The Pathetic Fallacy

Here's a supposition, as I continue this series of posts on seeing and knowing: those Morris essays about Fenton's Crimean War photographs at a road outside Sebastopol are a precis for studies of science and technology in society (STS). Inside his essays is a sort of mini-history of the field of that name. A particular and limited story, to be sure, but nonetheless it goes somewhere by following the ever deeper demands of developing context. I'll start in on this, but not finish, below.

To reset this, his question is: which of the cannonball/road pictures came first? ON or OFF? (Here is ON; and here is OFF, both of which are also in this post.) That question is soon replaced by another: how can we find out? It goes from a matter of fact to a matter of method. Morris initially tracks down the acknowledgments in Sontag's book that spurs this chase--they lead him to two guys, Ulrich Keller and Mark Haworth-Booth. Morris talks to both of them. They each claim that OFF was first and that Fenton moved the cannonballs onto the road for dramatic effect in the second picture (ON).

This leads from the second question--how can we find out?--to a third one: what do we know about Fenton that helps unlock the mystery? It moves, that is, from the artifact itself, the photograph, to the producer of the artifact. It moves from the asocial arena to the social one. The first two consultants Morris finds (consider them experts) both defer to some element of Fenton's character to explain that he "obviously" moved the cannonballs onto the road for the second picture because he wanted to enhance the dramatic effect for his audience. That's what he would have wanted to do, they tell Morris.

They use their knowledge of photographic history, which is considerable and respectable, to gauge the intentions of the photographer himself. This leads Morris down a sidetrack about fallacies, specifically the pathetic fallacy. John Ruskin coined the term pathetic fallacy in 1856 (Wikipedia concurs) as what historians and science studies types and especially environmental historians now think of as anthropomorphizing, of giving agency to the thing itself. Pathetic as in pathos. As in understanding the pathos of the thing itself, like "the summer's sun was an angry hot fire..." or "HAL sought to cripple the astronauts..." or some such. Specifically, it's about giving human characteristics to non-human things. (Can soil be exhausted? Tired out? Or do humans overwork the soil and drain it of minerals and organic matter? Somewhere in there lies a bone of massive methodological contention, one that untold numbers of scholars argue over everyday and that I can barely wave my hands at here. Try Linda Nash, though, for some of it.)

For the present conversation, the relevant issue is, what was the photographs intent? Stepping back to the photographer, it leads to questions about Fenton's intent.*

Everyone Morris speaks to starts to answer the question of which came first by reference to Fenton's character. It soon has less to do with the actual physical evidence, the pictures, and more to do with the picture-taker. Some say he was a coward. If he was a coward, then he would've staged the fearsome looking cannonball display to make it appear as if he was bold, standing bravely upon a dangerous scene. This, by the way, assumes that viewers take the cannonballs-on-the-road to be the more dangerous image. Some people (me, for example) did not think that was so obvious at first. I had to be told. Anyway, if he was not in danger, then he would've wanted to heighten the dramatic effect by lining the road with those cannonballs, an "obvious" sign of the harshness of the famous battle at the Valley of the Shadow of Death. My point being: these explanations rely upon claims of character.

Here are Keller's words:

The first variant obviously represents the road to the trenches in the state in which the photographer found it, with the cannonballs lining the side of the road. In a second version we discover a new feature....Fenton obviously rearranged the evidence in order to create a sense of drama and danger that had originally been absent from the scene.

Haworth-Booth doesn't use the word "obvious," but indicates the same certainty about the order of the pictures.

This is all well and good. But it's the "obviousness" the experts read into Fenton's intentions that really bugs Morris. He thus moves from the third question--what do we know about Fenton that helps unlock the mystery?--to a fourth one: who are you to say what Fenton intended? How do you know his intentions?

By this level of investigation, the investigator has expanded the realm of relevant viewpoints and gone far beyond a simplistic and isolated (may I say decontextualized?) visual comparison. To take this back to science and knowledge, this march into deeper questions about "what is true" reminds me of the shifts in studies of science in society that occurred in the post-positivist decades after Kuhn and the zenith of positivist influence, where sociologists got into the mix, where factors beyond a straightforward accounting of "the evidence" started to come into question (such as "whose evidence?", "where did it come from?", and so forth), and where a historical account of scientific activity began to foreground the fact that it was people doing this, that science was a human activity. If it happens that humans are the ones doing science, then, a lot of folks noticed, one has to pay attention to who those humans are. It might matter. Which is where I think I'll pick this up in the next post.

*I was recently re-reading a David Foster Wallace essay⁽ⁱ⁾ about Dostoevsky, where he goes on a long disquisition about intentional fallacy and affective fallacy, breezily, and in footnote form just like this, defining intentional fallacy as "The judging of the meaning or success of a work of art by the author's expressed or ostensible intention in producing it." For the purposes of the present post, this seems to work well with the complex investigation going on by Morris and the Fenton scholars who are all arguing about what Fenton's intentions "must have been." Needless to say, consider it an homage to DFW (and this additional parenthetical aside noting that he would've made any self-references into the DFW-acronymic form) that I made this aside in a footnote. Not, ahem, a lame imitation. An homage. More defensible.

⁽ⁱ⁾ It was "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky," from the Village Voice Literary Supplement back in the '90s, as reprinted in Consider the Lobster (2006).