c. scott andreas

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Susan Bordo’s Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. It’s very interesting and quite well-written.

Susan Bordo develops a nuanced critique of the status of images and narratives in Western culture. Admitting her fascination with beautiful images, she suggests that “the problem” lies in our collective unwillingness to engage media in a complex manner. Neither “beauty” nor constructions thereof are the core issue – rather, it is the manner in which we’ve become accustomed to receiving these images: passively, much like victims. As a result, Americans thrive on endless interpretation and debate concerning the meaning of a digitally-mastered “surreality” without bothering to question the implications of abandoning ourselves to an existence we refuse to question simply because there seem to be so many answers.

As such, “the problem” (a highly reductionist statement in itself) is as much epistemological as it is practical. Bordo suggests our collective flirtation with postmodern ways of knowing combined with lazy, oversimplified thought processes has left us without the ability or even the desire to separate “fact” from “fiction.” Washed in a subjective world of fleeting trends, we have traded in “reason” as a measure of facticity in favor of “believability.” Here, Bordo points to the jurors of the O.J. Simpson trial who held that DNA evidence “carried absolutely no weight,” preferring instead a contrived narrative that made sense of the facts and allowed jurors to dismiss pesky science (93). Thus, we take refuge in cartoonish abstractions such as race, gender, and class but refuse to recognize the endless particularity and multiple strands of identification that compose an individual.

Bordo suggests that we would do well to recognize the virtue in questioning our ability to know a thing with absolute certainty. She does not propose a flight to the ivory tower of modernity, as this risks further engendering resistance to complex thought. Rather, enlightened by a chastened epistemology, the task is to build our knowledge up once more with critical eyes, proper confidence, and complex engagement. Empowered by our newfound ability to push back against the images and narratives that pervade our world, we might discover something real as we appreciate the value of picking them apart. Negotiating the middle path between the gulfs of positivism and relativism, perhaps we could imagine something better, too.

I’m slowly catching on to something that many in the emerging camp have been onto for quite some time. Better late than never, I suppose.