Certainty and the Obvious: What It Takes to Bring in the Fabled "Context"

As I was saying, I love that Morris gets peeved at the expert's claims for certainty. It reminded me immediately of the grad student seminar experience--and any humanities or social science grad student has certainly had it, if not all graduate students--where the one student defends his philosophical premise by stating that it is "obvious." Says Morris, in words I wish I'd pulled together in Philosophy of Science 6504:

Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious. When someone says that something is obvious, it seems almost certain that it is anything but obvious - even to them. The use of the word "obvious" indicates the absence of a logical argument - an attempt to convince the reader by asserting the truth of something by saying it a little louder.

The "obvious" claim, on my view, is akin to the certainty claim. We never work with total certainty and nothing is ever so clearly obvious.

If I was craftier, I would here contribute a series of comments about the role of the expert in the history of science and then say more about what role certainty plays for those who have earned credibility, those who are the experts. I'd probably also go on about the place of the expert witness and the basis for such expertise in public demonstrations of certainty--and the common ground for legal and scientific discourse in the 17th century that had the court as its forum--but don't I have enough tangents to deal with already? Instead, I'll more simply make note of the rise of the expert in the 20th century, the same rise of an expert class that (did you forget I was tying these all together?) goes along with trained judgment, the trained judgment Daston and Galison explain in Objectivity and that I already wrote about in the prior posts (see the header above).

To be clear, I'm mixing two layers together here--there's discussion of the experts who are talking about Fenton, and then there's Fenton himself as a kind of photographic expert--so let me be careful about that. But in both cases, the point is to take the investigation away from the photograph and onto the means by which the photograph was produced.

The fourth level of questioning--who are they to say what Fenton intended? How do they know his intentions?--is the level that seeks to look behind the curtain to find out where such testimony comes from. Again, here's one way to take this--into further investigation of the witnesses (or experts, or consultants, or Fenton biographers), a discussion of the historical experts who are talking about Fenton. Are they credible?

But back to the other kind of focus, onto Fenton's own status. The pathetic fallacy leads Morris interviewees to speak on his behalf, suggesting why he would have put the cannonballs on the road or not. I thought this was the most interesting aspect of the Morris Quest, the part when he talks to Gordon Baldwin, retired curator at the Getty in LA, and begins a discussion about context. The certainty of prior interviewees starts to fade for Morris the further he follows his leads.*

Baldwin's view differs. He believes OFF is second, ON is first. (The prior two views were the opposite, that OFF was first.) He thinks the cannonballs were harvested by soldiers after the battle, removed from the road. Baldwin makes his claim based on developing the context around the scene.

All of a sudden, we have to know something about warfare in the mid-nineteenth century. All of a sudden, we have to know something about the conventions of reportage in that time, of being a war correspondent and traveling afar to give accounts of battles won and lost for the crowd back home. All of a sudden, we have to understand the very conventions of warfare itself, of how battles were pitched, of what was expected of soldiers, of what commanders would typically do, and so forth.

Not only that, but to understand and then make a claim of extension from any of the above (reportage, battles, soldiers, movements) we have to know a lot more about Russian history, about the fact that harvesting and then reusing cannonballs after a battle was not out of the ordinary, about empire and ruling families, about the slight Napoleon III felt against the Tsars in Russia, about the pretensions to European history that the Russians had, about the strange alliance between the French and British only thirty years after Waterloo, and more.

There are also Victorian sensibilities. What do they commonly show in newspapers? How are the dead portrayed? Baldwin (the retired Getty guy) notes that it was Alexander Gardiner in the American Civil War who photographs the dead, the mangled corpses, for public display. That was not until the decade after Fenton and that was in a different cultural context. (I pointed to Gardiner in an earlier post.) Before then and in Europe, it was against the cultural conventions of the time to show such scenes. So Fenton would've staged things differently based on his life within those conventions. (Check out this timely post on Victorian displays of the dead, and read the appended comments to see the different reactions one gets from said display styles.)

Baldwin also notes that the Crimean War was very unpopular and was "very badly run, not so badly run by generals, but the supply corps was hopelessly antiquated. The soldiers, in that first winter, before Fenton arrived, had inadequate food, inadequate shelter, inadequate clothing. The images that are propagandistic are the ones that show that the soldiers are adequately housed, adequately clothed." Although this doesn't say anything directly about the cannonball pictures, it does suggest how picture-taking was part of a broader journalistic and cultural context.

Which is to say: this question of which photo came first requires knowledge of the context around the photograph. You can't answer the question about what Fenton would have done, his intentions, without developing the context that gives meaning to his actions. Even then, the answer is not absolute. Nothing is obvious. And history and historical interpretation are thick, if not endless.

*Not just incidentally, but this whole thing about the importance of context and how to explain the world is the precise purpose of DFW's essay on Joseph Frank's biographies of Dostoevsky I footnoted in my prior post.