This is a post I've been elaborating in my head for a long time. The recent retraction of a PLoS ONE paper with unusual language that may have been a translation error, and the associated debate, has prompted me to get it written down. It does not directly address the so called #creatorgate, but it may help think about issues of language and power in science. If science is truly to be an international collaborative enterprise, then we need to become more conscious of what conducting that business in a language that is not the native one of many scientists means.
Languages matter to me. Like my siblings, I was raised fully bilingual. I can read and write fluently in both English and French, and at one point was an in-house translator for the channel-spanning company I worked at. Yet, when it comes to science, I am functionally monolingual: I cannot write about the work I do in French with any confidence that the words I use are correct, and that my explanations are meaningful.
Oddly, it was not always that way. My entire schooling up through highschool was in French, so I went to University knowing all my scientific words and concepts in French, not English. I had to cobble together an English science lexicon quickly, and for the longest time, there were certain things (integration and differentiation in particular) that I would do in French in my head. Yet, after 15 years of doing science exclusively in English, the French has been displaced. At this point, the only thing I do in French is long division, which is a skill I maintain much as one might practice fencing with a rapier. And here is the point: there is no incentive, professionally, for me to learn to do science in French. I already do science in the de facto lingua franca.
When I joined my PhD program, my advisor lamented that previous students had successfully campaigned for the abolition of the language requirement. At the time I was saddened, because I am always sad when people pass up the opportunity to learn a second language (and because I had just missed out on an easy credit). Now I am irritated. Irritated at the myopa of native English speakers decreeing that language requirements are unnecessary for PhD programs that demand English as Second Language certifications for all non native-English speaking applicants.
Because, when we get down to brass tacks, science today does have a language requirement: speak English. I want you to let that sink in for a moment. If you want to work where the jobs and money are, if you want your work to be cited, you have to speak English. So hegemonic is English's position as the language of science that, in many Universities with global ambitions, one can be hired as a professor there without speaking the local language, as long as one speaks English. Before you tell me that this is a sign of the internationalism of science, let me point out that the converse is not true. Anything but.
Let us take a minute to think what it means that a language that is spoken natively by 6% percent of the population is a sine qua non of doing science. If you've ever tried to master a foreign language to the point of being able to travel in that country, you know it's hard. Imagine doing it to the point of being globally competitive in your field. And let's add that we offer no help: no science societies, or universities, or journals, pay for translation services, or language classes. And, in fact, we scoff and are suspicious of letters by applicants from those countries as not having been written by the applicant (as if English-speaking applicants did not get their application documents heavily edited). We grimace when people have trouble clearly expressing themselves in English, without acknowledging that this is a challenge we will never have to face with anything like the same consequences (jobs, publications) for butchering a talk we might choose to give in Japanese or Mandarin or Hindi or Urdu (which we would only ever do as an outreach exercise anyway). Now, I want you to realise that every single foreign postdoc or grad student or faculty member in your department has put in the work to be good enough in English that she can just about communicate science with you. If you tried to order lunch for her in her native language, how far would you get?
Yet, beyond the obvious dreaded-P-word that is attached to being a native English speaker, and the obvious selection bias for people with ressources that it places on scientists from non English speaking countries, there is a more insidious effect, which I alluded to in the beginning. When certain fields are conducted only in one language, other languages loose out. For example, my mother speaks Alsatian (the Germanic dialect of her region of France). As a dialect, Alsatian is a language that important humanistic scholars (and Goethe's mentors) would have used. But, as French and Hochdeutsch became the languages of French and German nationalism, Alsatian, along with other dialects, was squeezed out of law, administration, science. Recent censuses put current Alsatian usage at about 60 to 70% of the population of Alsace, huge for a regional language in a country whose relationship to regional languages is ambivalent at best. And yet, my mother, who learnt her Alsatian from a woman born in 1870, knows words no one now knows. As the sphere of topics discussed in Alsatian has shrunk over the centuries, all the language associated with abstract or technical constructs has been lost. Yes, many people still speak Alsatian, but only when discussing the most mundane of topics.
As a Franco-British person growing up in England, France's often ham fisted attempts to promote French neologisms against English borrowing were often lampooned. And certainly there is a contemptible side to a former imperial power lashing out against another imperial power that has awkwardly gained ascendancy. Yet there is something equally contemptible in the tendency of Native English speakers to view the hegemony of English as a "natural" process. If we stop to consider the historical forces that have lead to this state of affairs, is this something to which science truly wishes to unequivocally yoke itself?
Because there are other models. At least two international organisations, the UN general assembly and the EU parliament advocate multilingual systems with active translations, because they recognise that equal participation cannot require someone learning a whole new language. And yes, both the UN and the EU translation administrations are hugely expensive. But if, as a publishing company, you're making billion of dollars in profits while maintaining a 40% profit margin, maybe translation services could be part of the added value you offer? And, if you're fighting for the creation of publicly funded open access repositories, and repeatedly tell me (because I've asked this question) that you have the long term digital archiving question all handled, then maybe you can also find money to broaden participation by supporting translation services?
Because, if not, and you're a native English speaking academic talking about how you're broadening access while requiring an ESL certificate from overseas grad students in your department? Then don't conflate the dregs of 200 years of imperialism and naked political power play with internationalism.
Tuesday, 8 March 2016
Sunday, 21 February 2016
Harper, Maya, and me
This is a post about my growth as a person through encounters with books. I make no claims about how what understanding of American race relations translates into my activities challenging racism, and acknowledge I am still learning.
Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" became my favorite book midway through my teens, dethroning Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" with its resonant message about parenthood, precocious children, and difficult worlds. I read that book in school (it is one of the handful of great American books, with Gatsby and either Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men, but not both, that have been allowed onto British school reading lists). I read it dutifully in the right way, as a story about injustice and segregated America, but that was only part of what captivated me. I preferred the story of Scout and Jem and Dill, their growing up, growing apart. I was captivated by Lee's evocative language, her rich complex female characters (to this day Miss Maudie Atkinson tops my list of fictional characters I would like to meet). In truth, I didn't yet have the historical knowledge or the analytical tools to understand all the parts of the story of Tom Robinson, or understand the monumental nature of Calpurnia's decision to take the children to First Purchase. Even back then, when I decided (to show how smart I was) to write an essay on "racism as a theme in To Kill A Mockingbird" i quickly felt ill equipped. My arguments were weak and I knew it. I should have written about " parenting as a theme in to Kill a Mockingbird" instead.
I've revisited that book so many times I can recite it. I have come to relish its depth more and more with every reading. The intelligence of Lee's device (to have an adult Jean Louise tell the story from a child Scout's point of view) allows such flexibility, deftly used. It allows the narrator to know things Scout would not have known. It allows the future to be alluded to. And it also leads to one of the great, and perhaps most questionable ellipsis in litterature. In the key scene where Atticus goes to sit outside Maycomb jail by night to protect Robinson from the lynch mob, at no point does Lee's adult Jean Louise spell out what is happening. We are told that the child Scout doesn't realise until later. But why does the adult Jean Louise hide from stating what is at stake, plainly, and clearly? Is it perhaps because the horror of that truth would make that scene's denouement hard to stomach, and make Atticus's pronouncement the next day sound hollow?
It was my encounter with another great American book that made me see the limits in Lee's novel as a tale of Southern Racism, and that made me see how much of a fiction even that book's limited victories were. While at University I read Maya Angelou's "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings". I do not know if Angelou had to Kill a Mockingbird in mind when she wrote her autobiography, but the parallels are very striking. Against fictional smart, white Scout, we have real smart, black Maya Angelou. Against fictional too good, too perfect Calpurnia, we have the Real Grandmother. So many of the scenes in Caged Bird echo scenes in Mockingbird, but tear down what little Lee left worth saving in white Maycomb.
Perhaps the key scene for me is the one where she describes how, one night, as a lynch mob is rampaging through town, the white sheriff rides up to the Grandmother's store to warn her, and tell her to hide her crippled adult son from them. The grandmother thanks him, and Angelou describes her uncle painfully squeezing himself into the space under a fruit display. Angelou concludes with a searing accusal of the sheriff that struck me forever (I am writing this from memory so forgive any error):
"If I came before God in Heaven and had to say a good word about that man I could not do it. He did nothing to oppose, and in fact supported, the system that made my uncle hide that night"
Through that book, I began to see all that was missing from To Kill a Mockingbird, that made it both a fairy story, and a flawed depiction of the Jim Crow south.
I still love to Kill a Mockingbird. But I am fiercely grateful to Maya Angelou, and all the other black writers who have helped me move past viewing as more than what it is: an exquisite piece of fiction, but no more a definitive portrait of the South than Gone With the Wind.
Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" became my favorite book midway through my teens, dethroning Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" with its resonant message about parenthood, precocious children, and difficult worlds. I read that book in school (it is one of the handful of great American books, with Gatsby and either Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men, but not both, that have been allowed onto British school reading lists). I read it dutifully in the right way, as a story about injustice and segregated America, but that was only part of what captivated me. I preferred the story of Scout and Jem and Dill, their growing up, growing apart. I was captivated by Lee's evocative language, her rich complex female characters (to this day Miss Maudie Atkinson tops my list of fictional characters I would like to meet). In truth, I didn't yet have the historical knowledge or the analytical tools to understand all the parts of the story of Tom Robinson, or understand the monumental nature of Calpurnia's decision to take the children to First Purchase. Even back then, when I decided (to show how smart I was) to write an essay on "racism as a theme in To Kill A Mockingbird" i quickly felt ill equipped. My arguments were weak and I knew it. I should have written about " parenting as a theme in to Kill a Mockingbird" instead.
I've revisited that book so many times I can recite it. I have come to relish its depth more and more with every reading. The intelligence of Lee's device (to have an adult Jean Louise tell the story from a child Scout's point of view) allows such flexibility, deftly used. It allows the narrator to know things Scout would not have known. It allows the future to be alluded to. And it also leads to one of the great, and perhaps most questionable ellipsis in litterature. In the key scene where Atticus goes to sit outside Maycomb jail by night to protect Robinson from the lynch mob, at no point does Lee's adult Jean Louise spell out what is happening. We are told that the child Scout doesn't realise until later. But why does the adult Jean Louise hide from stating what is at stake, plainly, and clearly? Is it perhaps because the horror of that truth would make that scene's denouement hard to stomach, and make Atticus's pronouncement the next day sound hollow?
It was my encounter with another great American book that made me see the limits in Lee's novel as a tale of Southern Racism, and that made me see how much of a fiction even that book's limited victories were. While at University I read Maya Angelou's "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings". I do not know if Angelou had to Kill a Mockingbird in mind when she wrote her autobiography, but the parallels are very striking. Against fictional smart, white Scout, we have real smart, black Maya Angelou. Against fictional too good, too perfect Calpurnia, we have the Real Grandmother. So many of the scenes in Caged Bird echo scenes in Mockingbird, but tear down what little Lee left worth saving in white Maycomb.
Perhaps the key scene for me is the one where she describes how, one night, as a lynch mob is rampaging through town, the white sheriff rides up to the Grandmother's store to warn her, and tell her to hide her crippled adult son from them. The grandmother thanks him, and Angelou describes her uncle painfully squeezing himself into the space under a fruit display. Angelou concludes with a searing accusal of the sheriff that struck me forever (I am writing this from memory so forgive any error):
"If I came before God in Heaven and had to say a good word about that man I could not do it. He did nothing to oppose, and in fact supported, the system that made my uncle hide that night"
Through that book, I began to see all that was missing from To Kill a Mockingbird, that made it both a fairy story, and a flawed depiction of the Jim Crow south.
I still love to Kill a Mockingbird. But I am fiercely grateful to Maya Angelou, and all the other black writers who have helped me move past viewing as more than what it is: an exquisite piece of fiction, but no more a definitive portrait of the South than Gone With the Wind.
Thursday, 4 February 2016
When lightning strikes a crowded room
When I met my first boyfriend, lightning struck. We had never met before, but the moment he walked into my friend's kitchen, he was my sole focus that night. It turned out to be mutual. We talked to each other, and for each other all through dinner. We walked to the bus stop for me to catch a bus, he wheeling his bike so he could keep talking to me. It was only the part of my screaming "you're not out yet! To anyone! Do not make any rash decisions!" that stopped me from kissing him that very night.
We texted incessantly, and began a rapid, dramatic courtship. We went on dates, walked through London at night, kissed, fought, made up, spilled our hearts to each other. It was passionate and powerful and joyous and liberating and melodramatic in a way only the first encounter with those feelings can be. I have no regrets about that relationship.
It lasted three months. We broke up (with much elegant drama), saw each other a couple more times, then went off on our separate lives once again. The only fallout from that relationship was a bruised heart, and some lessons about how to treat other people.
I was young, and single, and my boyfriend was a stranger. Lightning struck us, and it was exhilarating. If any of those parameters had been different, the lightning strike would have been at least inconvenient, at most terrifying.
There is a reason Anna Karenina flees the ball after her encounter with Vronsky. There is a reason Olivia's response to meeting Viola/Cesario is "Soft, even so swiftly may one catch the plague?" There is a reason Elinor Dashwood will not speak of her feelings for Edward Farrars, when she does not know (and has reason to doubt) that any good may come of it.
The lightning strikes of love guarantee nothing: not that the lightning strike is reciprocated, not that the fit is good, not that happiness will befall. To use them as the sole guide of behavior is foolishness. To claim they are the pathway to goodness and happiness and should be given special consideration above all other factors is adolescent petulance that results in real pain.
People take risks for love yes. They sometimes must. And they sometimes pay a heavy price. You probably know several people who've moved for love, only to have it not work out. They rebuild their lives in a new place, alluding only rarely to the circumstance that brought them there. We often, if we are friends with people making those choices, have misgivings, fears. "Are you sure? Is this wise?"
Literature and personal history tell us that lightning love is a poor guide of behavior. And yet, when some suggest that, in situations were abuse of power is easy, where all outside factors conspire to suggest that following the guides of Eros's arrow is foolish and dangerous, and enables much worse behavior, how quick we are to demand that love be given primacy.
How many of you would counsel a friend or daughter to run off with someone they'd met only once? How many of you would counsel a married friend to start an affair because of a moment on chemistry, rather than to make quite sure they were never alone with that person again? And yet you would not counsel someone not to start a relationship with their subordinates? And yet you would not tell them that is ill advised? And yet you would not tell them to protect both themselves and the one they claim to love? I call shenanigans.
Edward Farrars, as it turns out, was as enamoured of Elinor as she of him. But he had gotten engaged to Lucy Steele much younger, and to break that engagement (because of the fucked up social mores of Austen's time) would have ruined the young woman. Edward chose to honor his promise to Lucy (until circumstances relieved him of it). Had he not done so, not only would he have ruined Lucy, he would not have been the honorable, kind man that Elinor fell for in the first place.
In contrast, Willoughby, the Villain of sense and sensibility, pursues Elinor's sister Marianne. Here is the point though: Willoughby's love for Marianne is not insincere. But because he is selfish, he does not recognise that pursuing that attraction can only harm Marianne. This is what Elinor cannot forgive in him: that he put his own pleasure ahead of her sister's wellbeing. Austen understood only too well that to be in love with someone, is not the same as to care for them.
If you wish to do well by people, you cannot rely on the lightning strikes of passion to guide you to goodness. Austen knew this, Tolstoi knew this, Shakespeare knew this. Scientists should remember it too
We texted incessantly, and began a rapid, dramatic courtship. We went on dates, walked through London at night, kissed, fought, made up, spilled our hearts to each other. It was passionate and powerful and joyous and liberating and melodramatic in a way only the first encounter with those feelings can be. I have no regrets about that relationship.
It lasted three months. We broke up (with much elegant drama), saw each other a couple more times, then went off on our separate lives once again. The only fallout from that relationship was a bruised heart, and some lessons about how to treat other people.
I was young, and single, and my boyfriend was a stranger. Lightning struck us, and it was exhilarating. If any of those parameters had been different, the lightning strike would have been at least inconvenient, at most terrifying.
There is a reason Anna Karenina flees the ball after her encounter with Vronsky. There is a reason Olivia's response to meeting Viola/Cesario is "Soft, even so swiftly may one catch the plague?" There is a reason Elinor Dashwood will not speak of her feelings for Edward Farrars, when she does not know (and has reason to doubt) that any good may come of it.
The lightning strikes of love guarantee nothing: not that the lightning strike is reciprocated, not that the fit is good, not that happiness will befall. To use them as the sole guide of behavior is foolishness. To claim they are the pathway to goodness and happiness and should be given special consideration above all other factors is adolescent petulance that results in real pain.
People take risks for love yes. They sometimes must. And they sometimes pay a heavy price. You probably know several people who've moved for love, only to have it not work out. They rebuild their lives in a new place, alluding only rarely to the circumstance that brought them there. We often, if we are friends with people making those choices, have misgivings, fears. "Are you sure? Is this wise?"
Literature and personal history tell us that lightning love is a poor guide of behavior. And yet, when some suggest that, in situations were abuse of power is easy, where all outside factors conspire to suggest that following the guides of Eros's arrow is foolish and dangerous, and enables much worse behavior, how quick we are to demand that love be given primacy.
How many of you would counsel a friend or daughter to run off with someone they'd met only once? How many of you would counsel a married friend to start an affair because of a moment on chemistry, rather than to make quite sure they were never alone with that person again? And yet you would not counsel someone not to start a relationship with their subordinates? And yet you would not tell them that is ill advised? And yet you would not tell them to protect both themselves and the one they claim to love? I call shenanigans.
Edward Farrars, as it turns out, was as enamoured of Elinor as she of him. But he had gotten engaged to Lucy Steele much younger, and to break that engagement (because of the fucked up social mores of Austen's time) would have ruined the young woman. Edward chose to honor his promise to Lucy (until circumstances relieved him of it). Had he not done so, not only would he have ruined Lucy, he would not have been the honorable, kind man that Elinor fell for in the first place.
In contrast, Willoughby, the Villain of sense and sensibility, pursues Elinor's sister Marianne. Here is the point though: Willoughby's love for Marianne is not insincere. But because he is selfish, he does not recognise that pursuing that attraction can only harm Marianne. This is what Elinor cannot forgive in him: that he put his own pleasure ahead of her sister's wellbeing. Austen understood only too well that to be in love with someone, is not the same as to care for them.
If you wish to do well by people, you cannot rely on the lightning strikes of passion to guide you to goodness. Austen knew this, Tolstoi knew this, Shakespeare knew this. Scientists should remember it too
Thursday, 21 January 2016
On hard choices
A propos of nothing in particular.
My mother keeps her accounts in hand written double entry tables that would make medieval Venetian auditors weep. Her financial discipline is legendary (only a portion has come down to me). My mother's planner is similarly detailed, with colored blocks delimiting her time into discrete clusters. My mother is disciplined, strong willed, organised, and has been since she left her parent's house at 14 to go to a boarding school she was only able to attend because of her excellent grades.
At least five times in my mother's life, someone (her mother, her employer, her ex husband, her employer again, her landlords) has tried to take her livelihood away. Each time, my mother has doubled down on her organization and discipline. She has built a successful small business as a private tutor, and when necessary has expanded it to fill all available time so she could get money. She saves, she scrimps. She budgets her money and her time to the last penny and the last second. She doesn't give up, and so far, she has won every time.
I have learnt a lot from my mother's handling of tough choices, both from what she told me, and from being around for three of them. I have learnt to calculate compound interest, to track every penny, to scour sales. I have learnt patience. I have learnt to read the fine print, to check for myself, to ask questions. I have learnt the importance of rigor and discipline in getting anything done, and to never assume that things will sort themselves out.
I have also learnt other things. I have learnt never to trust what is not in writing. I have learnt never to put too much faith in the future. I have learnt that you should show up in court calm and collected in a sensible, freshly pressed suit you can barely afford to listen as your husband's lawyer explains that the house you both lived in and the education you both gave your children is too extravagant. I have learnt that you should not, under any circumstances, betray any emotion at this, though you may spend the next night raging into your pillow. I have learnt that when your employer looses track of ten years of your retirement contributions, they will tell you there is nothing to be done. I learnt that when you then spend two years tracking down pay slips from forty years ago, the lady handling the file that you have reconstructed will congratulate herself, and suggest that she really should come on a trip to London. I have learnt that you should say you would be glad to be her guide should she ever choose to do it.
I have learnt that knuckling down takes a toll. That going into crisis mode can become a habit. I have learnt your sleep can go to pot, and then your health. I have learnt that repeatedly getting screwed by people who are supposed to be looking out for you leaves deep wounds that stay fresh a very long time.
My mother never made us work as teenagers, and is always generous with her money. I have asked her why, and her reason is simple: no one was there to help her, and doing it on her own was hard. As she once observed to me when discussing her discipline and rigour "it might have been nice to know who I could have been if I hadn't had to be so disciplined and rigorous".
Mostly, what I have learnt from my mother is this. Tenacity, rigor, discipline, financial nous will help you in times of crisis, or when other people try to screw you over. But those efforts come at a cost, and one should not mistake the ability to endure adversity, with the adversity being a good thing. My mother is an amazing woman, but she would be the first to say that parts of her would have been better off without having to fight all these fights.
Pragmaticism is a necessity, but it is neither itself a virtue, nor a begetter of virtue. And tough choices, unavoidable as they may be, remain tough, and may leave us hard and hurt.
My mother keeps her accounts in hand written double entry tables that would make medieval Venetian auditors weep. Her financial discipline is legendary (only a portion has come down to me). My mother's planner is similarly detailed, with colored blocks delimiting her time into discrete clusters. My mother is disciplined, strong willed, organised, and has been since she left her parent's house at 14 to go to a boarding school she was only able to attend because of her excellent grades.
At least five times in my mother's life, someone (her mother, her employer, her ex husband, her employer again, her landlords) has tried to take her livelihood away. Each time, my mother has doubled down on her organization and discipline. She has built a successful small business as a private tutor, and when necessary has expanded it to fill all available time so she could get money. She saves, she scrimps. She budgets her money and her time to the last penny and the last second. She doesn't give up, and so far, she has won every time.
I have learnt a lot from my mother's handling of tough choices, both from what she told me, and from being around for three of them. I have learnt to calculate compound interest, to track every penny, to scour sales. I have learnt patience. I have learnt to read the fine print, to check for myself, to ask questions. I have learnt the importance of rigor and discipline in getting anything done, and to never assume that things will sort themselves out.
I have also learnt other things. I have learnt never to trust what is not in writing. I have learnt never to put too much faith in the future. I have learnt that you should show up in court calm and collected in a sensible, freshly pressed suit you can barely afford to listen as your husband's lawyer explains that the house you both lived in and the education you both gave your children is too extravagant. I have learnt that you should not, under any circumstances, betray any emotion at this, though you may spend the next night raging into your pillow. I have learnt that when your employer looses track of ten years of your retirement contributions, they will tell you there is nothing to be done. I learnt that when you then spend two years tracking down pay slips from forty years ago, the lady handling the file that you have reconstructed will congratulate herself, and suggest that she really should come on a trip to London. I have learnt that you should say you would be glad to be her guide should she ever choose to do it.
I have learnt that knuckling down takes a toll. That going into crisis mode can become a habit. I have learnt your sleep can go to pot, and then your health. I have learnt that repeatedly getting screwed by people who are supposed to be looking out for you leaves deep wounds that stay fresh a very long time.
My mother never made us work as teenagers, and is always generous with her money. I have asked her why, and her reason is simple: no one was there to help her, and doing it on her own was hard. As she once observed to me when discussing her discipline and rigour "it might have been nice to know who I could have been if I hadn't had to be so disciplined and rigorous".
Mostly, what I have learnt from my mother is this. Tenacity, rigor, discipline, financial nous will help you in times of crisis, or when other people try to screw you over. But those efforts come at a cost, and one should not mistake the ability to endure adversity, with the adversity being a good thing. My mother is an amazing woman, but she would be the first to say that parts of her would have been better off without having to fight all these fights.
Pragmaticism is a necessity, but it is neither itself a virtue, nor a begetter of virtue. And tough choices, unavoidable as they may be, remain tough, and may leave us hard and hurt.
Monday, 11 January 2016
Reinvention
I came to David Bowie late in life. Growing up in the UK in the 90s', he'd already transitioned to Elder Statesmen of music stage. His classics were all pervasive, and as a cultural icon he was instantly recognisable, but like Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and the Beatles, an intimate knowledge of his work was not required as a teenager. It doesn't help that all his musical offerings were judged by the critics to be inferior to his heyday, dismissed as the restlessness of an artist growing irrelevant. Listening to Heathen today, I have to wonder how world changing his 70s work must have been for anyone to dismiss that album as sub par. From any other musician, it would have been exceptional.
It was through his greatest hits CD that I came to a deeper appreciation of Bowie, and a greater interest in his work and career. It turns out I have a liking for restlessly inventive musicians that has over the years lead me to dive through the discographies of the likes of Tori Amos and Bjork. But, of course, Bowie laid the ground work, the basic template for these artists. Both Amos and Bjork play with his interest in personas, syncretic music styles, and vocal acrobatics.
Bowie has become synonymous with his continuous reinvention of himself, which pre dates his famous retiring of Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy, after all, was his second or third persona. There's been a lot written about the personas trick, and it's mostly been viewed as device by which Bowie could continually reinvent his music, to anticipate changes and trends from glam rock to psychedelia to electro soul to straight up electro. But I think there's more to it than just that. At least since the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane change, Bowie's re-iterating transformations have been part of his appeal. The .gif of Helen Green's illustrations of David Bowie's changing faces that has been going around highlights our fascination with his reinventions.
Such free wheeling transformation is fascinating because, well, most of us don't get to deliberately reinvent ourselves all that much. There are a few moments in life when change is accepted (puberty, going to university), but by and large, we're expected to settle into some sort of stability, or at least of smooth continuity. Try coming into work with changed hair and a completely new style to test this out. And larger changes are more traumatic.
And yet, on the other hand, change, as Bowie himself noted in one of his most famous songs, is inevitable. Sometimes, life forces us into situations in which we must re-invent ourselves, construct new personas. Entering or leaving a long term relationship, becoming a parent, becoming an orphan. Becoming old.. Such events require some degree of reinvention, because some of the modes of existence from our previous forms are no longer adequate. We can approach these changes more or less consciously, or more or less explicitly. Sometimes, we are unaware that we are transforming, until we realise that we are no longer who we once were. The risk here is that we change, but our image of ourself does not, and so one day we are strangers to ourselves.
As he was mulling over his affair with Albertine, Marcel Proust's narrator in the remembrance of things past realised how difficult it was for the version of him that was no longer in love with Albertine to understand the past him that was, or even to accurately remember what that person felt like. Memory is an active process, not a passive replay of the past, and so our current selves will tend to overwrite our past selves, declare them less authentic, less true versions of us. We are constantly engaged in a revisionist Whig history of ourselves.
The process of 'coming out' that gays such as myself go through in our modern western societies is an example of this process of active re-invention. In the standard narrative, the version of us before the coming out is incomplete, untrue, a cypher of the true self. And yet, this narrative never allows the actual pre-coming out version of the self (or several versions, I can count at least three for myself) to speak their truth, their experience.
I started writing a diary when I was 18 for precisely that reason: I felt my memories becoming less reliable as my adolescence ended and adulthood began. I wanted to leave a record of myself to myself. And sometimes, those old entries are like reading the notes of stranger. Things that are now trivial loom large, and dead ends of thought and growth long abandoned and forgotten are suddenly pressing and current.
In David Bowie's continuous re-inventions, we see a performance of our own lives, our own transformations. We have our equivalents of the man who fell to earth, Aladdin Sane, and even the Thin White Duke in our own lives. What Bowie allowed us to see was that we could be conscious of this change, and perhaps shape it at key junctures.
Our lives are being and becoming, until we become no more.
RIP David Bowie
It was through his greatest hits CD that I came to a deeper appreciation of Bowie, and a greater interest in his work and career. It turns out I have a liking for restlessly inventive musicians that has over the years lead me to dive through the discographies of the likes of Tori Amos and Bjork. But, of course, Bowie laid the ground work, the basic template for these artists. Both Amos and Bjork play with his interest in personas, syncretic music styles, and vocal acrobatics.
Bowie has become synonymous with his continuous reinvention of himself, which pre dates his famous retiring of Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy, after all, was his second or third persona. There's been a lot written about the personas trick, and it's mostly been viewed as device by which Bowie could continually reinvent his music, to anticipate changes and trends from glam rock to psychedelia to electro soul to straight up electro. But I think there's more to it than just that. At least since the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane change, Bowie's re-iterating transformations have been part of his appeal. The .gif of Helen Green's illustrations of David Bowie's changing faces that has been going around highlights our fascination with his reinventions.
Such free wheeling transformation is fascinating because, well, most of us don't get to deliberately reinvent ourselves all that much. There are a few moments in life when change is accepted (puberty, going to university), but by and large, we're expected to settle into some sort of stability, or at least of smooth continuity. Try coming into work with changed hair and a completely new style to test this out. And larger changes are more traumatic.
And yet, on the other hand, change, as Bowie himself noted in one of his most famous songs, is inevitable. Sometimes, life forces us into situations in which we must re-invent ourselves, construct new personas. Entering or leaving a long term relationship, becoming a parent, becoming an orphan. Becoming old.. Such events require some degree of reinvention, because some of the modes of existence from our previous forms are no longer adequate. We can approach these changes more or less consciously, or more or less explicitly. Sometimes, we are unaware that we are transforming, until we realise that we are no longer who we once were. The risk here is that we change, but our image of ourself does not, and so one day we are strangers to ourselves.
As he was mulling over his affair with Albertine, Marcel Proust's narrator in the remembrance of things past realised how difficult it was for the version of him that was no longer in love with Albertine to understand the past him that was, or even to accurately remember what that person felt like. Memory is an active process, not a passive replay of the past, and so our current selves will tend to overwrite our past selves, declare them less authentic, less true versions of us. We are constantly engaged in a revisionist Whig history of ourselves.
The process of 'coming out' that gays such as myself go through in our modern western societies is an example of this process of active re-invention. In the standard narrative, the version of us before the coming out is incomplete, untrue, a cypher of the true self. And yet, this narrative never allows the actual pre-coming out version of the self (or several versions, I can count at least three for myself) to speak their truth, their experience.
I started writing a diary when I was 18 for precisely that reason: I felt my memories becoming less reliable as my adolescence ended and adulthood began. I wanted to leave a record of myself to myself. And sometimes, those old entries are like reading the notes of stranger. Things that are now trivial loom large, and dead ends of thought and growth long abandoned and forgotten are suddenly pressing and current.
In David Bowie's continuous re-inventions, we see a performance of our own lives, our own transformations. We have our equivalents of the man who fell to earth, Aladdin Sane, and even the Thin White Duke in our own lives. What Bowie allowed us to see was that we could be conscious of this change, and perhaps shape it at key junctures.
Our lives are being and becoming, until we become no more.
RIP David Bowie
Sunday, 20 December 2015
The walls are in our heads
We had a seminar the other day on optogenetics given by one of the junior faculty in the neuro side of our department. Those of us in the biomechanics side of things are increasingly interested in the sensorimotor processing necessary to regulate the complex musculoskeletal behaviors we observe. Like good physiologists, we want to be able to disrupt the systems to see how they respond. And the prospect of being able to alter sensory and motor signals reversibly and quickly is particularly intriguing. So we had a chat about it.
Talking with the neuro people is a stark reminder of disciplinary boundaries. Our basic questions overlap on the matter of animal behavior, yet diverge in where we focus our explanatory efforts. To caricature, we examine behavior and musculoskeletal systems, and treat the brain as a black box, and the neuroscientists examine behavior and the brain, and treat the musculoskeletal system as a black box. So things we take for granted, they often are unclear on, and vice versa.
As we were discussing the background of optogenetics, the names of Chlamydomonas and Volvox, the green algae from whose genome the photosensitive ion channel genes have been extracted, came up. Because of my dillettantish path through biology, I have fair amount of botany, and a lot of taxonomy, in my knapsack. And that same wandering path included a pretty extensive flirtation with both cellular physiology, and neuroscience as an undergrad. As we discussed the various components of optogenetics, the light gated ion channels, the promoter sequences, the virus delivery vector, different questions popped into my head. Why did the algae have light gated voltage channels (I'm assuming some sort of phototactic behavior)? Where transposon sequences used to insert the genes into the neurone genomes, so that they would be replicated along with chromosomes, or were they left as free floating strands of DNA? Of course, in our group of mammalian biomechanists and neuroscientists, no one really knew the answers to those questions. And to be honest, they probably couldn't have pulled Volvox out of a eukaryote line up.
I often quip that huge amounts of knowledge about Mus musculus is held by people who don't give a damn about mice. Likewise, many of the people who know about Xenopus development probably know very little about frogs. Model organisms, translational focus and systems based thinking lead to extensive study of organisms that is oddly divorced from an understanding of the organism qua organism. Evolutionary biologists do this too. Systematists famously know little about the biological uses of the various structures they use to construct cladograms. In fact there was a time when such knowledge was considered harmful to establishing relationships, and systematists proudly touted their lack of knowledge about organism function. And molecular biologists have often been not much better regarding the organisms whose genomes they code.
And yet, here, with optogenetics, we have a technology that is born of in depth knowledge of the physiology of single celled algae, the reproductive chemistry of viruses, and the control of genetic expression at the cellular level in mammalian neurons. None of these things are trivial. All of them are products of long research programs within subfields of biology. (The discovery and understanding of transcription factors alone was a huge revolution in cellular genetics, and the histroy of our understanding of viruses and single celled algae is equally fascinating).
It is true that discplines are necessary to provide depth of understanding. It is also true, as Michael Hendricks recently pointed out, that interdisciplinary research assumes the existence of robust, vibrant, INTERESTING disciplines. But for this interdisciplinaryness to occur, there must be people with enough curiosity about what is going on in the neighboring silo to, well, see a possibility for coupling viral vector technologies with voltage gated channels from algae. And when the results of interdisciplinary research become ubiquitous within a field, there are potential risks in remaining ignorant about those aspects of your technique that come from a different scientific history and background.
Without a minimum of curiosity about what's going on in the silo next door, interdisciplinary breakthroughs are impossible. And without a minimum of curiosity about interdisciplinary breakthroughs, our understanding of things we do in our own fields is more black box that we might like.
Talking with the neuro people is a stark reminder of disciplinary boundaries. Our basic questions overlap on the matter of animal behavior, yet diverge in where we focus our explanatory efforts. To caricature, we examine behavior and musculoskeletal systems, and treat the brain as a black box, and the neuroscientists examine behavior and the brain, and treat the musculoskeletal system as a black box. So things we take for granted, they often are unclear on, and vice versa.
As we were discussing the background of optogenetics, the names of Chlamydomonas and Volvox, the green algae from whose genome the photosensitive ion channel genes have been extracted, came up. Because of my dillettantish path through biology, I have fair amount of botany, and a lot of taxonomy, in my knapsack. And that same wandering path included a pretty extensive flirtation with both cellular physiology, and neuroscience as an undergrad. As we discussed the various components of optogenetics, the light gated ion channels, the promoter sequences, the virus delivery vector, different questions popped into my head. Why did the algae have light gated voltage channels (I'm assuming some sort of phototactic behavior)? Where transposon sequences used to insert the genes into the neurone genomes, so that they would be replicated along with chromosomes, or were they left as free floating strands of DNA? Of course, in our group of mammalian biomechanists and neuroscientists, no one really knew the answers to those questions. And to be honest, they probably couldn't have pulled Volvox out of a eukaryote line up.
I often quip that huge amounts of knowledge about Mus musculus is held by people who don't give a damn about mice. Likewise, many of the people who know about Xenopus development probably know very little about frogs. Model organisms, translational focus and systems based thinking lead to extensive study of organisms that is oddly divorced from an understanding of the organism qua organism. Evolutionary biologists do this too. Systematists famously know little about the biological uses of the various structures they use to construct cladograms. In fact there was a time when such knowledge was considered harmful to establishing relationships, and systematists proudly touted their lack of knowledge about organism function. And molecular biologists have often been not much better regarding the organisms whose genomes they code.
And yet, here, with optogenetics, we have a technology that is born of in depth knowledge of the physiology of single celled algae, the reproductive chemistry of viruses, and the control of genetic expression at the cellular level in mammalian neurons. None of these things are trivial. All of them are products of long research programs within subfields of biology. (The discovery and understanding of transcription factors alone was a huge revolution in cellular genetics, and the histroy of our understanding of viruses and single celled algae is equally fascinating).
It is true that discplines are necessary to provide depth of understanding. It is also true, as Michael Hendricks recently pointed out, that interdisciplinary research assumes the existence of robust, vibrant, INTERESTING disciplines. But for this interdisciplinaryness to occur, there must be people with enough curiosity about what is going on in the neighboring silo to, well, see a possibility for coupling viral vector technologies with voltage gated channels from algae. And when the results of interdisciplinary research become ubiquitous within a field, there are potential risks in remaining ignorant about those aspects of your technique that come from a different scientific history and background.
Without a minimum of curiosity about what's going on in the silo next door, interdisciplinary breakthroughs are impossible. And without a minimum of curiosity about interdisciplinary breakthroughs, our understanding of things we do in our own fields is more black box that we might like.
Sunday, 15 November 2015
Techne
I was in New York yesterday evening to see Sylvie Guillem's farewell performance. Guillem is one of the great dancer of the past thirty years. Her career has been remarkable both for its brilliance, and for the determination she has shown in charting her own path as a dancer and performer. She has danced as a star in all the great ballets, but has devoted most of the past decade to contemporary ballet. Her work is breathtaking in its scope and originality.
Guillem has just turned fifty, and, with the same clarity of purpose that has marked all her career decisions, has decided to stop dancing. Yet she is not showing any decline in skill. Her performance yesterday was a masterpiece of virtuosity, her technique unparalleled, her famously athletic body still dazzling in the shapes it achieves, seemingly without effort.
As she writes herself in the program notes: "Why stop? Very simply, because I want to end while I am still happy doing what I do with pride and passion."
Performance relies on the body and the mind, and depends on the faculties of both. All performers live in anxiety of the failure of their tools: the body slows down, the muscles become less strong, the voice breaks. The mind fails. Dancers and opera singers are particularly aware of this, yet it affects all performers. A pianist known in her youth for extreme virtuosity may find as she ages that her playing must change. The fingers are less strong, the tendons tighter, and the spectacular brio of youth is gone. Yet the pianist is not necessarily done: a new maturity of playing, a new voice can emerge, as the performance changes to adapt to the new reality of the body. I remember hearing two recordings of the great violinist Heifetz playing the same concerto, once in his thirties, once on his final concert in his 80s. There was a noticeable difference in the playing. The youthful performance was brilliant and assured, yet the performance at 80, slower, perhaps a little more tremulous, had found a new depth of lyrical expression to the music. Perhaps, when virtuosity is insufficient, the performer must find new richness in the work.
Guillem's choices of pieces yesterday reflected this. They highlighted precision, athleticism, and shear physical expressiveness of her dancer' body. In the first piece, choreographed for her by Akram Khan, she crawled onto stage, and then reproduced her career before our eyes: her body growing expressing ever more technique. She explored the meaning of performance for her, and in doing so, entered a strange, uncanny space. Her human body became inhuman, the years of practice and the natural talent allowing to explore spaces that our bodies cannot enter. I watched as she lay on the floor in a posture that highlighted her over extended elbows and hyper flexible hips, and it was a strange thing. Virtuosity is other worldly. Yet the concern with the meaning of years of practice was a concern of maturity, of the artist wondering what it is they have done. Her other two pieces of the first half, where she danced with other dancers, seemed to me tinged with anxiety about the difficulties of collaboration. In one, Guillem appeared only for the briefest instant to disturb an exquisite, tense pas de deux between two male dancers, who kept coming into and out of phase with each other, ending sequences of steps in the same pose, but taking different paths to get there, and then sometimes seeming to attack each other. Was this a meditation on the frustrations of collaboration, and perhaps, the dangers of assuming one's centrality on the stage, and ignoring all that has gone on before you entered? In another piece, she performed a frantic duet with another female dancer while a dazzling light pattern redefined the shape of the stage constantly. Sometimes the dancers tracked the shifting lights, sometimes they didn't, yet always they moved as pair. Was this about succession and legacy?
In the final piece, entitled simply "bye", Guillem danced alone. This almost seemed a private dance (obviously it was not). And when she was done, she simply walked into a crowd, and vanished.
Guillem called the show "life in progress". That title acknowledges many things: that her life is not over because she has ceased dancing, and so by extension, that her life is not co extensive with her dancing (after all, she was once not a dancer, and existed as such). As scientists and academics, we too need to ask how long we wish to perform, and recognize that our life is not co-extensive with our work. And we too can think about how our performance changes as youthful virtuosity gives way to the techne gained through maturity.
Like performers, there is little reason to do academic science if we are not happy doing it with pride and passion. And like performers, deciding to end doing science does not mean deciding to end living.
Guillem has just turned fifty, and, with the same clarity of purpose that has marked all her career decisions, has decided to stop dancing. Yet she is not showing any decline in skill. Her performance yesterday was a masterpiece of virtuosity, her technique unparalleled, her famously athletic body still dazzling in the shapes it achieves, seemingly without effort.
As she writes herself in the program notes: "Why stop? Very simply, because I want to end while I am still happy doing what I do with pride and passion."
Performance relies on the body and the mind, and depends on the faculties of both. All performers live in anxiety of the failure of their tools: the body slows down, the muscles become less strong, the voice breaks. The mind fails. Dancers and opera singers are particularly aware of this, yet it affects all performers. A pianist known in her youth for extreme virtuosity may find as she ages that her playing must change. The fingers are less strong, the tendons tighter, and the spectacular brio of youth is gone. Yet the pianist is not necessarily done: a new maturity of playing, a new voice can emerge, as the performance changes to adapt to the new reality of the body. I remember hearing two recordings of the great violinist Heifetz playing the same concerto, once in his thirties, once on his final concert in his 80s. There was a noticeable difference in the playing. The youthful performance was brilliant and assured, yet the performance at 80, slower, perhaps a little more tremulous, had found a new depth of lyrical expression to the music. Perhaps, when virtuosity is insufficient, the performer must find new richness in the work.
Guillem's choices of pieces yesterday reflected this. They highlighted precision, athleticism, and shear physical expressiveness of her dancer' body. In the first piece, choreographed for her by Akram Khan, she crawled onto stage, and then reproduced her career before our eyes: her body growing expressing ever more technique. She explored the meaning of performance for her, and in doing so, entered a strange, uncanny space. Her human body became inhuman, the years of practice and the natural talent allowing to explore spaces that our bodies cannot enter. I watched as she lay on the floor in a posture that highlighted her over extended elbows and hyper flexible hips, and it was a strange thing. Virtuosity is other worldly. Yet the concern with the meaning of years of practice was a concern of maturity, of the artist wondering what it is they have done. Her other two pieces of the first half, where she danced with other dancers, seemed to me tinged with anxiety about the difficulties of collaboration. In one, Guillem appeared only for the briefest instant to disturb an exquisite, tense pas de deux between two male dancers, who kept coming into and out of phase with each other, ending sequences of steps in the same pose, but taking different paths to get there, and then sometimes seeming to attack each other. Was this a meditation on the frustrations of collaboration, and perhaps, the dangers of assuming one's centrality on the stage, and ignoring all that has gone on before you entered? In another piece, she performed a frantic duet with another female dancer while a dazzling light pattern redefined the shape of the stage constantly. Sometimes the dancers tracked the shifting lights, sometimes they didn't, yet always they moved as pair. Was this about succession and legacy?
In the final piece, entitled simply "bye", Guillem danced alone. This almost seemed a private dance (obviously it was not). And when she was done, she simply walked into a crowd, and vanished.
Guillem called the show "life in progress". That title acknowledges many things: that her life is not over because she has ceased dancing, and so by extension, that her life is not co extensive with her dancing (after all, she was once not a dancer, and existed as such). As scientists and academics, we too need to ask how long we wish to perform, and recognize that our life is not co-extensive with our work. And we too can think about how our performance changes as youthful virtuosity gives way to the techne gained through maturity.
Like performers, there is little reason to do academic science if we are not happy doing it with pride and passion. And like performers, deciding to end doing science does not mean deciding to end living.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)