(Continuing extracts and notes from Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes this World )
Hyde, around page 241, takes up our inability to see that which is not represented in our taxonomies or sciences. It’s a perennial problem of observation; that we see the phenomena that we expect to see. The results we get are very often informed heavily by the patterns of recognition we are apt to use.
This can be bad news for experimental research of course: the phenomena an experiment produces may not be those we expect to see, and we may miss them entirely if we are too confident in the inductive presuppositions that are often a good and valuable ally in our understanding.
It can be bad news for creativity too, moreover, or for the basic research we do to situate ourselves vis a vis a topic or an object of study. Depending too solidly on any system of understanding can make the functioning of creative insight in all its theatres of operation, a more difficult task. One of the points Eli Pariser makes in The Filter Bubble is that personalized forms of searching impose a knowledge structure (or rather, filter) that imposes a certain ordering sense on the information-world we see through it. This is all very useful, and helps us build strong, if artificial, means of inference. But he makes the points that we are alone in this bubble, and that it is, to all intents and purposes, invisible. How do we circumvent it? How do we counteract its effects and inoculate ourselves with the raw experience once in a while? (Can we turn it off? Is that what is needed?). Similarly, libraries order information in highly particular ways. But they are highly visible and they are not personalized. Furthermore, they often surprise or irritate us; I propose that such irritation is valuable, sensitizing us to the inadequacy of all systems of order, and reminding us that finding out is hard work, or it is if we are doing it well. This goes somewhat against some of the central library tenets of making the user’s search easy. Yes, help the user, but help them to work critically with information too. There are enough machines to make it easy. How can we help them when it gets hard – hard to find the truth that is at stake for a particular situation, when every source of information has its own agenda? How can we build critical literacy?
Hyde takes this up as part of the work Trickster does, especially in his in-between forms when he does not conform to the types or definitions that his audience uses to see the world (in fact, Hyde uses the history of Frederick Douglass, a man who had once been a slave, and whose personal history saw him write and rewrite his own story over the course of his lifetime, and find himself defined or mislabeled in ways he at various times found hard to accept or had to work through). Hyde notes how any audience has its judgments, or stereotypes that cannot easily comprehend or ‘see’ mixed, hybrid or new identity; “any such mixed identity is absurd, unthinkable, and unreal.”
All such judgments are in some way predicated upon a subjective notion of what the person or phenomenon under review actually is. As an audience, or as researchers, we do well not to repeat the error of the naturalists Melville describes in The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade (a passage noted by Hyde at p221 of Trickster makes this world):
"Experience is the only guide here; but as no one man can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it. When the duck-billed beaver of Australia [the platypus] was first brought stuffed to England, the naturalists, appealing to their classifications, maintained that there was in reality no such creature; the bill in the specimen must needs be, in some way, artificially stuck on."
Herman Melville The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade p.94
Longmans, London, 1857
Our typologies must grow to embrace the natural history of the platypus, so to speak. But the shock of the new is not simply that it greets us with the unexpected; it serves also to disrupt our settled ideas of the organisation of things. When we are open to new knowledge, we are also in a state of critical receptivity, and this is a state which also holds its structures of definition under review. To admit the platypus, we have to be able to suspend dogmatic responses to what is possible or right. The value of 'wild cards' like the platypus is that they elicit a radical response that either exposes our dogma for what it is, or begins in us the process of constructing a more inclusive critical apparatus.
If wisdom is the knowledge gained from experience, (phronesis, as Ricoeur has it) then we can gain wisdom from experiences like these, in never again holding our truths to be unassailable.
In a library environment, we might come across similar discoveries that jolt our sense of the possible; or at any rate challenge our sense of what constitutes the proper boundary of definition. I would propose that such experiences are valuable precisely because they can help instill in us a receptivity and flexibility of mind that stands ready to respond to such jolts. When we find, to our surprise, that our experience "is not coextensive with what is", the surprise helps us to formulate a self-reflective critical literacy. Contrariwise, if we are never challenged by the unexpected, if our sole experiences of searching, finding and researching are limited to verifying what we feel we already know, it would seem likely that we run the risk of etiolating our sense of wonder. Without the light of serendipity, we run ever more deeply into the channels of what we expect to find.