Portrait of Fractured Knowledge

  Surely the strangest feature of a narrative in time is its ability to weave together disparate events, fractures of knowledge, greeds and concerns, and demand that they all coalesce, and all become a policy: unlikely bedfellows are caught in the single deep crystal of time. This entrapment has become all too easy in a world where the media have committed themselves to constant new news stories. For the media know very well that the endless quest for novelty (and endless circles of boredom in that novelty) that are the news cycles, can be constantly fed by such crystals. - They seek them out therefore. That is, they look for stories that by linking previously unlinked elements one with the other, catch the audience and the authorities on the hop. The reaction of the authorities then becomes a part in the stories (as does of course criticism, just or unjust). The crystal of the new cycle then has a dynamic of its own, one that tests the mettle of experts, politicians, lawmakers and the general public, and so whiles away the endless hours of the new cycle (and incidentally confirms the media’s power).

  Additionally such crystals are all too easy to make, due to one of the strange consequences of modern science. In olden times there was a belief in a single series of explications for the universe. There was a God who explained it all, or at least a set of fairly all-encompassing sciences (or dialectics) that patterned the world. However one of the conditions for the modern science that has been developed since around say the end of the eighteenth century or so, is that such an idea of universal science has been left to the speculation of dreamers and fools. Real science is always a messy affair, and always linked up to this or that set of issues and events. Science is not unified in content then, but by method. It shares a rigour and a sceptical methodology and does so without any need to draw its facts together. Or perhaps one might say, that when it does draw facts together, as often as not what is created is not an all-encompassing theory, so much as a deepening of existing theories and a new sequence of problems and ideas (and possibly a new discipline). New sciences are then created at the boundary places of existing science – for example recently we have seen the birth of a science which splices the genetic with the chemical industry, and aims to produce selected and ‘clever’ drugs; while at the same time maths and the mathematics of complexity and chaos have re-invaded the world of economics and created new disciplines within the economic orbit.

  The irony is then that the same fissures in knowledge that makes good and creative science, makes good ‘news stories’ and yet does so for almost the opposite reasons. Events will then focus both domains, science and the media. - And yet just at the moment the scientists are getting very excited, and they start thinking up a new discipline and new ways to talk to and think with each other, the media are screaming for resolution and simplicity. All the more so if the story hooks up with that perennial of the media world, ‘the public’, and inconveniences them in some manner, for in their distress endless stories lurk. More than that, in the anger of their distress, rages against our political masters or our knowledge, come easy. The media will then very quickly be at their favourite game – the blame game, that long-standing engine of new stories (and their aftermath). This conflict of interests is then heightened by the frequent (and only occasionally mitigated) inability to explain probability by the interviewers. The copyeditors perhaps, or the journalists never quite give us the figures that matter - the probabilities that allow one to predict what is likely to happen. On the contrary we are fed with needless ‘this could go on for weeks’ stories, and the open-ended despair that they represent; as well as the idiocy, for many things could happen - the problem is, are they likely to or not?  Why have sense after all, when one can have all the drama of endless hope and despair? Why stick to rationalist sciences when all the power of Greek Drama is at one’s command?

  In this regard the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland and the cloud of ash which it has sent our way, is surely a masterclass in how the media do stories (and what follows on from that doing). First and foremost in this story is a simple fact. No one knows and no one has done the research necessary to know, when it would be all over. Who should do? How could they up until now, given that all research costs money? All there is to start the story off are two emblematic events. Twice in recent history, modern aircraft have had very great difficulty when they flew into volcanic dust. A dust that was moreover invisible and undetectable, as some kind of free-floating and perilous Bermuda Triangle. Dust was then known to be bad news: Or at least some dust was known to be bad news. Or at least some dust sometimes was known to be bad news. The trouble was then, how one coped with that bad news. Here in the absence of any actual body of evidence, the differing organizations who know something about this dust and how it might behave, become necessarily involved.

  Most important in this are three sets of experts - the Met Office, volcanologists, and aircraft engineers. The importance of the former is of course based upon what amounts to an acceptance of the mystery. No one knows what the effect of the dust will be, so, the argument runs, the best thing to do is to ensure that planes do not meet it. And the best (and perhaps only) organization capable of performing that role is the Met Office, whose job it is to model the upper atmosphere. The Met Office then produce endless models about what the dust is doing and how it will behave. They attempt to forecast the future (it is of course what they are asked to do by everyone). But there are two perils for the Met Office in making such predictions (perils that grows as the disruption spreads). Firstly, they are based upon probability and its verification. There will then be a sense in which the models are wrong. We will certainly be erring on the side of caution, and in a sense that is a very good thing. And yet it does mean that people are stranded when they do not need to be, and in their distress and rage, it is all too easy to discredit the organization that has indirectly stranded them. Secondly the problem with computer models is that in their reporting they appear rather absolute. The model says this, and we must behave therefore like this or do that. They then present an entire picture of what is happening to the world, a picture that we all feel is almost too complete, too absolute, too finished, given the complexities of what is happening here. If one then presents a too simple model to a world where there are many voices screaming in the face of that model (and where its very imposition creates endless new news misery stories), then one must be very careful, else the wild hunt of the media turn upon the forces that would guide it.

  The second set of experts are those who know of volcanoes and their power. These are individuals whose life’s work is in thinking about the deep problems of the mantle and the core. As such they are typical of a breed of scientists whom the rest of the world take for granted and do not over-fund. Where after all, is the glamour in drilling, when one can play God ramming particles together, or cross a tomato with a fish, or else go off to the moon? Volcanology, the science of the powderkeg we actually live on, ought perhaps to have the glamour of a Frankenstein style scientist (as romantic hero), but it does firmly not. Not that this matters of course to measured and careful science. The result is that our knowledge is very imperfect. The experts simply do not know, and all they provide are exactly the series of profundities that the media find rather tricky to comprehend or use. They say then that the eruption might carry on, or that another bigger one might happen, or that it might change what it is producing in the medium term (or might not). The careful lattice of probabilities so created then easily becomes a galaxy of horror stories, as the very uncertainty is re-marketed as despair and fatalism, by the media drama queens (who like a ‘good story’).

  The final set of experts are of course the aircraft engine designers. These individuals are the ones who ought to know the effects of ash on aeroplanes and might be able to design the planes differently to avoid the problem. And yet this is likely to be far from simple knowledge in itself. For what the ash does rather depends upon the type of ash there is in the sky, and the type of ash is not necessary known (as no one was initially up there running experiments to find out). Additionally engines are rather expensive to redesign, and anyway that takes time and this story is firmly in the now. These experts then will run experiments flying into the ash, and collate results, and yet still need time to process the information and define stratagems for action and for resolution.

  The trouble of course is that the fascinating conversation which all these individuals want to have one with the other, the productive scientific exchange, cannot happen under these circumstances. Such exchanges take time, and new ideas emerge and evolve: but time is what there is not. - For the mechanics of the capitalist system has already fully inhabited the space of the world before the fracture line in our knowledge, and is potentially in real trouble. I.e. we always have already fully used up the space in our world, the legitimate flight paths, slots at air ports and variety of different cost flights; We will have already used up to the maximum what our current parameters will allow. If those parameters change we are then in deep trouble straight way (this is the modern norm). The conversation then between experts cannot be the reasoned one that they promise themselves, but must rather be a hurried exchange carried out in the full media storm.

  Moreover this exchange is made all the more complex because four other elements intrinsic to capitalism are clearly involved -two linked to humanity and two to money. On the side of humanity there are then endless heartbreaking stories of those stranded in far off corners of the world. We are give then in the media, a portrait of a storm or mass shipwreck, where an entire heroic people are left stranded, and are making their way home as best they can in a sequence of modern Odysseys and Iliads. Who can not have their heart broken by the tales of trains, boats and Cyclops that everywhere abound? And whom does one blame for these tales, given that unlike the Greeks, one will not blame the Gods? All of course one is left with, is the government (or the experts). The government then of course needs to be involved. And yet here it is caught up in those mechanics of modern mass organizations (which have concerned in other essays in this series). The mechanics that mean that government acts always with longterm statistics in mind. No government can do anything then in the face of this kind of uncertainty. Or perhaps rather all they can do, is urge the experts to get some sort of programme thrashed out, and say how sorry they are. Or perhaps, given this is during an General Election campaign, all they can do is to dispatch a gunboat or two somewhere to do something (at least this is better than nothing). The trouble is that it might not be (much) for being reported are those endless horror tales, and gunboats and statistics are no real comfort here. On the side of money there are arranged two main camps. Firstly there are the airline companies themselves, who of course face huge losses and rage against the fact. You can hear them mutter that ‘a certain amount of health and safety is all very well but profits are profits’. As such they have a huge vested interest in either finding precedence from other times or places that discredit our current form of action, or else proving that things are not as bad as they seem. To illustrate the former case, these companies cite America, where they claim (strangely enough) the air companies themselves decide whether to fly or no (given certain empirical and not predictable information). Whether a company flies is then a function not of government policy or even scientific prediction, so much as what the insurers and actualities of that company will allow, given the risks of flying but also of not flying. The decision becomes then also a financial one. More cynically these companies use this approach to try and discredit the Met Office. On a more positive note they will research the effects of flight upon their planes and argue that it is not that bad (or not at this or that concentration). The interests of the airline companies lies then in almost opposing their experts against other experts. The companies get their flight engineers and their actuaries to out bid the experts of the Met Office, and their engineers gainsay the wisdom of the volcanologists, and define new textures and new paradigms. Such an opposition is not in itself bad, and yet it must always be thought about and born in mind (as it can lead one to weird places). Finally there are the economic effects of a delay, both in the insurance world and on the wider global economy – effects which are only beginning to play out, and which will echo across the next few months or even years.

  In the guise of a volcanoes, time has performed one of its endless and very demanding miracles. Elements of our world that appear separate and that no one really thought to hook one to the other, suddenly have become vibrant and real. In all the blood and the agony, and half-manufactured tragedies that the media is busy building, a new science is also being created before our eyes: a science that will then organize our future times, and prevent this happening quite this way again. More that that, models about disasters, and how they play out are being formulated and debated about. Let us hope then, in all the blood and fury of this debate, that the widescale predictions from the Met Office that hinder us all, the very real science of climate change, are not quietly also discredited (by implication). For it is worth remembering that in the volcanic debate, the same parties are arranged against each other. - In both debates the experts of science and larger models, and the ‘heroes’ of the modern business world, and major polluters the air companies are the protagonists. And if the latter have their way here, who knows what other effects that might have to the wider debate and the way that it is understood elsewhere?