Pale Fire, Part Deux

A gift that keeps on giving, from the Irony Fairy.

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, Professor of Psychology at Harvard , has words [via 3QD] for Barry Blitt about the way the common people perceive images. (The Irony Fairy suggests I italicize psychology and Harvard, for reasons we will see.)

Banaji is best known for her work with the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures unconscious racial and gender biases. As such she might be presumed to take special interest in the way the NYer Fist Bump cover of two weeks back is reverberating in the culture. Instead she seems more curious about the way it would be reverberating if her pet theories of cognition and human nature were accurate.

Banaji is disturbed by David Remnick's decision to run the fist bump cover because of a basic cognitive rule, namely: "seeing is believing." When people are exposed to an association (e.g. Senator Obama as an America-hating Islamist), no matter how they may understand it consciously (e.g. as satire), they cannot prevent it from setting up camp in the unconscious, where it continues to furtively operate. "To some part of the cognitive apparatus," writes Bajani, "that association is for real. Once made, it has a life of its own."

I'd be the last person to deny the importance of unconscious conceptions in influencing our beliefs and choices. But it's not hard to detect a note of fear-mongering (no doubt unconscious) in Banaji's words, which conjure themes of infiltration, hidden intrigue, contamination, and subterfuge, bracingly reminiscent of just about every fear campaign ever run. Her implicit argument, then, is that human nature demands that we purify our information stream to keep out harmful imagery, which, once loosened, can never be eradicated. This, I confess, suggests a branch of psychology that is unknown to me. At one point she goes as far as to state that any imagery we are exposed to, under any conditions, is fairly compared to Pavlovian conditioning:

Learning by association is so basic a mechanism that living beings are jam-packed with it — ask any dog the next time you see it salivating to a tone of a bell.

If only we had a cultural weapon against this mechanism, something that could subvert the meanings of these associations by calling close and precise attention to them. But such is not our fortune, alas.

Banaji is helped in her understanding of the operation of the minds of the common people by her Professorship at Harvard, from which humble perch she rails at the elitism of those who populate the New Yorker's oeuvre:

That is why I find the Blitt-Remnick response, even more than the image itself, to be so unfortunate. Unfortunate because it shows that artists and their managers, by remaining in the isolated world of art or publishing, cut off from the basic facts of human nature and experience, of conscious and unconscious social perception, learning and memory, have no choice but to be startled by the mismatch between their lofty intentions to do the public some good through satire and the results of their clumsy actions.

I, too, impatiently await the day when artists and those who publish them can finally show the kind of insight into the human condition demonstrated by a tenured Harvard psychology professor. I shudder to think of the works Shakespeare or Montaigne might have produced, if only they'd been given an office at William James Hall.

Not that Banaji herself is susceptible to the baleful influences of implicit association. She appears to have undergone some kind of esoteric Jedi training to strengthen her defenses:

I have been trained to step back and rethink my reaction to that which jolts and nauseates me. I know that, in such moments especially, I must look within for a possible inability to transcend ingrained values.

We must lament that such techniques are not normally transmitted to the common people, and that it would not be practicable for institutions of higher learning--or of clinical psychology--to attempt to do so. Such a skill as this type of patient reflection and consideration might prove a decent stopgap against human nature, at least until such time as we can genetically engineer a superior transhuman race with no unconscious faculties whatsoever. But surely if this were desirable, Dr. Banaji, an eminent and influential psychologist at our most prestigious university, would have advocated this type of training, rather than attempting to shame Barry Blitt for releasing imagery into the "open society" that the common people aren't prepared to understand.

Anyway, at least Banaji gets it. That's the important thing. Or does she? She seems notably occupied with the idea that if Blitt was truly a good satirist, he would have created his earlier covers with the same type and amount of irony.

Remnick showed off other covers by the same artist that were, in his mind, similarly offensive. In one cover image, Vice President Cheney is shown to be the boss of President Bush; in another, there's a flood in the Oval Office, with the administration afloat. Let's analyze Remnick's logic that those are psychologically equivalent to the Barack-Michelle image. When the artist's intention was to depict Cheney as the boss, he faithfully drew Cheney as the boss. That's satire? When the artist's intention was to depict the drowning of the administration, he sketched the drowning of the administration. Far out!

I'm still struggling through this, but what I think she's saying is that: (1) The fist-bump cover isn't satire; it's actually Pavlovian reinforcement of negative stereotypes. (2) The flood and Cheney-as-boss covers aren't satire, because they don't employ the exact ironic technique of the fist-bump cover, which is not satire. (3) The ironic relationship is properly considered as not between the artistic representation and the reality it comments on (Cheney is not the actual boss, the Oval Office is not actually flooded), but as between the artist's original intent, and his degree of success in executing that intent artistically. That is, the flooded office can't be satire, because it's exactly what Blitt set out to portray. (4) If something isn't satirical, it can't be offensive, but if it is satirical, it's offensiveness destroys any positive social benefit.

More study is obviously required. But the coup de grace is this:

If the argument is that The New Yorker cover was meant to depict the radical right's ludicrous portrayal of Obama as an apologist for Islam and its fundamentalists, then the question we might pose is this: Would Blitt consider it good satirical strategy to condemn child sexual abuse by depicting a young adolescent boy and an older man, obviously just having had sex, fist-bumping with knowing pleasure? In what world would that constitute satire rather than a failed imagination?

This passage reduces me to the desperate hope that Banaji's article is, itself, satirical, employing a buffoonish fictional narrator who, though recognized globally for her work on the psyche, cannot comprehend the barest essentials of the faculty of humor (and even has to labor over fairly basic logic). The idea that Dr. Banaji is seriously berating Blitt for the crime of failed imagination, over a non-funny cartoon of her own devising, which itself is a failed analogy for the cartoon by Blitt, is just too sad to contemplate.