Armitage epistemology: or, an exercise in source critique

[This is a building block. It’s a sort of summary of and variation on an exercise that I sometimes do with students I have in the first and second semesters of college study. I’ve just substituted “Mr. Armitage” for “historical events” and “interviews” for “the source.” For those worried that this taxonomy is too simplistic: this post is not the end of the discussion, and I am not implying that all texts are interpretable using some sort of neo-historicist fourfold exegesis. This is just a game I play to get students to think. I do it, for example, with Bartolome de las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, an account of the conquest of the “New World” that students tend to be inclined to accept at face value when they should not.]

Richard Armitage as Ricky Deeming in George Gently. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery. A totally gratuitous photo that has nothing to do with the content of this post. Or maybe it does, since Ricky is trying to hide who he really is. Or is he? Who is Ricky, really? We never find out for sure. In any case, all that notwithstanding, a rolled up workshirt over a t-shirt is one of my favorite looks for a man, probably because it’s my dad’s favorite outfit. That’s really why I picked this shot. The picture would get plus points if the shirt had been flannel, as I love to rub my cheek against a flannel-covered shoulder. Not that many women are rubbing their cheeks against Ricky’s shoulder. OK, enough adlibbing. If the question at hand doesn’t interest you, feel free to swoon in the comments. about Mr. Armitage as Ricky. I know I do.

This question has been bugging me for awhile, so here it is. To some extent it comes out of this discussion, but it was bothering me well before that, as I’m alternately beguiled and bemused by the “is he for real” discussion that erupts every time a new interview is published. This begs the question of what it is that we can know about Mr. Armitage, a question covered under the philosophical discipline of epistemology. (I am not going to run you, my poor readers, through that whole encyclopedia article, as historians tend not to think of the reliability of knowledge as based in such particular conditions. I offer it only for the purposes of definition. Historians tend, in the terms of that article, to be rather crude evidentialists. Thus I will play a game with you like the one that I force my beginning students to play, one that elucidates the basis of an evidentialist epistemology of Armitage.) 

Quiz question: What can we know about Mr. Armitage based on what he says about himself in interviews?

A) We can know Mr. Armitage reasonably well based on what he says about himself in interviews and can trust everything he says.

B) We can know Mr. Armitage to some extent based on what he says about himself in interviews. We can trust what he says based on our application of relevant context(s), linguistic conventions, verbal and non-verbal cues insofar as we have them, and our own experiences of interpreting conversations with everyday interlocutors.

C) We can know Mr. Armitage to some extent based on what he says about himself in interviews, but what he makes such statements primarily for publicity purposes and we cannot apply tests that facilitate the determinations argued for in B) with any strong reliability.

D) We cannot know Mr. Armitage at all based on what he says about himself in interviews.

Most of my students are at A or B when they start college, and my goal is to move them to consider the possibility of B, C, or D when they are reading. Obviously one stance does not apply to every source, or at least not in the same way, but I want them to realize that they will harvest more from a source the more suspicious they become of it, i.e., the further they move toward D as a method of reading.

It may help here to consider a specific example, so I’ve chosen one from the May 30th Mirror interview.

[Interviewer]: What type of girl would you go for?
RA: Someone a bit naughty. And who likes food – because I really do – and who doesn’t take life too seriously and has a sense of humour. I could never go out with another actor, I’d find that hard – the stresses of the job, they just pull people in different directions.

I think everyone can see that (A) as an answer falls apart here on the face of it. We can’t read without interpreting, and we can’t interpret without context. I don’t know exactly what a Brit means when he says he would go for someone “naughty,” for example. Is that someone who doesn’t feel compelled always to play by the rules? Someone who tells off-color jokes? Someone mischievous? A practical joke player? Sexually naughty? More than one of those things? Or something entirely different? And is this a listing of the most important attributes of the potential “girl” postulated by the reporter, or just some that occurred to him off the top of his head in a casual interview situation? We don’t know, because we have no clues to orient us.

So (B) is, from my position, the least skeptical interpretive stance that is nonetheless tenable. We might call it an optimistic common-sense position. Although it continues to assume that Mr. Armitage is reporting accurately about his preferences in a “girl,” (B) allows us to ask what he means by “naughty,” for example, and most of us will either apply our own definition of that term, or ask what cultural and linguistic clues tell us about his employment of it. As readers we will also ask what context might be definitive for his selection of these factors as opposed to others. The cynic in me, for example, notes based on my own relationship experiences and those of my close friends that people often state that they want in a partner the opposite of whatever issue bugged them the most in a previous relationship that went sour. So I would be tempted to contemplate the possibility that Mr. Armitage’s last serious relationship partner might have been a serious, perhaps rule-bound person with little or no sense of humor, for whom food was either unimportant or “the enemy.” In the same vein, since it seems unlikely, given the people he associates with, that Mr. Armitage has never gone out with an actor or performer in the twenty years of his adult life, I also find myself as reader mentally inserting an [again] right after the word “actor” in his response. Also, given his other statements in this article, we might wonder that he doesn’t report that he really wants a “girl” who likes to ski or who is in possession of a strong taste for adventure, for example. (B) also allows us to diagnose quotidian linguistic conventions like irony or sarcasm (although those don’t appear in this snippet, as far as I can tell) or politeness (which might, since he doesn’t reject the question out of hand as too personal). (B) is also problematic because some interpreters interpret more than others or in a more or less skillful way; (B) allows “projection” into the interpretation — but as we saw, (A) is impossible as we can’t understand the speech of others without making some assumptions, and without projection, without making some starting assumptions about our interlocutors, communication itself is impossible. But here’s a projection for you: Mr. Armitage’s juxtaposition of “[someone] who doesn’t take life too seriously and has a sense of humour” is revealing, as if he (conversely) believes or is at least asserting here that a person who takes life seriously does not or cannot also have a sense of humor. Importantly, (B) does not stop us from adducing interpretations that are slightly outside the evidence if we have good structural reasons for doing so. It is the first step out onto the interpretive ledge.

Despite the dangers, given the content that can be derived from it, it will be the least problematic stance from the standpoint of many readers who want to think well of Mr. Armitage. It offers the closest and most literal reading given our previous knowledge about Armitage. Thus, in the end, we might choose (B) as our interpretive stance just because the information that we gain from a positive take on the optimistic stance squares with our other information about Mr. Armitage as gleaned from about eight years of interview material. That is, numerous interviews have already created a picture of Armitage, and the material given here squares with it or at least does not contradict it explicitly.  Unfortunately the optimistic interpreter, however, that raises the problem of the tropes of the Armitage figure, or why it is that the press has always cooperated in giving us a very positive picture of our hero. Elements of the Armitage trope include: modesty, sincerity, forthrightness, etc. So at the very least, before embracing (B) without hesitation we have to do some critique of the medium in which our source appears.

That problem moves us as readers on to (C), which we might characterize as a more skeptical version of (B); in applying it, we as readers are directed more strongly toward context, audience, and interest as interpretive frameworks, because up until now, we have been reading Armitage as if we were asking the questions and Armitage were giving the answers to us, which is clearly not the case. Although we continue to assume that we can know some things about Mr. Armitage based on his statements in this interview, when interpreting from the position of (C), we start to apply filters generated by factors already raised by problems implicit in (B) in more explicit and aggressive ways: What is going on in this interview? To whom is he speaking? And cui bono? Who stands to gain if we believe his statements?

For instance: The interviewer is going to know, at the very latest after having googled Mr. Armitage, that the single factor of highest interest in potential readers of the article is going to be his relationship status. Mr. Armitage is going to know that making statements about his relationships threatens to throw his fans into speculative overdrive — at the same time that he probably feels that his personal relationships are none of our business. The interviewer wants to publish accurate or at least non-libelous/-slanderous information, and also wants to get an interview that readers are interested in and forward to their friends. Assuming we believe Mr. Armitage’s statements about himself in other venues (which we are inclined to do if we embrace [B]), we may infer that he may wish not to lie about himself in print. As a person professionally dependent on the good will of the press, he may also not want to alienate the interviewer. Finally, in giving this interview, Armitage is also speaking in a number of different contexts simultaneously: at the very least, to the reporter(s) in the casual atmosphere of the place where he is being interviewed (as the interviewer informs us, he breaks down and orders a glass of wine), but also as the spokesperson for his latest venture, which he wants the press to promote, and also for the benefit of all of us around the world who are hungry for more information about him. Given these different venues, and the impression he wishes to create, he has to judge the practicality and utility of any statement he makes about anything in a frightening array of situations.

So, still following (C), interpretive insights come in such as: love of food is generally seen as an appealing trait in humans. Being “a good eater” is a term of praise for a man or a woman where I come from, and enjoying your food when you come to visit someone is a way to warm the heart of every female above six years old. It’s also a trait that a lot of women have. Indeed, even some women who act in practice as if they hate food will claim to love it under the right social circumstances. Of course, you can eat very little and still love food. Saying that you like a woman who enjoys eating (since liking food seems to imply liking to eat it, a not unreasonable conclusion) is also not only a very classically male sort of statement, it plays on all kinds of cultural tropes that connect enjoyment of eating with enjoyment of sex. Mr. Armitage can hardly be unaware of these. Saying something like this also implies that you like a woman with a few curves (or don’t mind them, anyway), and most women these days have at least a few curves.

While I am not claiming that this statement is an intentional prevarication, then, I thus do note that it is also one that carries an extremely high cultural resonance and it is a classy way of saying “I am a real man.” If “naughty” has any sexual connotation for him, this statement about food backs that up, as eating a bit too much is one way of being naughty and thus connects the statement about naughtiness to the statement about liking to eat — which he makes in the form not only of a statement about the hypothetical “girl” but also about himself. In short: if you were trying to appeal to as many people as possible with a statement that makes you sound male but not Neanderthal, this is the sort of statement you should make. I could also make some extrapolations here about the benefits to him of saying he wouldn’t go out with an actor (it serves as a potential explanation, for example, for why he is never seen in public with starlets on his arm), but you get the idea. (C) is thus the skeptical common-sense stance. It accepts that while some things can be known (that Mr. Armitage makes certain statements, for example, and that he gives the necessary cues to signal their veracity), others are overdetermined or at the very least unverifiable. Mr. Armitage may indeed find women who enjoy food attractive, but plenty other reasons for him to make that statement also apply. Presumably, as well, enjoying food may be necessary, but not sufficient, for him to find a woman attractive. As embracers of (C) we can accept more fully that knowledge attained from interviews is highly fragmentary given the structural factors working on the statements the speaker makes.

Finally, (D), which is — in our scenario — the strongly skeptical position, and one which, from the standpoint of most fans, moves beyond the boundaries of common sense. I don’t need to explore this much because I don’t think many of the readers who have gotten this far would accept it, given the widespread conviction that Mr. Armitage is being sincere in his interviews or at least as sincere as he could be. It would also disable the act of reading almost entirely, as I note below; that is, if the purpose of reading an interview with Mr. Armitage is to find out something real about him, the conviction that it was impossible to do so would make reading the interview pointless from the standpoint of most Armitage fans. For our purposes, however, (D) could encompass a spectrum of possibilities: first, that the conditions affecting the possibility of knowledge created under (C) are so severely limiting that our knowledge of Mr. Armitage is inevitably indeterminate — we know what Armitage has said, but not whether it is credible information about him; second, that everything Mr. Armitage says about himself in interviews is a lie and that he seeks to mislead us for reasons that we could guess or that are entirely unknown to us; or the possibility that Mr. Armitage is doing something other than speaking about himself when he makes statements about himself in an interview. I am leaving that last hypothesis intentionally vague because it’s the topic of my next post.

For now, I wish to observe that:

1. The pudens discourse operates successfully only between (B) and (C). That is, the hide / reveal dynamic that also pertains to many of these interviews relies on the reader’s belief that she will apprehend something real about Mr. Armitage — whether she is optimistic about the truth of that belief (B) or skeptical about it (C). This means that as much as some of us would like to urge Armitage to stop making personal statements in interviews, in some sense, as a person who wishes to create continued demand for what he has on offer, he has to hint credibly occasionally. The appeal to the reader of the interview is to discover something that she then does not actually discover — a sort of intermittent reward schedule that keeps her coming back for more. If we stopped believing that we can know things about Armitage based on his statements, then we would probably stop listening to his statements.

2. All of these scenarios assume that Mr. Armitage knows who he is and can report accurately about it (or choose not to) to us. In short, he has a stable self which he communicates to us and which we interpret correctly or incorrectly, or a stable self about which he lies so that we are misled. This self may change historically (his notion of himself may develop in some way, or he may change his opinions about things), but it is essentially both stable and knowable. We assume this because we also assume ourselves to have stable, knowable selves which we can use to interpret his. This seems highly problematic as an assumption, though, and it is where I will pick up tomorrow (I hope).

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.

~ by Servetus on May 31, 2010.