Sherlock Holmes Meets Art Bell:
Masters of Knowledge at the
Fin-de-Siecle
One of the key issues facing scholars of contemporary culture involves the
question of knowledge, or better, popular attitudes toward the acquisition and
utilization of knowledge. The issue is critical because it is enmeshed in a
fundamental set of questions regarding public perceptions of truth, scientific (and
social scientific) objectivity, the power and limits of the human mind, and the
intersection of forms of power and knowledge. However, the question of these
popular attit udes is a tricky one, as there is often little direct address of such concerns
in popular culture; instead, one must often look for a more indirect reflection of
these belief structures. Valuable material may be found, for example, in popular
scientific discourse or in the rhetoric surrounding modem police work. I want to
turn to a rather different area of analysis, though it draws upon both areas—the
literal embodiment of popular beliefs regarding knowledge gathering in the figure
of a single person. The two figures I will exam, fictional fin-de-siecle detective
Sherlock Holmes and contemporary radio personality Art Bell would seem to be
strikingly different figures, and yet they share the position of emblem for an entire
set of historically specific attitudes toward the process of knowledge acquisition.
While the comparison of fictional character with real human is naturally risky,
it should be noted that Bell is essentially a media constmction and the product of
an intense process of self-mythologization. Indeed, it may be a suitably postmodern
gesture to treat Bell as a kind of fiction, given the striking similarity of his own
philosophical position to that of contemporary postmodern theory, a similarity that
will be discussed later in the essay. Fundamentally, I want to examine Holmes and
Bell as reflective of potent fantasies about the location, acquisition, and use of
forms of knowledge, with Holmes indicative of a rationalistic, hyper-modem, and
supremely positivistic vision of knowledge and Bell as symptomatic of a
fragmented, postmodern, and definitively paranoiac view of the same terrain. To
do this, I will proceed through a brief sketch of each figure, an examination of
their respective milieux, an analysis of the methods deployed by each, a discussion
of the connection between each and more classically academic understandings of
knowledge production, and finally a brief reflection on the analysis as a whole;
however, in a twist ending worthy of Holmes and with paranoia worthy of Bell, I
end with an appendix which casts some doubt on the entire enterprise.
It is probably unnecessary for me to offer more than a brief identification of