Sherlock Holmes and Art Bell
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Masters of Knowledge: Bell and Holmes as Symptom
In this section, I will try to offer some concluding thoughts regarding the
status of Holmes and Bell as cultural figures and as exemplars of an attitude toward
the generation and circulation of social information. I refer to the two as “masters
of knowledge” in the sense that they serve as symbols for a much larger set of
practices of collecting, storing, and processing information and even as near-heroic
figures in the struggle for truth. As noted, the Holmesian vision of truth is one
consonant with the scientific method, logical abduction, and an almost clinical
emotional divestment, while Bell’s program implies that it is precisely this set of
conventions that inhibits and obscures the hunt for truth and that the truth exists in
the shifting, fragmentary, and covert networks of information. More than this clear
distinction, though, both figures reflect a kind of epochal shift in public faith
regarding the infallibility of human rationality and the appropriate source of
knowledge. Of course, this necessarily raises the much wider question of whether
this should thus be regarded as a paradigmatic shift from the modem to the
postmodern, one with implications far beyond individual instances of popular
culture.
I suppose one can take a Holmesian approach to the question and expand the
study until a valid conclusion can be drawn as to the relation of this symptom (or
instance) to the whole. On the other hand, a more apocalyptic, Belhan perspective
would regard the individual instance of Bell’s knowledge world as a kind of
structural homology to a larger world marked by instabihty, cover-up, and the ride
on a UFO. In that sense, it seems that we would be forced to choose between two
forms of abduction. However, perhaps the real answer is that Holmes and Bell are,
in the final instance, both products of an intellectual social environment and
important figures in the popular dissemination of certain attitudes toward the process
of knowledge collection. Ultimately, perhaps, they reflect a kind of metaphysical
mood regarding the status of scientific rigor and the rationality of human
understanding. Of course, such relationships are necessarily complex and often
contradictory, and the latter is reflected in the conclusion below.
Twist Ending/Counterpoint: Conan Doyle as Mystic, Bell as Rationalist
As promised in the introduction, I will conclude this essay with a sort of twist
ending in which I offer some reservations regarding the claims made in the previous
sections. These reservations are derived from a closer look at the creators of both
Holmes and “Art Bell,” one that nearly reverses the portrait provided above. As I
hinted, Arthur Conan Doyle was far from Holmesian in his own philosophical
orientation, becoming a major authority in the area of spiritualism, the belief that it
was possible to communicate with the dead. Indeed, Doyle was a major supporter
of the Society for Psychical Research (breaking with them over their lack of creduhty