Allegory

Allegory is the art of meaning something other and more than what is being said. Closely related to irony, and also to metaphor, it is the art of decoding that meaning, reading between the literal lines to understand what is actually being depicted.

It is sometimes said that allegory is a lost art form and that in Euro-America we have lost the craft of saying or representing things indirectly. If this is right then perhaps it is for two reasons. The first is that allegory flourishes as an art form in contexts where there is explicit repression. If the regime (or the church, or the elders) do not tolerate criticism, then the conditions are in place for allegory. It has, then, been cultivated as an explicit art at certain periods in European history. Audiences have gone to the theatre to see a play (say) about classical Rome knowing full well that while they might be learning something about Rome, they were also learning about those currently in power. At present Euro-Americans are mostly lucky enough to live in countries which minimise overt political repression. To that extent stylised forms of allegory are not cultivated as a necessary form in public life.

In the present context the second reason is more interesting. This has to do with the dominance of literal representation. Descriptions describe directly. This is the goal, and seemingly the achievement, of many or most of the major forms of representation in Euro-America. Physical science, biomedicine, social science, but also politics, journalism and current affairs: method is assembled in all of these in the form of statements (or other representations) that corre- spond to manifest absences in straightforward ways. What is made manifest is, so to speak, constructed as being straightforward. More particularly, as the ethnography described in Chapter 2 suggests, the reality made manifest is said to author(ise) the representation that seemingly derives from it.

As an argument for the disappearance of allegory this sounds plausible. Direct representation is indeed celebrated. At the same time, the argument does not quite work. First, as I also argued in Chapter 2, direct representation is never direct. It is mediated. If a statement in endocrinology (or medical sociology) corresponds to a reality out-there, if it simply seems to describe it, then this is because most of the assemblage within which it is located has been rendered invisible, Othered. The authorship, the uncertainties, the enactment of out-thereness, all of these have disappeared. The appearance of direct representation is the effect of a process of artful deletion. So the argument we need to make is this. On the one hand, indeed it is the case that direct repre- sentation offers no overt space for allegory.⁷⁹ But on the other hand direct

representation is built in allegory. There is nothing direct or literal about the link between present statements and the absent realities. This means that those statements come out (or are telling) of something other or more than the reality they describe. They are effects of allegory that conceal their allegorical origins. That is what representation is: allegory that denies its character as allegory.

The argument, then, is that wherever there is depiction, so too, there is allegory. So it is not that allegory has been lost, but rather that it is covertly practised. Or, to put it differently, we are all steeped in the art of allegory. Natural scientists, social scientists, politicians, journalists, workers by hand and by brain, all of us are expert allegorists. All of us are skilled in reading between the lines being fed to us. All of us are consummately skilled at saying what we mean rather than what we are saying. Politicians, advertisers, lawyers, satirists, liars, diplomats, conciliators, priests, parents, partners, general practitioners – all of us trade in allegory, and all of us are skilled in the practices of decoding it.

But there is a further twist. As I have noted, an overt commitment to allegory flourishes in circumstances of overt oppression. But if we rephrase this slightly, we find that allegory flourishes in circumstances of contested authority. It is something like this. The powerful (try to) insist that their statements are literal depictions of a single reality. ‘It really is that way’, they tell us. ‘There is no alternative.’ But those on the receiving end of such homilies learn to read them allegorically. Cynicism, scepticism, the detection of hidden interests, a sense of the ideological, these are the techniques used by subordinates to read through the words of the powerful to the concealed realities that have produced them.⁸⁰

Apply this lesson back to the representational regimes of natural and social science. At first sight these are authorities, sources of authorised knowledge. Environmentalists know about the environment. Demographers know about populations. But, at the same time, the realities so made are also contested. Variably, to be sure. Perhaps sociology, and even worse cultural studies, carry little weight in certain locations.⁸¹ But for economics, demography, and many parts of natural science this is not the case.⁸² As institutions of authority they (try to) insist that their statements are literal depictions of a reality thereby made manifest. ‘Reality is that way’, they tell us, at least within technical restrictions. But here too allegorical readings are common. Experts are not trusted.⁸³

There is a substantial social science literature on experts and trust. The argument comes in a number of guises, but one is about the ‘public under- standing of science’. High-status scientists worry about the scepticism shown by lay people about natural science, and there have been several publicly funded research programmes on this in the UK over the last twenty years.⁸⁴ Those in authority believe that lay people do not properly appreciate and respect science and its methods – and that this is something that should be put right. But to think this way is asymmetrical. It assumes that scientists with their methods know best. That the realities they describe and make are prior,

independent, and all the rest. It is, in short, to refuse the legitimacy of lay and allegorical readings of science. Reading at least parts of science and its claims allegorically rather than literally, lay people are asking (for instance) about the special interests that lie behind claims about the truth. They wonder, for instance, exactly why a Minister of Agriculture appears on television feeding a hamburger to his obviously reluctant daughter.⁸⁵ And they fear the worst.

STS scholar Brian Wynne has written about the lack of trust in experts. Following the Chernobyl disaster, for instance, he watched the interactions between hill farmers in Cumbria and the experts who came to monitor the fallout on the Lakeland hills and check on the safety of the lambs to enter the human food chain. There are various themes in his work, but one of them has to do with scepticism, with lack of trust. Why should we believe the experts, the hill farmers were saying or thinking, when they are paid by government agencies that appear to be linked to the nuclear industry? Why should we believe them when they come on to our hills in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster and tell us how to treat our lambs in ways that we know from years of farming experience make absolutely no sense at all? Why should we believe them when it turns out that their confident predictions about the binding of radioactive caesium in the hill fields are simply wrong, and that months later the sheep still depend on imported fodder?⁸⁶ Wynne’s account shows that people like hill farmers are working allegorically. That they are moving the boundary between what is manifest and what is Othered around. Official versions of the manifest, the literal accounts offered by experts, are being doubted. Parts of what is Othered in those versions are being brought into view, made real.

And this is what allegory always does. It uses what is present as a resource to mess about with absence. It makes manifest what is otherwise invisible. It extends the fields of visibility, and crafts new realities out-there. And at least sometimes, it also does something that is even more artful. This is because it makes space for ambivalence and ambiguity. In allegory, the realities made manifest do not necessarily have to fit together.