La actio popularis en defensa de la supremacía constitucional y de los derechos de

Psychics vs. Scientists: Crime Drama and the Intuition/Reason Binary

Having established a way to categorise and organise such a large genre as crime drama, this chapter seeks to explore the concept at the very heart of it, knowledge. By examining different ways in which knowledge is theorised and utilised this chapter will elaborate points along the scientific-psychic continuum, exploring the ways in which the crime drama narrativises the process of information gathering. This approach will establish how knowledge and gender become intertwined concepts that shape this narrativising process, the two concepts together informing the structure of the protagonist’s investigative method. Additionally, this chapter will tease out how a genre so broad can be examined in a way that illustrates its variety while still demonstrating it to be a cohesive whole. Though investigative methods differ, the consistent way in which gender is understood and performed maintains a sense of a cohesive genre. Looking at crime drama through this dual lens explores how shows within a genre work in two ways at the same time; firstly they consistently use repeated tropes and themes within texts and paratexts to shore up the genre’s unity, while simultaneously emphasising elements that are unique to each individual show, creating a sense of variety. These secondary elements function as the unique selling points for the shows-quirks in the system-but are rarely fundamental to their genre classification. This chapter will look at how knowledge functions in both cases, as a central tenet of the very notion of crime drama and as a way of distinguishing the shows from one another. In other words, though forms of knowledge and the consequent modes of investigation may differ, there is a consistent ideology about the place and use of knowledge that runs central through all

the shows; an ideology that defines the consultant procedural and consequently helps illustrate how complex genres function.

In this case knowledge is being examined through the distinction between intuition and reason, a distinction centuries old, and a binary so longstanding it is at the centre of the construction of both concepts. This chapter considers how reason and intuition are figured within the crime drama and how different investigative methods found across the genre manage to both uphold this notion of a fixed binary but also complicate it by utilising both concepts within the same show. Though this notion of a binary opposition between reason and intuition is used throughout the genre as a way to distinguish shows and emphasise their distinctiveness, on closer inspection it becomes evident that crime drama is instead engaging in a constant dialogue between these two concepts. Crime drama then becomes a space in which these opposing methods become part of a complementary system of criminal investigation, in each individual show one side of the binary is emphasised but neither can work on its own. Perhaps a metaphor is useful here. Genre can be seen much like mixing paint; in the vast array of brown paints there are those that are more green and those that are more red, but all would still be considered brown. In crime drama there are those shows that preface reason and those that emphasise their use of intuition, but ultimately they all use a mix of the two. They are all brown, just different shades. It is important to note that this combination of approaches is not another example of a continuum; though intuition and reason exist in a system where both are necessary they are still very much separate entities. Both concepts are utilised by different characters and at different times, they are

complimentary but opposing. For example, Angela is often the intuitive counterpoint to Brennan’s reasoned scientist, but neither of them move toward the centre of this binary. Furthermore, the change in emphasis across the genre continuum is not simply a matter of aesthetics; the change in emphasis shifts everything from plot construction to tone. An emphasis on reason will affect the way the plot is constructed, the backstory of the protagonist and the kinds of crimes being

solved. Nevertheless, no matter which aspects of a show are more prominent, or in which order the plot is organised, they are all just a different way of mixing the same elements. It is from these building blocks of conventions and tropes that the genre is built.

That being said, the use of knowledge and the way the crime drama plays with the

intuition/reason binary is interesting and the backbone of many of the other shifts across the genre. From the philosophical writings of Plato to the psychological work of Carl Jung, many have theorised intuition and reason, and over time theories around these concepts of knowledge have changed. Greek philosophical writing sought to examine the shift from intuition to reason and ally the supposedly opposing concepts on either side of the gender divide. As Genevieve Lloyd writes in The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, “[F]emaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind – the dark powers of the Earth Goddesses, immersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers.”¹⁷⁰ Reason sought to organise the natural world, to move from fertility consciousness to a world ruled by rational gods.

As thought moved on this binary persisted. When the Pythagoreans formulated the table of opposites in the sixth century BC¹⁷¹ women were placed on the same side as ‘curved’, ‘dark’ and

‘bad’, they were placed with the formless, the vague. In Plato’s work the female was associated with matter, that which must be transcended through reason in order to attain knowledge¹⁷². Much later work sought to place intuition and reason within different parts of the mind. To this extent Jung claimed intuition to be “perception by way of the unconscious, or the perception of an unconscious concept.”¹⁷³ Intuition was to know something without understanding how you

170Genevieve Lloyd, The man of reason : "male" and "female" in Western philosophy, 2nd ed. ed.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).p2

171Charles H. Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans : a brief history (Indianapolis, Ind. ; Cambridge:

Hackett Pub., 2001).p65

172Plato, H. D. P. Lee, and T. K. Johansen, Timaeus and Critias, New ed. / translated and annotated by Desmond Lee ; translation revised, introduced and further annotated by T.K. Johansen. ed. (London:

Penguin, 2008).

173Carl Jung, "Psychological Types," in Personality: Critical concepts in Psychology, ed. Lawrence A. Pervin (Routledge, 1998).

knew it, it was intangible and immeasurable. Unlike reason, which depended on the senses, on data and processes, intuition simply was.

This binary opposition is still meaningful today and feeds into much of the construction of knowledge across the crime drama. Thus the investigators based in science, the ones who use empirical knowledge, are continually demonstrating their process, proving ‘how’ they know something to the viewer. Episodes of these shows are filled with depicting experiments and attempting to illustrate thought processes. Conversely the psychic investigators have no

explanation for the way they come upon their knowledge further than their own experience of it;

there is never an explanation as to why or how they have psychic visions. The genre seems at this point to be crudely split in two across this knowledge divide. On one side the scientific, empiricist shows defined by fact and pedagogy, on the other side the shows where investigation is a process of being ‘given’ knowledge. However, not only does the presence of the pseudo-psychic shows complicate this, but the intricacies of the other shows add additional problems to this model.

After all, it does not account for the dual appearance of both intuition and reason in most texts.

However, while the strict model of binary oppositions is complicated across the genre the conventions detailed above about intuition and pedagogy fit rather neatly into what Fiske and Hartley called the bardic function of television. In holding on to sets of conventions around the gathering and owning of knowledge that are centuries old, these shows uphold cultural notions that run much deeper than the crime drama. Fiske and Hartley explain the bardic function of television thus:

1. To articulate the main lines of the established cultural consensus about the nature of reality (and therefore the reality of nature).

2. To implicate the individual members of the culture into its dominant value-systems, by exchanging a status-enhancing message for the endorsement of that message’s underlying ideology (as articulated in its mythology).

3. To celebrate, explain, interpret and justify the doings of the culture’s individual representatives in the world out-there; using the mythology of individuality to claw back such individuals from any mere eccentricity to a position of socio-centrality.

4. To assure the culture at large of its practical adequacy in the world by affirming and confirming its ideologies/mythologies in active engagement with the practical and potentially unpredictable world.

5. To expose, conversely, any practical inadequacies in the culture’s sense of itself which might result from changed conditions in the world out-there, or from pressure within the culture for a reorientation in favour of a new ideological stance.

6. To convince the audience that their status and identity as individuals is guaranteed by the culture as a whole.

7. To transmit by these means a sense of cultural membership (security and involvement).¹⁷⁴

As this list demonstrates the heavy reliance on the mythology of masculine pedagogical authority and the power of the individual to find truth are most certainly bardic. As this chapter will

demonstrate, the depiction of knowledge in the consultant procedural functions almost entirely in these terms; re-enforcing dominant cultural ideologies through the very clinical process of

criminal procedure. As such the act of knowledge gathering itself becomes this site of

transmission, the place in the text that allows the audience to become members through their own guesswork and yet simultaneously attempting to implicate them into a dominant value system that defines the ways in which they are allowed to possess and utilise knowledge.

Though ideas about reason have changed over the course of centuries of thought, the connection between reason and form on one hand, intuition and formlessness on the other, has remained;

knowledge is still often thought of within the confines of these categories. In actual fact sometimes intuition is not understood as a form of knowledge at all despite it being used in almost identical ways. Crime narratives become an important site for working through these ideas since the detective as a figure is about the acquisition and use of knowledge and so the duelling concepts of reason and intuition are played out in the method of this acquisition. Evidence of this can be found in early crime fiction, from Holmes’ need for empirical experimentation and Dupin’s

174 Fiske and Hartley, Reading television. P67

application of logic to human behaviour¹⁷⁵, to Marple’s observation of social interaction. Even in these examples there is a sense of the gendering of these concepts as either masculine or feminine. By the period covered in this thesis the concepts of reason and intuition are firmly ensconced in the crime drama and made even more explicit in the narrative of the consultant procedural where method is premise. In the consultant procedural the investigator, the tone of the show, and the way it is positioned are all dictated by the central investigative method, and that method is still defined by these concepts of reason and intuition.

To fully explore how forms of knowledge work in the genre and how these shows manage to both uphold this long standing binary and attempt to work around it, this chapter is structured around an examination of the three kinds of knowledge utilised. Namely, scientific knowledge, that gained through testing, experiential knowledge, that gained through life experience and

empathetic knowledge, that which is gained through shared feeling. By looking across the whole continuum through these three lenses it is possible to map out a shift from the use of reason as the primary approach to crime solving, to the use of intuition. Much like the example above there is a noticeable shift from ‘masculine’ science and its use of rational, empirical evidence to

‘feminine’ notions of emotion and knowledge gained through intuition. The pivot around which this shift occurs, the pseudo-psychic shows, much like Dupin, present a point in the genre where intuition and reason masquerade as one another. Already we see that the binary becomes blurred in this moment of cross-over, illustrating the dependency that each side has upon the other. This is then complicated by the inextricable use of gender as a way of anchoring and continually attempting to separate these binaries. Note, this is not a discussion of the biological gender of the investigators in question but rather the way in which their investigative methods are presented as having gendered attributes; attributes linked very much to the conceptualisation of reason and intuition held by the Greek philosophers and continued into the present.

175 An examination of Dupin’s investigative method can be found in Dawn B. Sova, Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, (Facts on File, Inc, 2007), p153