Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars

5. Le Dinosaure Postmoderne

5 LE DINOSAURE POSTMODERNE Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and T. rex: Their images are icons of our popular culture. Everyone is familiar with scenes of Elvis gyrating or Marilyn with skirt billowing. Depictions of T. rex are similarly ubiquitous.A half-dozen images of dinosaurs can be encountered in a casual stroll through a drug store; a shopping mall can be a veritable Jurassic Park. T. rex dominates the dinosaur imagery just as it allegedly dominated the fauna of the Late Cretaceous. Icons begin as depictions of real people or animals, but soon the image takes on a life of its own. It becomes a pure image, unconstrained by the reality it originally represented.The bloated,drugged, middle-aged Elvis could not efface the iconic image. People overwhelmingly voted to memorialize the familiar youthful Elvis on the postage stamp. Icons once were rare and precious; now they are mass-produced and disposable like soup cans or cola bottles. We play with our icons, freely vulgarizing, satirizing, or trivializing them. Also, iconic images have innumerable incarnations: Anyone swiveling in a sequined suit, with curled lip and oiled forelock is immediately recognized as an “Elvis.” What starts as an image of a particular human being becomes an in¤nitely realizable archetype. With such cultural icons, it becomes very hard to discern the reality behind the mythical image. Some decades ago New Testament scholars abandoned the attempt (recently resurgent) to reconstruct an accurate picture of the historical Jesus.They concluded that the overlay of tradition and interpretation,going right back to the earliest sources, precluded any effort to distinguish the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith. What about dinosaurs? Are dinosaurs buried under so many layers 106 of myth that the most assiduous digging will never contact factual bedrock? Is the search for the historical T. rex like the quest for the historical Jesus—doomed to uncover myth and interpretation at every level? This intriguing and disturbing possibility is raised in a recent book,W . J. T. Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book (1998).1 Mitchell picks up a theme from Bruno Latour. In the early 1990s Latour claimed to repudiate social constructivism (Latour 1992,1993). He argued that constructivists and rationalists both err in assuming a dichotomy between the natural and the social and differ merely in the extent to which they invoke one or the other in explaining science. Rationalists think that science is ultimately driven by nature; constructivists say it is society. Latour proposed that scienti¤c objects be regarded as “quasi objects,” hybrid entities that can be regarded as more or less natural or more or less social, given the circumstance (Latour 1992, p. 282). Though Mitchell cites Latour only once (1998, p. 164), he draws just such a conclusion about dinosaurs: With dinosaurs a clear demarcation between the scienti¤c object and the cultural icon is not possible; the representation and the reality are fused into a hybrid entity. That image can no longer be distinguished from reality is a salient theme of postmodernist theorists. In an entertaining primer on postmodernism , Glen Ward discusses the view of Jean Baudrillard,a leading postmodernist pundit: We might naturally assume that simulation either duplicates or is emitted by a pre-given real.In this sense we might think that simulation and reality have a necessary attachment to each other.But for Baudrillard, this connection has long since snapped, so that simulation can no longer be taken as either an imitation or distortion of reality, or as a copy of an original. In Baudrillard’s dizzying cosmos there is no ¤rm, pure reality left against which we can measure the truth or falsity of a representation, and electronic reproduction has gone so far that the notion of originality is (or ought to be) irrelevant . (Ward 1997, p. 61) In Baudrillard’s own words: Abstraction today is no longer that of the map,the double,the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer pre107 Le Dinosaure Postmoderne cedes the map,nor survives it.Henceforth,it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory. (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 166; emphasis in original) Pure images, images that are not of anything, have long...