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Popular Culture Review
Kroker would describe it (7), one in which the West is firmly entrenched within an
“information age” and one in which the qualities associated with modernity—
instability, mechanization, networking—have metastasized with an unimaginable
intensity, and popular sentiment regarding science, technology, and the future is
riddled with anxiety, dread and a kind of vertiginous enchantment. Clearly, a new
kind of “information master” is required by this setting, one that is not bound to
the “obsolete” dictums of a traditional modernist orientation to scientific rationality
and linear thought. The following examination of how these figures operate within
these respective milieux may bring out this shift with greater clarity.
The Attic and the Network, or Two Kinds of Abduction: Methods
The title of this section refers to the structure of mind characteristic of Holmes
and Bell, respectively, with each figure offering a very different method for
uncovering the truth, and especially the truth regarding an unsavory or spectacular
event or phenomenon. Holmes himself suggests the image of the attic for his mind
not long after meeting Watson, telling him that a man’s mind should contain “nothing
but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large
assortment, and all in the most perfect order” (P oy\t,A Study in Scarlet 12). While
Watson is alarmed at Holm es’ ignorance regarding a number of important
contemporary issues. Holmes prefers absolute expertise in the relevant areas; in
this sense he is a quintessential specialist. Indeed, across the whole of the span of
the Holmesian canon, we are told that Holmes has authored works on tobacco
ashes, tattoos, typewriters, the “dating of manuscripts,” and numerous other topics,
in addition to general works on detection and scientific method. His intellectual
life is significant here because it gives Holmes a scholarly credibility that matches
his physical exuberance and dogged determination. That determination is displayed
over and over again in the canon; there are physical battles with villains, intellectual
matches with more clever criminals, and a continual reinforcement of the theme
that science in the service of order will defeat even the wiliest and most nefarious
of characters. Indeed, Holmes’ great weakness, cocaine, is presented as a cheap
substitute for the mental stimulation that detection provides; not as an escape from
reality as much as a holding pattern between cases. Holmes rational and orderly
approach to solving crimes is often referred to as “deduction,” both by Holmes
within the tales themselves as well as by numerous commentators; however, as
Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok point out, the actual technical-philosophical term, at
least within the semiotic system constructed by C.S. Peirce, is “abduction” which
creates a hnguistic if not methodological link to Bell.
Bell’s mind, at least as it is displayed on his website, in his books, and most
prominently on his ra dio program, is not an attic or a compartment or any
conventional space at all. Instead, as noted, it might be better envisioned as a