Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804747423 ISBN 13: 9780804747424

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2005

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Regimes of Description responds to the perception-however imprecise-that forms of knowledge in every sector of contemporary culture are being fundamentally reshaped by the digital revolution.

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John Bender is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Humanities Center, at Stanford University. Michael Marrinan is Professor of Art History at Stanford University.

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Regimes of Description responds to the perception—however imprecise—that forms of knowledge in every sector of contemporary culture are being fundamentally reshaped by the digital revolution: music, speech, engineering diagrams, weather reports, works of visual art, even the words most of us write are now subject, as Lyotard points out in The Inhuman, to a logic of the bit, the elemental unit of electronic information. It is now possible to slice, graft, and splice this knowledge in ways never before imagined using technologies that treat vast bodies of information as a stream of data bits. Programs and technical algorithms specify the criteria for discriminating between the data stream of a Mozart string quartet and the CAT scan of a diseased organ. But are these machine instructions and design parameters descriptions, or merely mechanical filters? And if the latter, what constitutes a description of digitally encoded knowledge? As a group, the essays in this volume pose that question as a first attempt to write the archaeology of the nature and history of description in the digital age.

Aus dem Klappentext

Regimes of Description responds to the perception however imprecise that forms of knowledge in every sector of contemporary culture are being fundamentally reshaped by the digital revolution: music, speech, engineering diagrams, weather reports, works of visual art, even the words most of us write are now subject, as Lyotard points out in The Inhuman, to a logic of the bit, the elemental unit of electronic information. It is now possible to slice, graft, and splice this knowledge in ways never before imagined using technologies that treat vast bodies of information as a stream of data bits. Programs and technical algorithms specify the criteria for discriminating between the data stream of a Mozart string quartet and the CAT scan of a diseased organ. But are these machine instructions and design parameters descriptions, or merely mechanical filters? And if the latter, what constitutes a description of digitally encoded knowledge? As a group, the essays in this volume pose that question as a first attempt to write the archaeology of the nature and history of description in the digital age.

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Regimes of Description

In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4742-4

Contents

Contributors.......................................................................................................xiIntroduction JOHN BENDER AND MICHAEL MARRINAN.....................................................................1Description: Fantasies of General KnowledgeDescription by Omission: Nature Enlightened and Obscured LORRAINE DASTON..........................................11Nature's Unruly Body: The Limits of Scientific Description LONDA SCHIEBINGER......................................25Mithridates in Paradise: Describing Languages in a Universalistic World JRGEN TRABANT............................44Between Political Arithmetic and Political Economy MARY POOVEY....................................................61Describing: Imagination and KnowingProblems of Description in Art: Realism WOLFGANG KLEIN............................................................79Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium) ELAINE SCARRY.....................................95Not Seeing the Laocon: Lessing in the Archive of the Eighteenth Century WOLFGANG ERNST...........................118Disparities between Part and Whole in the Description of Works of Art ALEX POTTS..................................135The Undescribed: Horizons of the KnownBetween Mechanism and Romantic Naturphilosophie: Vitalizing Nature and Naturalizing HistoricalDiscourse in the Late Enlightenment PETER HANNS REILL.............................................................153Transparency and Utopia: Constructing the Void from Pascal to Foucault ANTHONY VIDLER.............................175Aesthetic Media: The Structure of Aesthetic Theory before Kant DAVID E. WELLBERY..................................199Appendix...........................................................................................................215Notes..............................................................................................................219Works Cited........................................................................................................261Index..............................................................................................................285

Chapter One

Description by Omission

Nature Enlightened and Obscured

In its very first volume of proceedings, the botanists of the Paris Acadmie Royale des Sciences (est. 1666) announced that their mission consisted in the description of particulars about plants, and that these descriptions would be prolix: "Among plants, there are some which encompass such a large number of circumstances, that it is not possible to describe them in a few words. We have therefore decided that, after we have given an idea of the whole plant, it will be good to describe exactly each of the parts that merit treatment in more detail." The French language was not always adequate to the exacting descriptions the botanists desired. Somewhat apologetically, perhaps mindful of the vigilance of their colleagues at the Acadmie Franaise with regard to neologisms, the botanists took "the liberty of introducing several new ways of speaking when we lack appropriate words in usage," even at the expense of "a little less civility [un peu moins de politesse]." For the description of colors in particular, the botanists turned from the polite society of books to the shop talk of artisans: "we have in French many quite suitable words [mots significatifs] in this matter [of color], but which are not in any books, and which only painters, dyers and weavers appear to have introduced into their common usage." Such linguistic slumming was essential to botanical description, for colors were key to the identification of plants, and "could not be replaced in any manner" by figures alone.

Some seventy years later, the Swedish botanist Carl von Linnaeus railed against the verbosity and excessive prolixity of botanical descriptions: "[The French botanist Joseph Pitton de] Tournefort enumerates 93 Tulips (where there is only one) and 63 Hyacinths (where there are but two), and others have often been no less extravagant." He reproached his fellow botanists in scathing terms for their preoccupation, verbal and visual, with the details of color: "How many volumes have you written of specific names taken from colour? What tons of copper have you destroyed in making unnecessary plates? What vast sums of money have you enticed fraudulently, as it appears, from other men's pockets, the purchasers to wit, on the strength of colour alone?" Only "Number, Shape, Position, and Proportion" counted in the identification of plants, and each species could be described with an economical label of two words. Linnaeus went so far as to elevate verbal parsimony to a principle of ontological perfection: "The All-Wise Author of Nature shared such conciseness making all things.... The fewer elements are used in making anything, the more perfect it is." A quadruped was superior to a six-legged insect, a two-legged man to a quadruped, and Linnaeus boasted that he could "distinguish these 100 [plant] species by no more than six adjectives each."

The shift from the prolixity of the Parisian botanists to the parsimony of Linnaeus is emblematic of a far broader transformation in the ideals and practices of scientific description that occurred between circa 1660 and 1730. Whereas naturalists in the late seventeenth century had chosen "to make our descriptions very particular," in the belief that "nature is variable and inconstant," the Encyclopdie article on "Description" in natural history warned that "[a] book which contained so many and such long descriptions, far from giving us clear and distinct ideas of the bodies which cover the earth and which compose it, present to the mind only indeterminate and colossal figures scattered without order and traced without proportion." In this paper I will argue that this shift in the ideals and practices of the description of nature was symptomatic of a more fundamental shift in the category of the scientific fact in the early decades of the eighteenth century.

That the factual should have a history is an uncomfortable notion. Facts are the alpha and omega of modern scientific experience, the beginning and the end of all of its most exacting experiments and its most elaborate theories. Since we equate "the facts" with the totality of all that exists and happens, the claim that facts per se come into being and pass away seems outrageous, akin to that of the wild-eyed skeptic who denies the existence of the external world. What I mean is, however, nothing so metaphysical. It is facts as a way of sieving and parsing experience rather than experience per se (or whatever external reality may give rise to human experience) that is my quarry here. Although historians and philosophers of science have worried that facts may be "contaminated" by theory or "constructed" by society, and although they have charted the changing content and credibility of particular facts, the category of the factual has remained curiously unanalyzed. This or that fact may have a biography; facts in general may not be as neutral and detached as they seem; but the concept of what kind of thing or event qualifies as a scientific fact, and when and why it does, has escaped investigation. I would like to suggest that the category of the factual, as well as the particular facts that instantiate it, has a history, and that this history is rich in implications for how description creates a texture of experience-granular with particulars and riotous with colors, or smooth with generalizations and as angular as a woodcut (to return briefly to the botanists).

More specifically, I shall argue that the prototypical scientific fact mutated between circa 1660 and 1730, from a singular and striking event that could be replicated only with great difficulty, if at all, to a large and uniform class of events that could be produced at will. The texture of description of nature changed accordingly, from long accounts bristling with particulars to concise reports made deliberately bland by summary, repetition, and omission of details. Nature was not yet universal and eternal at the turn of the eighteenth century; my story of the transformation of the scientific fact is part of how it came to be so by mid-century. Examples might be taken from any number of scientific disciplines, from botany to meteorology to optics. For reasons of space, I have chosen to concentrate on a single case, symbolically resonant of the Enlightenment: the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century investigations of luminescence, or "cold light." Within the history of luminescence during this period, I shall focus on the writings of the English chemist Robert Boyle and the French physicist Charles Dufay, both because their work set contemporary standards of experimentation, and because their similar scientific temperaments, both wary of hypothesis, permit a more closely controlled comparison of how each drew the contours of the scientific fact.

I. "Shining Instances"

When Robert Boyle published his observations on his "aerial noctiluca" or on "a diamond that shines in the dark" or on "shining Flesh, both of veal and pullet," he was contributing to a collection of singular phenomena that he and his contemporaries hoped would eventually unlock the best-guarded "secrets of nature." The annals of the earliest scientific societies founded in the seventeenth century abound with such oddities: the Saggi of the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the Mmoires de l'Acadmie des Sciences in Paris, and the Miscellanea Curiosa (later Ephmrides) of the Collegium Naturae Curiosum in Germany all routinely carried news not only of things that glowed in the dark, but also of anatomical anomalies such as monstrous births, unusual weather such as cyclones or "rains of blood," heavenly rarities such as the aurora borealis or a new star, and a great deal that defied ready classification-a man who slept for three weeks at a stretch, a well that emitted a searing heat, ants from Surinam that "marched in formation."

It was just this miscellaneous quality that seventeenth-century natural philosophers valued in these strange phenomena, which were meant to serve two principal purposes in what they called the "new experimental philosophy." First, they would help destroy the old, Scholastic natural philosophy by confronting its sweeping generalizations and neatly parsed species with a crowd of exceptions. Second, they would help to build a new natural philosophy by laying bare the otherwise inaccessible deep structure of nature, and by furthering the labor of induction.

Strange facts would not only defy Aristotelian explanations, straddle boundaries between Aristotelian natural kinds, and contradict Aristotelian axioms; they would also lead the new natural philosophy to the hidden causes of all we observe in nature. Why should the phenomena that Aristotelians thought least suited to serve as the raw material of science-odd, variable, rare phenomena-have struck their seventeenth-century critics as the phenomena best suited to the purpose? In part, because they thought the fundamental causes in nature were likely to be beyond the grasp of human senses; Aristotle's forms can be discerned by perception, but not Francis Bacon's "latent configurations" of Ren Descartes' microscopic mechanisms or Isaac Newton's "active principles." Nature had "secrets," in the parlance of the day, and was thought most likely to divulge these when caught by surprise, or when deviating from her wonted paths. As in medicine, seventeeth-century natural philosophers (many of whom had medical training) expected to understand the normal by careful study of the pathological.

For a natural philosophy that above all was wary of facile generalizations and conventional wisdom and that sought the "secrets" of nature, the facts of strange phenomena were peculiarly enlightening. Even the wonder they evoked made a minor contribution to spreading the new science, for wonder, as Descartes observed, stimulates us to probe the causes of all that appears to us "rare and extraordinary." Both the typical characteristics of these atypical phenomena-rarity, singularity, variability-and the emotional responses they evoked-wonder, surprise, and occasionally fear-would, it was hoped, work to estrange the observer from the habitual, the familiar, and the conventional, and to open the mind to an empiricism without preconceptions. These were the alleged scientific advantages of wondrous facts, and in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy they were estimable.

We are now in a better position to understand how and why Boyle and his contemporaries studied luminescence. Like the study of monstrous births in anatomy or double refraction in optics, luminescent substances were the anomalies that would reveal true natures-in this case, the nature of light. Luminescent substances like Boyle's noctiluca or the celebrated Bologna stone were examples of Bacon's prerogative instances, "shining instances" in every respect. In contrast to the familiar light of flame or of the sun, these glowing objects were cold to the touch, decoupling the customary association of light and heat. Moreover, each instance of luminescence was a singularity in its class. The "carbuncle" (from the Latin "little coal") that Benvenuto Cellini claimed to have seen glow at night on the finger of one Biagio de Bono was a singularity among gemstones; the radiant mutton that the Danish physician Thomas Bartholin saw at the Montpellier market was a singularity among meats; the shining fungus described by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner a singularity among plants. However much these individual singularities strained the boundaries of received categories, they could nonetheless be gathered together into a single class of "substances of whatever kind, that generate light," as Bacon headed his Topica inquisitionis de luce et lumine (1612). The facts of strange phenomena simultaneously dissolved homogeneities and united heterogeneities-separating heat and light, but bringing together the stars, rotten wood, and "some stockings [that] shine while you are pulling them off." I shall call this outlook "militant empiricism."

Although there were several comprehensive seventeenth-century treatises devoted to luminescence, the bulk of the literature of this period dwells on a single type of luminescence, or even a single instance. Typical of these narrow-gauge publications was Boyle's "A Short Account of some Observations ... about a Diamond, that shines in the Dark" (1663), which describes the properties of a single gem when rubbed, warmed, plunged into oil, gouged with a steel bodkin, and spat upon. Throughout these observations, Boyle never lost sight of his broader goal, namely explaining the nature of light. But, in keeping with the metaphysics and methods characteristic of the facts of strange phenomena, he approached this unifying goal by carefully marking the differences-rather than the similarities-among luminescent substances. This preference for differences over similarities among luminescent phenomena runs through almost all of the seventeenth-century literature on the subject, even those more compendious treatises meant to encompass the whole range of known phosphors. It worked to undermine the integrity of the class of luminescent phosphors, despite their common property of being cold light-bearers. This splintering tendency was strengthened by the fine-grained descriptive detail also typical of seventeenth-century observation reports. Boyle for example records which side of the diamond he rubbed, and with what color cloth. He admitted his narratives were prolix and "particular," but refused to sacrifice even the most minute detail to the reader's impatience.

This strenuous heed to particulars stemmed from both the demands of militant empiricism and the sensibility it fostered. Determined to begin natural philosophy afresh, without preconceived notions, Boyle and his contemporaries could not afford to neglect the slightest detail, for who could tell a priori whether or not a red or white rubbing cloth, or the direction the wind was blowing that day, might make a difference? (In the case of capricious phenomena such as luminescence and electricity, such minutiae sometimes did make a difference.) For fear of missing a tiny but crucial detail, the natural philosopher cultivated a state of exaggerated attention that attempted to focus simultaneously and with equal sharpness on every aspect of the sensory field. When reading the observational reports of Boyle and his colleagues, one is irresistibly reminded of the impossible accuracy of some of Drer's animal paintings, in which every tuft of fur of the rabbit or squirrel is as crisply outlined as every other: there is no background in these pictures, only foreground. In natural philosophy, this heroic effort of observation was fueled by curiosity, which in the seventeenth century connoted not only an omnivorous and impatient appetite for knowledge, but also painstaking, even excessive care (recall the Latin root curare) lavished on each and every particular.

The open-mindedness required by militant empiricism, sustained by the typically seventeenth-century sensibility of curiosity, also predisposed natural philosophers to lend a sympathetic ear to marvelous tales ridiculed by their more skeptical contemporaries. In reviewing the many ancient and modern accounts of carbuncles and other wondrous gems, Boyle trod a fine line between credulity and skepticism: "though I be very backward to admit strange things for truths, yet I am not very forward to reject them as impossibilities." After all, both the voyages of exploration and recent scientific research on phenomena like luminescence and electricity had vindicated or even surpassed many a traveler's tale with new wonders. As Pierre Potier wrote in his 1622 account of the Bologna stone: "Daily there emerge new things in nature, in which its great miracles are appearing." The worst fear of empiricists-denying a real fact to save a false hypothesis-was not without grounds. For example, the French Cartesian Jacques Rohault doubted the carbuncle stories in his Trait de physique (1671) because "if it were true, what they say of a Carbuncle and a Diamond, viz. that they shine in the Dark; I should freely own, that I am mistaken in all that I have said about Light.... But it is certain, that these are only idle Stories, told without any Proof, and received by credulous Persons, for I have often times experienced the contrary myself."

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804747423
• ISBN 13: 9780804747424
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Herausgeber: Bender John, Marrinan Michael
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar