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

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804747423 ISBN 13: 9780804747424

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

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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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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.

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,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804747423
• ISBN 13: 9780804747424
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 303
• Herausgeber: Bender John, Marrinan Michael
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland