[S]cientific perception—especially when elevated to the level of systematic observation, often in carefully designed setups—is disciplined in every sense of the word: instilled by education and practice, checked and cross-checked both by other observers and with other instruments, communicated in forms—text, image, table—designed by and for a scientific collective over decades and sometimes centuries (as in the cse of botanical descriptions of new species). This kind of perception may still be specific to the human species and historical context—it is not the "view from nowhere," independent of "the species of the individual's makeup and position in the world." But neither is there anything capricious or mystical about it. (102)

—Lorraine Daston, "On Scientific Observation," Isis 99.1 (March 2008): 97-110.

Against this view it is urged that we underestimate the automatic powers of the normal subject. We are told that many of the acts which we usually do quite consciously might really be done without consciousness. In support of this assertion such facts are pointed out, as men completely undressing without knowing it, when their attention is distracted by other matters.

—Leon Solomons and Gertrude Stein, "Normal Motor Automatism" (1896)

Yes, you know how it is when that happens. (By the way, Solomons did the write-up.)

If a little learning is a dangerous thing, jeopardy from that source is today universal. The millions have fragmentary knowledge of societary relations, and they are trying to transmute that meager knowledge into social doctrine and policy.

—A. W. Small, "The Era of Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 1.1, 1895

"Popcock!" said Gertrude Stein.

With this unusually lucid and brief remark the writer who has grown famous for her "a rose is a rose is a rose" style dismissed recent efforts of scientists to explain her work.

"Popcock is popcock is science is popcock," Miss Stein might have been expected to say. But she did not, according to her report. For once, she failed to repeat herself or to bewilder her hearers.

The scientific explanation is that her writing is done with her wrist and not with her mind. Automatic writing is the scientific term for it. Miss Stein not only disagrees, but takes the view that her writing does not need explaining.

If you have seen her play, "Four Saints in Three Acts," or have read ay of her other strange writings, you probably feel that she needs as much explaining as that other famous "stein"—Einstein—who also always draws a capacity crowd but whom hardly anyone in the audience understands.

    —Jane Stafford, "Gertrude Stein Explained," Science News-Letter, 2 March 1935

Consensus and knowledge according to Colbert

I wonder what folks would think of teaching this Stephen Colbert clip (September 14, 2011) alongside Leviathan and the Air-Pump or Laboratory Life.



This clip brings the issues at stake in the notion of scientific consensus into rather stark relief, reflecting as it does on current public health policy. It also puts a brake on any too-quick readings of science studies that might construe the political nature of expertise as a debunking of expertise.

In the clip, Colbert mocks Rep. Michele Bachmann for presenting as truth an unnamed stranger's claim that the HPV vaccine (Gardasil) caused cognitive dysfunction in her daughter. The segment is funny, but it's also uncomfortable when we see how very flatly Colbert pits "the entire medical establishment" against "some lady." It's not a joke about method; it's a joke about authority, and who doesn't have it. Bachmann doesn't have very many people on her "team."

The clip forces us to confront the substantiveness of expertise as well as its political nature—its reliance on modest witnesses, on trustworthiness. Bachmann's statement genuinely doesn't hold up; it's about as epistemologically unsound a way to establish fact as we can imagine—it's no more than hearsay. But the reason it's hearsay to begin with is that we know so little about this woman or her daughter, about her methods, about her discernment. We don't have enough of those markers of trustworthiness.

Colbert is interesting when it comes to issues of consensus and knowledge. I've taught Colbert's segment on "Wikiality" before in the context of a media studies unit on wikis and citation. In it, Colbert pushes an extreme relativism that the bit is supposed to mock; the idea (contrary to the suggestion in the more recent clip about Michele Bachmann) is that reality is not determined by consensus, and a wiki encyclopedia is therefore an epistemologically untenable free-for-all.

That Colbert fans rather persistently vandalized the "elephant" entry on Wikipedia just to prove his point shows both Wikipedia's limitations and its relative strength: most of the time such things don't happen on Wikipedia. Colbert's overstatement of the consensus narrative led most of my students to come to see consensus as a potentially epistemologically strong method, under some circumstances, i.e. more than a mere convention. More practically, it led many of them to understand Wikipedia as a tenable project—without, however, losing sight of its limitations. It made for a very productive discussion, and I suspect the more recent clip would too.

A few links on HPS, publicness, public knowledge, etc., etc.:

A charming rant by Dominic Berry on "HPS on't telly":

It looks as though TV is just catching up with what David Phillip Miller has called the ‘Sobel effect’, the seemingly endless growth in popular science and science history writing triggered by Dava Sobel in the 1990s. In the particular case of the programme which sparked this blog post this is literally so, for John Emsley, one of the more prolific contributors to this popular history of science movement, was a key consultant on Jim Al-Khalili’s Chemistry: A Volatile History which is currently being repeated. Much of this programming is bad, just bad. And most irritatingly, history of science seems to be something anyone thinks they can just pick up and spout off about. One of the most recent and partiuclarly aggravating examples of this was Niall Fergusson’s use of Newton and Boyle as the prime example of how the Royal Society thrived due to collective enterprise. Fuck sake.

More recently and perhaps more reflectively, Rebekah Higgitt on history of science spoiling everybody's party (with great links and comments):

As regular readers will know, one of my abiding interests is the relationship between academic history of science and popular history of science or, more specifically, how to make historiographically-informed books into readable texts. It’s an issue that has been around for some time, prompting comments by David Miller on the ‘Sobel Effect’ back in 2002 (when he told “The Amazing Tale of How Multitudes of Popular Writers Pinched All the Best Stories in the History of Science and Became Rich and Famous while Historians Languished in Accustomed Poverty and Obscurity, and how this Transformed the World”). This wasn’t just sour grapes, but an analysis of the effect on the publishing marking and an important discussion of how more recent trends in historiography tend to complicate narratives and question accounts of discovery as a heroic process.

James Sumner has a satisfying rant about "first-talk" — the first computer, the first refrigerator, the first whatever — in the history of technology, and how it is always absolute garbage.

I’m paid a lot of money not to write like that, but he’s saying what I’m thinking. First-talk, far too often, reduces to an annoying game which gets out of the historical record pretty much what it decides to put in. It’s a distraction. Real technical change is gradual, and rich in independent overlapping discoveries. That’s not a fussy academic quibble: it’s a point small children can grasp.

And only semirelatedly, Iain Pears offers the most thoughtful assessment of A. C. Grayling's New College of the Humanities that I've yet seen. (It's also one of the few that takes the time to debunk the idea that NCH is an "American-style university": "Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr do not, I think, download curricula from the internet to teach their students.") The golden insight comes at the end:

Professor Grayling is acting because he considers the battle within the national university system to be lost. But in some ways it has only just started, after long delays.

It was the duty of his generation to fight that battle, but it did not. Had serious opposition been mounted 10 or 20 years back then there might have been some chance of success. But his generation was extraordinarily supine.

Collectively, they let it happen, and contented themselves with gaming the system. That worked, and some gained as much celebrity as academics can get in a culture which cares little for scholarship. But these are not the people who should now be delivering lectures about saving the humanities: they had their chance, and they blew it. A little more activity when they were in their prime and the humanities might not have needed saving; a little more humility now and the reception given to their proposal could have been radically more favourable.

Now we're really straying from the original topic, but I really enjoyed Alex Golub's debunking of the idea that creativity is the same thing as spontaneity.

Of course, overall I agree with Robinson’s point: as someone with a long history of performance in drama and music I am often shocked at the cultural barrenness of my students. We have created a system that teaches them that music comes out of machines, not them, and most serious dance they see on television has more in common with a strip tease than Alvin Ailey. Arts education, like physical education, or the craftwork that goes into creating visual art, is desperately needed in our schools’ curriculum at both the secondary and tertiary level. It’s an important part of learning to be human.

But what that education is — what enables creativity — is often quite different from what people imagine. It requires more training and discipline, not less. In other words: being socialized into a culture of practice. This is a lesson that any athropologist — or any artist — should remind us as we think about education in this country today.

And a reminder to myself: never, ever read the comments at Inside Higher Ed. They are like YouTube comments, only about things that matter.

A link this morning: Alice Bell on why calling for "scientific literacy" doesn't make sense.

This is apropos of her observation that what one of her FB friends called "the ultimate scab university," the New College of the Humanities, seems to place an awful lot of emphasis on "scientific literacy," by which they seem to mean "a list of Richard Dawkins-approved articles of faith supplemented of no particular understanding of why you should believe them or even what it means to believe them."

[Nina Power on the New College of the Humanities and its parasitic use of University of London resources:

Students of the new college will apparently ‘use many of the resources of the University of London: the exceptional library in Senate House, the University of London Union with its many societies and sports activities’ - how is this even remotely allowed? If you’re going to set up a private college, at least have the decency to buy your own fucking resources.

Also, a really spectacular rant in the Guardian by Terry Eagleton.]

Ian Hacking at the Berkeley City Club 10/27

I don't mean to turn this blog into an events calendar, but I'm pretty excited about this:

"Proof, Truth, Hands, and Mind"
Ian Hacking, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Philosophy and the History of Scientific Concepts, Collège de France

October 27, 2010 | 4:10 PM
Berkeley City Club Ballroom
2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley

In this lecture, Professor Ian Hacking will explore how our innate sense of symmetry has enabled us to probe the most hidden secrets of nature and also to get along with each other.
About Ian Hacking

A distinguished philosopher, Ian Hacking combines attention to anecdotal details about our experiences with very general conceptions of the place of human beings in the world. He likes to think of himself as a philosophical anthropologist. In this lecture he will present a new development in his philosophy, one which remains in the spirit of what has established his reputation as a "Philosopher of the Particular Case."

His early work, represented by The Emergence of Probability (1975) and The Taming of Chance (1990) brought a new understanding of how statistics changed the world and how we think about it, from sociology to physics, not omitting sports and our sex lives. His Representing and Intervening (1983) returned philosophers of science to their roots, namely experimental science. It began what he calls a "back to Francis Bacon movement," which has changed the history, philosophy, and sociology of the sciences.

Ezra Pound, conflating epistemology with ethics:

Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offence, and he is punished or despised accordingly. (42)

Pound, Ezra. "The Serious Artist." Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968. 41-57. Print.

CFP: The Literary Organ

The Literary Organ, MLA 2011 (January 6-9, 2011; Los Angeles)
A Special Session (subject to MLA approval)

“I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion. The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale?”

     --Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

An organ is, among other things, a part of a human or animal body; a site of sensation; a functioning unit within a larger system; a medium or engine of circulation, as in a magazine or journal; an instrument, device, or tool; a contraption of pipes that produces music. The concept of the organ unites mechanicity with organicity, function with form, embodiment with perception. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest that it is by detaching from the physical intractability of organs and their functions that we may repurpose the physical and produce an unstable, flowing “body without organs.” We invite papers that seek to mine the valences of perception, embodiment, medium, and literary form prompted by the term “organ,” especially in relation to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Please send 300-word abstracts and short bio to Natalia Cecire (cecire at berkeley dot edu) and Hillary Gravendyk (hillary dot gravendyk at pomona dot edu) by 1 March 2010.

(Our cfp is now also live at upenn.)

MSA 11

Some quick notes from today.

I went to a very interesting seminar on science studies and modernism this morning. The seminar was run by Anne Raine and Craig Gordon. I met some smart people, learned some new things, and wrote down the titles of some interesting-sounding books.

The thing that most struck me on reading all the papers was the diversity of possible meanings of "science studies," as manifested in people's various approaches. Most of the papers discussed a specific science in relation to modernism, e.g. environmental studies or astrophysics. Mine was one of the few papers that tried to deal with scientificity as a category (though I'm not sure to what extent I succeeded). For me, the most interesting sciences with which to deal in the modernist period are the biological and social sciences, precisely because of the way that they challenge existing notions of scientificity and/or experimentalism.

Unfortunately for my jetlagged, uncaffeinated body, the seminar was at 8am, but on the up side, the Montréal metro was a breeze.

I went to three panels today. One called "Border Conditions: Poetry at the Edge of Modernist Discourse" was chaired by Oren Izenberg and featured papers on Duncan's oracular impulse; Oppen's notion of poetry as a kind of testing of the truth, and translation and Mallarmé's refusal of voice.

A panel called "Circling, Singing, Scoring" included papers on Oppen and Stevens, Moore, and letter frequency -- what the speaker, Roger Gilbert, called "scrabbliness" (scrabbliness, roughly, is what happens when words are dense with letters that win a lot of points in Scrabble). The last paper was both interesting and comical, and this spoke to something I've been thinking about in relation to Christian Bök lately: why the act of accumulation is comical. I was most interested in Heather Cass White's paper on Marianne Moore, though (of course). She drew on the evidence of drafts to reveal a "romantic" Moore. Though I have a few reservations about how this was framed, it was an interesting and convincing talk.

In the afternoon there was a roundtable on "The Future of Women's Literature in Modernist Studies," chaired by Suzette Henke and featuring many important feminist modernists. It was very smart and illuminating. I was interested to learn, in Clare Hanson's talk, of Angela McRobbie's Aftermath of Feminism, which examines the sense of loss at the heart of postfeminism -- first, the loss of the mother as love-object, and second, the loss of a feminist ideal of liberation upon being handed a "feminism" that has been completely co-opted by patriarchal capitalism (i.e. "empowerfulness"). I'd love to read this book.

I did go to Susan Stanford Friedman's plenary talk, "Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies," but it'll have to wait.

It's about 10:30 pm, and somebody in this B&B is playing very loud dance music. I really wish this were not the case.

HG: I still can't get over the weirdness of "extreme" as an adjective applied to mammals. Whoever came up with that was some kind of wackadoo genius or idiot savant.

NC: Or a HUGE NERD?

HG: That's kind of a given.

[. . .]

HG: I really want you to take seriously the question of what makes a mammal "extreme" in the cultural imagination.

NC: I smell an article.

HG: Yes.

School's back!

My summer of fellowship was completely awesome, don't get me wrong. I got loads done. But I still get that autumnal excitement when fall semester starts, even though Berkeley's fall semester marks the beginning of the hot season. It's not just the thrill of buying more binder clips (oh, the pleasures of graduate life), it's the feeling that the whole world is back in business.

Here's why this semester will be awesome:

-I'm going to get to work on my Williams chapter, which is about Paterson and auto-ethnography and, probably, Margaret Mead

-I'm teaching a new course, featuring some science studies greatest hits, and also Virginia Woolf

-I'm going to MSA in November

No doubt I will start whining once the grading hits (I know I scheduled a couple of painfully quick turnarounds in there), but just now I'm excited for things to begin.

The Daily Show does Latour

John Oliver of The Daily Show summarizes Bruno Latour's Science in Action:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Human's Closest Relative
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Todd Disotell: I think the arguments are very easy to counter, and it's going to let me write a counter-paper.

John Oliver: What will he do then, write a counter-paper to your counter?

TD: Yeah.

JO: And you'll publish a counter-paper to that, then he'll write a counter-paper saying that he's right and you're wrong, and no one will read any of them.

TD: Ummm...probably true, unfortunately.

Oliver's clowning notwithstanding, it's a drama of black boxes: if it comes to be accepted by wider consensus that Jeffrey Schwartz is correct and that humans are more closely related to orangutans than to chimpanzees, then, as Disotell warns, we'll have to change all our textbooks, the ultimate black boxes.

On another note, I hope that was a fake textbook they used. Surely no one is teaching that humans are descended from chimpanzees. As Disotell says, humans and chimpanzees probably hold an ancestor in common; it's not at all the same thing.

Black boxes

If Marconi says something about ultra-short waves it MEANS something. Its meaning can only be properly estimated by someone who KNOWS.

     --Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading 25.

One of the reasons I find the history and philosophy of science (HPS) so useful in my work is its concern with the conditions of factuality. Bruno Latour calls facts "black boxes"; we don't worry about how they came to be determined; they're axiomatic.

HPS doesn't just open black boxes; it looks at how black boxes are made. I've seen a dictum floating around lately that strikes me as apt: "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts." Usually this dictum invokes the intractable reality of the fact, but to me it has more to do with social consensus. Latour argues that no statement, no matter how well it matches with data, can be a fact unless a community comes to a consensus about it, turning it into a black box. A fact can never be "your own."

To dispute a fact is to reopen the black box, inviting critique of the process by which the fact was established. Reopening a black box by definition has a destabilizing effect, because the fact is no longer being taken as a given. This is why science studies are so often caricatured as "debunking" science. And yet it is possible to examine the social and discursive conditions under which ideas become facts, and to understand where Hobbes was coming from, and still believe that there is such a thing as air pressure (to give one prominent example).

I was literally a child during the so-called "science wars"; the Sokal hoax transpired when I was about fourteen. They turned on the necessity of black boxes to get anything done.

Some things need to be black boxes, because all arguments require premises. Imagine teaching a course on twentieth-century history and having your students decide to debate whether there really was a Holocaust. It's not only inefficient; in this case it's morally repugnant. (And here we get into serious science studies territory: the intimate relationship between fact-making and morality.)

We hear from certain vocal factions that by making certain things into black boxes, we are shutting down debate. This is quite true. In my classroom, certain things are not up for debate: whether the Holocaust happened; whether women or people of color are capable of intellection or autonomy; whether there is such a thing as air pressure. If we entertained these questions, we would get nowhere.

This is exactly what Latour worries about in a 2004 essay: a tendency to open black boxes can be salutary, but can also lead to paranoid conspiracy theories (Obama's birth certificate, anyone?).

Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes -- society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism -- while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below.

To put it in literary terms, there was always something a little Gothic about Foucault.

And here is where I think literary criticism becomes useful to science studies: there was always something a little Gothic about science, too, whose residues emerge in culture (one prominent example would be Shelley's Frankenstein, directly inspired by the distinctly Gothic research of Luigi Galvani).

That's why the French physiologist Claude Bernard could write in 1865,

If I had to give an analogy to express my opinion about the science of life [the life sciences], I would say that it is a beautiful salon filled with light, which cannot be approached except by passing through a long and frightful kitchen. (28)

This remarkable quotation is about black boxes, cast in domestic terms. Teatime in the salon only happens by virtue of the messier labor occurring in the kitchen, and a humanities scholar would say that if we are interested in tea then we are also interested in the kitchen. Notice Bernard's language about the kitchen, however -- the space of labor and inquiry. We have feelings about it. It is "long and frightful."

Opening a black box is dangerous, yes, because in allowing disciplined scholars to examine the conditions of fact-production, we also invite less disciplined investigators to declare that facts are not facts and to argue for the legitimacy of theories legitimized by the consensus of the uninformed. (This is what leads Lorraine Daston to make a somewhat invidious distinction between a highly disciplinary and disciplined History of Science and a wilder and woollier, and less rigorous, Science Studies.)

Indeed, Latour seems to anticipate this when he titles the first chapter of Science in Action "Opening Pandora's Black Box," registering how science studies invites a world of trouble. As he puts it in the 2004 essay, "What social scientists do to our favorite objects is so horrific that certainly we don't want them to come any nearer. 'Please,' we exclaim, 'don't touch them at all! Don't try to explain them!" (240). Such a long and frightful kitchen.

Latour goes on to suggest that what's needed is a shift in focus from "matters of fact" to "matters of concern." I don't disagree, although I'm not sure Latour is so much pointing out a new direction as dividing good science studies from bad science studies (his footnotes seem to indicate the latter).

But what's more interesting to me is that feeling of fright. The upshot of Latour's 2004 essay is not that we must stop opening black boxes but that the fright must be removed and replaced by a feeling of warmth and security in our facts.

But there is a key difference between the fright mentioned by Bernard and that diagnosed by Latour, which is that for Bernard the fright is experienced by the investigator, for Latour by the believer in facts who is about to be pwned by a smug philosopher of science. For Latour, the (barbaric) critic experiences only the pleasure of domination, never the fear of uncertainty.

But can this be right? Doesn't any thoroughly sure-footed, smug critique amount to something less than critique? And perhaps the history of science can be forgiven for a overcorrecting a bit, after a tendency toward teleological just-so stories had made us so comfortable in our facts.

To open black boxes is to register the strange complexity of reality. This is a frightening pleasure: frightening because the danger is genuine, pleasurable because thinking people like a good scare.

As Jane Austen phrases it:

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all of Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; -- I remember finishing it in two days -- my hair standing on end the whole time." (121)

Austen recognizes as well as anyone how necessary it is to distinguish between critique and paranoid fantasies; Catherine Morland repeatedly tries literally to open black boxes only to find that they contain thoroughly banal items. When she is later confronted with a very material mystery -- that of General Tilney's sudden inhospitality -- her equally mystified mother counsels, "depend upon it, it is something not at all worth understanding" (232).

Her mother is mistaken, of course.

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1818; New York: Penguin, 1988. Print.

Bernard, Claude. Introduction à l'étude de la médécine expérimentale. Paris: Baillière, 1865.

Daston, Lorraine. "Science Studies and the History of Science." Critical Inquiry 35.4 (January 2009): 798-813. Chicago Journals. 17 July 2009. Web.

Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Print.

---. "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 225-48. Print.

Pound, Ezra. A B C of Reading. 1934; New York: New Directions, 1960. Print.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Time scales

Giles Slade's Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America offers a history of planned obsolescence.

Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence.

I recognize the irony of thinking this just after joining Twitter, which is perhaps the consummate purveyor of Benjaminian information, "[t]he prime requirement [of which] is that it appear 'understandable in itself'" (89). But it seems to me that the same desire for innovation as such characterizes contemporary scholarship: forward-thinking yet wasteful. Scholars keep hoping for the newest "killer app" -- indeed, we keep hoping to publish it ourselves (nobody wants to be doing ordinary science; everybody wants to be Einstein). And yet old theoretical ideas are still productive. I'm not talking about theory (TM) so much as scholarship per se. I just finished reading Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval, which is ten years old and yet full of ideas that were new to me, and not only new but theoretically rich. We will certainly continue to teach Foucault and Barthes, but will we teach Dinshaw and Halperin? Perhaps this is just griping over canonicity, and perhaps my view of this is skewed by my position as a young(ish) scholar. But it seems, you know, wasteful to produce so much knowledge at what seems like a fairly pressured pace. I remember a professor talking about the time she spent reading George Saintsbury's History of English Prosody. "I don't know why I thought I had time to do that," she said, laughing. But: oughtn't she have that time?

One is tempted to argue for a "slow scholarship" movement parallel to "slow food." Like slow food, it would be problematic. It would require the revaluation of time (difficult), and if there ever was a golden age of slow scholarship it probably rested on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women and people of color, as in the case of food. What's odd is that in contrast to publish (something very innovative)-or-perish, the dissemination of literary-critical ideas through popular culture, and even in teaching, seems quite slow. Witness high schools: still New Critical and proud. And yet it is precisely mass culture that is (alleged to be) the culture of planned obsolescence. From a mass-cultural perspective, literary criticism itself is outdated. Or as Carolyn Dinshaw says of her historical period in particular, "This American present abjects the medieval -- in such manifestations as Gregorian chants -- as irrelevant, by definition lifeless and inaccessible" (177). What Dinshaw is pointing out is a conflation between the ideas of "old" and "obsolete." Perhaps what is at issue is not fast or slow but a multiplicity of time-scales, as Mark McGurl suggests, that are not (cannot be?) aligned.

Lorine Niedecker writes: "I must possess myself, get back into pure duration" (28).

Indeed.



(Via Harvard UP.)

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. I am aware of problems with these translations.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.

Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.

Every single university press is currently tweeting the Chronicle's coverage of AAUP. That's old news, Columbia UP!

The Most General Fault of the A. O. U. Check-List

Mark Twain thought it would be a really cool idea to have a newspaper called The Back Number, composed entirely of old newspaper articles. Like Twain, I have a magpie mind, and so I completely agree.

Recent events have had me reading articles from The Auk, the publication of the American Ornithologists' Union, circa 1900. Just listen to Elliott Coues wax decorously indignant about the A.O.U. Check-List:

This is a serious matter which I have hitherto refrained from bringing up, partly on account of its hopelessness, in the present arrangement and numbering of the species, partly because it is to some extent a question of ornithological expertness regarding which opinions may reason[a]bly differ. But now, having occasion to retraverse the whole ground of North American ornithology, in the preparation of the Fifth Edition of my 'Key,' the blemish I shall point out obtrudes itself continually upon my attention; I cannot longer maintain the reticence I have hitherto preserved without seeming to condone the impropriety by tacit acquiescence; and I desire to put myself upon record in the matter, lest my silence be imputed to unrighteousness. This is the first general protest I make public on certain subjects concerning which I was often found in a more or less respectable minority of one or two, when various questions were put to vote for the official decision of the Committee over which I had for so many years the honor to preside.

Yes, that's his preamble right there. He hasn't yet actually said what's wrong with the A.O.U. Check-List (it will turn out to be that the order in which orders and families are listed is inconsistent with the order in which genera and species are listed).

Notice the language of speech and reticence, of repose and assault. Coues isn't writing this article because he wants to; he's writing it because he has to. The inconsistency in the Check-List has intruded on his quiet repose and forced his hand. Had the Check-List's inconsistency not "obtrude[d] itself ... upon [his] attention," Coues might have gone on quietly, as he always hoped to do, but the obtrusion makes his tact into "tacit acquiescence," altering the meaning of silence; indeed, concerning a problem so glaring, silence itself is speech.

Thus as Coues represents it, his complaint is not uncivil, tactless, improper, or unrighteous; rather, it is the only way he can avoid being those things.

And, clearly, it is very important that he avoid being those things.

* * *

I have yet to pick up the medieval bestiary I requested from NRLF, but I will definitely let on if there is a roc in there, or any EXTREME MAMMALS.

Elliott Coues. "The Most General Fault of the A. O. U. Check-List." The Auk 14.2 (April 1897): 229-31. JSTOR. 18 May 2009. Web.

Campanulas

I had my students this past semester read a chapter from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's 2007 study Objectivity. My students had a rough time wrapping their heads around the idea that "objectivity" and "science" are not the same thing, or that "subjective" and "bullshit" were not the same thing. When they saw the images that Daston and Galison used to emblematize truth-to-nature and mechanical objectivity, their first impulse was to say that the first image, an engraving of Campanula foliis hastatis dentatis, was "subjective," therefore unscientific and probably bad, while the photograph of a snowflake was "objective," therefore scientific and good.

Here is the true-to-nature image that Daston and Galison use, from Linnaeus's Hortus Cliffortianus (1737). The artist is Georg Dionysius Ehret; the engraver is Jan Wandelaar. As Daston and Galison write, "It is an image of the characteristic, the essential, the universal, the typical: truth-to-nature" (20).



Yesterday I saw some campanula growing outside the Women's Faculty Club and took some pictures with my cell phone camera. They may not be the same species as the one in the Wandelaar engraving -- IANAB (I am not a botanist).








My students greatly approved the snowflake photograph that Daston and Galison used to illustrate mechanical objectivity, "an attempt to capture nature with as little human intervention as possible" (20). A photograph is always more objective than a drawing, but my crappy cell phone pictures, precisely because there was so little human intervention (I couldn't control light or focus, for instance), show the drawbacks of objectivity. The photos are indistinct; it's hard to see what the leaves look like, for instance.


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Semi-relatedly, here is a CBC radio series on How to Think about Science. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison each have an episode! So do a lot of other brilliant science historians.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2007. Print.

Proofreading

It's not what it used to be. (TM)

Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008).

Michèle Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing

I recently read Michèle Le Doeuff's The Sex of Knowing (in translation). At its heart is a critique of difference feminism based on a historical observation: that women have been excluded from structures of knowledge, not because women have a different and undervalued way of knowing, but because they are women. The special kinds of knowing that have been attributed to women are not stable across history. The pattern that we see across them, Le Doeuff argues, is that these modes of knowing are devalued. Then they are attributed to women. She writes:

We are the little sisters who get the broken toys, the worn-out ideas, and the signs that are being discarded. However, the gift is snatched back when what appeared to be an ordinary stone is revealed as a diamond in the rough or something that could pass for one. The practice of attributing these negative values to women is constant in form, even if the precise content varies ad libitum. Women can be taxed with anything at all, in a way that is both arbitrary and not accidental, provided that at some point in history it has had a negative value. This phenomenon did not escape the attention of Gabrielle Suchon, who notes in 1693: “When desires are seen as marks of need and poverty, they will be attributed by the score to women and girls, since people are always ready to turn unpleasant things over to them.” She has discerned a kind of law, to which we may add a corollary underscoring the historic fluctuation of these gifts. In the seventeenth century, desire was in disrepute, and so women were said to have it in excess; today, it has been revalued by psychoanalysis, which even sees it as a sign of mental health. Since then, it has become a male characteristic, even in the writings of female psychoanalysts. (17)

The answer to women's systematic exclusion from institutions, Le Doeuff argues, is not to try to revalue failed intellectual modes. The answer is to insist once and for all that women can and do know things -- not intuit, not feel, but know, reason, and understand. (I may have more to say on this soon.)

Her point is well argued, although I don't think she gives difference feminism its due. Le Doeuff is at pains to distinguish between the modes of knowledge that have been called "masculine," which she argues are no such thing, and the ideologies that have kept the sciences largely populated by and entirely attributed to men.

One of her key arguments revolves around a critique of Evelyn Fox Keller's classic essay "Gender and Science," which reads Bacon's Advancement of Learning as envisioning a masculine subject pursuing violent knowledge of a feminine object. Le Doeuff happens to be a Bacon scholar, and she observes that Keller fails to read the original Latin. It is the translations on which Keller relies, Le Doeuff argues, that superimpose a masculinist ideology on Baconian science, which is itself neutral (149-50).

It's an effective take-down of the particulars of Keller's argument, but not a response to the broader point of "Gender and Science," which takes Bacon's wording as a metonym for a pervasive assumption in the sciences that by no means depends on Bacon.

Le Doeuff wants to say that science doesn't really fashion itself as masculinist per se; it just gets read that way all too often (and she readily points to other instances of Bacon being a raging sexist). But this ignores a problem of cultural dissemination. If science is couched in a masculinist ideology heartily espoused by its central theorists, even if it need not be masculinist, it effectively is.

In any case, Le Doeuff also elides the fact that, in the main, she and Keller almost entirely agree. As deserving of critique as some of the worst essentialist excesses of difference feminism are, Keller isn't guilty of them. Keller isn't out to prove that women by definition can't do science. Keller is a scientist herself. She's arguing that science has been theorized more or less formally as a masculinist pursuit. Thus:

A circular process of mutual reinforcement is established in which what is called scientific receives extra validation from the cultural preference for what is called masculine, and, conversely, what is called feminine -- be it a branch of knowledge, a way of thinking, or woman herself -- becomes further devalued by its exclusion from the special social and intellectual value placed on science and the model science provides for all intellectual endeavors. (Keller 202)

In fact, in this essay, Keller's a bit more willing to separate "real" science from the ideologies that surround it than I'm comfortable with (a problem she revisits in "Gender and Science: An Update").

There's another, non-essentialist, pragmatic argument for the idea that female knowledge could improve science, perhaps best articulated by example. Martha McClintock's 1971 paper establishing that when women live together, their menstrual cycles synchronize. This was groundbreaking in that it demonstrated a connection between a biological function and social interaction. But also? This is something that I and every other girl who went to summer camp knew long before we'd ever heard of Martha McClintock. (Of course, historical contingencies were involved in my own experience.) It's a phenomenon that men in science hadn't thought to investigate, because everyone knows that if you even whisper the word "tampon!" near a man, he may shrivel up and die, or at the very least lose his manhood. Le Doeuff does an excellent job of pointing out the ways in which the "object" of science may in fact know something about herself, despite claims to the contrary, in her extensive second chapter.

I found Le Doeuff overly dismissive of difference feminism, and of literary studies, but one of the real pleasures of the book is her sarcasm. There's a strong way in which The Sex of Knowing retreads the ground of A Room of One's Own, examining more systematically the phenomenon Virginia Woolf wryly points out in 1928/9:

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? [...] Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was more surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex -- woman, that is to say -- also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.(27)

Le Doeuff wants to find out why women and knowledge have been defined as mutually exclusive; Woolf seeks the answer to the same question about women and writing. Like Woolf, she skewers bald instances of male vanity, like Joseph de Maistre's pronouncement (1808) that

Women have never created a masterpiece in any field. They did not create the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Phaedra, or Athaliah, or the Pantheon, or the Venus of Medici [etc., etc.]. They invented neither algebra, nor the telescope, nor the heat pump, [etc.]..."(qtd. in Le Doeuff 170)

"De Maistre," Le Doeuff points out,

did not invent the telescope himself, nor did he write the Iliad; but, when he affirms that the 'masterpiece' is always a masculine product, he can imagine for an instant that algebra is almost his own creation. Generally, the exclusion of female creators from the mythic representation of inventiveness allows any man to take himself for an Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci, without having to manipulate an equation or handle a paintbrush, and even without the slightest interest in painting or physics. (173)

Like Woolf, Le Doeuff is brilliantly sarcastic. Stories of Le Doeuff's own career occasionally pop up, like the time she was nearly laughed out of the room for suggesting that Mary Wollstonecraft be included in an encyclopedia of eighteenth century English philosophers (because the rights of women, don't you know, aren't important like the rights of "man"). Nobody is spared the snark, and especially not sexist philosophers. For instance, she mentions Jacques Lacan merely in passing as someone "whose fine remark 'woman is not' or 'there is no such entity as woman' is sometimes used to dismiss you when you want to create a program in women's studies" (33).

Although I have significant reservations, I found this an enlightening and interesting book. The problematic of gender and knowledge casts light on unexpected questions, as, for example, the controversy a few years ago over head scarves in the French schools. Le Doeuff points out that the controversy over whether to throw girls out of school over a slip of fabric reveals the fragility of those girls' right to be educated -- the ease with which their right may be denied. Examples like these bring home the urgency of reasserting women's capacity for and right to knowledge qua knowledge. Martha McClintock recalls,

[At] Harvard, [...] because I was a woman, I was barred from the stacks at the Widener Library. I remember a moment when the chairman of the psychology department took his first-year students to lunch at the faculty club. I had to sit at a card table in the vestibule because I wasn't allowed into the dining room.

Le Doeuff's book reminds us that even though, as McClintock says, "[t]hings have changed," there are still beadles all too ready to chase our female students off the grass.

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Keller, Evelyn Fox. "Gender and Science." In Sandra Harding and Merill B. Hintikka, eds. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. Boston: Kluwer-D. Reidel, 1983. First published in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 1:3 (1978).

---. "Gender and Science: An Update." In Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Le Doeuff, Michèle. The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Annotated and Introd. Susan Gubar. 1929; New York: Harcourt, 2005.