History and Historiography of Science

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French history debate results

Sorry for another prolonged absence. Obviously Will is beating me in the number of posts here but I will do my best to plod alongside his commentary. This post summarizes our online debate that occurred several weeks ago. We are thinking of trying something similar, maybe with more of a direct science slant, in the near future.

Online debate on French history, theory, and the question of modernism

Our first experimental virtual chat went very well, and we are happy to report that we had the generous participation of some French historians in training who took some time to talk with us about the usage of theory, the meanings behind history, and what it means to be modern.

Our guests included Micah Alpaugh, a Ph.D. candidate in history at UC Irvine, who studies non-violent political protest during the French Revolution; Meghan Cunningham, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Northwestern, who examines modern conceptions of the family as evidenced in the writings of Enlightenment savants; and Natasha Naujoks, a Ph.D. candidate in history at UNC Chapel Hill, who investigates the mythology of Napoleon during the 19th century in light of both classical and contemporary traditions.

Here are summaries and fragmented excerpts selected from our group chat:

1. Derrida and Foucault in the Classroom

The long shadowy presence of Foucault seemed to dominate this part of the conversation since most of our participants’ educational backgrounds had touched upon his theories in some way. Most of our guests were in agreement that theory was often taught but there was little in the way of guidance about how to employ theory in relation to history. Natasha recommended Elizabeth Clark’s History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn as a good source that commented about the origins of the “new intellectual history” and its debt to French theory. Apparently, it also turned out that I was the sole supporter of theory with Will and the others quite happy to leave it alone. No closet Deleuzians here…

2. Textual Interpretation, Inside Out

Literary interpretation was another area of interest that seemed to be debilitating, or at least, lacking in proper means of usage. Meghan raised the problem of interpreting the emotional language found in the letters between romantic partners, parents/children, and friends for the purposes of her dissertation. Micah agreed that linguistic categories were equally limiting for the concept of mass-action. Everyone seemed to enjoy the work of Clifford Geertz as a budding graduate student, but Micah’s dislike of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms merit as a micro-history divided the group. Bruno Latour’s Laboratory Life and Science in Action provided some amusing thoughts about the agency of salmon.

Meghan: (summarizing the book)…with the more theory-inclined arguing that bacteria have agency…
Meghan: and this one history grad student pipes up, “So what’s next? Salmon have agency?”
Will: See, it’s not that he’s wrong, if you read him right, it’s that he’s not that helpful.
Meghan: I would say that was my take on him as well.

3. Historians are Humanists too!

Should history graduate students really pretend to be part of the humanities in order to garner more grants and fellowships (when art historians really do need the money)? As Natasha aptly articulated, the “exercise in fantasy,” when a dissertation has yet to become a concrete project, is a mix of rhetorical posturing and not knowing where one will find the appropriate forms of evidence (if they even exist). Some shuddered at the thought that some historians do not even use archives at all.

4. Traversing the *“Leaderless Minefield”

Meghan noted that some historians, in the spirit of finding new frontiers, were making the move to the area of material culture. Which possibly could devolve into museum studies, according to Will. Which could be generalized as visual culture, as I implied. Which could end up in media studies. Not quite sure if that is so good. In retreating to the analysis of culture, the group agreed that there was a strong lack of argumentative programs that did not offer any original viewpoints about the state of the field (there were many scholars who were certainly trying to avoid obvious faux pas or attempting to revise the revisionist literature).

*We actually owe this term “leaderless minefield” to Micah.

5. Modern, Modernism, Modernity, WTF?

We managed somehow to return to address Fish’s assertion that deconstruction does not and could not have a politics, which did not sit well with most of the guests. The conversation finalized around the types of questions that our guests are posing in their projects and if looming presence of modernity played a role in their assessment of historical periods, fields of study, and the kinds of conclusions drawn from scholarship.

Micah: Very broadly, I think it’s time to have Revolution come back in — the Soviet hangover’s worn off a bunch over the last twenty years, and the world over the next few is likely to get a lot more interesting…
Meghan: I would say my chief interpretative issue is how to write a sort of collective biography, and in particular how to access emotional/private life issues through texts, which involves a lot of correspondence theory.
Natasha: on a provincial level, I’m challenging early modern and modern French historians about periodization
Natasha: I really resent the 1789 dividing line
Me: What would be the new date of the French Revolution?
Micah: I’m pretty invested in the 1789 line myself.
Natasha: I’m in favor of 1750-1850, not across the board of course
Micah: Sounds Furettian 😉
Natasha: well, I do love my ferrets, you know…no seriously, think about teaching the French Revolution, how could you possibly start in 1789 and make sense of it? Inevitably you’d have to create a sort of prologue unit, you know, “origins of…”
Micah: Such is the great challenge, but a worthwhile one. Did the French Revolution really have origins?
Natasha: no, was an accident…you’re right 🙂 Seriously, though, I’m not sure I’m convinced by the conflation of the FR and “modernity,” fraught with teleological problems
Micah: Yeah, modernity, WTF?

Holmes, Part 4: Teleology? Why not!

In the epilogue to Frederic Holmes’ “Between Biology and Medicine” lectures, he addresses some of the general criticisms he received after his lectures. Two of them had to do with whether he was being “teleological” which seems to be used here as a synonym for “Whiggish”. By conceptualizing his lectures as what “led up to” intermediary metabolism, was he not being teleological and attributing motivations to his actors that they did not hold? Holmes therapeutically observes that we must “guard vigilantly” against this kind of reading of history, but defends himself in a couple of ways.

First “the unrecognized biases of hindsight inevitably shadow all historical narrative.” This is an uncomfortable point; we are always led in our investigations of the past by the concerns of how something came to be. I think I agree. It is only once we are immersed in the concerns of the past that we can look around and say, “Well, actually, they seem to be a lot more concerned with these other things…” But, this doesn’t change the fact that Holmes is reading a precursor history of “intermediary metabolism” stretching back to the 1850s, while it wouldn’t really congeal as a field until the 1930s–why is this legit?

So, second, Holmes is interested in the development of “fields” and “disciplines” and “investigative pathways” and “streams”. I think it’s true that none of his actors ever really take up a directed line of research in physiological chemistry; rather they pass through it. So, is it the author’s imagination that such a stream even exists? I think Holmes makes a convincing point to say “no”; the actors recognized the issue, but, for various reasons of discipline and specific investigative problems (e.g., difficulties in making progress on the problem of lactic acid formation in tissues) they pursued other paths.

I think this issue can best be resolved through some hypothetical situations. If the 1850s chemists and physiologists had seen the work of the 1930s, would they have recognized it as a contribution to their field, or would they have looked at it in bafflement and incomprehension–as incommensurable with their paradigm, or, alternatively, as irrelevant to the discourses that they engaged in? Holmes, I think, would argue that they would have seen it as significant–and here is where we must distinguish teleology from Whiggishness.

Teleology suggests a purposeful process; and people are purposeful creatures. It is when we read purpose onto nature that we commit teleological fallacies. While there have been some notions that science represents a blind process, I don’t think there are many who would deny that there is some envisioning of the potential results of future research programs. While they would certainly not have envisioned “intermediary metabolism” in all its details, they did have concerns about the chemical processes of cells, which they only marginally addressed for reasons that are explainable in terms of scientists’ choice not to pursue the program more rigorously.

So, in taking a teleological view, is Holmes being Whiggish? Maybe a little insofar as he chose to pursue this topic rather than another that would have been more significant at the time, but not insofar as he is addressing concerns that would have been foreign to the historical actors. Thus the emphasis on disciplinary formation–disciplinary formation represents a choice of what problems should be solved; and he shows that even though they could have addressed the problems of metabolism (roughly what the Germans were calling “Stoffwechsel” at the time), they chose not to.

So, at any rate, the product is an informative history of 19th century laboratory physiology and chemistry. Maybe there are better, more informative narratives to follow that will tell us about these traditions, but looking at it through the lens of the relatively minor field of physiological chemistry, while Whiggish in its choice, still represents a legitimate perspective on past events. Until I stumble across something better on this topic, this is my go-to, canonical source. If any experts in the area can recommend a better, more informative go-to source, I’m very much open.

But it’s a tough area to represent, so I’m not sure there are better sources. As Holmes closes the book: “These criticisms… reinforce my belief that a deeper historical examination of how the fields and disciplines of science have arisen and are sustained is crucial to our understanding of the nature of science [I’d rephrase that to “history of scientific knowledge”]. They also make it all too clear that the magnitude of the undertaking is greater than historians of science have so far attempted.”

So, here’s my question: have we since attempted this in the area of 19th/early 20th-century laboratory physiology and chemistry, or have we fallen back on easier, more localized questions (which, incidentally, Galison asks about in his “10 questions”)?

New Isis!

Ah, it’s that time again: the new Isis just found its way to my desk (a little worse for wear in the mail). On first glance, this one looks pretty cool, too. Former grad student colleague Alex Wellerstein has a piece on the patenting of the bomb; also: Rebekah Higgitt and Charles W. J. Withers on women as an audience at the BAAS, over a 70 year time scale–good sign! Robert Kohler has a piece on Vernon Bailey–looks a bit narrow, but maybe it’ll be surprising. Plus, a Focus section on “Changing Directions in History and Philosophy of Science” including 10 questions from my dissertation advisor, Peter Galison. Peter usually asks good, probing questions, so should be a good read. Another talented former colleague, Deborah Coen, reviews literature on the German environment, including one by David Blackbourn, who ran a great course I took in grad school on Problems and Sources in German History. OK, this post is getting a little Harvard-centric….

Plus, coming up in 3 months, a Focus section on the relevance of the history of science. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’s good to at least broach the topic. The blogging plate is full!

Housekeeping

Only three lectures left to go! After History 174 comes to a close (today was “Science and the Computer: Computation, Automation, Simulation, Information”), I think it will be about time to rejigger the blog a little bit, maybe harp on some people again to sign on as contributors, so we can get a more diverse dialogue going here.

One thing I’d like to see happen is a wider community of commentary and speculation. I think people take the blogging thing altogether too seriously and get intimidated, like you have to have some profound insight to blog. But I think it’s more of a place for unserious thinking, since we have to do so much serious thinking for publications. The most interesting and vital thinking seems to go on behind the scenes, so it seems like a good idea to open those conversations up a little to the public.

Anyway, to try and create a sense of there being an active blog community (no slackers!), I’ve decided to weed out a few defunct sites on the blog roll to the left. Phil Mirowski seems to have come to the end of his book promo blog, so he’s gone; it’s too bad, because I think if he ever had a real blog it would be seriously, seriously entertaining. Paul Edwards has apparently bored of writing about Infrastructuration, too, with no immediate hopes of return. However, Robert Vienneau’s “Thoughts on Economics” is updated regularly, and is usually historical in character and is also really thought-provoking–I recommend looking at it even though (especially because?) it’s not within The Biz. Similarly, the Copenhagen Medical Museion blog, Biomedicine on Display, kept up primarily by Thomas Soderqvist, is also frequently updated, and often asks really good questions.

Advances in the History of Psychology (celebrating 340 days on the web) is a little bit more newsletter-like with only occasional scholarly commentary. It is very professionally done–a model for all who want to try and reach out in this direction. Similarly, Michael Barton’s “The Dispersal of Darwin” is also usually in the newsletter vein. He’s done a great job of keeping the blog up, and his ClustrMap shows he has a wide audience. I might try and figure out some criteria for figuring out which of the (many) other popular blogs should get links.

The institutional blogs (except the Medical Museion) seems to be growing in fits and starts. The Penn Logan Lounge seems to have become a semesterly-updated seminar list, so I’m going to axe it. The University of Minnesota department blog is not updated a lot, but looks like it could become a place for reviews and thoughts–plus it’s Minnesota, and Minnesota is awesome. I’m really interested to see what the University of Oklahoma gang does with their Hydra online grad student journal/website.

I’ll be on the lookout foor more sites to put up, and will see if any of the hibernating ones spring back to life. If any readers have suggestions, please leave a comment. We’re looking for blogs dealing with the history of science, or any particular science, in at least a somewhat probing way, but the audience doesn’t have to be academic.

Harvard Conference

It’s been almost a week since the last entry, because I’ve been back up in my Cambridge, Mass. stomping grounds at a highly interdisciplinary conference on “Instability and Decomposition” put together by my friend, collaborator, and former colleague Lambert Williams. There were a lot of pretty sharp presentations on a really diverse array of topics. I gave a revised version of my Air and Space Museum talk (with even more diagrams, which seem to be going over well). This talk sets itself up in opposition to arguments where the big story is how patronage and politics shape the scientific policy advice being received. I don’t say this isn’t the case, but try and bring the analysis in new directions by reframing the motivation of policy scientists as being the improvement of policy (rather than dictation) through analysis, and by recasting policymakers as intellectual participants in the policy science process.

The only thing I want to talk about with respect to the conference is that only a couple of the talks really set up any sort of argument with the literature. There was an interesting friction between two papers, one of which framed itself using Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial critique, and another that set itself up in opposition to it (in a way that had some odd resonances with my paper, actually). Now, I don’t know the first thing about Bhabha’s critique, but it still gave the papers a little spice, a sense that something was being achieved. I find it strange that most papers don’t try and throw out a few sparks.

Anyway, Jenny wanted me to offer a few opinions on her summary of our debate last week before she posts, so I’ll do that at first opportunity, so we can get that up. And I swear I’ll get back to my string on Holmes, as well as maybe talk about R&D.

Virtual History Chat

Jenny and I just finished our first experimental online history chat–I think it was reasonably successful, and could be used for certain kinds of discussion. Largely historians (not historians of science) participated–it seemed to be agreed that some of the deeper theory-based concerns were not very high on everyone’s minds, but that there was plenty of need for new kinds of historiography that haven’t yet cohered. Maybe we’re in a period of theory hangover? Jenny will sum up in more detail soon.

Online debate on French history, theory, and the question of modernism

Apologies for my prolonged blog absence. I have not abandoned Will in his search for the history of history but was traveling abroad, which always takes time out of one’s schedule.

I am happy to announce that our online debate will debut tomorrow night, Wednesday, April 23rd, 8pm Paris time or 2pm Eastern standard time. If you have a Gmail account and would like to join our group chat room, feel free to send either me or Will an email at jennifer.ferng or gwilliamthomas. We will hope to refine this project as time goes on.

We will begin the debate with Stanley Fish’s recent essays on French theory in America.

Some other questions we hope to kick around are: how are French theorists different from French historians? Are there competing schools of contemporary French historiography today? What type of new methodologies are being used and what kind of exciting questions are being asked by graduate students and more established scholars? How do French historians compare with British historians? Is modernism still alive in the humanities or should it be? What about its relation to postmodernism?

We hope you can join us and look forward to a constructive and critical debate!

Depicting Science in Context

First: Jenny’s been away from Paris, but will be back this week, and, so far as I know, her online debate is still on. The plan is to use Google Talk Messaging, which requires either a special download, available here, or just a gmail account. If you’d like to participate or just watch, you can contact one of us on our gmail accounts: gwilliamthomas or jennifer.ferng and we’ll be sure to send you an invite. I expect it will be in the evening Paris time, so afternoon in America, on the 23rd. If you’d like to suggest possible points to discuss (really anything goes, but the idea is historiography, not even necessarily of science), leave a comment here.

Now, I wanted to discuss strategies for talking about scientific culture, which is influenced by my recent reading of Holmes, Mirowski’s More Heat Than Light (which I’m using for ideas for my lecture on economics tomorrow), and some recent emails with Paul Erickson concerning his work on game theory (which everyone interested in 20th century science should have a look at when it come out).

Here’s the historiographical problem: how do we talk about events “in their own terms”? First runs through a history tend (maybe inevitably?) to be Whiggish–how does the past presage some later understanding? The historian’s major response seems to be “to situate B within the contemporary context of X” or to show “B as a product/reflection of X”; which tends to read the history of B only inasmuch as it relates to X. Now, this in no way precludes reading B as a product of Y or Z, either, but it also doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding B “in its own terms”. This is definitively not to say that B is independent of everything else, but I do think it prevents us from taking B seriously, even as we take its cousins at the end of the alphabet entirely too seriously. Why are X, Y, and Z allowed to take on a solid meaning, and not B?

Take Mirowski–his big argument in MHTL is that 19th century economics was forged in relation to the perception of what physics was accomplishing, with neoclassical economics being a direct copy of energetics. He’s certainly right about the existence of the connections, but I rarely feel like I’m understanding the economics on its own terms, despite his valiant efforts to dispel the Whiggishness of the history of pre-neoclassical economics as striving towards some sort of obviously true neoclassical understanding. The mathematical moves the economists make might appear to mimic physics in some ways, but is there a different epistemology at work? Did the economists really think they were doing the same thing as the physicists, even if the equations are copied directly? I would tend to think not, given that their main tradition was one of political philosophy rather than mathematical physics, so I would think that the mathematics would be reinterpreted within the historically dominant tradition. A conversation for another day….

Anyway, Mirowski aside, my main trouble with “in the context of X/Y/Z” is that it presumes we have a solid understanding of X/Y/Z, when what is really meant is a simple shorthand. Take “science X in the context of the Cold War”; what is usually meant is that said science “has an aroma of paranoia about it”, “benefits the military”, and/or “is expensive”–detailed understanding of Cold War historical dynamics will typically not figure. As for science X, it’s usually implicit that the science itself is understood well enough “in its own terms” and that, therefore, additional light will be shed on it by situating it within its context. But, what strikes me is that the science is usually not well understood, either because it hasn’t ever been recapitulated in a coherent narrative, or that whatever recapitulation does exist is all within the inadequate Whiggish old school/practitioner/pop historiography, which few historians in the audience will actually read (for good reasons), thus limiting the informativeness of the exercise.

So, in my mind, it’s best to go back and retell the original story, maybe in a different way, paying attention to different things, or assigning different weights to different parts of the narrative “in light of” what we know about the context. So, we still acknowledge that the thing we are studying is actually an entity in and of itself, and is not merely an artifact bearing the marks of overlapping themes and discourses. This is why I like Holmes so well–he really tries to get back to the original material and understand its intellectual project without abandoning the context. This inevitably makes for a really convoluted history, but the attempt to unravel it is, in my experience, where the really good historical arguments take place. Next time, as promised, Holmes’ epilogue.

Holmes, Part 3: Does Nature Matter?

Comparing what I’ve (poorly) called the historical arc vs. the historical reality models of writing history, Holmes goes on to discuss some of the relevant literature. Probably his main target here is Robert Kohler’s (1982, now out of print) From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline, the first chapter of which explores how “physiological chemistry” was caught in a sort of professional limbo between physiology and organic chemistry in the German university system–hence this gap between first major calls for a cell-oriented chemistry ca. 1850, and the eventual instantiation of a full-blown biochemistry ca. 1900.

Now, things get complicated here, so all this is all too-fast, too-rough recapitulation, but, long story short, Kohler’s book focuses almost exclusively on the non-scientific politics of disciplinary formation. One of Holmes’ big points is to bring the science back into the picture. “If we are to understand scientific innovation and change comprehensively, then we need studies at all levels of organization, from the individual investigator [which he goes on to defend vigorously] and the local research school to the international field; and on time scales ranging from daily experimental operations to the several decades or even much longer that are often required for scientific problems to evolve and for major domains of scientific knowledge to be acquired.” He had previously discussed Mulkay and Edge, but he’s also clearly addressing the points made by Kohler and Latour: “A research field is more than a network of communication and ties of professional interest.”

In some sense, this boils down to the usual, “but nature matters!” argument deployed against the “spin up” interpretation of sociology. Rudwick (see the last post) certainly agrees (see the latest HSS newsletter). Kohler seems to as well, and actually, in his 1982 book, seems to lament the politics of the German university that prevented biochemistry from emerging. Although Holmes gets into it, repeatedly, with the sociologists’ “spin up” arguments throughout the lectures, I get the feeling his main concern is not with proving that nature matters, but, rather, that he has his own, very historiographical agenda. He wants to know how we get down to telling histories that reveal what mattered, and thus why his approach to history is best in this case, as opposed to an approach like that used in, say, Great Devonian Controversy or From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry.

By embracing both long time spans (unlike a case study approach like Rudwick’s), and by embracing laboratory-level practice (unlike Kohler’s approach to a similar topic), Holmes aims to show how the formation of a field like biochemistry is not simply a matter of willing it into existence provided there are no political barriers, but that nature and the evolution of ideas about nature matter in determining what is deemed worth investigation. Most of his lectures are centered around constructing a narrative in which such points are pertinent. In other words, he shows how a more sociologist-friendly book like Kohler’s is actually more Whiggish than his approach, because it presumes that a field like biochemistry ought to exist, and that it was necessary for the emergence of biochemical knowledge (as Kohler himself seems to confirm). This could all be a big misinterpretation of the historiographical argument taking place, on both Holmes’ and Kohler’s parts–I read this stuff quickly–but it’s what I took away from it.

Next time: Holmes responds to some criticisms in his epilogue.

Holmes, Part 2: Historical Realities vs. Historical Arcs

In the previous post I pointed out that Frederic Holmes was dealing with the problem of predecessor science. At the beginning of his lectures (1990), Holmes sets up an interesting comparison, saying that one can focus on “conceptually defined problems that appear to unify the contributions of several or many scientists.” He points to Jed Buchwald’s The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light, Alan Rocke’s Chemical atomism in the nineteenth century, and, lo and behold, John Heilbron’s Electricity in the 17th and 18th centuries. They key here is “appear to unify”–even though we’re looking at scientists with diverse perspectives, they fall into a collective conversation. So, this tends to exclude arguments along the lines of “this guy in India had this same idea in the 8th century” or the perennial favorite, “this really all goes back to Descartes”. This is important for Holmes, because it demands that if he’s going to trace his topic of metabolic chemistry back to the pre-1850 era, the burden’s on him to indicate that the 1850’ers and the 1930’ers were having the same conversation in a more-or-less continuous tradition.

But what’s really interesting to me is a second trend of argumentation exemplified, according to Holmes, by Martin Rudwick’s Great Devonian Controversy. Rudwick’s book (1985) is one of the key texts in the study of resolution of scientific controversies, which shows how artificial their closure seems to be. According to Holmes, Rudwick’s work, in comparison to the others, “is a more tightly bounded, densely recounted episode that Rudwick employed in his effort to transcend ‘the individual scientist’ in order to see how ‘a specific scientific problem… brought together some group of individuals in an interacting network of exchange.”

Holmes goes on from here with little comment, but the timing of his lectures, five years after Leviathan and Rudwick, comes at a critical juncture. These works still represent fresh, productive approaches that compete with a slightly older style represented by guys like Buchwald and Heilbron. For Holmes they are two possible models that do two different kinds of work, but there’s no need to comment on their historiographical place, because they’re two accepted approaches.

Now, in my mind, Rudwick is prototypical of the case study tradition. It sets out to demonstrate by means of example, rather than to trace a history. It functions both as an illustration of a moment of “science in action”, and as an exemplar of a long-term historical reality (episteme?) (i.e., social structures in which controversies can be resolved in a gentlemanly fashion). Whereas the three works mentioned above chart out more of a medium-term historical arc. I would claim that somehow the Rudwick model came to dominate historical writing in subsequent years, but it’s not the model that Holmes chooses for his discussion of the 1840s to 1930s historical arc.

For now, I’d just like to muse about functional differences between these two models. The Rudwick model seems like sort of a one trick pony–if we don’t appreciate (and it’s debatable whether historians did) that the settlement of controversy can proceed independent of scientific arguments, Rudwick serves as a slap in the face. But, like a joke, the more you tell the story, the less illuminating each new case study becomes. Whereas, inquiries into historical arcs, while perhaps less earth-shattering, I think, ultimately gives us something to argue over, and, if we choose the right trends (or invent new narratives altogether–excitement!), this is probably the most continually productive route.

I think this choice of models is really one of these stylistic/economy-of-writing issues. It’s not a question of correctness, but how much argumentative work you can make history do for you.