Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argue in their recent book Objectivity that “objectivity” is not a transcendental concept: it “has a history”. It therefore must have come into existence at a certain point in time. They further argue that the character of objectivity has both transformed and fractured with time, and that the transformation, fracturing, and collection of different notions of objectivity can be periodized. To demonstrate their case, they analyze scientific imagery and its production through time, as surveyed by assembling a gallery of scientific “atlases” (collections of images meant to convey a body of scientific knowledge).
Objectivity is, I think, an important work of historiography that addresses head-on problems associated with the historiography of the gallery of practices: how to write analytical long-term (“mesoscopic”) histories of scientific practice, how to write histories that do not depend on a strict narrative of causality, and how to write about science as a cultural and intellectual activity without questioning the ultimate validity of scientific work. In addition to their scattered commentary toward these points throughout the book, see a distillation of their position last year in Victorian Studies.
Reviews suggest that the book will be a widely-read touchstone. I believe this presents a danger to a historiography that is not sufficiently reflective. Rather than critically reflect on the book’s strategies, there is a danger that historians will now be inspired to “go fishing” for instances of “truth-to-nature” or “mechanical objectivity” in the histories that they themselves study. Those who do so may deploy Daston and Galison’s methodological insights directly, or may question or problematize their periodizations by finding contrary examples. But I believe a more productive exercise is questioning the methodology in toto as an approach to the historiographical problems the book explicitly seeks to address.
The book is certainly broadly-researched and its presentation is extremely erudite, and it contains useful insights. But I disagree with Daston and Galison as to what these insights are. I believe the presentation in Objectivity is grounded on a few interrelated assumptions. First, the practice of representation constitutes a fundamental act of science, a presentation of what scientists believe the scientific object must look like as seen through the scientific eye. Second, there is, therefore, a
Read More…Read More…