{"id":650,"date":"2008-09-19T01:34:51","date_gmt":"2008-09-19T01:34:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=650"},"modified":"2008-09-19T01:34:51","modified_gmt":"2008-09-19T01:34:51","slug":"schaffer-on-spectacle-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2008\/09\/19\/schaffer-on-spectacle-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Schaffer on Spectacle, Pt. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having gone over<\/a> Schaffer’s specific argument about the relationship between public spectacle and the need to police natural philosophy in the late-18th-century, I want to talk a little more about how I perceive his historiographical project at this point in his oeuvre.\u00a0 Basically, he says, he wants to “experiment” on the utility of three “fashionable themes”.\u00a0 These are (1) scientific production as performance, (2) the relationship between natural philosophy and natural history “(with its effect on a possible taxonomy of eighteenth century sciences)”, and (3) the shift from entrepreneurial deployment to political control of natural philosophy.<\/p>\n

I discussed (1) and (3) last time, and Schaffer barely deals with (2), but, at the same time, I get the sense that (2) is a project Schaffer got started on but never really finished.\u00a0 It relates to what looks like a fairly small historiography relating to “what Geoffrey Cantor calls ‘the eighteenth century problem’—the search for a convincing description of the variety of sciences at this period.”\u00a0 I think this taxonomical project was important to Schaffer because it was essential to his accounting for important transitions in some\u00a0disciplines but not others in the period in question.<\/p>\n

Last time, I mentioned that Schaffer seemed to be testing the ability of then-recent sociological theory to chart the transition noted in fashionable theme #3.\u00a0 However, whether sociological theory could adequately <\/em>account for the transition was not clear-cut, because “political control” did not descend all at once or evenly over “the sciences”: institutionalization was a process that occupied most of the 19th century.\u00a0 Thus it was necessary to have a sense of just which <\/em>sciences would have been susceptible to the need for political control, and thus it was necessary to have a workable taxonomy of these sciences.\u00a0 As Schaffer put it, “The ‘true [experimental] history’ of this paper is not purely chronological.”\u00a0 To explain the transition from A to B, you first need to understand what A and B were, i.e., what the pertinent aspects of certain times and places were that can accept coherent accounts of change between them.<\/p>\n

This gives Schaffer an opening to drive a conceptual wedge between the “complementary” but not “necessarily complementary” practices of natural philosophy and natural history.\u00a0 As he explained<\/a> (drawing on Foucault’s Order of Things<\/em>) in his 1980 description of William Herschel’s use of natural history to inform his astronomical observations, natural history (at this time) involved an arrangement of objects according to their “natural types”, which, carefully studied, allowed observers to make more informed interpretations of whatever future observations they might undertake.<\/p>\n

This is important, because it implies that natural history is a deeply personal enterprise, as opposed to the culture of demonstration surrounding unique cases that accompanied natural philosophy.\u00a0 Schaffer spends very little time on the point (I assume he intended it provisionally), but he quotes Diderot on natural historians very effectively\u00a0 (my translation of Schaffer’s direct quote): “There is no trace of charlatanry in their doings.\u00a0 They tend to their aims, but without any care about those around them: if they amaze us, that is not at all their intent.”<\/p>\n

Natural history, being a personal science, would not (yet) have been susceptible to the same pressures as demonstrative natural philosophy.\u00a0 However (I speculate here; Schaffer has nothing to say about this), as the 19th century progressed and the temporal development in geological formations and in living things mimicked the cosmological descriptions of natural philosophy<\/a>, these pressures would indeed arise (see, for instance, Rudwick’s Great Devonian Controversy<\/em>).\u00a0 But, at this point, the process of evolution through time (while percolating in some places) was not yet at the fore of natural history.\u00a0 Natural history, in general, looked just like Herschel’s use of it as a guide for the mind and senses, rather than as a set of objects whose seeming<\/em> relationships to each other (think layers of rock or anatomical resemblances) demanded<\/em> mechanistic-historical accounts—and learned debates—of their actual <\/em>relationships to each other in deep history (rather than merely in God’s plan).<\/p>\n

Here we need to understand Schaffer as one of the few people actually taking Michel Foucault at his word.\u00a0 In The Order of Things<\/em> (1970), Foucault explicitly said that he was conducting an “archaeology” of human knowledge, that is, a sort of a preliminary<\/em> survey of books that he used to chart out systems of thinking through time, without any attempt to overlay a “structural” account on the survey.\u00a0 (Having been accused of being a “structuralist”, Foucault responded in his foreword to the English edition, “I should be grateful if a more serious public would free me from a connection that certainly does me honour, but that I have not deserved.”)<\/p>\n

Now, Foucault’s book was path-breaking in 1970, but it’s also difficult to take him at his word, because, while modest enough in the foreword, he makes his accounts of “epistemic” shifts sound like actual ontological shifts rather than “after such and such a date the books I’m reading take a different epistemological approach”, and, in general, Foucault tended to be exceedingly reserved about what he had in mind when he was describing different epistemes.\u00a0 In\u00a0his account, people more-or-less just suddenly thought differently after the 1500s.\u00a0 This is misleading, in particular, because Foucault offers no real institutional <\/em>account of, say, the extended efforts to debate and distinguish between simultaneous<\/em> traditions in Scholastic learning, natural magic, and practical knowledge, and to bring them into the mainstream literature of their day.<\/p>\n

Thus, Foucault’s archaeological view, his textual<\/em> analysis, is not only incomplete, but also mostly ahistorical.\u00a0\u00a0 Historians and sociologists of science, however, were beginning to be able to offer more structural<\/a> reasons for the ascent and descent of ways of thinking through history, provided<\/em> the intellectual content of knowledge, its epistemic basis, and<\/em> its institutional context could be adequately described and taxonomized.\u00a0 Schaffer (and probably a few others writing in the early 1980s) seem to have seen themselves as amending and extending Foucault’s project into a satisfying historical account<\/em>, as, indeed, Foucault seems to have hoped would happen.<\/p>\n

Thus, Schaffer’s study of William Herschel as a key figure mediating between the natural philosophy tradition, the non-institutionalized natural history tradition (which he uniquely applied to astronomical observation), and the highly institutionalized rational mechanical astronomy tradition provided the ambitious young scholar with an opportunity to generalize his conclusions about the key place of Herschel in the astronomical tradition to a far broader account of the significance of the late-18th-century in the institutional-intellectual development of some<\/em> sciences (but not others).<\/p>\n

(Concerning Hershcel’s status as a mediator, by the way, Schaffer’s 1981 paper, “Uranus and the Establishment of Hershcel’s Astronomy” Journal for the History of Astronomy <\/em>12, 11-26 is crucial).<\/p>\n

All of this is wildly extrapolative from my reading of Schaffer’s work.\u00a0 It is, if you will, a historiographical theory that needs further testing (and maybe at some point we can actually ask<\/em> him about it).\u00a0 However, already, it’s clear to me that there is an acute need to read Leviathan and the Air-Pump <\/em>from two separate perspectives.\u00a0 More soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having gone over Schaffer’s specific argument about the relationship between public spectacle and the need to police natural philosophy in the late-18th-century, I want to talk a little more about how I perceive his historiographical project at this point in his oeuvre.\u00a0 Basically, he says, he wants to “experiment” on the utility of three “fashionable<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Schaffer on Spectacle, Pt. 2<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1087,1359],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-schaffer-oeuvre","tag-michel-foucault","tag-simon-schaffer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}