John Tresch

Technological World‐Pictures

Martin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings that disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. This essay extends his discussion of things—part of a sustained criticism of modern technology—to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world‐picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe.

On Going Native: Thomas Kuhn and Anthropological Method

In this article, Thomas Kuhn’s theory of incommensurable paradigms learned through exemplars is discussed as a theory of acculturation akin to those of cultural anthropology. Yet his hermeneutic approach results in a classic problem, referred to here as the paradox of objective relativism. A solution, at least for observers of contemporary cultures, is drawn from Kuhn’s own writings: a fieldwork method of “going native.” It is argued that Kuhn’s views are as important a corrective for anthropologists studying native systems of knowledge as they have been for philosophers and sociologists of science. The epistemological and disciplinary implications of such a methodology are discussed.

Another turn after ANT: An interview with Bruno Latour

This is a review, or preview, in the form of an interview, of Bruno Latour’s forthcoming book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. We discuss his intellectual trajectory leading up to actor–network theory and the pluralistic philosophy underlying his new, ‘positive’ anthropology of modernity.

Toward a new organology: instruments of music and science

The Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientific instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments’ diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative “ethics of instruments”: an analysis of instruments’ material configurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature.

‘The potent magic of verisimilitude’: Edgar Allan Poe within the mechanical age

The role and status of writing in scientific practice have become central concerns in the history and philosophy of science. Investigations into the rhetoric of scientific texts, the ‘language games’ of calculation, experimentation and proof, and the uses of textbooks, reports and specialized journals in the formation of scientific communities have all brought a growing awareness of what the American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) heralded as ‘The Power of Words’. In discussing several works of this author, who perhaps more than any of his ‘literary’ contemporaries grappled with the growing dominance of science and technology in his time, this paper shows the potential ambiguity and polyvalence of the rhetoric of science. Poes writings exploit this increasingly powerful language in a variety of ways: through logical proofs, satires, hoaxes, and the analysis of mysteries, codes and poetry, notably his own. Poes unorthodox use of scientific rhetoric highlights the importance of historically specific modes of discourse for the consolidation of truth.

Extra! Extra! Poe invents science fiction!

Special edition from the past NEW YORK CITY, April 13, 1844 - In an unprecedented feat of human ingenuity and artistic audacity, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe of Fordham today reported a purely imaginary feat of science and technology as a fait accompli , creating a near-riot outside the offices of The New York Sun . The stir was caused by citizens who sought to purchase a special edition containing the fallacious report of a hot air balloons crossing of the Atlantic. By making facts of physical philosophy the basis and central concern of an adventure tale, Mr. Poe has invented science fiction . The seriousness and high-mindedness of this fictional mode will soon undoubtedly allow it to take its place among the most highly esteemed and prestigious genres of literature. Countless unsuspecting readers were duped by Poe’s report, which claimed the paper’s front page with the large-type headline, “Astounding News! By Express Via Norfolk! Signal Triumph!” The article described in minute and technically plausible detail the flying apparatus allegedly invented and flown by well-known aviator Mr. Monck Mason. In all instances the author of the report was careful to explain the principles of aeronautics, meteorology, navigation and mechanics upon which the unexpected phenomena observed by his protagonists relied.

The Prophet and the Pendulum: Sensational Science and Audiovisual Phantasmagoria around 1848

During the French Second Republic—the volatile period between the 1848 Revolution and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état—two striking performances fired the imaginations of Parisian audiences. The first, in 1849, was a return: after more than a decade, the master of the Parisian grand opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer, launched Le prophète, whose complex instrumentation and astounding visuals—including the unprecedented use of electric lighting—surpassed even his own previous innovations in sound and vision. The second, in 1851, was a debut: the installation of Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon. The installation marked the first public exposure of one of the most celebrated demonstrations in the history of science. A heavy copper ball suspended from the former cathedral’s copula, once set in motion, swung in a plane that slowly traced a circle on the marble floor, demonstrating the rotation of the earth. Disciplines History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Science and Technology Studies This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/hss_papers/5 16 Giacomo Meyerbeer. Robert le diable, 1831. The nuns’ ballet. Meyerbeer’s synesthetic cocktail debuts at the Paris Opera. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

“Matter No More”: Edgar Allan Poe and the Paradoxes of Materialism

Unsettled by doubt, we reach for matter; we clutch a tool, pound a table, drive a spike into the earth. We think our grip on something solid will catapult us past uncertainty, deception, delusion. But grasping for solidity often leaves us displaced. The more anxiously we reach, the quicker terra firma recedes. This is the case when we study the “material culture” of matter itself—when historians of science, for instance, inspect devices of observation and inscription in chemistry, physics, or the earth sciences. Though often taken to be more reliable than fugitive perceptions or beliefs, instruments in action are revealed as temperamental links in fragile chains of mediation, riddled with gaps. We see the sustained efforts needed to stabilize phenomena—glass, light, dirt—and the tremendous labor involved in getting people to agree that a given technical setup speaks reliably for the world. Looking closely at theories of matter leads to even more puzzling detours. Historians of physics gather tracings that reveal vast empty spaces in seemingly solid matter; they chase diagrams marking particles’ oscillation into and out of existence. Treating the molecular structure of metals and crystals, we find patterns of latent motion

Cosmopragmatics and Petabytes

How do people represent everything all at once, in a single space? A cosmogram is any object that tries to do just that. The first uses of the term were in religious studies, but cosmograms also appear within the sciences. I will first offer a handful of examples to flesh out the idea of cosmopragmatics or cosmograms in use. I’ll then consider examples from the nineteenth century, an age of utopias and media revolutions. Finally, I will raise some current questions concerning cloud computing and big data, and their “cosmopragmatic” potentials, asking whether these new modes of accessing the world, these new digital windows, create sturdy arks for navigating the sea of information.

Introduction: Audio/Visual

A/V” seems to belong to the always-already obsolete. Even at the height of the craze for “audiovisual aids” in the mid-twentieth century, its association with the humble schoolroom and the “A/V geek” gave the acronym an air of the outmoded. Overtaken, in quick succession, by “multimedia” and “new media” at the end of the century, the audiovisual seems all the more rudimentary, remedial rather than remediated, or simply a minor component of larger media systems. Disciplines Art and Design | History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | Science and Technology Studies This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/hss_papers/6 Grey Room 43, Spring 2011, pp. 6–15.