Thoughts - Fukishima? water.
2
Goody - unexpected divides
cool:
"These quick reversals prove that !the
divide between prescientific and scientific culture is merely a border —like! that between
Tijuana and San Diego. It is enforced arbitrarily by police and !bureaucrats, but it does
not represent any natural boundary."
Why are dichotomies maintained?
avoid relativism
so, science has done much
absurdity of not seeing this new activity of science (differences in effects)
3
So, where do we go?
“Materialist” explanations often! refer to deeply entrenched phenomena,
of which science is a superstructure !(Sohn-Rethel, 1978). The net result of this strategy is
that nothing is empirically !verifiable since there is a yawning gap between general
economic trends and the !fine details of cognitive innovations. Worst of all, in order to
explain science we !have to kneel before one specific science, that of economics. So,
ironically, !many “materialist” accounts of the emergence of science are in no way
material !since they ignore the precise practice and craftmanship of knowing and hide
from !scrutiny the omniscient economic historian.
avoid materialist and mentalist
It seems to me that the most powerful explanations, that is those that generate! the
most out of the least, are the ones that take writing and imaging craftmanship !into
account. They are both material and mundane, since they are so practical, so !modest, so
pervasive, so close to the hands and the eyes that they escape !attention. Each of them
deflates grandiose schemes and conceptual dichotomies! and replaces them by simple
modifications in the way in which groups of people! argue with one another using paper,
signs, prints and diagrams. Despite their! different methods, fields and goals, this strategy
of deflation links a range of very! different studies and endows them with a style which is
both ironic and! refreshing2.
4
his own experience of observing "transcriptions"
similar to
those to which Goody refers. When !these resources were lacking, the self same scientists
stuttered, hesitated, and! talked nonsense, and displayed every kind of political or cultural
bias. Although !their minds, their scientific methods, their paradigms, their world-views
and !their cultures were still present, their conversation could not keep them in their!
proper place. However, inscriptions or the practice of inscribing could.
writing as an aside of the scientific revolution? or cause of it? (manifestation or cause -- uprisings in middle east?
new ground, old marsh in terms of writing facilitating intellecutal ability?
5
binocular - hold steady focus visual / cognitive
La Perouse - map and scale
what caused the creation of this artifact?
To say it !in yet
other words, we do not find all explanations in terms of inscription equally !convincing,
but only those that help us to understand how the mobilization and !mustering of new
resources is achieved.
The essential
characteristics of inscriptions cannot be defined in terms of !visualization, print, and
writing.
it's not the writing itself, but the situation into which the writing is placed.
mobilization
7/8
a. optical consistency - perspective to create - 2 way avenues
freeways
perspective to create hybrids
9
b. visual culture
ways in which eyes are used in certain cultures to "see" - discipline:
The new precise
scenography that results in a world view defines at once what is science,! what is art and
what it is to have a world economy. To use my terms, a little! lowland country becomes
powerful by making a few crucial inventions which allow people to accelerate the
mobility and to enhance the immutability of! inscriptions : the world is thus gathered up
in this tiny country.
maps - power in holland
c. new way of accumulating time and space
Because she considers the printing press to be !a mobilization device, or, more exactly, a
device that makes both mobilization !and immutability possible at the same time.
Eisenstein does not look for one !cause of the scientific revolution, but for a secondary
cause that would put all the !efficient causes in relation with one another. The printing
press is obviously a !powerful cause of that sort. Immutability is ensured by the process of
printing !many identical copies ; mobility by the number of copies, the paper and the!
movable type.
print shapes a world (Eisenstein)
so what happens when text can shift quickly?
12
print is an assmeblage of ideas?
graven image - to "advance" a field
how is this stuff fact? well, what is engraved becomes fact! new ways of discoursing!
"immutable mobiles"
13
favoring things that show movement
"mind is still being domesticated -- what the hell?!
Inscriptions
capital of "showing" someone
14
Dogonet - chemistry and the modern world
small changes...make huge leaps in understanding
Foucault - panopticon - emerge as science from files...
optical consistency in geology
15
" An asymmetry is created because we create a space and a time in which we place
the other cultures, but they do not do the same. For instance, we map their land, but
they have no maps either of their land or of ours ; we list their past, but they do not ; we
build written calendars, but they do not. Fabian’s argument, related to Goody’s and also
to Bourdieu’s critique of ethnography (1972) is that once this first violence has been
committed, no matter what we do, we will not understand the savages any more. Fabian
however, sees this mobilization of all savages in a few lands through collection, mapping,
list making, archives, linguistics, etc. as something evil."
knowing?
16
importance of making points in 2 dimensional shapes
objects (reminds me of drone victims)
Archives, or representations of collections!!
So, the phenomenon we are tackling is not inscription per se, but the cascade of ever
simplified inscriptions that allow harder facts to be produced at greater cost. For
example, the description of human fossils which used to be through drawings, is now
made by superimposing a number of mechanical diagrams on the drawings. The
photographs of the skies, although they produce neat little spots, are still much too rich
and confusing for a human eye to look at ; so a computer and a laser eye have been
invented to read the photographs, so that the astronomer never looks at the sky (too
costly), nor even at the photographs (too confusing).
17
increased dissention via interpretaton - cascades of inscriptions
concept of "stage" - Pasteur
earlier science - more attention to setting vs. inscription
18
What contributed to Brahe's insights?
sky - works - contradictions
19
IV capitalizing inscriptions...
9 advantages (p. 20)
21
The mobilization of many resources through space and time is
essential for domination on a grand scale. I proposed to call immutable mobiles these
objects that allow this mobilization to take place. I also argued that the best of these
mobiles had to do with written, numbered or optically consistent paper surfaces. But I
also indicated, though without offering an explanation, that we had to deal with cascades
of ever more simplified and costlier inscriptions. This ability to form a cascade has now
to be explained because gathering written and imaged resources in one place, even with
two-way connections, does not by itself guarantee any superiority for the one who gathers
them. Why ? Because the gatherer of such traces is immediately swamped in them.
Galilelo - geometry and physics
22
Galileo - holding 3 domains
we arrive at ideas by different paths
23
assembling allies
conservation - piaget - shift in indicators...good point!
24
we believe more in inscriptions than in other types of evidence
25
paperwork
industrial drawing
26
Realms of reality that seem far apart (mechanics, economics, marketing, scientific
organization of work) are inches apart, once flattened out onto the same surface. The
accumulation of drawings in an optically consistent space is, once again, the “universal
exchanger” that allows work to be planned, dispatched, realized, and responsibility to be
attributed16.
"connective quality for what can be written" - but in life, too, is it not connected?
27
power through filing.
even large "entities" are created through this
domination via records
scale itself is possible to understand through recording.
concepts of metrology - stable measurements!!
money - fascinating
code
map - state of affairds
29
says we can't use capitalism to describe science. oh brother.
money useful when combined with other things.
30
There is not a history of
engineers, then a history of capitalists, then one of scientists, then one of mathematicians,
then one of economists. Rather, there is a single history of these centers of calculation. It
is not only because they look exclusively at maps, account books, drawings, legal texts
and files, that cartographers, merchants, engineers, jurists and civil servants get the edge
on all the others. It is because all these inscriptions can be superimposed, reshuffled,
recombined, and summarized, and that totally new phenomena emerge, hidden from
the other people from whom all these inscriptions have been exacted.
manipulation of inscriptions = power
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