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Aurora, Nemesis and Clio

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

J. R. R. Christie
J. R. R. Christie
Affiliation:
Division of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT.
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Extract

This essay offers some preliminary and general considerations of big picture historiography of science, attempting an introductory specification of the topic by means of narratological analysis. It takes no strong, substantive position either pro or contra big pictures themselves, preferring an approach which is more diagnostic and heuristic in nature. After considering what may be meant by a term such as ‘big picture’ and its cognates, it interrogates the kind of desire which could lie behind the wish expressed by the conference title ‘Getting the Big Picture’: namely, that a big picture may be worth getting. It proceeds by way of a limited enquiry into what seems to be felt as a relative absence of big picture works in contemporary historiography, criticizing one very general historicocultural thesis which accounts for such an absence, advancing instead evolving features of the professional history of science community over the last thirty years as reasons for this relative absence. Concludingly, it turns the issues raised thus far on their head, in some measure at least. In trying for a more precise specification of the contemporary historiographical formation, we will discover eventually a situation not so much of relative absence of big pictures, rather one where there exists both frame and title for the picture, together with some distinguished painters' names; but where the canvas is only minimally marked, a partial and shadowy sketch, stylistically disjoined. Although this sounds paradoxical, a concrete paradox is not intended. The existence of frame and title enclosing mainly empty canvas indicates only the limitations of the pictorial metaphor for describing complex and developing sets of historiographical practice. What is instanced concludingly is less a theoretical paradox than an intelligible sequence and form of development which issues in a potential problem of practice.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 391 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1993

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References

1 The comments of Caspar Hakfoort have been particularly helpful in rewriting this essay for publication. A chief source of insight for me in developing narratological analysis of historiography has been Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative (tr. Mclaughlin, K. and Pellauer, D.), 3 vols., Chicago and London, 1984–1988.Google Scholar

2 Coincidentally, at the venue of the Big Picture conference, the Science Museum in London, there was also a footwear exhibition, sponsored by the manufacturing company Nike. Nike, winged goddess of victory, ought emblematically at least to join the trio of this essay's title.

3 Whewell, W., History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time, 3 vols., London, 1837Google Scholar; Mason, S. F., A History of the Sciences, New York, 1962Google Scholar (originally Main Currents of Scientific Thought: A History of the Sciences, New York, 1953)Google Scholar; Gillispie, C. C., The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas, Princeton, 1960.Google Scholar

4 Hakfoort, C., ‘The missing syntheses in the historiography of science’, History of Science (1991), 29, 207–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A proof copy of this paper was a timely aid in the composition of the original version of this essay.

5 Christie, J. R. R., ‘The development of the historiography of science’, in Companion to the History of Modern Science (ed. Olby, R., Cantor, G., Christie, J. and Hodge, J.), London and New York, 1990, 20–1.Google Scholar

6 Turney, J., ‘Bookends’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 10 11 1989.Google Scholar

7 What follows draws upon and synthesizes a variety of reading, not all of which is strictly relevant to history of science. But see, generally, Lyotard, J. F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (tr. Bennington, G. and Massumi, B. G., foreword by F. Jameson, series Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10) Manchester, 1984Google Scholar; Bauman, Z., Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals, Oxford, 1987Google Scholar; Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, 1989Google Scholar; the essays by Anderson, Moretti, Jameson and Ross in Section III, ‘The politics of modernity and postmodernity’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (ed. Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L.), London, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar More closely focused on science, see Haraway, D., ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review (1985), 80, 65–107Google Scholar; and Galison, P., ‘History, philosophy and the central metaphor’, Science in Context (1988), 2, 197–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially section 4, ‘A critical “postmodern” model’; and Rouse, ‘Philosophy of science and the persistent narratives of modernity’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (1991), 22, 141–62.Google Scholar Of the latter three, the approach of Rouse via narrative is more congenial to this essay's narratology than Galison's philosophical metaphorics. Not having read Rouse's essay before composing the original of this essay, I was pleased to note a certain overlap of approach and conclusion, and interested to note the divergnces.

8 Gillispie, , op. cit. (3), 8–9.Google Scholar

9 E.g. Bernal, J. D., Science in History, London, 1954.Google Scholar More especially, Needham, Joseph's Science and Civilisation in China, 6 vols., Cambridge, 1954–Google Scholar, bids fair to remain the biggest, and in some scholarly senses, most distinguished picture of science in a civilizational epoch ever produced. Its highly individual blend of Marxism, Taoism and Christianity, and its devotion to Eastern rather than Western culture, creates a very particular place for it in big picture historiography, most specifically as something of a disruptive counter-model to the thoroughly Western civilizational reflexes that inform so much other big picture writing. Rather than treat Needham's enormous and complex work inadequately in this essay, I hope to return to it in detail on another occasion.

10 Gillispie, , op. cit. (3), 9.Google Scholar

11 See Rouse, , op. cit. (7)Google Scholar, for an informative discussion of post-positivism.

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14 Koyré, A., Etudes Galiléennes. A l'aube de la science classique, Paris, 1939, 6–7.Google Scholar Notice how the terms inveighed against by Koyré here (active, action, operative, homo faber, domination) nowadays reappear, in a context discussed in the latter stages of this essay.

15 Koyré, A., ‘The significance of the Newtonian synthesis’Google Scholar, in idem., Newtonian Studies, London, 1965, 3–24.Google Scholar

16 Whewell, , History of the Inductive Sciences, 2nd edn, 3 vols., London, 1847Google Scholar, i, ‘Preface to the first edition’, p. xix.

17 Bernal, , op. cit. (9), 10–18, 27–9.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 22–5, 31–4, 866–80, and Table 8, 929–32.

19 Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962.Google Scholar

20 Kuhn, ibid., 2nd edn, 1970, 108.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., 108–9. It is worth remembering that Structure is of course not a big picture, and would tend historiographically towards the generation of relatively fragmented and smaller scale narratives. Kuhn's own attenuated big picture is of the seventeenth century producing revolutions in the classically established ‘mathematical’ paradigms of astronomy, mechanics and optics, followed by paradigm formations in the eighteenth century for ‘experimental’ sciences such as electricity, followed by a ‘second revolution’ of nineteenthcentury professionalization. See Kuhn, , ‘Mathematical versus experimental traditions in the development of physical science’Google Scholar, in idem., The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Chicago, 1977, 31–65.Google Scholar For the ‘second Scientific Revolution’, see Cunningham and Williams' essay in this issue, also Brush, S. G., The History of Modern Science: A Guide to the Second Scientific Revolution, 1800–1950, Ames, Iowa, 1988Google Scholar, and Bellone, E., A World on Paper: Studies in the Second Scientific Revolution, Boston, 1980.Google Scholar

23 Gillispie, , op. cit. (3), 52–3.Google Scholar

24 Heilbron, J., Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Berkeley, 1979, 500.Google Scholar

25 See Young, R. M., ‘Marxism and the history of science’Google Scholar, in Companion (ed. Olby, et al. ), op. cit. (5), 77–86Google Scholar, for a more thorough account of this process.

26 E.g. Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S., Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton, 1985.Google Scholar For references to Collins and Latour, see 15–16, 226, 281, 340.

27 Hakfoort, , op. cit. (4), 209.Google Scholar

28 Christie, , ‘The ether and the science of chemistry: 1740–1790’, in Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories (ed. Cantor, G. N. and Hodge, M. J. S.), Cambridge, 1981, 85–110Google Scholar; and Christie, , ‘William Cullen and the practice of chemistry’, in William Cullen and the Eighteenth-century Medical World (ed. Passmore, R. and Doig, A.), Edinburgh, 1992.Google Scholar

29 Heilbron, J., op. cit. (24)Google Scholar; Webster, C., The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660, London, 1975Google Scholar; Rudwick, M., The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists, Chicago, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 This composition of the perfect historian's attributes is undertaken in less than analytical spirit; it is meant to be neither exhaustive nor exclusive.

31 Ophir, A. and Shapin, S., ‘The place of knowledge: a methodological survey’, Science in Context (1991), 4, 15–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Barnes, B., The Nature of Power, Oxford, 1988Google Scholar; Latour, B., Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Milton Keynes, 1987Google Scholar; Aronowitz, S., Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harding, S., The Science Question in feminism, Ithaca and London, 1986Google Scholar; Rouse, S. J., Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science, Ithaca, 1987Google Scholar; Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972–1977 (ed. Gordon, C.), Brighton, 1980.Google Scholar Note how, with the exception of Foucault, all these works appear in the three years 1986–88. For a highly informative joint review of Barnes and Rouse, see Turner, S., ‘Depoliticizing power’, Social Studies of Science (1989), 19, 533–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See, in addition, Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (ed. Law, J., Sociological Review Monograph No. 32), London, 1986Google Scholar; Paul, H. W., From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 1860–1939, Cambridge, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, R. D., Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865, Oxford, 1989.Google Scholar

33 Bacon, , ‘The New Atlantis’, in The Works of Francis Bacon (ed. Spedding, J. et al. ), 14 vols., London 1870–1874, iii, 125–66.Google Scholar

34 Gillispie, , op. cit. (3), 8–9.Google Scholar

35 See Ricoeur, , op. cit. (1), iGoogle Scholar, especially chs. 2 and 5 for exposition relevant to ‘configuration’. The particular meaning I intend here is of ‘grasping together’.

36 Aronowitz, , op. cit. (32), especially ch. 12.Google Scholar

37 Harding, , op. cit. (32), ch. 10.Google Scholar

38 Latour, , op. cit. (32)Google Scholar, prefers a more neutral vocabulary of ‘action’ and ‘control’: ‘we need to get rid of all categories like those of power, knowledge…’, p.223. However, his own literal militarization of science, p. 172, surely must make the topic of power unavoidable and central for his work.

39 Latour, , op. cit. (32), 168–73, 215–19.Google Scholar

40 Focault, , op. cit. (32), ‘Truth and power’, 107–33.Google Scholar

41 Barnes, , op. cit. (32), ‘Introduction’, p. ixGoogle Scholar; Latour, , op. cit. (32), 219–32.Google Scholar

42 Foucault, , op. cit. (32), ‘Body/power’, 55–62.Google Scholar See also The Foucault Reader (ed. Rabinow, P.), London, 1986, 169–329Google Scholar, for this and other Foucauldian perspectives on power.

43 Latour, , op. cit. (32), ch. 1.Google Scholar

44 Shapin, and Schaffer, , op. cit. (26), e.g. 42–3, 48, 60–9.Google Scholar

45 Latour, , op. cit. (32), appendix 1, ‘Rules of method’, Rule 7, 258.Google Scholar

46 See Latour's sub-title (note 32); also Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (ed. Knorr-Cetina, K. and Mulkay, M.), London and Beverly Hills, 1983Google Scholar; and Shapin's exemplary review of Latour, ‘Following scientists around’, Social Studies of Science (1989), 18, 533–50Google Scholar, which emphatically distinguishes Latour's project from that of more traditionally or conventionally conceived sociological and historical explanation.

47 If it does so, historiography of science may only be following developments in the historical profession generally. An article on the Princeton History Department in the New York Times (19 04 1987, section 6, p. 42)Google Scholar, emphasizes its recent shift from a focus on social history to a renewed enthusiasm for the historical narration of power.