171
////// obsah / contents /////////////////////////////////////////
tematické studie / thematic articles
“Filosofické hračky /// Philosophical Toys”
Tomáš Dvořák
Philosophical Toys Today 173
Lina Hakim
Instruments as Playthings: An Alternative Methodology
for the Study of Scientific Artefacts 197
Kate Maddalena
The Toys of Organic Chemistry: Material Manipulatives
and Scientific Reasoning 227
Meredith A. Bak
Grand Illusions: Large-Scale Optical Toys and Contemporary
Scientific Spectacle 249
Jana Horáková
The Turing Machine on the Dissecting Table 269
Claudia Mongini
Philosophical Toys as Vectors for Diagrammatic Creation:
The Case of The Fragmented Orchestra 289
miscelanea / miscellanea
Michal Ivan
Neznesiteľná ľahkosť zdôvodnenia prima facie 315
Andrea Průchová
Médium v jednotném čísle 321
Michal Šimůnek
Věda jako veřejný obraz 326
Petr Krása
Struktura filosofie v pojetí Zdeňka Vašíčka 335
Dagmar Zajíčková
Přínos renesančních učenců historiografii matematiky 340
Josef Vojvodík
Kniha o obrazech, které opustily svůj rám 345
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TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXV / 2013 / 2
////// tematická studie / thematic articles //////////////////////
PHILOSOPHICAL TOYS TODAY
Abstract: The article introduces
a  thematic issue of the journal
Theory of Science that attempts to
revive the category of “philosophical
toys” – objects and instruments
designed for experimental scientific
research that simultaneously played
crucial role in the creation of the
modern visual culture. It claims that
to fully understand their nature and
the kind of experience philosophical
toys induce, it is necessary to situate
their origins in eighteenth-century
experimental science and aesthetics
and proposes to approach them as
perceptual and cognitive extensions.
Keywords: philosophical toys;
scientific instruments; modern
visual culture
Filosofické hračky dnes
Abstrakt: Studie uvádí tematické
číslo časopisu Teorie vědy věnované
aktualizaci koncepce „filosofických
hraček“ – předmětů a  přístrojů
určených k  experimentálnímu vědeckému
zkoumání, jež zároveň
výrazně ovlivnily utváření moderní
vizuální kultury. Abychom plně
porozuměli povaze těchto přístrojů
a  typu zkušenosti, již sebou přinášejí,
je třeba jejich původ situovat
do  experimentální vědy a  estetiky
osmnáctého století a  chápat je jako
percepční a kognitivní extenze.
Klíčová slova: filosofické hračky;
vědecké přístroje; moderní vizuální
kultura
TOMÁŠ DVOŘÁK
Kabinet pro studium vědy, techniky a společnosti
Filosofický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i.
Jilská 1, 11000 Praha 1
email / tomdvorak@flu.cas.cz
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Tomáš Dvořák
The term “philosophical toy” was used in the first half of the nineteenth
century to designate a specific family of artifacts with a dual ambition: to
examine various phenomena experimentally and to provide popular amusement.
They were mostly simplified or derivative versions of scientific instruments
that spread among the lay public and became sought-after consumer
goods, modern, awe-inspiring curiosities. This issue of Theory of Science
seeks to analyze the specific position that philosophical toys occupied – at
the boundaries of science, arts and popular culture, in between theory and
practice, knowledge and amusement – and to describe cultural forms that
populate these thresholds in today’s culture.
In this introduction, I will attempt to capture the nature and functions
of philosophical toys through a combination of perspectives of three contemporary
authors from different fields, whom I find most inspiring for both
the historical analysis of this phenomenon and its contemporary relevance.
Triangulation of these perspectives will reveal some of the distortions they
entail; I will try to address them in a seemingly paradoxical maneuver – by
descending into the material culture of the science and aesthetics of the
second half of the eighteenth century.
Nicholas Wade is a psychologist specializing in research of vision and
visuality, both contemporary and historical. He is interested chiefly in optical
philosophical toys and their role in the history of experimental physiology
and psychology, as well as in their influence on the visual arts. Although Wade
emphasizes the fact that unlike “philosophical instruments” (instruments
of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that
served the purposes of demonstration and experimental analysis) philosophical
toys are meant to be also amusing and accessible to the broader public, his
accounts are essentially limited to the development, use and interpretation
of these contrivances within the scientific realm: they constitute a neglected
chapter in the history of science. By “public” Wade typically means artists,
namely painters, for whom questions of vision are also essential. His contribution
rests primarily in his detailed account of philosophical toys (such as
the kaleidoscope, thaumatrope, phenakistiscope, stroboscope, stereoscope,
tachiscope...) and their roles in nineteenth-century scientific research on the
perception of colors, space, depth, movement or time.1
1
Nicholas J. WADE, “Philosophical Instruments and Toys: Optical Devices Extending the
Art of Seeing.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, vol. 13, 2004, no. 1, pp. 102–124
and Nicholas J. WADE, “Toying with Science.” Perception, vol. 33, 2004, no. 9, pp. 1025–1032.
This article was supported by grant no. P401/11/2338 “Contemporary Approaches in Historical
Epistemology” from the Czech Science Foundation.
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Philosophical Toys Today
A very similar set of devices is discussed by Jonathan Crary, a historian
of art and visual culture. In his Foucaldian attempt at rewriting the
traditional historiographies of art and media, Crary introduces a  radical
historical break, a discontinuity between the classical and modern regimes
of vision, between the classical and modern spectator. The period of seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries is characterized by the camera obscura
as both a material device and a discursive figure: it is a concrete technical
artifact and a dominant epistemological model (embraced by empiricists as
well as rationalists) that defined the status and capabilities of a perceiving
subject. The camera obscura model was based on a radical differentiation of
the inside from the outside, on the separation of the dark interior of the human
mind from the luminous outside world that penetrates inside through
the aperture of the senses and so depicts its own image. The outside model
and its inside copy correspond to each other, and it is the mechanism of the
camera obscura and its physical principles that guarantee the objectivity of
the projection. Experimental physiology developed in the early nineteenth
century breaks with this model in an essential way when it begins to conceive
of vision in terms of bodily and temporal processes. Goethe’s or Purkinje’s
investigations of afterimages begin to delineate the conception of subjective
vision, imagery produced by the human body that lacks any correlate in the
outside world. It is the various optical apparatuses that according to Crary
play crucial role in research and control of such visual experience. Thanks
to them the referential illusion could have become the subject of popular
entertainment as well. In the simplest form we can find it in a thaumatrope,
a device that utilizes the persistence of vision: two different yet complementary
images are painted on the front and reverse side of a paper disc (such as
a bold head and a wig, a bird and a cage ...), which is attached to a stick or two
pieces of rope and by twisting them fast enough the two images combine.
This way anyone could realize that the resulting visual impression is not
really what is in front of us, that the human senses generate optical illusions
thanks to their “fallibility”. Crary devotes most attention to the stereoscope,
the “quintessentially nineteenth-century device” and the source of the most
realistic effect in the mass culture of that time. The principle of stereoscopy
is “based on a radical abstraction and reconstruction of optical experience”,2
it is the result of the separation and isolation of individual senses, their
2
Jonathan CRARY, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1990, p. 9.
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scientific analysis and targeted and controlled irritation by mechanical
instruments.
Film historian and theorist Tom Gunning published several brilliant
studies about (again, particularly optical) philosophical toys. I regard these
studies as the most inspiring contributions to the topic so far, because they
actually situate the toys within the realm of popular culture (Crary’s account
follows mainly shifts in the conceptualization of vision in the works of intellectual
elites, philosophical toys being their secondary illustrations) and also
regard them as a constitutive moment of modern and contemporary media
culture, a tendency still present and effective that intersects with and supplements
other visual forms and conventions. The starting point for Gunning’s
interest in these proto-cinematographic devices is his radical reassessment
of early cinema, expressed in the conception of “the cinema of attraction”
from 1986. Until then, the historiography and theory of film were dominated
by a narrative understanding of film that was unable to adequately grasp its
early phase (until about 1906), which was taken to be a groping, undeveloped,
primitive film form still in search of its true media-specific narrative
nature. However, according to Gunning, the cinema of attraction is guided
by very different principles, it is based on making images seen, harnessing
visibility and exhibiting both the filmic illusion and the film technology. He
sees early cinema “less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting
a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory
power [...] and exoticism.”3
It is necessary to point out that this exhibitionist
impulse does not evaporate from cinema even after the classical, narrative
form takes over; it rather becomes a kind of submerged stream that feeds
avant-garde film and often surfaces into mainstream cinema, just like today
in the form of special effects or so-called 3D, 4D, and 5D cinema. Later,
Gunning searches for these aspects of film understood in terms of a fair
attraction or a parlor trick in the popular visual culture of the nineteenth
century. Philosophical toys and their “technological images” based on the
manipulation of human perception through mechanical devices give rise to
the modern image culture, at once profoundly technological and perceptual.
Thanks to its simplicity, thaumatrope serves as Gunning’s first and foremost
example of this new phenomenon:
3
Tom GUNNING, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.”
Wide Angle, vol. 8, 1986, no. 3–4, p. 64 (63–70).
Tomáš Dvořák
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We see this image not simply as a representation of something, but as an event,
a process, an almost theatrical turn in which the image behaves in an unexpected
manner, calling attention to its own production, making its appearance
into a performance of image-ness, of becoming visual, of appearing.gg 4
Similarly, later devices such as the phenakistiscope – a rotating disc with
a series of movement phases – “do not represent motion, they produce it.”5
While producing visual illusions, philosophical toys, according to Gunning,
at the same time demonstrate the process that generates them and make it
possible for us to understand how our senses function and how they interact
with the environment: they provide us with “rational entertainment.”
Gunning adopts Crary’s historiographical model, situates the moment of
emergence of the modern visual culture in the 1820s and exemplifies it with
the thaumatrope. I am convinced we must look deeper than that.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote his short but remarkable fragment “That
more than five senses are possible for human beings” at the very close of
his life, most likely in 1780. In several paragraphs, he outlines a conception
of human development from simple forms to complex and advanced ones:
human sensory apparatus is not fixed once and for all but evolves towards
greater refinement and complexity. Our present stage of five senses was
achieved through combinatorics of individual ones: “If nature nowhere
makes a leap, the soul will also have progressed through all the lower stages
before it reached the stage at which it is at present. It will first have had each of
these senses singly, then all ten combinations of two, all ten combinations of
three, and all five combinations of four before it acquired all five together.”6
The present combination is not, however, the final stage of development:
senses determine the limits of the soul’s representations, they are their order
and measure and the way the soul is conjoined with matter – the senses are
themselves material. Matter, however, is not monolithic; it contains homo-
4
Tom GUNNING, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian
Era.” Victorian Studies, vol. 54, 2012, no. 3, p. 510 (495–516).
5
Tom GUNNING, “The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century
Philosophical Toys and Their Discourse.” In: RØSSAAK, E. (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion.
Film, Photography, Algorithms. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2011, p. 38 (27–43).
6
Gotthold Ephraim LESSING, “That More than Five Senses Are Possible for Human Beings.”
Philosophical and Theological Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, p. 180
(180–183).
Philosophical Toys Today
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geneous elements or masses that correspond to particular senses.7
Because
we know that there are more than five homogeneous matters (although we
cannot know for sure how many there are in the world altogether), we can
assume more senses are possible:
Thus, just as the sense of sight corresponds to the homogeneous mass through
which bodies attain a condition of visibility (i.e. light), so also is it certain that
particular senses can and will correspond, e.g., to electrical matter or magnetic
matter, senses through which we shall immediately recognize whether bodies
are in an electrical or magnetic state. We can at present attain this knowledge
only by conducting experiments.8
Lessing illustrates his thesis with the classic motive of sensory impairment:
if we lacked vision, for example, we would not be able to form any conception
of it. After gaining sight, a “whole new world will suddenly emerge for us,
full of the most splendid phenomena.” In the same way, we are aware (thanks
to scientific research) of the existence of electrical or magnetic powers but
we cannot perceive them because we haven’t developed special senses for
them yet. Human perception is dependent upon psychophysical constitution,
which is not invariable.
Of course, Lessing does not speak in terms of purely biological evolution;
his system is “the oldest of all philosophical systems,” the system of the
soul’s pre-existence and of metempsychosis. The idea of a process in which
an immortal soul migrates into new complex beings was very popular in
Lessing’s times and he himself developed it further in some of his other, later
texts. Aside from a rich tradition of metempsychosis speculation, Lessing
was most likely inspired by Charles Bonnet’s theory of palingenesis.9
Bonnet was one of the first authors to use the term evolution, although
in a different manner than it is known to us from the nineteenth century. His
Leibnizian approach to evolution was marked by a belief in preformation, according
to which every living being encapsulates in itself a primordial seed,
an unchanging miniature replica of itself that is activated at fertilization and
7
In this regard, Lessing draws on the traditional assigning of particular senses to different
elements and simultaneously radicalizes his earlier and more famous notion of a “suitable
relation” between signs, their referents and modes of perception that will be discussed below.
8
LESSING, “That More than Five Senses Are Possible.” p. 181.
9
Such is the contention of H. B. Nisbet in his introduction to LESSING, Philosophical and
Theological Writings, p. 14. The influence of Lessing’s close friend Condillac and his discussion
of the senses in the 1754 Treatise on the Sensations needs to be acknowledged as well; however,
it is the progressive development found in Bonnet that provides the relevant framework.
Tomáš Dvořák
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develops into new identical organisms. At the creation of earth, all future
generations of living beings were embodied in these primordial germs and
the breeding of new creatures is essentially the production of endless series
of copies of a given species. Preformationism excludes change or variation
in the later evolutionary sense. It is not, however, an entirely static system.
In his Philosophical Palingenesis from 1769, Bonnet delineates an image of
catastrophic revolutions that radically alter living conditions on Earth and
lead to new rebirths. The physical bodies of organisms are destroyed during
these periodical catastrophes, but their germs survive and are born again
into new worlds. These new worlds bring about different living conditions
from the preceding ones, which is the reason why organisms acquire new
forms corresponding to these new environments. “I conceive that the germs
of all organized beings were originally constructed or calculated with a determinate
correlation with the diverse revolutions which our globe was to
undergo.”10
Catastrophic revolutions are predetermined just like the forms
of the living are and they allow organisms to evolve towards greater biological
complexity and higher spiritual perfection.
Bonnet’s temporalizing of the chain of being does not involve the
gradual transformation from simple to complex forms but proceeds rather
by discontinuous leaps, a  general shifting of all living beings and their
hierarchical arrangements. During these phases, living beings constitute
a continuous series, an uninterrupted chain of being that develops through
sequential revolutions of time:
The series of events, however, is quite distinct from these spatial configurations,
each of which describes the taxonomic continuity in its own way; the series of
events is discontinuous, and different in each of its episodes; but, as a whole, it
can be drawn only as a simple line, which is that of time itself (and which can be
conceived as straight, broken, or circular). In its concrete form, and in the depth
that is proper to it, nature resides wholly between the fabric of the taxinomia
and the line of revolutions.11
Late eighteenth-century natural history historicizes nature by integrating
a consecutive series with the continuity of living beings: “evolution” is still
both a scientific and a theological term. It has to be reconciled with the be-
10
Quoted in Arthur O. LOVEJOY, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1936, p. 285.
11
Michel FOUCAULT, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London –
New York: Routledge 2002, p. 163.
Philosophical Toys Today
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lief in the immortality of the soul and preformation. The inner hierarchical
structure is not affected by time; time is not the principle of the evolution
of organisms and their organization in the sense of later evolutionism and
transformism. For Bonnet, evolution is the unfolding of a pre-programmed
course that determines the nature of organisms, their mutual relationships,
as well as revolutions of the environment they inhabit.
Lessing’s fragment falls within this evolutionary framework, the
development of the senses is understood as a  combination of individual
senses and their aggregates, not as their gradual perfection. However, his
examples of existing matter (electrical or magnetic), which cannot be immediately
perceived yet, must bring us to a halt. We gain knowledge of them
by conducting experiments. It is due to scientific experiments that invisible
processes, powers and matters become manifest in various effects – and we
can register these effects with our senses or detect them with diverse (mostly
measuring) instruments. The discoveries of electrical, magnetic or galvanic
phenomena in the eighteenth century were still closely connected to the
belief of God’s presence in the world and they inspired radical changes in
the understanding of the relationship between the body and soul or matter
and spirit, when they replaced the traditional medieval metaphysics of light:
“Magnetism and electricity emerged as the most palpable manifestation of
the hidden presence of divine power in the world and its objects – as the
concealed power that creates life, movement and warmth; that permeates
the entire universe ...”12
Joseph Priestley, the author of a seminal survey of historical and contemporary
electrical research from 1767, emphasizes the role causality plays
in human cognition:
One of the most intimate of all associations in the human mind is that of cause
and effect. They suggest one another with the utmost readiness upon all occasions;
so that it is almost impossible to contemplate the one, without having
some idea of, or forming some conjecture about the other. In viewing the works
of nature, we necessarily become first acquainted with appearances or effects.13
Appearances and effects are extremely diverse; therefore, it is necessary to
search for analogies among them and so explain them by a small number of
12
Ernst BENZ, The Theology of Electricity. On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology and
Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Allison Park: Pickwick Publications 1989, p. 2.
13
Joseph PRIESTLEY, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments.
Vol. II. London 1775, p. 11.
Tomáš Dvořák
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causes. An effect can become a true scientific phenomenon when it ceases to
be only a particular event and becomes a regular and regulated one instead:
it has to be made to appear every time under given circumstances and only
then becomes a stabilized, observable phenomenon. Searching for analogies
between appearances and producing them under identical and controlled
conditions are the ways in which one establishes relationships between
the large number and variety of visible effects and the few simple invisible
causes. This principle is particularly distinct when studying electricity:
Indeed, no other part of the whole compass of philosophy affords so fine a scene
for ingenious speculation. Here the imagination may have full play, in conceiving
of the manner in which an invisible agent produces an almost infinite
variety of visible effects. As the agent is invisible, every philosopher is at liberty
to make it whatever he pleases, and ascribe to it such properties and powers as
are most convenient for his purpose. And, indeed, if he can frame this theory
so as really to suit all the facts, it has all the evidence of truth that the nature of
things can admit.14
The first experiments, which most commonly produced static electricity by
friction, explained it in terms of gravitation, as a kind of attraction or repulsion
intrinsic in specific bodies. “But when electricity began to show itself in
a greater variety of appearances, and to make itself sensible to the smell, the
sight, the touch, and the hearing: when bodies were not only attracted and
repelled, but made to emit strong sparks of fire, attended with a considerable
noise, a painful sensation, and a strong phosphoreal smell; electricians were
obliged to make their systems more complex, in proportion as the facts were
so.”15
In the last decades of the eighteenth century, electrical phenomena
became even more complex when animal electricity was added to the register.
Investigations of the nature and specificity of animal electricity and
its similarity to static electricity produced artificially in laboratories (as we
know them primarily from the Galvani–Volta dispute) were simultaneously
an arena for speculations about the roles of analogy and metaphor in scientific
research.16
14
Ibid., p. 16.
15
Ibid., p. 18.
16
Cf. Marcello PERA,ff The Ambiguous Frog. The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal
Electricity. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992 and Laura OTIS, “The Metaphoric
Circuit: Organic and Technological Communication in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of
the History of Ideas, vol. 63, 2002, no. 1, pp. 105–128.
Philosophical Toys Today
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Take the example of the electric shock that can be delivered by a torpedo
fish or an electric eel. In the Renaissance, it was still an inexplicable, occult
phenomenon. In early modern times, it became the subject of more focused
research and acquired mechanical explanation. Thanks to the invention of
the Leyden jar in 1745, a condenser able to store static electricity, one could
perceive some similarity between the two effects and consider the torpedo
shock as electrical. Electricity, however, permeated the organic realm much
more intensively once it began to be understood as a possible medium of
communication in the nerves and when the emerging neurophysiology was
still closely connected with physical and technical research. Even though
explicit parallels between organic and technological systems would become
commonplace in the next century, the preconditions for their intersections
and interfacing (both conceptual and technical) emerged in Luigi Galvani’s
lab, on a table full of wires, condensers and dissected frog legs, which he
himself regarded as the finest existing electrometer. Scientific apparatus and
the instrumental arrangements do not just serve the purpose of displaying
the nature and functions of the subject matter; they also help to formulate
the conceptual models and metaphors used to interpret these phenomena.17
The core element of modern electrophysiology, beyond the more or less technical
terms and concepts it makes use of, consists of the fact that the membrane of
nerve and of muscle fibers is actually a “machine,” which produces and utilizes the
electricity necessary to encode and transmit information to the excitable tissues.18
The nature of electricity is revealed through its effects and the phenomena
produced must be stabilized in certain ways so they can be compared
one to another. One way is to measure them. A different method was discovered
in 1777 by Georg Christoph Lichetnberg, who found by chance another
sensitive “tissue” that could be affected by electricity. While working with
his electrophore, Lichtenberg noticed how resin dust would settle in its base
forms into peculiar patterns and he started to examine this more systematically:
radial or circular patterns were thought to be the result of positive or
negative electrical fluids. Lichtenberg compared them to macroscopic images
– stars, milky ways, suns – or to the images brought forth by the frost
on window-panes and referred to them as “projections.” He was also able to
17
See Tomáš DVOŘÁK, “Scientific Instruments and Epistemology Engines.” Theory of Science,
vol. 34, 2012, no. 4, pp. 529–540.
18
Marco PICCOLINO – Marco Bresadola, Shocking Frogs. Galvani, Volta, and the Electric
Origins of Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, p. 320.
Tomáš Dvořák
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preserve them by spreading an adhesive substance on a sheet of black paper,
thus discovering the principle of xerography.
The electrophore generated an electrical charge and served as an auxiliary
instrument for charging a Leyden jar – Lichtenberg decided to build a much
larger version (with a diameter of over 2 meters, his older model’s diameter
being around 45 centimeters) because “executing experiments with larger
instruments is tantamount to observing the exhibited phenomena under a microscope:
what went unnoticed beforehand to the most acute eye even with
greatest scrutiny, can no longer remain forever unnoticed even by the sloppiest
and most inconsiderate observer with the dullest sense once it is enlarged
in this manner.”19
Thanks to this substantial magnification of the power to
visualize an electrical charge (Lichtenberg was able to produce 40-centimeterlong
sparks), the electrophore became a much more sensitive instrument of
detection and display that allowed even for “drawing” patterns or letters:
a new kind of secret language allowed nature to make itself manifest. At the
time, electrostatic figures captured the attention of the public as analogies of
atmospheric charges, thunderbolts harnessed and domesticated. Smaller versions
of Lichtenberg’s instrument were soon on sale, philosophical toys that
were meant to demonstrate and explain the emergence of frost patterns. The
principles behind these invisible processes were still unknown but thanks to
the instrument they could be made visible, and release a lasting image of their
transient state, a pregnant moment of their potentiality: “In the frozen state
of a single image, the world is expressed as a specific state of tension.”20
Lichtenberg’s
figures are nature’s explosive gestures, indexical images that allow
nature’s hidden forces to surface by means of the apparatus and to translate the
haptic sensation of electric shock into a visual one. They are simultaneously
beautiful and true ciphers, not yet fully understood but nevertheless able to
insert certain degree of certainty into theoretical confusion and controversies.
These sonograms of modernity inaugurate an era of mediation that are
characterized by the dialectical tension between movement and stillness and
would develop into the forensic imagination we indulge in today.
It might seem surprising that Lichtenberg did not pursue a more thorough
explanation of his figures or attempt to situate them within the system
19
Quoted in: Davis BAIRD – Alfred NORDMANN, “Facts-Well-Put.” The British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science, vol. 45, 1994, no. 1, p. 46 (37–77).
20
Siegfried ZIELINSKI, “Show and Hide: Projection as a Media Strategy Located between
Proof of Truth and Illusionising.” In: ZIELINSKI, S. – WAGNERMAIER, S. M. (eds.),
Variantology 1. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies. Köln: Walther
König 2005, p. 97 (81–100).
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of knowledge of the time. It was as if they could speak for themselves. Such an
approach resonates with his other scientific and literary work: Lichtenberg
favored experiment over theory as well as aphorism over novel. His method
of presentation was based on a graphic and immediately effective apparition,
shocking rather than contemplative. His anti-systematic approach led to the
demonstration of knowledge in a condensed and concentrated form, not in
a gradual and detailed interpretation or theoretical explication.21
When Lichtenberg introduced his electrostatic figures to the public
in 1778 and when two years later Galvani began his series of experiments
with dissected frogs, exposing them to static or atmospheric electricity, they
contributed yet another fascinating images to the rich repertoire of electrical
imagination of the eighteenth century.22
This imagination was not the exclusive
property of scientists, rather the opposite: ingeniously elaborated and
spectacular demonstrations of electrical phenomena accompanied scientific
lectures but also attracted customers to instrument shops, and became fashionable
parlor tricks and domestic amusement and were discussed in the
periodical press as sensational events.
[N]atural philosophers could use their control over active powers to construct
a theatre with all the appeal and all the dangers that implied. The theatrical
image, as an analogy for the world which was to be investigated, was common.
The Linnaean disciples wrote of “the theatre of this life” and of the naturalist as
“the eye and spirit of the Earth, attentive to gaze with astonishment upon the
economy of the Creator”. They emphasized that “one finds in Man two properties
of which all other animals are deprived: astonishment andt language.”23
21
The relationship between Lichtenberg’s scientific and literary work is discussed in Jürgen
TEICHMANN, “Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Experimental Physics from the Spirit of
Aphorism.” Nuova Voltiana. Studies on Volta and his Times, vol. 5, 2003, pp. 15–30 and Jeremy
ADLER, “Klikatá čára. Vizuální narativní metoda: Sterne, Lichtenberg, Novalis.” Kritický
sborník, vol. 19, 1999/2000, pp. 65–82.
22
It is worth noting that both these discoveries, as well as many others at the time, are regarded
as having occurred “by chance.” This interpretation stemmed from the lack of theoretical
explanations for them and from the understanding of an experiment as a test of a theoretical
hypothesis, which denies any kind of epistemological gain on the side of instrumental
arrangement. In fact, similar discoveries occur only thanks to experimental systems that are
not simply tools for generating answers but rather materialize questions and produce material
entities along with concepts and theories; see Hans-Jörg RHEINBERGER, Toward a History
of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press
1997.
23
Simon SCHAFFER, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century.”
History of Science, vol. 21, 1983, no. 1, p.  14 (1–43). The role of instrument makers and
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In scientific experiments, the controlled production of a phenomenon
and wonder went hand in hand; eighteenth-century science did not know
the future differentiations between professionals and amateurs, academic
institutions and market, work and amusement. It was in the next century,
when science was “purified” of popular, entertaining, commercial – in short,
non-scientific – activities, and this process of purification was a way of legitimizing
its new social role and status.24
Epistemological dramas that were
performed in the theatres of nature of the eighteenth century were, above
all, entertaining and educational visual spectacles. They accounted for the
different regime of visuality that was assigned to the period by authors like
Foucault or Jacob: for Foucault, theatre is the model of Renaissance visuality
and it is substituted in the Classical period by the table and the catalogue;
according to Jacob, the eighteenth century is defined by a search for “visible
structure”, “reducing a living being to its visible aspect and translating
its shape, size, colour and movement into words.”25
Both authors focused
primarily on natural history; it is true that public demonstrations were
dominated by the physical and mechanical sciences, but alongside light,
electricity, magnetism and various automata, minerals, plants, corpses and
monsters were also put on display. The way they were exhibited was very different
from the Renaissance regime of curiosity, because it became a public
and commercialized enterprise. Instead of totally displacing theatricality,
we should look for moments where both modes of observation overlap and
supplement one another while avoiding their subsumption under some
monolithic and normative framework: in every period, we can find a number
of coexisting heterogeneous scientific cultures with frayed edges. On
the one hand, they allow for and inspire mutual exchanges of concepts and
metaphors, the sharing of methods of research and instrumental equipment,
the creation of analogies between disparate phenomena and hints of universal
systems; on the other they also produce moments of cognitive dissonance
and provoke discursive, disciplinary or institutional battles.
itinerant lecturers in both the presentation and research of electricity is discussed in
Oliver HOCHADEL, “A  Shock to the Public: Itinerant Lecturers and Instrument Makers
as Practitioners of Electricity in the German Enlightenment (1740–1800).” Nuova Voltiana.
Studies on Volta and his Times, vol. 5, 2003, pp. 53–67.
24
See Bernadette BENSAUDE-VINCENT – Christine BLONDEL (eds.), Science and Spectacle
in the European Enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate 2008.
25
François JACOB, The Logic of Life. A History of Heredity. New York: Pantheon Books 1973,
p. 45.
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Making the invisible visible or rather making the imperceptible perceptible
by some sort of mediation is one of the concerns shared across many
different fields and disciplines. It was within aesthetics that questions of
mediation were posed in the most pronounced and profound ways, especially
in the works of Lessing. His Laocoön from 1766 is a critique of the
classical doctrine of ut pictura poesis, an understanding of painting as mute
poetry and poetry as a speaking picture. Lessing proceeds from the different
ways identical situation is rendered in these media: Vergil’s epic poem
Aeneid and the ancient sculptural groupd Laocoön and His Sons from the
first century BC. Laocoön was a Trojan priest, punished for attempting to
expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse (according to the most common interpretation).
Poseidon sent sea snakes to kill him and his sons and the group
of the three suffering figures with snakes wrapped around and suffocating
them is taken to be the prototypical icon of human agony. Lessing is puzzled
by the expression in Loacoön’s face – unlike the poetic rendition, the
sculpture does not portray the most extreme moment of pain and suffering
because that would have been a violation of the classical ideal of beauty.
The artistic medium therefore determines to a certain extent what can be
represented and how. We should note, however, that a strong normative
claim is present here; in fact it is not the very material limits of individual
media, as many interpreters of Lessing the semiotician claim, but rather
a required form of expression. Technically speaking, the sculpture could
represent the situation in a  different way as well but then it wouldn’t
fulfill Lessing’s preferred conventions and ideals. In the same way, the
critique of ut pictura poesis is directed against excessive descriptiveness
and staticness of poetry; “good” poetry should follow its medium-specific
principles.
There were many discussions of the relationships between artistic media
before Lessing, his originality, however, lies in the reduction of this difference
to the fundamental distinction between temporal and spatial principles. The
succession of time is the sphere of the poet and space is that of the painter:
In the first place I presume it will scarcely admit of dispute that the imitations
of painting are effected by means entirely different from those of poetry; the
former employing figures and colors in space, and the latter articulate sounds
in time. Now, as it is evident that the signs employed must bear a suitable relation
to the things represented, it follows that those signs which are arranged
in juxta-position with each other, can only express co-existent objects, or an
object whose parts are co-existent, while those signs which are consecutive, can
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only express things which, either of themselves, or in their component parts,
are consecutive.26
Lessing further distinguishes between primary and secondary or direct and
indirect expression: painting can represent actions by intimation, by means
of bodies, and poetry may also delineate bodies by means of actions. Thus
expressing juxtaposition by poetry or consecutiveness by painting is not impossible,
it is only more complicated and strenuous and demands more effort
from the recipient. The crucial criterion here is, simply, the effectiveness of
generating a full and vigorous illusion. In the ideal situation we even stop
perceiving the means that bring it to life:
The poet seeks to render the ideas which he awakens within us so vivid, that we
may instantly fancy we perceive the real and sensible impressions of the objects
they refer to; and, in that moment of illusion, we cease to be conscious of his
words, that is to say, of the means by which he produces his effect.27
If poetry is specifically temporal, it produces its own specific temporality: in
that moment of acceleration necessary to generate the desired deception, it
breaks up with the pace of human perception, falls below the threshold of
consciousness and becomes a machine for producing special effects. When
Lessing talks about actions and their consecutiveness, he does not refer only
to some general conception of time or movement but rather to human action
and the effort, activity, work it entails.
Those combined effects which the eye perceives at a glance, [the poet] is obliged
to enumerate in tedious detail, and it not unfrequently happens that by the time
we arrive at the last of his traits, we have already forgotten the first. Nevertheless,
it is from these successive traits alone that we can form any conception of
the whole. To the eye, the parts contemplated remain constantly present, and
may be recurred to over and over again; on the contrary, when the ear is the
channel of perception, the parts described are lost, if they are not preserved in
the memory. And even supposing them to be all correctly remembered, – what
an effort, what an exertion would it require to revive their impressions all in the
26
Gotthold Ephraim LESSING, Laocoon; or the Limits of Poetry and Painting. London:gg
J. Ridgway & Sons 1836, p. 150.
27
Ibid., p. 165. The English translation uses the word “instantly” instead of speed or rapidity,
which would more precisely translate “die Geschwindigkeit” – thanks to the speed of sensory
impressions we believe we perceive the real objects.
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same order and with the same distinctness, and to think them over again with
even moderate rapidity, so as to form a tolerable idea of the whole!28
The effort, exertion and time needed have to be passed on to the mechanism
that produces the synthesis for us. Leibniz was pondering the idea that eyes
of sufficient acuity might read all the relations in space and time within the
“present;” that idea is realized here, although on a much smaller scale, in
the appropriately structured artifact and its coordination with the human
sensorium: artworks are phantasmagorical projections, we are not aware
of the processes that generate illusions because they take place below the
threshold of our consciousness.
Lessing’s reflections are most fruitful when they focus on possible violations
of laid down principles (such as the treatment of indirect, “unsuitable”
modes of expression). These moments also uncover the most problematic
of his assumptions and his normative requirements. Producing an effective
illusion is predicated on two levels of abstraction: the first step is based on
the very differentiation between painting and poetry and their respective
inner principles, coexistence and sequentiality, space and time. The second
one results from what media with such a bias – according to their material
limits – may choose to represent from the space-time continuum.
The painter can only employ, in his compositions of co-existing bodies, one
single moment of the action, and he must therefore select, as far as possible, that
which is at once expressive of the past, and pregnant with the future.
In like manner the poet, in his consecutive imitations, can employ but one single
attribute of bodies, and must therefore select that which awakens the most
sensible image of the body under that particular aspect which he has chosen to
represent.29
The reality effects postulated by the emerging science of aesthetics are based
on the sequential isolation of these elements and their resulting combination.
In this respect, Lessing proceeds in union with the methods of natural
sciences of the time. “Observation,” writes Foucault, “from the seventeenth
century onward, is a perceptible knowledge furnished with a series of systematically
negative conditions.” It advances via reduction and selection of
phenomena that can be further analyzed and made generally acceptable:
“The area of visibility in which observation is able to assume its powers is
28
Ibid., pp. 166–7.
29
Ibid., p. 152.
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thus only what is left after these exclusions [...] This area, much more than the
receptivity and attention at last being granted to things themselves, defines
natural history’s condition of possibility, and the appearance of its screened
objects: lines, surfaces, forms, reliefs.” Foucault hurries to emphasize that
optical instruments such as a microscope fall within such regime of visuality
as well: “it was the same complex of negative conditions that limited the
realm of experience and made the use of optical instruments possible.”30
The main difference lies in the fact that the aesthetic sphere is interested
in the creation of artifacts that produce anticipated effects. This difference is,
however, only a misrepresentation based on our contemporary perspective:
we tend to view various spheres of knowledge and experience separately as
subject matters of individual fields and under the influence of traditional
historiography of science understand the history of knowledge mainly as
the history of ideas and theories. In fact, experimental science and aesthetics
share many fundamental concerns: recall Lichtenberg figures in case of
which any separation of truth and beauty is impossible and pointless. They
are not a reflection or a representation but rather a discharge, which would
quickly become the prime concern of Romanticism. Romantic aesthetics
would treat it first of all in psychological terms, as the excessive pressure
of the author’s emotions, and thus suppressing its bonds with the ways the
world appears in scientific experiments. The more Romanticism wanted to
bring forward a critique or an alternative to the experience of rationalization
and industrialization, the more it lost the ability to understand this new expressive
form in its wholeness and complexity. The “mirror” and the “lamp”,
the metaphors analyzed by Abrams as the dominant models of mind and
creative processes in the Classical period and in Romanticism,31
are always
simultaneously material technologies, cognitive extensions that are located
outside of the human body but define it and its abilities and partake in their
development. Any conception of a bare human subject and its inner vision
is but a strained abstraction. The lamp of Romanticism is an electric lamp
and it was electrified decades before Kant or Coleridge. The pivotal aspect of
modern explosive aesthetics is then found in Lessing.
If apparition illuminates and touches, the image is the paradoxical effort to
transfix this most evanescent instant. In art something momentary transcends;
objectivation makes the artwork into an instant. Pertinent here is Benjamin’s
30
FOUCAULT, The Order of Things, pp. 144–5.
31
Meyer Howard ABRAMS, The Mirror and the Lamp. Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1953.
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formulation of a dialectic at a standstill, which he developed in the context of
his conception of a dialectical image. If, as images, artworks are the persistence
of the transient, they are concentrated in appearance as something momentary.
To experience art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an
instant at a standstill; this may perhaps have nourished the central concept of
Lessing’s aesthetics, that of the “pregnant moment.”32
Lessing formulates his conception of the pregnant moment in the beginning
of his essay, long before the rigid differentiation of time-based and spacebased
media and modes of perception appears. It emerges when he discusses
the problem of Laocoön’s facial expression, the question of why the sculpture
does not portray the most extreme state of the priest’s pain and suffering. It
is not just a matter of aesthetic conventions. If the visual arts are to choose
one particular moment for depiction, they must select the appropriate one:
If it be true that the artist can adopt from the face of ever-varying nature only
so much of her mutable effects as will belong to one single moment, and the
painter, in particular, can seize this single moment only under one solitary
point of view; – if it be true also that his works are intended, not to be merely
glanced at, but to be long and repeatedly examined; – then it is clear that the
great difficulty will be to select such a moment and such a point of view as
shall be sufficiently pregnant with meaning. Nothing however can possess this
important qualification but that which leaves free scope to the imagination.
The sight and the fancy must be permitted reciprocally to add to each other’s
enjoyment.33
Here, the later claim for maximal effectiveness is somewhat denied: it is
not a matter of overlooking the image at once, seeing it in one instant, but
rather a question of creating an interface in which the viewer is animated
by the image and the image animated by the viewer. The last sentence of the
excerpt is translated very loosely. It really reads: “The more we see, the more
we must be able to imagine; and the more we add in our imagination, the
more we must believe we see.” In condensed form, Lessing captures the basic
principle of the emergence of the illusion, the linking of human sensorium
and its extensions that form their coordinated complicity: a specific kind of
technical imagination. In the pregnant moment being appears in its process
of becoming something, it is both static and dynamic and thus addresses our
32
Theodor W. ADORNO, Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 84.
33
LESSING, Laocoon, pp. 28–9.
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affective and cognitive processes that simultaneously trust it and let themselves
be deceived. Different layers of our minds and bodies participate in
this paradoxical tangle of trust, seeing and imagination: the human being
is divided into segments that in different ways and in different measures
respond to specifically structured stimuli. The doctrine of the separation of
the senses is a precondition of the establishment of aesthetics as developed by
Lessing or Diderot. The major texts of Enlightenment theory are imminently
interested in the capacities and limits of medial transmission and sensory apparatus
– that is why various forms of sensory deprivation play such a crucial
role in these discussions. Through them, restrictions can be delineated and
combinatory possibilities envisioned. It is not a matter of a perfection of the
senses but rather of a prosthetic overwriting of their capacities and capabilities,
a whole new architecture in which corporeality is provisionally and partially
synchronized with various supplements and assistive technologies. This
coordinated rearrangement has a specific dynamic that is most pertinently
developed in Moses Mendelssohn’s reaction to Lessing’s Laocoön.
Following Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Mendelssohn asks why looking at
sorrow, pain and misery can bring us pleasure and satisfaction. Bullfights,
racks, insane asylums, bloody scaffoldings for execution, these are his examples
of things we would prefer not to feel than to feel – peculiar mixtures of
appreciation and rejection. Deficiencies and evils are immediately undesirable
but in mediated form can be good and pleasant. If we perceive them, for
example, in the form of artworks, our “secret consciousness” (ein heimliches
Bewusstsein) reminds us that we have only an imitation before our eyes and
thus moderates the strength of the objective disgust:
It is true, the soul’s sentient knowledge and capacities to desire are deceived by
art and the imagination is so swept away that at times we forget every sign that
it is an imitation and fancy that we truly see nature. But this magic lasts only as
long as it is necessary to give our conception of the object the proper vitality and
fire. In order to have the most pleasure, we have accustomed ourselves to diverting
attention from everything that could disturb the deception and directing
attention only at what sustains it. However, as soon as the relation to the object
begins to become unpleasant, a thousand factors remind us that we are looking
at a mere imitation.34
34
Moses MENDELSSOHN, “Rhapsody or Additions to the Letters on Sentiments.” In:
Philosophical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, p. 138 (131–168).
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In the interest of maximum pleasure the soul plays a specific energetic game
in which the controlled experience of immersion, of loosing oneself in the
projected world, temporarily dominates, only to be turned off once a critical
state is reached. Mendelssohn anticipates Coleridge’s concept of the “willing
suspension of disbelief” but frames it in a much more sophisticated fashion.
In his account, the concept of attention understood in terms of practice
and acquired habit is crucial. Not everyone enjoys dramatic tragedies. We
have to be accustomed to such experience, for which “a certain refinement is
required.” Whoever is not accustomed to it feels bored or experiences a conflict
– sometimes annoying, sometimes ridiculous – between his reason and
his imagination.
For Mendelssohn, the problem of pleasure from sorrowful spectacles is
an ethical rather than an aesthetic problem. He recalls Plato’s concept of
virtue and the difference between speculative and pragmatic knowledge.
If virtue is a certain kind of knowledge, it can be learned and acquired by
repeatedly practicing skills and habits. It is not a theoretical, verbalizable
knowledge, a knowledge we can be aware of, but exactly the opposite: our
capabilities are transformed into proficiency only when we cease to be conscious
of them. They have to stream through our blood, get under our skin,
become automatic, become habitual. The principle of such automation is,
again, speed:
For what causes consciousness to stop? The quickness with which concepts succeed
one another. Thus, although the degree of our knowledge is lessened by the
lack of consciousness, the quantity of effective impulses remains the same in
this case. For what is lost in the degree of knowledge is gained in the shortness
of the time or in the quickness.35
The effectiveness of representation depends on three factors: 1) the degree
of the perfection of the representation; 2) the degree of our knowledge;
3) the speed with which we ponder matters. The less time we need to consider
the perfection presented to us, the more pleasant our intuitive knowledge is,
and the more passionately we desire to enjoy it. The speed of our intuitive
insight compensates for the fact that we are not fully aware of it. “This explains
how, without thinking about it, we can perform a number of habitual
actions which in the beginning required deliberations and reflection. What
array of automatic movements are part of speaking and writing? How slowly
and deliberately they proceed in the beginning and how quickly they follow
35
MENDELSSOHN, “Rhapsody,” p. 163.
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upon one another, often unconscious to ourselves, once we have achieved
a proficiency in this regard.”36
Mendelssohn further analyzes the process of
automation with the examples of a pianist or a typesetter; it does not just
apply to mechanical activities but also fundamentally concerns the modes of
perception and cognition mediated by artifacts and the formation of the human
subject in modernity as such. Unlike the more or less isolated moments
of aesthetic experience in Lessing, Mendelssohn conceives of these intervals
and situations as components of the gradual constitution and reconstitution
of human nature.
Virtue is, to be sure, a science and can be learned; but if it is be carried out, then
it demands not merely scientific conviction, but also artful practice and proficiency.
Indeed, anyone who grapples with the highest stage of ethical perfection
and strives for the blessed condition of bringing the subordinate powers of the
soul into a perfect harmony with the superior powers of the soul, must do this
with the laws of nature just as the artist must do so with the rules of his art. He
must continue practicing until, in the course of the exercise, he is no longer
conscious of his rules, in other words, until his principles have turned into
inclinations and his virtue appears to be more natural instinct than reason.37
The planes of instinct, intuition or habit are formed by different rules and
principles than rational and theoretically expressed convictions are; because
they are saturated with material practices and techniques and have to deal
with their affordances and relatively autonomous development. If we want
to conceptualize the transformation of experience and to historicize forms
of perception and cognition, we cannot make do with just the development
of philosophical, scientific or aesthetic systems. On the contrary, we need
to descend onto levels traditionally regarded as low and subordinate. Just
like Walter Benjamin did with his concept of distraction, which essentially
refers to habit realized through tactile reception: “For the tasks which face
the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be
performed solely by optical means – that is, by way of contemplation. They
are mastered gradually – taking their cue from tactile reception – through
habit.”38
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., p. 166.
38
Walter BENJAMIN, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” In:
Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940. Cambridge, MA – London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press 2003, p. 268.
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In the first paragraph of his seminal essay, Benjamin alludes to the multiplicity
and diversity of logics and temporalities of technical and organic
segments that continuously combine one with another and rearrange and
get used to themselves: lithography, invented by Senefelder in 1796,39
made it
possible to reproduce images in much larger numbers and at a much quicker
pace, thus providing an illustrated accompaniment to everyday life. A few
decades later, lithography was surpassed by photography, which for the first
time “freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks in the process of
pictorial reproduction – tasks that now devolved solely upon the eye looking
into a lens. And since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw,
the process of pictorial reproduction was enormously accelerated, so that it
could now keep pace with speech. A cinematographer shooting a scene in
the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech.”40
” Manual
labor, skilled gestures, machines and instruments, speech, sight, hearing,
touch, technical images, sound recordings – apparatus and organs combine
and group together in changing clusters and constellations that give rise
to historically specific cultural techniques and practices; these provisional
arrangements are simultaneously determined by political and economical
preferences of the time.
The accounts of philosophical toys mentioned in the introduction agree
that one of their characteristic aspects is the disclosure of the processes simultaneously
examined and experienced: “A crucial feature of these optical
devices of the 1830s and 1840s is the undisguised nature of their operational
structure and the form of subjection they entail.”41
”” Gunning develops
this point most thoroughly, in my opinion as a consequence of his effort
to debunk the myth of early cinema’s passive and helpless audience.42
The
spectators of philosophical toys are entertained yet at the same time actively
participate in the process and rationally engage in a quasi-scientific experimental
instruction. Scientific curiosity is thus made public and transferred
to lay consumers: “in contrast to the traditional magic trick, whose illusion
remains mysterious because the secret is kept close by the prestidigitator,
39
Senefelder developed lithography while searching for a cheaper and more effective way of
distributing his dramatic works; see Alois SENEFELDER, The Invention of Lithography. New
York: The Fuchs & Lang Manufacturing Company 1911.
40
BENJAMIN, “The Work of Art,” p. 253.
41
CRARY, Techniques of the Observer, p. 132.rr
42
See Tom GUNNING, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator.” Art and Text, vol. 34, 1989, pp. 31–45.
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the philosophical toy is a  tool of demonstration and demystification [...]
The philosophical toy sought to demystify magical effects and unveil the
secrets of perception and technology to the masses.”43
” I think that this is
an overly idealistic interpretation of the technological imagination, which
cannot hold up even in reference to the simplest possible devices such as the
thaumatrope was.
Gunning vigorously opposes the traditional view that the composite image
of the thaumatrope derives from a “fallacy” of the human eye – similar
arguments of such deficiency or weakness of human senses surround discussions
of later animation devices or cinema: it is because the eye is not
capable of perceiving rapid change that we actually see the virtual image
instead of a series of still images. Referring to sensory insufficiency, according
to Gunning, reveals a prejudice towards perception as a static process.
We should rather embrace its mobile possibilities and praise our senses’ ability
to participate in the creation of similar phenomena. Gunning attempts to
resolve this dilemma by embracing a phenomenological standpoint, which,
in effect, seems to be more of an evasive maneuver:
My position is obviously phenomenological; that is, I maintain that perceptions
need not be dissolved into their physiological process (I am not against doing
this – if we are studying physiology rather than moving images). But my
task here is to describe our perception as we experience it. The riddle of the
perception of the moving image lies in the fact that no one can explain it purely
physiologically and the physiological explanations are still debated. In other
words, we have a true challenge to explanation here.44
Indeed, we still do not fully understand all the subtleties of the physiological
process of perception; so what exactly is it that the viewer of a philosophical
toy is instructed about? What kinds of secrets are unveiled, what operational
structures are demonstrated? None really. No one can explain this process
in purely physiological terms simply because it is not a purely physiological
process. If we take seriously Gunning’s claim that human perception
undergoes a fundamental transformation based on a deep coordination of
the perceptual and the technological, we also have to acknowledge the fact
that the technological is a relatively autonomous and largely unknown territory
– though this in no way precludes us having an intimate relationship
with it. We can see without fully understanding our senses and we can also
43
GUNNING, “Hand and Eye,” pp. 503, 509.
44
GUNNING, “The Play between Still and Moving Images,” p. 39.
Philosophical Toys Today
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see mediated, virtual images without fully understanding the principles of
their genesis. We are happy to delegate time and labor needed for perceptual
and cognitive tasks on technological processes that take place below our
consciousness or beyond the confines of our bodies. The phenomenological
description is obviously a legitimate one, but I believe that the crucial
lesson philosophical toys provide us with is the glimpse they offer of the
appearance of a very intricate and volatile cohabitation that can be most
productively addressed within the framework of extended cognition. This
concept seeks to overcome the residual Cartesianism in our understanding
of human cognition that draws a dividing line between the “thinking thing”
and the “extended thing”, criticizes traditional mentalist and propositional
conceptions of knowledge, and argues for the inclusion of the material environment
into cognitive and perceptual processes and activities. This is not to
say only that artifacts, instruments or media somehow amplify human cognition,
but rather that the dividing line between human and non-human is
redrawn with respect to what constitutes a cognitive process. Such a process
then cannot be limited to the human brain or human body since material
objects in the environment function as parts of our mind or sensory apparatus
and together constitute coupled systems and assemblages that need
to be acknowledged on their own if we are to adequately understand our
knowledge-making processes. Neural, bodily, material and social resources
need to be addressed simultaneously since material artifacts establish an
external connection between our motor, visuo-spatial, and conceptual systems,
thus creating dynamic experimental spaces within which knowledge
and perception is processed and constituted. If we delegate certain tasks to
technological agents, we need to acknowledge the fact that we are not able
to fully control and often even understand them in a reflexive and rational
manner:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent
people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of
thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances
by extending the number of important operations which we can perform
without thinking about them.45
45
Alfred North WHITEHEAD, An Introduction to Mathematics. New York: Henry Holt &
Co. 1911, p. 61.
Tomáš Dvořák
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TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXV / 2013 / 2
////// tematická studie / thematic articles //////////////////////
INSTRUMENTS
AS PLAYTHINGS:
AN ALTERNATIVE
METHODOLOGY FOR
THE STUDY OF SCIENTIFIC
ARTEFACTS
Abstract: This article proposes that
thinking of scientific instruments
as playthings or philosophical toys
offers a  method for looking at the
ways in which we learn from made
things and from the act of making in
investigating the world. Rather than
approaching artefacts as stable objects,
definable and categorisable in
terms of their function, this method
puts forward the instability and
mobility of artefacts on several levels:
in terms of their movements between
hands, social contexts and systems of
knowledge, in terms of their physical
articulations and of their changing
functions, and in terms of the flows
and processes of materials at work
within and through them.
Keywords: historical affordance;
scientific playthings; thinking things;
variant invariance
Přístroje jako hračky:
alternativní metodologie
výzkumu vědeckých
artefaktů
Abstrakt: Uvažovat o vědeckých přístrojích
jako hračkách či filosofických
hračkách nabízí specifickou metodu
zkoumání způsobů, jimiž se z vytvořených
věcí i způsobů jejich vytváření
učíme při zkoumání světa. Nepřistupuje
k artefaktům jako ke stabilním
předmětům, definovatelným a  klasifikovatelným
na  základě jejich
funkce, nýbrž zdůrazňuje nestabilitu
a  mobilitu artefaktů na  několika
rovinách: jejich pohybu mezi rukama,
sociálními kontexty a systémy
vědění; jejich fyzické artikulace
a  proměn funkcí těchto artikulací;
materiálních procesů působících
v nich i jejich prostřednictvím.
Klíčová slova: historická afordance;
vědecké hračky; myšlení věci;
variantní invariance
LINA HAKIM
34 Hazlemere Court
26 Palace Road
London SW2 3NH
United Kingdom
email / lina@matchboxflight.com
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Lina Hakim
I  begin this article by elaborating an understanding of playthings from
multi-disciplinary perspectives that consider their role in the reciprocal
constitution of self and world. I then explain how the resistant malleability
of playthings, their participation in the explorative and expansive play of
thought and the attention to technology and materials during play lead
a consideration of scientific instruments into the realm of playthings. I use
this to argue that regarding instruments as playthings allows for an ecological
approach to artefacts that is more concerned with (embodied) comprehension
than knowledge and that takes into account their varying roles and
meanings. This allows me to introduce the notion of ‘historical affordance’
to relate the evolution in what an instrument offers to perception, action
and understanding. I finally flesh out this methodology and apply it to the
Crookes radiometer as a case study to demonstrate how thinking of instruments
as playthings offers scope for ‘tuning in’ to them.
Playthings
In his 1987 presidential address on “Scientific Toys”, science historian
Gerard L’Estrange Turner describes the importance of homo ludens when
“considering how human beings acquire knowledge”.1
The way in which yesterday’s science so often becomes today’s recreation does
not make it any less scientific. Indeed, much scientific, and other, knowledge is
absorbed consciously or unconsciously through play.2
Turner’s argument is that learning through play has always been essential
to “discovering how the natural world works”, which is to say scientific
understanding, and he illustrates this through an overview of philosophical
apparatus and demonstration instruments from the seventeenth and
eighteenth century that passed into recreational use in the 19th
century and
became toys in the twentieth.
In “Cognitive Objects”, psychologist Robin A. Hodgkin, similarly
concerned with the relationship between scientific discovery and play,
tries to work out the nature of this connection.3
Building on Jean Piaget’s
1
Gerard L’Estrange TURNER, “Presidential Address: ‘Scientific Toys’.” British Journal for the
History of Science, vol. 20, 1987, p. 377 (377–398).
2
TURNER, “Scientific Toys,” p. 384.
3
Robin A. HODGKIN, “Cognitive Objects.” Oxford Review of Education, vol. 14, 1988, no.
3 (353–362). See also Robin A. HODGKIN, “Making Space for Meaning.” Polanyiana, vol. 6,
1997, no. 2 (55–71).
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Instruments as Playthings
framework in developmental psychology and Seymour Papert’s theories of
cognitive science, he argues that “the key questions” in order to understand
this connection
[...] are not to do with a child’s exposure to mechanical ideas in toys, but rather
with the many-sidedness and depth of his own involvement in play. Here is the
seed bed not only of active science but also of technical craft skills.4
The looping structure of play
Hodgkin describes a semi-cyclical and recurrent process of creativity that
he visualises as “a  looping structure originating in play”, which he also
uses to show the way in which a plaything oscillates between being toy, tool
and symbol; its nature changing as a result of the alternating possibilities
of progressing by skill-developing practice on one hand or of proceeding
by exploratory “groping and experimenting movements” on the other.5
His
contention is that this cycle is common to all processes of discovery, and
that the “cognitive object” or “generative thing-idea” that it involves acts
as a “transitional object”.6
This term was introduced by psychologist D. W.
Winnicott to refer to a child’s first “not-me” possession, which, he contends,
enables a mediation between the child’s inner and outer world through inhabiting
“an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and
external life both contribute”, that is by being part of both the subjective and
what is objectively perceived.7
Such objects, according to Winnicott, exemplify
the ways in which humans negotiate their relation to the world: their
task is to keep inner and outer reality separate but interrelated.8
Describing
archetypes of interaction with “transitional objects” in Playing and Reality,
he further suggests that “thinking, or fantasying, gets linked up with these
functional experiences”.9
This is the insight that Hodgkin picks up on in his
4
HODGKIN, “Cognitive Objects”, p.356. It is important to note that while Hodgkin picks up
on the revaluation of concrete reasoning in Piaget, he does not cast it, as the latter does, as an
inferior stage in the progression towards formal or abstract thinking: for Hodgkin the two
modes of thinking always alternate and, moreover, concrete objects play a significant part in
both.
5
Ibid., p. 357.
6
Ibid., p. 359.
7
Donald W. WINNICOTT, Playing and Reality. London – New York: Routledge 2008, p. 3.
8
This also explains how the prospect of the loss of an object is always a part of the love one
has for it.
9
WINNICOTT, Playing and Reality, p. 5.
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text when he speaks of the “many-sidedness and depth” of involvement in
play. Playthings move between the status of tool and symbol, which means
that, like transitional objects, they are both sensory and abstract. Playing
with things is fundamentally a mediating between material existence and
mental operations, a form of search that is essential to science, technology
and craft.
While I generally agree with this statement, my concern here is not with
the broad relationship between play and science. What I would like to draw
on instead are aspects of Hodgkin’s description of playthings, which, I will
argue, offer a useful tool for thinking of scientific artefacts in a way that
takes into account, amongst other things, their varying roles and meanings
in a  phenomenological/ecological framework. Playthings are objects for
thought and action that change their ‘nature’ in a looping movement, which
paradoxically both results from and enables a reciprocal and constitutived
interaction between self and world. A plaything, rather than being defined
by a function, embraces varying roles, switches in the categories that it belongs
to and is even prone to changes in what constitutes it, all the while still
remaining, in some sense, itself. How does this varying invariance operate?
What kind of understanding does it present? What kind of engagement does
it require? How does it involve the thing that it puts into play?
Familiar and poetic substance
In a short essay on “Toys” in his Mythologies, literary theorist Roland Barthes
laments complicated “French toys” with which a child can only engage as
a user or owner, and opposes them to simple playthings, such a set of blocks,
which provide “a very different kind of learning”. 10
With these “unrefined”
playthings,
[...] the child does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to
him whether they have an adult name; the actions he performs are not those
of a user but those of a demiurge. He creates forms which walk, which roll, he
creates life, not property: objects now act by themselves, they are no longer an
inert and complicated material in his hand.11
10
Roland BARTHES, “Toys.” In: Roland BARTHES, Mythologies. Translated by Annette
Lavers. London: Vintage 2000, p. 54 (53–55).
11
Ibid., p. 54.
Lina Hakim
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In describing playthings coming to life in this way, Barthes is not implying
an animistic understanding of toys, but rather identifying a particular kind
of contact with the world – one that they offer in the shape of an object
which both yields to the player’s desires and whims and at the same time
informs them. These playthings provide what he describes as “a  familiar
and poetic substance”, something simple that can be deployed intricately
and that keeps child and environment in close contact.12
When built using
“an ideal material”, such as wood for instance, they “can last a long time,
live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and
hand”.13
It is an attentive and caring relationship that evokes the emotional
attachment to “transitional objects” and that likewise develops a sensitive
and enquiring approach to the world. It is moreover an immersive experience
that understands the need for taking one’s time, for putting time
into things. The movement it entails, as Hodgkin has suggested, is a loop
rather than a straight line: its objective is not to complete a journey or to
get somewhere, but rather to cover as much space as it can while retracing
itself, to spread out. It is, in that sense, spatial, whence both Hodgkin and
Winnicott’s reference to an intermediate space or privileged zone of play.
Like the loop, it recursively goes back and forth without crossing over itself,
is concerned with versatility rather than economy and has for principle an
extension of possibilities, a spread in testing them out. The actions it involves
are “those of a demiurge”, because they are a kind of composition, a creative
act that plays out the different possibilities of the thing put into play. Playing
with a thing is a playing out of its affordances, and the ideal plaything offers
a wide range of affordance, has a lot of “play”.
Thinking things
In “A Philosophy of Fidgets”, cultural theorist Steven Connor reflects on
the things that seem to call for such looping actions and suggests that they
might embody thinking, make it palpable:
The deeper secret of these objects is perhaps that they are the necessary accessories
to thought. Perhaps they are forms of thought themselves. [...] It is as
though we were compelled to act out literally the meaning of the word ‘reflection’,
from re-flectare to bend back on oneself. Just as we recruit our own bodies
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
Instruments as Playthings
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for these doubling enactments of our own reflective work, so we requisition
objects to join the flexing play of thought.14
Connor describes such playthings as “accentuating rather than accelerating
devices”, as instruments “for pervading rather than progress”.15
They are
necessary for thought because they give shape to the operations of thinking,
they offer thinking an external object with which to think of itself. They
are what he calls ‘thinking things’, “the kinds of thing that draw, drain and
detain our thinking, and that make thinking accessible as a kind of thing”:16
[T]hinking as an adjectival participle and thinking as the name of an action
– thus ‘things that are thinking’ and ‘thinking about things’. [...] So thinking
things constitute a surrogate way of thinking about the things that thinking
takes to itself in order to think about the way it thinks about things…17
“Thinking things” are the things with which we interrogate both the
world and our thinking about the world, they are the things of,ff through and
in which we think the world. Playthings are what we think of in the absorp-f
tion and intent that playing with them requires. They are what we think
through when we enrol them in our exploratory activities. They are what we
think within when they come to stand for the thinking about the world that
is thought through them as an extension of us into the world and of them as
a part of the world exterior to us. The plaything, then, shares its play loop
with “the flexing play of thought”: both join in this flickering between thing
and thought, between object and subject, that reciprocally constitutes them
both.18
14
Steven CONNOR, A  Philosophy of Fidgets [online], talk given at the Liverpool Biennial
Touched Talks, 17 Feb 2010. 2010. Available at: <http://www.stevenconnor.com/fidgets/> [cit.d
15. 7. 2013], p. 3.
15
Ibid., pp. 4–5.
16
Steven CONNOR, Thinking Things [online], plenary lecture given at ESSE-9, the 9th annual
conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), Aarhus, Denmark,
25 August 2008 and as the Textual Practice lecture, University of Sussex, 14 October 2009.
2008–2009. Available at: <http://www.stevenconnor.com/thinkingthings/> [cit. 15. 7. 2013],
p. 4.
17
Ibid., p. 22.
18
CONNOR, “A Philosophy of Fidgets,” p. 3.
Lina Hakim
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Evocative objects
This reciprocal constitution of subject and object in play is what motivates
essayist Walter Benjamin to call for a “philosophical classification of toys”
that would “penetrate to the reality [and] to the conceptual understanding
of toys” in several essays on playthings and on “the mysteries of the world of
play” into which they lead:19
We experiment early on with basic rhythms that proclaim themselves in their
simplest forms in these sorts of games with inanimate objects. Or rather, these
are the rhythms in which we first gain possession of ourselves.20
Playthings are what sociologist of science Sherry Turkle calls “evocative
objects” to emphasise “the inseparability of thought and feeling in our
relationship to things”. As she puts it, “[w]e think with the objects we love;
we love the objects we think with”.21
As both affective companions and
“provocations to thought”, playthings are at the origin of the “basic rhythms”
through which our emotional and intellectual lives are composed.22
The
question then is: how does this work? What makes playthings evocative?
In “The Cultural History of Toys”, Benjamin cautions against the common
“assumption that the imaginative content of a  child’s toys is what
determines his playing; whereas in reality the opposite is true.”23
A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play
with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into
a robber or policeman.24
Here are again the “actions of a demiurge”, the creative acts that put things
into play; but Benjamin’s description reveals an additional and important
aspect of this enrolling of things: it is specific to what each thing offers to be
19
Walter BENJAMIN, “The Cultural History of Toys.” In: JENNINGS, M. W. – BULLOCK,
M. – EILAND, H. – SMITH, G. (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol.2, Part 2,
1927-1930. Cambridge – London, Belknap Press 2005, pp. 115–116 (113–116). See also Walter
BENJAMIN, “Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Märkisches Museum.” In: Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, pp. 98–112.
20
Walter BENJAMIN, “Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work.” In: Walter
Benjamin Selected Writings, p. 120 (117–121).
21
Sherry TURKLE, “Introduction: The Things That Matter.” In: TURKLE, S. (ed.), Evocative
Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2007, p. 5 (3–10).
22
Ibid.
23
BENJAMIN, “The Cultural History Of Toys,” p. 115.
24
Ibid., p. 115.
Instruments as Playthings
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done with it, to its affordance. The child does indeed determine the imaginative
content of a plaything, but she does so in recognition of and in reaction
to the possibilities for action that the plaything presents to her. A toy carriage
is pull-able, and in pulling it the child may imagine herself a horse drawing
the carriage; sand can be wet into doughy mud and be kneaded, allowing the
child to impersonate a baker; but it can also be poured and have her picture
herself an hourglass, or be used to build sandcastles making her a kind of
architect. It cannot, however, be pulled, or tied, or folded. The imaginative
content of playthings is determined by the child but, it also always results of
the affordances of the thing for the child: it is part of a particular moment
or circumstance and is linked to a desire or query, to something someone
wants to do that it presents itself as useful for. This can range from wanting
“to pull something”, through testing what can be done something and what
purposes it can serve, to looking to represent something, or most typically
an intermingled combination of several of these.
Ecology and the theory of affordance
The way in which the perception of things is situated and they way in which
they are apprehended as possibility for action are the founding principles
of James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and of his theory of
affordance that the methodology I am proposing builds on. In Ecological Approach
to Visual Perception, Gibson introduces his ecological understanding
of the environment as what affords animate life, that is, as what supports
perception and behaviour, which are in turn reciprocally related to the eco-
system.25
He explains his understanding of ecological reality thus:
The world of physical reality does not consist of meaningful things. The world
of ecological reality, as I have been trying to describe it, does. If what we perceived
were the entities of physics and mathematics, meanings would have to
be imposed on them. But if what we perceive are the entities of environmental
science, their meanings can be discovered.26
Gibson’s ecological theory describes things in terms of their organismindexed
significance in relation to living forms as well as in terms of their
ecological (shared) objectivity, both of which are understood to be in dis-
25
James J. GIBSON, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New Jersey – London:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 1979.
26
Ibid., p. 33.
Lina Hakim
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continuous and reciprocal (animal-environment) change. Based on this
understanding, he elaborates the theory of “affordances”, a  term he uses
to describes “what [the environment] offers animals, what it provides or
furnishes, for good or ill”, that is, any opportunity or danger within an
organism’s environment.27
He further insists that an affordance is neither
a subjective nor an objective property or “could be both” and that it “points
both ways, to the environment and to the observer”.28
Things, then, have
affordances defined by the possibilities for action on a particular environment.
This can be thought of as “-ables’ as in “movable”, “see-through-able”,
“touchable”, “smell-able”, “sit-upon-able etc”. 29
Affordances are, moreover,
perceived in relation to the organism in question: different things afford different
meanings and actions to different organisms.30
Gibson finally notes
that, rather than qualities or properties say, affordances are always what we
first pay attention to in things.31
Following Gibson’s ecological framework, affordances, availability, access
and the particulars of a given situation play an essential part in the enrolment
of a thing in enquiring play. It nevertheless seems that some objects are
more evocative than others, that some things are better at leading into “real
living play”.32
So what then has the affordance of an ideal plaything? What
possesses the resistant malleability required for the exploratory looping of
play? What constitutes, in Barthes’ words, a “familiar poetic substance” and
is that demanded from a plaything?
Clarity of materials and technology
Like Barthes, Benjamin bemoans complex toys and those “based on imitation”,
which he says lead away from authentic playthings and from “real
27
James J. GIBSON, “The Theory of Affordances.” In: SHAW, R. – BRAUSFORD, J. (eds.),
Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. New York – Toronto –
London – Sydney: John Wiley & Sons 1977, p. 68 (67–82).
28
GIBSON, The Ecological Approach, p. 129.
29
M. T. TURVEY, “Perception: The Ecological Approach.” In: NADEL, L. (ed.) Encyclopedia
of Cognitive Science. London: Nature Publishing Group 2002, p. 540 (538–541). See also draft
article Claudia CARELLO and M. T. TURVEY, The Ecological Approach to Perception [online].
Available at: <ione.psy.uconn.edu/~corr/EncCogSci.pdf> [cit. 14. 8. 2013].
30
GIBSON, “The Theory of Affordances,” p. 79.
31
GIBSON, The Ecological Approach, p. 75.
32
BENJAMIN, “The Cultural History of Toys,” p. 116.
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living play”.33
Noting how “chaste” children are in their use of materials
and how interested they are in the construction and modification of toys in
play, he proposes that a “particular clarity” is required that makes genuine
playthings:34
In the case of toys simplicity is to be found not in their shapes but in the
transparent nature of the manufacturing process. Hence, it cannot be judged
according to an abstract canon but differs in different places, and is less a matter
of formal criteria, because a number of methods of processing – carving, in
particular – can give free rein to their imagination without becoming in the
least incomprehensible. In the same way, the genuine and self-evident simplicity
of toys was a matter of technology not formalist consideration.35
Benjamin, like Barthes, insists that: “however unified and unambiguous the
material is, the more it seems to embrace the possibility of a multitude of
figures of the most varied sort”.36
But he suggests that the required simplicity
is not only to be found in an object’s material composition: technological
transparency is also essential. Structure and operation must, like materials,
be accessible and intimately grasped in order for them to be effectively
deployed. It is the clarity of the processes at work in an object that determine
its simplicity and its consequent creative potential both practically and allegorically.
In the same way that we can only use words to their full poetic
or theoretical potential once we’ve become familiar with the way they work,
so can we only put artefacts maximally to play when their technology is
“self-evident” to us.
Benjamin, also like Barthes, seems to be giving primacy to wood as
a material, but his reason for that is not something to do with an inherent
quality of the substance: it is rather to do with the “methods of processing”
that it lends itself to, the particular comprehensibility of carving as a method
of making. A genuine plaything necessitates an intimate understanding of
its inner workings by the person engaging with it. While it is easy for most
people to agree with Benjamin that carving is in that sense particularly easy
to understand, perhaps we should keep in mind that comprehension is in
the eye of the beholder. A technology that seems alien to a person might be
33
Ibid., pp.115–6. He writes that “imitation [...] is at home in the playing, not in the plaything,”
p. 116.
34
BENJAMIN, “Toys and Play,” p. 119.
35
Ibid., p.119.
36
BENJAMIN, “The Cultural History of Toys,” p. 115.
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another’s favoured plaything; a medium that seems opaque to a person could
open up a world of possibilities to another.
Skill
This account of playthings puts forward the way in which making things
and interacting with them are interrelated rather than opposed practices,
and the fact that both are based on an attentive engagement of human beings
with elements of their environment.
Artefacts are made things and should be thought of as the outcome of
the skilful engagement of a maker with elements from his or her environment.
In a  chapter from The Perception of the Environment in which het
discusses skill and the construction of artefacts, anthropologist Tim Ingold
insists on the importance of doing away with the modern dichotomy between
art and technology that separates made things in terms of oppositions
between mental/material or semiotics/mechanics, and presents the notion
of “skill” as a solution to this split.37
To describe what he means by “skill”,
Ingold articulates five critical dimensions of skilled practice: the first is that
intentionality and functionality are immanent in it as a synergetic process
involving humans, tools and materials rather than being an attribute of one
or the other; the second is that it is an ecologically embedded system of relations
between the body and the environment; the third is that it is grounded
in an attentive perceptual involvement with things requiring care and a haptic
dexterity based on a “continual adjustment or “tuning” of movements in
response to an ongoing monitoring of the emergent task”; the fourth is that
it is handed down practically “by introducing novices into contexts which
afford selected opportunities for perception and action, and by providing
the scaffolding that enables them to make use of these affordances”; the fifth,
related to Ingold’s claim that “what we call ‘things’ too are grown”, is that
skilled practice precedes design in generating the form of artefacts.38
I think that by describing “the transparent nature of the manufacturing
process” that makes for an ideal plaything, Benjamin is referring to artefacts
37
Tim INGOLD, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
London: Taylor & Francis Inc. 2000.
38
INGOLD, The Perception of the Environment, p. 345; p. 345; p. 83. See also Tim INGOLD,
“Making Culture and Weaving the World.” In: GRAVES-BROWN, P.  M. (ed.) Matter,
Materiality and Modern Culture. London – New York: Routledge 2000 (50–71) where he
argues we should think of making “as a modality of weaving” [p. 54], meaning that in making
“we work from within the world, not upon it” [p. 68].
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where the five dimensions of skill articulated by Ingold are visible, that is
objects that clearly present the affordances involved in making them as an
essential part of those offered in interacting with them – this is the “clarity”
that makes something a thing for “real living play”.
As components of an ecological environment that unfolds, rather
than of a physical/material world that just is, these properties of things, as
Ingold puts it, “occur”, meaning that they are “processual and relational”,
that they are “neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined, but
practically experienced”.39
As such, they emerge through a reciprocal and
changing engagement between being and environment, which is what leads
Ingold to the conclusion that “[t]he properties of materials, in short, are not
attributes, but histories”.40
Destruction
I will elaborate on the necessity of a historical dimension when considering
instruments as playthings when I flesh out the principles of the methodology
that I am proposing below. Before that however, I would like to address
another aspect of the investigative tendency in play that is less concerned
with arrangement and composition, a way at getting to the inner workings
of a thing in which testing its affordances is pushed to its extreme, where the
object is taken to its limit – its destruction. As Connor writes,
perhaps all play has at its horizon the death of the plaything. When we put
something to work, we use it for a particular purpose. In play, we seek not so
much to use them as to use them up. The point of putting things into play may be
to play them out, to see how far they go, how far we can go with the open totality
of their affordances.41
In “A  Philosophy of Toys”, the poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire,
examining the role of playthings “in the great drama of life”, considers the
tendency to take them apart.42
Like Barthes and Benjamin, he begins his
essay by describing the genial affordance of things in play, citing the example
39
Tim INGOLD, “Materials against Materiality.” In: Tim INGOLD, Being Alive: Essays on
Movement, Knowledge and Description. Oxon – New York: Routledge 2011, p. 30 (19–32).
40
Ibid., p. 32.
41
CONNOR, “A Philosophy of Fidgets,” p. 3.
42
Charles BAUDELAIRE, “A Philosophy of Toys.” In: Charles BAUDELAIRE, The Painter
of Modern Life and other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press
1964, p. 198 (197–203). For further examples of the affordance of playthings see also Charles
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of a simple chair that becomes at once carriage, horses and passengers in
a game of diligence.43
Baudelaire also underlines the creativity involved in
such play, the “poetry of childhood” that unfolds when engaging with “these
little inventions”.44
This even has him place playthings at the origin of aesthetic
sensibility: “the toy”, he writes, “is the child’s first initiation to art”.45
However, for Baudelaire, the “overriding desire” when putting things to
play, the principal affordance of playthings, is the opportunity to dismantle
them, to dissect them, to break them open in order to “get at and see [their]
soul”.46
He illustrates this testing of a plaything to destruction, and the “extraordinary
agility and strength” applied at it:
The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against
the walls, throws it on the ground. From time to time he makes it re-start its
mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvellous life
comes to a stop. The child, like the people besieging the Tuileries, makes a supreme
effort; at last he opens it up, he is stronger. But where is the soul? This is?
the beginning of melancholy and gloom.47
Baudelaire sees in this impulse to play things out “a first metaphysical tendency”,
a search concerned with the nature of existence for, as he put it at the
text’s opening, “is not the whole life to be found [in playthings]?”48
” While
the answer to this at first seemed affirmative, it now appears to be “no”. Or
perhaps Baudelaire is suggesting that things are not that simple, that in
a sense all of life it is in playthings yet at the same time not really there at all.
Allegorical objects
It is this paradox that literary theorist Daniel Tiffany picks up on in Toy Medium
in which he describes the ambivalent matter of playthings, how they
are always more and less than what they take themselves to be.49
He points
BAUDELAIRE, “The Plaything of the Poor.” In: SMITH, T. R. (ed.) Baudelaire: His Prose and
Poetry. New York: Boni & Liveright Inc. 1919 (70–71).
43
Ibid., pp. 198–199.
44
Ibid,. p. 200.
45
Ibid,. p. 199.
46
Ibid,. p. 202.
47
Ibid,. pp. 202–203.
48
Ibid,. p. 202.
49
Daniel TIFFANY, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkley: University of
California Press 2000.
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out how the plaything in Baudelaire’s text is “antithetical, at once philosophical
and inimical to reflection, ideal and concrete”.50
The impulse to open up
the plaything in the destructive narrative above is in fact evidence of the
“metaphysical” world that it represents for the child, the idea of “material
things founded on the immateriality of ‘the soul’ – the allegorical object,
in effect”.51
Rather than the “melancholy and gloom” that the spleen-ridden
Baudelaire sees in the failure at finding a soul in the plaything, Tiffany argues
that it registers the beginning of allegorical thinking: playthings are our first
models for our understanding of the world, they are exemplary of the objects
we use as structural substitutes in natural philosophical investigations to
make the intangible tangible. As Tiffany puts it,
Inquiries into the nature of material substance rely fundamentally on images
that do not bear witness to empirical entities, but rather serve as models of
unobservable phenomena. Indeed, the realism of modern physics (in contrast
to its mathematical foundation) relies, by necessity, on a framework of vivid
analogies and tropes, sometimes realized in visual practice. That is to say, the
foundation of material substance is intelligible to us, and therefore appears to
be real, only if we credit the imaginary pictures we have composed of it.52
Tiffany’s book is concerned with how poetry “can help to elucidate the
sometimes paradoxical bodies conjured by scientific materialism”; and an
exploration of playthings winds through his inquiry because the toy, he argues,
is the fundamental manifestation of the paradoxical thing suspended
between matter and immateriality, “a spectacular device that discloses, in
the name of science, the immaterial foundation of the object – the invisibility
of the real”.53
In his narrative, playthings represent the “hypothetical modelling
of invisible matter”, which leads him to write that “[t]he toy divines the
invisible substance of things”.54
When breaking the plaything open to look for its interior mechanism
and finding no “soul” in it, we learn that our natural investigations can only
yield an imagined interior of things; which is why the plaything, as well as
being an abbreviation of the whole world, is the perfect symbol of the methods
with which we investigate the world. Perhaps this is the reasoning that
50
TIFFANY, Toy Medium, p. 307, note 21.
51
Ibid,. p. 73.
52
Ibid,. p. 3.
53
Ibid,. p. 6; p. 82.
54
Ibid,. p. 52.
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has Benjamin conclude his article by saying: “If a modern poet maintains
that for each individual there exists an image which engulfs the world, how
often does that image not arise from an old toy chest?”55
Even testing playthings to their destruction is in a sense constructive
to understanding: when they break, playthings simply go from being things
with which we understand the world to becoming things with we understand
our ways of understanding the world with things – “thinking things”
with which we interrogate our thinking about the world.
But breaking playthings open is also practically useful in the quest to
understanding them as artefacts, as made things: it reveals how they are
constituted, not only in terms of material parts, but also, as Benjamin suggests,
in terms of the technologies that form them and make them work,
which it to say, as Ingold shows, the different dimensions of skill involved
in their making, the combined movements of people, materials and tools
that bring them to be. When a thing stops to work or is broken open, these
movements are made visible through the formation of an understanding of
what causes the thing to fail or break. In this sense, breaking a plaything is
only part of putting it to play with all the search and learning that such play
involves.
Playthings methodology
The methodology I am proposing is concerned with the material culture of
natural philosophy and science, specifically with the ways in which we learn
from made things and from the act of making in investigating the world.
Rather than the “knowledge” we get from instruments, with all the epistemological
baggage of truth, justification and objectivity that the term entails,
it addresses something closer to the word “comprehension” which finds its
Latin etymological root (comprehend-ĕre) in the act of grasping at something
before actually seizing or comprising it, and the word “understanding”
with its source in the German for “to step under” (understân) or “to take
upon oneself” (unterstehen), with the embodied engagement with the world
55
This quote is from Benjamin’s “Toys and Play” referenced above, but I am using here Tiffany’s
translation in Toy Medium [p. 81] which, by using the word “engulf” to translate from the
German “versinkt”, I find closer to the original text: “Wenn aber ein moderner Dichter sagt,
es gebe für jeden ein Bild, über dem die ganze Welt ihm versinkt, wie vielen steigt es nicht aus
einer alten Spielzeugschachtel auf?” from Walter BENJAMIN, “Spielzeug und Spielen.” In:
TIEDEMANN-BARTELS, H. (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag
1972, p. 131.
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that such actions would involve.56
My suggestion is that regarding scientific
instruments as playthings would allow for a multi-faceted approach to their
role in the co-constitution of human perception and understanding of the
world.
Following the elaboration on playthings above, let us go through the
ways in which the analogy is fruitful for these aims by applying them to the
Crookes radiometer as a case study.
The Crookes radiometer
The most common form for a Crookes radiometer (or light-mill) consists of
a glass bulb of about 10cm in diameter, mounted on a stand. It is partially
evacuated and contains an anemometer-like structure of four vanes pivoted
on a vertical axis. These vanes are usually white on one side and black on the
other, and all face the same way. When the instrument is exposed to light,
this “fly” rotates with the white sides leading, its spin intensifying with the
length of exposure, and slowing down then stopping when the light source
is taken away.57
In an article published on the centennial of the instrument’s inception,
historian Clifton W. Draper makes a  case for the importance in science
education of the device that has “fallen to the unprestigious role of a gift
shop knickknack”.58
Besides the fact that its theory “is today still only qualitatively
understood”, his reasons include the interest of its inventor William
Crookes’ life and career, its history’s wealth in “accidental observations,
lengthy and ingenious experimentation, and incorrect conclusion all leading
to a not totally satisfying theory” and the ease with which it lends itself
to experiments adaptable to different audiences rendering it a very useful
classroom tool.59
Draper’s arguments for giving attention to the Crookes
radiometer show the breadth of play of the device and explain its particular
suitability for the “playthinging” that I am putting forward in this article.
56
“[comprehend, v.]” in: Oxford English Dictionary [online]. Second edition, 1989. 2012.y
Available at: <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37847> [cit. 7. 8. 2012]; “[understand, v.]” in:
Oxford English Dictionary [online]. Second edition, 1989. 2012. Available at: <http://www.oed.y
com/view/Entry/212085> [cit. 7. 8. 2012].
57
Crookes names the moving part this way first in William CROOKES, “On Repulsion
Resulting from Radiation – Parts III. & IV.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London, vol. 166, 1876, p. 344 (325–376). See image 1.
58
Clifton W. DRAPER, “The Crookes Radiometer Revisited: A  Centennial Celebration.”
Journal of Chemical Eductaion, vol. 53, 1976, no. 6, p. 356 (356–357).
59
Ibid., p. 356.
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Although I believe that the aspects that will be teased out through regarding
a device as a plaything are true of all artefacts, some devices, for nonnoumenal
reasons, seem to show them in an extended way: they seem to
be made to be transformed and seem particularly prone to fall in the gaps
of classification systems, to require and register paradigm shifts that they
outlive. The radiometer falls into this category, and that probably explains
why it became a toy and is still widely available today.
Image 1: “Crookes Radiometer,” Image by Timeline for Wikipedia Commons [online]
2005. Available at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crookes_radiometer.jpg>
[cit. 2. 9. 2012].
A  good standard description of the device explains that, despite
its name, it is a  demonstration device rather than a  measuring instrument,
relates the way in which it grew out of its inventor’s recognition of
an anomaly when weighing hot samples in vacuum, tells how its theory
caused controversy from the time it was first presented in 1874 and how
its operation is still considered complicated to this day, recounts some of
the big names of science whose interest it attracted, describes the way in
which Crookes’ investigation of its effects took him in a different direction
(generally described as erroneous) to his contemporaries and usually lists
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the device’s contributions to the kinetic theory of gases and to the invention
of the cathode ray tube.60
Such an account certainly points out the fascinating story of the device
but, I would argue, does not capture the array of understanding that the
device offers as a material object, the variation in its affordance to action and
perception, which is to say its “play”. Thinking of it as plaything however,
as I will demonstrate below, leads to a more comprehensive account in these
respects.
Restoring mobility
A plaything, as we’ve seen in Hodgkin’s account above, is recognised as such
through the part it performs in the looping structure of play. It is a material
object in constant oscillation along this loop, its nature varying in a recurrent
semi-cycle. It seamlessly moves between the status of tool, toy and symbol,
is both sensory and abstract and, rather than being defined by its function,
embraces change in its role, constitution and classification all the while still
remaining itself. Considering a scientific instrument as a plaything means,
in the first place, restoring its inherent mobility as an artefact.
Rather than defining the instrument in terms of its function, it means
opening it up to the various uses it has been put to, as well to others it might
in the future be applied for, whether scientific or not because all thoughtful
engagements produce understanding.
In the case of the radiometer, this means that rather than defining it
as a demonstration instrument, which creates a phenomenon and provides
working knowledge of it, we can also address its inventor’s intended function
of it as a measuring instrument for radiation (whence its appellation radiometer),
regardless of it fulfilling this function. It also allows us to look intor
the way it was hypothesised as a model: for action at a distance in Crookes’s
first interpretation of its behaviour as well as (a not particularly effective
one) for the kinetic theory of gases in the accepted explanation of its workings.
It gives us access to the tacit know-how informed by its construction as
perfected by Crookes and his assistant Charles Gimmingham, as well as to
the objective information it offers that passes into the domain of scientific
60
Excellent examples of such an account are two articles by Norman R. HECKENBERG,
“Radiometer, Crookes.” In: BUD, R.  – WARNER, D. J. (eds.), Instruments of Science: An
Historical Encyclopedia. London – New York: Science Museum & Smithsonian 1998, pp.
510–511; and Norman R. HECKENBERG, “Crookes’ Radiometer and Otheoscope.” Bulletin
of the Scientific Instrument Society, no. 50, 1996, pp. 40–42.
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and technological knowledge proper. It also admits the subjective understanding
it has offered at various times, including its relevance to Crookes’
spiritualist investigations into medium communication. In other words,
considering the radiometer a plaything challenges the divisions, definitions
and categorisations that would limit what is admitted as understanding in
what the device has to offer.
Sensitive and enquiring process
In 1873, Crookes was attempting to determine the atomic weight of Thallium,
the new element that he had discovered by use of the spectroscope. It
was during these “very laborious researches” that he noted the odd behaviour
of the warm samples that he was weighing in an evacuated chamber,
and it was this recognition of an anomaly and the desire to stabilise its effect
that lead to the making of the radiometer.
Noticing that something is behaving anomalously presupposes a tacit
knowledge of the context in which a phenomenon is encountered, that is
an attentive sensitivity to the usual workings of a defined environment. It
results from directed chance, borne out of a more or less defined course of
investigation and necessitating skill and training in order to recognise the
significance of the chance encounter; in this case, the anomalous behaviour
of heated bodies in vacuum. In Representing and Intervening, philosophergg
of science Ian Hacking suggests that even the most irrational looking
course of inquiry can be a tool of discovery. To the question: “must there
be a conjecture under test in order for an experiment to make sense?” he
answers: “I think not.”61
What is however required are attentiveness, care
and practice, which provide the means of understanding and interpreting
the effects produced. It is important that Crookes was aware of how things
were meant to behave according to the scientific theories of the time and
through his experimental experience. Had this not been the case, he would
not have distinguished the phenomenon as anomalous. It is also essential
that he recognised its meaningful potential. Without this informed curiosity,
experimentation would not have taken place. The recognition of an
anomaly in his study of Thallium led Crookes to look at ways of elaborating
the striking effect that he believed would be of scientific significance.
61
Ian HACKING, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of
Natural Science. Cambridge – New York – Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1983,
p. 154.
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This inductive process and its various contingencies are brought to the
fore when one considers the device as a plaything: the sensitive and enquiring
approach to the world that it entails is put forward, suggesting a hands-on
and groping approach to understanding, the more embodied and immersed
aspect of scientific inductive reasoning. To the enduring philosophical question
of whether it is theory or practice that comes first in scientific inquiry,
the answer this method presents is an oscillation between the two, a reciprocal
constitution of one through the other.
It also brings out the spatial nature of this kind of engagement when all
paths are still possible and various options are tested; and helps identify the
particular context for this searching activity, an experimental space which,
like the privileged zone of play, has its own laws and is in a way extracted
from everyday rules. Instruments in the making are like playthings as the
things we think of in the absorption and open-ended intent that “playing”f
with them requires.
Evocative objects: things we think with
Instruments are evocative objects for their makers and users. In the
case of the radiometer, this is made particularly clear through its inventor
adopting the instrument as a symbol for his scientific researches and
achievements. When the scientist was knighted in 1897, the most prominent
icon in the design of his coat of arms (pictured below, image 2) is a depiction
of the radiometer. His chosen motto inscribed on a scroll underneath it is
“Ubi crux ibi lux,” which translates into: “Where the cross is, there is light.”
Although this line most obviously refers to the Maltese cross on his cathode
ray which features twice at the upper corners of the design, his biographer
William H. Brock also reads it as wordplay by the inventor: “Where Crookes
is, there is light” – the light of knowledge provided by the radiometer, its
whirling vanes representing “the black of scientific ignorance fleeing from
the white of a new understanding of fundamental physics.”62
A  1902 portrait of Crookes holding the radiometer firmly in his left
hand while his right hand rests casually in his pocket further demonstrates
the symbolic importance of the radiometer for its inventor (see image 3).
The fact that he chose to be represented with the device in his hand two
decades after he first presented it is significant. The image reveals something
62
William H. BROCK, William Crookes (1832–1919) and the Commercialisation of Science.
London: Ashgate 2008, p. 222.
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of the relationship between the instrument and its maker: Crookes seems
confident in his handling of the object held up like a sword. It is the weapon
that renders the world knowable and controllable by science, and it becomes
an extension of the scientist’s body, assimilated by his everyday practice.
Scientist and instrument appear bound in a seamless way by a narrative of
knowledge and intellectual ascendance. In this narrative, the radiometer
plays the part of the key to understanding the world.
Image 2 (left): “Sir William Crookes (1832–1919)” in Escutcheons of Science – Armorial
of Scientists – Numericana [online]. Available at: <http://www.numericana.com/
arms/crookes.htm> [cit. 28. 6. 2009].
Image 3 (right): “Sir William Crookes (1832–1919)” from Vanity Fair, 1902, by “Spy”r
Sir Leslie WARD (1851–1922) [online]. Available at: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Sir_William_Crookes_1902.jpg> [cit. 16. 5. 2009].
A  tiny otheoscope mounted on a  tiepin that Crookes is said to have
always worn plays a similar symbolic role. I found a reference to it in a letter
to his son where he introduces this new variant of the radiometer under
the first name he had given it, “elaunoscope”, writing: “I have one about
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½ inch in diameter mounted as a scarf pin.”63
I believe it is this accessory
that I photographed in a small case at Blythe House (below, images 4 and 5).
It can now be found in a case near the entrance of Royal Society’s Library in
Carlton Terrace, London, along with most of Crookes’ radiometers, which
he presented to the Royal Society in 1911.
Images 4 and 5: Photographs taken by the author at the Science Museum’s storage
facility in Blythe House in April 2009.
Recognition of and reaction to affordances
As with playthings, what makes an instrument evocative is a result of
the recognition of and reaction to the possibilities of action that it presents
to its maker as well as to its users. They result from the affordances of an
object and/or environment to a scientist that appear useful to his or her investigative
purposes. The “actions of a demiurge” that lead to their making
63
William CROOKES, “Letter to Henry,” quoted in E. E. FOURNIER D’ALBE, The Life of Sir
William Crookes. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. 1923, p. 261.
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consist of testing out, modelling with, and refining materials and phenomena
in particular circumstances for which they present themselves as useful.
What an instrument offers to be done with it, as with a plaything, cannot
be thought of as separate from the process of making it, from the skilled
practice involving materials and techniques that leads to its emergence.
In “Showing, Doing and the Ontology of Using Scientific Instruments”,
philosopher of science Denis L. Sepper proposes the following description
for how an artefact becomes a scientific instrument:64
I would suggest that as a general principle that objects become scientific instruments
(or perhaps proto-instruments) when they display an effect of interest to
researchers, i.e., within an already well-defined context of investigation. [...] If
the effect is sufficiently striking and if one also discovers that one can elaborate
the effect and even do things with it, the object becomes a full-fledged processing
instrument.65
Sepper further notes that the transformation of an object into a processing
instrument affects the instrumental significance of related objects and
opens up the possibility of developing new compound and more complex
instruments.66
Scientific instruments, then, come to be or, more accurately, are made,
within particular contexts of investigation through their association with
particular effects that are enrolled for action and interpretation in these
contexts and that can subsequently extend beyond them. Thinking of instruments
as playthings brings these contexts, effects and negotiations to
the fore. In that sense, it helps unravel what is referred to as “black-boxing”
in the sociology of science: rather than considering instruments as inputoutput
devices that unproblematically transmit natural knowledge, it facilitates
the aims of constructive approaches to the history of science which
address scientific practices and socio-political and cultural contexts in order
to unravel the social means through which particular experiments executed
64
Dennis L. SEPPER, “Showing, Doing and the Ontology of Using Scientific Instruments.”
In: DRAGONI, G. – McCONNELL, A. – TURNER, G. L’E. (eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh
International Scientific Instrument Symposium [Bologna University, 9–14 September, 1991].
Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1994 (29–34).
65
Ibid., p. 30.
66
Ibid., pp. 31–32.
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by specific experimenters with specific instruments came to produce valid
knowledge for particular audiences.67
Reverse black-boxing
In the case of the radiometer, this allows an elaboration on Crookes and
Gimmingham’s experimental work towards stabilising the observed effects
of repulsion resulting from radiation into an instrument “which had none
of [the] defects [of previous arrangements], whilst it showed the movement
of rotation in a very convenient matter”.68
It also allows for a discussion of
the scientific context in which the device was presented, the controversy it
caused in the interpretation of its effects, the various players involved in its
scientific career and its eventual epistemic obsolescence. While the radiometer
first caused sensation in the scientific community when it was presented
at a Soirée of the Royal Society on April 7th
1875, especially because of its
promise of answers about the nature of light and radiation, critics of Crookes
theory of its behaviour were quick to emerge. His positing of a pressure of
radiation causing the vanes to rotate was criticised by Osborne Reynolds
who convincingly argued that the movement of the radiometers’ vanes
could be easily explained by the presence of residual gas in the evacuated
chamber.69
Reynolds further referred to an experiment by Arthur Schuster,
led at his instigation, which gave experimental evidence that “the Force
which turns the Mill is not directly referable to Radiation”. This consisted in
suspending a radiometer with two parallel fibres and subjecting it to a light
source. If external radiant light caused the repulsion then, because of the
tiny amount of friction in the glass vessel, the whole instrument would turn
in the same direction as the vanes. However if the forces were produced
within the instrument, then the instrument would rotate in the opposite
direction of the vanes in accordance with Newton’s third law of motion.
The latter was observed and Schuster concluded that: “The motion in the
light-mill is wholly due to the forces acting between the revolving mill and
67
See Jan GOLINSKI, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 140, definition of “black-boxing”.
68
William CROOKES, “On Repulsion Resulting from Radiation. Parts III. & IV.” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 166, 1876, p. 339 (325–376).
69
Osborne REYNOLDS, “On the Forces Caused by the Communication of Heat between
a  Surface and a  Gas; And on a  New Photometer.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, vol. 166, 1876, p. 726 (725–735).
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its enclosure.”70
Based on the experiment, Reynolds proceeded with calculations
that led to the explanation commonly held to this day.71
His notion
of “Thermal Transpiration” and Maxwell’s development on that theory
eventually explained the radiometer effect as a result of the difference in
temperature between the two sides of the vane causing gas molecules at the
edge to slide in such a way as to cause tangential stress on the vanes’ surface
and thereby produce motion.72
Consequent theoretical researches on the behaviour of particles and on
the properties of rarefied gas by all involved led to the progressive development
of a new molecular kinetic theory of gas, and pushed the radiometer
away from the centre of attention as it became reduced to merely a context
amongst others in which to test the new theory. By 1880, apart from a few
sparse speculations, scientists seemed no longer concerned with the radiometer
itself, their attention now directed to the phenomena in rarefied gases
that it had contributed to enlighten.73
Thingness: materials and technologies
While such an unpacking of black-boxes is now common practice in approaches
to the history of science and technology, the plaything methodology
adds a dimension that seems to be left out by such historiographies:
they seem to overlook what the thing itself does outside of socio-political
and scientific discourses, to leave out what the instrument’s “thingness”, the
materials and technologies at work in it, afford to perception, action and
understanding.
70
This was later regarded as the “crucial experiment” on the radiometer. Arthur SCHUSTER,
“On the Nature of the Force Producing the Motion of a  Body Exposed to Rays of Heat
and Light.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 166, 1876, p. 718
(715–724).
71
REYNOLDS, “On the Forces,” p. 730.
72
Osborne REYNOLDS, “On Certain Dimensional Properties of Matter in the Gaseous State,”
Part I-II Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 170, 1879, pp. 727–845;
J. C. MAXWELL, “On Stresses in Rarified Gases Arising from Inequalities of Temperature.”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 170, 1879, pp. 231–256.
73
It is worth noting that in 1924, Albert Einstein contributed additional explanation to the
radiometer’s behaviour that was picked up by M. Knudsen who elaborated on it in 1930. The
“Einstein effect” suggested an additional phenomenon at work in the radiometer: that of the
excess pressure at the edges of the vane. This would be caused by gas molecules at the edge
being held back both by molecules rebounding on the vane one side and, less effectively, by
molecules passing the edge to the cooler side.
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This attention to technology and materials in play may be the essential
aspect that leads a consideration of scientific instruments into the realm of
playthings. Scientific instruments are things made with skilful use of techniques
and materials (ahead of and informing form), and engagement with
them foregrounds the affordances of these in the exploration of the world.
Moreover, these affordances, by characterising the looping movement of
playthings, are shown to vary over time: what particular materials and technologies
offer to perception, action and understanding evolves with respect
to context, circumstance and perceiver/actor/interpreter. I use the expression
“historical affordance” to refer to this notion which is the main argument for
looking at the instruments of science and technology as playthings.
Historical affordance
Gibson’s theory of affordance gives leeway for a variation in or evolution
of the affordance of an environment or a thing, because the ecological environment,
as he presents it, is a blend of permanence and change, what he
calls “discontinuous change” rather than “transformation” in order to set
variance and invariance as reciprocals in describing the stable and changing
relationships between self and world. Affordances, he tells us, are specified
in the relative invariants over transformations, and involve a  reciprocal
process of attunement (as in active and progressive adjustment and equilibration
towards harmony) between being and environment (“resonating”
to one another), a dynamic reciprocity. Since relative ecological constants
and affordances that appear to have the quality of stability and permanence
persist to the degree to which these constants persist, the invariance of an
affordance is just a matter of differing time scales: what seems stable is just
in a different regime of duration, it endures. Affordances, then, are always
(semi-cyclically) historical. This “historical affordance” of things that
changes over time is the principal notion that this methodology aims to
tease out.
By regarding scientific artefacts as playthings, the range of “play” in their
affordance is brought to the fore, and these variations in and evolution of
their affordances call for an historical approach to register them. A historical
account can take into consideration the mobility and transformability of
things while keeping the memory of their past affordances and anticipating
future ones, it can show that change is occurring yet in a continuous subsisting
thing. Just as borrowed or adapted terms conserve their prior layers of
meaning, so artefacts retain a memory of their past affordances; and just as
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terms offer potential poetic uses inspired by earlier ones, so objects suggest
further ways of deploying them that extend previous uses and practices.
There is always time in things: they are chronic (rather than temporal)
because they recurrently change and sometimes disobey what we think is
characteristic of them. In order to take this into account, the methodology
set out here approaches objects in a historical way, which is not to say that it
does so chronologically: history is not considered as a linear progression and
no such thing as precedence or a “more real” reality is posited. Like the looping
structure of play, it is viewed as a semi-cyclical spatial movement rather
than as a matter of succession: sometimes what happens latest in an object’s
career is what seems more “primary” at the time and place of writing. No
such thing as a “more primary” quality or characteristic or role of a thing is
therefore posited or assumed, except in relation to a particular perspective/
context/etc. Although I will resort to using it in the text, this explains why
“declination” is not quite the adequate term to describe what might appear
to be the “other” lives of things: it implies that there is a “real” life and an
order of precedence, whereas the plaything methodology considers that all
manifestations of an object are valid.
By adopting this historiography, the varying affordances of artefacts are
brought forward, and any suggestion of pattern or objectivity is understood
as the result of a  regular recurrence or of repeatedly instantiated sets of
relations. The unfixity, uncontainability and irreducibility of the artefacts
considered thus foregrounded render them ideal for a “philosophical” and
“elastic” understanding of things that is also involved in a thought about its
own processes. Instead of stable information and definition, scientific instruments
regarded as playthings offer a lot of scope for “tuning in” to them
as thinking things, with sometimes the reward of rare moments of “being
in tune” with them: they become, in other words, ideal philosophical toys.
The radiometer’s historical affordances
The notion of historical affordance as I’ve described it above brings attention
to the different materials and technologies that compose the device as histories,
first of each constitutive part separately and then of their particular
arrangement and relationships within it.
In the case of the radiometer, this involves looking at the cultural history
of glass, its affordance as a material and process, and the problems that its
transparency and transitivity generate. Literary scholar Isobel Armstrong
reminds us that 19th century glass was blown by artisans, which means that
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in using it “you literally looked through, and by means of, somebody else’s
breath.”74
She explains how as a consequence of its availability and ubiquity
in the mid 1800s it came to participate in the formation of consciousness
itself and suggests that the epistemological questions raised by glass at the
time were about mediation, transitivity and their implications. The dialectic
of glass, at once letting through and blocking, or selectively doing one or the
other, generated, she writes, “different kinds of epistemological confusion
out of the very lucidity of glass.”75
Transparency and mediation are at the
heart of this confusion: “Just as the artisan’s breath was invisible, so also was
the fact of mediation, as the invisible shaped experience.”76
Attention to glass as substance and process allows us to problematise
the radiometer’s glass enclosure in laboratory practice in terms of surfaces,
membranes and boundaries. It also brings attention to technologies of containment,
and leads us to the next material constitutive of the device: the
vacuum (though later understood as partial) that it is a necessary vessel for.
The radiometer was for the scientist James Clerk Maxwell first and
foremost a device that allowed, by means of a glass globe both impermeable
and see-through, for the sealing and observation of vacuum, or at least of
a condition or medium “much nearer to nothing” than had previously been
achieved.77
Interrogating vacuum, which only became an experimental object that
could be made and manipulated in the late seventeenth century, opens up
discussions about the hypothesised subtle medium called “ether” and its
use as a trope for natural philosophical investigations. It crucially allows
us to look into its affordance to Crookes’ spiritualist investigations: this attenuated
environment held for him the possibility of revealing the effects of
parapsychological transmissions, its conductive capability mirroring that of
the sensitive mediums of nineteenth century séances – the radiometer, for
Crookes, could render spiritual energy phenomenal.
74
Isobel ARMSTRONG, “Technology and Text: Glass Consciousness and Nineteenth-Century
Culture.” In: FLINT, K. – MORPHY, H. (eds.), Culture, Landscape and Environment: The
Linacre Lectures 1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, p. 149 (149–175). See also Isobel77
ARMSTRONG, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination. Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2008.
75
Ibid., p. 149.
76
Ibid.
77
Letter from Maxwell to Robert Cay, 15 May 1876, quoted in S. G. BRUSH and C. W. F.
EVERITT, “Maxwell, Osborne Reynolds, and the Radiometer.” In: MC CORMMACH, R. (ed.),
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Volume 1. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press 1969, p. 112.
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It can then be studied as a device for explicating an environment where
different laws of nature operate, its magical potential heightened by the suggestion
of perpetual movement in the rotation of its vanes.
Artistic declinations
Furthermore, the plaything methodology allows us to look at artistic practices
that put the instrument to use, bringing alternative affordances to view
and suggesting future ones. Various artworks can be considered as material
“declinations” of an instrument in a chain of connection that links objects
to one another.78
An attention to artworks is particularly fruitful in uncovering
an object’s affordances outside of its designated function because of the
way in which artists put things maximally to play in their investigations,
processes and productions. Three brief examples demonstrate how this is the
case with the radiometer.
The artist Francis Picabia’s 1913 watercolour Mechanical Expression
Seen Through Our Own Mechanical Expression shows an abstracted radiometer
that he uses to represents the dancer Stacia Napierkowska.79
The analogy
puts forward the empathetic affordance of the radiometer’s performance,
inversing the usual trope in his title so that it is human movement that
promises to reveal the inner working of the device.
In Northern Lights, the novelist Philip Pullman alludes to the radiometer
when describing the magical effect of a scientific instrument:
Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on
one side and white on the other, began to whirl around as the light struck it. It
illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, for the black of ignorance
fled from the light, whereas the wisdom of white rushed to embrace it.80
Pullman’s account puts forward the device’s resonance as a holy object and
sheds light both on Crookes’ adoption of it as a  symbol of his epistemic
virtue and on the reasons for which it seems to promise a link between the
physical and the metaphysical.
78
The word “declination” is taken from Christopher PINNEY, “Things Happen: Or, From
Which Moment Does That Object Come?” In: MILLER, D. (ed.), Materiality. Durham –
London: Duke University Press 2005 (256–272). In this article he suggests that networks of
objects might offer an alternative method of engaging with things.
79
Francis PICABIA, Mechanical Expression Seen through Our Own Mechanical Expression,
watercolour and pencil on paper, 1913. New York, Collection Lydia Malbin.
80
Philip PULLMAN, Northern Lights. London: Scholastic 1995, p. 149.
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More recently, artist Luke Jerram’s chandeliers, made of hundreds of
radiometers (665 for a 5m tall chandelier), multiply the device’s aesthetic
effect in a spectacular demonstration of its flickering play with light, bring
forward the sensitivity of its responsiveness to environmental light and heat
and seem to point to an infinity of atmospheric enclosures each contained
in an ever larger one.81
While I cannot expand on these examples within the scope of this article,
these brief sketches demonstrate how productive the study of artistic
declinations of instruments can be. Once regarded as playthings, they are
found to share the aesthetic inspiration of artworks that put them to play.
I  have elaborated in this article a  phenomenological/ecological understanding
of the plaything in order to argue that considering scientific
instruments as playthings is a generative methodology that restores their
mobility and inherent transformability, takes into account the skill required
in making them as well as their historical affordances and allows for their
consideration alongside objects from different fields with which they resonate.
I hope that in doing so I have made a convincing case for reviving the
category of philosophical toy in studies of science and technology.
81
Luke JERRAM, Chandeliers (undated). See project page on the artist’s website available at:
<http://www.lukejerram.com/projects/chandeliers> [cit. 13. 4. 2013].
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TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXV / 2013 / 2
////// tematická studie / thematic articles //////////////////////
THE TOYS OF ORGANIC
CHEMISTRY:
MATERIAL MANIPULATIVES
AND SCIENTIFIC REASONING
Abstract: Chemical visualizations
and models are special kinds of media
for thinking. In this paper, I  examine
several historical case studies—an archive
of images from museums, special
collections, and popular magazines—
as examples of emergent practices of
physical modeling as theoretical play
which became the basis for molecular
biology and structural chemistry.
I  trace a  legacy of visualization tools
that starts with Archibald Scott Cooper
and Friedrich Kekulé in the late 1800s,
crystallizes as material manipulatives
in Van’t Hoff and his folded paper
“toys,” is legitimized in the California
lab of Linus Pauling, and is glorified in
the popular imaginary with James Watson
and Francis Crick’s model of DNA.
My tracing then follows several threads
into contemporary modeling practices.
I ultimately argue that modeling play,
originally outside of the boundary of
deductive, positivist science, is now an
accepted mode of reasoning in these
related chemical fields.
Keywords: epistemology;
manipulative models; materiality;
toys in science
Hračky organické chemie:
materiální manipulativy
a vědecké uvažování
Abstrakt: Chemické vizualizace
a modely jsou zvláštními druhy médií
myšlení. Tato studie zkoumá několik
historických případových studií – archív
obrazů z muzeí, specializovaných
sbírek a populárně-vědeckých časopisů
– emergentních praktik materiálního
modelování coby teoretické hry, jež se
staly základem molekulární biologie
a  strukturní chemie. Sleduji dědictví
nástrojů vizualizace počínaje Archibaldem
Scottem Cooperem a Friedrichem
Kekulé na  konci 19. století, jejich
vyústění do materiálních manipulativů
Van’t Hoffa a užití jeho skládaných papírových
„hraček“ Linusem Paulingem
i  jejich následné pronikání do  populární
obraznosti díky modelu DNA
Jamese Watsona a  Francise Cricka.
Sleduji dále jejich vliv na  současné
praktiky modelování a  zdůrazňuji, že
materiální modely, jež tradičně stály
za hranicemi deduktivní, pozitivistické
vědy, jsou nyní v  těchto oblastech
chemie akceptovány jako způsob vědeckého
uvažování.
Klíčová slova: epistemologie;
manipulativní modely; materialita;
hračky ve vědě
KATE MADDALENA
Department of Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media
North Carolina State University
Campus Box 7579 // Raleigh, NC 27695 // USA
email / skmckinn@ncsu.edu
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Kate Maddalena
Introduction
In an iconic image of Nobel Prize winners James Watson and Francis Crick,
the pair pose with their famous model, a spiral staircase made of delicate
metal pieces. Crick gestures to the model, while Watson looks up. The men
are young and unequivocally triumphant; the image thinly disguises its subjects’
smugness, their slightly arrogant attitude towards their artificial poses.
Historians have made much of the personalities of these two: unconventional,
flippant, perhaps immature, and most certainly playful. The popular
mythology that has developed around them would have us believe that they
were boys playing with toys. But a critical consideration of epistemology
in action must recognize that those were some pretty powerful toys. What
is that model made of? How did they decide to put it together, and, more
importantly who (or what episteme) taught him (or them) to do it? How did
“playing with toys” come to be recognized as Nobel-worthy science?
Evelyn Fox Keller’s book The Century of the Gene tells the story of the
conceptualization of the gene—the irreducible unit of molecular biology—as
a myth of simplicity that contemporary genetics is still struggling to escape
with more robust and complex explanations. The crux of her criticism is the
biologist’s linguistic tools for representation and argumentation; the gene as
a name and unit, she argues, has “simplicity and allure,” but the tests of such
a simple catch-all (gene as code and gene as driving action) have not born
out. Keller ultimately claims, among other things, that “biologists who seek
to make sense of [new developments in epigenetics and the like] will have
a considerably expanded array of conceptual tools with which to work.”1
In
a related version of the history of the gene, Philip Thurtle traces the cultural
forces behind what he calls a “genetic rationality”.2
His argument focuses on
the intersection of technologies and political ideologies3
that animated the
20th
century’s uptake of the encoded “living material” approach to inheritance,
eugenics, population and, more broadly, a genetic way of seeing life
itself.
Though both of these approaches touch upon what I might call material
and visual rhetorics, they really focus on the verbal and conceptual
1
Evelyn Fox KELLER, The Century of the Gene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2000,
p. 10.
2
Philip THURTLE, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality. Seattle: University of Washington
Press 2007.
3
Thurtle is less concerned with an “internalist” view of epistemology (as I am here), but rather
with how knowledge functions as power in society large.
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The Toys of Organic Chemistry
aspects of explanation and argumentation. But the epistemic practices of
molecular biology and structural chemistry are often dependent upon embodied,
material and spatial conceptualization; they require understanding
of molecular architecture that natural spoken languages are ill-equipped to
manage. Much of what scientists in these fields do is manipulate material
(a model) which ostensibly represents the thing-in-itself (a molecule). Such
epistemic work may be discursive, certainly, on one level, but its materiality
calls for a different sort of frame with which to describe it. Keller’s request
for new “conceptual tools” for geneticists begs, from the historian, a detailed
understanding of the conceptual tools that have existed to this point, a materialist
media history of things we think with. Historians and philosophers
of science—and particularly those who wish to treat structural chemistry,
molecular biology, genetics and the like—must become historians and philosophers
of media and technology.
The pages that follow are an example of a project to that end. In them,
I  briefly examine a  few of the practices of physical modeling in organic
chemistry that enabled the kind of material-theoretical play that, in turn,
enabled James Watson and Francis Crick to conceptualize DNA and the
modern world at large to conceive of the material replication of life as
a primarily structural-chemical affordance. First, in a brief review of scholarly
literature, I  describe some current conversations in science studies
that such a tracing might inform. Then I historicize the development of
what Linus Pauling calls “spatial models” in molecular biology. My story
isn’t an unbroken historical line; it is rather an archaeology – a series of
related snapshots, starting with the simultaneous innovation of drawing
the valence structures of organic compounds by Archibald Scott Cooper
and Friedrich Kekulé in the late 1800s. I trace those innovative visualizations
into the toylike manipulatives used in labs like Linus Pauling’s – the
concepts made concrete that afforded the paradigm-establishing, nowiconic
“model,” then into the generally accepted, public scientific way of
knowing as evidenced by mass-produced modeling kits that were sold as
toys and used as pedagogical tools. Ultimately I’ll argue, from the perspective
of media theory, that the unique affordances of what I call “material
manipulatives” – the tinkertoys of Linus Pauling’s spatial models –were as
important to the discovery of DNA’s structure as the social and rhetorical
situations that have already been so thoroughly historicized. The ongoing
contemporary remediations of such methods also imply that the chemical
spatial model persists as part of a now-unquestioned, arguably “invisible”,
epistemic practice in molecular biology.
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Studies of inscriptions, visualizations, and modeling technologies
in science
In an entry for the 2012 edition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
philosopher of science John Carroll lists discursivity as a point to be addressed
in future scholarship; “more attention,” he writes, “needs to be paid
to the language used to report what are the laws and the language used to
express the laws themselves.”4
”” I maintain that the equation, the diagram, and
the manipulative are a material parallel to that language that is as powerful,
or more powerful, than the verbal. Rhetoricians Alan Gross, D. S. Birdsell
and L. Groarke would likely agree with Carroll’s call to pay attention to inscription.
Birdsell and Groarke hit upon the philosopher’s “propositionality”
and the relationship of the real to the representation of the real when they
argue that scientific demonstrations “are inherently propositional because
a visual image is used to convey information that is purportedly true.”5
In
2009, Gross wrote “Toward a Theory of Verbal-visual Interaction: The Example
of Lavoisier”, 6
in which, among other things, he calls for visual and
material rhetorics of scientific arguments; he claims that much of science’s
convincing is done with meaningful images and objects, not words. Gross
is careful to distinguish between the “verbal” kind of visualization – images
that are symbolic and meaning-bearing, and the mimetic image – a photograph
that is seen as empirical evidence in itself. He spends most of his time
on the latter, and mimetic images are indeed inscriptions that require their
own set of problematic rhetorical questions.
But I am more interested in what he has to say about the former – the
more consciously signifying visualization tools. Gross maintains, most
notably, that visualizations can allow us to think “with” space in ways that
prosaic language cannot: “in the case of natural and artificial languages, internal
connections exist among their fundamental components. In contrast,
in the case of images, contiguity rules: they and their components are organized
spatially into synchronous hierarchies or nested sets.” “Unlike words,”
Gross writes, “images can undergo meaningful spatial transformations and
4
John W. CARROLL “Laws of Nature.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]y
(Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL <http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/spr2012/entries/laws-of-nature/>.
5
David BIRDSELL – Leo GROARKE, “Outlines of a  Theory of Visual Argument.”
Argumentation and Advocacy, vol. 43, 2007, no. 3–4, p. 106 (103–113).
6
Alan G. GROSS, “Toward a Theory of Verbal–Visual Interaction: The Example of Lavoisier.”
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 39, 2009, no. 2, pp. 147–169.
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manipulations, such as superimposition, projection, rotation, magnification,
and animation.”7
A turn to the visual, non-verbal, and material is in
the making for rhetoric of science. Propositionality becomes even more
embedded in movable material models – as the (empirically discovered)
structural protocols of molecules themselves (angles of attachment, sites of
attachment, mobility and the like) are incorporated into designed materials,
each piece and the way it relates to the whole becomes unquestionably
true in the context of the model itself. Manipulatives – Watson and Crick’s
model, for example – combine the affordances of natural languages and
visual ones; materials designed to have protocols relate both internally and
spatially. Moreover, the protocols upon which material models depend have
even less potential for the semantic slippage of verbal and visual arguments
– they are, at least potentially, self-evident, obdurate objects in themselves.
The turn to the material is, of course, an ongoing trend in scholarship on
both media and science, though scholars in interdisciplinary science studies
rarely explicitly recognize the implications of their claims for media studies.
Phenomenological accounts of how science thinks with and produces
objects are perennial. Most notably, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger’s Towards a History
of Epistemic Things discusses how inquiry produces entire systems of
materials –particularly lab-produced phenomena like cultures and protein
replicators – to constitute a  given field of knowledge,8
and Davis Baird’s
Thing Knowledge focuses on the design of specialized instruments to manipulate
the same.9
Historians who study knowledge-making in genetics are already examining
media, and they are particularly interested in the inscription of
images. Carol Keirns has documented geneticist Barbara McClintock’s
practices of “pictorial communication”, and Keirns’ description hints at
the kind of inscription-reading expertise that Lorraine Daston and Peter
Gallison turn in to a  full-blown theory years later: “McClintock taught
close colleagues to ‘read’ the patterns in her maize kernels, ‘seeing’ pigment
and starch genes turning on and off.”10
Daston and Galison’s 2007 book,
7
Ibid., p. 148.
8
Hans-Jorg RHEINBERGER, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in
the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997.
9
Davis BAIRD, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments. Berkeley: University
of California Press 2004.
10
Carol KEIRNS, “Seeing Patterns: Models, Visual Evidence and Pictorial Communication
in the Work of Barbara McClintock.” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 32, 1999, no. 1,
pp. 163–195.
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Objectivity,11
considers more cases like Keirns’s, focusing on the materials
– mostly machinery – and practices of image-rendering in the life sciences,
and the way in which mediation has become a layer between the scientist
and object of study. They argue that, though the media layer has been seen to
remove the observer from the observed, such a “removal” is almost always
more of a gesture – a social action, a convention of the community – than
it is an actual separation. On the contrary – Gallison and Daston note that
the specialization of inscription technologies makes it so that the expert
scientist is even more tied to his or her product, as he or she must make
sense of the image or rendering. Different types of inscription techniques
and technology, different types of inscriptions themselves, and the resulting,
extremely specialized inscription-reading practices become different types
of objectivity.12
But the treatments of inscriptions I’ve described so far are all mediations
based in visual representations or reproductions, not manipulative models.
In their chapter of the same book entitled “Structural Objectivity”, Daston
and Galison note a scientific trend that paralleled the philosophical move to
structuralism, and they say that “[scientists] who identified ‘structures’ as
the core of objectivity understood a great variety of things under that rubric:
logic, ordered sequences of sensations, some of mathematics, all of mathematics,
syntax, entities that remain invariant under transformations”.13
Scientific structuralism, then, is at the basis of the experience and inscription
of Ludwik Fleck’s “system of uniformities”14
– patterns that can become
protocols in the recording, communicating, and manipulating of rules
(maybe theories, laws), and concepts. Daston and Galison call the dependence
on such structures a solution to “the specter of incommunicability in
the sciences.”15
(It is no surprise, then, that a popular pre-med textbook is
entitled Organic Chemistry as a Second Language: Translating the Basic Concepts.)
Galison’s essay “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science”
lists the structures and their inscription apparatus as “Problem number 3”:
Technologies of Argumentation. When the focus is on scientific practices (rather
than discipline‐specific scientific results per se), what are the concepts, tools, and
11
Lorraine DASTON – Peter GALLISON, Objectivity. Boston: Zone Books 2007.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., p. 254.
14
Ludwik FLECK, Genesis and Development of a  Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 1981.
15
Ibid.
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procedures needed at a given time to construct an acceptable scientific argument?
We already have some good examples of steps toward a history and philosophy
of practices: instrument making, probability, objectivity, observation,gg model
building, and collecting. We are beginning to know something of the nature ofgg
thought experiments—but there is clearly much more to learn. The same could
be said for scientific visualization, where, by now, we have a large number of
empirical case studies but a relatively impoverished analytic scheme for understanding
how visualization practices work. So, cutting across subdisciplines
and even disciplines, what is the toolkit of argumentation and demonstration—
and what is its historical trajectory?16
Given Galison’s name for the problem, a brand of scholarship that considers
the material manipulatives with which scientists theorize must naturally go
into the toolkit.
There are a few notable exceptions to the overall lack of scholarship on
manipulative models and knowledge-making: the work of Eric Francoeur is
one. In 1997, Francoeur called the “design and use” of physical molecular
models a “forgotten tool [...] a constituitive yet overlooked element of chemical
practices.”17
Francoeur’s analysis of the differences between visual and
spatial models and case-study historiography of model design is precisely
the kind of work that my own inquiry strives to continue. Stephan Hartmann
uses a case study in high-energy physics to define the term “model”;
he determines that there are four types of model, and the “toy model” is
one. Toy models and developmental models, he maintains, are “considerably
useful in the process of theory construction”, 18
i.e., toy models are a means
of practicing scientific inductive reasoning. Even more recently, Adam Toon
has used ethnographic sociology of science approaches to explore modeling.
Toon watches scientists use models and interviews them about their attitudes
towards them.19
In two different articles explaining his findings, he
uses a theory of make-believe from art studies to describe how scientists
“imagine the models to be molecules, in much the same way that children
16
Peter GALISON, “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science.” Isis, vol. 99, 2008,
no. 1, pp. 111–124 [emphasis mine].
17
Eric FRANCOUER, “The Forgotten Tool: The Design and Use of Molecular Models.” Social
Studies of Science, vol. 27, 1997, no. 1, pp. 7–40.
18
Stephen HARTMANN, “Models as a  Tool for Theory Construction: Some Strategies of
Preliminary Physics.” Accessed in PhilSci Archive, Reprint of a chapter from Theories and
Models in Scientific Processes, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1995, pp. 49–67.
19
Adam TOON, “The Ontology of Theoretical Modelling: Models as Make-believe.” Synthese,
vol. 172, 2010, no. 2, pp. 301–315.
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imagine a  doll to be a  baby”.20
The “make-believe” step between the real
and the representation resonates well with my own claim that models—and
model pieces—are materially propositional—what Daston and Gallison call
“entities that remain invariant under transformations”,21
stand-ins for what
is that ostensibly behave just like what is.
More recently, scholars like Alan Rocke, Peter Ramberg, and the essays
featured in a  collection edited by Roman Frigg & Matthew Hunter
have all treated representation in science and chemistry specifically. Rocke
historicizes the drawings that enabled the beginning of modern organic
chemistry,22
and his story is where my own tracing begins. Ramberg takes up
stereochemistry as an inscription-producing process.23
The most pertinent
recent scholarship, however, is Soraya de Chadarevian’s edited collection
that looks “back” on physical models as modeling practices move more
and more to digital representations, which are arguably more detailed and
less experientially embodied. Chadarevian’s own chapter of the volume
features the model as critical to the development of molecular biology as
a discipline,24
an argument that I will echo here. The epistemic impact of the
“loss” of tanglible, embodied modeling remains to be seen; the arrangement
and rearrangement of manipulative models is one well-established way that
science reasons with materials.
From visual thinking to material thinking: a tracing
Figure 1: Structure of Benzine as first visualized by Frederich August Kekulé.
Source: Friedrich August KEKULÉ, “Sur la constitution des substances aromatiques.”
Bulletin de la Societe Chimique de Paris, vol. 3, 1865, no. 2, pp. 98–110.
20
Adam TOON, “Playing with Molecules.” Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part
A, vol. 42, 2011, no. 4, p. 580.
21
DASTON – GALISON, Objectivity, p. 254.
22
Alan J. ROCKE, Image and Reality: Kekulé, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 2010.
23
Peter RAMBERG, Chemical Structure, Spatial Arrangement: The Early History of
Stereochemistry, 1874–1914. Aldershot – Burlington: Ashgate 2003.
24
Soraya de CHADAREVIAN, “Models and the Making of Molecular Biology.” Models: the
Third Dimension of Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2004.
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Figure 2: Kekulé’s ring structure as he proposes it at the end of the same paper.
Source: Friedrich August KEKULÉ, “Sur la constitution des substances aromatiques.”
Bulletin de la Societe Chimique de Paris, vol. 3, 1865, no. 2, pp. 98–110.
Most histories of organic chemistry and molecular biology include Frederich
August Kekulé, and I will begin with him because he is credited with
conceiving of the ubiquitous hexagonal and pentagonal ring structures at
the heart of organic chemistry—the shapes that Watson and Crick made into
metal plates to “stack” as the base center of their model. While Kekulé was
working at the University of Ghent in Belgium, he conceived of the benzene
ring in a now-famous dream about a snake swallowing its tail and published
a paper postulating that the specific structures of organic compounds were
likely as important as their formulae.25
Kekulé’s argument was the culmination
of a general movement, caused by molecular theory, to include physics
in chemistry—an obsession with discovering how the structure of molecules
would predict their behaviors and properties. Kekulé and his contemporaries—most
notably Josef Loschmidt and Alexander Crum Brown, who, John
Wotiz, Ursula Klein, and Alan Rocke note, were devising graphic formulae
four years before Kekulé published the same sort of work—necessarily invented
a new notation to represent the structures. The big epistemic turn
that Kekulé and his contemporaries made was to conceive of the angles of attachment
as key to chemical behavior and interactivity (ultimately allowing
for tetravalence and the entire field of organic and structural chemistry).26
Wotiz maintains that Kekulé’s visualizations worked to allow for a different
kind of cognition than the (linear, mathematical) formulae that chemists
had depended upon until then—the beginnings of a  geometric thinking,
a realization that what molecules did had much to do with their architecture
25
Ibid.
26
ROCKE, Image and Reality.
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in space.27
Spatial reasoning was the basis of structural chemistry, and key
to Linus Pauling’s methodology (to be described later). Kekulé’s work also
hypothesized the variety and complexity of organic compounds to be discovered
in the coming decades by Pauling and others.
Kekulé’s student, Jacobus Henricus Van’t Hoff, following Kekulé’s assertion
that chemicals’ spatial arrangements were key to their chemical
behavior, was one of the first to use toy-like models to do chemistry (Kekulé
himself used “ball and stick models”)28
and the first to publish an argument
for spatial modeling as a legitimate scientific methodology. According to
Trienke M. Van der Spiek of the Booerhave Museum in the Netherlands,
who has extensively historicized Van’t Hoff’s contributions to molecular
modeling, Van’t Hoff’s argument, a pamphlet entitled La chimie dans l’espace
(Chemistry in space), published in 1874, was before its time, representing
“a major schism with the prevailing view of dimensionless molecules.”29
The
epistemic context of the pamphlet is difficult to imagine with a contemporary
mind; Van’t Hoff had to argue against a way of thinking that didn’t
yet conceptualize objects as small as molecules actually occupying space in
a way that was important to how they behaved physically or chemically. That
step was a difficult enough paradigm shift for chemistry, but Van’t Hoff also
proposed new methodology. He began playing with toys – small paperboard
triangles cut, color-coded, and folded into triangular solids to represent tetrahedral
carbon atoms and their potential surrounding bonds. The models
went through several iterations as Van’t Hoff came to understand the asymmetrical
shape of carbon and that shape’s effects on its potential valences.30
According to Van der Spiek, Van’t Hoff’s pamphlet described his models as
“aids to visualization that made his hypothetical exegesis easier to understand
and less strenuous to read”31
—that is, they constituted a new form of
technical communication, a spatial-material semiotic. Van der Spiek also
points out that Van’t Hoff’s models are clearly designed to concentrate on
potential attachments (and angles of attachments) around the carbon atoms
in organic compounds, rather than being concerned with the location of the
27
John WOTIZ, The Kekule Riddle: A Challenge for Chemists and Psychologists. Vienna, IL:
Glenview 1993.
28
Trienke VAN DER SPIEKE, “Selling a Theory: The Role of Molecular Models in J. H. van‘t
Hoff’s Stereochemistry Theory.” Annals of Science, vol. 63, 2006, no. 2, pp. 157–177.
29
Ibid., p. 160.
30
Ursula KLEIN, Experiments, Models, Paper Tools: Cultures of Organic Chemistry in the
Nineteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003.
31
VAN DER SPIEKE, “Selling a Theory.”
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central atoms.32
Van’t Hoff, then, was concerned with a way to conceptualize
the multitudes of possibilities for carbon-based arrangements – he wanted
to imagine as-of-yet unobserved compounds. His models were for theorizing.
His paperboard toys were hypothesis-makers for the most complicated
chemical questions of the time.
That complexity was, of course, the bread and butter of an entire field of
chemistry; for the good part of the next century, organic chemists devoted
their careers, in part, to theorizing, finding, diagramming, and naming
organic compounds. One product of that work was The Ring Index: Ring
systems used in organic chemistry, published in 1940 by Austin Patterson
and Leonard Capell, a 650-page listing of classes and individual molecular
arrangements of known organic compounds, complete with instructions for
subtle variations in names and notation – a field guide to organic chemistry’s
drawn representations. The “historical” section of the book’s introduction
notes that its compilation began in 1922, when a “Committee on the Preparation
and Publication of a List of Ring Systems Used in Organic Chemistry”
was formed from the Board of Editors of the Journal of the American Chemical
Society. Writing was delayed by the Depression but finally completed in
1938, and the book claims to cover all classes of rings systematized through
that year.33
Two things are particularly notable about The Ring Index for my pur-x
poses. The first is that it so clearly answers an exigence for the standardization
of a symbolic language that uses known and empirically tested physical
attributes of molecular structures to theorize about (and, later, design) the
structures of unknown compounds. Secondly, the final and newest classes
of ring system documented by the index (in 1938) are Class D1 and D2,
simple spiro systems and complex spiro systems, respectively. The “spiro”
class of system are the proto-helix—the structures that DNA will ultimately
be discovered to have. Here the simple, two-dimensional drawings of the
hydrocarbon/nitrogen shapes clearly begins to break down; the notation
is cluttered by multiple numbers (to denote the number of atoms between
“spiro atoms”) and cross-hatched lines to denote bonds at certain angles
(bond angles would, of course, be affected by this number). The basic penciland-paper
notation fails to communicate the “structure” that is so key in
structural chemistry and its deployment in molecular biology. At the end of
32
Ibid.
33
Austin M. PATTERSON – Leonard T. CAPELL, The Ring Index: A List of Ring Systems Used
in Organic Chemistry, New York: Rheinhold 1940.
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The Ring Index, the edited appendices offer a suggestion to chemists working
with C3 class molecules and above: “In difficult cases it may be advisable
to construct a spatial model so as to decide upon the most natural [plane
formula and structure].”34
Figure 3: Image from The Ring Index: Ring Systems Used in Organic Chemistry
in the Spiro Class section. The notation required to denote the number and angle of
attachments is outgrowing the capacity of the two-dimensional representation.
Source: Austin M. PATTERSON – Leonard T. CAPELL, The Ring Index: A List of
Ring Systems Used in Organic Chemistry. New York: Rheinhold 1940.yy
The “Complex Spiro Systems” end the book, and the last line of the
volume says of these systems: “Rule 24 [The rule pertaining to systems
containing other ring unions in addition to spiro unions] has been marked
‘provisional’ because at some later time it may be thought desirable to give
directions for numbering these systems ‘straight around,’ like the preceding
classes. No simple and certain way of doing this has yet been worked out.”35
At the time of The Ring Index’s publication, Linus Pauling sat on the
American Chemical Society’s Board of Editors; he is credited at the end of
the index’s “General Introduction.”36
It could easily have been Pauling who
made the recommendation I’ve cited above, as spatial modeling was his
preferred method of reasoning. He was known for his models, and many
interviews and correspondences attest to the fact that models were his (theoretical)
experiments – his way of thinking. During undergraduate school,
Pauling was a machinist – a good one by his own lights, and it would seem
34
PATTERSON – CAPELL Ring Index, p. 607
35
Ibid., p. 610 [emphasis mine].
36
Ibid., p. 6
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that his skill at space and shapes translated to a kind of material, structural
intelligence. He was predisposed to think with models. In a 1964 interview
with John Heilbron, Pauling exclaims, “[I have] always [made models], yes!
[...] I still have the models [that he and the interviewer are discussing]. Here
is the water molecule [showing the model]: the two electrons, here are the
two electrons holding the hydrogen atom, these are the two K electrons. They
don’t need to be at that angle. I made these.”37
A paper Pauling published
in the Review of Scientific Instruments in 1952, the year before Watson and
Crick published the description of their structure, describes his models in
detail. “Models representing atoms or groups of atoms built from hard wood
to the scale 1 in.=1A are connected by a clamping device which maintains
desired molecular configurations,” says the abstract. Pauling goes on to say
that “[t]hese accurate models have been used as substitutes for calculation
in investigations of the probable configuration of the polypeptide chain in
proteins. Analogous models constructed of rubber‐like plastic to the scale
1 in.=2A and connected by snap fasteners are designed for qualitative studies
of protein structure.”38
Ultimately, Pauling’s work with manipulatives
won him recognition for a successful alpha model of the helical structure of
amino acids – he proposed the structure that Watson and Crick’s model was
based on. When Watson and Crick proposed the complete double-helical
model they had, in Watson’s words, “beat Pauling at his own game.”39
Pauling’s “game”, of course, was the combination of modeling and X-ray
crystallography as the empirical measure to inform the physical protocols of
his models. Pauling came up with the alpha helix model by using crystallography
to determine the precise angles and architecture of the peptide bonds
on a helical carbon chain and the structure of the residual atoms that would
stack up against each other and cause the curve of the helix. According to
Oregon State’s special collections feature on Pauling, Pauling was ill and
prescribed bed rest by his doctor when he sketched the molecules he was
working with on a strip of paper and folded it along the same bond line,
coming up with a helix. When he returned to the lab, he adjusted his model
37
Linus PAULING. “Oral History Transcript.” In: Niels Bohr Library and Archives [online].
1964. Available at <http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/3448.html> [cit. 12. 10. 2012].
38
Robert COREY – Linus PAULING, “Molecular Models of Amino Acids, Peptides, and
Proteins.” Review of Scientific Instruments, vol. 24, 1953, no. 8, pp. 621–627.
39
James D. WATSON, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure
of DNA. New York: Touchstone 1968, p. 48.
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and drew up plans for a more robust, wooden version, which is now housed
in Oregon State University’s archives.40
Across a nation and an ocean, in England, James Watson and Francis
Crick followed Pauling’s lead and employed a methodology of model play,
as well. Watson and Crick’s story has been told by the men themselves and
their close colleagues, and it has since been retold by historians, rhetoricians,
and filmmakers; I do not mean to retell it again, here. But I do want
to highlight the model itself – the metal plates and rods that the famous
pair used as their primary, concrete argument – as a key character in the
story. In some ways, the models Watson and Crick constructed were a way
of responding to social constraints on their lab materials; they didn’t have
access to equipment or experimental, empirical data. Watson’s account gives
a scientist’s rationale for his decision to use self-fashioned manipulatives:
“I was soon taught that Pauling’s result was a product of common sense,
not the result of complicated mathematical reasoning [...] The key to Linus’
success was his reliance on the simple laws of structural chemistry [...] the
main working tools were a set of molecular models superficially resembling
the toys of preschool children.”41
”” But Watson’s description of his relationship
to Wilkins’ lab and Rosalind Franklin in particular imply the much more
circumstantial reasons for his choice: he was a failure at growing myoglobin
crystals, he was bad at math, X-ray analysis bored him, and, most importantly,
even after he and Crick had made good progress on the model, they
weren’t able to produce the empirical evidence to “prove” their structure;
“the crux of the matter was whether Rosy’s new X-ray pictures would lend
any support for a helical DNA structure [...] clues in constructing molecular
models [... but Franklin’s] determined mind had set upon a different course
of action.”42
”
If Watson and Crick were constrained by limited access to Franklin’s
empirical data, it can be argued that Franklin and Wilkins were equally
constrained by their fixation upon it. And while Franklin (according to
Watson) openly disdained Pauling’s “game”: “[t]he idea of using tinker-toylike
models to solve biological structures was clearly a last resort,”43
” Watson
40
All Documents and Materials, Linus Pauling and The Nature of the Chemical Bond:
A Documentary History, Special Collections, Oregon State University [online]. n.d. Avaiable
at <http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/bond/materials/index.
html> [cit. 6. 5. 2012].
41
WATSON, Double Helix, p. 50
42
Ibid., p. 211.
43
WATSON Double Helix, p. 69
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and Crick were almost painfully dependent upon it, and at the mercy of
the materials necessary to play. About John Kendrew’s models—the first
manipulatives that Watson and Crick have access to—Watson writes, “[they]
would not be satisfactory [...] there existed no accurate representations of the
groups of atoms unique to DNA [...] Rapid improvisation would be necessary
since there was no time [...] to give a rush order for their construction.”44
””
Watson goes on to fashion his own stand-in parts out of copper wire, but
he also relates the difficulty of theorizing without the proper materials and
their inherent protocols: “Unlike the other constituents, [the inorganic
ions] obeyed no simple-minded rules telling us the angles at which they
would form their respective chemical bonds [...]we had to know the right
DNA structure before the right models could be made.”45
” In reference to
conversations away from the models, Watson speaks of his own “inability to
think in three dimensions [without the help of embodied interaction with
the physical model],”46
”” and the model’s end game is fraught with waiting
for new parts to come back from the machinist – time in which Watson,
ironically, “decide[s] that no harm could come from spending a few days
building backbone-out models.”47
”” In the end, even Maurice Wilkins seemed
to understand that the “real” work was being done in the albeit artificial
model – he urged Watson and Crick to delay their modeling in order to give
his own lab time for the X-ray imaging and only hesitantly agreed to allow
them to continue.
Francis Crick’s memoir, which stretches into the uptake of the double
helix into accepted theory and its subsequent growth into the field of molecular
biology, discusses the importance of models as a means for theorizing
and a way of knowing, as well. 48
He seems especially insistent that working
in three dimensions is epistemically different than representation in two
dimensions. He complains of having to remediate his work on to paper more
than once. “Diagrams of models,” he writes, “are often difficult to draw
satisfactorily since, unless care is taken, they usually convey more than one
intends.”49
” The distinction between thinking with models andg communicating
with words – perhaps reducible, in rhetorical terms, to a difference ing
44
Ibid., p. 197.
45
Ibid., p. 195.
46
Ibid., p. 155.
47
Ibid., p. 158.
48
Francis CRICK, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic
Books 1990.
49
Ibid., p. 46.
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audience – is a fascinating one. Crick’s commentary echoes the concepts
that Francoeur describes in his work on particle physics.
In another compelling section of Crick’s book, he discusses at length
the theoretical “mistakes” that he made when working to develop many of
his theories, mistakes that he was able to understand better at the time of
writing his memoir, as theoretical and empirical knowledge continued to
be built upon the helix as a basic structure for the gene (specifically the role
of RNA in replicating genetic information). One of these bears mentioning
here because it speaks to the way he thought about the models. He writes:
It is clear that I thought of the RNA in the cytoplasm [...] as a “template,” that is,
having a rather rigid structure comparable to the double helix of DNA but probably
having one single chain. It was only later that I realized that this was too
restrictive an idea, and that “tape” might be nearer to the truth [...] I eventually
realized that RNA need not be rigid, but could be flexible, except for the part
that coded the next amino acid to be incorporated. Another consequence of this
idea was that the growing protein chain did not have to stay on the template
but could start to fold itself up as the sequence proceeded, as indeed had been
suggested earlier.50
The complex process of protein folding and its tremendous impact on
the action of proteins has become, of course, the next big problem for material
manipulative reasoning to solve in molecular biology and genetics.
Manipulative Models in the Public Imagination: an archive of
advertisements and images
At the same time that Watson, Crick, Franklin, Wilkins et al. were doing
their work in labs largely inaccessible to the layman, models as ways of
seeing and knowing about the sub-visible world were already common to
the public imagination, thanks to Kekulé’s epistemic legacy. An illustrated
Popular Mechanics article from 1928 pictures Henry D. Hubbard, then secretary
of the U.S. Bureau of Standards, with models designed to depict organic
compounds. “One of his sets of models,” the magazine tells its lay audience,
“depict[s] the formation of carbon nuclei, carbon atoms, and diamonds [...]
Strength and hardness are due to the arrangement of the atoms, and clarity
to the ‘space patterns’ which their particular arrangement provides.”51
50
CRICK, What Mad Pursuit, p. 110.
51
Ibid, p. 560.
Kate Maddalena
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Hubbard worked for the Bureau of Standards, a position that resonates with
Pauling’s interest in the Committee for Chemical Nomenclature and the
standardizing force of the Ring Index – scientists involved with modeling
were acutely aware of the need for a consistent material language.52
Figure 4: Image from an article in Popular Mechanics from 1928, depicting Henry
Hubbard and wooden models of organic compounds.
Source: Popular Mechanics, Volume 50.4, October 1928.
Later, in the 1940s, models like Hubbard’s were ultimately marketed to
parents and school systems as pedagogical tools, and the propositional materials
of manipulative models became their own kind of publicly accepted
facts. Probably the most influential of these models was the Fischer-TaylorHirschfelder
Atom Model Kit. It was used in high school chemistry courses.
52
For a recent treatment of the intersection of the specific problematics of modeling and issues
of standardization, see Adrian MACKENZIE – Claire WATERTON – Rebecca ELLIS – Emma
FROW – Ruth McNALLY – Lawrence BUSCH – Brian WYNNE, “Classifying, Constructing,
and Identifying Life: Standards as Transformations of ‘The Biological’.” Science, Technology &
Human Values, 2013.
The Toys of Organic Chemistry
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Figure 5: A basic Fischer atomic modeling kit from the 1940s.
Source: “1940s Vintage Wooden Atomic Model Kit.” Factory 20 [online]. n.d. Available
at <http://www.factory20.com/objects/1940s-vintage-wooden-atomic-modelkit/>
[cit. 6. 5. 2012].
Figure 6: The same Fischer kit featured in Popular Science in 1942.
Source: Popular Science, June 1942.
Kate Maddalena
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The most basic kit included five isotopes of nitrogen and five isotopes of
carbon, three of sulfur, two of oxygen, and one piece-type each to represent
the elements bromine, iodine, and chlorine. Models using the set look like
nubby caterpillars with dark blue and black middle bodies – the dark blue
being nitrogen, black being carbon. Where the oxygen, hydrogen, bromine,
iodine and chlorine pieces are semi-circle bubbles that attach to the flat side
of carbon and nitrogen, C and N are triangular wedges that work together
to make hexagonal and pentagonal centers – echoes of Van’t Hoff’s triangular
arrangements of carbon. These same models are featured in a story
in Popular Science in 1942 that explains to its readers exactly how scientists
think with models. In it, models are hailed as science’s “newest aid to the
study of molecular structure.” The article, which is a history of modeling
practices, even touches upon my own question of the fluidity of scientific
knowledge production and the concretized, material propositionality of the
standardized wooden models. “Until a few years ago,” the journalist writes,
“knowledge of the architecture of organic compounds was not sufficiently
complete to allow for accurate representation,” and models, he claims, were
“crude” and vague.53
Later, the article describes the models’ relationship
to the basic assumptions of structural chemistry quite well; “Investigation
of some 500 compounds by electron diffraction revealed that the different
forms of building blocks required to make them were surprisingly few. In
fact, most organic compounds could be represented accurately by molecule
models built up from less than two dozen kinds and shapes of atom model-
s.”54
Complexity is made up of meaningful combinations and recombinations
of very simple elements. The world is a toy sculpture made of structural
protocol. With good representational tools for arrangement, the article
seems to promise, we can inductively find its structure and even invent new
structures that play according to the existing world’s rules.
Popular magazines provide evidence that modeling as a  pedagogical
practice was still flourishing into the 1960s and 70s. In 1963, LIFE magazine
devoted a  whole page and a  half to advertising for at-home science kits,
including a “Chemcraft Master Deluxe Lab” that boasted an “atomic model
kit,” along with a centrifuge, molecular balance, and spectroscope.55
In 1971,
Great Britain’s New Scientist reviewed A. F. Wells’st Models in structural inorganic
chemistry (with model building set), a text that describes the practice of
53
Ibid, p. 42.
54
Ibid, p. 42.
55
LIFE magazine, November 22, 1963, p. 11.
The Toys of Organic Chemistry
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modeling in structural chemistry. According to reviewer Jeffrey Cox, Wells
“elaborates the theme that the builder of a model gains a deep insight into
the structure it represents.”56
Cox applauds the publisher on its “enterprise
[… in including a model in the text] here is a plentiful supply in a single kit
for building ball-and-stick, pack of spheres, and joining-of-polyhedra models.
Each type of model emphasizes a particular aspect of structure: spatial
relationships, steric requirements of ions, and the coordination of atoms.
Both teacher and learner can profit from this multiplicity of emphasis.”57
Standardized modeling tools for structural chemistry, then, were taken for
granted as thinking and learning tools by the 1970s.
Conclusion: A snapshot in the present
Modeling as efficacious pedagogy is still being studied; I’ll briefly describe
two examples from the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, heregg . “The
use of three-dimensional visualization as a moderator in the higher cognitive
learning of concepts in college level chemistry,” by Lawerence H. Talley,
argues for the use of material models in student labs, not just for teacher
demonstration, because modeling is an enhancement of visualization skills
essential to higher-level chemistry. 58
In “Effect of Bead and Illustrations
Models on High School Students’ Achievement in Molecular Genetics”,
Yosi Rotbain, Gili Marbach-Ad, and Ruth Stavy report the results of an
empirical study of pedagogical practices in high school genetics classes and
conclude that “it is advisable to use a three-dimensional model, such as the
bead model” 59
to engage students in conceptualizing genetic action at the
molecular level.
And at the level of knowledge-making in university and private labs, the
tools used to design and interact with models are changing and evolving,
as well—spatial and material modeling is a living methodology in molecular
biology and related fields. The Foldit60
project out of the University of
56
Jeffrey COX, Book Review, New Scientist, July15, 1971, p. 159.
57
Ibid.
58
Lawrence H. TALLEY, “The Use of Three‐dimensional Visualization as a Moderator in the
Higher Cognitive Learning of Concepts in College Level Chemistry.” Journal of Research in
Science Teaching, vol. 10, 2006, no. 3, pp. 263–269.
59
Yosi ROTBAIN – Gili MARBACH-AD – Ruth STAVY, “Effect of Bead and Illustrations
Models on High School Students’ Achievement in Molecular Genetics.” Journal of Research in
Science Teaching, vol. 43, 2006, no. 5, p. 525 (500–529).
60
Foldit, University of Washington [online]. Available at: <http://fold.it/portal/> [cit 12. 10.
2012].
Kate Maddalena
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Washington, for example, employs designers from the UW Center for Game
Science to maintain a computer game whose object is protein folding to predict
and produce data about the structures of heretofore unknown organic
compounds.
Figure 6: Foldit’s puzzle interface
Source: Foldit, University of Washington [online]. Available at <http://fold.it/portal/>
[cit 12. 10. 2012].
Foldit’s interface is a  three dimensional on-screen manipulative, but
its genre is a multi-player online game; the protocols of the game turn all
users—anyone who signs up for an account—into modelers. The game
produces data to answer real scientific exigencies: “Figuring out which of
the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the
hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money
and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structures oft
proteins by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having
people play competitively to fold the best proteins. Players can design
brand new proteins that could help prevent or treat important diseases”
(Foldit, About). The website goes on to detail how protein folding and protein
design could contribute to knowledge-building about therapies for HIV/
AIDS, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s Disease. Foldit clearly takes the Tinker-Toyt
ethos to a new and fascinating level – one Linus Pauling would approve of,
The Toys of Organic Chemistry
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I think. Foldit and other crowd-sourced approaches to science take Watson,t
Pauling, and Franklin’s idea of model-manipulation as “playing with toys”
or “beating [another scientist] at his own game” out of the realm of analogy.
The move implies new questions for study of philosophical toys: how does
gamification change the knowledge-making process by allowing for the
manipulation of “big data”? What new roles does the object-as-model take
on when it becomes a multi-player game? And what are the implications of
the remediation of the three-dimensional model through digital tools rather
than hands-on materials like metal, plastic and wood?
Kate Maddalena
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TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXV / 2013 / 2
////// tematická studie / thematic articles //////////////////////
GRAND ILLUSIONS:
LARGE-SCALE OPTICAL
TOYS AND CONTEMPORARY
SCIENTIFIC SPECTACLE
Abstract: The zoetrope, a  nineteenthcentury
optical toy that showcases illusions
of motion, has enjoyed an active
“afterlife” in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Today,zoetropicdevicesarefoundinfine
art and advertising, and are often much
larger than their 19th-century counterparts.
Modern-day zoetropes still captivate
viewers primarily because of their
adjustment in scale. Exploring a range
of examples in art, entertainment, and
advertising, this article discusses various
technical adjustments made to successfully
“scale up” the zoetrope, arguing
that these new apparatus reconfigure
the relationship between audience and
device. Large-scale zoetropes revise the
traditional conception of the user, who
tactilely manipulates and interacts with
the apparatus, instead positing a viewer
who has less control over the illusion and
is often a captive audience surrounded
by the animation. It is primarily through
their adaptation of scale that contemporary
zoetropes successfully elicit wonder
as visual and scientific spectacles from
their audiences today.
Keywords: zoetrope; art;
advertisement; large-scale; audience
Velké iluze:
optické hračky velkého měřítka
a současný vědecký spektákl
Abstrakt: Zoetrop, optická hračka
19.  století předvádějící iluzi pohybu,
oživla v  různých podobách ve  20.
a 21. století. Dnes ji nalezneme ve výtvarném
umění či reklamě a  to často
v mnohem větším měřítku než ve století
předcházejícím. Moderní zoetropy
uchvacují své diváky primárně díky
tomuto zvětšení měřítka. Věnuji se
řadě jejich příkladů z  umění, zábavního
průmyslu a  reklamy a  sleduji
různé technické úpravy vedoucí k jejich
zvětšení. Tyto nové aparáty proměňují
vztah mezi přístrojem a  publikem,
přehodnocují tradiční pojetí jejich
uživatele, který s  ním zacházel dotykem,
a  předpokládají naopak diváka,
který má nad iluzí méně kontroly a je
často publikem, zajatým a obklopeným
touto animací. Současné zoetropy jako
vizuální a  vědecké spektákly dokáží
vzbuzovat údiv primárně díky změně
svého měřítka.
Klíčová slova: zoetrop; umění;
reklama; velké měřítko; publikum
MEREDITH A. BAK
Department of Theatre, Dance & Film / Franklin & Marshall College
415 Harrisburg Ave // Lancaster, PA 17603 // United Kingdom
email / meredithabak@gmail.com
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Meredith A. Bak
Introduction
In February 2009, Sony debuted a television commercial for its line of Bravia
televisions featuring an enormous zoetrope constructed in a city square in
Venaria, Northern Italy. Conceived by London-based ad agency Fallon, the
zoetrope, which is called the Bravia-Drome, is the ad’s central feature. It is
comprised of an enormous drum with a series of screens affixed around its
perimeter. Each screen displays one still image of a motion sequence, and
when a series of shutter blades whirs around the drum in front of the band
of illuminated images, they appear to come to life in smooth, fluid movement.
Fallon’s previous commercials for the ad campaign showcased Bravia’s
state-of-the-art color display by staging large-scale visual stunts and using
labor-intensive techniques. In one, the production crew released a quarter of
a million bouncy balls down a San Francisco street and filmed the results.
Another featured a series of environmentally friendly paint bombs attached
to the interiors and exteriors of buildings, which, when strategically detonated,
created a colorful visual symphony. A third commercial was created
with stop-motion animation and involved moving colorful large physical
models in an urban setting. The Bravia-Drome commercial similarly remains
devoted to public spectacle and display by relying upon a large-scale,
site-specific installation. Its main thrust focuses not on the Bravia television’s
color display, and instead highlights its 200hz MotionFlow technology,
which offers an unprecedentedly smooth televisual image by “filling in” the
gaps between each image frame. Because of its ability to smoothly display
rapidly changing images, it is a particularly attractive feature for watching
sporting events, and in the commercial, the Bravia-Drome features footage
of Brazilian soccer star Kaka juggling a soccer ball.
When devising a  way to promote MotionFlow technology, Sony and
Fallon gained their inspiration from the zoetrope: a persistence of vision toy
first introduced in the 1830s. That Sony and Fallon used an analog technology
to showcase a new digital one is perhaps unsurprising, given that new
media technologies often bear the traces of earlier forms, which fall out of
visibility only to resurface, adapted in other related ways. As the zoetrope
resurfaced here, it had grown dramatically in scale, from a domestic tabletop
toy in the nineteenth-century parlor to a gigantic public display filling
a city square in Northern Italy. The histories of media technologies are rarely
strictly linear. Despite our tendency to wrestle various technologies and
forms into neat causal chains wherein each emerging device improves upon
its predecessor in a clean narrative of technical progress, instead, technoloTeorie
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Grand Illusions
gies always emerge unevenly across complex cultural landscapes, inspired
by, and, in turn, shaping that landscape as they come into being. It is thus
difficult to assert that this or that technology was the very “first” of its kind.
However, some superlatives are more easily or quantifiably applied, such
as proclamations of size. At ten meters in diameter and capable of speeds
reaching 50 kph, Sony’s Bravia-Drome established its place in history and
garnered international attention by being vetted as the biggest zoetrope ont
record, a certification authenticated by a Guinness Book of World Records
Adjudicator in December of 2008.1
Figure 1: Bravia-Drome.
Source: © Neuropsychology: Sony BRAVIA-drome.jpg / Wikimedia Commons /
CC-BY- SA-3.0.
1
Darren MURPH, Sony Sets Guinness World Records with BRAVIA-DROME [online]. 2005.
Available at < http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/21/sony-sets-guinness-world-record-withbravia-drome/>
[cit. 19. 11. 2012].
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Traditionally forgotten as dead, failed, or obsolete media that merely
paved the way for more technically advanced cinematic apparatus, optical
toys, and particularly persistence of vision devices that showcase illusions of
motion have, in the past few decades, enjoyed a robust resurgence of interest
in critical, artistic, and popular circles. Much like their nineteenth-century
counterparts, the contemporary zoetrope is often celebrated as a scientific
spectacle, capable of entertaining and instructing with illusions of motion.
However, scant critical consideration has been given to the role that scale has
played in the success of contemporary zoetropes. Fine artists and advertisers
have scaled up the zoetrope, reconfiguring the relationship between viewer
and apparatus, and cultivating new models of spectatorship. The creators of
these devices use a range of strategies to make them accessible to increasingly
large audiences in public venues, galleries, and in video form. Close
examination of such installations challenges the traditional conception of
the audiences of these toys, positing captivated viewers in opposition to
nineteenth-century users, who were capable of manipulating these interactive
media themselves.
The successful afterlives of contemporary optical toys have been predicated
on a number of shifts. First, the context of many of these toys has
moved from the domestic to the public sphere, either into museum and gallery
spaces as works of art, or woven into the everyday experience of public
life in places such as the subway tunnel and city plaza. Secondly, whereas
optical toys were once mainstays of popular culture, they are now often
found across the cultural spectrum, in popular, commercial, and fine arts
contexts. Both of these shifts are inextricably linked to the transposition
of scale. Optical toys today have “gone big,” and while the perceptual and
technological principles undergirding their illusions of motion are not new,
their monumental size has necessitated a range of technical adjustments and
innovations to ensure their functional operation as large-scale apparatus.
Just as early optical toys served as parlor amusements and scientific novelties,
their colossal contemporary counterparts achieve equivalent status as
scientific and visual spectacles because of their commanding size.
As commercial or promotional tools, within the context of fine art, and
as public installations, large-scale contemporary optical toys have enjoyed
considerable critical attention. In their current iterations, traditional zoetropic
effects or illusions of motion are no longer simply conjured by the
user, but, rather, are propelled by strong motors or subway trains in motion.
The traditional slats through which the viewer peers have been replaced by
large architectural features and stroboscopic lights. With these adjustments,
Meredith A. Bak
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the modes of looking and models of spectatorship that these devices encourage
have also shifted. In their new modalities, these toys move around the
user’s body, are presented to them in gallery contexts that draw them in, or
work in tandem with other mechanisms that move the viewer past them. At
a time when technologies are often praised for growing smaller, lighter, and
more mobile, the contemporary optical toy is marked not by its portability,
but rather, its status as colossal.
Philosophical toys and their users: From parlor amusement to the
animation of everyday life
In their initial contexts, optical toys that showcased illusions of motion
were designed to demonstrate and popularize persistence of vision, the
theory that if the eye was bombarded by a series of images in slightly different
positions rapidly enough, the brain would combine them into a fluid
motion sequence. In order for this effect to work successfully, the images
would have to be shown rapidly (at least eight per second) and some kind of
shutter mechanism (often a slat between each picture) had to separate each
one, lest they blur into an indistinguishable continuum.2
While persistence
of vision has subsequently been discredited as an adequate description of
how the human sensorium actually processes motion, it is still frequently
used to describe the principle mechanism behind the illusion of motion
in film, where the standard frame rate is twenty-four images per second.
The optical toys that relied upon persistence of vision for their operation
such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and zoetrope, found the most
traction as novelties for mixed-aged audiences in the middle-class parlor.
These toys, many of which were introduced in the late 1820s and early 1830s,
fell into the category of “philosophical toy,” which historian of psychology
Nicholas Wade has distinguished from a scientific instrument. Wade writes
that whereas the assignation of “instrument” might be given to any object
“used to examine natural phenomena ... philosophical toys served the dual
2
A variety of frame rate ranges have been discussed in both contemporary and historical
literature. In contrast to the standard 24 frames per second for film, early literature on
persistence of vision often refers to 8 images per second as a minimum number of frames,
while Jimena Canales has identified the increment of one-tenth of a second as gaining new
import during the nineteenth century. See Jimena CANALES, A Tenth of a Second: A History.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2011.
Grand Illusions
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function of scientific investigation and popular amusement.”3
They were
prominent features in popular science literature for juveniles and amused
their users by exploiting an optical phenomenon: the ability to trick the eye
into seeing a fluid animated sequence from what was, in reality, a series of
still images.
The traditional model of spectatorship associated with such toys advanced
by Jonathan Crary in his seminal work Techniques of the Observer isr
fundamentallydisciplinaryinnature.Craryarguesthatindemonstratingthe
eye’s tendency to be tricked, these optical toys contributed to the formation
of a modern observer, whose subjective vision was standardized into a quantifiable,
predictable practice.4
Departing from this Foucauldian-inspired,
predominantly disciplinary view, other scholars have introduced alternative
ways of understanding the roles that optical toys have played in cultivating
new forms of interaction with visual media. Mary Ann Doane, for example,
has challenged Crary’s reading, asserting its failure to address the rupture or
trauma that may have accompanied these toys as they exploited and revealed
the eye’s vulnerability to optical deception, while Tom Gunning’s recent
work on the thaumatrope posits a viewer who actively delighted in the toy
as it combined both visual and literary modes of representation in its use.5
The importance of Crary’s work in wresting optical toys from a purely teleological
history culminating in the cinema cannot be underestimated, and
has enabled subsequent scholarship to incorporate these devices into new
historical trajectories, such as Wanda Stauven’s theorization that they more
rightfully belong in a history of games and interactive media.6
Common to many of these formulations is a dual focus on the form
rather than the content of these toys, and on their interactive qualities. Users
had to arrange their bodies in relation to the toy, to, for example, lean
in to peer through the zoetrope’s slots. They also maintained the ability to
manipulate the toys, to spin the drum forward and backward at varying
3
Nicolas WADE, “Philosophical Instruments and Toys: Optical Devices Extending the Art of
Seeing.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, vol. 13, 2004, no. 1, p. 102 (102–224)
4
Jonathan CRARY, Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge: MIT Press 1991, p. 17.rr
5
Mary Ann DOANE, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2002; Tom GUNNING, “Hand and Eye: Excavating
a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era.” Victorian Studies, vol. 54, 2012, no. 3,
pp. 495–516.
6
See Wanda STRAUVEN, “The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch.” In:
HUHTAMO, E. – PARIKKA, J. (eds.), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and
Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press 2011, p. 148–163.
Meredith A. Bak
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speeds, as well as to change the animated picture strips. These toys’ central
feature was their ability to manifest a memorable effect, the illusion of
motion, rather than foreground their content. Indeed, while the makers of
some of these toys attempted to represent narrative arcs, or combined the
signifying systems of words and iconography, as Crary asserts, their most
important attribute resided in popularizing a  certain understanding of
seeing as a subjective practice, through the arrangement of their formal or
material attributes. Likewise, as Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault have
suggested, one of the primary ways of distinguishing philosophical toys
from the cinema, instead locating them within narratives of toys, games, or
interactive media, has required emphasis on their “toy-like” qualities, such
as the ability of the user to change discs or bands, conjure moving images at
different speeds and in different directions, and in exhibiting a kind of activity
to contrast with the traditionally “passive” cinematic spectator (itself
a problematic formulation).7
However, both of these features: the promotion
of form over content, and the interactive qualities of the devices, have radically
been altered in the design and exhibition of contemporary large-scale
zoetropes. Although much critical interest has arisen in relation to the earliest
instantiations of these toys, equivalently thorough consideration of their
contemporary counterparts has been scarce, and thus the importance of
scale and its attendant influence on the modes of spectatorship these devices
encourage has not been explored.
During the nineteenth century, the toy panorama offered a similarly
interactive experience for its user. In his book-length study of the panorama,
Erkki Huhtamo notes the prevalence of toy panoramas designed (or constructed)
for domestic, which were in popular circulation the large public
panoramas after which they were modeled. The effect of “scaling down” the
panorama configured a new role for the user: “As the device became smaller,
the human grew – or at least seemed to grow – bigger.” These small versions,
Huhtamo suggests, enabled the user to play the role of the exhibitor, affording
7
See Dulac, Nicolas DULAC – André GAUDREAULT, “Circularity and Repetition at the Heart
of the Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Serie.” In: STRAUVEN,
W. (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions: Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2007,
pp. 227–244. Dulac and Gaudreault’s discussion of Reynaud’s praxinoscope theatre highlights
the extent to which many early philosophical toys truly possessed “toy-like” interactive
qualities; they regard the praxinoscope theatre as less of a  toy because its mechanisms of
operation are concealed from view.
Grand Illusions
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them an opportunity for engagement and control.8
Although these multiple
forms of panorama coexisted alongside one another, the shift from large to
small scale is precisely the inverse of the zoetrope’s resurgence as a largescale,
public apparatus. In contrast to the move from public amusement to
handheld gadget like those so prevalent in the contemporary mediascape,
the contemporary large-scale zoetrope represents an interesting shift from
private to public; its success is predicated on the construction of a mediated
experience over which the viewer typically maintains little control.
The critical formulations that explore the ways in which early optical
devices invited interaction from their users do not fully account for the way
that large-scale contemporary devices are meant to engage larger audiences.
As advertising and promotional tools, contemporary optical toys have relied
upon scale to prioritize their products, thus asserting not only the form of
the toy as a means of spectacle and novelty, but also prioritizing the content;
the product being advertised. Bringing what has traditionally been a domestic
entertainment into the public sphere necessarily involves scaling it up in
order to equivalently increase the size of the audience able to experience it.
Susan Davis has described the ways in which large-scale media advertisements,
what she and others have called location-based entertainment, collapse
distinctions between public and private spheres, resulting in a media
saturated environment that is seemingly undifferentiated from other spaces:
“Privately produced collective spaces based on and filled with familiar mass
media content can create a kind of seamless world, one in which the home
– currently devoted to extensive consumption of conglomerate culture – is
tightly knit to and continuous with the outside.”9
Contemporary philosophical
toys, particularly those used for advertising or promotional purposes,
often punctuate public spaces or become the surfaces surrounding their
audiences as they move through space. Their large scale, then, redefines the
relationship between people and these installations, framing them as viewers
rather than users who control the animations they see. Although these
contemporary forms are still dealing with wonder and excitement like the
nineteenth-century zoetrope, their principle element of attraction is scale,
making the illusion of motion as big as possible within these contexts.
8
Erkki HUHTAMO, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and
Related Spectacles. Cambridge: MIT Press 2013, p. 368.
9
Susan G. DAVIS, “Space Jam: Media Conglomerates Build the Entertainment City.” European
Journal of Communication, vol. 14, 1999, no. 4, pp. 435–37 (435–459).
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Surfaces and towers: Scalar adaptations of shape and direction
While scale serves as a unifying quality in common among various contemporary
philosophical toys, the particular kinds of scalar adaptations they
take are more diverse. Whereas Sony’s Bravia-Drome and other examples
are essentially gigantic versions of the traditional zoetrope, maintaining the
cyclical form of the device, other installations shift scale directionally. Deviating
from the form of the round drum, other zoetropic works extend in one
direction, making them particularly suitable for image sequences that do not
rely on repeatability, but instead depict a steady visual progression or short
narrative sequences. Linear zoetropes, for example, array their animated
sequences along a straight linear path, and the animations are brought to
movement not through the device’s motion, but as the viewer moves past
each screen or “frame.” The viewer is thus less in control of the motion sequence
as it unfolds. It is fleeting and ephemeral rather than repeatable, and
it has a more defined beginning and end rather than a perpetually renewing
cycle.
One of the most prominent such installations is Bill Brand’s Masstransciscope,
designed and first installed in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway
station in New York City in 1980, and later restored in 2008. Comprised
of 228 hand-painted panels set behind vertical bars that act as the shutter
mechanism, the installation is found along the B and Q subway lines just as
Manhattan-based trains leave Brooklyn. Commercial advertisers have also
capitalized on the use of public transit tunnels as prime spaces for promotional
content. Already traditional posters, ads, backlit displays, and screenbased
content are ubiquitous on trains and in stations, but the darkness of
the subway tunnel, combined with the captive audience and movement of
the train, make such spaces ideal for animated advertisements. New Yorkbased
company SubMedia, which specializes in linear zoetropic subway ads,
was founded in 2001. Its first advertisement was in Atlanta’s MARTA transit
system, and by 2009, the firm had installed over 40 installations in cities
around the world. Clients include companies in a variety of industries, and
the subway installations promote products ranging from films and television
shows to automobiles, airlines, and soft drinks. Since 2008, company, along
with Winnipeg-based company Sidetrack Technology, which holds the
markets in Boston and L. A., have transitioned to digital displays, enabling
content to be changed more rapidly and easily.10
Each linear zoetrope ad
10
David GOETZL, “Underground Profits: Submedia’s Corrigan Tunnels For Ads.” Media
Post [online]. 2008. Available at: <http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/92951/un
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consists of approximately two hundred individual light boxes that are three
feet square. The length of the ad’s moving image is dependent on the train’s
speed. A convincing moving image can be perceived at speeds as low as five
miles an hour, and the “resolution” or fluidity of the illusion only increases
with faster moving trains. Ads last for approximately fifteen seconds as the
train zips by.11
The zoetrope’s scale both renders it ideal for serving large audiences
(particularly in areas where commuting by public transportation is more
prevalent than driving), and is striking in that it is the viewer, not the images,
that are in motion (though the images appear animated as the viewer
moves past). Relying on subway trains propelling viewers along, commercial
linear zoetropes assume a captive viewer who becomes activated and engaged
as the ephemeral image rushes past, drawn to the backlit display by
its contrast to the surrounding darkness. The viewer has no ability to replay
or repeat the motion sequence (aside from taking the train again, which
some viewers do).12
In a moment of technological culture where images are
endlessly accessible, copyable, and retrievable, the fleeting nature of such
linear zoetropes, where images are only brought into motion by the motion
of the train, may well contribute to the effectiveness of the advertisement.
SubMedia CEO Peter Corrigan noted at least seven studies worldwide that
demonstrated audience recall rate at an average of 93%, versus an only 13%
retention rate associated with television spots.13
Such a recall rate may be
linked to a  sense of urgency associated with the images, over which the
viewer has no control to review.
SubMedia’s founder, Joshua Spodek, has also installed non-commercial
zoetropic art in the New York City Subway. For example, Union Square in
Motion (2011), a linear zoetrope placed at eye level in Union Square, is a collaboration
with students at Parsons the New School for Design.14
In contrast
to linear zoetropes installed along train lines, installations placed along
derground-profits-submedias-corrigan-tunnels-f.html#ixzz2FR7gjBZj> [cit. 11. 10. 2012].
11
Luis M. BRILL, “Subway Advertising: Outdoor Underground.” Sign Web [online]. 2006.
Available at: http://signweb.com/content/subway-advertising-outdoor-underground#.UNH
PbIUjFNY [cit. 11. 10. 2012].
12
Dana FLAVELLE, “Subway Ads’ Tunnel Vision.” The Toronto Star [online]. 2006. Availabler
at: <http://transit.toronto.on.ca/archives/data/200604100654.shtml> [cit. 23. 10. 2012]. Flavelle
describes riders disembarking from their train to go back and re-watch ads in Toronto.
13
GOETZL, “Underground Profits.”
14
Jen DOLL, “Union Square Subway Station Now Boasts the World‘s Largest Linear Digital
Zoetrope.” The Village Voice [online]. 2011. Available at: <http://blogs.villagevoice.com/
runninscared/2011/09/_josh_--_its_a.php> [cit. 10. 8. 2013].
Meredith A. Bak
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pedestrian thoroughfares function similarly to the original, hand-spun
zoetrope in that the viewer maintains a degree of control in interacting with
the illusion, able to stop, and to experience the zoetrope’s moving image
forward or backward. In scaling up the apparatus, the viewer is forced to arrange
their entire body (rather than just their eyes) in relation to the display,
thus maintaining the same kinds of playful, interactive qualities of their
nineteenth-century counterparts. However, even such interactive linear
zoetropes represent a departure from the originals, as their site-specificity
mandates that viewers be in the public places where they are installed, and
must manipulate themselves while the apparatus remains stationery. Union
Square in Motion thus has the ability to transform commuters into participants
and interactors.
Figure 2: Union Square in Motion.
Source: Union_Sq_Zoetrope_2. Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority /
Rob Wilson, September 2011, CC-BY-2.0.
Within public transit spaces, the ephemeral, site-specific nature of
linear zoetropes contributes to their status as memorable features of the
built environment. Still other contemporary zoetropes have scaled up vertiGrand
Illusions
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cally, creating impressive towers of animation. Vertically arrayed zoetropic
installations challenge the parameters of the form by building upward.
Linear zoetropes in public transit contexts are constrained by the existing
infrastructures of the systems in which they are installed (for example, the
distance of the tunnel between two stations or the length of a particular pedestrian
walkway and the way in which foot traffic utilizes the space). Largescale
vertical zoetropes, on the other hand, encounter physical constraints
with regard to their weight and volume, and the strength required to keep
such apparatus in motion. These objects are heavy, cumbersome, and do not
immediately lend themselves to views by large audiences simultaneously.
However, they are also often constructed with the express purpose of being
filmed, thus their status as enormous, handcrafted apparatus is maintained,
even as their animations are recorded onto screen-based media, a highly
commodifiable form.
The nineteenth-century zoetrope had to be placed squarely at the viewer’s
eye level in order to function: the viewer had to see the moving pictures
through the slotted drum, as looking from above only produces a blurred
image. The zoetrope’s common tabletop placement thus primed it for child
audiences (for whom the device was at eye level) and required adult viewers
to arrange themselves accordingly in relation to it. In contrast, large-scale
vertical zoetropes prevent a viewer from apprehending their animated sequences
both due to their size, and often, by excluding a shutter mechanism,
spinning for a camera to capture the animation to be viewed in video form
later. The result is a unique, intricately designed physical object, both rich
with details, and also impressively large. As a singular artifact, it is still able
to reach mass audiences because it is designed to be animated through video.
The act of filming these installations is not merely documentation; rather,
the camera’s frame rate functions as the shutter mechanism that brings
these zoetropes to life.
Such is the case with the zoetrope designed to promote Temperley
London’s Spring Summer collection in 2010. New York-based transmedia
company LEGS, a member of The Milk Group, and fashion firm Temperley
London collaborated to design and construct a  zoetrope to showcase
Temperley’s Spring/Summer collection. Construction of the zoetrope took
a month, and the video capturing its rotation, directed by Greg Brunkalla,
Georgie Greville and Geremy Jasper, showcases the animated bands in
fluid motion. The finished zoetrope is circus-themed, and is topped with
a carousel-like roof. It is twelve feet tall and boasts fifteen distinct tiers of
animation, each featuring a Temperley look. To record the motion, a camera
Meredith A. Bak
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was mounted on a pulley system that runs the vertical length of the installation
so that each individual tier’s animation could be filmed. Although
the zoetrope was displayed alongside simultaneous projections of each loop
of animation, the animations can only be seen in the video footage, which
furnishes the shutter mechanism.15
Filmmaker and animator Jim Le Fevre also constructed a  vertical
zoetrope, which was to be filmed and used in the title sequence of a Tony
Roche’s BBC docu-drama Holy Flying Circus. Le Fevre’s piece, entitled “The
Holy Flying Circus Phonotrope,” is based on his earlier experimentations
with zoetropic forms, which he has called phonotropes (early instantiations
and prototypes used record player turntables). Le Fevre, a freelancer whose
commercial work is is represented by Nexus Productions, designed the
phonotrope’s animations with the computer program 3D Studio Max, and
each individual image or frame was printed out and laser cut to be arranged
around each of a series of platters, which were constructed into a single vertical
tower. The final piece is over two meters tall, and requires ten seconds
from start up to achieve its standard speed, and sixteen seconds to go from
moving to stationary. When filmed, “The Holy Flying Circus Phonotrope”
showcases an impressive 90-second animated sequence, which was used as
the basis of the docu-drama’s opening credits. Integral to Le Fevre’s concept
of the phonotrope is the synchronization between the spinning apparatus
and the frame rate of the camera used to record its movement. In lieu of
traditional zoetrope slats, or even strobe lights to provide the “moment of
rest” or shutter mechanism between each individual frame, the phonotrope’s
illusion can only be seen when recorded and the frame rate.16
Both the Temperley zoetrope and Le Fevre’s Holy Flying Circus Phonotrope
address a central problem of the traditional zoetrope: the finitude of
an individual band or strip of animation, which has to be switched out and
replaced to vary the animated sequence. While the vertical zoetrope does
not fully solve such a dilemma (there are physical and material limits to
the size and scope of these installations), as a form, it nevertheless affords
the opportunity to display multiple simultaneous animated bands, which, in
these two cases, are tied thematically and offer a brief, simple narrative. By
scaling up the zoetrope’s form, these vertical installations prevent the viewer
15
A Q&A With Legs on the Temperley London Spring 2010 Zoetrope [online.] 2010. Available at:
<http://glossyinc.com/misc/legszoetrope.html> [cit. 26. 11. 2012].
16
Jim LE FEVRE, Holy Flying Circus Title Sequence [online]. 2011. Available at: <http:
//phonotropia.blogspot.com/2011/10/jim-le-fevre-holy-flying-circus-title.html> [cit. 18. 11.
2012].
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from observing the entire animated display at once, and in the absence of
a shutter mechanism to distinguish between images or “frames,” such as rotating
slots or strobe lines, the spinning apparatus does not appear animated
at all. Instead, these zoetropes rely upon the video’s frame rate to function
as a shutter. These vertical zoetropes then both exploit the spectacle of their
size as they are prominently displayed in public (the Temperley zoetrope
was displayed alongside projected images of its animation; after being filmed
for the docu-drama’s title sequence, Le Fevre’s Holy Flying Circus Phonotrope
was put on display in the lobby at Nexus), while also recommitting
their animated sequences onto screen-based media, thereby reducing their
physical, colossal attributes to a two-dimensional surface that can easily be
distributed.
Figure 3: Holy Flying Circus Phonotrope.
Source: Phonotrope for Title Sequence for Hillbilly Films’ ‘Holy Flying Circus’
© Fremantle Media/Hillbilly Television/Nexus Productions. In picture: Gordon
Allen & Gee Staughton assessing Phonotrope mid-build.
Vertical and linear scalar adaptations of contemporary optical toys, such
as zoetropic subway ads and enormous spinning towers covered in intricate
animations all engage the viewer not by giving them the agency to manipuMeredith
A. Bak
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late the mechanisms of motion, but by offering compelling but limited views
of their animated spectacles. Linear zoetropes in public transit spaces appear
as bursts of movement in dark tunnels, then abruptly disappear. Vertical
zoetropes are unique physical objects that command awe, but which are best
seen through a camera, which both serves to animate each image sequence
as well as offers the optimum vantage point from which to view the display.
The viewer is meant to appreciate the large structure and the human ingenuity
that went into its construction, but is also able to enjoy its animation
through a more convenient, circulatable form of the screen-based image.
The artifactual qualities of these zoetropes also contributes to the production
of supplementary media, such as “making of” videos, which similarly
call attention to the objects’ intricacies.17
Here, the spectacle of these objects’
size is just as important as the spectacle of their moving images. The flatness
of this image, along with the smooth linearity of the subway zoetrope, is
in sharp contrast to another class of large-scale philosophical toys, which
awaken multiple senses as they extend into the physical space of the viewer.
Animated objects and physical frames: Animation extruding into
everyday life
Screen-based linear zoetropes and the vertical installations that are ultimately
designed to produce screen-based products maintain a degree of versatility
or flexibility in terms of how the work can be distributed, updated,
or manipulated. SubMedia’s digital screen displays, for example, easily allow
for content to be changed or varied, while the recorded animations of the
vertical zoetropes can be shared and disseminated in as many ways as other
video or animation content. In contrast to such work, many fine artists and
entertainment companies have instead employed persistence of vision to
construct large-scale kinetic sculptures that are most prominently characterized
by their material presence and the permanence of their animated
forms. Artists such as Brooklyn-based Gregory Barsamian, Peter Hudson
of San Francisco, and London-based Mat Collishaw have all constructed
large-scale zoetropes comprised of series of three-dimensional sculptures
spinning on metal armatures and animated by external shutter mechanisms,
often strobe lights. Unlike the Bravia-Drome or commercial linear
zoetropes, which represent each animated frame or image on a single screen,
17
For example, the making of Le Fevre’s Phonotrope is chronicled in a short video. [online].
2011. Available at: <http://vimeo.com/30833811> [cit. 10. 8. 2013].
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in these artworks, each discrete position in a motion sequence is a single,
often intricately constructed sculpture.
Scale has become a distinguishing factor in describing, understanding,
and experiencing these sculptures, and many artists who work in this medium
foreground scale and monumentality in their discussion of their work.
For example, Peter Hudson, whose zoetropes have appeared at Burning
Man, describes his piece Charon (2011) on his website in terms of its physical
complexity and the labor that went into creating it. Charon depicts the ferry
operator Charon (represented as a full-size skeleton) rowing across the River
Styx. In his description, Hudson highlights its specifications and the scale of
the construction process. The series of 20 skeleton sculptures (for a total of
20 “frames”) are installed as a sequence inside the rim of 34-foot tall vertically
mounted wheel, and at over 7 tons, the sculpture required a principle
team of 20 fabricators and artists (along with over 80 volunteers) working
cumulatively over 6 thousand hours over 6 months to complete.18
Gregory
Barsamian’s Feral Font (1996), on permanent display at the Museum of thet
Moving Image in New York City, is seven feet in diameter and nine feet tall,
while Mat Collishaw’s Garden of Unearthly Delights (2009), in the collection
of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, is six and a half feet in diameter.
All of these examples, much larger than the original zoetrope, create a new
relationship between apparatus and viewer. Hudson has curiously called his
work life-size, suggesting that such scaling up somehow puts these kinds
of sculptures into a frame of reference commensurate with the scale of the
human perceptual experience.19
Animator George Griffin has offered a  formulation of what he calls
“concrete animation,” which he sees as an emerging form of contemporary
animation practice. Concrete animation, Griffin suggests, often occurs in
nontheatrical settings, such as gallery, museum, and public spaces, and consists
in one incarnation of “object animation which displays physical moving
objects arrested in synthetic time by strobe light or shuttering devices (both
low and high tech).”20
Much like the artifactual status of vertically arrayed
18
Peter HUDSON, Charon [online]. 2012. Available at: <http://hudzodesign.com/?p=192>
[cit. 12. 12. 2012].
19
The notion of a “life-sized zoetrope” is also evoked in the eponymous short film The Life
Size Zoetrope (2007) directed by Mark Simon Hewis, in which a series of participants, each
holding a single animated frame, are filmed on a rotating amusement park ride. <http://www.
animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2007/life_size_z>
20
George GRIFFIN, “Concrete Animation.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 2,
2007, no. 3, p. 262 (259–274).
Meredith A. Bak
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zoetropes, Griffin highlights these sculptures‘ materiality in his discussion.
For Griffin, a central feature of this work is that it often calls attention to
rather than conceals the way that the illusion of motion is produced. His
formulation also includes animated work that the user or viewer is able to
manipulate and play, such as flipbooks and mutoscope machines installed
in gallery spaces.
While he does not deal extensively with scale in his discussion, Griffin
describes stroboscopic and kinetic sculptures such as Barsamian’s (and,
I would add, Hudson’s) as “complex environments and contraptions which
are unwieldy, clanky, and not easily portable, designed to investigate the essential
mechanisms of perception in motion.”21
In emphasizing materiality,
the visibility of the mechanisms of motion, and instances where users are
able to control the animation, Griffin’s conclusion is that concrete animations
offer an opportunity “to return some measure of freedom and control
back to the viewer.”22
Unlike many large-scale installations that are not useroperated,
such as vertical or linear zoetropes, sculptures such as Hudson‘s
work have the capacity to engage the onlooker as a user or manipulator of the
image. However, the kind of interaction or engagement they encourage may
have less to do with the tactile exploration associated with the traditional
zoetrope (or devices like the mutoscope), instead cultivating a different kind
of participatory network commensurate with their size. Peter Hudson’s Charon,
for example, is “user-operated,” brought to motion by six pairs of users
pulling on ropes to activate the enormous wheel and synchronized strobe
light. By requiring a  group of users to synchronize with one another to
operate the sculpture, the interaction is less about manipulating the illusion
(for example, the ability to spin the nineteenth-century zoetrope forward
and backward), and more about achieving a goal through teamwork. The
zoetrope‘s operation thus becomes a context-specific performance.
Many large-zoetropic installations displayed in gallery settings do not
offer the viewer an opportunity to tactilely interact with the sculpture. Instead,
the use of external shutter mechanisms like strobe lights deliver an
experimental or exploratory experience to the viewer. For example, Gregory
Barsamian’s Feral Fount (1996) and Mat Collishaw’s Garden of Unearthly
Delights (2009) are displayed with a strobe light on a timer, demonstrating
the object as it appears both with and without the strobe-shutter mechanism.
The rotating sculpture on its armature never stops turning, though the
21
GRIFFIN, “Concrete Animation,” p. 270.
22
GRIFFIN, “Concrete Animation,” p. 273.
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Meredith A. Bak
viewer is able to observe it both fully animated (when the strobe light is on
and it gives the flickering illusion of objects in fluid motion) and a “behind
the scenes” look with the naked eye and no strobe light (when the sculpture
just appears as a blurry spinning armature to which many small objects are
attached). While the viewer is not actively in control of producing the illusion,
presenting zoetropic sculptures in environments with timed strobes
permits viewers to compare the two modes of operation. When activated, the
strobe light erases the presence of the spinning metal armature, producing
a fluid animated sequence out of physical three-dimensional objects, thereby
reconfiguring the status of animation, prompting consideration of whether
the movement is “real.” Thus, although the viewer is not directly manipulating
the sculpture, as was the case with the original zoetrope, a similar set
of preoccupations emerges from these large-scale versions about how the
images are produced. Barsamian’s Artist’s Statement addresses this mode of
engagement: “The images exist in real time and viewers are able to share the
same space with them. The illusion creates a conflict between sensory information
and logic which suggests the reality of a dream.”23
Such sculptures
thus raise the question of whether the motion is real or simulated, though
in their rapid rotation, they often generate a breeze or draft that the viewer
can feel on their skin, thus confirming that some form of motion is actually
taking place.
Conclusion
Although the basic perceptual principles that animated the earliest philosophical
toys are still at play in contemporary iterations, they are produced
in slightly different ways that enable them to serve larger audiences and
display visual spectacle on a much bigger scale. The relationship between
audience and apparatus is transformed when optical toys are scaled up; the
mechanisms for creating the illusion of motion are less frequently usercontrolled,
thus producing an audience comprised not of users or interactors,
but of viewers. When taking scale into consideration, then, theorizing
contemporary optical toys moves away from the critical line of inquiry that
positions them within a lineage of interactive media like games, and instead
roots them in a tradition of visual and scientific spectacle.
23
Gregory BARSAMIAN, Artist Statement [online]. Available at: <http://www.gregoryt
barsamian.com/> [cit. 26.11.2012].
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Grand Illusions
Fine artists, advertisers, and others have employed a range of creative
strategies in the design and construction of contemporary optical toys.
Replacing the slotted shutter with architectural features, strobe lights, and
the frame rate of a camera, these large zoetropes combine the elements of
individual artwork or piece of craftsmanship with the spectacle, wide reach,
and visual appeal of commercial work made for mass audiences. The resulting
displays thus exhibit an interesting interplay between transience and
permanence. On the one hand, in their materiality and physical presence,
large-scale zoetropes are inserted into everyday public experiences in places
like subway tunnels, museum galleries, and in television commercials. On
the other hand, in their site-specificity and tendency to be displayed under
controlled conditions (such as on a timed strobe light), their illusions remain
fleeting, and unlike many forms of new media, they cannot always be
retrieved or repeated at will by the viewer.
Contemporary adaptations of the zoetrope marshal feelings of wonder
and awe equivalent to their early precursors and invite consideration of how
their visual effects are achieved. However, their reentry into modern public
life cannot simply be understood as a resurgence of a long-dormant media
form without taking into account the importance of scale as a concept critical
to their transformation and recent success. Adaptations in size, shape,
and direction have made the zoetropic form into a media spectacle in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and have accordingly cultivated new
forms of spectatorship as animated displays surround, pass by, and envelop
the viewer.
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TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXV / 2013 / 2
////// tematická studie / thematic articles //////////////////////
THE TURING MACHINE ON
THE DISSECTING TABLE
Abstract: Since the beginning of the
twenty-first century there has been an
increasing awareness that software represents
a blind spot in new media theory.
The growing interest in software also
influences the argument in this paper,
which sets out from the assumption that
Alan M. Turing’s concept of the universal
machine, the first theoretical description
of a  computer program (software), is
a kind of bachelor machine (Carrouges).
Previous writings based on a  similar
hypothesis (Daniels, Baudrillard,
Turkle, Ascott) have focused either on
a comparison of the universal machine
and the bachelor machine in terms of the
similarities of their structural features,
or they have taken the bachelor machine
as a metaphor for a man or a computer
(artificial intelligence). Unlike them, this
paper stresses the importance of the context
(the imitation game of the Turing
test)asa keytointerpretingtheuniversal
Turing machine as a bachelor machine
and, potentially, as a self-portrait.
Keywords: Turing machine; bachelor
machine; Turing test; dissecting table;
magic
Turingův stroj
na pitevním stole
Abstrakt: Od začátku 21. století roste
vědomí, že software je slepou skvrnou
teorie nových médií. Vzrůstající zájem
o  software ovlivnil také tezi předkládaného
příspěvku. Vychází z  předpokladu,
že koncept univerzálního stroje
Alana M. Turinga je jedním z mládeneckých
strojů (Carrouges). Předchozí
texty založené na  podobné hypotéze
(Daniels, Baudrillard, Turkle, Ascott)
se zaměřily buď na  srovnání univerzálního
stroje a  mládeneckého stroje
na základě jejich strukturálních podobností,
nebo užívaly mládenecký stroj
jako metaforu člověka nebo počítače
(umělé inteligence). Na rozdíl od nich,
tento příspěvek zdůrazňuje význam
kontextu (imitační hry Turingova
testu), který je klíčem k  interpretaci
univerzálního Turingova stroje jako
mládeneckého stroje a potenciálně jako
autoportrétu.
Klíčová slova: Turingův stroj;
mládenecký stroj; Turingův test;
pitevní stůl; kouzlo
JANA HORAKOVA
Masaryk University / Faculty of Arts
Department of Musicology / Theory of Interactive Media Studies
Arna Novaka 1
602 00 Brno // Czech Republic
email / horakova@phil.muni.cz
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Jana Horakova
The software turn
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing
awareness among humanities scholars that software, the internal structure
and the processes performed inside a computer have remained a blind spot
in new media studies. Software had hitherto been considered a tool, a thing
that merely figures in the realm of a machine’s functionality. Now that the
bubble of newness of the new media has burst, it is clear that a systematic
and critical analysis of the functional features of new media and a reconsideration
of them in a historical perspective and in the cultural production
context have yet to be done.1
Inside the black box
The turn to software in the discourse of new media studies has been motivated
by an effort to open up and to analyse the black box of the computer
from the inside. The belief now is that it is not the interface but the inner
structure and programmability of the computer that defines the medium.
Thus, the turn to software marks a shift from interface to the layers of the
new media below the surface, which mostly operate unconsciously.
The internal functional features of computers affect a broad spectrum
of cultural practices that occur through and around them. The power and
influence of computational processes over different cultural practices is even
higher because they have remained in the dark, inside the box, for a long
time. Thus, the black box of the computer must be opened and examined in
the way other cultural products and practices are analysed and interpreted.
From code to context
The paper focuses on Alan M. Turing’s concept of the universal Turing
machine (also just called the Turing machine), which is the first theoretical
description of the computer program (software). The universal machine
has already captured the attention of a number of new media scholars. Approaches
within software studies are represented by Friedrich Kittler and
Mathew Fuller. While Kittler deals primarily with code as the language of
1
For more information on the software turn in new media studies, see: Jana HORÁKOVÁ,
“K recepci informatiky v kontextu společenských věd: Obrat k softwaru.” In: KLÍMOVÁ, H.
– KUŽELOVÁ, D. – ŠÍMA, J. – WIEDERMANN, J. – ŽÁK, S. (eds.), Hovory s informatiky.
Praha: Ústav informatiky AV ČR v.v.i. 2011, p. 117–135.
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The Turing Machine on the Dissecting Table
programming media, Fuller calls for a broader understanding of the programming
and processes that occur through the computer to link technology
with its context.
Kittler was one of the first media theorists to deal with software in the
new media studies perspective.2
He considers the computer to be a descendent
of the typewriter and points to the symbolic and transformative power of
the universal Turing machine. In his view, while the typewriter transformed
handwriting into a chain of discrete letters of the alphabet, the computer
completed the transformation of the symbolic order by replacing letters with
a (secret) code of numbers (ciphers).3
He writes:
From the Remington via the Turing machine to microelectronics, from mechanization
and automatization to the implementation of a writing that is only
cipher, [...] one century was enough to transfer the age-old monopoly of writing
into the omnipotence of integrated circuits. [...] All data streams flow into a state
n of Turing’s universal machine; Romanticism notwithstanding, numbers, and
figures become the key to all creatures.4
According to Kittler, the code of programming languages has become the
dominant mode of representation in the computer age.5
As a  result, the
historical order, based on narratives, has been replaced by the programmable
media order, which involves/is based on the abstract, isolated, and,
in its isolation, omnipotent universe of mathematics. At the core of the
mathematic order is a seductive concept of general substitution.6
Thus, the
computer can be seen as an isolated universe of symbols within which it is
possible to completely represent the world or even to replace a human with
a simulation of one.
2
Friedrich A. KITTLER, “There Is No Software.” In: KROKER, A. – KROKER, M. (eds.),
C-theory net [online]. Available at: <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74> [cit. 12. 8.
2013]. Originally published as Friedrich A. KITTLER, “Es gibt keine Software.” Draculas
Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam 1993, p. 225–242.
3
Friedrich A. KITTLER, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Pressrr
1999. Originally published as Friedrich A. KITTLER, Grammophon, Film, Schreibmaschine.
Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose 1986.
Se
e also Friedrich A. KITTLER, “Code (or, How You Can Write Something Differently).” In:
FULLER, M. (ed.), Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge: The MIT Press 2008, p. 40–47.
4
KITTLER, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, pp. 18–19.
5
KITTLER, “Code,“ p. 40.
6
Wendy Hui Kyong CHUN, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press 2011.
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Mathew Fuller adopted a  different perspective. His focus is the programming
and other practices that occur around and through computers. It
is his belief that in order to know more about the influence programmable
media have on our culture we must study not only the media itself, but also
the activities that occur through and around them. He writes:
Software marks another of its beginnings in Alan Turing’s desire to chart the
computable, [...] within the terms of mathematics. Computation establishes
a toy world in conformity with its axioms, but at the same time, when it becomes
software, it must, [...], come into combination with what lies outside code. [...]
And it is this paradox, the ability to mix the formalized with the more messy non-mathematical
formalisms, linguistic, and visual objects and codes, events
occurring at every scale from the ecological to the erotic and political - which
gives computation its powerful effects, and which folds back into software in its
existence as culture.7
Software as a toy
Within the effort to make software a part of culture, there is a complementary
ambition to discover new, appropriate, and often subversive methodologies
for software studies. Wendy Chun talks metaphorically about the in
media res8
perspective, referring to giving up the critical distance of general
statements in favour of close readings, microanalyses, and interpretation of
particular features and principles of computation.
This paper contributes to the software studies perspective, in which software
is seen as being part of wider cultural production and imagination and
is treated not as a tool but as a toy-concept that we can deal with playfully.t
The argument is placed within and beyond the formal scientific discourse,
as well as within conscious and unconscious parts of human mind activities.
The universal machine is treated both as a self-portrait (in the sense that it
represents activities of the human mind) and as a symbol of Alan Turing’s
personal and professional life tragedy. My hypothesis is that the universal
Turing machine can be seen as a kind of compiler, which is transcoding the
bachelor machine (the symbol of the vain urge for transcendence) into the
Turing machine (the symbol of the transformation).
7
Matthew FULLER (ed.), Software Studies: A  Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008,
p. 5–6 (1–13).
8
CHUN, Programmed Visions.
Jana Horakova
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The universal Turing machine
Alan Turing’s universal (computing) machine (later renamed the Turing
machine) warrants special attention because it is the first theoretical explanation
of the stored program computer (software), which directly influenced
early thinking on the nature of computation and the modern electronic
computer’s architecture. Moreover, the supposition that Turing based the
concept of the universal machine is that any complex operation can be reduced
to a series of simple steps described as mathematical functions (add,
subtract, multiply, etc.) is what lies at the heart of all programming.
Turing presented the concept of the universal machine for the
first time in “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem”.9
He explained that the universal machine consists
of an infinitely long piece of paper comprising an infinite number of boxes
and through these a mathematical calculation, even a very complex one, can
be performed by following a series of actions based on the symbols in the
boxes. The hypothetical machine was described in the chapter Computing
Machines as follows:
The machine is supplied with a “tape” (the analogue of paper) running through
it, and divided into sections (called “squares”) each capable of bearing a “symbol”.
At any moment, there is just one square [...], which is “in the machine”. We
may call this square the “scanned square”. The symbol on the scanned square
may be called the “scanned symbol”. The “scanned symbol” is the only one of
which the machine is, so to speak, “directly aware”. However, [...] the machine
can effectively remember some of the symbols which it has “seen” (scanned)
previously.10
As the quotation itself implies, rhetorical figures based on analogies between
the human mind and computing machines are applied next to exact mathematical
formulations on the paper. One more example for all:
For the present I shall only say that the justification lies in the fact that human
memory is necessarily limited. We may compare a man in the process of com-
9
Alan M. TURING, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”
In: Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 42, 1936, no.  2,
p.  230–265. Available online at: <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.
pdf > [cit. 14. 8. 2013].
10
TURING, “On Computable Numbers,” p. 231.
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puting a real numbers to a machine, which is only capable of a finite number of
conditions.11
However, the association of the universal Turing machine with man is made
not only on the level of metaphor. Explaining the machine’s operations
Turing refers to the similarities and analogies between a human’s and a computational
machine’s invisible functional characteristics. To enable a comparison
and link the concept of a human to the concept of a computer, the
model and definition of man must be reduced to an “information processing
system”.12
Hayles regards this reduction within Turing’s argument as a significant
contribution to the discourses of cybernetics and posthumanism.
The mechanical aesthetics of Marcel Duchamp’s seminal work The Bride
Stripped by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) enables us to compare
it with the universal Turing machine. This way we can develop thinking
in analogies between the computing machine and the exercises of the human
mind to describe their similarities in such features that lie outside the
“retinal world”. Moreover, both (conceptual) apparatuses refer to the notion
of the “bachelor machine” that makes it possible to articulate the dominant
image-myth of the mechanical age that has spread through the collective
unconscious.13
The bachelor machine
Marcel Duchamp coined the term bachelor machine (or machine célibataire)
around 1913, when he named the lower glass plate of his seminal
work The Bride Stripped by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923) or in short
The Large Glass. The bachelor machine referred to the realm of mechanical
components, a water paddle, scissors, a chocolate grinder, a sledge, and nine
balloon-like pods called the Malic Molds. These Malic Molds represent nine
bachelors condemned to eternal longing for the Bride that remains remote
in the upper glass plate realm.
11
Ibid., p. 231.
12
Katherine N. HAYLES, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Chicago – London: University of Chicago Press 1999.
13
Dieter Daniels was probably the first new media theorist to see certain resemblances
between the functional features of Turing’s computing machine and The Large Glass by Marcel
Duchamp, and elaborated this observation by using the term the bachelor machine. Dieter
DANIELS, “Duchamp: Interface: Turing: A Hypothetical Encounter between the Bachelor
Machine and the Universal Machine.” In: GRAU, O. (ed.), Media Art Histories. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press 2007, p. 103–136.
Jana Horakova
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However, later on the bachelor machine acquired the status of a broader
concept in the art theory. Michel Carrouges appropriated the term to point
out the structural similarities between Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass
and different apparatuses described by writers in the second half of the nineteenth
and the early twentieth century.14
For example, a punitive apparatus
described by Franz Kafka in the short story In the Penal Colony (1919), ory
apparatuses designated in novels Impressions d’Afrique (1915) by Raymond
Roussel, or Le Surmâle (1915) by Alfred Jarry, and many others.
By deciding to articulate the shared structure of these apparatuses with
the term bachelor machine Carrouges pays homage to The Large Glass,
which is the only visual, and not literary, depiction of a bachelor machine
within Carrouges’s theory. According to him, all bachelor machines share
“the sexual origin of The Large Glass mechanics and their signification
of death”. They assume the form of a blueprint or a diagram made of mechanical
and visceral structures, referring both to mechanisms that are
“unfinished, unfinishable, and incapable of operating in reality” and to
the “mental machines, the imaginary working of which suffices to produce
a real movement of the mind”. Thus, bachelor machines are usually reminiscent
of scientific images or technical drawings, which mediate knowledge
about un-presentable and unconscious phenomena and forces. Carrouges
interpreted the bachelor machine as a concept that emerges from and refers
to the collective imagination and that thus acquires the status of the myth of
the man of the mechanical age.
The bachelor machine’s anatomy
All bachelor machines share certain structural features. They operate as
closed circuits between an upper and a lower part, within which the message
from the upper zone is inscribed upon the lower one. Each bachelor
machine consists of two overlapping mechanisms, the desiring machine
and the suffering machine. It is a kind of diagram made of two overlapping
layers, which represents the forces of the vain desire for transgression, both
towards love and death, which characterize modern man.
The desiring machine: The Large Glass’s apparatus represents the layer
of the desiring machine. It consists of two distinct realms, the realm of the
bride above and the realm of the bachelors below. There is a vertical boundary
between them, which makes impossible their immediate contact. The
14
Michel CARROUGES, Les Machines célibataires. Paris: Arcanes 1954.
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bachelors in the lower part are imagining and desiring the bride without any
possibility of comprehension because the mechanism of communication is
frozen into death in the glass.
The suffering machine: A torture apparatus similar in structure to The
Large Glass is found in Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and represents they
layer of the suffering machine. The apparatus consists of a lower part, the
bed, and the upper part, the designer. Between them, there is a section called
a harrow, which is a piece of glass in which needles are fixed and that can
be moved up and down. The condemned man has to lie on the bed and his
offence is written into his back with the harrow. The man is not told of his
offence. He must learn it through his body, sentenced to death.
The universal machine: The universal machine shares its functional features
with other bachelor machines. It consists of two horizontally separate
realms, the upper part called the head and the lower part made of the tape.
The head scans, writes, and reads the tape according to its current state. The
writing device, in the shape of a needle, writes and erases signs according to
its program, while the tape moves back and forth, mediating communication
between the upper and lower part.
The bachelor machine in the new media discourse
Dieter Daniels made a comparison of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass
and Turing’s universal machine in an attempt to prove that the bachelor machine,
which emerged in the world of art, can offer new, illuminating insight
into the understanding of computer-mediated communication which has
become the dominant means of communication and self-representation in
the computer age. He suggested naming the current information and communication
technologies “the universal bachelor machine”. This neologism
embodies his opinion that the most significant articulations of the bachelor
machine are no longer found in the world of art but in the realm of new
media, which are more and more defining and restricting the ways in which
we communicate with other people and experience the world we live in. He
wrote, “[the] bachelor machine, having started out as an artistic vision, has
turned into a way of embracing and developing technologies”.15
15
Dieter DANIELS, “Duchamp: Interface: Turing: A Hypothetical Encounter between the
Bachelor Machine and the Universal Machine.” In: GRAU, O. (ed.), Media Art Histories.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2007, p. 130 (103–136).
Jana Horakova
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Daniels made the most refined contribution to rethinking the bachelor
machine concept in new media theory. However, other remarkable examples
of applications of the bachelor machine concept or of analogies between
computers and The Large Glass can be found in the new media discourse.
Jean Baudrillard wrote that the bachelor machine represents the artificial intelligence
of computers because they are unable feeling pleasure. He insisted
that this is the last difference between man and machine. “What will always
distinguish the functioning of even the most intelligent machine from man
is the ecstasy, the pleasure of functioning [...].”16
Sherry Turkle, focusing
on the computer user, wrote that the geeks, nerds, and hackers who spend
nights with computers live in so-called “bachelor mode”.17
Roy Ascott used
an analogy between The Large Glass and the computer monitor to provide an
insightful description of the interface. He wrote that:
We see in the work known as [...] The Large Glass a field of vitreous reality in
which energy and emotions are generated from tension and interaction of male
and female, natural and artificial, human and machine. [...] Its subject is attraction
[...]. As “ground”, The Large Glass has function and status anticipating that
of the computer monitor as a screen of operations – of transformations and as
the site of interaction and negotiation for meaning.18
The universal machine as a self-portrait
The following argument deals with similarities between functional features
of the universal machine and the bachelor machine as well. These two concepts
are treated as portrayals of the hidden (unconscious) processes that go
on beneath the computer desktop in the case of the universal machine, and
the unconscious forces inside the mind of a man in the case of the bachelor
machine.
The universal machine is seen not as a counterpart of the bachelor machine
in the techno-science discourse,19
but as one of many articulations of
16
Jean BAUDRILLARD, “Videowelt und fraktales Subjekt.” In: Ars Electronica (ed.),
Philosophie der neuen Technologien. Berlin: Merve 1989, p. 130 (113–133).
17
Sherry TURKLE, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and
Schuster 1984, p. 198.
18
Roy ASCOTT, “Is There Love in Telematic Embrace?” In: SHANKEN, E. (ed.). Roy Ascott.
Telematic Embrace. Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Berkeley – Los
Angeles – London: University of California Press 2003, p. 235 (232–246).
19
Cf. DANIELS, “Duchamp: Interface: Turing”.ff
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the bachelor machine. Thus, their relationship is not based on a dichotomy
and should rather be ideated as a kind of palimpsest, as a drawing on which
one can see at first glance the universal machine description, but upon
second glance will see the diagram of the bachelor machine emerge from
within its background.
The link between subject of Alan Turing and the concept of the universal
machine is constituted by playing with significant slips of the tongue within
scientific writings rhetoric. The genre of the universal machine image that is
going to be drawn is close to the self-portrait.
The human computer
We can ask what kind of man served Turing as the inspiration for the computing
machine. Turing described the man he had in mind in chapter 4,
Digital computers:
The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines
are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human
computer. The human computer is supposed to be following fixed rules;
he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail. We may suppose that
these rules are supplied in a book, which is altered whenever he is put on to
a new job.20
Thus, the universal machine resembles a human computer, someone who is
counting all the time. It could be a bookkeeper, an accountant, or a bureaucrat,
simply someone who is “squirreling around in the back office, shuffling
through stacks of rigged paper, reading, writing, and erasing numbers in
little boxes”.21
The freak of numbers
However, Turing points to the much better performance and accuracy of the
counting done by the universal machine than the man-computer. Thus, we
can say that the model is not merely a conscientious bureaucrat, but rather
someone who has an extraordinary memory, who is very accurate and persis-
20
Alan TURING, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, vol. 59, 1950, no. 236
(433–460). Available online at: <http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html> [cit. 12.  8.
2013].
21
Warren SACK, “Memory.” In: FULLER, M. (ed.) Software studies, p. 188 (184–193).
Jana Horakova
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tent in his counting, and who is able to solve very complicated mathematical
and logical problems. Hence, Mathew Fuller calls precursors of computers
“freaks of number”22
and he refers to computers as the descendants of these
eccentric freaks or prodigies, whose talent reveals itself in the form of monomaniacal,
enormously fast, and extremely accurate counting.23
The mathematician
We can speculate that it is almost impossible that Turing would be able
to avoid any self-reflection while describing the human mind in a state of
computing. Therefore, another possibility is to search for analogies between
the computational abilities of the universal machine and the excellent performances
of the mind of its inventor, Alan Turing himself.
Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, suggested certain relations
between the universal machine concept, in particular the first of its two
axioms, its isolation (the second one is its completeness), and the person
Alan Turing. He wrote:
[T]he discrete state machine, communicating by teleprinter alone, was like
an ideal for his own life, in which he would like to be left alone in a room of
his own, to deal with the outside world solely by rational argument. It was the
embodiment of J. S. Mill liberal subject, concentrating upon the free will and
free speech of the individual.24
The demand for the isolation of the universal machine from the outer world
can be interpreted as a decision that belongs in the realm of the cold logic
22
Matthew FULLER, “Freaks of Number.” In: COX, G. – KRYSA, J. (eds.), Engineering
Culture: “On The Author as (Digital) Producer”. New York: Autonomedia (DATA browser 02)
2005, pp.  161–175. Available on-line: <http://www.spc.org/fuller/texts/freaks-of-number/>
[cit. 12. 8. 2013].
23
Fuller noted the strange but significant structure of the book Le Calcul simplifié par les
procédés mécanique et graphique, subtitled A  History and Description of Instruments and
Machines of Calculation, Tables, Abacuses and Nomograms by Maurice d’Ocagne published
in 1894. D’Ocagne included a  list of individuals with exceptional counting skills into the
Introduction of a book dedicated to taxonomy of counting tools and machines. Fuller regarded
the arrangement as the inaugural moment of the computer age. He wrote: “What is interesting
though is that this list of numerical freaks appears at the beginning of a sober text on the
means of automating mathematical operations. It is as if it were something that has to be
acknowledged, marveled at, but disowned. The chemist describes the alchemists. This shudder
of recognition and of admiration passes. The thing is safely out of their clammy hands, but
the continuum between these persons and these machines is established.” Ibid., pp. 163–164.
24
Andrew HODGES, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. London: Unwin 1985, p. 425.
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of mathematics. However, Hodges’s psychological explanation of this demand
suggests that the rational purity of mathematical models may be just
an illusion. Instead, they should be recognized as being entwined within
human desires, fears, and hopes, as well as the human will to control and
manipulate the world.
From model to index
Taking the universal machine as a model for the human computer, a prodigy,
or a mathematician, means effacing its status as a blueprint for computational
machines in favour of treating it as a model for a human. Based on
the argument establishing a link between the universal machine and (the
person of) Alan Turing, we can refer to the universal machine as a kind of
self-portrait. However, we should ask, what is the nature of the relationship
between Turing and the universal machine?
It is common to treat the relationship between the model and the
original as representation or substitution on the basis of shared features.
However, dealing with signs in this way can lead to certain misunderstands
and even mistakes. Turing discussed the risk of thinking in terms of analogies
between an original and a model in his paper “The Chemical Basis of
Morphogenesis”25
. He wrote:
[... the] mathematical model [...] will be described. This model will be a simplification
and idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be held that the
features retained for discussion are these of the great importance in the present
state of the knowledge.26
Turing’s words about the weak status of a model express a certain scepticism
towards a mathematical model’s ability to provide a rich enough representation
of the original.
To avoid thinking in analogies between a  model and an original, in
this case between the universal machine and the person Alan Turing, we
shall instead employ the speak in terms of indexical references. While in the
first part of the paper the concept of the bachelor machine was introduced
as a suitable analogy for the universal machine by listing their structural
25
Alan TURING, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.” In: Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society of London. Series Biological Science, vol. 237, 1952, no. 641, p. 37–72. Available
online at: <http://www.jstor.org./stable/92463> [cit. 12. 8. 2013].
26
Ibid., p. 38.
Jana Horakova
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similarities. In the argument below the bachelor machine will represent an
indexical relationship between the author, Turing, and the universal machine.
This will enable us to interpret the relationship between the person
Alan Turing and the universal machine within the structure of the two
overlapping diagrams that the bachelor machine comprises. This kind of
relationship can help us to avoid the reductionism of a scientific model and
be more sensitive to the context or the background of the universal machine.
With this approach we can show that the universal Turing machine is both
the result of a brilliant exercise in mathematical logic and an index of the
person Alan Turing, the conscious and unconscious parts of his desires and
will. We could say that below the universal machine will be subjected to
a kind of x-ray examination to expose the hidden layers of unconscious and
(deleted) embodied experience.
The universal Turing machine on the dissecting table
Dissecting table
Carrouges described the bachelor machine as a “fantastic image that transforms
love into the technique of death” that is first of all an “improbable
machine”, and said that “the determinant structure of these unlikely looking
machines is based on mathematics”.27
In the effort to explain the basic principles
shared by all bachelor machines, he pointed to its simpler precursor,
Lautréamont’s formula from Le Chants de Maldoror (1869, Chant VI):r
He is beautiful [...] like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella
on the dissecting table.28
Carrouges turns the interpreter’s attention away from the heterogeneous
setting created by the umbrella as a male symbol and the sewing machine
as a female symbol to a third object in the background of the image, the
dissecting table. The dissecting table does not figure among the bachelor
machine’s mechanical and sexual components. However, its importance for
understanding the bachelor machine is crucial.
27
Michel CARROUGES, “Istruzione per L’uso / Instructions for Use.” In: CLAIR, J. –
SZEEMANN, H. (eds.). Le macchine celibi / The Bachelor Machines. Catalogue La Biennale di
Venezia. Venice: Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte 1975, p. 21 (21–49).
28
Ibid. p. 22.
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[The dissecting table] represents a specific function arising out of the system
of the two ensembles. Instead of love bed, signifying union and love, the
dissecting-table expresses the bachelor machine’s specific function, which is
solitude and death.29
The principal importance of the background, which unites the bachelor
machine’s components into one system, is confirmed in Marcel Duchamp’s
response to the letter sent to him by Carrouges, in which he explained the
concept of the bachelor machine on the basis of the correspondence between
The Large Glass and Franz Kafka’s short novels Metamorphosis and In the Penal
Colony. Even though Duchamp expressed doubts about using a method
based on searching for structural analogies between the upper and the lower
part of The Large Glass and, for example, between the sewing machine and
the umbrella in Les Chantes de Maldoror, he appreciated the analogy be-rr
tween the transparent glass plates and the dissecting table. He wrote:
6 Feb. 1950
My dear Carrouges,
[...]
I can tell you that the introduction of the ground theme explaining or provoking
certain ‘acts’ of the Mariée and the bachelors, never came into my mind
– but it is likely that my ancestors made me “speak” like them [...].
Celibately yours,
Marcel Duchamp30
The Turing test
Analogically to the transparent glass plates of The Large Glass, the crucial
role of the background in the universal Turing machine setting is played
by the imitation game of the Turing test. Turing explains the rules of the
game as follows:
The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we
call the “imitation game.” It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman
(B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in
29
Ibid.
30
Jean CLAIR – Harald SZEEMANN, Le macchine celibi / The Bachelor Machines, catalogue
La Biennale di Venezia. Venice: Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte 1975, p. 49. Available online at: <http://
www.scribd.com/doc/46775310/The-Bachelor-Machines> [cit. 12. 8. 2013].
Jana Horakova
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a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is
to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.31
In the second round of the game, one player is replaced by a machine. Turing
asks:
[...] “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will
the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he
does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions
replace our original, “Can machines think?”.32
However, it is not the rules for the players’ actions that plays the crucial
role in the experiment but rather the arrangement of Turing test’s based on
remote, mediated communication. Turing described this as follows:
[...] the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement
is to have a  teleprinter communicating between the two rooms.
Alternatively the questions and answers can be repeated by an intermediary.
[...] The new problem has the advantage of drawing a fairly sharp line between
the physical and the intellectual capacities of a man.33
The magic trick
Katherine N. Hayles has noted the importance of the setting in which Turing’s
imitation game takes place. She writes:
Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early
stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. The
important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is a man,
the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much
earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic system in which represented
bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine
interfaces.34
The Turing test was intended to serve as a means of eliminating the body
from the definition of man. Thus it was possible to reduce man to an in-
31
TURING, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” p. 433.
32
Ibid., p. 433.
33
Ibid., p. 433.
34
HAYLES, How We Became Posthuman, p. xiii.
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formation processing system and intelligence to the “ability to manipulate
formal symbols rather than enaction in the human life-world”.35
While in
the first round, the game deals with the performativity of gender, in the
second one, it deals with the performativity of intelligence. This way, Turing
was able to make his audience/readers accept the comparison and the hypothetical
intersubstitutability of a human’s and a computational machine’s
intelligences. Hayles wrote that: “[I]n the push to achieve machines that can
think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at
the heart of the Turing test.”36
It is significant that Hayles highlighted the ritual and performative
quality of the Turing test in the introductory chapter of her book How We
Became Posthuman.37
She saw in the imitation game “the inaugural moment
of the computer age”, for it erased the embodied experience from the model
of human and established a close circuit of references between human and
machine within a mediated environment. According to Hayles, the Turing
test proved that:
[T]the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer
a natural inevitably but a contingent production, mediated by technology that
has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer
meaningfully be separated from the human subject.38
The Turing test’s setting of mediated communication, as well as the
transparent glass plates of The Large Glass, or the dissecting table in Les
Chants de Maldoror are just different examples of the background whichr
unites the mechanical and sexual components of bachelor machines to trigger
their meaning production. It is as though the imitation game of the Turing
test were taking place on the “dissecting table”, where a man is divided
into a body and a mind to be transposed onto the level of their symbolic
representations. The magic trick of the Turing test allows a human or a machine
to be judged by the interrogator on the basis of the communication
established through symbolic exchange and on intellectual arguments only.
However, Turing learned first-hand during his judicial proceeding that
neither a typewriter nor a computer interface could protect him if he breaks
35
Ibid., p. xi.
36
Ibid., p. xi.
37
Ibid.
38
Ibid., p. xiii.
Jana Horakova
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the laws of the society he lives in. The sentence for his “crime” was inscribed
deep in his body by his hormonal treatment.
Alan, the Bachelor machine
Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23 June 1912 in London in the district of
Paddington, and he died on 7 June 1954 in Winslow in Cheshire. He was an
outstanding mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist.
His homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution against him in 1952,
when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom.39
He was
arrested, convicted of homosexuality, and put on trial for “acts of gross indecency”
between adult men. To avoid imprisonment, Turing agreed to submit
to a one-year course of oestrogen therapy. In other words, he underwent
a chemical castration. The treatment caused gynecomastia as a side effect.
However, the sentence he was subjected to also had other side effects. He was
excluded from all government research projects owing to a loss of confidence
in him and his unclean criminal record. Two years later, in 1954, he committed
suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.40
Coming out of “the toy world”
The Turing test’s magic power, which lies in its ability to change someone’s
identity (a man into a woman or a man into a machine) within the setting
of the imitation game, was re-enacted by Duchamp and Turing themselves
later when their work on their bachelor machines was done. In this sense, it
was as though The Large Glass and the universal Turing machine were just
blueprints or sketches for further embodiments of the invisible forces whose
traces maps the bachelor machine diagram.
Subsequently, Marcel Duchamp playfully dealt with performativity of
a gender identity on his famous transvestite photographs made by Man Ray,
which show his alter ego Rrose Sélavy. Alan Turing wrote later on “On the
Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”41
”” , his prophetic contribution to the math-
39
The law was not repealed until 1967.
40
Turing’s biographers, Hodges and Leavitt, suggested that Turin’s death was the re-enactment
of a scene from his favourite film Snow White (Walt Disney, 1937). Andrew HODGES, Alan
Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. London: Unwin 1985; David, LEAVITT, The Man Who
Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. New York – London: W. W.rr
Norton & Co. 2006.
41
TURING, “On The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.”
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ematical biology. He wrote the paper at the same year when he underwent
his judicial proceeding, which ended with condemnation to the hormonal
treatment of his homosexuality.
Both, Duchamp and Turing, had undergone similar development in
their interests from mechanic arrangements to organic matters. While Duchamp
had focused on the optical effects, which can unsettle our faith into
empirical experience, thus he remained on the surface of things. Turing’s
affair with the organic matter was much more deep-seated, for he not only
contributed to the mathematical biology, but he underwent the substantial
body transformation during the hormonal therapy, and he committed suicide
just two years later.
Within these regrettable events, he underwent transformation from the
male to female body, and from the life to the death. Turing made coming
out of the toy world of representation (the metaphor fits the world of both
art and mathematics) and entered into the embodied, physical experience of
becoming someone else.
It can be said that Turing performed the perfect magic trick of the Turing
test for it was not a trick or an illusion.42
Unlike Duchamp, his transformation
occurred, literally, within his own body. Thus, he should be recognized
as not only the father of modern computing but also the first post-human,
the “new mutant”,43
in the radical sense of the word.
Epilogue
Turing’s mathematical hypotheses concerning the universal machine and
the Turing test failed in practice. The personal tragedy of Alan Turing proved
that the universal machine’s axioms, its isolation and completeness, can
work within the clean laboratory of theory only, but cannot be accomplished
once the universal machine acquires material form, for example, the form
of a personal computer, and becomes part of culture. However, we can say
that Turing won the hypothetical competition between him and the other
magician, Duchamp, in terms of the magic of transformation. Moreover,
he became aware of the illusion of his conviction that scientific discourse
evolves within the logic of scientific discourse. He feared that the sentence
he had to face in his private life would affect the way his professional work is
42
See the film The Prestige (2006).
43
Leslie FIEDLER, “The New Mutants.” In: Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. 2nd vol. Newrr
York: Stein and Day 1965, pp. 392–400. Available online at: <.http://www.texaschapbookpress.
com/newmutants01.htm > [cit. 12. 8. 2013].
Jana Horakova
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treated by scientific society. He expressed his apprehensions in a syllogism at
the close of a letter to his friend Norman Routledge.
Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines cannot think.
Yours in distress,
Alan44
Turing’s contributions to computer science and his influence on disciplines
like artificial intelligence and advanced robotics are enormous. However,
his personal tragedy was not discussed in public for a long time. Not
until 10 September 2009, when, following an internet campaign for Turing,
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on
behalf of the British government for “the appalling way he was treated”.
Meanwhile, Turing’s chemically crippled body has worked like an archetype,
in the deep layers of the discourse of computer culture, sublimated
in Turing’s writings, and interpreted as a logical slip.45
Turing, the man, the
numbers freak, the excellent (human) computer, was for a long time erased
from the history of computing, and substituted by the universal machine,
referred to in short, but significantly, as the Turing machine.
To add the universal machine to the list of bachelor machines is a gesture
of transposition from the realm of mathematics to the realm of culture, from
the realm of pure logic to the realm of self-expression. By treat the universal
machine as the bachelor machine the unconscious, the sublimated ”personal
obsessions”46
” that cannot be excluded from the realm of science are made
44
LEAVITT, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 5.
45
Hodges interprets Turing’s inclusion of gender in the imitation game of the Turing test as
a “red herring”. He wrote that the passage of the argument “was not expressed with perfect
lucidity. The whole point of this game was that a successful imitation of a woman’s responses
by a man would not prove anything. Gender depended on facts which were not reducible to
sequences of symbols.” HODGES, The Enigma of Intelligence, p. 415.
46
Curator Harald Szeemann revisited and expanded Carrouges’ argument in 1975, when he
organized exhibition inspired by Duchamp’s The Large Glass entitled The Bachelor Machines.
The exhibition belongs to the series of his exhibitions on personal obsessions. His attempt
was to visualize the myth, thus he displayed fabricated full-scale models of different bachelor
machines, including the torture and execution device, which Kafka described in In the Penal
Colony at the exhibition. Szeemann interpreted the bachelor machine in a later interview:y
“It had to do with a belief in eternal energy flow as a way to avoid death, as an erotic of life:
the bachelor as rebel-model, as antiprocreation.” Hans OBRIST, A Brief History of Curating.gg
Ostrava: Ringier Print 2008, p. 92–93.
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visible. Paradoxically, from this point of view, the universal machine loses
its uniqueness as the foundation of individual genius, and it becomes part of
the many articulations of the bachelor machine myth. This way the universal
machine becomes part of general cultural production and its significance
penetrate far and deep into our culture.
Jana Horakova
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TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXV / 2013 / 2
////// tematická studie / thematic articles //////////////////////
PHILOSOPHICAL TOYS
AS VECTORS FOR
DIAGRAMMATIC CREATION:
THE CASE OF THE
FRAGMENTED ORCHESTRA
Abstract: The central topic of this essay
consists into establishing a  relation
between two dimensions of formation:
the conceptual process of creating philosophical
toys – that is of reelaborating
existing philosophical concepts, mainly
deriving from the thought of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in terms of
their potential as ‘operative constructs’
– and their parallel redeployment
towards the specific problem of analyzing
a recent transdisciplinary artwork
(The Fragmented Orchestra by Jane
Grant, John Matthias and Nick Ryan).
By means of this strategical shift, theory
looses its character of explanation and
illustration. Philosophy as toy becomes
rather the matter of evaluating the complexity
of a specific artistic composition
in terms of its aesthetic potential. It
contributes towards developing metastable
conditions of mutual resonance
between heterogeneous modalities of
creation.
Keywords: rigorous analogy,
individuation, conjunctive synthesis,
neuronal plasticity, art and aesthetics
of sound creation
Filosofické hračky
jako vektory diagramatické
tvorby:
případ Fragmentovaného
orchestru
Abstrakt: Ústředním motivem této
studie je ustavení vztahu mezi dvěma
dimenzemi utváření: konceptuálního
procesu vytváření filosofických hraček
(tj. přepracování existujících filosofických
pojmů s ohledem na jejich potenciál
coby „operativních konstruktů“,
odvozeného zejm. z  myšlení Gillesa
Deleuze a  Félixe Guattariho) a  jejich
současného využití pro analýzu nedávného
transdisciplinárního uměleckého
díla (Fragmentovaného orchestru
Jane Grant, Johna Matthiase a  Nicka
Ryana). Díky tomuto strategickému
posunu ztrácí teorie povahu vysvětlení
a  ilustrace. Filosofie se coby hračka
naopak stává způsobem zhodnocení
komplexity specifické umělecké kompozice
z hlediska jejího estetického potenciálu.
Přispívá k rozvoji metastabilních
podmínek vzájemné rezonance mezi
heterogenními modalitami tvorby.
Klíčová slova: rigorózní analogie;
individuace; konjunktivní syntéza;
neuronální plasticita; umění a estetika
zvukové tvorby
CLAUDIA MONGINI
Independent researcher Vienna // Austria
email / cmongini@gmx.at
url / www.claudiamongini.net
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Claudia Mongini
„How is it possible to come to massively produce a desire to create, a collective
generosity, by means of the tenacity, the intelligence and the sensibility proper
to arts and sciences.”
Félix Guattari
“The plasticity of time is inscribed in the brain.”
Catherine Malabou
Introduction
This paper examines the role of philosophical concepts as vehicles for
knowledge production in relation to an artwork which combines recent scientific
(neurophysiological and physical) developments into the implementation
of new sonic experiences (The Fragmented Orchestra by Jane Grant,
John Matthias and Nick Ryan). The interest in this work arises from the
fact that in it scientific, technical, sonic and visual forms of experience (and
not only given results) intrinsically contribute to the emergence of a nonreductionist
dimension of aesthetic expression. In this frame, the role of the
philosophical concept as toy becomes that of examining the artworks along
their complex compositional procedures, in order to extract and transpose
the operative conditions of art towards more general questions concerning
collective sensibility. That is if, as it will be shown, The Fragmented Orchestra
creates the conditions for transposing a physical model1
from the realm of
neurophysiology towards the aesthetic one in terms of a procedure of deand
recomposition of sonic occasions, the task of philosophical tools will be
that of transferring the operative field of scientifico-aesthetic construction
proper to the artwork towards the aesthetico-political question of emergence
of collective sensibility.
The method adopted here is what Muriel Combes following the thought
of Gilbert Simondon defines as “rigorous analogy”2
. Rigorous analogy dismisses
both the use of visual and linguistic metaphors, as well as the structural
transfer of logical conditions from one epistemic domain to another. It
is a question of avoiding any form of reductionist similarity deriving from
the transposition of elements of knowledge conceived as being „already
1
Eugene IZHIKEVICH – Joe A. GALLY – Gerald M. EDELMAN. “Spike-Timing Dynamics
of Neuronal Groups.” Cerebral Cortex, vol. 14, 2004, pp. 933–944.
2
Muriel COMBES, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press 2012, p. 10.
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Philosophical Toys as Vectors for Diagrammatic Creation
there“ that is, independently from the study of their formation. Rather than
transferring the whole logical structure of what is already known and taken
for granted, the emphasis is set onto the problem of re-materialization of
the logical operations pertaining to an established epistemological domain
within the realm of a new productive dimension.
The idea of rigorous analogy is intimately related to the concept of
individuation, which is understood as the operation leading towards the
constitution of individuals, that is generic beings. What is significant to
the current inquiry, is that individuation intimately relates the ontological
operation of constitution of beings to the epistemological one concerning
the creation of knowledge. The “rigour” of analogy derives explicitly from
conceiving the relation between being and knowledge not in terms of their
resultant conditions, i.e. the appearances they might take, but of the operations
they are both traversing. According to this approach, analogy becomes
a matter of “squaring”,3
that is of assigning another dimension of power to
the intensity of the original discovery. Squaring emphasizes the fact, that ity
is not only the question of establishing a relation between different formations
of knowledge and of beings, but that the relation has to be conceived in
terms of a relation of relation: what gets transferred is not only a particular
result deriving from specific procedures of knowledge production, but the
structural logic determining the modality of individuation in a particular
case. Furthermore, because of the tight relation between being and knowledge,
the idea of squaring does not only refer to the relational character of
a mathematical operation, but acquires the status of a “physical paradigm”,4
inasmuch as the operation allowing to extract the genetic conditions of
emergence, is always bound to the material conditions determining the
specificity of each case. Muriel Combes observes that the explicit reference
to physics is “a matter of pinpointing the epistemological role”5
played by
the notion of the individual; that is, emphasis is set upon the tight relation
between being in its material development, and the operative dimension of
knowledge, which it comes both to acquire and to express.
Given these premises, I will proceed in the following way: first, I will
describe The Fragmented Orchestra in terms of its aesthetic recomposition of
physical and neurophysiological zones of intensity; I will subsequently introduce
philosophical concepts such as disparation and individuation; next,
3
Ibid., p. 11.
4
Ibid., p. 12.
5
Ibid., p. 13.
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I will relate the heterogeneous dimensions of the artwork and that of the
concepts by means of the operative dimension of “rigorous analogy”. Last,
I will address the role of theoretical concepts as toys by examining the field
of problematic tension unfolding between arts and science and philosophy,
and addressing issues of epistemic creation and collective sensibility.
First Squaring: The “tiny brain” as a device of sonic de- and
re-composition
The Fragmented Orchestra by Jane Grant, John Matthias and Nick Ryan,
interrelates visual, scientific and sonic dimensions into complex patters of
de- and re-composition.
These disparate aesthetic compounds are orchestrated together by
means of transferring in the realm of aesthetics the operative conditions
of a  mathematical model currently implemented in brain research. This
model6
, accounts for a  quantitative description of the electrical activity
of single neuronal cells in the brain area called cerebral cortex. This thin
section comprising the outermost neuronal layers below the scull, functionally
accounts for the area where lower information deriving from specific
internal components gets reshaped into the formation of wider and more
complex patterns of association. It is the locus where sensory and motor
information is combined and integrated with the cognitive processing of
thinking and language. In more general terms, and this is important for
the argumentative line which follows, the cerebral cortex accounts for the
straightforward relation between levels of perceptual experience and processes
of abstract composition.
By transposing the functional conditions of mathematics from brain science
into the realm of art, The Fragmented Orchestra “squares” – in Muriel
Combes terminology - the activity of small portions of the cerebral cortex: it
artificially reconstructs their dynamics into sonic and visual aesthetic traits.
Significantly, the artificial reconstruction of a  small part of cerebral
cortex, is not a metaphor of the activity of the human brain. “Squaring”
as will be shown, means here to reconstruct another cerebral cortex whichr
aesthetically modulates and recombines specific levels of expressive and
perceptual experience with forms of abstract reduction (the aesthetic action
of the involved algorithm).
6
IZHIKEVICH – GALLY – EDELMAN, “Spike-Timing Dynamics of Neuronal Groups.”
Claudia Mongini
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The work was widely installed across UK between December 2008 and
February 2009. It consisted of 24 fixed geographical locations, including
FACT Gallery, Liverpool, University of Plymouth, Landscove Primary
School, Devon, The National Portrait Gallery, London, Millennium Stadium,
Cardiff and Kielder Observatory, Northumberland. At each of the
locations, a  ‘soundbox’ was installed, which consisted of a  microphone,
a small computer connected to the internet and a Feonic “drive”, a device
which transmits audio through resonating architectural surfaces.7
These sounds were transmitted across the internet and were microgranuled
trough the activity of an artificially reconstructed 24 neuron “tiny cerebral
cortex” situated in the FACT Gallery in Liverpool. The activity of the
cortex was complexified by the introduction of two further computational
elements responsible for the interconnection between the activity of single
neurons and thus accounting for the creation of the patterns of association
which the cerebral cortex is responsible for. Spatial delays in the information
propagation between neurons were included, which cause a shift delay
in the interconnection between sounds. The time-difference of the arrival
of heterogeneous sounds to the “tiny cortex”, was registered by another
algorithmic component, the so called “Spike Timing dependent Plasticity”
which accounts for a modulation of the connection strength between the
single neurons, and thus for a reconfiguration of the whole sonic event without
erasing the singular specificity of each sonic occasion related to one of
the disparate locations. Furthermore, the activity of each artificial neuron
dissolved the incoming sound into sound grains thus adding a further level
of complexity to the whole design, but doing that trough subtle processes of
dephasing and decomposition.
While in the gallery, “the audience, weaving their way through the
space, was able to hear the live composition as a whole and listen to each of
the sites individually”8
, the artificial brain also accounted for sending back
from the gallery sounds to each of the sites scattered in the UK. The public
in the gallery was thus not only invited to listen, but also to compose the
work by moving through the space, and to take notice of the effects of this
composition on an internet site which registered what was happening on
each of the heterogeneous geographical places:
7
Jane GRANT – John MATTHIAS, “Shifting Topographies: Sound and the Fragmented
Orchestra.” In: RUGG J. – CRAIG M. (eds.), Spatialities: The Geographies of Art and
Architecture. Bristol: Intellect 2011, p. 50 (50–63).
8
GRANT – MATTHIAS, “Shifting Topographies: Sound and the Fragmented Orchestra,”
p. 51.
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The sounds of The Fragmented Orchestra will vary according to location;
wind over Black Fell, inner city traffic, chanting from sports stadia and
the chatter of migrating birds arriving for the winter will be combined with
incidental and performed sounds from members of the public.9
The artificial cortex becomes a machine in terms which get close to the
definition given by Deleuze and Guattari10
: according to them machines are
not to be confused with some predetermined structure, but they constitute
the mechanisms for creating immanent and transformative relations within
the realm of specific concrete constellations. In the case of the fragmented
Orchestra, the machine consists in the connection between a layered spatiotemporal
dimension which is on one side extended physically (across UK) but
whose spatiality solely accounts for the transmission of a non predetermined
sonic temporal sequence: ”Occasionally, huge sonic ‘waves’ filled the gallery
with sound, whilst at other times, smaller more discrete events occurred
which had to be listened more intently.”11
This macroscopic cartography is
further connected to the microscopic spatiotemporal patterns in the brain of
the listeners/actors. There, the interplay between the spatial distribution of
neurons and the evolution of their firings accounts (among other things), for
the possibility of the formation of new neuronal junctions (synapses) from
a different experience of sensation.
The machinic function of the artificial cortex, can be now understood
more clearly within the realm of the complex relation between the macroscopic
geographical dimension and the microphysics of brain activity of the
listener. The “tiny cortex” relates the heterogeneic dimensions of disparate
sounds and neuronal activity, but does this by means of a twofold disjunction.
Grant and Matthias insist that the reconstructed brain cannot generate
new sound but instead it is “the noise in the system [which] keeps the model
buoyant and allows to self generate events from previous stimuli”.12
The oc-
9
Jane GRANT – John MATTHIAS – Nick RYAN, “The Fragmented Orchestra – About the
Project” [online]. 2008. Available at: <http://thefragmentedorchestra.com/about/> [cit. 31. 1.
2013].
10
Gilles DELEUZE – Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press 1987, p. 510–511
11
GRANT – MATTHIAS, “Shifting Topographies: Sound and the Fragmented Orchestra,”
p. 51.
12
Ibid., p.  60. See also: Jane GRANT – John MATTHIAS – Tim HODGSON – Eduardo
MIRANDA, “Hearing Thinking.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5484, 2009, p. 237
(234–240); John MATTHIAS – Jane GRANT – Nick RYAN, “The Fragmented Orchestra.” In:
MIAH, A. (ed.), Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty. Liverpool: FACT – Liverpool
University Press 2008, p. 73 (71–75).
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currence of this endogenous activity is not a side effect but goes along with
“the central artistic aim” of the project, which is “to affect the rupturing of
the boundaries between the sensed and the action, removing the sensed and
the sensory part of the “self”.13
This makes the “tiny cortex” a sonic instrument
of its own, its sound being created by a mathematical modelling of
the neurophysiological property of synaptic plasticity. The implementation
of this property via mathematical algorithm, accounts for the fact that the
microscopic sonic events produced by the firings of each neuron, are encouraged
by the enhancement of a wider range of interneuronal connections.14
That is, sonic events are on one side the expression of singular nervous cellr
activities but at the same time it is those accounting for the construction
of interrelation patterns between neurons. And furthermore, the aesthetic
significance of the tiny cortex arises as we have seen from a will to create
sensory disconnections, and on the other side it is the machine relating
geographically distant sounds and brain activities. What are the aesthetic
and philosophical inferences of this artistic strategy? Can this machinic
(definire) device be translated into an appropriate terminology in order to
engage with the aesthetic (or aesthetico-political) question of emergence of
collective sensibility?
I address these questions by introducing another artificial entity: the
Simondonian and Deleuzian concepts of disparity and individuation. The
idea is to open a problematic field between the aesthetic dimension of The
Fragmented Orchestra and the conceptual lenses of philosophy. I will then
show that when entering in relation with the artwork, the concepts become
‘toys’, inasmuch as they acquire the function of clinical evaluation of a work
of art. This means that philosophy does not account for a judgement “in
terms of transcendent or universal criteria”,15
but examines how the conditions
of “formation of new blocks of sensation”,16
concur to the creation
of a new aesthetic world (or, more specifically in this case, a new aesthetic
brain). What is furthermore important to stress out, is that the “toy” does
not exist as a pre-given entity since the beginning. Rather, it gets constructed
13
GRANT – MATTHIAS – HODGSON – MIRANDA, “Hearing Thinking,” p. 234.
14
Daniel JONES – Jane GRANT – John MATTHIAS – Tim HODGSON – Nick RYAN –
Nicholas OUTRAM “The Fragmented Orchestra.” Proceedings of the International Conference
on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, vol. 9, 2009, p. 299 (297–302).
15
Daniel W. SMITH, “‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique Et Clinique’ Project.” In:
DELEUZE, G., Essays Critical And Clinical. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota
Press 1997, p. liii (i-lvi).
16
Ibid., p. lii.
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in the very process of operative tension with the aesthetic realm. Construction
doesn’t mean to “correct” or to change the intrinsic conceptual
meaning of philosophical theories, which are de facto already at hand. At
the contrary, it means to precisely investigate their movements, strategies
and expressions of thought, and to inflect (i.e. differentially deviate) them
towards the engagement with distant matters of concern. It means to create
what Alberto Toscano defines as “a local resolution of disparation, the
invention of a compatibility between heterogeneous domains and demands:
an ‘emergence produced by asymmetrical captures correlated in time’.”17
Out of this perspective, it can be seen that The Fragmented Orchestra
provides the perfectly matching “artistic matter” to the conceptual move I’m
interested to follow. First, because it is in itself an expression of the necessity
of combining elements of knowledge deriving form heterogeneous epistemologies
(that is from physical, neurophysiological, musical and visual art
problems), necessity which is reflected by the different backgrounds of the
involved actors (the artist Jane Grant, thet physicist, musician and composer
JohnMatthias,andthecomposerNickRyan).18
Secondandmoresignificantly,
because it has brilliantly resolved the tension between the heterogeneities at
stake (in the creation of the “tiny brain”, to resume it in synthesis).19
The question that now opens up, is how the “tiny cortex” qua resolved
artistic disparation, can enact further fields of problematic tension, that is to
produce the conditions for other problematic fields between heterogeneous
entities to emerge. In order to address this issue, I introduce the philosophical
concepts relevant to this realm, in terms of a brief geneaological introduction
and an analysis of their unfoldings in the thought of Simondon and
Deleuze. Disparity and individuation are relevant inasmuch they constitute
the conceptual entities enabling to state the issue of problematic tension
from a theoretical point of view.
17
Alberto TOSCANO, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant
and Deleuze. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006, p. 149.
18
MATTHIAS – GRANT – RYAN, “The Fragmented Orchestra – About the Project.”
19
In this regard it is significant to note that the Fragmented Orchestra was awarded with
the PRS Foundation New Music Award Prize, recognition being “the most financially
prestigious for new music in the UK and [having] been likened to the Turner Prize for music.”
(MATTHIAS – GRANT – RYAN, “The Fragmented Orchestra – About the Project]). However
it is symptomatic that despite this prestigious recognition there is barely any theoretical essays
engaging with it. This is related to the fact that more traditional (art) theory approaches are
unable to grasp the fundamental heterogeneity at the basis of the work.
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Philosophical concepts: The emergence of dramatization.
The concept of disparity was coined by the French Epistemologist Gilbert Simondon
in the late fifties. Simondon has used this term in order to indicate
the tension between different energetic levels as the motor leading towards,
what he calls, a process of individuation. The concept of individuation is
introduced in order to describe the active element in the emergence and
becoming of an individual entity. It opens an important philosophical shift:
the individual (i.e. the being, any kind of individuated entity), is taken under
consideration not from the point of view of its full constitution, but from its
genesis. And even more important, the genesis is not inquired from a move
a posteriori that is, moving from the perspective of an already constituted
individual towards the inquiry of its genetic becoming. Rather, individuation
describes the process of becoming individual as such.
To set the focus onto a process, onto something that necessarily entails
a level of indeterminacy, does not mean that the content becomes vague.
Quite the contrary. Simondon’s inquiry regards the determination of precise
conditions which are both generative of the process and allow for its
sustainability. Brian Massumi20
calls them “enabling constraints”. Enabling
constraints can be seen as juncture knots in order to allow for the onset
of processes of metastable resonance. Processes of resonance, Simondon
explains, significantly involve an exchange between already constituted beings,
but within a systematics which is not yet fully individuated. The yet
individuated part accounts for the ability and the means to produce the
exchange, the not yet individuated part, constitutes the “elbow room” which
gives space for the occurrence of novelty, that is, allows for the emergence
of information which has not yet come to constitution. The dimension of
indetermination allowing both for the openness, but also for the potential
of novelty, constitutes the dimension of metastability. Thinking in terms of
resonant metastability within the specifics of this field allows to open a space
for both science and arts to be grasped in the dimension of their operative
emergence.
It was Gilles Deleuze who rapidly picked up Simondon’s notion of disparity
and individuation. The fifth chapter of his 1968 ontological treatise
“Difference and Repetition”, starts with the concept of disparity borrowed
from Simondon. In the reading proposed by Deleuze, disparation does not
only connect to different energetic levels but also to the Leibnizian theory of
20
Brian MASSUMI, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2011, p. 115.
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differential calculus. Significantly, this move allows for the inclusion of the
abstract operative dimension of variables.t
Disparation in Deleuze’s understanding stands for an infinitesimal difference
of intensity. It is conceived as a “difference operator” enacting both
the occurrence of visible phenomena and the production of its complex surrounding
relations. It is this operational shift, what allows individuation to
become performative.
Deleuze understands this performative moment in terms of “dramatization”.
It is at the level of infinity, Deleuze explains, that the intensity ofy
disparity becomes indistinguishable from its extensity i.e. from its more
proper physical and sensuous qualities. It is in this way that heterogeneous
elements are not only able to emerge, but also to acquire a performative
character, as its very constitution accounts at the same time for the creation
of new relations, of new channels of deep communication. In other terms:
the metastable resonance between different entities, does not only open for
new levels of communication, but lies at the very onset of their conditions
of creation. Here is where the onset of the transductive condition starts: it
accounts for the actualization, (the becoming real) of the relation between
conditions of creation and modes of metastable communication. In other
terms: the “rigorous analogy” introduced above, can now be defined more
precisely in terms of intertwining differential processes which involve both
microsteps of genetic construction and transmission towards another epistemic
dimension.
“Dramatization”, in Deleuze’s conception, does not only express an
ontological condition, i.e. a condition of how being and becoming is understood,
but entails also a pragmatic aspect, as it can be seen as a „method“
defining different modalities of producing a surface of sense.
Two aspects of dramatization are important for the development of the
current argument.
1) It contributes to change the idea of how knowledge is understood
and how it gets produced. “Knowledge” in its widest “scientific, artistic
and philosophical” dimension is understood here “as a  comprehensive
‘sensing’”21
and not as being limited to human cognitive processes. This wide
perspective changes its definitions and its generative conditions: knowledge
is primarily not defined as an act of recognition, which would involve a cognitive
act of recalling something which was already preconceived, neither
21
Christoph BRUNNER, “Slow Practices 11 Theses.” In: SCHIESSER, G. – BRUNNER, C.
(eds.) Practices of Experimentation. Zürich: Zürich University of the Arts 2012, p. 59 (58–69).
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as the production of linguistic analogies or visual metaphors, but in terms
of problematization. A problem is always bound to a field in which it can
be stated, where the means to ‘solve’ it can be assessed, and where also its
solutions can be found. Moreover, a problem derives from a compulsion to
create. Parafrasing Isabelle Stengers, “You create (knowlegde) when you
are forced or obliged to create. You do not create without a ‘cause’.”22
Here
“cause” is not understood in terms of a linear relation to an effect, but as
an indeterminate connection to a broader dimension of sensibility, to an
affective “territory”. This territory is shaped by the occurrence of intensive
encounters. Encounters can be of any kind: “What is encountered may be
Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones:
wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic
is that it can be only sensed.”23
” Sensation is primary inasmuch as it creates
the necessity to engage.
2) It accounts for the creation of transversal relations between different
modes of creation scientific, artistic or philosophical. Transversal relations
are expressive of the pragmatic unfoldings of the tension between intensities
and extensities which Deleuze conceived to be the core of the movement of
“dramatization”. Trasversal relations involve the ability to perceive, to engage
into and to create different spatio-temporal modalities. It is the differential
relation in space- time conditions, which is constitutive of the intensity
contributing to demarcate the specificity of each aesthetic or philosophical
problem. Thinking in these terms, not only allows to better understand the
specific conditions involved in each situation, but creates also means to find
ruptures into consolidated patterns, and to allow for processes of epistemic
transduction to happen.
The concatenation of a series of disparate zones of intensities and extensities
lies at the basis of what Deleuze in his book on Michel Foucault,24
understands as the diagram qua concept. Other than the visualization technique
depicting a relational exchange between different entities, scales or
points, constituting the common definition of the diagram, the conceptual
term has a double role, that of a tendency and that of agency. The aspect
22
Cf. Isabelle STENGERS, “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.”ff Cultural Studies
Review, vol. 11, 2005, no. 1, p. 191 (183–196).
23
Gilles DELEUZE, Difference and Repetition. Columbia: Columbia University Press 1995,
p. 139 [emphasis mine].
24
Gilles DELEUZE, Foucault. London – New York: Continuum 2006.
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of tendency refers on the connection between “yet unrealized potentials”,25
that is to the connection between the intensities at the core of the process of
dramatization described before. The diagram as agency,26
refers instead to
the actualisation of the abstract spatiotemporal modalities in terms of relations
between forces and affects, which are always intended to be concrete
and singular inasmuch as they emerge within a specific dimension.
In what follows, I will discuss the modalities of diagrammatic agency in
relation to the specific case of The Fragmented Orchestra. Furthermore, I will
extend the notion of diagrammatic agency towards that of vectorial translation,
i.e. take into account the possibility to translate the affective potential
of the work of art towards new dimensions of inquiry.
Diagrammatic agency: neuronal plasticity and the physics of sounds
The aim of this section is to address the question of the endogenous plasticity
of the “tiny cortex” posed at the end of section two, through the philosophical
toy as diagram which has been discussed in the third part of the current
article.
As already stated, the plasticity of the “tiny cortex” accounts for a complex
relation between disparate sounds and brains. On one side it creates
a precarious relation between sounds and brain activities at distance between
each other. On the other it needs to cut out the connection with external
sensory paths, in order to endorse mechanisms of self generation. In order
to understand these operations, I will explore the physical basis of sound
creation which accounts for an analogical translation (in Combes “rigorous”
understanding) of the concept of plasticity from the realm of neuroscience
to that of music. The plastic action of sound creation is ensured by the activity
of the neurogranular sampler,27
the algorithm at the basis of the artificial
neuronal activity.
In his book Sound Ideas, Music, Machines and experience Aden Evens
describes the underlying conceptual methodology, defined as granular
synthesis. “Granular synthesis approaches sound as very short chunks, or
grains. One creates a sound by composing these brief grains, each of which is
25
Christoph BRUNNER, “Diagramm.” Einunddreissig. Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie,
vol. 16–17, 2011, p. 64 (63–65).
26
Eric ALLIEZ, “Diagrammatic Agency Versus Aesthetic Regime of Contemporary Art:
Ernesto’s Neto’s Anti-Leviethan.” Deleuze Studies - The Smooth and the Striated, vol. 6, 2012,
no. 1, p. 10 (6–26).
27
GRANT – MATTHIAS – HODGSON – MIRANDA, “Hearing Thinking,” p. 235.
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a slice of sound that endures between two and two hundred milliseconds.”d 28
Significantly, the scale of each grain is treated separately from that of the
whole sound by the assignment of a separate set of parameters. Because of
this complex division granular synthesis allows to precisely modulate tiniest
sonic variations: it is not only the variation itself but also the variability
of the variation, which is taken into account. And from a sonic point of
view, “variable variation most effectively simulates real-world sounds and
instruments”.29
That is, the endogenous plasticity of the artificial cortex
reconstructs the material reality of the geographically sparse sounds by
modulating them through another endogenous materiality, that of the neurogranular
sampler, and at the same time connecting them to the plastic
material connections in the brains of the listeners. Through the modulation
of the variability of noise, the granular synthesis comes to transform
the “stasis and consistency of an exact and determinate quantity”30
which
determines “the formal sterility of the digital” and as such to recreate “the
rich depth of reality”, i.e. the haecceity of singularity. Evens explains that
actuality, differently than the digital,
is not the sum of elemental facts [...], but includes essentially a force of productivity
that sets in motion. What the digital misses, therefore, is not so much
what falls between its thresholds, but the creative power of the actual, that will
always defy fixed or static representation. This missing haeccity is not a further
difference, not something about the object that gets missed, for any such thing
about the object is amenable to digital capture. It is rather a productive difference,
a not yet-determined, an ontological fuzziness inherent to the actuality
itself.31
In the same way than the theoretical “basic unit” of disparity, can lead
to a process of individuation only if set in metastable resonance with a wider
collective domain, the elementary unit of artificial sound is not distinct and
disconnected. The grain is not single but related to “graininess”, “a matter of
envelopes, layers, densities, variations and the relations among elementary
grains”32
. Furthermore, the activity at the infinitesimal level of the grain is
only the minimal step, which influences upper levels of magnitude. At the
28
Aden Evens, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience. Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press 2005, p. 106.
29
Ibid., p. 110 [emphasis mine].
30
Ibid., p. 70.
31
Ibid., p. 70–71.
32
Ibid., p. 116–117.
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stage of the artificial neuronal activity of the “tiny cortex”, the graininess is
reflected in a complex correlation between the rhythmic (and not random)
activity of a single neuron, whose rhythmicity gets complexified (‘polychronized’)
by the action of a certain surrounding group of neurons in a pattern
of mutual reinforcement between the activity of the single cell and that of
the group.33
Understanding the “tiny cortex” not only from its connective qualities,
but also from the “friction” of its graininess, requires the introduction of
a parallel “curettage” at the theoretical level: that is, to take into account
the “break” produced by the encounter between Deleuze’s philosophy with
Félix Guattari’s cartographic compositions. “Their collaboration,” Stephen
Zepke explains, “allowed Deleuze to find what he felt was missing in his
own work, an engagement with real [aesthetico-]political processes”.34
To
conceive theory in terms of pragmatic engagement with real frictions, requires
a shift in perspective: the question at stake is not only how concepts
get dramatized into different methodical configurations (i.e., into the possi-d
bility to conceive and to express transversal relations between heterocronic
dimensions), but also how they become actualized into the specificity of
an artistic creation (The Fragmented Orchestra in this case). It is at this
pragmatic stage, that concepts become “toys”, or “operative constructs”
as Isabelle Stengers puts it. “Operative constructs” are a “matter of effectuation”,
and not of “explanation and illustration”,35
inasmuch as they deal
with the specifics of the creation of an assemblage, i.e. of a partial territory
which has to be yet both discovered and produced. Eric Alliez resumes this
strategical move from the construction of philosophical concepts, towards
the onset of a theory-practice of experimentation, into what he calls the
“Guattari-Deleuze effect”.36
33
See JONES – GRANT – MATTHIAS – HODGSON – RYAN – OUTRAM, “The Fragmented
Orchestra,” p. 298.
34
Stephen ZEPKE, “Eco-Aesthetics: Beyond Structure in the Work of Robert Smithson, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari.” In: HERZOGENRATH, B. (ed.), Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology.
Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009, p.  200 (200–216). Deleuze and Guattari met in
1968, the year in which Difference and Repetition was first published. Their first book written
together was Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizofrenia I, first published in 1972.
35
Isabelle STENGERS, “Relaying a War Machine?” In: ALLIEZ, E. – GOFFEY, A. (eds.), The
Guattari Effect. London – New York: Continuum 2011, p. 141 (134–155).
36
Eric ALLIEZ, “Conclusion: The Guattari-Deleuze Effect.” In: ALLIEZ – GOFFEY (eds.), The
Guattari Effect, pp. 260–274.
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Becoming toy: the aesthetic individuation of The Fragmented Orchestra
Getting back to the realm of the “tiny cortex”, the Deleuzo-Guattarian (or
Guattaro-Deleuzian) “toys” in their very process of becoming individuated,
allow us now to explore specific “spatio-temporal individuations in and
as the world”.37
That is, they allow us to investigate how The Fragmented
Orchestra recreates the relations between neuronal firings and registers the
conditions for them to be experienced both onto an aesthetic and onto an
artistic level.
Rhythm, the authors of a Thousand Plateaus state, is there where there
is a transcoded passage “between that which is constructed and that what
grows naturally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic [...]
yet without that series constituting a progression”.38
This transcoded passage
between, is what the ‘tiny cortex’ intrinsically enacts by connecting heterogeneous
disparities (the recorded sounds and the activity of the brain cells of
the listeners), and endogenously constructs through the synthetic properties
of noise. Given the excursus about the material basis of sonic generation,
I intend now to get closer to the “paradox” of the transcoding mechanism
of the “tiny cortex”, i.e. to the assertion that the sonic development in the
neurogranular sampler can only develop endogenously, i.e. by blockage
of external sensory paths which on the other side constitute its necessary
source.
We are here in front of a machinic device whose operational input (i.e. its
feed) is characterized by a connective synthesis between distant singularities;
at the same time it necessitates the disjunction from its sources, in order
to produce the desired sonic events. Knowing from the Anti-Oedipus that
the “equation” relating connection and disjunction leads to the definition of
conjunction,39
I want to pursue the current inquiry by asking under which
conditions the synthesis of conjunction which Deleuze and Guattari refer to
in their description of the forces constitutive of a process of subjectivation,
could be transposed to the realm of an artificial device, whose “sense” is that
of creating sonic events out of the tension between heterogeneus disparities
pertaining to the collective realm of non-linguistic forms of expression.
37
Stephen ZEPKE, “Becoming a Citizen of the World: Deleuze Between Allan Kaprow and
Adrian Piper.” In: CULL, L. (ed.), Deleuze and Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press 2009, p. 112 (109–125), [emphasis, mine].
38
DELEUZE – GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 313.
39
Gilles DELEUZE – Felix GUATTARI, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New
York: Penguin Books 2009, p. 36–41.
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In the Antio-edipus, the connective synthesis of production is the “presubjective
or transsubjective” stage,40
inasmuch as it solely produces relations
between the heterogeneous singularities of Kleinian “partial objects”. It does
not involve any cognitive stage, but operates mechanically by the action of
basic Freudian drives. The disjunctive synthesis of recording is “estranging”
in the sense that it is regulated by anti-productive mechanisms, acting as
blockers towards the unleash of connective relations. “The effect of antiproduction
on the connective syntheses then, is to desexualize desire [...],
and thereby constitute a surface that records networks of relations among
connections, instead of producing connections themselves.”41
”” Disjunction
induces repression, but constitutes also the mechanism for potential freedom
inasmuch as it registers the conditions of productive connections and
allows a multiplication and a diversification of the relations between them;
it accounts for the psychic ability of registering singularities and forming
chains.42
It is in the third stage, the conjunctive synthesis, that newly reactivated
productive connections of desire, are attracted to the recording
surface of disjunctive points, and enact “an entire network of new syntheses”;
the points on the disjuncted grid become loci of intensities and enact
possible paths of becoming. It is only with conjunctive synthesis, that “ “a”
subject – or rather “some” subjectivity”43
” can be discerned. Importantly, the
subject of the conjunctive synthesis has nothing to do with a fixed identity,
inasmuch as this precarious and transitory stage “is a product of its experiences,
rather than being their ground or their precondition”44
” . The subject
emerging from experiences,
extracts “a  residual share” of their content as a  sort of “recompense” for its
perpetual dispossession, [thus becoming] [...] a  supplement, a  marginal epiphenomenon,
a “mere residuum.” It is “a spare part adjacent to the machine,”
a byproduct of processes that both precede it and go beyond it. [...] And yet,
there is something splendid and glorious about the subject of the conjunctive
synthesis – despite its marginality and its transience. For it lives an “experience
of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable
40
Steven SHAVIRO, The Third (Conjunctive) Synthesis [online]. 2008. Available at: <http://
www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=648> [cit. 31. 1. 2013].
41
Eugene W. HOLLAND, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis.
London – New York: Routledge 1999, p. 28 [emphasis, mine].
42
Felix GUATTARI – Gilles DELEUZE, “The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis.” In:
GENOSKO, G. (ed.) The Guattari Reader. New York – Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 1996, p. 92.rr
43
HOLLAND, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, p. 36.
44
SHAVIRO, “The Third (Conjunctive) Synthesis.”
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– a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended
between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked
intensity stripped of all shape and form.” In other words, it lives a purely aesthetic
condition.45
It is by a procedure of conceptual extraction of the operations at the basis
of the Antioedipal production of subjectivity,yy and their recomposition into
the realm of an artificial process of creation of sounds, that we can now start
to appreciate the “tiny cortex” from its aesthetic dimension: its ‘machinic
function’ sets the conditions for pure encounters between heterogeneous
sonic dimensions and their (artificial) neurophysiological substrates of
capture and elaboration. The basic material procedure of decomposing heterogeneous
sounds into their graininess, reduces on one side the sound to its
minimal conditions and in so doing, allows to lie bare (and thus to perceive)
its qualitative properties such as density and variation. This means that what
gets transmitted, is not only the re-composition of disparate heterogeneous
sounds but also a “residual share”, of the original experience determining
the conditions of sonic production.
What the wired and wireless internet connections are conveying from
the fragmented geography of sparse sites to the ear/brains of receivers, is
not solely a composite sonic sequence out of sparse singular happenings,
but also the intensity of the differential relations between the sounds. They
“paradox” of the artificial conjunction lies in the subtraction intrinsic in
the materiality and process of graininess. Subtraction which produces both
the detachment from the sonic origins and accounts for the creation of newd
tones. It is in the realm of this double articulation that the heterogeneous
sonic elements get interlaced into the dynamics of a “stronger synthesis”.
Deleuze and Guattari explain:
It is clear that what is necessary to make sound travel, and to travel around
sound, is very pure and simple sound, an emission or wave without harmonics
[...]. The more rarefied the atmosphere, the more disparate elements you will
find. Your synthesis of disparate elements will all be the stronger if you proceed
with a sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture or extraction that works
in a material that is no longer meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively
limited, selected. For there is no imagination outside of technique.46
45
Ibid.
46
DELEUZE – GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 344–345.
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The technical construction of the “tiny cortex”, is what shapes the
overall aesthetic (and artistic) dimension of The Fragmented Orchestra. The
algorithmic modelization of its basic elements, the grains, allows for the
creation of “time patterns and rhythms”, which on one side reproduce the
‘internal’ neurological rhythms, as they derive from the implementation of
a mathematical model simulating neurophysiological activity in the brain47
.
The ‘effect’ of this reconstruction which follows certain neurophysiological
paths of the brain (that of the cerebral cortex) in a deep and precise way
but nonetheless does it artificially, is that of an estrangement: the “‘internal’
neurological rhythms”, which the granular synthesis reshapes, “appear
unfamiliar to us”48
” . This is because the granular element acts as a threshold
and thus introduces a new “sensual boundary: below a duration of around
twenty milliseconds, all sounds are perceived as ‘clicks’ and it is impossible
for us to distinguish the frequencies of the sound sources”.49
The granulation thus produces a new sonic event which in its very act of
becoming, “circumvents any ‘motor’ action, which we would expect to occur
in a real brain/body in which a sense precedes processing which causes
action”.50
It does it by extracting, through a  process of subtraction, both
from the brain/body physiology and from the sounds in nature the “rarefied
atmosphere” which Deleuze and Guattari conceive as being necessary
in order to reorganize the sonico-physiological material into a novel ‘plane’
of constistency. The very moment in which the motor action is prevented on
a physiological level (in the body/brain of the listeners), is also that in which
it gets artificially extended in the processing of the ‘tiny cortex’ itself. It is the
schizo-event of ‘cutting’ certain physiological spatiotemporal-conditions
and ‘pasting’ them as a process of construction of a distant and ‘neutral’
nervous system, which allows for the re-configuration of the sensual input
on a wider level. Out of this perspective, the “tiny cortex” constitutes a basis
for a “strong synthesis” of the disparate, basis which is both material (it consists
into the activity of a portion of artificially reconstructed cortex) and
immaterial (the artificial neurons are not bound to any “real” physiological
process) and whose degree of consistency is determined by extraction and
creative selection of and from its sources.
47
IZHIKEVICH – GALLY – EDELMAN, “Spike-Timing Dynamics of Neuronal Groups.”
48
GRANT – MATTHIAS, “Shifting Topographies: Sound and the Fragmented Orchestra,”
p. 57.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., p. 58.
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How do all these technical considerations, concerning the materiality
and the artificiality (i.e. the formation) of The Fragmented Orchestra, concur
towards a (possible) grasping of its aesthetic and artistic value? The process of
composition between heterogeneities which gets synthesized into the sonic
event and subsequently rearranged into the formation of neurophysiological
states, fits into the realm of the Whitehedian “aesthetics of the Beautiful”51
,
i.e. an aesthetics in which the “production of the new” does not arise from
a gesture of overcoming (the real), but instead emerges out of a transformation
of existing heterogeneous forms of expression towards the constitution
of novel singularities.52
Stephen Shaviro emphasizes the importance of this
understanding of aesthetics in terms of a (political) “act of resistance”53
. If
practices of “sampling, recombination and reappropriation”54
do constitute
a common generality in contemporary capitalist culture, the aesthetic concern
becomes that of redirecting the “logic” of these practices towards the
“novelty” of beauty. Because novelty and beauty are currently abused and
misused in such a heavy and omnipresent manner, it becomes all the more
important to evaluate them according to their enabling potential towards
generating what Whitehead understands as a “creative event”.55
Whitehead defines beauty as “the mutual adaptation of the several factors
in an occasion of experience”;56
adaptation is never happening casually,
but “implies an end”, an aim which emerges in the process of adaptation
itself. The aim does not predetermine experience but rather constitutes its
consequence. This perspective, Shaviro states, “is what opens the doors to
novelty. Every achievement of unity is something that has never existed before:
something different, something radically new”.57
Novelty arises when
multiple entities reach the level of unity, a unity which is never permanent,
but only in “continual transition”. The fact that novelty cannot be deter-
51
Steven SHAVIRO, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press 2009, p. 151. In this regard it is relevant to note that Shaviro’s argumentative
line towards this idea of aesthetics, unfolds through the development of the three Antioedipal
syntheses explained before. This, he states, is the crucial moment in which Deleuze and
Guattari encounter Marx and, indirectly, Whitehead (p. 125–127).
52
Alfred N. WHITEHEAD, Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of
Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28). Detroit: Free Press 1979, p. 21.
53
This definition originates from Gilles DELEUZE, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and
Interviews 1975–1995. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) 2007, p. 317.
54
SHAVIRO, Without Criteria, p. 171.
55
Ibid., p. 154–157.
56
Alfred N. WHITEHEAD, Adventures of Ideas. Detroit: Free Press,1967, p. 252.
57
SHAVIRO, Without Criteria, p. 73.
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mined in terms of a particularity which establishes it, doesn’t mean that it is
boundless; Whitehead’s whole ontology ‘grounds’ in creativity. ”Creativity is
an ultimate principle and a universal ground, only because – and precisely
because – it is featureless and neutral, entirely without a character of its
own”.58
Because of its generic neutrality this ultimate principle cannot be
determined by any “metaphysical authorization”, or by an “ethical imperative”;
instead it requires aesthetic constraints. By drawing a relation between
the philosophies of Kant and Whitehead, Shaviro proposes to elaborate
a “constructivist account of the conditions of receptivity, or sensibility”59
;
that is, he identifies aesthetic constraints as the necessary conditions which
account for the production of novelty.
From this brief outline, we understand that the beauty of The Fragmented
Orchestra can be grasped in the aesthetic process of constructing the generic
“tiny cortex”. That is, in the operation of redirecting sounds, perceptions,
neuronal activity pertaining to specific subjects or objects towards a level
of impersonal and therefore indifferent ‘grounding’. This is a gesture that
affirms the “ubiquity of creativity”,60
i.e. that creation can come from any
kind of human and non-human sources (or resources). It is this ubiquity that
accounts for the emergence of beauty in a potential state, I.e it demarcates
a  general compatibility for integration, without yet producing the act of
integration itself.61
With the ideas of novelty and beauty, Whitehead provides the enabling
conceptual means by which the question of the consistency necessary for
synthesizing the disparate can be framed onto an aesthetic level. Because
these notions derive from the affirmation of creativity in its widest understanding,
they “respond to the singularity of every occasion of experience”.62
From this point of view, the procedure of sonic extraction by granular
synthesis is a novel reconfiguration of diverse peripheral sounds in distant
relation with accidental listeners.
What remains to be discussed now, is how to frame The Fragmented
Orchestra from its artistic side. That is, how the Whiteheadian concepts
of novelty and beauty can be understood in their actualization within the
specificity of the “process of production” enacted by the artwork. I will proceed
with the question of how the sonic production under consideration can
58
Ibid., p. 150.
59
Ibid., p. 51.
60
Ibid., p. 158.
61
Ibid., p. 73.
62
Ibid., p. 150.
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be thought in terms of transforming the “residual share” emerging out of the
third conjunctive synthesis into the pragmatics of a collective enunciation
in the realm of art. Enunciation is here understood in terms of the definition
that Félix Guattari gave in his last book Chaosmosis; as the emergence
of a collective “logic of non-discursive intensities”63
, i.e. the valorization of
all “pre-personal, polyphonic, collective and machinic”64
modes of production,
which are currently kept suppressed by the semiotic one. It is by the
inclusion of this complex and rich tissue of singularities within the realm of
theory, that the “novelty” characterizing the sonic event of The Fragmented
Orchestra, can be grasped conceptually.
Second Squaring: art as a process of collective synaptogenesis
In the previous paragraph I  have introduced the Whitehedian notion of
beauty in terms of a conceptual definition. The question to be addressed
now, is how beauty gets constructed within the realm of the constraints
relative to the artwork under consideration. Otherwise stated, how the heterogeneous
“occasions of experience”, are adapted into the formation of the
artistic “object”.
The first problematic issue in this regard, is that although The Fragmented
Orchestra, “covered a vast area of physical space”, the ‘object’ did not
exist as such. Grant and Matthias clarify:
Whilst there were 24 connected sites and a  central exhibition area, the real
‘space’ of the work was in the connectivity of the sites, the in between, in the
temporal firing events of the work. All that was evident regarding the materials
of the work were speakers, ‘soundboxes’, wires, microphones, and a central
“listening space”.65
Given these conditions, the question arises, why the distinction between
art and aesthetics should still be maintained. In “art and experience”, John
Dewey66
has defined as artistic the moment of the making of art, and as
aesthetic its perceptual potential, i.e. the experience that one can make out of
it. Given the complex system of feedbacks between sonic inputs and the reac-
63
Felix GUATTARI, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press 1995, p. 22.
64
Ibid., p. 21.
65
GRANT – MATTHIAS, “Shifting Topographies,” p. 55–56.
66
John DEWEY, Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Trade 2005, p. 162.
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tions of the listeners, it is clear that The Fragmented Orchestra has blurred
these categories from their very roots. The reason why I nonetheless propose
to make use of these concepts, is because I want to question them in terms
of their relation in-between. That is, I want to understand them as operative
constraints along the definition given by Stengers, and ask about how they
can be reshaped by the conditions set by the artwork. First of all, the current
artistic frame accounts for the necessity of redefining the “artistic object” in
terms of a fragmentary complexity without specific locality.
In order to address the issue of grasping the non local dynamics from
an artistic point of view, I follow Stephen Zepke’s thesis, according to which
Félix Guattari “remakes” the Duchampian readymade by fragmenting art
into “polyphonic” and “multiplicatory” processes of individuation. Guattari,
Zepke argues, has transposed the Duchampian ‘nominalist’ paradigm – according
to which everyone is able to consciously decide about what is to be
considered art – in the realm of an aesthetic paradigm “that does not efface
art but marks its renewed relevance within contemporary life”.67
The Duchampian
aesthetic decision, generic inasmuch as it could come from any rational
being, is transposed into the indifference of a proto-aestheticl 68
– realm;
the semiotic act of speaking out a decision gets translated into an “event of
enunciation” which includes a wider range of human and non-human modalities
of expression.69
Zepke exemplifies the shift from the readymade as
67
ZEPKE, “Becoming a Citizen of the World,” p. 112.
68
The term protoaesthetic is an expression by Guattari, by which he intends to emphasise that
his focus does not lie on “institutionalized art, to its works manifested in the social field, but
to a dimension of creation in a nascent state, perpetually in advance of itself”. GUATTARI,
Chaosmosis, p. 102.
69
Zepke’s argument is that Guattari‘s reading turns the Duchampian “conceptual readymade”
into an “affectual readymade”. The parallel examination of Duchamp‘s oeuvre with the work
of the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, allowed Guattari to revalue aesthetically not
the object itself but the involved creative act. With this move, Guattari kept from Duchamp
the desideratum of an ‘aesthetics of indifference’, unbounded from a specific actor, skill or
taste. On the other, he strongly rejected the mental operation of consciousness at the basis
of the readymade as “object” (the “nominalism” by which art gets valued). See ZEPKE,
“Becoming a  Citizen of the World.” Out of this argumentative line Zepke has begun to
retrace the conditions for an alternative geology of contemporary art, along the work of John
Cage, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and Adrian Piper, as well as articulating its political
potential (see Stephen ZEPKE, “From Aestehtic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and
Life in Guattari.” In: The Guattari Effect, pp. 205–219. My former analysis of the graphical
notations of the composer Anestis Logothetis is situated in this line of research. See Claudia
MONGINI, “Sign and Information: On Anestis Logothetis’ Graphical Notations.” In: ZEPKE
S. – O’SULLIVAN S. (eds.), Deleuze and Contemporary Art. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press 2010, p. 227–245.
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object to the ‘event’ of “making ready”, in the discussion of the score which
Allan Kaprow associated to his performances “Happenings”. Especially in
the work after 1961, Kaprow spoke in terms of score – i.e. explicitly importing
the concept of musical notation in the sphere of performative art – as
a possibility for projecting the sheer magnitude and unforseeable details in
the real world” onto a neutral plane. The project was to create a “plan(e) of
composition”, whose organizational principle gets directly constructed in
“the Happening in an ongoing, aleatory and autopoietic feedback loop [...] in
which the question of individual subjective expression is subsumed by that
of the construction of an individuation of the world.”70
The neutral “plane” re-constructing the happening in terms of individuation,
is the element allowing to draw a line of continuity between Kaprow’s
score and the “tiny cortex” of The Fragmented Orchestra. In the last case,
the operative conditions of the “score” are defined by the way the artificial
neurons of the “tiny cortex” treat the incoming sound. This mechanism,
called neurogranular sampler,71
is the specific algorithmic implementation
of the idea of granular synthesis described before; it triggers (i.e. extracts)
grains of sound from the original pattern. “The resulting sound therefore
consists of short bursts of the original sample triggered by the cortical neurons.
It is a sonification of the cortical firing patterns.”72
This means that the
heard result is the activity of the neurons, filled up with the content of the
original sound. The artificial neurons of the “tiny cortex” thus transform the
specificity of a particular sound into an “indifferent” shape, which nonetheless
reproduces the tension of the original tonalities. The neuronal action
contracts the original sound and in so doing extracts its “residual share”, i.e.
its expressive modalities.73
It unleashes the sonic forces to a bare state of sensation
and recomposes them into a new chain of machinic processes. A conjunctive
chain: its connectivity creatively plays out its non-connectivity by
accentuating the sheer presence of “the unexpungeable difference between
the sheer individuality of [sonic and perceptive] events”.74
Sound as a mean of expression as such, becomes of prior significance in
the constitution of this realm of generic indifference, inasmuch as “it has the
70
Ibid., p. 113.
71
Eduardo MIRANDA – John MATTHIAS, “Music Neurotechnology for Sound Synthesis:
Sound Synthesis with Spiking Neuronal Networks.” Leonardo, vol. 42, 2009, no. 5,
pp. 439–442.
72
GRANT – MATTHIAS – HODGSON – MIRANDA, “Hearing Thinking,” p. 235.
73
EVENS, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience, p. 18–19.
74
MASSUMI, Semblance and Event, p. 21.
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ability to create a space without a tangible physical presence”.75
Sound opens
the pathway towards the creation of what Guattari calls “partial modules
of temporalization”, a break with the “hypothetical projection” of “a time
of generalized equivalence”.76
That is, sound or better said the procedure
of becoming sonic (“sonification”) modulates different spatio-temporal
conditions by recomposing them into a novel dimension. It differentiates
space-time situations and creates what Deleuze calls “spatio-temporal dynamisms:
that is [...] agitations of space, holes of time, pure syntheses of space,
direction and rhythms.” “These dynamisms”, Deleuze continues, “always
presuppose a field in which they are produced, outside of which they would
not be produced”77
. Thus the question arises, how to define the field of action
proper to the artwork.
At the geo-macroscopical level of temporality, because of the lack of consistent
service of internet broadband lines, an artificial latency was built in into the
sonic transmission, in order to avoid cuts in the stream. This had the effect that
“a sound event is not echoed back for several seconds of time. Though not intentional,
this serves to accentuate the vast distances travelled by audio signals out
of the geographical network.” This latency constituted the refrain of the broad
geographical space.78
This broad latency resonated with the time holes given by the microscopic
delays in nerve cell transmission at the level of the brain of the listeners.
Axonal conduction delays refer to the time required for a nervous signal
to travel from its initiation site at the centre of the cell, towards its periphery
terminals, where transmission to other neurons gets enacted through synapses.
These delays get to assume a wider significance when the activity of
more cells is taken under consideration, as they concur to shape the strengths
of the connections between groups of neurons. “Tipically, a connection will
be increased if a pre-synaptic neuron causes a postsynaptic neuron to fire.
The connection is depressed if the firing of the postsynaptic neuron occurs
before the pre-synaptic neuron has fired, a phenomenon known as ‘SpikeTiming
Dependent Plasticity’.”79
75
GRANT – MATTHIAS, “Shifting Topographies,” p. 56.
76
GUATTARI, Chaosmosis, p. 16.
77
Gilles DELEUZE, Desert Islands And Other Texts, 1953–1974. Lapoujade, D. (ed.).
Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) 2004, p. 94–95.
78
JONES – GRANT – MATTHIAS – HODGSON – RYAN – OUTRAM, “The Fragmented
Orchestra,” p. 300–301.
79
GRANT – MATTHIAS, “Shifting Topographies: Sound and the Fragmented Orchestra,” p. 55.
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By means of its operation of heterogeneous reassembling, the “tiny
cortex” counteractualizes80
both the virtual cavities of the web and the
neurophysiological gaps in the brain into another fragmental dimension:
the synthetic action of sound-grains. It makes the rhythmic nature of sound
explicit, inasmuch as it lies bare its “intense moments of widely varying
lengths”81
. It does this by extracting the time movements from specific material
conditions – the functional shift of the differential equations originally
envisaged to model human neuronal activity and the internet delay – and
recomposing them at the level of another physical motor: the graininess of
the artificial grains. Duchamp’s “artistic object” is thus pushed at its very
limit of dissolution; at the point in which the semiotic circuitry between the
object and its nominal collective judgement crumbles and gets recomposed
into “an abstract machinic transversality”.82
The “tiny cortex” reshapes
different temporalities into a generic mutative form which partains to the
rich enunciative registers of a generic polivocal collectivity. By establishing
complex (non)local relations between singular neuro-sonic disparities, the
Fragmented Orchestra rewires the plastic modulations at the level of single
brains into a wider circuitry entailing the potential for a collective neuronal
regeneration. New sonic formations induce different sensual experiences
which might become the onset for an enhanced synapto-genetic formation
in single brains. These novel particular configurations feed back into the
collective ability to react plastically to the plasticity of our brains.83
It is at this level of practical mutual action, that an ethical component
can be perceived in its emergence. An ethics which is not the ‘philosophical
imperative’ the way Shaviro has criticised it, but an “enabling constraint”
for a wider dimension of ethico-aesthetic experimentation. A concomitant
creation of the conditions for an emergent collective sensibility, in which the
philosophical toy intervenes in terms of a partial actant.
80
This concept is explained by Deleuze in Negotiations (Gilles DELEUZE, Negotiations
1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 202); it denotes the action upon any
kind of activity channelled into predefined paths and roles, and its operative transformation
into a new dimension of composition.
81
EVENS, Sound Ideas, p. 116.
82
GUATTARI, Chaosmosis, p. 107.
83
Catherine MALABOU, What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University?
Press 2008, p. 30.
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TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXV / 2013 / 2
///// recenze /////////////////
Neznesiteľná ľahkosť zdôvodnenia
prima facie
Marek PICHA, Kdyby chyby. Epistemologie
myšlenkových experimentů.
Olomouc: Nakladatelství Olomouc
2011. 195 s.
Michal Ivan
Predstavte si, že by ste mali písať
recenziu na  knihu Mareka Pichu.
Keby ste začali tak, ako ja teraz,
ponúkali by ste čitateľovi myšlienkový
experiment (podľa definície,
ktorú ponúka Marek Picha)? Odpoveď
na túto otázku nie je úplne jednoznačná,
ale k tomu sa dostaneme
neskôr. Najskôr si povedzme niečo
o tom, čo nám autor vo svojej monografii
pripravil. Kniha Kdyby chyby
je monografia zaoberajúca sa myšlienkovými
experimentmi. Jej podnadpis
znie Epistemologie myšlenkových
experimentů a  podstatná časť
knihy je venovaná práve ich epistemológií.
Neprehliadnuteľnou časťou
je aj niečo, čo by sme s istými obmedzeniami
mohli nazvať „ontológiou”
myšlienkových experimentov.
Je to hlavne prvá časť, predstavujúca
snahu o definíciu a ďalej časti pohybujúce
sa na hrane ontológie a epistemológie
(napr. koncepcia ako
Machov psychologizmus). Ako odpoveď
na epistemický status ponúka
autor pojem prima-facie zdôvodnenia,
akúsi skromnú koncepciu bez
veľkých ambícií, no aj bez prepadávania
skepticizmu. V neposlednom
prípade podáva dôkladnú analýzu
toho, ako postupovať pri kazuistike,
akých chýb by sme sa mali vyvarovať
pri posudzovaní myšlienkových
experimentov.
Téma myšlienkových experimentov,
hoci to tak z  pohľadu
miestnych diskusií nemusí vyzerať,
predstavuje jednu z  tých najpopulárnejších
a  najvýznamnejších
v  súčasnej filozofii. Práca Mareka
Pichu k  nej pristupuje ambiciózne,
pričom autor preukazuje znalosť
týchto diskusií, čím prináša neznalému
čitateľovi okrem samostatnej
práce aj prehľad tých najzaujímavejších
príspevkov. Reaguje tak
na autorov ako sú napr. Gendlerová,
Williamson alebo autori z  kruhu
experimentálnej filozofie. Jedinou
záhadou z  tohto pohľadu zostáva
malý priestor venovaný pojmu intuície,
ktorý v týchto diskusiách práve
naopak hrá obvykle významnú
úlohu a  býva často spájaný s  „rozhodovaním
sa” o  výsledkoch myšlienkového
experimentu, obzvlášť
diskutovaná je napr. otázka expertných
intuícií odborníkov (čiže filozofov).
Na druhú stranu, vzhľadom
na  autorov deklarovaný dešpekt
k diskusiám verbálneho charakteru
(pozri napr. s. 40), je pochopiteľné,
že pri otázke intuície mu stačí poukázanie
na  rovnakú podmienku
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miscelanea
zdôvodnenia intuície (rovnakú
s  myšlienkovými experimentmi).
I tak by som považoval minimálne
za  vhodné uviesť viac súvislostí
medzi intuíciou a  myšlienkovými
experimentami.
V  prvej kapitole si Picha kladie
otázku, čo to myšlienkový experiment
je. Ide o  otázku, ktorá
má rovnako tendenciu presúvať sa
do verbálneho sporu, čo si však autor
uvedomuje. Čitateľovi ponúkne
svoju definíciu („Myšlenkový experiment
je soubor pokynů určujících,
jakou konkrétní situaci si představit
s  cílem něco zjistit.”) a  uvedie jej
výhody v  kontraste k  ďalším definíciám.
Rozkúskované na  časti
tu vidíme tri podmienky – 1) súbor
pokynov; 2) predstavovanie si;
3) kognitívny cieľ. Jedným z (treba
dodať, že explicitne prijatých) dôsledkov
je, že aj odhadovanie je
považované za  myšlienkový experiment.
Myšlienkovým experimentom
tak je odhadovanie, či sa batožina
zmestí do kufra auta, pokiaľ ho
vykonáme predstavovaním si, ako
by sme kufre naskladali (s. 32).
S tým isto možno polemizovať,
no autor má na  také vymedzenie
právo. Väčší problém vidím v bode
3. Čo je to totiž kognitívny cieľ, čo
znamená „něco zjistit”? Autor síce
upozorňuje, že nemá v  úmysle zahrnúť
fantazírovanie medzi myšlienkové
experimenty, no je to také
jednoduché? Povedzme, že pred
verejným vystúpením postupujete
podľa určitých pokynov a  predstavujete
si ako rozprávate pred
publikom, vďaka čomu nadobudnete
presvedčenie, že to zvládnete
a tréma je zbytočná. Picha tvrdí, že
tu prebehol reálny psychologický
experiment, ktorý vykonal subjekt
sám na sebe. Je však hranica medzi
odhadovaním vlastnej emocionálnej
reakcie a odhadovaním naskladania
batožiny akokoľvek jasná?
A  nie je napríklad predstavovanie
si záchranného člnu s piatimi ľuďmi
a jedným psom (príklad, ktorý Picha
medzi myšlienkové experimenty zaraďuje)
podobným psychologickým
experimentom?
V  druhej kapitole sa Picha začína
venovať epistemickej otázke.
Keďže sa neuspokojuje s tým, že by
myšlienkové experimenty mali iba
didaktický význam, púšťa sa do debaty
o  ich epistemickom význame.
Ponúka 3 otázky: 1) Je myšlenkový
experiment zdrojom nového
presvedčenia?; 2) Je myšlienkový
experiment zdrojom epistemicky
zdôvodneného presvedčenia?; 3) Je
myšlienkový experiment zbytočný?
Z  nich sa ako najplodnejšia javí
druhá otázka. Autor predkladá štyri
rôzne teórie o  zdrojoch zdôvodneného
presvedčenia myšlienkových
experimentov (konkrétne Brownov
apriorizmus, Machov psychologizmus,
Kuhnov konceptualizmus
a  asocianizmus), ktoré by mali
dokladať ich epistemický prínos.
Po  dôkladnom kritickom zhodnoTeorie
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miscellanea
tení sa napokon prikláňa k tomu, že
je možné zodpovedať otázku epistemického
významu aj bez toho, aby
sme museli prijať niektorú z týchto
koncepcií.
V  ďalšom texte sa objavujú,
aspoň sa mi tak zdá, tri výrazné
postoje voči myšlienkovým experimentom.
Jedným je odmietnutie
prílišného optimizmu voči ich
epistemickému statusu. Optimistické
koncepcie predpokladajú, že
myšlienkové experimentovanie je
tvorené určitým psychologickým
procesom a zároveň, že tento proces
je dôveryhodný. Avšak to sú príliš
silné predpoklady, ktoré podľa autora
neprejdu testom skepticizmu
(s. 77). Druhým postojom je obhajoba
pojmu prima-facie zdôvodnenia,
ktorý je založený na akceptácií.
Tretím postojom je opakované odmietanie
skepticizmu, ktorý by spochybňoval
význam myšlienkových
experimentov ako taký.
Čo je to zdôvodnenie prima
facie? Túto kľúčovú otátzku Picha
rozoberá v tretej kapitole.„Přesvědčení,
že p, je pf-zdůvodněné, pokud
existují epistemicky relevantní důvody
pro p a zároveň dané přesvědčení
není vyvrácené” (s. 71). Ako je
asi zjavné, kritickým sa stáva pojem
epistemicky relevantných dôvodov.
Ktoré dôvody teda sú tie, ktoré sú
epistemicky relevantné? Picha ich
definuje nasledovne: „D je epistemicky
relevantní důvod pro p jedině
tehdy, pokud D vede k  akcepto-
vání p” (s. 77). Pokiaľ nemáme silnejší
dôvod, na základe ktorého by
sme presvedčenie p odmietli a  zároveň
ho na základe myšlienkového
experimentovania akceptujeme, je
toto presvedčenie pf-zdôvodnené.
Je to práve táto definícia, ktorá je
základom Pichovej obhajoby epistemického
statusu myšlienkových
experimentov.
Výhodou tohto prístupu je, že
poskytuje jednoznačnú odpoveď
na epistemickú prínosnosť myšlienkových
experimentov – prínosné sú
práve preto, lebo vedú k akceptácií.
Môžeme ich využiť v argumentácií
a  v  prípade, že náš spoludiskutér
akceptuje rovnaký záver (výsledok)
myšlienkového experimentu
ako my, máme takpovediac navrch
– preniesli sme na  neho dôkazové
bremeno (s. 80). Zároveň nie je rozhodujúcou
sila akceptácie - dôležité
je, že určité tvrdenie považujeme
za  pravdivé a  sila akceptácie nemá
vplyv na silu argumentu, ktorý myšlienkovým
experimentom podkladáme.
Ako príklad uvádza Picha nasledujúci
pomyselný rozhovor, ktorý
uvediem vcelku, aby som ním poukázal
na jeden zvláštny dôsledok.
„Adam: Percepce je vlastností
částí.
Boris: Vážně? To se mi nějak
nezdá.
Adam: Prošel jsem si Leibnizův
Mlýn a vyšlo mi, že percepce musí
být vlastností částí.
Boris: Co je to Leibnizův Mlýn?
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318
Adam: Představ si percipující
stroj, vlez dovnitř a  prozkoumej.
Nenajdeš v něm nic kromě mechanicky
spojených částí, nebo ano?
Boris: Asi ne. Ale jak to s  tím
souvisí?
Adam: Kdyby byla percepce
vlastností kompozice, jak tvrdíš,
musel bys ve stroji najít i něco
dalšího.
Boris: Ano, to bych asi nejspíš
musel.”
Čo je ne tomto príklade
zvláštne? Ukazuje sa na ňom podľa
mňa problém dostatočnosti pojmu
zdôvodnenia prima facie. Totiž,
dokáže takýto prístup odlíšiť dôveryhodné
zdroje od  tých nedôveryhodných?
Čo keby sme príklad pozmenili
a Boris by akceptoval nový
postoj na  základe Adamovho rozprávania
o tom, čo videl vo vešteckej
guli? Epistemický význam vešteckej
gule potom môžeme zachytiť nasledovne:
Pokiaľ nie je veštenie z gule
vyvrátené, potom je prima facie
zdôvodnené. Picha si, zdá sa, silnejší
pojem zdôvodnenia ani za cieľ
nekladie, keďže, ako vraví, „prima
facie argument není postaven na důvěryhodnosti
procesů. Netvrdí, že
imaginace má tendenci k  pravdě,
a my bychom jí proto měli důvěřovat.
Tvrdí pouze tolik, že když už
považujeme nějaké přesvědčení
za  pravdivé, nemůžeme se tvářit,
jako bychom ho za pravdivé nepovažovali.”
(s. 85). Pokiaľ však dôveryhodnosť
nie je otázkou, akú váhu
má takýto pojem epistemického
významu? V  istom deskriptívnom
ponímaní úlohy epistemológie, ktorej
ambíciou je opísať všetky zdroje
akceptácie, ktoré v spoločnosti nájdeme,
je takáto definícia zdôvodnenia
asi prijateľná. Otázkou zostáva
užitočnosť takéhoto pojmu – že ľudia
nadobúdajú presvedčenia z rôznych
dôvodov je triviálnym faktom.
Picha však pokračuje ďalej. Jeho
tretí výrazný postoj je odmietanie
skepticizmu. Postoj, že sa myšlienkove
experimenty používajú, ergo
k  niečomu sú, nie je dostatočná.
Skeptik nenamieta, že myšlienkove
experimenty nevedú k  akceptácii,
namieta, že pri určovaní pravdy
tvrdení je rovnako účinná veštecká
lampa. Pichova odpoveď je,
že otázka miery dôveryhodnosti je
otázkou empirickou. Vedú myšlienkové
experimenty k  lepším alebo
horším výsledkom? To musíme
zistiť pozorovaním. A  podľa Pichu
skeptik jednoducho nepreukázal, že
myšlienkové experimenty vo väčšine
prípadov vedú k skôr nepravde
ako pravde (s. 86).
Zdá sa mi, že tu Picha postupuje
príliš zbrklo a vytvára si zo skeptika
tak trochu fackovacieho panáka.
Jednoducho všeobecne bez podloženia
povie, že skeptikovi sa nepodarilo
preukázať nedôveryhodnosť.
Podobným postupom dospejeme
k tomu, že sa preukázať skeptikovu
neoprávnenosť nepodarilo Pichovi
– jednoducho neposkytol empi-
miscelanea
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319
rický dôkaz toho, že skeptikovi sa
to nedarí. Podobne naprázdno vyznieva
diskusia s  experimentálnou
filozofiou (s. 134–137). Tá sa predsa
snaží realizovať konkrétne experimenty,
ktoré prinášajú konkrétne
výsledky a tie by bolo namieste konkrétne
posúdiť. Dodajme, že autor
určitú konfrontáciu s  konkrétnymi
neduhmi podstupuje v  poslednej
kapitole - poskytuje prehľad chýb,
ktorých sa pri hodnotení myšlienkových
experimentov dopúšťame.
Ako budem o chvíľu tvrdiť, robí to
kvalifikovane a kvalitne. No takmer
pri každej chybe dodáva, že to je iba
chyba, na ktorú si musíme dávať pozor
a všetko bude v poriadku.
Ďalší postup Pichovej argumentácie
je ešte záludnejší (s. 85).
Predstavme si, že by sa nám podarilo
dokázať, že myšlienkove experimenty
(alebo kľudne aj veštenie
z  gule) vedú v  nadpolovičnej väčšine
k omylu. Podľa Pichu tým paradoxne
považujeme myšlienkové
experimenty za dôveryhodný zdroj!
Stačí predsa negovať ich výsledok
a vo väčšine prípadov získame pravdivý
výsledok. Nie je mi jasné, či je
potom vôbec možné dokázať nedôveryhodnosť
akéhokoľvek zdroja.
Vo štvrtej kapitole sa Picha zaoberá
eliminativizmom, teda teóriou,
podľa ktorej sú myšlienkové experimenty
epistemologickými parazitmi,
sú to iba rétoricky upravené
argumenty, ktoré nemajú silu samú
o sebe. Je ich totiž možné rekonštruovať
do  podoby argumentu a  svoj
záver dokážu zdôvodniť iba do  tej
miery, do akej je toho schopný tento
všeobecný argument. Na  základe
analýzy Pisanského experimentu,
ktorého štruktúrovanosť a  explicitnosť
postupu je mimochodom
výnimočná a  napr. v  porovnaní
s  experimentmi ako sú Záchranný
čln alebo aj Dvojča Zeme, sa až zdá,
že sú v  niečom podstatnom odlišné,
rekonštruuje Picha diskusiu
medzi obhajcami a  kritikmi tohto
postoja. Riešenie sporu v  diskusii
samotnej nenachádza a  ako cestu
von poskytuje rozlíšenie medzi
e-xperimentom a  i-xperimentom.
To zakladá na rozlíšení medzi exemplom
a  ilustráciou (vypožičanom
od  autorov Perelman a  Olbrechts-Tyteca).
Myšlienkový experiment
použitý ako príklad, ako dôvod všeobecného
tvrdenia, je e-xperiment,
myšlienkový experiment použitý
na ilustráciu všeobecného princípu
je i-xperiment. Ten prvý je epistemicky
prínosný, zatiaľ čo ten druhý
nie je. Či ide o  jeden alebo druhý
však závisí na  konkrétnom použití
myšlienkového experimentu – dá sa
použiť oboma spôsobmi.
V poslednej piatej kapitole autor
ponúka prehľad toho, čoho by sme
sa mali pri posudzovaní myšlienkových
experimentov vyvarovať. Postupuje
tu so znalosťou veci a podáva
dôkladný prehľad. Chybami myšlienkových
experimentov sú Neprojateľný
výsledok, Nedôveryhodný
miscellanea
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výsledok, Nedosiahnuteľný výsledok
a chybami argumentov obsahujúcich
myšlienkový experiment sú
Nerelevatívnosť, Nesprávna generalizácia,
Netrpezlivosť. Možné chyby
sú uvedené na príklade, je uvedená
ich podstata, kritická otázka, ktorá
nám pomôže konkrétnu chybu odhaliť
a  možnosti ako postupovať.
Kapitola sa tak stáva užitočnou príručkou
pre každého, kto by chcel
myšlienkové experimenty využívať
alebo kritizovať.
Na  záver Picha prehľadne zopakuje
najdôležitejšie otázky a  odpovede
vo forme akéhosi FAQ
(najčastejšie kladených otázok).
Príjemným a užitočným zároveň je
dodatok, ktorý uvádza prehľad všetkých
myšlienkových experimentov,
ktoré sa nachádzajú v  knihe. Pridáva
k  ním príbeh vedkyne Mary
a tak snáď jediným slávnym experimentom,
ktorý v knihe, je dumanie
nad tým, aké to je byť netopierom.
Experimenty sú vždy popísané citáciou
príslušného autora, je uvedený
ich destilát a pri viacerých aj princíp
a  diagram. Stávajú sa tak, nakoľko
skromným, doplnkom, ktorý poskytuje
prehľad, aký u nás chýba (ak
by autor náhodou uvažoval o encyklopédii
myšlienkových experimentov,
prípadne ďalších filozofických
argumentov, bolo by vhodné ho
v tom iba podporiť).
Aby som zhrnul predchádzajúce,
zdá sa mi, že pre Pichu sú
myšlienkové experimenty akýmsi
dialektickým nástrojom pre tých,
ktorí ich akceptujú. Pokiaľ ich totiž
niekto odmietne, nedostaneme
sa k  potrebnému bodu v  diskusii
– k  akceptácii. A  keďže Picha neobhajuje
dôveryhodnosť predstavivosti,
nejestvuje vyššia inštancia,
na ktorej by sme sa mohli s tým, kto
myšlienkove experimenty odmietne
akceptovať (alebo len bude vždy tvrdiť,
že nevie, ako ich posúdiť), nie je
možné ich takémuto človeku nijako
„nanútiť“. Je to postoj zaujímavý, no
skrýva podľa mňa v sebe viacero záludných
bodov. Vyššie uvedené polemické
poznámky nemajú byť ničím
viac, než polemickými poznámkami.
A je vlastne dobre, že mohli
vzniknúť – kvalitná práca sa pozná
aj podľa toho, že je s čím nesúhlasiť.
Marek Picha napísal v tomto zmysle
kvalitnú knihu. Pokiaľ bolo jej
predstavenie na viacerých miestach
jej kritikov, je to tým, že kniha vyzýva
ku diskusii. Ešte raz je nutné
vyzdvihnúť i  rozsah tém, ktoré sa
Picha pokúša rozobrať a  množstvo
polemík s  renomovanými autormi,
do ktorých sa (úspešne) púšťa. A tak
jediná skutočná výčitka, ktorú voči
knihe mám, je technického charakteru.
Knihe chýba menný i vecný index.
Verím, že by bol užitočný a pomohol
by pri práci mnohým, nielen
autorovi tejto recenzie.
miscelanea
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321
///// recenze /////////////////
Médium v jednotném čísle
W. J. T. MITCHELL – Mark B. N.
HANSEN (eds.), Critical Terms for
Media Studies. Chicago – London:
University of Chicago Press 2010,
353 s.
Andrea Průchová
Antologie1
Kritické pojmy mediálních
studií usiluje o  artikulaci
současné povahy tohoto oboru.
Ta podle jejích editorů směřuje
ke  stále otevřenějšímu charakteru,
který čerpá z  propojení společenskovědních
oborů s  poznatky
přírodních věd (zjm. biomedicíny
a kybernetiky) při sledování trendů
technologického vývoje. Kniha je
výsledkem editorské práce kulturního
a  literárního teoretika Marka
B.  N. Hansena a  historika a  teoretika
umění W. J. T. Mitchella, kteří
interdisciplinární povahu textu
vytyčují jeho rozdělením do  tří
zastřešujících částí – „Estetika“,
„Technologie“ a  „Společnost“. Tyto
oddíly se zabývají estetickými, technickými
a  politickými formami,
v nichž lze média sledovat. Hlavním
motivem textů je reflexe tradičních
1
Recenze vznikla v  rámci projektu GAUK
1122313 a Specifického vysokoškolského výzkumu
SVV 2013 267 501.
témat a  metodologických postupů
spjatých se studiem médií vedená
dekonstrukční logikou narušování
moderních dichotomických kategorií.
Návaznost jednotlivých textů,
pocházejících z různých oblastí společenských
věd, zajišťuje specifické
pojetí termínu médium definované
předmluvou.
Při formulaci vize mediálních
studií 21. století se obracejí Hansen
a  Mitchell zpět k  myšlení klasika
oboru Marshala McLuhana a k jeho
porozumění vztahu lidského těla
a média. McLuhan nechápe tělo jako
privilegované médium řídící vnímání
našeho okolí ani jako plošný
přenašeč informací šířených médii.
Tělu rozumí jako nesoběstačné
platformě nabízející a  organizující
všechny možné akty mediace. Z této
představy o  lidském těle odvozují
editoři vlastní definici pojmu médium.
Rozumí mu jako synergickému
prostředku lidské společnosti,
jenž proměňuje člověka stejně, jako
člověk proměňuje médium. V  podobě
archeologického prostředku
médium odhaluje minulá uspořádání
společnosti a formou vynálezu
objevuje nová fakta. V  inspiraci
prediktivními schopnostmi oboru
meteorologie používají editoři termín
mediarologie, jímž označují
kýženou úroveň stavu mediálních
studií, které budou schopny předpovídat
vývoj forem a vztahů ve společnosti.
Zdůrazněním vzájemné
součinnosti člověka a média se pub-
miscellanea
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likace vymezuje proti předchozímu
populárnímu pojetí média jako
neutrálního kanálu přenosu informací,
který nastolila komunikační
a  lingvistická teorie sedmdesátých
let. Na základní otázku „Jak souvisí
koncept média s médii?“ kniha odpovídá
ustanovením média za  nezbytnou
podmínkou ontologické,
fyzické i  sociální existence člověka
a  studium médií pasuje na  rovinu
poznávání základního fungování
jednotlivce i celku společnosti.
Jádro recenze tvoří zhodnocení
sekce „Estetika“. Ta se jeví být klíčovou
hned v  několika ohledech.
Za  prvé, v  rámci oborových textů
dosud nebyla estetická perspektiva,
kladoucí důraz na  proces percepce
a  individuálního mentálního prožitku
média, důsledněji rozvíjena.
Úvahy z  oblasti filosofie umění,
dějin umění a  estetiky prozatím
zastávaly funkci vhodně zvolených
příkladů uměleckých děl (nejčastěji
novomediálního charakteru),
které ilustrovaly cizí teoretické
stanovisko. Přínos estetického oddílu
proto spočívá v  rozvoji méně
frekventovaných témat tělesnosti či
vnímání prostoru a času, která jsou
vzhledem k  pojetí média jako základního
elementu ekosystému společnosti
nezanedbatelná. Za druhé,
se skladba a  obsah témat vybrané
části („Umění“, „Tělo“, „Obraz“,
„Materialita“, „Paměť“, „Smysly“
a „Čas a prostor“) dovolávají mcluhanovské
perspektivy nejsilněji.
Za třetí, tento oddíl nejvíce koreluje
s editorskou představou stále se rozšiřujícího
mezioborového pojetí mediálních
studií.
Úvodní esej “Umění“ kulturní
a vizuální teoretičky Johanny Drucker
působí nejméně přesvědčivým
dojmem. Autorka řeší široké téma
podáním výčtu mezníků vývoje
mediálních forem. Historický exkurz
nenaplňuje editorskou ambici
přínosu nových podnětů. Drucker,
věnující se studiu vizuálních prostředků
sdělování informací, dlouhodobě
čerpá z  analýzy transformace
uměleckých forem ve  vztahu
k  rozvoji nových komunikačních
prostředků. Zde však její text zůstává
pouhým popisem formálního
vývoje umění. Proměny médií uměleckého
vyjádření sleduje od  starověkého
pojetí techné ke  vznikué
středověkých řemeslných cechů
a  novověkého uměleckého trhu až
k  romantické představě umělce /
génia. Nástup masového tisku a reprodukci
uměleckých děl, které vedou
ke znejistění podstaty originálu
uměleckého díla, označuje Drucker
(podobně jako většina zainteresovaných
autorů) za klíčový zlom ve vývoji
uměleckých forem. Výrazný
rozvoj uměleckých hnutí druhé
poloviny 20. století, užívajících postupů
postmoderního eklekticismu,
konceptuálního elitismu či minimalistické
redukce forem, chápe právě
jako reakci na znejistění tradičního
pojetí umění. V kontextu všech pří-
miscelanea
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spěvků se text jeví odtržen, bez širší
obsahové i tematické návaznosti.
Další texty lze číst více provázaně.
Pro přehlednost je můžeme
rozdělit do dvou trojic, přestože tak
v  publikaci nejsou řazeny. První
trojici reprezentují témata „Tělo“,
„Materialita“ a  „Smysly“. Jejich
společným jmenovatelem je problematika
tělesnosti, jež zdůrazňuje
tělesné kvality užívání médií. Text
lingvistky a  dokumentaristky Bernadette
Wegenstein představuje
tělo jako aktivní médium rozvoje
lidské kultury. Stručným historickým
přehledem autorka nabourává
protichůdné kategorie duch – tělo,
tělo jako objekt – tělo jako subjekt.
Zdůrazňuje jejich používání
v současné společnosti. Upozorňuje
na  ně zejména v  oblasti reklamy
a  kosmetické propagandy, v  nichž
se tělo stává hlavním kapitálem.
Nástup virtuálního prostředí, tvrdí
Wegenstein, proměňuje rovnici,
jež dosud spojovala tělo s materiálními
kategoriemi a duši s imanentní
podstatou. Příchodem nových médií
virtuálního charakteru dochází
k paradoxní exteriorizaci těla do nehmotné
podoby. Dle autorky proto
patří novým médiím důležitá role
celospolečenského nástroje, který
definitivně vyvrací stále přežívající
duální karteziánské představy.
Stejným argumentačním postupem
střetu hmotné substance a spirituálních
kvalit postupuje také lingvista
Bill Brown v eseji „Materialita“.
Autor se zabývá tématem strachu
společnosti z  dematerializace reality.
Ten se v ní objevuje pravidelně,
a  často také slouží jako argumentační
prostředek proti šíření nových
technologií. Důvodem je domnělý
nárůst abstrakce vztahů mezi osobami
a konkrétními věcmi, který je
novými technologiemi způsoben.
Jak například během rozšířování
směnného média peněz či vynálezu
fotografie, strach ze ztráty reality byl
ve společnosti vždy přítomen. Změnila
se nějak situace dnes, kdy zažíváme
nevídanou invazi technologií
do  každodenního života? K  odpovědi
autor, stejně jako Wegenstein,
používá samotných nových médií
postavených do  role obětního beránka.
Ukazuje, že jsou to právě
nová média, která naplňují funkci
rematerializace. Podobně jako lidské
tělo formuje a  propojuje abstraktní
vjemy přicházející z  okolí, slouží
nyní rozhrání obrazovky k  tvorbě
konkrétního a  uchopitelného světa
informací. V přeneseném slova smyslu
nás obrazovka počítače chrání
před rozpadem okolního světa.
Závěr trojice kapitol tvoří esej
„Smysly“ teoretičky umění Caroline
Jones. Autorka textem usiluje
o obhajobu smyslového vnímání, jež
hraje v západním myšlení vzhledem
k  intelektuálním rozměrům ducha
roli outsidera. Jones detailně popisuje
jednotlivé umělecké proudy
posledních pěti dekád, jejichž vznik
motivovala snaha změnit negativní
miscellanea
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etické a  politické hodnocení smyslových
kvalit. Autorka představuje
řadu směrů pasujících se do role reformátorů
smyslového vnímání. Ty
formou tělesných performancí a ritualizovaných
praktik poukazovaly
na  bytostné sepětí smyslové zkušenosti
s  intelektuálním výkonem.
Mezi příklady nechybí evropský
Vídeňský akcionismus či díla amerických
zástupkyň feministického
umění 60. a 70. let.
Druhou trojici textů tvoří
autorské eseje editorů Mitchella
a Hansena „Obraz“, „Paměť“ a „Čas
a prostor“. Editoři zde pracují s triádou
pojmů obraz, gramatizace
a  paměť, pomocí nichž chtějí vy-ťť
mezit estetický přístup ke  studiu
médií. Mitchell, autor kontinuálně
se věnující filosofii obrazu a tvůrce
termínu obrat k  obrazu,2
definuje
obraz jako nutnou podmínku existence
jakéhokoliv média. Přestože
byl historicky obraz polem mnoha
sporů mezi těmi, kteří jej jako médium
reprezentace uznávali či odmítali
(vzpomeňme středověký spor
ikonoklastů a  ikonodulů), obraz je
dle Mitchella vždy médiem repre-y
zentace, a to ve dvojím ohledu. Obraz
je přirozenou součástí dalších
zobrazovacích médií, jakými jsou
hudba, poezie či vizuální repre-
2
W. J. T. MITCHELL, Picture Theory: Essays
on Verbal and Visual Representations.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994,
s. 11–34.
zentace (např. socha, malba, fotografie).
Jednotlivá média však také
vnímáme jako obrazy. Mitchell obhajuje
fakt, že obraz byl v naší kultuře
historicky stále přítomen a ani
nástup nových technologií nemůže
jeho pozici či existenci ohrozit. Autor
odmítá zejména možnost transformace
obrazu způsobenou nástupem
digitalizace. V  návaznosti
na  práci estetika a  analytického filosofa
Nelsona Goodmana3
ukazuje,
že digitální obraz není nebezpečně
dematerializovaným binárním kódem
bez přímého vztahu k  realitě,
ale je tvořen omezeným množstvím
prvků stejně jako abeceda, hudební
stupnice či mozaikový obraz. Obraz
slouží jako jedno ze základních
médií percepce a orientace ve světě,
ačkoliv nabývá různých povah.
Společným textem editorů je
esej věnovaná termínům času a prostoru.
Západoevropskému myšlení
vždy dominoval čas nad prostorem.
Nástup moderních technologií
tisku, fotografie a  filmu autoři považují
za  moment, který situaci
změnil. Vyjevil obě kategorie jako
vzájemně propojitelné. Expanze
médií tisku, fotografie a  posléze
i  filmu probudila v  teorii hlubší
zájem o  jemnější diferenciaci času
v různých kvalitách trvání, pohybu,
montáže (např. Bergson, Deleuze) či
autenticity prožívaného času (např.
3
Nelson GOODMAN, Jazyky umění: nástin
teorie symbolů. Praha: Academia 2007.
miscelanea
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Husserl, Heidegger). Nevyhnutelně
jsou tyto kategorie vztaženy také
k podmínkám života člověka, který
je do  nich vetknut a  pouze jejich
prostřednictvím je schopen vnímat
a rozlišovat další média.
Poslední esej „Paměť“ francouzského
teoretika technologií
Bernarda Stieglera představuje nejzajímavější
text oddílu. Stiegler staví
své pojetí média na referenci k paleontologické
teorii antropologa André
Leroi-Gourhana. Ta se zabývá
původem technické paměti člověka.
Leroi-Gourhan tvrdí, že rozvoj
lidské biologické paměti probíhá
na základě používání uměle vytvořených
nástrojů. Z  tohoto pohledu
vývoj člověka neprobíhá geneticky,
nýbrž extrageneticky na  základě
setkání s  mimobiologickými fakty.
Otázka technické paměti se vzhledem
k  expanzi nových technologií
jeví aktuální. Mohou paměť ohrozit?
Hansenovo úvodní slovo k eseji definuje
povahu strachu z nových médií
jako vedenou logikou pharmakonu.
Nové formy technologické paměti
(např. iPad, cloud computing) oceňujeme
jako způsob uchovávání
informací, který nás však zároveň
zdánlivě zbavuje potřeby užívat
plnou kapacitu paměti. Stiegler
v textu tematizuje situaci přechodu
od  individuálních mnemotechnik
k  používání hromadných síťových
mnemotechnologií. K  odvrácení
strachu z  paměťových technik používá
pojem gramatizace. Termín
gramatizace označuje přirozený proces
zapomínání aktu užívání určitého
média ve chvíli, kdy pronikne
do každodenního života společnosti
(např. opomínáme tužku při psaní).
Nové technologie explicitně nabízejí
možnost exteriorizace paměti. Dříve
probíhal přechod paměti do  vnějšího
prostředí nereflektovaným zacházení
s  nástroji individuálních
mnemotechnik (např. zápisník,
psací stroj, diktafon). Nyní se stává
na první pohled viditelným. Veřejná
prezentace možností síťové kapacity
paměti zároveň proměňuje politickou
a sociální situaci. Zřetelně exteriorizovaná
paměť nových médií se
stává prostorem kreativním činnosti
jedince. Člověk nepředstavuje pasivního
konzumenta nástrojů technické
paměti, ale tuto paměť může aktivně
obohacovat a sdílet. Tím se však také
z  oblasti technické paměti, jak varuje
Stiegler, stává otevřená politická
hra kontroly systémů paměti.
V  celku se antologie pokouší
o rozvoj mediálních studií jako interdisciplinární
společenské vědy,
jež společnosti umožňuje poznat
její ontologické a  sociální elementy
i  predikovat vlastní budoucnost.
Volí metodologický postup dekonstrukce
modernistické terminologie,
s níž ve vztahu ke kritice médií
operujeme. Mediální studia jsou
prezentována jako typ protovědy,
schopné porozumět šíři současné
společnosti v  momentě sjednocení
společenskovědních oborů. K tako-
miscellanea
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vému výsledku je však nutné připojit
ty disciplíny, jež dosud zůstávaly
stranou, tak jako v případě filosofie
umění a  estetiky. Obtížnost úkolu
vyvstává již v propojení oddílu „Estetika“
s  dalšími částmi publikace.
Mnohé historické odbočky činí
z esejů místy opakování základních
znalostí z  dějin umění. Zdůrazňování
spojitosti reflexe médií v  estetických
kategoriích s nástupem nových
technologií nabývá nezřídka
čistě kauzálního charakteru, a blíží
se tak spíše východiskům kritického
determinismu, vůči němuž se editoři
vymezují. Výrazně je opomenuto
propojení estetické části se společenskou
a politickou perspektivou, které
dlouhodobě hrají na poli estetického
uvažování klíčovou roli. Politické
proměny související se změnou myšlenkových
formací společnosti vždy
vycházely i zpětně ovlivňovaly fenomén
umělecké tvorby. Vyznění antologie
se namísto trojjediného čtení
(„Estetika“, „Technologie“, „Společnost“)
stává třídílnou publikací,
která sama na sobě demonstruje, nakolik
jsou snahy o interdisciplinární
rekonstrukci oboru náročným úkolem.
Také forma publikace, která je
přehledovým slovníkem, by neměla
zůstat opomenuta. Heslovité zpracování
esejí samo se vzpírá snaze
přinést odhalení nových mezioborových
souvislostí. Pro takové objevy
je třeba delší textové plochy i jasnějšího
ideového východiska publikace.
Dozvídáme se pouze málo o  algo-
ritmuvýběruzpracovanýchtermínů,
a chybí také zdůvodnění, proč právě
slovníkový přehled má sloužit jako
vhodná forma definice nového pojetí
pojmu médium. Na stranu druhou,
a to zejména, je nezbytné ocenit celkový
přínos knihy ve dvou ohledech.
Za prvé, ve snaze rozšířit mediálně
studijní slovník o  kriticky zhodnocené
termíny z  oblasti estetiky
a umění, jež ovlivňují reflexi vztahu
člověka a  společnosti. A  za  druhé
pak, vytyčením vize sjednocené
„třetí“ cesty mediálních studií jako
alternativního modelu k dogmaticky
rozdělenému poli několika různých
historických tradic.
///// zpráva z konference ////
Věda jako veřejný obraz
The Public Image. International Visual
Sociology Association Annual
Conference 2013. Centre for Urban
and Community Research, Goldsmiths,
University of London (Velká
Británie), 8.–10. července 2013.
Michal Šimůnek
International1
Visual Sociology Association
(IVSA) je jednou z něko-
1
Tato zpráva z  konference vznikla s  podporou
Grantové agentury České republiky
v rámci výzkumného záměru „O digitálním
miscelanea
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327
lika organizací, které vznikly v průběhu
70. až 90. let 20. století jako
institucionální reakce na  vizuální
obrat v  sociálních vědách.2
Ačkoli
byla založena ve  Spojených státech
převážně americkými sociology,
od  samého počátku byla koncipována
jako mezinárodní a mezioborová
organizace, což je patrné např.
na  stránkách časopisu Visual Stu-
dies3
a zejména pak v průběhu pravidelných
výročních konferencí,
které IVSA pořádá již od roku 1983
a jichž se vedle sociologů a antropologů
pravidelně účastní vědci napříč
různými obory sociálních věd
společně s  dokumentaristy, umělci
a aktivisty.
Letošní konference se konala
ve  Velké Británii pod pořadatelskou
záštitou Centre for Urban
a  dialogickém obratu v  sociálních vědách“
(reg. č. 13-33640P).
2
První vizuálně orientovanou vědeckou
institucí byla International Visual Literacy
Association, která se začala formovat již
v roce 1968. IVSA byla založena v roce 1981
a např. již v roce 1984 ji následovala Society
for Visual Anthropology, v roce 1985 Societé
Française d’Anthropologie Visuelle a  v  90.
letech pak byla v rámci British Sociological
Association ustavena British Visual
Sociology Group a  International Sociology
Association vytvořila tématickou skupinu
Visual Sociology Thematic Group.
3
IVSA vydávala do  roku 1991 newsletter
Visual Sociology Review, od  roku 1991
časopis Visual Sociology, který byl v  roce
2002 adoptován nakladatelstvím Taylor &
Francis, kde časopis dodnes vychází pod
titulem Visual Studies.
and Community Research (CUCR)
na  Goldsmiths College, University
of London a jak již napovídá název
The Public Image, ústředním tématem
bylo objevování souvislostí
mezi vizuální a veřejnou sociologií
a  hledání možností, jak by mohly
vizuální sociální vědy přispět k rozvoji
Burawoyovy koncepce veřejné
sociologie.4
Problematika vztahu
vizuálního a  veřejného a  zejména
pak otázka, jak učinit sociální vědy
nejen „vizuálnějšími,“ nýbrž i „viditelnějšími“
a srozumitelnějšími pro
širokou veřejnost, je nesporně jedním
z klíčových témat, které se současné
(vizuální) sociální vědy snaží
řešit. Zřejmě právě díky aktuálnosti
zvoleného tématu přilákala letošní
konference velké množství řečníků
a  přinesla řadu zajímavých doprovodných
akcí: v  rámci plenárních
zasedání a čtyřiceti panelů vystoupilo
více než dvěstě padesát řečníků;
organizátoři konference připravili
řadu workshopů, filmových projekcí
a  terénních „procházek“ do  ulic
Londýna; účastníci konference měli
možnost navštívit několik instalací
studentských prací a výstavu Visualising
Affect,5
která byla zaměřena
na problematiku možností a limitů
využití uměleckých postupů jakožto
4
Cf. zejménaff Michael BURAWOY, „For
Public Sociology.“ American Sociological
Review, roč. 70, 2005, s. 4–28.
5
Podrobněji výstavu představuje webová
stránka dostupná z: <http://visualisingaffect.
weebly.com/index.html> [cit. 15. 7. 2013].
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výzkumných strategií v  sociálních
vědách. Hlavní téma konference
bylo v rámci výše uvedených aktivit
rozvedeno do  řady souvislostí jako
např. vztah vědy a  aktivismu, problematika
participatorních a inovativních
metod, vztah soukromého
a veřejného, dohledu a osvobození,
vědy a  ne-vědy (umění, dokumentarismu,
žurnalistiky), důsledky
digitalizace a  multimedializace sociálních
věd, etické aspekty vizuálních
výzkumných metod apod.
V  souvislosti s  rozsahem letošní
konference tak Alison Rooke z pořádajícího
CUCR v  uvítacím proslovu
výstižně a zcela oprávněně poznamenal,
že letošní konference se
proměnila spíše do podoby festivalu
s  mnoha paralelně probíhajícími
akcemi. Z  těchto důvodů nemohu
níže předložit komplexní obraz letošní
konference IVSA, nýbrž pouze
několik stručných a  mými preferencemi
a  postřehy ovlivněných
„momentek.“6
Momentka první – veřejná
věda jako samozřejmost: Název
konference a  veškeré oficiální materiály
počínaje výzvami k zasílání
návrhů příspěvků až po  program
konference směřovaly pozornost
6
Kompletní program konference je dostupný
na  oficiálním webu IVSA, srv. The Public
Image. IVSA 2013 Annual Conference –
Conference Program [online]. Dostupné z:
<http://visualsociology.org/images/stories/
conference/2013/IVSA_2013_program_7.2.
13.pdf> [cit. 15. 7. 2013].
účastníků k  promýšlení postavení
vizuálních sociálních věd ve vztahu
k Burawoyově koncepci veřejné sociologie.
Zmínku o  Burawoyovi
a  jeho koncepci jsem však v  průběhu
konference zaznamenal pouze
jednou, a  to v  rámci uvítací řeči,
ve které Monica Sassateliová a Alison
Rook z pořadající CUCR připomněli
hlavní zaměření konference.
V následujících třech dnech v rámci
panelů, kterých jsem se účastnil,
v diskusích u kávy a čokoládových
sušenek a nebo z úst Douglase Harpera,
Lese Backa a Caroline Knowlesové,
kteří se zhostili zahajovacích
a  závěrečných plenárních přednášek,
nebyla problematika veřejné sociologie
ani jednou zmíněna.
Toto mlčení však neznamená,
že by ideál veřejné sociologie nehrál
v  průběhu konference důležitou
roli. Skutečnost, že účastníci konference
neměli zpravidla potřebu
explicitně se odvolávat na  Burawoye,
je do značné míry dána tím,
že směřování k ideálu veřejné vědy
je v  komunitě vizuálně orientovaných
sociálních vědců považováno
spíše za  samozřejmý předpoklad
než za  výzvu, o  které by se mohlo
pochybovat a  diskutovat.7
Koncept
7
Vizuální sociální vědy měly vždy velmi
blízko k  angažované vědě (např. tradice
sociální fotografie je považována za klíčový
zdroj inspirace pro vizuální sociologii – srv.
např. Howard S. BECKER, „Photography
and Sociology.“ In: Doing Things Together:
Selected Papers. Evanston: Northwestern
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veřejné vědy se tak objevoval v řadě
příspěvků a  diskusí zejména v  podobě
zpravidla nadšeného vítání
participatorních metod, inovativních
výzkumných přístupů a v diskusích
o možnostech a očekáváních
spojovaných s  novými digitálními
technologiemi. Ačkoli sdílím toto
nadšení, považuji omezenou míru
diskuse o rizicích a problémech participatorních
metod,8
nových techUniversity
Press 1986; Douglas HARPER,
Visual sociology. London - New York:
Routledge 2012, s. 18–38) a k ideálu veřejné
vědy. Snaha používat obrazy jakožto nástroje
sběru dat a reprezentace vědeckého poznání
byla totiž vždy do  určité míry motivována
snahou opustit vědu založenou na  textech,
číslech, psaní a  nepřístupném odborném
žargonu. V  této souvislosti byly obrazy
(zejména fotografie a  film) považovány
za nástroj otevření se sociálních věd jiným
„neakademickým“ žánrům a publikům (srv.
např. Howard S. BECKER, Telling about
Society. Chicago – London: University of
Chicago Press 2007; Clifford GEERTZ,
Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as
Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press
1988) a  potenciálně i  dialogu a  produkci
sdíleného vědění (srv. např. Marc Henri
PIAULT, „Audiovizuální vyrovnání aneb
za mimotextovou antropologii.“ In: ČENĚK,
D. – PORYBNÁ, T. (eds.), Vizuální antropologie
– kultura žitá a  viděná. Červený
Kostelec: Pavel Mervart 2010, s. 25–68).
8
Srv. např. Davis BUCKINGHAM,
„‚Creative‘ Visual Methods in Media
Research: Possibilities, Problems and
Proposals.“ Media, Culture & Society, roč.
31, 2009, č. 4, s. 633–652. Ačkoli v průběhu
konference byly participatorní metody
převážně adorovány, např. Luc Pauwels
v příspěvku A constructive critique of visual
‚participatory‘ methods as data-production
nologií9
a  poněkud jednostranné
a  nekritické přijetí ideálu veřejné
vědy10
za snad jediný nedostatek letošní
konference IVSA. Tím samozřejmě
nechci tvrdit, že by si účastníci
konference neuvědomovali
rizika a kontroverze spojené s vizuálními
metodami a veřejnou sociologií,
jen se o nich v atmosféře sdíleného
nadšení rozhodli nemluvit.
Momentka druhá – staré naděje
a  nejistoty: Významný představitel
současné vizuální sociologie Luc
Pauwels nedávno poznamenal, že
„na  vizuální sociální vědy již nemůžeme
pohlížet jako na exotickou
specializaci a  práci s  vizuálními
daty bychom měli přestat považovat
za  jakousi alternativní podobu
(sociální) vědy.“11
Ačkoli je jeho
and empowerment strategies poukázal
na řadu etických a epistemologických úskalí,
která jsou s participatorními metodami svá-
zaná.
9
Rizikové důsledky digitalizace byly
výrazněji zvažovány snad jen v  panelu
Exploding Bentham’s Scopic Regime:
Does the Metaphor of the Panopticon Still
Hold? jemuž předsedal Paolo Cordullo
z Goldsmiths.
10
Burawoyova koncepce nebyla v sociálních
vědách jednoznačně a  nekriticky přijata.
Řada autorů např. poukazovala na  riziko
ohrožení integrity sociálních věd, problém
banalizace a  deprofesionalizace vědy apod.
Přehledově o kritice Burawoyovy koncepce
srv. např. Lawrence T. NICHOLS (ed.),
Public Sociology: The Contemporary Debate.
New Brunswick – London: Transaction
Publishers 2007.
11
Luc PAUWELS, „Visual Sociology
Reframed: An analytical Synthesis and
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poznámka s  ohledem na  množství
institucí, periodik, monografií a antalogií
věnovaných vizuálním metodám
a studiu vizuální kultury zajisté
výstižná, mezi vizuálně orientovanými
sociálními vědci můžeme
stále identifikovat silnou potřebu
obhajovat oprávněnost existence
samotné vizuální sociologie, přínos
vizuálních metod a  vizuálních
způsobů reprezentace pro rozvoj
sociologického poznání.12
Zajímavé
přitom je, že způsob této obhajoby
se v  mnoha ohledech nezměnil
od  doby zrodu vizuální sociologie
na  konci 70. let minulého století,
což lze ilustrovat např. editorským
úvodem Jona Wagnera k  antologii
Images of Information, jenž je de
facto seznamem problémů a otázek,
kterým musí vizuální sociologie
Discussion of Visual Methods in Social and
Cultural Research.“ Sociological Methods &
Research, roč. 38, 2010, č. 4, s. 575.
12
Příznačný je v  tomto smyslu komentář
Howarda S. Beckera: „Antropologové a sociologové
používají fotografie od  samého
počátku jejich disciplín, avšak doposud se
nebyli schopni dohodnout, jak a  proč by
vlastně měli fotografie používat. Zdá se, že
my sociální vědci nějak cítíme, že je dobré
fotografie používat, že to beztak každý dělá
a my bychom neměli zůstat stranou. Avšak
zároveň nejsme schopni vysvětlit sobě nebo
komukoli jinému, proč by tomu tak vlastně
mělobýt.“(HowardS.BECKER,„Photograhy
as Evidence, Photographs as Exposition.“ In:
KNOWLES, C. – SWEETMAN, P.  (eds.),
Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual
Methods and the Sociological Imagination.
London – New York: Routledge 2004, s. 193).
čelit, má-li se stát uznávanou součástí
vědy. Jeho několikastránkovou
argumentaci můžeme shrnout
do jedné klíčové otázky: Za jakých
okolností mohou být fotografie (či
jiná vizuální média) zdrojem sociologického
poznání?13
S  drobnými formulačními
rozdíly zazněla tato otázka z  úst
hlavních řečníků konference opakovaně
zejména v  rámci plenárních
přednášek.14
Douglas Harper
v  konferenci otevírající přednášce
Terrible Beauty: the Public Eye of
De-Industrialization představil svůj
rozpracovaný soubor dokumentárně
laděných fotografíí z  oblasti
Monongehelia River Valley poblíž
13
Srv. Jon WAGNER, „Introduction:
Information in and about Photographs.“ In:
WAGNER, J. (ed.), Images of Information.
Still Photography in the Social Sciences.
Beverly Hills – London: Sage 1979, s. 11–22.
14
V obdobném duchu se pak nesla diskuse
k  řadě příspěvků, kdy se často probíralo,
do jaké míry je ten či onen výzkum sociologický
a jaké sociologické poznání prezentované
fotografie přinášejí. Tato diskuse byla
výrazná např. nad příspěvkem The use of
time-lapse photography in visual research:
a  rhythm-analysis of Billingsgate fish market,
ve  kterém Dawn Lyonová představila
výzkum, jehož cílem bylo postižení senzorických
aspektů a různých podob interakcí
odehrávajících se na londýnském rybím trhu
Billingsgate Fish Market. Výsledný krátký
film složený ze série pravidelně pořízených
fotografií podkreslených záznamem zvuku
rovněž pořízeném v  pravidelných intervalech
je dostupný na  <http://www.nowaytomakealiving.net/post/2332/>
[cit. 15. 7.
2013].
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Pittsburghu, prostřednictvím kterých
se snaží dokumentovat lokální
důsledky ekonomického kolapsu
amerického ocelářství, přičemž
na  tomto příkladě přesvědčivě demonstroval,
jak mohou fotografie
vypovídat o  sociálním a  environmentálním
úpadku dané lokality.
Les Back v  předposlední plenární
přednášce nazvané Why do  Sociologists
take Photographs obhajoval
sociologickou fotografii odkazem
na  Bourdieův způsob práce s  fotografií
a  na  příkladech jeho „alžírských“
snímků ilustroval, jak
fotografie vypovídají nejen o  tom,
co zobrazují, ale i  o  povaze Bourdieuovy
sociologické imaginace.
Caroline Knowlesová zakončila
konferenci přednáškou nazvanou
Uses of Photography in the
Practice of Sociological Research,
ve které se pokusila formulovat několik
základních důvodů, proč fotografie
podporují sociologickou
imaginaci.15
15
Millsův koncept sociologické imaginace
(srv. Charles Wright MILLS, Sociologická
imaginace. Praha: SLON 2002) je mezi vizuálními
sociology velmi oblíben a je často
zmiňován jako argument pro obhajobu vizuální
sociologie. Jinde Knowlesová píše: „Tím,
že vizuální metody zachycují partikularity
sociálních procesů, ilustrují obecné prostřednictvím
jedinečného a objasňují vztah
mezi těmito dvěma rovinami, jsou obzvláště
vhodné pro rozvíjení myšlení, které Mills
označil [...] jako ,sociologickou imaginaci‘.“
(Caroline KNOWLES – Paul SWEETMAN,
„Introduction.“ In: KNOWLES, C. –
Výše zmínění autoři tak
do  značné míry ignorovali letošní
téma konference a  místo toho měli
potřebu obhajovat vizuální sociologii
jakožto disciplínu, která má
právo být součástí sociálních věd.
Jejich obhajoba přitom měla povahu
diskuse, která je příznačná pro období
70. a  80. let minulého století
(zaměření pozornosti na  fotografii
zejména dokumentárního charakteru)
a  kterou dnes lze s  ohledem
na velké množství podobných úvah
považovat za  příslovečné nalévání
starého vína do nových lahví.16
Výše
uvedená Wagnerova otázka je sice
stále důležitá a aktuální, před jejím
zodpovězením je však nutno hledat
odpovědi na to, co jsme ochotni považovat
za sociologické poznání, kde
je hranice mezi vědou a  ne-vědou
a  zda-li je tato hranice vůbec ještě
podstatná. A  právě v  tomto duchu
se v rámci téměř všech panelů odehrávala
diskuse o  důsledcích digitalizace,
o  nových technologiích
a  o  participatorních a  inovativních
metodách.
Momentka třetí – experimenty,
inovativní přístupy a  nové „digiSWEETMAN,
P.  (eds.), Picturing the
Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the
Sociological Imagination. London – New
York: Routledge 2004, s. 7.).
16
Srv. např. Jon WAGNER, „Constructing
Credible Images. Documentary Studies,
Social Research, and Visual Studies.“
American Behavioral Scientist, roč. 47, 2004,
č. 12, s. 1477–1506.
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tální“ lahve: Historií i  současností
vizuálních sociálních věd zajímavým
způsobem proniká časté odvolávání
se na experimentální povahu
toho, co vizuální sociologové dělají.
V této souvislosti Howard S. Becker
již v roce 1979 v předmluvě k výše
odkazovanému Wagnerovu sborníku
poznamenal, „že do  oblasti
vizuálních sociálních věd vstupují
lidé s odlišným zázemím, vzděláním
a zkušenostmi a nutně tak provádějí
velice rozmanité experimenty (téměř
vše co v této chvíli úděláte je experiment)
a rozsah nových nápadů,
postupů a  výsledků je v  celkovém
úhrnu velice vysoký.“17
Experiment
zde má přitom význam zejména
metodologického experimentu, kdy
různé pokusy s využitím vizuálních
metod a jejich případné nedostatky
jsou legitimizovány právě poukazem
na to, že se jedná o „pouhý“ experiment.
Toto platí výrazně právě
i o diskusi o využívání nových digitálních
technologií a o inovativních
metodách.
Z hlediska tématu konference je
přitom významné, že motivace pro
experimentování s  novými technologiemi
a metodami je dána zejména
snahou učinit sociální vědy a sociologické
poznání přístupnější. A právě
v  tomto smyslu můžeme za  řadou
17
Howard S. BECKER, „Preface.“ In:
WAGNER, J. (ed.), Images of Information.
Still Photography in the Social Sciences.
Beverly Hills - London: Sage 1979, s. 7.
příspěvků a následných diskusí rozpoznat
Burawoyův koncept veřejné
sociologie, a to jak v tradičním, tak
v organickém smyslu,18
přičemž příchod
nových digitálních technologií
posouvá současnou diskusi o veřejných
vizuálních sociálních vědách
za hranice diskuse 70. a 80. let: nové
„digitální lahve“ jsou totiž v mnoha
ohledech plné „nového vína“.
Z  plenárních přednášek výše
uvedenému nejvýrazněji odpovídalo
vystoupení Bernda Kräftnera
(Incubating a Syndrome – Crossmedial
Sociology), který představil výzkumný
projekt založený v  ethnografickém
výzkumu hranic vnímání
jedinců s  tzv. syndromem areaktivní
bdělosti způsobeným zpravidla
dlouhodobým komatem. Cílem
projektu bylo dokázat, že i pacienti
se závažnými poruchami vědomí
jsou schopni reagovat na  podněty
z vnějšího okolí, pročež tým vědců
vedený Kräftnerem pod hlavičkou
neziskové organizace Research
Center for Shared Incompetencies
(shared.inc) vyvinul řadu experimentálních
technik pro rozpoznání
úsměvu na  tvářích vybraných pacientů.
Tento výzkumný projekt
18
Jednoduše řečeno, tradiční přístup usiluje
o zpřístupnění vědeckého poznání v rovině
reprezentace vědeckého poznání, organický
přístup pak prostřednictvím participatorních,
dialogických a angažovaných přístupů
zpravidla v  rámci komunitně zaměřených
výzkumů (srv. BURAWOY, „For Public
Sociology,“ s. 7–9).
miscelanea
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(stejně jako další projekty share.
inc) je bytostně mezioborový, vychází
z  experimentálního míchání
různých metod a  přístupů a  jeho
nedílnou součástí je angažovaná
intervence do  zkoumané reality,
tedy například proměna přístupu
k  pacientům v  komatózním stavu.
Výstupy z  jejich projektů pak mají
multimodální povahu, zpravidla
kombinují text, fotografie, video,
kresbu, malbu, materiální objekty
a řadu interaktivních prvků.19
Obdobně laděných příspěvků
bylo možno zaznamenat v průběhu
paralelně probíhajících sekcí řadu:
např. diskuse v  panelu Visual Methods
Revisited (předseda Luc Pauwels)
byla zaměřena na promýšlení
teoretických a  metodologických
výzev spojených s digitalizací a produkcí
komplexních multimodálních
reprezentací v  sociálních vědách.
Řada příspěvků pojednávala o inovativních
přístupech, jako např.
spoluautorský příspěvek Wendy
Martinové, Katy Pilcherové a  Lese
Backa The Use of Visual Diaries to
Elicit Insights into Everyday Life,
ve  kterém byl představen výzkum-
19
Podrobnější informace o  shared.inc lze
nalézt na  webu této organizace (dostupné
z: <http://www.sharedinc.net> [cit. 15. 7.
2013]). Aktivity této skupiny jsou známé
i české veřejnosti, neboť v červnu a červenci
tohoto roku se v brněnské Galerii Art konala
výstava Collective Sensor, na  které byly
představeny výstupy právě z projektu, který
Kräftner prezentoval na konferenci IVSA.
ných projekt zaměřený na postižení
povahy každodennosti lidí v důchodovém
věku, jenž byl metodologicky
založený na  rozhovorech podporovaných
fotografickými deníky.
Různí řečníci dále zvažovali např.
možnosti využití 3D vizualizací
(Lauren Leigh Hinthorne, Researching
the Un-seeable Through 3D
Visual Representation: An example
from Papua New Guinea), mobilních
záznamových technologií typu
SenseCam, Subcam nebo Google
Glass (Jen Tarr, Power and ethics in
research with new mobile digital recording
technologies) nebo metody
tzv. digitálního vyprávění (digital
storytelling), které se věnoval zejména
panel Visual Methodologies
and Technologies.20
Teoreticky jsou inovativní přístupy
ukotveny v  řadě přístupů,
přičemž výrazně byl zmiňován
např. vztah vizuálních sociálních
věd a STS (Science and Technology
Studies) a jedním z nejčastěji odkazovaných
autorů byl Bruno Latour.21
Latourovou sociologií vědy byl inspirován
např. panel Inventive Fu-
20
V tomto panelu jsem vystoupil s příspěvkem
The Craft of Digital Storytelling in
Social Sciences: Possibilites, Problems and
Proposals.
21
Srv. Bruno LATOUR, „Poznání a  vizualizace
aneb Jak myslet očima a  rukama.“
Teorie vědy, roč. 30, 2008, č. 3, s. 33–90;
Bruno LATOUR, Making Things Public.
Atmospheres of Democracy. Karlsruhe –
Cambridge – London: TKM –The MIT Press
2005.
miscellanea
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tures for Visual Sociology: Visual
Sociology meets Science and Technology
Studies vedený Ninou Wakefordovou
a  Michaelem Guggenheimem
z  Goldsmiths nebo například
panel On Mapping (předsedající
Felipe Palma a David Moatse rovněž
z  Goldsmiths), ve  kterém byly zvažovány
zejména digitální možnosti
produkce map jakožto specifického
typu analytických vědeckých zápisů.
V  souvislosti s  inovativními
metodami a  novými technologiemi
byla věnována velká pozornost
participatorním metodám, které lze
vnímat jako nejvýraznější naplnění
organické podoby veřejné vědy. Vedle
tradičních fotografií/filmem/
videem podporovaných rozhovorů
(photo-elicitation method) byla
řada příspěvků věnována participatornímu
a dialogickému potenciálu
digitálních technologií. Např. Paolo
Favero představil v příspěvku Learning
to look beyond the frame: Reflection
on the integration of GPS-tracking
in visual ethnographic
practice své výzkumné experimenty
založené na propojování vizuálních
metod s  GPS technologií a  stejně
jako mnoho dalších řečníků naznačoval,
že vizuální sociální vědy musí
vykročit mimo tradiční vztah vědce
a zkoumaného a mimo rám obrazu,
tedy rozšiřovat vizuální rovinu reprezentace
o  další senzorické a  interaktivní
záznamy skutečnosti.
Momentka čtvrtá – Goldsmiths
a  budoucnost vizuálních sociálních
věd: Letošní konference
IVSA naznačila a  potvrdila několik
tendencí, které lze identifikovat
ve vizuálních sociálních vědách přibližně
od  konce 90. let: směřování
od  vizuálních k  multimodálním
a  multisenzorickým reprezentacím
a  posun od  dokumentární a  observační
tradice vizuálních metod
k  participatorním metodám, sdílené
produkci sociologického vědění
a  veřejné sociologii. Tyto dvě
tendence tvoří (a  zřejmě i  v  blízké
budoucnosti budou tvořit) ústřední
téma vizuálních sociálních věd.
A právě v této souvislosti se letošní
výroční konference IVSA příznačně
konala právě v  Goldsmiths, kterou
lze považovat za jedno z center, kde
jsou výše uvedené tendence výrazně
podporovány. K rozvoji vizuální sociologie
tak již řadu let přispívá konferenci
pořádající CUCR.22
Zdejší
katedra sociologie a  v  jejím rámci
založená výzkumná iniciativa Methods
Lab23
věnuje hlavní vědecké
úsilí průzkumu možností a  limitů
vizuálních, senzorických a inovativních
metod sociálněvědného výzku-
mu.24
Na Goldsmiths již několik let
22
Bližší informace viz web CUCR dostupný z:
<http://www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/> [cit. 15. 7. 2013].
23
Informace o této iniciativě jsou dostupné
na  <http://www.gold.ac.uk/methods-lab/>
[cit. 15. 7. 2013].
24
Mezi poslední výrazné publikační počiny
tohoto pracoviště lze zařadit například
knihu Les BACK - Nirmal PUWAR (eds.),
Live Methods. London, Wiley-Blackwell
2013.
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běží studijní program MA in Photography
and Urban Cultures,25
který
bude počínaje nadcházejícím akademickým
rokem 2013/2014 rozšířen
o  magisterský a  doktorský studijní
obor Vizuální sociologie (MPhil/
PhD in Visual Sociology).26
Ostatně
toto výrazné směřování Goldsmiths
k vizuálnímu a inovativnímu se
odrazilo i v průběhu samotné konference,
kdy tamější vědci předsedali
patnácti tématickým panelům
a přednesli více než třicet příspěvků
v rámci paralelních sekcí.
Jestliže vizuální sociální vědy
neměly a  doposud nemají žádné
centrum (spíše se jedná o řadu institucí,
výzkumných týmů a  jednotlivých
badatelů roztroušených
po  celém světě), letošní výroční
konference IVSA možná naznačila,
že Goldsmiths má potenciál stát
se klíčovou institucí vizuálně orientovaného
výzkumu v  sociálních
vědách. Možná i  v  této souvislosti
se bude na letošní konferenci vzpomínat
jako na  významný moment
v historii vizuálních sociálních věd.
25
Srv. web programu dostupný z: <http://
www.gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-photography-urban
-cultures/> [cit. 15. 7. 2013].
26
Pro informace o  tomto programu srv.
<http://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-visual-soci
ology/> [cit. 15. 7. 2013]. Obecně o vizuální
sociologii na  Goldsmiths srv. blog <http:
//visualsociologygold.wordpress.com/> [cit.
15. 7. 2013].
///// recenze /////////////////
Struktura filosofie v pojetí
Zdeňka Vašíčka
Zdeněk VAŠÍČEK, Jak se dělají filosofie.
Praha: Triáda 2012, 240 s.
Petr Krása
Zdeněk Vašíček (1933–2011) ve  své
poslední (posmrtně vydané) knize
Jak se dělají filosofie analyzuje
obecný způsob konstrukce filosofií.
Nezkoumá, co filosofie jsou, ale to,
jak se tvoří, ačkoli tento jeho rozbor
dává celkem dobrou představu, co
si nakonec pod pojmem „filosofie“
představit. Mnohé se o  filosofiích
čtenář dozvídá již z přehledu kapitol
knihy, např. že sledují jazyk, jsou
jazykem formulovány, musí respektovat
celek, jsou charakteristickým
způsobem konstruovány, pracují
s  pojmy, jsou předávány určitými
médii a samy médium tvoří.
V  úvodu práce autor čtenáři
nabízí, že jeho knihu nemusí číst
lineárně od  začátku do  konce, ale
pořadí kapitol může náhodně volit.
Prozrazuje, že v  tom je zakódována
zpráva, a sice, že se nevyhnul
opakování (třebaže vždy v  jiných
souvislostech) (a  to i  celých pasáží
z minulých děl),1
že v knize zůstávají
1
Srv. např. Zdeněk VAŠÍČEK, Podmínky
volby. Praha: Triáda 2003, s. 119–139.
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banality, bez nichž podle něho není
konec konců možné nic pochopit.
Podotýká, že jeho práce je rozvinutím
stanoviska Fritze Mauthnera,
že: „celá naše filosofie sestává více
z  jazyka než z  rozumu [...]. Chybí
nám doposud gramatika rozumu“
(s. 7–8).
Filosofie pak autor představuje
především jako jisté celky, které jsou
vytvářeny jako celkové výpovědi
o  celku nějakých jsoucen. Mluvit
o  jedné filosofii je problematické,
protože filosofie se člení na  různé
disciplíny (metafysika, etika, estetika
a  logika) a  směry. „Všechny
mají odlišné metody a  předměty,
každá si mele své – jakákoli superfilosofie
je v  nedohlednu“ (s. 12).
Přesto minimálně jejich struktura
je podobná.
Jak tedy filosofii definovat, když
desítky jejích vymezení si někdy
odporují? Autor připomíná různá
pojetí filosofie, např. u Nietzscheho,
existencialistů nebo specifické chápání
pojmu v běžném jazyce. Další
analýzu staví na  pojetí filosofie
jako myšlení o  myšlení: „To, co je
všem filosofiím až dosud společné,
je vystiženo podle mého soudu [...]
tvrzením, že filosofie je myšlení
o myšlení“ (s. 15). Proto svou knihu
považuje za pokus o meta-filosofii.
Chceme-li se zabývat tím, jak
jsou filosofie utvářeny, vytváříme
další myšlenkový celek, jenž představuje
celek vyššího řádu, který
patří do  celku filosofie. „Filosofie
má tedy tu zvláštnost, že reflexe o ní
je součástí jí samé“ (s. 16). Vašíček
v  knize zkoumá, jak se filosofie
vyjadřují, nikoli co vyjadřují. Proto
se zaměřuje především na  jazyk,
kterým se vyjadřují, a na celek jako
formu jejich výpovědí. Z toho samozřejmě
plynou jejich charakteristiky.
Autor dále rozebírá obecnou
slovní zásobu jazyka a  jeho
fungování. Zjišťuje, že základní
slovní zásoba pracuje především
s objektovými pojmy, které vstupují
do  vzájemných vztahů. V  základě
jazyka nachází jeho schopnost tvořit
celky. Děje se tak především díky
opozitům. Každodenní jazyk nelze
oddělit od  každodenního světa,
celek světa je propojen se svým
jazykem. Upozorňuje proto, že to,
co víme o  světě, je potřeba hledat
ve struktuře jazyka, jímž se o něm
vyjadřujeme. „Díky této vzájemné
podmíněnosti (z  níž lze usuzovat
na  obdobnou strukturu) můžeme
prostřednictvím jazyka, podobně
jako v zrcadle, byť i křivém, na každodennost
alespoň nahlédnout. [...]
Jazyk byl vynalezen ke komunikaci
v celku a sám celek tvoří. Směřování
k  celku je v  jazyku zakódováno“
(s. 50).
Těmto tématům se autor věnoval
již v  dřívějších publikacích,2
kde podobně rozebírá vztah celku
2
Zdeněk VAŠÍČEK, Obrazy [minulosti]:
O  bytí, poznání a  podání minulého času.
Praha: Prostor 1996; VAŠÍČEK, Podmínky.
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a jazyka, vztah mezi jazykem a mýtem
apod., přičemž zjišťuje, že jazyk,
mýtus a  pojetí historie v  podobě
historické syntézy mají velmi podobnou
strukturu, která odpovídá
struktuře obrazu. Obraz Vašíček
v  základním pojetí vymezuje jako
„reprezentaci většího množství objektů
a jejich vztahů, kde – na rozdíl
od  příběhu – pořadí jejich recepce
není jednoznačně předepsáno.“3
To
dává tušit, že i  filosofie je pro Vašíčka
vlastně obrazem. Nasvědčuje
tomu již zmíněné doporučení, jak
číst jeho poslední knihu.
Celek jazyka podle Vašíčka
představuje předobraz světa. Celek
světa pak nachází své vyjádření
v  jednotlivých filosofiích, v  nichž,
protože jsou formulovány jazykem,
můžeme sledovat základní podobnosti.
Jako základní stavební kámen
v  nich autor nalézá binární opozice,
které vytvářejí jejich prostor.
Poukazuje třeba na to, že základní
gramatická kategorie, jakou je číslo,
„představuje významnou oposici,
kterou např. Platon povýší na principiální
protiklad Jedno kontra
Dvojí a  Mnohé“ (s. 61). Soustavy
opozic a negací dovolují filosofii vy-
3
VAŠÍČEK, Obrazy, s. 51. Jinde vymezuje
obraz jako „soubor objektů a jejich vztahů,
v  němž z  hlediska našeho zájmu nechybí
nic podstatného, který je rozčlenitelný
na  diferencované části, jež musí navzájem,
i  jen zprostředkovaně, souviset, přičemž
pořadí recepce těchto částí není jednoznačně
dáno.“ – VAŠÍČEK, Podmínky, s. 123.
tvářet nové pojmy, otevírají možnost
klasifikace a hierarchie, vyvozování
důsledků z předpokladů atd.
Výstavba popisu světa začíná
ve filosofiích často právě na základě
soustav binárních opozic. Popis
světa musí splňovat především požadavky
celku, potom se můžeme
zaobírat otázkou, co je možné
o tomto celku říci. Objevuje se tím
mimo jiné problém vztahu celku
a  jeho částí, vztahů mezi jednotlivými
částmi celku, kde každá část
může představovat další celek atd.,
objevuje se dynamika těchto vztahů,
případně statičnost celku. Různé
vědy mohou za  celek považovat
předměty svého zkoumání. Filosofie
je zde v jisté nevýhodě, má-li
se vyjadřovat o celku všeho. Autor
naráží na  problém definic celku,
kterých může být více. Připomíná,
že způsob, jakým k  celku při jeho
zkoumání přistoupíme, ovlivňuje
to, co o tomto celku zjistíme. „Celek
lze rovněž vymezit jako všechny
vzájemné vztahy jednotlivostí (lze
se vůbec vyhnout kruhové definici?).
Záleží pak na výběru těchto
vztahů a v tom případě nám hrozí
jistá libovůle výběru z jejich počtu
nebo závislost na  jejich postavení
v  oposicích, universech, na  jejich
kategorisaci. Jestliže zvolíme vztahy
subsumpce, nemůžeme než dostat
hierarchii, což byla cesta starších
metafysických systémů. Zvolíme-li
časový sled, dostaneme diachronické
uspořádání a  zdůraznění
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kontinuity, v  případě synchronických
vazeb dospíváme ke kausalitě“
(s. 91).
V praxi proto mohou existovat
vzájemně se vylučující teorie či
přístupy. Tak máme např. individualismus
vs. holismus nebo
idealismus vs. materialismus. Dalším
problémem je, že pokud celek
popíšeme, pak tento popis může
být jeho částí, tedy ho měnit. Nelze
dost dobře konstruovat do  sebe
uzavřený celek, systém nezávislý
na  okolí, bez instituce prvotního
hybatele apod. Celek, pokud má své
okolí, může s  ním být v  interakci.
Je potom součástí vyšších celků.
„Vlastností každé řádné filosofie je
proto snaha vyjadřovat se o  všem,
a  musí si tedy konstruovat jakýsi
všeobjímající celek, v  jehož rámci
(se) může vypovídat. Na  druhé
straně můžeme poněkud zlomyslně
říci, že nalezneme-li jazyk, ve  kterém
se můžeme vyjadřovat o všem,
můžeme se nadít nějakého toho
celku“ (s. 99–100).
Jak známo, hledali takový jazyk
např. Descartes, Leibniz a  Komenský,
kteří byli v  podstatě přesvědčení,
že pokud nalezneme dokonalý
jazyk, poznáme dokonale řád světa.
Otázkou ovšem je, zda tento řád
do  světa nevkládáme. Má-li ale
filosofie popisovat všeobsahující
celek, je zřejmé, že popisuje něco,
o  čem má na  začátku jen mlhavé
představy. Musí počítat s  tím, že
může existovat mnoho různých
popisů tohoto celku.4
Ilustrací
mohou být desítky pojetí pojmu
Bytí. Četným pokusem, jak tento
celek vymezit, byla ve filosofii snaha
stanovit absolutní hranice tohoto
celku.5
Celek všeho lze myslet,
nikoli poznat. „Vyšetřujeme pak
totalitu myšlenou, nikoli svět jako
totalitu. Takováto totalita je vlastně
podmínkou naší zkušenosti – a jak ji
potom zkoumat? Přitom musíme ale
tuto myšlenkovou práci zahrnout
do  totality skutečnosti – zavádějící
a nepříjemné“ (s. 124).
Dalším znakem filosofií, který
Vašíček zkoumá, je jejich uvažování
v  pojmech. Problémem je zde
samotný pojem pojmu. Pojmy se
snaží zachytit základní vlastnosti
jimi popisovaných jevů, celků.
Ve  vztahu k  celku to znamená, že
4
Zde opět Vašíček nalézá ve filosofii podobnost
o  obrazem. „Obraz je totiž obrazem
proto, že připouští vždy možnost více interpretací,
není a nemůže být jednoznačný“ (s.
104).
5
„Tak máme Platonovo Dobro, Aristotelova
Hybatele, Původce, Stvořitele, tomistického
Boha, Descartovu absolutní a  Spinozovu
nekonečnou substanci (Deus sive natura),
Schellingův absolutní Rozum (jako splynutí
Přírody a Ducha, Objektu a Subjektu),
Hegelův absolutní Duch, Okenovo
Absolutno. Rovněž Jedno (hen) – (slučující
jedno/jiné a  látku/formu) – je charakterisováno
jako jediné, věčné, nekonečné, neměnné
a nedělitelné. Obdobnou roli mohou
hrát i totalita, vše, vesmír, svět, universum,
příroda. Tyto postuláty mají funkci výchozího
bodu, absolutní jistoty, konce regrese
ad infinitum, bohužel za cenu prázdnoty či
nepostižitelnosti“ (s. 122).
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pojem je určován celkem a naopak.
Ustavováním vztahů mezi jednotlivými
pojmy se potom můžeme
vyjadřovat o platnosti či neplatnosti
výpovědí. Setkáme se samozřejmě
s  různými významy jednotlivých
pojmů v  různých filosofiích. „Jestliže
někdo jiný tvrdí o témže něco
jiného, pak si patrně stanovuje jiný
rámec [...]. Abychom se dohodli,
museli bychom předpokládat další
rámec rámců, jakési meta-metateorie“
(s. 135).
Původ pojmů nachází Vašíček
především v  metaforičnosti přirozeného
jazyka. Zpřesňování pojmů
může vést k abstrakcím a ideálním
typům, kterým v  realitě nic neodpovídá.
Co potom ale poznáváme
a co filosofie popisují? „Je-li takový
pojem skutečně základní, nemůže
mít už pojmovou referenci, může
být jen odkazem na  vzájemně
sdílené představy založené na společné
zkušenosti – a ty jsou obvykle
popsatelné jednoduchým jazykem
každodennosti“ (s. 145). Jsme-li
navíc my sami součástí celku,
pak se tvrzení o něm vztahují také
na nás. Vašíček správně připomíná,
že s  popisy světa a  návody k  jeho
používání se setkáváme již v rámci
naší socializace. „Chováme se podle
své deskripce, nebo popisujeme své
chování?“ (s. 163).
Z  faktu, že filosofie něco vyjadřují,
vyplývá nutnost zkoumání
zásad logiky a  argumentace. Filosofie
se nedějí ve  vzduchoprázdnu,
ale jsou přenášeny určitými médii,
která se historicky mění. Mění se
formy těchto médií (ústní podání,
odborný článek), mění se postavení
vypovídajících, mění se také materiál
médií (svitek, elektronická
informace). Samy filosofie jsou
samozřejmě zároveň také médii.
To vše se vzájemně ovlivňuje (v neposledku
bychom mohli do  těchto
úvah připojit také společenské
změny), působí na realitu, tyto důsledky
se zpětně odrážejí v  našem
obraze světa.
Ve  Vašíčkově pojednání, které
představuje meta-filosofii jako
obraz,6
celek a  soustavu binárních
opozic, se tak setkáváme se zacykleností,
ze které na ty, kdo by chtěli filosofii
dělat, může dopadat marnost
takového počínání. Z jeho výkladu
plyne, že se pohybujeme ve strukturách
(jazyka, pojmů, teorií), které se
vzájemně předpokládají a dokazují.7
Kniha tak vyúsťuje v otázku vlastně
klasickou: Poznáváme svět takovým
způsobem, jakým existuje, nebo pro
nás existuje takovým způsobem, jakým
jej poznáváme? Každé poznání
z  velké části vychází z  reflexe poznání
předchozího. Má tato spirála
někde konec? Filosofie tak kladou
při odpovědích na základní otázky
mnoho dalších otázek. Ostatně sám
6
Což vysvětluje a  zároveň předpokládá
mnohost jeho interpretací, čili jednotlivých
filosofií.
7
Zde je zřejmě třeba hledat základy oné
gramatiky rozumu.
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Vašíček na  mnoha místech knihy
upozorňuje na  problémy, které se
filosofii dosud nepodařilo vysvětlit,
ačkoli se o to musí pokoušet. Každý
takový pokus představuje objevení
dalších problémů a nutnost dalších
zkoumání. „Takže: jediný způsob,
jak zjistit, co filosofie je, je ji dělat“
(s. 213), uzavírá knihu citací
Russela.
Je vysoce pravděpodobné, že
na velkou řadu základních otázek se
nám nikdy nepodaří najít odpovědi.
Přesto však Vašíčkova analýza konstrukce
filosofií přináší jistou útěchu:
„Sama filosofie se ocitá v  roli
média, totiž média výchovy k virtus
(k ní patřila i schopnost formulovat
a obhájit své postoje a tvrzení), tedy
k  ideálu občana“ (s. 195), pokud
je v  ní ovšem toto stále přítomno
(a  nestává se prázdnou učeností).
Domnívám se, že ano, že filosofie
kultivuje naše pobývání ve  světě,
jakkoli je v  dnešní postmoderní
podobě vystavena mnoha vlastním
problémům. Je tedy na místě k Vašíčkově
otázce „jak“ připojit otázky,
kterým se v  textu, jak sám upozorňuje,
nevěnuje. Otázky „proč“
a „nač“.
///// recenze /////////////////
Přínos renesančních učenců
historiografii matematiky
Robert GOULDING. Defending Hypatia:
Ramus, Savile and the Renaissance
Rediscovery of Mathematical
History, New York: Springer, 2010,
201 s.
Dagmar Zajíčková
Gouldingova kniha Defending Hypatia:
Ramus, Savile and the Renaissance
Rediscovery of Mathematical
History (2010) je snahou ukázat, žey
různá pojetí dějin vědy, především
matematiky, existovala už v období
renesance, a nejedná se tedy o oblast,
jež zaznamenala rozmach až během
osvícenství, které je běžně ztotožňováno
se vznikem a rozvojem této vědecké
disciplíny. Mnozí historikové
považují za  první skutečný výklad
dějin matematiky dvousvazkové
dílo Histoire des mathématiques
(1758), jehož autorem je francouzský
vědec a matematik Jean-Étienne
Montucla (1725–1799). Montucla
dějiny matematiky chápal jako rozvoj
lidského ducha a byl přesvědčen,
že v  matematice docházelo postupem
času ke změnám a pokrokům,
které byly totožné s  pokroky lidského
ducha.
Hlavním záměrem Gouldingovy
knihy je snaha dokázat, že
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práce z dějin matematiky existovaly
už před Montuclovými Histoire des
mathématiques, a že i ony si zasluhují
naši pozornost. Goulding se
domnívá, že výklady dějin matematiky
lze nalézt i v renesanci, a že
renesanční matematici věnovali
pozornost rozvoji této vědy, jejímu
pokroku i úpadku. Podle Gouldinga
to byli právě renesanční humanisté,
kteří významně přispěli k historiografii
matematiky, a  z  nichž jsou
nejvíce známí Federico Commandino
(1509–1575) a  Bernardino
Baldi (1553–1617). Kniha má být,
podle autorových slov, „studiem
renesanční historiografie matematiky
a také přínosem pro institucionální
dějiny matematiky“ (s. xii).
Goulding se zaměřuje především
na  dva autory, kterým podle něho
není v současné historiografii vědy
věnována dostatečná pozornost.
Prvním z  nich je francouzský matematik
Petrus Ramus (Pierre de
la Ramée, 1515–1572), jehož přínos
jako historika vědy je podle Gouldinga
opomíjen, přestože z  jeho
prací čerpali Baldi i Commandino.
Druhým významným vědcem a historikem
vědy, jemuž Goulding věnuje
část knihy, je anglický matematik
Henry Savile (1549–1622), který
na Ramovy práce reagoval. Kniha je
rozdělena na dvě velké části, z nichž
každá obsahuje několik podkapitol.
První část tvoří čtyři kapitoly,
z  nichž ta úvodní je věnována původu
a  rozvoji historických pojednání
o vzniku a vývoji matematiky
a  přenášení této vědy z  kultury
na  kulturu. Za  důležitý zdroj pro
renesanční dějiny matematiky považuje
Goulding výklad dějin matematiky,
který předložil řecký
historik Diodorus Siculus (1. stol.
př.n.l.) ve svém díle Bibliotheca historica.
Podle Gouldinga byl Diodorus,
podobně jako mnoho ostatních
řeckých historiků, fascinován starověkým
Egyptem a  domníval se,
že matematiku vynalezli egyptští
kněží, kteří svůj volný čas věnovali
matematice a  jejímu zdokonalování.
Židé a Babylóňané byli podle
Diodora vysláni z  Egypta jako kolonisté,
a  Chaldejci, národ s  dokonalými
astronomickými znalostmi,
byli egyptští kněží přestěhovaní
do jiné země. Řekové pak vědu zdědili
od Chaldejců. Za další důležitý
zdroj, z  něhož čerpali renesanční
historikové matematiky, považuje
Goulding Flaviův (37/38 – asi 100)
příběh o původu židovského národa
a  také matematiky, jíž Židé podle
Flavia vynalezli. Autor se v  této
části knihy věnuje ještě dalším důležitým
osobnostem, jakými byli
mimo jiné například řecký novoplatónský
filosof Proklos (412–485),
který ve  svém Komentáři k  první
knize Eukleidových Základů nastínil
dějiny matematiky, jež vyvrcholily
napsáním Eukleidových Základů,
nebo Johannes Regiomontanus
(1436–1476), jenž se také věnoval
dějinám matematiky od období sta-
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rověku až do své doby. Podle Gouldinga
renesanční autory spojoval
především hon za  nalezením prapůvodní
ztracené moudrosti biblických
patriarchů v období před potopou
(prisca sapientia( ), o níž hovořili
ve  svých dílech Flavius, Diodorus
a ostatní řečtí historikové. Goulding
upozorňuje na to, že v dochovaných
dílech tohoto typu nalézáme pouze
chaotický a  nejasný výklad. Autor
v  knize předkládá možnosti, jak
se renesanční vědci s  těmito obtížemi
vypořádali. Buď se zaměřili
na  užitečnost věd nebo si osvojili
platónský pojem „přirozenost matematiky“,
případně kombinovali oba
způsoby, jako například Girolamo
(Geronimo) Cardano (1501–1576)
(s. 18). Zde autor také uvádí, že právě
Ramus a Savile, jimiž se kniha především
zabývá, předkládají dvě odlišné
verze dějin matematiky, které
inklinují k jednomu nebo druhému
způsobu výkladu.
Druhou kapitolu autor věnuje
vývoji prvotních Ramových názorů
na  matematiku a  její dějiny,
které předložil v  práci Dialecticae
institutiones z roku 1553, a pak také
Ramovu pojetí dějin matematiky
a  jeho dílům Arithmetica z  roku
1555 a  Prooemium mathematicum,
které bylo vydané v roce 1567. Goulding
se domnívá, že právě Prooemium
mathematicum mělo největší
vliv na  dějiny matematiky, a  to až
do doby, kdy byly publikovány Montuclovy
Histoire des mathématiques.
Goulding v  této kapitole nejprve
stručně popisuje Ramovu Dialecticae
institutiones, a  poté se dostává
k výkladu Ramových dějin matematiky,
v němž pokračuje i v další kapitole.
Podle autora Ramus věřil Flaviovu
příběhu o  původu věd, podle
něhož se o největší rozvoj matematiky
zasloužili bibličtí patriarchové
v  období před potopou. Teprve
po potopě, když se znovu obnovilo
lidstvo, se věda šířila k Egypťanům,
Řekům, Italům, Arabům, a dalším,
a  nakonec k  Francouzům. Goulding
u  Rama objevuje snahu najít
kompromis mezi Flaviovým vyprávěním
o původu věd a nezpochybnitelnými
úspěchy řeckých matematiků
(s. 29). Autor na tomto místě
vyvrací možnou domněnku, že by
Ramus mohl Flaviův příběh odmítnout,
že by mohl nesouhlasit s představou,
že Adam a  s  ním i  první
lidé měli nejdokonalejší znalosti
v oblasti matematiky. Místo toho si
Goulding všímá Ramova hodnocení
úspěchů řeckých matematiků, a Eukleidových
Základů, které považoval
za  dílo, v  němž byla obsažena
všechna matematická fakta, která
dali dohromady jeho předchůdci.
Ve  třetí kapitole autor pokračuje
ve  výkladu Ramových dějin
matematiky, se kterým začal už
v  předcházející části. Svoji interpretaci
zde opírá o díla Prooemium
mathematicum z  roku 1567 a  jeho
rozšířenou verzi Scholae mathematicae,
která vyšla v  roce 1569.
miscelanea
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Goulding se opět navrací k  Flaviově
představě o  původu vědy, kterou
byl podle jeho názoru Ramus
inspirován. Od  zkoumání původu
matematiky a  jejích dějin přechází
autor k Ramově kritice řecké vědy.
Domnívá se, že v  průběhu psaní
svých prací byl Ramus stále méně
a  méně okouzlen řeckou matematikou
a  řeckými matematiky. Autor
se v  této kapitole z  velké části
věnuje Ramovu nejasnému názoru
na  Platóna. Podle Gouldinga Ramus
přešel od  chvály v  první části
svého Prooemia až ke kritice a obvinění
Platóna z úpadku matematiky,
ve  druhé části knihy. Jako jednu
z hlavních příčin této kritiky považuje
Goulding to, že Ramus vkládal
do Platóna naději, že znovu obnoví
a  ustaví původní, ztracenou matematiku
z období před potopou, a on
místo toho tuto příležitost promarnil
(s. 46). Goulding se domnívá,
že dokonalá matematika z  období
před potopou byla podle Rama jednoduchá
a dostupná všem, a Platón,
místo toho, aby tuto jednoduchost
obnovil, zahalil matematiku do  filosofických
nejasností. Toto je podle
autora hlavní bod Ramovy kritiky
řecké matematiky a Platóna především,
neboť v  jeho pojetí se matematika
stala složitou a  dostupnou
pouze vyvoleným.
Centrální postavou čtvrté kapitoly
je anglický matematik Henry
Savile. Autor v této části knihy hovoří
především o  Savilově životě,
vědecké práci a  jeho přednáškách
z  matematiky a  astronomie, a  také
o  Savilově reakci na  Ramovo dílo.
Na  tomto místě je důležité zdůraznit,
že veškerá Savilova práce
se dochovala pouze v  rukopisech,
které Goulding studoval a mohl tak
prostřednictvím této knihy seznámit
čtenáře s dosud neprobádaným
dílem tohoto renesančního matematika.
Goulding se domnívá, že
Savile čerpal z  Ramova Prooemia,
ale nesdílel Ramův názor na  účel
a hodnotu matematických věd. Autor
také tvrdí, že Savile přejímal Ramovy
myšlenky a  názory a  poté je
otáčel proti němu, nicméně nachází
společné rysy v pojetích obou vědců.
Například oba matematici se snažili
bránit matematiku před obviněním
z obtížnosti a nejasnosti, i když každý
jiným způsobem. Za hlavní rozdíl
v přístupu obou vědců považuje
autor snahu každého z nich zaměřit
se na odlišnou část matematiky. Zatímco
Ramus se podle Gouldinga věnoval
především praktické stránce
matematiky a užitečnosti této vědy,
Savile svůj zájem soustředil na  teoretické
aspekty. Oproti kapitolám
věnujícím se Petru Ramovi a  jeho
myšlenkám se tato daleko více zaměřuje
na Savilův život a na institucionální
prostředí, v němž působil,
což mnohdy zastiňuje informace,
které by podle názvu jednotlivých
kapitol měly být klíčové. Práce s původními
Savilovými rukopisy poskytovala
Gouldingovi daleko širší
miscellanea
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potenciál pro zpracování této části
knihy, který ale zůstal nevyužit.
Pátá a  šestá kapitola se věnují
Eukleidovi a jeho Základům. V páté
kapitole Goulding analyzuje dobové
prameny a  poukazuje na  to,
že v  minulosti docházelo k  dohadům
a  nejasnostem okolo Eukleida.
Domnívá se, že mnozí vědci
a  matematikové zaměňovali Eukleida
(325 př.n.l.–260 př.n.l.), autora
Základů, za Eukleida z Megary
(450 př.n.l.–370 př.n.l.), Sókratova
žáka a  stoupence jeho filosofie.
Goulding zde ukazuje, že renesanční
historikové matematiky,
včetně Petra Rama i Henryho Savila,
si uvědomovali problémy související
se snahou určit autora Základů.
A nejen tito dva matematici si všimli
chybného ztotožnění Eukleida, autora
Základů, a Eukleida z Megary,
sókratovského filosofa. Goulding
považuje právě Petra Rama za prvního,
kdo odhalil správnou totožnost
autora Základů.
Šestá kapitola se týká samotných
Eukleidových Základů a nejasností
spojených s jejich autorstvím.
Renesanční vědci se podle Gouldinga
domnívali, že Základy mají
dva autory, jedním z nich je Eukleidés,
řecký matematik a  geometr,
a  druhým je řecko-egyptský matematik
Theón (335–405). V této části
knihy autor ukazuje odlišné pozice,
které zastávali Ramus a Savile, přičemž
oba ve  svých výzkumech
čerpali Z  Proklových Komentářů
k první knize Eukleidových Základů.
Goulding tvrdí, že pro Rama Theón
nebyl pouze tím, kdo Základy se-y
stavil dohromady a  vydal, ale jeho
role byla daleko významnější. Ramus
podle Gouldinga předpokládal,
že Eukleidés byl autorem teorémů
a Theón důkazů. Savile s Ramovým
tvrzením nesouhlasil, nepovažoval
Theóna za  autora Základů, a  svá
zkoumání uzavřel tím, že i  když
Theón nebyl autorem Základů, byl
vynikajícím vědcem a  matematikem.
Autor knihu uzavírá zajímavou
Savilovou úvahou a také asociací
Základů s  příběhem Theónovy
dcery, matematičky Hypatie.
Kniha Roberta Gouldinga Defending
Hypatia: Ramus, Savile and
the Renaissance Rediscovery of Mathematical
History je originálním
zpracováním téměř neprobádaného
tématu. Goulding zprostředkoval
čtenářům koncepce dějin matematiky
nejen dvou autorů uvedených
v  názvu knihy, naopak, snažil se
o zařazení Rama i Savila do dobového
i  institucionálního kontextu.
Bez povšimnutí tak nezůstali ani
ostatní více či méně známí renesanční
vědci a matematikové a jejich
práce a také zdroje, z nichž čerpali.
Kniha je velkým přínosem pro historiografii
vědy a je prvním a dosud
jediným podrobnějším zpracováním
nejen renesančních dějin matematiky
jako celku, ale především
práce dvou matematiků, jimž se dosud
nikdo podrobněji nevěnoval.
miscelanea
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///// recenze /////////////////
Kniha o obrazech, které
opustily svůj rám
Kateřina SVATOŇOVÁ, Odpoutané
obrazy: archeologie českého virtuálního
prostoru. Praha: Academia
2013, 344 s.
Josef Vojvodík
... je to tedy pouze „obraz“, je to,
ať se sebevíc jeví, „nic“.1
Když Andy Warhol vysvětluje
motivaci své instalace Silver Clouds
z roku 1966, říká, že chtěl zanechat
malování a  místo toho dělat filmy,
a uvažoval, „že musí být nějaká cesta,
jak s tím skončit, a myslel jsem si, že
jediná cesta je udělat obraz, který lítá
[...]. A ten nápad je, naplnit je héliem
a pustit je z okna a ony potom uletí.
A  tím je o  objekt [...], který tady
stojí, míň. A to je potom [...], no jo,
způsob, jak nechat malování a [...]“.
O  obrazech a  obrazových fenoménech,
jež překračují a opouštějí tradiční
kategorii a funkci obrazu jako
plošného a  artificiálního předmětu,
určeného ke  ztvárnění a  vizuální
1
Edmund HUSSERL, Phäntasie, Bildbewusstsein,
Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie
der anschaulichen Vergegenwartigungen.
Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925).
Husserliana XXIII. Den Haag: Martinus
Nijhoff 1980, s 46.
recepci reálných nebo fiktivních obsahů,
pojednává nyní kniha Kateřiny
Svatoňové, vydaná nakladatelstvím
Academia. Je pozoruhodným
a  problémově bohatým příspěvkem
nejen k teorii a „archeologii“ médií
a k diskusím o realitě obrazu, ale také
k  poznání specifik českého iluzivního
a  virtuálního prostoru, dosud
stále nedostatečně prozkoumaného.
V době omniprezence obrazu kniha
Kateřiny Svatoňové ukazuje, že
není vždy snadné a  jednoznačné
určit, co ještě obraz je či není, neboť
existují objekty, které jako obrazy
primárně nevnímáme a  přesto jimi
jsou a naopak existují objekty a věci,
které na první pohled jako „obrazy“
vypadají, aniž by jimi ve skutečnosti
byly. Jestliže autorka „odpoutané
obrazy“ charakterizuje jako takové,
jež opouštějí svůj rám, dotýká se jednoho
ze základních určení obrazu,
kdy rám (ať skutečný nebo fiktivní)
funguje jako dispozitiv, umožňující
obraz vnímat právě jako obraz, tedy
jako ohraničenou plochu, odkázanou
na  určitého materiálního nositele.
Také projekce, pro něž tento dispozitiv
zdánlivě neplatí (např. IMAX
apod.), mají své hranice, na  které
divákův pohled naráží.
Pojem „odpoutané obrazy“ se
vztahuje na  obrazy, osvobozené
od  dosavadních struktur své produkce
i recepce, od svého „nositele“
(plocha, okno, rám atd.), odpoutávající
se od  zákonitostí centrální
perspektivy a geometrického vidění,
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od vžitých a petrifikovaných norem,
a  konstituující virtuální prostor.
Kateřina Svatoňová je specifikuje
jako decentralizované, dislokované,
fragmentární, pluralizované, diskontinuální
a jejich vytváření velmi
úzce souvisí s  proměnami pojmu
reality a s tím, co by bylo možné nazvat
„experimenty se skutečností“.
Rozlišuje vnější odpoutané obrazy,í
které se buď fragmentarizují nebo
vytvářejí „všeobklopující celek“,
produkované většinou technicky,
a vnitřní mentální obrazy.
Zkoumání fenoménu „odpoutaných
obrazů“ a  virtuálního prostoru,
v němž se realizují, je v knize
Kateřiny Svatoňové strukturováno
čtyřmi hlavními kategoriemi: myslí,
percepcí, odpoutaným obrazem,
prostorem. Metodicko-teoreticky  je
kniha postavena na kombinaci
několika přístupů a hledisek, umožňujících
mezioborovou analýzu
„odpoutaných“ a  „odpoutávajících
se“ obrazů, konkrétně intermediálně-technický
přístup, psychologicko-neurologický,
kulturně-filozofický
a  kulturně-historický přístup.
Přínos zvolené kombinace
rozdílných metodicko-teoretických
přístupů spočívá v tom, že umožňuje
adekvátní přístup k fenoménu polydimenzionality
obrazu, pikturální
dimenze pohledu, obrazového prostoru
/ prostoru obrazu, a  zároveň
k  myšlení o  obrazech a í v  obrazech
jako specifické mentální operaci
„ve sféře fikce“ (Husserl).
Autorka však nevychází pouze
z prací teoretiků médií, obrazu a vizuality
jako William J. T. Mitchell,
Rudolf Arnheim, Jonathan Crary,
Oliver Grau, Siegfried Zielinsky,
Friedrich Kittler, Georges Didi-Huberman,
Mieke Balová, Anne
Friedbergová ad., ale invenčním
způsobem využívá a  pro své
zkoumání zhodnocuje uvažování
fenomenologů jako Alfred Schütz
i  badatelů z  oblasti fenomenologicko-antropologické
psycho(pato)
logie vnímání jako Erwin Straus,
Eugène Minkowski, Ludwig Binswanger
nebo Svetozar Nevole,
jenž ve čtyřicátých letech 20. století
rozvíjel svébytnou fenomenologii
iluzivního vnímání, předznamenávající
v  nejednom aspektu současné
uvažování o  pronikání do
virtuální skutečnosti, hyper-reality
atd. Za  podnětnou považuji v  její
knize také aktualizaci teorie aperspektivity
historika kultury Jeana
Gebsera z  jeho proslulé, třebaže
dnes již historické práce Ursprung
und Gegenwart (1949/1953), která jet
v českém prostředí téměř neznámá.
Jako jeden z cílů své knihy zdůrazňuje
Kateřina Svatoňová „proniknout
do divákovy mysli, která je
odpoutaným obrazům vystavena“.
Ve  svých přednáškách o  fantazii
a  obrazovém vědomí (Husserliana
XXIII) uvažuje Husserl o paradoxní
podvojnosti obrazu, která spočívá
v  podvojné viditelnosti obrazu:
obraz je sice viditelný jako „fyzický
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objekt“ a  „obrazový objekt“, existující
v času a prostoru, zároveň je
mu však vlastní specifická irealita,
neboť „obrazový objekt je fiktum,
[je] objektem vnímání, ale zdánlivým
objektem“ (Scheinobjekt). To
znamená, že obraz se „vyjevuje“,
ale má charakter neskutečnosti a je
ve sporu s aktuální přítomností.
Samotný metaforický pojem
odpoutání evokuje fenomenologic-í
kou epoché ve  smyslu zpochybněníé
a „neutralizaci“ samozřejmého postoje
ke skutečnosti tzv. přirozeného
světa. Proto věnuje Kateřina Svato-
ňováv poslední5.kapitolepozornost
„vnitřním odpoutaným obrazům“
a  „subjektivním jevům optickým“
Svetozara Nevoleho a  jeho uvažování
o možnostech vytváření a vnímání
obrazů, odpoutávajících se
od svého kontextu. Tyto obrazy mají
charakter imaginativní variace, jež
je specifickou formu anomalizace.
Tento „nepřirozený postoj“, jako
specifický výkon fenomenologické
reflexe,2
tvoří zároveň podstatu
anomalizace a narušování kontextu
v Nevoleho experimentech.
Kateřina Svatoňová upozorňuje
na podstatnou skutečnost, že dnešní
média a jejich zacházení s obrazy se
opět pokoušejí obraz, který opustil
rám, znovu zarámovat a „spoutat“,
virtuální prostředí svazovat mřížkou
perspektografu a  konvencemi
2
Edmund HUSSERL, Logická zkoumání
II/1. Praha: OIKOYMENH 2010, s. 25.
původně renesančního centrálně
perspektivického myšlení. Dnešní
technologie a  média připouštějí
skutečnost (i  virtuální) jen pokud
je pro běžného vnímatele představitelná,
mediálně přenosná a v této
redukované podobě také digitálně
manipulovatelná.
Poněkud vypointovaně by se
dalo říci, že vnější odpoutané ob-í
razy, produkované komunikačními
médii mohou technicky inscenovat
hyperrealitu, ale právě jen inscenovat
(až k  čistě zábavnímu efektu)
v závislosti na smyslovém vnímání,
pohybu těla atd. Vnější „odpoutané“
obrazy mohou být nositelem „estetického
zdání“; v jejich případě jde,
jak Kateřina Svatoňová píše, také
o  hledání ve  specifickém smyslu
„ideálního“ nebo přinejmenším
alternativního prostoru a  obrazu
světa. Polyvizuální a  polymediální
instalace československých pavilonů
na EXPO’58 a ’67 pod heslem
„Bilance světa pro svět lidštější“
(’58), program Zrození světa (’67;
Josef Svoboda, Alfréd Radok) ad.
mají zároveň společensko-politickou
nebo přímo ideologickou implikaci.
Samotné realizace těchto vnějších
„odpoutaných“ obrazů, jimiž se
autorka zabývá v  kapitole „Technický
fragmentárně-imersní prostor:
sítě, jež si spolu hrají“, jsou
ovšem ambivalentní: na  jedné
straně měl být nejmodernějšími
technologiemi simulován co nejkomplexnější
obraz ve  všech ob-
miscellanea
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lastech tzv. rozvinuté socialistické
společnosti a  světa socialistické
skutečnosti, jehož rozvoj přestal být
utopií, na druhé straně znamená samotné
zmnožení a fragmentarizace
obrazů, myšlenka polyvizuality
atd. kritiku totálního a  totalizujícího
obrazu totalitního systému.
Heterogenita je postavena do  opozice
k  homogenitě (obrazu) světa.
Třebaže tento typ (postmoderních)
obrazů operuje s  fragmentem, je
pro něj příznačné, jak Kateřina
Svatoňová ukazuje, směřování k celistvosti,
k  typu multimediálního
„Gesamtkunstwerku“.
Pohled člověka není jen intuitivní,
je zároveň reflexivní,
„klamaný“ ovšem příslibem, který
vzbuzuje jeho žádostivost. Dalo
by se říci, že to je v  jistém smyslu
také efekt „odpoutaných obrazů“;
žádostivost je vedena touhou vidět-poznat,
co je „za  nimi“, chce je
„odhrnout“ jako imaginární závěsy.
Co se však za nimi skrývá, je past
klamné reprezentace, neboť jejich
podstatou je subverzní, desorganizující,
anamorfotický princip.
Fenomenologie vnitřních „odpoutaných
obrazů“, kterou Kateřina
Svatoňová rekonstruuje ve zmíněné
poslední kapitole své knihy, je
především fenomenologií určitého
stavu, v němž se fenomenolog zdrží
všech úsudků o reálných skutečnostech
a pohybuje se v oblasti čirých
možností. V  tomto stavu se reálný
svět stává fenoménem světa. Tato
myšlenková operace předpokládá
ovšem „zničení světa“ (Weltvernichtung)
a  dosažení stavu trans-gg
cendentální subjektivity, pro kterou
neexistuje už žádné „tam venku“.
Erwin Straus, k jehož fenomenologicko-antropologické
psychologii
a psychopatologii vnímání se Kateřina
Svatoňová vztahuje, zdůrazňuje
již ve své významné práci Vom Sinn
der Sinne z roku 1935: „realita světa
zůstává jako objasněná a prokázaná
problematickou. Vnější svět je zprostředkovaný,
sekundární, vnitřní
svět evidentní, bezprostřední,
primární“.3
Imaginativní variace
mají – zde konkrétně u  Nevoleho
– charakter fascinujícího, třebaže
riskantního experimentování.
Nevole usiloval o proniknutí do takových
stavů – a  o  jejich poznání
-, v  nichž smyslově vnímatelný
svět pozbyl charakter skutečnosti.
Mezi experimentálně vyvolanými
a  patologickými zkušenostmi existuje
určitá podobnost, jak ukázal
již Kurt Goldstein,4
pokud svět
ve  specifickém smyslu izolujeme,
tedy „uzavřeme“ jako výzkumnou
laboratoř.
V  souvislosti s  vnitřními „odpoutanými
obrazy“ Nevoleho experimentů
uvažuje Kateřina Svatoňová
o Teigeho teorii vnitřního modelu,
3
Erwin STRAUS, Vom Sinn der Sinne.
Berlin: Springer 1956, s. 374.
4
Kurt GOLDSTEIN, Der Aufbau des
Organismus. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff
1934.
miscelanea
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kterou Teige promýšlel v  časové
koincidenci s Nevoleho uvažováním
a  jeho experimenty. Teorie vnitřní
formy, vnitřní zkušenosti, vnitřního
modelu, vnitřního obrazu zaujímá
důležitou pozici v estetice a filosofii
dvacátých až čtyřicátých let 20. století.
Na tomto místě bych připomenul
jen pozoruhodnou antropologii
vnitřní zkušenosti Schelerova a Husserlova
žáka Paula Ludwiga Landsberga,
který zdůrazňuje nezbytnost
„niterné praxe“ lidského bytí,
která je však především námahou
a pokorou, bez níž není pravé sebepoznání
možné: „Niternost vnitřní
zkušenosti tkví tedy především
v tom, že život, který je konkrétním
subjektem vší zkušenosti, nevychází
ze sebe ven k nějakému ,předmětu‘,
nýbrž setrvává v sobě a chápe sebe
skrze sebe sama. [...] proces vnitřní
zkušenosti je sám toliko částí celkové
seberealizace, během níž se
personální subjekt stává ryzejším,
zaměnitelnějším a  samostatnějším,
niternějším dokonce sám vůči sobě.
Nezůstává jen sám u sebe, nýbrž se
ubírá ,tajuplnou cestou‘ sebeuskutečňování
a humanizace“.5
Kniha Kateřiny Svatoňové je pozoruhodnou
událostí: nejen proto,
že přináší velké množství poznatků,
jež autorka vřazuje do  nových
souvislostí, že seznamuje s  řadou
5
Paul Ludwig LANDSBERG, Einführung
in die philosophische Anthropologie.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1934, s. 9.
koncepcí z  teorie médií, z  filosofie
umění, vizuálních studií a  psychologie
vnímání, z  nichž mnohé
jsou v  českém prostředí téměř neznámé.
Její kniha není jen arche(o)
logií ve  smyslu odkrývání nánosůí
a vrstev s cílem proniknutí k archē
jako základu, podstatě, počátku
českého virtuálního prostoru, jak
čteme v jejím názvu. Její uvažování
o  „odpoutaných obrazech“ se dotýká
aktuálních problémů a otázek
teorie vizuality, obrazu, mediality.
Že obrazy mohou, jsou schopny
něco ukazovat, je nezpochybnitelné.
Otevřeným problémem zůstává, co
naznačuje citát Maurice Merleau-Pontyho,
jímž autorka otevírá
první kapitolu své knihy: „Není
nic těžšího než vědět, co vlastně
vidíme“. Také obrazy disponují (podobně
jako řeč) logickou formou; již
proto má pojem „archeologie“ v názvu
knihy své opodstatnění, třebaže
s ním autorka pracuje v přeneseném
významu. Ludwig Wittgenstein
k  problému logické formy obrazu
v  Traktátu (2.172) poznamenává,
že svoji formu zobrazení nemůže
obraz zobrazit: „prokazuje ji“ („es
weist sie auf“). A stejně tak se obraz
vzpírá diskursivní analýze. Viditelné
zůstává záhadou a  uvažovat
o  obrazech, znamená uvažovat
souběžně o  neviditelném, nezobrazitelném
a neztvárnitelném. Obraz,
jak píše Dieter Mersch, vydává svoji
vlastní medialitu unikání (Entzug).gg
Je to medialita, jež zůstává ve sféře
miscellanea
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neviditelného.6
Není náhodné, že
fenomén „hyperstereoskopie“ je
posledním slovem knihy Kateřiny
Svatoňové: knihy, jejímž hlavním
a  klíčovým tématem jsou hyperfenomény,
otevírající (potenciálně)
imerzní prostor (jako hypersteroskop,
který chtěl sestrojit Nevole)
jako souhru reality a ireality, jíž je
ovšem vlastní realita svého druhu,
prostor, v němž se vnímatel setkává
s  mimořádným, hyperbolickým, jež
vybočuje z  řádu a  uspořádanosti,
aniž by se od ní ovšem zcela vzdálilo,
a vyvolává tak údiv, ale i úděs.
6
Dieter MERSCH, „Medialität und
Undarstellbarkeit. Einleitung in eine
,negative‘ Medientheorie.“ In: Sybille
Krämer (ed.), Medialität und Performanz.
München: Fink Verlag 2004, s. 75–96. Pojem
„Entzug“ může znamenat také „mizení“,
„odebrání“, „odepření“, „ztrátu“.
miscelanea
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