A prominent feature of late nineteenth-century psychology was its intense preoccupation with precision. Precision was at once an ideal and an argument: the quest for precision helped psychology to establish its status as a mature science, sharing a characteristic concern with the natural sciences. We will analyse how psychologists set out to produce precision in 'mental chronometry', the measurement of the duration of psychological processes. In his Leipzig laboratory, Wundt inaugurated an elaborate research programme on mental chronometry. We will look at the problem of calibration of experimental apparatus and will describe the intricate material, literary, and social technologies involved in the manufacture of precision. First, we shall discuss some of the technical problems involved in the measurement of ever shorter time-spans. Next, the Cattell-Berger experiments will help us to argue against the received view that all the precision went into the hardware, and practically none into the social organization of experimentation. Experimenters made deliberate efforts to bring themselves and their subjects under a regime of control and calibration similar to that which reigned over the experimental machinery. In Leipzig psychology, the particular blend of material and social technology resulted in a specific object of study: the generalized mind. We will then show that the distribution of precision in experimental psychology outside Leipzig demanded a concerted effort of instruments, texts, and people. It will appear that the forceful attempts to produce precision and uniformity had some rather paradoxical consequences.

addressing a picture with a general rule feels rather like addressing a peach with a billiard cue (Baxandall, Patterns ofIntention, 1985, p. 12) To represent is to perform division. To represent is to generate distributions. Distributions between painter and observer, between a depicting surface and object depicted, between places located on a surface, between that which is depicted and that which is not. To represent is to narrate, or to refuse to narrate. It is to perform, or to refuse to perform, a world of spatial assumptions populated by subjects and objects. To represent thus renders other possibilities impossible, unimaginable. It is, in other words, to perform a politics. A politics of ontology.This chapter explores four visual depictions and the different ways in which these make subject/object distinctions, narratives and spatialities. Our object is to lever these different modes of performance apart to create an area of play in which we may learn something of the politics of subject/object division, of narrative, of spatiality. Along the way we may learn about a politics which tries not to legislate about such divisions but, rather, explores the labour of division. Two of the visual depictions are taken from the great corpus of Western 'high art': paintings by Paolo Uecello and Jan Vermeer. The other two are contemporary. One is a painting by Remy Blanchard, from France. The second, by Tim Leurah Tjapaltjarri, takes us to a recent tradition of Australian Aboriginal art. These four paintings do not simply differ from one another in their generation of distributions but also come from different times and places, differ in the status attached to them, and where we have to go in order to see them. We will not focus extensively on these other differences-but they make the approach towards each painting a little different, and mean (or so we hope) that we avoid falling into the trap described by Bryson above.

The ArgumentThis essay addresses the historiographical question of how to study scientific instruments and the connections between them without rigidly determining the boundaries of the object under historical scrutiny beforehand. To do this, I will explore an episode in the early history of the tachistoscope — defined, among other things, as an instrument for the brief exposure of visual stimuli in experimental psychology. After looking at the tachistoscope described by physiologist Volkmann in 1859, I will turn to the gravity chronometer, constructed by Cattell at Wundt's Leipzig institute of psychology in the 1880s. Taking Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances as a methodological suggestion to travel from one member to another to find out just how members relate to one another, I will investigate part of the family to which both the tachistoscope and the gravity chronometer turn out to belong. A detailed analysis of these instruments, using both historical sources and historical accounts of psychological instruments, may demonstrate that the instrument is not a standard package that, if well applied, will simply secure good results. Each package needs to be assembled again and again; the particular package that is assembled may differ on different occasions. Thus an alternative is developed to an understanding of instruments as univocally functioning material means.

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