Boxes in Nature

Heesen, Anke te

doi:10.1016/s0039-3681(00)00017-0

Cited by 14 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…transferring dried plant individuals on sheets of paper. This enabled Linnaeus to align his list with stabilized specimens -"immutable mobiles" that were unchanged, or hardly changed, by transport -of the species referred to in the list (on this practice, see te Heesen 2000). These specimens could be used again and again as referents for renewed attempts at representation, either on the journey while collecting information on their medicinal uses, or after the journey in refined and extended attempts at their representation.…”

Section: Travel and Presentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany

Müller‐Wille

2003

SIC

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During the early modern period, European naturalists were confronted with a rapidly growing body of new objects due to the recent geographic discoveries. According to Bruno Latour's model of "action at a distance" naturalists managed this situation by mobilizing and stabilizing specimens and inscriptions at the periphery of the known world, as well as accumulating, reshuffling, and processing that material in "centers of calculation." This paper tries to resolve an ambiguity that lies in this model: While the work of naturalists was clearly dependent on local institutions, collections, and botanical gardens in particular, they nevertheless claimed universality for the interpretations of the natural world they propounded. Analysis will be based on a case study: In the 1730s Carl Linnaeus produced a series of manuscripts and printed books that allow us to reconstruct the sequence of translations which led from the first encounter with a "new" plant at the periphery of the known world (in the case of Linnaeus, Lapland, which he visited in 1732) to a major botanical center (the botanical garden of George Clifford, former director of the Dutch East India Company, who employed Linnaeus in 1736 and 1737 to catalog his collection). I will argue generally that the abstraction process that was constitutive of Linnaeus' universal plant taxonomy-the separation of "constant" species and genera from local "varieties"-did not take place exclusively in the centers of knowledge production. This abstraction process was rather coextensive with the global network of translation and exchange that connected such centers with each other and with their peripheries. The "map" of the plant world outlined by Linnaeus did not represent "things drawn together," but rather "things being exchanged," and the global circulation of specimens and inscriptions was the foundation on which its claim to universality rested. Many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased (Daniel 12:4). Motto of Hans Sloane, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, 1707 The rapid expansion, if not explosion, of natural history during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be (and countless times has been) explained by the simple fact that, due to colonial expansion, a "New World" was opened for European naturalists full of equally "new" objects hitherto unknown to them. In this respect,

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Section: Travel and Presentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany

Müller‐Wille

2003

SIC

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“…Krajewski (2011) points out the centrality of notes and index cards in the work of scientists since the 16th century, seeing them as “paper machines” involved in the construction of scientific knowledge. Heesen (2000) shows the impact that boxes and notes of 18th-century explorers had on the establishment of standard classification and taxonomy in natural history. The page (Mak 2012), word processing (Kirschenbaum 2016), the book (Houston 2016), and the scroll (Kelly 2019) have all been explored as theatres of communication which structure the message inscribed on them (McLuhan 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic media and critical knowledge about the self: Thinking about algorithms with Habermas

Fisher

2021

Critical Sociology

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This article explores the ontology of personal knowledge that algorithms on digital media create by locating it on two axes: historical and theoretical. Digital platforms continue a long history of epistemic media—media forms and practices, which not only communicate knowledge, but also create knowledge. As epistemic media allowed a new way to know the world, they also facilitated a new way of knowing the self. This historical perspective also underscores a key difference of digital platforms from previous epistemic media: their exclusion of self-reflection from the creation of knowledge about the self. To evaluate the ramifications of that omission, I use Habermas’s theory of knowledge, which distinguishes critical knowledge from other types of knowledge, and sees it as corresponding with a human interest in emancipation. Critical knowledge about the self, as exemplified by psychoanalysis, must involve self-reflection. As the self gains critical knowledge, deciphering the conditions under which positivist and hermeneutic knowledges are valid, it is also able to transform them and expand its realm of freedom, or subjectivity. As digital media subverts this process by demoting self-reflection, it also undermines subjectivity.

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Case History, Historia, Classification. François Boissier de Sauvages at Work on Paper

Hess

Mendelsohn

2013

N.T.M.

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Case History, Historia, Classification. François Boissier de Sauvages at Work on Paper What was classification as it first took modern form in the eighteenth century, how did it work, and how did it relate to earlier describing and ordering? We offer new answers to these questions by considering an example less well known than that of botany or zoology, namely medicine, and by reconstructing practice on paper. The first and bestknown disease classification is the ''nosology'' of the Montpellier physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix.Its several editions, we show, were less products than process: published tools for building a classification system. The disorder of a hitherto unstudied notebook that Boissier de Sauvages kept throughout this process provided a way of breaking with the topical order of earlier physicians' humanistic commonplace books of disease observation while sustaining the paper practices those earlier physicians-and Sauvages himself as a student-had used to order disease. This suggests a different picture of historical change than that of a scholarly world of ordered words giving way to a scientific one of ordered things. Classification, in the case of Sauvages' nosology, arose through an incomplete break with, and intensified practice of, a past way of ordering the described world. The humanist paper practice that had made observationes, differently applied, now made species. Classification into genera and species by similarity and difference, which Sauvages' nosology shared with botany, was an algorithm of paper and ink practice-in its operation more machine-like than humanist textual practice yet in its effects more creative and re-creative of categories and questions of relationship. Thus a new empiricism of generalizations (species) arose out of the older, Renaissance empiricism of particulars (observations, facts).Keywords: Nosology, eighteenth-century medicine, humanist textual method, observatio, disease species

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Boxes in Nature

Cited by 14 publications

References 10 publications

Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany

Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany

Epistemic media and critical knowledge about the self: Thinking about algorithms with Habermas

Case History, Historia, Classification. François Boissier de Sauvages at Work on Paper

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