34 Top: Laboratoire De Cartographie, École Pratique Des Hautes Études. Diagram of “Soci

Home , Jacques Bertin, The Savage Mind

Top: Laboratoire de cartographie, École pratique des hautes études. Diagram of “Social Structure and Marriage Rules of the Aranda Type,” in Claude Lévi- Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966). Bottom: Laboratoire de cartographie, École pratique des hautes études. Draft of a diagram on the structure of myths that appears in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit (1964). Courtesy Archives nationales.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Signs and Sight: Jacques Bertin and the Visual Language of Structuralism

ALEXANDER CAMPOLO

One needs to look near at hand if one wants to study men; but to study man one must learn to look from afar; one must first observe differences in order to discover attributes. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind

I. A Structuralist Vision The preface of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind marks the crest of the structuralist wave that swept through French intellectual life during the 1960s. In just two pages Lévi-Strauss surveys the postwar traditions, from phenomenology to existentialism, whose humanist foundations were beginning to shake.1 The preface opens with a dedication to the memory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Lévi- Strauss then thanks Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had met decades earlier when they taught at the same secondary school.2 He concludes by setting his sights on Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialist monument Critique of Dialectical Reason is subject to a searching evaluation in The Savage Mind’s final chapter.3 The brilliance of these luminaries overshadows the technical acknowledgments in the preface’s final paragraphs. Here, Lévi- Strauss acknowledges Edna Lemay for typing the manuscript, Nicole Belmont for assembling the bibliography and the index, and his wife—unnamed but presumably Monique Lévi-Strauss—for proof corrections. He concludes with a brief note of gratitude addressed to the designer who gave The Savage Mind its distinctive visual style: “I would like to express my warm thanks to my colleague, Jacques Bertin, professor at the École des Hautes Études who was kind enough to make some of the diagrams for me in his laboratory.”4 The inclusion of Bertin, a geographer and graphic theorist, is a small detail given the ambitious scope of the larger work. But the structuralist period would be difficult to imagine without his signature diagrams, a visual language of signs whose combinatorics constitute culture. These images allowed Lévi-Strauss to present cultures in

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 comparative ways, “from afar,” as he suggests by quoting from Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language toward the end of The Savage Mind. This shift in perspective enabled him to grasp a set of elements underneath the infinite variety of ethnographic experience, to detect “the invariants beyond the empirical diversity of human societies.”5 Bertin’s charts and maps visualize these invariants with geometric clarity. In this sense, a seemingly minor technical acknowledgment opens onto structuralism’s most important philosophical stakes. By revolu- tionizing the methods and objects of the social sciences, structuralists threw into doubt the status of human beings as transcendental subjects capable of giving a firm grounding for knowledge. Philosopher Patrice Maniglier poses the structuralist challenge in the form of a question: How can we study “units of cultural practice (whether matters of speech, ritual, myth or custom) [that] are not given in any observable way?”6 Bertin and his colleagues offered an answer: a system of graphic signs that visualized these unobservable relations. Due to the highly centralized nature of French knowledge production, many of these figures—including Lévi-Strauss and the historian Fernand Braudel—were colleagues at a single institution: the Sixth Section of the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), which housed Bertin’s Laboratoire de graphique. Images from the lab circu- lated among academic disciplines that were studying objects resistant to empirical forms of scientific observation: languages, myths, the unconscious, and deep historical time. To analyze how the French social sciences addressed problems of signs and data, the present article returns to the institutional context where these ideas developed and makes two related arguments. First, Bertin influenced his colleagues at the EPHE, transforming their works with techniques to visualize new sources of data. Graphics, as Bertin often remarks, do not simply illustrate the ideas present in these works; they produce new forms of knowledge. One especially transformative instance is his contribution to the second, definitive edition of Braudel’s classic study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Originally published in 1949, Bertin updated the 1966 second edition with a set of new maps and charts that spatialize historical durations and bring a new set of historical relationships—price movements, agricultural yields, and climatic conditions—to the visible surface of the page. These images bring to life the longue durée conception of history that Braudel developed through contact with structuralists throughout the 1950s. Second, Bertin’s work is a site of productive tensions. It grew out of the contentious ethos of the structuralist moment, marked by polemics over methods and disciplinary hierarchies. And his semiological

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 theory of graphics was shaped both by internal frictions and external misreadings and critiques. At times Bertin endorses a theory of meaning that is functional and communicative, drawing from the French reception of information theory. In these moments, he insists that graphics, like mathematics, are unambiguous, “monosemic” sign systems, and he develops an “image theory” to evaluate graphics according to how efficiently they transmit information. These impulses grew out of the French form of universalism promulgated by the EPHE. The outlines of France’s borders appear again and again in his works, an inheritance from the organic nationalism of his pre- structuralist teachers in geography, such as Paul Vidal de la Bache, whose monumental Géographie universelle anticipated the search for a unified social science sought in many quarters of the EPHE.7 Bertin’s most perceptive critics questioned this line in his work, asking whether rules for the graphic presentation and transmission of information are as universal and axiomatic as he presumes. Elsewhere, Bertin works against reductive tendencies for fixing or universalizing meaning, theorizing graphics as “living images” where the production of new relationships from data displaces the reductive, representational transmission of information. Here Bertin’s theory of graphics echoes Ferdinand de Saussure’s vitalist definition of semiology as the study of the life of signs within society. Bertin saw the potential of graphics, powered by computing techniques, to generate forms of “quantitative perception,” a characteristically structuralist understanding of subjectivity not as the transcendental ground of knowledge but as an effect of a system of relations— a visual language of signs in Bertin’s case.8 He created a computer- ized system, cartographie automatique, to allow researchers to rapidly produce charts to stimulate comparisons and generate new hypotheses. Anne Sauvagnargues’s wonderful phrase “cartographies of style,” drawn from her reading of Gilles Deleuze, evokes these productive arrangements of elements.9 In Bertin’s case these signs are the lines, shapes, shadows, and colors that actualize possible relationships within cultural data, signs whose mode of being is variational.10 Charts and maps from Bertin’s lab flowed through French institu- tions and print culture during the structuralist moment, from the prestigious Annales journal to the popular news magazine Paris Match. Against a linear narrative that suggests structuralism was somehow surpassed or rendered obsolete by poststructuralism, a return to these controversies suggests alternative genealogies of visualization. Bertin’s theory has since emerged as a surprising touch- stone for a new generation of researchers who face epistemological challenges as the production of digital data intensifies. In the 1990s, computer scientists at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 credited Bertin as a fundamental influence on data visualization, writing, “In 1967, Bertin, a French cartographer . . . identified the basic elements of diagrams and described a framework for their design. . . . Bertin’s and [Edward] Tufte’s theories became well known and influential in the various communities that led to the development of information visualization as a discipline.”11 Contemporary guides to data visualization, like Leland Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics, continue to sing Bertin’s praises: “With rare exceptions,” Wilkinson writes, “theorists have not taken graphics seriously or examined the field deeply. And I am convinced that those who have, like Jacques Bertin, are not often read carefully. It has taken me ten years of programming graphics to understand and appreciate the details in Bertin.”12 From the upward curves of global temperature to widening gaps in wealth, our culture envisions itself in these images. Revisiting Bertin’s midcentury work allows us to critically interrogate how this graphic self-imaging unfolded while failing to retain some of structuralism’s most important insights. Today, data are naturalized and universalized by graphic means.

II. A Laboratory for Graphics Although Bertin and his Laboratoire de graphique are rarely men- tioned outside of footnotes or prefaces, he was deeply embedded among the leading lights of the French social sciences. Bertin was born in 1918 in Maisons-Laffitte, a suburb of Paris, and educated by an elite lineage of geographers who placed the problem of mapping at the center of his thought. His advisor was the cartographer Emmanuel de Martonne, himself a student of one of the most important figures in modern geography, Paul Vidal de La Blache. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Vidal sought to unify the French social sciences through a new “human geography” that studied the dynamic relationships between people and their envir - onments.13 Bertin earned his degree in 1934 from the School of Cartography at the University of Paris established by de Martonne. His earliest published works link social and spatial questions following the methods established by his teachers.14 In 1952 a young Bertin contributed numerous maps and charts to a well-received work in urban sociology titled Paris et l’agglomération parisienne by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe. Bertin argued that the study of complex, modern cities demanded urban maps overlaid with new sources of social data.15 In 1954, on the strength of these early collaborations, Bertin was tapped by Lucien Febvre, historian and president of the EPHE, to direct his own research center, the Laboratoire de cartographie. The laboratory was to take its place within the EPHE’s newest school, the Sixth Section, which was dedicated to the economic and social

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 sciences and had been founded by Febvre and Charles Morazé with sup- port from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1947. In 1974, the laboratory changed its name to the more general Laboratoire de graphique, signaling both its integra- tion into the social sciences and the growing autonomy of graphics as a research discipline in its own right. When the Sixth Section of the EPHE split into a separate institution, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 1975, the laboratory followed. Over the years, it employed a talented staff of cartographers, photog- raphers, and researchers, including Françoise Vergnault, Serge Bonin, Jean- Daniel Gronoff, Jacques Bertrand, Roberto Gimeno, and Michel Mako, but Bertin was always its dominant figure. After his retirement in 1984, the laboratory lost its independent status and was integrated into the EHESS’s publications department. However, for its first thirty years the laboratory occupied a strategic position at the crossroads of the social sciences while also staking Top: Jacques Bertin examines out its own disciplinary territory. a graphic, ca. 1970. Courtesy Bertin’s earliest collaborators at the EPHE were a group of histo- Archives nationales. rians who have since come to be associated with the Annales school. Bottom: A group of lab workers organizing graphic material, They took their name from a journal, Annales d’histoire économique with Jacques Bertin at bottom et sociale cofounded by Febvre and Marc Bloch in 1929 while they left, ca. 1970. Courtesy Archives were colleagues at the University of Strasbourg.16 Both Bloch and nationales. Febvre had studied Vidal’s geography and been influenced by Durkheimian sociology. They took a special interest in Durkheim’s student François Simiand, an economist who attacked a late-nineteenth-century French historiography that he saw as romantic and unscientific in light of newly available social and economic statistics. When starting their own journal, Bloch and Febvre imported statistical models from economics and sociology to construct a new history that could stand at the center of a unified social science.17 After Febvre’s death in 1956, his former student Braudel assumed the presidency of the Sixth Section and solidified the relationship with Bertin and his laboratory. Braudel and Bertin shared a fundamentally geographic perspective, and their collaboration bore fruits

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 in the transformation of Braudel’s masterpiece, The Mediterranean Left: Laboratoire de cartographie, and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. École pratique des hautes études. Sketch for Lucien Febvre depicting the distribution of III. Visualizing Structures: History and Geography at the EPHE Protestant groups across France, Braudel had the idea for a thesis on the history of the Mediterranean ca. 1955. Courtesy Archives nationales. while teaching in Algiers in the 1920s. After gathering materials from archives around the region, his writing was interrupted by the Right: Laboratoire de cartographie, École pratique des hautes outbreak of the Second World War. Braudel spent almost six years as études. Sketches for Fernand a prisoner of war, initially in Mainz, where he had access to a uni- Braudel, La Méditerranée et le versity library, but from 1942 onward in much more difficult conditions monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2nd ed. (1966). in Lubeck. Relying on his prodigious memory, Braudel continued Courtesy Archives nationales. work during this period, receiving encouragement from Febvre by mail and passing drafts through the Swiss embassy.18 The Mediterranean was finally published in 1949 and was recognized as a classic on both sides of the Atlantic. Braudel announces his fundamental problem in the preface: how to write a history that encompasses a plurality of times. Accordingly, he divides the work into three sections, each encompassing a temporal scale, in descend- ing order of importance: the first part focuses on the “quasi-immobile” forces of geography and the environment, the second analyzes the development of human groups in societies and civilizations, while the third registers the contingent political events that bubble up to the visible surface of history.19 Braudel frames the problem of a diversity of times as one of perception, particularly when studying the long-term changes in environments working beneath the more visible succession of political events that have long played the primary role in historiography. In the 1949 first edition, Braudel emphasizes geographic topics

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 that would later place him on common ground with Bertin. The preface begins with an ode to the sea, where Braudel credits the geographers who taught him at the Sorbonne for his “unwavering conviction” that the “sea itself . . . is the greatest document of its past existence.”20 The most important of these teachers was an intellectual ancestor shared with Bertin: Vidal. In the first edition’s bibliography, after a formidable list of archives scattered around the Mediterranean world, Braudel lists a series of “essential works” that determined his study’s “general orientation.” Second on this list, following only the works of the Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne, is Vidal’s Principes de géographie humaine, edited by Bertin’s teacher, Martonne. Braudel “lingered longest” over its pages, whose “rich- ness,” “meticulousness,” and “power of thought” demanded repeated readings.21 In a later analysis of The Mediterranean, Samuel Kinser emphasizes Vidal’s centrality to Braudel’s philosophy of “geohistory.” Instead of a historical geography focused on the political evo- lution of state borders, geohistory connects space and time through the effects of geography and climate in determining the patterns of human movements, habits, and civilizations.22 Kinser writes, Braudelian geohistory is based on three assumptions, all of which he shared with Vidal: (1) geohistory has a specific, con- crete object that is “tied to the soil,” to down-to-earth, elemen- tal, ecological conditions; (2) geohistorical process, because it develops slowly, represents a relatively “immobile” history, whose characteristic patterns last for long periods; and (3) geohistory is fundamental to other kinds of historical processes and underlies other forms of historicity.23 Braudel’s desire to write the history of these deep, determining processes required new sources of historical data: not only the ephemeral documents written by diplomats and chroniclers of the court but also sources that could register changes in climate, soil, or the slowly shifting patterns of trade routes. This data also demanded new historiographical techniques that put Bertin and Braudel in close contact for the book’s second edition. However, there were several intermediate steps between the publication of the 1949 and expanded 1966 editions of The Mediterranean, the most significant of which were Braudel’s exchanges with Lévi- Strauss. After returning to Paris from New York City, where he was introduced to structural linguistics by Roman Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss moved between a formal chair in religions at the Fifth Section and the Sixth Section of the EPHE, where Braudel assumed the presidency in 1956.24 By this time Lévi-Strauss had already caught Braudel’s attention with his article “History and Anthropology,” published in 1949.25

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 “History and Anthropology” troubles the received idea that structuralism and historicism are incompatible, that the synchronic focus of structuralist linguistics could not accommodate diachrony.26 On the contrary, Lévi-Strauss contends that history and ethnography share more in common than is usually thought. Both are fundamentally concerned with “otherness,” whether due to differences in time, space, or culture. Both work not to perfectly reconstruct these different societies but to make parts of their experience accessible to others.27 But Lévi-Strauss insists on one difference between these disciplines: the way that each organizes its data. He explains, “History organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology examines its unconscious foundations.”28 The unconscious nature of this activity is what made structural linguistics such an appropriate method for the new anthropology that Lévi-Strauss was developing. Just as we are unaware of linguistic rules when we speak, so we are unaware of the system of relations that determines how we act as members of a culture or society. Studying these foundations entailed surfacing them in some more explicit way, and Lévi-Strauss often turned to Bertin’s laboratory to visualize them. The implications for other disciplines, like psychoanalysis, were profound. Jacques Lacan, no stranger to topological diagrams, was fascinated with Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship and in 1964 was invited by Braudel, on the suggestion of Louis Althusser, to lecture at the EPHE.29 However, even this difference between conscious and unconscious data would not consign history and anthropology to separate spheres. In a phrase that would not look out of place in Braudel’s work, Lévi-Strauss reminds anthropologists, “history alone makes it possible to abstract the structure which underlies the many manifes- tations and remains permanent throughout a succession of events.”30 He continues, The historian no doubt intends, first of all, to explain social phenomena in terms of the events in which they are embodied and the way in which individuals have thought about and lived them. But in his progress in grasping and explaining that which appears to men as the consequence of their representations and actions . . . the historian knows quite well . . . that he must call to his aid the whole apparatus of unconscious elabo- rations. We are no longer satisfied with political history which chronologically strings dynasties and wars on the thread of secondary rationalizations and interpretations.31 Here Lévi-Strauss is referring to economic history and the work of Febvre on unconscious structures of religious belief—two of Braudel’s most important inspirations.32 Even the status of written

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 documents, the historian’s bread-and-butter data, is deprecated. According to Lévi-Strauss, both anthropologists and historians needed to move beyond “everything men ordinarily think of record- ing on stone or on paper” if they were to reveal the determining logics underneath history’s usual chronologies of people and events.33 Braudel was receptive to these overtures. He had already used the word structure throughout the 1949 first edition of The Mediterranean, although it did not yet have the technical sense it would acquire through structuralism. In 1958 Braudel entered into an explicit dialogue with Lévi-Strauss in his seminal article “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée.”34 Despite its polemical fram- ing, Braudel shared many of his colleague’s concerns. On the first page, Braudel credits Lévi-Strauss as one of the few scholars willing to look beyond the disciplinary myopia that threatened the unity and universal scope of the social sciences.35 Braudel proposes his own signature concept for integrating these studies into a unified whole: the titular longue durée. The longue durée is foremost a temporal principle that names the almost imperceptible changes in human environments studied in the first part of The Mediterranean. It is also a polemical, antihumanist—and in this sense structuralist—concept deployed against a predominant interest in short time spans at the level of great people and events. Describing the reemer- gence of this longer historical perspective “of exceptional value,” Braudel writes, Above all, there has been an alteration in traditional historical time. A day, a year once seemed useful gauges. Time, after all, was made up of an accumulation of days. But a price curve, a demographic progression, the movement of wages, the variations in interest rates, the study (as yet more dreamed-of than achieved) of productivity, a rigorous analysis of money supply all demand much wider terms of reference.36 The problem is again posed in terms of data, with direct connections to the visual techniques that Bertin was developing. Gone are the kings, generals, statesmen, revolutions, battles, and treaties that pop- ulate event-based histories. In the place of chronological narrative is a list of much more abstract, numerical objects associated with political economy or what we might now call “biopolitics”: variations in prices, wages, and populations.37 The longue durée opened a historical vertigo, where new objects and structures, not to mention data-filled archives, threatened to overwhelm the historian without representational techniques adequate to their scale and scope. These structures, in Kinser’s words, needed to be rendered “perceptible” by giving form to the “mass” of the “new facts,” new data that Braudel had painstakingly gathered.38

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Having theorized this historical scale, Braudel worked closely with Bertin on his major project for the coming years: a second edition of The Mediterranean in which new graphic material supports the now explicit longue durée conception of history.39 As usual, formal acknowledgment of Bertin’s participa- tion is relegated to Braudel’s matter-of-fact footnote in the preface.40 However, the 1966 edition includes no less than sixty-eight new maps and graphics collected across its two volumes.41 Sixty-five of these maps and graphics are concentrated in the book’s first two sections (on the role of the environment and demographic and economic trends). Bertin’s hand was needed most at the critical temporal scale of the longue durée, where the production of images supple- Laboratoire de cartographie, ments the historian’s more familiar method of critically interpreting École pratique des hautes études. The creation of a map of written sources. Mediterranean grain trade. A second difference between the two editions of The Mediterranean Above: Tables of Venetian wheat concerns the notion of “structure.” The word appears in the intro- sources, using data drawn from duction to the second section of the earlier 1949 edition, on social Maurice Aymard, Venise, Raguse et le commerce du blé pendant history and collectivities, in reference to “the structural history” of la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle Gaston Roupnel, a historian of the generation directly preceding the (1966). Courtesy Archives Annales.42 However, as Kinser meticulously shows, the references nationales. to Roupnel’s—as well as Vidal’s—organic, functionalist “structures” Opposite, left: Draft showing were suppressed in the second edition even as the use of the words the location and magnitude of sources of Venetian wheat. structure and structural multiplied. By the 1966 edition, the word Courtesy Archives nationales. structure in Braudel’s work had taken on its own meaning, also dis- Opposite, right: Finished map tinct from structuralist usage. His concept refers to a temporal differ- showing changes in the grain ence, with long-term “structures” contrasted with shorter-term trade over time. From Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le “conjunctures” in order to capture different temporal scales. Braudel monde méditerranéen à l’époque 43 never fully embraced the structuralist label. But his work, most de Philippe II, 2nd ed. (1966). notably The Mediterranean, draws productively from this revolution in the social sciences, as explicitly attested in his exchanges with Lévi-Strauss that developed out of their institutional proximity at the EPHE during the late 1950s. Braudel and Lévi-Strauss agreed that new visual techniques— created by Bertin—were required to study the most important issues in the social sciences, whether these were “the unconscious foundations” of social life or the “motionless,” “semistillness,” and “depths” of the longue durée.44 Price curves or the elements of myth were objects resistant to direct methods of observation or written accounts. In both Lévi-Strauss’s and Braudel’s thinking at the end of the 1950s, these structures were the crucial invariants that eluded

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 the humanist perspective of the postwar phenomenologists and exis- tentialists. Bertin’s considerable work furnishing the second edition of The Mediterranean with maps and charts was a response to the paradoxical challenge of making these nonempirical entities visu- ally amenable to structural analysis. To use the language of structuralism, his graphics themselves were an invariant, conserved across the social sciences, from history to economics to sociology to anthropology, allowing them to organize their data in new ways.

III. Quantitative Perception Recognition for the laboratory’s role in these transformations began to appear at the margins of articles in Annales, as well as in Lévi- Strauss’s works. Historians in the generation that followed Braudel worked with new sources of statistical data, relying on the visual techniques that were being developed at the Laboratoire de graphique. They also saw that the adoption of digital computers would intensify these transformations. As early as 1955, Lévi-Strauss expressed hope that “I.B.M. equipment” could help anthropologists encode and analyze “mythological literature.”45 Historians followed. In 1968, the great historian of Languedoc Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote, “many promising research possibilities are of course opened up to those historians who have access to computer science. One that immediately springs to mind is the analysis of those vast deposits of documents, containing vital data, but whose sheer bulk has until now daunted all researchers.”46 His colleague, the conser- vative historian of the French Revolution François Furet agreed: The historian’s use of computers is not only an enormous practical advance in the time it saves . . . it is also a very useful

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 theoretical discipline, in that the formalization of a documen- tary series . . . forces the historian . . . to abandon epistemological naiveté, to construct the actual object of his research, to scrutinize his hypotheses, and to make the transition from implicit to explicit.47 Both the practice and theory of history were being shaped by new sources of data and digital technologies. For Furet, a truly quantitative history was not simply a statistical garnish on narrative historiography or, worse, a reduction of all history to economic history. Rather, computers prompted new understandings of sources and data. He writes, “The whole conception of history based on archives is radically transformed at the very time when its technical possibilities are multiplied by the electronic processing of information.”48 Instead of using documents to preserve historical memory, electronic data could be used to produce new historical facts at levels beneath that of conscious reflection. The familiar historical method of criticizing written documents according to external events would be supplemented by a critique of sources based on internal, immanent relations in data—a characteristically structuralist move in form if not in name. Like Lévi-Strauss, Furet understood the limitations of a history confined to “the written traces of men’s existence.”49 Furthermore, encoding these new sources of historical data entailed responsibility for constructing historical facts. When facts and data were no longer unproblematically given, objectivity could no longer be used as a historian’s shield. Surprisingly, quantification—most often associated with objectivity and impersonal epistemic authority—would make history more subjective. Furet explained, The encoding of data presupposes their definition; their definition implies a number of choices and hypotheses, made all the more consciously because they have to conform to the logic of a program. And so the mask finally falls away of that historical objectivity which was supposed to lie concealed in the facts and reveal itself at the same time as them. Henceforward the historian is bound to be aware that he has constructed his own facts.50 Furet denies any simple equivalence between facts and objectivity. New sources of historical data would not simply increase the objectivity of historical analysis; on the contrary, the accumulation of historical data at new scales would force historians to account for the subjective choices that they make in organizing, analyzing, and presenting this data. Bertin shared this interest in computing and subjectivity. In 1966 he wrote a short research note to his colleagues in which he reflects

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Société d’études et de réalisa- on the lab’s first decade and its future trajectory. The note expresses tions pour le traitement de a theme shared with both Braudel and Lévi-Strauss: the wild growth l’information. A schematic diagram of the cartographie of knowledge and the challenges of complexity. Bertin reframes automatique system, 1965. these problems through a computational understanding of graphics. Courtesy Archives nationales. Visualization conditions how data can be made intelligible and comparative, how they can be rendered empirical: Contemporary research introduces a growing number of ana- lytical factors and categories. This enlargement of the field of investigation is only made possible by the implementation of methods of memorization and reduction capable of making the complexity of feasible combinations intelligible to the human brain. This has been the work of statistical mathematics and their powerful instrumentation. It is also, in many cases, the work of visual analysis. In every study, graphic representation is first of all a research instrument. One must understand its role like that of a computer. It is an instrument that allows one to compare quickly and with exactitude a sizable number of variables of all natures and to increase the elements likely to reduce a problem, to prove a thesis, a choice to be made.51 Here Bertin articulates the principles of a visual discourse. As the social sciences approach the immense complexity of their objects, the data they generate exceed human cognitive and perceptual capacities. Both digital calculation and visual analysis are needed to rebalance the relationship between data and knowledge. If at first the relationship between graphics and computing was rhetorically expressed through analogy—that is, a graphic would operate “like a computer”—Bertin saw that computers could be used to produce graphics. Computers promised access to social structures and invariants through calculation, but visual presentation was needed to render them intelligible. In the early 1960s Bertin and his colleagues began to create these tools, a system they called cartographie automatique. Like many forms of automation, the project was justified to outsiders as a labor- saving process to help the lab deal with a constant backlog of requests for visual material. In collaboration with the French divi-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 sion of IBM and the Société d’études et de réalisations pour le traitement de l’information (SERTI), Bertin assembled a customized computer, software, and a printer for creating quantitative graphics. The system comprised an adapted IBM 870 with a punch-card reader (an IBM 836 control unit) and a modified typewriter with letters replaced by different-size points.52 It was initially limited to data that could be represented on a two-dimensional map of France designed to fit the printer. The system was only partly automated. Researchers entered data by hand into a punch-card system that translated it onto the spatial grid of the map. In addition to positional coding, quantitative values could be translated into a dot whose area represented a set range of values. Despite these limitations, finished maps revealed complex spatial patterns, Laboratoire de cartographie, especially when juxtaposed in temporal sequence. École pratique des hautes études. The cartographie Automated forms of information processing also opened new pos- automatique system, which sibilities for the use of visual data in scientific research. Graphics, featured an IBM 836 control once produced only at the final stages of the publication process, unit for data processing and a printer modified by Bertin, could now be generated quickly to generate hypotheses and identify ca. 1967. Courtesy Archives unexpected correlations. The dull, routinized labor of scouring tables nationales. would be replaced with an instant of perception, freeing the researcher’s creative energies. SERTI described a world of graphics in motion: “The systematic use of automatic cartography . . . introduces the ‘cinema’ and its power of communication into economic and statistical research.”53 The reference to “cinema” emphasizes how automatically produced graphics could be juxtaposed to produce comparisons just as individual shots can be edited together in a film. Furthermore, SERTI’s goal was not only to represent new sociological or historical objects; it was also to train subjects by fostering “quantitative perception”—a way of seeing that was ordered and discrete. Quantitative perception emerged through a technical design process that took advantage of affordances of human sight, such as the ability to distinguish among dots increasing in size at certain spatial thresholds. This way of seeing is built on the relational perception of asignifying graphic elements: a viewer can make local comparisons among points of different sizes and reach global con- clusions based on the overall distribution or density of points.54 The “regular pattern of graduated circles,” according to Bertin, is the best means to express many numerical relationships. One example given

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Laboratoire de graphique, École is the percentage of urban population in relation to percentage of pratique des hautes études. total population in a region. He even attempted to standardize their Two sets of maps produced 55 using the cartographie automa- sizing with a system called “points Bertin.” tique system. The points are distributed within an instantly recognizable hexag- Left: Changes in the number of onal map of France’s borders. These figures appear again and again court proceedings in France. in graphics produced by the lab, as well as in Bertin’s later books, From Bernard Schnapper, “Pour une géographie des mentalités Semiology of Graphics (1967) and Graphics and Graphic Information- judiciaires: La litigiosité en Processing (1977).56 These serialized images use France’s abstract France au XIXe siècle,” Annales: borders as an invariant on which different structural relations can be Économies, sociétés, civilisations 34, no. 2 (1979). Courtesy projected, subtly centering the nation within the world-historical Archives nationales. ambitions of the Annales school or the structuralist project of unifying Right: Mock-up of election the social sciences. Unlike Lévi-Strauss’s more cosmopolitan under- results for the cover of popular standing of cultural difference, universalizing claims about quantita- weekly magazine Paris Match tive perception flowed outward from France in these images. (March 1967). Courtesy Archives nationales. IV. Semiology and Information Theory In addition to being a sought-after collaborator among social scientists at the EPHE, Bertin also began to theorize graphics as an autonomous research discipline. This idea emerged gradually in the 1950s in seminars and practice-oriented publications such as Cartes et graphiques: Quelques éléments de base, published at the EPHE in 1954; the short book Éléments d’une grammaire du langage graphique; and a 1958 seminar titled Recherches sur la langue graphique.57 By this time, cartographers and graphic designers around the world were addressing the problem of automation.58 However, the titles of these works indicate a shift that made Bertin’s work stand out: a linguistic understanding of graphics, inspired by his structuralist milieu. His approach to linguistics was eclectic borrowing, not only from the structuralist reception of Saussure but also from statistical theories of communication and information developed in the United States following the Second World War. In a lab report from 1963,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Bertin describes graphics as a new branch of semantics (the branch of linguistics that studies meaning). As the social sciences generated more data, graphics could serve as the method of “semantic communication” capable of reducing this complexity to its essential “message.”59 This emphasis on reduction of data attests to the influence of information and communications theory on semiology, stemming from Jakobson’s initiation of Lévi-Strauss into the world of structural linguistics during their time spent together in New York.60 As the decade went on, Bertin’s analogical references to linguistics were incorporated more formally into a semiological theory of graphics. The historian François Dosse argues that semiology, the science of signs, formed the “central core” and “unifying center” of structuralism.61 He credits the French-Lithuanian linguist Algirdas Julien Greimas with reviving interest in Saussure in France as well as developing an expanded version of semiology as a unifying method for the social sciences.62 By the mid-1960s, Greimas, Lévi- Strauss, and the literary critic Roland Barthes were all on the faculty of the Sixth Section of the EPHE, giving semiology a formidable foothold in Bertin’s institution and by extension in the French social sciences at large. Bertin developed his linguistic theory of graphics as semiology crested in popularity, notably with the publication of Barthes’s 1964 article “Éléments de la sémiologie,” based on a seminar given at the EPHE.63 The article lays out the Saussurean oppositions that would come to define semiotics: langue and parole, signifier and signified, denotation and connotation. Barthes emphasizes the immanent, synchronic character of semiology: Analysts should situate themselves within a sign system, be it fashion or cinema, and describe the relations among its elements without recourse to sociological, historical, or even psychological explanations.64 From this vantage the objects of semiology—any system of signs—appear limitless, and Bertin took advantage of this openness to assimilate graphics under its rubric. Hints of a graphic approach to semiology could already be seen in Barthes’s “Éléments de la sémiologie,” where he classifies signs as either verbal, graphic, iconic, or gestural.65 The close affinity between the formalism of semiology and Bertin’s geospatial perspective now expanded beyond cartography to the more general study of the relations among graphic signs. However, to claim graphics as an autonomous branch of semiology, Bertin had to describe the distinctive systematicity of its differences. This was the ambition of Bertin’s first major book, Semiology of Graphics, published in 1967 (an auspicious year: Deleuze identifies it as the most intense moment of structuralist thought).66 The book opens with an unmistakable semiological flourish:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Top: The schema of myth as a Graphic representation constitutes one of the basic sign-systems metalanguage or “second-order conceived by the human mind for the purposes of storing, semiological system.” From Roland Barthes, Mythologies understanding, and communicating essential information. As (1957). a “language for the eye,” graphics benefits from the ubiquitous Bottom: Jacques Bertin. properties of visual perception. As a monosemic system, it forms Comparative semiology of the rational part of the world of images.67 graphics, which sits alongside mathematics as a monosemic Graphics established a new relationship between the materiality of sign system. From Jacques Bertin, “La graphique,” the page and visual signs, moving beyond cartography to give sen- Communications 15, no. 1 sory access to nonobservable cultural data: “the two dimensions (1970). Bertin’s illustration is of a sheet of paper could usefully represent something other than remarkably similar to Barthes’s 68 schema of myth in Mythologies. visible space.” Bertin recognized that charts and graphs had a longer history. He dates the roots of this sign system to the eighteenth century, where new sciences of wealth and population adopted the visual conven- tions of charts and graphs that we recognize today.69 Political econ- omists invented visual techniques to represent abstract phenomena such as wealth or demography—objects the Annales school placed at the center of historiography. Bertin often cites the example of Charles Louise de Fourcroy’s 1782 Tableau poléométrique, which orders cities according to their geographic area, as the earliest example of a semiological graphic system, although precursors such as Joseph Priestly’s time lines and François Quesnay’s Tableau écono- mique were published in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Charles-Joseph Minard’s dazzling statistical maps and diagrams ele- vated the art in the nineteenth century.70 However, Semiology of Graphics is very much of its own time,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 characteristically structuralist in its ambitions to systematicity and univer- sality. It opens with a set of axiomatic definitions and eight visual variables: the two dimensions of the plane, along with “size, value, texture, color, orientation, and shape.”71 The last six variables exist “outside” the plane; that is, they do not depend on a spatial position. Because they operate according to phys- iological properties of sight, they are “retinal” variables to be used when a graphic needs to express relationships among more than two variables, conven- tionally represented on x and y axes.72 For example, a difference in color might be used to indicate qualitative differences between two data sources, while differences in value or shading are capable of expressing quantitative relationships within a single data source when each different shade is associated with a range of numerical values. These variables are not abstractions of substantial entities but rather expressive means to actualize possible relations in cultural data.73 Bertin’s semiology also incorporates ideas from information theory and cybernetics that sit in tension Earlier charts analyzed by with this structuralist emphasis on variation and relationality. These Jacques Bertin. ideas sometimes emerged from the same source. As Bernard Top: Charles de Fourcroy. Tableau poléométrique, 1782. Geoghegan shows in the case of Lévi-Strauss, a “cybernetic appara- The table compares the areas 74 tus” links theorists and techniques from both sides of the Atlantic. of European cities. In France, semiologists enthusiastically adopted this language. Luis Bottom: William Playfair. Prieto’s entry on semiology for Gallimard’s 1968 Encyclopédie de la Universal Commercial History, Pléiade analyzes meaning using terms borrowed from information 1805. The chart depicts the wealth of nations over more theory: signal, transmitter, and receiver. The “success” of a commu- than 3,000 years. nicative event is defined according to strict engineering standards of an acceptable reduction of ambiguity: The semic act is initiated by the transmitter, and the goal of the operation is to establish between him or her and the receiver the social relation that will constitute meaning. . . . For this to hap- pen, first, the receiver must be able to assign the signal a definite meaning, in other words, there must not be ambiguity.75

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Left: Jacques Bertin. The eight Parts of Bertin’s work connect to this assemblage by furnishing visual variables (clockwise from “material aids” and “diagrammatic strategies” that render the trans- top): size, value, texture, color, 76 orientation, shape, and the two mission of information monosemic or unambiguous. planar dimensions. From Jacques In this vein, Bertin was interested in creating objective criteria for Bertin, Semiology of Graphics the construction of graphics. He laments a situation where “some of (1983). the graphics are ‘good,’ others ‘worse,’ others simply ‘bad.’” “These Right: Jacques Bertin. Mock-up opinions,” he continues, “are purely subjective. We need only sub- for an overview of the entire graphic system, including net- mit a dozen maps for evaluation by a group of readers in order to dis- works, maps, and diagrams. cover that each person will have a different opinion, based most The finished version appears often on considerations of an aesthetic nature.”77 To systematize the in Jacques Bertin, Sémiologie graphique (1967). Courtesy construction of graphics, Bertin drew on the ideas of George Archives nationales. Kingsley Zipf, a Harvard linguist who is an important lesser-known precursor to information theory. What interested successors like Claude Shannon was Zipf’s mathematical treatment of word frequency, first elaborated in his 1935 book The Psycho-biology of Language.78 Zipf identifies a statistical distribution in which the most common word in a text will occur about two times as frequently as the second most common word, and so on.79 For information theorists as well as French semiologists such as Pierre Guiraud, Zipf’s discovery held the promise that not only frequency but meaning itself might operate according to statistical patterns.80 Zipf proposes a quasi-metaphysical explanation for these regularities: a principle of “least effort”—that is, problem-solving behavior is gov- erned by an impulse to minimize work.81 Bertin drew on these references to time and effort to develop principles for objectively evaluating graphics, a pursuit he calls “image theory.” Consistent with Zipf’s statistical understanding of meaning, Bertin terms his criterion “efficiency” and defines it with a proposi- tion: “If, in order to obtain a correct and complete answer to a given question, all other things being equal, one [graphic] construction requires a shorter observation time than another, we can say that it

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 is more efficient.”82 Bertin explicitly credits this criterion of “mental cost” to Zipf’s The Psycho-biology of Language. From his definition of efficiency, Bertin deduces an elementary unit for a science of graphics, “the image”—“the meaningful visual form, perceptible in the minimum instant of vision.”83 The best graphics are those that produce answers to questions with the least perceptual and cognitive effort. According to Bertin, this parsimony and unambiguity separate graphics from other sign systems, such as “pansemic” visual art. Graphics make an especially efficient use of our sense of sight and visual memory. They can express in a single instant of perception what would require a long, inefficient, and ambiguous expres- sion in another sign system, such as written language.84 Just as information theory promised to reduce communication to an engineering problem of noise and channel capacity, Bertin hoped to clar- ify complex historical or cultural structures through efficient forms of graphic presentation. The systematicity of Semiology of Graphics impressed Bertin’s contemporaries, who recognized it as a branch of semiology that moved beyond semilinguistic applications into a totally new visual area.85 Georges Mounin, author of his own introductory text on semiology, sees Bertin’s book as “the first organic theory of a semiological (or semiotic) system other than natural languages” and faults other systems—such as Barthes’s social semiotics or Christian Metz’s semiological analysis of cinema—for their superficial use of linguistics.86 Mounin bestows on Bertin no less a title than “the Saussure of graphic semiology” for his achievements.87

V. Living Images Metz himself was more reserved, and his objections to Semiology of Graphics surface tensions at the heart of Bertin’s work. The noted cinema theorist, who was also Bertin’s colleague in the Sixth Section of the EPHE, wrote a long review of Semiology of Graphics for the Annales journal in 1971. Metz was applying linguistic methods of analysis to cinema during this period, notably in his 1964 essay “Le cinéma: Langue ou langage?” and later in his collection Essais sur la signification au cinéma, published in 1968, a year after Semiology of Graphics.88 Like Mounin, Metz appreciated Bertin’s originality in extending semiology to a new domain and discovering distinctive rules governing graphical signs. However, Metz reproached Bertin for failing to recognize the cultural specificity of these signs, natu- ralizing visual techniques that he saw as historical outgrowths of industrialized Western societies.89 Just as the cartographie automatique system opened the door for universal claims about human perception based on serialized images of France, Bertin assumed that variations in color or texture were monosemic, unambiguous, and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 universal. Most significantly, Metz criticized Bertin’s reduction of graphic semiology to a “purely denotative code,” valued instrumen- tally for its ability to transmit cognitive or referential content in the most rapid and unambiguous way possible. Metz was suspicious that a science of graphics could be constructed without taking other “social codes,” such as education or class, into account.90 This critique struck at the importation of a highly universalist information theory into semiology. Was the semiology of graphics to be an engineering problem, where the subject was reduced to the mechanical status of a receiver in the transmission of messages? Or, following Metz, would subjective differences become significant in the visualization of cultural relations and variation? Bertin considered these points important enough to merit a reply in the same issue of Annales, where he doubles down, insisting that monosemic systematicity is essential for a scientific theory of graphics.91 He also takes great pains to underscore this point at the outset of Semiology of Graphics, asking What does it actually mean to employ a monosemic system? It is to dedicate a moment for reflection during which one seeks a maximum reduction of confusion; when for a certain domain and during a certain time, all participants come to agree on certain meanings expressed by certain signs, and agree to discuss them no further.92 The valuation of efficiency and the reduction of ambiguity connects Bertin’s theory to long-running processes of quantification in the sciences and social life, where the clarity of numbers enforces consensus, transcends distance, and depersonalizes knowledge.93 Bertin undeniably makes these types of arguments when drawing on information theory. However, other moments in his work complicate this imperative, producing difference rather than disciplining viewers into silent agreement. One opening is Bertin’s treatment of the concept of “information.” His definition rejects the term’s technical usage in information theory. The “information” of a graphic, according to Bertin, is nothing less than “the translatable content of a thought.” He continues emphatically, “Let us stress once and for all that we will never use the term ‘information’ in the very limited and precise sense which it has in ‘information theory,’ but as a synonym for ‘data to be transcribed.’” For Bertin, information and data are fundamentally relational concepts, never givens but rather means of actualizing “correspondences” between what is common to all data (the “invariant” in Bertin’s vocabulary) and variables (the “components” in Bertin’s system).94 Recall that invariants are exactly what Lévi- Strauss saw as the objects of the comparative studies of culture.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 In these moments the formal properties of graphics and acts of visual perception permit viewers to produce meanings by actively organizing and choosing among the relationships actualized in a graphic, rather than serving as passive receivers of a message. This tension in Bertin’s work is also at the heart of the structuralists’ reflections on method. As Maniglier explains, the real stake of structuralism consists in its having relativized the question of meaning, its having shown that the “cultural sciences” can be regarded as having a specific unity because they face, whether or not they are aware of it, the same primary methodological problem—that of how to define their data.95 Bertin’s work alternates between a reductive attempt to engineer meaning and relational practices for presenting the variability of cultural data, actualizing unobservable relationships at the visible level of the graphic. His structuralist colleagues also recognized this tension. Reflecting on the use of mathematics in the social sciences, Lévi-Strauss emphasizes the need to go beyond simplistic statistical studies common in economics and psychology—“to break away from the hopelessness of ‘great numbers’”—and instead move toward “qualitative mathematics,” the graphic methods of set theory and topology capable of capturing relations and discontinuities.96 Similar ideas can be found in Bertin’s understanding of simplification and reduction. These notions can be traced within the longer history of quantification: much of statistics, for example, involves summarizing or reducing data, with the assumption that these abstractions share objective attributes. But, for Bertin, simplification also involves comparison rather than fixing or essentializing meaning. He cautions that graphics must never reduce “the number of correspondences” or relationships within data. Similarly, he argues that “knowledge” itself “involves a continuing effort of comparison, which means that one objective of any new information is to enter into the most extensive possible interplay of comparisons.”97 Despite making frequent analogies between graphics and mathematics, Bertin also argues that reduction or simplification is never only a logical or computational process but always involves practical judg- ments about the level and type of reduction to be employed. “No computer,” he proclaims, “will tell us which algorithm is missing. . . . No computer will tell us which data are missing. In short, we must call upon external elements—our own knowledge and intuition— in order to imagine data and relationships about which the machine has not yet been instructed.”98 This is no nostalgic, humanist rejec- tion of technology. Rather, Bertin maintains that the advancement of computing technologies will require a recalibration of the relationship between data and knowledge, of perception and techniques, the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 production of new forms of subjectivity. Computing should not be limited to the crude, machinic reductionism of information theory but should rather be combined with creative perception and intuition to produce sensitivity to structuralist data. Finally, Bertin animates graphics by reimagining their role in the processes of research and knowledge production. If information theory conceptualizes communication as a minimization problem, Bertin wishes to multiply images for comparison. The rules of construction he identifies are not to serve as mechanistic formulas for the transmission of messages but rather as engines of difference. These graphics will be creative, generative, even social. He argues, When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the “illustration,” to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the “representation” of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification.99 In these living images meaning is not imposed by a sovereign Kantian subject on empirically given sense data. Visual signs surface relationships in data in generative, even surprising ways—graphics or visualizations are matched to questions, iterated, refined, and transformed. Graphics put into practice the structuralist principles of variation to organize the data of the social sciences. Moreover, as Metz suggests, these principles themselves might vary from subject to subject, according to who was reading or interpreting a graphic. This pluralist quality of graphics traces an alternative thread back to Bertin’s earliest work. In his first tentative attempt to define the role of a discipline of graphics in Chombart de Lauwe’s study of Paris in the early 1950s, he writes, One can be alone to make a map; one is never alone when studying, commenting on, or critiquing it. When a map is spread out, all the collaborators see the same things “at the same time,” but with how many different points of view or opinions? Questions flow, problems emerge, solutions begin to appear, discussion is immediate.100 How different is this perspectivism from the austere opening of Semiology of Graphics, where graphics put an end to conversation, impose consensus, demand viewers “discuss them no further?”101 Bertin’s relationship to the structuralist project hinges on this very real disjuncture, on his ambiguous treatment of the objects and data of the social sciences.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 On the one hand, there is a reductive, meaning-centered, engineering view of graphics. Here images rationalize perception into elementary temporal units in order to transmit unambiguous messages through a monosemic system of signs. On the other hand, Bertin follows in Lévi-Strauss’s and even Rousseau’s footsteps, using abstraction, looking at data “from afar” to make relations and differences visible. In an interview from 1975, Bertin insisted, “we no longer draw diagrams,” following a logic of representation. Rather, “we construct and reconstruct them”—a logic of production—“until all of the relations within the data have appeared. The modern diagram is a transformable image that must be transformed.”102 In these moods, graphics are not simple objects of interpretation by a pre- given subject but are created through practices of transformation. It is with precisely this orientation toward practice that Deleuze concludes his essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?”—still one of the most perceptive analyses of the movement.103 For those like Braudel who worked in close proximity to structuralists but never adopted the label “structuralism,” Bertin’s work created new methods for understanding differences in historical time, moving beneath the chaotic contingencies of conscious history and bringing the structures of the longue durée into view. Bertin and Braudel’s close working relationship was built on a shared geographic outlook but moved beyond the representation of space in order to produce “positional”—another of Deleuze’s watchwords for structuralism—diagrams of the movement of people, currencies, or changes in climate.104 Staying with these differences in Bertin’s own work alerts us to possibilities for engaging with the overabundant digital data of our present. Bertin undoubtedly gives license to reductive or cognitive understandings of graphics as transmitters of messages and meaning. The repetition of isolated maps of France in his work naturalizes the hexagon, implicitly making the nation a universal backdrop or ground for his sign systems. Data and graphics are today still presented as objective, disciplining representations of social facts. But the history of Bertin’s invention of a visual language for structuralism—his system of visual signs—reminds us of the fundamental relationality and variability of cultural data. His system and its associated practices produce a subjectivity sensitive to comparison. Rather than reducing data to a single meaning or interpretation, graphics allow us to create images of the differences at the heart of our histories and cultures. This potentiality in Bertin’s work points beyond the limitations of information theory, semiology, and even structuralism itself. Graphics as living images escaped the disciplining and disciplinary strictures of the intellectual currents that animated the EPHE during this period. Bertin worked alongside a set of actors

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 Notes I thank Nadine Gastaldi and Emmanuelle Giry of the Archives nationales for sharing their expertise with Bertin’s papers. Erica Robles-Anderson, Patrice Maniglier, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers made comments that greatly enriched this article.

1. Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 2. Frédéric Keck, “Beauvoir lectrice de Lévi-Strauss,” Les temps modernes, no. 647–48 (2008): 242–55. 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), xi–xii; originally published as La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). 4. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, xii; emphasis in original. 5. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 247. 6. Patrice Maniglier, “Signs and Customs: Lévi-Strauss, Practical Philosopher,” Common Knowledge 22, no. 3 (2016): 416, https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X– 3622260. 7. Samuel Kinser, “Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel,” American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (1981): 68. See also Paul Vidal de La Blache and Lucien Gallois, Géographie universelle, 15 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927–1948). 8. Étienne Balibar, “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?” Differences 14, no. 1 (2003): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-14-1-1. 9. Anne Sauvagnargues, “Cartographies of Style,” in Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, trans. Suzanne Verderber (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 11–29. 10. Patrice Maniglier, La vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2006), 470. 11. Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999), 7. 12. Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer, 2005), xi. 13. Paul Vidal de La Blache and Emmanuel de Martonne, Principes de géogra- phie humaine publiés d’après les manuscrits de l’auteur (Paris: Armand Colin, 1922). For a more contemporary commentary, see Marie-Claire Robic, “Paul Vidal de la Blache, Principes de géographie humaine: Manuscrits publiés par Emmanuel de Martonne,” Études rurales 141, no. 1 (1996): 218–21. 14. Gilles Palsky and Marie-Claire Robic, “Aux sources de la sémiologie graphique,” Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography, doc. 147 (17 November 2000), https://doi.org/10.4000/cybergeo.554. 15. Paul Chombart de Lauwe, ed., Paris et l’agglomération parisienne, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952). 16. Jacques Revel, “Introduction,” in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: New Press, 1995), 1–63. The journal’s current full title is Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, although at the peak of its influence its title was Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations. “Annales” is often used as a shorthand to refer to this style of historiography.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 17. Revel, “Introduction,” 10. 18. Pierre Daix, Braudel (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 163–200. 19. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 1st ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949), xiii. Translations from this edition are my own, as the English translation was made from the 1966 second French edition. 20. Braudel, La Méditerranée, 1st ed. The preface to the first edition is repro- duced in the English translation of the second French edition. See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972–73), 17; originally published as La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966). 21. Braudel, La Méditerranée, 1st ed., 1,125. 22. Braudel, La Méditerranée, 1st ed., 296. 23. Kinser, 69. 24. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi- Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 64; originally published as De près et de loin (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1988). 25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 1–27; originally published as “Histoire et ethnologie,” Revue de métaphy- sique et de morale 54, no. 3/4 (1949): 363–91. 26. This idea is perhaps most closely associated with Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism. See Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1969); originally published as Pour Marx (Paris: François Maspero, 1965). 27. Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology,” 17. 28. Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology,” 18. 29. Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 302; originally published as Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée (Paris: Fayard, 1993). 30. Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology,” 21. 31. Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology,” 23. 32. See Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); originally published as Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942). 33. Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology,” 25. 34. Originally published in the “Débats et combats” section of the 1958 volume of Annales. Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 13, no. 4 (1958): 725–53. For consis- tency I refer to Sarah Matthews’s translation: “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25–54. 35. Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 25. 36. Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 29. 37. Philippe Carrard, “Figuring France: The Numbers and Tropes of Fernand Braudel,” Diacritics 18, no. 3 (1988): 2–19, https://doi.org/10.2307/465251. 38. Kinser, 74. 39. The French second edition was the basis for the book’s translation into

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 English in 1972; anglophone readers never knew the work without Bertin’s images. 40. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 16. 41. The work orders from Braudel took up much of Bertin’s laboratory’s time during the early 1960s. “Fichiers de Commande: 1954–1960,” 1960, in folder 1, box 2010297, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Archives nationales. 42. Braudel, La Méditerranée, 1st ed., xiii. See also Kinser, 70–71. 43. Kinser, 89. 44. Lévi-Strauss, “History and Anthropology,” 18; and Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences,” 33. 45. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 443, https://doi.org/10.2307/536768. 46. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, trans. Ben Reynolds and Siân Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 3; originally published as Le territoire de l’historien (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 47. François Furet, “Quantitative History,” Daedalus 100, no. 1 (1971): 155; originally published as “Histoire quantitative et construction du fait historique,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 26, no. 1 (1971): 63–75. 48. Furet, “Quantitative History,” 155. 49. Furet, “Quantitative History,” 157. 50. Furet, “Quantitative History,” 160. 51. “Le Laboratoire de cartographie de l’École pratique des hautes études,” 1966, in folder 1, box 20150774, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Archives nationales. 52. Jacques Bertin, “La cartographie statistique automatique,” Mathématiques et sciences humaines 17 (1966): 75. 53. Société d’études et de réalisations pour le traitement de l’information, “Cartographie automatique: Rapport final,” 1965, 2, in folder 7, box 20150774, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Archives nationales. 54. Bertin, “La cartographie statistique automatique,” 73. 55. Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps, trans. William J. Berg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 368–69; originally published as Sémiologie graphique: Les diagrammes, les réseaux, les cartes (Paris: Mouton et Gauthier-Villars, 1967). 56. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics; and Jacques Bertin, Graphics and Graphic Information-Processing, trans. William J. Berg and Paul Scott (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), originally published as Jacques Bertin, La graphique et e le traitement graphique de l’information (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). 57. Jacques Bertin, Cartes et graphiques: Quelques éléments de base (Paris: Fondation national des sciences politiques et Laboratoire de cartographie de l’École pratique des hautes études, 1954); and “Rapport d’activité 1961–1962,” 1962, in folder 1, box 20150774, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Archives nationales. For more on Éléments d’une grammaire du langage graphique, including its role in the genesis of Semiology of Graphics, see Palsky and Robic, “Aux sources de la sémiologie graphique.” 58. Throughout the 1950s, academic geographers were working to theorize and implement automated forms of cartography. Elsewhere, graphic designers, such as Paul Rand of IBM, worked to consolidate corporate identities for commercial communication. Bertin’s work stands out from these efforts due to his close contact with historians and social scientists who prompted him to develop his unique semiolog-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 ical approach. For more on automated cartography in this period, see Waldo R. Tobler, “Automation and Cartography,” Geographical Review 49, no. 4 (1959): 526– 34, https://doi.org/10.2307/212211; and P.W. Wesley, ed., Automation in Cartography: Papers Presented at the Annual Symposium of the British Cartographic Society, Held in Southampton in Sept. 1973 (London: British Cartographic Society, 1974). For more on Rand, see Stephen J. Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 310. 59. “Rapport d’activité 1962–1963,” 1963, in folder 1, box 20150774, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Archives nationales. 60. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (2011): 96–126. 61. François Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); originally published as Histoire du structuralisme: Le champ du signe, vol. 1 (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). 62. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 45. Greimas’s 1956 article “L’actualité du saussurisme” (The contemporaneity of Saussurism) reads the work of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and even Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology through a linguistic lens. See Algirdas Julien Greimas, “L’actualité du saussurisme,” Le français moderne, no. 24 (1956): 191–203. 63. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 205. 64. Roland Barthes, “Éléments de sémiologie,” Communications 4, no. 1 (1964): 91–135. 65. Barthes, “Éléments de sémiologie,” 109–10. 66. Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” in Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2004), 104; originally published as “À quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” in Histoire de la philosophie, vol. 8, Le XX siècle, ed. François Châtelet (Paris: Hachette, 1972), 299–335. 67. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 2. 68. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 4; emphasis in original. 69. This is an extremely rich historical problem. For two possible approaches, see Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (1995): 434–67; and Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007). 70. Fourcroy’s poleometric table translates the geographic area of a city into a square, which is grouped with squares of other cities for comparison. It was roughly contemporaneous with the 1786 Commercial and Political Atlas of William Playfair, whom historians of visualization often identify as the inventor of modern statistical graphics. See H. Gray Funkhouser, “Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data,” Osiris 3 (1937): 269–404; James R. Beniger and Dorothy L. Robyn, “Quantitative Graphics in Statistics: A Brief History,” American Statistician 32, no. 1 (1978): 1–11; Gilles Palsky, Des chiffres et des cartes: Naissance et développement de la cartographie quantitative française au XIXe siècle (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1996); and Michael Friendly, “A Brief History of Data Visualization,” in Handbook of Data Visualization, ed. Chun-houh Chen, Wolfgang Karl Härdle, and Antony Unwin

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 15–56. These articles provide a fascinating long-term discussion of visualization as it grew out of areas such as astronomy and analytic geometry in the seventeenth century. These issues, however, are outside the scope of the present article. For more on Minard in particular, see Sandra Rendgen, The Minard System (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). 71. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 42. 72. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 60. 73. For more on the notions of variables, structures, and relations, see Maniglier, “Signs and Customs,” 427. 74. Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory,” 97. 75. Luis J. Prieto, “La sémiologie,” in Le langage, ed. André Martinet, in Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 105. 76. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 98. 77. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 139. 78. Although Zipf died in 1950, just as the field was taking off, his work was well known by Claude Shannon. See Claude E. Shannon, “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,” Bell System Technical Journal 30, no. 1 (January 1951): 52. 79. George Kingsley Zipf, The Psycho-biology of Language (Boston: Houghton- Mifflin, 1935). 80. Pierre Guiraud, “Langage et théorie de la communication,” in Le langage, 145–68. 81. George Kingsley Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1949), viii. 82. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 139. 83. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 142. 84. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 146. 85. Palsky and Robic, “Aux sources de la sémiologie graphique.” 86. Georges Mounin, “La sémiologie graphique,” in Introduction à la sémiologie (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1970), 227. 87. Palsky and Robic, 4. 88. Christian Metz, “Le cinéma: Langue ou langage?” Communications 4, no. 1 (1964): 52–90; and Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968). 89. Christian Metz, “Réflexions sur la sémiologie graphique,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 26, no. 3 (1971): 746. 90. Metz, “Réflexions sur la sémiologie graphique,” 762. 91. Jacques Bertin, “Réponse à Christian Metz,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 26, no. 3 (1971): 769. 92. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 2; emphasis in original. 93. Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 84. 94. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 5. 95. Maniglier, “Signs and Customs,” 425; emphasis in original. 96. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Mathematics of Man,” International Social Science Bulletin 6, no. 4 (1954): 586. For more on Lévi-Strauss’s use of set theory, graph theory, and topology in a Cold War context, see Eric C.H. de Bruyn, “Constructed Situations, Dynamic Labyrinths, and Learning Mazes: Behavioral Topologies of the Cold War,” Grey Room, no. 74 (2019): 44–85, https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00263. 97. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 171.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00286 by guest on 01 October 2021 98. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, xiv. 99. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 4; emphasis in original. 100. Jacques Bertin, “La recherche graphique,” in Paris et l’agglomération parisienne, 2:37. 101. Bertin, Semiology of Graphics, 3; emphasis in original. 102. Marc Emery, “La sémiologie graphique: Entretien avec J. Bertin,” Communication et langages 28, no. 1 (1975): 33–43, https://doi.org/10.3406/colan. 1975.4248; emphasis in original. 103. Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” 189. 104. Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” 174.

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