Things That Talk

MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2003 PREPRINT 233 Lorraine Daston and Anke te Heesen Things that Talk Table of Contents Introduction 3 The Glass Flowers Lorraine Daston 5 News, Papers, Scissors Anke te Heesen 33 Things that Talk – Table of Contents 57 Introduction These two essays were written as part of a working group of historians of art and science on “Things that Talk”, organized under the auspices of the research project “The Common Languages of Art and Science” (2001-3) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (Dept. II). The other members of the working group were Peter Galison (Harvard University, USA), Caroline A. Jones (MIT, USA and Wissenschafts- kolleg zu Berlin, Germany), Joseph Koerner (University College London, UK), Antoine Picon (Ecole des Ponts et Chausées, Paris, France), Joel Snyder (University of Chicago, USA), Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge, UK), and Norton Wise (UCLA, USA). The group met three times in Berlin to discuss various versions of members’ essays and, more generally, the place of material culture in the history of science and the history of art. The nine essays, including the two that appear here as a preprint, will be published as a volume by Zone Books. A complete table of contents is appended to this preprint. The aim of the research project was to go beyond cases of historical interactions between art and science to investigate tools (e.g. drawing) and challenges (e.g. representation) common to both. In the case of the working group on “Things that Talk”, the departure point was a shared perplexity about how to capture the thingness of things in our respective disciplines. Given the distance separating the subject matter and methods of historians of art and science, the convergence of the terms in which the dilemma was posed was striking. Joseph Koerner formulates it pithily for the history of art: “Art historians today tend to be divided between those who study what objects mean and those who study how objects are made.”1 For historians of science, the polarization is starker still. Because the objects in question have long been assumed to be as inexorable and universal as nature itself, the history of inquiry into these objects--i.e. the history of science--has traditionally been narrated as just as inexorable and universal. A chasm yawns between this older historiography and recent studies of “science in context”, which emphasize the local character and cultural specificity of natural knowledge. Once again, the opposition between matter and meaning (sometimes tricked out as that between nature and culture) is reproduced. On the one side there is the brute intransigence of matter, everywhere and always the same, and the positivist historiography of facts that goes with it; on the other side, the plasticity of meaning, bound to specific times and places, and the corresponding hermeneutic historiography of culture. This Manichean metaphysics is of course a caricature, which the work of historians of art and science often shades and softens. But the metaphysics nonetheless exerts a powerful influence on how practitioners of both disciplines grapple--or fail to grapple--with things, those nodes at which matter and meaning intersect. 1 Joseph Leo Koerner, “Factura,” Res 36(1999): 5-19, on p. 5. 3 What language do talking things speak? Some things speak irresistably, and not only by interpretation, projection, and puppetry. It is neither entirely arbitrary nor entirely entailed which objects will become eloquent when, and in what cause. The language of things derives from certain properties of the things themselves, which suit the cultural purposes for which they are enlisted. It is neither the language of purely conventional connections between sign and signified, nor the Adamic language of perfect fit between the two. This is the language wistfully invoked in Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s short story “Ein Brief” (1902), in which the talented Lord Chandos confesses to Sir Francis Bacon that his long-awaited literary projects will never come to fruition, for there is no known language in which “the mute things speak to me”.2 These essays explore the space between these two extreme visions of the way words and world mesh together, and thereby unsettle views about the nature of both talk and things. The two essays that comprise this preprint were written by the two MPIWG participants in the working group, Anke te Heesen and Lorraine Daston. Te Heesen’s essay deals with a technique, cut-and-paste, as well as with the things--collages, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, even scientific identities--produced by that technique. While researching her essay, she also organized a small exhibition devoted to the same theme.3 Daston’s essay explores the attractions and repulsions of extreme mimesis in scientific models--here the glass botanical models commissioned by Harvard University, which later came to be known as “The Glass Flowers”. Both essays address the period around 1900, and convergences between the techniques and aims of art and science. 2 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” in Der Brief des Lord Chandos. Schriften zur Literatur, Kunst und Geschichte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), pp. 46-59, on p. 59. 3 “Cut and paste um 1900. Der Zeitungsausschnitt in den Wissenschaften” held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (25.9.-26.10.2002) and at the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum (7.11.2002-12.1.2003). See also the catalogue “cut and paste um 1900. Der Zeitungsausschnitt in den Wissenschaften,” ed. by Anke te Heesen, Kaleidoskopien 4 (2002), 192 p. 4 The Glass Flowers1 Lorraine Daston “My father used to say, ‘Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellow’s grave or the glass flowers at Harvard. Self-reliant like the cat-- that takes its prey to privacy, the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth-- they sometimes enjoy solitude, and can be robbed of speech by speech which has delighted them. The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.’” --Marianne Moore, “Silence” Introduction: Making Things Talk They seem wholly unremarkable at first glance: a stem of thyme (Thesium alpinum) with tiny white flowers; a pine tree branch (Pinus rigidum) with straggling needles and mottled bark; an iris (Iris versicolor) of deep violet, some of its blossoms already withered. [Figure 1] It could be a rather miscellaneous collection of freshly gathered botanical specimens, displayed for some eccentric reason under glass. But there is nothing fresh, nothing even vegetable, about these plants. And they are not just under glass; they are made of glass. It is the triple triumph of art over nature that annually draws over a hundred-thousand visitors to the Ware Collection of Glass Models of Plants--or the Glass Flowers, as they are known far and wide, in poems and novels as well as tourist guides--at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. First, there is the triumph of all artistic naturalism, the successful deception of the senses: these glass models are more lifelike than the most painstaking Dutch still life. Second, there is the triumph of enduring art over ephemeral nature: it is the essence of the beauty of flowers 1 My hearty thanks to Susan Rossi-Wilcox of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Don Pﬁster of the Harvard University Herbaria, Chris Meechan of the National Museum and Gallery at Cardiff, Henri Reiling of the University of Utrecht, James Peto of the Design Museum in London, and the staff of the Harvard University Archives for their generosity in making materials concerning the Blaschka models available to me and for their knowledgeable counsel. I am also grateful to Debora Coen for research assistance in the Harvard archives, to Rupal Pinto for allowing me to read her senior thesis, to Denise Phillips for advice concerning Dresden scientiﬁc societies, and to Martha Fleming for information about the artistic uses to which the Blaschka models have recently been put. 5 Lorraine Daston Figure 1: Blaschka glass model of Iris versicolor. Courtesy of Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, Harvard Museum of Natural History. 6 The Glass Flowers to be fleeting, but the blue delphinium blossom, even the half-yellowed leaf, are frozen in time, like an insect in amber. Finally, there is the triumph of form over matter, of artistry over the resistance of natural materials: the sheer unsuitability of hard, brittle glass to mimic the delicate fronds, soft petals, veined leaves, fleshy fruits, and thready roots of plants turns these models into wonders. What would be ordinary in nature becomes extraordinary in art. The 847 life-size models of over 750 species and varieties of plants is unique in the world, the work of two Dresden craftsmen, Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf Blaschka (1857-1939), who in 1890 signed a contract with the Harvard botanist George Lincoln Goodale “to make glass models of plants, flowers, and botanical details, for Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exclusively and to engage in the manufacture of no other glass models” for the annual sum of 8,800 Marks, over ten years.2 Ultimately, the Blaschkas (after Leopold’s death in 1895, Rudolf alone) labored for some fifty years (1886-1936) to produce the Harvard collection, which was financed by Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware in memory of Dr. Charles Eliot Ware, Harvard Class of 1834.3 Mary Lee Ware had attended Professor Goodale’s botany lectures and over the years befriended the Blaschkas, visiting them at their workshop-home in Hosterwitz, near Dresden.4 Over decades, before and after the first World War, during the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s, after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933--the Glass Flowers made their well-packed way from Hosterwitz in Saxony to Cambridge, Massachusetts, financed by the ever-loyal and ever-generous Miss Ware.

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