Nature Displayed

Gender, Science and Medicine 1760-1820

L.J. Jordanova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317884958
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A collection of essays - including 3 that have never been published before - by one of the leading figures in cultural history. Professor Jordanova examines and reinterprets the writings of eighteenth-century thinkers and, in the process, sheds light on contemporary views on issues such as motherhood, sexuality, the body, art and medicine. The volume includes some of the author's most controversial and pioneering work, all the pieces have been revised in the light of the latest historiography and much of the material is published here for the first time.

CHAPTER ONE

Cultural Effort: An Introductory Essay

In his seminal book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson analysed the cultural preconditions for a modular notion of nationhood: a type of nationhood came into being, composed of certain elements, and the resulting ensemble was adapted to suit other historical and geographical settings. Central to the pattern he identified were ways of imagining not just the nation itself but the relations between its members. He set out the social, cultural and economic mechanisms underlying the main means by which citizens who generally lacked direct personal contact with one another could, nonetheless, imagine themselves as part of a shared enterprise. ‘Nation’ was an abstract term given life in the minds and behaviour of ordinary people. His account implies that much of the work of creating and sustaining a sense of nationhood goes on in the head, and he stressed that such mental effort takes place in specific historical contexts and that it has particular, material preconditions. In other words, Imagined Communities is a book about what I am calling cultural effort.¹

Nature Displayed is concerned with imagined relationships and examines the creation and use of modular concepts. Unlike Anderson, however, my domain is nature. I am especially interested in how those committed to producing authoritative knowledge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries worked to imagine abstractions, such as ‘nature’ and ‘family’, which concerned relationships. Even in the routine empirical business of medicine and natural history, these larger conceptual issues were always present. Although describing and classifying objects were important tasks for natural historians and medical practitioners, they were equally mindful of the need to understand the palpable affinities between living beings, especially human beings, as well as between God and nature, nature and nature’s laws. Representing and conceptualising such kinships in terms of visible similarities was a complex enterprise, one that touched not only a sense of cosmological order but also the most intimate identifies of all concerned. The abstractions I write about were also, like ‘nation’, modular. Indeed, there can be no more modular concept than ‘the family’, which has, since the eighteenth century, carried the assumption that forms of human organisation share fundamental elements in common, that where there are not families there ought to be, and that the family is rooted in nature. Thus natural relations were imagined, and actively created, through cultural processes, not ‘discovered’ in the physical world. Thereby nature was indeed displayed.

We can express the same point in a different vocabulary. For Raymond Williams, nation and family are ‘keywords’, terms that are historically dense, whose changing meanings and uses contain broad social and cultural shifts. Scholars from several disciplines have noted how a limited number of concepts do a disproportionate amount of work – both analytical and emotional – at any given moment. Nature is certainly one such term and it has been functioning in this manner for generations. Especially at a time when longue durée history is unfashionable, it is hard to do full justice to ideas such as nature, to capture both their locally-forged specificities and their enduring associations. Furthermore, such keywords also tend to be elusive. Their richness of meaning brings with it on the one hand a flexibility and ambiguity that makes precision difficult, and on the other relevance to so many aspects of human experience that it becomes overwhelming. Nonetheless the centrality of these terms has drawn many writers to them. In some ways Williams and Anderson responded quite differently to the challenge – Williams, a literary scholar and socialist writer, always sought to show how complex texts worked to mediate changing social relations, while Anderson, a historian of South-East Asia, focused on constellations of collective practices, such as reading newspapers and administrative procedures. Neither, it should be said, has shown particular concern for the nature of visual experience, although it is implicit in Williams’s work, especially on The Country and the City, that writers’ visual responses to their immediate surroundings act as important triggers, especially of fantasies of other, better times and places, generally located in the past. ‘Country’ and ‘city’ are categories that take significant emotional charge, after all, from sensory experience – a point that also applies to ‘nation’.²

I have mentioned Anderson and Williams as two hugely influential figures, especially for my generation; they have both, if in somewhat different ways, privileged the social and cultural processes that go on in the head without divorcing those processes from larger historical shifts. While I have found them inspiring, the writings presented here are very different. The essays that follow may signal some bigger shifts and attempt to open up the interpretative difficulties raised by keywords and modular concepts, but they are strictly limited in their focus. Most of them are based on readings of a small number of texts and images, although they make no pretence to being complete or exhaustive interpretations. But they are textually based because that is where I believe important cultural work gets done. My primary interest here is not in the means by which groups affirm and reaffirm their values, which generally involve forms of collective practice, although making, disseminating and responding to words and images is just such a practice. So, while I certainly assume that making cultural products occurs through complex social practices to be analysed as such, there is also room for work that emphasises the internal complexities of those products in their own right. I am fascinated by the way in which issues that are inevitably difficult, confusing, troubling and dangerous may be creatively handled through the processes of writing and image-making. I see the evidence for this in the cultural products themselves, and in the light of what is known about their context, I try to interpret and explain them. However, this is more a textual than a contextual study. The term ‘text’ itself is in fact rather slippery. I have used it to mean a consciously wrought artefact, made up principally of words, rather than as a generic term for all cultural products.

We should avoid reinforcing the idea that there is a self-evident distinction between texts and contexts, between, on the one hand, representation and, on the other, behaviour, action and structural forces. Yet it is undeniable that in the practice of each historian the interpretative weight tends to fall more on one than on the other. It is possible to understand this in terms of a combination of methodological preferences and disciplinary background. Those who pay attention to critical methods, and who often have a training weighted towards literature, art history and philosophy, give far greater emphasis to texts than do scholars with an interest in social, economic and political phenomena, coming from history and the social sciences. Many of those who would call themselves cultural historians have been anxious to blend the two approaches, as have historians and philosophers of science, especially those interested in the social construction of natural knowledge. There are a number of strategies available for accomplishing this: for example, to show how the production and reception of texts are themselves practices deeply embedded in the social, economic and political orders, and hence that texts are not fixed and static artefacts that exist in a separate world. Another is to expand the range of what counts as a text. One I find particularly compelling is to show how ideas, and the means by which they are expressed, act as mediations of the social conditions in which they exist. ‘Mediation’ suggests that ideas never passively reflect or directly express a prior state of affairs that is somehow more real than they are. It is used to stress both the transformations that ideas constantly undergo and their interested, ideological nature. Many historians, however, find the language of mediations and ideology baffling or unsuitable for their particular subject matter and intellectual style. Furthermore, historians genuinely differ over where and how at any given moment the most important things are happening, and, on the whole, conventionally trained ones have not given priority to the inner workings of texts and images. Yet for those interested in the generation of knowledge about nature, the use of concepts, the development of mental models of physical processes, and the role of metaphor are central issues. All these concerns encourage an emphasis on texts, although the diverse ways in which texts are handled needs to be stressed. Perhaps the variety of responses is most striking in the varying degrees to which texts are taken to be multi-layered, the products of different levels of consciousness.³

Historians of science and medicine have usually given priority to ideas, especially innovative ones, and to the individuals who produce them. The dangers of this type of privilege are well known, and have been expressed in attacks on triumphalism, on easy assumptions about the progressive nature of scientific knowledge and on Whig history. Nonetheless we continue to give a disproportionate amount of attention to those deemed the most outstanding innovators and discoverers. Such figures often acquire a paradigmatic status. Sometimes they are used as case studies of the way in which scientific and medical innovations function. At other times they are simply exemplary of great intellectual achievements. Or they can be indicators of intellectual trends, individuals who stand as indices to significant shifts and patterns. A number of figures recur in the chapters that follow, and I would like to clarify the status I give them. None of these men would be placed in the first rank of scientific innovators, although their historical significance is undoubted. I am not condoning the ranking mentality, but seeking to situate historiographically the individuals that interest me. I am certainly not claiming that they are ‘representative’ of the scientific and/or medical communities of their time. By definition they are likely to be exceptional individuals, where ‘exceptional’ is not about some universal intellectual superiority or genius (indeed such figures may be unusually ambitious, hubristic or greedy rather than clever), hence they are not representative in the usual sense of the word. But their writings may nonetheless be indicative of broader trends, articulating ideas with particular clarity, energy and force, making them especially valuable to historians. On the whole I have found in such figures themes and preoccupations that their contemporaries shared but expressed with less immediacy or only in a piecemeal fashion. Frequently it was the desire to generalise, to generate big pictures and comprehensive accounts that marked such figures out. I have often turned, for example, to the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck to illustrate points about the trends towards a more naturalistic style of thinking. Lamarck rejected any hint of metaphysical explanation in natural history, natural philosophy and psychology – nature should be understood in terms of natural forces only. The breadth of his scientific interests and the nature of his intellectual ambition make him a valuable case study, as do his earnest attempts to present a cosmology and general methodological precepts for the pursuit of natural knowledge. But Lamarck, like many other figures discussed in the book, holds another kind of interest for me.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes suggested that a photograph possesses what he called a ‘punctum’ – a point that captured his interest and excited his curiosity.⁴ It was not necessarily connected with the overt subject matter of the image, and could be an apparently irrelevant detail. His attempt to conceptualise what captures an individual’s attention in an image interests me because I am curious about its academic equivalent and more specifically about the ways in which scholars revisit the same figures and issues in their writings. I am struck by the way in which the ideas of certain thinkers have acted as a kind of punctum for me. What I like about Barthes’s notion is that it does not seek to endow some aspect of a photograph with an independent value in and of itself; rather it acknowledges that capturing the attention is an individual matter, involving an intricate dynamic between viewer and image. Once the capturing has taken place, re-reading a text or viewing an image again becomes a journey motivated by love and familiarity – it is no coincidence, I think, that Barthes’s book concerns his beloved mother’s image, making it simultaneously an act of mourning and an exploration of the allure of photography.⁵ Historians, having been lured to a person, period, text, image, country or theme, then examine the materials to which they have been led as thoroughly as possible, but often cannot fully explain how and why they were drawn there in the first place. Lamarck has constituted a sort of punctum for me, and at each visit I find something new in the themes he tackled. I have no desire to claim some kind of greatness for Lamarck on this account. I am merely asserting that I have found prolonged engagement with his ideas generative, that I believe their significance can be justified on historical grounds, and that they appeal because the issues they speak to are wide-ranging and not easily exhausted.

Indeed, I would extend the argument to the periods and places historians work on and to the issues that grab them. For many years I have been drawn to the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Possibly this reflects the life span of the figures I have studied. This era cannot simply be called the Enlightenment, which is generally deemed to have started somewhere between the mid-seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century and to have ended either with the French Revolution or shortly thereafter. Nor is it really the late Enlightenment, because criticism of that movement of ideas was already well-developed by the first decade of the nineteenth century. It could be claimed that this period has no real unity at all, split as it is by having that great divider, the French Revolution, right in the middle of it. Nonetheless for me 1760 to 1820 is a ‘natural’ period, but it is precisely my interests that make it so – I cannot and would not claim objectivity for its boundaries, partly because historical periods, however delineated, have blurred edges. This is not to say that they are arbitrary or lack intellectual plausibility, only that different scholars in interaction with their materials will foreground distinct chronological patterns. I could equally well describe the period these essays cover in terms of cohorts. Most of the people I discuss were products of the Enlightenment, rather than members of the generations that shaped it. It was already under way when they were born and as they grew to adulthood they absorbed its commitments. By the time some of them, such as Mary Shelley, arrived, disenchantment with it was under way. These individuals were liberal rather than conservative, reformist rather than reactionary. The exceptions, men such as Paley, Chateaubriand and de Maistre, figure here as foils to more liberal belief systems, such as transformism and the Enlightenment. Those whose ideas are given prominence in Nature Displayed were also largely professionals and middle-class, and hence influenced by the political and social debates of the second half of the eighteenth century, which, in their printed forms especially, were largely conducted by and on behalf of that class. They were also worshippers and students of nature, a concept that enjoyed an extraordinary degree of prestige in this period, which is precisely why critics of change and reform so often accused their opponents of un-naturalness.

I could also describe the periods to which I have long been attracted in style terms: late Baroque, rococo, neo-classical, romantic. Admittedly, style is a tricky concept, but I use it because it suggests both a historical and an aesthetic analysis: historical because styles are understood to be specific to a given time, and aesthetic because styles are taken to be composed of formal elements that produce particular kinds of beauty. Styles elicit strong reactions; their appeal may, ultimately, be inexplicable, but the powerful responses they evoke facilitate their capacity to act as puncta. Although I have not generally used stylistic classifications, it is nonetheless helpful to remember that aesthetic responses to cultural products and the contexts that produce them are integral to historical work, which, in my experience, is strongly driven by visual and intellectual pleasure. Since style refers to the recognisably shared features of diverse entities, which express their time of creation, it effectively yokes together historical and aesthetic approaches. I wonder whether there was, for instance, a cognitive style shared by many of the writers I have designated ‘naturalist’, which I have found particularly compelling. I have also mentioned style because its extension to fashion, to interiors, to food and so on, indicates that the styles we are drawn to give immediate pleasure and form part of daily life. Historians’ choice of geographical areas is a closely related issue; places can also act as puncta. This was certainly the case for me in the early work I did on French science – France was a country I knew from infancy, and it excited my curiosity. Several essays were shaped by that interest. However, preferences also change, and although I still work on French materials, eighteenth-century Britain came to seem alluring; it too appeared seductive for reasons I cannot adequately explain. However, from the earliest research I ever did, I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Plates
• 1. Cultural Effort: An Introductory Essay
• PART I NATURAL POLARITIES
• PART II BODY MANAGEMENT
• PART III FAMILY VALUES
• Bibliography
• Index