Editorial Statement

In the winter of 1993, Configurations was inaugurated as the first interdisciplinary forum for scholars who sought connections between literature and science under a broader rubric of cultural study. In this first issue, Joseph Rouse queried the cultural studies of scientific knowledge, while Bruno Latour parsed the semiotics of Pasteur’s lactic-acid yeast; Katherine Hayles brought to our attention the materiality of informatics, and Barbara Stafford charted the dilemmas of display in Enlightenment history. It was an exciting time to cross disciplinary boundaries, a productive moment of putting into action the call to cyborgian arms that Donna Haraway made a decade earlier, and there was John R. R. Christie reminding us of this in his “A Tragedy for Cyborgs.” A philosopher, an anthropologist, a historian of science, a classicist, a historian of technology, and a literary scholar—such were the fields represented in the first issue of Configurations.

Flash forward nearly twenty years and you will find that the spring 2011 issue of Configurations (19:2) represented the following disciplines: quantum mechanics and discourses of action; intersections among consumer electronics (“gadgets”), cinematography, and the cognitive sciences; subjectivity after the neuroscientific turn; science writing for children in the Victorian era; and emergent biotechnologies read through the writings of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. In many ways, this shift speaks to the success of the journal and to the broader change in the academy of traditional disciplines, to the collectivity of ideas and the practical consortiums of scholars working under transdisciplinary rubrics, such as sustainability or informatics. Individual disciplines have also morphed under the pressure: history has been changed by the many histories embedded in the convention of the grand narrative, and literature has been freed forever from the fetters of “pure” aestheticism. But while this more recent issue of Configurations reflected the shifts of the academy in general, it also served as a reminder that in many spaces, disciplinary boundaries still prevailed. Configurations is and must remain an outlet for transgressive and transdisciplinary scholarship in the field of literature, science, and technology studies.

Now, on the twentieth anniversary of the first issue of the journal, it seems a good time to take stock of our history. The technological developments alone over the past twenty years are reason enough to rethink the configuration of Configurations. Sherry Turkle first uncovered the complicated ways in which computers interacted in our psycho-social lives in the early 1980s, but the breathtaking insistence of these interfaces has reconfigured the ways we “talk” to one another in the new millennium. Our discursive lives as teachers, thinkers, and academics have changed unalterably and will continue to do so. It stands to reason, then, that the forums in which we explore these connective nodes should shift as well. It is not, however, simply technological development that shapes and affects our discursive lives, but the variety of narratives that we write that (con)figures our science. From Jules Vernes’s fantasies of moon-landing in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and from Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) to Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories (2011), our narratives provide contexts for the conceptual and material coexistence of literature, science, and technology.

These shifts do not occur in the vacuum of the present or the future or the near past; to ignore the deep histories and genealogies that determine their occurrence is to relegate the past to a mere repository of anecdote and chronology, to use Thomas Kuhn’s words. What does an investigation of the eighteenth-century production of ice in colonial India, for example, tell us about climate change and its embedded ideologies? How could nineteenth-century phrenology inform twenty-first-century brain imaging? How do Romantic paintings of sublime landscapes get projected onto the extraterrestrial pictures generated by the Hubble telescope? How and why is it important to think about science as narrative, or narrative as science? Our Configurations is as committed to providing a venue for historical scholarship as it is to the ultra-contemporary studies of literature, science, and...