Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (review)

Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Edited by Timothy Lenoir (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 457 pp. $65.00 cloth $24.95 paper

This collection of sixteen essays combines, in roughly equal amounts, two approaches expected to shed light on scientific practice, namely historical constructivism and deconstruction after the manner of Jacques Derrida. The former, a once radical approach that redefined the history of science during the last two decades, is represented by some of its leading practitioners, as well as by more junior scholars. They all present singularly illuminating and erudite case studies from early modern science (Lorraine Daston), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century astronomy (Simon Schaffer and Alex Pang), nineteenth-century physiology and animal behavior (Robert Brain and Phillip Prodger), and twentieth- century computer science (Robin Rider) that further consolidate and expand the scholarly repertory of this revisionist and occasionally contestible approach. They highlight the key role of literary, linguistic, and other technologies of representation (most notably photography) in the historical and social construction of scientific facts. Prodger is particularly impressive in his innovative analysis of Charles Darwin's integrative use of new photographic technologies to render persuasive some of his more radical textual claims about emotions in animals. Though one could lament the lack of a more diversified composition of authors, that is, other than those possessing close links to Stanford University, on the whole, these chapters enrich the already hegemonic scholarship about historical constructivism of science.

The other major category in the collection includes contributions inspired by Derridean deconstruction, mostly by literary scholars, who pursued, directly or implicitly, Derrida's call to focus on the materiality of inscriptions. ¹ Such a singular focus is further justified in terms of Derrida's suggestive emphasis on the fact that inscription devices and media technology are simultaneously linked to the contents of literature, philosophy, and science, as well as to the social, economic, and political order. As such, they appear to satisfy the ever-growing demand for more sophisticated mediating devices between the "internal" and the "external" in science, or its contents and context.

Some of these literary scholars work in the tradition known to historians of science as "literature and science," in which scholars of English literature examine, among other prevailing approaches, the literary strategies embedded in scientific texts of great public appeal. Those represented in this collection are Gillian Beer, who contributes exquisite and highly original reflections on Darwin's ethnographic perception of exotic islands, in terms of Britain's own insular condition; Brian Rotman, who outlines an important argument about the inseparability of reasoning and persuasion in mathematical language or, rather, in mathematics-as-language; and Lisa Bloom, whose perceptive analysis of the contrasting literary strategies deployed in two narratives of failure by British and American explorers of the South and North Poles, respectively, is an exemplary account of how such strategies reflect the social, political, and economic interests that create national myths.

Of special interest is Hans-Jorg Rheinberger's pioneering effort to apply the method of Derridean deconstruction to the history of crucial experiments in science. He muses on the relationship between "experimental systems"--the working unit of scientists in his view--and the graphemic spaces, or material traces, that are produced in the representational space generated by experimental systems. He views his work as a preliminary step toward a history of "epistemic things," that is, a history of science that is not only a history of scientists, or of science, but also of "things." Indeed, in pondering the relevance of Rheinberger's emphasis on xenotexts in molecular biology--or texts that have no ultimate or fixed meanings but possess an uncanny ability to create interpretive futures for themselves (his case study examines crucial experiments in protein synthesis)--to other experimental systems in this future holding discipline, one wonders how the famous double helix, conceived by scientists who never experimented with DNA...