Objectivity, Collective Sight, and Scientific Personae

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's new book, Objectivity, is an original and important landmark study that contributes to broader understanding of the emergent history of objectivity, the epistemic values of scientific visualization, and the links connecting both. Objectivity is based on a close examination of numerous scientific and medical atlases published in Europe and the US since the eighteenth century. The authors are eminent historians of science who specialize in different historical periods: Daston is a scholar of early modern science, while Galison is a historian and philosopher of twentieth century microphysics. Both scholars have published extensively and influentially on a number of topics regarding the scientific community, objectivity, vision, and representation. Objectivity, beautifully produced and containing over one hundred illustrations (including twenty-one color plates), depicts a variety of scientific phenomena studied since the eighteenth century, from astronomical to botanical to meteorological subjects, and more.

Daston and Galison explore how historically variant approaches to scientific image-making since the eighteenth century have expressed—and reinforced—changing epistemic ideals and values linked to the intellectual authority of scientists. Objectivity is a rich, sophisticated, and complex historical analysis to which a brief summary cannot adequately do justice, and readers will find many treasures of their own to mine. A few of their main arguments can be highlighted here:

The authors emphasize that scientific objectivity is a contingent value that has meant different things throughout history and that it is far more complex and novel a concept than it has sometimes seemed. Specifically, Daston and Galison show that making sense of objectivity as a historical value requires deep understanding both of the essential place of visual representations in scientific practice and of how particular ideals surrounding visual representation in science and medicine emerged and developed within a longer, complicated series of changing epistemic values and concepts of truth.

To grasp the underlying historical patterns of change in epistemic virtues, Daston and Galison emphasize a third point: the need for a long, cross-sectional, multi-disciplinary view of science. They use the analogy of the panorama to describe their project: "Our study is unusually broad in geographic, chronological, and disciplinary sweep: it attempts a panoramic view of developments spread over the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries and situated in Europe and the United States" (47). Their analysis overflows the usual boundaries (of discipline, geography, time period) that organize the writing of the history of science. As they put it, "Both the scope and narrative shape of this book contrast with much of the best work in the history of science published in the past two decades, although the book is gratefully indebted to that scholarship" (47). They tell their history "not as a microhistory, thickly described and densely embedded in local circumstances, or even as series of such finely textured episodes" (47). Daston and Galison recognize several advantages to the panoramic, or aerial, view: "Some significant historical phenomena are invisible at the local level, even if their manifestations must by definition be located somewhere, sometime" (47). Enlarging the view yields, among other things, further refinement of the received narrative of scientific history, "reconfiguration" (10) replacing "rupture" (47), and "stages" replacing "paradigms" (19). Taking a broad historical view also allows the authors to see new features of science, and it provides the type of perspective needed to map a variety of different epistemic virtues to which scientists have aspired in different times and places, virtues that include—but are not limited to—mechanical objectivity (18).

Of particular interest to scholars in Victorian studies will be Chapters 1, 3, and 4, in which Daston and Galison lay out evidence for their view that objectivity "emerged as a scientific ideal borne out in practices only in the mid-nineteenth century" (35). In contrast to eighteenth century naturalists and anatomists, who were "aggressively selective" (73) in their ways of describing, depicting, and classifying, nineteenth-century scientists aspired to ideals of "self-denying passivity" (59), "self-restraint" (42), "automatism" (43), and even "blind sight" (311). Increasingly "wary of human mediation between nature and representation, researchers now turned to mechanically produced images...