Letters of the Laws: Science and the Matter of Inscription

THE COMVAnATIST postmodern hyperspace. Baudrillard's dystopian or postapocalyptic imagining of the simulacrum "as a 'bad totality' "(21) is in Deleuze countered with the Utopian celebration ofthe simulacrum as the pleasure we take "in usurpation and forbidden metamorphosis" (10). Appearing in its "daemonic aspect," the simulacrum celebrates in its Nietzschean "will to power" the metamorphic "power of the false" which, in the process of destabilizing the dominant order of truth, draws out the "latent potential for difference and metamorphosis" (15) in the cultural imagination. Instead of deploring the effects of an ungrounded procession of copies, Deleuze concentrates on the act ofsimulation itself, celebrating the mask or spectacle as performance . Where Baudrillard expresses a postmodern anxiety about a culture increasingly divorced from the "real," Deleuze (and Foucault) delight in the metamorphic potential ofme simulacrum to do things differently. At stake in this discussion ofthe simulacrum is the relation of art to the world, the Utopian possibility ofhinting at "the unimaginable world ofa collective which has not yet come into being" (25). However, since the "Utopian and dystopian interpretations of the culture of the simulacrum thus appear as two poles of a nontotalizable totality" (23), we cannot simply choose between them; Durham consequently proposes to pursue this paradoxical trope as a form that is "fundamentally problematic and problematizing" (17). Phantom Communities achieves this problematizing reading of this problematic figure of postmodernity with astounding intellectual dexterity, creative agility, and scholarly thoroughness. The density of Durham's theoretical prose requires ofreaders an effort that is generously rewarded by the pleasure afforded by the display ofcomplex intellectual debate. Evelyn CobleyUniversity ofVictoria TIMOTHY LENOIR, ed. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality ofCommunication. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. xv + 457 pp. LETTERS OF THE LAWS: SCIENCE AND THE MATTER OF INSCRIPTION The thesis explored in this outstanding collection of essays, according to its editor, is that "attention to the materiality of inscriptions themselves will demonstrate the extent to which inscription devices actually constitute the signifying scene in technoscience " (12). The inscription devices discussed are many: letters, words, mathematical symbols, drawings, engravings, maps, phonographs, photographs, experimental models, computer simulations, etc. All are richly contextualized in detailed analyses of specific historical situations, and all bear convincing testimony to the inextricability of the means of inscription and that which it inscribes. This constructivist orientation, ofcourse, is not uncommon in recent studies in the history of science, but the refreshing focus here is less on the usual conceptual, institutional , and pragmatic presuppositions surrounding particular scientific objects than on the material nature ofthe vehicles ofscientific representation themselves—on the peculiar powers, limitations, distortions, modulations, and enhancements specific to various physical modes ofregistering the world as conceptual entities. Two essays on photographic inscription may serve as apt examples of the volume's focus. In "Illustration as Strategy in Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man andAnimals, " Phillip Prodger considers the role ofengravVoI . 24 (2000): 167 REVIEW ESSAYS ings and heliotypes (an early kind ofphotograph) as persuasive devices in Darwin's 1 872 study offacial expressions. Prodger first notes the conceptual transformations induced in the study offacial expressions through the development ofmechanical and instantaneous means of recording transient physiological phenomena (as opposed to an artist's drawing ofa prototypical expression), pointing out as well the practical limitations ofvarious photographic media in realizing the theoretical ideal ofa neutral and objective representation offacial traits. He then weighs the rhetorical effect of the combination of artists' engravings and heliotypes in Darwin's book, showing mat the heliotypes serve as objective, scientific evidence of Darwin's thesis, even though they are manipulated through cropping and are often ofdubious provenance (several ofthe heliotypes' seemingly "spontaneous" expressions being elicited either through electrodes applied to a subject's features or uirough a model's dramatic performance of an emotion). Alex Pang, in "Technology , Aesthetics, and the Development ofAstrophotography at the Lick Observatory ," reviews the correspondence between astronomers at the Lick Observatory and the photographic laboratories and printing companies responsible for reproducing the observatory's celestial images, foregrounding the multiple aesthetic and technical concerns that problematized the transfer ofa constellation's emission of light to a printed page. Though the astronomers claimed publicly that their images were entirely objective...