The history of the practices of the microscope in the Enlightenment shall thus provide us with a historiographical lesson, illuminating the existence of a field in an area where historians have previously negating one. Nevertheless the question touches also upon the epistemological level when one considers the stake, in terms of scientific
communities and of construction of a scientific discipline, as related to the history of the practices of the microscope. In this respect, the analysis of the relation between science and society can shed much light on the question of the status of the practices of the microscope.
Through the documented example of the seventeenth-century air-pump as the centre of a conflict between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, Steve Shapin and Simon
Schaffer have shown that a literary technology such as the experimental report allowed for the change in the status of authority in Restoration England, by multiplying the
number of witnesses for an experiment.144 In a similar way, the reproduction of
experiments has been considered by Peter Dear to be a new form of authority replacing the previous form embodied in religious and antique texts.145 A vaguely similar pattern can be perceived in Italy with the quarrel of the Neoterics and the Aristotelians, and, in the case of literacy in France with the querelle des anciens et des modernes, through which the modern viewpoint established itself against traditional knowledge.146 It permitted the placing of Fontenelle at head of the renewed Académie des Sciences in the late seventeenth-century. The establishment of the report of experiments as a new form of authority has been documented more recently by several historians. Christian
Licoppe, through an analysis of the “rhetoric of trial” (the use of “I did, I saw”) has emphasised the differences between the relationship of the academies to political power in France and in England in the late seventeenth-century. Allan Gross et al., on the other hand, have established the emergence of an international scientific community sharing narrative and visual arguments that grew independently of political powers.147 Licoppe’s study on the fate of experimental reporting in the eighteenth-century has brought to light an important differences with the previous century. During the 1710s, the experimental report began to represent the decontextualisation of instruments used in the experiments, which opened to it new mercantile and scholar prospects.148 There is indeed an important difference between the period when a new form of authority was invented, and the following period when this form became the established form of scientific authority. In studying institutional changes, Bourdieu and Passeron have characterised this difference as forces enacting in order to create new institutions, as opposed to conserving established institutions. Such that, on the point of authority, the
144 S&S 1985, 56-58.
145 Dear 1985, 159-161.
146 On the cultural implications of the Querelle, see Hahn 1971, 54-57; Gillot 1968.
147 Licoppe 1994, 239-241. Licoppe 1996. Gross et al. (2000, 388-389) have identified shared knowledge in arguing local facts, explanations and visual arguments.
148 Licoppe 1996, 157-158. Broman (1994, 144) has identified a public sphere which emerged during the eighteenth-century, characterised by the spread of periodical literature, which “manifested a new discursive formation” that “reconfigured the basis on which knowledge was considered
authoritative”.
difference between seventeenth and eigtheenth-century academic institutions can be understood as the opposition between creative and conservative forces. One difference is that while previous sacred and traditionalist institutions retained an immutable form of knowledge, the new academies defended and preserved a creative method for producing knowledge. Habermas has situated the emergence of this “form of
rationality”, as he termed it, in the twentieth century.149 But its origin was more likely related to the creation of the seventeenth-century academies which institutionalised the production of new knowledge.
When related to eighteenth-century practices of the microscope, this discussion opens up two paths. I shall first examine the hypothesis that two different statuses of the microscope correspond to the difference between creative and conservative forces in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century. The microscope was a new and unknown
instrument to be explored and used in the seventeenth-century, bound to the creative atmosphere which characterises this period. Historians of seventeenth-century microscopy have documented this point well. The use of the microscope was
legitimated by its novelty and its knowledge-producing capabilities. In the eighteenth-century, the microscope, already known and framed by a conservative form of
knowledge, became a routine instrument not linked particularly to one field. It could not be a goal per se, but had to be considered as a means of research, a routine research tool of which little was to be said, because it was accepted almost everywhere by scholars as a “normal” research tool. This process implied that a certain form of authority was delegate to the instrument itself.150 The following chapters will provide evidence for this phenomenon.
The second point of discussion relates to the tyranny of the experimental report over the historiographic debate concerning the sciences of the ancien regime. Shapin and
Schaffer, Peter Dear, Christan Licoppe and others have mainly discussed several forms
149 Habermas 1968,
150 See Licoppe 1996, 277-282; S&S 1985, 36-39.
of the experimental report, in the context of physics. Catherine Wilson has argued that the features of knowledge constitution described by Shapin and Schaffer were also valid for seventeenth-century microscopy.151 But, especially in the case of the eighteenth-century, I believe that the natural sciences demonstrate a noticeable specificity in contrast to the physical sciences which have been largely examined. Natural sciences in the Enlightenment period deal with types of languages and logic, in part different from those of experimental physics. While both share the experimental report as a form of communication of knowledge, the question of naming and classifying natural objects appears to be a constitutive issue mainly for natural history, which has been well investigated by another historiographic tradition.152 In the field examined by Shapin and Schaffer, and Licoppe the question of classification is treated as an epistemological issue similar to that of demarcation, for instance, outlining the difference between matter of facts and hypotheses.153 On the contrary, the field in which the microscope operated during the eighteenth-century dealt progressively with classification and nomenclature i.e. a set of logic and linguistic technologies irreducible to demarcation and the three technologies, literary, material and social, discussed by Shapin and Schaffer.154 Among the causes of the so-called decline of microscopy in the late
seventeenth-century is a pattern too dependent on the British form of narrative rhetoric, as we will see in chapters 2 and 8, which neglected entirely the issue of naming and classifying creatures seen through the microscope. This latter work was undertaken mostly by continental scholars.
What did the experimental report become in particular cases of the practices of the microscope? It floated between the democratic and the elitist methods of reporting, while certain scholars felt the obligation to complete their reporting with a descriptive
151 Wilson 1995, 100.
152 Concerning different aspects of the language and classification of the Latin natural history tradition see Stearn 1995, 10-16, 41-44; Stevens 1994, 161-182; Slaughter 1982, 76-82; Stafleu 1971, Foucault 1966, 140-150.
153 S&S 1985, 162-163.
154 S&S 1985, 25.
theory of natural objects. Microscopists still had to manage experimental reports, but there first existed another emerging relation in terms of language which was developing --through the Latin natural history tradition-- and secondly, the experimental report itself was in the process of transformation. Indeed, it would be misleading to believe that no changes affected the experimental report after it was established in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth-century. Since this new form of authority was now approved by academies, scholars did not have a problem dealing with this form of authority any more. The narrative report of experiment, marked by circumstanciated details, prolixity, the use of the pronoun I, modesty, became, in the eighteenth-century, the place of transformation. I would characterise it as such: economy of words was the tacit rule followed by experimenters and observers, due to the increasing amount of data they focused on and ave to the new procedures they had adopted in order to face this increase. As early as 1687, Fontenelle sensed and summarised this emerging trend, when, in the midst of the querelle des anciens et des modernes; he wrote: “I thought that the quickest way was to consult on this matter the Physics, which holds the secret to summarise many disputes which rhetoric makes infinite”.155 Experimenting in series, i.e. the multiplication and variety of experiments by the same experimenter, and
condensing its narrative before presenting results in their entirety to the public, notably for replication, was among the elements that build the new identity of natural sciences of the 1740s.
If the experimental report was improved, observations with non standardised
microscopes were also the subject of literary practices. The absence of standardisation was indeed a major constraint which placed scholars before a choice between two styles of communication. On the one hand was the possibility of fully opening up to others their method in order to encourage a precise and complete repetition of the original procedure by other scholars. On the other hand, scholars could conceal the means and procedures they had employed for the production of a particular result. Speaking of the
155 Fontenelle 1994[1688], 34.
means here refers to the narrative and analytical description of the procedures and objects which allowed for repetition, including a description and the use of tools and microscopes themselves. In this respect, the practices of the microscope raised, in an acute way, the fundamental issue of the social construction of science. I call the first instance, use of the “democratic microscope”, where a scholar includes himself, through his narrative. The text being, in some ways, transparent, its construction aims at
analytically recreating the smallest detail concerning observations and procedure. The second situation, in which the text operates as an opaque reference to a experiment and discovery, and does not provide the analytical means to reproduce the observation, I shall call use of the “elitist microscope”.
There is a second aspect to the issue of the social microscope. Looking through a classical microscope is equivalent to looking at an object which no one can see at the same moment in time and in the same way. A proof of the importance of
communication was the fortune of the solar microscope in Germany in the second part of the eighteenth century. This microscope, which enabled the depiction of an image on a wall, was marketed in the early 1740s, and opened up a new social space for the discussion of images. Still the use of the classical microscope was, in some ways, entirely antisocial. To this major difficulty of partial communication due to the
elimination of another person’s experiment, one can add the specificity of the spectacle observed. The shapes and motion observed were incommensurable with the perceptive and visual reality of everyday life. Being an antisocial instrument, separating the observer from others’ perceptual experience, the problem was always that to socialise this instrument, which, in two words, forced the scholar to adopt a strategy of
communication in order to fill the gap opened up by the antisocial microscope. Scholars were forced thus, on one hand, to adapt the narrative report to the particular case of their practices of the instrument. They needed always to account for the reproducibility of their observations as a major factor in their work. On the other hand, before
“spectacle”, scholars constructed an object to be more and more microscopical, but it
also had to become a shared object in order to exist in the scientific realm. The issue of this cognitive constraint was knowing which were the smallest of the knowable objects available, describing and classifying them. The issue of the “social microscope” was entirely different, and lay, for every scholar, in finding the method by which other scholars could see and repeat what they had seen and made, thus choosing the
democratic or the elitist microscope. Even more, the particular asocial relationship of the scholar with the instrument lead progressively to the understanding that there was a place for a descriptive theory of the natural objects itself, carried out in the tradition of Latin natural history. Other issues opened or renewed by microscopical observation, such as generation, regeneration, causes of illness, appear more as superstructures in comparison to the infrastructure represented by the construction of the microscopical object and by the social constitution of the “microscopical report”. Still these issues sometimes played a major role when they met with unanimous success through reproducibility. Trembley’s work symbolises this success. As it will progressively emerge, most eighteenth-century scholars contributed to the shaping of these last categories while working on generation and other topics. The modern categories of using the microscope --social construction of the procedures, and of the object-- were elaborated during the eighteenth-century.
PART.I.