Browsing by Subject "History of science"

This dissertation consists of two parts: a chamber opera and an article on the work of Claude Vivier.

"Cardano" is a new chamber opera by composer Bryan Christian about the work and tragic life of the Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576). Scored for three vocal soloists, an actor, and an eleven-part ensemble, "Cardano" represents a coalescence of Christian's interests in medieval and Renaissance sources, mathematics, and intensely dramatic vocal music. Christian constructed the libretto from fragmented excerpts of primary sources written by Cardano and his rival Niccolo Tartaglia. The opera reinvigorates Cardano's 16th-century scientific and philosophical models by sonifying and mapping these models to salient musical and dramatic features. These models prominently include Cardano's solution to the cubic equation and his horoscope of Jesus Christ, which was deemed so scandalous in the 16th century that it ultimately led to Cardano's imprisonment under the Roman Inquisition in 1570 - the opera's tragic conclusion. Presenting these ideas in opera allows them to resound beyond the music itself and project through the characters and drama on stage. In this way, the historical documents and theories - revealing Cardano's unique understanding of the world and his contributions to society - are given new life as they tell his tragic story.

Claude Vivier's homophonic treatment of combination tones--what he called les couleurs--demands an extension of traditional methods of harmonic and spectral analysis. Incomplete explanations of this technique throughout the secondary literature further demand a revised and cohesive definition. To analyze all variations of les couleurs, I developed the analytical concept of combination-tone classes (CTCs) and built upon Angela Lohri's (2010) combination tone matrix to create a dynamic CTC matrix, from which CTC sets may be extracted. Intensive CTC set analysis reveals a definitive correlation between CTC set and formal sections in Vivier's composition "Bouchara." Although formally adjacent CTC sets are often markedly varied, all sets share a subset of lower-order CTCs, aiding in perception of spectral cohesion across formal boundaries. This analysis illuminates the interrelationships of CTC sets to their parent dyads, their orchestration, their playing technique, and form in "Bouchara." CTC set analysis is compared with Vivier's sketches for "Bouchara," which suggest that les couleurs were intended as integral components of the work's musical structure.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Great Britain's computing industry led the world in the development and application of computers for business and administrative work. The British government and civil service, paragons of meritocracy in a country stratified by class, committed themselves to implementing computerized data processing techniques throughout the sprawling public sector, in order to modernize their economy, maintain the competitiveness of British high-technology industries, and reconsolidate the nation's strength and reputation worldwide. To succeed in this project, the British government would need to leverage the country's existing expertise, cultivate the heterogeneous field of computing manufacturers, and significantly re-train labor.

By the 1970s, Britain's early lead in the field of computing had evaporated, government computing projects had produced disappointing results, and the nation's status as a world power had declined precipitously. This dissertation seeks to explain why British computing achieved so few of its intended results by looking at the intractable labor problems within the public sector during the heyday of the Britain's proclaimed "technological revolution." The dissertation argues that the interpretation of, and solutions for, these labor problems produced disastrous effects.

Sources used include government documents, civil service records, records of the nationalized industries (the Post Office, National Health Service, Central Electricity Generating Board, Coal Industry, Railways, and others), computing industry records, press accounts, and oral interviews. By using methodologies from the history of technology, institutional history, and labor history, as well as gender analysis, this dissertation shows that despite the government's commitment to both high technology usage and labor meritocracy, competing claims of technological expertise and management tradition led the government to misjudge the role of computing within the public sector and the nation.

Beginning with a labor situation in which women did the majority of computing work, and seeking to achieve a situation in which young men and management-level technocrats tightly controlled all digital computing, the British government over-centralized its own computing endeavors, and the nation's computing industry, leading to a dangerous winnowing of skill and expertise within the already-small field. The eventual takeover of the British computing market by IBM, and purchase of the last viable British computing company by Fujitsu, marked the end of any hope for Britain's computing dominance in either their home market or the global market.

While multiple factors contributed to the failures of government computing and the British computing industry--including, but not limited to, American competition, inability to effectively create a global market for British machines, and misjudging the public sector's computing needs--this dissertation argues that labor problems, arising largely from gendered concerns about technological change and power, constituted a critical, and unrecognized, stumbling block for Britain's government-led computing revolution.

Modern scholars cannot agree how extant fragments of thought attributed to Leucippus and Democritus integrate (or do not) to form a coherent perspective on the ancient Greek world. While a certain degree of uncertainty is unavoidable, given the nature of the evidence available and the fact that Democritus wrote many different works (including at least one in which he deliberately argued against positions that he defended elsewhere), this study demonstrates that we know enough to take a more integrative view of the early atomists (and of Democritus in particular) than is usually taken. In the case of Democritus, this study shows that it makes good sense to read what remains of his works (physical, biological, and ethical) under the presumption that he assumes a single basic outlook on the world, a coherent perspective that informed every position taken by the atomist philosopher.

Chapter 1 provides an in-depth portrait of the historical and philosophical context in which early atomism was born. As part of this portrait, it offers thumbnail sketches of the doctrines attributed to a representative catalogue of pre-Socratic philosophers to whom published work is attributed (Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Philolaus). It demonstrates how each philosopher presumes that his theory offers a universal outlook on human reality, a perspective on the universe which purposely encompasses (and builds into a single theoretical framework) physics and biology and practical ethics.

Chapter 2 introduces the early atomists as respondents to the pre-Socratic movement before them (a movement which this study refers to as the Critical Tradition). It presents evidence for an integrated reading of early atomist fragments, a reading that construes the Leucippus and Democritus as men of their time (working with and responding to the positions taken by their predecessors in the Critical Tradition).

Chapter 3 shows how Democritus' ethics arise naturally from his physics via an historical process of development. Like his predecessors in the Critical Tradition and many of his contemporaries, the atomist deliberately imagines nature (physics) providing the raw material from which culture (ethics) naturally and inevitably rises.

Chapter 4 offers an original reading of extant ethical fragments of Democritus, showing how the atomist uses his unique outlook on the world to develop a practical approach to living well.

This dissertation is at once a historical study of the emergence of U.S. hegemony through the lens of discourses and techniques of attention, and a sustained series of methodological reflections centering on how to write and think about historical dynamics of causality. Methodological emphasis is first on establishing a reconceptualization of the dynamics of scientific and commercial accumulation animating capitalist modernity. From there, this study maps the emergence of two intersecting truth technologies that I argue are central to the peculiar ways in which U.S. corporate capitalism has worked over the long twentieth century. These apparatuses of not-only scientific truth are the psychological problematic of attention as a model enabling the representation of, and intervention in, human cognition, and the Marginalist visualization of "the economy" as a welfare equilibrium.

Both technologies emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century along with the trans-Atlantic proliferation of research universities, and subsequent re-organizations of the material bases, and representational strategies and practices, of authoritative truth-making. In the U.S., these developments effected a particular displacement and broad re-orientation of previously theological frameworks for understanding human cognition and the "Natural" order of society. I argue that one consequence of this displacement and re-orientation has been the formation of a governmental rationality of the U.S. "Market Republic" that takes the welfare equilibrium of a mass-market economy as its telos and idiom of rational order, while simultaneously rendering civic freedom a matter of choices made after paying the right kind of (primarily economic or scientific) attention. As my examples indicate, this rationality is not necessarily state-based, but rather unfolds medially as a series of conceptual-discursive and socio-technical conventions in three primary institutional sites of attention-gathering and market-making: early mass-circulation print culture, systematic corporate management, and modern research universities. In all three sites, my focus is on communication technologies conceived as staging procedures for the socialization and accumulation of attention.

As mentioned above, my historical horizon of significance for these investigations is the emergence of U.S. hegemony between 1870 and 1929. By conceptualizing hegemony in terms of a nation's intermediating position as a dominant global "center of (commercial and intellectual/scientific) calculation," I keep in play a general conception of accumulation wherein knowledge, money, and indeed, human attention, are all forms of currency that have kept U.S. hegemony current throughout the long twentieth century (1870 - present). At stake in this alternative account of capitalist accumulation and scientific knowledge as tightly linked networks is not the by-now-standard conflation of scientific and class-based authority to "make things mean;" but rather, an insistently historical, constructivist, and indeed relativist conceptualization of how resources and power systematically concentrate and disperse in the very micro-processes by which people think "truth" with their eyes and hands -- by what they look at, interface with, are constituted in terms of, and so on. To accomplish this, the study proceeds by holding together Giovanni Arrighi's macrosociological theory of world historical capitalism, Bruno Latour's microsociological account of the power of "immutable mobiles" in (scientific) modernity, and Michel Foucault's genealogical conception of history as well as his theory of governmentality (the "conduct of conduct" through practices of freedom).

When debating the structure of the cosmos, Raphael delivers to Adam perhaps Milton's most famous line: "be lowly wise." With the promise to "justify the ways of God to men," Milton does not limit man's knowledge to base matters, but reclaims the heights of "other worlds" for the poet. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the natural philosophers' material explanations of the natural order were slowly gaining authority over other sources of knowledge, the poets prime among them. My dissertation takes up the competing early modern claims to knowledge that Milton lays down for Adam. I argue that natural philosophy, what today we call "science," emerged as the dominant authority over knowledge by appropriating the poet's imagination.

The poet's imagination had long revealed the divine hand that marked nature--a task that, as Sidney put it, merited the poet a "peerlesse" rank among other professions. For Bacon, Galileo, and Royal Society fellows, the poetic imagination revealed material explanations of nature's order that other orthodox models and methods could not. For the first decades of the seventeenth century, the imagination aligned poetry and natural philosophy as complementary pursuits of knowledge: Sidney's poet was to imagine a "golden" world that revealed the divine order, the material cause of which Bacon's natural philosopher was to discover in nature. But as the Royal Society fellows countered the claim that they peddled fancies, they severed ties with the poet. In one ingenious rhetorical move, Royal Society fellows proclaimed themselves to have perfected the poet's imaginative work, securing the imagination for natural philosophy while disavowing poetry as the product of an idle fancy. Such rhetoric proved as powerful then as it does now. For Margaret Cavendish, the poet occupies the supplemental role that "recreate[s] the mind" once it grows tired of the "serious" natural philosophical studies. After the Restoration, then, the important role of the poetic imagination would go largely unrecognized even as it set itself to work in what would become the separate disciplines of literature and science.

In American letters, the Civil War represented a decisive break in literary form, a shift from interiority to exteriority. Sentimentalism harnessed the transformative effects of aesthetic feeling to galvanize political opinion in antebellum America, whereas realist and regionalist writing's empiricist attention to surface and appearance represented a reaction against sentimentalism. Yet postbellum literature is nothing if not a sustained meditation on how the feeling, sensate body negotiates the abstraction of citizenship and political life.

The paradoxes presented by black emancipation, immigration, and women's suffrage forced what today we consider the period's most canonical authors, from Emily Dickinson to W.E.B. Du Bois, to confront the contradictory feelings provoked by a democratic nation that excluded most of its citizens from their fundamental rights. The taste of Ellis Island, Henry James warned in The American Scene, "will be forever in [the] mouth" of the citizen, who must share "the intimacy of his American patriotism with the inconceivable alien." James's literal distaste for immigrants raises the stakes of what it means to locate the experience of belonging neither inside nor outside the body, but at its sensory orifices, its porous thresholds. The issue of corporeal intimacy manifested in aesthetic forms that made the senses legible across linked areas of nineteenth-century literary production: from the cookbook (Russell's Domestic Cookbook) and local color fiction (Chopin's The Awakening), to utopian novels (Bellamy's Looking Backward), autobiographies (Keller's The Story of My Life) and the apparently tasteless lyric poems about spiritual hunger (Dickinson's poetry). Senses of Belonging seeks to show how postbellum American literature, in all its forms, transformed civic abstraction into a sensate experience.

Senses of Belonging builds on and seeks to advance work on embodied citizenship in the broad area of cultural studies by showing how taste, touch, smell, sight and sound articulate otherwise intangible feelings of national belonging. To do so, each chapter is devoted to a single sensation, thereby placing literary treatment of each sensation in the context of political, scientific, and philosophical debates about citizenship. This structure helps draw attention to how each sense perception uniquely registered the multi-faceted experience of belonging in the wake of the Civil War, the bloodiest event Americans had yet experienced. The project's focus on literary form and sense experience is also historical, as it traces modes of national affiliation from the problem of black emancipation during the Civil War, to the "Negro Problem" during Reconstruction, to what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the "problem of the color line" at the turn of the twentieth century. This chronological arrangement both reframes existing periodizations of nineteenth-century American literature and adds dimension to what is often referred to as the "Gilded Age."

What emerges from this methodology is a literary analysis of how seemingly disparate and unconnected nineteenth-century American writers shared a central preoccupation with sensory experiences of, and the emotional effects on, everyday civic life. This study crosses disciplinary boundaries in order to chart connections among nineteenth-century writers and thinkers: anthropology, philosophy, and physiology among others. The questions that organize this dissertation are fundamentally literary, for Senses of Belonging demonstrates that the senses do not exist prior to or outside of language, but rather are constituted through literature's rich imaginings.

My argument is that the rise of biology at the start of the nineteenth challenged the individualism of the Enlightenment, and that it fell to the novel to enable readers to reimagine themselves in light of the resulting contradictions. Chapter one considers how the eighteenth-century individual was dismantled, chapter two looks at the human organism erected in its place, and chapter three accounts for how human organisms form communities. By factoring fiction into the break between natural history and biology that Foucault identifies in The Order of Things (1966), I consider the effect of that epistemological shift on the history of subjectivity. In my first chapter I use Gillray’s satirical cartoon, The Cow-pock (1802), to show how the concept of a human being who is at once individual and organism was an unlivable contradiction, and how that contradiction played out in the cultural conflicts of the time. In the next chapter I use Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to argue that the novel reimagined life within that contradiction by reconfiguring individuation into an uncertain process whose goal is both unattainable and dangerous. Finally, I use Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) to show how the novel developed a new conception of community suited to the self-contradiction of the individual as organism.

Growing "old" in contemporary American society often means being seen as a problem: you threaten the stability of Social Security and Medicare; cutting-edge science seeks a cure for what ages you; cosmetic companies and health magazines sell you products and strategies for holding on to your youth as long as possible. The Age of Obsolescence: Senescence and Scientific Rejuvenation in Twentieth Century America traces the emergence of these attitudes toward old age back to the turn of the twentieth century when a publicly shared conception of aging was emerging in relation to advances in science and medicine, industrialized labor practices, a slowly developing welfare state, demographic observations of increased life expectancy, changing gender roles and expressions of national identity. During that time, the quest for the fountain of youth shifted from the stuff of legend to a driving motivation behind modern science.

In the four chapters of this dissertation, I bring literary critical methods to bear on literary and scientific texts, public health tracts, journalistic accounts, advertisements and public records. Through this survey of science, government and popular culture, I document the formation of several cultural narratives of aging--or, formulaic ways of addressing aging produced by repeated metaphors, imagery and story lines--that circulated with reciprocal influence through all of these spheres, determining attitudes toward, and experiences of, aging at that moment and into the present. After briefly exploring our contemporary "anti-aging" culture, the four chapters of The Age of Obsolescence address the framing of a moral responsibility for aging individuals to "take care of themselves" as a duty to their nation; the association of aging with obsolescence and its influence on worker's experiences and industrial practices; the scientific and cultural construction of aging as a disease in need of professional intervention; and the proposed "cure" for this problem of aging: scientific rejuvenation, particularly the glandular rejuvenation fad of the 1920s. My conclusion traces this fervor for scientific rejuvenation into the present, showing how the turn-of-the-century cultural logic of aging has become a taken-for-granted framework of American popular culture today. In illuminating the historical moment when the "problem" of aging was located in the bodies of aged individuals, I point toward solutions that may arise not from scientific discovery, but from rewriting these cultural narratives of aging and old age and restructuring the national practices that stem from them.

Historically, the wind has functioned in multiple capacities, both physically and symbolically. The following study explores the ways in which natural history, myth and folklore, craft knowledge, and religion contributed to a growing body of knowledge about the wind at a moment in British history when wind knowledge assumed unprecedented political and economic significance. How did people come to know the wind and to narrate and communicate wind knowledge in the seventeenth century? What work did these complex and competing narrations perform? And what do they make visible? In pursuing these lines of inquiry, my work brings together three principle bodies of knowledge: Environmental History, History of Science, and British Imperial history; and it draws upon documents that include scientific treatises, written records of oral anecdotes and weather wising, religious sermons, travel narratives, fictional novels, and imperial correspondence. I argue that because the wind and wind knowledge were ubiquitous to the emerging success and identity of the British empire, a great variety of historical actors sought to control and narrate what wind knowledge was, where it came from, and what political work it should do. These efforts were unequivocally rooted in first hand experience and observation of the wind--maker's knowledge--and created what I call an intellectual commons that enabled commoners as well as elites to shape and briefly control the contours of wind knowledge in early Modern Britain and its expanding empire.