This essay is a study of the “Project for the establishment of a war and hunting gunpowder manufactory in the United States,” written by Irénée Du Pont de Nemours in 1800, in order to raise funds from potential investors for what was to become the DuPont Corporation. It shows that the “Project” is best understood as a demonstration device akin to those used by natural philosophers at the time. This investment proposal relied on demonstration techniques similar to those of the report of an experiment, textually gathering a crowd of virtual witnesses to address their objections, submitting the proposed manufactory to a number of manipulations to assess its reactions under various circumstances, and relying on a specific experimental device—a profit-and-loss account—that made it possible to produce compelling quantitative results. The essay shows the originality of these techniques at a time when profit-and-loss calculations were uncommon in business practice. It explains that these calculations were intended to ameliorate the entrepreneur’s problematic credit situation, which required a specific demonstrative effort, and points to scientific demonstration practices in Physiocratic political economy, and in Lavoisier’s chemistry, as likely influences.
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This article explores the political, legal, and social history of the 1981 “Japanese Smokers’ Wives Study.” This large-scale cohort study, led by Takeshi Hirayama, chief epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Tokyo, found that the nonsmoking wives of smokers were themselves at greater risk for developing lung cancer. The study was successfully used by American anti-tobacco activists to regulate indoor smoking during the 1980s. Taking a transnational approach, the article explores the complex, multilayered relationship between American tobacco production, Japanese epidemiology, and American tobacco restriction. It argues that smoking and anti-smoking in the United States and Japan have produced each other through flows of tobacco and epidemiological data. In the postwar era, Japanese cigarettes were increasingly filled with American-grown tobacco as part of aid packages, or sold to the Japanese Tobacco Monopoly. The subject population of the study was made, in part, by American tobacco producers. Meanwhile Americans who lived under an expanding umbrella of tobacco ordinances in the 1980s were made by Japanese tobacco consumers. The circulation of tobacco from American farms to Japanese bodies, from leaf to epidemiological data, is a window into the coproduction of science and capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century.
本文探讨了1981年“日本吸烟者妻子研究”的政治、法律和社会历史。东京国立癌症研究所(National Cancer Institute)首席流行病学家平山武(Takeshi Hirayama)领导的这项大规模队列研究发现，吸烟者的妻子不吸烟，她们自己患肺癌的风险更大。20世纪80年代，美国反烟草活动人士成功地利用这项研究来规范室内吸烟。本文采用跨国方法，探讨了美国烟草生产、日本流行病学和美国烟草限制之间复杂的多层次关系。它认为，美国和日本的吸烟和反吸烟是通过烟草和流行病学数据的流动相互产生的。在战后时期，作为援助计划的一部分，日本香烟越来越多地加入了美国种植的烟草，或者卖给了日本烟草专卖公司。该研究的对象人群部分是由美国烟草生产商组成的。与此同时，20世纪80年代生活在不断扩大的烟草条例保护伞下的美国人被日本烟草消费者所取代。从烟叶到流行病学数据，从美国农场到日本人身上的烟草流通，是一扇了解20世纪下半叶科学与资本主义合作生产的窗口。
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This essay engages a classic debate about the way nineteenth-century biology was informed by contemporaneous developments in political economy, and vice versa. However, rather than argue for a convergence between classical liberalism and Darwinian evolution, this essay traces the way that the concept of organization moved between both fields of discourse. Compared to the theory of evolution by natural selection, the logic of organization was far more teleological and, often, authoritarian. Instead of asserting that competition for access to scarce resources among autonomous agents yields adaptive outcomes in the population at large, it held that organic entities inexorably tend to develop from a state of simplicity to one of complexity. Moreover, it stressed the production of hierarchical structures wherein the whole was privileged over its constitutive parts, in biology as well as society. It is my thesis that the logic of organization proved especially attractive in debates about the transition from free-market to corporate capitalism, providing a powerful means to describe, discuss, and dispute the centralization, rationalization, and bureaucratization that contemporary observers often took to be characteristic of a distinctly modern political economy.
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As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new markets in “blood” helped define new theories of heredity and race. This essay expands on this literature by examining eighteenth-century British efforts to control a different aspect of animal reproduction: desire. Spurred by changing meat markets in out-of-season lamb and expanding property structures that created sex-segregated herds, shepherds, farmers, and agricultural writers worked to provoke the seasonally dependent desires of ewes by feeding them aphrodisiac foods, changing the ways that sex was staged, and creating landscapes of “artificial” grass timed to help ewes escape the constraints of the seasons. Their efforts draw our attention to a broader range of bodily experts, from physicians, to professional feeders, to Linnaean botanists, who were interested in the ways that landscapes could be made to shape bodies. The essay suggests that these forms of environmental control, which still undergird capitalist farming, have left significant modern traces on both knowledge and landscapes and offer a rich and relatively untapped source of bodily knowledge.
{"title":"Feeding Desire: Generative Environments, Meat Markets, and the Management of Sheep Intercourse in Great Britain, 1700–1750","authors":"E. Pawley","doi":"10.1086/699233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699233","url":null,"abstract":"As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new markets in “blood” helped define new theories of heredity and race. This essay expands on this literature by examining eighteenth-century British efforts to control a different aspect of animal reproduction: desire. Spurred by changing meat markets in out-of-season lamb and expanding property structures that created sex-segregated herds, shepherds, farmers, and agricultural writers worked to provoke the seasonally dependent desires of ewes by feeding them aphrodisiac foods, changing the ways that sex was staged, and creating landscapes of “artificial” grass timed to help ewes escape the constraints of the seasons. Their efforts draw our attention to a broader range of bodily experts, from physicians, to professional feeders, to Linnaean botanists, who were interested in the ways that landscapes could be made to shape bodies. The essay suggests that these forms of environmental control, which still undergird capitalist farming, have left significant modern traces on both knowledge and landscapes and offer a rich and relatively untapped source of bodily knowledge.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"33 1","pages":"47 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699233","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45894030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay considers the political economy of transnational scientific research based on global collection of biota for laboratory manipulation, focusing on a program to develop pest-resistant wheat using fungal endophytes common in a range of wild but closely related grasses. This effort extends long-standing efforts to commoditize living substances of increasing scope and complexity, and it is supported by efforts to collect and preserve biological diversity. The essay explores how imperatives of capital shape biodiversity as a policy category and determine which forms of life are saved, materially altering our records of life on earth. These newly legible and malleable organisms become more perfect commodities, suitable for standardization and transmutation into finance capital. Yet endophytes are also of interest in part because of their resistance to such control, throwing into sharp relief the reductive imperatives of commoditization while also provoking new ways of justifying capital accumulation and flow. This essay questions the extent to which histories of capitalism and science as conjoined projects rooted in the biological species concept can explain contemporary practices of biodiversity preservation and the microbiological research they support. Microbiological research provides new renderings of life on earth that may challenge or reconfigure metaphors and practices common to capitalism and science.
{"title":"Microbiology and the Imperatives of Capital in International Agro-Biodiversity Preservation","authors":"Courtney Fullilove","doi":"10.1086/699993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699993","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the political economy of transnational scientific research based on global collection of biota for laboratory manipulation, focusing on a program to develop pest-resistant wheat using fungal endophytes common in a range of wild but closely related grasses. This effort extends long-standing efforts to commoditize living substances of increasing scope and complexity, and it is supported by efforts to collect and preserve biological diversity. The essay explores how imperatives of capital shape biodiversity as a policy category and determine which forms of life are saved, materially altering our records of life on earth. These newly legible and malleable organisms become more perfect commodities, suitable for standardization and transmutation into finance capital. Yet endophytes are also of interest in part because of their resistance to such control, throwing into sharp relief the reductive imperatives of commoditization while also provoking new ways of justifying capital accumulation and flow. This essay questions the extent to which histories of capitalism and science as conjoined projects rooted in the biological species concept can explain contemporary practices of biodiversity preservation and the microbiological research they support. Microbiological research provides new renderings of life on earth that may challenge or reconfigure metaphors and practices common to capitalism and science.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"33 1","pages":"294 - 318"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699993","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42090642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Is there a correct way to ascertain social fact? As late as the 1950s, the scientific community remained divided over this question. Its resolution involved not just epistemological and theoretical debates on the unity or disunity of statistical science but also practical considerations surrounding state-capacity building. For scientists in places like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, at stake was the very ability to realize the kind of planned economic growth that socialist countries idealized. The solution they chose reformulated statistics explicitly as a social science, salvaging it from what they then dismissed as the tainted, bourgeois, and socially unproductive pursuit of mathematical statistics. This distinction—most tangibly understood as the rejection of all probabilistic methods—had implications for both the ways in which data was collected and the ways in which it was analyzed.
{"title":"Lies, Damned Lies, and (Bourgeois) Statistics: Ascertaining Social Fact in Midcentury China and the Soviet Union","authors":"Arunabha Ghosh","doi":"10.1086/699237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699237","url":null,"abstract":"Is there a correct way to ascertain social fact? As late as the 1950s, the scientific community remained divided over this question. Its resolution involved not just epistemological and theoretical debates on the unity or disunity of statistical science but also practical considerations surrounding state-capacity building. For scientists in places like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, at stake was the very ability to realize the kind of planned economic growth that socialist countries idealized. The solution they chose reformulated statistics explicitly as a social science, salvaging it from what they then dismissed as the tainted, bourgeois, and socially unproductive pursuit of mathematical statistics. This distinction—most tangibly understood as the rejection of all probabilistic methods—had implications for both the ways in which data was collected and the ways in which it was analyzed.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"33 1","pages":"149 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699237","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44363521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Debates about the nature of the so-called Scientific Revolution can be treated as a touchstone describing many of the fundamental changes in the field of the history of science. The establishment of the history and philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century occurred at a time when leading academic scientists among the victorious Western allies were intent on keeping the sciences apart from direct political and economic entanglements. In contradistinction to the Marxist-inspired scientists of the 1930s, they sought to raise scientific ideas to the rank of the highest expression of the human spirit, standing alongside Shakespeare and the like. A history of “pure” scientific ideas therefore motivated the field. By the 1970s, attention to ideologies, social relations, and practices began to open up other analytical possibilities. But other analytical approaches began to look for ways to understand mind and body as joined rather than as separate. The material objects to which scientists attend can be made commensurable, flowing like coins across many borders, suggesting that scientific processes are not confined to one branch of human history or one region of the world. The sciences have economies that are larger than moral economies alone.
{"title":"Sciences and Economies in the Scientific Revolution: Concepts, Materials, and Commensurable Fragments","authors":"H. J. Cook","doi":"10.1086/699171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699171","url":null,"abstract":"Debates about the nature of the so-called Scientific Revolution can be treated as a touchstone describing many of the fundamental changes in the field of the history of science. The establishment of the history and philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century occurred at a time when leading academic scientists among the victorious Western allies were intent on keeping the sciences apart from direct political and economic entanglements. In contradistinction to the Marxist-inspired scientists of the 1930s, they sought to raise scientific ideas to the rank of the highest expression of the human spirit, standing alongside Shakespeare and the like. A history of “pure” scientific ideas therefore motivated the field. By the 1970s, attention to ideologies, social relations, and practices began to open up other analytical possibilities. But other analytical approaches began to look for ways to understand mind and body as joined rather than as separate. The material objects to which scientists attend can be made commensurable, flowing like coins across many borders, suggesting that scientific processes are not confined to one branch of human history or one region of the world. The sciences have economies that are larger than moral economies alone.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"33 1","pages":"25 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699171","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45138006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The term “Comstock capitalism” describes new commercial, legal, and scientific conditions emergent in the silver mining industry of the early 1860s in western Nevada. On the Comstock, the first joint-stock mining companies in the American West were incorporated, and stockholders, “the speculative interest,” underwrote exceptional investments in large labor forces, powerful machines, cutting-edge engineering, and, most importantly, incessant litigation. In high-stakes court cases over mining rights, men of science, as expert witnesses, played central roles in the takeover of silver mining by big, well-financed companies. The development of Comstock capitalism essentially rested on the consolidation of scientific theory. Where once there had been numerous silver veins, geologists found a new object of nature—an immense single deposit called the Comstock Lode.
{"title":"Comstock Capitalism: The Law, the Lode, and the Science","authors":"P. Lucier","doi":"10.1086/699702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699702","url":null,"abstract":"The term “Comstock capitalism” describes new commercial, legal, and scientific conditions emergent in the silver mining industry of the early 1860s in western Nevada. On the Comstock, the first joint-stock mining companies in the American West were incorporated, and stockholders, “the speculative interest,” underwrote exceptional investments in large labor forces, powerful machines, cutting-edge engineering, and, most importantly, incessant litigation. In high-stakes court cases over mining rights, men of science, as expert witnesses, played central roles in the takeover of silver mining by big, well-financed companies. The development of Comstock capitalism essentially rested on the consolidation of scientific theory. Where once there had been numerous silver veins, geologists found a new object of nature—an immense single deposit called the Comstock Lode.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"33 1","pages":"210 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699702","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49378660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Responding to the Soviet state’s call to expand export for currency during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), Siberian scientific personnel—pointing to Siberia’s importance in the history of global science and exploration—created and promoted a new category of commodity, calling it “scientific” or “museum crude.” These uniform sets of objects of the natural and human sciences of Siberia represented a departure from existing international specimen trade in that the expeditions to extract scientific/museum crude relied on institutions and techniques of state socialism. In this vision, scientific goods became a nationalized resource subject to state planning and capitalization. However, once collected, these commodities came up against characteristically Soviet/Stalinist barriers: after being trumpeted as a contribution to Soviet trade, most of these collections were stopped at the border because of a shift in Soviet political culture. Instead of contributing profits to Soviet international trade, therefore, scientific crude’s accumulation in Moscow and Leningrad functioned as a way of requisitioning value from the periphery to the center, not unlike state treatment of other resources. Suggesting that scientific/museum crude represents the ultimate logic of capitalism as applied to the scientific spheres, this essay argues that state socialism itself created the institutional spaces that fostered and then shut down this extreme iteration of capitalism-science entanglement.
{"title":"“Scientific Crude” for Currency: Prospecting for Specimens in Stalin’s Siberia","authors":"Julia Fein","doi":"10.1086/699703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699703","url":null,"abstract":"Responding to the Soviet state’s call to expand export for currency during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), Siberian scientific personnel—pointing to Siberia’s importance in the history of global science and exploration—created and promoted a new category of commodity, calling it “scientific” or “museum crude.” These uniform sets of objects of the natural and human sciences of Siberia represented a departure from existing international specimen trade in that the expeditions to extract scientific/museum crude relied on institutions and techniques of state socialism. In this vision, scientific goods became a nationalized resource subject to state planning and capitalization. However, once collected, these commodities came up against characteristically Soviet/Stalinist barriers: after being trumpeted as a contribution to Soviet trade, most of these collections were stopped at the border because of a shift in Soviet political culture. Instead of contributing profits to Soviet international trade, therefore, scientific crude’s accumulation in Moscow and Leningrad functioned as a way of requisitioning value from the periphery to the center, not unlike state treatment of other resources. Suggesting that scientific/museum crude represents the ultimate logic of capitalism as applied to the scientific spheres, this essay argues that state socialism itself created the institutional spaces that fostered and then shut down this extreme iteration of capitalism-science entanglement.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"33 1","pages":"253 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699703","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43629322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay explores relations among algorithms, everyday experience, and contemporary systems of knowledge and production. It considers one kind of image as emblematic of late capitalism: online pictures of food, with particular attention paid to #avocadotoast. The essay traces such images’ implications and equivocations, indicating the technoscientific chains that produce both food and images. The reading thus operates at the level of code—an exercise of cultural decipherment—and of craft—a history of making and using. The creation and distribution of digital images is both a constitutive part and a (ripe) symbol of the material and semiotic ecosystems of algorithmic culture. These systems are characterized by globally distributed scenarios of consumption, predation, and metaconsumption.
{"title":"Afterword","authors":"J. Tresch","doi":"10.1086/725185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725185","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores relations among algorithms, everyday experience, and contemporary systems of knowledge and production. It considers one kind of image as emblematic of late capitalism: online pictures of food, with particular attention paid to #avocadotoast. The essay traces such images’ implications and equivocations, indicating the technoscientific chains that produce both food and images. The reading thus operates at the level of code—an exercise of cultural decipherment—and of craft—a history of making and using. The creation and distribution of digital images is both a constitutive part and a (ripe) symbol of the material and semiotic ecosystems of algorithmic culture. These systems are characterized by globally distributed scenarios of consumption, predation, and metaconsumption.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"305 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41323311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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