Scientific Americans: The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

by John Bruni

Overview

In Scientific Americans, John Bruni brings matters of global citizenship and ecological awareness to bear on an analysis of literary naturalism and identity formation. Bruni looks at the works of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Henry Adams, arguing that their works both illustrate how social environments shape the representation and reception of evolutionary theories and test the evolutionary destablilizing of identity against the social categories of race, gender, and citizenship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783160174
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	05/15/2014
Series:	University of Wales Press - Intersections in Literature and Science Series
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Bruni is visiting professor of American literature at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan.

Read an Excerpt

Scientific Americans

The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

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By John Bruni

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2014 John Bruni
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-017-4

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CHAPTER 1

POPULAR SCIENCE, EVOLUTION AND GLOBAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Published in Scientific American in 17 October 1896, 'The development of Africa' recounts Henry M. Stanley MP's thoughts about England taking the lead in establishing a new imperialistic phase: 'Her efforts for some years after the Berlin Conference had been confined to reserving spheres of influence, rather than to violent annexation, and to moderating the passion for African land manifested by Germany, France, and Italy.' The concept of 'spheres of influence' abstracts foreign policy; it encapsulates how nations take control of foreign markets through a sophisticated deployment of rhetorical posturing, diplomatic manoeuvring and statistical reporting. As I shall argue, popular scientific journalism contributes to the performance of this new phase of imperialism through its role as an observing system. The making of popular science demonstrates how information begins to have its own intrinsic value – as a political commodity – that augments the imperialistic (re)mapping of peoples and regions. At the same time, the feedback loops that connect race, gender and class formations to emergent forms of global citizenship also tie scientific reporting to strategies for global information management. We will start by questioning the separation between the social and scientific, a critical move for historicizing science that provides a new perspective on scientific rationales for national imperialist global adventures.

I. Reconstructing the social and scientific

The construction of the idea of popular science calls attention to how a scientific truth claim can be interpreted as a performative statement, or as Ira Livingston remarks, 'one that displaces both reference and self-reference. What kinds of language games is the statement playing? What does it do, and with and against what other kinds of statements does it operate?' We might say that the power to render observation as a permanent, rather than contingent or partial, declaration of authority makes that observation socially meaningful or valuable. To put it slightly differently, as Karen Barad does,

Performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real. Hence, in ironic contrast to the misconception that would equate performativity with a form of linguistic monism that takes language to be the stuff of reality, performativity is properly understood as a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.

From this perspective, I want to examine popular science journalism performatively: looking at what it does through its self-professed strategy of selection. For example, the stated objective of Popular Science Monthly is to be 'popular in the sense that it is not special or technical, not in the sense that it makes an appeal to all the people' and 'intended for those having a cultivated and intelligent interest in the advancement of science'. The first part of the statement sets the journal's level of selectivity; it aims for neither an exclusive nor a universal audience. The second part extends the principle of selection through a performative act: possessing 'a cultivated and intelligent interest in the advancement of science' creates a class distinction. In other words, you stand apart from the general populace if you display a 'genuine' interest (that has no evaluative criteria as such) in science. Yet such a distinction does not come before or after the objective; popular science and class are co-constituted in the act of self-declaring an interest in science.

Both Scientific American and Popular Science Monthly, through their editorial choices, define popular science in part by what the term restricts or excludes. For example, from 1896 to 1899, Scientific American featured articles on science and sensationalism, science and spiritualism and the fraud of perpetual motion, thus attempting to distinguish popular science by demonstrating what it is not: sensationalism, spiritualism or fraud. Again the principle of selection comes into play. At this point, though, the principle is contextualized within first-level observation: X is either popular science or not, and the observer as science journalist, having un-mediated access to reality, makes the decision. The larger point, if we focus on system theorist Niklas Luhmann's comments about second-order observation (the observation of observation), is that 'the mass media create the illusion that we are first-order observers whereas in fact this is already second-order observing'.

The debate about N-rays, a form of radiation supposedly discovered by Rene Blondlot in 1903, pressures this 'illusion'. In the 4 June 1904 edition of Scientific American, an unsigned editorial, 'The N-rays: are they real or illusory?', muses: 'French eyes are certainly blessed with no greater clarity of vision than those of Englishmen; and yet the fact remains that Blondlot's rays, or at least the most important phenomena of which they are the cause, have never been observed by any but ... French investigators.' Nationality does not come before or after observation (there is no biological difference, strictly speaking, between French and non-French eyes), but is constituted through observation: what you see – or do not see – creates national differences. Nowhere perhaps is the contingency of observation made clearer; as Luhmann counsels us: 'Everything becomes contingent whenever what is being observed depends on who is being observed.' But the proposed resolution of this controversy, in a rather fantastic moment, gives scientific knowledge production the ability to exceed disciplinary limits. Here, it seems, chemistry becomes conflated with physics:

[B]y means of the old periodic law of chemistry it was possible to tabulate the chemical elements according to their properties and their atomic weights in a sequence that brought out their relation to one another strikingly. Wherever gaps occurred, it was reasonable to infer that they would be filled by elements still to be discovered – an inference that was more than once justified. By a similar tabular arrangement the N-rays may be shown to fill a gap in the series of undulatory rays.

As Cary Wolfe explains, the desire to transcend disciplinary 'closure' is part and parcel of the humanist framework, whose default setting is objectivity. So this resolution would be challenged by transdisciplinary thinking, that is, a strategy that maintains the differences among disciplines. It is 'a kind of distributed reflexivity' informed 'by the fact that (by definition) no discourse, no discipline, can make transparent the conditions of its own observations'. Transdisciplinarity reflects Luhmann's idea that observations are contingent upon those doing the observing; observations are embedded in the dynamic relationship between observer and environment. And to resist making observation transparent, to take contingency seriously, as it were, marks the critical observing process, central to any and all academic disciplines, as being of second- rather than first-order status.

By upholding its promise to serve those who have a 'cultivated and intelligent interest in the advancement of science', Popular Science Monthly also questions the fantasy of media as first-order observation and troubles the notion of objectivity through its commentary on scientific knowledge production. For example, we may refer to John M. Coulter's 'Public interest in research'. Published in August 1905, the article claims that the dissemination of research to the public currently happens through newspapers and magazines, and is 'scant in amount, sensational in form, and usually wide of the mark'. Coulter looks at the possibilities of investigators writing their own articles for newspapers and magazines. He suggests that if the significance of the research were highlighted, the public would take a greater interest. As a result, the research would be deemed as 'practical' and then 'secure endowment for research'. 'We have behind us', Coulter insists, 'a public more prosperous and much more generous, accustomed to support liberally what it is interested in. If this can be taken advantage of, there is no reason why research in America cannot be developed to an extent that is without precedent.'

In March 1908, Popular Science Monthly reprinted Gordon Webster's address at Clark University on 1 February 1907. The address, 'America's intellectual product', claims,

It is frequently supposed that the American public is extremely interested in the results of scientific progress, and so it is, in a certain sense. Certainly we cannot accuse it of lack of alertness, when it reads more than any other – in the newspapers. It reads with eager interest, and with implicit credulity, accounts of the supposed discoveries of science, taking at equal value the productions of notorious charlatans and those of real investigators.

Part of the problem, Webster thinks, is that newspapers pay little attention to science. Few newspapers have on their staff writers who regularly 'acquaint the public with the current achievements of science'. He recounts his difficulty finding the names of Nobel Prize winners, surmising that the public at large has the same difficulty. Indeed, until the US President was a recipient, he believes it likely that few even knew that such awards existed.

Webster alludes to larger modes of cultural production, art and literature, in which the nation is also behind in the competition for international prominence. He pits such productions, mentioning the names of respected authors William Dean Howells and Henry James, against the popularity at home of 'new religions, intellectual fads, and isms, ologies, and pathies of every sort'. But despite such distraction, Webster says, the public is becoming aware that scientific research has 'practical applications'; it is necessary for industrial development and 'commercial dominance' of global markets. Knowledge making becomes part of national identity: that 'deep thinking' is 'characteristic of Germany' leads Webster to propose that the US should make a name for itself in a similar way: 'The national government provides richly for the education of those who devote their lives to her defence; is there any less reason for providing for those who are to make her intellectually great?'

Barad, in my opinion, expresses the idea that the scientific and social are coterminous most precisely:

The point is not that there are leaks in the system where social values seep in despite scientists' best efforts to maintain a vacuum-tight seal between the separate domains of nature and culture. Nor should we conclude that the quality of the results is diminished in proportion to the permeability of this barrier. This kind of thinking mistakenly reifies culture and nature and gender and science into separate categories. But the fact is that the world isn't naturally broken up into social and scientific realms that get made separately. There isn't one set of material practices that makes science, and another disjunct set that makes social relations; one kind of matter on the inside, and another on the outside. The social and the scientific are co-constituted. They are made together – but neither is just made up. Rather, they are ongoing, open-ended, entangled material practices.

Barad proposes that there is no longer a line between an observer and what is being observed; she concludes there is no longer really an outside world at all. To express this idea in the language of systems theory, as Wolfe does, '[I]t is not an "outside" to the system that is given as such but it is rather the outside of a specific inside'. Thinking with Barad and Wolfe, there is not a universal outside/inside binary that would privilege the inside, and in so doing limit our agency by making subject formation dependent on such a distinction.

II. Scientific and cultural narratives of expansion

The question of how the concept of popular science is created through the editorial policies and practices of Scientific American and Popular Science Monthly enables us to make a critical challenge to how narratives about evolution are often traditionally regarded. That is, to read these narratives in a larger scientific context challenges their apparent status as transparent, first-order observations. And that is important because to concede that such narratives are of first-order status becomes a bad faith agreement that, as will now be discussed, supports national imperialist global adventures.

In the traditional social Darwinist model, natural selection justifies capitalist competition. Yet such a model reduces the diversity of thinking about evolution, as natural selection comes to be regarded by those on the conservative end of the scientific political spectrum as the exclusive biological motor. An overemphasis on natural selection misrepresents why evolutionary theories build up cultural visibility. Not only are these theories widely disseminated because they appear to provide a scientific rationale for social practices; they also benefit from acting like the practices they reinforce. That is, rather than depending upon the victory of natural selection over competing principles, evolutionary theories offer a rather loose, broad-based view of biological life, a view easily compatible with a multitude of academic disciplines and cultural beliefs. These theories assimilate with other ways of thinking, much as dominant political and economic ideologies do. Livingston explains, with regard to the constant debate about the role of natural selection in guiding life,

[F]ar from constituting a failure of evolutionary thinking, this [debate] seems to be part of the ongoing success of principles of evolution and natural selection, which continue to be incorporated in the paradigm pantheon of more and more fields, such as physics and cosmology. In other words, the depth of the paradigm (its position as exclusive center or anchor point) is being displaced as it achieves greater reach and saturation of other realms; its pluralization and relativization make it more resilient even as they may in some ways make it less itself. Not coincidentally, this seems to have been one of the leading principles of empire building for several millennia, just as it makes a rough-and-ready account of the current transnational hegemonic success of capitalism and the West.

Livingston is worth quoting at length because of how radically he departs from the received wisdom about the relationship between science and culture. Evolution, in his view, does not wield a considerable cultural influence due to its victory in the economic marketplace of ideas; nor does it follow Raymond Williams's template for cultural cycles (emergent, dominant, residual). Rather evolutionary doctrines gain popularity through allowing themselves to be co-opted: like capitalism, they offer no resistance to being transformed. To put it in terms of Williams's thinking, evolutionary theories are always in the process of emerging. But in the early twentieth century, it is not just evolutionary theories that follow such protocol: scientific speculation about social development, at large, does so too. The scientific attempt to create objective truths about the formation of human society – and to institutionalize these truths – is enabled by a cultural narrative of national expansion.

Regarded as a precursor to the storyline for 'the current transnational hegemonic success of capitalism and the West', Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams (1907) fixates on discovering natural analogues for the capitalist machinery crucial for sustaining US global influence. According to John Carlos Rowe, Adams counsels (albeit indirectly) 'the most powerful leaders of his age', in particular his friend and former Secretary of State John Hay, 'to pursue policies that would consolidate the twentieth-century economic authority of the United States in international trade and serve as the [basis] for that special brand of US neocolonialism understood in the era of the Vietnam War in the phrase "establishing spheres of influence"'. We will return to Adams a bit later; at present, I want to emphasize how the idea of establishing spheres of influence channels (neo)colonialist energies toward creating sites of international trade through which information flows. The rise of new academic disciplines, as we will now see, mirrors this process.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

1. Popular Science, Evolution and Global Information Management

1.1 Reconstructing the social and scientific

1.2 Scientific and cultural narratives of expansion

1.3 Information and control systems

1.4 Historicizing science

2. Dirty Naturalism and the Regime of Thermodynamic Self-Organization

2.1 Social regulation and the power of art

2.2 Self-organization and energy flows

2.3 Ecocriticism and thermodynamics

2.4 Social work and moral parasites

3. The Ecology of Empire

3.1 The Call of the Wild and the national frontier

3.2 Wild Fang and the ideology of domestication

3.3 The multiplicity of animal bodies

3.4 Ghosts of American Citizens

3.5 Where to draw the line? Biological kinship and legal discourse

4. After the Flood: Performance and Nation

4.1 Managing life

4.2 Business morality and Western water policy

4.3 ‘Constitutional restlessness’ and ‘something not ourselves’

4.4 Systems of art: perception and communication

4.5 Pure fiction

5. The Miseducation of Henry Adams: Fantasies of Race, Citizenship and Biological Dynamos

5.1 Evolution as historical process

5.2 Thermodynamics and citizenship

5.3 The new American as techno-subject

5.4 Beyond evolution: information, control and paranoia

5.5 ‘The Rule of Phase Applied to History’

5.6 ‘A Letter to American Teachers of History’

Conclusion

Henry Adams: ecocritic?

‘Cyborg politics’ and the technoscientific regime

The American System and global debt

Biopolitics and posthuman life: the call of Jack London

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Scientific Americans offers an original assessment of Jack London’s novelistic use of animal characters to engage with scientific and political discourses, and brilliantly models for literature and science scholarship the interrogation of cultural assumptions about personal and social identity.

Bruce Clarke