Lissa Roberts, Universiteit Twente
I. Introduction
Andrew Yarranton, an ironmaster, engineer, projector and – according to some – a crank, wrote a mercantilist tract in 1677 with the promising title England’s improvement by sea and land to out-do the Dutch without fighting, to pay debts without moneys, to set at work all the poor of England with the growth of our own lands. In his book, Yarranton ascribed the enormous advantage Dutch merchants enjoyed to the fact that “every acre of land in the seven provinces trades all the world over, and is as good as ready money.”1 Another way to state his observation is that the Netherlands – a union not only of seven provinces, but also of countless local acres – owed its prosperity to the active entrenchment of its innumerable parts in a network of global trade. The particularities and geographical rootedness of that trade ultimately didn’t matter – at least not from an economic standpoint – because of their translatability into the more freely (because more abstract and standardized) circulating medium of what he calls ‘ready money’.
Some 140 years later, following the devastation and dislocation of revolution, war and Napoleonic occupation, the Netherlands was still being described by some in terms of its position in international trade. The chemical industrialist Jean Antoine Chaptal referred to the Netherlands in his survey De l’industrie Françoise, published in 1819, explicitly as an ‘entrepôt’ that was strategically situated between producers and consumers.2 But passage through Dutch harbors, Chaptal explained, involved more than just a question of transportation and trade. The Netherlands had a long tradition and international reputation in refining and processing. Resources that arrived at Dutch ports tended to leave in substantially different form.
I could multiply historical examples that portray the Netherlands as a key location in the global flow of goods and services. I could also turn to a number of studies that have focused on the Netherlands as a temporary place of sojourn and point of productive transit for philosophers and their ideas, authors and their books, travellers and their geographies. But let us content ourselves for now with these two examples and see how they introduce us to the concept of ‘circulation’. To begin, Yarranton’s rendition moves from the extremely local – the acres of land inhabited by entrepreneurial individuals – to the level of national identity, through which the Dutch were embedded (at least in terms of reputation) in a global network of trade. It further implicates the presence of money – a transportable medium of exchange that travelled along the same routes as locally produced goods, helping to transform them into commodities the values of which were calculable in increasingly standardized ways. Key terms here, to which we will return, are: local, global and standardization. Chaptal also underscored the Netherlands’ situation in a worldwide network of exchange. But implicit in his discussion is the added recognition that passage through a given locality involves a process of transformation, one that can be subtle and slight or as fundamental as the production of snowy white paper from an imported pile of filthy rags (a Dutch eighteenth-century speciality).
Circulation, as is obvious to us and underlined by these introductory examples, is a hugely broad term, applicable to various contexts, some of which – at first glance, at least – have little to do with the history of science. Rather than explore its immensity, what I would like to do in the limited time I have here, is to suggest more particularly how we might put this concept to work for us. What makes it such an intellectually pregnant and strategically beneficial focus for our proposed national research program? For now I can dispatch the question of strategy rather quickly, realizing that much more can and will be said about this tomorrow afternoon. Basically, I would argue that ‘circulation’ can serve us as a kind of ‘boundary object’, described by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer as “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing [it], yet robust enough to maintain a common identiy across sites…[it has] different meanings in different social worlds but [its] structure is common enough to more than one…[making it a] recognizable means of translation.”3 The concept of circulation is open enough, in other words, to accommodate virtually every research topic that interests us as historians of science and yet methodologically coherent and attractive enough (we hope!) to win support from funding agencies such as NWO.
As to circulation’s intellectual fecundity, I’d like to try and rein the topic in a bit by delineating three interpretive rubrics – three general ways in which historians of science have and can put this concept to work.
1] As part of a family that includes vocabulary such as transmission, diffusion, popularization and transfer. Here we find scientific production bracketed off from its subsequent travel, at which point science can be modified, interpreted, applied or generalized in various ways that need not impact the core definition of what constitutes good science.
2] As a transformative journey from local to universal. Here universal knowledge claims are analyzed as the product of hard work, negotiation, resistance and mediation, where the circulation of standardizing tools rather than objective truth provides the medium of translation.
3] As a substitute for the claim of geographic fixity. In place of moving from the local to the universal, or between center and periphery, one examines circulation here as part of the means whereby geographical claims of locality, centrality and distance – and along with them, power relations – are constructed as part and parcel of the development of knowledge claims and practices.
Before I elaborate on these three categories, it might do to begin with a basic but important question: just what is it that circulates? Jim Secord admonishes us to think materially about this. It isn’t free-floating ideas, he argues, that travel, but tangible things likes books and instruments – objects that embody theories, ideas, knowledge claims, ideology, tacit skills, etc. I want to add, with at least partial seriousness, that nothing seems to travel faster than gossip. Surely we need to allow for the impact that is tied to the specificity of verbal communication’s form. Further, can we say that reputations travel as well, serving perhaps as mediative vehicles for the passage of objects, claims and practices? Or should we aspire to complete material oxthodoxy and refuse to let go of the material traces of communication whereby rumors and reputations are carried from place to place? Whatever we decide, I offer here a (partial) inventory of the kinds of things that might be said to circulate in ways that should interest historians of science.
1] made objects: maps, instruments, books, newspapers, letters, machines, models.
2] natural specimens: from any of the three kingdoms, dead or alive, simple or hybridized through artistic additions and transformations, includes humans as subjects of investigation and observation (these might be construed as social specimens).
3] embodied skills: carried by humans and trained animals, encoded in instruments, models and machines.
4] means of transportation: ships, trains, cars, etc.4
5] media of exchange: money, papers of credit, valuables eg. jewels and gems.
6] tools of standardization: transportable metrological instruments and standards, treaties, bureaucrats.
7] people: impossible to enumerate – think of various professionals and workers, aristocrats and commoners, educators and students, spies and tourists, government officials and fugitives, all with their associated retinues.
8] regulations and power: let’s not forget Foucault!
9] loci of activity: demonstrations by itinerant lecturers and travelling salesmen, portable laboratories, travelling museum displays, voyages of exploration.
10] reputations, prejudice and rumors: one might argue that these don’t belong here as they must be borne by bodily/material conveyers.
II. Circulation as transmission or transfer
I take as my starting point the article by R.G.A. Dolby, “The transmission of science” which you all had the opportunity to peruse before coming.5 Fearing that the word ‘diffusion’ implies a passive model of reception in which ideas and innovations are adopted rather than adapted, Dolby opts for the term ‘transmission’. “A new scientific idea or practice,” he tells us, “is transmitted from one individual to another if the second individual learns about the innovation from the first, directly or indirectly, and accepts it as knowledge or uses it in his own work.” (p. 1) Transmission occurs across space, but also across time, disciplines and levels of expertise (popularization).
The important point to notice is that Dolby analytically sets the so-called ‘process’ or ‘context of discovery’ apart from what he describes as the ‘subsequent’ process of transmission. For some, this separation entails a division of labor. As the sociologist Robert K. Merton argued, it is the job of sociologists (and social historians) of science to enquire into the social context within which science develops. Eschewing both what he called ‘vulgar Marxism’ and ‘vulgar purism’, Merton searched in his justly famous dissertation for a middle road in which ambient religious sentiments, economic interests, military demands and so forth, influenced – not quite a causal claim – where scientists turned their attentions.6 But the content of science, Merton maintained, is subject to different rules of analytical engagement, best left in the hands of those (i.e. trained scientists) who understand them.
Dolby presents us with an interesting position regarding this question. On one hand, he claims that “the processes by which science is transmitted also select and transform its content.” (p. 32) On the other hand, he is convinced that
[t]he features of science which are most readily transmittable are those which can fit into a wide range of social contexts, the kind of value-neutral self-contained facts and structures of knowledge which internalist historians of science have concentrated on … It is neutral positive science … which is truly international. (p. 33)
The process of transmission, thus, is ultimately responsible for reinforcing the positive character of science.
Separating the ‘context of discovery’ from it subsequent transmission need not, however, invoke the objective sanctity of scientific content. For it is precisely here that the sociology of scientific knowledge has taken aim, giving rise to countless micro-studies of scientific production at the local level. Whatever the benefits of scrutinizing the local nature of production, old certainties about the universality of science have been sacrified along the way. And yet, as an American judge once said about the definition of pornography, we seem to know ‘good science’ when we see it. How can we trace the move from local specificity to the seemingly universal nature of science?
III. Circulation as a means of moving from local to universal
Because time is so brief, I can do little more than point out that much work has already been done to flesh this out and outline a number of strategies that have been proposed. The key term that brings the various approaches falling under this rubric together is ‘mediation’. The movement from local production, with all its idiocyncratic particularities, to seemingly standardized and/or universal knowledge claims and practices is carried by vehicles and occasions of mediation. These are known to us in many incarnations, ranging from metrological standards and professional journals to the methodologically more arcane ‘immutable mobiles’ and ‘trading zones’. What they all have in common is that their active presence enables acts of translation through which the representations they yield are accepted as valid substitutes or covers for the discoveries, processes and interpretations made locally.
We can discuss this by noting the development and use of measuring devices – tools that embody standardized and standardizing quantities, themselves the historical traces of campaigns to gain acceptance for humanly deviced systems – the metric system, Celsius and Farenheit scales, voltage and the like.7 We might move to the more general history of quantification and note, along with Ted Porter, that the substitution of quantities for natural phenomena represents the outcome of a negotiating process between parties who generally do not trust each other. Experts use quantities, Porter tells us, in an effort to manage complex and far-flung operations (and people!) that might otherwise escape their control.8 Quantification, ironically, allows them to extend their reach by distancing their corporeal presence from the scientific phenomena they produce and manipulate. It exerts, in other words, a claim of impersonal objectivity that ties results to a local point of claimed scientific discovery, while apparently liberating them to float freely through the world of scientific fact.
In an interesting discussion, Ken Alder refers to quantification, its successes and acceptance as involving a “thinning process.” First, quantification distances scientists from the thickness of their local achievements; that is, it erases the details of recalcitrant conditions and characteristics from which circulated results originally arise. Second, quantification leaves observers with a thin substitution for the descriptive thickness that can only be recovered by attending to local practices and the rituals of negotiation.9
Local practices (to which I just referred) have been linked to circulation and assertions of universality in a number of revealing ways. For the sake of discussion I collapse these studies into two sorts: those that examine the export of local efforts and those that attend to the importation of knowledge claims and practices from elsewhere. The first can be represented, perhaps controversially, by Bruno Latour’s concept of “immutable mobiles.” Consider for a moment how graphs, technical drawings, maps and so forth, spread out from their locality of production, carrying stabilized and stylized renditions of what they are made to represent. By an historical act of ontological slippage, Latour warns us, their inscriptions and associated ‘matters of fact’ have come to replace the very processes that, in all their glorious messiness, immutable mobiles ought actually be taken to do no more than point to. But these perspectival ‘snap-shots’ that purport to provide ‘a view from nowhere’, travel increasingly well as time and space shear their local roots. The farther they are from home, the more convincing they become, extending the network through which they circulate.10
Localities are not only only contexts of production, of course. In order for a claim or practice to gain general acceptance, it must travel to and be taken up by other locales. But in so doing, theories and practices that gain widespread assent and thereby take on the air of universality, turn out to bear the variegated marks of local meaning when we take a closer look. Bert Theunissen, in his recent oratie that many of us had the honor to attend, mentioned Andrew Warwick’s book Masters of theory: Cambridge and the rise of mathematical physics along these lines as a study in how local reception – or better said, appropriation – is formatively abetted by local pedagogical practices.11 The local particularities of education, in other words, help to shape the context wherein that which circulates is taken up, interpreted and put to use.
Far from being a passive or reactive exercise, then, consumption plays an active part in the circulation process. Robert Darnton analyzed this point in relation to the history of the book, but his claims can be easily adapted to other mediating objects of circulation as well. In his The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Darnton suggests that we view the circulation of books as a highly complex network of communication, one in which the shape and meaning of texts change as they are written, printed, illustrated, published, distributed, sold, read, interpreted, reviewed and used.12 In light of this, as many have commented, we might do better to speak of ‘mutable mobiles’.
But Darnton is forced to admit that “[r]eading remains the most difficult stage in the cycle to understand.” (p. 184) And yet reading – like other forms of consumption and use – is a crucially important process whereby a huge range of interpretive possibilities (including the intentions that authors, producers, advertisers and sellers work to encode in the text) gets narrowed down by a hybrid act – that is, a simultaneously wilful and culturally conditioned act – of appropriation. Somewhere within a space bounded by what Darnton calls “cultural framing” and individuality, readers not only choose and ascribe meaning to what they read; they also put their reading to specific uses. The result might be a conformist act that underscores adherence to social or scientific norms. But it might present a radical challenge to the status quo or anything in between.
If you turn your thoughts back to my introduction, you’ll recall my claim that the import-export business is rife with translations and transformations. While this point provides a good transition to my third category of circulation, I want first to say something about where translations take place. This can be done best, I think, by referring to Peter Galison’s ‘trading zones’ and the already mentioned concept of ‘boundary objects’. Recognizing the heterogeneous nature of actors and communities involved in the enterprise of science, Galison conjured an image from anthropology to invite our consideration of how various communities manage to communicate. In his own words:
What is crucial is that in the local context of the trading zone, despite the differences in classification, significance, and standards of demonstration, the two groups can collaborate. They can come to a consensus about the procedure of exchange, about the mechanisms to determine when goods are “equal” to one another. They can even both understand that the continuation of exchange is a prerequisite to the survival of the larger culture of which they are part.
I intend the term “trading zone” to be taken seriously, as a social, material and intellectual mortar binding together the disunified traditions of experimenting, theorizing, and instrument building. Anthropologists are famiiar with different cultures encountering one another through trade, even when the significance of the objets traded – and of the trade itself – may be utterly different for the two sides. And with the anthropologists, it is crucial to note that nothing in the notion of trade presupposes some universal notion of a neutral currency. Quite the opposite, much of the interest of the category of trade is that things can be coordinated … without reference to some external gauge.13
Rather than make use of a spatial metaphor, Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer situate the nexus of translation in what they call ‘boundary objects’ – material things, concepts, and procedures whose mobile positions provide points of contact between communities. Instead of calling attention to group differences, boundary objects render borders porous by embodying fields of overlapping meanings, interests and use. As Joan Fujimura shows in her Crafting Science: A sociohistory of the quest for the genetics of cancer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) for example (though I’m not sure she actually uses the term!), entities that were fashioned in one community as a theory of what causes cancer were taken up by others as tools and model organisms for cancer research. While the local practices and goals of these various communities exude heterogeneity, the vocabularies and references they share as part of engaging with boundary objects – no matter how different the configurations and meanings they ascribe to them – allow these communities to co-exist, communicate and, from time to time, collaborate.
IV. Circulation as a substitute for the claim of geographic fixity
My third and final rubric, though rooted in earlier work, is only now really making a strong appearance on the agenda of science studies. As is true in other areas of history and cultural studies, this perspective begins by questioning the basic suppositions and categories upon which my other two rubrics rely. It begins, in other words, by asking what we mean by opposing the local to the universal, the center to the periphery? Are these locations and their oppositions given or do they need to be analyzed in terms of the work and struggle that went into their historical construction? Further, how are these constructive histories and the shaping of scientific knowledge and practices related to each other?
At the risk of antagonizing some of you further, I want to begin with Latour’s claim that the positioning of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ is a hard-won achievement – that the fulcrum that determines this apparently spatial relation is movable and itself imbedded in a process of circulation. “For a Copernican revolution to take place,” he tells us, “it does not matter what means are used provided this goal is achieved: a shift in what counts as center and what counts as periphery.” (Latour, 1987, p. 226) The story Latour offers to illustrate his point relates how Tycho Brahe established a central position for Uraniborg by circulating preprinted forms to astronomers throughout Europe, which they could fill in with data from their sightings and return to Brahe, who was using the same chart to record his own sightings.
Here again a virtuous cumulative circle starts to unfold if all sightings at different places and times are gathered together and synoptically displayed. The positive loop runs all the more rapidly, if the same Brahe is able to gather in the same place not only fresh observations made by him and his colleagues, but all the older books of astronomy that the printing press has made available at a low cost. His mind has not undergone a mutation; his eyes are not suddenly freed from old prejudices; he is not watching the summer sky more carefully than anyone before. But he is the first indeed to consider at a glance the summer sky, plus his observations, plus those of his collaborators, plus Copernicus’ books, plus many versions of Ptolemy’s Almagest; the first to sit at the beginning and at the end of a long network… (ibid., pp. 226-227)
Others have questioned the historical details built into Latour’s rendition and it is not my task here to defend his empirical strengths and weaknesses. Whether one could tell this story with greater historical precision, I think his analytical point still stands. It was not pre-ordained that Tycho Brahe should ascend to the position he temporarily held in the history of astronomy. Neither can this be accounted for by comparing his book-bound astronomical system to those of Ptolemy and Copernicus. We need to go back and retrace the route by which Tycho Brahe became Tycho Brahe. How did he manage to place himself and his fortress observatory relative to the stars, to patronage, to the production, circulation and consumption of astronomy?
We are reminded here that circular motion was privileged by Ptolemaic astronomy because of its perfection – circularity has no beginning or end. No wonder, then, if we continue with the logic of our metaphor, that Brahe’s efforts to privilege his position along the path of astronomy’s circulation could be no more than temporary, partially eclipsed by Kepler’s assertion that heavenly orbits follow a different, elliptical path. To be more consistent, indeed, we would have to argue that what eclipsed Brahe’s position was the work done by Kepler and others to reform European astronomy’s dominant network, not only by launching new theories but by setting other mediating devices in motion whose paths tied various localities to theirs as important nodes of origin and determination.
Actor-network theory – even in this simplified form – certainly has its detractors and it is not my purpose today to defend it, especially since mentioning it now while having discussed ‘immutable mobiles’ under my second rubric indicates that the divisions between my three general categories of circulation are not analytically watertight. The virtue of mentioning it here is that it introduces the claim that geography itself, as many have argued, is an historical construct. Space, as Einstein informed us long ago, is essentially relative. But what can we historians of science do with the notion that location is relative and that local identity only only takes shape in relation to other places through the passage of time?
The answer to this question is worked out with great force and elegance, I think, in Kapil Raj’s essay “Circulation and the emergence of modern mapping: Great Britain and early colonial India, 1764-1820.”14 While his story focuses on the history of modern map-making, its lessons can be extended to cover a good deal of the history of modern science more generally. It is a story, he tells us, that “can only be meaningfully told as a connected and circulatory story, simultaneously involving and constructing metropolis and colony.” (p. 6) Indeed, he argues, the history of science is part of the broader history in which colonizers and colonized – ‘center’ and ‘periphery’, if you will – are co-constituted.
Let me briefly list the consequences of this view. First, the history of science is a constitutive component of the broader socio-political and cultural history in which it develops. We can speak here of ‘co-construction’ or ‘co-evolution’. Second, the process of circulation (carried by the passage of maps, instruments, textbooks, personnel and so forth) is not one in which the ‘periphery’ pre-exists as virgin territory upon which various incarnations of (modern Western) science can be impressed. Rather, localities are ‘always already’ enmeshed in one or more networks. The approaching reach of a new, aspiring center does not take place in a vacuum, but infuses the environment with new struggles and negotiations that alter the local and locational identities of both. Third, the practical goal of colonization and control (be it political, economic or scientific) isn’t universalization, but standardization. Given the presence of local conditions, skills and resources, universality is, in any event, a practical impossibility. As tools, practices and claims circulate, localities take them up and put them to use within their own environments and practical economies, leading to a process of re-calibration as various accomodations, local substitutions and repairs have to be made to keep them functioning. If localities, then, are changed by the mediated introduction of new objects, practices and claims, through which colonizers seek to exert control, so too do the hybrid consequences filter back to re-form the ‘center’. Finally, this is not to claim symmetry between the impact of all localities on each other, but to point out that involvement in a network of circulation affects all the parties concerned. As such, the concept of circulation presents a great challenge to those who would focus exclusively on the history of a limited geographical or social space.
V. Conclusion
This remark is a good place to draw my remarks to an end, for it brings us to the question that I didn’t yet pose – that of what we mean by ‘the Netherlands as an historical laboratory’. Until now I’ve been focusing on the part of the question that asks ‘a laboratory for what’? Just what do we want to investigate when we speak of ‘circulation’? But we need also to think about where we want to place the boundaries around our laboratory and how we want to furnish it. Especially in light of Raj’s warning about the potential myopia of national histories, how should we proceed? Are we justified in limiting our sight to events and institutions within the Netherlands and/or Belgium? And given what I’ve said about local identities being historical constructions that need to be investigated rather than objective categories with which to shape our inquiries, what do we take these labels to mean? Can it be that the Netherlands and/or Belgium were and are simulataneously centers and peripheries? Colonizers and colonized? I look forward to hearing the preliminary choices that our workshop presenters have made.