Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge

aesthetics
of universal
knowledge
Edited by
simon schaffer
john tresch
pasquale gagliardi
Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge
Simon SchafferJohn TreschPasquale Gagliardi
Editors
Aesthetics of
Universal Knowledge
Editors
Simon Schaffer John Tresch
Department of History & Department of History &
Philosophy of Science Sociology of Science
University of Cambridge University of Pennsylvania
Cambridge, United Kingdom Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Pasquale Gagliardi
Secretary General
Fondazione Giorgio Cini
Venezia, Italy
ISBN 978-3-319-42594-8ISBN 978-3-319-42595-5(eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938305
Fondazione Giorgio Cini onlus 2017

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Cover illustration: La mano di Atlante, glass mosaic by Tomaso Buzzi

Photo by EnricoFiorese, Courtesy of Fondazione Giorgio Cini
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Acknowledgement
The editors would like to thank all the contributors for the thought and
care they have shown to this project, making it a truly collective dialogue.
We would also like to thank Palgrave and its fine team of editors, especially
Amy Invernizzi, who shepherded the book to its completion. Finally, this
book would not have been possible without the innumerable contributions
of Anna Lombardi of the Segreteria Generale of the Fondazione Cini.
From the very start of the planning of the dialogue through to the collect-
ing of the final photos and signatures, Annas steadfast, exacting, skilful,
and generous work has been essential to this project. The editors wish to
express their enormous and sincere gratitude to her for all she has done.
v
Contents
1 Text and Context: Genius Loci (A Preface)1

Pasquale Gagliardi
2 Introduction11
Simon Schaffer
Part IVisions: How Aesthetics and Museology Affect the

Ways in Which Worlds can be Shown and Known29
3 Re-visioning the World: MappingtheLithosphere31

Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton
4 Architects ofKnowledge53
Pierre Chabard
5 Pictorialism (Prelude and Fugue)77

Cheryce von Xylander
6 The Unending Quantity ofObjects: AnObservation

onMuseums andTheir Presentation Modes115
Anke te Heesen
vii
viii Contents
Part IIWorlds: How the Performance of Cosmologies can

Change the Way the Moral History of the World is
Told and Understood135
7 Cosmopragmatics and Petabytes137

John Tresch
8 Gaia or Knowledge without Spheres169

Bruno Latour
9 Mapping Dark Matter and the Venice Paradox203

David Turnbull
Part IIIEconomies: How Different Models of Knowledge

and Their Contents Matter to Politics and Society233
10 The Web, Google, andCosmograms235

Steve Crossan
11 Rhetoric, Economics, andNature249

Deirdre N. McCloskey
12 Lodestar263
Richard Powers
Biographies of Contributors
Jerry Brottonis Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary

University of London and Associate Director of the Queen Mary/Warwick
University project Global Shakespeare. He is the author of Trading
Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (1997), Global Interests:
Renaissance Art between East and West (2000), co-authored with Lisa
Jardine, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
(2002), and The Sale of the Late Kings Goods: Charles I and His Art
Collection (2006), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Jonson Prize. His
bestselling and prize-winning A History of the World in Twelve Maps
(2012) has been published in 12 languages. In 2014, he published Great
Maps (Dorling Kindersley). He is also a broadcaster and presented BBC4s
three-part TV series, Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession (2010),
Mapping Ulster (2013), and BBC Radio 3s Courting the East
(2007). He also co-curated and edited the exhibition and catalogue of
Penelopes Labour: Weaving Words and Images with Adam Lowe, an
exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 2011, part of ongoing collaborations
with Lowe. In 2016 he published This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England
and the Islamic World (Penguin).
Pierre Chabard, architect, historian, and critic, graduated in 1998
from the School of Architecture Paris-Belleville. He wrote a PhD thesis
(University of Paris VIII, March 2008) dealing with the graphic, sceno-
graphic, and museographic devices designed by the Scottish thinker
Patrick Geddes, in the 1910s, to visually display urban knowledge.
Associate Professor in Architectural and Urban History since 2004, he
ix
x Biographies of Contributors
teaches at the cole nationale suprieure darchitecture Paris-La Villette

and at the cole spciale darchitecture. Member of the research team
AHTTEP (Unit Mixte de Recherche CNRS no. 3329 Architecture
Urbanistique Socit), his current research deals with the relationship
between architectural production and mediation (books, magazines,
exhibitions, etc.). He published (with Marilena Kourniati) Raisons
dcrire. Des livres, des architectes, 19451999 (Paris, d. de La Villette,
2013) and is currently working on a museological history of architecture
in the 1970s and 1980s. A founding member of the editorial board of
Criticat (www.criticat.fr), Pierre Chabard practises architectural criti-
cism in several forms: architectural monographs (Charles Vandenhove,
matre duvres, Le Moniteur/Bonnefanten Museum, 2010), exhibition
catalogues (Archilab, 19992002; Venice Biennale 2002; V+, 2015),
architectural magazines (Larchitecture daujourdhui, AMC, dA, A+,
A10, etc.), and reviews (Le Visiteur, Les Cahiers du Mnam, Critique
dart, etc.).
SteveCrossan is a technologist with a deep interest in history. He founded
culturalinstitute.google.com in 2011 and joined DeepMind in 2015 to
help bring their AI technology into Google. Prior to that Steve was the
first product leader hired by Google in Europe, initially building the Maps
team in Zurich, and subsequently working on Search and Gmail. Steve
read Modern History at Oxford before taking a Masters in Computer
Science at UCL, and it was studying the history of technology that took
him from one to the other. Prior to Google he started 3 technology
companies in fields including digital asset management, open source soft-
ware and search. He grew up in Africa, France and Cambridge, England.
PasqualeGagliardi is former Professor of The Sociology of Organization
at the Catholic University of Milan and is at present the Secretary General
of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. During the 1990s, he contrib-
uted to the raising and development of the aesthetics of organization as
a specific field of enquiry within organisational studies. His present research
focuses on the relationship between culture, aesthetic knowledge, and
organisational order. He has widely published on these topics in Italian
and English. Among his publications are: Le imprese come culture (Torino:
Isedi, 1986); Symbols and Artifacts. Views of Corporate Landscape (Berlin/
New York: de Gruyter, 1990); Studies of Organization in the European
Tradition (Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1995), co-edited with Samuel
Bacharach and Bryan Mundell; Narratives We Organize by, co-edited with
Biographies of Contributors xi
Barbara Czarniawska (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003);

Management Education and Humanities, co-edited with Barbara
Czarniawska (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006); Les atmosphres de
la politique. Dialogue pour un monde commun, co-edited with Bruno
Latour (Paris: Les Empcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, 2006); Coping
with the Past. Creative Perspectives on Conservation and Restoration, co-
edited with Bruno Latour and Pedro Memelsdorff (Firenze: Leo
S.Olschki, 2010); Il gusto dell organizzazione. Estetica, conoscenza, man-
agement (Milano: Edizioni Angelo Guerini e Associati, 2011); and
Protecting Nature, Saving Creation. Ecological Conflicts, Religious Passions,
and Political Quandaries, co-edited with Anne Marie Reijnen and Philipp
Valentini.
Ankete Heesen is a historian of science and a curator. Since 2011, she
teaches history of science at the Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany.
She worked at the Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, at the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and at the University of
Tbingen, Germany. She was founding director of the Museum of the
University Tbingen and held the chair for Historical and Cultural
Anthropology before she came to Berlin. Her research has focused on
issues of objects and science, notation-systems of scientists, art and sci-
ence, and collecting/ordering practices. Her main books are World in a
Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (2002),
Theorien des Museums (2012), and The Newspaper Clipping: A Modern
Paper Object (2014). Her current research projects deal with the history
of exhibitions of the 1970s and the emergence of the research interview.
Bruno Latour is Professor and Vice President for Research at Sciences
Po, Paris. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology, and
anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies in science
policy and research management. He wrote: Laboratory Life; Science in
Action; The Pasteurization of France; a field study on an automatic subway
system, Aramis or the Love of Technology; an essay on symmetric anthropol-
ogy, We Have Never Been Modern; a series of essays, Pandoras Hope: Essays
in the Reality of Science Studies, on the consequences of the science wars;
and a book on the political philosophy of the environment, Politics of
Nature. In another series of books, he has been exploring the conse-
quences of science studies for traditional topics of the social sciences such
as religion, social theory, and law, including Reassembling the Social, an
Introduction to Actor Network Theory. With Peter Weibel, he curated
xii Biographies of Contributors
Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (2002) and
Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2007), major interna-
tional exhibitions in Karlsruhe at the ZKM centre. At Sciences Po, he cre-
ated the Mdialab and a new experimental programme in art and politics
(SPEAP). His An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2014) was both a book
and a collaborative digital platform. In 2014, he delivered the Gifford
Lectures, Facing Gaia: A New Enquiry into Natural Religion.
Adam Lowe,artist, is the founder and director of Factum Arte and
founding member of the Foundation for Digital Technology in
Conservation. Established in 2001 and employing over 30 people in
Madrid, Factum Arte has set new standards in digital documentation and
the production of facsimiles for conservation; its technological innova-
tions include the production of a new laser scanning system, a white light
scanning system, software for the visualisation of 3D data, a device for
recording fragile manuscripts when open at less than 60 degrees, a flatbed
colour scanning system, and a 3D concrete printer that works on a large
scale. Works by Lowe and his team at Factum Arte include the 2011
recording of the Sala Bologna in the Vatican and the production of an
exact facsimile of the south wall for the Museo della Citt, Bologna; the
production of eight objects from Piranesis designs, in conjunction with
the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (20102011); the complete high-resolution
colour and 3D recording of the burial chamber and Sarcophagus from the
Tomb of Tutankhamun (20092011); and the production of an exact
facsimile of Veroneses Wedding at Cana, that has been installed in its
original location in Palladios refectory in Venice (a project with the
Muse du Louvre in Paris and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice
[20062007]). Factum Arte also works with many of the worlds leading
artists including Marina Abramovic, Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry, Marc
Quinn, Peter Greenaway, Gabriel Orozco, Lara Baladi, and Manuel
Franquelo.
DeirdreN.McCloskey has been, since 2000, UIC Distinguished Professor
of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of
Illinois at Chicago and was Visiting Tinbergen Professor (20022006) of
Philosophy, Economics, and Art and Cultural Studies at the Erasmus
University of Rotterdam. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has
written 14 books and edited seven more and has published some 360
articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, femi-
nism, ethics, and law. She taught for 12 years in Economics at the
Biographies of Contributors xiii
University of Chicago and describes herself now as a postmodern free-

market quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian. Her latest books
are How to be HumanThough an Economist (University of Michigan
Press, 2001), Measurement and Meaning in Economics (S. Ziliak, ed.;
Edward Elgar, 2001), The Secret Sins of Economics (Prickly Paradigm
Pamphlets, University of Chicago Press, 2002), The Cult of Statistical
Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with
Stephen Ziliak; University of Michigan Press, 2008], and The Bourgeois
Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press,
2006). Before The Bourgeois Virtues, her best-known books were The
Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1st ed. 1985; 2nd
ed. 1998) and Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago, 1999), which was a New
York Times Notable Book.
ElizabethPisani is an epidemiologist and a hypocrite. She believes data
collected with taxpayers money should be made available to anyone who
could use them to save or enrich lives and was instrumental in nudging
major funders of public health research to publish a joint policy on data
access in 2011. She just really hates giving other people her data and
not just for visceral reasons. Having learnt at the well-manicured hands of
Jakartas transvestite hookers that good data do not necessarily equate to
useful knowledge, Elizabeth has come to question the utility of liberating
vast quantities of facts into a contextual vacuum. Her book The Wisdom of
Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS (Granta, 2008)
explored the interplay between the creation of scientific data and its
interpretation, both things moulded by politics and human frailty.
Deracinated data can be worse than useless; they can be dangerous.
Elizabeth has a degree in Classical Chinese from Oxford and others in
Medical Demography and Infectious Disease Epidemiology from the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her most recent book
Indonesia Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation (WW Norton, 2014)
ponders the persistence in the collective imagination of a notional/
national unity.
RichardPowers is the author of 11 novels set among disparate disciplines
such as photography, artificial intelligence, music composition, molecular
biology, game theory, virtual reality, business, genomics, and neurosci-
ence. His stories explore the interdependence of technological change,
scientific models, and personal narratives. The books have received various
prizes, including the W.H.Smith Literary Award; the Ambassador Book
Award of the English Speaking Union, TIME Magazines Book of the
xiv Biographies of Contributors
Year; and the National Book Award. He is a MacArthur fellow, a fellow of

the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of a Lannan
Literary Award, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
and the Knight Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University.
SimonSchaffer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the
University of Cambridge. His first visit to Venice was in 1963, in a badly
insulated tent on the Lido. Since then, he has studied the various roles of
insulation, machinery, travel, calculation, and performance in the past of
the sciences. With Steven Shapin, he wrote Leviathan and the air pump
published in 1985 and in a new edition in 2011. In 2000, he collaborated
with Adam Lowe on a multi-site exhibition about digitality and informa-
tion, N01SE.Schaffer has worked for a number of shows and catalogues,
including Iconoclash and Making things public (for Bruno Latour
and Peter Weibel) and Unconformity and entropy (for Anish Kapoor
and Adam Lowe). He is a member of the advisory board of the Science
Museum. Between 2010 and 2015, he helped lead a collaborative project
with the National Maritime Museum on the nautical history of longitude:
how the assemblage of charts, clocks, cunning, and collaboration could
ever have helped travellers find out where they were at sea. A tercentenary
exhibition on longitude at sea opened at the National Maritime Museum
in summer 2014.
JohnTresch is Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at
the University of Pennsylvania. His book The Romantic Machine: Utopian
Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago, 2012) explored the aes-
thetic and political aspirations invested in the technologies of the early
industrial revolutionsteam engines, daguerreotypes, and electric
mediain Paris before 1848. His follow-up book connects the fantastic
visions, hoaxes, and philosophical speculations of Edgar Allan Poe to the
fragile institutional authority of science in the early USA.He is also con-
ducting a long-term ethnographic study of the neuroscience of medita-
tion. He has degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of
Chicago and the Ecole Normale Suprieure and in History and Philosophy
of Science from Cambridge University.
David Turnbullis Senior Research Fellow at the Victorian Eco-
Innovation Lab in the Melbourne School of Design at the University of
Melbourne. His overarching research interest is the ways in which knowl-
edge and space are co-produced. He approaches this from a number of
Biographies of Contributors xv
disparate but intersecting trajectories. (1) The comparison of knowledge

practices across cultural traditions including western science. (2) Narratives
of prehistory: comparative explanations of how humans moved and devel-
oped complex polities. (3) Theories of complexity and the commons, and
how to work with and sustain multiplicity. This all comes together in a
variety of current projects including maritime prehistory, rock art and
early cognition, and performative mapping at Lake Mungo. He is the
author of numerous works including Maps Are Territories: Science is an
Atlas (1993), and Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative
Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (2003).
Cherycevon Xylander is an American by birth, German by upbringing,
and English by the wiles of the Norns. She studies the aesthetic politics of
knowledge transmission. Taking cognition to be a form of situated prac-
tice, she explores the madness of mind. Her work, cross-cultural and
trans-disciplinary, clusters around themes of applied popular philosophy:
aesthetic re-education inside and outside the asylum, bracketed intercon-
nections between the natural sciences and liberal arts, and comparative
global imaginaries. She currently teaches intellectual history and philoso-
phy at the Technical University Darmstadt and lives in Berlin.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venezia. Photo by ORCH,

Courtesy of Fondazione Giorgio Cini 1
Fig. 3.1 The first map of the lithosphere. Willem Goeree,
Voor-Bereidselen Tot de Bybelsche Wysheid Gebruik
der Heilige, Amsterdam 1690 33
Fig. 3.2 Yu Ji Tu map of China, 1136. Courtesy Library of Congress 35
Fig. 3.3 Waldseemller 1507 world map. Universalis cosmographia
secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii
alioru[m]que lustrationes. Saint Di, France. Courtesy
Library of Congress 37
Fig. 3.4 Jean Picard, diagram of triangles used to measure the meridian
south of Paris. Jean Picard, La Mesure de la Terre, 1671 38
Fig. 3.5 Apollo 17 Blue Earth photo, 1972. Image courtesy
NASA Johnson Space Center 39
Fig. 3.6 Marc Quinn, from The Eye of History series, 2013.
Copyright Marc Quinn Studio 40
Fig. 3.7 Gerard Mercators map of the world using his
famous 1569 projection. Public Domain 41
Fig. 3.8 Terra-centric equi-rectangular projection of the world,
digital. Factum Arte 47
Fig. 3.9 Terra-centric equi-rectangular projection of the world,
routed. Factum Arte 47
Fig. 3.10 Terra-Forming montage. The proposed site in the
Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio
Maggiore, Venice. Factum Arte 49
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 3.11 Terra-Forming montage. The proposed site in the

Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio
Maggiore, Venice. Factum Arte 49
Fig. 3.12 A detail of the 2 4 meter model that can be flooded and
drained, Factum Arte. The model was made for the
Anthropocene Monument, an exhibition curated by Bruno
Latour and Bronislaw Szerszynski at Les Abattoirs,
Toulouse, October 2014 50
Fig. 3.13 Wyldes Globe in Leicester Square, Illustrated London News,
7 June 1851 50
Fig. 3.14 Reclus globe project, sketch by Louis Bonnier; IFA,
Fonds Louis Bonnier 18971898, doc. R 35-39-36.
In Alavoine-Muller Soizic, Un globe terrestre pour
lExposition universelle de 1900. Lutopie gographique
dlise Reclus, LEspace gographique 2/2003
(tome 32), pp. 156170 51
Fig. 4.1 Design of a (never built) Civic Museum and Outlook Tower
for an American City, by the architect Frank C.Mears for
Patrick Geddes, 1923 (Strathclyde University Archives,
Glasgow, T-GED-22-1-1882) 56
Fig. 4.2 Sketch of the Outlook Tower, drawn by Patrick Geddes,
probably atthe end of the 1890s, presenting the different
ways to look at theworld from the tower (Strathclyde
University Archives, Glasgow, T-GED-14-1-14) 58
Fig. 4.3 Cover of George Guyou (alias Paul Reclus), The Hollow Globe.
A New Geographical Apparatus, n.d. [c. 1900] (Strathclyde
University Archives, Glasgow, T-GED-7-8-69) 59
Fig. 4.4 Schematic model of the Mundaneum, exhibited at the Muse
International, n.d. [c.1920] (Paul Otlet Archives, Mundaneum,
Mons, Belgium, M.I.10, f.201) 61
Fig. 4.5 Allegorical representation of the Mundaneum engraved by
IgorPlatounoff in 1938, and published as a greetings postcard
(Paul Otlet Archives, Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium, Box no. 4) 63
Fig. 5.1 Bettmann Panopticon contributors perform a pun on Portable
Bettmann (Panopticon, 10) 88
Fig. 5.2 Herbert Bayer: 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Bayer-advert showcased
in a 1932 Bettmann-article (Otto L. Bettmann, The
Relationship of Word and Picture: Principles of
Photo-Typography, in: Penroses Annual: The Process
Year Book & Review of the Graphic Arts 34 (1932): 7476) 89
List of Figures xix
Fig. 5.3 This poster appeared in Bayers Great Ideas of Western Man
series,produced for the Container Corporation of America.
HerbertBayer: 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Blaschke, Commodification
of Images, 138) 91
Fig. 5.4 Entry for cowboys in the Portable Archive
(Portable Archive, 47) 92
Fig. 5.5 The World Geo-graphic Atlas map of energy slaves.
Herbert Bayer: 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Bayer, Geographic
Atlas, 278) 94
Fig. 5.6 The Portable Archives depiction of energy slaves
(Portable Archive, 84) 95
Fig. 6.1 The wet collection of the Museum of Natural History
in Berlin, 2010; photographed by Carola Radke,
courtesy of Museum of Natural History, Berlin 118
Fig. 6.2 Mona Hatoum, Current Disturbance, 1996, wood, wire
mesh, light bulbs, computerized dimmer unit, amplifier and
four speakers; photographed by Ben Blackwell, courtesy
Capp Street Studios, San Francisco 121
Fig. 6.3 Towers with cars from Volkswagen, 2000; photographed
by Emanuel Raab, courtesy of Autostadt GmbH, Wolfsburg 123
Fig. 7.1 N-gram of Cosmogram in English, 18002008.
Copyright Google Corporation 140
Fig. 7.2 Umar bin Muzaffar Ibn al-Wardi. Kharidat al-Ajaib wa
Faridat al-Gharaib. (The Pearl of Wonders and the
Uniqueness of Things Strange). Courtesy of Library of
Congress, Late seventeenth century. Near East Section,
African and Middle Eastern Division 143
Fig. 7.3 Haj in November 2008. Al-Haram Mosque, Mecca.
Courtesy Al Jazeera English 145
Fig. 7.4 Temple of Humanity, Rio de Janeiro. Photo Paul Marett 150
Fig. 7.5 View of Hamina Data Center, Finland (formerly Stora
Enso paper mill). Photo by Connie Zhou. Courtesy Google 152
Fig. 7.6 View inside Google Data Center, Mayes County,
Oklahoma. Photo by Connie Zhou, Courtesy
Google153
Fig. 8.1 George Cruikshank, All the World Going to See the Great
Exhibition of 1851, from Henry Mayhew and George
Cruikshank, 1851; or The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys
and Family (London: George Newbold, 1851) 170
xx List of Figures
Fig. 8.2 Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Abschied von Kosmos

(Berlin, 1869: woodcut) 171
Fig. 8.3 Paper and transparencies. Elena Tamagno, Universit di
Architettura di Torino, Central library archives, Carlo
Mollino fund. Torino, Italy, 2009. Courtesy Armin Linke 173
Fig. 8.4 Mars Rover Model, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars
Yard, rover. Pasadena, USA, 1999. Courtesy Armin Linke 173
Fig. 8.5 Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a
laboratory in the Department of Anatomy at the University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1992. http://www.depont.nl/
en/collection/artists/artist/werk_id/415/kunstenaar/wall/174
Fig. 8.6 Ceci non plus, nest pas une pipe. Samuel Garca Prez, 2012 176
Fig. 8.7 The strange scenography of objects being seen by subjects.
Drawing by Samuel Garca Prez, 2012 177
Fig. 8.12 Gerard Mercator, Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes
de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura. Duisburg, 1595 184
Fig. 8.13 Deus sive Sphaera; God, or the Spheres. Image: Bruno
Latour/Lindsay Stairs 186
Fig. 8.14 Parallel between theocentrism: Cosmocentrism and
knowledge-centric: Laboratory-centric views. Image:
Bruno Latour/Lindsay Stairs 187
Fig. 9.1 Dark_Matter_Map 2012. Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:COSMOS_
3D_dark_matter_map.jpg204
Fig. 9.2 The Expanding Universe. Source: https://otrasfuentes.files.
wordpress.com/2013/01/5c8c5c4f3cb7d8f4ca299ba
723fa9e71.jpg206
Fig. 9.3 Gravitational lensing: using the universe as a telescope.
Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_
on_%22Gravitational_Lensing%22.jpg209
Fig. 9.4 Christoforo Sabbadinos Project for Venice 1547. The first
map to be used administratively in constructing Venice.
Source:Archivio di Stato di Venezia. http://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cristoforo_sabbadino_-_progetto_
per_venezia_del_1557.jpg210
List of Figures xxi
Fig. 9.5 Fra Luca Paciolo teaching Albrecht Drer linear

perspective? Portrait by Jacopo de Barbari 1495. Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacopo_de%27_
Barbari_-_Portrait_of_Fra_Luca_Pacioli_and_an_Unknown_
Young_Man_-_WGA1269.jpg213
Fig. 9.6 The MOSE Project to protect Venice from flooding. Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Localizzazione_
GB.jpg216
Fig. 10.1 The problem with Wikipedia. Source: https://xkcd.com/214/238
Fig. 12.1 Lodestar. Image by Richard Powers 266
CHAPTER 1
Text and Context: Genius Loci (A Preface)
Pasquale Gagliardi
Fig. 1.1 Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venezia. Photo by ORCH, Courtesy of
Fondazione Giorgio Cini
P. Gagliardi
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy
The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Schaffer et al. (eds.), Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_1
2 P. GAGLIARDI
Visitors to Venice who look out from the Doges Palace over the Bay
of San Marco immediately recognize the white forms designed by archi-
tect Andrea Palladio. The splendid faade of one of the most beautiful
churches the divine Palladio built in Venice shines out from the monu-
mental complex of the former Benedictine monastery on the island of
San Giorgio Maggiore. This is now the headquarters of the Fondazione
Giorgio Cini, a major centre for humanistic studies. For some time now,
every year towards mid-September, when the summer has grown mild,
the Fondazione Cini hosts the Dialoghi di San Giorgio. Their goal is to
encourage dialogue and multidisciplinary debate on key issues facing con-
temporary society.
The current book faithfully illustrates the talks and discussions in the
Dialogue that was held in San Giorgio from 10 to 13 September 2012.
A small group of experts and scholars from different cultural and profes-
sional backgrounds (philosophers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists,
experts on new technologies of information and representation, and artists)
addressed the theme Re-visioning the World: Myths of Universal Knowledge
and Aesthetics of Global Imaging. The aim of this preface is to help the
reader grasp the logic and spirit of this book by setting it in the temporal,
spatial, and institutional context that generated it.
From their first instalment in 2004, the San Giorgio Dialogues have
eschewed the traditional format of academic conferences. They empha-
size spontaneous conversation over erudite prepared papers, crossovers
of language and epistemology over specialized disciplines, and equal
importance is given to sensory knowledge and aesthetic communica-
tion (knowledge by acquaintance) and to intellectual and discur-
sive knowledge (knowledge by description). On these grounds, the
participants at previous meetings have included artists such as Adam
Zagajewski and Olafur Eliasson, while the 2012 Dialogo was attended
by novelist Richard Powers and eclectic artist Adam Lowe. Of course,
this conversational format entails more risks than a traditional academic
format in which each participant presents a paper, answers questions,
and, often, simply takes his or her leave. When you are forced to sit at
a round table, with the basic aim of conversing, you accept the risk of
not knowing what the outcome will be. But experience has shown that
the advantages of this formula are much greater than the disadvantages.
Indeed, five of the seven Dialoghi have been translated into publications
and thus made accessible to a much wider public.1
TEXT AND CONTEXT: GENIUS LOCI (A PREFACE) 3
Many participants of the Dialoghi have immediately realized that the

conversational formula is particularly well suited to the island of San
Giorgio, whichlike all places rich in history and traditionshas its own
genius loci. The specificity of the place, its suitability for exchanges of
views, can easily be explained, if we bear in mind that for around 1000
years, the island was a kind of enclave or free territory, despite being
so close to the palaces of power in the Serenissima. After obtaining the
island from Doge Tribuno Memmo in 983, the abbot Giovanni Morosini
founded a Benedictine monastery on it. Over time, the monastery gradu-
ally developed into a great cultural centre and later a place that welcomed
exiles, hosted political meetings, and encouraged dialogue between differ-
ent cultures.
From theExhibition totheDialogo
Each Dialogo has a much longer history than the three days in which the
contributors meet. The initial ideait is often difficult to identify its exact
moment of conceptionhas a long incubation period. The initial task
is to assess if the theme proposed is topicalif it is an idea whose time
has comeand if it can be usefully analysed from different disciplinary
points of view. The next step is to assemble a small team of experts, who
set out to draft a manifesto that will form the intellectual framework
for the Dialogo and will clearly describe the theoretical reach and practi-
cal implications of the issues raised. Once this framework is in place, we
begin to sound out various experts on the issues raised to see whether
they are interested in taking part. And so we gradually build up the group
of 1012 contributors, trying to achieve the right balance of genres, dis-
ciplines, cultural backgrounds, and nationalities. The story of the Dialogo
of 2012, on which this book is based, is somewhat different from the
story of the other dialogues and has some original features that deserve
to be mentioned.
In reality, we originally had in mind an exhibition and not a dialogue.
The idea of the exhibition came from Adam Lowe, a British artist and
Director of the Factum Arte studio. Based in Madrid and Bologna,
Factum Arte consists of a team of artists, technicians, and conserva-
tors dedicated to digital mediationboth in the production of works
for contemporary artists and in the production of facsimilesas part
of a coherent approach to preservation and dissemination. In 2007,
for the Palladian refectory in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore,
4 P. GAGLIARDI
Lowe and his studio made the f acsimile of the Wedding at Cana, Paolo
Veroneses masterpiece, which had been looted by Napoleons commis-
sars in 1797 and taken to the Louvre. Lowe subsequently set up a close
collaboration with the Fondazione Cini and made a crucial contribu-
tion to the large exhibition on Piranesis etchings (The Arts of Piranesi)
staged on San Giorgio in 2010. Then in 2011, with Renaissance scholar
and historian of maps, Jerry Brotton, he curated an exhibition on
antique and contemporary tapestries (Penelopes Labour: Weaving Words
and Images).
Lowes new project, also drafted in collaboration with Jerry Brotton,
was for an exhibition that illustrated human attempts to represent the
world in its entirety. At the centre of the project, they planned to construct
a large relief map of the visible and submerged surfaces of the globe
the lithosphere. This three-dimensional map was to have been gradu-
ally filled with water from the lagoon until it was completely submerged,
then gradually emptied. (See Chap. 3 in this book, in which they discuss
the project.) This planned exhibition was discussed at length, ranging
between two very different although not contrasting viewpoints: the first
placed the emphasis on the ecological question, with the aim of making
exhibition visitors more aware of the consequences of global warming and
the problems of the planets survival, while the second focused on the rela-
tionship between representation and creation of the real. The way the
project developed is clearly reflected in the series of titles it was given dur-
ing the work in progress: Meltdown. Avoiding Apocalypse; Meltdown.
Re-visioning the World; Theatre of the World. Revisioning the Earth
Building Worlds; Terra Firma. Revisioning the EarthBuilding Worlds;
Terra! Terra! Drawing Maps, Building Worlds; and Terra-Forming.
Engineering the Sublime.
Initially, we thought of timing the exhibition to coincide with the 2013
Venice Art Biennale and to use the 2012 Dialogo to finalize the project.
Simon Schaffer joined Adam Lowe and myself in drafting the manifesto
for the dialogue, and the focus gradually shifted from the history and roles
of cartography to more general epistemological issues, such as the relation
between knowledge and power, global forms of knowledge, and a com-
parison of representations of the worldindividual and universal, tangible
and abstract, theoretical and aesthetic. The manifesto (or Introductory
Note) for the Dialogo, which was sent to all the guest experts who con-
tributed to this book, ran as follows.
The Manifesto
This Dialogue is prompted by considerations of an urgent problem of knowl-
edge and power. New technologies of information might seem to offer renewed
opportunities for global connexion and global forms of knowledge. These tech-
nologies are commonly accompanied by new master narratives of universal
knowledge and complete transparency. Such stories carry with them a kind of
moral lesson: all our problems would be solved if only everything was, or could
be, known about everything everywhere. This lesson moralizes the world of global
data banks by urging the virtues of accountability, access, and audit. But of
course this knowledge order is also accompanied by major risks. Among such
risks, there is a threat to the virtues of tacit, embodied, secluded, and private
forms of knowledge and skill, which run the hazard of expropriation or suppres-
sion by the universal knowledge order. There is also the challenge that corporate
agents, increasingly the masters of global knowledge systems, exploit them for
their own purposes under the cover of stories of universal knowledge and trans-
parent accountability.
The critical relation between knowledge and power is certainly not new,
but this predicament gives it urgency. One is told to think globally and act
locally, yet it is often hard to see how local actions matter and hard, too, to think
simultaneously of all the globe. This Dialogue asks about the aesthetics of global
knowledge in a time of crisis. In particular, it addresses the vices and virtues
of different world views, by contrasting singular and universal, tangible and
abstract, intellectual and aesthetic representations of the world.
There are many long histories of projects that have tried to bring the globe
to a scale where its contents and connexions become evident: cartographies of
cities, landscapes, globes; collections, museums, encyclopaedias; the theme of the
Ark as both universal cabinet and survival mechanism; and modernist plans
for universal languages, exhibitions, and data systems that would encapsulate
the entire world. Often crucial for all such schemes is the claim that they would
revision the world so that by making a better global representation, the globe
would become better. Like a corrective mirror, the world would simultaneously
be reflected and improved. Thus these projects belong to the histories of utopia.
There, a secluded island lets a community build an ideal world in miniature.
Good links between island and mainland help the ideal become a resource else-
where. This dialogue brings together on an island some of those who care about
the puzzles and prospects of these political arts.
The dialogue therefore asks the question of the scale at which the political arts
of representation should work. Its participants will explore how combinations
of macro- and micro-cosmic world images can be made to function and how
shifts of scale around the immediate, local, and miniature can be resources for
the global or the worldly. These revisions would be realist, respectful of modesty
6 P. GAGLIARDI
rather than insistent on an exhaustive account. Thus, as an alternative to forms

of reductive abstraction, which work by removing features of the world, might
it be possible to engage in the work of condensation, which achieves its ends by
composing, by adding, and by giving, a condensation which makes atmospheres
into waterways and currents?
San Giorgio, a secluded island, is an ideal venue for the Dialogue, in that
it differs from some other utopias. Instead of dogmatically assuming the answer
has already been reached, the Cini Foundation offers the chance for a collabora-
tive search for better questions.
The Rules oftheGame andtheInaugural Event

Another document which will help readers understand the context that
fostered the ideas in this book is the letter of invitation sent to all the con-
tributors. It clearly set out the rules of the game and the format:
As we believe that dialogues are more important than formal paper pre-
sentations, we are not asking participants to write a new formal paper in
advance: rather, they should bring to Venice their opinions on these burning
questions, their wish to confront their own assumptions, and their willing-
ness to accept the risk of not knowing what the outcome will be: in short, they
are expected to be engaged in a conversation. That is why from the outset we
have called this project a Dialogue. We ask, however, each scholar to choose a
theme or topicwithin the framework proposed in the attached notethat s/
he could introduce in a single session, thus setting the tone of conversation and
the agenda for the session.
All participants will sit at a round table for the duration of the meeting.
In each of the three days there will be three sessions, two in the morning and
only one in the afternoon, thus leaving enough time and space for informal
exchanges, rest, exploring Venice and generally enjoying the stay on the island.
According to the tradition of previous Dialogues, a formal opening event,
aimed at exposing the Dialogue to the public and the press, will take place before
the event, preparing our intellectual experience with an aesthetic experience
conveying emotions as well as thoughts.
The inaugural event featured two ambitious attempts to represent the

world by means of two different forms of expression: music and litera-
ture. The first was the composer Mauricio Kagels illustration of musically
possible trajectories in the world, guided by the compass, a universal
instrument; three of his eight pieces of The Wind Rose (South, East, and
South-West) were performed. These were interspersed with readings from

the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, which compared the
splendour and decline of great mapseither so detailed as to be pointless
or so all-embracing as to contain only nothingnessto the simultaneous,
instant vision of the whole universe which the poet, Borges, managed to
convey with his electrifying intuition.
Two Final Remarks

The art project at the origin of the Dialogue, and this bookLowe
and Brottons relief map of the lithospherewas not realized in time
for the 2013 Venice Art Biennale, for various reasons.2 But, perhaps as
compensation, the 2013 Biennale itself underscored the extraordinarily
topical theme of our Dialogo: its main exhibition was The Encyclopedic
Palace. This exhibition drew inspiration from a utopian dream by Marino
Auriti, who filed a design with the US Patent office in 1955, depicting
his Palazzo Enciclopedico, an imaginary museum meant to house all
worldly knowledge. Auriti planned the model of a 136-storey building
to be built in Washington, standing 700 metres tall and taking up over
16 blocks. Auritis plan was never carried out, of course, the curator
Massimiliano Gioni wrote on the Biennale website, but the dream of
universal, all- embracing knowledge crops up throughout the history
of art and humanity, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many
other artists, writers, scientists, and self-proclaimed prophets who have
triedoften in vainto fashion an image of the world that will capture
its infinite variety and richness. Today, as we grapple with a constant flood
of information, such attempts to structure knowledge into all-inclusive
systems seem even more necessary and even more desperate. Clearly,
our plan for the Dialogo was drawing from some inevitable historical and
contemporary spring.
The order of the chapters in this book reflects the sequence of the
Dialogo sessions, with the exception of the introduction by Simon Schaffer
and the essay by Lowe and Brotton. In fact, Lowe described the project
of the lithosphere map in an informal evening meeting of the Dialogo
with other participants. We thus thought it was only logical to begin the
book with the essay by Lowe and Brotton to highlight the role that their
planned but still unrealizedand thus, perfectly utopianmap played in
originating and shaping the entire Dialogo.
8 P. GAGLIARDI
Notes
1. The Dialoghi of 2004 (Atmospheres of freedom. For an ecology of
good government), 2005 (The architectures of Babel. Creations,
extinctions and intercessions in the languages of the global world),
2007 (Inheriting the past. Tradition, translation, betrayal, innova-
tion), 2010 (Protecting nature or saving creation? Ecological con-
flicts and religious passions) led to the publication of the following
books, respectively: Latour, B. and P.Gagliardi (sous la direction
de), Les atmosphres de la politique. Dialogue pour un monde com-
mun, Paris, Les Empcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, 2006;
Fabbri, P. and T.Migliore (eds) The Architectures of Babel. Creation,
Extinctions and Intercessions in the Language of the Global World,
Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2011; Gagliardi, P., B. Latour and
P.Memelsdorff (eds), Coping with the Past. Creative Perspectives on
Conservation and Restoration, Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2010;
Gagliardi, P., A.M.Reijnen and Philippe Valentini (eds), Protecting
Nature, Saving Creation. Ecological Conflicts, Religious Passions,
and Political Quandaries, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Moreover,
excerpts of the Dialogue held in 2005 (Martyrdoms. Witnesses to
faith, cultures of death, and new forms of political action) have been
published in Studi Veneziani: Martri. Testimonianze di fede,
culture della morte, nuove forme di azione politica, n.s. LIX (2010),
pp. 1769.
2. Curiously enough, a commentator took it for granted that Lowe and
Brottons planned relief map would be realized for the Art Biennale
2015. Matilda Bathurst, reviewing in the Oxonian Review the book
Mapping it Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies,
edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, writes: One of the most interesting
contemporary manifestations of mapping and materiality, notably
missing from the book, is the work of the Madrid-based practice
Factum Arte, the art worlds leading innovators of 3D printing tech-
nology. Renowned for their astonishing facsimiles of iconic art
works, in 2013 the studio produced a high resolution three-dimen-
sional record of the 13th century Hereford Mappa Mundi, recalling
the folds and undulations of the bull hide on which it was originally
etched. Positioned according to the East rather than the North, the
map famously looks towards the Second Coming, imagining the
annihilation of the very world it meticulously depicts. A similar
principle informs the studios proposal for the 2015 Venice Biennale,
a sculptural relief map of an oceanless earth, to be installed in a for-
mer football pitch. Over the course of the Biennale, the lunar-like
projections would be gradually flooded with water from the lagoon,
eventually submerging the map and rendering it invisible. Sadly, the
project was never realized and remains, like many of the objects dis-
cussed in this book, a lost utopia.
References
Pasquale Gagliardi, Exploring the Aesthetic Dimension of Organizational Life, in
Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, Thomas B. Lawrence, and Walter R. Nord
(eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organizational Studies (London: Sage, 2006).
Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1967).
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key. A Study of Reason, Rite, and Art
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
CHAPTER 2
Introduction
Simon Schaffer
I owe the discovery to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia

Jorge Luis Borges, Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius1
Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge takes upon itself some weighty ques-

tions of mapping and universal knowledge. As will soon become evident,
Borgesian themes provide its principal motifs: the Argentinian masters
tales of one hell of an observatory from which the entire universe of
experience could be apprehended, of a tragic map manufactured at the
same scale as the territory, of John Wilkins scheme for a universal char-
acter and the startlingly unlikely taxonomy of a Chinese encyclopaedia, of
the curators of an infernal library that contained all possible books, and of
an entirely alternative world barely accessible through patchily tantalising
traces. Contributors to this volume refer to these stories as they debate
the long-term and fraught relation between schemes that aim somehow to
assemble universal knowledge in a single site and the way these schemes
work through ingenious techniques of production, design, and storytell-
ing. Interests in digital and cartographic technologies, methods that help
S. Schaffer
Department of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, United Kingdom

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_2
12 S. SCHAFFER
make worlds as well as picture them, are central to these conversations. The
volume soon broadens to more general issues of knowledge and power.
Instead of simply lauding the capacities of accumulation and display, the
authors wonder what kinds of worlds can be revealed by techniques that
proclaim their global scope.
The collection thus raises anew themes canvassed at the Fondazione
Cini around the installation there in 2007 of a facsimile of Paolo Veroneses
Wedding at Cana. In one of their contributions to those earlier debates,
Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe proposed tracing such works trajectories
and careers as a means to counter the mistaken notion that digital tech-
niques are best understood as forms of mere reproduction. False accounts
of resemblance and of authenticity go with the claim that maintenance,
conservation, and reproduction generate inauthentic versions of some pri-
mordial source. The aim is not to identify archetypical originals but rather
to distinguish good and bad reproductions. Such aesthetic and ethical
terms attend more respectfully to the specific purposes of making, show-
ing, interacting, and sustaining.2 This new set of discussions now asks how
to develop such models of trajectory and career in cases such as the ency-
clopaedia and the museum, the world map and the database. This matters
especially where questions of the absolute novelty of the digital order, and
the aesthetic and mythic registers these questions involve, seem so salient.
An account of perfect cartographic imitation, encapsulated in anxieties
about the relation between map and territory, strangely gives way in the
digital regime to something like a navigators mobile engagement with
the territory traversed: internautes surf as much as they fixedly inspect.
In this process, much earlier practices of tracing trajectories and journeys
return in force.3
No doubt the connection between programmes for world maps and
universal accumulations of knowledge and the interests in aesthetic design,
manufacture, and their histories has become more pressing. Were told
what is needed in the Anthropocene, with the geologists recognition of
the planets character as a human artefact, is a better picture of the world
without us so the world can work better with us. Digital information
technologies have apparently enabled newly intense forms of mapping and
of data accumulation that allow an exhaustive system of global extent. It
is commonly claimed that since urgent crises are global in extent, cor-
respondingly vast accumulations of data are required. Hence also arise
contemporary cults of encyclopaedically networked data banks: Facebook
(2004), Google Earth (2005), and WikiLeaks (2006) all embody, in very
INTRODUCTION 13
different ways, the moderns notion that a picture-perfect utopia would be

secured by vast cartographic assemblages of every trace and image.
In the sciences, too, the conceit is nourished by the cult of Big Data,
which holds that innovatively unexpected knowledge can be secured from
the rigorous, automated, large-scale handling of the unprecedentedly vast
data sets online.4 The shock of the new can too easily distract from reali-
ties of data management. CERNS Large Hadron Collider generates 40
terabytes of information every second, far too much to be used. CERN
uses magnetic tape to store and manage selections of these experiments
data outputs.5 Older kinds of information technologies survive in power,
whence the need for more sensitive attention to the history and aesthetics
of seemingly unprecedented knowledge systems.6 Furthermore, as several
contributors to this volume will insist, the algorithms on whose applica-
tion data accumulation and management rely are themselves dependent
on prior theoretical and ideological judgements. Like any taxonomy,
forms imposed on information involve highly charged theories about the
world: raw data, so its been proposed, is a contradiction in terms.7
At the same time, the very systems that nourish global accumulation
are some of the most important sources of the planets eschatological pre-
dicament. The claim is that universal surveys in fact make what they claim
simply to picture. David Turnbull has pointed out that since maps, for
example, are so evidently powerful and simultaneously so dependent on
specific forms of life, there is an important sense in which the map is
the territory, even though paradoxically the territory is not the map.8
Its become a familiar position in debates on world fiscal crises, to be
discussed here by Deirdre McCloskey, that economists actions help make
the markets they then treat as the basis of global order.9 Correspondingly,
its often been held that important roots of the politico-economic and
ecological emergency lie in the very enterprise of these dreams of perfect
knowledge, gathered at the centre, contemptuous of or at least full of con-
descension to those who, confined to the maps margins, may have local
knowledge but cannot be trusted to see the big picture.
Many studies seek to show how apparently exhaustive and perfectly
imitative maps were and continue to be tools of exploitation and oppres-
sion. The world maps left out of their allegedly universal picture those
agents whose rights the mapmakers masters wished to deny or confis-
cate: the memory media of the age of discovery, as Peter Sloterdijk calls
them.10 Such charts helped fix in place the webs of relation and patterns of
movement whose dynamism and fluidity might provide resources against
14 S. SCHAFFER
the cartographers rule and authority. Interactions between and conflicts

over the shaping and imagery of the world have become some of the most
pressing concerns in political and ecological struggle: this is the case in
plans for the Venetian lagoon, over the Amazonian forest, Arnhem Land
culture, or the Yangtse gorges.
Recent work in this area shows us how mapping is indeed never inno-
cent: but that certainly does not mean that it is always tyrannical. In his
analysis of mapmakers imagery and ethics, especially in the notorious case
of the Peters projection and its supposedly critical representation of global
power, the geographer Brian Harley wrote that aesthetics is not a value-
free science: it is as much a prisoner of ideology as the empirical content
of the map.11 According to such polemics, mapmakers encouraged those
agents whom they put in their encyclopaedias and charts to change their
ways of life so as better to conform to the alien categories the classifiers
had invented. These debates captured much more widespread issues about
the partiality of mapping and its forms of knowledge, and heralded moves
towards digitised online cartography.12
It therefore seems apt to address these fraught issues through stories
from history and museology, from technology and cartography. As many
of the debates below will make clear, the work of map-making and of
tracing direction and position has been peculiarly evident in ways of mak-
ing sense of what global knowledge could possibly be and of the threats
and resources it offers. None of these questions are at all unprecedented.
In his visionary 1751 manifesto for the first volumes of the Encyclopdie,
Jean dAlembert notoriously described its arrangement of knowledge as
a kind of world map and its articles as individual, highly detailed maps.
Cartographic perspective and projection thus became key tools in grasp-
ing and making universal knowledge. The instability of such compari-
sons between mappemonde and encyclopaedic knowledge showed these
enlightened attempts to map the world were simultaneously aware of the
contingency of any such cartography. This gave rise to important debates
between the techniques of tree-like division of hierarchically ordered
knowledge and the apparently more open-ended system of alphabetical
order and freely associated entries.13 One puzzle was that of specifying
the individuals viewpoint. One can create as many different systems of
human knowledge as there are world maps having different projections,
dAlembert declared, yet the encyclopaedists aimed at collecting knowl-
edge into the smallest area possible and of placing the philosopher at a
INTRODUCTION 15
vantage point high above this vast labyrinth.14 Much depends on the
choice of vantage point, the technology of projection, and the notion that
such maps do not simply represent worlds but help make them.
The apparent urgency of issues of utopian and dystopian forms of
universal information is thus strongly linked to changes in map-making.
Jerry Brotton and Adam Lowe envisage a relief map of the lithosphere, a
cartographic response to the advent of the Anthropocene. In their con-
tribution here, Brotton and Lowe propose a genealogy of projection as a
means to engage with the Earth from different points of view. Their his-
tory reinforces the point that choices of world view are set by local inter-
ests in politics, economy, and communication. The claim is that there is a
basic relation between recent processes of globalisation and novel digital
map techniques. As examples, in his remarkable survey of the history of
world maps, Jerry Brotton notes the near-simultaneity of a pair of deci-
sive initiatives taken by the US administration at the end of the last mil-
lennium, a startlingly Borgesian project to develop a digital map of the
world at one meter resolution, proclaimed by Vice President Al Gore
in early 1998, and the decision massively to enlarge access to the US Air
Forces Global Positioning System in spring 2000. Googles acquisition of
some of the digital mapping systems that developed in response to such
initiatives led quickly to very widely available geospatial applications and a
new and potentially lucrative online business model. Brotton cites a telling
comment that the firms nave view that we could have one global rep-
resentation of the world was rapidly displaced by a more locally adapted
tool, allowing customers to make maps of their own world and for their
own purposes.15 In his contribution, Steve Crossan details the ways in
which Googles search engine constructed a found, plastic taxonomy.
These reflexions on adaptation and on local interests in navigation and
understanding prompt many of the concerns expressed throughout this vol-
ume. Lowe and Brotton envisage a hydrophilic world map, manufactured in
three dimensions and subject to a land-centred projection with the vertical
axis strongly exaggerated to bring out the drama and dynamics of the deluge
and the uncanny features of an otherwise unrecognisably water-less world.
One aim, they indicate, is to stage a series of poetic acts as an intervention
in current concerns with anthropogenic climate change and the fate of the
world. The enterprise draws astute attention towards the partial character of
any version of the globe and to the highly charged choices embodied in any
specific set of technologies of visualisation and production. It finds telling
16 S. SCHAFFER
precedents both in Renaissance and in Baroque maps of the newly global

imperium, at least one of which already showed the planet without its water,
and in the key conjuncture of high modernism and its aftermath, when a
host of contemporary schemes were promulgated for visionary and ambi-
tious assemblage of all the worlds knowledge and data.
During the earlier twentieth century, protagonists of modernism
launched many projects that sought to bring together in the same place
an exhaustive, potentially universal, image gallery of the whole world
with the aim of social progress, public re-education, global knowledge,
and environmental transformation. Pierre Chabard traces the complex
pathways from enterprises also featured in Brotton and Lowes contri-
bution, notably the remarkable though never completed Great Globe
designed for the 1900 Paris Exhibition by the anarchist geographer
Elise Reclus, to the utopian schemes of Patrick Geddes Outlook Tower
and Paul Otlets Mundaneum. Cheryce von Xylander charts the career of
Otto Bettmanns pictorialist assemblage of a huge image bank launched
in Weimar Germany and ultimately acquired by Corbis as part of its
accumulation of a global iconographic storage system. These projects,
which perhaps predictably have drawn increased recent public atten-
tion, demanded the production of astonishingly ambitious pictorial
records of the emergence of modern society and culture. Otto Neuraths
Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (developed in Vienna in 1925)
and Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas (launched in 19279) are other
impressive examples of the practical reverie that an exhaustive assemblage
of images and charts could at once capture the world and allow its reform
and divination.16
The conjuncture that marked these contemporaryand closely
linkedschemes for universal accumulation and display of global know
ledge and culture is of considerable significance. Urgent problems about
sciences, society, and their future depended on a characteristically modern-
ist theme of the relation between the local powers of machines and their
grip over the wider world, the capacity of culture to translate its values
between different spaces and times. In an epoch marked by the continuing
presence of academic and aristocratic authority, the realities of an evident
techno-scientific transformation of the contemporary mode of produc-
tion and reproduction, and the imminence of global war and revolution,
it was clear to these visionaries how to respond to, and exploit, the array
of image technologies and spatial engineering to offer a radical vision that
INTRODUCTION 17
would challenge tradition yet ward off threats of chaos.17 Hence Geddes
enthusiastic reaction to Reclus planned Globe, which the Scottish social
engineer saw, in terms redolent of more recent evocations of Gaia, as
simultaneously spiritually redemptive and technologically potent: instead
of a book, were it the best, the latest, here was now the most monumental
of museums, the most simple of observatories, the microcosm of the mac-
rocosm itself. This was no scientific model in its institute but the image,
shrine and temple of the Earth-mother.18
Instead of a book, the temple of the Earth-mother: much of this vol-
umes interest in such visions hinges on the fate of the conventionally manu-
factured book, and its expropriation and displacement by radical innovations
in typography, data and image production, and collection and distribution.
Considerable discussion hinged on the relation between the engineering of
such universal schemes of knowledge and imagery and the model of prop-
erty at stake in the acquisition and use of accumulated materials, be they
pictures filched from libraries or data gathered through surveillance of the
unaware. Evocations of these grand architectural, museological, and pic-
torial schemata reinforce the key point that the design and construction
of the layout of displays are not impartial but instead highly situated. The
significant spatial tropes of globe, tower, and window all emerge as crucial
interventions in ways of making assemblages, of patterning data, and of gov-
erning both production and access. In Warburgs ghost story for adults,
his name for the series of panels in his Mnemosyne Atlas, these aesthetic
tools served the purposes of an explicitly global series of juxtapositions. One
of the first panels bore a celestial map, a chart of the movement of Western
culture, and the family tree of a clan of Renaissance bankers; the second
panel put Ptolemaic celestial maps next to various images of the Farnese
Hercules holding the Globe on his shoulders and the mythological scenes
depicted there.19
Such brilliant use by the modernist visionaries of the aesthetic register
of cinematics was, of course, not solely in play in display but gave form to
the work of manufacture. Hence, for example, the telling contrast between
Herbert Bayers plans for a World geo-graphic atlas and the very differ-
ent ludic designs of Bettmanns version of pictorialism, which functioned
more allusively and was keen on the compilation of ingenious series of
juxtaposed images. The role of chosen form in the production of informa-
tion is equally well illuminated by Otlets profound impact on Neuraths
universalist museological schemes, resulting in 1929in the launch of the
18 S. SCHAFFER
Novus Orbis Pictus protocol governing relations between the two mens
projects. Like Bettmanns contemporary inauguration of his Leica cam-
paign for a potentially global trawl of imagery and print in a re-engineered
Denkraum, so for Otlet and Neurath the aim was to produce a universal
atlas and a world encyclopaedia, specialist maps and newspapers, as well
as a whole series of standardised world museums which would consist
primarily of reproducible pieces stuck together. According to Neurath,
writing in the wake of the collapse of the Novus Orbis Pictus enterprise
after the 1929 world economic crash, to speak of the museum of the
future is like speaking of the automobile of the future. Automobiles are
manufactured in series and not produced one by one.20
Anke te Heesens reflexions on the iconography of information in the
vast and visible accumulation of objects in contemporary museums focus
on how this seriality might work now in a representation of order with-
out end. The framed but seemingly infinite array of these displays links
them with much older tropes of universal knowledge and its relation with
creation. Heesen astutely launches her intervention with a citation from
the radical philosopher and world traveller Georg Forster, who in 1794
reflected on the challenge of ordering a seemingly unbounded collection
of equally wondrous objects. As a voyager with James Cook in the South
Seas in the 1770s, Forster had direct experience of such collections, vast
in extent and hard to classify. Insufficiently relativist or reflexive, he sim-
ply assumed that Polynesian taste for certain goods was but a version of
occidental consumerism, rather than a key aspect of islanders cosmol-
ogy. Capitalist forces are realized in other forms and finalities, Marshall
Sahlins has observed of the mediations and cosmological changes in long-
range Pacific encounters, in exotic cultural logics far removed from the
native-European commodity fetishism. And Forster then earned a living
across Europe by marketing these Pacific goods to wealthy patrons. The
Tuscan Grand Duke was offered Tahitian tapa cloth from which to make
garments, alongside herbaria, weapons, carvings, and tools.21 In such col-
lections, the challenges of scope, of order, and of meaning were closely
entwined: too many things, too hard to classify, with different senses in
different cultures.
These themes of loot, excess, and incomprehension, strongly in evi-
dence in European entry into the Pacific, coincided with the formation of
major metropolitan collections. This volume often attends to such chal-
lenges of putatively universal museology. The modish aesthetics of vast
accumulation described by Heesen were just as linked with arrogantly
INTRODUCTION 19
expropriative colonial possession as they were with an egalitarian politics

of open storage and easy access to museums backstage. According to one
of his mariners, Cooks vessels might be called a second Noahs Ark,
both because of the superfluity of their cargo and because of the need to
impose some taxonomy.22 The theme of the Ark captures these dilemmas.
In the Western tradition, the vessel that allowed survival from the univer-
sal deluge was also taken to be the first comprehensive museum. This was
not solely a reflexion on the virtues of preservation of fragile specimens of
life from hostile threat. It also long underwrote the claim that the exhaus-
tive collection was also a path to redemption. Seventeenth-century schol-
ars such as John Wilkins in Oxford and Athanasius Kircher in Rome thus
entirely identified their study of the population of the Ark with schemes
for the overhaul of classification schemes, languages, and museums so that
a virtuous and perfect order could be recovered from chaos and its survival
guaranteed. It is barely surprising that moderns such as Borges or Warburg
found so much to nourish their reflexions in these visionary schemes.23
Otto Bettmann attributed his first notions of the Picture Archive to his
initial boyhood encounter with technologies and graphics he found in his
fathers collection of the works of Kircher, whom he labelled the Thomas
Edison of the seventeenth century. The Bettmann Archives commercial
repute was first established, significantly, in a 1938 Fortune advertisement
for the US radio network CBS: it foregrounded a picture of a vast com-
munication machine taken straight from Kircher.24 Baroque scholars also
already bewailed the flood of data, in print and image, which threatened to
overwhelm the world of learning and culture. Kircher also manufactured
small-scale arcae, ingenious wooden boxes that let their users calculate,
send messages, design buildings, and compose music. The trope of the
Ark, in a strange prefiguration of online technologies, figured the capacity
to reduce and manage with ingeniously embodied hardware a potentially
universal world of form and meaning.25
These Baroque myths and images have long provided some of the most
important resources for rethinking the relation between ambitions for
global knowledge and the techniques of storage, design, and accumulation
on which they depended. The fantasy of open storage and of boundless
loot, already present in the arks and cabinets of early modern Europe and
the newfangled public storerooms of the colonial powers, has returned
with renewed aesthetic energy both in the designs of contemporary gal-
leries and museums and in the digital systems that proffer access to global
databases. This volume is prompted by consideration of these vast displays
20 S. SCHAFFER
to begin discussion of the data illusion: the fantasy that these things are,
precisely and unproblematically, gifts. In Baroque mathematics and natu-
ral philosophy, data were instead premises explicitly assumed for the sake
of an argument not further to be debated: they were taken as given. In
more recent cultures of fact, however, especially in the emergent practices
of classical political economy and encyclopaedic human sciences, the term
has come instead to refer to the results of inquiry and survey. During
the debates, both McCloskey and Latour importantly stress that data are
taken not given: deliberately elicited and captured. Aesthetic judgements
and ingenious designs matter far upstream from the work of display and
are directly at stake in the formation of information.26
The volume is therefore much concerned with the processes through
which worlds are formed, not merely pictured. The terminology of engi-
neering and exploitation is significant here: its claimed that knowledge
would be developed by trawling and mining pristine quarries and jungles
of web-based data. The format is the message, according to Sloterdijk.27
Prompted by these views, the discussion that follows often adopts a some-
what constructivist idiom: the security and authority of knowledge forms
are dependent on the work of mediation and of maintenance, and this
especially applies to versions of the global, in which the enterprise of pro-
duction and repair deserves careful attention.28 David Turnbull explains
how the most seemingly mundane technologies, of navigation and map-
ping, of writing and tying, were long used to form and transform different
worlds. At least two important implications follow: on the one hand, it
is too easy to underestimate the productive importance of these every-
day techniques; on the other, it is easy to overestimate the capacities of
hierarchically structured planning, whether corporate or statist, in making
and managing worlds. This is, as example, the aim of the Story Weaver
system (2007) that Turnbull offers in response to Steve Crossans descrip-
tion of Googles Knowledge Graph (2012). The Story Weaver system
was developed at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and
directly involves knowledges in which the relations between human and
non-human entities are present, performed, and vital.29 Turnbulls chief
example within his contribution, drawn from the crises of management
in the Venetian lagoon, is designed to show how the mix of social, eco-
nomic, hydraulic, and political forces in play is becoming much less easy to
control and what other strategies are available in cases of turbulence and
flow. In common with other contributors, he draws attention to the need
for attention to performative, rather than representative, techniques and
INTRODUCTION 21
actions. In his careful analysis of the ways of Pacific navigation, as example,

he brings out ways in which Polynesian and European cartographic meth-
ods could indeed be aligned during the period of the Cook voyages: but
yet that these maritime worlds were known through practice and per-
formance: maps carry within themselves the seeds of their alternatives.30
The challenge for such constructivist and performative accounts of
world-making and patterns of global knowledge partly stems from the
long-established notion that to draw attention to the making of an account
is typically to undermine or denounce its authority and authenticity. Hence
arise, as examples, condescension towards mere replicas, scepticism about
the role that aesthetics plays in making knowledge and data, or the notori-
ous and urgent crises surrounding criticisms of the models developed of
anthropogenic climate change or genetic engineering. Apparent hostility
to the ubiquity of mediation in making and working with world maps
prompted the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirces celebrated 1906 discus-
sion of experimentation on diagrams: one can make exact experiments
upon uniform diagrams; and when one does so, one must keep a bright
lookout for unintended and unexpected changes thereby brought about
in the relations of different significant parts of the diagram to one another.
Such operations upon diagrams, whether external or imaginary, take the
place of the experiments upon real things.31 Under what Bruno Latour
calls the fantasy of double-click, there is a countervailing sense that only
the immediate and the instant appropriation of knowledge could possibly
be reliable and a common denial that mediation is an indispensable means,
rather than a treacherous betrayal, of faithful engagement.32
The emphases within this collection on data as elicited, extracted,
and selected rather than merely given, and on the aesthetic and mythic
performances involved in world-making, seek to counter this fantasy.
Adam Lowes evocation of the artful reconstruction by Factum Arte of
the Sala Bologna, originally painted by Lorenzo Sabatini in the Vatican
for Gregory XIII in the Holy Year 1575, brings these questions to an
unusually clear focus. The Salas programme was avowedly political and
theological, staged as the first major sacred public ceremonial after the
launch of Counter-reformation initiatives at the Council of Trent. Its
ingenious choice of sky maps deliberately counter-posed traditional
global cartography with those of the Popes own city, proffering a world
view proper to the urban, lettered administrative class from which the
Pope emerged, cleverly entangled with the divine viewpoint of creation.
And, just as Brotton, Lowe, and Turnbulls discussions of mathematical
22 S. SCHAFFER
perspective and astronomical calculation suggest, in this great vision of

the city, the world, and the creation, the achievements of the mixed sci-
ences on which this rendering relied are explicitly and visibly celebrated
and exploited. These were the techniques that have allowed what Lowe
calls the extraterrestrial viewpoint, while their role is not concealed but
publicly registered both in the work of Sabatini and in that of Factum
Arte.33
There is, therefore, a specific set of connexions between careful
attention to the work of making worlds and the possibility of global
or extraterrestrialperspectives. Latour has urged that the global is
largely, like the globe itself, an invention of science.34 Historians of
globalisation have argued in similar manner that the history of this pro-
cess is necessarily entwined with histories of the category of the global.
The often violent work of reordering associated with the enterprise of
world capital draws immense resources and significance from the reor-
ganisation of the way notions of the worldly and the global are deployed
and transformed.35 A considerable advantage of attention to the work of
world-making is that it might escape less tangible, and less verifiable, ref-
erences to abstract world views and cultural sensibilities. It would instead
foreground the labours of curators, entrepreneurs, designers, architects,
masons, and artisans, those carrying out the tasks of active construc-
tion of what John Tresch calls cosmograms. This originally religious
term here gains a wider application, evoking the means designed to
show everything simultaneously within a single location, designed to
include artefacts that allow performance of a global system and practi-
cal interventions to overhaul or redeem world orders. The cartographic
assemblages of the Casa de la Contratacin, Humboldtian schemes for
panoramas and earth charts, the visionary Comtian temples of the cult of
Positivism, and the physiocratic tableau of inputs and outputs evoked by
Deirdre McCloskey, all evince these fascinating features of world-making
and laborious performance.
There is here an immediate resonance with dAlemberts defini-
tion of encyclopaedism as the project of collecting knowledge into
the smallest area possible and of placing the philosopher at a vantage
point high above this vast labyrinth, yet another kind of extraterres-
trial perspective. The sublime schemes for the vast and allegedly uni-
versal libraries of Baroque and Enlightenment Europe show how
cosmogram construction worked. Layout of shelving, book design and
classification, architectonic bibliography, and library architecture both
INTRODUCTION 23
embodied and struggled with attempts to assemble knowledge in con-

crete and practical terms. Aesthetics was combined with the mythology
of unending order: far from distracting attention from the spectacle
of the books, tienne Boulle declared of his utopian Royal Library
(1784), it would offer only that decoration necessary to give yet more
brilliance and nobility to this beautiful place. Significantly, however,
the aesthetic programme accompanied a deeply consequential reor-
dering of knowledge spaces: in the name of enabling an unbounded
future of print and its expansion, books were shifted to stacks behind
the scenes; the immediate connexion between the work of reading and
that of envisaging the collection was forever broken, and spaces of stor-
age and curatorship were summoned into existence.36 The aesthetics and
politics of open storage evoked here by Anke te Heesen descend directly
from this new cosmogram of learning. Cosmograms matter because they
involve performance, often on a vast scale, not a restricted kind of rep-
resentation. The explicitly engineered and doubtless partial qualities of
such constructs thus provide rich material for the respectful but attentive
analysis of claims to universal knowledge.37
An important prompt for the analysis of such claims offered in this
volume was the apparently unprecedented resources and challenges
of the digital interfaces that enable global knowledge systems. A bet-
ter history of cosmograms may show that this predicament is neither
entirely new nor effortlessly universal. Steve Crossans discussion of
the Google cosmogram directly addresses the puzzle. He identifies
the challenges of reconciling putatively individual points of view with
the unavoidable fact that such information is always already formatted
in ways that govern choice and action: the tool absolutely conditions
what you can create. Nor is it simply that a given cosmogram, however
tentative and partial, directs and constrains the action of its members; it
is also the case, much discussed towards the close of this volume, that
every cosmogram is made in a world already occupied by many others.
The cases of the Sala Bologna, which quizzically engaged with prior
papal cosmological maps, or of Bettmanns development of thumbnails
and subsequent online exploitation of the technique, which sought
simultaneously to reassure and disconcert the image banks users, illu-
minate this dilemma.
Contributors agreed that storytelling can be one key means through
which these relations with existing practices and institutions are negoti-
ated and, in principle, resolved. No doubt the relation between global
24 S. SCHAFFER
knowledges and historically contingent notions of the global plays its role
here, since those notions must form part of a host of very different nar-
ratives and performances that give worlds their realities. This is exactly
the sense of Deirdre McCloskeys insistence on the role of rhetorical per-
suasion: science uses art for urgent practical purposes daily.38 At the
moment of technological industrialisation that some geologists favour
as the golden spike of the Anthropocene, McCloskey urges that nature,
power, and the state were all reconfigured through innovative rhetori-
cal and disciplinary reorganisation.39 In one of the most brilliant analyses
of those later eighteenth-century cosmograms, Mona Ozoufs history of
the festivals of the French Revolution, the historian sagely notes that the
pedagogy and ideology of these great ceremonials were always accompa-
nied by, and in many cases overlaid by, commentary, writing, speech, and
inscription. It was as if those who choreographed and performed these
cosmologic events remained convinced of the weakness of their mere
imagery and design. Nothing goes without saying: that might be the
slogan of Revolutionary aesthetics.40
Lodestar, Richard Powers closing narrative for the volume, explores
exactly this aesthetic and political principle of excessive talk and the
dream of perfect knowledge. A cunning evocation of database as voice,
commentary, and guide is used to show how maps are territories, how
the entire system of labour, curatorship, and production must be co-
present yet weirdly invisible on each and every occasion when the world
is navigated; as John Tresch concludes, in telling you everything you
want to hear, it is telling you who you are. It is certainly apt that this
volume therefore ends with a meditation on mirrors and their corrective,
uncanny, and cosmological functions. An entrepreneur of global image
banks such as Otto Bettmann observed that, for the moderns, the vast
assemblage of graphic print, news, and data formats provided a mirror
that would enable them to see themselves grow.41 The collection seeks
to understand the many worlds like this, constructed as forms of seques-
tration and, simultaneously, of reflexion. It is as though, somehow, one
could at last be redeemed by making many different mutually insulated
worlds, each of which mirrors others yet somehow corrects and reforms
their grave errors. A kind of surreal gaze is needed to see all these worlds
simultaneously. As is evident in what follows, that gaze is a major con-
cern of this book: From the remote depth of the corridor, the mirror
spied on us. We discovered, so Borges wrote in 1941, that mirrors
have something monstrous about them.42
INTRODUCTION 25
Notes
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions (1941, London: John Calder, 1965), 17.
2. Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe, The migration of the aura, or
how to explore the original through its facsimile, in Pasquale
Gagliardi (ed.), The Miracle of Cana: the Originality of the
Reproduction (Venice: Fondazione Cini, 2011), 10615.
3. Valrie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hbner and Bruno Latour,
Entering a risky territory: space in the age of digital navigation,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010),
58199, on p.586.
4. Elizabeth Pisani, Has the internet changed science?, Prospect
Magazine, 17 November 2010.
5. All too much: monstrous amounts of data, The Economist, 25
February 2010; Kate Crawford, Kate Miltner and Mary Gray,
Critiquing Big Data: politics, ethics, epistemology, International
Journal of Communication 8 (2014), 166372.
6. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global
History since 1900 (London: Profile, 2006), 7.
7. Geof Bowker and Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification
and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1999); Lisa
Gitelman (ed.), Raw Data is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, MA.:
MIT Press, 2013).
8. David Turnbull with Helen Watson, Maps are Territories, Science is
an Atlas (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1989), 61.
9. Michel Callon, The embeddedness of economic markets in eco-
nomics, in Callon (ed.), The Laws of the Markets (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998), 157, on pp.2332.
10. Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a
Philosophical Theory of Globalisation (Cambridge: Polity, 2013),
1067.
11. J.B.Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of
Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001),
2001.
12. Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London:
Allen Lane, 2012), 4023.
13. Robert Darnton, Philosophers trim the Tree of Knowledge: the
epistemological strategy of the Encyclopdie, in Darnton, The
Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
26 S. SCHAFFER
(New York: Vintage, 1985), 191213, on p.195; Roger Chartier,

Larbre et locan, in Roland Scher (ed.), Tous les Savoirs du
Monde: Encyclopdies et Bibliothques de Sumer au 20e Sicle (Paris:
Flammarion, 1996), 4825.
14. Jean dAlembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of
Diderot, translated by Richard N.Schwab (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 5758.
15. Brotton, History of the World in Twelve Maps, 41920, 4267.
16. Nader Vossoughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis
(Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2008); Christopher Johnson, Memory,
Metaphor and Aby Warburgs Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2012).
17. Perry Anderson, Modernity and revolution, New Left Review
114 (1984), 96113, on pp.1045.
18. Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner
(London: Routledge, 1990), 105.
19. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion
(New York: Zone, 2004), 242, 257.
20. Vossoughian, Otto Neurath, 103110.
21. Ruth Dawson, Collecting with Cook: the Forsters and their arti-
fact sales, Hawaiian Journal of History 13 (1979), 516, on
pp. 1314; Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: the Voyages of Captain
Cook (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 2312; Marshall Sahlins,
Cosmologies of capitalism: the trans-Pacific sector of the
world-system, Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988),
151, on p.5.
22. J.C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on his
Voyages of Discovery: the Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery
17761780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 995.
23. Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the

Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern
Europe (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, 1998),
98101; Johnson, Warburgs Atlas of Images, 140.
24. Otto L.Bettmann, Bettmann: the Picture Man, ed. Skip Sheffield
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 910, 6667.
25. Mara Miniati, Les Cistae Mathematicae et lorganisation des con-
naissances au XVIIe sicle, in Christine Blondel, Franoise Parot,
Anthony Turner and Mari Williams (eds.), Studies in the History of
Scientific Instruments (London: Turner Books, 1989), 4351.
INTRODUCTION 27
26. Daniel Rosenberg, Data before the Fact, in Gitelman, Raw

Data is an Oxymoron, 1540, on pp. 2026; Mary Poovey, A
History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of
Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
3046.
27. Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, 175.
28. Bruno Latour, The promises of constructivism, in Don Ihde and
Evan Selinger (eds.), Chasing technoscience: Matrix for Materiality
(Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2003), 2746.
29. David Turnbull and Wade Chambers, Enabling Diverse

Knowledges: Trails and Storied Spaces in Time, in James Leach
and Lee Wilson (eds.), Subversion, Conversion, Development: Cross-
cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design (Cambridge,
MA.: MIT Press, 2014), 15382, on pp.16870.
30. David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative
Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge
(Amsterdam: Harwood, 2000), 1224.
31. Charles Sanders Peirce, Prolegomena to an apology for pragmati-
cism, The Monist 16 (1906), 492546, on pp.4923.
32. Bruno Latour, What if we talked politics a little?, Contemporary
Political Theory 2 (2003), 14364, on pp.1456.
33. Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and
Politics in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2005), 14152.
34. Bruno Latour, Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics? Comments
on the peace terms of Ulrich Beck, Common Knowledge 10 (2004),
45062, on p.451.
35. Geoff Eley, Historicising the global, politicizing capital: giving
the world a name, History workshop journal 63 (2007), 15488,
on p.158.
36. Thomas A.Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in
the Origin of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993),
177.
37. Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux, Cosmograms (New
York: Lukas and Sternerg, 2005); John Tresch, Technological
world-pictures: cosmic things and cosmograms, Isis 98 (2007),
8499.
38. Dierdre N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd edition
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 21.
28 S. SCHAFFER
39. Paul J.Crutzen, Geology of mankind, Nature 415 (3 January

2002), 23.
40. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge,
MA.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 214.
41. Bellamy Partridge and Otto Bettmann, As We Were: Family Life in
America, 1850-1900 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1946), 180.
42. Borges, Fictions, 1718.
PART I
Visions: How Aesthetics and

Museology Affect the Ways in Which
Worlds can be Shown and Known
CHAPTER 3
Re-visioning the World:

MappingtheLithosphere
Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton
Everything is dynamic about the planet we inhabit, from its rotation and
orbiting to being orbited. The weather changes from day to day, while
the climate changes over a longer time scale. The epochs of geological
time are getting shorter as they approach the present. The next is likely
to be the shortest of all: the Anthropocene epoch, an age of ever-greater
terra-forming, as humanity intervenes with the rhythms of terrestrial life
on earth. We are a terra-forming species, and though we might dream of
making other planets inhabitable, at our current moment in time we are
most active in reshaping our own earth; the planet is now a human artifact
in many significant ways.
Editors note: The terra-forming installation to which the authors allude is the
three-dimensional map of the earths lithosphere discussed in the Preface by
Pasquale Gagliardi; they describe it in greater detail below. The project has not
yet been realized, but its possibility informed the entire Dialogue of 2012 as a
constant reference point for our discussions. This chapter offers a theoretical and
historical rationale for the project, grounding it in a history of attempts to map
the globe as a dynamic physical entity.
A. Lowe (*)
Factum Arte Foundation, Madrid, Spain
J. Brotton
Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_3
32 A. LOWE AND J. BROTTON
In what follows we offer a genealogy of terra-forming, culminating in

the discussion of a proposed installation that we argue will offer a critical
and artistic reflection on the emerging Anthropocene moment.
The earth is in flux, irrevocably marked by humanitys depredations,
and so is its physical composition. Do we consider the ice on the polar
caps to be part of the hydrosphere or the lithosphere? Is the pedosphere
a subset of the lithosphere? How can bathometric and topographic read-
ings be taken with any accuracy when the lithosphere itself is not stable?
The lithosphere is the rigid outermost shell of a rocky planet which is
influenced by the dynamic nature of the asthenosphere, the viscous but
mechanically weak and ductilely deforming sphere responsible for the
movement of the tectonic plates and isostatic adjustments.
In 1694 Willem and Jan Goeree produced one of the first images of
the globe without water for Thomas Burnets speculative cosmogony
Telluris Theoria Sacra (The Sacred Theory of the Earth). It contains
an attempt to depict the undulations of the ocean floor, and proposed a
hollow earth model with all the water on the inside prior to The Flood.
However, Burnets calculations reveal that there was not enough water in
the combined spheres to cover the entire land mass (Fig. 3.1).
The Goerees illustration shows that the idea of removing the water
and considering the spirit in the mass of what we might call the
hard stuff is not new. It has crossed the mind of many thinkers who
have thought about the earth as anything other than a resource to be
exploited. But mapped onto the outside of a sphere, it remains a con-
cept that does not resemble the world as we experience it. As a result, it
cannot be walked over and engaged with: it needs to be projected. The
globe needs to become a landscape that can be traversed and discussed
as we engage with it from different points of view. The act of projecting
the surface of the globe onto a rectangle is a representation that belongs
in the ethnosphere. From the first clay maps of the earth found in mod-
ern-day Iraq dating from the Babylonian period (sixth-century BCE) to
Google Earths digital cartographic mediations, we need to occupy the
central point in our own world.
The first systematic attempt to map the whole earth based on Greco-
Roman knowledge is actually surprisingly late: it comes in 150 AD, in
Alexandria, at the very end of a period of Hellenic culture that had domi-
nated so much of the Mediterranean: Claudius Ptolemys Geography. The
book described the Greek ecumene (settled communities), as well as how
to draw world maps, and a gazetteer, or index of places, for over 8000
locations known to the Hellenic World. Ptolemy made two important
RE-VISIONING THE WORLD: MAPPING THE LITHOSPHERE 33
Fig. 3.1 The first map of the lithosphere. Willem Goeree, Voor-Bereidselen Tot de
Bybelsche Wysheid Gebruik der Heilige, Amsterdam 1690
assumptions. First, that the earth is a globe, though his focus was only
on what the Greeks believed was its inhabited areas. He did not believe
the inhabited world extended more than 16 degrees south of the equator.
Second, he acknowledged that any attempt to map the whole globe onto
a flat surface would create distortions, and cartographers would have to
make compromises. His solution was to offer two methods of projecting
the known world onto a flat surface.
His first projection looks like a cone. It has straight meridians that fan
out from a point above the North Pole, and curved parallels. Ptolemy
pointed out that this method had the advantage of being easier to draw.
But it caused serious distortion just south of the equator, where the
meridians suddenly turn into acute angles in a clumsy attempt to mimic
the earths curvature. Ptolemy then goes on to offer a second projec-
tion. It covers the same space, but represents both parallels and merid-
ians as curved arcs in a closer imitation of a sphere. Ptolemy preferred
this method, but admitted that it still retained distortions, although his
main worry was that it was more difficult to draw curved parallels and
meridians.
Ptolemy was not terribly concerned with representing the whole sphere.
His only interest was in representing the Greek ecumene, the known inhab-
ited world. This stretches from the Canary Islands in the west to Korea in
the east; around 60 degrees north (Scandinavia) and 16 degrees south of
the equator. This is classic egocentric mapping, working outward from
a culturally defined center, from which space is imagined as empty and
homogenous. Both projections are based on defining principles of Greek
geocentric and geometric belief (inherited from Aristotle and Euclid) that
valorized the circle as the perfect plane figure, and the sphere as a perfect
solid. As a result the world out there can be mapped according to a
purely geometrical template, using a graticule of latitude and longitude,
within which it is possible to plug in locations, a process which is infinitely
extensible.
Other cultures used different forms of subliminal geometry to imag-
inatively abstract the whole earth. In early imperial China, the founda-
tional cosmological principle was that of the nonary square. This was
divided into nine squares to make a 3 3 grid. The nonary square was
used in the allocation of agricultural land, and the number nine shaped
most elements of Chinese culture (like fields of heaven and divisions
of the body). This found its way into regional and ultimately world
maps, like the Yu Ji Tu map of China, composed of a cartographic
grid of 5000 squares, each side representing approximately 50 kilome-

ters. These maps influenced later Korean examples, like the Kangnido
Map. Their orientation is to the north, based on imperial ideology:
the emperor looks down (or south) on his subjects who look up
(north) (Fig. 3.2).
At the same time the rise of the theological geography of Christianity
and Islam showing the whole earth abandoned geometry in favor of nar-
ratives of faith and salvation. In Christianity this led to world maps with
east at top. In Islam many (though not all) world maps were oriented with
Fig. 3.2 Yu Ji Tu map of China, 1136. Courtesy Library of Congress

south at the top, because most converts to Islam lived north of Mecca,
leading them to regard the qibla or sacred direction as due south. The
rediscovery of Ptolemy and its application to the period of European sea-
borne expansion and discovery led to a whole range of global projections
which struggled to accommodate the geometrical legacy of the Greeks
and Ptolemy in particular (Fig. 3.3).
Martin Waldseemllers 1507 world map is celebrated as not only the
first known map to name America but also the first to represent the
Pacific Ocean. Its title is a Universal Cosmography according to the tra-
dition of Ptolemy and the voyages of Americus Vespuccius and others.
Although Waldseemller knew that the content of Ptolemys Geography
was wrongVespuccis discoveries proved thathe still returned to the
form of Ptolemys projection to frame his new map, a modified version of
Ptolemys second projection, which Ptolemy said was better for retain-
ing the shape of the globe. The result is an awkward distortion of the
meridians to the south, and even greater distortion in the far west and
east. Waldseemller tried to force the new discoveries into the frame of
Ptolemys 1500-year-old methods, stretching them to breaking point.
The Greeks had revered the circle, the Chinese the square; and by
the late seventeenth century it was the application of the triangle that,
as far as the French were concerned, would ultimately make the earths
surface knowable. The development of surveying methods using tri-
angulation in France in the late seventeenth century led to the great
national surveys of first the Cassini dynasty of several generations of
mapmakers, and then the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey in the
British Isles (Fig. 3.4).
If there is one moment we can identify as capturing a shift in this imagi-
native perspective, then it must be December 1972, with the release of this
photograph taken by astronauts on board NASAs Apollo 17 spacecraft.
Here, finally, was the subject of geography, captured by not a map or a
geographer but an astronaut using a Hasselblad camera. The photo of the
fragile Blue Earth floating in space is often seen as an inspiration for the
emergent environmental movement. But we can see now that it also antic-
ipated the emergence of another very new cartographic initiative: digital
mapping, driven by the availability of geodetic data of the earth, already
being captured by satellites and used in military intelligence, but by the
end of the twentieth century commercially available to computer software
companies with the capacity to build applications like Bing, Google, and
Apple Maps. Rather than struggling upward through layers of geography
to rise above the earth in an act of transcendence, these geospatial tech-
Fig. 3.3 Waldseemller 1507 world map. Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii
RE-VISIONING THE WORLD: MAPPING THE LITHOSPHERE
alioru[m]que lustrationes. Saint Di, France. Courtesy Library of Congress

37
Fig.3.4 Jean
Picard, diagram of
triangles used to
measure the merid-
ian south of Paris.
Jean Picard, La
Mesure de la Terre,
1671
Fig. 3.5 Apollo 17 Blue Earth photo, 1972. Image courtesy NASA Johnson
Space Center
nologies zoomed down on it, with techniques characterized by miniatur-

ization, compression, and the annihilation of distance (Figs. 3.5 and 3.6).
Google grasped earlier than anyone else the synergy between the digi-
tal representation of the globe and globalization. Once they began to see
that over a third of all Google searches contained explicit geographical con-
tent, they began monetizing mapping as never before, by making digital
geographical data fungible (capable of quantification and mutual substitu-
tion with other commodities). So a typical online map can include: direct
advertising; search advertising; paid listings; payment for sales point display;
payment for Application Programming Interface (enabling the map to be
displayed on a third-party website); and various other syndication and licens-
ing to third parties. In 2007 Michael T Jones, Googles Chief Technology
Advocate, claimed that Google inverts the role of web browser as applica-
tion and map as content, resulting in an experience where the planet itself is
the browser. But of course when conducting such a search, the user is not
just consulting Googles data but also they are adding to it: and that is the
kind of fungible data that advertisers will pay for.
Fig. 3.6 Marc Quinn, from The Eye of History series, 2013. Copyright Marc
Quinn Studio
We could say that the map is now mapping us. This is exemplified in
a series of Marc Quinns recent paintings, The Eye of History. Are we
looking out or in at a world of global surveillance and personal data col-
lection? This is also a globalized world defined by parochialism rather
than geographical expansiveness. The mantra of geospatial technology is
Waldo Toblers First Law of Geography (1970): Everything is related
to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.
Globalization valorizes what is near to us, because the law of demand sug-
gests that we are more likely to buy things that are near to us rather than
further away. And as if to underline this fact, what is the first thing most
of us do when we use an online mapping service? We zoom in on what is
near at hand, usually our own home.
We have become over-familiar with projections which put the north
at the top and the south at the bottom. There are many different ways of
projecting the globe onto a flat map, but what triumphed was Mercators
method (Fig. 3.7).
RE-VISIONING THE WORLD: MAPPING THE LITHOSPHERE
Fig. 3.7 Gerard Mercators map of the world using his famous 1569 projection. Public Domain
41
Mercator offers a projection which enables navigators to sail east to

west, so he stretches the map from north to south, creating his infa-
mous distortions. From where Mercator stands, the world is driven by an
eastwest commercial and navigational axis, so north comes at the top and
south at the bottom, influenced by magnetism. Mercators global projec-
tion was challenged explicitly in 1973, when the German Socialist Arno
Peters produced what he called an equal-area world map. Peters accused
Mercators map of being imperialist and Eurocentric. His method offered
a different way of projecting the globe onto a flat surface. Its most impor-
tant element was the equality of surface area. This, Peters believed, put
the Third World on an equal footing with the First World. But just
like Mercator, Peters magnified some things at the expense of others. The
poles are still distorted to infinity. Peters urged that no global projection
could ever be neutral or completely accurate.
The distortions caused by both Mercator and Peters projection reveal
a great deal. The polar ice caps are stretched to infinity losing their both
shape and significance. The region occupied by the developed and trad-
ing world corresponds to eye level, sitting comfortably in the top third,
disproportionately large and dominant. The Mediterranean occupies
the central position. This was a comforting and familiar position for the
European cartographers who were primarily serving the needs of the trad-
ing nations. There was nothing of commercial importance in the polar
regions; their gross distortion was a small price to pay for the prioritization
of economic imperatives.
Now our needs are different. The icecaps are important both for the
speed at which they are melting and for the minerals and resources they
hold. Taking an equi-rectangular projection and revolving the point of
view so that only sea occupies the zone at the top and the bottom changes
our point of view in significant ways. Antarctica appears on the right of
the map, a significant land mass with a clear relationship with Australia.
If the vast thickness of ice was removed, the two landmasses would form
one surface as they did before the movement of the tectonic plates drove
them apart. The familiar shape of Africa has become unsettlingly warped
but it has assumed a size that reflects its physical importance. The relation-
ship between Europe, Russia, Canada, Greenland, and Alaska around the
North Pole makes it clear why this is rapidly becoming a disputed zone.
Every representation is partial and of its time. The projection we
produced at Factum Arte in 2012 is an equi-rectangular projection like
Mercators. North is no longer on top, south no longer at the bottom.
This is a terra-centric projection which mainly stretches water to infin-
ity at top and bottom. The movement of Argentina and Chile away from
Antarctica is alienating to the modern eye; Japan is harder to identify as
it moves toward the top of the map; and Tristan da Cuna (at the bot-
tom) and Midway Atoll (at the top) have effectively disappeared as they
undergo an elastic stretch beyond the bounds of our ability to identify
them. This projection may seem initially unsettling, but this is part of its
purpose, as well as providing a more compelling image of our world in the
twenty-first century than the familiar north-up projection.
Like many maps it uses tone to express information. In this case white
represents the highest points on the map and black the lowest. Mount
Everest is the whitest point, the Mariana Trench the blackestbetween
these two points a gradation of tone represents height. Current sea level
is shown as slightly lighter than mid-tone gray. The topographic data is
accurate to one measured point every 500 meters and the bathymetric
data is accurate to one measured point every kilometer. Unlike in most
maps there is no water in the oceans. This is a map of the hard stuff ,
not the fluid stuff. The X and Y axes are at the same scale but the Z
axis has been magnified 100 times. The physical map reproduced here
has been made by carving a gradated block of pigmented plaster on a
Computer Numerical Control (CNC) router, but it could have been
built in layers using an additive process of cut paper with contour lines
to describe the changes in height. While this is in keeping with the lan-
guage of cartography, it was decided that the subtractive process reso-
nated better with the way the earth was formed.
During the research and development phase there were many influences
that conditioned the final form of both the projection and the resulting
relief map: the giant silver map made by Al-Idrisi (and since lost) for Roger
II of Sicily in the twelfth century; James Wylds Great Globe which stood
in Leicester Square from 1851 to 1862; Elise Reclus proposal for the
World Expo in Paris in 1900; Cyrus Reed Teeds compelling arguments
for a Hollow Earth in the early twentieth century; Tom Van Sants famous
map of the world without clouds; the remarkable scale models of fortified
French cities made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Herbert
Bayers World Geo-Graphic atlas; Biosphere II; the stories of Borges; and
new discoveries in neuro-science and geospatial technologies.
However, there is another important factor. The emergence of three-
dimensional (3D) input and output devices is changing the way we think
about and materialize models of our environment. New models are now
possible that are changing the ways we can understand and relate to car-
tography as a realistic representation of the world out there.
Representing the Planet as It Writes

ItsOwnHistory
In early 2012 the exhibition La France en ReliefChefs doeuvre de la
collection des plans-reliefs de Louis XIV Napolon III was held in the
Grand Palais, Paris. It contained 16 of the 1:600 scale models that are
normally displayed or stored in the attic spaces of the Htel des Invalides.
They are models of the fortified cities of France and their primary pur-
pose was military. But they provide a remarkably accurate insight into how
these towns looked at the time they were surveyed. The largest model is
Cherbourg and its surrounds160 square meters of highly detailed mod-
eling. Linden wood buildings with papier-mch decoration, shredded silk
vegetation, sifted soil, and oil paint are some of the materials that animate
this Lilliputian world. At the exhibitions entrance was a detailed map on
the floor of France. As people walked in they could be watched, circling
around, orientating and then homing in, kneeling on the floor to find
the small black rectangle which marked their homea pre-digital Google
Earth. Google Culture was involved in the exhibition, providing multi-
screen displays, but it was clear that the virtual could not compete with
the physical in this instance. Factum Arte assisted Google Culture in an
attempt to make a miniature Google Earth from these relief models. The
technical challenges were complex and a panoramic photographic system
was used, mounted onto a linear guide. Multiple photographs were taken,
focused at different distancesa process known as focus stacking. Only
the sharpest pixels are selected, using software called Helicon Focus in
order to define the plane of focus for each focusing distance. Once you can
identify the exact position of both the plane and the edge of the object, a
3D model can be constructedeffectively laminar building in reverse. As
3D printing technologies develop and become familiar the metaphors of
additive and subtractive materialization processes enter common usage
and focus attention, changing the way we think about the formation of
the world itself.
There is a long history to the notion that the earth may be its own
best cartographerand that we learn how to represent it by studying
its internal processes. As Simon Schaffer put it in a discussion of a cru-
cial episode in the history of geology, The planet writes some of its
most important history through long sequences of layers of sedimented
rocks. Where the two sets of layers meet, one upon the other, geologists
find unconformities. In 17871788 the wealthy Scottish farmer James
Hutton searched for these junctions between layers to prove his theory
that the earth has seen eternal cycles oscillating between periods when
the strata were laid down in ancient sea beds and periods when inner
heat and pressure forced them upwards and changed their direction.1
Geological time stimulates the imagination. During the 1790s, Sir James
Hall, an atheist, democrat, and friend of the young Napoleon Bonaparte
ran a long series of trials to show how Huttons processes of sedimenta-
tion, erosion, and volcanic uplift would work in practice. He started with
lava and with limestone heated and reconstituted in the furnace of an
iron foundry (the furnace blew up at least once). Then Hall mimicked
strata formation by putting vast weights on layers of clay. Finally, he
claimed in a famous paper of June 1812 that huge tsunamis produced
by sudden upheavals of the ocean floor could have reshaped the earths
surface (especially round Edinburgh) and carried vast boulders across it.
He wrote: I have made a few experiments lately with explosions of some
pounds of gunpowder under water, in order to try the effect of sudden
impulse. In every case, a very manifest heave of the surface was produced
at the instant of the explosion, and at that same instant, a very smart
percussion was felt. This was always followed in two or three seconds by
a distinct and separate agitation of the water, occasioned by the rising of
the permanently elastic gases produced in the explosion. As Hall real-
ized, laminar building is never straightforward, whether at the scale of a
foundry or the earth itself.
Furthermore, the geological time scale relating stratigraphy to time
is beyond normal comprehension. In coming years, the international
Commission on Stratigraphy will decide if we have entered a new
geological epoch, the Anthropocene. If they approve the change, the
Anthropocene epoch will succeed the Holocene Interglacial Period that
began 11,500 years ago. When did the Anthropocene epoch start? This
has been a point of heated debate. Perhaps it started in Ur in present-
day Iraq, or with the industrial revolution in Coalbrookdale or with the
Apollo 17 photograph of 1972 taken from a known position in space.
What seems likely is that the Anthropocene will be the shortest geologi-
cal time span on record. In any case, the irreversible changes being made
will have a significant impact for millions of years. Traditionally, the
change from one era to epoch to another has been celebrated by driving
a gold spike into the exact point that bears witness to the exact moment
of change. But in the case of the Anthropocene it is more subtle, more
insidiouseven negotiable.
The Globe as a Model of Itself: The Removal of

the Hydrosphere
Terra-Forming, the construction of a relief map of the surface of the

globe without water, is our attempt to address the aesthetic dimension
of such an act of geological time-marking, while dissolving distinctions
between art and science. Our installation will be transformative and visu-
ally compelling; its scale is an important part of its sculptural form. While
it is a mathematically accurate map in terms of both the topographic and
bathymetric data, its aims are not limited by the rules that govern scientific
research and statistical analysis. This is a visceral and poetic proposal that
aims to provoke a sublime reaction in which questions and reactions well
up and physically and emotionally shape our perception of the world. It
will be dynamic. As the water slowly covers the surface in simulation of
the great flood, it will hopefully suggest many applications and provoke a
surge of conversations and ideas.
After several years discussing, presenting, and refining the idea, the
hydrophilic world is finding its form. It has only recently become pos-
sible to merge the bathymetric and topographical data at high-enough
resolutions to be meaningful. Many scientists need a relief map of this
resolution as an experimental tooland many artists are imagining its
poetic potential. By changing the projections orientation, exaggerating
the relief, and removing the water, the viewer is confronted with a world
that initially appears unfamiliar. The coastlines and boundaries everyone
normally assumes are gone. They are replaced with an alien, spiky terrain
that visitors can walk around, re-engaging with a world they thought they
knew, but had forgotten (Figs. 3.8 and 3.9).
The first scale models for this project, in three dimensions, have
already been completed in Madrid. The land-centric equi-rectangular
projection has been carved into a tonally layered block of plaster at 50
100 cm. The highest points are white. They are 8 cm above the darkest
points that represent depth. In this model the relief of the surface has
been exaggerated by a factor of 100 in order to draw attention to the
relief on the surface of the planet. With no exaggeration, when repre-
sented at this scale, the surface will be as smooth as a billiard ball. While
it is possible to cut a scale model on an accurate CNC routing machine,
the change of scale requires radical rethinking in terms of both process
and materials.
Fig. 3.8 Terra-centric equi-rectangular projection of the world, digital. Factum

Arte
Fig. 3.9 Terra-centric equi-rectangular projection of the world, routed. Factum

Arte
The Event
We propose that this 3D relief world map be installed on the Island of San
Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. It will be made in alabaster, and will be 20
40 3 meters. It is intended as a temporary installation. The water of the
lagoon will be slowly pumped onto the flattened earth over a period of
six days until, in a moment of sublime intensity, the tip of Mount Everest
is covered and the relief surface is only partially visible under the murky
water. There will be many points of drama and interest, such as when the
current sea level presents a reassuringly familiar world. But there will be
other moments which alarm and disturb, as Bangladesh or Siberia disap-
pear. The cycle of flood and recession will continue at a regular pace. This
poetic act alludes to the emotional debate about global warming, while
revealing a shocking new image of our globe seen from above. When full
of water, the vast sculpture will be used as a screen, and videos, both fac-
tual and artistic, will be projected onto the surface of the water. It will then
drain over a two-day period and the cycle will repeat until the installation
is moved.
The terra-forming relief map will be a platform for art and politics,
education and innovation. The performance will be visible from ground
level as visitors walk around the structure. It will be filmed from a camera
fitted on the bell tower of San Giorgio and from a balloon tethered above
the map. The image of the flood will be relayed onto screens and broad-
cast live over the internet in an event that will be designed to capture and
hold the public imagination. Public links to different cities will be estab-
lished. Social media will be used to communicate the dramatic nature of
the installation. Some moments will have more impact than others: these
will be published in advance and communicated to an international audi-
ence. Such communications would include the time the flooding begins,
historical information (e.g. the height of the sea level ten million years
ago), the current level, and future projections. With correct planning the
dynamic and transformative nature of this installation has the potential to
attract and capture the imagination of millions of people around the world
(Figs. 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12).
The public and performative aspects of our installation have strong
precedents in the history of exhibitions and world-makings. The great
imaginative cartographic projects have often captured the public
imagination. The model built in 1851 at 18.9 meters in diameter in
Leicester Square by James Wyld is a good example. It was originally
intended to open in time for the Great Exhibition but the construction
of the cast-iron sections that formed the sphere of almost 19 meters
diameter, the relief globe on the inside of the sphere modeled in plas-
ter of Paris with mountain ranges and rivers all to scale, the elegant
building, and the hydraulic platforms to lift the visitor to the desired
position, all took time. When it did open it became an instant sensation
attracting paying visitors in large numbers. The complicated nature of
the lease led to the creation of the Cosmos Institute and hopes of open-
Fig. 3.10 Terra-Forming montage. The proposed site in the Fondazione Giorgio
Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Factum Arte
Fig. 3.11 Terra-Forming montage. The proposed site in the Fondazione Giorgio
Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Factum Arte
Fig. 3.12 A detail of the 2 4 meter model that can be flooded and drained,
Factum Arte. The model was made for the Anthropocene Monument, an exhibition
curated by Bruno Latour and Bronislaw Szerszynski at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse,
October 2014
Fig. 3.13 Wyldes Globe in Leicester Square, Illustrated London News, 7 June 1851
Fig. 3.14 Reclus globe

project, sketch by Louis
Bonnier; IFA, Fonds Louis
Bonnier 18971898, doc.
R 35-39-36. In Alavoine-
Muller Soizic, Un globe
terrestre pour lExposition
universelle de 1900.
Lutopie gographique
dlise Reclus, LEspace
gographique 2/2003
(tome 32), pp. 156170
ing a national geographic and ethnological museum. But these failed

and the globe was demolished and sold for scrap in 1862 (Figs. 3.13
and 3.14).
The proposal for a 3D globe by anarchist geographer Elise Reclus for
the World Exposition of 1900 was designed to be 160 meters in diameter,
containing a second revolving globe of 127.5 meters in diameter. Reclus
project was never realized, but it continues to influence artists and imagi-
native thinkers. The Terra-forming installation we propose for Venice
and the Island of San Giorgio will be a notable contribution to this longer
history of remaking the globe in order to understand better the ways in
which it has made and is constantly remaking itself.
Note
1. Simon Schaffer, James Hutton, in Anish Kapoor, Adam Lowe,
and Simon Schaffer, Unconformity and Entropy (Madrid: Turner
Books, 2009), p. 192.
CHAPTER 4
Architects ofKnowledge
PierreChabard
Revisiting myths of universal knowledge is a crucial subject for our age and
its global data ecosystem. Going back in time, this chapter considers this
thematic of the present in relationship to what was happening a century
ago, from the early 1870s to 1914and in some respects we can extend
this period up to the Great Depression. This period had some points in
common with our own. First, it was unstable and uncertain. Second, it was
a period of economic development and increased international exchanges:
of goods, money, people, or information. Suzanne Berger has analyzed
this international phenomenon as the first globalization.1 Concerning
the scientific world, this period was also characterized by intensification
and internationalization of intellectual exchanges. From 1905 to 1914,
the number of international associations for scientific or intellectual coop-
eration exploded and new forms of communication flowered: congresses,
journals, and so on.
This transnational networking of knowledge, this Internationale
Scientifique, as the historian Anne Rasmussen called it, shared generous
ideals: humanism, cooperation, pacifism, scientific, and social progress.2
Facing the instability of this world, this Internationale Scientifique gener-
ated a large number of projects of totalization of universal knowledge:
P. Chabard (*)
cole Nationale Suprieure dArchitecture de Paris-La Villette, Paris, France

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_4
54 P. CHABARD
major encyclopedias of enlightenment were at that time fully revised

and complemented. The 9th and the 11th editions of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, finished in 1888 and 1911, respectively, have remained ref-
erences in his area. In parallel with these collective editorial enterprises,
this period was rich in individual initiatives aimed at creating systematic
documentary collections. Taking France as an example, we could men-
tion, for instance, Albert Kahn (18601940), a rich banker who devoted
his life and fortune to his world archive project, Les Archives de la Plante,
between 1909 and 1931the date of his bankruptcy due to the financial
crash of 1929. For 20 years he gathered an extensive collection of images
from all around the world, which finally contained 72,000 autochromes
and hundreds of hours of films. Jules Maciet was an art collector and
a founding member of the Union Centrale des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris.
Between 1886 and 1911 he undertook a massive collection of images in
order to document the work of decorative artists. In 25 years he gath-
ered nearly a million printed images that covered all fields of creation and
he organized them thematically in over 4000 albums conserved in the
Library of Decorative Arts. Ferdinand Brunot was a linguist. In 1911 he
created the Archives de la Parole at the Sorbonne, ancestor of the National
Sound Archive. During the 1910s he traveled across France with his pho-
nograph in order to record on wax cylinders provincial spoken languages,
dialects, patois, accents, popular songs, and oral tradition.
These collectors shared some points in common. First, they compulsively
sought to fix the materials of a world that was changing very rapidly. Second,
they manipulated not only texts but also objects, images, and sounds,
thereby anticipating the extensive concept of document as it would be
theorized in the 1930s.3 Moreover, they had to conceive of spaces, in which
not only to store these collections but also to organize them, to make them
accessible and intelligible, and possibly to exhibit them.
Topology ofKnowledge
It is precisely through their spatial and topological dimension, and to some
extent through their architecture, that these projects often distinguished
themselves from each other. This architectural or topological dimension,
this spatial organization of universal knowledge, may be fruitfully examined
through the comparison of two figures of the Internationale Scientifique.
The first important figure is Patrick Geddes (18541932), a Scottish natu-
ralist, general thinker, unsettling polymath, and social activist.4 Geddes
ARCHITECTS OFKNOWLEDGE 55
believed in popular education and dissemination of knowledge as vectors

of emancipation and social progress. The second, Paul Otlet (18681944),
was a Belgian lawyer and a utopian of classification of knowledge.5 He
devoted his energy and his family fortune to several universal projects and
in particular to what he called the Mundaneum, a chimerical international
meta-institution.
Geddes and Otlet, or rather their respective encyclopedic projects, make
for interesting comparison. First, these men were contemporary and com-
pletely aware of each other. Second, their projects were of a comparable
nature: these two encyclopedic projects didnt aim at a literary form, but
rather at a scenographic and museographic one. They were thus not only
two attempts at the classification of knowledge but also two attempts at
the spatialization and exhibition of it. They both tended toward a graphic,
scenographic, and architectural formalization. Neither was an architect, but
both had a topological and spatial way of thinking. Throughout their lives,
Geddes and Otlet unflaggingly explored the topological representation of
knowledge, testing, and mobilizing canonical forms arising from the ency-
clopedic tradition. Among these forms we can find the biblical motif of the
nave, or of the ark as a microcosm, as a miniature perfect world, as a closed,
autonomous form in tension with an open and even hostile environment.
Otlet once represented his Mundaneum as a Navis Mundaneum, that
is, an ark, floating on a raging ocean, symbol of the chaos of the world.6
Using the garden as a form combining leisure and study, nature and
culture, Geddes created pedagogical gardens around his Scots College in
Montpellier (France); the garden of the nine muses was one of its thema-
tized places were students themselves embodied mythological characters.
Geddes at times represented human history as an Arbor Saeculorum, using
the tree as an arborescent hierarchical and potentially increasing structure.
Arks, gardens, trees: what to make of these forms? They are at once
images, symbols, and topoin the sense of common places. They carry
ideological, poetic, or mythical content and moral values. These con-
tents also change over time, depending on the circumstances of their use.
However, it seems that something remains invariant in these forms: their
topological properties, which are independent from their appearance, or
their particular physical shape: all trees, for instance, regardless of their
type, have the same arborescent topology.
What is crucial in each of these forms is the topological figureone
might almost say the topological conceptwhich underlies it and which
involves a particular principle of organization and spatialization. Among
56 P. CHABARD
these topological figures, some recurred frequently in the work of the

encyclopedists at the turn of the twentieth century. Two were explored in
an insistent and even obsessive manner by Patrick Geddes and Paul Otlet:
the tower and the globeand these are in some way dialectically anti-
thetic. The tower and the globe are fundamental to the two lifelong proj-
ects of Geddes and Otlet. The Outlook Tower for the first, initiated in the
years 1890s, the Mundaneum for the second, initiated in the years 1910s.
These two complex programmatic assemblages were above all muse-
ums; they accommodated encyclopedic collections gathered by Geddes or
Otlet. But these two architectures were not simple containers or neutral
receptacles. Rather, they determined and structured relationships between
themselves and their contents. The tower and the globe are both spatial
categories and knowledge-organizing principles. These two topological
concepts, the meaning they carried and the very different ways in which
Geddes and Otlet articulated them, thus make it possible to compare, to
distinguish, and to differentiate these two apparently similar projects: the
Outlook Tower and the Mundaneum (Fig. 4.1).
Fig. 4.1 Design of a (never

built) Civic Museum and
Outlook Tower for an Ameri
can City, by the architect
Frank C. Mears for Patrick
Geddes, 1923 (Strathclyde
University Archives, Glasgow,
T-GED-22-1-1882)
Outlook Towers
Unlike the Mundaneum, the Outlook Tower was a building before being
an idea. It was a small six-story tower which Geddes acquired in 1892in
the heart of old Edinburgh.7 Until the 1910s, it constituted the center of
his encyclopedic and reforming activities; then, when his life led him far
from Edinburgh, the Outlook Tower accompanied him in the form of an
evolving idea which he sought to carry out elsewhere, sometimes in mod-
est and sometimes in madly ambitious forms. Two extreme examples of
the idea of the Outlook Tower were the project for a simple bookcase for
the Scottish Public Libraries in 1898 (in which each shelf corresponded to
a level of the tower)8 and the project for a skyscraper which Geddes tried
to export to the United States in 1923.9
The Outlook Tower was a vertical and hierarchical exhibit of the world,
in its both geographical and historical dimensions. Each level of the tower
corresponded to a scale in the apprehension of the universe. The highest
level proposed a panoramic view of the local environment. Going down the
levels, the view opened up until embracing the universal scale when reach-
ing the ground floor. The vertical and hierarchical organization induced
by the topological concept of the tower presented for Geddes undeniable
benefits. First, the anthropomorphic shape of the tower allowed for an
interesting analogy not only between the building and its visitor but also
between a panoramic view upon a territory and an encyclopedic view over
knowledge, both circular views. Second, the succession of the floor levels
allowed an analytical division of universal knowledge, like in the squares
of a table.
Nevertheless, for Geddes the tower form always raised a series of ques-
tions: How to combine the universality of human knowledge with the
relativity and specificity created by the local anchoring of the tower? How
to represent the globality, the unity, and the continuity of the world by
means of the local hierarchical and discontinuous form? In other words,
Geddes obsessively sought the better way to put the tower on the globe
and the globe in the tower, that is to say, to combine these two contradic-
tory forms (Fig. 4.2).
This problem led Geddes to work intensively with geographers in order
to envision new kinds of world cartographic representations. For exam-
ple, his Hollow Globe, an original geographical apparatus, offered for
purchase in the Outlook Tower,10 was a response to a double problem:
first, the inability of the tower to show the world beyond the horizon,
58 P. CHABARD
Fig. 4.2 Sketch of the Outlook Tower, drawn by Patrick Geddes, probably at the
end of the 1890s, presenting the different ways to look at the world from the
tower (Strathclyde University Archives, Glasgow, T-GED-14-1-14)
and second, the inability of the globe to show all its faces at the same
time. The Hollow Globe consisted in a central projection of the terrestrial
surface not onto the convex surface of the sphere of the globe but onto
the concave surface of a kind of bowl. In other words, it combined both
perspective and cartographic projections. The commercial brochure said:
The Hollow Globe shows a picture of the earths features as they would
be seen from the chosen point were the earth transparent.11 So it pro-
posed a globular representation of the world as viewed from the tower as a
relative center of the universe. The originality of this world representation
was that its shape depended on the place from which it was projected. It is
different from each point of the globe. In this respect, the Hollow Globe,
which was exhibited in a larger version in the tower, is a direct c artographic
expression of Geddess ideals: internationalism, pacifism, anti-imperialism,
and decentralization (Fig. 4.3).
Another crucial moment in Geddess researches coincided with the
World Fair of Paris in 1900, in which he took an active part. Two archi-
tectural projects particularly captured his attention: the first was the Great
Globe, the ambitious but failed project conceived by lise Reclus and
Fig. 4.3 Cover of George Guyou (alias Paul Reclus), The Hollow Globe. A New
Geographical Apparatus, n.d. [c. 1900] (Strathclyde University Archives, Glasgow,
T-GED-7-8-69)
60 P. CHABARD
designed by Louis Bonnier, a huge georama which was to represent the

universality of the world, in its both human and geographical dimen-
sions.12 Twenty-six meters in diameter, the globe would have contained
within itself a planetarium and a chronophotographical panorama of the
evolution of humanity, conceived by Etienne-Jules Marey.13 Although
it was not built, the Great Globe remained for Geddes a central refer-
ence throughout his life, in particular concerning a possible architectural
articulation between the tower and the globe. The other project was the
Cosmorama, built at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Forty-six meters in
diameter, this celestial sphere was a spherical panorama of the vault of the
heavens. It was conceived by the French architect and astronomer Paul
Louis Albert Galeron. Geddes was fascinated by both ludic and didactic
aspects of the building.
Meeting and collaborating with Reclus and Galeron nourished Geddes
in his quest for local exhibition of universal knowledge. Once back in
Edinburgh, he proposed to the Scottish Geographical Society a project for
a National Institute of Geography, a place of research and exhibition of the
evolutionary relationship between human communities and their physi-
cal milieu. The project, drawn by Galeron, combined a colossal Outlook
Tower with two globes: a revolving celestial sphere designed by Galeron
and a terrestrial relief globe designed by Reclus.14 This new attempt at
combining the tower and the globe as two forms for organization of
knowledge finally failed. Nevertheless, Geddes used Galerons compe-
tences to work out new exhibits for the Outlook Tower: for instance, a
hollow celestial sphere made of paper which one could individually try out
on the upper floor of the tower. This last example shows again the dia-
lectic articulation that Geddes sought to create between globe and tower,
between the globe-based representation of the world and the panoptic
and encyclopedic view upon knowledge, between a scopic view from out-
side and a circular view from inside. The same question can be examined
in the case of Paul Otlets museographic work and in particular in the
concept of the Mundaneum.
Mundaneums
The Mundaneum appeared relatively late in Otlets work. At the turn of the
1920s, at a critical time in his life, it appeared as a recapitulation and a cen-
tralization of all his previous endeavors. These included his bibliographical
project, initiated in 1895 with the foundation of the International Office
of Bibliography where Otlet developed his Rpertoire Bibliographique

Universel and invented in 1904 a Universal Decimal Classification system
(homologous to the Dewey system)15; his museographic project for the
visualization of universal knowledge, called Muse International, initiated
at the time of the World Fair of Brussels in 1910 and planned for installa-
tion in the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, before being interrupted
by the outbreak of the First World War; his internationalist project, that
is, the attempt to organize international, nongovernmental associations
through the foundation of the Union Internationale des Associations in
Brussels in 191016; and finally, his educational project, the Universit
Internationale, founded in Brussels in 1920, in which courses of lectures
were given by scholars from 15 universities in the world (Fig. 4.4).
Beginning from the Palais Mondial in 1910, the whole ideal of the
Mundaneum was to globalize, to combine these various institutions within
the same architectural and even urban organization. The topological con-
cept of the globe underpinned the Mundaneum. It constituted for Otlet
the ultimate symbol of the continuity and the unity of the world and of the
Fig. 4.4 Schematic model of the Mundaneum, exhibited at the Muse

International, n.d. [c.1920] (Paul Otlet Archives, Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium,
M.I.10, f.201)
62 P. CHABARD
cooperation between human beings. It was also the symbol of the sum-
mation of all his other internationalist works. The terrestrial globe was not
only used for the logo of the Union of International Associations but also
occupied the center of the ideal scheme of the Mundaneum, published in
1925.17 Indeed, a terrestrial globe adorned the entrance to the congress
room in the Palais Mondial during the 1920s. The globe also constituted
a model of tridimensional classification of universal knowledge as it was
represented in the Muse International by the Sphere of the World,
or Sphera Mundaneum, made of three circular rings: the horizontal one
represented the dimension of time, the front vertical one the dimension of
space, and the profile vertical one the dimension of things.
In 1928, while the architect Le Corbusier worked out the design of the
Mundaneum and World City in Geneva, Paul Otlet pushed him toward
circular and spherical forms. In a drawing he sent to Le Corbusier, he pro-
posed a circular building and encyclopedic exhibition about the geological
matter of the Earth and a spherical georama intended for the esplanade
of the Muse Mondial. As a synthesis of Galeron and Recluss projects for
the 1900 World Fairof which Otlet was awarethis globe combined a
geosphere, on its external surface, and a celestial sphere, on its internal
surface.
However, the recurrence of the globe is not enough to describe the
Mundaneum. From the globe, Otlet drew the idea of unity, continuity,
and totality, but the Mundaneum also embodied values that were foreign
to it, such as locality, hierarchy, centrality, panoptical and encyclopedic
visibility, which are values rather associated with the concept of the tower.
After his failed attempts to build a Mundaneum and a World City for the
Brussels World Fair in 1935, Otlet charged Maurice Heymans, a Belgian
architect, to design a little stand presenting the Mundaneum. In front of a
screen displaying many of Otlets other projects, a small monument would
ideally represent the Mundaneum. As Otlet explained it: It is composed
of three elements: the sphere, symbol of the unity and the connection of
all parts of the world; the pyramid, symbol of the Mundaneum itself and
whose levels correspond to its various departments; an orienting chart
[table dorientation], indicating the distance and the direction of all the
capitals compared to Brussels.18
The vertical and anthropomorphic proportions of Heymans pyra-
mid assimilated it to a tower with all its topological valuesfor example,
the discontinuity of the levels, which distinguished the various institu-
tions within the whole. But what the tower concept first instilled in the
Fig. 4.5 Allegorical representation of the Mundaneum engraved by Igor

Platounoff in 1938, and published as a greetings postcard (Paul Otlet Archives,
Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium, Box no. 4)
64 P. CHABARD
Mundaneum was the assertion of a center. One of the principal properties

of the Mundaneum was to centralize institutions, activities, and informa-
tion in space. Centrality constituted for Otlet a very effective principle of
organization. This is obvious, for example, in both architectural and dia-
grammatic appearances of his Union of International Associations.
And, basically, in order to mark the center of the world, the erection of
the tower is the most obvious gesture for Otlet. He particularly appreci-
ated this aspect of Hendrick Andersen and Ernest Hbrards project for a
World City that he supported for a long time. In 1913, Otlet wrote about
this project: The Scientific Centre is composed of a Tower of Progress
which majestically rises towards the skies, monumental symbol of progress
drawing humanity towards a common center where its interest will be
sheltered and protected. Because of its height, marconigrammes will reach
it from all parts of the globe. At its base, a universal Press would receive
and distribute all the most important news throughout the world.19
As we see, the tower is for Otlet more than a simple building. He dis-
tinguished at least three different levels of interpretation for this form: the
spatial level (architectural and urban), the spiritual level (allegorical and
symbolic) but also a technical level (in the technological organization of
international information) (Fig. 4.5).
The most ambitious architectural formalization of the Mundaneum
was undoubtedly that which Le Corbusier designed for Otlet between
1927 and 1929.20 Conceived as a city, the Mundaneum was organized
around a principal building sheltering the World Museum. This monu-
ment proposed a paradoxical synthesis between tower and globe: while
it was the culminating element, the building did not have a vertical order
like Hbrards Tower of Progress, but it rather seemed to seek the round-
ness of the earth. Despite their discontinuous and hierarchical appearance,
the stepped terracing hid in fact the most continuous form: a helical slop-
ing gallery which seamlessly described the globality of historical time and
geographical space.
Topological Divergences
Geddess Outlook Tower and Otlets Mundaneum were two complex
and chimerical attempts at a synthesis between the tower and the globe.
However, their propositions remained absolutely different. Geddes always
favored the tower over the globe. For him, it was the tower that had to
include the globe; the local was prior to the global; the globe was always
seen from a local point, according to an always particular profile. In each

city, he envisioned building a particular Outlook Tower as a relative and
decentralized means of accessing the totality of human knowledge and the
globality of the world.
On the contrary, Otlet favored the globe. The Mundaneum was first of
all international, transnational, and liberated from the local. By definition,
it embodied the single and unique center from which the globality of the
world would be revealed. Otlet once wrote: Our desire is that from one
point on the globe, the total image and the significance of the world can
be perceived and understood; that this point becomes a sacred, inspiring
place and coordinator of great ideas and noble activities.21 What interested
Otlet in the tower was its centralizing function, to build the neutral center
of a pacified world. What interested Geddes in the globe was its unbounded
roundness, to prolong the limited horizon of each particular place.
In any attempt at totalizing universal knowledge, architecture is a cru-
cial parameter, not only in the sense of a spatial arrangement of the places
where this knowledge is elaborated, stored, or exhibitedwhat Christian
Jacob called les lieux de savoir22but also in the more abstract sense of
the topological properties which articulate its contents: vicinity, adjacency,
hierarchy, succession, continuity, compactness, convexity, and so on. One
aspect of our debate could be to further discuss the dynamic relationship
between these two registers.
Debate
Deirdre N.McCloskey
This was extremely interesting. It seems that all these schemes are central-
izing, aiming in the style of Jeremy Benthams panopticon to bring every-
thing under one pair of eyes. There is a promise of control. It reminds me
of early positivism and its enthusiasm for knowledge and control. Now,
theres another view that what works best is a marketa free market as
opposed to a centrally planned one. In The Use of Knowledge in Society
(1945), Friedrich Hayek said that knowledge is local. Sticking to encyclo-
pedias and observing it from afar is not the same thing as local knowledge;
for Hayek, you need a free market to assemble the local knowledge. In
an odd sense, for Hayek the free market is an encyclopedia. It is a central
planner, except its a central planner without a central planner, whereas
your examples personify the central planner. Is that right?
66 P. CHABARD
Pierre Chabard
Centralization is a fundamental principle in both projects. However, there
is an important distinction in the case of Patrick Geddes. These knowledge
centers are decentralized objects in the territory: there is no parent orga-
nization which would hierarchically control all the decentralized institu-
tions. Each small town, potentially, could have its Outlook Tower which
would allow everyone to be aware of the universality of the world. This
priority of the local in the Outlook Tower is perfectly illustrated in the
Hollow Globe, which seems to be a completely new cartographic inven-
tion, based on the idea that the world map has a different shape depending
on where it is displayed. For each point on the globe where an Outlook
Tower is built, the map is reconstructed. That seems to be, in the case of
Geddes, a kind of antidote to the centralizing and scopic drive both of
these people share.
But there is another approach to the problem of centrality for these two
characters: the difference between the universal ambition of their projects
and their social and institutional marginality. Both were always outsiders;
they never managed to acquire a central position in society. Geddes was
a naturalist, specializing in marine biology, but he never built a university
career, and remained on the sidelines. Paul Otlet, a lawyer by training and by
necessity, always invested his energy in his universalist personal projects; for
a time they were subsidized by public authorities, but from the late 1910s
they gradually lost this support and in the end were financially ruined.
Geddes and Otlet had the ambition to globalize universal knowledge
when they were, themselves, at the margins of their world. In any proj-
ect of totalization of universal knowledge, it is important to identify who
the actors are. Whether these actors are dominant, and in power, or,
on the contrary, marginal, completely changes the perspective and the
significance of these projects. In the case of Otlet, there was a political will
to go against the imperialist antagonism rising during this period among
the major European nation-states. His enterprises were explicitly attempts
to oppose imperialism, to introduce a kind of counter-power.
Elizabeth Pisani
You describe this as a desire to control: centralizing knowledge on index
cards in one physical location. But that is also potentially a way of allow-
ing people to find a local knowledge more easily. So it is not necessarily
the need to control all knowledge by bringing it together; it also makes

organic tagging and other things no longer necessary; we can now find the
specific directly without going to a universal center of knowledge to find
our specific information.
Bruno Latour
There is actually a book on the architecture of the marketplace, Peter
Sloterdijks Globes. Your paper seemed to be a beautiful commentary on
the question of spheres and the Crystal Palacethe fictional architecture
of the marketplace as a space of competition. Im interested in two points.
One of them is the anxiety of classifyingwhich differentiates the images
you showed. Some of your images were of long rows of archives. But
there is also question of displays that take the form of a globe, which is
Sloterdijks question. Why is knowledge presented always in the shape of a
ball? This is something very strange in the history of the West. Of course
there is theology and Platonism, with this logic of circular emanations, but
the question remains. Id also like to mention Philippe Descola, and his
argument that in analogism, the obsession for classification and arranging
never stops. So all this obsessive classification shows that perhaps we have
never been naturalists, despite what Descola says. Your paper is a beau-
tiful example, because the encyclopedists have always been there. From
Humboldts time everybody has always been trying to organize, with
this same anxietywhich naturalists are not supposed to have, according
to Descola. The naturalist has to be relaxed, because the laws of nature
unfold on their own; it is only we, the humans, who have fights about it.
But in fact they are very anxious, as we see in Otlets obsessive files of facts.
My second question is this. It seems that the naturalists are anxious in
two different ways. First, in accumulating the capital of that asset of huge
archives; and then in showing them. So what you just said, that these two
were a bit marginal, is striking, because it means the display is part of the
pedagogical goal; collecting is not enough. So what do you think about
the accumulation of that asset, not just the display?
Pierre Chabard
I think there is a big difference between the two characters: Otlet was
a compulsive accumulator, and I think his plans died of suffocation.
Whenever initiatives met an obstacle, he answered by an even greater
68 P. CHABARD
ambition: his universal bibliographic repertory reached 15 million pages.

When state funding became scarce, instead of reducing the activities of his
Office of Bibliography, he decided instead to expand to images, sounds.
In situations of difficulty, he was dominated by the drive for accumulation.
Bruno Latour
But the pathology of accumulation and the pathology of display are
not the same. One sentence in your presentationterrarum humanitas
unita, humanity united throughout the worldis very interesting for the
Anthropocene. People never doubt that the thing to be shown, the globe,
is united, and they apparently never doubt that humanitas is united, which
is of course the big question of the Anthropocene: neither the anthropos
nor the thing, the earth, is united. So it is quite extraordinary, a sort of
paradox, that before there was Gaia, there were lots of globalists, and now
that there is Gaia there is no globe, no globalism. Its amazing, the timing
of Gaia. This is what I will be talking about in my chapter.
Anke te Heesen
Your paper is, for me, a paper about inside and outside. You have shown
us so many towers from the outside. So my question is about what is
inside the tower, and not only inside the globe. What is inside the tower
of Geddes?
Pierre Chabard
Geddes was fascinated by display, by the setting of things. His collections
were left unfinished or embryonic, but that didnt matter to him. What
mattered was the way they were put in space, exhibited with pedagogical
and didactic purpose. So within the tower, at times, there were relatively
empty rooms. For example, in the floor dedicated to Scotland, there was
a large map of the country painted on the ground; in the room dedicated
to the World, a large globe manufactured by Elise Reclus simply occupied
the center. The more developed levels were in the higher floors, includ-
ing one dedicated to Edinburgh, where Geddes had accumulated mainly
graphic and cartographic documentation: engravings, photographs, and
old maps he bought in bookshops and antique shops in the city; therefore
quite an accidental collection, which depended on what he found. At the
top of the tower there is a large terrace where you can enjoy a 360-degree
view of the city. There Geddes installed various machineries representing
the universe and the movement of the stars, including a network of metal
rails on which globes flowed, representing the solar system. There was also
the famous Episcope. These were objects both very playful and inventive
from the point of view of their design and scenography. There was also a
camera obscura in which visitors entered and could contemplate a moving
picture of the city which a periscope system projected onto a circular table
in the center of the room. There were also shelves full of press cuttings.
Geddes ordered an archive of clippings on various topics concerning the
city where each Tower would be built, organized into thematic folders for
use by citizens of this city. Part of the archives of Patrick Geddes at the
University of Edinburgh is composed of thousands of filing cabinets full
of press cuttings.
John Tresch
Is the relative emptiness of the lower floors seen as a problem for Geddes,
or is that actually part of the structure? Typically, you lose detail as you
go from the specific to the general. So the idea that the rooms get more
crowded as you go up does make sense according to his systemmore
detail as you ascend to knowledge of the local, the city where the tower
stands. Pedagogically, isnt that what is intended? That there is less to
know at the level of the very general, and a great deal to know at the level
of the very local? This makes me think of the Eamess film, Powers of
Ten: there is not a lot of content to that film didactically, but you do learn
a lot about the correlation between those scales. So for Geddes, is that a
sufficient aim for the tower? Not that you learn precise details or fill your
mind with more facts, but that you make this transition through scales,
from the very general to the very particular.
Pierre Chabard
Yes; the issue of scale is essential in articulating the different floors of
the tower. This transition of scales is fundamental to the educational
project of Geddes. When he designed the Outlook Tower, the district of
Old Edinburgh was an overcrowded, unsanitary workers slum. So the
Outlook Tower had a role of both philanthropy and popular education.
In particular, it housed cycles of lectures that were part of the system of
70 P. CHABARD
university extension at the beginning of the century: scholars came to

give courses in the tower for workers. More generally, the Outlook Tower
was conceived as a mediating tool, allowing the inhabitants of this poor
district to become aware through this gradation of scales of their place in
the world, but always moving from the known to the unknown, the most
local to the more universal scale.
Elizabeth Pisani
All of which is expressed by this constructed tower of testosterone, which
is taking you to greater knowledge. The parallel is too obvious, but the
tower is symbolic of taking us toward a higher, more constructed human
knowledge, and the Earth, the round shape, is more organic. This sug-
gests a potentially innate human knowledge about organic shapes and an
appreciation of those things which we build into the constructed envi-
ronment around us in our textiles, in our art, which only recently have
become revealed scientifically. I think its quite interesting that you dont
find those constructed masculine phallic tower shapes in ancient textiles in
the same way you that you do the rounded earthy organic ones.
Pierre Chabard
The topological figures I mentioned obviously embody a number of gen-
dered values, which are antithetical: the tower is a symbol traditionally
associated with masculinity, the globe with femininity. However, I think
the symbolic interpretation of these topological forms changes over time;
it is as if they were shrouded in a cloud of possible meanings that are
activated differently in different contexts of reception. I think for example
that the phallic dimension of the tower is a relatively minor element for
Geddes. It is perhaps more important for Otlet, with his particular inter-
est in the Tower of Progress of Hbrard, whose construction involved a
strong, frontal gesture. But I think it would be counter-productive to inter-
pret these projects of the past in terms of todays value system, in which
gender has now taken on a particular importance that it didnt have. If we
take for example the Tower of Babel, the meaning of the myth has evolved
considerably in the history of ideas. It was very negative in medieval read-
ings of the Bible, but became a rather positive myth in the Renaissance;
at the time of LInternationale Scientifique, this was still the case. Paul
Otlet thought it was essential to bring about a global linguistic unification
to facilitate trade and harmonize humanity. He was very involved in the

creation ex nihilo of an international language. Nowadays, it seems to me
that the Babel myth has again become negative and derogatory.
David Turnbull
I was wondering if we could re-think what seems to be developing into an
idea of the pathology of universalization into something much more like
the dynamic contradictions that are inherent in such projects, which can
give strength to both sides of the argument. The year 2012 is the fiftieth
anniversary of one of those dynamic contradictions, in the publication
of Thomas Kuhns seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
It was a chapter in Otto Neuraths International Encyclopedia of Unified
Science. So right at the heart of an attempt to universalize everything
comes the great disunifier. But thats obviously not the only example, and
it misses the point that Neurath had in mind himself. Neurath had the
most delightful way of describing what he saw as the central philosophi-
cal task, which is to re-build the raft while at sea. And that captures, it
seems to me, the central contradiction. There are other obvious examples,
like Ulrich Becks imagining of universal knowledge as a balloon that is
expanding and the volume is increasing at one rate, but the surface area of
the balloon, which is what we do not know, is expanding faster. So right at
the heart of the attempt to grasp all there is to know, youre always going
to be stuck with the reality that either youve got it wrong, or that some-
thing will disunify it, or that the universe beyond the balloon will turn out
to be amazingly different. This brings me back to that imagethe tower
of Babel by Bruegel the Elderwhich shows that the first globalization
was not in the late nineteenth century. It was when humans occupied
the whole world, thereby unifying it culturally, linguistically, and in every
other way. And of course what happened? You got disunification, you got
the burst of culture and linguistic difference which is precisely the problem
at the heart of the attempt to know everything.
Bruno Latour
Universal means very different things: if you are a naturalist, the uni-
verse expands everywhere and there is one algorithm and if you attack
with the algorithm, the disorder is cleared up. But for the analogist, the
universal lies in the accumulation of small display cases. This is the cabinet
72 P. CHABARD
of curiosity argument, and this obsession reappears every time you find
a little hole in the arrangement of the objects. So the universe has very
different names if you are a naturalist or an analogist. It seems to me that
Pierres guys are making an analogists display inside a sphere, which, no
doubt, is taken from naturalist geography.
Pierre Chabard
From this point of view, the characters can be even further distinguished.
Patrick Geddes was hardly bothered by the incompleteness of his ency-
clopedia of the world. For him it was an ongoing process that he was in
no hurry to complete; quite the contrary. There was a total openness in
his encyclopedic project. This is not the case with Paul Otlet. The overall
formalization of his project depended on its completenesswhich was
also probably the weak point of his work. He embarked on his project of a
universal bibliographic directory at the end of the nineteenth century, at a
time when it was still possible to gather all these references. Very quickly,
after 1910, the project was overwhelmed by the tremendous increase in
publications, and it became impossible precisely because he could not
think of it otherwise than with the aim of completeness.
In relation to this issue of the finite and the infinite, I would go back
to Sloterdijk, whom Bruno cited earlier. I love the way he represents the
period he calls modern times (to which, apparently, LInternationale
Scientifique still belongs), as a phase of the gradual conquest of the surface
of the globe. Sloterdijk represents this world as a convex sphere on the
surface of which humanity is distributed, in the face of a dizzying uni-
versean immense exteriority from which the human being is projected
toward the infinite void. I also like his idea that today we have moved from
this vision to that of a finite world, one he presents as a great interioritya
large air-conditioned sphere, a world that does not totalize all the ele-
ments of the planet.
Richard Powers
It might be interesting to step back for a moment from the particular
topologies that Pierre presented so systematically and lucidly, and appreci-
ate just for a moment the most interesting and useful part of his arrange-
ment of these ideas. There are at least two kinds of order in the project of
ordering. Lets call them, first, the who what when where why of the act
of collecting itself, and second, the questions associated with presentation,

which I think are effectively processes of indexing. I have a little trouble
with the notion of pathology, since it seems to imply a normative health
that I cant quite envision. Consciousness itself may be a perpetual anxiety
of totalizing and collapsing and re-totalizing.
But in any case, since Bruno suggested anxiety, which I think might be
a great descriptive term, lets call this first-order anxiety of collecting itself
selection anxiety: What are we collecting? Where are we going with the
collection? How are we acquiring these things? And then we can call the
second-order anxiety of indexing a retrieval anxiety: How are we going
to deploy these things in a way that people can use? Maybe this is too
crude, but I am hearing, by implication, a third order of ordering. This
may be just my bias as a storyteller, but I believe we are talking about a
kind of third dimension that needs to be mapped onto a two-dimensional
project of indexing, always implying a one-dimensional project of nar-
rating or interpreting or reading. Narrative works because it is driven by
instabilities inherent in linear expectation, so the shape of our indexes may
contain an implied narrative about progress, about epistemology. We are
setting up classic tension graphs of exposition, development, climax, and
denouement. So we need to be talking about at least three different levels
of ordering.
Pierre Chabard
I have not talked about this third level of anxiety in my presentation.
But these different architectures of knowledge were made to be walked
through. The pathway through the Outlook Tower was accompanied by a
speech that gave meaning to the various elements on display. The accounts
I could find of these visits show that there was a big difference between
visiting the tower without a guide, or accompanied by Geddes himself.
Exhibits in the Outlook Tower or the International Museum were, for
the most part, quite mute and required guided tours. This might con-
nect with the discussion we will have next about the role of the curator in
instituting a discourse or discourses, more or less explicit, to give meaning
to an exhibition.
To rephrase what Richard just said, there are three moments in these
projects of the scenography of encyclopedic knowledge: the accumula-
tion or collection of objects, the formatting of the display, and the visit.
The three are related but more or less developed depending on the case.
74 P. CHABARD
Otlet, for example, favored the internal order of his collection over that
of its scenography, and the visualization of knowledge over its discursive
presentation. His International Museum was like a large curiosity shop, a
space where he accumulated objects, but with a fairly mediocre scenog-
raphy. Documents, sometimes quite sophisticated in their visual design,
were often poorly managed and poorly hung.

There must also have been an element of anxiety in the fact that they
were building these innovative architectures of knowledge, while realizing
this very process would probably render them redundant. In other words,
what they are in the process of doing is subject to its own technological
obsolescence. How did they deal with that anticipation? This may in fact
be answered by your suggestion that the element of what they are con-
structing that remains is the narrative: that is the part that will be portable,
that will carry on. So how are those narrative spins conceived? And to
touch on another aspect of this question of the sustainability of their pro-
posals: How are they financing all of this? Are they tax-funded? Do they
offer a service that makes them somehow sustainable?
Pierre Chabard
Thats a question that never stopped showing up, for these two people
whose social and financial situations were fragile. Paul Otlet had the rem-
nants of the fortune he had inherited from his father, a wealthy tycoon of
railways and trams in Belgium, but he went bankrupt around 1900. He
especially had some real estate property which he benefitted from. But his
universal bibliographic repertory, which transmitted its records to all sub-
scribing libraries, was mainly funded by the state. Clearly, Otlets income
was insufficient to complete all his projects.
Geddes, meanwhile, had no personal fortune and benefited, rather,
from a network of wealthy liberal industrialists who were interested in
his projects from a philanthropic angle. However, his financial situation
remained fairly erraticwhich aroused the concern of its employees. In
the early twentieth century, the Outlook Tower was on the verge of bank-
ruptcy. In 1905, a network of Geddess friends had to organize to raise
funds in order to allow the institution to continue its operations a bit
longer.
As for the obsolescence of the technological arrangements of these proj-

ects, I think the two men did have a particular consciousness of this, and
instead threw themselves quite eagerly into all the media innovations their
time offered. Otlet was fascinated by all the advances in telecommunica-
tions: telegraph, telephone. All these technologies were carefully outlined
in the International Museum and integrated as new tools to improve the
dissemination of knowledge. In his Trait de documentation in 1934, he
devised a method for disseminating writing that integrated the telephone
and a form of display on remote screens. The idea was to create a kind of
textual database at the center of the world, which readers could see on
their screens everywhere in the world. Some historians have seen in these
visions a foreshadowing of the World Wide Web.
Notes
1. Suzanne Berger, Notre premire mondialisation: Leons dun chec
oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2003.
2. Anne Rasmussen, LInternationale Scientifique, 18901914, PhD
dissertation: History: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
Paris, 1995.
3. Paul Otlet, Trait de documentation, le livre sur le livre. Thorie et
pratique, Brussels, Palais Mondial, 1934.
4. Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionnist and City
Planner, London, Routledge, 1990; Volker M. Welter, Biopolis:
Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press,
2002; Pierre Chabard, Exposer la ville: Patrick Geddes (18541932)
et le Town Planning Movement, PhD: University Paris 8, 2008.
5. W.Boyd Rayward, The Universe of Information: the Work of Paul
Otlet for Documentation and International Organization, Moscow,
All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technological Information,
1975; Wouter van Acker, Universalism as Utopia. A Historical
Study of the Schemes and Schemas of Paul Otlet (18681944),
Zelzate, University Press, 2011.
6. Postcard designed by Igor Platounoff and published in December
1938 (Paul Otlet Archives, Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium, Box no. 4).
7. Pierre Chabard, LOutlook Tower comme anamorphose du
monde: Patrick Geddes et le thme de la vision, Le Visiteur, no.
7, 2001, pp.6489.
76 P. CHABARD
8. Letter from Thomas Marr to Patrick Geddes, 15 November 1898

(Strathclyde University Archives, Glasgow, T-GED-9-203).
9. Volker M. Welter, op.cit., pp. 130131; Pierre Chabard, Paris-
Montpellier-Domme: French Migrations of the Outlook Tower
(190019241937), Journal of the Scottish Society of Art History,
no. 9, 2004, p.80.
10. Pierre Chabard, LOutlook Tower, op.cit., p.72, 7475.
11. George Guyou (alias Paul Reclus), The Hollow Globe. A New

Geographical Apparatus, n.d. [c. 1900] (Strathclyde University
Archives, Glasgow, T-GED-7-8-69)
12. Soizic Alavoine-Muller, Un globe terrestre pour lExposition uni-
verselle de 1900. Lutopie gographique dElise Reclus, Espace
Gographique, vol. 32, no. 2, 2003, pp.156170.
13. Etienne-Jules Marey, Chronologic Panorama of the Development
of Civilization, tapuscrit, n.d. [c.1900] (Strathclyde University
Archives, Glasgow, T-GED-3/1/10).
14. Volker M.Welter, op.cit., pp.179181.
15. W.Boyd Rayward, The Origins of Information Science and the
International Institute of Bibliography, Journal of the American
Society for Information Science, no. 48, 1997, pp.289300.
16. Anne Rassmussen, op.cit., pp.130135.
17. Paul Otlet, Mundaneum: Le nouveau Palais Mondial organis en
Centre Intellectuel International, Brussels, Union des Associations
Internationales, 1925.
18. Paul Otlet, Le Mundaneum lExposition de Bruxelles, 1935,
tapuscrit, 13 mars 1935 (Paul Otlet Archives, Mundaneum, Mons,
Belgium, Box no. 3).
19. Paul Otlet, Un projet grandiose de Cit Internationale, in

Premier congrs International et ex position compare des villes,
Brussels, Union Internationale des Villes, 1914, p.79.
20. Giuliano Gresleri, La Citt Mondiale: Andersen, Hbrard, Otlet, Le
Corbusier, Venice, Marsilio, 1982, pp.161196.
21. Paul Otlet, Mundaneum: Le nouveau Palais Mondial organis en
Centre Intellectuel International, op.cit., p.4.
22. Christian Jacob (dir.), Lieux de Savoir, Paris, Albin Michel, vol. 1
(2007), vol. 2 (2011).
CHAPTER 5
Pictorialism (Prelude and Fugue)
Picturing History
History has a way of calling time, especially when worldviews vie.
In 1995 Bill Gates, personification of personal computing, purchased
the Bettmann Archive, canonical repository of the pictorial past.1 The
New York Times asserted that what had changed hands was nothing less
than the chronicle of the twentieth century.2 With transfer of owner-
ship, supply of visual content and provision of tools for its management
coalesced, institutionally, on an unprecedented scale. Gates privately
owned corporation Corbis soon announced that the entire collection
would be moved to a purpose-built, cold-storage facility in the vast,
underground data-prison, Iron Mountain.3 No doubt, to digitize a frac-
tion of the collection and restrict access to the rest was an emphatic
intervention into modernitys visual rhetoric that imperiled the prevail-
ing picture of history. This treasured buttress to national identity, widely
assumed to be under the custodial stewardship of public officials, was
taken to be a cultural asset on whose sustained continuity the general
public has an exceptional and legitimate claim. The critical outcry that
ensued focused on sustaining public access; justified though it was, this
outrage obscured the profound implications of the BettmannCorbis
transfer for visual semiotics and knowledge-curation.
C. von Xylander (*)

Technische Universitt Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_5
78 C. VON XYLANDER
Privatized orchestration of pictured history in the age of digital repro-

duction by no means began with the Bettmann purchase. Its advent in
the age of mechanical reproduction was analyzed by Walter Benjamin
(18921940), whose thoughts on the changing nature of the artwork
were contemporaneous with the emergence of the archive as conceived
by Otto Bettmann (19031998) in late Weimar Republic Berlin. And
make no mistake, the acquisition of Bettmann by Corbis was not a break
with the established routines of picture trafficking, but a continuation of
the cultural commerce developed by none other than Bettmann himself.
Technically, Gates business plan is consistent with Bettmanns own col-
lecting practice and in that regard perpetuates a status quo.
Plotting the career of the Bettmann cultural establishment in juxtaposi-
tion to the pictorial output of other Weimar practitioners and refugees,
notably Eduard Fuchs (18701940) and Herbert Bayer (19001985),
helps to illuminate what was at stakebeyond the privatization of pub-
lic assetsin the complex genealogies of rival modes of global image
banking. Despite continuities in service delivery, a profound difference
of aesthetic allegiance separates the visual imaginary of Bettmann and
CorbisBettmann. It centers on the role of historicity in the manufacture
of image banks. The graphic brand built by Bettmann came to stand for
historical imagery of the highest quality documenting historical events of
the greatest significancebut this is a moving target.
When Corbis published Bettmann Moments in 2004, a folio-sized
album of black-and-white documentary photographs, it featured such piv-
otal historical events as the exploding Hindenburg airship, JFKs burial
procession, first flight trials of the Wright brothers, and so on.4 Drawn
from 16 million images purchased, now considerably culled to 11 mil-
lion images, the handpicked Moments selection exemplifies what Corbis
takes the Bettmann legacy to be. Yet, most of the current collection has a
provenance unrelated to its namesake. Bettmann assembled a mere 3 mil-
lion images. Photographs belonging to the United Press agency, Reuters,
and numerous other collections of historic significance were Bettmannized
(read absorbed into the collection), in later years, under the aegis of Kraus
Thompson, the archives interim owner. The onetime cottage industry
sprawled into a managed media apparatus whose name connotes the his-
torical as measured on a foreshortened American timeline.
Corbis foregrounding of sensational historical events in fact runs
counter to Bettmanns collecting intuition, which was wary of purely
documentary photographs.5 He eschewed literal documentation of the
PICTORIALISM (PRELUDE ANDFUGUE) 79
past and favored, instead, emblematic, antiquated graphics that tagged

the present by way of referential anachronism. Specifically, he gravitated
toward images from the prehistoric era to the Renaissance: animal sil-
houettes etched in limestone by cavemen or the weird futurist fantasies
of a sixteenth-century monk. His modernist outlook inclined toward the
superannuated in paintings, drawings, lithographs, and woodprints, dated
graphic material that would show its age in print reproduction. These
eye-catchers, prone to the play of irony, accentuated a dimension of sig-
nification apt to be eclipsed in mass communication, namely context of
reference, conceived not as the stable ground of meaning but rather as a
highly instable relational category subject to the protean inconstancy of
its perpetual negotiation. Simply put, he thematized context by scram-
bling it. Bettmanns allusive historicity emulated techniques of alienation,
which also surfaced, notably and contemporaneously, in expressionist art
and Brechtian theater. In Foucauldian terms, Corbis fetishized instanta-
neity corrupts the dispositif of Bettmann negatives. But, indeed, pictures of
history are works in progress, ever a matter of construal.
Thumbnail Think
Bettmanns innovative enterprise drew on recent technological develop-
ments in industrial publishing and library science. The archive germinated
in Berlin, arguably, the first city of graphic design and print capital at the
time.6 Employed from 1930 to 1933 as a rare books librarian at the State
Art Library in Berlin (Staatliche Kunstbibliothek), Bettmann acquired
an early Leica camera.7 This handheld device, introduced at the Leipzig
Trade Fair in 1925, revolutionized graphical expression by making it easy
to take pictures on the go. The amateur photographer became a com-
monplace figure. Photojournalism including paparazzi snapshots emerged
in cultural life. Bettmann saw another applicationthe camera as copying
machine. He took pictures from illustrated books and, with hundreds of
precious volumes under his stewardship, assembled a formidable collec-
tion of fine art and historical image replicas.
The success of his commercial picture library, which he founded after
emigrating to New York, hinged on its visual indexsubject catego-
ries that reflected a systematic iconographic method for describing our
picture age. Bettmann ordered the pictorial past not in terms of tradi-
tional art historical concerns but rather in line with the conditions of mod-
ern life and its concrete, precise marketing needs.8 Vintage graphics could
80 C. VON XYLANDER
reference such antique subjects as kitchens and weapons, book binding

and marriage and, equally, many a streamlined device that betoken the
late-industrial condition. Corbis may have named itself after the wicker
baskets it fantasized as receptacles for new-fangled privately licensed digi-
tal images. But in Bettmanns universe, the classical theme of Virgil in the
basket is filed not under receptacles but under the history of elevators.9
These topical attributions reflected a highly theorized approach to infor-
mation design. Besides professional training in library science, Bettmann
had completed a doctorate in philosophy and studied phenomenology
under Edmund Husserl (18591938). The functionalist semantics of his
search apparatus fitted with contemporary experiments in functionalist
architecture, design theory, and typography. His lexico-graphic information
system was in conversation with the work of the Bauhaus, the functional
typography movement, the Vienna Circle, and the eminent philosopher of
visual form, Ernst Cassirer (18741945). Bettmann cites Otto Neuraths
(18821945) visual statistics and Ludwig Wittgensteins (18891951)
philosophical graphology. His thinking resonated with Aby Warburgs
(18661929), another prominent pictorial system-builder of the day. These
variously affiliated knowledge-workers were united by a shared belief in the
critical need for new notional tools that could compass the shape-shifting
realities of modern life. In codifying the conditions of semiotic possibil-
ity, they sought to contrive a virtual actuality that might render complex,
industrial society intelligible to itself.10 Warburg coined the term Denkraum
(thought-space) to designate the new realm of navigational practice.
The Denkraum in which Bettmanns program germinated also gave
birth to the visual curator of knowledge. According to Benjamin, this fig-
ure was a Weimar period creation, a necessary companion of mechanically
reproduced artworkits ideal type personified in a personal acquaintance,
Eduard Fuchs (18701940).11 Popular historian, committed Marxist, ped-
dler of the risqu and irreverent: Fuchs made a fortune publishing folios of
historical illustrations drawn from an extensive, private collection housed in
his Dahlem Villa and in a custom-built, modernist library tract. Composed
of images that document Sitten (customs) he called the resulting genre
Sittengeschichte (history of customs). These prurient image compila-
tions were comprised of sexually explicit material and social satire. Initially
banned, then released with restricted circulation for adults only, Fuchs
line of provocation attracted an exceedingly large and devoted readership.
One of Bettmanns tasks at the Prussian State Art Library was to curate
an outstanding collection of erotica for the famed pictorialist and scan-
dalmonger.12 He also curated, by himself, a show on the social history of

reading. The inspiration for the Bettmann Archivecollecting and ordering
pictures for commercial re-usecame to him in the course of these engage-
ments. He developed the subject eyes needed to sort pictures by use-value
and began to peruse the entirety of the pictured past under his professional
stewardship for viable subject pictures. As a memento of the key insight
driving this search, he preserved the images of his reading exhibitionwhich
reflected a generalized Fuchsean labeling logicin a cigar box.13
Fuchs graphic collections were seized and auctioned off by the Nazis.
His library traveled with him to Paris where Benjamin, penniless and bereft
of the tools of scholarship, found temporary intellectual shelter. Both were
on the political left, both fled Nazi persecution, both were close associates
of Max Horkheimer (18951973) in whose Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung
Benjamin published two period chronicles whose bifurcated destiny replays
the cultural pathology they diagnose. Though companion piecesto judge
by the inseparable whole that their inversely related thematics formThe
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) and Eduard
Fuchs: Collector and Historian (1937) are mostly read as solitary com-
mentaries onto themselves. They describe a single dynamic from different
vantage points: one shows the beguiling aspects of industrial mass society
(it probes the new materiality of aesthetic value and seems to compel affir-
mation); the other presents a bleaker counterpart to this picture (it ques-
tions the commodified ideality of material culture and, on that account,
is routinely overlooked). His two-pronged analysis ensnares the enabling
hypocrisies which are integral to moral economy in the sign of the steam
engine. Those in doubt that we vigorously avow what we concurrently
spurn need only consult the Social Sciences Citation IndexMechanical
Reproduction waxes at the same time that Eduard Fuchs wanes. There
is a collective refusal to acknowledge the downsides of the technology-
enhanced culture work prevailing today.
Benjamin wrote these essays under duress when there was ample
ground for solidarity. All the same, he viewed the impact factor of his pro-
lific comrade with cautious concern. The commodity aesthetics of Fuchs
Sittengeschichte confounded cultivated elites traditional efforts to separate
two spheres of engagement, namely learned refinement and commercial
pursuit. This pioneer of a materialist consideration of art stoked a new
demand as well for monetized culture-for-hire. Such collectorsless forager
than hoardershape the future by carrying out research on an art in whose
creations the productive forces and the masses come together in images
82 C. VON XYLANDER
of historical man.14 Benjamin effectively warns spectators to be wary of

curator-collectors with a commercial interest in their cultural output.
While Benjamin, the most authoritative commentator on the newly
emergent mass media of the Weimar Republic, would be hounded by
National Socialists into suicide, Bettmann launched a commercial picture
library in New York that peddled the use of thumbnail images for graphic
signposting.
Regressive Progress
Bettmann found his calling as a pictorial entrepreneur after he fled from
Nazi Germany in 1935. His biography documents an all-American career
coinciding with the rise of the illustrated magazine. His official bibliogra-
phy of publications commences with the archives founding in New York.
Bettmanns personal papers, held at the University of Florida, give the
impression that any significant professional engagement of his began only
in exile.15 Fascinated by the nascent mass media, he helped stage-manage
its insertion into public life. Vocal advocate for the modernist book, self-
appointed advertising expert, vociferous commentator on graphic design
and new media developments, he published extensively in German and in
English, on such broad-ranging topics as women in book making, win-
dow displays of modern bookshops, illustrated adverts, capital lettering
in text layout, psychology of type, dust jacket design, the first audio book
and intellectual property lawon everything, it would appear, except the
inherent dangers of mediated public manipulation.
Why did he conceal his earlier role in European debates on the
transmission of information? Bettmanns biography alludes to German
typography debates but fails to mention that he belonged to the small
coterie of aesthetic gatekeepers steering the course of the discussion.
When Typographische Mitteilungen, premier professional journal for
German graphic art in its day, sent out a questionnaire polling experts on
how they saw the future of gothic versus geometric fontsan invitation
to comment on the highly polarized design controversies of the daythe
editors solicited Bettmanns opinion. Others invited to respond were Jan
Tschichold (19021974), Paul Renner (18781956), Laszlo Moholy-
Nagy (18951946), and Herbert Bayer (19001985), by then no longer
on the faculty of the Bauhaus but self-employed in his successful Dorland
Studio.16 In the charged political atmosphere of the late Weimar republic,
typography was deemed a seismograph of cultural activity that antici-
pated socio-political developments.17
A first round of replies appeared in the January 1933 issue of

Typographische Mitteilungenthe month Hitler was named Chancellor.
Bettmann, for his part, confidently predicts that an unstoppable will to
progress will further modern geometric lettering: We live in the twen-
tieth, not the sixteenth century. Bayer took the opportunity to fret, in
public, over vulgarity: while it is doubtful that gothic fonts will be able to
evince truly German vigour, what he really specifically abhorred were
poor imitations of so-called bauhaus-style typography.18 A few months
later, the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) took con-
trol of the Typographische Mitteilungen and turned it into a specimen of
Gleichschaltung, forcible-coordination, under Goebbels command.19
The remade journal was formatted to fascist specifications. Its target audi-
ence, visual professionals throughout the country, learned where on a page
to place the Swastika, why to use Gothic lettering and how to frame portraits
of the Fhrers face. Without missing a beat, the new editorial board rewrote
history to back up the venerable journals sudden shift in visual orientation:
a revisionist account of the late typography wars ushered in the new era.
The piece quotes, out of context, earlier essays by Bettmann and fellow
cultural reformers and makes as if these spokesmen for an internationalist
style of visual communication were sympathetic to the Nazi-aesthetic and its
implied politics. Bettmanns work is cited, repeatedly.
Meanwhile, the resourceful librarian was fired from his civil service
position. He was also prevented from launching his commercial picture-
licensing agency: discriminatory labor laws barred Jews from starting a
business. These circumstances induced Bettmann to emigrate. Equipped
with information-management skills and his cigar box of thumbnail pic-
tures (which had grown to two suitcases of photonegatives), he had what
it would take to enter the picture trade: a supply of visual content and
tools for its management. His fellow advocate of visual modernism, Bayer,
opted out of the Reich three years later in 1938 and also emigrated to
the United States. In the interim, he so persuasively communicated the
aspirations of the Brown Shirts to the German people that he became the
highest paid graphic designer in the land (Deutsches VolkDeutsche
Arbeit 1934, Wunder des Lebens 1935, Deutschland Ausstellung
1936).20 His longtime lover, Walther Gropius wife Ise, teasingly called
him the star of the propaganda ministry.21 Bayers own Jewish-American
wife was presumably not amused.
Fuchs, Benjamin, Bettmann, and Bayer experienced a breach of civil
society and public order of unparalleled dimensions. Unlike the throng
of contemporary actors merely engulfed by an epic tragedy, these star
84 C. VON XYLANDER
witnesses were participant observers in the events that unfolded. They

scrutinized the nascent mass media and intuited new dexterities of visual
coercion that proved equally serviceable to irreconcilable interests along
the political spectrum. The New World output of Bettmann and Bayer
diverged, radically, as they sought to cope with what had happened back
at home under their watch. The resulting pictorial schism has network-
aesthetic ramifications still manifest in and relevant for the visual layout
of the virtual thoroughfares sustaining online traffic today. History rests
while Gates Microsoft Word program has confined typography controver-
sies that once presaged coming catastrophe to a handy pull-down menu.
Godification
Pictorial engineering was in demand on both sides of the Atlantic; resil-
ient informational infrastructures were needed to navigate urban habi-
tats, rapidly in flux due to the fast pace of industrial, technological, and
social change. Bettmann and Bayer had highly marketable skills. Unlike
the majority of political migrs, who lost their cultural patrimony en route
to New York, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades, these expatriates thrived
in the new national context. At this point, a brief aside on the relative
weighting of the historical actors is in order. The discrepant attention that
Bettmann and Bayer receive in this paper is not intended as a reflection
on their respective merits as cultural innovators. Both graphical legacies
are significant. This study focuses on Bettmann for whom Bayer plays the
apt foil. Not only is Bettmann the party less studied but also, of the two
trajectories of the German immigrant experience that can here be seen to
variously segue into the digital age, he has the edge over Bayer as viewed
from the terminus Gates, both qua content-provider (Corbis) and qua
cognitive tool-maker (Microsoft).
In a country that had yet to find its bearings in matters of taste, Bayer
established himself as the de facto impresario of European modernism. He
curated the first Bauhaus exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art and
ran high-profile advertising campaigns for the Container Corporation of
America, nationwide supplier of that essential, albeit humble, accoutre-
ment of global capitalism, the cardboard box.22 This same corporation
also bankrolled Bayers design of a perfectly lifestyled haven in the Rocky
Mountains where intellectuality, commerce and a refined variety of milita-
rism merged. The expansive regional complex he designednothing short
of a modern Acropolis for a modern superpowercomprises the Aspen
ski resort, the Aspen Institute and the Air Force Academy.23 Social capital
has congregated here since the 1950s: Bayer masterminded a meeting

place for the upper echelons of society, movers and shakers from around
the world, to commune in the serene comfort of manicured surroundings
while enjoying the exclusive companionship of equally privileged peers.
Bettmann, for his part, launched a highly successful, commercial picture
library and, in his spare time, authored for mainstream consumption picto-
rial histories championing national institutionsfamily life, sports, music,
medicine, and so on. With the single-minded conviction of a late convert,
he resolved to bolster the young democracys cultural resilience. Surely, this
fledgling empire lacking in past, a condition both real and imagined, would
have to be retrofitted with its very own longue dure. Never mind that
he quilted said picture of history from non-native, second-hand graphics
predating the countrys colonial settlement in part. He added the subject
category Americana to the archival holdings and scouted for indigenous
sources of historical graphic material.24 An historical chronicle befitting this
modern democratic republic, fountainhead of a new pictorialism, reached
out to every woman and every man. Its ancestral narrative is properly writ-
ten in pictures because, in Bettmanns words, the impatient temper of
its inhabitants means that Americans prefer pictures to the more-difficult-
to-imbibe words.25 He hired a team of graphic artists to piece together a
picture history of the world expressed, solely, in thumbnail images.
His quest to enhance historical awareness crowded out parallel efforts.
Since the Roaring Twenties, Van Wyck Brooks (18861963) and his close
literary companion Lewis Mumford (18951990), foremost philosopher-
theorist of American technological modernism, had been spearheading
the drive to invent a useable past.26 When Bettmann proposed to shrink
Brooks five-volume treatise on the history of the American novel into
a lavishly illustrated, single-volume anniversary edition, Americas First
Man of Letters became one of numerous celebrity authors forced to pic-
torialize or die, as it were. It galled Brooks that a European import tout-
ing idolatry was succeeding in servicing Americas historical void.27 By
contrast, Bettmann deemed this challenging venture in bookmaking his
most spiritually rewarding exercise in pictorialisms, literary and visual.
In the key Cold War moment of 1956, this clash of outlooks was, perhaps,
inevitable. The BrooksBettmann collaboration finessed conspicuous cul-
tural rifts between New World and Old World erudition, literary and pic-
torial authorship, assimilated Jews and their Gentile compatriots.
Undeterred by wasp snobbery, Bettmann saw his archive as a civ-
ilizing force. He remained at heart an unreconstructed German
Bildungsbrger who took Bildung (human development or human
86 C. VON XYLANDER
cultivation) to serve a threefold purpose, namely the uplifting of self,

ennobling of other and glorifying of creation. Benjamins remarks aside,
this naturalized American citizen insisted that culture work be redemp-
tive, evenor, perhaps, especiallywhen pursued with profit in mind.
He modeled his picture trade on the mercantilist, enlightened book
trade of the eighteenth century described in his doctoral thesis.28 The
well-rounded Bildungsbrger is a lover of music and, true to form, this
fervent curator-collector not only performed as an amateur pianist but
also patterned the information architecture of his archive on the works
of Bach. Bettmann admired the pictorialism of Bachs oeuvre, its
numerous quotations from life and nature. These sound snippets are the
musical equivalent of thumbnails, so Bettmann stressed. Bachs musi-
cal curating and his own visual curating made the world entire com-
prehensible in pictorial re-enactment.29 Both simulacra, according to
Bettmann, follow the rules of formal oratory as laid out in Quintilians
ars rhetorica.30 The archives picture of history followed the art of the
fugue and, in emulating Bachs musical rhetoric, provided tuition in
pictorial rhetoric.
For Bettmann, pictorial oratoryverbal, musical, or visualengages
Gemt, a sentient phenomenon closely related to Bildung in the
German-speaking modality of feeling. Bettmann attributed the popu-
lar appeal of Bachs music and, by implication, his own graphic his-
tories to the experiential dimension in question: a fugue is a polite
conversation31 and, as such, conducive to Gemuets-Ergoetzung
(Gemt-regaling).32 Unable to express this concept within the canon
of English sentiment, he enlists the German term. Mainstay of German
letters throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth,
Gemt is the ultimate fount of subjectivity whether referring to the
individual or the collective. The archive, so he indicates, emanated from
the inner movements of his never quiescent German-forged Gemt.33
His commercial stockpile of images, collated in years of subjective labor,
is a manifestation of the archives generalized bias. The likes and dis-
likes of Bettmanns selective filtering supplied the commercial edge that
enabled him to turn a profit on copies of other copies, also in circulation
but of lesser value, being in want of intimate, curatorial care. A further
entailment of invoking this subjective force, which Germans hold to be
both intensive and extensive, is that it disclosed Bettmanns two-way
causal commitment to rouse Gemt in an audience unaware of being
thus swayed. To render in English this untranslatable concept, abso-
lutely critical to his pictorial enterprise, Bettmann coined a grandiose

neologismgodification.34
Camp Humanism
Bettmanns Portable Archive, a miniaturized version of the real thing,
appeared in 1966. This handy volume marked a turning point in how
the archives pictorial agenda was disseminated. Hitherto, commissioned
commercial artwork and themed pictorial histories had given only isolated
glimpses of the referential anachronism governing the archives semantic
architecture. The Portable Bettmann, as commercial graphic artists affec-
tionately termed this remarkable trade catalog, brought a commanding
picture of history for present purposessubmerged in the deep grammar of
the Bettmann archiveto view. An alphabetically ordered compendium of
sample images shows lexical, conceptual, and visual schemes of classifica-
tion plotted out, concurrently, in sophisticated typographical layout. The
archives philosophically informed aesthetic had matured into an identifi-
able pictorial idiom; its offbeat historicity, newly installed in the standard
tool kit of visual professionals, became readily accessible. Presented as a
cohesive system of visual reference, Bettmanns thumbnail thinking went
viral, so to speak: art directors, picture editors, creative professionals of all
kinds functioned as multipliers of Bettmanns cultural imaginary and, in so
doing, tacitly proliferated Bettmanns cultural gesture, in a word, Gemt.
The Bettmann Panopticon, a 1963-exhibition of artwork in conver-
sation with the archive, had prepared the ground for this semiotic dis-
closure. It confirmed the archives hip credibility and the need for it
to be converted into a desktop tool.35 Bettmann, our Fuchs-inspired
curator-collector, financed the show and asked Peter Max (b. 1937),
not yet synonymous with Pop Art, to co-curate the show. He envis-
aged a forum where young designers could express their views, unham-
pered by commercial stricturesa sentiment strangely reminiscent
of Benjamin, the critic.36 Maxs psychedelic posters, which enlisted
Bettmanns retro-vocabulary in a mocking, pseudo-patriotic triumpha-
lism, tickled the counterculture. Pictorial thumbnailing likewise cropped
up in connection with Eames IBM-pavilion at the New York Worlds
Fair (1964), which cast the computer as integral part of our future;
the timeline of its technological evolution is charted in quaint imagery
of calculating machines.37 The animation work that Terry Gilliam (b.
1940), a New York-based graphic artist at the time, produced for Monty
88 C. VON XYLANDER
Python scrambled context of reference and echoed the Portable Archives

absurdist collages in freeze-frame montage of historical cut outs redolent
of Bettmanns whimsical humor.
These and related renderings of an American sublime in which his-
torical displacement defies signifying conventions to humorous effect
might be termed camp humanism. Compare Susan Sonntags con-
temporaneous reading of camp, that rousing term du jour: Camp
taste has something propagandistic about itbut, Sonntag hastens
to add, the propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction.38
The same holds for Bettmanns visual rhetoric: he countered profane
pictorialism with critical pictorialismhis programmatic diffusion of
Panoptic Art, the creative fusion of the old and new.39 A much
sobered German-Jewish commentator on graphic design who narrowly
escaped the apocalyptic collapse of a world he thought he knew might
well seek to inoculate the public sphere against the hazards of nefarious
suasion (Fig. 5.1).
Fig. 5.1 Bettmann Panopticon contributors perform a pun on Portable Bettmann

(Panopticon, 10)
Picture Philosophy in Pictures

Bettmann was no radical political activist. He was not one to decry the
communications industry as such. Nor did he abjure the commercial
ethos to which he had signed up: his archive supplied a service in line
with the demands of mass media. Indeed, the first, major, commer-
cial breakthrough that brought Bettmann nationwide visibility was an
advertisement commissioned by CBS Radio Network for Time maga-
zine in 1938, not long after his arrival in the United States. All the
same, something in his modernist outlook shifted in exile. For one,
he expunged from his public persona most of his German publishing
history and, notably, all of the work pertaining to commercial graphic
artwork from the Berlin days. For another, he pushed a maverick con-
ception of pictorialism that suffused the modernist experience with
ironic juxtaposition of the historical (Fig. 5.2).
Fig. 5.2 Herbert Bayer:

2015 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn. Bayer-advert
showcased in a 1932
Bettmann-article (Otto L.
Bettmann, The Relation
ship of Word and Picture:
Principles of Photo-
Typography, in: Penroses
Annual: The Process Year
Book & Review of the
Graphic Arts 34 (1932):
7476)
90 C. VON XYLANDER
Bettmann and Bayer engaged each others work, repeatedly, over the years.
In a 1932 article, written during the Berlin years, Bettmann praised Bayers
illustrated advertisements commending their typo-photographical finish. He
especially admired the accord of word and picture to produce a totality
of effect.40 Their contact continued in the United States. An advertising
poster overseen by Bayer (Harmony) features a Renaissance concert scene
sourced from the archive.41 Toni Zepf (b. 1902), Bayers Berlin assistant and
director of the Dorland studio, designed the poster (Fig. 5.3).
Against this background of mutual admiration, it is all the more note-
worthy that Bettmanns Portable Archive of 1966 can be read as a sus-
tained rebuttal of Bayers Geo-Graphic Atlas of 1953. The Portable Archive
summed up Bettmanns pictorial philosophy just as the Geo-Graphic Atlas
did Bayers pictorial stance. This monumental piece of work, produced
for the Container Corporation of America, encapsulated the firms global
ambition. Bayer translated into a visually beguiling world atlas the big
science datasets marshaled therein. Conceived to be a corporate gift for
valued clients and partners, it flaunted high-end production values and
proudly proclaimed that knowledge is power.42
The Portable Bettmann dismantled the Atlas global, corporate-
sponsored agenda in a page-by-page critique. Bettmanns graphic history
of almost everything topically arranged and cross-referenced to serve
as an idea stimulator and image finder, the abbreviated subtitle of the
catalog, rejected the worldview of Bayers Atlas. Casting his nemesis as an
unapologetic apologist willing to serve any master and further the inter-
ests of any social machinery, howsoever de-humanizing, Bettmann chal-
lenged the unwholesome patronage informing Bayers partisan aesthetic.
A sustained, pictorial exegesis mocks inter alia property speculation in
Aspen, mountaineering and fashionable winter sport, corporate fantasies
of world domination, the genteel whitewashing of industrial exploitation,
and the tainted environmentalism of the cardboard box-manufacturing
powerhouse behind Bayer, which spearheaded paper recycling to econo-
mize on the cost of wood. A few examples serve to show how Bettmanns
pictorial rhetoric marshaled collage-compositions antithetical to Bayer.
Every page of the book-formatted archive follows its own storyboard.
One of the entries under C invites an autobiographical reading. We see
scenes from the life of cowboys in thumbnail pictures framed by a stam-
peding herd; an alpha cow has fallen off the cliff. The unfortunate animal
is brand-marked with the initials HB and B. (The imaginary America
of Bettmanns boyhood was a land of cowboys and Indians. On the sad
occasion of his leave-taking from Germany, Bettmanns friends wrote
Fig. 5.3 This poster appeared in Bayers Great Ideas of Western Man series,
produced for the Container Corporation of America. Herbert Bayer: 2015
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Blaschke,
Commodification of Images, 138)
agoodbye poem that spoke of his escaping the evil Indians, i.e. Nazis, to
join the peaceable Indians of the Americas.43) This composed image is a
troubling meditation on the swaying of public opinion by means of brand
92 C. VON XYLANDER
management, mass psychology, and ideological manipulation. There is an

implicit connection between cattle branding and the notion of a commercial
brand; indeed, the two are etymologically linked. The solitary cow raises the
question of personal culpability. Its demonstrative lettering can be variously
interpreted: HB and B (Herbert Bayer and Bettmann) or HB in B (Herbert
Bayer in Berlin). The ambiguity computes both ways (Fig. 5.4).
Bettmann repeatedly critiques Bayers pictorialism throughout the
alphabetically ordered subject categories of the Portable Archive. A further
Fig. 5.4 Entry for cowboys in the Portable Archive (Portable Archive, 47)
example shall illustrate his anti-Bayer rhetoric. The Geo-Graphic Atlas has
its own expository plot celebrating the free market and culminating in a
world map entitled Conversion of Resources. This map conceives of the
earth as one, vast, industrial production plant for the processing of raw
materials. Different countries have different processing capacities: square
sets of dots depict the regional distribution of available machine power. So
far so good, but the caption makes light of these dots in referring to them
as energy slaves. This map metaphor both takes for granted the long
history of human exploitation and wholly brackets its moral importsuch
insouciance Bettmann apparently finds objectionable (Fig. 5.5).
In the Portable Bettmann, he challenges Bayers notional slavery in a pic-
torial retort that foregrounds the human cost of the Industrial Revolution.
Referential anachronism furnishes the missing element: visual conscience.
The entry for Gay Nineties features a Ferris wheelthe very epitome
of gaiety and industrial progressportrayed as a vehicle of social injustice:
a line-up of naked humanity stands in readiness by the gearwheels of the
machine waiting to be consumed as fuel. These energy slaves expose the
facile cogency of Bayers map without, however, exempting the curator-
collector from culpability. Bettmanns Ferris wheel is self-referential: it
portrays a search engine within the search engine of the portable archive.
The image casts pictorial retrieval as an automated process reliant on itera-
tions of reference comparable to the mechanical rotations of industrial
machinery; each capsule of the wheel generates a corresponding image.
The point is that modern graphic services devolve from the self-same
socio-economic arrangements that turbo-Capitalism entails. Technology-
driven visual cultureeven in the form of an enlightened, progressive pic-
torialismpartakes of the imperative of industrial production and must
also be critically examined. Unlike Bayers erasure of social cost and con-
text, Bettmanns aesthetic engagement bears witness to this agonistic state
of affairs (Fig. 5.6).
The American Bettmann disowned his professional past as a German
media theorist and reinvented himself as an American pictorial histo-
rian. Pictorialism, for him, was a creed to be instantiated in visual
oratory. The propagandizing archivist developed pictorialism into his
own graphic philosophy of the past, meaning an all-American, look-
see philosophy that would further a plurality of perspectives and shore
up democratic ideals.44 By diffusing referential anachronism into the
public sphere, he sought to safeguard the media milieu of his adopted
homeland from pernicious abuses of the pictorial. His conception of
94 C. VON XYLANDER
Fig. 5.5 The World Geo-graphic Atlas map of energy slaves. Herbert Bayer:
2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Bayer,
Geographic Atlas, 278)
Fig. 5.6 The Portable Archives depiction of energy slaves (Portable Archive, 84)
ictorialism went beyond the use of thumbnail images for illustrative

p
purposes. On his reading, the phenomenon was not even restricted to
pictures: it found articulation in music and words as well. Though he
excelled at the picture trade, he always insisted that verbal pictorialism
far surpassed graphical pictorialism: I consider words infinitely superior
as a means of communication. True, pictures reflect action superbly,
but rarely do they reflect thought. 45
96 C. VON XYLANDER
Bettmann aimed at nothing less than a critique of pictorial reason.

His take on pictorialism drew on the same intellectual traditions as the
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms put forward in the late 1920s by Cassirer,
a contemporary Berlin- and Hamburg-based philosopher who moved in
Bettmanns modernist circles and worked closely with Warburg in articu-
lating a new order of knowledge.46 Unlike Cassirer, however, Bettmann
placed supreme importance on being intelligible in a pictorial age. In
keeping with the radical functionalism he had always espoused, his phi-
losophy of pictures came to expression through pictures. His ordering of
visual knowledgein the archive and in page layoutsevinced a sophisti-
cated semiotic standpoint. Well aware that Pictorialism served as a genre
label in photographymannerist use of the camera to produce a painterly
effect yields hybrid utterances comparable in kind to the deployment of
historical graphics for interfacing with modernityBettmann broadened
the meaning of the term to define his own practice. He was friendly with
Edward Steichen (18781973), the American photographer whose work
bridged the pictorialist and the modernist style.47
The applied pictorialism that emerged in the early twentieth century,
here exemplified in the work of Fuchs, Bayer, and Bettmann, went beyond
a simple inventory of novel, graphic dexterities. Pictorialism does not tally
up with visual literacy; it intervenes in the referential relations organizing
the world we inhabit. This space of surrogacy has normative implications.
Fred Turner, the historian of cyberculture, develops a similar argument
in The Democratic Surround. Turners notion of the surround is com-
parable to Bettmanns pictorialism in that it signifies the sum total of
graphical signposting efforts that emerged in the postwar, pre-internet
era. Architects of the surround were some of the most well-known art-
ists and intellectuals of the forties and, according to Turner, they built
into the surround new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self
in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the
fascist and communist movements.48 Turner doesnt mention Bettmann
but he would likely agree that his archive contributed to the surround in
question. The key players in Turners account are Edward Steichen and
(with no mention of a speckled past) Herbert Bayer. It seems hardly to
matter that, prior to engineering the democratic surround, Bayer unabash-
edly furthered the fascist surround in Nazi Germany. Turners surround-
concept ignores the moral register of aesthetic practice.
Bettmanns dispute with Bayer concerned the normative implications
of pictorialism. Both visual engineers possessed a common toolbox of
techniques for re-visioning the world under the banner of trade. Both were
declared pictorialists. Unlike Bettmann, however, Bayer upheld an exclu-
sive view of the pictorial and restricted its purview to non-verbal, graphic
representation. He deemed the immediacy of pictorial utterance vastly
superior to the incommodiousness of words and lamented that verbal con-
cepts cruelly invade our minds every second of the day. Worse yet, they
act like a screen between us and our visible world. To ease communica-
tion, Bayer claimed, information must become simpler, more direct, and
for that reason more pictorial.49
Pictures of history are easily falsified, or lost, in the shuffle of referential
practice. It is widely agreed that a given image may be propagandistic.
But in addition the system of visual conventions comprising our virtual
actuality normalizes controversial and value-laden schemes of representa-
tion. From Bayers rebranding of the democratic self, to the diffusion of
Bettmanns reverse-pictorialism, to the uptake of camp humanist opposi-
tional propaganda, to the countercultural roots of home computinga
contested history of pictorialism lurks in the shadows of the limited screen
real estate we share. Network-aesthetic principles organize todays online
experience: surrogacies taken for granted privilege certain modes of engag-
ing attention and disseminating curated information. Bettmann developed
a reflexive critique of the pictorial; Bayer did not. Both legacies live on,
both styles of visual reasoning are pervasive in our digital habitat. But the
argument between them has been mutedscrambled in the algorithmic
automation of the wired world.
Conclusion
Primitive modernists in the age of Reactionary Modernism: Bettmann,
Bayer and their generation of pictorial engineers did not at first appreciate
how their mediated partiality might impact the course of history.50 They
gathered images as material artifacts bound on celluloid, photographic
paper or in print reproduction. Curators of knowledge, they repurposed
ready-mades from the graphic commons and pictorialized scientific exper-
tise from across the disciplinary spectrum. Relentless bricolage allowed
these curator-collectors to capitalize on knowledge resources produced
and retained at public expense. Subjective labor, technologically lever-
aged, characterized their work. Todays cyberphiliac blogosphere, a-throb
with derivative content curation, is powered by expressive practices fol-
lowing on from theirs.
98 C. VON XYLANDER
Two commanding visual tropes of the presentinformation architec-

ture and global connectivityharken back to the pictorial innovations of
Bettmann and Bayer respectively. In the process of articulating their picto-
rial agendasrehearsed modes of surrogacy, if you willthey formatted a
host of visual metaphors that govern our virtual task-completion routines.
The graphical conventions they developed prefigured the luminous ico-
nography of search engines, dynamic links, pointer prompts, thumbnails,
scalability, mobilityand, indeed, Windows.
From the outset, the Bettmann Archive was taken to be a venture rather
like starting ones own postal service or railroad system.51 It came to be
viewed as a national treasure on a par with the Metropolitan Museum and
the Library of Congress. Conjuring a pictorial past wedded to contempo-
rary commercial incentives, the so-called archive was in fact a brokerage
firm selling restricted copyright to visual solutions that it had appropri-
ated from elsewhere. Any pictures of history generated along the way were
by-products of the philosophically informed, semiotically sophisticated
information retrieval apparatus put in place by Bettmann. The referential
anachronism of his thumbnails, consolidated into hybrid figurationspart
symbolic pastiche of the pictorial past, part visual roadmap to the present,
part ironic salute to a camp humanist futureproduced a retro sensibility
that continues to enable twentieth-century America to self-situate.
On the threshold of the twentieth century, a software mogul merges
image ownership and global appliancing in a newly potent way. Bettmanns
de/contexted, big-history picture is tucked away in a custom-built oubli-
ette in Pennsylvania, his wayward sense of irony decoupled from the com-
mercial picture delivery it once textured: Iron Mountain is irony free. In
the course of the pictorial age, the progressive turns totalitarian, turns
devotional, turns countercultural and, yes, turns digitala mercurial his-
tory has gone missing in the online experience. Even so, the virtual of
Gates/Microsoft/Corbis is pictorial still. And custodial bias does rule.
Debate
Steve Crossan
Do we know that Bettmann was explicitly responding to Bayers World
Atlas, perhaps among many other things? Isnt he also directing critiques
at himself and his own world, in this conflict between the collection and
the creation of a physical archive, and the subversive aspects you find in
this portable archive in the 1960s? And then the story continues through
to the sale to Corbis: there is clearly some kind of internal conflict that he
is trying to articulate.

Bettmann is very aware of Bayers work and he has been commenting
on it for a long timegoing back to the 1930sbut he doesnt say I
am directing critique at this project. The archive went through several
hands and was bought by Corbis in the 1990s. When they bought it they
immediately decided that the graphic material was very fragile so they
built a special film preservation center in a salt mine in Pennsylvania, Iron
Mountain. So the entire visual history was taken out of circulation and
stored in a mine and is supposed to be digitized: that is more or less the
recompense for removing it from circulation. There is another difficulty,
which is that the collection Bettmann actually sold included three million
images, but it has now gone through so many hands, through mergers
and acquisitions, that by the time Corbis bought the archive the collec-
tion contained 16 million images. But all of these 16 million are called the
Bettmann archive, because Bettmann invented the commercial delivery
service: the licensing mechanisms for how to distribute this visual material.
Of those 16 million Bettmann images, only 200,000 have been digitized.
This of course fuels the very critical reaction to what happened to the
archive and the difficulty of accessing it.
The question about Bettmanns self-criticism is very interesting and
complicated. His association with the typographic innovators in Berlin in
the 1930s, with whom he had a vast publishing history, is entirely excised
from his biography. He never referred to it again. In his Nachlsse archive,
there is not a single reference to it; in his official biography, he described
everything that he had ever published after he immigrated and in the
period in which he reinvented himself as a pictorial historian, but this pre-
history is silenced. I think its because he felt so uncomfortable about the
kinds of discursive mechanisms that he was involved in enabling.
This is particularly clear in one case: the Typographische Mitteilungen,
which was the central typographical professional publication in Berlin.
The Typographische Mitteilungen, right before the Nazis came to power,
conducted a survey asking the major voices in this field how they saw the
future of Gothic script versus classical Roman script and radically modern
geometric scripts. This was of course a discussion about the politics of
100 C. VON XYLANDER
visual aesthetics in that moment, so everyone was asked to respond. They

published the answers from familiar figures such as Bayer and Bettmann,
along with Moholy-Nagy, Jan Tschichold, and Paul Renner.
By the next issue of the journal, the political situation had collapsed,
the Nazi state had taken charge of these organs of aesthetic communica-
tion and this next issue had a long, revisionist history explaining that mod-
ern typography had been headed, and had always been headed toward the
development of Gothic script, the German script, our script. They quoted
the leading visual experts of the day: the justification of this Gothic colo-
nization of the visual media was explained in terms taken from Bettmanns
articles. At the same time, however, as he had been excluded from public
service, he could no longer work as a curator in the city. This simultaneity
was so uncomfortable and so difficult that he never addressed his history
at that level, except in these coded visual scripted pictures.
Steve Crossan
To physically move to New York and to reinvent himself is in some sense to
undermine himself. There is some connection here also with Pierres talk,
how these utopian projects of collection and archiving also have a totali-
tarian dimension. In a way, they go along with this totalitarian conjuncture
of the 1930s. The later subversion into a sort of camp format is a very
interesting anti-totalitarian reaction.
Pierre Chabard
I had a question about the typographical innovations that make it so this
encyclopedia is thought of as a device that is less textual and more visual
with its double pages that violate the discontinuous form of the codex and
turn this book into a genuine space of its own. I wanted to know if you
found the same visceral and explicit distrust toward books that was there
with Patrick Geddes and Paul Otlet. They both in fact made a radical cri-
tique of the book as a medium, as an inert and intimidating receptacle of
ancient knowledge, dusty and academic. When they published books, they
tried all typographic means to overcome the book form. And if they always
preferred the scenographic and museological forms for the presentation of
knowledge, it is precisely because they saw books as unsatisfactory media.

Here the two paths of my two characters begin to bifurcate. Already in his
Berlin period, Bayer was interested in overcoming the book and finding
new forms of literacy that could be spatially realized, in which just moving
through exhibitions was a way in which information is transmittedand
thus the rigid linearity of the book and the hierarchical authority of the
author could be left behind.
Bettmann first studied philosophy, earned a Ph.D.; but then he needed
a day job. He qualified as a librarian. It was with this librarians train-
ing that he was employed as the curator for the art history libraries in
Berlin: this is why he was surrounded with fantastic graphic books of rare
materials, and he owned one of the first Leicas, right when the Leica was
invented. He realized that he could use it as a copying device to collect
these images to which he had access by virtue of his professional situa-
tion. His role was not that of an artist per se as he moved in the circle of
Bauhaus innovative graphic tone-setters. He was the person who reflected
upon the forms of the new book, which ones are particularly effective; he
discussed the relationship of book covers to contents, he discussed the way
in which bookstores should reorganize their shop windows, he was incred-
ibly excited about one of the books presented in my paper, one of the first
audio books, a book actually with a record inside. And why was this so
important? Not just the possibility of sound effects while you are reading
but also the fact that it reminds us of how important the book is. So for
Bettmann, the book will remain, for some time, the medium by which this
new multimedia environment is drawn together; our sensorium has been
trained to be able to process this altered technological environment by
means of the book.
Bruno Latour
How much is statistical aesthetics relevant here, especially in the geo-
graphical atlas? And how much of its design is there to address this anxiety
of the analogists, these mad classifiers? That is, if analogists are anxious, it
is because every single item has to be ordered. The usual way to order it is
in the old sixteenth-century way, by aligning a microcosm with the mac-
rocosm. But when you dont have that sort of skill or framework, design
becomes a very important aspect. I was struck by the extreme beauty of
the design in all these works you discuss: the extreme carefulness, the
102 C. VON XYLANDER
search for the ordering pattern. But of course design is another way of
thinking again about the difference between the gathering, the long series
of archives, and the display.

It is very striking that the arkas an organizing/salvaging principle
came up in the original plan for this Dialogue and again it comes up with
the problem of design. The problem with the ark, and the caption that
Bettmann attaches to it, is to remind us that the ark is always anachronistic
and always responding to an imminent crisis: it is a design for survival, but
it is a design that will help us transition into a world, which will then be
a New World in which this design will be anachronistic, redundant, over-
come. So there is a permanent problem of the tools that we need, that we
rely upon to make a new order. They are, by definition, anachronistic and
redundant. And that is part of the design that Bettmann is very interested
in. But it seems like the design in which Bayer is operating is a design
that is cohesive and hegemonic and closed, and somehow he assumes it
will not be subject to its own obsolescence. As for statistics, what Bayer
complained was so difficult about assembling his atlas was that it had to
be at the absolute cutting edge of scientific discovery. So he would gather
the statistics, the numerical knowledge from all of these fields, voraciously
gathering and then finding a way of translating that into a graphic equiva-
lent that insisted upon its accuracy. So this was why it became such a large
project dealing with the statistical multiplication of data.
Simon Schaffer
Weve already mentioned that there is a very uncanny and unstable rela-
tionship between the enterprise of gathering data, accumulation, and
then, in contrast, the enterprise of displaying, of putting them on show.
But these are not the same enterprise. Does this material help us under-
stand more about what that relationship in tension is?

At the later stage in his career, Bettmann seems not to see that relationship
as so problematic; but then with the publication of this catalog he real-
izes that there is in fact an intervention that he wants to make, between
his own accumulation and the mechanism of display. The interest that
organizes his display at this period, is precisely to make this gap appar-
ent. This is part of what the portable archive does: it teaches us to make
that distinction, and develop a critical awareness, to make us more than a
manipulated crowd to whom pictorial messaging is just spread by osmosis.
Bettmann seems intensely aware of the future redundancy of the precise
archival apparatus that he has put in place. So what he is interested in is:
what would remain of this message, of this lesson that I have to articulate?
That is what should be portable, and that is a kind of critical awareness of
the form, what carries the message.
Anke te Heesen
Bettmanns whole undertaking is very playful, and this playfulness is
important. Think, for example, of Siegfried Kracauers Mass Ornament,
a very critical and specific view of the formation of masses. For me,
Bettmann is offering a kind of pattern, a pattern of the masses: in contrast
to Kracauers negative view of the imagery of the masses which enables
domination, and so on, this looks like a very positive moment in formu-
lating the mass as a positive background. Could you elaborate a little bit
more about these patterns of the masses that Bettmann is usingsuch as
lines, little pathways, circles, all of these patterns that occur as a part of the
books design. Is there a certain meaning behind that? That is what I see
in that archive.
Elizabeth Pisani
My question is about the morality and the ethics of stealing 16 million
images from other people with your Leica, then selling them to other
people, monetizing other peoples intellectual property. It occurs to me
only because there is a very big and urgent debate going on right now
about ownership of data and liberation of data, particularly with the public
health data that I have worked on. Doesnt Bettmanns story raise issues
for us about who has the right to organize this information? However
good your taxonomy may be, do you have the right to then sell those data
on to other people, no matter the circumstances?
104 C. VON XYLANDER

To reply to Anke, first, and her question about the mass, and the whole
notion of engineering consent and crowd manipulation. Bettmann is criti-
cal of the tools that make that possibleand also points a very accusing
finger at himself. In his version of the portable archive we never find a
mass, but always only groups, communities, and they are lovely, they are
beautiful. One of the images is the studio photograph, and we see all
the people who have had their pictures taken in that studio. Another is
a Japanese bath and we see all of its customers relaxing, sort of huddled
together. They are always very small groups, deeply cultured, in a ritual
of convening. Then having sold the collection, the first time, to Kraus
Thompson, they re-issue the portable archive, adding all kinds of new
subject categories, and much of this is excised. It is now much more about
showing the wares, the kind of pictures available; it is also very important
to demonstrate that there is colored photography, not all black and white.
But in Bettmanns imaginary, it is so important that anachronistic, histori-
cal images are used to describe the world of airplanes and elevators and
modern acceleration, modern logistics. The woodcut gives us our orienta-
tion, it is always backward-looking and anachronistic, all of our references
are always pass. He wants us to learn new ways of implementing our old
references, not inventing new references. But when the portable archive
was re-issued, one of the themes, page after page, was to show masses:
we see the census being taken in America, we see landscapes of desks, of
workers. There is a whole different kind of mass representation in-between
the mid-1960s version and the next issue in the late 1970s.
In reply to Elizabeth, the ethics and morality of the service model
Bettmann developed are complicated by the fact that the property rights
question had not yet been codified and legalized in the way that would
make it transgressive in the way it looks on your reading. One of the early
books that Bettmann worked on was for a law firm. He wrote the history of
the law firm in Berlin that was responsible for copyright protection which
was just beginning to develop. What he codified in his licensing system
was a service license for his search mechanism for the work of keyword-
ingof being able to retrieve this material. It is a 50-dollar fee for using
the images, at first. Thats the license that he initiates: a single-use license.
By the end of that period in the 1940s, the single-use license is adjusted
to the audience size. So it becomes 25 dollars, depending on what size of
campaign youre planning to use the graphics for. There is a transition to
different kinds of licensing mechanisms that he is definitely participating

in. And he is tickled that he was allowed to move in a world of libraries
in which you could take your camera and just photograph anything you
wantedhow wonderful, he thought. And for the record, Bettmann only
captured 3 million images.
Simon Schaffer
It is an episode in the history of Leica. The coincidence of the machine
and the library seems one of the most interesting episodes in the story. It
is an absolutely revolutionary theft device.
John Tresch
But it is also an important episode in the history of the loss of the com-
mons, as in the enclosures: we will claim this land, and then set up the
rules which make it possible and impossible for others to have access to it,
after this original theftwhich cant even be called a theft until these rules
are put into place.

Bettmann justifies his participation in this process in the dissertation he
wrote about book trading in eighteenth-century Germany: he showed
that it was traders who brought standards of uniformity to the book
and alleviated the anguish of readers who had all these different copies
because copies have been pirated. So it is trading that brings regularity
and order to cultural affairs. When he was inventing the picture trade,
it would be again the traders who would order this chaotic cultural
system.
This goes back to my comment after Pierres talk. We are considering
conscious collection and display. The museum, the encyclopedia, the
library, the catalog, the access, the library catalog, and then the archive
that you described are all visible hand institutions. But you can also
think of the micro, where its just local decisions, the hands of all the
106 C. VON XYLANDER
users and formatters. There is a kind of middle ground between the

micro and the macro, which is the invisible hand, various kinds of invis-
ible hands, not necessarily of the marketplace, but all kinds of things:
language, for example. These are spontaneous orders. There is one idea
from economics which might be helpful: the matter of the social func-
tion of appropriating stuff from the commons, which, in the sense John
Tresch gave, is a theft. Economics would say instead that in order for the
commons to be correctly allocated, in order for the commons to find its
way to the hands of the people who value it the most, who are prepared
to pay the most, there has to be an act of gathering, or as you said, of
appropriation. But after it is appropriated, the economist says: It should
be free. So the economist says that the property relation is necessary, it
is not theft; but it is not locked either. It needs to have a price, or else
it would be misused, overused. But once it is created as property, once
you have constructed the bridge, access over the bridge has to be free.
So in this light, Bettmann could be viewed as both a hero and a villain.
He is a hero who goes around with his camera collecting these images
essentially for free; and a villain for charging the working-mans weekly
wage, which is about what he is charging in the 1930s for each image.
We need to talk about spontaneous orders as well as about planned cen-
tralized orders.
Pierre Chabard
I would go back to the tension between the act of collecting and the act of
display, and make a further remark concerning Patrick Geddes. An original
feature of the Outlook Tower is that it was the visitor himselfthe citizen
of this Edinburgh neighborhoodwho was supposed to create the collec-
tion, to participate in the documentary accumulation, under the heading
of what Geddes called the Civic Survey. It was a fairly open method of
documentation, which at the same time had a teaching value. Although
Geddes failed to truly engage the working community, he nevertheless
involved teachers in some primary schools and kindergartens from old
Edinburgh. These teachers put their students to work in accumulating
images, maps, even in the production of certain documents for the Tower.
In the ideal, the Survey was the continuous manufacture of the archive that
was to accompany the evolution of both the city and the world. Therefore,
the display was not the only moment of mediation in this encyclopedic
project. The visitor of the Outlook Tower was also to be, in principle, the
producer of the content evolution.
Simon Schaffer
We have been considering what seem to be highly centralist forms of accu-
mulation and display, centralist in perhaps at least two senses: centralist in
the sense that there is a singular gathering point and also centralist in the
sense that it is materialized in a remarkable way. In the case of this version
of the tragedy of the commons, we are perhaps more authentically invited
to see the ancestry of the internet and of the network and of a possible,
not exactly anti-centralist, but non-centralist model, in the jokey portability
of the Bettmann portable archive. The invention of the thumbnail image
seems also one of the most interesting newish commodity forms that allows
the tragedy of the commons to work out. You can almost, but not quite,
see the things Bettmann will charge you for. That seems an extraordinarily
ingenious way of commodifying free use. So there is a series of questions
on the table now: about the spontaneous emergence of orders, the tragedy
of the commons, and the specific example of Geddes invention of crowd
sourcing, along with this general thought about to what extent we are talk-
ing about the transition from the centralized model to a networked model.

Part of the tragedy is that Bettmanns way of interpreting his service is to
make the archive accessible to anyone who wants to come and browse the
indexes for a kind of entry feeyou buy yourself a ticket, like to a museum,
and then you can come and hang out. It is also telling that he calls it an
archive, a word we generally use for public servicesbut this is in fact a
private enterprise. It is called an archive and is so successful at insinuating
itself as a public service that part of the outrage when it was bought and
taken into this preservation situation was the popular view that material
to which we have rights was being sequestered. And Bettmann himself
helped articulate that sense of a right; he appears to have seen it as part
of his responsibility. But it seems that he did not create the mechanism
to preserve it; instead, his service and ownership model was so subject to
interpretation that it was vulnerable to other uses. This shows that it is not
enough just to be paternalistically generous in organizing the access.
108 C. VON XYLANDER
Simon Schaffer
When Corbis got Bettmanns archive, then retrospectively Bettmannized
his material which was actually in the original acquisition, was that seen as
a privatization of a former public good?

Yes. The debate is still alive. There is an amazing text now on the Corbis
website explaining the Bettmann collection: why it has been preserved,
why it has been drawn out of circulation, why it has always been private,
why it was never available publicly, why they have not done anything at
all except to contribute to the longevity of this material. That document
offers a way to study the way in which the public and the private are com-
pletely at odds.
This appropriation into the museum, into the archive, comes at a spe-
cific period in history. It is the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesand it
seems very awkward now, in my opinion, as Google can tell us. It was awk-
ward before, as well, in a different situation, when there wasnt copyright,
when the author had not been invented. Then, people stole things all the
time, there was open access. In between, there was a period of privatiza-
tionwhich I regard as terrible.
Richard Powers
I remember a second issue raised about the Corbis acquisition. At the
time, I was working in the computer trade press. The worry then was not
only that the thing had been done but by whom? The caveat of course is
that we need to be very careful about a kind of vertical integration here;
there was paranoia about the acquisition by Microsoft, or the agents of
Microsoft, of all of this property. Do we really want the people who are
putting the software in our boxes on our desks to also be the owners of
the content? And that was perceived as a very dangerous or potentially
dangerous and exploitable thing.
John Tresch
This discussion has shown that design was one of the twentieth cen-
turys great solutions to the problem of order, with design as a kind of
lightweight, transparent infrastructurenot the very visible and ritual-
ized micro- and macrocosm of the analogist. Cheryces story provides
materials for a genealogy of the aesthetics of the digital age. It adds an
element which is very menial, the thumbnail. But there is also some-
thing to be said about the interplay between the centralized and decen-
tralized in Bettmanns first and second stages, his German and then his
New York phase, in the way his design principles were taken up by the
media and by Madison Avenue and eventually integrated to the coun-
terculture. Isnt there a kind of back and forth with the counterculture,
too? The aesthetics of Bettmann, and especially the portable Bettmann,
as Cheryce pointed out, is close to the aesthetics of Monty Python; but
it is seems to echo or anticipate the outsider aesthetics of Harry Smith
and his version of anthropology, collecting and reformatting the Old
Weird America in woodcuts and collages and a new archive of 1945s. It
also becomes the aesthetics of psychedelia. A name like The Jefferson
Airplane is exactly, in words, the visual logic of the Bettmann archive:
the combined anachronism and novelty of the woodcut. We could see
the Bettmann vision at work in this context too, as these design forms
moved to Silicon Valley and into the commercialization of the coun-
terculture, alongside Steve Jobs and Apple. Apple references not only
the Garden of Eden, Newton, but also the Beatles commercialization
enterprise, Apple Records. And you can get back to the garden for a
price, with the right interface.
David Turnbull
Deirdre McCloskey mentioned this museum moment, which was not
there before and it is now over or is soon to be over. And this was in
relation to the question about centralized power versus something that
might look less centralized, such as a network. But the networked or
the cybernetic organization of knowledge does not of itself say any-
thing about how power is organized. In a network, in a non-organized
and emergent substrate it is still possible, and in fact it still happens,
that there are asymmetries which allow power to emerge in particular
110 C. VON XYLANDER
ages and in particular places so that the power can become centralizing.
There is a sort of utopianism about cybernetics, that it will save us from
powerbut it wont.
Elizabeth Pisani
Pierre Chabard described how the content of the Tower was supposed
to be contributed by the slum dwellers around it. I absolutely agree that
the network does not constitute power, but one of the ways we might be
deconstituting that power is that the network now allows everyone to con-
tribute content. In that parenthesis of Bettmann collecting and displaying
the content and then passing it on to a corporation that would control
that content, we have one of the things that is disappearing along with this
recent museum age: because now weve got the possibility of contributing
content in the same way. Its surprising but I think it is interesting to see
something similar in an earlier age.

The idea of the visual aesthetic organization of the digital age, closely
connected with the anxiety of who is buying the archive and the geneal-
ogy that we have been talking aboutthis resemblance is not purely an
unfortunate coincidence of the form of software and the content of web
pages. Rather, the graphical user interface upon which the Microsoft oper-
ating system relies, which made Windows practicable and popular, was
in fact being articulated by the person whose content Microsoft bought:
namely, Bettmann and his colleagues. So this was not a negative coinci-
dence. There is a kind of logic of history unfolding itself here.
Richard Powers
A pernicious consolation: that not only what is available to us will be
decided for us but how we can think about or retrieve those things.
Notes
1. Cheryce Kramer (von Xylander), Bettmann/CORBIS
Techniken der Sichtbarmachung von historischem Bildmaterial.
In: Konstruieren Kommunizieren Prsentieren. Bilder von
Wissenschaft und Technik. Edited by Alexander Gall. Gttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 2007 (this German essay was adapted from a

prior English version, Bettmann/CORBISRetrographic
Content Delivery from 1936 to 1995, available on my homep-
age: http://is.gd/vdIjDm). Reiterated and supplemented in:
Estelle Blaschke, Photography and the Commodification of Images:
From the Bettman Archive to Corbis (ca. 19242010). Doctoral dis-
sertation, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, 2011.
2. Steve Lohr, Huge Photo Archive Bought by the Chairman of
Microsoft. The New York Times, October 11, 1995. http://
is.gd/3V1Xw8 (Last consulted 02.25.2014).
3. This subterranean complex typifies the digital materiality mostly
bracketed from the networked imaginary of electronic
communications.
4. Bettmann Moments. Edited by Corbis to commemorate the 100th
birthday of Otto Bettmann. Seattle: Barnes & Noble, 2003.
5. Otto L. Bettmann, Bettmann: the Picture Man. Editorial coordina-
tion by Skip Sheffield. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida,
1992, 101103.
6. Peter de Mendelssohn, Zeitungsstadt Berlin. Menschen und Mchte
in der Geschichte der deutschen Presse. Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1985.
7. Picture Man, 2527.
8. Kramer, Bettmann/CORBIS, 257, 262272, 279286.
9. Otto Bettmann, A Picture Index, in: Wilson Bulletin for
Librarians, 13(1939): 536537, 537.
10. For discussion of virtual actuality versus virtual reality, see
Christoph Hubig, Die Kunst des Mglichen, vol. I. Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2006, 187.
11. Walter Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker,
in: Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung, 6 (1937): 346381; English
translation Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian, in: Walter
Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol.3 (19351938). Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2002, 260302.
12. Bettmann, Picture Man, 95.
14. Benjamin, Fuchs, 261, 275, 284.
15. Online finding aid to the Otto L. Bettmann Personal Papers

Collection held at the Florida Atlantic University Libraries, see:
http://is.gd/q46rwV (Last consulted 02.25.2014).
16. Im Kampf um neue Gestaltungsfragen, in: Typographische

Mitteilungen, vol. 30, January & February issues, 1933.
112 C. VON XYLANDER
17. Julius Rodenberg, Die Druckkunst als Spiegel der Kultur in fnf
Jahrhunderten. Berlin: Druckgewerblicher Verlag der Preussischen
Verlagsu. Druckerei GmbH, 1942, 329330.
18. Gestaltungsfragen, 1933, February issue: Bayer, 70; Bettmann,
73.
19. Reactionary interpretation of lettering types was not stable during
the Nazi regime.
20. Herbert Bayer: Die Berliner JahreWerbegrafik 19281938.
Exhibition catalog by Patrick Rssler, with a contribution by Ute
Brning. Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum fr Gestaltung, 2013.
21. Gropius made the comment in 1934. See exhibition text in

Herbert BayerDie Berliner Jahre. Also Interview with Patrick
Rssler, the shows curator, in the Tagesspiegel. See: http://is.gd/
NvrqQt (Last consulted 02.25.2014).
22. Cheryce von Xylander, Cardboard: Thinking the Box, in: History
and Philosophy of Technoscience, Pickering & Chatto (in progress).
23. Robert Allen Nauman, On the Wings of Modernism: The United Air
Force Academy. Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, Springfield:
University of Illinois Press, 2004, 60.
26. Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: Cultural Criticism of
Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis
Mumford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
27. Van Wyck Brooks, Otto L. Bettmann, Our Literary Heritage: A
Pictorial History of the Writer in America. New York: E. P. Dutton,
1956.
28. Otto Bettmann, Die Entstehung buchhndlerischer Berufsideale im
Deutschland des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Doctoral dissertation,
University of Leipzig, 1927.
29. Otto Bettmann, Johann Sebastian Bach: As His World Knew Him.
Foreword by Martin Bookspan. New York: Kensington Publishing
Corporation, 1995.
30. Otto L. Bettmann, Bach the Rhetorician, in: The American

Scholar, vol. 55, 1986, 113128.
31. Bettmann, Rhetorician, 115.
33. The author has a book in preparation that traces the phenome-
nology of Gemt from Kant to the furthest reaches of German
influence; her dissertation studied its aesthetic re-education in

asylum psychiatry.
35. Interview with Peter Max: Skip Sheffield, Peter Max in a category
all his own, in: Boca Raton News, Oct. 4, 2002, p. 6. http://
is.gd/8gbTy8 (Last consulted 02.25.2014).
36. Bettmann Panopticon. The Bettmann Archive and The Daly &
Max Studio, 1963, quotation from preface.
37. A Computer Perspective. Exhibition book by the office of Charles
& Ray Eames. Edited by Glen Fleck. Introduction by I. Bernard
Cohen. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1973.
38. Susan Sonntags Notes on Camp first appeared in 1964:

http://is.gd/nkIxCQ (Last consulted 02.25.2014).
39. Panopticon, 1963, preface.
40. Bettmann, The Relationship of Word and Picture, 74, 76.
41. Blaschke, Commodification of Images, 2011, 138.
http://goo.gl/JZswbI (Last consulted 02.25.2014).
42. World Geographic Atlas: a composite of Mans Environment. Edited
and designed by Herbert Bayer. Chicago: Container Corporation
of America, 1953.
44. Portable Archive, 3.
46. Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists. Warburg, Cassirer,

Panofsky and the Hamburg School. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2013.
48. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American
Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013, quotation from publishers
announcement. http://is.gd/1e6F0A (Last consulted 02.28.
2014).
49. Bayer, design, designer, and industry, (1951), in: Arthur A.

Cohen, Herbert Bayer: The Complete Work. Boston: MIT Press,
1984, 354.
50. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and
Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984.
51. Picture Man, 51.
CHAPTER 6
The Unending Quantity ofObjects:

AnObservation onMuseums andTheir
Presentation Modes
Ankete Heesen
When we are confronted with the overwhelming quantity of objects and

images that surround us, we always ask ourselves the same question: Who
can order this unending quantity of objects? [] who can gaze into the
universe and pick out just the remarkable, when everything is so equally
important and equally wondrous []? Where is the beginning and where
is the ending of this gaze?1 When the naturalist Georg Forster published
these words in his essay about the Whole of Nature in 1794, it was clear
that it would be humans themselves who would take up this challenge
and attempt to solve it as best as they could. Forster provides two impor-
tant indications of this. First, he designates the unending quantity to be
the perception that knowledge about the world will never be complete.
Second, he designates the gaze to be a possibility of comprehension.
The task is to mark out a beginning and an end of this gaze, in order to
enable knowledge about the world, the earth, and nature. Since then there
A. te Heesen (*)
Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_6
116 A. TE HEESEN
have been a number of attempts to gaze at the world and to transform

these gazes into human knowledge: the curves of a diagram illustrate a
flow of goods; pictorial atlases propose the typical constellation of stars in
summer; and collections give an impression of the ritual uses of vases in
early cultures. This admittedly random list of possibilities reveals organiza-
tions of the world through certain media, which make the variety of things
around us sometimes more and sometimes less visible. It is not the gaze
alone that determines what we comprehend, but rather its encounter with
different constellations of things. Our understanding is formed through
the gaze and the objects upon which the gaze falls.
This might seem commonplace. Much research of the last 30 years has
clarified the relationships between knowledge and perception, human and
object. The museum has won much attention in these efforts as a site of
collection and of viewership. Similar to archives and libraries, the museum
has been treated here as a central agent of knowledge, attempting to bring
order to the unending quantity through the preservation and arrange-
ment of objects. However, new technologies of exhibition and museologi-
cal display go a step further and find a different solution: they categorize
this quantity, but they present it to the gaze of the viewer as an endless row
without hierarchy. They represent the quantity itself. I will argue in the
following that the most recent installations of numerous museums evoke
a moment that resonates with the words of Forster with which we began:
one of amazement, reverence, and fascination. But, at the same time, and
different from those systematizers of the eighteenth century, we are no
longer confronted with a classification behind the order, but with the mass
of objects alone.
In 2012, the German Kunstzeitung published a review on page eight
about the wet collection at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.
The article described a series of optical sensations in the exhibition. In
the Swiss architecture firm Diener & Dieners reconstruction of the east
wing of the museum, which had been badly damaged during the Second
World War, the 300,000 jars of the wet collection were redisplayed. It
was a sight to behold, which could hold its own with any work of
installation art [literally in Germanit could pass the water to any instal-
lation].2 The photograph on page eight shows the shelves with some of
the jars; one can also make out a few visitors drifting off into the depths of
the narrowing chamber. The ambience is dim, styled like a treasure vault,
an impression that stems from the cleverly illuminated glass jars contain-
ing the specimens (fish, amphibians, and other organisms). Looking at
THE UNENDING QUANTITY OFOBJECTS: ANOBSERVATION ONMUSEUMS... 117
the shelves in the picture, one could argue that what we see here is con-
nected to and explained by the taxonomic order of the classical age. We
could think of portraits of natural historians of the classical age like that
of Albertus Seba: the natural philosopher and pharmacist sitting in the
midst of his collection, veiled by drapery, with shelves after shelves seen
behind him, filled with jars. Inside the jars are snakes and fishes. Or we
think of the transparent order of a mineralogical cabinet, where the stones
are presented according to a classification system. The whole cabinet is a
representation of the system as well as of the world. We could take it for
granted that the organizers of the Berlin showroom had those pictures
beside othersin mind. But since the classical age, more than 200 years
have passed. So the question is, what is in the presentation other than the
order of the eighteenth century? In the following pages, I would like to
describe the Berlin showroom. I will argue that these infinite/finite rows
of objects are a central image which is not only used in other museums as
well but has several resonances which need to be described. The question
will be: What is a collection of endless objects when the explanation for
classification is missing?
Everyone who passes through the gates stands in front of a towering
and overpowering wall, composed of shelves, cylindrical glass jars, in each
one a preserved organism (Fig.6.1).
The visitors typically speak to each other in hushed tones, moving
about slowly, as the wall slowly comes to be recognized as a tower that one
can walk around. No text on the wall, no description inside the cube tells
what is to be seen. One looks at a glassy, glowing tower. In the middle, in
a space inaccessible to the viewer, there are a few work tables and a stair-
case. The shelves with the specimen jars contain this space for work and
storage. If a curator were to enter, he would become part of the exhibit.
But, as it is, there is no curator, so ones gaze is drawn continuously to the
towering multitude of jars. Just as in an old library, in which the books are
sorted according to size (folios on the lowest shelves, then quartos, and
finally the octavos), here the jars appear to be arranged according to their
weight and their size, decreasing in volume as the shelves get higher. In
short, here is one of the most beautiful and impressive presentations of a
collection to be seen today. It was opened in 2010.
That this is not, however, a singular instanceone clever idea from
an individual architect or curatorbut rather, a recent tradition of
presentation becomes clear through the following examples. I am con-
cerned not with emphasizing these examples as precedents but much
118 A. TE HEESEN
Fig. 6.1 The wet collection of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, 2010;
photographed by Carola Radke, courtesy of Museum of Natural History, Berlin
more with exposing the development of a mode of presenting and percep-

tionas mentioned abovewhich reveals something about our engage-
ment with objects in the museum since the 1990s. Three examples come
to mind (and I am sure there will be many others).
The central building of the Musum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris
is dedicated to zoology and was opened in 1994 under the name Grande
Galerie de l'volution. In the middle of the imposing hall, surrounded
by galleries, one is immediately confronted with an extended parade of
animals. These taxidermied creatures cut across the entire hall. They have
been remounted so that their hooves and claws actually touch the twenty-
first-century floor; we associate the parade of animals with going into or
leaving Noahs ark. Looking down at this parade from upper galleries, one
gets a splendid overview of the animals of the world spread out before
ones eyes. Even if the displayed specimens only make visible a small frac-
tion of what lies behind the scenes, their multitude produces adepot-effect,
one of visible storage: here it is not only the animal and the life sciences
that are thematized but also the functionality of the specimen as an object
both of presentation and also of archiving in and for the museum.3
My second example is a library: The British Library in London reopened

in a new building in 1998, featuring a central entrance hall with a recep-
tion desk, access to guest services, and a cafe restaurant. In the middle
of the hall, however, the visitor catches a direct view of a glass tower,
cutting through the floors of the building, which contains the library of
King George III.The tower was designed by the buildings architect, Sir
Colin St. John Wilson. Inside are moveable bookcases where books are
taken in and out for readers all day (at least this is what the website says).
The appearance and feel of the tower of books dominates the entrance
hall. The color of the books creates a dignified atmosphere. Here too, the
image of a glass collection of jewels pervades.
My third example is the Muse du quai Branly, the ethnological museum
which opened in 2006 in Paris. It features the indigenous art, cultures
and civilizations of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and America. This museum was
in the works since 1995 and was finally completed 11 years later by the
architect Jean Nouvel. Here too, the visitor enters through an entrance
hall, which is positioned, together with the typical guest services, along a
central ramp leading to a collection housed in glass. This section is con-
structed as a tower with many floors, in which one of the four central col-
lections of the museumthe musicology collectionis kept. The objects
are visible on the shelves, alongside workstations for researchers. Different
sounds and musical phrases are audible, accompanying the visitors ascent
into the actual exhibition room like a soft whisper.
The examples I have given here all accommodate an entire or partial
collection within their respective museums. None of these cases prioritizes
an individual object accompanied by a label, but rather theyhighlight the
volume of the objects and their appearance as a multitude. The viewer
acquires an overview, a glimpse into storage. The interior of the museum
itself becomes transparent. Open storage has been a topic of discussion
for some time. Notable examples include the Museum of Applied Arts in
Vienna and the bersee Museum in Bremen. These examples feature the
serial, classificatory objectsix Thonet chairs, seven offering bowls of dif-
ferent cultures. The presentation of objects as parts of a wall or a tower
of glass goes a step further, characterizing the classification itself as an
ordering of endless objects. The order, but not the classification, remains
accessible and conceivable even in its sheer diversity: it is the display of the
infinite amount.
Leaving the museum and its presentation modes aside for a moment,
one may ask for other resonances which occur while looking at the tower
120 A. TE HEESEN
of glass jars. Both the tower and its image suggest a multitude of inter-
pretations. A tower (or temple) of knowledge, for example, summons
up the many utopias of knowledge systems (just as the parade of animals
in Paris evokes Noahs ark). But by taking this a step further, it becomes
apparent that it is not just a central metaphor in the Western history of
knowledge which is being mobilized here. What is being forwarded is a
representation of endless order or serial storage. This representationfor
the uninformed visitordoes not account for the system of classification,
nor does it explain the depots function as storage. The museum and its
operations are being staged as an installation. If one understands an instal-
lation to be a three-dimensional, often site-specific work of art, usually
with a conceptual approach, then numerous examples of installations can
be related to the presentation of the wet collection Ive described.
For comparison, Ive selected a work by the British-Palestinian artist
Mona Hatoum. The installation is titled Current Disturbance, and was
created in 1996. From 2010 to 2011 the work was exhibited in London
in the Whitechapel Gallery (Fig.6.2).
The artist constructed four walls of cages, creating a four-sided trans-
parent cube. Within each of the 228 cages is a single light bulb individu-
ally wired to a central junction box. The light bulbs start to glow and
increase in intensity before shutting off. [] The sound of the current
flowing into the lightbulbs is amplified so the 60 cycle hum intensifies
and drops off as the current surges and recedes in the different wires. It
is at times a crackling, sizzling sound, at times a humming sound.4 The
lighting effects and the wired compartments produce an enclosed frame,
filled with light in different intervals, changing the ambience. Through
the sounds produced by the electrical connections, the cube dominates
and determines the space. If one considers the title of the work, namely
the double meaning of the word current between contemporary,
momentary, and electrical power, as well as electricity and its rela-
tionship to disturbance, then it becomes clear how important simulta-
neous seeing and hearing is to the installation, an effect which is only fully
revealed after a longer stay in the space.
This piece can be situated and interpreted in different ways. I am
concerned here with the image that the space and installation produce.
Two elements dominate. On one hand is of course the iconographical
comparison: the wooden slats produce a framework which recalls the
individual compartments in a classificatory scheme; the compartments
are filled with objects, assembled together in unending rows, which
Fig. 6.2 Mona Hatoum, Current Disturbance, 1996, wood, wire mesh, light
bulbs, computerized dimmer unit, amplifier and four speakers; photographed by
Ben Blackwell, courtesy Capp Street Studios, San Francisco
produce the tower. On the other hand, there is the coherence between
modes of perception: the combination of seeing, hearing, and moving in
space is the central experience for the visitor, who in this way can com-
prehend and examine in detail the effect of the three-dimensional frame-
work in the space. In Hatoums work, image and mode of experience
are intertwined, gesturing toward the natural historical, ethnological, and
book historical collection towers, created shortly after which I have just
shown. From the middle of the 1990s onwardthis is my argumentwe
approach the objects of a museum more and more as an artistic installa-
tion, as an aesthetic performance, communicated exclusively through the
senses. The individual object and the many rows of objects are meant to
affect us, to be u
nderstood associatively, and through their appearance and
enclosed exterior form to convey to the viewer the museum as an insti-
tution which can be grasped. The perceptual dispositif is one of sensory
graspability.
122 A. TE HEESEN
Beside the installation and art work, another resonance comes in when
we think about the infinite row of objects and the image of a tower. Since
the early nineteenth century and with the world exhibitions from the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century, the gaze of the visitor encompasses an even
more powerful image of the tower and its serialized objects, namely the
department store. I will not go into the history of commerce and com-
modities, but we can think of rows of tomato ketchup bottles, walls of hats,
and towers of cosmetics. Whether one looks at historical photographs in
which one can see interiors of warehouses, or at more recent arrangements
in supermarkets, we are shown quantity and abundance. So, looking at the
tower of the wet collection, one might make an association to mass pro-
duction and the serialized. A great example is the so-called car-town from
the Volkswagen (VW) group in Wolfsburg. This is a sort of park which was
newly constructed and opened in 2000, simultaneously with the EXPO,
the world exhibition in Hannover. The whole area encompasses about
25 hectares and in it we find a mixture of contemporary art and architec-
tureamong all the cars. It is organized into several buildings, a museum,
lots of brand pavilions, and a customer center where customers can pick
up their preordered VW.For this function, the architects built a high rack
as a tower with glass walls that make it possible to peer in at the rows of
brand new cars. Looking inside, you see how the individual cars accelerate
and are positioned on the little storage place (Fig.6.3).
What interests me here, is less the inner mechanism than the visible
and transparent depot of the cars: a glassy representation of marketing,
aestheticized and formed as a customers experience. Both towers count
20 floors, up to 400 cars can be stored in them. The car towers are 48m
high and fully illuminated at night.
Whether jars in Berlin, books in London, or cars in Wolfsburg, in all
these cases our gaze is trained to see the same: the order of objects without
the politics of classification behind it. Whereas Hatoum is openly present-
ing the conceptualization of her cube and how it functions, the others
hide their organization as well as their classification. It is not the classifica-
tion itself which appears, but the image of classification, and, as described
at the outset, the image of the quantity which is being displayed here. The
point is that museums adopt aesthetic surfaces that stem from art contexts
as well as from those of commodification. In the more recent modes of
presentation in museums and exhibitions, the answer to Forsters question
with which we startedwhere are the beginning and the end of the gaze
upon natureis that a quantity of objects organized for the viewer is no
Fig. 6.3 Towers with cars from Volkswagen, 2000; photographed by Emanuel
Raab, courtesy of Autostadt GmbH, Wolfsburg
longer made visible in its systematic organization, but rather it is the quan-
tity as quantity, and not as classification, which is offered up to view. It
is quantity which is in the foreground of the presentation of cars, and
quantity which is in the foreground in the installation of the Museum of
Natural History. A gaze at the wet collection tower in Berlin does reveal a
utopia of a universal, functional order. It is an obsessive system of knowl-
edge that we seebut first and foremost it is a representation of infinity
without limit, without the demarcations that Forster once dreamed of. Is
this how we will understand knowledge in the future?
Debate
Elizabeth Pisani
The coup dil invites a form of what the English call gawping. I call it
The Rape and Pillage Museum, because theres an aesthetic of putting
on display huge quantities of cultural artifacts, which are, in fact, everyday
objects in the cultures from which they come. They are not artifacts so
much as just pots that are still used to cook with and spears that are still
124 A. TE HEESEN
used for hunting. We stack them up in the middle, so you can walk with
some considerable effort for some considerable time around them, so that
we can then assure you that its the one perfect specimen that we have cho-
sen to display for you. We allow you this glimpse, but were going to show
you the one that we curators have chosen for you. And I find that offensive.
When I see a tower of VWs, I dont find it offensive at all because its
explicitly consumption. Its a display of explicit consumption and its not
pretending to be a cultural experience or a pedagogical experience.
You showed us a lot of towers encompassing large crowds of objects,
so Im curious to know about alternative museums. For instance, the new
Ashmolean, where you just walk through a gallery heading to one thing.
When I was at Oxford, I would go through these dusty rooms of dusty
things which I was not remotely interested in and didnt look at, to get to
the Chinese ceramics which I was interested in. Now, I look at the Chinese
ceramics and I see this little window on four medieval instruments and I
think Oh, thats interesting! Ill go down and look at the medieval instru-
ments. That small window on a small number of objects, without showing
the mass of things that are in storage, is more likely to draw me into knowl-
edge and new pathways. Its sort of a hyperlinking of the museum experi-
ence. Im curious what you think about these two different approaches.
Anke te Heesen
I think you are absolutely right about the coup dil. Im very ambivalent
about the whole story, and the ambivalence comes from my own curatorial
work in the 1990s, when I tried out these modes of representation. I look
at these towers and these masses of objects and I think theyre hard to get
into. There is nothing touchable in it, just the glassy surface of a quasi-
transparency. You dont get into a depot or warehouse, you do not even
have a depot-effect if you look at these glass jars, because no custodian is
working in that space; they refuse to go in and work there. So, that is the
irony about the tower in Berlin. One has to say that the whole presenta-
tion of course is very aesthetic and very nice, but at the same time it tells
you nothing about what is in there.
A second point is, what would the museum of the future be? And
of course I cant answer it. Its absolutely right that, in a way, we are
ready now to reintroduce the masterpiece, so we can get over the 1970s.
But we need other display procedures, and I think that we are not there
yet. And we try to cope with new media in the museum, though I have
not found many examples where that really works. If you were to ask me
whether I have a clear-cut idea of the future of the museum, I have to
say no, I havent. I think I could only establish something like that if I
were not only a museum visitor but also someone working in a museum.
Because I think only in the everyday exchange with the objects can you
develop such a future museum. I would love to do that, but at the moment
I have a different job.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
It seems to me that there is a certain pridefulness in these displaysa
superbia in visible storage. And its information, not knowledge.
Anke te Heesen
That is exactly why I call it the iconography of information. Because that
is our image of information today: its the glass tower in Berlin where we
receive this information.
Simon Schaffer
Could you say a word about where theMuseum of Natural History fits in
the political geography of Berlin?
Anke te Heesen
It was formerly part of the Humboldt University. The whole collec-
tion started in 1810 out of various natural history collections and was
turned into a zoological museum within in the newly founded university.
This changed in 2009: the museum was separated from the Humboldt
University and became part of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, a national asso-
ciation of independent research institutions, among them leading muse-
ums like the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.
Pierre Chabard
I find an interesting paradox in the resurgence of the table, these tabular
accumulations of objects. It is on the one hand the most neutral organiza-
tional form for universal knowledge, the least overdetermined in terms of
126 A. TE HEESEN
its meaning. This reminds me of a text by Roger Chartier on the history of

encyclopedism, where he contrasted the figure of the tree, and that of the
ocean, as two antithetical encyclopedic traditions.5 The figure of the tree
represents the idea of a completed form, hierarchical, overdetermined,
which imposes a principle of arborescent organization to knowledge itself.
In contrast, the figure of the ocean, which Chartier associates with the
alphabetical organization of the encyclopedia, is a fully open, horizontal
and underdetermined shape. We clearly saw it in Cheryce von Xylanders
presentation of Bettmann: a book organized alphabetically, where each
letter is a kind of box inside of which can be stored an infinite number of
mutually independent entries.
From this point of view, the table form is aligned with this oceanic
aesthetics of openness and incompleteness which corresponds fairly well
to our current relationship to knowledge: we accumulate, but we give
this accumulation the most neutral possible form, which makes it pos-
sible not to restrict it, not to complete it, and to leave open all possible
interpretations.
What is ironic is the fact that the shape of the table or tableau, this ver-
tical tabular grid, also references the form of the window, the showcase, at
least in the examples youve shown, and thus induces the trivialization of
objects, their commodification, their presentation for purely commercial
purposes. This is both very exciting because it speaks a lot about our cur-
rent relationship to knowledgerelatively open and uncertainand also
disturbing because it also speaks to us of this powerful process of com-
modification of everything, whether thats works of art, industrial prod-
ucts, or the objects of science.
Anke te Heesen
All these different aspects, the aesthetic, the whole world of commodities,
are coming together. But its not only the lack of completeness: as you say,
its extremely interesting that this lack of completeness is framed. We have
a lack of completeness but its put in a box, so there is now an image for
this endless and incomplete series. There are no rows because a row can
be completed, while a series cannot; there is a difference. We had rows in
the classificatory schemes in the eighteenth century, there we talked about
rows. Here we talk about series, even though we are still dealing with clas-
sification. The point for me is the frame: the tower gives a frame for the
infinite amount, and that means we can work with it. Or, to take your nice
example, the ocean is framed.
Bruno Latour
I find the idea that a framed object can be considered neutralextremely
odd. Its most extraordinary for birds, elephants, and foxes, to be in a
framed box, visible to the gaze of a passer-by, and counted and com-
pared. This is the most bizarre, anthropologically local idea about neu-
trality and universality. So I was very struck by the installation by Mona
Hatoum, because I think thats a great, great piece of art: it shows this
unstable precondition of framing and lighting. How far do we take the
aestheticization of information? Im worried that the aestheticization
was going all the way to the data producedthough I dont like to talk
about data, which is the given, but rather the sublata, what is obtained.
We dont want to say that aestheticization begins when we start to refor-
mat old collections. Instead, we want to push the notion of aestheticiza-
tion all the way to the production of data, and relate it to the notion of
cosmology, so those people who assemble all these data are doing cos-
mological as well as aesthetic work. What would be the aestheticization
of the information that is produced when these guys are filling in their
glass shelves with specimens?
In other words, often when we talk about the aestheticization of data,
scientists will say Ah, you are in science studies, an anthropologist of
sorts! But we are using real data, which are non-aestheticized, because
they are there, given, data. My view is that we have to consider the aes-
thetics not just of this last, most recent moment in the life of information,
the moment its put on display for the public; we also have to be inter-
ested in the aesthetics of the accumulation itself. When we talk about the
aesthetics of data, we mean looking at the production of information that
is epistemological, and very seriously different from aestheticization, but
putting both on the same groundwhich is basically the ground on which
most of us here work, which is the anthropology of science, so to speak.
So we should also be able to follow the framing, the lighting, the air con-
ditioning, putting things into a box, at the earlier moment of producing
knowledge, collecting specimensand not only the moment in which it
appears in the display.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
Can you imagine a presentation of information that is not aesthetic in
some sense? It would be like saying theres a non-rhetorical way of speak-
ing, which I regard as a kind of a very nave way of talking.
128 A. TE HEESEN
Anke te Heesen
It would change things for me if, for example, you could enter the tower,
and you could find your way into the tower on your own, and, for example,
grasp the glass jars, or have an open-ended encounter. That would make a
difference. But that would be more like the idea of the library. Instead, we
have a sealed, framed, glassy space: you cant get into it from any side, lit-
erally. So maybe I have a different notion of aestheticization at that point.
Simon Schaffer
We want practical aesthetics to be evident all the way along the long chains
of reference and production that tie together sites of appropriation and
exploitation which provide all the loot that the visitors are then going to
see. Its not just at the end of the game that things look pretty, or things
are designed to look pretty. Sometimes theres a mediation of that activ-
ity. I take it that in the new outline of the Museum of Natural History in
Berlin, the curators cant stand being seen, and they cant do any work
because of the way in which architects have laid the stuff up. But the obvi-
ous comparison is with the Natural History Museum in London, where
work in the Spirit Room is now part of the show. Is that a way of deal-
ing with your concerns about the untouchability of whats on show in
Berlingiven that what you mainly see when you now visit the Spirit
Room, is expert, white-coated curators moving the jars around?
Anke te Heesen
I believe in the encounter with human beings in the museum. Those human
beings should be connoisseurs, maybe experts. We could call them cura-
tors. If there is an exchange with those people, I would say that is great and
that would benefit the idea of the museum. Of course, that would not be
the normal sort of glass laboratory you see in the German museumwhich
is a few people working there with their microscopes and then going out.
Simon Schaffer
I take seriality to involve not simply open-ended juxtaposition. It also
requires a shift agent; you need to know how to get to the next item in the
series. Otherwise, it isnt a series. And, typically, the name of the aesthet-
ics of vast strangely ordered accumulation is not seriality, but the sublime.
This is the mathematical sublime, the vast assemblage of an overpowering
pile of objects, whose principle of order is completely invisible to us. We
dont know why what goes next to each other goes next to each other;
what we see is something much vaster than us, much greater than us, per-
haps even terrifying to us, but what the sublime evokes in us is a feeling of
solidarity with that very principle which must have ordered this, even if we
dont know yet what the principle of order is.
Anke te Heesen
Lets take the Bettman Archive. There is a kind of order in it, and we
could call a page in the Bettman Archive a juxtaposition of different items.
So, there is juxtaposition because they come from different areas, differ-
ent disciplines. The point with the wet collection is somehow different,
because it seems its not a juxtaposition in the same sense. The wet col-
lection is not a kind of juxtaposition, but rather, exactly, a framed infinite.
You might call it the sublimethat would be something to think about!
Richard Powers
One of the chief concerns here is that we are looking at visual representa-
tions of what rightly or wrongly is often called the postmodern break. I
think we dont want to become too comfortable with replacing the seman-
tics of an object with a merely surface interest. But I want to articulate one
possible redemptive quality of this series, to make it a slightly fairer fight.
Pierre Chabard very usefully introduced the contrast of tree versus ocean;
another classification dichotomy that were all familiar with is lumpers
versus splitters. Biologists were divided for long periods of time between
those who wanted to put different-shaped close kin into the same species
and those who wanted to create a new species for each morphological
variant. The debate between lumping things together and particulariz-
ing them is very long standing. One thing that these kinds of collections
do is make the case for the splitter: I will show you, through a kind of
proof by anti-induction, that whatever category you superimpose upon
this information is going to be insufficient. If we keep adding variations
on the same kind of thing, eventually they will bleed over any classification
boundaries that we artificially create for them.
130 A. TE HEESEN
Anke te Heesen
That was exactly how I was working in the 1990s, to make these kinds
of tableau-like presentations. We thought What is a classification? There
are different modes of ordering objects. The famous Borges classifica-
tion comes to mind.6 The point is that you need an informed spectator to
get that. And for a long time, we made exhibitions for exactly these audi-
encesthe informed audiences. But this tower, here in Berlin, is a spectac-
ular tower without any information. There is no label in it, and there is no
explanation about classification and what classification is. So, we have now
come to a point where our ideals of the 1990s have become a frozen image.
Richard Powers
One brilliant move on Borges part is that one instance on his list is those
included in the present classification, and another instance on that list is
others. Among the things included in the museums tower are those
things that are done justice to by being included in the tower.
Bruno Latour
Here is another question. What is the relation between classification, the
old realm of epistemology dealing with splitters, lumpers, and classes,
and a very different type of ordering, which is furniturewhich relates
to architects and design. There might be a whole range of other ordering
practices, which we have to take into account when people talk about clas-
sification as either a neutral or a non-neutral category. If we were looking
at science this way, not from the perspective of museums but in terms
of the architecture of libraries and so on, we would have a lot of other
approaches to the classification obsession, which relies on the whole range
of these other thingsa much bigger picture than the official version of
what classification is. But I also want to make sure we dont distinguish
between information and knowledge, because that writes into a very
regressive distinction, because information has a form in it.
John Tresch
Maybe theres another, more positive way to read this seriality. The collec-
tion at the Museum of Natural History might be improved if we added a
space where you could talk to actual researchers. It might also be improved
if there were an explicit didactic element to it. In the British Library, the
display is complementary with but distinct from another spacethats the
space where you actually do access knowledge: thats where you can order
and read books, or you can access things digitally. Visitors to the British
Library completely understand that theyre not going to learn what they
want to learn by staring at the glass case of books; theyll be accessing con-
tent in a different way. So, if there were another mode of access to biological
knowledge in that same space in Berlin, this mode of presentation might be
redeemed. In addition, I dont think these displays are simply an aesthetici-
zation or just the pretty picture that goes along with information, because
this mode of presentation, along with the British Librarys mode of pre-
senting books, is a didactic aestheticization of earlier modes of didactically
aestheticizing knowledgemodes of presenting that stage of data which is
always already aesthetic. In other words, when you see this collection, in one
way you are really seeing how it was in the nineteenth century: they stored
things in these beautiful bottles and that they arranged them in rows. Youre
looking at an earlier mode of storage. Likewise, with the Kings Library. So
these arent totally vacuous aestheticizations: theres at least a gesture here
to the history of science, the history of collecting data, in these displays.
Anke te Heesen
If there were a place in the museum where you could get into that clas-
sification, get any kind of explanation, that would be different. But there
isnt. And the library is the main place where you go for reading and
ordering books. But in the Museum of Natural History, the modes of per-
ception and the reasons why you go there are much different, so its not
as clear-cut an example as the library. There are many different spaces, and
the point is that you see this tower, and it is one of the many presentations
that are not necessarily connected to each other.
Simon Schaffer
One might ask the question: Is the extreme aestheticization of the Berlin
Museum of Natural History not a sign of where the politics of science and
its history are heading, not a sign of a kind of aestheticization of living
science, but exactly the reverse? Global politics divides lumpers and split-
ters. Lumpers are people who live at the imperial center. Lumpers live in
Paris, and Kew, and Berlin. Splitters live in Ontario, New Zealand, and
132 A. TE HEESEN
Fiji: they see difference where the imperial center wants to see similitude.
So an intervention which could point out that theres much more differ-
ence in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your colonialism, might be
a progressive intervention if that was the effect of this kind of display. But
I doubt it has that effect.
David Turnbull
Not only do I think that its not the effect, I dont think its the intent of
the display either. When I look at this I think of a hotel lobby, and there
is something very commercial about this. And I also think about Damien
Hirsts Pharmacy, the boxed pharmacy, and I think its performing
something. Im not sure what its performing or even trying to perform.
Its not just that its decorative, its actually saying Look at us! Arent
we clever? Weve gone beyond the past and now were showing you, you
know, how clever we are. And come in, all you little people, and appreciate
how clever we are.
Richard Powers
I wanted to mention one case where a recuperative transformation may have
occurred, changing one of the earlier generations of serial collections into
something of real sociological interest: the Royal Museum for Central Africa,
in Tervuren, outside of Brussels. This museum is the emblematic case for
what Elizabeth Pisani called The Rape and Pillage Museum. It consists of
a million elephant tusks, and a million shields and spears, and the collection
was simply never modernized. But now that particular style of display has
lasted so long that it is now a kind of ethnographic experience of the nine-
teenth century. The point is: if we were to whitewash this and throw out the
collections, we would lose an invaluable chance to understand who we were.
Anke te Heesen
But thats exactly what changed, we fought against it in the 1980s and
1990s. Ironically, we won, because now the Tervuren is closed for renova-
tion, and they will do exactly that. So, they closed in July this year, and
they will change it, so we will no longer have a document of this kind of
museum of imperial accumulation. Today, we know better; it seems clear
that the anti-imperial, the anti-hierarchical is not the answer either.
Pierre Chabard
I just wanted to come back to the Muse du quai Branly, and the fact
that the architect Jean Nouvel designed not only its building, but the
scenography, the stage set for the permanent exhibition. This scenery
has been rightly criticized, notably by anthropologists themselves, for its
Eurocentrism, its neocolonialism, its neo-exotic navet, and so on. But it
seems to me as if it was the architect who in this case had the responsibil-
ity for organizing this collection. This suggests a failure of the institution
of the quai Branly and perhaps an inability in the world of ethnology to
program this museum and to give it meaning in light of all the advances
made in this scientific domain. So this is a question Id like to ask, to
take advantage of the presence of ethnologists and anthropologists here:
Is it possible today to find a consensus on museology collections which
are often inherited from the colonial period, where another point of view
reigned over these objects?

Formulating this image of seriality as the framed infinite is incredibly com-
pelling. Its troubled me the whole time, to try to situate it in relation to
the examples I prepared. Theres a page in the Bettman Portable Archive
on the topic of frames in which he places a page of text to make you
think about the frames that youre being shown. These are empty frames,
because the whole point is the framing activity: that this is what we do to
create an order, we build these frames, and we should always be aware of
the frames we are making. Now, the way I present those efforts is to point
how they lead to the development of the window, the notion of the win-
dow, and Windows: Windows as the place that we go to, where we open a
frame that is a gateway to a multiplicity of data, information, meaning that
we navigate and can access in its dense historical fullness. And the safety of
the bounded window is how we gain access to that infinite. The aesthetic
is one of entire uniformityas if we needed a place of relief from these
windows and, despite the windows weve created, its still too much. But
what I wasnt able to bring up was the fact that everything were describ-
ing in this visual, graphic context also has an auditory complement. And
so the most exciting diversifying and complicating factor seems to be the
people walking around and talking to each other. Their voices bring an
element of chaos and surprise which is otherwise not part of the display.
134 A. TE HEESEN
Notes
1. See GeorgForster: Ein Blick in das Ganze der Natur (1794), in:
Kleine Schriften zur Philosophie und Zeitgeschichte. Georg Forsters
Werke, Bd. 8, Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, 1974, p.97.
2. Jrg Restoff: Vom Bauwerk zum Schauwerk, in: Kunstzeitung,
No. 186, February 2012, p. 8.
3. A further example of this is the 2007 Biodiversity wall of the
Museum of Natural History in Berlin, which more or less transposes
the horizontal parade of animals in Paris into the vertical.
4. Mary Ceruti: Current Disturbance, Capp Street Project, San
Francisco 1996, cited in: libraries.cca.edu/capp/prop_r96d001.
pdf (last accessed January 2017).
5. Roger Chartier, Larbre et locan, in Tous les savoirs du monde,
Paris, Flammarion, Bibliothque nationale de France, 1996.
6. Jorge Luis Borges, The analytical language of John Wilkins in:
Other inquisitions 19371952 , Austin, TX, University of Texas
Press, 1993.
PART II
Worlds: How the Performance of

Cosmologies can Change the Way the
Moral History of the World is Told
and Understood
CHAPTER 7
Cosmopragmatics and Petabytes
John Tresch
In preparation for this event, we were all reminded by our organizers and
hosts of various works of Italo Calvino, Lewis Carroll, and above all Jorge
Luis Borges. Borges is one of the great designers of representations of
the cosmos. Take for example his allegory of the Library of Babel, as well
as The Alephwhere he writes of a space between two steps through
which the narrator can observe, itemized in a beautiful and sublime list,
everything that is and ever was.
Borges puzzles capture the starting problem of my chapter, which is
simply: How do people represent everything all at once in a single space?
A cosmogram is any object that tries to do just that. But Borges, in a story
like The Circular Ruinswhich uncannily gives you the birth of the
story as the outcome of the story itselfalso shows the self-referential-
ity, tricks and paradoxes involved in the challenge of representing all that
exists. Borges version of the Library of Babel was composed of indefinite
and perhaps infinite hexagonal galleries where librarians are constantly
looking for the true copy of a book, finding many versions of it, but never
being sure that they have the original: many of them fall into despair as
they wander through this infinite gallery. This is a pretty good representa-
tion not just of knowledge systems, but of the labyrinth of the universe
itself and the endless pathways through it, despite the ongoing production
J. Tresch (*)
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_7
138 J. TRESCH
of massive projects to organize it. So Borges gives us some very good cau-
tionary images for what Im talking about today.
Cosmogram is a word Ive used a lot. I borrowed it originally from
religious studies.1 Thats the first place I heard the word and where it is
still used most often. That provenance underlines one of its key points for
me: which is that we must not move too quickly to separate those aspects
of activity that are called religious from those that are called scientific. In
fact, gathering everything together into an orderly whole, a cosmos, is
something that both of those fields do well. Even the division between
the scientific and the religious is itself a cosmogrammatical actionand a
fairly recent one, not much older than the seventeenth century. So, also
following up from yesterdays discussion, a cosmogram is a second or third
order of gathering and displaying. Its not raw data, as if that existed,
nor is it gathering information into facts, theories, or laws. Instead, it
involves assembling many, many sub-assemblages, concretely, into a single
space or a site: an object, event, entity that offers a unified impression of
everything that is.
Of course, the makers of cosmograms take shortcuts of all kinds; they
have to. The shortcuts can be very revealing about the setting and the use
of a cosmogram. We can ask about what is used as a passage, a bridge, a
fold through many kinds of entities and modes of signification, through
data and functions, through organizations of various kinds, to make it so
that this one concrete instance can be said to somehow capture everything
in all the other concrete instances, as well as the other attempts to capture
concrete instances that have existed before. Theres also going to be that
self-referentiality of cosmological representation: the act of representing
will be contained implicitly or explicitly in the representation, as we see
rather clearly in many of Borges riddles.
One of the reasons to look at cosmograms is as a solution to a meth-
odological problem in the social sciences and in philosophy, where at vari-
ous points great concern has been expressed that in trying to talk about
peoples worldviews, or cosmologies, or cultures, youre forced to make
an imaginative leap into peoples thoughts and experiences, which are
notoriously elusive. But cosmograms are objectifications, externalizations,
material renderings of that overarching order by people in specific places
and times; therefore, theyre open to examination and analysis in a way
that something abstract like a worldview or mentality or even cos-
mology is not.
As I said, the first uses of the term were in religious studies, particu-
larly in studies of Indian religions, where the mandala was a key example.
COSMOPRAGMATICS AND PETABYTES 139
Thenit was picked up by Jungian psychoanalysts, and now it seems like

theres a pretty even split between anthropologists and New Age users of
the term. If you look at the N-gram for the wordthis new world-viewer,
thank you again, GoogleIm not sure why, but it had a huge uptick
in the 1980s and 1990s, after being pretty silent for a long time. Maybe
because after the certainties of modernism and its nature, were starting
to pay more attention to the many different ways in which the cosmos has
been and can be written and drawn (Fig. 7.1).
So, back to first time I heard it: this was in reference to the Tabernacle
in Exodus. Then, I started seeing similar imagerythe world in a box (to
use Anke te Heesens expression), carried, and then unfolded as mobile
temple. The same imagery was used again in the early modern period, in
works by those who were founding the new world of modern science,
especially Francis Bacon. The image of the Ark was repeated over and
over, in Bacon and Kircher and Wilkins and others, as the image of a new
temple, where all the domains of the world, all facts, people, and objects
would be gathered and organized. To consider some other examples, the
old analogical logic is at work in some early modern renderings of the uni-
verse, as in Robert Fludds Rosicrucian and alchemical imagery. But then,
through contact and conquest, other orderings of the cosmos enter into
Western conversations: Kongo images, visible on artifacts in Africa as well
as in the American diaspora, marking the division between the visible and
invisible worlds; again in Indian and Tibetan mandalas, part of globalized
Hinduism and Buddhism.
But cosmograms also appear within the sciences, where there are many,
many images with this cosmological reach. Its not a stretch, I think, to
talk about the periodic table or the tree of descent of Darwin or Haeckel
as having that aspect; especially given the topic of todays talks, what were
looking at in science as well is moral histories inseparable from representa-
tions of the world. Its not hard to show that Darwins cosmogram does
carry with it a moral history: one can see Malthus, Victorian culture, gen-
tlemanly science, and the new institutions of research and publication, all
folded into that little sketch of a tree of descent. And we might move up
more recently to popular representations of the cosmos, such as the TV
series of Carl Sagan, getting remade now by Neil de Grasse Tyson, stand-
ing in his spaceship as he journeys with you through the history of a very
specific vision of all that all ever was and everything we know about it.
One of the many problems of the term cosmogram is that the most
usual connotation is a kind of diagram, a flat drawing. That flatness can be
a problem. It leads people to focus on the representation as a direct trans-
140
J. TRESCH
Fig. 7.1 N-gram of Cosmogram in English, 18002008. Copyright Google Corporation

mission of what people think, or their worldviews, and it leads us to bring

all the methods of interpretation for reading texts, philology, art history,
hermeneutics, and so onbut not to see it as an object in action. To deal
with this problem I want to introduce yet another neologism: cosmoprag-
matics, for the pragmatic settings and uses of cosmograms.
I have three sections in what follows. First, I offer a handful of examples
just to give some flesh to this idea of cosmograms in use. Second, Ill
turn to some nineteenth century examples, an earlier age of utopias and
media revolutions, which forms the background for many of the cases we
heard about yesterday. Finally, there will be a somewhat reckless attempt
to talk about the current age, raising some issues concerning cloud com-
puting and big data, and their cosmopragmatic potentials. There the
question will be whether these new modes of accessing the world, these
new digital windows, allow us to create sturdy arks for navigating the sea
of knowledge.
So, on to some quick examples. I thought it would be worthwhile to
bring in some non-Western cases, in anticipation of David Turnbulls
paper, and because the whole point of cosmograms is to make a compara-
tive cosmology possible, in which Western science is analyzed symmetri-
cally with other practical knowledge worlds. My first example is quite old,
from medieval India. Ronald Inden is an Indologist who wrote about a
new temple that was created in the eighth century, at the center of a new
imperial city, by a king, Lalitaditya, who had conquered his rivals, making
him king of kings.2 At that point, it was his duty to create a new imperial
city and a temple to go along with it. Examining a temple construction
manual from that era, the Visnudharmottara, deeply marked with ritual
and cosmological obligations, Inden describes the choices that Lalitaditya
and his ministers had to make. He emphasizes that the temple this king
finally built was not a representation of something that already existed,
or of a conception of the universes order that was already given, but
was, in the understanding of the time, a deliberately performative way of
restructuring the universe, of restructuring analogical spaces. In building
the temple, he put himself and this new sacred site at the top of a new
great chain of being.
After militarily defeating his rival dynasties, he built his new capital
city very far north, well beyond any existing kingdoms, near whats now
Kashmir, and he built next to this new city a temple, represented in its
descriptions as a mountain. This construction shifted what was seen as
the physical support of ancient India, which had then Mount Kailash in
142 J. TRESCH
Tibet, to the north. So this cosmogram brings a geographical transforma-

tion. The map changes, but the earth itself changes too, by instituting this
portal to the absolute in a new geographical location. Its not a representa-
tion: its a performative act, with concrete effects.
The temple itself also contains a performative chain of being. At the
center there is a sculpture of Vishnu; access to that statue goes only to the
king and the Brahmins who administer it, who give offerings to it and care
for it. Around that, theres an inner chamber, accessible to land owners,
who can give puja, offerings, to other statues, but not to this central one.
And further outside is the perimeter, which is as close as most of the rest
of the people of the kingdom are allowed to get. So, again, what we have
here is a cosmological chain of being which is getting performed, realized
through this new construction: its physicalit transforms the physical
worldas well as metaphysicalit shifts the relation between the physical
and spiritual world. But it also organizes and reassembles the social order,
according to different orders and functions and their proximity to the God
at the temples center.
My next example is a Mediterranean story, a little closer to where we
are now, in Sevilleand this is something that David Turnbull has writ-
ten about already. Im borrowing in part from his account.3 Right after
Columbus voyage to the Americas, to control the information and goods
that were flowing in from the New World, the Casa de la Contratacin,
that is, the House of Trade, was set up in Seville to regulate the over-
seas trade, collect taxes and duties, and determine what voyages could be
taken. So, this was a central site of cosmograms in action. One of the key
aspects of trade in that house was a new map, the Padrn Real, which
was one of the most valued state secrets of the Spanish crown. Everyone
taking a journey to the Americas was required to take an oath that they
would honestly report back and place on this map any new lands that
were seen and claimed for the Crown; theyd combine their data with this
data. So in this map-in-construction, theres a relation to God with the
oath, theres obviously a relation with the King and Queen. And of course
theres an ongoing redrawing of the geographical space of New Spain and
the Atlantic, of European and Mediterranean power relations as well.
But the map itself became the site for many disputes, very fierce battles,
early in the sixteenth century. One was between the courts cosmogra-
phers, who used theoretical astronomy to create the map, and the pilots
who came back, who preferred to use rule-of-thumb navigational systems,
such as Portolan charts and dead reckoning to identify land masses and
locations. So between these two groups, one in the court versus one doing
the sailing, its a power struggle, but its also a struggle about ways of
knowing, the basis of representation, and how this representation will be
used: top down, Apollos eye views, versus ground-level, rule-of-thumb
knowledge by technicians in the form of the pilots. It was only settled in
court after a very long struggle. As an example of cosmopragmatics, they
reach a compromisemainly because most of the people involved in the
earlier dispute had left the field by then. The Casa de la Contratacin was
a site housing a performative map, but also a site for marking differences
among different users and agencies, the makers as well as the users of these
maps, knowers as well as doers. Its a site in which the actual mechanisms of
agreement are not given and are far from obvious, so that the controversy
is pushed from an internal dispute to a legal dispute, one not easily settled.
My third example comes from another time and place, east of
here.Here is a map of the universe from a medieval Islamic manuscript
(Fig. 7.2):
Of course, Mecca and Medina are at the center. Though the Christian
lands are there, just off to the side, and China and India are indicated
Fig. 7.2 Umar bin Muzaffar Ibn al-Wardi. Kharidat al-Ajaib wa Faridat al-
Gharaib. (The Pearl of Wonders and the Uniqueness of Things Strange). Courtesy
of Library of Congress, Late seventeenth century. Near East Section, African and
Middle Eastern Division
144 J. TRESCH
at the north, this is all built around the new belly button of the uni-
verse. Rome and Jerusalem are marked, but in contrast to maps from
Christendom, theyre decentered. To nod to Chateaubriandwho wrote
about the Genius of Christianity, but to deform his words in a way he
probably would not acceptif we wanted to talk about the genius of
Islam, part of it would lie in principles such as the five pillars, with the
requirement that every day all the faithful direct themselves toward this
physical space, to Mecca, the Kabah, this one place on the earth.
Historians of science are very interested in the Houses of Wisdom, in
the Abbasids new capital in Baghdad, where astronomy, mathematics, and
natural history were all practiced, translated, and commented upon, but just
as remarkable in terms of knowledge practice is one very portable and ubiq-
uitous bit of cosmological equipment: the astrolabe. People carry it with
them across the entire space of the Islamic empires, and its a kind of medi-
eval global positioning system (GPS), situating them in relation to the heav-
ens, knowing what time it is, so they know when to pray, and also orienting
them toward Mecca, and all the elements of the faith. This geographical
orientation on the earth is restatedas Richard Powers has written about in
Plowing the Darkin Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, where what was formerly a
Christian cathedral was subtly reoriented, redirected from facing Jerusalem
toward Mecca, by shifting the prayer niche at the front, rotating the entire
building on its axis, redirecting it toward this earthly as well as divine pole.
In addition to the daily prayers, theres also the requirement in the
course of a lifetime to do the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajits a moral,
geographical, social, cosmological obligation. Today, you can pick up your
cell phone and book one if youre in New York, with a package deal which
sets up all that youll need for the trip, or if youre in Australia you can
find slightly sleeker-looking advertisements for the sacred journey of a
lifetime, and an agency that can schedule the trip you should take. So to
move beyond static, two-dimensional maps or three-dimensional temples,
its worth thinking about the pilgrimage to Mecca itself as a performed
cosmogram (Fig. 7.3).
But this means thinking of a cosmogram as more than a cognitive or
even aesthetic representation: in order to activate it, to make it effec-
tive, you actually have to walk through it yourself, you have to under-
take it, at great cost of money and time, following fairly closely scripted
rules about the order in which you should visit the sites. This embod-
ied, enacted cosmogram is described beautifully in a book by Abdellah
Hammoudi, ASeason in Mecca.4 Hammoudi is a more or less non-believ-
ing Moroccan anthropologist who describes taking a pilgrimage in the
Fig. 7.3 Haj in November 2008. Al-Haram Mosque, Mecca. Courtesy Al

Jazeera English
early 2000s. Hisresponses are fascinating. Hes very upset by the crowds,
by the bad traffic, by the long waits, by the commercialism, by how hot it
is, by how bad the food is, by the ubiquity of security, and by the fact that
over the loud speakers the Saudi government is pronouncing Wahhabi
interpretations of the Haj, banning access to certain sites, after having
actually razed certain sites, tombs, and sites of memory, where what they
consider to be idolatry had been practicedthus imposing a very specific
interpretation of the Haj on everyone there, despite the wide national
and sectarian differences among Muslims worldwide. And nevertheless,
Hammoudi finds himself, through the collective experience of the stages
of the journey, and even against his own intentions, awakening to some
stirring, a palpable sense of commonality and brotherhood, recollections
of a faith that he had thought he had left behind.
Hammoudis personal narrative allows us to think of two more themes
to keep in mind with cosmograms and their uses. First, that they often
raise issues of mass access and crowd control; they are often mass phenom-
ena, and getting everyone to encounter them at the same time or in the
same way produces huge, socio-technical challenges. But at the same time,
146 J. TRESCH
as mass phenomena, they are highly individuated in terms of the personal,

embodied experience that determines an individuals response to them,
including the transformational effects they can have, as for Hammoudi.
The experience of cosmograms can be quite distinct from individual to
individual; they demand a multiple, stratified, diverse theory of reception.
These three wide-ranging, rapid examples are meant to put on the
table some methodological elements for how to think about cosmo-
grams pragmaticallyas objects in use. Now I want to concentrate on
another moment, the nineteenth century in Europe, the birth of indus-
trial modernity, and think about how some of these blurrings of knowl-
edge and religion, representation and ritual, the world discovered and the
world constructed, took place even in the age which is described as the
age of disenchantment, the age of positivism. Ill offer some examples that
were direct precursors for some of the universalizing, totalizing architec-
tures and displays of knowledge we discussed yesterday in the late nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries.5 A lot of people when they think about
nineteenth-century science think of the evil Mr. Gradgrind from Dickens
Hard Times, who was all about calculating, number and facts, or of tables
like those of Durkheim from Suicide, statistical tables created by a stan-
dardized procedure or a machine. These images seem to embody an era of
utilitarian calculation, where knowledge was produced blindly and auto-
matically through mechanical objectivity, to use a recent term.
As a shorthand, this is often called the age of positivism: which often
means, at least polemically, an assembling of facts without a guiding theory
or conception of the world, and with destructive, reductive, ultimately
inhuman consequences. Sometimes this is called nave Baconianism, but
of course even Francis Bacon didnt assemble facts in this way at all. He
was not collecting facts just to collect facts; he was trying to construct a
new cosmos out of them, laying up new tables of knowledge, gathering
and digesting and transforming like a bee; this was the explicit aim of New
Organon and the The Great Instaurationa new tool to lay the bases for a
new institution of the world, both religious and scientific, sacred and fac-
tual at once. And, in fact, many of the projects in the nineteenth century are
Baconian instaurations in this much larger sense, in that they aim at recon-
stituting the universe, both the order of society and of knowledge. They
all work to integrate earlier projects for organizing the universe: Versailles
is still an important political and symbolic site in the French Restoration of
the early nineteenth century, with all of its references to the four quarters
of the world and its reflecting chambers around the King at the center.
The cosmological institutions that Louis XIV set up are still anchoring this
world, as in the famous painting of the early Academy of Sciences, with the
Observatoire in the background, a GPS that situates Paris within the stars
as well as along the meridian, on the map of the globe.
After the huge shake-ups of the turn of the nineteenth centurythe
Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon and his empire, the industrial
revolutionthere was an attempt by many people to take all the facts
which had been created, the laws that have been generated out of them,
and put them together to ground a new order of knowledge and society. A
new Great Instauration. The Encyclopedia was a precursor (and its authors
admired Bacon), but in fact, because of its oceanic ordering, it was
seen as insufficient; the early nineteenth century demanded something
more tree-like, cut to the joints of nature. As one example, the physicist
Andr-Marie Ampere put together a classification of knowledge, crowded
with neologisms, to organize the world into what he called cosmologi-
cal versus noological ordersnoological meaning having to do with
nous, or understanding. He also situated all these domains of knowledge
in relation to God, still there in his map of the universe in the 1820s and
1830s: theology was one of the sciences he was classifying, as was the field
of political governance whose name he coined: La cyberntique. God,
animals, machines, systemsall had a place in his map.
Other famous cosmograms from this period came from Alexander Von
Humboldt, the Prussian scientist and explorer schooled in romanticism
who spent a lot of time in Paris. Hed sailed to the Americas with many,
many instrumentssailing up rivers, climbing mountainsand then put
together the findings of all those instruments in all these different places
into verbal tableaus, in descriptions of the different parts of the world, but
also in beautiful visual tableaus, like the one in his Geography of Plants, the
side view of a mountain. It shows you how all the data taken in this place, at
each altitude, wove together to form a unified tapestry; this spread across
the globe and situated the observer within it. Earlier, Simon Schaffer said
that the sublime is both an overwhelming quantity of information but
also a call to acknowledge ones responsibility for how that information is
organized and used: this dual meaning of the sublime is very present not
only in the Anthropocene but in the work of Humboldt, 200 years ago.
He was using the visual logic of the panorama, well known to everyone
in Paris at this time, and he dreamed of a panorama that would be a kind
of a science museum, attached to the Academy of Science, where people
could go to see views of the parts of the world that they couldnt physically
visit, and be immersed in these settings, to have a direct embodied experi-
ence of it, and to have their souls elevated by understanding the interrela-
148 J. TRESCH
tions of nature and their own place within it. Modes of presentation that
defined the age of mass spectacle were enrolled within these projects for
organizing the sciences and data.
Something similar happened with the Saint-Simonians, a bunch of engi-
neers and social philosophers who denounced the science of their time as
disconnected, too specialized, and egoistic; they said the same about society,
which, due to liberal doctrines of the free market, set people in a war of all
against all, defined by competition and greed. After this diagnosis of the
chaos of modern society, the Saint-Simonians argued that what was needed
was to reimagine and recreate the organic social order that had been lost
after the medieval period. Catholicism had failed to keep up with science
and industry, which meant its cosmological framework couldnt keep up
with the changing world. What was needed, therefore, was a new cosmo-
logical dogma, a new spiritual power, to reactivate the collective rituals of
the past, but one which included the sciences and their enrichment of our
understanding of the world. New sacred sites were also needed. The Saint-
Simonians proposed a new Woman-Temple. It was a fetish, literally, with
which they wanted to replace Notre Dame, at the center of Paris. It would
have museums in it, halls of learning, but also shops, music halls, as well
as panoramas and dioramas, in which would be united, in a single point,
all space and all time, all the religions of the past, the ancient temple of
the Hebrews, the ruins of Thebes and Palmyra, the Parthenon, Alhambra
and Saint Peters, the Kremlin, mosques of the Arabs, pagodas of India and
Japan. Michel Chevalier wrote a poem about it which ended: What an
immense communion and gigantic moralization of the whole people, the
glorification of God! So, this object was a center of commerce, a center of
learning, and a center of worship. A cosmogram for a new society religiously
oriented toward industry. Of course it was never madethough some have
seen it as the inspiration for the Statue of Liberty.
One influential thinker who started as a Saint-Simonian but broke
away was Auguste Comte, the founder of the philosophy of positivism.
Its very important to put him in that Saint-Simonian lineage, and not
just see him as a philosopher of science, or merely associate him with
the encyclopedic past that he was deliberately reclaiming and updating.
His attempt to reorganize the sciences followed from Saint-Simons calls
for a new social order and a new spiritual order in society. His positiv-
ism was not a reductive, but rather a constructive system. Comte was
not trying to reduce all the sciences to a basic principle, but rather to
carve out the different levels of organization for nature, corresponding
to all the sciences. And so his famous hierarchy of the sciences divided
the world into different domains or levels of the real, each of which
had its basic concepts, methods, and styles of reasoning. He acknowl-
edged a preformatting of all data in each field according to basic con-
cepts and methods; this is then tied together into the overall system of
positive philosophy, and the hierarchy of sciences are then tied into an
even bigger plan for a new social organization. The cosmogram of his
Course of Positive Philosophy might be seen as just a new representation of
nature (and of the nature of society, since it included the final science he
invented, Sociology), but in 1848, in his System of Positive Polity, the
intense reflexivity of his thought becomes even more clear. This work is
an explicit cosmogram that is a practical as well as an emotional manual
for how individuals relate to nature, how they know it and domesticate
it and put it to use. Including human nature: he introduced new rites,
bodily practices, to go with the new doctrine grounded in the sciences,
with plans for rewriting the calendaras new religions frequently do.
He also designed a new Temple of Humanity to put in every city where
these rites would be practiced (Fig. 7.4).
Now, those plans werent realized in Paris, but that was his dream
to replace Notre Dame, again. They were realized in Rio de Janeiro,
however, since positivism was most successful in Brazil, where it was
seen by republican engineers as the short-cut out of the ancient regime,
the fast track to modernity. A positivist cathedral, built almost exactly
following Comtes plan, exists in the Glria district of Rio. Until its roof
collapsed in 2009, it was a remarkable time machine, not only because
it transmitted visitors to this nineteenth century way of organizing the
universe but because Comte himself dreamed of this as a time machine:
as you approach it you walk through the fields of incorporation, a
cemetery for everyone who has contributed the most to humanity and
are now part of this great organism, and once you enter, along the
walls you go past the heroes, the new saints of positivism, one for each
month, the contributors to humanity: St. Paul for Catholicism, indus-
try represented by Gutenberg, and the physiologist Bichat representing
modern science, because he formalized the need for a specific science of
the living, not reducible to physics.
When you get to the central altar, plaques remind you of all the reli-
gious stages of humanity, starting with fetishism, which in Comtes early
writings was seen as a stage that had to be left behind. But in his later
writings, especially The Subjective Synthesis, Comte saw fetishism as a state
we need to return to, to reawaken collective feelings of love and d evotion
and altruismanother term he coined. This was based on a science of
150 J. TRESCH
Fig. 7.4 Temple of Humanity, Rio de Janeiro. Photo Paul Marett
impulses and drives, a theory of mind and personality grounded in phre-

nology. So in presenting the universe, he was also thinking about human
physiology, sensorium, and morality: theres an entire theory of human-
ity at the base and at the pinnacle of this system, about how to stimulate
altruistic drives and suppress egotistic ones.
So to sum up, this first positivism was not just about facts, not just pro-
tocol sentences: it was an intellectual structure, an emotional structure, a
social order, a theory of history, a pluralism with different but intersecting
philosophies for each domain of the universe. And it was realized in a phys-
ical structure, the Positivist Templea cosmogram that inculcated specific
thoughts and feelings and directed these actions. So at the start of indus-
trial modernity, when we were supposed to have become modernnatu-
ralist, objective, neutralpositivism itself was none of these, at least not
as we typically understand them. In thinking about cosmograms through
this example of Comte, we return to something Deirdre McCloskey said
earlier: Comtes philosophy is an argument against certain forms of self-
organization. Comte and all of his contemporaries argued that knowledge
is not going to organize itself. Neither is society. Its not a free market. You
require some intervention to frame things and some theory about how
people are going to interact with those framings. And the cosmopragmat-
ics of the Europe around 1848 aimed at putting that into action.
Having spoken a bit about the constraints on building cosmograms in
this first wave of positivism in early industrial modernity, now I want to
jump forward to the present, to think about some of the technologies for
organizing the universe nowthe universe thats stored in the cloud.
That phrase makes me think of Gulliver and the floating island of Laputa, a
satire of the Royal Society and the new form of knowledge-making which
Bacon inaugurated. Now the term references new ways in which data is
collected and analyzed and stored in data banks, which are supposed to be
accessible from everywherea sort of vapor of information that follows us
around, which is supposed to be dematerialized but in fact is rematerial-
ized in very specific sites.
One of the ways we access it is through viewers, through the windows
of the screens which give us access to the world, and through the search
engines which allow us to run through it. We talked a lot yesterday,
especially after Cheryce von Xylanders talk, about some of the aesthetic
preconditions for the mode of accessing information that we now deal
with: the modes of gathering and retrieval, structured through the digi-
tal interface, as well as the notes that we add to it by our choices. We
often access the world through screens. We heard some of the aesthetic
precursors yesterdaybut what made that discussion so interesting is
that more often this access is presented in purely utilitarian terms, with-
out thinking about the aesthetics involved. And Anke te Heesens paper
pointed out the ways in which formats which originally appear to be
decontextualizing, capable of producing exciting and stimulating jux-
tapositions, over time can become quite standard and conventional and
deadening.
I think thats very true of the juxtapositions that we encounter every
day when we do a search for images, for instance. A Google image search
is a kind of Dada collage, but we dont see it that way: instead its decon-
textualization and recontextualization in quite structured forms, a struc-
tured spontaneity in our interaction with the Internet. Isnt a desktop with
many windows open at once about as clear representation of a highly for-
matted but ultimately disordered cosmos as we could imagine? The sub-
jective effects of that disorder, the confusion, distraction, fatigue, weve
all experienced.
We need to be thinking about the interfaces through which we access
the world, their cognitive, aesthetic effects. How are those windows
152 J. TRESCH
structured, what are the forms that are given? A lot of thought is being
given now, in various information schools and futurological settings
(including design schools), to how those interfaces change when theyve
become pervasive and ubiquitous, when we have many different ways
of accessing themcomputers, smartphones, screens everywhere, as
well as sensors throughout smart cities, taking in information about
us as we walk through the world, and then feeding it back to us in
terms of location and directions and suggestions about where we might
want to go today. Ongoing updates on our quantified self. Were now
dealingwith a mobile, enveloping interface, overlapping windows that
never close.
This all combines in the deliberately vague but increasingly imposing
slogan of big data. One of its key components is the combined increase
in computing power and in the sensitivity of sensors, automatically regis-
tering information about individuals and nonhumans, relaying it back to
databanks, frequently stored far from the sites that are accessing them, in
server farms. These are the solid base of the cloud, with considerable envi-
ronmental impacts on the landscapes in which theyre placedland use,
water, and electricity (Figs. 7.5 and 7.6).
Fig. 7.5 View of Hamina Data Center, Finland (formerly Stora Enso paper mill).
Photo by Connie Zhou. Courtesy Google
Fig. 7.6 View inside Google Data Center, Mayes County, Oklahoma. Photo by
Connie Zhou, Courtesy Google
Huge quantities of data also require new ways of mining and ana-
lyzing that data. An early announcement about this was an essay by
Jim Gray, a Microsoft consultant, from 2007.6 He wasnt talking about
big data yet, he was talking about The Fourth Paradigm, which
he saw as a new way of doing science, after the first three. These he
called empirical science (Bacon), then hypothesis-driven theoretical sci-
ence, then simulations, and finally the fourth paradigm, what he called
154 J. TRESCH
e-science. Grays descriptions of the first thousand years of science,

andthelastfewhundred, is scandalous for anyone in history of science
who will see them as a grotesque simplification. But the point is what
he was announcing as new, and the kind of work such announcements
perform.
According to Gray, the fourth way of doing science, e-science, is brand
new. Its all about automatic data exploration. He sees it as unifying all
the earlier strands: now data is captured by instruments, processed by soft-
ware. All the information and knowledge are stored in the computer, and
we analyze that data using data management, processing, and statistics.
And among the many consequences of this changeone accelerated if the
administrators in universities and funding agencies listen to Gray and later
promoters of data-driven scienceis that traditional disciplines begin
to lose ground, increasingly replaced by programmers and data experts
who are able to work across existing fields, dependent on none of them,
necessary to all.
Gray raises many prescient concerns about this new paradigm, this fre-
quently evangelically proclaimed new era. One of his first worries is about
who is in charge of these new methods. Data and analysis tools particularly
favor large-scale industry. Scientists, especially those working in smaller-
scale institutions, dont have the resources for storage and processing on
this scale; but in fact they need them, because research budgets can be
from one quarter to one half devoted computing, to software, to process-
ing data, knowing what to do with it, not just gathering it and designing
experiments. Every science is now the science itself plus the computa-
tional methods for handling its data. So, according to Gray, writing all the
way back in 2007, whats needed are tools to allow people to build their
own supercomputers. Since then, a number of open-source tools have
come into existence. Hadoop is the format of choice for many, it makes
it possible to cluster a number of small computers and turn them into a
supercomputer. And programs like MapReduce make it possible to travel
through that data, searching for specific features or objects. Gray argues
that disciplines need to make their own databases to share information, so
we send questions to the data, and not data to the questions. This would
also mean new kinds of economies of data, as well as new moral econo-
mies among researchers: for instance, calls for neuroscientists to build a
shared map of the default state of the brain by pooling their data, just as
astronomers pool the data from multiple observatories to deepen the map
of the universe.
Gray also argues that such databases should be publicly funded, along
with laboratory information management systems, with careful planning.
What form do you give that data? How do you tag it, so that it can be
combined with other tools of data, permitting an eventual infrastructural
inversionPaul Edwards term for tracing data back to its sources, from
the current format to an earlier one?7 Now, for historians and sociologists
of science, this sounds like scientists making their own arguments against
the image of timeless knowledge: its a claim, from within the sciences, that
we need to contextualize and always keep tags and show who gathered it
and where. Emphasis on metadata and the inevitability of infrastructural
inversions seems like recontextualization in practiceand in some ways, a
new image of knowledge, one which incorporates its origins and settings.
Acting thoughtfully with the changes brought by data-intensive science
may bring about a change in science publishing, and make publicly funded
science publicly availablethats Grays hopebut in that case there will
be new questions about how you allot credit and whether there should
still be peer-reviewed journals. Many argue that we should be exploiting
the new storage capacities to provide the data freely so that other users
can access it directly and in fact redo published science themselves. Thats
the dream made possible by the cloudreally these massive energy- and
capital-intensive server farms that are being assembled now in a monopo-
listic or oligopolist way. Peer review continues, but theres the idea that
you could have curated comments and additions to the data as part of the
publication. So the notion of curation that has come up already may be
a key term for organizing the knowledge of the sciences in future: that
its not so much a single algorithm or picture of knowledge, but a way of
formatting many different modes and styles of knowledge.
Id like to make one last point along these lines, in thinking about how
the image and method of science might change in the age of big data
and petabytes. One take on this was an article from Wired that made a
lot of waves, called The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the
Scientific Method Obsolete.8 The article claimed that data-intensive sci-
ence changes the image of knowledge. When you are finding objects auto-
matically through algorithms sent into these masses of data, the author
claims this is science done without hypothesis. In other words, the scien-
tists dont know what kinds of patterns and correlations between these
numerical objects theyre going to find; they dont set out with a hypoth-
esis that they later test. As Elizabeth Pisani argued in response to this
article, while science never really functions like that, it can nevertheless be
156 J. TRESCH
extremely useful for funding and for allotting credit to say that you have
a hypothesis that you then test. Yet, this point about the rhetorical power
of saying youre using hypotheses doesnt change the fact that empiri-
cal disciplines are frequently wading through data, looking for unknown
patterns. So, the alleged move away from the ideal of hypothesis-driven
research thanks to the data deluge is not a radical shift in practice. But
it is a formalization and public acknowledgment of something that was an
informal, backstage aspect of science before.9
In addition, the performative and constructivist examples I gave from
the nineteenth century and earlier suggest that the idea that data-driven
science means knowledge that is automatically generated is an absurd
overstatement. In designing the algorithms, and setting the form of the
data that youre looking for, you must have a conception, right? You know
what you were looking for based on, inductively, other cases where objects
that you take to exist had that configuration. So, the claim that is made
about the obsolescence of the scientific method, of a future science with-
out theory, science without hypothesis, science without models, makes no
sense. Science without hypothesis, sure, because weve always already been
therescientists knowledge is frequently serendipitous, unplannedbut
science without models? No, never.
Looking back at the context and the methods for reorganizing the cos-
mos in the nineteenth centurythe moment of another deluge, another
flood of facts and informationwe see, especially with Comte, that a pre-
formatting for information was required and openly recognized. This was
a preformatting which was aesthetic all the way down, and at a certain
stage of robustness took the form of a cosmograma concrete rendering
of the organization of the universe, showing what slots are filled in, which
still needed to get completed, how change and future re-orderings might
happen. Comte spoke of this dynamic aspect of his cosmogram in his slo-
gan, Order and Progress; his later version of this slogan made it clear
that remakings of natural order also aimed at remaking humans: Love for
Base, Order for Principle, Progress for Goal, the slogan carved into the
frieze of the Temple of Humanity, part of which is on the flag of Brazil.
So, the question on the table is the following. Given the tools and
windows we have for accessing and shaping the contents of the world,
gathering and displaying them, and keeping in mind the individual and
mass ways with which we interact with them, what kind of organizations,
arrangements, displays, and narratives can and should be made? Whats
the cosmogram, or what are the cosmograms, of the petabyte age? Thats
where Id like to leave things for discussion.
Debate
Pierre Chabard
I find this use of the term cosmogram very enlightening, particularly in
view of the paradox between the universal vocation of these worldviews
and their contingency with regard to the very specific contexts in which
they are located, spatially and socially. I am wondering about the question
of the social scale of the cosmogram: How do they form a social member-
ship? Also, there is the question of the temporal coexistence of cosmo-
grams, and the conflicts that can occur between these visions of the world.
How do you imagine the quarrel between cosmograms?
John Tresch
Yes, both of those points are crucial. Cosmograms are often a response
to some kind of social struggle or strife. Thats explicit in the nineteenth
century, when there was a strong sense of society being divided among
individuals and among groups. So these holistic images are attempts to
overcome those divides. But there were many solutions launched at the
same time which are not commensurable, so these could be read, perhaps,
as a symptom of social disorder rather than as an image of a harmonious
society: the more cosmograms proliferate, the more there is dissent in
society. As my first examples were meant to show, those kinds of rivalries
and disputes are going to be administered in many different ways. In the
case of Spain, Seville, there was a turn to the courts, there were both
the legal courts and the royal courts to administer between these two
knowledge groups. To answer that question we have point to the sites
in any time and place, where consensus about the biggest questions is
sought, and attainedor not. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of
print media, and discussions about democracy, and the threat of revolu-
tion, we frequently find an appeal to the masses, an appeal to the hearts
and minds of those who would choose one order or another, as well as
to emerging structures of expertise. Today we hear instances of a kind of
crowd-sourcing, which of course is not the same thing, despite some con-
tinuities. The cases I gave from the nineteenth century were all occurring
in the wake of the French Revolution and building up to the Revolution
of 1848, which shows that its not as simple as presenting a solution to
bring about a new order of the universe. These proposals can create con-
flict as well as produce consensus.
158 J. TRESCH
Elizabeth Pisani
The example of Seville is an interesting one, because by allowing it to
be decided by the courts, youve already decided who will decide. The
structure is already built in, inherent to your cosmograms. So, its self-
referential to an extent.
David Turnbull
After the founding of the Casa de la Contratacin, the world was divided
into two by the Pope: there was a line drawn down the middle of the
Atlantic, the Portuguese were allotted one side, the Spanish the other.
But they didnt know where the line went on the other side of the
world. One of the consequences was the deal in which Spain abruptly
sold the provisional position of that line on the other side of the world
to the Portuguese. That position is actually now represented on maps as
the longest straight line in the world: the North-South border dividing
West Australia from the rest of Australia. You would imagine its straight,
having been drawn using radio frequency transmissions from Greenwich
to exactly position that line. However, one of the surveyors of the border
started in the North, one of them started in the South, and when they
got to the middle, their two lines didnt meet, they were 167 m apart.
Nothing of any great importance, right? Except that the Aboriginal people
whose territories are in that area made a land claim which was rejected on
the grounds that it was inaccurately surveyed. Problem is it wasnt the
Aboriginal land claim that was inaccurately surveyed, it was the original
line, which, of course, is still a palimpsest, an impression laid down by the
Pope 500 years earlier.
Another example which follows from the discussion of the Haj con-
cerns the author Zia Sardar, a famous Islamic commentator on science and
society. In his first job as a Pakistani mathematician, he was hired by Saudi
Arabia to model the Haj, because they had just had massive fatalities in a
tunnel, where there was a crush of all the people trying to do the pilgrim-
age. They wanted a model to eliminate that kind of problem. So he did a
computer analysis with a big team, and worked out that the optimal way
to do the Haj is by walking. If you let the natural flow express itself, the
old people will be slower than younger people, and gradually people will
self-sort into a non-crushing passage around the sites. That proposal was
thrown out by the Saudi authorities: for them the answer had to be high
tech. They wanted four-story buses on ten-lane highways, with built-in

toilets, tickets, and the whole system of imposed modern control. So in all
these cosmopragmatics, its the practical attempt to impose them on the
world that generates all these essential tensions and collisions between the
image of the world and the real experience of being in the world.
Steve Crossan
I wanted to add a couple of points which actually come back to conflicts
generated by ways of framing the world. I completely agree with this skep-
ticism toward any claim that, say, big data relieve us from the duty and the
necessity of models and of framing. An algorithm is absolutely a model,
but not only that. The organization of the data is also very much a model
and very much conditions the questions that you can ask of the model.
And this has very practical effects. Hadoop is an open-source version of
not so much an algorithm as a combination of an algorithm and a data
organization called MapReduce, which is key to the success of Google. Its
still used very much with Google, which is essentially a model for using a
lot of computers to preprocess data in certain well-defined ways. A lot of
what makes Google successful is spending enormous resources on prepro-
cessing data to get it into a particular order.
But, very interestingly in the organizational history of Google,
MapReduce was a curse as well as a blessing, because Google has astound-
ing amounts of infrastructure which is oriented toward this model and
has historically therefore found it difficult to respond to questions which
dont require that exact model. We have a particular kind of hammer and
so we see everything as a particular kind of nail. This has very particular
effects on Googles historical ability to compete with Facebook, for exam-
ple, where the data organization is very different, and the data structures
are very different, and so on. In fact, a lot of work has gone into these very
differences. So, the structure of data is very important.
But there is maybe a slight saving grace here as well, which is that
perhaps there is in the new cloud-based, big data organization, a new
element which gives another possibility: that there is always the possibil-
ity of remodeling the data. There is always the possibility of reorganizing
and restructuring the data, as long as its still there. That can continually
happen, and in fact is always happening. And a lot of work in computer
science, done by computer scientists at Google and other organizations,
is about taking data with a particular organization and reorganizing it to
160 J. TRESCH
answer different sorts of questions. Although of course, that requires that

you keep all the data that youre going to need for your future questions,
which you dont always know at the time.
Elizabeth Pisani
Its interesting that you started off with cosmograms being essentially por-
table manifestations of world views, and now youre saying that when you
codify something enough, when that becomes a well enough accepted
cosmology, then it becomes immutable in ways, and that makes it less
portable over time.
John Tresch
All these questions are very much about the way in which a cosmogram in
one moment has to wrestle with and incorporate earlier iterations and later
alterations, and that can be very difficult. Theres a legacy of precursors
that has to be addressed, which may or may not be successfully addressed,
and can produce a breakdown as new things come up. On Steves point
about data infrastructure building in certain questions and answers, just
in the way its stored and reduced in the first instance, how that deter-
mines what questions can and cant be answered, I want to say that for
anthropologists of science and historians of science working today, thats
precisely a part of the scientific flowchart that so far has received very little
attention. That may be because it appears to be preconceptual, just bytes
and numbers, and because computers are doing the analysis: but an algo-
rithm is a model, and we absolutely need to be turning our attention to
that stage of the process, the choosing of the model and the work it does,
because thats where so much happens. Thats the first formatting, a very
crucial early moment of adding form to information, and its where the
paradigm dwells. Its very hard to access, and especially because we dont
generally speak in numbers.
Bruno Latour
For every data set, it seems you need an Auguste Comte to narrate, in a
neo-traditional way, the ordering. In our discussions so far, I have been
very struck by the fact that there is both an ordering of collecting and
an ordering of display. So, my question is really about the novelty of the
big data set. Is it a great novelty, or is it just a fabulous expansion of the

striking empty space realized by Mona Hatoum, with this frame flickering
in and out? We are back again with the anxiety of the naturalists, who are
supposed to know from first principles everything which happens next,
and yet there is plenty of stuff which is not deducible from their first
principles. There is a constant ad hoc built into naturalism, despite the
underlying notion that if you had all the first principles, everything else
would be understood, and yet there are all sorts of bits and pieces com-
ing in which have to be put somewhere, hung on some sort of peg. Then
again you have to do the work of display, and of narration. So Id like to
know what the equivalent of Auguste Comte is now. Because as shown
in Treschs book, The Romantic Machine, in the early nineteenth century
Comte and these other cosmologists were making solutions to both the
scientific and political revolution. So what would be the equivalent of this
neo-tradition today, for reformatting the data set, in a sort of contem-
porary positivismthis positivism whose meaning has been completely
redefined in your book.
Its very easy to see other peoples cosmoprags (Id suggest that you call
it a cosmoprag instead of a cosmogram, because it is pragmatics, its
action, that youre interested in). In other words, its very easy to see
other peoples rhetorics. The danger here is the word data, which we all
know means things given. And I think it would be wise if we stopped
talking about data and instead used the word capta, things seized, which
is what we do. We seize things. We dont receive things. The whole idea
that things are given to us embodies the nave epistemology that there
are statements that exist in the world. Rocks exist in the world but geol-
ogy does not. Geology is part of a human conversation. And its con-
versation all the way down. I would claim that in positivism and these
early cosmoprags, and then in the cloud and most particularly in the
manipulation of capta, were hiding the judgment. And in particular, we
hide statistical tests of significance.10
Patterns, correlations, tests, and arguments dont exist in the world.
And most particularly, theyre not inside numbers themselves, no more
than theyre inside, in some ontological sense, towers or spheres or
urban plans. They arent just there, theres something that we read
into them. Weve got these statistical methods invented in the early
162 J. TRESCH
twentieth century, and were like the boy who gets a hammer for his
birthday; for him the whole world is a nail. Im very alarmed that these
machines of interpretation, these cosmoprags, such as statistical sig-
nificance or the gold standard of double-blind experiments, take over
our minds. Its an invasion of the body snatchers. And we think were
dealing with data when in fact were dealing with highly interpreted,
narrated capta.
Elizabeth Pisani
I think its a brilliant distinction between data and capta. But increas-
ingly, after this high modern, hypothesis-driven model which was actually
all about making a pitch to science funders, describing research in terms
that could be funded, I think now were moving back to a more organic,
semantic web approach. As we said yesterday, were talking more and more
about user-generated data. Whats being mined with these algorithms is
stuff that teenagers are shoving into the great dataset that is the web, so
its not capta any more, inasmuch as what we interpret in our papers and
algorithms is mediated, but what were mediating is stuff that is increas-
ingly chaotic and increasingly non-mediated in the way its contributed.
How we choose to present that is a question.
Steve Crossan
Even in the case of teenagers contributing data and torrents to the
cloud, the form of the data that is being contributed is being decided
by the person who has written the software. And theyve done that for a
very deliberate reason. Were capturing very certain kinds of data about
teenagers and organizing it in very certain kinds of ways. Its not that
teenagers are sort of somehow, you know, magically deciding what to
give us and what not to give us. So I think thats in fact even more of a
reason for concern.
John Tresch
It is important to note that user input is important not only in sociol-
ogy, marketing, and public health, where data feeds from Twitter, for
instance, are used to track trends or networks or epidemiology. Big data
also describes processes where the human intervention is less evident, as

in astronomy and neuroscience, where theyre relying on sensors that are
taking in huge amounts of data, then in some cases combing through it
for a signal. And I absolutely agree that this is capta: the instruments, the
code, determine what youre looking for. At another level up, an fMRI
or functional magnetic resonance imagery is picking up variations in the
blood flow, in the oxygen content of the bloodthe actual meaning of
which in terms of brain function is still being debated. But with an fMRI,
theres this scenography of the removal of agency, a giant machine which
says, no, its not human, its objective, its just finding facts. This is a field
thats entirely dependent on the statistical manipulation of large amounts
of dataeven if its not technically big datawhich is automatically
captured. You wouldnt have brain imaging unless you had these huge
sweeps of brains that are then interpreted at many levels by the statisti-
cal manipulators. And thats hugely under-examined in the sociology and
philosophy of neuroscience except at the level of images, though Andreas
Roepstorff has pointed to it: the role thats played by statistical modeling,
smoothing, in determining how to create and read a scan.11 And a lot
of the current models of the brain have been called neo-phrenological,
since they are the product of very deliberate statistical manipulations that
smooth out things that are happening in areas that are assumed to be not
of interest. You begin with a region of interest and then in a lot of cases
you statistically rule out other areas that might be activated in a given task.
So our models of the brainand therefore models of the self, right?are
byproducts of the way in which that data are captured and then processed.
Its statisticians who are shaping our conception of the self at that very
concrete level.
But there are similar stories to tell about astronomy, about bioinformat-
ics. This is beyond the Netflix algorithm; its not just preference choices
defining us as an intersection of likes that make it so we are like those
who like what we like. Though even this Netflix model is also a kind of
radical redefinition of society, of the social: that the group that were a part
of is simply the accumulation of formatted preferences. But something
comparable is happening in the ways in which readings of the stars and
readings of biological processes are taken automatically and then trawled
for meaningful signals. Already thats a selection process, the sensors aim-
ing for certain things. They choose certain aspects of the world to sense.
But then, theres further selecting that occurs when the data are processed.
164 J. TRESCH
So what is the Auguste Comte of these kinds of data sets, of these pro-
cesses of knowledge production? The problem might be that you need an
Auguste Comte at every stage of that chain of mediations. So its difficult
to imagine: thats a very big project to incorporate all those stages of trans-
formation, all of which claim not to be transformation, they all claim to be
preservation. But about the impact of these data-based methods, I think
the hype is probably justified, at minimum in a very performative way. The
forms of knowledge are definitely shifting.
But one further thought is that a Comte, or a kind of neo-neo-positivist
cosmogram that would organize what is going on, will probably be likely
to respond to certain epistemic values that we hold dear, even against
the constructivist aspect of Comte that is so important but usually gets
ignored. If things continue as they have, the naturalist idea that at many
stages in the process, there is a kind of self-organizing principle at work,
that it is the data or it is the processes themselves that are discovered, and
that theres no human will being imposed on itI think thats likely to be
part of the rhetoric or the image, because thats still the kind of universe
that good naturalists want to live in. The new data orientation does little
to undermine that traditional naturalism. Its hard to imagine that the
current structures of science, this massive enterprise which is committed
to realism at so many levels, would accept that there are aspects of choice,
design, and mutability at every stage of the production of knowledge.
They wont want the order to be recognized as arbitrary or contingent
and its that fundamental recognition of the arbitrariness of knowledge,
its relativity to our needs and questions and tools, which many have found
incomprehensible in Comte. But I think in a way we still havent caught
up to the first positivism.
Bruno Latour
The nightmare might be big data but much smaller narratives than
before. In other words, when we read Comte, we read it as an extraor-
dinary simplification, through this imposition of a narrative format at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, responding above all to the
political and scientific transformation. In big data we may have no big
narrative to go with it. Thats what the worry could be: an enormous
increase in data, but a much smaller story. And I say that as a founder
of laboratory studies, the anthropology of science, where we say lit-
tle things about great masses of clouds of points with arrows linked
together, which are supposed to be networks. We say less about more.
And that would be a worry.
Simon Schaffer
We should perhaps remember that the word data was introduced into
the western tradition to mean precisely the opposite of what it now
means. In Euclids geometry, data means the principles which one will
assume as proof. These are the things that are given, so they are pre-
cisely not what is observed. So its exactly mechanical romanticism that
turned data from being what must be assumed into its exact opposite.
Second, John Treschs analysis draws our attention to the tension and
the contrast between how expert members deal with each other and how
they may be dealt with or seen elsewhere. Theres a constant movement
backwards and forwards. This tension is a constitutive element of how
cosmograms work: it isnt some unfortunate byproduct of the pragmat-
ics of cosmograms, its what they do. So the question that presses is how
does it ever come to pass that the focusing, the formatting, the fram-
ing without which cosmograms dont work, are routinely denied, made
invisible?
Richard Powers
Im wondering if we might begin to formulate a desirable kind of process
for the forming and reading of cosmograms. What seems to be emerg-
ing from the conversations is that were recognizing the degree to which
there is a narrative inherent in the assembling and collecting of data.
Narratives are also involved in the presentation and indexing of data.
And of course, the readings of those indexes are themselves narrative
processes. Each of those levels puts constraints on the reconfigurability
or re-readability of data. Might we say that were looking for a world in
which those processes remain as fungible or as reconfigurable as pos-
siblebecause we know any given narrative is likely to be superseded by
another? Perhaps were looking for a kind of awareness of the social and
reciprocal processes that allows us to have a relationship with these pro-
cesses, which keeps this reconfigurability available to the greatest extent
possible.
166 J. TRESCH
Steve Crossan
If I can rephrase, I think youre suggesting that we consciously try to
design these processes for maximum fungibility and maximum transpar-
ency. And that we develop some kind of theory which can drive that, to
externalize as much as possible the narratives that were inherent in these
processes, and to leave them open to be re-narrated.
Richard Powers
We are the collectors, organizers, and readers of datathis continuous
dynamic, reformulated group of people who are involved in these recipro-
cal processes.
Bruno Latour
The question is whether the sphere is in the narrative, or the narrative
in the sphere? Comte tried to make the sphere out of the narrative. If
spheres are inside narrativethe universe taking shape inside our stories,
rather than our stories taking shape within an already-ordered worldits
a completely different ball game. It means that the narrative for the public
as well as the producer is organizing the whole trajectory of information.
But why is it that a sphere always has to come back as the way of organiz-
ing thingsas if every narrative was inside the sphere?
John Tresch
These are points about inside and outside, where figure and ground are
constantly being reversed and re-narrated. I think its there in all the
examples I gave, but I think the famous image from Geography of Plants by
Humboldt is a really great example, for the way in which he builds in prov-
enancea term that data processors think is their own, though of course
its got a much bigger provenance and earlier roots, in art history, gene-
alogiesdirectly and explicitly into his representation of the cosmos. This
is one way of addressing the very important foreground and background
question, the front stage and back stage question. Its an image of a single
place which is meant to be a metonym for the whole universe; but along
with the image of the mountain, and the data taken at different heights, in
every column of his diagram we see the instrument and the specific kind of
data that went into producing the overall image. And who is taking those
readings? Its Humboldt. But as for who could go back and reproduce it
and test and refine it, either there in the Andes, or the particular milieu in
London, Philadelphia, Siberia, Kathmandu, its everyone who reads it. So
you, the reader, the inhabitant of the cosmos, you are put into this map,
interpellated, and shifted in. Humboldt himself is tracing the origin of all
his data and giving you the resultboth at once. This seems to me to be
a nineteenth century version of the utopia of publishing scientific findings
where you have a result, a conclusion, plus the methods, and now all the
data. This is the dream that the cloud supposedly makes possible. I dont
know if itll happen, but its a lot of peoples hope that the data will be
published along with the paper, and carefully marked as to where, when,
and by what instrumentation it was produced, so that you can go back
and climb that mountain and make that image yourself, which may or may
not arrive at the same picture at the end. So the open, iterative process of
production would be incorporated into the closed, final representation of
the cosmos. Thats one of the new utopias of information.
Notes
1. Latour, Bruno. Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments
on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck. Common Knowledge 10, no.
3 (2004): 450462; Tresch, John. Cosmic Things, Cosmograms:
Technological World-Pictures. Isis 98, no. 1 (2007): 8499.
2. Inden, Ronald. The Temple and the Hindu Chain of Being.
Purusar tha 8 (1985), 5373.
3. David Turnbull. Cartography and Science: Mapping the
Construction of Knowledge Spaces, Imago Mundi, 48 (1977),
pp. 524.
4. Hammoudi, Abdellah. A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a
Pilgrimage. New York: Macmillan, 2006.
5. Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and
Technology After Napoleon. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
6. Jim Gray on eScience: A Transformed Scientific Method. In
Hey, Tony, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle. The Fourth
Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. Microsoft Research
(2009), available at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/
people/gray/ talks/NRC-CSTB_eScience.ppt.
168 J. TRESCH
7. Edwards, Paul N. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate

Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press, 2010.
8. Chris Anderson. Wired, June 23, 2008, 16:7. http://www.wired.
com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory.
9. Pisani, Elizabeth. Has the Internet Changed Science? Big Data is
Challenging Traditional Research Methods. Prospect (2010): 54.
10. Deirdre N. McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical
Significance (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
11. Roepstorff, Andreas. Mapping Brain Mappers: An Ethnographic
Coda. Human Brain Function (2004): 110517.
CHAPTER 8
Gaia or Knowledge without Spheres
Bruno Latour
I want to start with a picture from the book by Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres,
to introduce the idea that there is an architecture to the market-
place. Itisabeautiful book called The Crystal Palace. It says, here, at
thebottom: All the world going to see the great exhibition of 1851
(Fig. 8.1).
My chapter is really informed by this image, though it doesnt exactly
address the history of science. Thats covered by Alexander von Humboldt,
pictured here (Fig. 8.2).
We just read about him in the last chapter, and here he is holding
the globe of the cosmos on his shoulder, ready to die, and shifting the
weight of the cosmos on to the personification death. My question in
this chapter is the following: is there a way to shift the weight of the
sphere in our own conception of knowledge away from our own present
history? In other words, is there a way to get rid of the sphere as a basic
model of understanding? In spite of all the impossible projects we heard
about yesterday, we keep gazing from the middle of a sphere and seeing
that as the model of knowledge. Since Platos time the sphere has been
seen as the best, most beautiful geometrical figure; its supposed to say
B. Latour (*)
Sciences Po, Paris, France

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_8
170 B. LATOUR
Fig. 8.1 George Cruikshank, All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition
of 1851, from Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank, 1851; or The Adventures
of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family (London: George Newbold, 1851)
everything at once, put everything in its proper order, give us the whole
picture. Of course this completion never occurs, because the sphere is
never really built. It is full of holes; we actually dont see anything in it;
its a bubble. This obsession with spheres is part of the history of philoso-
phy and theory; it has never been anything in practice. So why, in spite
of the fact that it is not practical, do we keep thinking of knowledge in
terms of a sphere?
Ill make three points today: one about data and the aesthetics of
knowledge, another about the strangeness of naturalism, and a last one
about an old discrepancy between two kinds of spheres and, in conclusion,
how this can help us see the challenges of confronting the Anthropocene
and Gaia.
GAIA OR KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT SPHERES 171
Fig. 8.2 Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Abschied von Kosmos (Berlin, 1869: woodcut)
From Data to Sublata: An STS Point

The first is a point for science and technology studies, closely connected
to what weve heard yesterday and today. Its based in a slight uncertainty
about the Latin alternative to the word data. Is data simply a given, a kind
of gift, or is it sublatasomething that has to be obtained and achieved?
172 B. LATOUR
If we say its just given, that worries me a bit because it means you just
seize and receive it. But in fact you actually elicit it, and eliciting is what
I think this term sublata captures. In thinking about elicitation, what Im
most interested insince this is the topic of our meetingis what the
aestheticization of information means. I have been slightly worried that
we only think of aestheticization in connection with art and that were not
thinking about it in the sense of its etymology, which has to do with creat-
ing and enhancing a new sensitivity to things. This is something I will talk
about in connection with Gaia. Aestheticizing data might be understood
as a shifting of real data into the display, into the design, into the architec-
tural part of the work. But then we risk, as Deirdre reminded us yesterday,
forgetting that the sublata, when they are elicited out of a mass of interest-
ing practices, are themselves something which builds an aesthetic, again,
in the etymological sense of the word: something that makes us sensitive
to other entities, human or non-human. And I think thats the meaning it
would be best to use when we speak of the aestheticization of data.
I want to show a few images, starting with these ones from Armin
Linke, a great artist who is participating very much in the enterprises some
of us are doing here, looking at archives, collections, institutions.
When I look at a collection, Im in fact more interested in the back of it
than in the front. Likewise, in all of Linkes productions, you always have
an interest in the mechanisms of extracting sublata; this will not be a sur-
prise to people in science studies here. Even though its interesting to see
the display, for me, as an anthropologist of science, it is often more inter-
esting to see the way in which the form, which is going to produce the
information, is actually produced. This is something that David Turnbull
has worked on, also many others here, to remind us that information, at
the very earliest stage of extraction, eliciting, capturing, and achieving, is a
set of gestures which have a very interesting form which we usually dont
see when we are just looking at the later display (Fig. 8.3).
Take the example of pictures of paper placed on paper to copy a draft:
transparent paper allows superposition, which is something which we can
then begin to talk about as data. But the word data does not describe
the whole scale of transformation. The same is true with scale models. In
our project at Sciences Po on Modes of Existence, we are very interested in
Armin Linkes work because he has a knack for capturing the places where
science is produced; this perspective is very rare. My own photographs of
the sites of laboratories are pathetic; in contrast, this picture of Linkes is
an amazing scale model, showing how scale models make it possible to
obtain data impossible to get otherwise. This is all just to remind you of
the very well-known point from Science and Technology Studies (STS):
that information production still relies on models (Fig. 8.4).
Fig. 8.3 Paper and transparencies. Elena Tamagno, Universit di Architettura di

Torino, Central library archives, Carlo Mollino fund. Torino, Italy, 2009. Courtesy
Armin Linke
Fig. 8.4 Mars Rover Model, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars Yard, rover.
Pasadena, USA, 1999. Courtesy Armin Linke
174 B. LATOUR
For instance Armin went to visit a rehearsal of a Mars Rover in Pasadena,

which recreates exactly the same sort of desert environment in which the
Rover will rove, millions of kilometers away. In anthropology of science we
are used to thinking about these places, of course. But the point is that thats
where, for our argument, the extraction and putting into a form begins.
A Strange Aesthetics of Objects

My second point is related to the discussion yesterday about how extraor-
dinarily odd is the notion of an object that gets made into data in the
history of science. This is a very strange aesthetic, and here, I take aes-
thetic in all the senses including the question of lighting and presenting,
which we can find either in the early stage of sublata or in the later stage
in which the knowledge or display is consumed. Not only the definition of
the object is very odd but this notion of an object addressed to a subject
is even odder, as you will see. My point is illustrated by this beautiful and
famous image by Jeff Wall, which is a nice way to characterize what I mean
by the aesthetic of the object (Fig. 8.5).
Fig. 8.5 Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a laboratory in the
Department of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1992.
http://www.depont.nl/en/collection/artists/artist/werk_id/415/kunstenaar/wall/
You have northern light; you have a very, very carefully situated dis-
tance from the draftsman. The object to be seen and drawn is extremely
bizarre as an object because its mummified, the arm of a mummy, which
is itself put onto a background of felt. So, even the background is infor-
mation in my sense, because it makes the mummy more drawable. And
then its drawn. Thats my interpretation, but of course Jeff Wall himself,
who made the image, disagrees with my interpretation, unlike this very
melancholic Adrian Walker, the subject in the photograph, who, in my
view, is a witness to the strangeness of this view of object and subject,
which has influenced the whole history of the West. But Jeff Wall says no,
its a completely modernist image: so for him its an apology for empiri-
cism, while in my view this image should be aligned with the death of
empiricism. This disagreement may just be because I am not much of a
great artist, I am sorry to say.
But the point I want to take from this strange scenography of sub-
jects confronting objects is that there is no way to avoid giving knowl-
edge the shape of a sphere, a balloon, which we are at the center of,
looking, so long as we confuse knowledge with an object that is given
and knowninstead of something elicited, drawn out, obtained, or
achieved.
Magrittes old joke, Ceci nest pas une pipe, which is still probably taken
seriously by some intellectual artists, relies entirely on the notion that a
pipe itself is a stable, real thing which can be portrayed. But of course,
the pipe itself is not a pipe either, because the pipe, to use Whiteheads
terminology, has to follow its own trajectory in order to persist in exis-
tence. So when we make this joke, Ceci nest pas une pipe, we always
stabilize the relation between a thing which has to be painted and the
world, which, in this account, is not susceptible to any kind of narration
or analysis, because the pipe is supposed to be just sitting there, stupidly,
persistently. But instead, what we need to try to imagine is a way to show
that the trajectory of the pipe is in motion and that capturing an image
means capturing just one moment of the encounter between an informa-
tion trajectory and the trajectory of the pipe itself as it tries to maintain
itself in existence (Fig. 8.6).
And thats related directly to the question that Simon Schaffer asked at
the end of the last session, which is why do we have this bifocal view, in
which knowledge production never appears as foregrounded, except when
we deal with controversy or with descriptions of a site? To deal with this
176 B. LATOUR
Fig. 8.6 Ceci non plus, nest pas une pipe. Samuel Garca Prez, 2012
question, I want to come back to a quote by Peter Sloterdijk, which I will

explain more later:
The bifocalism of the image of the world had to be kept latent, without
the possibility of any explicit dialogue about the complete contradiction
between the geocentric site and the theocentric site of the projection
inside the illusory bubble of philosophia perennis.1
As we will see, Sloterdijk is talking here about something important for

science studies: the impossibility of having any explicit dialogue about
the complete contradiction between the site of knowledge production and
the site of knowledge projection.
The immediate question Sloterdijk is asking is why Western philosophy
takes it for granted that knowledge, when its detached from the site and
labor of its production, always takes the shape of a perfectly round ball, a
balloon. This has been the case since at least the neo-Platonist, Plotinus,
who talked about being emanating from a divine center. Sloterdijk points
out that this is a very odd conception. There is no reason why when you
detach knowledge from its settings, it should take this form. This shape does
not correspond to any practice of production, display, or use of information,
but once you detach it from these practices, we start arranging knowledge
into a sphere. And thats what he explains in his second book of his trilogy,
Spheres, in talking about the globe, which I will mention in a minute.
For now, what Im interested is the bifocalism, which we discussed just
after John Treschs talk, between the sites of production on the one hand and
on the other hand knowledge, which takes the shape of a sphere for which
there is no site of production, where knowledge is confused with the thing,
fused with the thing. And thats where the narrative impossibility comes
from, the impossibility of telling the story of these objects; it comes from
this bifocalism, these two totally different ways of talking about knowledge.
But before I get to Sloterdijks bigger question about why we take knowl-
edge to look like a sphere, I want to help us visualize the foundation of this
strange way of talking about knowledgewhich lies in the scenography of
subjects and objects which is so central to Western epistemology.
I asked Samuel Garcia, one of the students at the program I created
in Sciences Po, SPEAP, to try to imagine a way to help us visualize this
extraordinarily bizarre notion of knowledge as an object confronted by
a subjectwhich, despite its strangeness, we take as the natural view.
HereIll use the example of a still life. He draws this first scene (Fig. 8.7):
Fig. 8.7 The strange scenography of objects being seen by subjects. Drawing by
Samuel Garca Prez, 2012
178 B. LATOUR
Of course, when you consider the three vases being seen here from the
observers point of view, in an example coming from the tradition of still
life, then you imagine seeing them through a screenwhich is very odd.
Then you imagineeven oddera gaze. Lots of peoplephilosophers,
art historianshave studied the strangeness of this gaze.
But now of course, if you remember Whiteheads point about the
pipe, there is a whole long history and trajectory of all these objects
which have been caught, immobilized, and held captive in their life
trajectory by the still life. They are here displayed as moving entities
(Fig. 8.8).
So its very odd to take vases, glasses, oysters, lemons, and so on, any
sort of thing like that, to stop them, and to ask them to be stuck in front a
subject, which has its own long complicated life trajectory.
Thats why I was so interested yesterday in the role of the curator,
because there is a curator who produces the machinery of object-subject
connection. In this case Samuel Garcia has chosen the arch-modernist
figure of Le Corbusier. And as you see, he occupies the hidden position of

being simultaneously on both sides of the picture plane: both arranging
and observing (Figs. 8.9 and 8.10).
Since this curator is simultaneously on both sides, he can arrange the
interrupted object to make it visible for the implausible subject. This
means organizing and situating an absolutely impossible place, in the
middle of this plane, simultaneously occupying both sides, presenting to
a non-existing subject a non-existing object. Samuel was clever enough
to picture the subject sidethe one always forgotten when objectivity is
being criticizedas a single artificial eye mounted on a camera scaffold
(Fig. 8.11).
And its this bizarre scenography that we take as natural! Its extraordi-
nary, no? This is what we take as a naturalist, realist painting, which is the
most bizarre anthropological construction. Even more bizarre because, as
many people know from Panofskys reading, the subject itself is not actu-
ally a human: its just an eye.
180 B. LATOUR
Fig. 8.10 The strange scenography of objects being seen by subjects. Drawing
by Samuel Garca Prez, 2012
Fig. 8.11 The strange scenography of objects being seen by subjects. Drawing
by Samuel Garca Prez, 2012
This scene has nothing, almost nothing to do with the trajectory of

the object. Nothing to do with the subject either. So the whole history
of subjectobject in philosophy and its critiquea critique being the
same as a eulogyis actually built on a very, very strange subject: an
ocular entity which is nothing like us, not like anyone we know. And, of
course, neither is the object like any we know, since the object is actu-
ally the flow of history. So our assumption of naturalism is incredibly
strange, and even more so because it means we confuse the interruption
of a trajectory of a thing going as it goes through its own existence with
the thing that we know.
Apart from reading Whitehead, which is not the easiest thing to do,
there is only one character who can remind us that the essence of existing
entities is a trajectory. And that character is Gaia. The distinctive character
of Gaia, because it is inescapably historical, allows us to seize the strange-
ness of his construction of object-subject, to see its oddity.
This has a direct connection with what we have been discussing at
this conference up till now. Because if we want to aestheticize data, not
only in the artistic sense of the word but also in the sense of building
sensitivity to existing entities which have the same characteristics as the one
who is sensing them, we need this notion. This is a familiarity we need to
develop, a new habit. The old habit was to see ourselves as naturalists, as
subjects seeing nature, and that scenography winds up making a spheri-
cal argument, where the knowledge arrays itself spherically all around
us, with our consciousness at the center. One sphere confronts and con-
tains another. But a completely different type of habit or familiarity is
possible, and this is that we are narrative creatures looking at narrative
creatures, making ourselves sensitive to uncertain, unpredictable series
of situations.
A Puzzle of Spherology
What is Gaia? It would be too difficult to approach this question head-
on. Instead, today, I want to approach it through Sloterdijks argument
about spheres which I started to discuss above. To lift extra weight from
our shoulders we have to indulge in a little bit of spherology, the fas-
cinating discipline Sloterdijk invented from scratch in his massive study
of the envelopes indispensable for the furthering of life. His project
is to generalize Von Uexklls Umwelt to apply to all the bubbles that
agencies have generated to make a difference between their insides and
182 B. LATOUR
their outsides. Toaccept such an extension, one has to consider all the
philosophical as well as the scientific questions thus raised as being part
of a vastly expanded definition of immunology, understood here not as
a human nor as a natural science but rather as the first anthropocenic
discipline.
According to Sloterdijk, the complete oddity of Western philosophy,
science, theology and politics is to have invested all its virtues in the figure
of a Globewith a capital Gwithout paying the slightest attention to
how it could be built, sustained, maintained, and inhabited. The Globe
is supposed to capture everything that is true and beautiful, even though
it is an architectonic impossibility that will crumble as soon as you look
seriously at how and where it stands. Sloterdijk asks a very simple, humble
architectural question, one that is just as material as those asked by the
geologists with their inquisitive hammers: where do you reside when you
say that you have a global view of the universe? How are you protected
from annihilation? What do you see? Which air do you breathe? How are
you warmed, clothed, and fed? And if you cant fulfill those basic require-
ments of life, how is it that you can still claim to talk about anything
that is true and beautiful, how can you still claim to occupy some higher
moral ground? Without specifying your specific climatology in these
extremely concrete ways, the values you are trying to defend are probably
long dead alreadylike plants that have been kept inside a greenhouse,
overexposed to the sun. In Sloterdijks, even more than in Lovelocks
hands, the notions of homeostasis and of climate control take on an even
more metaphysical dimension.
In the middle of his second volume on Globes (now accessible in
English), Sloterdijk devotes 100 pages to a meditation that he titles Deus
sive Sphaera, God, that is, the Sphere. Although it could seem to be
just a tiny technical fault in design, it is one that destabilizes the whole
architectonic of Western cosmology and that is most clearly detectable in
visual imagery. Sloterdijk is an unusual thinker; he takes metaphor very
seriously. And where other thinkers might say, Well, perhaps the meta-
phors dont hold, but they are just metaphors after all, what really counts
are thoughts, Sloterdijk says No, no, no, they are metaphors, and they
have to be followed in all their detail, all the way through. And here he
shows the implausibility of the architecture of universal spheres and towers
that Pierre Chabard talked about yesterday.
So when he takes on the metaphor, for instance, of an atlas, hes asking
us to take seriously the direction of the gaze and the total implausibil-
ity of the picture of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders and how
it is actually drawn. Where is Atlas standing, and who is able to see him?
Sloterdijks whole book, not surprisingly for us, is an interpretation of the
implausibility of the spherical mode of the gaze. In fact it never works:
Atlas carries on his shoulders a sign from heaven, whose real support no
human observer could ever see from a mortal locationif he existed from a
physical point of view. Who would you have to be, in order to look upon the
celestial shell of this ball, as if it was an object facing you? But even more:
where would you be traveling in order to see from the outside, as in a vault,
the entirety of what is?2
In his discussion of Atlas, and the limitations of this view of knowledge

as a projected sphere, Sloterdijk points out an amazing paradox: what he
calls the time of the globe is the time that stretches from the early modern
cartographers we saw in Seville all the way to the end of the nineteenth
century. In that period we had a globe, and thats why it is symbolized for
Sloterdijk, and very rightly so, in the metaphor of the atlas by Mercator.
Mercator is the first person to modify the metaphor of Atlas: he shifted it
from someone who holds the world on his shoulders to someone who has
the world in his hands (Fig. 8.12).
So, at the time of Europeans geographical expansion, the globe served
to situate knowledge in one place, basically, by latitude and longitude.
The globe was a kind of virtual world in which all the new little discoveries
were being placed. The map was getting filled in.
But Sloterdijks argument, in the third volume of Spheres, is that now,
in the present, there really is an age of the globala new era which
he calls foam, in the sense that there are networked connections, ways of
following traces of pollution and protection and immunology through
economics and traffic and ecology and so on, all across the planet. But
there is no longer any globe to hold it. The time of the globe was precisely
the time when the global was not yet in place, not yet accomplished, with
Europeans going out and filling this virtual space in. But when the global
arrivesas an economical and mental and ecological activity, now going in
all directions, not just from the Europeans out to the rest of the world
there is now no empty place to put all of the elements that are coming in.
This is why Mercators Atlas used to be a good metaphor, but why its no
longer adequate for absorbing the multiplicity of entities that are making
the world global.
184 B. LATOUR
Fig. 8.12 Gerard Mercator, Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica

mundi et fabricati figura. Duisburg, 1595
But a second point to which Sloterdijk devotes 100 pages to in

his book is another little difficulty which I want to draw on, to make
you aware of a difficulty I think we are facing. This is the discrepancy
between two images. In other words, its basically the discrepancy
between Plato and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). One
is the Theocentric image of the world, where God is in the center and
emanates out the chain of other entitiescherubim, planets, and so on,
with the earth at the farthest periphery (and the periphery is of course a
pretty bad place to be, because the light cannot reach it). But the other
image, an older metaphor coming from the Greeks, is the geocentric
universe, where the earth is at the center. This one is well known from
Dante, of course, even though Dante actually used both metaphors:
one with the earth at the center and Satan at the center of the earth
and then moving up, your wife, society, and God; but also the one
with God in the middle. Dante used these two completely contradictory
models, one with Satan and the earth in the middle and one with God
in the middle, which scholars later tried to understand and calculate; as
you know, Galileo himself wrote a whole book on the architecture of
Dantes story (Fig. 8.13).
And this poses a puzzle, an architectural puzzlethats why it will
interest Pierre Chabard. Sloterdijk asks why did no one ever notice that
its impossible to build a sphere out of these two different metaphors? Because
that would mean that God is central and the earth is at the periphery and,
at the same time, that the earth is central and God is at the periphery. And
there is no way to hold this doubled architecture together. It will crash.
Nevertheless both of them continue for a whole incredible stretch of time,
through the whole amazing history from Plotinus to Nicolas de Cusa and
so on, without anyone bothering to see the total implausibility of such an
arrangement.
Now, the reason I am interested in this implausibility is because it is
exactly the same implausibility that we have just encountered in the previ-
ous session, when we anthropologists and historians of science try to fore-
ground the sites of production of knowledge, but the people we talk with
forget about these sites and give us the image of knowledge as a sphere or
a balloon instead. So we have this parallel (Fig. 8.14).
We are trying to build, but with two completely different centers,
one image of knowledge which starts with practices and sublata and the
other which is this sphere of givens or data. There is a complete archi-
tectural discrepancy between these two ways of building information.
186
B. LATOUR
Fig. 8.13 Deus sive Sphaera; God, or the Spheres. Image: Bruno Latour/Lindsay Stairs
GAIA OR KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT SPHERES
187
Fig. 8.14 Parallel between theocentrism: Cosmocentrism and knowledge-centric: Laboratory-centric views. Image:
Bruno Latour/Lindsay Stairs
188 B. LATOUR
Butinfact when we try to align knowledge as production and knowledge

as a sphere, were dealing with an architecture thats just as impossible as
Dantes.
So now I may modify the quote above about theology, which you recall:
The bifocalism of the image of the world had to be kept latent, without
the possibility of any explicit dialogue about the complete contradiction
between the geocentric site and the theocentric site of the projection
inside the illusory bubble of philosophia perennis.
But now, in order to insist on the parallel problem, this time not in theol-
ogy but in epistemology:
The bifocalism of the image of the world had to be kept latent, with-
out the possibility of any explicit dialog about the complete contradiction
between the knowledge production sites and the knowledge projection
sites inside the illusory bubble of philosophia perennis.
So what Sloterdijk says is that the bizarre feature of the philosophia

perennis comes from this bifocalism. An image of the world, the world-
picture in Heideggers expression, had to be maintained in latency,
without the possibility of any explicit dialogue with the place in which
it was produced. This is another way of talking about the complete
contradiction between the geocentric metaphor, with Satan in the mid-
dle and earthly corruption and destruction and the Theocentric, neo-
Platonic metaphor, which is a projection of the earth as the extreme
limit, the outer limit of an illusory bubble. Its the same bifocalism in
both cases.
So, I see this meeting in Venice as all about getting us out of an illusory
bubble of philosophia perennis. Why? Well, because if you connect the two
bizarre contradictionsthe contradiction between the neo-Platonic uni-
verse and the Ptolemaic universe and the contradiction between knowl-
edge as trajectories or narratives versus knowledge as a spherethen we
can see that the emergence of the earth in ecology as Gaia, the name that
Lovelock gave it, is an event in this history of spheres. Its not the intro-
duction of the earth into philosophy and public sentiment but exactly
the opposite; that is, its the end of the sphere in the Western history of
philosophia perennis.
Consequences: How to Picture Gaia

And this is where I want to end my chapter, with the Anthropocene, and
to superimpose it with this amazing film, Melancholia, by Lars von
Trier, which tells the story of the destruction of our planet by another
planet by coming at it. Of course there are lots of different interpretations
of this film. But I would like to read it as the allegory of the destruction
of a sphere, the destruction of the globe, of the old globe by the eruption
of Gaia. Why? Well, one good reason is that Gaia is not a sphere: its just a
periphery, an edge, a limit, a very, very tiny, thin little outer ring.
Thats why Im so obsessed with Gaia. The emergence of Gaia is the
end of the sphere. Why? Because of questions of scale. None of us has
the sensitivity, the aesthetic instruments in the etymological sense, to feel
what is happening with Gaia. Gaia is a historical figure. It has a history.
It is completely contingent. It has lots of strange characteristics. None of
them look like the divinity of the Theocentric world, in spite of the name.
A great thing about the emergence of Gaia is that its controversial. We
have the sad climate controversy to help make my point, because it is tied
to the very emergence of the figure of Gaia. Even though climate skeptics
or climate deniers as some people call them are unbearable, the fact that
the controversy is part of the description of the planet means we cant
lodge the planet into a sphere. You cant build a sphere out of Gaia, in
spite of some horrible and simplistic animations and representations about
the Anthropocene which try to map human impacts on the earth. Why are
these so horrible? Because they eliminate all the new figures of ecological
crisis in trying to represent the earth.
The great interest for me, the great reason why the question of scale
raised by Gaia is so interestingthe masses of data we have about the
climate, all the controversies, the enormous time scale, the endless fac-
tors to consider, and so onis because it modifies, it renders implausible,
even more implausible than what we have seen the last couple of days,
the dream of organizing knowledge in a sphere, of lining it all up for a
gaze at its center which can see the whole at once. Gaia is not a figure of
wholeness. So this is what makes it interesting. Because the globe keeps
showing upas we heard again with Auguste Comte, where every single
science has been a cosmogram organizing the whole cosmos around some
new entity. Whether were looking at Louis XIV or Ancient China, what
we see is that immediately, as soon as you get a new cosmology, you get
a cosmogram, and its put in the form of a sphere, which is immediately
190 B. LATOUR
used for political reasons. And this is precisely what is impossible with this
strange situation summarized by the word, the Anthropocene.
The word Anthropocene announces that between Gaia and the human
there is a Mbius strip: you never know which is which, whether youre
on the inside or the outside, the human or the non-human. I remind you
that the term Anthropocene was invented by geologists, not some strange
anthropologists of science or silly philosophers like me to qualify the pres-
ent period. And there is still a dispute over whether it is a discrete epoch
or not. Unfortunately, geologists work very slowly, so the nomenclature,
which was supposed to be decided in Brisbane in 2012, has actually been
delayed for a decision until 2016. We will not know if we have been liv-
ing in the Anthropocene or not until 2016. What is interesting in the
Anthropocene is that on the face of it, it plays out again all of the old
ideas about microcosm and macrocosm: all the ideas of the superposition
between human activity and natures activity. I will remind you of the fact,
which Oliver Morton drew our attention to at an earlier meeting, that in
terms of energy consumption and energy use, mans waste is now operat-
ing at approximately the scale of plate tectonics. So its not just a little
minor phenomenon on the surface of the earth, as it would have been at
the time of all the moments we saw before. The Anthropocene has all of
the characteristics of both of the two old spherical centers: the human-
centered and the earth-centered and their impossible superposition.
And yet, its completely different from past globes, because its not a
Globe. Its extraordinary character, which I hope to be able to talk about
in discussion, is due to the way it resurrects the sublunar and superlunar
distinction, which is very odd, because the earth is local; Gaia is a local
phenomenon. Its not nature. It has nothing to do with nature, or with
creation, or with the infinite. The moon is not part of Gaiawell, there
are some arguments about this, its disputable. But Mars is definitely not
part of it. So the Anthropocene names this local phenomenon which has
the shape of a ring, a Mbius strip, where the superposition of human
activity and so-called Gaias activity is now tied together.
In all the chapters we saw before, where we saw people arranging knowl-
edge and the universe into some kind of display, in all of these images we
had man in the middle and there seemed to be no one questioning the
assumption that the thing to be organized was itself circular. But Gaia is
not circular; its a retroactive loop, a loop of which we dont know the end,
in which we are, ourselves, inserted in a way which in itself is controversial.
Its a plate of spaghetti compared to what weve seen up to now. You cant
build a Humboldtian view about that or a constant, stable view. But you
might want to give a narrative version, because the way the world itself is
articulated is now finally much closer to a narrative flow than it is to the
old sphere, which was itself always a theological construct.
So thats the sense in which we are actually moving out of the sphere.
And now, as in the image of Humboldt at his graveside, all these nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century images of knowledge can die safely.
Humboldt can lower himself into the grave and leave the sphere to be
carried instead by the figure of death.
Debate
Economists have a way to see the whole globe at once and thats to see
human relations, production, consumption, and the globalization of
products, all in one object. Theres a famous popularization of this idea
called i/o, the input/output table. Take a pencil. In the pencil are embod-
ied pieces of the world that come together. And indeed if you go further
and point out that we ourselves have inputs like food that comes from all
over the place, and we have outputs like books, which then are written
with pencils, then you have, actually, the eighteenth-century vision of the
French Physiocratsthe input-output table. You can then see the macro
in the micro in any particular object. You see the accumulation of human
knowledge that made the pencil possible.
Richard Powers
There are several questions on the table, and some of them are psycho-
logical. Bruno Latours repeated question was why use a balloon for the
resting state of data, why do we keep coming back to spheres as some-
how being an organizational optimum? To take that metaphor seriously, as
Sloterdijk wants us to do, you can invoke a kind of metaphorical analogue
to physics: that when you blow into a balloon there is a rest state; the par-
ticles that need to get away from each other, as far away as they can within
the constraint of the system, are going to take that shape, and if you have
a faulty balloon, its going to inflate in irregular ways, and thats going to
show a bias on the part of the collector. What were really looking for is an
unbiased, un-predisposed, natural, three-dimensional resting state of data.
192 B. LATOUR
So Bruno is asking why we gravitate toward that symmetrical state;

thats a psychological question. I think we are all in intellectual sym-
pathy with this desire to free ourselves from the need for fixed arrival,
for a product, one size of which will fit all. And we know the moral
imperative to return to the dynamic, reciprocal processes that cannot
be arrested, processes that need to be imbricated and perpetually defin-
ing and released along the axis of time in unpredictable ways. But there
is in us another, conflicting desire. We grow tired. We want to arrive,
we want to rest, and that desire is inherent in all of this hunger, this
historical hunger, the need to finally be able to put the burden down
somewhereto invoke the Atlas metaphor. So I guess to the extent that
youre inviting us to escape this need to arrive at an optimal state and
to realize that what we want to look at are, in fact, enormously complex
and reciprocally influencing processes, you have to also say: I under-
stand the human propensity to want to solve things in the totalizing or
finalizing way.
Bruno Latour
The problem is that weve already had that time. That was the globe, the
resting stage, knowledge taking shape as a globe. Were already slightly
out of Comtes time. That possibility has been tried. The problem is that
we cant speak of Gaia in the sphere language, thats the difficulty. We have
to foreground the controversy, the uncertainty about the loops, economic
or otherwise; we no longer have a choice. Traditionally, the thing to be
ordered is supposed to be easy: its a sphere, its there, its on its way. The
great novelty of Gaia is that its not clear what is on its way. This is why
Lars von Triers film is so powerful. It raises an uncertainty in our ability
to say, Ah, the greatest thing about knowledge is that it is at rest. The
gas metaphor is perfect: a sphere is gas at rest. Well, the problem is that
Gaia is not at rest.
According to Sloterdijk, the idea of using the balloon in the history of
philosophy comes from Plato, the idea of a demiurge inflating the universe.
Behind this was the geometry of the timenot really the physics but the
geometry. It was a powerful metaphor. But what is so interesting in this
argument is that it kept constantly being broken down so that we could
never be at rest. Not that Newton was ever at rest either. We were never
at rest because of this anxiety I keep bringing inthough if we had really
been naturalists, we would be at rest; from the first principle, everything
would follow. But that never worked. So we can deny, which is, again, in
the climate controversy, exactly what the climate deniers do. We can keep
being modern, so to speak, and we can deny this inevitable breakdown.
We want this knowledge at some point to be uncontaminated, untouched
by locality, spherical, and at rest. The point is that this is no longer what
the once-spherical nature is now telling us. Also, even the phrase which
has been criticized so much in Lovelock, the revenge of Gaia, I think
is very important. Because the revenge is also there, even though it adds
lots of problems with loops between data, meta-data, knowledge, and
meta-knowledge.
Richard Powers
I want to make two quick points. First, the moon is most definitely part
of Gaia! And second, I want to extend that point by saying that anything
outside of a system that has any influence on any agent inside these recip-
rocating processes in Gaia is also, itself, in Gaia. Meaning that anything
that the Hubble telescope shows us, as agents inside the system, we then
add to our mental systems and as such, is added to the system itself. Were
not autonomous. And just as an aside, your critique of naturalism is abso-
lutely analogical to my critique of whats called realism in literary circles.
Pierre Chabard
The key question seems to be to understand the complexity of the topol-
ogy described here, especially the images of co-inclusion, of inside and
outside, of self and world, of word and thing crushed together. I think
we need to ask for a little clarification in understanding that topology.
Then a second question: perhaps the metaphor of an archipelago is a
useful one for thinking how these spheres relate to each other, distrib-
uted in space. Perhaps there is no longer an interstitial space, a place
where the spheres intersect any longer. Archipelago might therefore
be a useful metaphor to use also because it is spatializing. And third,
theres the question of the Anthropocene, the sphere of the impact of
human activity on the planet. To come back to another metaphor of
Sloterdijks, what relation does this have with Sloterdijks notion of the
Crystal Palace, in the Western world, which is all about self-enclosure
and maybe too narrow of a space in which to negotiate the wider expanse
that youre discussing?
194 B. LATOUR
Elizabeth Pisani
I do want to bear in mind the positioning of man at the center of this
globe and the feeling of discomfort we have when that is somehow
disrupted. We might look at what Adam Lowe has done in his projec-
tion, to squish the globe around on its side and say Africas the wrong
shape. Were suddenly discomforted by the fact that our position in
that globe has been moved. But here Latour is suggesting much, much
greater changes in our vision of the world, so Id like to reflect on how
the rest of humanity is going to position themselves in relation to those
changes.
Bruno Latour
The whole idea of Sloterdijk is that space has an immunological character-
istic, which is not surprising for architects. The question is what immunol-
ogy Gaia has, because you never know if you have to protect Gaia against
you or if we have to be protected against Gaia. So there is a complete
uncertainty about the immunological characteristics of that space. The
Anthropocene is interesting precisely because it comes from geology, its
a question of erosion: what happened to weather, what happened to soil,
and the impacts compared to volcanoes? Theres a committee of geolo-
gists, a nomenclature committee, about the way to seize this question,
which looks very humanistic: what do humans do on earth? Actually its
an old question, but when taken up now by geologists, it becomes quite
interesting. Im interested in the fact that neither Gaia nor the human
as a whole can be composed as two distinct entities facing one another.
Thats why Gaia does not fit into the spheres and the representation argu-
ment. And thats why it foregrounds controversies. Because, you never
know where you are intervening in the cycle, because they are all made
of loopsall positive now, since negative loops are rarebut you never
know where to intervene. This is a figure which we are absolutely unable
to describe.
Adam Lowe
I want to go back to the images of the subject and the object and the
drawing on both sides of the perspective grid. It reminds me of the very
first time Bruno and I met years and years ago, with exactly the metaphor
of the pipe. Ive always had a very big problem with that, because to me,
paintings arent primarily intellectual; they have many levels, but they are
deeply visceral. So the great privilege I have is spending so much time
looking at the surface of something, reading its physicality, going into it,
being occupied, doing things, but having time to think about it and hav-
ing time to share it with other people. To me, paintings only come alive
in dialogue. They are things that need to work in their own time and very
slowly. Magrittes This is not a pipe, always seemed a bit weak, its not
really very interesting. I mean, its a game, an intellectual game, its a lan-
guage game, but in the grand scheme of things, its rather poor.
Last year I had the extraordinary privilege to spend five days in the Sala
Bologna. The Sala Bologna is outside the Popes private rooms. It was
painted for Gregory XIII by Lorenzo Sabatini. No one really knows much
about it because if you paint pictures in the Popes private rooms they
dont get seen. But walking in there I had one of those absolutely weird,
visceral moments where all the hair goes up, apophilia: you know youre
on the track, but you dont know why. And standing in the middle of the
room and again being able to talk to people who know about this thing
the Popes interior designer, historians. The depictions in the room are
all of Bologna, so theyre very local. The Pope, moving to Rome, brings
with him a bolognese painter, builds a room outside his private rooms; to
get through it you go through all the corridors of maps and spheres and
other cosmological images, the metaphors youre talking about. And in
the room, he creates something that to me was the most mind-blowing
work of conceptual art Id ever seen.
Its a room about 9 meters by 15 meters and 9 meters high. On one
end of the wall is the largest and most accurate map of the Renaissance, of
the city of Bologna. Every detail, everything, including the first depiction
of a football match, going on in the city. On the long side of the wall is
the complete province, from the plain to the mountains, with every city
marked, with Bologna in the center, with detailed images of all the main
buildings in the province. On the other wall opposite there were two win-
dows. But between the two windows was the most beautiful and delicate
view of the city of Bologna, done from San Michele in Bosco, which is
just outside looking back onto the city. On the other long wall are three
windows. And out of the three windows, he could look over the whole
of his domain, which is Rome. So hes standing on his family crest. Hes
looking out. There are three windows that overlook the whole of Rome.
He looks out over his domain that hes now the one person, the top of his
triangle of mediated triangles, this Catholicism that Bruno taught me so
196 B. LATOUR
much about that I never knew, which is mediation all the way up. And hes
at the top as he stands in the middle of the room.
Interestingly, we were recording the room with a panoramic system.
Always when were recording, I prefer planar systems, but theyre slower, but
this was done mathematically with a panoramic system so its firing around,
effectively creating the sphere that you want us to get away from. And the
room has a sort of curved ceiling that caused lots of problems in the record-
ing because everything else was effectively flat and we could work it out.
The ceiling has one of the largest cosmological ceilings in the Vatican.
Talking to Greg, one of my team members, we were looking at this ceil-
ing, and Greg was trying to map onto it the data that he could download
off the internet about it, and we noticed its reversed. So the Vatican ceil-
ing is back to front, flipped.
We start talking to all the people, and everybody says its totally obvious
that this is an extraterrestrial projection. So effectively, as the Pope stands
surrounded by everything he loves, looking over everything he controls,
he sees the world from Gods point of view. And its one of the things
where you think, actually, paintings can give us metaphors that are com-
plicated and beautiful and arent just about spheres: what were doing is
abstracting but really what we have to do is condense it.
John Tresch
Adam, that is amazing. Now Bruno, if I understand rightly, with this talk
about the history of the pipe and about Gaia, youre hoping to recover,
or perhaps invent, a more process philosophy-oriented way of seeing the
world and knowledge. You mentioned Whitehead briefly, and you artic-
ulated very interestingly why thats necessary. But Im intrigued by the
question of what would that look like. What have we seen, what has been
thought about an aesthetics of knowledge that was process-oriented? Can
you say more of your thoughts about what that would look like and what
it would mean in practice?
Bruno Latour
Isnt that what were all trying to do here? The history of science has been
often accused of aestheticizing science. Because when the scientists work
hard in the field, we say, its so beautiful, its so interesting, what you do
is fabulous, it goes through all sorts of steps, and they say no, we are just
producing data. We cannot solve this question of aestheticizing after the

factin the literal sense of the phrase after the fact. The discrepancy
will keep turning up as long as we have not made it possible to describe
the world as a process too, which is actually what the world is like; aes-
theticizing will just be a further reflection by people from the humanist
fields to positivist data. This is why for me your book Romantic Machine
is so important, because positivism is used in many, different senses, but
the sense of positivism has completely shifted after this book, in the same
way the argument about physics and politics has changed after Leviathan
and the Air Pump. So, is there a way to retrieve all of that before the fact
and not after the fact?
And my solution to it, if its a solution, is that the world itself is articu-
lated. Thats why I was so interested in painting, not the look of an object
but the movement, the trajectory of a scene as well as the object. But for
that, you have to have a metaphysics: if you want to speak like the world,
you have to speak in a native form, where the crack which lets in the light,
which Elizabeth Pisani mentioned earlier, is what is foregrounded.
Now, we are beginning to have ideas about what this looks like. It looks
like controversies and not a sphere. It looks localwhat I call an oligop-
ticon, and not a panopticon. We have seen very small but very wild places
that look like networks of connection. So collectively, we are beginning to
have a feel for this. The problem is that this feeling is always interrupted
by the facts, by the spherebut the world is not like that. For the first
time, the world, as far as its the local world, not the Big Bang, but at least
locally, Gaia, lets say, begins to looks like that as well. Its precisely because
the Anthropocene has mixed the human into it and just at the moment
when people were talking about the post-human, the end of humans. Its
now geology which is human. So there is a reflexive loop. None of us
had the slightest idea that this would happen when we started this field
of science studies, where we thought we were adding a reflexive loop to
unreflexive people. Now its the geologists who say, Oh, look, this is the
Anthropocene, you are producing as much of an effect on plate tectonics
as the tectonics itself. Thats reflexivity doubled. This is a chance for us.
Simon Schaffer
I think the language of process is slightly helpful for the following reason.
My puzzlement about the metaphysical analysis of the mistake of the sphere
is that it tends to draw attention away from the work that goes to making
198 B. LATOUR
the sphere. To put it bluntly, Im much more interested in the production

of spherical entities than I am in the iconography or even the impossible
iconography of the sphere. The history of northwest European sciences
is full to bursting of attempts to make large balls. Thats really what the
scientific revolution is. And they never managed to work out how to make
any mechanical ball that was self-consistent, that adequately captured (the
word is appropriate) the cosmology that it was designed to illustrate. And
at the same time, early modern European cosmology was obsessed by the
made quality of all these balls. Now the language of spheres is typically
presented as episodes in the history of cosmology and iconography, and
that makes the Anthropocene look unprecedented. But my argument is its
not unprecedented at all. We have always been concerned about making
space, not simply occupying it. What we do is construct the environment
and then announce that its the environment. Shape and capture but then
claim it was just given, just data. So would it make any difference if the
Anthropocene were less novel than it might seem?
John Tresch
About the novelty of the Anthropocene, I agree that theres a lot to be
said about the striking fact that the geophysicists and geoscientists are
speaking to us in a language, a process language, a language of reflexivity
and performativity, that sounds like what science studies has been saying
for a long time. Part of the archaeology of science studies, with clear lines
you can trace, is quantum mechanics and the idea that the world were
studying is one that we create and intervene in. But this is an update of a
theme that is much oldera theme everywhere in the nineteenth century,
as in Comte and Humboldt, and of course its in the Renaissance too, and
its always available as a critique within the most rigid naturalism. So join-
ing Simon Schaffers concern to what Bruno Latour has said, about the
process of making a world that we then describe as having already been
there, I dont necessarily see a gap between the examples that Simon just
gave and either the theological or earth-centered world, thanks exactly
to Adam Lowes example: the theological world is also a projection, a
construction, a very delicate one with aesthetic concerns. To build the
Popes chambers requires the same kind of skill with the same kind of risk
of cracks that producing a mechanical orrery will. And theres no way that
the painters, and the Pope himself, didnt know that. Part of the value of
such an exquisite sphere is precisely that its incredibly difficult, rare, and
costly to produce! Thats why its in the Popes palace in the first place.
Bruno Latour
This is a very difficult and important point. We make the world and then
we believe its not made. My point is that the agency has shifted, so all
of these words, which are very strange words, like revenge of Gaia and
all of that, are interesting because of the agency. Not only is the agency
reversedbecause nature was supposed to be the agent before and now
its humans toobut there is now the complete intermingling of the
agents, which looks like microcosm and macrocosm, except it cannot be
ordered in the same way. And thats where there would have been another
argument about the analogists and the naturalists. But the novelty is also
in scale and the unprecedented question of having to solve these ques-
tions at the scale for which there is such a disconnect and which cannot
be done symbolically. The part that we dont have now is the aesthetic,
in terms of sensitivity, to be able to register that there is no anthropos to
the Anthropocene. The human race is not a race, its not an agent. Nor is
Gaia. And thats why the Anthropocene is so interesting. Its a distribu-
tional entity: not in the semiotic sense but in the literal one. And the liter-
alness is what is so interesting. Thats not the old taskit doesnt seem to
be the task of the collective that we know, which had to do that only sym-
bolically. Neither the Achuar Indians studied by Philippe Descola, nor the
sixteenth-century Europe, nor our very recent ancestors had to solve this
question. Because the task is new, because of the scale and the literalness
of it. I hope Im wrong, actually. I would desperately hope to be wrong
on that noveltybecause if it wasnt novel, we would have a resource to
draw on.
Richard Powers
It seems to me that the Gaia model presents a great challenge for practi-
cal or moral action, because if people and their actions and behaviors are
distributed among these many dynamic reciprocal rings, how do we know
the efficacy of any action that we take? Were thrown back on enormously
complex, possibly unsolvable calculations in complex and chaotic systems.
I dont know of any way to move us toward a morality or an ethics except
for the slim possibility that somehow, we can model complex systems in
more and more subtle ways and get better at predicting possible outcomes
for our actions. The larger scales are perhaps easier to calculate. But we
know in complex systems very small changes in conditions can ripple out-
ward in unpredictable ways.
200 B. LATOUR
Steve Crossan
Im interested in your introducing of ideas from complexity theory, because
there are in fact in those disciplines, theories of emergence, whether its
in economics or whether its in neuroscience or artificial life, for example.
There are theories of how complexity and order emerge. And one of the
problems with them, and one of the worries, is that they necessarily tend
to be more qualitative than predictive and scientific in the traditional sense
that weve grown used to. So we tend to be able to gain insight but then
get frustrated at our inability to act on our insights. Ive been thinking
of a concept like autopoiesis, which is the self-creation of a system, the
self-organization of a system, a very strong idea in complexity theory. Its
a very problematic idea because its metaphorical, and its one of those
things that seem apparently insightful and metaphorical, psychological, if
you will, but impossible to pin down. Thats certainly been my experience
with theories of emergence: they frustrate action in exactly the way that
youve hinted at.
David Turnbull
I want to offer you an image that breaks away from a discussion that has
struck me as being far too geometric and formalist. A classic example of
a complex adaptive system in action is a termite mound, which we all too
often see as a structure, which we want to read, as it were, architecturally.
But if you step back a pace and think of it as a fountain of earth, it is liter-
ally a dynamic process constantly in action, in which none of the agents do
anything remotely spherical at all, or geometrical, or in which they have
any intention. They just interact with the other agents and they are driven
by stygmergy, the recognition of the sign of work by others. Thats all they
need to produce a continuous distributed fountain of earth, which is in
fact a living lung. But it isnt just a structure on an organism, or an organ.
It is a cascade, a constant cascade. Not a sphere, not a geometrical struc-
ture, not a piece of architecture, not an organ but a process, continuously
cascading, falling back. Thats my image.
Bruno Latour
So what would be the equivalent if you have to build one now? Ive been
asked to do that in Toulouse. There is a center of research in Toulouse and
we happen to have there a group that works on the Big Bang, they have
the big Pic du Midi telescope. They also work on the ocean. Of course its
the biggest center in Europe on space. They also work on the fish of the
Garonne, biodiversity, and so on. And I was trying to imagine the equiva-
lent of a place for the director of this institute, as a sort of commission to
an artist. I mean, what would it be for, not a Pope, but the equivalent,
this guy who is directing an institute of cosmograms? You would have to
take into account something which is of course not unordered. It has tip-
ping points, it is in itself a very interesting redefinition of limits because
they are uncertain tipping points, controversies, a big Mbius strip, where
you untangle into the thing and yet you have to be able to realize this
immunological space. But of course, without any of the resources of the
well-ordered sphere, always at rest. In other words, what would be the
equivalent not for knowledge at rest but for anxious knowledge? That is the
commission we have to make. So this would certainly bring us much closer
to the sixteenth century, because anxious knowledge is a much better way
to describe the sixteenth century than what came later, the supposed cer-
tainty of the naturalists.
Notes
1. Globes: Sphres II, p. 418.
2. Ce que porte lAtlas sur son paule est un signe du ciel, dont aucun
observateur humain ne pourrait jamais voir le pendant rel depuis
son site mortelsil existait vraiment dun point de vue physique.
Qui devrais-tu tre en effet pour regarder lcorce cleste de la boule
comme un objet face toi? Mais surtout: o devrais-tu sjourner
pour regarder de lextrieur, comme une voute, le toutdeltant?
Globes: Sphres II, dition franaise, p. 63 (Fig. 8.12).
CHAPTER 9
Mapping Dark Matter and

theVenice Paradox
DavidTurnbull
One approach to revisioning modernity is suggested by looking at the

question of where and how the boundary between the mappable and the
unmappable moves. Its a question thats brought into focus by the recent
announcement of the map of dark matter and its parallels with the para-
doxes that have long defined Venice.
The dark matter map, in bringing into visibility and knowability that
which was previously by definition invisible, seems to have forced a recon-
figuration of thought and knowledge very like that brought about in
Venice with the publication of Luca Paciolos mathematical encyclope-
dia Summa de Arithmetica in 1494. This famous work was the first to
give formal protocols to double-entry bookkeeping and linear perspective,
both of which are dependent on the previously unthinkable, contradic-
tory, and paradoxical zero, that which was both something and nothing.
These reconfigurations occurred here, in Venice, a site which is itself at a
liminal boundary, being miraculously self-constructed on the land and in
the water, mapping itself into existence out of nothing.
In this chapter, I want to explore these transformations in knowability
and mappability in the early shapings of the forms of knowledge, objec-
tivity, value, and place that came to underpin capitalism, science, and
D. Turnbull (*)
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_9
204 D. TURNBULL
modernity, and contrast them with the transformations brought about by

cosmopaleontology, the mappers of dark matter and the current problems
besetting the contemporary Venetian lagoon.
In January this year, an international team announced that they had
made a map of the dark matter in the universe, something which I think
is truly extraordinary. It gives us a picture of the universe in evolutionary
development, something that just until a very few years ago was beyond
imagining, let alone seeing. Figure 9.1 is the current dark matter map.
From within the standard narrative viewpoint of science as usual, the Dark
Matter Map can be portrayed as a classic example of the moving fron-
tier of science and the hypothetical-deductive method in action: form a
hypothesis and put it to empirical test, that is, if there is dark matter, its
gravitational field would be in the path of light as predicted by Einstein.
Bingo! We can record such pending effects and this figure is the map of
the result. Indeed, dark matter has become something of a trope to cover
the extraordinary chasms of unknown/unknowns in our knowledge.
Fig. 9.1 Dark_Matter_Map 2012. Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/

wiki/File:COSMOS_3D_dark_matter_map.jpg
MAPPING DARK MATTER ANDTHEVENICE PARADOX 205
We, for example, now have biological dark matter being proudly
announced by virus hunter Nathan Wolfe: amazingly, 40% of the bio-
logical material in our bodies has until now gone completely without
notice. Now it can be detected: it exists, but its unidentified, what it is
is completely unknown, it may be an entirely new form of life yet to be
discovered.1 From an external perspective, the dark matter map is pro-
foundly paradoxical. Dark matter is invisible, its not like ordinary matter,
it doesnt interact with the matter or the radiation that makes the world we
inhabit. It comes close to being in the same category as gods, angels, and
spirits: ineffable, unknowable, of another universe. Yet they claim to have
mapped it! Indeed, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of 2011 has just released
an interim map of the universe as part of a project to map all the matter
in the universe from which dark matter can be gravitationally inferred.
For those who work in a constructivist and performative science studies
frame, the map brings dark matter into existence rather than the other
way round, but I think it can be argued that the dark matter map opens
up a completely new order of seeing and knowing in the modern scientific
episteme. Such radical transformations in the conditions of knowability
are rare, much rarer than revolutions in science, which themselves have
become much rarer than Kuhn would have us believe. So they need to
be subjected to skeptical and careful questioning: is there such a radical
transformation actually in process, or is it just messiness as usual? For such
questions to make any sense, I need to back up and try to explain, as sim-
ply as possible, just why cosmological physics had to invent something as
metaphysically implausible as dark matterand, indeed, why its an inven-
tion and implausible at least by the standards that have themselves seemed
plausible up to now.
The prevailing cosmological theory that the universe began with the
explosive transformation of nothing became established orthodoxy with
the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. Wherever you
look in the universe with a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope, there is
a more or less evenly distributed faint background glow of radiation not
associated with any objects, stars, or galaxies. This relic radiation is taken
as the key evidence of the Big Bang with which our universe began 13.7
billion years ago. In addition, for some time, it was assumed that gravity
was the predominant force and that the universe, after expanding for a
while, would contract. But now, not only does it seem to be expanding
but the rate of expansion is accelerating. It was also assumed that fol-
lowing the Big Bang, the matter and energy produced would be roughly
206 D. TURNBULL
evenly distributed. However, it seems the distribution of matter in the uni-

verse is not even. The universe has structure: the billions of galaxies, that
is, clusters of stars are themselves clustered in supergalaxies and, further-
more, their shapes and speeds of rotation do not conform with predictions
of an otherwise empty space (Fig.9.2).
To explain these observed phenomena, cosmologists have argued that
there must be both missing matter and a missing force: there must be
an invisible unknown force that is dark energyor possibly, dark magne-
tismdriving it all apart and an equally invisible unknown kind of matter,
matter that does not interact with known matter but provides the missing
mass that makes galaxies behave the way they do. In so many ways, these
propositions are reminiscent of the pre-Galilean astronomers who, in
their concern for saving the appearances, added epicycles to epicycles and
crystalline spheres to crystalline spheres. But what makes it profoundly
Fig. 9.2 The Expanding Universe. Source: https://otrasfuentes.files.wordpress.

com/2013/01/5c8c5c4f3cb7d8f4ca299ba723fa9e71.jpg
problematic is the unblushing acknowledgment that invoking dark mat-

ter and dark energy implies the need for a new physics. This is no ad hoc
adjustment nor even is it just the invocation of forms of matter and energy
that havent yet been encountered or even anticipated; this is a whole
new ontology and epistemology. Theres something deeply paradoxical
about postulating a new physics on the basis of the discoveries of the old
physics. Something more fundamental than, for example, anticipating the
resolution of the irreconcilability between general relativity and quantum
mechanics by deploying more dimensions or more strings than we know
of at the moment.
This change is both paradoxical and embarrassing for at least some
physical cosmologists who confess that not only is our understanding
of gravity incomplete, we do not have a good physical theory of mat-
ter, mass, space and time, nor do we know if they can be unified.2 Yet,
on the basis of this radically incomplete physics and the reality that what
they claim to know is based on the observation of a minuscule 4% of the
universe that they can actually see, they make claims aboutand indeed
map25% of what they imagine is missing, the other 70% being the even
more unmappable dark energy. But what seems to me to be the key move
is the concept of nothing out of which the Big Bang occurred. According
to quantum theory, that nothing or vacuum contains neither matter nor
energy, but it does contain fluctuations, transitions between something
and nothing in which potential existence can be transformed into real
existence by the addition of energy. This radical reconceptualization of
nothing, of zero, of the vacuum as being a seething turmoil of creation
and annihilation, provides an answer for both of the biggest metaphysi-
cal conundrums. (How do you get something out of nothing at the Big
Bang? And how do objects have mass when theyre mostly empty space?)3
Reconfiguring mass and existence in this way brings with it similar recon-
figurations of space, time, and causalitythe whole ontological enchilada.
These reconfigurations have occurred in conjunction with a range of
major changes in the way cosmology is performed. The universe itself has
been transformed into a technological instrument. Observing the unob-
servable, seeing matter that doesnt interact with matter as we know it is
of necessity indirect, beyond the unaugmented capacity of earth-bound
telescope technology, built of ordinary so-called baryonic matter which
is composed of atoms, carries charge and interacts with electromagnetic
forces. To see dark matter, you need what has rather neatly been called
Einsteins telescope. Einstein predicted that the gravitational fields of
208 D. TURNBULL
stars would bend light; modern cosmologists predicted that on a cosmic

scale, galaxies would similarly behave like lenses and also bend light. The
amount of bending revealed by looking through a cosmic telescope with
galactic lenses showed that there had to be very much more mass than
could be accounted for in terms of ordinary matter. The structure of the
universe itself became a component in the socio/technical instrument for
measuring the universes structure. But in some strange way, mapping
dark matter acts as proof that dark matter exists and even brings it into
existence (Fig.9.3).
The dark matter map is the territory. Indeed, what counts as territory
is transformed. In performing the territory, the map reveals the territory
as performing itself. This is close to the ultimate god-trick, as Donna
Haraway calls it, claiming to be able to map the universe, to watch it in
action. Where previously mapping was two-dimensional, the dark matter
map has a temporal dimension as well as three spatial dimensions; dark
matter cartographers now self-consciously see themselves as doing natu-
ral science field work and call themselves cosmopaleontologists. What
counts as seeing and knowing has been profoundly changed, courtesy of
new ways of moving and assembling people, practices, and places, and
courtesy of possibilities opened up by reconfiguring the paradoxes of
nothing, of zero.
What I want to do now is a complete volte face, to shift time and place
and conceptual focus and examine the context of an analogous transfor-
mation of knowing and seeing by locating it in a particular site: fifteenth-
to sixteenth-century Venice. A site which is intriguingly paradoxical, one
where its possible to trace the trajectories of knowability, mappability, and
seeability as they come into and pass out of existence (Fig.9.4).
Theres very little known about the earliest history of this region, but
in early Roman records, the fishermen who were the original inhabitants
of the lagoon were called incolae lacunae. The paradoxical sense of lacuna
asa knowable, visible presence implied by the absent, the unsaid, the invis-
ible, lies at the heart of the liminality of Venices origins. As Richard Platt
brilliantly demonstrated, For the Renaissance, Venice of contemporary
accounts and Shakespeares Othello was a location that could perform an
epistemological function and could force a reconfiguring of thought and
knowledge.4 What made Venice paradoxical was its contradictory and
liminal nature, its capacity to astonish, to challenge cognitive categories.
Its a Foucaldian heterotopia with a multiplicity of spaces, times, and iden-
tities that in opposition to hegemonic utopian spaces reveal the possibility
MAPPING DARK MATTER ANDTHEVENICE PARADOX
209
Fig. 9.3 Gravitational lensing: using the universe as a telescope. Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Diagram_on_%22Gravitational_Lensing%22.jpg
210 D. TURNBULL
Fig. 9.4 Christoforo Sabbadinos Project for Venice 1547. The first map to be
used administratively in constructing Venice. Source: Archivio di Stato di Venezia.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cristoforo_sabbadino_-_progetto_
per_venezia_del_1557.jpg
of other spaces, other ways of being. Everywhere in the representation

of Venice were presented with this condition of liminality, of being on
a border between oppositions, often extreme and irreconcilable antino-
mies, paradoxes, oxymorons, extremes that are impossible to conceive of
as elements of a unified totality.5 Venice seemed to straddle political, eco-
nomic, geographic, and epistemological boundaries. It marked the sepa-
ration between the West and the East, the civilized and the barbaric, the
rational and the esoteric:
A Western city saturated with the East, a city of land and stone penetrated by
water, a city of great piety and ruthless mercantilism, a city where enlighten-
ment and licentiousness, reason and desire, indeed art and nature flow and
flower together. Venice is indeed the surpassing-all-other embodiment of
that absolute ambiguity which is radiant life containing certain death.6
It provided a utopian model of unified political rule over a heterogeneous

multiplicity. It was a city of stone balanced on a forest of wooden stakes.
It was both in the sea and on the sea.
whatever hath the world brought forth, more monstrously strange, than
that so great and glorious a city should be seated in the middle of the sea,
especially to see such palaces, monasteries, temples, towers, turrets and pin-
nacles reaching up into the clouds founded on quagmires and planted upon
such strange, unfirm, Moorish and spungie foundations.7
It was simultaneously natural and a work of man, yet though it was delib-
erately built, it was notaccording to Lefebvreplanned like an artwork,
it created itself out of nothing: The urban fabric of Venice was devel-
opedwithout benefit of an existing ancient site, with no organizing cen-
tral nucleus, no tradition of town planningfrom a limited number of
pivotal growth points, the few plots of dry land. Little by little, as the city
moved out to conquer its space and each small island was drained, orga-
nized, and divided into plots, that urban fabric tightened. The relation-
ship between land and water was thus constantly changing.8 Venice thus
embodies the boundary of liminality, where, in the struggle between the
abstract, rational, and ordered and the messy, vague, and lived, the known
and the unknown are codependent and coproduced.
The paradoxical dimensions of the reconfiguration of thought, knowl-
edge, representation, and identity that Venices Renaissance liminality
produced are captured in the works of Fra Luca Paciolo. By the end of
the sixteenth century, Venice had become a major maritime and trading
power, but even more importantly, it came to so dominate the production
of maps, images, and texts, that it could be called the theatre of the world
and the eye of Italy.9 Art historian Bronwen Wilson argues that Venice
was the hub of the European encounter with alterity having 450 printers,
publishers and booksellers all contributing to a new geographical view of
the world. The world and the viewers place within it could be seen in
ways never imagined before.10 One of the first texts off the Gutenberg
press which established that publishing industry was the first mathemati-
cal encyclopedia of the Renaissance, Paciolos Summa de Arithmetica,
Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalit in 1494. It was the first publica-
tion to formally describe linear perspective and double-entry bookkeep-
ing. Paciolo makes no pretense to having discovered or invented anything,
he simply gave a formal mathematical description of the Venetian method
212 D. TURNBULL
that had been adopted by Venetian merchants trading with India, where
it had been in use for generations. Similarly, he described the geometry of
the vanishing point of linear perspective that he learned from Leonardo da
Pisa and Piero della Francesca, based on the work of Toscanelli, Gioberti,
and Brunelleschi. In turn, Paciolo taught the method to Leonardo da
Vinci and Albrecht Drer. Jacopo de Barbaris famous portrait of Paciolo
is interpreted by the mathematical historian Nick McKinnon as depicting
a real maths lesson that captures one of the greatest moments of the
Renaissance: the transmission to Albrecht Drer, and hence to the world
north of the Alps, of the geometry of Ancient Greece and the basis of
the new art of Italy.11 Dull, mundane, and routine: it is a classic example
of the invisible work that allows the infrastructure of modernity to per-
form our world. Double-entry bookkeeping transformed thinking and
knowing. Though it should be borne in mind, that attribution of such
major reconfigurations in the history of thought to the power of particular
sets of techniques of movement and assemblage has to be tempered with
awareness of its Eurocentric specificity. Gengis Khan, for example, and
the Mongol hordes, without writing or the wheel, transformed the whole
Eurasian world, spreading a vast range of transforming practices, by simple
conquest. Likewise, the Inca ran an empire on string and the Polynesians
transformed the world with canoes and performative maps (Fig.9.5).
Nonetheless, science and capitalism are deeply rooted in double-entry
bookkeeping. As Werner Sombart argued in 1902in Modern Capitalism:
it is simply impossible to imagine capitalism without double-entry book-
keeping; they are like form and content.
Through its encouragement of regular record-keeping, mathematical order

and the reduction of events to numbers extracted from time and place,
double-entry bookkeeping fostered a new view of the world as being sub-
ject to quantification and it was this urge to abstract and quantify natural
phenomena that lies at the heart of the scientific revolution.12
Double-entry bookkeeping was able to make the world subject to quan-

tification through providing for authoritative, visible comparisons of that
which was otherwise invisible, incomparable, and unknowable. It allowed
for commensuration by establishing measures of objective, commonly
agreed value within an authorized accountor story. Commensuration
of incommensurables became central to trade, enabling traders to cease
traveling, to deal with goods directly, instead becoming sedentary and
establishing large-scale financial centers.
Fig. 9.5 Fra Luca Paciolo teaching Albrecht Drer linear perspective? Portrait
by Jacopo de Barbari 1495. Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Jacopo_de%27_Barbari_-_Portrait_of_Fra_Luca_Pacioli_and_an_Unknown_
Young_Man_-_WGA1269.jpg
The performative and transformative effects of acts of commensuration

facilitate comparative measurement across vast differences of sentiment,
person, kind, culture and nation. To provide an account is to provide a
classificatory schema, its a cognitive device that sorts, orders, and names.
Accounts frame an economic reality in a particular way. In producing new
relations and new entities, they create what they purport to describe.
One key to the abstract representation of a commonly agreed value that
was so central to mercantilism was the use of algebra and Arabic numerals,
with their recognition of zero in assigning it place and agency. Another
key was in making visible the commensurate balance, the reduction to
nothing of both sides of the ledger. For Paciolo, seeing was the most
noble sense: the eye is the entrance portal through which the intellect
perceives; Alfred Crosby argues that it was double-entry bookkeeping
214 D. TURNBULL
that made the Western mentality become one based on visuality and quan-
tification: together they snap the padlock, reality is fettered.13
Another dimension in changing the visibility of the world was linear
perspective. Like double-entry bookkeeping, it depended on the articula-
tion of zero or nothing. To get things in perspective to achieve the form
of representation that we now take for granted, in which two-dimensional
images are taken as accurate and a facsimile of the three-dimensional world,
the lines in the picture plane have to converge at a vanishing point. A rever-
sal of the lacunae in making that which is present recede to nothing, to
absence; the present achieves reality. In summary then, it may not be totally
hyperbolic to argue, as Brian Rotman does, that zero and its manipulations
were one of the engines of modernity contributing to the rise of the West.
However, it was in sixteenth-century Venice that map-publishing began
its explosive efflorescence that some have titled the cartographic revolu-
tion. Though coming to see the world through the eyes of the map was
a change that took place remarkably slowly over 300 years, once instanti-
ated, it too was a radical transformation of the ways we see and know the
world.
A map that became iconic of the power of mapping and of Venice itself
as a map was Barbaris Birds Eye View of Venice; arguably, it became
iconic through the effect of accuracy and the deployment of perspec-
tive giving the impression of detailed realism that we now equate with the
power of maps to display how things actually are. A variety of analystshave
pointed out that the reality effect of the Barbari image was achieved
through studio fabrication rather than through compilation of detailed
survey data andits shaping gives Venice the iconic shape of a dolphin.
Maps so shape our understanding that even though were often
admonished not to confuse appearance with reality, maps, like double-
entry bookkeeping, can create and perform a reality. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in Venice, which arguably mapped itself into existence but
now seems in danger of being unable to stop itself passing out of existence
through a failure of mapping.
Is Venice Sinking? AndWhat Should BeDone?

TheCartographic Dilemma
Now, here in 2012, Venice faces very much the same problems as it did
in the sixteenth century: the land and the sea are conspiring to return
it to its natural state. But unlike the sixteenth century, when mapping
became established as the key way to see all the dimensions of the prob-
lem, mapping itself is now problematic. What was once mappable starts to
appear unmappable. The controversy today is over MOSE, the on-again,
off-again construction of barriers to hold back the sea at the entrances to
the Venetian lagoon.
The central hydraulic phenomenon that focuses the minds of Venetian
administrators is that St. Marks square, the heart of Venice, now floods
4070 times a year. In 1900, it was seven times a year. 600 years ago, the
water level was 6 ft lower. In 1966, there was a catastrophic flood lasting
for days and that was the trigger for what was to become MOSE, (Modulo
Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), an experimental model for submersible
gates across the three porti, sea channels into the lagoon. In December
2001, the Government announced plans to build the gates at a cost
between two and three billion dollars. The project actually began in 2003,
halted in 2005, recommenced with the finish date of 2012, and is currently
rescheduled for completion in 2018. The delays and interruptions were in
part financialcosts have risen to seven billionbut the real conundrum
is knowing whether it will work or if it will make things worse (Fig.9.6).
The MOSE project has always had a number of very vociferous critics,
who have produced evidence supporting a number of compelling argu-
ments against the idea of raising barriers to stop sea surges. Ammerman
argues that sea levels are rising more than were originally anticipated and
that would mean that the gates would have to be raised for increasingly
long periods. The effect of that would be to cause serious pollution and
silting, because the vital flushing effects of the tidal floods would be seri-
ously reduced.
Troccoli, from Australias CSIRO, argued from an even more funda-
mental point that on his modeling, the frequency of extreme storm surges
is expected to fall by 30%. Similarly, it seems Venice may not be sinking
at quite the rate it did when ground water was being extracted to sup-
ply mainland industries in Mestre. Now, as this has been halted, it would
appear that Venice is still sinking, but thats because the whole North-East
region of Italy is tipping slowly into the sea.
So ultimately, whats at issue in the barrier controversy is understanding
the complex dynamics of Venices acqua alta, the high water now expe-
rienced all too frequently. Its now acknowledged that its a consequence
of a complex set of interactions: atmospheric circulation patterns in the
northern Adriatic can cause water levels to be raised; global warming may
also be causing sea level rise; and canalizing the 292 rivers, streams, and
216 D. TURNBULL
Fig. 9.6 The MOSE Project to protect Venice from flooding. Source: http://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Localizzazione_GB.jpg
canals flowing into the lagoon from the land along with the dredging of
deep water channels and tankers and cruise ships has radically affected
siltation rates.
Its a classic wicked problem of the kind we face more and more fre-
quently as the global economy impacts the environment, especially envi-
ronments like the lagoon which are transitional, dynamic interactions
between marine and terrestrial processes: The Venetian lagoon is a
remarkably complex system with physical, chemical, biological interac-
tions taking place across a range of space and time scales, incorporating
interactions between terrestrial, aqueous, marine and freshwater envi-
ronments plus the wet/dry tidal cycles.14 A key parameter is of course
relative water level, but the interactions of geological subsidence, rates
of buildings, recent land reclamation, groundwater extraction, eustasy
(global sea level), and weather patterns on different temporal-spatial scales
make it hard to establish a fixed reference point. However, just as I was
writing this, it was announced that by using a combination of GPS to
measure absolute ground deformation and space-based radar to measure
relative water elevation, it can be determinedthey claimthat Venice is
sinking 1mm a year, and the waters rising 2mm a year. However, the
MOSE gates are also sinking. To make it even more intractable, there are
interdisciplinary problems of epistemology, ontology, and methodology
owing to the fragmented institutional responsibilities. I wont go into the
variety of institutions involvedthats a long listnone of whom use the
same methodologies. What was once assemblable, mappable, and visualiz-
able under the Magistry of the Waters is now becoming unassemblable,
unmappable, unvisualizable under the fractured incommensurabilities of
late modernity.
If, as the foregoing suggests, the forms of representation and the
ontologies that underpin what counts as seeing and knowing are not fixed
but subject to change as the liminal boundaries shift between concepts
of nothing and becoming, its not possible to reach a formal conclusion.
Rather, the point is the Foucauldian one, of critiquing our structures of
intelligibility to see what gets brought into visibility, what is mapped and
mappable, what is subjugated, excluded, unmappable, and under what
conditions. Mappings, like processes, are becomings, and complex adap-
tive systems are, as so many people have pointed out here, scale-dependent.
For example, what goes on at the nanoscale of atoms differs from the
mesoscale where emergent effects like life and magnetism occurwhich
differs from the world of classical physics which has only recently been
218 D. TURNBULL
connected to the cosmological scale. Introducing mapping and hitherto

unmapped scales brings into existence unexamined and invisible territory.
But there are also the conditions for the possibility of bringing something
into existence out of nothing, out of the articulation of the zero. The
absent always implies a presence yet to be made known A new era is in
configuration. Its at the liminal boundaries of scale transition, in the bor-
der lands of between marked by lacunae, that sudden, unexpected pres-
ences come into being. But at the same time some things are passing into
invisibility and unmappabilitylike the global financial system itself and
the Venetian lagoon. If we are to revision modernity, we need to be alert
to the boundary conditions of those these processes of deterritorialization
and reterritorialization.
Debate
Pierre Chabard
I appreciate this analysis of the city of Venice as the paradigm of a certain
worldview that implies a link between the projection of perspective and
map projection. I wonder if we could not extend this analogy between the
cosmos and the city, which seems quite recurrent in the history of univer-
sal knowledge. Diderot, in the article Encyclopedia of his Encyclopedia,
wrote: the formation of an encyclopedia is like the formation of a great
city. The two characters I mentioned yesterday, Patrick Geddes and Paul
Otlet, were both pioneers of urbanism. Carrying both an epistemological
ambition and a documentary approach, they were both involved in the
emergence of this new field of thought and action that was called urban-
ism in France, town planning in England, the Stdtebau in Germany. It
seems to me that today the same type of uncertainty characterizes the
knowledge that we could construct about the urban space and that which
we could build more generally about the cosmos.
David Turnbull
Its true that a very common cosmogram is the image of Venicefor
example, Thomas More uses it in his Utopia and it is often compared with
Tenochtitlan, and what both those images have in common is that Venice
is imagined in those representations as an island surrounded by water.
Its therefore sphericalalmost invariably, its enclosed and its insular. In
other words, its the very cosmogram that lies at the heart of much scien-
tific imagination. If you can turn the world into a laboratory which is itself
isolated from absolutely every other possible input, then you can control
the totality of what happens within it; and classically, environmental psy-
chologists and the like love islands for that point. They think of islands
as being insularliterally uncontaminated by the effects of the outside
world. Easter Island is a classic example of that.
And of course, the real problem is precisely that Venice is not an iso-
lated island. It is itself a node in a complex, dynamic set of interactions
and as soon as you imagine it to be isolated, you get into the fundamental
problem that lies at the heart of things like city planning: the idea that you
can build utopia in the middle of somewhere, anywhere, and imagine itll
all work beautifully. Then you go to Brazil and you realize that it didnt
quite work, or India, or especially Canberra, because of course it doesnt
exist in isolation. Its got to exist in constant interaction, and thats what
made Venice as important and as powerful and as influential as it is; it was
the hub of a very great trading network. This image of it as being a utopia
surrounded by water, insulated from the world is completely and utterly
misleadingbut also thoroughly seductive.
Bruno Latour
You mention the word quantification, with Pacioli, and perspective,
double-entry bookkeeping. It seems to me that this raises another way of
understanding what weve been discussing. We need to ask if quantification
should be understood in naturalist or analogist terms. Here the argument is
connected to Foucault who made that excellent point, which Anke knows
very well, about cabinets of curiosities. Distinguishing between the cabi-
net of curiosities and the museum is almost completely impossible because
there are so many variations all the way up to now. So, another version
Id like to suggest, as a sort of revisionist argument about quantification,
is that we keep the analogy called reasoning, but we now have, also, an
idiom of classification, of ordering, which is made possible by perspective.
This is not the same argument as saying we shift from the prose of the
world to rationality. Instead, Im saying perhaps we shift with perspective.
And thats the reason Im asking the question, because you mentioned 2D
and 3D.Analogies dont hold up easily with 3D, things dont really match
when youre in 3D, since when you move around, things shift. When you
manage to hold a 2D perspective of space, with the tableau, things can be
220 D. TURNBULL
analogically classifiedwhat is far can be compared to what is closeand

both stay the same. So maybe theres an analogism that persists into the
Classical age, both in reasoning and in perspective. Maybe we have to
aestheticize quantification. The word quantification should always be, if I
can say so, qualified. It seems to me we have to qualify what quantification
meansif its analogical or naturalist.
David Turnbull
I didnt consider the kinds of quantification that linear perspective and
double-entry bookkeeping bring into existence because they are different.
In the case of double-entry bookkeeping, what youre actually able to do,
or are encouraged to do, in fact, is to make things commensurable which
are otherwise incommensurable. Theyre not actually the same: lets say,
a bolt of silk from China and a barrel of wine from Venice. How can you
make these two things comparable, commensurable when you attribute
a value, a number, a quantity to them? Thats worth 50 Lira and thats
worth 50 Lira and therefore they are the same. In the bookkeeping, they
are suddenly the same thing, theyre both 50 Lira. Provided you can find
all the costs and benefits of all that, you can express it as coming to a bal-
ance. Whereas in the case of linear perspective and mapping, when youve
created a map, you can actually measure something on the map and expect
it to be commensurable with something in the world. This is a slightly
different mode of quantificationnonetheless, youre doing the same
sort of thing, youre turning bits of landscape into something that can
be measured where previously bits of landscape are rather heterogeneous,
tricky. So, quantification and objectivity and value are being assembled at
the same time. What all this is doing is what Alfred Crosby calls fetter-
ing reality, which is really quite a nice term, to get it in handcuffs: it is
that double trick of making that which doesnt look commensurableto
make it commensurable. Youve turned the visible into quantity, and then
youve got it.15 Then you can do this stuff called trading, capitalism, sci-
ence, and what we call modernity.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
The only objection Id make to that its that its all wrong. Like a few
other people such as John McGuire and Jack Goldstone, Im in the ide-
ational school in economic history. We all think that ideas matter a great
deal for the coming of the modern world or the delay of the modern world
or the coming of this and that. But, we dont think they work the way Max
Weber thought they worked or the way Sombart thought they worked.
Its not that people actually quantify and thats how they make their eco-
nomic decisions and that makes them more rational and that makes the
modern world. The modern world is not because of rationality. The way
one knows this from contemporary evidence is how decisions are actu-
ally made in management. So its not quite that Weberian story, I think;
its not that we are more rational. On the contrary, we have always been
modern.
David Turnbull
There is a lovely image in the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam during
a reenactment by actors dressed in the seventeenth-century costumes.
Theres a woman dressed in black who is the owner of a whaling ship, and
shes reading from a book of accounts and explaining how, for example,
its costing her a lot of money to look after the ship while its not out
hunting whales; she still has to pay the captain even though shes dis-
missed the crew and the boat needs maintenance and so on. Then, the
seas calm down, so she sends a boat to sea, complete with a crew who are
hungry, who have ten tons of food, and meat and beer. They go away for
six months and then they come back, without any whales. She just checks
the bookkeeping and says the whole thing is a pointless waste of time.
Nonetheless, the point is, she only knew that because she got a balance
of costs and so on, but whaling wasnt given up, something was being
done I agree, plenty of rational people are not living in a Weberian cage
of rationality, nonetheless the way you, as it were, negotiate all the way
through this rather complex jungle of being a capitalist or an entrepreneur
or a trader is that you keep a record, you keep an account, and you have
already pointed out that an account is literally an account, its a narrative.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
But what I would argue is that its only representative of an alleged ratio-
nality. Its not actual rationality. Economic decisions, decisions about
innovation, are all about the future, and its hard to predict, especially
about the futureand this is a fundamental problem in academic account-
ing. Professors of accounting are concerned with this, because managerial
222 D. TURNBULL
accounting, financial accounting, they realized that what theyre trying to

do is help managers, entrepreneurs make decisions about the future, but
only can tell them as history. Heres what happened last year; now, you
have to decide what to spend in the comming year.
Simon Schaffer
For Newtonian historians, what David Turnbulls work reminds us of is
that the conjuncture where the capacity to act at a distance was turned
into a cosmology, the key to that was to work out ways in which it was
not necessary to act at a distance at all. Thats one of the things that
double-entry bookkeeping gives you. It means the merchant doesnt have
to travel anymore. So the bills of exchange travel, other people travel,
but the merchant himself, or if its a Dutch whaling enterprise, the ship,
doesnt have to move. So theres one version of the Venetian paradox
which goes right through all three elements of David Turnbulls story.
The very practical technologies that make it unprecedentedly easy to travel
make it almostbut not quite completelyunnecessary to travel, and
that relationship seems to me to be extremely interesting. Newton was
never on a boat. He never saw a tide, he never used the moon to navigate
at sea. Newton was not Venetian. However, without Venice, there is no
Principia Mathematica, as it was a fundamental element of the Newtonian
information order. Rather than read the kinds of account as reflections or
otherwise of a certain kind of rationalism, Western or not, positivist or
not, I prefer to think of it in terms of how to make sense of any agents
capacity to act somewhereespecially where they are not.
John Tresch
This history of the virtualization or the de-literalization of trade has many
interesting components. Down the line from this one is, for instance, the
kind of thing that William Cronon in Natures Metropolis does in his dis-
cussion of the grain elevator: you dont have to take the same corn out of
the grain elevator that you put in, you can still trade it virtually, and this
is one of those steps in that great transformation. Im persuaded by the
concurrence of the inventions you describe in Renaissance Venice, all of
which involve being able to make isomorphic equivalents of some kind.
But it seems to me that theres something different that comes in with
bookkeeping where youre equating things of the same order, as opposed
to linear perspective and then in map-making, where youre equating rep-

resentational and analogical activities with something material, rather than
just counting. Is that difference significant? I see where a common intel-
lectual and practical revolution or period eye may be fostering these things
in common, but are you also interested in the differences between these
kinds of isomorphic processes?
David Turnbull
I think its those very technologies that enable things to move, that enable
people, practices, and places to be assembled, that makes the difference
not only between the kinds of major transitions that Im talking about
but also between cultural traditions. Every culture has ways of doing all
these same sorts of things, its not unique or special to Venice or the West
or modernity. Every culture, every society, and every period, right from
the very beginning, when humans moved around the world, these were
precisely the technologies and the social practices that they deployed. You
couldnt move without stories and string. But the point about those two
things is that they are technologies, narratives, telling stories as a technol-
ogy, a mode of communication for persuading somebody else to join you
on the journey. You cant make those journeys by yourself. It has the same
kind of pragmatic effect as, lets say, a map, similar to a string, and thats
the string you carry because you cant assemble your stuff to carry it with
you. So every era, right from the earliest possible times to the present
day, and in every culture, has different ways of doing it. It results in very
different spatial imaginaries and very different worldviews, very different
understandings of what counts as space and time, causality, and effect.
We need to be aware that if we want to revision modernity, we have to
understand how the things that we take for granted, like spatiality, time,
and place, are brought into existence by the very techniques that we have
used to make things move.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
What Im trying to stop is what I see as a temptation to fall back into a
Weberian story of rationality. Theyre rationalists, they believe that there
is a rational way of being a human being, and whats so stupid about these
other folks is that theyre not rational, which means what Westerners can
then come and help us. Were from rational psychology, were here to
224 D. TURNBULL
help you, you all make mistakes all the time. But the actual fact is that
businesspeople in ancient Greece or China were able to make innovations
and able to think about the future, imagine new worlds and new ways
of doing things. I think we all kind of agree with this, but we keep for-
getting because weve all been told since we were in grade school that
theres something peculiar about the Europeans and their rationality. This
Marxist/Weberian idea has got us very deeply into the idea that were
exceptions.
Elizabeth Pisani
Much of this discussion brings to mind the work of Benedict Anderson
and imagined communities. At the same time as the mapping of Venice,
in a way calling Venice into being, what Anderson described as print
capitalism became one of the technologies that allowed us to transfer
knowledge easily at the time when you could say the power of the irra-
tional forces, the churches and so on, was diminishing. The monopoly
on language was being destroyed by printing in the vernacular. Printing
in the vernacular was necessary because the market dictated that if you
were going to print, you needed to sell enough copies to make that
worthwhile, so print capitalism created the possibility for these tech-
nologies to call into play whole communities and whole ways of being
in cultures.
David Turnbull discussed the mappability and unmappability of things
and that something such as the Venice lagoon has gone from mappability
into unmappability because of complex systems and so on. But were not
describing complex systems here. Were describing complex bureaucra-
cies: its because these people wont talk to those people who wont like to
use this instrument who wont give you access to this part of the lagoon.
Were talking about politics, and politics are mappable just like everything
else. This is a lot of the work that Bruno Latour and his colleagues have
been working on, identifying networks and nodes and taking knowledge
through these networks and nodesbut thats mappable just like every-
thing else. So Im just curious about how things become unmappable,
when really the things that are obstructing us are not that the technologies
suddenly disappeared, not that things have suddenly become structurally
more complex but only politically more complex. I think thats a map-
pable phenomenon in its own right.
David Turnbull
Im not sure I entirely agree. I mentioned that political dimension of the
institutions that cant cooperate as only one of the components in the
whole complexity of the lagoon situationbut theres that higher-order
complexity of all the interacting components. Can we imagine effectively
an entirely new way of mapping which is commensurate with a recogni-
tion that all the things we talk about all the time are a complex interac-
tive process in a continuous state of becoming, whereas nearly everything
weve ever talked about turns the world into something static and thereby
examinable?
The whole process of trying to represent complex interactions is exem-
plified by neuroscience. Neuroscience is a discipline that is starting to
dominate forms of representation and dynamic interaction. It isnt just
phrenology, its something much more complicated which other people
have pointed to, which is the aesthetics of data display. The real decisions
about what counts as real or objective or true are now actually questions of
graphic design, because brain-slicing folks have developed a whole set of
techniques for showing you whats revealed in the data by their new ways
of chopping up the brain. Theyre much more advanced than other people
are in developing effective representations of complex new interactions.
Those very techniques that are used to display the so-called new highways
of the brain are adopted deliberately because theyre so effective at show-
ing you the data; they are now used to explain how supernovae explode.
But the point that everybodys been getting at is that this is just actu-
ally a hidden set of ways of tweaking the data to make it look dynamic.
It isnt in any sense real, and its not even the same sort of thing statisti-
cians do when theyre organizing the data. These images are pretty, and
pretty is now convincing, authoritative, and its how you understand how
the universe itself blew into existence. For example, drawing the map of
dark matterthat was done by crowdsourcing. And in a very weird sort
of Cannes film festival-kind-of way, it was open to competition. How you
work out whats the best way to map the galactic effects of dark matter
was put out to competition in such a way that everybody could send their
results in and try to develop a model to explain it and you could compete,
you could see how the other contestants models were doing. It was like
winning the World Cup or a film prize. This structuring of how-to-do
analysis is called Kaggle, to organize competitions for otherwise uncrack-
able, unsolvable mathematical problems. You just put out a competition
226 D. TURNBULL
and let everybody have a go at it, and in fact, a group at Irvine won
because they developed a genetic algorithm, an algorithm that itself was
in a state of complex adaptation to produce the better result. So you now
have levels of complexity, seducing one away from the real reality of there
being no such thing as the actual raw data that these guys were manipulat-
ing. They are playing with ways of representing it rather than finding out
something like the approximate dynamics of whats going on, and thats
why they won. So the whole picture is very, very complicated. Not only is
the universe itself being corralled into self-represention, but also the ways
we deploy to understand it are themselves allied to self-evident practices
that are not at all like what we used to do. We are definitely moving into
a new era.
John Tresch
Crowdsourcing is not new, if Newton is an example of crowdsourcing.
But perhaps the competition to figure out who gets the answer is new? We
could do a list of whats not new in this equation. But I also see this as a
confirmation of what Bruno Latour brought up in the discussion about
big data. That with bigger data we may be getting smaller stories, by the
transportability of a mode of visualization from brain size directly into
astronomy, this is a mode of the kind of analogization that Pierre Chabard
was talking about from city to cosmos, through a new procedure of medi-
ation, and weve seen some of the steps that those modes of mediation go
through. Its a form of rationalization thats got an aesthetic much like the
emergence of perspective and quantification through double-entry book-
keeping in the Venice case. The question is whether this is just more stages
of mediation, more complexity, or is this moment of simulation plus sta-
tistical manipulation to produce very complex and striking images some-
thing altogether new? Is this a new epistemic moment? Back to something
Richard Powers said, we used to call this postmodernism, right? Thats
what it looks like, fascination for surface but now with multiple layers of
surface. Is this a new epistemic mode?
David Turnbull
I agree that the problem is that its just messiness as usual, because, as
with everything, there is in fact very little thats new; were always con-
tinuing to do what more or less weve always done, which is always more
or less the same sort of thing: make things move and assemble them. Is
this really a different form of assemblage from any other? Well, what I
am trying to do in this case is argue strongly for it being strikingly differ-
ent, in order to see whether there was any substance to some such claim.
The differences will be rather subtle, rather less marked, rather less 3D
Hollywood Technicolor than I portrayed them. I went for a sort of a
hyperbolic account in order to try and bring into visibility that which was
previously invisible.
Steve Crossan
Is your contention something to do with performativitythat a model,
either of the brain or of the supernova, is performative in the sense that
it yields predictions which can actually get us to the other side of the hill?
Are you contending that this doesnt add anything to our policy to get
to the other side of the hill? Are you arguing that this doesnt get us any
closer to the sphere?
David Turnbull
Lets say approximately this time last year, dark matter was just a hypoth-
esis. There were plenty of people around here saying, RubbishYou
dont have to worry about it, its not real, cant be, its impossible. Now,
in the approximately six months since the discovery was announced,
theres practically a whole discipline of dark matter; people are publishing
galore, theres a whole field, we now can talk about competing theories,
about dark matter consistency, and its about to make sense of all the
basic problems that everybody else has been fretting about. Now weve
got dark matter to blame, we can solve all these problems. Everybodys
terribly excited, industrys booming all over the place, and in fact, its just
like a favorite example of mine: turbulence research. Turbulence research
depends on the idea that somehow things like airplanes fly because of the
vortex. But show me somebody out there who knows what a vortex is?
Or some kind of common agreement about how to think about them?
It doesnt matter that they dont and theyre not likely to in the next
five minutes. Airplanes fly, everybodys happy, big and better bombs go
around the world.
But thats the point. It doesnt matter so much about whether this
is, as it were, a real representation of some substantive reality. There is
228 D. TURNBULL
a new machine out there now, bringing that new reality into existence
in dynamic and important ways, and that is not, as it were, foolishness
or mere fantasy. Same with dark matter. I think its going to change the
world and its going to be new and exciting and very different and I look
forward to it and it will be great.
John Tresch
I was thinking what a great point this is that youre making for us. That
somehow, modern, quite hard science, has fallen in love with the idea
that it doesnt know much of anything and there is always a radical para-
digm shift around the corner. Theres this huge hole in all theory, and we
love that because the hole in the theory proves the rhetoric of the method,
the ongoing industry of science, because its all about how the real world
is in fact, messy and we can still make things work, and its all OK.That
a whole new field of unknowns is much more stimulating than a new set
of answers.
Bruno Latour
Im just worried that this sounds like a critical argument. I was under the
impression instead that paying attention to the aesthetics of data was not
part of the old critiquethat it was actually positive. But as long as it is a
critique, then we can make jokes about all the facts in science and the facts
they got wrong, and nothing will be changed, so the notion of aestheti-
cization that I was trying to ask about has not finally been taken up. You
seem to be shifting more and more into critical talk.
David Turnbull
No, the endpoint of the exercise as far as Im concerned is that we do have
to live in a new reality. The two aspects to that reality, as it were, in the uni-
verse of Gaia, are that nearly everything is to be understood as some kind
of complex process or interaction of processes and not so much as objects
and things, and that we are going to have to develop a whole new way of
thinking, representing, and talking. We hardly have even any language,
let alone techniques, for representing, for talking about how processes
interact. If I can give you an example of how it works in another culture:
if you take the photograph of a canoe on a beach and ask an aboriginal
person what is this photograph, in English, they would say its a canoe on
a beach. But in aboriginal language its more accurately translated as it
is canoeness in the state of on-ness with respect to beachness, and the
subject of the sentence is not about beaches or canoes, its about on-ness,
its the relationship between processes. And notice how awkward it is to
say that in English. We dont have the vocabulary and it makes storytell-
ing very difficult, and since it is stories all the way down, we are going to
have to develop a new language as well as a new set of technologies and
modes of representation, and some of them will be based in a new aesthet-
ics. Theres no problem about it being fundamentally aesthetic from my
perspective.
John Tresch
That exchange reminds me of a striking fact that many scientists today,
when they give papers, when they give posters, frequently are rushing to
get them together, and as they do, they say, Do I have my story yet?
I think thats relatively new, and it makes me wonder whether were not
already in a kind of Gaia logic, where the scientists themselves realize that
theyre telling stories, and once theyve delivered their paper, hopefully
theyll be able to tear it down next time, because thats what they expect
and thats whats being measured, a measure of the productivity of sci-
ence. And the critical point of all this creative destruction isto go back
to your claimthat Venice gives us both the birth of modern science and
the birth of modern capitalism. So Deirdre McCloskey, as an economist,
may have many objections to the claim of, say, David Harvey, that were
not going to be able to solve economic or ecological issues until we get to
a point where weve conceptualized an economics based on zero growth.
Its no coincidence that we also have a science which is based on constant
growth as the only good state. Is it possible, or even, is it conceivable, and
the question further down the line is, is it desirable, to think of a science
which would be on a model of zero growth?
Simon Schaffer
So, precisely for that reason, Ive been trying to think if there are any
examples of cartography and double-entry bookkeeping, where those two
technologies ever came together explicitly. One example that comes to
mind is that Edmond Halley was commissioned by the British state to
230 D. TURNBULL
determine the area of each region of England, of each county, so what

he did was to make an extremely accurate map of the whole of England
and then draw the map out on very heavy paper and then cut out each
county and compare them. Is that not double-entry bookkeeping applied
to cartography?
Notes
1. http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_wolfe_what_s_left_to_explore.
2. Kroupa, Pavel (2011), Question C.I: What are the three best rea-
sons for the failure of the LCDM model? I: Incompatibility with
observations. http://www.scilogs.com/the-dark-matter-crisis/
2011/03/08/question-c-i-what-are-the-three-best-reasons-for-
t h e - f a i l u r e - o f -t h e -l c d m - m o d e l - i - i n c o m p a t i b i l i t y - w i t h -
observations/.
3. Malcolm W.Browne, New Direction in Physics: Back in Time.
New York Times, August 21, 1990, p. C9; www.nytimes.
com/1990/08/21/science/new-direction-in-physics-back-in-
time.html.
4. Platt, Peter. Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009, p.58.
5. Holderness, Graham. Shakespeare and Venice. Farnham: Ashgate,
2010, p.11.
6. Tanner, Tony. Venice Desired. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992, p.368 (quoting Simmel quoting Schopenhauer).
7. Contarini, Gasparo. The Commonwealth and Government of Venice
(1544), translated by Lewkenor (1599), quoted in Platt, p.63.
8. Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth. Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a
Myth. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2002, p.10.
9. Francesco Sansovino, Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia, libri
due (Venice, 1561), in Bronwen Wilson, Venice, Print, and the
Early Modern Icon, Chorographic Impressions: Early Modern
Venice through Print.
10. Wilson, Bronwen. The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early
Modern Identity, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005,
p.3.
11. Mackinnon, Nick. The Portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli. The

Mathematical Gazette (1993): 130219.
12. Quoted in Gleeson-White, Jane. Double Entry: How the Merchants

of Venice Created Modern Finance. New York: WW Norton &
Company, 2012, p.164.
13. Crosby, A (1997) The Measure of Reality: Quantification and

Western Society 12501600, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 212, 227, 229.
14. Jane Da Mosto, Tom Spencer, et al., Venice and the Venice

Lagoon: communication, uncertainty and decision making in an
environmentally complex system, in Flooding and Environmental
Challenges for Venice and its Lagoon: State of Knowledge, edited by
C.A.Fletcher and T.Spencer (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 643.
15. A. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western
Society, 12501600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997.
PART III
Economies: How Different Models

of Knowledge and Their Contents
Matter to Politics and Society
CHAPTER 10
The Web, Google, andCosmograms
SteveCrossan
One of the things I want to look at in this chapter is the way that the
internet creates a slightly different and interesting model for production
and discovery of knowledge. I thought it would be interesting to actually
describe a little about how Google works so Im going to discuss that a
bit. Ill preface it by saying that Im speaking for myself, in the spirit of
this conference, and not as a representative of Google or the Cultural
Institute though of course those experiences working there inform my
views. In the background is what Ive understood as a general theme
of this dialogue: that in human history, there has always been a tension
between our desire to encompass larger and larger sets of things in our
understanding of the world, and our resistance to the totalizing nature
of that. Put another way, theres a danger that any cosmogram drifts
towards megalomania.
In the last 20 years, the internet has come to occupy a central role
in the way that we produce, consume and transform knowledge. Search
engines, and Googles in particular, have been an important part of the
process. In the very early days of the World Wide Web, only rudimentary
search engines were available with very partial coverage. The web instead
relied much more on the links between documents, engendering a kind
S. Crossan (*)
DeepMind, Paris, France

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_10
236 S. CROSSAN
of serendipitous, wandering mode of knowledge discovery. After a few

years, search engines did emerge which covered large portions of the web
(Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot) but in which the quality of the response was
often poor, requiring the user sometimes to hunt through several pages
of results for a good resource. In the parlance of the industry, recall had
improved but precision was still patchy.
This indexing difficulty was a side effect of a positive aspect of the new
mode of productionthe fact that anyone could produce content and
link it to any other content. The explosion of production that resulted was
and remains thrilling, but there was no army of librarians or cataloguers
who could keep up. The early success of Yahoo! was based on an attempt
to organize a large proportion of the web into taxonomies using human
curators, but quite soon, it was clear that no reasonable workforce could
keep up. Without a taxonomy, we were in a vast library with little order
to it.
Google was founded on the idea of scavenging for taxonomy. The web
itself had democratized the ability to publish and link; Googles search
engine made use of those links to create a kind of found, plastic taxonomy.
The first idea was that the links pointing to a document could be regarded
as votes for its value or rank. Links that themselves came from highly
ranked documents could in turn carry more weight. This allowed many
optimizations to be carried out even before the user had made a query
and made result ranking much more accurate. An equally important idea
was that the words used in the linking document could give you good
information about the subject of the linked document, creating a kind
of found taxonomy. Because Googles crawlers ran continually, both the
voting and the taxonomy were inherently plastic; they changed as the web
itself changed.
So we had here a model where the original and fundamental innova-
tion of the web met a clever idea about implicit, dynamic information
hidden in the network. Creating text available to a global audience had
become very simple and low cost, as had embedding permanent links to
other work which could be immediately followed rather than looked up.
Now those links themselves could be used as a democratized, implicit and
dynamic value score and taxonomy, making the problem of navigating the
new tower of Babel seem much more tractable.
Perhaps because of this heritage, Googles mode of operation for
a long time remained heuristic and pragmatic. The search engine algo-
rithm advanced through an accumulation of small adjustments continually
THE WEB, GOOGLE, ANDCOSMOGRAMS 237
madesometimes several per dayreviewed in an open internal forum

according to the performative yardstick of getting the user to a high-quality
answer as quickly as possible. But there was more to the review than this.
If you sat in a few of those meetings, you would realize that what was
going on was also storytelling. It wasnt enough to show that experiment
A was better than experiment B; there also needed to be a story about
why this was so. Black box approachesin which the inputs and outputs
could be understood but not the content of the boxwere mistrusted.
The Google cosmogram then was a process rather than an objecta pro-
cess of software running continuously, processing and reprocessing what
was discovered but also of that software continuously being adjusted and
evolvedand re-storiedin experiments judged by a forum of peers.
In 2010, Google announced that it had acquired a company called
Metaweb, the creator of an open database product called Freebase.
Freebase is an attempt at creating a collaborative, structured database of
canonical entities, their attributes, and their relationships to one another.
As an open, editable resource, it is similar to the earlier and much larger
Wikipedia but attempts to model the world with more structure. Freebase
(and the Metaweb team) became the core of Googles Knowledge Graph,
asignificant change to the search engine launched in 2012.1 Through the
Knowledge Graph, Google attempts to answer many user questions with
structured information and not just with links to an ordered set of docu-
ments from the web (Fig.10.1).
Google had experimented with structured data to complement the
semi-structured documents on the web for many yearsand in certain
domains (such as geographical information) already managed and served
very large structured databases. The Knowledge Graph, though, was a step
forward in terms of answering users questions with structured, canonical
knowledge. As Amit Singhal described in his launch blogpost, Google was
now managing a knowledge base, and not just a document base, consist-
ing (at launch) of over 500 million objects and 3.5 billion associated facts
and relationships.
The Knowledge Graph is a new kind of cosmogram, derived from the
web and other sources but (where successful) with a much richer struc-
ture. That structure allows Google to offer users a better experience for
queries such as life expectancy in the UK. But it also makes the repre-
sented knowledge much easier for software to process. One implication of
this is that interactive representations of statistics are possible, but there
are many others.2
238 S. CROSSAN
Fig. 10.1 The problem

with Wikipedia. Source:
https://xkcd.com/214/
The Knowledge Graph was important to the Google Cultural Institute,

launched in 2011. As part of Googles pro bono work, the group had a
remit to provide technology and services useful to the cultural sector. We
realized quite early on that an enormous amount of digitization work has
already gone on over the last 20 years but that its sometimes hard for
curating institutions to get value from all that work because, like the early
web, digitized material is hard to index. Some institutions have invested
quite heavily in metadata and tagging, but this is expensive, difficult work,
and of course, there are many different choices to be made when it comes
to taxonomies. So we felt that one thing we could offer to the sector was
help with indexing and therefore discoverability. By taking digital objects
with heterogeneous taxonomies and mapping to the Knowledge Graph,
and by doing this across multiple institutions, we might allow material as
diverse as painting, photography and archives to come together in a use-
ful way. The team also recognized the central role of storytelling in this
domain and the importance of involving the curatorial community. This
was important to users of our services; much of the material only comes
alive to a wide audience with context. Doing a good job of indexing goes
a certain way, but often you as a user dont know exactly what youre
looking for. So in fact the first thing webuilt was a tool for curators, one
that allowed them not only to manage material but also to create stories
around that material from their own institutions and from other willing
partners. The central object created is a digital exhibit.
As with indexing the web, two ideas are central to making this success-
ful. First, there needs to be a diversity and plurality of stories. Secondly,
the process of indexing and organizing the material (in the current model,
mapping to the Knowledge Graph) needs to be plastic and continuous.
The Knowledge Graph itselfthis new kind of cosmogramalso needs
to remain plastic, as new evidence whether from digitized cultural mate-
rial or from the ever-expanding web can be used to fill in missing pieces
or adjust connections. Only in this way can these cosmograms claim to be
even modestly innovative.
Debate
Deirdre N.McCloskey
Yours is a story about value and valuation, about curating to make an
experience that has ethical value, that talks about good and bad, not nec-
essarily in an ethical sense but in some sense. That brings me to a distinc-
tion between what the humanities do and what engineering doesnot
science but engineering. We have in economics an old problem called the
index number problem: if you are going to try to correct for inflation,
you have to have a bundle of goods in 1930 and a bundle of goods in
2012, and youre going try to see how much goods have increased by
deflating, by mirror prices, since when the value of the dollar goes up and
down, it doesnt change real stuff. But you have to choose between 1930
as the point of view you take or 2012. And thats a substitute for human-
istic choice, mans choice. What economists want to do sometimes, and
now they commonly do, is kind of stupid: they average the two. And that
sounds like Google search: they have no engineering but say, well, this
works. I am not criticizing Google for part of my life depends on Google,
but there is value capital V which is categorization, and it is character-
istically a humanistic activity. A kind of nave version is not only, This is
a bad painting, or a good painting, but also Is this a real Veronese or
not? These are humanistic questions, about categories: do we choose as
humans to break the world up into two? And thats all about our human
interests, not about numbers. Once we have done that, we can count
how many Veronese paintings there are. And then theres small v value,
240 S. CROSSAN
which is what Google and the economists are depending on: the old joke
that an economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the
value of nothing. Its merely a matter of a vote in the search engine. It
is not solving the top-down humanistic question of valuable capital V
characterization.
Steve Crossan
If there is anything interesting or new about this approach, it is for two
reasons. First is that it is happening democratically but not quite con-
sciously. It is a sort of harvest of the subconscious, since you dont know
that what youre doing is voting necessarily. And the second thing is that
it is dynamic, it doesnt stop.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
I agree, but it is not as if it solves the problem of capital V value, lets
get that straight. If its democratic, Im for it and lets go for that, because
thats a lot better than the rule of experts. But on the other hand, with
matters of taste, matters of categorization, what are its limits?
Steve Crossan
That brings us to this: there is an opposition in the way this dialogue
has been set up, between any taxonomy whether democratic or not and
whether dynamic or not, and an individual point of view of conversation,
a moment of standing in front of a painting and talking about a particular
thing. So again here this is an attempt to address that by saying this is
a tool through which all of the stories can be told and, importantly
though I didnt really touch on thistold and connected one to another.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
Stories are ethical, metaphors are not. We do our ethical thinking nar-
ratively. So what you are doing when you bring all these facts into a story
is moralizing them, youre giving them a moral and you are combin-
ing stories which are metonymies. Youre taking metonymies and youre
combining them with metaphors, and this is how all human thinking
works.
Bruno Latour
Am I right in understanding that if you throw together enough cabinets
of curiosity, in big numbers, you end up with an organization? I was very
struck by your link between serendipity ending up in organization, which
is also the shift from science to engineering: thats a very interesting point
about what has always happened in collecting, in natural history as well
as in the other sciences. We stop trying to organize, we gather all the
taxonomies coming in, we scavenge them. Its a very powerful metaphor.
If it is big enough we end up with categories in the end and then we can
talk about having an organized knowledge, even though it has nothing
to do with top-down order. This would actually be a practical solution to
the cabinet of curiosity problem, which is also the end of theory. Is this
what you are saying? So theory was a very local, brief, momentary way of
doing things?
Steve Crossan
I think youve characterized it exactly right. The only thing I would add to
your characterization is again, it is dynamic: it doesnt just happen once, it
is continuous. The elicitation of the taxonomies is continuous and keeps
happening. And the way in which it keeps happening is heuristic, the
mode of eliciting the taxonomy is changed by a group of people sitting in
a room and thinking about it and heuristically changing it, not so much by
somebody coming with a single algorithm to rule them all.
Richard Powers
I wanted to take issue with Deirdre McCloskeys characterization of cura-
tion, narration and moralizing. Selecting images on the basis of meta-tags
to arrange them in some kind of pathway to tell a story is a narrative
activity. But every narrative is not necessarily a moralizing action. In fact,
I think the best stories hold moralizing in abeyance. My fundamental defi-
nition of story is that people with different systems of values are placed
in a situation where they collide with each other and arrive at multiple
choices which have different results, but the act of putting people in those
collisions and seeing what the possible results are is not necessarily to take
a moral stand. The interesting choice is between making a model to argue
a point, using the model in an argumentative mode or making the model
in the narrative mode.
242 S. CROSSAN

Do not think of storytelling as just a verbal activity; there is also storytell-
ing as a pictorial activity. The rules of pictorial storytelling are contiguous
with and separate from, and can be contrapuntal to, verbal storytelling and
have their own grammar. There is a whole structure of the relationship of
text and pictures, and the way in which those are brought into one place is
one of the lessons I found so interesting about the Portable Archive. And
thats to realize that this pictorialism Bettmann articulated is very similar
to methods of how we now make all of these pictures available: how do
you want to combine them, how do you want to transport them to new
context? So pictorialism is a distinct kind of cultural activity. Bettmann said
pictorialism has its own in-built philosophical commitment and theoriz-
ing which we have to learn to employ. We have to become sophisticated
pictorialists. That involves learning how visual information is employed,
not just as content that we can line up chronologically because we are
telling a story that way but also as a form of rhetoric, and we have to
learn to employ, display and engage an audience in the use of these forms.
We use the forms to educate them, to think critically about the forms by
which we are trying to compel them and how to bring in that typographi-
cal formal flexibilityhow to make the curator not just choose between
picture options but actually express them with rhetorical flexibility. But
beyond scavenging taxonomies, there is this graphic problem that I have
absolutely no idea how you will engineer.
John Tresch
First, taking off from what Cheryce just said about the way in which visual
form itself has a kind of logic distinct from any content, which we have
to learn how to interrogate and think through and evaluate. This makes
me think of what Bruno has been saying: lets not just keep aesthetics at
the final moment of display, lets analyse aesthetically the level of gather-
ing too, the first formation of whats called information. Maybe we can
analytically say narrative is different from metaphor, that it is a differ-
ent procedure of gathering, linear versus synchronous temporality, for
instance, but nevertheless, there is an aesthetic at both levels. Id also say
that means theres a moral issue there too: not that there is a final lesson
that we can draw from it about what to do and not to do, but there is
a morality to it. Just as there is an argument in using the pictorial form
before any content in the picture, there is some kind of judgement in

the metaphor you choose long before you get to the conclusion of the
encounter of those values.
But Steve Crossans report from Google suggests that to bring the dis-
cussion up to date, we need to be skilled evaluators of the moral valuation
and aesthetic valuation that go into the gathering procedures of algo-
rithms also. We have to be moral analysts and judges of that procedure
of selecting. When we encounter our world via a preselecting, machine-
driven, scavenged taxonomy, we have to be able to evaluate what kind of
world that brings with it, what kind of ethical direction that brings with
it. Especially since it is constantly remaking itself. We have to somehow
be able to keep up with that algorithm which is constantly reshaping the
world in ways that are beyond our choice and which are said to be unin-
tentional, no one driving them; and yet they bring with them all the things
that intentional action brings, aesthetic moral judgement, a goal, a telos.
Steve Crossan
It is algorithms all the way down. In the sense, first of all, that the scaveng-
ing in some sense doesnt relieve us of the obligation to examine the mode
in which we are doing it. It is not automatic; however, there are people
doing it with some judgement in their heads in a very complicated way,
deciding how to do it and how to adjust it. The information is coming
from a lot of people, but nonetheless, it is coming out of intentions and
there are moral values attached. And, in a similar vein, when we talked
about the aesthetics of how you put the material together, although we
are trying to open things up to stories, the tool absolutely conditions what
you can create.
Now, one other slightly redeeming point, which I think might be inter-
esting about the digital age, is APIs. APIs are Application Programming
Interfaces. So when you build a tool like this, you can build a set of affor-
dances which allow users to do certain things, and it is this kind of thing
that weve built. But you can also open it up so that other programmers
outside of your organization can rework it and build new things, and
that is also our ambition. The interjection of APIs into the story and the
open Web and the open data Web means the scavenging comes in and the
results go out but can be re-scavenged by other people, and other people
can create tools which allow you to put things together in a different way.
244 S. CROSSAN
Elizabeth Pisani
It is important to make explicit and transparent the assumptions in any
model, and that is true of the grammars we adopt in this relatively new
medium. But it is a grammar of visual language. We have grammatical con-
ventions that everyone agrees on that help us navigate our way through a
narrative and that we are not all that uptight about. So, I dont think we
should get uptight about the fact that we are, for the moment, constrained
by an emerging grammar, essentially an aesthetic grammar, that you guys
happen to be very kindly designing for us, so the way that I curate my own
story by putting it up on the web with the images that I choose and the
text that I choose is constrained into a visual grammar by some emerging
consensus. But I do think that constantly making it transparent and the
ability to change it over time, the dynamism of it, is something that it is
important to maintain.
I just want to go back for a second to chaos versus control and seren-
dipity versus efficiency. One of the things that we see with the Wikipedia
experience and with the American electoral experience is that most people
are idiots; that you have a tendency towards the lowest common denomi-
nator in a true democracy. And I think thats something that is unresolved
in this web, where all of us get to be curators over time. I am just curious
what people think about that.
Richard Powers
Most people are definitely not idiots. But I did want to follow up on
John Treschs point. Judgements and selections and affordances are
always being created as we shape the narrative, but I would make a dis-
tinction between a monological narrative and a dialogical one: that is,
between a narrative that is shaped to lead inexorably towards a certain
hierarchy of values and a narrative that aims at revealing the contest of
those values.
Steve Crossan
Ive already talked about the fact that the tool conditions what can hap-
pen and that I think it is important to be aware of it and to recognize
it and to try to make the conditions as plastic as possible. That what we
are trying to do. We are trying to make the conditions of production as
plastic as possible and pursuing how far we can go with that. The chaos
question is a question which very much exercises us: how we get towards
openness while maintaining some sort of scale of quality, while not cen-
soring or editing. Thats the impossible task weve set ourselves over the
next few months. I agree that people are not idiots, and if you succeed in
eliciting the moment at which they are the most creative, then you can
have something; the tone of what you create can influence what happens
afterwards.
David Turnbull
A colleague of mine who works at the Institute of American Indian Art,
David Wade Chambers, has a bunch of students there who are basically
art practitioners but not necessarily terribly literate. Of course the institu-
tion wants to establish itself as academic, to introduce essays and the like,
but essays do not work too well for Native Americans. So how do you
develop a technique to allow them to tell stories in non-textual ways? The
programme we developed is called Story Weaver, which is very like what
Steve Crossan has described. Its an infinite space in a computer in which
you can assemble in any way you like whatever materials of any variety you
likevisual, audio, photographs, your mum telling you how we used to
cook cornwhatever. All of that can be arranged and precisely with the
kind of critical grammar I imagine that Cheryce von Xylander is talking
about. You can make an argument by putting some images closer together
or making one bigger than the other or with a stronger colour, or you
can literally put in links, or you can allow the position in the space to be
the way the story is told. And you get extraordinarily effective narratives
coming out of this. Whether or not they are moral is another point, but
they are effective ways of telling a story principally in terms of place. These
people are not practitioners, they are citizens from another culture, but
this doesnt matter; why would you want to deal only with practitioners?
But what we hope to have happen, once these stories start to accumulate,
is to be able to move to the next level and to see if there is an emergent
kind of story, one which can be developed to understand things in terms
of geography, for example.
So my two questions are, do you have a plan to allow any idiot from the
street into your archive, and can you imagine a sort of meta-level, emer-
gent mapping coming out of what youre doing?
246 S. CROSSAN
Anke te Heesen
Are there any self-reflecting techniques in your group, for example,
archiving the stages of your work? Is there any kind of documentary work
about what you have been doing since March 2011? We have had intense
discussions for many years about pictorial grammar, and what you showed
us for the online exhibition in the Google Cultural Institute exactly reca-
pitulates the photomontage of the 1920s. So is there any discussion about
that kind of self-reflectionnot only in a sense of archiving but also in the
sense of the grammars you are putting into the net?
Steve Crossan
The ambition is absolutely that anyone can get in. We dont yet know how
we are going to get there without chaos, so our current thought right now
is that for the set of curator historians, people are mostly professional prac-
titioners. They mostly either come from the partner institutions or we go
out and ask them. There is a group of 40 or 50 of them right now who are
in a test mode. Our current thought is that we will make it work by invita-
tion. They will expand the circle of people who are doing it by invitation
but without limits; that enables us to understand the speed limit by the
number of invitations. Kind of the way Google+ was launched and kind of
how Gmail was launched, in fact, and Facebook originally. So thats a way
in which we hope to get the scale while being able to track what is going
on in the chaos and on the quality front. We do not know everything
about how the story is going to work by any means. In terms of emergent
mapping, that is also very much in our ambition, we dont have anything
there yet but definitely we want to understand the path that comes out.
Something that we talked about a lot is what does all of history look like
on one screen, on one interactive screen? This is important because an
interactive screen is not an image. It is a tool for getting in, for navigating.
We think about that question. Are we aware of the heritage? The honest
answer is that we are dimly aware of the heritage. We have some people in
the team who have a background either in history or in art, some in digital
humanities as well, but we are very amateurish, that is the honest answer.
Do we document? Yes, we document everything. Google obsessively
documents everything and has always done so, and so, yes, there is a trace
of what weve done and how weve done it. I think recently as well some-
body decided we need an historian, not for our group but for Google as a
whole, a Google historiannot to tell externally the story of Google but

to tell the story internally to people as well. This hasnt actually happened,
but there is a suggestion which I like very much, which is to hire one or
more journalists to actually journalize what we do.

I want to dispel the sense of comfort that there are agreements that we
have simple rules governing things like periods, followed by a capital let-
ter. Exactly when the photomontage, verbal-visual coordination was being
negotiated, with the debate of the questionnaire that I mentioned to you
in 1933, when all of the visual professionals were invited to comment
upon the future of just the visualization of language and the verbal struc-
tures, one of the main issues was whether it is legitimate to continue with
the capital letter after a period. This depends entirely on which font you
choose to use; the answer already commits you either to gothic, or to
geometric or to roman script. So with just that tiny issue that seems so
securedo you follow a period with a capitalyoure completely in the
political mess of the time. So the sense of stability and comfort that we
have about that is actually extremely fragile.
Simon Schaffer
For a very long time, constructivists were shot down in flames for claiming
that humans make the world. Now, were told that the Anthropocene is
the answer. It seems to me that one of the things we learnt from this inter-
vention and this very good discussion on taxonomy is that Google is well
understood, as weve just done, as an episode in the history of taxonomies.
Notes
1. h ttp://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/introducing-
knowledge-graph-things-not.html.
2. https://www.google.co.uk/search?es_sm=119&q=uk+life+expecta
ncy; https://www.google.co.uk/search?es_sm=119&q=population
+of+france.
CHAPTER 11
Rhetoric, Economics, andNature
DeirdreN.McCloskey
Yesterday, September 11, 2012, I turned 70. We celebrated this event with
an exquisite dessert. And I want to sketch for you today the result of my
60s. Im hoping to go on for another ten years or so. Aside from a techni-
cal book about statistical significance, my real passion is the project Im
working on now. It will be three volumes long; Ill have a boxed set, and
Ill die happy. The third volume is in the oven, as we say.
I also want to talk about an older obsession of mine, which occu-
pied my 40s and part of my 50s. This was rhetoric. Persuasion. So-called
Samuelsonian economists, of which I am an example, at least by training,
think about knowledge, and words, and actions in terms of quantities,
whether its eating hot dogs or building widgets or whatever. You know,
how many of us admit to having three desserts last night? Theres two and
theres one, and theres ten, but that might be too muchand so theres
the question of diminishing marginal utility, even of a sumptuous dessert.
You also have to figure in the cost of search, the costs and benefits of
search. Suppose you are looking for a handbag in Venice, which is rather
easy to do, and you go from shop to shop. You have an idea of what you
want and then you start searching for the lowest price. Thats what the
economists are clever at, because each shop you go to gives you another
D.N. McCloskey (*)

University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_11
250 D.N. MCCLOSKEY
observation in a sample, and then its simply a matter of optimal stopping

rules, as its called in statistical language or quality control. Thats the
marginal benefit: the lower and lower price you might get because youre
sampling from all of this. As a result, you get the benefit of a lower price.
But then there are the hours of search, of course; there is also an oppor-
tunity cost. Opportunity cost, as weve been saying since the 1930s in
economics, is what you could have done instead with that hour of search.
So according to the Samuelsonians, that is a complete account: you
dont need to know anything more about how humans behave. This, I
call in this book, the first of the three, Bourgeois Virtues, which is really
only prudence. And Samuelson is the great economist who formalized
this.
Now, the problem with this way of looking at the economy is that
it involves nothing from the humanities at all. In fact, it involves noth-
ing having to do with Value, capital-V.Only value, small-v: price but not
Value. So it doesnt involve ethics, it doesnt involve valuation of a higher
sort. And it doesnt involve human language, which is a little odd because,
after all, were speaking animals. In our terms, the terms of this confer-
ence, were animals who symbolize, who represent, and the re- in rep-
resent is crucial.
There is something kind of weird about this. But economists are very
proud of their weirdness, and they go around saying to people: You
namby-pamby humanists, you talk about language and so on, dont you
know that its all about marginal cost, its all about price? Youre just a
bunch of queers. There is a kind of a masculinist, nasty homophobia in
all of this.
So if someone asks, What about words, or images, or meanings? the
economists reply Shut up, we dont want to hear about that. But theres
an empirical problem: you can hoist the economists by their own petard
by saying Now wait a second, you think that the value of a person so far
as the economy is concerned is what shes paid, right? And the econo-
mist says You bet. Thats what determines value. Who cares about Saint
Francisits how much hes worth, cash value. So I would reply, OK,
miei signori economisti. But look here at the numbers. You can consider
the numbers of people employed in various occupations. And you can go
down into quite detailed occupational categories, 500 occupations, and
ask yourself, how much of what this persons paid has to do with sweet
talk? Sweet talk. Persuasion. Its rather interesting that suadeo, which is the
Latin origin of persuasion, per-suasion, per suadeo, is connected in Indo-
RHETORIC, ECONOMICS, ANDNATURE 251
European with the root for English and common Germanic word sweet.
Sweet talk, persuasion. We change peoples minds by sweet talk, not by
drawing out my 0.38 revolverwhich of course I also have in my purse,
Im an Americana, after all, so of course I come armed, just in case. But
lets set that form of argument aside.
Because it turns out that many occupations in a modern economy of
free people, a modern democratic economy, require persuasion. You cant
just enslave people or hire them and if they misbehave take out the whip,
which was common in the eighteenth century and before; in a free society,
you constantly have to use persuasion. There are obvious cases, such as
advertising, but advertising is an extremely small part of all this; its only
two percent of national income. There are also judges and lawyers: the law-
yers are advocates, as the Italians say, and the judges are professional audi-
ences for their rhetoric. And there are teachers; we academics, of course,
convey information, but thats not what this is about. Samuelson and the
economists were dealing with information, but persuasion is something
else. In education, its about getting the kids with the program, making
them become an educated person.
The biggest numerical impact of the persuasion professions comes with
managers and supervisors of all kinds, which exist in great numbers in
modern economies. In a free society, you dont just order people about.
Its not commands that figure, its sweet talk. Its changing minds. In
education, I persuade you of the Pythagorean theorem (if I ever could
remember the proof). So adding all these persuasion professions up turns
out to be a quarter of the national income, one quarter of national income
in a modern economy. In the eighteenth century, it was perhaps ten per-
cent. But in a modern economy, like the Italian economy or the American
economy or the English economy, its one fourth sweet talk.
This creates a problem for the prudence-only, lets-not-talk-about-
it model of economy. And so Ive been moving toward the humani-
ties. Though to tell the truth, Ive been dragged kicking and screaming,
because Im a trained Samuelsonian economist. Actually its even more
than that: Paul Anthony Samuelson was my mothers mixed-doubles ten-
nis partner, thats how deeply I am implicated in Samuelsonian economics.
Nevertheless, over the last 30 years or so, Ive been gradually drifting, but
actually kicking and screaming, toward the humanities, toward thinking
about the role of language and talk and rhetoric. Rhetoric is my master
term for all of this. This has been a very slow process, which Ive written
about at length.
252 D.N. MCCLOSKEY
Now in my map of knowledge, my own cosmoprag, I would want all

four basic itemsethics, economy, power, and natureto have easy con-
nections with each other. And they would be connected with dotted lines:
the outlines between rhetoric of ethics, rhetoric of economy, rhetoric of
power, and rhetoric of nature. In other words, Id want to map all the
different ways humans talk about these things, why that matters, and why
these kinds of rhetoric have an effect. But I also want to point out all the
connections between the rhetoric of ethics and rhetoric of economy and
between the rhetoric of nature and the rhetoric of power. Between the
rhetoric of power and the rhetoric of economy, for example, is where you
have questions of monopoly. And then questions of environmentalism are
located at the intersection between economics, power, and nature.
So bloody what?, you might ask. That is always the best question to ask
in any context. We say En? in Dutch or Allora? in Italian or So what
else is new? to quote an old Yiddish expression. Here is so what: I think
the modern world, dated from roughly Shakespeares time to the present,
is a matter of contestation about these rhetorics. And I think these rheto-
rics change in interesting ways. Ive shown how they changed in the first
book in my trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues, and again in the third book in,
in progress, The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How Innovation Became Ethical,
16001848.1 For instance, nature and the economy were submerged, you
might say, before the year 1600. They were not separate categories. Or
rather, nature was a separate category, but it was this terrifying other that
we were trying to cover up. Things like original sin are nature, and, in
the famous clich, the Alps were terrifying. My friend Stephen Pyne, an
excellent historian at Arizona State, wrote a very fine book called How
The Grand Canyon Became Grand, about how, before the late nineteenth
century, the Grand Canyon was viewed as an obstacle to navigation, as a
terrible scar on the earth, an entrance to hell. And then, gradually, people
began to say, Ah, the Grand Canyon, isnt it wonderful? It became sub-
lime. It swung to the other side. And that happens a lot.2
So Im claiming that the rhetorics change, and that there are re-
visionings of these spheres of ethics, economy, power, and nature. The
economy gets re-visioned by Turgot and Smith in the eighteenth century.
The sciences having to do with nature and economy were invented, at least
in their modern form, in the eighteenth century. You get the classifications
of natural history, late in the eighteenth century, the invention of geology,
in the early nineteenth century. And the same holds for economics. Now,
you might think that nature and the economy are always important cat-
egories in peoples lives. Yet before the eighteenth century, people dont
theorize them much. They absorb economic questions, for example, into
ethical questions or into questions of power. This is particularly clear in the
history of Venice, where the first and last word is always the state, lo stato,
period. Every economic activity, however Smithian it is, gets subordinated
to the glory of la Serenissima. And nature, too, is occluded, so to speak.
But then, later, as we all have been saying for three days, you get maps,
globes, trees, towers, archipelagos, islands, utopias, war, and the war of all
against all. You get a refiguring of these domains and their rhetorics.
Nature gets refigured in these ways. And the state gets refigured; power
gets refigured. All of this happens roughly at the same time. It happens
in the sixteenth century for the geographers and then gets really going
in the seventeenth century. In Amsterdam, the town hall, now the Royal
Palace, initiated in 1848, has this marvelous map on its floor, the map of
the world. And this is a very economistic operation, the Amsterdam rul-
ing body, the upper middle class. It also has emblems of ethics all over the
place.
Theres a refiguring of the realm of power by Machiavelli, of course,
and Hobbes; its odd because it happens quite late in this period of early
modernity. Its a refiguring of ethics. The way I talk about the bourgeois
virtues in my book is the way more or less every culture has talked about
ethics more or less forever: in terms of individual virtues. You can find very
similar categories to the seven principal Christian virtues in Confucianism
or in South Asiaall over the place.
But the view of ethics in terms of virtues gets dropped, mysteriously
and suddenly, in the late eighteenth century. It gets replaced with top-
down instructions or rules. Of course the way we learn ethics is always
through stories: stories of Abraham, of Hamlet, of King Lear, are how we
theorize, so to speak, particular virtues. But that all gets dropped, and in
its place you get analysis: the metaphorical reasoning in Kant on the one
hand, in which you have justice elevated as the only virtue, and in Jeremy
Bentham on the other, in which prudence is elevated as the only virtue.
These are the only categories that remain, replacing all these other virtues
and forms of argument that used to be ethics.
To make sense of all of this, and to start to re-vision this modern re-
visioning, for me the central term is rhetoric. Because its in the c ontestation
over how to talk about ethics in relation to, say, power, that things start
to happen: you get constitution-making or civic republicanism. How we
talk about the economy and power is what divides the Democrats from
254 D.N. MCCLOSKEY
the Republicans in the United States: the chief worry of the Democrats
is monopoly, the chief worry of the Republicans, at least nowadays, is the
state. And my view is that theyre both right.
Thats the scheme. Words matter is my claim. This is what youve all
been talking about so far. But for me, its an incredibly important issue
and a huge struggle, to try to bring this message to my economist col-
leagues, to my friends in political science. For instance, in my book on the
Industrial Revolution, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cant Explain
the Modern World, I argue that interests, that is, things internal to the
economy or internal to power, are not what explains the modern world.3
And I dont think that nature explains the modern world: I dont think its
coal, or energy units, or whatever. Instead, I think its an ethical change
that explains the modern world. Its a change, actually, in the quality
of the conversation, most particularly in the engineering conversations.
As Peg Jacob has shown, there is a tremendous amount of cooperation
among steam engineers in England in the eighteenth century; they talk
to each other all the time. Theres an exhibition in a church in Venice of
Leonardos machinesits not a good exhibit in that the tags, the captions
dont reflect a sophisticated history of science view, and there are bizarre
translations from Italian into English. But it does show that in Leonardos
time, this engineering was all secret. His inventions, his experiments, his
practicalities, his diagrams, and his attempts to do this or that were all
secret. But then, in the eighteenth century, this kind of work stops being
secret. There are trade secrets, sure, but theres an awful lot of public
conversation, a kind of republic of engineering, of the sort that Steve
Crossan was describing at Google. In Elizabethan England, if you talked
about politics, your hand would get cut off, not to speak of your head,
but in the eighteenth century, there are now coffee houses where politics
can be discussed.
In my view, modernity is all about this change in the quality of the rhet-
oric about power, economy, ethics, and nature. You can give lots of dif-
ferent names to this change. Ive called it the decline of hierarchy, because
ordinary peoples projects become valued. This bourgeois dignity, as I call
it, is crucial to the modern world. Theres a new respect for innovators, for
merchants, instead of having them completely subordinated to the honor
of aristocrats.
One more example from the meaning of words helps make my point.
The word honest changes in meaning from Shakespeares time to Jane
Austens. If you look at a dictionary of Shakespearean English, the first
meaning of honest would be honorable. Italian dictionaries will talk

about an obsolete meaning of onest, which is aristocratico. Its true in
French, and then very strangely its also true in all northern and western
Germanic languages, where the world for noble is ehr, or, in Dutch, eer.
(Im always amused that Barbara Ehrenreich and Paul Ehrlich have this
sir in their names even though they hate it.) And then, it changes to
become ehrlich, or honest, in our ordinary modern English sense of tell-
ing the truth. Theres a change in the Valuation, capital-v, of these various
realms.
Thats my attempt at a re-visioning of the modern period.
Debate
John Tresch
I would like to ask what you think about the revaluation of innovation
and what youre calling the republic of engineering, as a part of the ascen-
dancy of the bourgeois, which youre calling ordinary peopleand all
with regard to the impact on pedagogy, on education. There is a big sign
at the University of Pennsylvania, which celebrates itself as Franklins uni-
versity, the good honest man in the Jane Austen sense of the term, who
is celebrated by Max Weber as the beacon of all bourgeois virtues and
utilitarianism, which says this is one of the first places in which engineer-
ing and practical sciences were made part of the basic liberal arts curricu-
lum, where a business curriculum was added to the university. In the late
eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, into the middle of the
nineteenth century, there was a fight to force utilitarian practical matters
into the traditionally humanistic curriculum of the university. But now, if
we skip forward 200 years, we see the exact reverse tendency. The admin-
istrators, with help from the outside funders, trustees, and alumni and
charitable foundations set up at the height of the railroad monopolies,
all are pressing to say why on earth are we teaching people rhetoric? Why
are we teaching them persuasion? Interpretation? Values? What we need
to do is teach people something that matters, which is utility, facts, things
that produce wealth, cure people, and produce machines and technology.
What are your thoughts about this second level of transformation in the
middle or late twentieth century, where theres a new turn and rhetoric is
submerged and the praise of innovation becomes the critique of tradition,
humanities, and humanistic values as a whole?
256 D.N. MCCLOSKEY
Deirdre N.McCloskey
What is very interesting is that in the same period, in the seventeenth
century, rhetoric was already devalued. You have this marvelous absur-
dity of these extremely eloquent men, in the seventeenth century, Bacon,
Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, writing treatises on rhetoric, attacking rheto-
ric. Writing essays against eloquence, eloquently. Its a performative con-
tradiction, and it goes on and on. Of course its a theme in the history of
science and in the history of learning generally.
Simon Schaffer
One of the prompts for our discussion was to wonder first of all, what are
the transcendental conditions of possibility of making cosmograms: what
must the world be like in the most general sense, such that it can be simply
captured? For historians of the sciences, especially for the first modernity,
one of the most striking features of innovation at least in Western and
Northern Europe is a rather novel and extraordinarily consequential set of
arguments which tightly associate nature with power. And its not obvi-
ous that those two entities should so be associated. Phusis and potestas are
not obviously going to go together but they do. And certainly for all the
sweet-talking men whom you named, they do. What Im interested in for
our project is why it now seems so obvious that such an association has
to be made. The question is, why does it now seem utterly self-evident?
Why does it now seem utterly self-evident that if an appeal is made to a
contingent politico-social arrangement, on the grounds that thats a law
of nature, that appeal, rhetorically, tends to work?
Steve Crossan
Why is there this self-evidence in the relationship between power and
nature? Is it because it turns out that the experimental method is really
good rhetoric? Its a really good way to win arguments, and that gets
noticed?
Deirdre N.McCloskey
The invention of modern statistics comes out of a eugenic and frankly
racist program in the nineteenth century. And this, alas, comes into ordi-
nary political and scientific discussion. Ive been trying for 25 years to
persuade economists that statistical significance is nonsense. Its always the

best move not to have to argue at all. Self-evidence is the best argument.
Elizabeth Pisani
You make the point that one of the transitional things between Elizabethan
England and later ages, the age of democracy, is the coffee shop, a physical
location that allows people to sit around and talk politics and where its a
safe to do that. But over time, you also make the point, that rhetoric has
become increasingly devalued: now we want action, not talking shops. A
talking shop now is a bad thing somehow. We oppose it to action and the
things that we consider to be virile and good. We want everyone to have
a voice, but then over time everyone having a voice produces something
that for itself is becoming increasingly devalued. So that the democracy
which the web gives us access to becomes progressively devalued unless we
do something with it, introduce an ordering to it.
How do we get people to do other things? Well there are three ways.
We can force them, we can use the monopoly of violence. Or we can pay
them, we can do an exchange, and that doesnt only have to be in cash, it
can be other types of exchange. Or, using what we Christians call grace,
we can give a free gift to them, of persuasion. And those are the only
three ways to change peoples behavior. And I worry that when people
say, Congress is just a talking shop, just a bunch of interests, and it surely
is, or its all about power, or its all about economy, or its all about just
paying people, were going to devalue persuasion. That way lies fascism
and other totalitarianism.
Simon Schaffer
My conjecture, rather, was that the self-evidence suggested by the link
between power and nature might have something to do with the way
in which both absolute power and Phusis, or nature, seem to be outside
the limits of the kingdom of rhetoric. Persuasion has nothing to do with
power; its the opposite. And persuasion has nothing to do with nature.
But theres an association, perhaps, between a whole series of realms,
which achieve their rhetorical effect by denying that they are rhetorical.
And thats the situation that we now find ourselves in.
258 D.N. MCCLOSKEY
Pierre Chabard
It seems to me that our reflection on the conditions of possibility to
reformulate cosmograms overlaps with a major problem: multicultural-
ism, which Andr Corboz names multicontemporaneitywhich is to
say that we live on this planet not at all at the same stage of development,
we do not share the same culture, the same means. This is almost a Babel
problem to us. How can we integrate this issue into our thinking which is
very Western, ethnocentric, and caught within the Crystal Palace of which
Sloterdijk speaks? Further, beyond multiculturalism and multicontempo-
raneity, there is also the issue of the digital divide: the fact that not all the
inhabitants of the planet have a computer, internet access, or their use may
not be in the same manner.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
As an economic historian, its my responsibility to tell you that these
divides dissolve. With respect to the divide that were all concerned with
between the poor and the richtheres always the poor because theres
always someone down in the bottom ten percent. But its the poor who
have mainly benefitted from economic growth. And likewise the digital
divide. Theyve been able to leap over this crazy state monopoly infra-
structure that we had in the West, and now they just have phones. And
theyre going to have computers because these computers, by Moores
Law, are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So I just dont think
the digital divide is a permanent problem.
Elizabeth Pisani
John Tresch was talking about different cosmograms for different cultural
groupings, in a time when those cultural groupings were basically geo-
graphically separate and often temporally separate. But now weve got all
of these different cultures coexisting in the same city, in the same econ-
omy, on the same web. So its added a layer of complication.
John Tresch
The question is where and how does that meeting happen? And this gets
back to questions raised in Bruno Latours exhibit, Making Things Public:
where is the space and what is the thing around which all the peoples of
the world could gather to agree upon some kind of partial mapping of
where the world now is?4 Now, there is no such physical space, except
maybe in the United Nations, or UNESCO [United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization], or the World Bank, which of course
are partial and contestable, or perhaps they exist online, which means they
are on servers, in the server farms of Google, Facebook, and Amazon and
not actually, thanks to the digital divide, equally distributed across the sur-
face of the globe. Thinking through the actual means, the imagined and
real places in which these different parts of the world do meet and could
meet, is crucial to begin to answer such questions. That means, looking
not only at global cities but also at the virtual cities that are constructed
through the window of the web.
Weve been talking about how each cosmogram must deal with the
already existing cosmograms that precede and surround them. How does
a map of the world which has Mecca at its center deal with Rome and
Jerusalem and Beijing and so on? So thats a question that you can also
put in terms of databases. How do all of those clusterings of what there
is in the world, which may be more or less incommensurable at certain
points, how do they commensurate? Where do they intersect and how
do they communicate between themselves? You need to be able to put
all the contestations on the map, youd want there to be places for all the
other maps and the ways they dissent, the ways they differ. Like Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro and his perspectivalist cosmology but on a global scale.
I hope there are ways of doing this other than just dismissing them or
labeling them heretical.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
I am also a pluralist, la Isaiah Berlin. And I think that the conversation of
humankind is where this is all going. What I think is remarkable since the
spread of the printing press is that the conversation has gotten better, and
also, its gone off on some terrible tracks. The conversation of nations and
the fate of nations morphed into this horrible century that has just passed.
Steve Crossan
Conversationsand Im deliberately saying conversations plural rather
than a single conversationreplace maps.
260 D.N. MCCLOSKEY
Deirdre N.McCloskey
The problem with that is that we devalue conversation, we think its just
chatter. Whereas what we want are diagrams and organizations.
Elizabeth Pisani
May I observe some differences between conversations and maps, and
note that were back to the issue of grammars and pictorial depictions?
Maps are, broadly speaking, independent of language, of actual physi-
cal language. And all the depictions, the trees and the organograms,
are basically symbolic and can be understood across languages and cul-
tures. Conversations are mediated through languages, but despite all our
attempts to make English dominate the world, languages are still not inde-
pendent of values.
Deirdre N.McCloskey
That is the history of artificial languages. Since the sixteenth century, there
have been something like 200 serious attempts at artificial languages. One
of them was Logical Positivism, an attempt to take the culture out of lan-
guage, and each time, its an attempt to escape from some local particular-
ity of French or Latin or English. And its a sad project. Its the attempt to
find a view from nowhere.
Simon Schaffer
There is a very distinguished tradition in our field of analyzing cosmo-
grams as insular, in a way even more developed than weve discussed so
far. The name of that tradition is heterotopia. The Foucauldian project,
which he discussed with an audience of French architects, was exactly that.
The thought was that alongside utopias, there are sites entirely set apart,
where one is entirely withdrawn, yet the function in those sites is to reflect
on key aspects of the world from which one has withdrawn so that that
world can be reformed and changed. This is almost the exact opposite,
therefore, of the utopia. San Giorgio is not a utopia, but it is, I think,
heterotopic. Its supposed to reflect on, in both senses, Serenissima. And
the idea is to overhaul what one has withdrawn from. The reason I dwell
on this is because it is very striking what examples in Des espaces autres
Foucault offers up. Theyre old-age homes, pirate ships, holiday camps,
and prisons. And one way of developing the cosmopragmatic reflection
is to think: what other kinds of institutions are like that or could possibly
perform that function?
Deirdre N.McCloskey
You ought to look into the history of Christianity or Buddhism, for that
matter, because monks and monasteries are precisely what youre talking
about.
Notes
1. McCloskey, Deirdre N. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How
Markets and Innovation Became Ethical, 16001848, and Then Suspect.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012.
2. Pyne, Stephen J. How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History. NewYork:
Penguin, 1999.
3. McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the
Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
4. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2005.
CHAPTER 12
Lodestar
RichardPowers
A Preliminary Confession [or Something Alike]

I will confess that when Pasquale Gagliardi first sent me the manifesto
for this conversation, I had a vision of something like massive hexagonal
bookshelves extending infinitely in all directions, full of endlessly propa-
gating ideas. Within a minute of receiving the invitation to join the con-
versation, I sent back an eager yes. Shortly after, I got another email from
Pasquale saying: Richard, would you mind going last and maybe doing
some kind of artistic response that would pull all these chapters together
and summarize everything into a nice whole? I said I could try to make
a little thumbnail story, but for that, I would need some data points. And
so Pasquale sent the abstracts, and I read through all the abstracts and I
thought: Oh, of course, now everything is entirely clear: we are dealing
with a collection of clocks, corsets and cowboys.
Editors note: We are delighted to be able to present as the final chapter of

this book this previously unpublished short story, written expressly for our
dialogue. Due to the tales eloquence and evocative force, we have decided not
to transcribe the discussion which followed the reading. Instead, we give the
last word of our discussions on the aesthetics of universal knowledge to Richard
Powersor rather, to Lodestar.
R. Powers (*)
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-42595-5_12
264 R. POWERS
But I soon began to imagine how I might weave a little narrative

around some of the themes in the manifesto, and in about ten days, I had
a short story. I still wasnt sure what the conference would be about or
whether my story had anything at all to do with it. But I thought: Lets
just wait and see; I can always do the Scheherazade thing, or the Penelope
thing, and just go to my apartment in the evening after the discussions
and re-write the whole story depending on what we talked about during
the day. After the first night, I thought: So far so good, no emendations
necessary. After the second night, I thought: I might just get away with
this. After this morning, I thought: Hee hee hee Lets go have lunch,
Im ready!
All you need to know about the story by way of background is that
it concerns an elderly man who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, which is very
close to the geographic center of the United States. Its title is Lodestar. It
was originally called Polaristhe North Starbut Lodestar expands
the sense metaphorically to mean any guidance principle a person might
use for navigation.
LODESTAR 265
Lodestar
Choice on an epic scale disoriented Firpo, and once inside the mega-
stores maze of glittering electronics, he had to ask a salesman for help.
Could the young man recommend the best automobile navigation system
for a first-time user? The boy chewed on his mirth and eyed Firpo as if to
say, You, Sir, are totally clueless, arent you? Firpo could neither confirm
nor deny.
They all lease the same databases, the clerk told him, pinching and
zooming the air. They do exactly the same thing. It seemed a simple
matter of picking the packaging you liked most.
Firpo liked the box that showed the streets of a sprawling city with a
route in red floating above them like the optimal solution to some Platonic
traveling salesman problem. He liked, too, that the device, a tiny screen
called Lodestar, promised everything the better-advertised brands did, for
half the price: nine million points of interest and complete knowledge of
every road in the country, right down to the turning lanes. It surprised
Firpo to realize the country had nine million points of interest.
Even before the sale discount, the thing was a steal. He clutched a
Lodestar to his chest and found his way to the cash registers at the front
of the store, getting turned around only once.
It did make Firpo a little nervous that he had to give the machine
his credit card, just to qualify for the free lifetime updates. The software
needed a number on file to offer additional data modules for inline pur-
chase. Firpo couldnt imagine what other data a person might need, once
he owned nine million points of interest and every road ever built. But a
lifetime of free data was good value, even for a man of 65. In the span of
four short months, Firpo had become first retired, then divorced. All he
wanted to do anymore was get away. If the Lodestar took it on itself to
run up his card balance and bleed his bank account, Firpo would adjust.
He set the Lodestar on the dash of the Fiat and pecked in the address
of the public library across town. These days he could drive to the library
by smell. He went five times a week to pore over guide books and maps.
Firpos sons laughed at him for staying with print. But print was still the
best way to find things by chance.
There was an accident on Clarke, and two squad cars blocked the road.
In two blocks, turn left, the Lodestar said, and before Firpo could
object, insisted, Turn left now.
266
R. POWERS
Fig. 12.1 Lodestar. Image by Richard Powers

LODESTAR 267
Horrified by his blatant rudeness and sure the machine would never
speak to him again, he drove straight through the intersection, almost
doubling the accident.
Recalculating, the Lodestar said. And soon enough, it had a backup
plan, one that would never have occurred to Firpo. Something in Firpo
went bold, liberated by the sheer brilliance of the machine. He tried to
thwart it, perversely zigging where the Lodestar told him to zag. With no
trace of anger or distress, as if thankful for this new Sudoku, the Lodestar
readdressed the problem, a happy Sisyphus. And with a wonder he hadnt
felt since seeing his car in his driveway through the lens of a camera in
earths orbit, Firpo realized that hed never be lost again.
He pecked the word Yellowstone into the tiny screen, and three days
later, after a 600-mile detour through the worlds largest prairie dog town
in Oakley, Kansas, he arrived at the park he hadnt seen since his honey-
moon, 40years before. And as he sat watching Old Faithful blow repeat-
edly, he thought back on a lifetime of road trips with his wife and sons,
the epic shouting matches and the icy silences, and it occurred to Firpo
that he and his spouse might still be together, had they had a navigator
like Lodestar.
On the long way home, Firpo stayed at two reasonably priced motels
that Lodestar thought highly of, and when he asked for the very best steak
house in Davison County, Lodestar knew just the place. Every detour was
a bagatelle. Lodestar knew every gas station, ATM, supermarket, restau-
rant, hotel, cafe, bar, museum, grocery and convenience store, specialty
shop, business, professional office, entertainment palace, salon, spa, scenic
vista, church, mosque, synagogue, school, public building, car park, rest
area, automotive service, sports facility, tourist attraction, and historical
marker along the way. The world was Firpos oyster.
But an hour south on I-29, the honeymoon soured. Lodestar took him
smack into a ridiculous construction snarl that Firpo had entirely forgot-
ten to avoid. An hour later, hed moved a dozen car lengths. A message
popped up on Lodestars screen: Real-time road conditions and traf-
fic modules available. Press here to unlock. And it named a price that
seemed almost comically cheap, given the data involved.
The upgraded Lodestar knew a great deal. It knew about congestion
and population density. It knew about hazards and work zones and rough
surfaces and road closures, sometimesit seemed to Firpomoments
before the road was actually closed. It even knew about speed traps and
speed cameras and cameras policing lonely desert stop signs, and for the
268 R. POWERS
first time in his life, protected by a virtuoso knowledge that made his life-
long safe-betting habits seem superstitious, Firpo let out the throttle and
learned what the Fiat could do.
It is your responsibility, the startup screen warned him on every trip, to
disregard any unsafe, hazardous, or illegal route suggestions. But Lodestar
held all the cards, and Firpo had no idea how he might even tell when one
of its suggestions might be hazardous.
He went and bought the safety module too, along with the danger-
ous curves and intersections packet. Now, Lodestar knew about road
slopes and gradients; proximity of emergency and medical facilities; bridge
height and weight limits; safety histories, pavement class, and something
the database referred to vaguely as neighborhood quality. Firpo recalled
that moment in his childhood when his father sat him down with a map of
the city, warning him which streets any person named Firpo should never
walk down.
Fed by so many information streams, Lodestars instructions sometimes
wandered into the arcane. It issued routes that seemed almost capricious.
One time, it made Firpo go clear around the city just to return from the
mall, a 20-minute rerouting of a trip that should have taken five. Firpo
never did learn the reason for the detour. But another time, Lodestars
combined databases kept Firpo from being caught in a parking lot shoot-
out that sent three innocent motorists to the emergency room. Perhaps it
was a coincidence; perhaps the emergent machine now possessed a fore-
sight that bordered on the inspired.
Firpo stopped questioning all but the oddest of commands that the
instrument issued. Ask not the logic: Lodestar, he began to see, had a
higher purpose for him, one he did not yet know enough to grasp.
The minute he bought the voice module, Firpo wondered how hed
gotten along without it. He could now talk to the machine hands-free, in
natural dialoguesso much safer than pecking words into a tiny keyboard
while piloting one and a half tons of metal at a mile a minute. But speech
also opened up whole new possibilities. Firpo loved how he could say,
Take me to my mothers, and Lodestar determined from the tone of his
voice whether to take him by the shortest route, the fastest route, the most
picturesque route, or the one that involved the highest chance of getting
in an accident.
He bought maps for Montenegro and Madagascar, Senegal and
Sumatra. He bought maps for places he knew hed never get to in this life.
Sometimes he studied the roads of some distant capital, checked out its
LODESTAR 269
must-see monuments, and located its currency exchanges. Sometimes, he

squirreled away the maps and never thought of them again. It comforted
and excited him, just to possess the information. He collected the world,
like the best of connoisseurs, hungry for completion.
Lodestar told Firpo about the personal history module. By combing
through all Firpos driving records that the servers had collected, com-
bined with all his credit card purchases and browser histories and bank
transactions and phone logs and library borrowings that Lodestar could
gather, and by factoring in the likes of all other GPS users whose driv-
ing and purchasing habits most closely resembled Firpos, Lodestar could
calculate which of its tens of millions of pleasures would mean the most
to Firpo.
Firpo was horrified. The machines were spying on him, laying his
insides bare. It was as if the Devil himself had led him up a high spire and
made him look out, saying, All this can be yours. He shook himself free
from the year-long bender hed been on. He took the tiny screen off of its
dashboard mount, brought it into the garage, set it on the concrete floor,
and grabbed the largest hammer he owned. But as he lifted the blunt
weapon in the air above the insidious device, he realized Lodestar was
blameless. The hydra-like data were already everywhere, simply a matter
of gathering. All that Firpo could ever hope to smash was this obliging,
cheerful tool, offering to help him with what his own life had forever
struggled to discover: the shape and nature and means of fulfilling his
innermost desires.
Firpo bought the personal history module. In a way, he was simply
buying back the rights to what already belonged to him. To make it up to
Lodestar, he let his guide take him on another long, scenic, meandering
tour out West. And this time, every stop that Lodestar found for them,
every diversion and facility and service was exactly the one that Firpo
himself would have sought out, had he had the wherewithal to find it on
his own.
They crossed the Rockies, at a spot Lodestar had found that seemed to
come straight out of Firpos imagination. Beautiful mountains, Firpo said.
No problem, Lodestar answered. One moment. Recalculating.
No, Firpo blurted. I mean these are beautiful mountains. Here,
already. Dont you think?
Lodestar kept its counsel. After a moment, it said, There is music that
many people like you think might be perfect for scenery like this. Would
you like to try the music module? And no sooner did Firpo answer yes
270 R. POWERS
than that cab of the car was flooded by the sounds of Songs of a Wayfarer,
the perfect mountain music that Firpo never knew existed but seemed to
have been written for right here, right now, him.
He told Lodestar that he wanted to go back to Omaha. The long way.
Around the world.
Sure, Lodestar chirped and began to calculate. It knew every dirt
track, every ferry boat, every auto train in the world. It could avoid
every unstable banana republic and evade every impoverished stretch
of ratland out there. It knew the kinds of things that Firpo always liked,
and it had on file every pleasure along every road into every Shangri-La
around the globe. It took some minutes, but soon enough, it proposed
a route.
In three blocks, turn right on Main Street, it told Firpo. Then off to
Alaska, the Bering Straits, Siberia, China.
Ooh, Firpo said. China. The Great Wall?
No problem, Lodestar answered.
They traveled for weeks, then months, and never once were they close
to being lost. That made Firpo a little sad. He seemed unable to wind up
anywhere except where he thought he wanted to be.
Bangkok, Firpo demanded. Chennai. Karachi.
Lodestar served them up, with endless delightful points of interest
along the way. They saw religious processions and great souks, and cities
nestled under stunning, snow-capped ranges and perched on the banks of
ancient rivers. They had sights and sounds and smells, alien experiences
that Firpo could never have dreamed of on his own, yet every one hand-
picked just for him, for what hed be surest to find beautiful.
The density of the world amazed him, and every chaotic town and
tangled trade route he saw changed him forever. Yet it was all somehow
smaller and more manageable than hed imagined.
Tehran, Firpo said. Istanbul.
It was, Lodestar told him, no problem at all. Just a question of cash and
time; the itinerary, per se, was handled in a heartbeat.
Firpo bought more modulescultural, historical, ecological, educa-
tional, economic. He was hungry for a place he didnt even know how to
ask for. He could find no trace of it in Greece, the Balkans, or the Alps.
Venice, Firpo ordered.
Lodestar balked. No cars allowed.
Ill park nearby. Ill walk.
You might get lost, the machine cautioned.
Thank God, Firpo said.
LODESTAR 271
But La Serenissima Repubblica was too small to get too lost in for long.
Firpo wandered at random, in back alleys along the crumbling canal pal-
aces, until the illusion of escaping the satellites omniscience wore off. He
found the car and Lodestar again in the Piazzale Roma, as unshakable as
a recurring dream.
Paris, Firpo murmured, determined to see the City of Light.
Something in his voice warned Lodestar off of suggesting any scenic
detours.
At a darkened exit on the Priphrique, Lodestar requested a surprise
detour. The device took Firpo through a crowded banlieue that the safety
module should never have allowed. Turn left, it said, now right, now
left again, leading Firpo deeper into a narrowing concrete maze. Pull
over, Lodestar commanded.
Firpo did. He sat in the idling car, awaiting further instructions.
Look left, Lodestar said. Paris. Gray block towers spread like some
vast prison, as far as the eye could see.
Firpo didnt understand. This is in your points of interest? Why are
you showing me this?
Look right, Lodestar said.
There, on a placard on a concrete barrier, someone had scrawled, Le
jour du jugement est proche. Some other wag had inserted, before the
word jugement, three red letters: NON.The day of non-reckoning is
near.
The maps had gone mad, the databases demented. Or perhaps all the
modules had begun to draw conclusions on their own.
Get me back, Firpo ordered, New York. Chicago. Omaha.
Sure, Lodestar said. It knew of several transports departing soon from
nearby ports, carrying cars across the ocean by the millions. Shortest
route? it asked. Easiest? Most picturesque?
Firpo asked for the fastest. Lodestar found a carrier leaving from
Normandy, through the middle of the 500-kilometer-wide garbage patch
in the center of the North Atlantic Gyre.
Firpo blanched. Five hundred?
Give or take, Lodestar answered. The Pacific patch is bigger.
Jesus, Firpo said. Get me out of here.
Lodestar mentioned an Epidemics, Toxic Sites, and War Zones suite
available for one-click purchase.
Firpo gripped the wheel and whispered, Never mind. Take me home.
Home? Lodestar echoed. Sure thing. And the screen flashed with
the word, Recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.

Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge

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Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge

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aesthetics

ISBN 978-3-319-42594-8ISBN 978-3-319-42595-5(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938305

Fondazione Giorgio Cini onlus 2017

Cover illustration: La mano di Atlante, glass mosaic by Tomaso Buzzi

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Text and Context: Genius Loci (A Preface)1

Part IVisions: How Aesthetics and Museology Affect the

3 Re-visioning the World: MappingtheLithosphere31

5 Pictorialism (Prelude and Fugue)77

6 The Unending Quantity ofObjects: AnObservation

Part IIWorlds: How the Performance of Cosmologies can

7 Cosmopragmatics and Petabytes137

8 Gaia or Knowledge without Spheres169

9 Mapping Dark Matter and the Venice Paradox203

Part IIIEconomies: How Different Models of Knowledge

10 The Web, Google, andCosmograms235

11 Rhetoric, Economics, andNature249

Jerry Brottonis Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary

teaches at the cole nationale suprieure darchitecture Paris-La Villette

Barbara Czarniawska (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003);

University of Chicago and describes herself now as a postmodern free-

Year; and the National Book Award. He is a MacArthur fellow, a fellow of

disparate but intersecting trajectories. (1) The comparison of knowledge

Fig. 1.1 Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venezia. Photo by ORCH,

Fig. 3.11 Terra-Forming montage. The proposed site in the

Fig. 8.2 Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Abschied von Kosmos

Fig. 9.5 Fra Luca Paciolo teaching Albrecht Drer linear

Text and Context: Genius Loci (A Preface)

The Author(s) 2017 1

Many participants of the Dialoghi have immediately realized that the

From theExhibition totheDialogo

rather than insistent on an exhaustive account. Thus, as an alternative to forms

The Rules oftheGame andtheInaugural Event

The inaugural event featured two ambitious attempts to represent the

South-West) were performed. These were interspersed with readings from

Two Final Remarks

I owe the discovery to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia

Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge takes upon itself some weighty ques-

The Author(s) 2017 11

different ways, the moderns notion that a picture-perfect utopia would be

the cartographers rule and authority. Interactions between and conflicts

precedents both in Renaissance and in Baroque maps of the newly global

expropriative colonial possession as they were with an egalitarian politics

actions. In his careful analysis of the ways of Pacific navigation, as example,

perspective and astronomical calculation suggest, in this great vision of

embodied and struggled with attempts to assemble knowledge in con-

(New York: Vintage, 1985), 191213, on p.195; Roger Chartier,

26. Daniel Rosenberg, Data before the Fact, in Gitelman, Raw

39. Paul J.Crutzen, Geology of mankind, Nature 415 (3 January

Visions: How Aesthetics and

Re-visioning the World:

Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton

The Author(s) 2017 31

In what follows we offer a genealogy of terra-forming, culminating in

grid of 5000 squares, each side representing approximately 50 kilome-

Fig. 3.2 Yu Ji Tu map of China, 1136. Courtesy Library of Congress

alioru[m]que lustrationes. Saint Di, France. Courtesy Library of Congress

nologies zoomed down on it, with techniques characterized by miniatur-

Mercator offers a projection which enables navigators to sail east to

Representing the Planet as It Writes

The Globe as a Model of Itself: The Removal of

Terra-Forming, the construction of a relief map of the surface of the

1 Text and Context: Genius Loci (A Preface)1

Part IVisions: How Aesthetics and Museology Affect the

3 Re-visioning the World: MappingtheLithosphere31

5 Pictorialism (Prelude and Fugue)77

6 The Unending Quantity ofObjects: AnObservation

Part IIWorlds: How the Performance of Cosmologies can

7 Cosmopragmatics and Petabytes137

8 Gaia or Knowledge without Spheres169

9 Mapping Dark Matter and the Venice Paradox203

Part IIIEconomies: How Different Models of Knowledge

10 The Web, Google, andCosmograms235

11 Rhetoric, Economics, andNature249