Robert Richards Objectivity and the Theory of the Archetype

In response to Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, this essay argues that that idealized depiction of creatures and plants persists powerfully into the contemporary period, often bypassing the more mechanical, selfabnegating ideals of other sciences. Lorraine Daston has written frequently on the relationship between art and science, most notably in two influential books. In Wonders and the Order of Nature, she and Katherine Park recounted the collecting activities of medieval and early modern scholars, who discovered certain curiosities (e.g., a tusk of a narwhal) believing them to be wonders of artistic delight (e.g., the horn of a unicorn). This was followed by Objectivity, in which she and Peter Galison constructed the history of scientific objectivity. They argued that the idea of objectivity had gone through three historical phases. The first stemmed from the early modern period through the mid-nineteenth century, when naturalists attempted to represent kinds of things—e.g., a species of flower, bird, or mammal— focusing on the essential features of the type, those universal structures that were “true to nature.” Such types were illustrated, often by gifted artists, in collections of botanical and zoological atlases. In the second period, as scientists grew wary of the possibilities of subjective bias, they introduced instruments, such as the camera and the kymograph, to achieve “mechanical objectivity” in their illustrations. Thus scientist guarded against incursions of subjective preference by focusing on the concrete individual, rather than succumbing to unstable assumptions about types and essences. And then in the early twentieth century, methods of “trained judgment”were deployed to guard against the wiles of subjectivity, even when hand-drawn illustrations were used. Naturalists who attempted to render objects “true to nature”would base their illustrations on particular objects, which might be brought back from a collecting expedition. Such illustrations did not, however, picture an individual organism— not, for example, a Nankeen Night Heron, but the Nankeen Night Heron, say as rendered by John Gould (1804–1881), chief ornithologist at the British Museum. 1 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 2 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010). Gould, for instance, would sketch birds from life, or more often from samples that had been preserved in spirits of wine and sent back to the museum. He would then work with artists and lithographers to produce vivid color reproductions of organisms, shed of individual peculiarities or blemishes suffered during shipment back to the museum (fig. 1). Fig. 1: The Nankeen Night Heron; from John Gould’s The Birds of Australia, 1840–1848. Daston and Galison do not suppose that the three historical periods they discriminate mark abrupt transitions. They allow that older modes of depiction might continue as a regular part of a discipline. Yet, they do not indicate just how deeply techniques of representation from the first period have penetrated into scientific practice right up to the present time, especially in the biological disciplines. Three general considerations, I believe, should be given due weight. First, in many biological specialties—botany, insectology, ichthyology, ornithology, and several other areas of zoology—the color of organisms serves a crucial function in identifying a species. Color photography in monographs, however, only came into general use in the 1930s. Thus hand drawn illustrations transformed into copperplate etchings with aquatint and lithography remained the usual ways biological atlases and catalogues would represent organisms in color. Color-lithographs of original, typical organisms continued to be used through the historical boundaries set by Daston and Galison. Second, even in areas, such as embryology, where color is less important, it would be difficult to use individual specimens Objectivity and the Theory of the Archetype 27