The curiosity cabinet

I'm not posting what I said I would, but this is better--an excuse to link to an article from Cabinet magazine about curiosity cabinets that I really like. (Go there for images!) Be warned--this post is from a school paper.

The curiosity cabinet, popular during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a microcosm for the study of a larger, concomitant shift wherein an initially aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena became a scientific endeavor to classify and define. This change paralleled the changes brought about by Newtonian physics and the rise of science, changes that affected, among many other things, both how and where we look for truth. Science became the preferred "how," and a nature whose truths are accessible to scientific method became the "where." Rather than look for truths inherent in nature, Nietzsche, Koestler, Hesse, Arbib, Kövecses and others argue for a reality of contingent truths constructed by humans, a mythos that is, as Robert Pirsig says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues" (317). The everyday act of constructing reality through metaphor becomes an artistic act, one that relies on an aesthetic appreciation of similarities to create the network of meaning and relationships that is our reality. It is also a rhetorical act, one defined by probability rather than certain truth, and one that implicates us as creators of the very causality and reality science once defined as unaffected by human involvement.

The claim that "all is metaphor" represents a thorough departure from the ideology defined by the science formed up to and during the 17th century ---to be an inquiry, first by Aristotelian deduction, then by induction, into nature in order to discover its fundamental truths. As Hesse and Arbib characterize it, "In the seventeenth century, the rise of science was accompanied by the conception of an 'ideal language' that would enable us to read off from the 'book of nature' the true science that exactly expresses reality" (149). The universe was seen as a book humans could read, given we could divine the proper (that is, logical) methods for reading its text. Science was the chosen system of methods for doing this, and this choice represents a calcification of values that even today seem established, a priori, obvious--indisputable. As Hesse and Arbib argue, the seventeenth-century myth of inherent truths in nature discoverable by humans lives on in the nineteenth-century project of a universal logic, a formal analysis of language that takes for granted fixed, stable meanings (150). Within such an analysis, there is little room for metaphor as anything more than decoration, so metaphor is afforded no more status than mere decoration. Wherever there is the notion of fixed meanings, metaphor, with its quixotic displays of novel meaning, will always be anomalous, deviant, difficult to systematize, and thus relegated to an innocuous outpost that is even inferior to aesthetics.

At the time when Liebniz was searching for a language that corresponded exactly to the language in which the text of nature was written, the curiosity cabinet represented visually the contemporary shift from an aesthetic, haptic understanding of nature to a logical, categorical, and ultimately textual understanding. Prefigured by the Wunderkammern (wonder chambers) of the Renaissance, curiosity cabinets were collections of rare, curious, beautiful, and valuable objects that were for the most part nature's dead: dried, stuffed, preserved, bottled and skeletal (Olalquiaga "Object Lesson/Transitional Object"). They represented at first wonder at nature, over time control and categorization of nature, and finally a conquer of nature through the repetition of (and perhaps ritualization of) organizing, naming, labeling, and categorizing natural phenomena.

Curiosity cabinets came to resemble texts, filled as they were with systems of organization and displayed in an increasingly linear way behind glass, rendering them two-dimensional and discouraging any sensory involvement beyond sight. The immediate accessibility of exhibition was transformed into an esoteric system, which suggested that "truth" was not immediately apprehensible but required study, initiation, and knowledge of particulars. "Natural history was no longer a matter of surface and exteriority, and therefore of mere aesthetic arrangement and disposition, but rather one of depth and interiority in the empirical sense. Admirative joy gave way to autopsic glee" (Olalquiaga "Object Lesson/Transitional Object"). Curiosity cabinets were no longer about the clutter and curiosity of the Renaissance Wunderkammern but about systematic inquiry, and inquiry was no longer about looking but about studying, learning the boundaries of categories, reading nature's text--no matter that nature's text was ordered, defined, and ultimately written by humans.

Brain Maps, Icons & Indices, THE END.

"So anyway, like I was saying" is part introduction, part resignation concerning a debate I've addressed obliquely but hope to illustrate a little more bluntly here. But I've resisted roughhandling it so far, this little argument, because roughness begets dichotomous, angsty things I want nothing to do with, no way. I don't want to see this intricate argument turned out and pried apart. And I certainly don't want to see it solved. Some things, particularly this sort of debate, lose to the wastes of resolution what made them meaningful all along: an ability to exist outside strict categorization, to remain unnamed.

But to keep an air of inscrutability about this business, I won't yet address this thing directly. Indirectness and uncertainty -- in fiction, these often lead to revelation of identity and knowledge. There's Box Man, the narrator of Kobo Abe's The Box Man, who lives and moves about Tokyo in a cardboard box he outfitted with one-way windows and little air holes and hooks. A chapter near the end is titled "In His Dream the Box Man Takes His Box Off. Is This the Dream He Had Before He Began Living in a Box or Is It the Dream of His Life After He Left It...?" Ambiguous 'its'...ambiguity abounds. So too in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, where "box" is physical appearance and literature the frame for the contexts Orlando's many guises suggest. That unity can be achieved via opposition and divisibility is the idea that disguise and change make clear, especially in something like Dhalgren, an ode to mutability and who-the-hell-am-I meanderings that arrive by departure from any pretense to a coherent story. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the same people keep appearing as different people, and in this time-bound cycle there's the sense that while individual crusades will fail, the answers each is after are somehow contained in an overarching and messy and glorious thrust toward...who knows. It contains that answer, too.

It's in this light I want to suggest that science relies on metaphor -- whether admittedly or not -- whenever it makes claims about the outcome of experiment. A recent article illustrates this nicely with its suggestion that we'll soon be able to experiment on simulations of bacteria rather than on bacteria itself (itsselves?). The reason? We already know all there is to know about bacteria -- it's a closed system, so modeling it is less complicated than modeling something like the brain, about which much is still unknown. As the article suggests, models are becoming experimental subjects, proving valid at least one instance of the annoying postmodern claim that science really just ends up investigating its own constructs. That aside, what give me hope is the fact that the human brain, the unknown that it is, allows debates like this one to sprawl and mutate and get absolutely no closer to resolution on this coordinated thrust toward who the hell knows. Where it's headed doesn't so much matter, does it?

What to expect

Soon: A last post about brains.
And then: What happened when a lecture on the Ptolemaic universe and theism inspired a daydream about aliens.