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.
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.
posted by evelyn at 3:13 PM
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