The Science of Letters
Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin
Published 21 June 2016
The Apparency of Evidence
It cannot be said that the matters of science are uncertain just because they abound with quarrels and controversies.
— Spinoza, Ethics, 1677
This essay considers how the ethical and
epistemological confusions apparent in the private reflections of European
naturalists of the nineteenth century suggest an alternative history of
colonial science and its long-presumed positivist trajectory. By attending to some
lesser-known letters, exchanges, notebooks, and ephemera found among the
well-ordered annals of natural history, our aim is to delineate a minor history of uncertainty. This
attempt is not simply a matter of correcting the historical record, nor is it
an effort to
exonerate those responsible for developing or implementing typically violent
programs of colonial expansion, whether by way of cartography, collections, or
other means of empire and publicity. Instead, by mapping a minor history of
uncertainty throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and by traversing the torrid
zone alongside several figures in pursuit of new knowledge to bring back to Europe,
our aim is to trouble an image of science which continues to obstruct environmental justice in the present. 1 Simply put, we believe
that the enduring image of science as an enterprise committed to a positivist
clarification of knowledge through the elimination of any ethical friction or moral
doubt subverts contemporary climate change science and related inquiries into
biodiversity loss, mass extinction, and planetary toxicity.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ccd6e08f04021e8c89afb316089f6cd8cfb0e8836207024abd7fcd410c15fc3/H_TrumpTweet.png)
Fig. 01. @realdonaldtrump denying climate change, 6 November 2012.
Before
we consider European expeditions in the Indonesian archipelago and the various
expressions of the will to knowledge which these journeys reified in the
history of science, it is necessary to recount three more recent events that further
clarify the stakes of this history by exposing its pernicious if difficult-to-discern
legacy.
17
November 2009. In anticipation of the United
Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) set to be held in Copenhagen,
Denmark, in December 2009, the servers of the Climate Research Unit at the
University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, were attacked. Hackers copied
thousands of files, documents, and emails, then leaked them to various internet
sites for global distribution and commentary. The suggestion that the hack exposed
evidence of falsified climate data—thus proving climate change was an
orchestrated conspiracy—was thoroughly promoted by climate denialists,
including James Delingpole, executive editor for the London branch of the
Breitbart News Network, who first named the incident “Climategate.” That far-right
extremist, white supremacist, and conspiratorial media outlets could so thoroughly
leverage the incident to suggest that there was no scientific consensus on
anthropogenic climate change certainly requires further discussion; however, our
concern in this essay are the latent assumptions about scientific consensus
that the hack revealed. 2 If the publics who read
about it online or
in the mainstream press, or saw it televised on cable news networks, had a
greater appreciation for the subjective uncertainties that constitute the real
work of science, instead of the positivist image of decisive objectivity, would
there have been a controversy at all? Even when we admit the role played by
climate denialists in falsely extrapolating scientific conspiracy theories from
the hacked data of the Climate Research Unit, it is evident that non-scientific
communities could be better inoculated against such flagrant falsehoods if they
shared a more sensitive and dynamic image of science. Which is to say: a
post-positivist image of science wherein uncertainty on one stratum does not
prevent consensus on another would be an essential component of the aesthetics
of evidence in the Anthropocene. 3
22 April 2017. From the March for
Science homepage: “In more than 600 cities around the world, we marched as an
unprecedented coalition of organizations and individuals. We marched because
science is critical to our health, economies, food security, and safety. We
marched to defend the role of science in policy and society.” 4 It is essential to
acknowledge that the need to “march for science” in 2017 might have seemed
unnecessary were it not for the inauguration of the new President of the United States,
Donald J. Trump, in January of the same year. That “science,” as a mode of
inquiry, now requires public demonstrations in a manner that was until very
recently the purview of social movements is a rather startling indicator of the
apparency of evidence in the era of Trump. 5 While the Trump White
House promoted homegrown “alt-truths” on issues from U.S. health care and
taxation to veterans affairs and missile launches, the disconcerting deletion
of climate change information and related public data sources from government
websites also helped to draw hundreds of thousands of marchers around the world
into the streets. “What do we want? Evidence-based policies! When do we want
them? After peer-review!” Amidst these unprecedented calls for the protection
of a properly scientific
evidentiary, what post-positivist image of science can we help co-produce? How
can we help ensure that the various pro-science reactions to Trump-era attacks avoid
simply reifying an image of science that undermines broader but no less urgent
questions about epistemological diversity, knowledge co-production, and the
social and environmental consequences of techno-scientific endeavors undercapitalism? 6
17 February 2017. As Scott Pruitt assumed
his duties as the 14th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) of the United States of America, the fact that as Attorney General of
Oklahoma he sued the EPA no fewer than fourteen times was not lost on America’s
scientific community. The EPA
was established in 1970 under an Executive Order from then-U.S. President
Richard Nixon, who saw the agency as a necessary extension of the federal
government that could help to protect human and environmental health. That
Trump would appoint a known climate skeptic and long-time industry advocate to head
the EPA signaled, in no uncertain terms, that the agency would be thoroughly
dismantled both in terms of providing evidence-based policy, as well as
upholding environmental legislation such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
How, when facing such a severe attack on the scientists and their ability to
shape policy through research (not to mention research funding and global research collaborations), can a
history of ethical uncertaintycontribute to the self-defense of human and nonhuman worlds?
Indeed,
as climate change studies warn persistently of devastating trajectories for
human and nonhuman worlds alike, the Trump administration’s disposition toward scientific
research makes the current essay particularly untimely. In this moment of anti-science (as well as the industry-backed non-science, which has attempted
to undermine the integrity of public debate at least since the end of WWII),
alt-truths, and accelerating climate change, is it not more important than ever
to rally behind an image of science as an objective, incontrovertible,
collective human endeavor? While we acknowledge the increasing acrimony of thisapparent debate as well as ongoing
disputes between scientists and industry-backed researchers who intentionally
create doubts about valid scientific findings, we nevertheless believe that to
be drawn uncritically into such a binary weakens the power of collectives and communities
to respond effectively to attacks on their neighborhoods, their health, and their
variously constituted worlds. 7 Neither Trump, nor Pruitt,
nor their climate change-denying supporters will be defeated by a neo-positivist
image of science because their matters of concern are not scientific; instead, what
is at stake is power. 8 And, in the struggle
against racist, populist State-capitalism, its environmental violence, and its
life-threatening externalities which have been aggregating together in the
atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution as planetary
climate change, a more powerful science is definitely not one still tricked by
a positivist promotional campaign. In his remarkable essay on the scientist and
engineer S.V. Seshadri, historian Shiv Visvanathan emphasizes the need to
transform the work of science itself, “to create a science that thought with
its hands, a science that was more sexual and sensual, a science that was sensitive
to suffering." 9 This, in our estimation, is a science at
once worth fighting for and worth fighting with;
indeed, many examples of lithe, scientific practices are now proliferating as
the pressures for communities to defend themselves from the ravages of
capitalism become ever-more acute. 10 In what follows, we
develop a minor history of uncertainty as a way to help describe what is at
stake in the suppression of non-positivist scientific sensitivities. To
reanimate a sensitive science for the Anthropocene, the colonial image of
science that still represents the will to knowledge as a triumphalist suppression
of doubt must also be decolonized; again, this is no strategy of exoneration,
but rather the necessary overcoming of a powerful image of science that not
only weakens our sensitivities in the present, but that never really was.
In
the intellectual shadow of scientific papers, which can only ever announce the
confident findings of an objective mode of inquiry, we find so many other
letters and notebooks that declare, sometimes emphatically and often in confused
or ambiguous terms, an altogether different affect. When we pay closer
attention to these uncertainties, it becomes clear that even the most confident
figures in the pantheon of modern science flinched when considering the ethical
implications of their work. As a man of social rank with deep connections to
the Church of England, Charles Darwin hesitantly pondered the danger of his
ideas about evolution; inevitably, he was aware of the potential accusations of
heresy his work might solicit from his fellow Victorians, confident as they
were about the unity of nature wherein every creature purposefully inhabited
its position within God’s unchanging master plan. Fifteen years before he would
agree to publishing On the Origin of
Species (1859), Darwin admitted his bad conscience about “presumptuously”
believing in species’ mutability to his colleague Joseph Hooker with the
parenthetical remark: “(it is like confessing a murder).” 11 While Darwin’s concern
over the consequences of his ideas were well-founded, the history of scientific
letters suggests this concerned comportment is less of an aberration than it
might appear in the textbook accounts of the Great Men of Science. In fact, nagging doubts about the ethics and
implications of scientific research were a psychological condition familiar
among the colonial explorers and naturalists of the nineteenth century. But, if
Darwin’s concerns were keyed to the metaphysical structure of Victorian life,
the will to scientific knowledge in the colonial tropics raised a different set
of vexing questions about the environmental consequences of their inquiries.
Michel
Foucault, a philosopher more attentive to systems of thought than perhaps any
other in the twentieth century, once explained that the objective of philosophy
“is to render visible precisely what is visible, that is, to make appear that
which is so near, that which is so immediate, so immediately bound to ourselves
that we for that very reason do not perceive it.” 12 In this estimation, “if
the role of science is to make known that which we don’t see, the role of
philosophy is to make us see what we see.” 13 While these two
objectives are present among the trajectories of the will to knowledge that
Foucault describes in his inaugural lecture course at the Collège de France, it is
another, more ambivalent mode of evidence that we discover in circulation among
the letters of colonial naturalists in the Indonesian archipelago. 14 If philosophy renders
visible what had been too
visible to see, and science brings to light what was previously beneath the
“threshold of detectability,” 15 hallucinations are a part of that curious brand of revelation which
weaves together the seen and unseen by way of spectacular, networked patterns
of incorporeal connectivity. 16 Among the European
dropouts who elected to find their fame and fortune on the shores of faraway
colonies, we discover the precise inversion of this revelatory phenomenon.
Instead of iridescent connections mending together the dimensions of apparent and latent
reality, the perceptions of colonial scientists are blurred by the recurrence
of “reverse hallucinations”—an expression borrowed from William Gibson by way
of Ricardo Dominguez—which occasion events of not seeing what is manifestly
present. Let us now turn to the torrid zone in the nineteenth century,
where we will quickly discover how the colonial segregation of subjective,
ethical life from the objectivity- oriented will to scientific knowledge both
encouraged and relied upon reverse-hallucinatory discrepancies between the obvious and the obscure.
Colonial Contours
You are free to conjure up an ecology, a demography, and a
geography that would be most favorable to the state and its ruler. What, in those
circumstances, would you design?
—
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (2010)
Among its vast collection, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (State Library of
Berlin) contains an original map of the geology of the
island of Java, published by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (1809–1864) in 1855. To
view this, the first comprehensive map of the world’s most populated island,
visitors can request an appointment online. After waiting several weeks, and upon
arriving at the library’s Maps Collection, it is then possible to unfold a three-meter-long
rendering of Java across several pristine library tables. The quality of the
production is compelling, awesome even. In a world dominated by Google Earth
and its military-grade resolution, the achievements of this mid-nineteenth-century
map are still irreproachable. The Perpustakaan Nasional di Indonesia (National
Library of Indonesia) in Jakarta also contains an original of Junghuhn’s map,
albeit the section profile included in the first volume of his publication Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke und
innere Bauart, published in 1852. Extending 153 centimeters, this foldout
illustration depicts all of the Indonesian island’s peaks, arranged from west
to east across its 1,000-kilometer length, at a ratio of 1:18.25.
In
Berlin, in order to view the map visitors must leave behind their ink pens upon
entering the research room. Inside, they must wear a pair of white flannel
gloves to further protect this precious document of colonization––heralded
among historians of cartography as a remarkable achievement––from any human
damage. In Jakarta, the tome containing the section map is passed over the librarian’s
counter; opening it to reveal the century-old lithograph, visitors are
confronted with numerous moldy stains, perpetually conjured by the tropical
humidity. The precarious state surely points to a lack of institutional funding
that would be necessary to preserve this century-old paper stock; but, when the
map begins to crumble as it is unfolded for viewing, its efficacy of a colonial
tool of power comes into question. What does it mean to witness the decay of
such a document in the place it once served to conquer? The history of
Junghuhn’s map and its attendant socio-spatial consequences helps to trace the
colonial contours that enabled the island of Java to become fully addressable
by its European occupiers. Because any cartographic addressability ultimately
expedites forms of violence typical of both historical and contemporary
imperialism, such endeavors must be understood as part of the colonial will to
science that renders legible and measurable the entangled territories of
tropical life. 17
While various other cartographers
attempted to capture Java’s contours before and during the six years in which
Junghuhn produced his Javakaart,
these efforts were typically based on an awkward assemblage of incomplete
fragments. What distinguishes Junghuhn’s survey is the fact that he was the
sole cartographer to chart the horizontal expanse of the island in its
entirety. As a lover of the region’s high altitudes, he achieved this total and
totalizing image by climbing nearly all of Java’s peaks in order to measure and
triangulate the distances among the mountains in relation to two astronomically
determined points on the northern coast of Java, in the cities of Batavia and
Surabaya. He could then extrapolate their latitude and longitude in relation to
Greenwich, England. In addition to using compasses and a sextant, he employed a
barometer, which helped him to measure atmospheric pressure and thus altitudes
with remarkable accuracy. 18 The stunning precision of Junghuhn’s
maps revolutionized geological and geographical knowledge of Java, then the
most important island in the most important colony occupied by the Netherlands:
more than a century would pass before these maps required any significant
updating through modern cartographic means. 19 According to historian
Renate Sternagel, Junghuhn was ensnared in a contradictory position, pitting
the ambitions of his colonial employers against his own, formidable Romantic
ambition for personal freedom: “As a natural scientist Junghuhn loved untouched
nature, the ‘wilderness,’ and hated ‘civilization.’” 20At the same time, through
his work as surveyor and collector, “he embodied [...] the ideal of the
progressive-thinking colonial explorer, who played his part in taking measurements
of the world, as a forerunner for soldiers and planters.” 21 It is worth emphasizing
that, at least in the context of scientific endeavor, the cartographic will to
knowledge coincides almost exactly with the colonial will to power. As in many
other cases, the map of Java served as an “imperialist weapon,”
determining
friends and enemies among those mapping and those being mapped. 22
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c37bb39796a67c09c0abc181a465e1bc19cbd35249f154f51a46e1a2d2b37133/D_Junghuhn_JavaMap.jpg)
Fig. 02. F.W. Junghuhn’s “Kaart van het Eiland Java.” Breda: A.J. Bogaerts, 1855. Scale 1:35,000; format 79 × 308 cm. Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin —Preußischer Kulturbesitz.