The Science of Letters

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. 

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