“With the aid of the reflecting shield of literary theory, scientists may free themselves from these bonds, first, by realizing that they tell stories and, second, by recognizing that they may put them to good purpose. Stories may be strong of jaw, but like Huxley’s dragon, they can be serviceable creatures.” — Misia Landau, “Narratives of Human Evolution,” pp. 2-3
With the claustrophobic pressures of hyperspecialization, it seems increasingly difficult for one person to both engage in the creation of scientific knowledge and be a raconteur for science. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rule (Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan), but these seem only to prove the rule. The changing nature of science has incentivized the production of literarily sanitized journal articles over book-length works (where there might be more room for the researcher to engage in reflection and other narrative forms). Under these circumstances, science may tell stories, but the scientists themselves don’t seem to have time to tell them. This responsibility, then, would seem to fall to science journalists and historians of science. We’re the ones holding the flame up to science’s face, or the flashlight up from under its chin, when the narrative calls for a horror story. In this instance, the creation of histories of science becomes something akin to a non-fiction novel, a la Truman Capote. Should we collaborate more with the characters in our stories, to get the first-hand details we need? Or should we exorcise them from the storytelling endeavor altogether, lest they should attempt to taint our dispassionate undertakings by the bias of their proximity? Being the storyteller is a burden. For what purpose are we telling these stories? The aggrandizement or chastisement of science? Our own spiritual enrichment, in the humanist mode? To inform the public? All three would be nice, but then our job is storytellers is made much more difficult, if we are to have three (or more) distinct invoked audiences with three, sometimes contradictory, sets of desires and rhetorical expectations.
“. . . Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928). The aim of this book is to classify literary forms, and Russian fairy tales in particular, in the same manner that biologists classify living forms such as plants and animals: “according to their component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole.” p.3
So the literary theorists were learning from science to try to systematize their classification schema. Now it seems, if historians of science are the wardens of the narrative of science, we have a reciprocal obligation to learn from those who know how stories work. Should we be studying literature and rhetoric and composition, in addition to our studies in sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology, and all the myriad STEM disciplines? In the age of intersectionality and transdisciplinary studies in the humanities, we’re getting stretched pretty thin.
“Furthermore, Latour’s contribution argues for the centrality of pictures to the crafting of knowledge, using several important case-studies of the development of pictorial languages. Here and in an earlier paper, Latour argues that images effectively escape our attention because they are so practical, so modest, so pervasive — so close to the hands and the eyes. He emphasizes the way in which groups of people argue with one another using illustrations and argues that the importance of images is the unique advantage they give in the rhetorical or polemical situation — ‘you doubt what I say? I’ll show you.’”
— Stephanie Moser, “Visual Representation in Archaeology: Depicting the Missing-Link in Human Origins,” in Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science (Brian S. Baigrie, Ed.), pp. 186-7
The idea that “if you doubt what I say, I’ll just show you,” hinges upon our cultural conception of the image as an exact representation of reality. This is akin to saying that only verbal symbols possess rhetorical qualities, that imagery is not subject to rhetorical manipulation. This follows from the idea that pictorial languages are direct translations of the reality they depict, whereas verbal language is mediated through and constructed by the human mind, and thus possesses idiosyncrasies that imagery is immune to. This has got me thinking of Peter Galison’s Image and Logic, Daniela Bleichmar’s Visible Empire, and Daniel Margocsy’s Commercial Visions. Scientists’ selection of imagery, construction of diagrams and graphs, and aesthetic choices imbue their pictorial representations with rhetorical influences. If historians of science are going to deploy these images to forward arguments, then do we need to attain fluency in these rhetorics of aesthetics and representation? So we have to add this to our list of fluencies inferred from Landau’s recommendations: fluency in literary analysis, rhetoric, anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, STEM (chemistry, math, physics, astronomy, various engineering disciplines, biology, ecology, earth and atmospheric sciences, computer science (and all of their various sub-disciplines)) . . . and, we have to learn foreign languages to study these phenomena in their various geospatial and sociocultural contexts. How?