Naming and framing ‘Nature’ in Photographie Zoologique

Abstract

‘For natural history to appear,’ wrote Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, our collective understanding of nature did not have to grow progressively more dense and obscure, amassing authority under an ‘opaque weight’ of unexplainable facts and scientific calculations. Instead, Foucault believed the opposite had to occur: ‘it was necessary,’ he wrote, ‘for History to become Natural.’1 Foucault distinguished between the archaic tasks of the seventeenth-century collector of curiosities, who amassed specimens because they were interesting or rare, and the nineteenth-century natural historian, who collected specimens in order to discover deep structures that linked together diverse species, ultimately forging conceptual links between those specimens and the origins of mankind.2 while the former examined, named and classified phenomena using both a terminology he considered neutral and an approach he believed unmediated, the nineteenthcentury natural historian had no illusions that his task was anything but historical and contextual: his primary activities involved incorporating the texts of his predecessors and making historical commentaries about natural phenomena while constructing the new lexis of the scientific catalogue.