Early Twentieth-century Science Research Articles

Unclean stream: Representing selfhood in Joyce and Lewis

AbstractThis article explores questions of selfhood in Joyce's Ulysses and the early work of Wyndham Lewis. I argue that although Joyce apparently uses the stylistic technique of “stream of consciousness” to unravel the consistent agency of the conscious ego, in so doing his writing both echoes the discoveries of early twentieth century science and re‐inscribes the ethical potential of subjectivity. I follow the trajectory of Scott Klein by examining the supposed literary rivalry between Joyce and Wyndham Lewis in terms of contrasting strategies for representing the “I” and the eye, the ego and the gaze. In Lewis' early work with its “wild anthropology,” I trace a critique of the model of subjectivity implied by “stream of consciousness,” a critique that anticipates key aspects of psychoanalytic theory. By switching the narrative centre from the logocentric “I” to the toxic gaze of the Other, Lewis aims to challenge the metaphysical presuppositions of “stream of consciousness” and thus expose one of the defining techniques of modernist writing as deluded or fraudulent. I conclude by examining the political dimension of Lewis' early work, arguing that the modernist stream of consciousness should be seen not merely as a stylistic practice but as an ethical one (in the sense indicated by Marian Eide).

Trans* Plasticity and the Ontology of Race and Species

During the 1920s, French surgeon Serge Voronoff became an international sensation for his technique of grafting chimpanzee testicular matter into human testicles. Félicien Champsaur’s 1929 popular speculative fiction novel, Nora, la guenon devenue femme (Nora, the Ape-Woman), imagines the possibilities of human-ape ontological and erotic proximity suggested by Voronoff’s practice of gland xenotransplantation, or transspecies transplantation. This article puts Nora and the early twentiethcentury science of ductless glands (ovaries, testicles, thyroid, thalamus, etc.) into conversation with trans* new materialist science studies around their shared investment in plasticity. In so doing, it contributes to the burgeoning inquiry into transsex, tranimal, and transspecies plasticity— which the author terms, jointly, trans* plasticity—while interrogating the affirmative and even utopian valance of such inquiry. Trans* plasticity describes the capacity of organic matter to transform itself in ways that transgress ontological divides among sex, race, and species. Building on Eva Hayward and Che Gossett’s claim that “the Human/Animal divide is a racial and colonial divide,” this article zeroes in on the historical process by which race and animality were produced in relation to each other. Ultimately, the author argues that gland xenotransplantation was a use of trans* plasticity that generated rather than troubled the ontobiological concepts of sexual, racial, and species difference.

Ernst Cassirer's transcendental account of mathematical reasoning

Cassirer's philosophical agenda revolved around what appears to be a paradoxical goal, that is, to reconcile the Kantian explanation of the possibility of knowledge with the conceptual changes of nineteenth and early twentieth-century science. This paper offers a new discussion of one way in which this paradox manifests itself in Cassirer's philosophy of mathematics. Cassirer articulated a unitary perspective on mathematics as an investigation of structures independently of the nature of individual objects making up those structures. However, this posed the problem of how to account for the applicability of abstract mathematical concepts to empirical reality. My suggestion is that Cassirer was able to address this problem by giving a transcendental account of mathematical reasoning, according to which the very formation of mathematical concepts provides an explanation of the extensibility of mathematical knowledge. In order to spell out what this argument entails, the first part of the paper considers how Cassirer positioned himself within the Marburg neo-Kantian debate over intellectual and sensible conditions of knowledge in 1902–1910. The second part compares what Cassirer says about mathematics in 1910 with some relevant examples of how structural procedures developed in nineteenth-century mathematics.

Trajectories in the History and Historiography of Physics in the Twentieth Century

BOMB HISTORIOGRAPHIES, I: BY ANALOGYSeveral months after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 2 November 1945 J. Robert Oppenheimer gave an address to the scientists at Los Alamos that many remembered years later. To gain some understanding of their situation, Oppenheimer told his colleagues one naturally looked for analogy, first to the development of relativity, atomic theory and quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century, and second to the era in which science had disentangled itself from religion in the renaissance. In the early twentieth century science had forced a reconsideration of the nature of reality and the relations between science and common sense; and still earlier its very existence and value had been in question. Oppenheimer thought his analogy imperfect, because nothing in the experience of building the bombs had involved revolutionary ideas.1 Yet both the events he lit upon and the limits he saw to the analogy reveal widely shared assumptions, which have arguably shaped much historical writing on physics in the twentieth century. When academic historians of science first began publishing on the twentieth century, a decade or so after Oppenheimer spoke, they were preoccupied with the subjects of Oppenheimer's analogy, perhaps for similar reasons, and sometimes to teach similar lessons about the relations between science and the everyday. They also incorporated the terms of his description into their analyses of scientific change; yet they rarely dealt explicitly with atomic bombs. After considering the contexts in which histories of physics were written before 1945 in this introduction, the second section of this essay will examine the characteristics of this early concentration of academic historiographical thought. Tracing trajectories of historical concern with relativity and quantum theory will show that in fifty years of historical research, a focus on revolution and ideas has never been fully shaken off, but it has been met by the challenges of social causation, by the demand to pay due attention to experiment and the material dimensions of science, by an interrogation of the political dimensions of work in physics and a concern with the institutions of big science, and also by the rise of cultural histories, some of whose central characters are not scientists at all. From the 1980s, historians have increasingly focused attention on Oppenheimer's situation and the complex demands of physics in the cold war era, so much so that this may well form the present centre of gravity of research in history of physics. Exploring the consequences and limitations of our now explicit concern with bomb historiographies will occupy the third and fourth sections of this essay.First, consider how understandings of the history of physics were shaped in the early twentieth century. Oppenheimer's sense ofthat history is likely to have been formed from a range of sources, but most viscerally through his education and research. As a student at Harvard from 1922 his voracious reading of science texts was so improbably impressive that he was allowed to shift straight from chemistry into upper level courses in physics. After graduating in 1925 he moved through Cambridge, Gottingen, and other European centres before fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard, and beginning teaching at Berkeley in 1929. There his work in the new quantum mechanics helped found a school of theoretical physics side-by-side with the ever-expansive experimental work on accelerators being led by Ernest Lawrence.2 In 1932, Oppenheimer wrote his brother Frank to say his work was fine, not in fruits but in the doing: We are busy studying nuclei and neutrons and disintegrations; trying to make some place between the inadequate theory and the revolutionary experiments.3 Had he looked for histories of his subject, between his reading in Sanskrit, of Plato, and physics, Oppenheimer could have drawn on only a few professional histories of science, and most of those focused on earlier centuries. …

The letters of Sigmund Freud & Otto Rank: inside psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud's relationship with Otto Rank was the most constant, close, and significant of his professional life. Freud considered Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. The two collaborated on psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank was the managing director of Freud's publishing house; and after several years helping Freud update his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, Rank contributed two chapters. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page. This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break. The 250 letters between Freud and Rank compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from 1906 through 1925. The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of the two but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other details about their personal and professional lives. Most interestingly, the letters trace Rank's growing independence, the father-son schism over Rank's anti-Oedipal heresy, their surprising reconciliation, and the moment when the two parted ways permanently. Presenting a candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families, the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis grew in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics. A rich primary source on psychology, history, and culture, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank is a cogent and powerful narrative of the history of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.

Was Early Twentieth-Century Criminology a Science of the ‘Other’? A Re-evaluation of Austro-German Criminological Debates

In the course of the last decade or two, there has been a growing historiographic consensus that the early twentieth-century science of criminology in Germany and elsewhere in Europe is best understood as a body of knowledge that aimed to identify and classify criminals independent of their criminal acts. The aim of this science, then, was to construct – and frequently eliminate – the criminal as ‘other’. As such, scholars have broadly endorsed the Foucauldian narrative that initiated interest in the history of criminology, despite frequent quibbles with Foucault's methodology and empirical legwork. Recent scholarship has investigated the nature and chronology of the shift from criminal anthropology to criminal psychology, the interaction of criminological/penological theory with prison practice, and the interaction of criminology with broader medical and social knowledges, from degeneration theory to social statistics. The results of this research tend to strengthen the above-described consensus, unsurprisingly perhaps given that they draw on it as their implicit theoretical foundation.My paper seeks to challenge this vision of criminology as a science centring solely upon the deviance of the criminal. It does so by drawing attention to the work of Hans Gross, an Austro-German criminologist and criminalist, and the debates raging in the Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, a criminological journal edited by Gross. I will argue that Gross has been unjustly sidelined as a narrow-minded, practice-orientated reactionary whose ideas concerned investigative technique only and had no theoretical impact on criminology. I will show that Gross's critique of criminological methodology was founded on sophisticated theoretical doubts which induced him to turn away from the assumption of criminal deviance as the starting point of a science concerned with criminality. His ideas both reflected and fed a much wider debate within criminology and its attendant disciplines concerned with quasi-pathological phenomena among the general population, thus blurring any line that would delineate criminal and non-criminal. At the same time, implicitly, Gross and his followers erected a sharp line of demarcation that separated the unreliable, proto-degenerate masses on the one hand from trained, educated, and rational experts on the other.

Nature Conservationism and the Arctic Commons of Spitsbergen 1900–1920

The purpose of this article is to show how national interests and western ideas about the polar wilderness influenced initiatives taken in the early decades of the twentieth century to protect the natural environment of the Arctic islands of Spitsbergen, today called Svalbard. After a brief outline of the environmental history of the islands, the explanatory significance of a game theory-based assumption about the predicament of nature conservation on common land is discussed by applying it to this historical case. It is the environmental dilemma known as the “tragedy of the commons”. Some elements of the western and Scandinavian ideological interpretations of the Arctic nature are introduced as a background to the following discussion of the most significant early initiative of nature conservation in the Arctic: Hugo Conwentz's proposal for the protection of the nature of Spitsbergen of 1914. The conception and outcome of Conwentz's initiative is explained by references to the political, social and ideological contexts of early twentieth-century science and colonialism. In the final section, the post-war development of the environmental administration of the islands is correlated to the political situation following World War I with its many historical contingencies and the breakdown of internationalism in science and nature conservation.

An American Anthropologist in Melanesia: A B Lewis and the Joseph N Field South Pacific Expedition, 1909-1913 (review)

In the early twentieth century, American anthropologist A B Lewis undertook a remarkable ethnological expedition to collect objects, mainly from New Guinea, for Chicago's burgeoning Field Museum. And collect he did! Lewis returned with an astounding 14,000 items and 2,000 photographs. Pioneering though he was, Lewis's contributions to Pacific Island studies have been difficult to appreciate. But no longer. In an encyclopedic effort, Robert Welsch has masterfully compiled Lewis's field diaries and annotated them with a wealth of contextual information culled from Lewis's photos and writings, museum storerooms and archives, maps and gazettes, and his own fieldwork along the north coast of Papua NewGuinea. This innovative two-volume work is important for anthropology, history, museology, and material culture studies. It offers a comprehensive, textual and pictographic view of a pivotal era in Pacific studies, showing how early twentieth-century science quite literally "saw" Pacific Islanders and their things.

Miyazawa Kenji and the Lost Gandharan Painting

M IYAZAWA KENJI RNW6, 1896-1933, was a writer of astonishing imaginative powers. The reader of his poems and stories enters a world where the familiar has been subtly altered, charged with new meaning, and interspersed with the exotic, erudite, and unfamiliar. Scenes from the everyday world are apt at any moment to give way to vast, unexpected vistas richly ornamented with motifs from Buddhist scriptures and early twentiethcentury science. Anyone who looks into Kenji's work becomes perforce a traveler in a strange land and, like most travelers, is better off in the company of a guide. In the past several years scholars have been reading his work closely and supplying definitions of difficult vocabulary as needed.' Using a system of crossreferences between the poems and stories and their various drafts, they have begun to reach a consensus about the meaning of landmarks and characters in Kenji's world. The driving idea behind this project is the realization that Kenji assigned a relatively consistent value to his images and figures; if it is possible to understand what a raging asura or a whisp of frozen nitrogen is doing in one piece, it is reasoned, then there is a good chance of understanding what it is doing in another. The present article takes a single recurrent image from Kenji's work, that of a lost Gandharan Buddhist painting unearthed from the sands of western China, and examines it in all its manifestations. This quest will lead to the home of the mural (or murals) in the far west of China to an area historically called Hsi-yti (J. Saiiki or Seiiki) NAi and referred to as the Western Marches in English-language works. Assuming that this theme held a related and consistent set of associations for the poet, we will examine a number of pieces, both stories and poems, in which he uses a similar image taken from Central Asian art. In this way we will be able to bring greater sensitivity and depth to our reading of all the pieces in the corpus of Kenji's literature that deal with the