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This book is a history of an illusion. It is also a history of the dream that preceded the illusion. The book discusses statistics as the field of tension between the scientific claims of neutrality and universality on the one hand and the political and economic reality of the conflicting interests of nation-states on the other. The various paths of state- and nation-building that European countries traversed in the nineteenth century are recognisable in the objectives of government statistics and are reflected in the topics selected for statistical study and in the categories used in the research. Each congress was clearly dominated by the specific interests of the country in which the statisticians convened. The book shows in each case how the organisation of government statistics and national concerns influenced the international agenda. It describes the perceptions, goals and dilemmas of the protagonists and their contact with each other, and in so doing unravels the complex relationships between science, government and society, wherever possible from their point of view. The genesis of international statistics was inspired by a desire for reform. Belgium's pioneering role in the European statistical movement was informed both by its liberal polity and the special status of statistics within it, and by Adolphe Quetelet's key position as an intellectual. The consolidation of the Grand Duchy of Baden, a new medium-sized state in the Rhine Confederation and later in the German Confederation, offered great opportunities for the development of official statistics.
rooted in the architectural ekphrases from antiquity and remain the established method of describing the past in our period. In this way, for instance, Colen Campbell uses a similar technique with his survey of British architecture, Vitruvius Britannicus . We also experience a bifocal vision of the past in works such as Stuart and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens , which also draws on the European conventions of picturesque aesthetics. Both the use of the picturesque to commodify and appropriate the past, and the language of scientific neutrality are familiar
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. The subject topics covered are wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. The duality indicated by the book’s title reflects its themes. It is an experiment in writing an American sexual history that refuses the confines of identity sexuality studies, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly ‘normal’. What unites this project is a fascination with sex at the margins, refusing the classificatory frameworks of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and demonstrating gender and sexual indecision and flexibility. And the book is also an exploration of the role of the archive in such histories. The sex discussed is located both in the margins of the archives, what has been termed the counterarchive, but also, importantly, in the pockets of recorded desire located in the most traditional and respectable repositories. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow’s archive. The market is potentially extensive: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
is the scientific stance towards what remains contentious for the sciences; or, in other words, no scientific neutrality can be accomplished as long as dialectics itself does not claim neutrality. Science is either dialectical or it is nothing. The moment in which critical theory embodies dialectics is, for Marcuse, the moment of negation of the given thesis and principles. In many references, in his work and interviews, Marcuse recognizes that the scientific constructions of modernity in the twentieth century are deprived of such an embodiment of a dialectical
of organising statistical research. The statisticians who gathered in Brussels in 1853 shared a boundless optimism and believed in the scientific neutrality of statistics, but when they tried to put their ideas into practice they encountered many obstacles. Railway connections to Brussels were excellent. At that time, Belgium had the densest railway network in the world and Brussels was the main hub. International meetings were frequently staged in the city. In the period 1830– 1850 Brussels and Paris were the refuges of exiles and political fugitives. In 1841
’s caution reflects a self-conscious historicity where the practitioner is committed to maintaining a distance with the artwork. Appropriate historical distance ensured that the threat of anachronism was minimised, a built-in safeguard designed to maintain the art historian’s objectivity. Didi-Huberman’s ‘Pollock-like’ encounter with Fra Angelico’s panels is a clear rejection of Panofsky’s ambitions for the art historian’s scientific ‘neutrality’ or detachment. Didi-Huberman is seeking to restore the art historian’s subjective memory that had been carefully bracketed by
Doxiadis Associates’ scientific neutrality was in tune with Nkrumah’s position amongst the non-aligned leaders; on the other hand the firm’s almost unconditional support of international development strategies could conceal the geopolitical motives of those investing. Bounded by the harbour, the industrial area and the lagoons, the new town imagined by
been pioneered in the history of science by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. At the heart of their book, Objectivity , is a claim that the practice of science is affective, even when the claims staked for that practice are antithetical to affect. To clarify, Daston and Galison demonstrate that allusions to the objectivity of scientific practice as a core tenet of scientific neutrality are political, masking the affective behaviour of and among scientists, and enabling them to present their procedures and results as morally valueless. 3 Daston and Galison
deeply suspect, as they seem perfectly designed to enact and replicate contemporary inequalities while maintaining an effect of scientific neutrality.
of the congress. Engel was also a good strategist. He managed to persuade the Prussian government to support the congress by stressing national interests; he impressed upon the Prussian bureaucracy the administrative benefits of good statistics; and at the congress was scientific neutrality personified. The conferees did not go home empty-handed: the decisions made by the congress took up over fifty 123 chap5.indd 123 02/12/2009 12:15:06 States and statistics in the nineteenth century pages of the proceedings. As was so often the case, the positive results came