Dissertation Research: Practices of Representation

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project traces the contentious debate between Frangois Arago and JeanBaptiste Biot over the nature of light in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although often presented as a brief and pointed clash over the particle and wave theories of light, their long-standing disagreement was in fact rooted in the issues of practice: whether the images they produced in their optical instruments were transparently available to all, or only to those who knew precisely how light worked. This work explores the ways in which optical instruments, and the associated material culture and bodily techniques, participated in dividing the world into domains of visibility and invisibility, and how this in turn functioned on a political level as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Both Arago and Biot were explicit in tying their respective commitments to transparency and mystery to claims about who was qualified to speak on worldly matters, and thus who belonged within the bounds of the communicative public represented by the state.