Cultural progress is attached, undeniably, to modern science, so much so that cultural progress is thought to follow scientific progress. But what sort of cultural progress follows a science in which the myth of progress has been discounted? In the manner of using science to understand its limits, we could focus, as Latour has shown, on the constant preoccupation of scientists with inscription, in order to show how the documents and artifacts of “science proper” over the last 105 years, signify “different” science, but only intensifications, rather than a direct line of development from the past to the future. With From Charcot to Mitterand, I have synthesized an alternate, composite text from Max Nordau’s 19th Century work, Degeneration, and Pierre Bourdieu’s 20th Century work, Distinction, in order to suggest “different” science, but not necessarily “better” science.

Dealing with Proto-Freudian psychology and Post-Structuralist sociology, From Charcot shows in particular how the 19th Century gives “science” its signification, and how the 20th Century gives “science” its signification. What would a document of science and its practices and agents look like if the ideals of the era of one “existed” in the time of the other? Or what would a hybrid document, as a composite of two eras say in turn about the social science of Nordau and Bourdieu?

Poetics, alternative ideologies, stratagems, and values, we suggest in studying, comparatively, 19th and 20th Century authorship in the sciences, thus requiring hybrid epistemologies of science. With hybrid epistemologies of science, we can create a poetics, and if we are the creators of a specimen, of a text that needs the world around it to become layered and multiple, we have to create that world through knowledge, information, research, and history.

I have traced potential and parallel sources of 19th Century literature and psychology--as well as 20th Century reflexive sociology, creating texts that share a field of knowledge with Distinction and Degeneration. I have mapped, through textual artifacts, words, letters, sentences--the relationships of Nordau’s and Bourdieu’s dual textual artifacts.

The 19th Century, in part, saw a continuation of the mechanical philosophies of Hobbes and Newton in the face of the new sciences of biology and of the mind. Along with the systematization and control of the body through the factory, commerce, and advertising, as well as nascent science in other fields, Sigmund Freud and Max Nordau, disciples of Charcot, developed the science of psychology, although in different ways and in different degrees of prominence. For Freud’s development of a mode of analysis that potentially could “free” the mind and thus the body, Nordau paralleled this work in Degeneration, with a textual analysis of literature, the so-called reservoir of potentially “pure” or “diseased” artistic production. Rather than a systematization of the unconscious, Nordau’s text is a product of the clash between the medical bourgeoisie and an emerging class of literary artists such as Oscar Wild and Henrick Ibsen.

What is the process by which we see, then, science in its historical context? I propose that a composite of current science with the science of the past, can demonstrate how models are made, how agents are organized, and how paradigms are altered in the Kuhnian sense of scientific revolutions. Maintaining a relational description of the Structuralists and Post-Structuralists, we see that the trajectory of a text that goes forward to incorporate texts of the past and present while going backward to the genesis of references which denote a shared field of textual sources, suggests that meaning forms from aggregates and not from the thing itself, or in isolation. From Charcot offers the opportunity for the process of writing to in turn offer an artifact that is hybrid and to necessitate a reader that is a hybrid interpreter.

As a solution to the structuralist dilemma, From Charcot takes the form of fragments: non-contiguous passages that necessitate a variety of textual strategies, from hypermedia to careful inspection akin to that of the reader of ancient scroll fragments. Not by their estimated importance but by the conceptual constraint of the fragment, does From Charcot necessitate a careful reading. With these fragments, I hope to suggest a larger text, and the notion of an alternative text, without requiring a total mimesis of an author like in Borges’ Pierre Monod.

Through texts and the written element of science, From Charcot seeks to show how texts operate as artifacts that parallel the “data” forming shared resources in the literary, authorial, and scientific fields. From Charcot is an attempt to consciously construct an artifact of unconscious patterns in history-writing, sociology, and psychology. Because of the valence behind incorporation and appropriation of references, which are sewn into the fabric of informational and cultural networks, From Charcot is a concrete text, in the way that Bourdieu’s writing incorporates long sentences, but practical speech-acts and ways of saying--as well as the concrete artifacts of the society in which he found himself, as well as the society in which Nordau found himself.

Immersed in the text, in turn immersed in the field of cultural production, we must strive to realize both how we may immerse ourselves, and what, after all, is outside of the text.

--Gregory Bringman