rheinberger_scrips and scribbles

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Scrips and Scribbles

Rheinberger, Hans-Jrg.

MLN, Volume 118, Number 3, April 2003 (German Issue), pp.

622-636 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mln.2003.0062

For additional information about this article

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622 HANS-JRG RHEINBERGER

MLN118 (2003): 622636 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Scrips and Scribbles1

Hans-Jrg Rheinberger

1. Introduction

Over the past thirty years, scientific writing and publishing hasreceived substantial coverage from the history of science and relatedliterary studies. A great deal of attention has thereby been devoted toliterary technologies, especially the different forms and tools of

rhetorical enhancement, persuasion, and dissimulation.2

This paperaddresses another aspect of scientific writing. It is concerned with thescrips and scribbles of the laboratory, that research place wherescientific knowledge is made to emerge and can be grasped in itsemergence. An increasing amount of literature in the history ofscience, especially from historians of science and technology con-cerned with micro-historical reconstructions, has been devoted tolaboratory notebooks and other forms of laboratory and researchinscription.3 With few exceptions, however, the epistemic function of

such notes in the overall order of knowledge production has been

1 I thank Colin Milburn for editing this text and improving its readability.2 See, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump:

Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985);Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge. The Genre and Activity of the ExperimentalArticle in Science(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1988); Greg Myers, WritingBiology. Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge(Madison: The University ofWisconsin Press 1990); Timothy Lenoir (ed.), Inscribing Science. Scientific Texts and theMateriality of Communication(Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998).

3 From a science study perspective, see Karin Knorr Cetina, The Manufacture ofKnowledge. An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford:Pergamon Press 1981); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life. The Construc-tion of Scientific Facts(Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986); for an overview from


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have not yet definitely become paper, and the paperthe scrip, thescribbleis still part and parcel of a materially mediated experimen-

tal engagement. It still belongs fully to the knowledge regime of thelaboratory.

A closer look into these spaces reveals an immense variety ofprimary written research traces and marks ready for historical analy-sis. These traces reach from excerpts of research papers to notes offragmentary ideas or preliminary conjectures, from sketches ofexperimental setups to records and arrangements of data derivingfrom these experiments, from tentative interpretations of experimen-tal results to calculations, from the calibration of existing instrumen-tation to the design of new apparatus. All these and many morecomparable activities circumscribe a space, and at the same time areinscribed into a space that lies between the materialities of theexperimental systems and the spirituality of the final written commu-nications that are eventually, at a later date, released to the scientificcommunity.

The primary forms of write-ups in the laboratory have long beenregarded as simple records of data. These data in turn have been seen

as ideally resulting from some pencil of nature and thus transparentwith respect to the matter whose contours they were taken to renderintelligible. Forms of tracing such as the method of curves innineteenth century physiology or microphotography in bacteriologyat the end of the nineteenth century have been praised as instances ofsuch transparent renderings. But being the result of data collection

which usually itself already derives from a sophisticated experimentalconstellationis only one part of these graphic assessments: they arealways already part of a broader laboratory discursivity.8 They are not

the inert and extrinsic starting point for a genuinely intellectualprocess of subsequent knowledge generation, for they are themselvesan integral part of this process, deriving from and connecting theprocess to its epistemic objects. The epistemically productive functionof these tracts, tracks, and traces of an experimental system is thatthey always already display and exhibit a tentative texturalization thatcan be addressed as an intrinsic aspect of any epistemic thing.

8 Soraya de Chadarevian, Graphical Method and Discipline: Self-Recording Instru-ments in Nineteenth-Century Physiology in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science24(1993), 267291. Peter Geimer (ed.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft,Kunst und Technologie(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001).


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One of the eminent functions of the tracing and writing process atthe laboratory bench is what I would like to call the redimension-

alization of the experimental arrangement. In the most trivial sense,this means that the temporal and spatial arrangement of the experi-ment with its corresponding data scattered in four dimensions isessentially plated and pasted onto a two-dimensional surface. Sur-faces force and enable one to explore new options of ordering andarrangement. Sequential events can be displayed in simultaneity,temporal relations rendered as spatial relations. In a more sophisti-cated sense, however, a laboratory protocol produces what I wouldlike to call effects of condensation. Such condensation can extendover several stages of reduction, where at each stage, new patternsmay become perceivable according to the order and the amount ofdata compression. It is essential for a well-conducted laboratoryprotocol that such reduction processes be kept reversible. Theirepistemic productivity lies exactly in the possibility to walk transversallyalong the chain of transformations in both ways, to travel back andeventually turn the compression in another direction.9

In a sense, therefore, laboratory protocols represent the integrated

memory of whole series of experiments, a memory that makes theretrieval of data easier and possible at any time. Reducing the size ofthe memory and transforming it from a chronology into a flexiblepatchwork of signsicons, symbols, indiceshave more than aquantitative function. The ensuing redimensionalization brings thelaboratory, so to speak, into a manageable and transportable form,thereby creating novel forms of dislocation and disposition.10 Indoing so, laboratory protocols transform sources and sediments intoresources and materials that can be played with and from which new

questions may spring. Driven by the forces of compression, they setfree the inadvertent powers of synopsis inherent in their patchcondition.

In what we might call the space of primary scientific writing, theidiosyncrasies of the scientist can develop and play out their potentials.It is here that the individual style of scientific novelty production isexerted and exercised. On this level, we gain a thoroughly different

9 For a nice example of such reversibility, see Bruno Latour, Le pdofil de BoaVista in La clef de Berlin(Paris: La Dcouverte 1993), 171225.

10 Christoph Hoffmann and Peter Berz, Machs Notizbuch in ber Schall, 91141.


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idea of science in the making than on the level of texts and thepossibilities of analysis they suggest. Here we find ourselves largely in

the space of the pre-normative, where the opportunistic character ofknowledge acquisition shows itself unhindered, in the space of theassay in the deeper sense of this notion, a sense that is constitutivefor the making of science. An assay is not a trial. It is an exploratoryleap whose tentativity is not yet bound to scrutiny. Thus, the explor-atory potential of experimental systems is carried over into theexploratory space of notetaking with its enhanced freedom of combi-nation, unrestricted by narrow compatibility considerations.

As Franois Jacob has recently remarked, scientists, when goingpublic, describe their own activity as a well-ordered series of ideasand experiments linked in strict logical sequence. In scientificarticles, reason proceeds along a high road that leads from darknessto light with not the slightest error, not a hint of a bad decision, noconfusion, nothing but perfect reasoning. Flawless.11 Research notes,on the other hand, are the documentary residues, the products of

what Jacob, in contrast to the well-ordered day science, has charac-terized as the agitations of a night science. By contrast, night

science wanders blind. It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it is forever trying to find itself,question itself, pull itself back together. Night science is a sort of

workshop of the possible where what will become the buildingmaterial of science is worked out. Where hypotheses remain in theform of vague presentiments and woolly impressions. Where phe-nomena are still no more than solitary events with no link betweenthem. Where the design of experiments has barely taken shape.

Where thought makes its way along meandering paths and twisting

lanes, most often leading nowhere.12

In this contact zone halfwaybetween experiment and paper, where the shuffling and reshufflingof research notes is executed, the individual artistic potential of theresearch scientist finds its primary playground.

11 Franois Jacob, Of Flies, Mice, & Men(Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1998),125.

12 Ibid, 126.


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3. The Research Notes of Carl Correns

Let me illustrate these considerations with an example taken fromthe early history of genetics. In the spring of 1896, the Germanbotanist Carl Correns started a series of crossing experiments withpea varieties in the small botanical garden of the University ofTbingen. Since 1894, he had been searching for a solution to thexenia question: Can pollen of a different variety have a directinfluence on the characteristics of the fruit and seed of the motherplant? Correns had been screening the literature for reports of plantson which to demonstrate the phenomenon that had already puzzled

Darwin. Zea maysand Pisum sativumwere among the plants reportedto show xenia. Correns hoped to be able, first, to produce a clear-cutand indisputable example of the phenomenon by experiment. Sec-ond, he wanted to solve the riddle by a physiological-histologicalexamination of the fructification process.

The protocols of Correns experiments with Pisumand with cornhave been preserved.13 They allow us to retrace the gradual process by

which the original research question was substituted by the observa-tion and explanation of regularities in the character distribution of

the hybrid progeny, which had already been described by GregorMendel in a paper published in the Verhandlungen des NaturforschendenVereins in Brnnin 1866.14 This paper had scarcely been noticed by thecontemporaries of Mendel and in fact did not gain a wider recogni-tion until around 1900, the year marked in the annals of the historyof genetics for the rediscovery of Mendels laws. The publication ofCorrens results in the spring of 1900 was precipitated by a paper byHugo de Vries from Amsterdam reporting on the same phenomenon.15

In the years between 1894 and 1899, Correns had accumulated agrowing repository of observations that concentrated on the charac-teristics of the hybrid seeds of his two experimental plants and their

varieties. Elsewhere I have followed Correns experimental pathway

13Archive for the History of the Max-Planck-Society, Berlin, III. Abt., Rep. 17.14 Gregor Mendel, Versuche ber Pflanzen-Hybriden in Verhandlungen des Natur-

forschenden Vereins in Brnn4 (1866), 347.15 Hugo de Vries, Sur la loi de disjonction des hybrides in Comptes rendus de

lAcadmie des Sciences de Paris130 (1900), 845847; Carl Correns, G. Mendels Regelber das Verhalten der Nachkommenschaft der Rassenbastarde in Berichte der DeutschenBotanischen Gesellschaft18 (1900), 158168.


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in detail and from year to year.16 Here I would like to focus inparticular on some characteristics of his way of notetaking. It is

obvious that at the beginning, Correns attention was fully devoted tothe xeniaquestion. He experimented with a considerable number ofmaize and pea varieties that he had selected according to thecharacters of their fruits. His aim was obviously to produce a broadspectrum of hybrid fruits through which to observe and studypotential xenia. From the reciprocal crosses of these varieties heraised, in each case, a very limited number of hybrid plants which hethen carried on into the second and third generation, accompaniedby a corresponding number of control plants and backcrosses wherenecessary. Accordingly, he drew up protocols that contained detaileddescriptions for each cross of the color and structure of the seeds as

well as the embryos within them. Since he pursued these experimentsover a period of six years, the accumulated details are immense. Thehistorian looking at these details tends to become lost. But from thisimmensity, an impression of the experimenters involvement with theminutiae of his work emerges, and it becomes clear that these noteskept the arrangement of the experimental garden and the fruits of

the experimenters labor present from year to year in an almost one-to-one manner, albeit ready and arranged for condensation, as willbecome clear from what follows.

It is worth mentioning that Correns drafted his protocols in such away that he later was able at any time to trace back each individualseed and the plants raised from it to the respective plants and theseeds of the preceding generation. He thus kept a virtually completerecord of individual seed lineages on paper that he could followforward and backward. These paper tracks were complemented by

the seeds themselves, stored in boxes and on shelves: a correspondingmaterial repository. This observation is very much in line with theassumption that Correns by no means designed the starting point ofhis Pisumexperiments to corroborate a statistical regularityas wemight expect if he had derived such an idea from his first docu-mented reading of Mendels paper in 189617but rather, he waslooking for surprising seed characteristics that he expected to emerge

within this broadly conceived set of crossings.

16 Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, Carl Correns Experimente mit Pisum, 18961899 inHistory and Philosophy of theLife Sciences22 (2000), 187218.

17 Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, When did Carl Correns read Gregor Mendels paper? Aresearch note in Isis86 (1995), 612616.


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Despite their appearance as a faithful duplication of the order ofthe garden and its products on paper, the protocols were thus not

mere inert records of data. Their very design and structure related toand also translated the original object of investigation. In addition,the design of the protocols focused attention on certain aspects of theobject. On the other hand, the notes were drafted in such a way thatenough redundancy and excess of possible information existed inboth retrospective and prospective directions so as to allow forreorientation of the experimenters gaze at a later stage. Consider thefollowing example.

Fig. 1. Hybrid gr + p - A1 (yellow). Archive for the History of the Max PlanckSociety, Berlin, III. Abt., Rep. 17, Folder Pisum Results 1897. Reprinted withpermission of the Archive for the History of the Max Planck Society, Berlin.


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On this protocol sheet of 1897, we clearly see the individualizingnotation that reaches from the numbering of the plants to the

numbering of the pods to the numbering and detailed description ofthe peas contained in them. We also see that the very outline of thepage leaves a blank space to the left, a space that eventually came tobe filled with a peculiar form of additional remarks at a later stage.From all the indications that can be gathered from the written recordand which cannot be displayed here in detail, the overwriting of theprimary protocol must have taken place over the course of the year1899. The first of these remarks reads: S was 22 and is 22. From theseseeds therefore none has been sowed. 18 with yellow germ, 77,8%, 4

with green [germ] 22,2%.From the right to the left of this protocol, we can follow the switch

from the descriptive and individualizing xenia-regime to the numeri-cal and statistical Mendel-regime. This difference could not be moredrastic. At some point in the course of his experiments, in allprobability while contemplating the results of some odd corn crossesof the fall of 1897 which proved to be inadvertent backcrosses withunrecognized hybrids, Correns must have come to suspect that

something else was going on in his experiments, something to whichhe had so far not paid attention. It is also reasonable to assume that,at this point in the course of his experiments, his earlier reading ofMendels paper took on a new meaning for him. When he had readthe paper for the first time in the spring of 1896, he had only lookedat it with the prospect of obtaining possible clues to the xeniaquestion. Now his reading amalgamated with the results of hisexperiments that surreptitiously had come to fill the pages of hisnotebooks and the boxes of his experimental barn without explicit

recognition. Only now did he realize that, whereas his peas persis-tently refused to exhibit any obvious xenia, the proliferating hybridsofPisumand, in a less clear-cut manner, also those of his corn breeds,showed clear segregation with respect to the seed characters on whichhe had focused his attention. One character appeared to be domi-nant over its complement in that it swept throughout the firstgeneration of hybrids. However, in the second generation, thedominant character appeared to rule in only about three quarters ofthe offspring, while in the remaining quarter, as we have seen in the

above quotation, the suppressed character reappeared unaltered.Correns could now browse through the whole record of his

protocols under a completely different perspective without having tostart experimentation all over again. He could concentrate on just


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one character pair, namely the color of the germ (cotyledons), andneglect the form of the seed as well as the color of the seed coat to

which he had paid considerable attention in his earlier descriptions.He could retrace which seeds he had used to raise the successivegenerations of hybrid plants, and add them to the remaining ones to

yield a virtually complete record. In so doing, and in summing overall the individual plants and their yield of seeds, he could arrive atsubstantial numbers that allowed him, in contrast to what he had setout to do at the beginning, to perform a thorough statisticalevaluation of his numbers. The experiment in his publication of1900, which in fact is a composite of all the crosses he had been doing

with these two pea varieties between 1896 and 1899, now added up toseveral hundreds of peas in each of the successive generations for theparticular character pair under review. The research notes assumedthe positive function of a repository and of a tool to reorient theexperimental gaze in a direction that had been unthinkable forCorrens at the beginning of the experiments.

It can be seen as a fortunate byproduct of the starting point of theexperiments that Correns concentrated on characters that he ex-

pected to become visible on the seeds. Paradoxically speaking, wecould say that the xeniaboth prevented him from an early recognitionof the transmission ratios observed later andenabled him to do justthat after all. For in addition to the protocolsthat is, the paperrecordthe seeds themselves acted in his system as a kind ofnaturally digitalized material protocol of green cotyledons and yellowcotyledons. This repository existed because Correns had to collectand keep the seeds for sowing the next generation in the following

years. Correns could also come back to this material protocol

namely, his boxes filled with peasat any time, even after a year ortwo, and he could use them additionally as a check for his notes. Notuntil Correns had worked himself deeply into the breeding system ofZea mays and Pisum for about four years did this character of thesystem become relevant for him, at a time when he realized that hisresults were heading in a different direction. It appears to me thatthis is a particular juncture of an experimental paper trail with thematerial characteristics of an experimental system, creating thepossibility of recurrent moves of interpretation, which possibly repre-

sent a generalizable feature of experimental exploration. In any case,it is a good example of the epistemic and potentially knowledge-producing function of scientific notetaking.


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4. Collective Forms of Laboratory Writing18

Let me now go one step further and ask whether there are collectiveequivalents to the individual, more or less private forms of scientificnotetaking, such as we have encountered in the case of Correns. Thequestion amounts to an exploration of a kind of graphism that can nolonger be seen as a simple protocol, but which is not yet a definiteform of argument. There are intermediate forms of representation inscience located in the space between the laboratory bench and theorganized public discourse of the scientific community. With MichelFoucault, we could talk about an exploration of the discourse-

objects of a laboratory archaeology.19 We could talk about thelaboratory itself in its scriptural organization. In this intermediaterealm we find different categories of writing, of preserving traces andmarks worth being explored in their general characteristics for theirown sake.

One of these categories comprises lists, tables, and other forms of what could be called scientific bookkeeping. We could call themtechnologies of numeracy.20 In the research process, they serve asregisters from which to retrieve the bits of information, data, or

figures that are necessary for assembling an experimental setup, orthat have to be chosen in a particular experimental situation. In thisfunction, they are systems of retrieval, an archive that is integratedinto the laboratory itself. In addition, they serve as the databases into

which research results can be entered and thus made available for thecollective work of a particular laboratory, or even a network ofcollaborating laboratories. They serve as media and mediators for theexchange of primary data. Today, these technologies of numeracyhave largely taken on electronic forms of data storage, retrieval,display, and communication. Prominent examples are the DNAsequence databases on which molecular geneticists and gene tech-nologists rely in constructing their probes and comparing theirresults, and into which they in turn feed their sequencing products.

18 This part of the paper is based on a section of Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, Discoursesof Circumstance. A Note on the Author in Science in Peter Galison and Mario Biagioli(eds.), Scientific Authorship(London: Routledge 2003), 309323.

19 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge(New York: Pantheon Books 1972),140.

20 Special kinds of such technologies are to be found in different scientific disci-plines. For chemistry, see Ursula Klein, Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures inStudies in History and Philosophy of Science32A (2001), 265302.


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The items that compose these pools of information constitute a firstform of the collectivization of the research process. As such they

represent a new source from which new questions can spring,resulting from comparison and synopsis.

Another category in this realm comprises semi-standardized proto-cols and laboratory manuals. They could be addressed as technolo-gies ofliteracyin a very specific sense. This category consists of writtenprocedures that have proven robust and reliable enough to beapplied, at least by those initiated, in a more or less routine form.These protocols have left the realm of an individual researchersidiosyncrasy, but they usually remain marked by the collective idiosyn-crasy of a local laboratory community. They preserve in an incremen-tal manner, sometimes even over generations of experimenters, thoseelements of laboratory practice that have proven to be successful.They are alsoand this is not the least of their functionthescriptural forms of laboratory life into which newcomers are social-ized. As such, they constitute a particular laboratory identity.

It is very tempting to perceive the laboratory itself emerging as ascientific writing collective in these conserved, written, mimeographed,

and chronically overwritten forms and formats. The writing collectivepreserves a particular laboratory tradition, an identifiable way andstyle of doing experiments that is reiterated precisely because of theseprotocol-related reifications. It displays the laboratory function as acollective author representing more than the mere fact that a groupof people have collaborated in order to arrive at a particular result. Itis rather the choreography needed to arrive at results, the collectiveform of an epistemic subject, the way in which personality and stylein science begin to take on the form of interpersonal work, in the

competitive as well as the collaborative mode. Such a laboratory-function is at the base of what has been discussed for a long timealready in science studies and the history of science as researchtraditions or research schools.21 Instead of concentrating on thesociological features of these schools or traditions, such as the strongleader, the special opportunities of a local institution, or the disciplin-ary junctures in a particular laboratory, I would like to claim that it

will be worth investigating in more detail the material circumstances

21 For a comprehensive overview, see Gerald L. Geison and Frederic L. Holmes(eds.), Research Schools: HistoricalReappraisals(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press1993, Osiris 8).


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and the embodied gestural repertoire of the epistemic foundation ofthese phenomena. My guess is that particular technologies of numeracy

and literacy such as those mentioned play a major role in shapingthese traditions. Research traditions emerge from a process ofmaterial reproduction, in which the scripturally reified idiosyncrasiesof the laboratory, such as recipes, procedural advices, log sheets,standardized experimental designs, and adapted software, are irre-placeable bits and pieces of a local research culture.

Within this medial realm between semi-matter and semi-print,forms of scientific numeracy and literacy exist that, though they arenot yet of the order of texts released into the public, also no longerpertain to the private diary of the individual researcher. They taketheir shape from a sort of collectively accumulating memory andcommunalized experience, and in turn shape this memory andexperience, from one laboratory generation to the next. The ques-tion is what precisely these forms can tell us about that strange butepistemically crucial form of half-authorized subjectivity and half-private objectivity, something that is different from signature writ-ing. What does it take epistemically to make a researcher part of a

knowledge-gaining collective? As what kind of figure and in precisely what kind of function does the researcher act at the bench? Whospeaks to whom and especially through which kind of written mediain the process of research? How can we characterize that space andtime where epistemic things are no longer private dreams but not yetsanctioned facts, that semi-public realm where capillary communionoverrides official communication? The mechanisms of reinforcementthat hold a knowledge-producing community such as a laboratorytogether, in both the synchronic and the diachronic axis, are materi-

alized in a special kind of laboratory discourse with its uniquelaboratory scripts somewhere between the dense and impenetrableexperimental arrangement on the one hand and the articulatedconcept on the other, between the scientist at the bench and thescientist as the author of a scientific paper. Just as languages of art, intheir capacity as systems of symbols, oscillate between density andarticulation, between picture and text,22 this laboratory relation canassume all kinds of hybrid forms, mixtures, and blends between theseamless plenitude of an acting subject and the punctuated detach-

ment of a signature, between the jargon of a recipe with its

22 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1968).


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performative, almost private language and object-signs barely intelli-gible for the non-initiated on the one hand, and the codified and

punctuated argumentation of a research paper on the other.In this short essay, my concern has been with forms of data

collection and writing as they occur in the laboratory. I have tried toconvey a sense of the fact that the process of graphematic tracing andthe forms in which it takes place at the work bench are not inthemselves passive data recording procedures. On the contrary, theprimary traces, prints, and indices of the experimental setup makepart of a textured entanglement which scientists address and experi-ence through their efforts of making sense of data. It is on this planethat the process of knowledge generation takes form. It is theprivileged plane of epistemic tinkering. It is the plane where scientificrepresentations take shape. Tinkering here is meant in exactly thesame way as it is defined by Claude Lvi-Strauss: namely, that thesignifischange themselves into signifiants, and inversely.23 Speaking

with Lvi-Strauss, in tinkering, the traces have still the opacity of signs,they have not yet assumed the transparency of concepts.

As shown in the example of Correns, the microhistorical gaze

through the magnifying glasses of research notes can reveal the kindsof delays that appear to be constitutive for empirically-driven thinkingin general, the sorts of slownesses and troubles that appear, in the

very act of knowing, intimately, in a kind of functional necessity, of which Gaston Bachelard has spoken in his psychoanalysis of thescientific spirit.24 The research notes of Correns help not only tomake this point in a particularly clear manner, but they also displaysome of the intricacies and peculiarities characterizing the process ofnote-taking in the positivity of its recursive potentials. They practically

show what iterativity means for the generation of knowledge. In hisMargins of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida has proposed a generalized viewof writing as the exemplar of a process of iteration.25 According toDerrida, writing is characterized by the structural possibility ofbecoming weaned either from its putative originary referent, fromthat to which the writing refers and is derived from, or from itsputative origin, from the one who writes. The first possibility has been

23 Claude Lvi-Strauss, La pense sauvage(Paris: Plon 1962), 31.24 Gaston Bachelard, La formation de lesprit scientifique(6th ed. Paris: Vrin 1969), 13.25Jacques Derrida, Signature vnement contexte in Marges de la philosophie(Paris:

Editions de Minuit 1972), 365393.


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exposed in the section on laboratory writing and explored throughan example in the section on Correns. The second has been the

subject of the last section on generalized forms of laboratory writing.The historical productivity of scrips and scribbles, of inscription andtranscription, resides exactly in the possible incidence of such adouble loss in the process of gaining knowledge.

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

rheinberger_scrips and scribbles

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