In the early nineteenth century, chemistry emerged in Europe as a truly experimental discipline. What set this process in motion, and how did it evolve? Experimentalization in chemistry was driven by a seemingly innocuous tool: the sign system of chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius. By tracing the history of this "paper tool," the author reveals how chemistry quickly lost its orientation to natural history and became a major productive force in industrial society.

These formulas were not merely a convenient shorthand, but productive tools for creating...

Since its publication in 1936, Walter Benjamin's "Artwork" essay has become a canonical text about the status and place of the fine arts in modern mass culture. Benjamin was especially concerned with the ability of new technologies--notably film, sound recording, and photography--to reproduce works of art in great number. Benjamin could not have foreseen the explosion of imagery and media that has occurred during the past fifty years. Does Benjamin's famous essay still speak to this new situation? That is the question posed by the editors of this book to a wide range of leading scholars and...

In what Beatriz Sarlo calls six -episodes, - ranging from the proto-science fiction of Horacio Quiroga and the apocalyptic urban surrealism of Roberto Arlt through the development of mass media, tales of inventors and inventions, and an entertaining tour of -weird science- and medical quackery, The Technical Imagination examines how technology entered the popular imagination in 1920s and 1930s Argentina. Often wry, but always sympathetic, and dispensing erudition with a light touch, Sarlo shows how the products of modern technology (radio, the telephone and telegraph, movies, and...

What do biologists study when they study -life- today? Drawing on tools from rhetoric and poststructuralist theory, the author argues that the ascent of molecular biology, with its emphasis on molecules such as DNA rather than organisms, was enabled by crucial rhetorical -softwares.- Metaphors such as the genetic -code- made possible a transformation of the very concept of life, a transformation that often casts organisms as information systems. With careful readings of key texts from the history of molecular biology--such as those of Erwin Schrodinger, George Gamow, Jacques Monod, and...

This is an extraordinarily imaginative attempt to analyze the relations between literature and technique in Brazil from the 1880's to the 1920's. The author suggests that in these relations we can see more clearly the shape of a period that is otherwise usually defined from a literary perspective as -pre-- or -post-- something or other, rather than in terms of its own characteristics. One such characteristic is the intense interaction with the new technologies then arising in Brazil, the beginning of the professionalization of writers, and a revision of the concept of literature, redefined as...

The genealogy and function of epigenesis-the theory that organisms generate themselves under the guidance of a formative drive-provides a unique means of understanding the profound changes in philosophy, philosophy of language, and literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book begins by describing how and why epigenesis came to replace the reigning model of biological origination, preformation-the theory that all organisms were preformed at the creation of the world. Contemporary with these developments, Kant used the figures of epigenesis and self-formation to illustrate his...