Humphry Davy
Humphrey Davy’s Sexual Chemistry is a fascinating article. A bit of backtracking lead me to Jan Golinsky’s publications page, which has a couple more books to add to my list: Making Natural Knowledge : Constructivism and the History of Science and Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain. I’ve thought for a long time that Davy doesn’t get his due in histories of photography, but I didn’t know he was such a shrewd rhetorician when dealing with the ladies.
Back in 2002, I wrote about Davy’s photographic experiments in relation to silhouettes. Now, I see a strange affinity between Davy’s investigations into electrochemistry and the speculations of Hunt and Draper regarding light as “chemical rays.” For Davy, electricity was power. For Hunt, light was power. For both, control of these elemental forces was central to the investigations of “man” in natural philosophy.
Tricks of light were more than an amusement for early opticians like David Brewster; it seems to me that Davy’s usage of bits of potassium thrown in the water or voltaic piles to “spark” attention from the audience differed little from the “magic mirrors” or optical illusions explored at length in these early scientific texts. It was a crusade to understand and control reality, not to amuse people with illusions. “Men” were nonplussed it seems, as Golinsky suggests in his citation of Louis Simond from 1810:
The resources of chemistry, to recal or keep up the attention of a mixt audience, are infinite. A small bit of potassium thrown in a glass of water, or upon a piece of ice, never fails to excite a gentle murmur of applause. More than one half of the audience is female, and it is the most attentive portion. I often observe that these fair disciples of science taking notes timidly, and as by stealth, on small bits of paper; no man does that,— they know already the things taught, or care little about them!
I’m interested in the depiction of pop science (and perhaps technology as well) as a sort of “shiny bauble” which draws the attention of women—the smug man, of course, being above such things. Increasingly I think that “visual rhetoric” is a poorly defined category because it is too often complicit with other issues: the rhetoric of technology and the rhetoric of emotion—with its attendant feminization.
I did manage to read Jonathan Crary’s last book, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture while in Oklahoma. It subtly undermines any privilege granted to the visual in matters of cultural criticism without abandoning his earlier work on “scopic regimes”. Crary claims that the problem of “attention” is far more interesting (although often coincident with) his previous explorations of visual culture. Perhap’s that’s why reviewers consider it “unfocused”— Crary is essentially exploring rhetoric.
W.J.T. Mitchell also suggests that the “visual turn” is vastly overrated in his latest What do Pictures Want, implying that just as rhetoricians have discovered the visual—the whole thing is now “over.” But that’s too much to write about just now. I just wanted to make some notes about Davy the Dandy.
