Papers by Henning Schmidgen
Dies ist die Übersetzung der Einleitung, die Philip Barnard und Stephen Shapiro 2014 für Didier D... more Dies ist die Übersetzung der Einleitung, die Philip Barnard und Stephen Shapiro 2014 für Didier Deleule und Francois Guery, "The Productive Body," geschrieben haben. Das Buch von Deleule und Guery erschien zuerst 1972 in französischer Sprache. Ihre "interessante Analyse" wird von Foucault an prominenter Stelle in "Überwachen und Strafen" zitiert (S.283), um die "Ausarbeitung von Disziplinarprozeduren" in Zusammenhang mit den "technologischen Veränderungen des Produktionsapparats" zu stellen. Die Einführung von Barnard und Shapiro erläutert den Hintergrund dieser Bezugnahme und die bleibende Aktualität der Studie von Deleule und Guery: "Im Rückblick hilft uns 'Der produktive Körper', Foucaults Dialog mit Marx zu verstehen. Aber seine eigentliche Anziehungskraft liegt darin, dass er uns darin unterstützt, die Maschinerie des zeitgenössischen Kapitalismus besser zu begreifen."
This is a general paper dealing with the history of the history of science, with a special focus ... more This is a general paper dealing with the history of the history of science, with a special focus on historians and epistemologists who bolster their historiographic approach by making reference and/or relying on science, e.g. Popper, Bachelard, and Canguilhem
Here are some excerpts from my thesis dealing with Félix Guattari and the question of technology.... more Here are some excerpts from my thesis dealing with Félix Guattari and the question of technology. The German version was published in 1997 under the title “Das Unbewusste der Maschinen” with Fink Verlag. I hope to finalize the translation and add some updated reflections over the course of next year
Christiane Kraft Alsop (ed.), Grenzgängerin/Bridges between disciplines: Festschrift für Irmingard Staeuble, Heidelberg/Kröning: Asanger Verlag, 2001, pp. 265-287
Twelve years after his famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (... more Twelve years after his famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (1943), the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904–1995) published a book-length study on the history of a single biological concept. Within France, his Formation of the Reflex Concept in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1955) contributed significantly to defining the ''French style'' of writing on the history of science. Outside of France, the book passed largely unnoticed. This paper re-reads Canguilhem's study of the reflex concept with respect to its historiographical and epistemological implications. Canguilhem defines concepts as complex and dynamic entities combining terms, definitions, and phenomena. As a consequence, the historiography of science becomes a rather complex task. It has to take into account textual and contextual aspects that develop independently of individual authors. In addition, Canguilhem stresses the connection between conceptual activities and other functions of organic individuals in their respective environments. As a result, biological concepts become tied to a biology of conceptual thinking, analogical reasoning, and technological practice. The paper argues that this seemingly circular structure is a major feature in Canguilhem's philosophical approach to the history of the biological sciences. Keywords Georges Canguilhem Á Historiography Á Concepts Á General Biology Concepts are not in your head: they are
Many of the methodological restrictions associated with the traditional history of ideas can be o... more Many of the methodological restrictions associated with the traditional history of ideas can be overcome by focusing more closely on the history of the material substrata which served to transmit knowledge. This argument is substantiated here with respect to the relationship between the early work of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and the disciplines of phenomenology (E. Husserl, M. Seheier), phenomenological psychopathology, and dynamic psychiatry (K. Jaspers, E. Minkowski, E. Kretschmer). By examining in detail the genesis of Lacan's 1932 doctoral thesis on paranoia and related texts, one realizes that it was not so much Husserl, but rather Scheler's book on the nature and forms of sympathy (1913/1923) which contributed most to the elaboration of Lacan's later theory of the imaginary. lt also becomes evident that Lacan's incorporation of certain German philosophical terms (Ausschaltung, Aufhebung) into his French writings was not devoid of productive misreadings (»Aufha...
1947 hat Daniel Lagache (1903 bis 1972) an der Sorbonne eine Vorlesung gehalten, die fur die Entw... more 1947 hat Daniel Lagache (1903 bis 1972) an der Sorbonne eine Vorlesung gehalten, die fur die Entwicklung der Nachkriegspsychologie in Frankreich Signalwirkung haben sollte. In "L'unite de la psychologie" konzipierte Lagache die Psychologie als eine allgemeine Theorie der Verhaltensweisen, in der Klinische Psychologie, Experimentalpsychologie und Psychoanalyse gleichberechtigt nebeneinander stehen. Mit diesem Programm begrundete Lagache die Unabhangigkeit der Psychologie von Philosophie und Medizin. Auserdem legte er den Grundstein zur Etablierung einer psychoanalytischen Forschung und Lehre an der Universitat. Der hier unternommene Ruckblick auf Lagaches Antrittsvorlesung versucht, ihre diskursiven Voraussetzungen aufzuzeigen: einerseits Jaspers' Zusammenfuhrung von verstehender und erklarender Psychologie, andererseits eine Konzeption der Psychonanalyse, die deren naturwissenschaftliches Erbe produktiv zu wenden versucht. Die Vorlesung von Lagache ist aber nicht n...
History of Psychology, 2005
In Wilhelm Wundt's (1832-1920) Leipzig laboratory and at numerous other research sites, the chron... more In Wilhelm Wundt's (1832-1920) Leipzig laboratory and at numerous other research sites, the chronoscope was used to conduct reaction time experiments. The author argues that the history of the chronoscope is the history not of an instrument but of an experimental setup. This setup was initially devised by the English physicist and instrument maker Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) in the early 1840s. Shortly thereafter, it was improved by the German clockmaker and mechanic Matthäus Hipp (1813-1893). In the 1850s, the chronoscope was introduced to ballistic research. In the early 1860s, Neuchâtel astronomer Adolphe Hirsch (1830-1901) applied it to the problem of physiological time. The extensions and variations of chronoscope use within the contexts of ballistics, physiology, and psychology presented special challenges. These challenges were met with specific attempts to reduce the errors in chronoscopic experiments on shooting stands and in the psychological laboratory. On May 26, 1845, the English physicist Charles Wheatstone addressed the Paris Academy of Science with the following words: I perceive, in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, that, at the sitting of Jan. 20, a communication was read from M. Breguet, in which he attributes to Captain Konstantinoff and to himself the invention of the electromagnetic chronoscope, an instrument which I had myself invented and completed several years previously, for the purpose of measuring rapid motions, and especially the velocity of projectiles. (Wheatstone, 1845, pp. 86-87) Wheatstone claimed that he had the idea of applying electromagnetism to the problem of measuring short time intervals in early 1840. He further explained that he had communicated this idea to the public shortly thereafter. Wheatstone underscored these claims by introducing an expression that the clock and instrument maker Louis Bréguet (1804-1883) had not used at all in his earlier communication to the French Academy. According to the Oxford English Dic-Henning Schmidgen is a postdoctoral research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. He is currently working on a book about psychophysiological time experiments, 1850-1910. This article was written in connection with a project titled "The Experimentalization of Life" located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Department III: Hans-Joerg Rheinberger) and funded by the VolkswagenStiftung, Hannover, Germany. I thank Rand Evans, Thomas Schraven, Jan Deiman, and Paolo Brenni for an extraordinarily rich and open exchange of ideas and material concerning the Hipp chronoscope. I am equally thankful for the helpful comments I received from Friedrich Steinle and Douwe Draaisma. Finally, I thank Laura Otis for her help in preparing the English version of this text.
Literalität und Liminalität
Literalität und Liminalität, 2008
Das Experimentelle und das Pathologische: Zur Geschichte physiologischer Zeitmessungen, 1880-1900
Literalität und Liminalität, 2008
Zwischenräume sind jene Schnittstellen, Intervalle und Abstände, in denen sich elementare Prozess... more Zwischenräume sind jene Schnittstellen, Intervalle und Abstände, in denen sich elementare Prozesse der Wissensproduktion ansiedeln. Zwischenräume sind eine epistemologische Kategorie für sich. Das gewohnte Bild geordneter Wissenschaftlichkeit schwindet, wenn die Produktion von Wissen auf spezifische materielle Kulturen zurückgeführt wird: auf die Begegnung von Instrumenten, Schreibgeräten und experimentellen Verfahren, aber auch auf das Zusammenspiel von Diskursen, Medien und Mythen. Verknüpfungen und Trennungen werden so zu epistemischen Ereignissen, die dem Zufall stärker verpflichtet sind als dem Geplanten und Erwarteten. Dieses Buch verdeutlicht, dass es die Lücken und Leerstellen in der medialen Wissenschaftspraxis sind, die wesentlich zur Entstehung des Neuen beitragen.
NTM International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine, 2004
Abstract Toward the end of the 1840s, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) began to investigate exp... more Abstract Toward the end of the 1840s, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) began to investigate experimentally the propagation of stimuli within nerves. Helmholtz’s experiments on animals and human subjects opened a research field that in the following decades was intensively explored by neurophysiologists and experimental psychologists. Studying the concrete experimental settings and their local contexts shows how deeply the work of Helmholtz, Adolphe Hirsch (1830–1901), Franciscus Donders (1818–1889) and others was embedded in the history of culture and technology. In particular, the rapidly growing technologies of electromagnetism, which gave rise to telegraphy and electric clocks, facilitated the time measurements of 19th-century physiologists and psychologists. However, the transition from frogs to human beings as model organisms confronted the time-measuring psychophysiologists with a whole range of experimental parameters that were difficult to control (temperature, attention etc.). It is no wonder then that it took some 20 years before this branch of research stabilised.
Configurations, 2007
The history of experimentation in physiological and psychological laboratories is a history of ma... more The history of experimentation in physiological and psychological laboratories is a history of machines-of spatially circumscribed and temporally limited installations that connect a vast number of heterogeneous components: partial objects derived from the experimenter and the experimental subject (eyes, hands, voices, etc.), more or less isolated organs (hearts, lungs, muscles, nerves, etc.), energy sources, styli, sooted paper, tables, notes, and publications. Starting in the 1850s, the territories of physiological and (later on) psychological laboratories were increasingly populated by such installations that transitorily "machinized" mechanical and organic components and combined material with semiotic aspects. In Berlin and Paris, physiologists hooked animals up to kymographs and quicksilver manometers in order to turn bodily functions into indexical curves. In Königsberg, nerve and muscle preparations were integrated into electromagnetic circuits, not just to produce demonstrative contractions, but also to measure the propagation speed of excitations in the still-living nerve. In the 1870s, Leipzig physiologists presented artificial circulation models to academic audiences and the general public: installations made of rubber hoses, glass tubes, and funnels, in which beating frog hearts functioned as "natural motors" pumping salt water in circles-until the organic components would irrevocably refuse to do service (for a further example, see Fig. 1). All these machines developed continually and as within a "phylum" (while single parts, such as the brass cylinder and 211
The American Journal of Psychology, 2003
Mid-19th-century chemistry constituted a practically and theoretically important resource for exp... more Mid-19th-century chemistry constituted a practically and theoretically important resource for experimental psychology as conceived by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). In the early 1850s, Wundt began working in Gustav Herth's private chemical laboratory in Heidelberg. The experimental work Wundt conducted under Herth's direction provided the practical model for the psychological methods advocated in Wundt's pioneering publication on visual perception in 1862. With respect to theory, Wundt relied on John Stuart Mill's System of Logic, a book often referring to the chemical writings by Justus Liebig. Wundt not only read and quoted Mill's logic but also was personally acquainted with its German translator, the former Liebig student Jacob Schiel. Thus, in various ways, chemistry influenced Wundt's early theory and practice of experiment.
Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History, 2007
Science and technology scholars tend to emphasize space over time. Current studies in the history... more Science and technology scholars tend to emphasize space over time. Current studies in the history and sociology of laboratory practices mainly focus on the »spaces of knowledge« tied to and created by these practices, e. g. institutional settings, networks of human and non-human actors, visual and textual representations, etc. This paper argues in favour of a more dynamic, time-based understanding of science. Drawing on examples from the history of 19th century physiology, it suggests conceiving of experiments as machines that combine and contrast a variety of times: the time of the experimenter, the time of the model organism, the time of the instruments, the time of reading and writing, etc. It is true that historians of science have oen dealt with the problem of time, in particular with concepts of time and time measuring. However, in these studies time oen remained an exterior parameter of the natural and/or artificial phenomena and processes investigated by historical actors. The more recent work of authors such as Andrew Pickering and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger suggests conceiving of time as an operator built into the very functioning of »experimental systems.« Along these lines, the paper briefly discusses the semiotic and material culture of the pioneering experiments on the propagation speed of nerve stimulations carried out by the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in the early 1850s. These experiments contributed in important ways to our understanding of physiological time as the »proper time« (Eigenzeit) of organic individuals. At the same time, they illustrate in an exemplary manner that the organization and management of time in its diversity is a crucial factor in the construction of scientific objects. □ × Zukunftsmaschinen Zeit als Gegenstand der historischen Wissenschaftsforschung Am Anfang stehen zwei Bilder. Das erste stammt von 1812. Wir sehen den Experimentiertisch eines Physiologen. Auf diesem Tisch sindgrausam genug-der Rumpf und der Kopf eines Kaninchens zu sehen (siehe Abb. 1). Schere und Skalpell deuten darauf hin, was eben geschah: der Fachjargon spricht von Dekapitierung, was nichts anderes bedeutet als-Enthauptung. Und während der Kopf des Kaninchens, wie uns mitgeteilt wird, 1 noch Bewegungen des Gähnens macht, ist sein Körper schon auf einem Brett festgeschnallt und wird künstlich beatmet. Das ist es, worauf dieses Bild eigentlich abzielt: Insgesamt drei Spritzen sind zu sehen, in unterschiedlichen Größen. Es sind Luftspritzen. Und wahrscheinlich ist es kein Zufall, dass der Experimentator, dessen Hände von rechts ins Bild ragen, die größte dieser Spritzen in Aktion zeigt. Mit Luft gefüllt, dient sie zur Beatmung des Kaninchens. So erhalten wir eine Vorahnung von der Rolle des Physiologen als »Gegen-Machthaber der Schöpfung«, wie Claude Bernard rund fünfzig Jahre später schreiben wird. 2 51 Henning Schmidgen Debatte Abbildung 1: Versuchsanordnung mit Kaninchen und Luftspritzen (aus: César Julien Jean Legallois, Expériences sur le principe de la vie, notamment sur celui des mouvements du coeur et sur le siège de ce principe, Paris 1812, Tafel).
Horn or The Counterside of Media, 2022