Timothy Lenoir (ed.): Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (1998)

Early practitioners of the social studies of science turned their attention away from questions of institutionalization, which had tended to emphasize macrolevel explanations, and attended instead to microstudies of laboratory practice. Though sympathetic to this approach—as the microstudies included in this book attest—the author is interested in re-investigating certain aspects of institution formation, notably the formation of scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines. He emphasizes the manner in which science as cultural practice is imbricated with other forms of social, political, and even aesthetic practices.

This book offers case studies that reexamine certain critical junctures in the traditional historical picture of the evolution of the role of the scientist in modern Western society. It focuses especially on the establishment of new disciplines within German research universities in the nineteenth century, the problematic relationship that emerged between science, industry, and the state at the turn of the twentieth century, and post-World War II developments in science and technology.

After an Introduction and two chapters dealing with science and technology as cultural production and the struggles of disciplines to achieve legitimation and authority, the author considers the following topics: the organic physics of 1847; the innovative research program of Carl Ludwig as a model for institutionalizing science-based medicine; optics, painting, and ideology in Germany, 1845-95; Paul Ehrlich’s “magic bullet”; the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; and the introduction of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation into the practice of organic chemistry.

Publisher Stanford University Press, 1998
Writing Science series
ISBN 0804727775, 9780804727778
476 pages

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Walter Lippmann: Public Opinion (1922/1997)

In what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication. As Michael Curtis indicates in his introduction to this edition, Public Opinion qualifies as a classic by virtue of its systematic brilliance and literary grace.

The work is divided into eight parts, covering such varied issues as stereotypes, image making, and organized intelligence. The study begins with an analysis of “the world outside and the pictures hi our heads,” a leitmotif that starts with issues of censorship and privacy, speed, words, and clarity, and ends with a careful survey of the modern newspaper. The work is a showcase for Lippmann’s vast erudition. He easily integrated the historical, psychological, and philosophical literature of his day, and in every instance showed how relevant intellectual formations were to the ordinary operations of everyday life.

The field of public opinion research has produced much since this 1922 classic, but no work is more compelling in its argument or lasting in its impact. Lippmann’s conclusions are as meaningful in a world of television and computers as in the earlier period when newspapers were dominant. Public Opinion is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians,- sociologists, and political scientists.

Originally published in 1922.
This edition originally published in 1992 by The Macmillan Company
With a New Introduction by Michael Curtis
Publisher Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey; London, 1998

Publisher Transaction Publishers, 1997
ISBN 1560009993, 9781560009993
427 pages

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Bernhard Siegert: Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (1993–) [DE, EN]

“This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature—namely, the postal system—determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium.

The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used by the population (instead of by the prince alone); the sexualization of letter writing, which was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century and changed the reading of a letter into an interpretation of intimate confessions of the soul; and Goethe’s turning of this new ontology of the letter into a logistics of literature whereby literary authorship was constructed by means of postal logistics, with the precision of engineering.

The second part analyzes nineteenth-century postal innovations that facilitated communication through letters and examines how literary works were able to live off such communication. These innovations included the reform of the post office; the invention of the postage stamp; the Universal Postal Union, which subjected letter writing to an economy of materials and uniform standards; and the telegraph and the telephone, which surpassed literature in terms of speed, economy, and analog-signal processing.

In the third part, on the basis of a close reading of Franz Kafka’s letters to his typist-fiancée, the author demonstrates how postal logistics of love and authorship have worked in the era of modern postal systems and technical media. Kafka’s correspondence is deciphered as a “war of nerves” waged by means of all available techniques and conditions of transmission.”

Publisher Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin, 1993
ISBN 3922660525
317 pages

English edition
Translated by Kevin Repp
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1999
ISBN 9780804732369
340 pages

Reviews: Peter Berz (Mediamatic, 1994), Daniel Punday (Electronic Book Review, 2000/01), Esther Leslie (Mute, 2008), Hans Kellner (19C Contexts, 2006).
Commentary: Reinhold Martin (Grey Room, 2016).

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Relais: Geschicke der Literatur als Epoche der Post, 1751-1913 (German, 1993, updated on 2012-6-13)
Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (English, trans. Kevin Repp, 1999, Intro and ch 1 missing, added on 2014-5-20 via lostobserver)