Dissertation Research: Practices of Representation

这个项目追溯了19世纪上半叶弗朗索瓦·阿拉戈和让·巴蒂斯特·比奥关于光的本质的争论。尽管经常被描述为关于光的粒子和波理论的短暂而尖锐的冲突，但他们长期存在的分歧实际上植根于实践问题：他们在光学仪器中产生的图像是对所有人透明可用，还是只对那些确切知道光是如何工作的人开放。这项工作探索了光学仪器以及相关的物质文化和身体技术如何参与将世界划分为可见和不可见的领域，以及这反过来如何在政治层面上作为一种包容和排斥机制发挥作用。阿拉戈和比奥特都明确地将他们各自对透明度和神秘性的承诺与关于谁有资格谈论世俗事务的主张捆绑在一起，因此谁属于由国家代表的善于沟通的公众的界限。

This project traces the contentious debate between Frangois Arago and JeanBaptiste Biot over the nature of light in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although often presented as a brief and pointed clash over the particle and wave theories of light, their long-standing disagreement was in fact rooted in the issues of practice: whether the images they produced in their optical instruments were transparently available to all, or only to those who knew precisely how light worked. This work explores the ways in which optical instruments, and the associated material culture and bodily techniques, participated in dividing the world into domains of visibility and invisibility, and how this in turn functioned on a political level as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Both Arago and Biot were explicit in tying their respective commitments to transparency and mystery to claims about who was qualified to speak on worldly matters, and thus who belonged within the bounds of the communicative public represented by the state.