Book Review: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
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texts in this volume lies the hidden message: the representation of representation. The book itself is a medium, multiplying pictures and words, which the texts explore. The first three essays by Carlo Ginzburg, Irene Winter, and Amy Slaton show that the notion of style is laden with ideological meanings. Style is used for professional identity formation or for production of national cultural identity. What does style look like? Style, says the underlying general thesis, is content one way to deal with pictures and to organize them, but it is not a neutral way to describe art. In the second section, the chapters of Arnold Davidson, Londa Schiebinger, Caroline Jones and Donna Haraway describe the relationship between bodies and images. In their papers they unfold different ways of how images were used to represent bodily knowledge and how those representations themselves shaped the knowledge about the body. These essays span from the visualization of St. Francis's visions in thirteenth century Italy to the drawings of twentieth century artist Picabia, which navigated a certain knowledge of the sexed body. The question "What do we know when we see?" is especially important for the third section, where Krzysztof Pomian, Lorraine Daston, Katharine Park, David Freedberg, and Joseph Leo Koerner deal with the Renaissance and early modern period. Here we are invited to read between the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the seen and the known, the monstrous and the wondrous, boundaries which were not fixed in a way common to us today. The fourth section includes texts from Peter Galison, Jan Goldstein, and Joel Snyder. They deal with the central questions of nineteenth century sciences: What can images tell us about nature? Is imagemaking with special instruments so "mechanical," that it can exclude human invention and be "objective"? How did the physiologist Marey use photography for correcting the senses, which were regarded as unreliable? Finally, as Svetlana Alpers, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, and Jonathan Crary suggest, we have a whole range of different visual cultures, guided by the central theme "What viewers and processes does the image presuppose?" These cultures are not exclusively defined by art and science; they are to be understood-so the topic of one paper-within the popular culture of their time. What one can see in an image and how it is described refers not only to the examined scientific object, but also to parallel public discussions in newspapers or magazines. This rich volume refers to an ongoing discussion of which only facets can be described here. In the last decade a wide range of publications on the relationship between art and science has appeared, mostly centered on the "scopic regime" (M. Jay) and "visual culture,"! Picturing Science, 339