[...]--> the key to all kinds of norms (--> awe = wonder + fear + respect)


(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it

•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*


why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...

are we now in the position to reclaim norms from nature?
--> yes <== nature exemplifies so many different kinds of order:
•order of the stars and plant =/= order of weather
•order of specific natures =/= order of universal natural laws
•order of local ecologies =/= order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****

terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]

•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])


...................................

[title]
itchy eyes

...................................

16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*

(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature

.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...

“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston

... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...

cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador


for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)

genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain

Daston =/= (early 20th century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world

...................................

pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)

...................................

(to move from) eternal truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments

despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects

...................................

popular and learned interest in monsters

(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
•corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•

Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)

(Daston --> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture

legal status of monsters
infanticide in antiquity


earlier tradition of interest in monster:
•Aristotle --> Albertus Magnus
•divine sign --> Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Sevill
•cosmographical & anthropologic --> Solinus


monsters in a context of a whole natural phenomen (bestiary):
earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, strange rains (of blood), stones, and miscellanea

(monsters --> shift from) signs of God's wrat --to--> signs of nature's fertility
(by the end of 17th century) --to--> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy --to--> examples of medical pathology

*peasant and professional had participated to a significant extent in a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause


prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]

•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect

(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)

various bestial parts...

bestial vices and errors (of...)

ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate


Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”

The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.


...mons[...]