Cloud Physiognomy
by Lorraine Daston

The essay begins…

When it came to clouds, art and science faced similar challenges of description: how to capture almost infinite variety and variability? Both variety and variability flummox description, whether in words or in images, but not in the same way. Perform the following thought experiment: first, imagine all the species of life on earth arrayed together in their dazzling diversity, all circa ten million of them, from the Lesser Antillean iguana to the figeater beetle, from brain corals to black-capped chickadees, from mosquitoes to barley. That is variety, and clouds have it aplenty: cirrus fibratus intortus, cirrocumulus castellanus lacunosus, altostratus undulatus, and on and on. But viewed on a human time scale, it is a static variety. Evolution rarely proceeds before our very eyes. Now imagine all of these ten million-odd species constantly metamorphosing into one another and into intermediate forms—not just evolution speeded up to cinematic tempo but everything changing into everything else, all at once, not just past forms to present forms but also present to past and this present form to that other one, without regard to taxon or phylogeny. That is variability—the vertiginous variability of clouds.

It is not just the variety of clouds but also their fast-paced variability that eludes description: if the pace of biological evolution is too slow to be perceptible on a human timescale, that of cloud evolution is too swift for the human eye to fix, much less to capture in a net of words and images. Although the skies have been scanned and studied since the meticulous astrometeorological diaries kept for more than six centuries by ancient Babylonian scribes, and weather-watching networks sponsored by scientific societies have been trying to systematize observations since the seventeenth century, it was only at the turn of the nineteenth century that two naturalists, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in France and Luke Howard in Britain (it is significant that both were steeped in the practices of Linnaean classification) independently and simultaneously proposed cloud classification schemes—but two quite different schemes based on different principles.

For the next hundred years, cloud observers elaborated their own systems, splitting and lumping the original categories according to local weather patterns and individual proclivities. Is it any wonder that almost every scientific publication on cloud classification from Lamarck’s and Howard’s pioneer attempts around 1800 to the latest edition of the International Cloud Atlas in 1975/1987 begins with a tetchy paragraph defending the whole enterprise against skeptics who point to the notorious mutability and evanescence of their subject matter?

After centuries of serving as the metaphor for mutability, clouds began to be classified by genera and species in the nineteenth century, on the model of Linnaean taxonomy. In order to standardize nomenclature, cloud watchers had to learn to see in unison, recognizing cloud types as one would recognize human faces. The analogy between cloud and facial recognition runs deep: in both cases, a few salient features (that aquiline nose, those long wispy streaks) are foregrounded at the expense of a great many others. What the art of caricature is to faces, condensed description was to clouds: a few bold strokes that focused attention on the essential and screened out everything else. Cloud classification depended crucially on description by omission.

LORRAINE DASTON is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science, including probability and statistics, wonders and the order of nature, scientific images, objectivity, quantification, observation, and the moral authority of nature.

On Friday, September 23, Representations board member and co-editor of the special issue, “Financialization and the Culture Industry,” C. D. Blanton, will participate in a symposium on Barrett Watten’s Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences at UC Berkeley.

Blanton is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include modernist literature and thought generally, as well as the long history of post-romantic verse. He is the author of Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism (Oxford, forthcoming) and co-editor of two volumes of postwar poetry: Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism (Yale Journal of Criticism) and A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Blackwell). He is currently working on a project on the end(s) of modernist aesthetics.

Lyn Hejinian will host the symposium, which takes place from 1–2:30PM in room D1 of the Hearst Field Annex, on the UC Berkeley campus. Other participants include Jane Gregory, Donna V. Jones, Andrew Key, Charles Altieri and Barrett Watten.

The Point of Precision
by Kathleen Stewart

The essay begins…

ANNIE DILLARD’S Pilgrim at Tinker Creek opens with a series of scenes attuned to “the unthinkable profusion of forms” encountered in her daily walks in the woods; “the inrush of power and light … the curl of a stem” are not just sensory details described, but material-aesthetic registers of what Wallace Stevens called “the mobile and immobile flickering / In the area between is and was.” A “form gulping after formlessness” that can “seem physical if the eye is quick enough.”

This is what Derek McCormack calls a “radical empiricism,” here entrained on a bid, according to Félix Guattari, to “capture existence in the very act of its constitution.” Here, the act of description, then, is a peering, accidental glimpse of what matters—what comes into matter in the cocomposition of objects in contact, what shifts its matter in a moment of recognizable, though unnamed and partial, significance. Isabelle Stengers calls this a “vivid pragmatics.” Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, following Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of the prehension of all things, call it “thought in the act”: “Every practice is a mode of thought. . . . To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking in color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.”

Dillard’s description of her walks in the woods is not a report of finished events and known entities but a realism of prismatically energetic states: “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent”; “light . . . suddenly runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, and goes again in a wink.” Things radically perform their capacities. A mockingbird takes a single step off a roof gutter into the air. “Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care . . . and so floated onto the grass.”

Thought and practice, telling and sensing, foreground and background, fuse in a soft focus trained on tonal differences, a spark of color, a modulation in tempo, the half-patterned expressivity of a scene teemingly differentiated and marked by thresholds of matter. Subjects and objects are at once taken aback and literally transformed by their own self-surprised acts and effects.

This essay proposes a kind of critique aimed at approaching the improvisatory conceptuality of ordinary forms emergent in everyday life. Using a slowed ethnographic attention to the immanent aesthetics of objects, it argues that the singularities through which forms take place animate both event and perception.

KATHLEEN STEWART teaches anthropology by means of writing experiments at the University of Texas, Austin. Her books include A Space on the Side of the Road (Princeton), Ordinary Affects (Duke), Worlding (forthcoming from Duke), and, with Lauren Berlant, The Hundreds (in preparation).

Observable Behavior 1–10
by Liza Johnson

The essay begins…

1. IN ACTING, BEHAVIOR IS A word for observable gestures, pulses of affect. It is a primary craft element of screen performance; alongside dialogue and action, it is one of the main ways that anything becomes legible in cinema—character, plot, meaning. It’s also the element that is generally unscripted, so, for actors, behavior is a site of invention and interpretation. It’s very rare that a screenplay dictates behavior: ‘‘She bites her lip,’’ or, ‘‘He lurches a little to one side.’’

2. Some people rely a lot on observing behavior. Everyone does it, but not everyone does it in the same way, and not everyone is good at it. At least in my experience, if you’re outside a culture or a friend group, or in figurative or literal ways you don’t speak the language, you must rely on observing behavior. It makes other people think you have ESP, when in fact you are really using sensory perception in a way that culture would prefer you didn’t.

It is said that the children of addicts and other erratic parties are especially good at this kind of observation, of reading all the surfaces of the world all the time. I like to think of it as a special skill that is learned eccentrically, outside the academy. This may be one of the reasons that acting remains a semidemocratic site of class mobility, because the things that make you really good at observing or reproducing behavior are unsystematic, unpredictable, or at least not the same things that get you into Harvard.

There are different words for this: if you want to pathologize, you call it hypervigilance; if you want to psychoanalyze, you call it projective identification; or if you are an actor of a particular training, you might also liken it to Anne Bogart’s viewpoint of kinesthetic response.

Behavior comes before language, before affect can be named as feeling, or explained or narrated, or described in words. It is arguably one word for the legible pulses of affect that people can pretend are illegible, so you seem psychic if you recognize them.

In this “listicle,” filmmaker Liza Johnson proposes ten ways of thinking about—and looking at—behavior, through her own and others’ films and writing.

Introduction to the special issue Description Across Disciplines
edited by Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best

The introduction begins …

Academics don’t necessarily know what description is, but they know they don’t like it. “That talk was wonderfully descriptive; let’s give him the job”—said no one ever. When scholars from multiple disciplines gather to evaluate grant proposals, they can usually agree on one thing: the wisdom of rejecting any project they consider “merely descriptive.” And at least one university department’s grading rubric formalizes its low judgment of work that “is correct but largely descriptive, lacking analysis” by assigning such papers a C. Boring and static, rote rather than creative, reproductive rather than productive: description in such moments does not even rise to the status of a necessary evil. Instead, it is defined by failure or falling short: lacking a compelling argument or organizing perspective; insufficiently self-conscious of its own procedures; basic in the bad sense of naive and mechanical. Even the clearest accounts of description often contrast it to what it is not—not interpretation, not explanation, not prediction, not prescription.

Yet description is everywhere, a ubiquitous and necessary condition of scholarship, and in practice, if not in preaching, attitudes toward it vary across and within disciplines. Although scientists aim at explaining causal mechanisms and identifying predictive laws, many consider description an activity sufficiently worthy in its own right that one can find highly cited articles whose titles identify them as “descriptions”—of forest geckos, road surface roughness, molecular excitations, or valence bonds. Social scientists express more overt ambivalence about description. In 1980, economist Amartya Sen wrote, “It is fair to say that description as an intellectual activity is typically not regarded as very challenging. To characterize a work in the social sciences as ‘purely descriptive’ would not normally be regarded as high praise.” Three decades later, John Gerring similarly noted that in political science description “has come to be employed as a euphemism for a failed, or not yet proven, causal inference. Studies that do not engage causal or predictive questions, or do not do so successfully, are judged ‘merely’ descriptive.” But Sen and Gerring also contest this view by underscoring the fundamental importance of descriptions in social science and by foregrounding the skills needed to produce them. Nor are they alone. Many historians and ethnographers would say that without description, albeit of a highly interpretive kind, they could not produce historical narratives or field notes. Humanists often keep their engagement with description tacit and articulate their explicit discomfort with “mere description” by insisting (rightly) that description cannot be separated from interpretation. Even so, art historians, literary critics, and musicologists must learn to describe the paintings, sculptures, texts, and musical works that they study.

We believe that description is a core, if unacknowledged, method in all scholarship and teaching. In order to proceed, interpretations, explanations, and prescriptions must give an account of—describe—what they interpret, explain, or evaluate. Description makes objects and phenomena available for analysis and synthesis, and is rarely as simple as its critics imply. An elusive object that travels by many names, and sometimes by no name at all, description’s dictionary definitions include representation, drawing, report, portrayal, and account. Description can take many forms, including lists, case studies, sequences, taxonomies, typologies, genealogies, and prevalence studies, and it involves many actions, including observing, measuring, comparing, particularizing, generalizing, and classifying, using words, images, and numbers.

We write from the perspective of literary critics who became interested several years ago in questioning the dominance of interpretive methods in our discipline. In 2009, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus published a special issue of Representations called “The Way We Read Now.” The introduction to that volume gathered a set of recent developments in literary studies under the rubric “surface reading,” referring to methods trained on “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts.” In 2010, Heather Love published an essay called “Close but Not Deep” that proposed the observational social sciences as a model for descriptive readings of literary texts. It was in part the controversy generated by these essays that prompted us to take a closer look at description: to assess what were widely cited as its limitations, or even dangers, and to further explore what we still imagined to be its unacknowledged and even untapped potential. What, we wondered, would it mean to acknowledge the ways that our critical and pedagogical practices make description central—to prosody, plot summary, histories of the book, even to allegorical and symptomatic interpretations? What would we learn if we widened our purview to ask scholars and practitioners from disciplines beyond literary studies to reflect on their own practices of description? Continue reading (free access until October 31, 2016) …

Universally practiced across the disciplines, description is also consistently devalued or overlooked. In this introduction to the special issue “Description Across Disciplines,” Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best propose that description is a critical practice more complex (and less contradictory) than its detractors have taken it to be.  They argue that turning critical attention toward description’s nuances gives us access to the ways that scholars conventionally assign and withhold value and prestige. The authors set forth a number of principles (using their contributors’ essays as a guide) toward the end of “building a better description.”

SHARON MARCUS is Dean of Humanities and Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as well as the co-founder and co-editor in chief of Public Books, an online review of books, arts, and ideas.

HEATHER LOVE is R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”).

STEPHEN BEST is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004).