A demonstration differential thermometer for use in lectures. Remains of liquid in glass bulb, possibly glycerin or alcohol. Possibly made by Miller and Adie of Edinburgh. 1808-1813.
Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums, ID: TPH732.
Devices seem to be a ubiquitous feature of modern life. They also, to a greater or lesser extent, shape who we can be. Their inherent newness—not least because of their planned obsolescence—may make us think that devices are unique to our modern world. In recent years, academics, public intellectuals, journalists, and political activists have begun to consider the ethical and cultural implications of new technologies, these devices that mediate our daily lives. Indeed, the explosion of the technology of AI and ChatGPT has led to headlines about artificial intelligence rendering human intelligence obsolete. Even so, too often, we fail to see to the entangled history of technology and literature at the heart of what we now think of as a device.
My new book, Devices of Enlightenment: Literature and Technology in the Long Eighteenth Century, argues that a device is both a “design” and a “scheme formed; project; speculation” with an important technological and literary history in the long 18th century (c. 1660-1800), one that also imagines its own future. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century devices—physical and conceptual objects in literature and science—present a pressing opportunity to understand the co-mingling of Enlightenment technological and imaginative practice. To that end, I argue that a “device of Enlightenment” may be a physical object: a microscope, encyclopedia, anatomy, mathematical problem, thermometer, or a language machine. Although the term “literary device” does not emerge until the 19th century, a “device of Enlightenment” may just as easily also be a literary form: a detail, dictionary, library, periodical, Georgic poem, or an author.
Drawing upon Andrea Ballestero’s recent work, I define a device as a “juncture”: a device is at once an object and a process with a duration; as such, a device facilitates distinctions constitutive of intellectual, cultural, and social value. “Technology,” as Bruno Latour notes, is the “study of techniques” that reveal patterns of knowledge production. Enlightenment devices show us that these practices are both technical and imaginative. As objects and processes that shape scientific and literary narratives, devices reveal both the fitful history of techne and the meaning-making of literary form.
Therefore, when we study devices, we also study the cultural and intellectual logics that authorize some, denigrate others. And at the heart of my work is a commitment to reimagining the potential that devices of Enlightenment suggest. Katherine McKittrick teaches us that scientia—the arts and technologies of knowledge production—produces its own fictions “that provide the conditions to concoct a different story altogether.” As scientia, devices show possibilities (even if they are never fully realized) and failures (even if they are ignored) that can enable us “to concoct a different story altogether” of the past that will help us to think towards a more just scholarly and cultural future.
