Things that Talk: On a new perspective for engaging with scientific instruments

Our contribution will propose a new approach for engaging with scientific instruments inspired by a recent exhibition which we have designed and organized. Inverting the current trope of presenting history through many objects, the exhibition weaved together various surprising stories around a single object from the UNIL-EPFL Collection of scientific instruments. The goal was not to tell the continuous history of this object (such as its construction or use by specific disciplines), but rather to show how it came to be embedded in multiple layers of context with different social, economic, cultural or aesthetic dimensions. This curatorial approach, which though centered on the object engaged with it from an oblique perspective, has suggested a new historical method. We will illustrate this method by discussing the measurements taken with the Régnier dynamometer by the naturalist François Péron during the Baudin expedition to Australia. Péron believed that his measurements proved the physical superiority of Europeans over the indigenous populations, and thus disproved Rousseau’s claim that civilization brought with it degeneration. While the usual historical approach would focus on contextualizing and deconstructing their pretended objectivity, we will reconceptualize these measurements as an account produced by the dynamometer itself and only transcribed by Péron. In this oblique perspective the dynamometer ceases to be a mute historical actor to be talked about (something that needs to be explained). Instead, it becomes a witness capable of capturing a historical reality which requires historical interpretation and is not to be confounded with the “objective” reality produced by instruments when regarded from a purely scientific perspective.