Mary Poovey

Mary Poovey's extraordinary analysis begins, as she notes in the introduction, with her noting a curious shift that occurs in historical discourse, in which numbers somehow acquire an authority and trustworthiness in describing reality that they simply did not possess in earlier periods. This apparent objectivity of numbers and statistics, in other words, is not a natural state of affairs, but the product of a long historical debate about knowledge, reality, and what can be trusted when attempting to describe the world.

Chapter 1 begins by reflecting on what exactly we mean by a fact. A fact is usually thought of as a particular, a particular that in turn needs to be understood within the larger context or system of which it is a part. That said, there have been different ways of approaching this question of the fact. The ancient, Aristotelian way was to look upon facts as things that confirmed the order of things, as "commonplaces." This way of looking at things is overturned in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon, who reverses Aristotle's perspective by asking how we account for those facts that don't fit into the commonplace, that disrupt the system.

Poovey locates Bacon's revolutionary new perspective within a larger discourse that owes an explicit debt to Bruno Latour's [b:We Have Never Been Modern|134569|We Have Never Been Modern|Bruno Latour|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348835649l/134569._SY75_.jpg|3058288]. Latour argues that early thinkers of modernity, from Bacon to Boyle to Hobbes, engaged in a false separation of nature and society. On one side, there is the objective reality, on the other, the discourse that describes it. This division makes possible a theoretical separation between "objective" or "scientific" description of facts, and their political interpretation.

Poovey's task, then, is to question and interrogate this separation, to reveal the extent to which knowledge and interpretation, fact and rhetoric are inextricably intertwined with each other. The emphasis on numbers and statistics, which is grounded in a denial of rhetoric in favor of "plain speaking" and "hard facts," is just one strategy among many that conceals the reality that numbers are also selective and interpretive. To prove this point, Poovey signals her intention of looking at the historical tools that were developed to promote the illusion of the modern fact, beginning with the phenomenon of double-entry book-keeping.… (altro)

Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 examines the way that British society was consolidated in the early nineteenth century, particularly through practices dependent on the metaphor of the “social body,” practices that she refers to with the term “aggregation,” and many of which are scientific practices: “The image of a single culture had begun to seem plausible in 1860… because the technologies capable of materializing an aggregate known as the ‘population’ had been institutionalized for several decades. These technologies included the census… and statistics” (4). These technologies of aggregation are a form of scientific detachment, because they allow aspects of culture to be approached from a distance, not bound up in individuals.

Poovey repeatedly considers the gendered dimensions of aggregation. She seems to predominantly consider the practice of aggregation a male one, perhaps because of the metaphors aggregation employed. In discussing Edwin Chadwick’s Sanitary Report (1842), she points out that his “plan for improving the sanitary conditions, and hence the productivity, of Britain’s working poor cast the city (and society more generally) as a giant body that required a physician’s care” (37); on the other hand, writers such as Charles Babbage employed the metaphor of the social machine or factory (38). Either one of these metaphors makes the detached observer male, for the typical doctor and typical (if not all) factory operator were men. Poovey later generalizes that by the early nineteenth century, “the abstract reasoning of political economy was considered a masculine epistemology, while the aesthetic appreciation of concrete particulars and imaginative excursions was considered feminine” (133). Her discussion of this separation, however, throughout Making a Social Body seems to set up an implicit preference for the feminine epistemology over the masculine: Poovey seems to consistently privilege “the aesthetic appreciation of concrete particulars” and view instances of abstract reasoning with suspicion or hostility, recalling Donna Haraway’s characterization of feminist critiques of objectivity as being only about “what they have meant and how it hurts us.”

In discussing James Philip Kay’s The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), Poovey characterizes his work as being “[e]mpirical observations of specific instances of working-class distress, gathered and interpreted by a middle-class (white male) expert” (57). The construction of the phrase, especially the parenthetical insertion of “white male” seems to indicate that the reader is mean to take it as read that a middle-class, male examination of working-class subjects is innately flawed.

Poovey presents as an alternative to this “anatomical realism” (74) the actions of Ellen Ranyard, the founder of the Female Bible Mission, which undertook to place a Bible in every home. Though Poovey admits that Ranyard too “contributed to the rationality associated with abstraction” (50), she seems to praise Ranyard for her determination “that the knowledge generated by the mission about the poor should not be used to facilitate either the kind of aggregation that let Chadwick to calculate the tons of waste produced by poor bodies each year or the kind of science whose systematic nature was its chief criterion for its success” (51). Poovey claims that Ranyard was “adapting a practice associated with women to a science dominated by men” and thus “preserved an alternative model of knowledge that challenged the claim to superiority advanced by the science she practiced” (54), but does not really substantiate why Ranyard’s endeavor was superior to the masculine efforts of Chadwick it contrasted against. Chadwick’s work was aimed at reducing the suffering of the poor, even if in aggregate and even if it was unsuccessful; Ranyard’s work resulted in the dissemination of a number of Bibles among the lower classes, but does not seem to have been particularly helpful in reducing the suffering of the poor, either. The praise for Ranyard’s efforts seems to mostly rest on an unquestioned belief that her “feminine” epistemology was somehow superior to the masculine one that it was challenging (but nevertheless being replaced by). Though Poovey’s analysis of the gendering of specific forms of knowledge is useful and strong, the problem I see with Poovey’s approach is that she seems to have bought into the dualism that the nineteenth century set up—only she has just reversed its significance.… (altro)