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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
THE TROUBLED HISTORY OF THE ETHER
Joseph Milutis
Art Department
University of South Carolina, Columbia
November 20, 2003
Thursday, 12:30pm
Preston Seminar Room
The foundations of the science of electricity were also the origins of the
first scientific paradigm. For the electricians of the18th century, what
this meant, among other things, was that the ether would be the agreed upon
substance through which electricity traveled. This first object of rational
consensus, inaugurating a three hundred year period of modern
technoscientific advance, still had very strong affiliations with what
could be called pre-paradigmatic science: natural philosophy and alchemical
mysticism. My work has dealt with the troubled history of this term 'the
ether' from the moment of this break from its hermetic origins to today.
For this talk, I would like to start from the 'beginning', sketching some
crucial features of the break that Enlightenment science made with earlier
forms of knowledge, and then continue on to figures in the arts and
sciences who would begin to make clear the flaws of a positivism that would
do away with obsolete forms of knowing. The talk may include episodes from
the lives and work of Anton Mesmer, Edgar Allan Poe, Federico Fellini,
and/or Gilles Deleuze.
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