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On one side we have the complete history of humanity, where nothing can be forgotten because everything might be relevant. On the other, we have an efficient classification system that allows us to remember only what we need to remember about science. The classification system operates as a clearance: all that was religious and metaphysical is wiped away with a single gesture. It operates selective erasure in that even in the current scientific age the processes of the production of knowledge will have to be erased from the account of the knowledge itself. The classification system tells you what to forget and how to forget it. It operates a double distribution in space of scientific memory. First, the social story of science will be excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it (if at all) by historians. This is a form of erasure. |
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Second, it offers a natural hierarchy of the sciences, saying that a given discipline (say geology, statics) will need to remember all and only a given set of facts about the world. It also operates a distribution in time, saying that all scientific problems can be progressively unfolded so that at one point along the path in treating a problem you will need to draw on biology, then chemistry, then physics, then mathematics. Each type of memory that has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time. The plenum is contained by the overarching organization constituted by the scientific community precisely through a controlled program of first clearance then continuing erasure. The work of conjuring the world into computable form (compare Hutchins 1995) has already begun by the setting up of a certain kind of formal memory system, for example, one in which facts can be stored in linear time and space. |
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In the history of science, we frequently encounter an apposition among clearance (the deliberate destruction of the past) and establishment of a classification system. When Lavoisier set out to found the new discipline of chemistry, he wrote a textbook that standardized the names of the elements (so that Ag became silver: not Diane's metal, a name that "remembered" the alchemical prehistory of the discipline). He also rewrote the history of chemistry so that his rivals, arguing the theory of affinities, no longer occupied a place in the textbooks: they were written out of the historical record. (Bensaude-Vincent 1989). |
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The strategy of clearance is a complete wiping clean of the slate so that one can start anew as if nothing had ever happened. As in the example of the burning of books, it is doubtful if clearance can ever work in the short term since people do remember things and institu- |
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