The scientist is not just a thinking machine: he laughs, he gets anxious, he fears, he gets angry, he makes friends with his work colleagues. The emotions of researchers are numerous, but most often neglected, as if they did not enter into the process that leads to knowledge.
As the academic world moves ever more towards the quantification (and evaluation) of the work of researchers – and their reduction to indexes, notes, numbers of publications, rankings – the human, sensitive dimensions of their daily lives sometimes tend to be hidden.
Is the scientist only a “thinking machine” (p. 10), producing texts, data, experiments? Supposed to abandon his preconceptions, his prejudices, does he also abandon his body and his emotions at the door of his laboratory or his library? If, when he works, the scientist is also a being of sensations, passions, pleasures or sufferings, does this have an influence on his way of producing knowledge and on the very content of knowledge?
Françoise Waquet, in her Emotional History of Knowledgeaims to shed light on these questions by restoring an “emotional identity” (p. 11) to the researcher, by showing him as a “being of flesh and blood” (p. 10). Contrary to a history of ideas that is too disembodied, it is a question of restoring to scientists their sensitivity, of reestablishing the sensorium (The material order, p. 163) of scholarly culture.
This project is clearly a continuation of the previous work that the author devoted in 2015 to The material order of knowledge. There she studied the practical dimensions of the work of scientists, the materiality of their daily lives and the diversity of the tools they design and use. We find in this Emotional story the attention that F. Waquet had already paid to the banal, to the insignificant, to the study of what one might believe to be unworthy of interest. In this, this work is remarkable. In its approach, it participates in a broader historiographical movement striving to propose other stories by reversing or shifting the objects worthy of historical analysis.
Inventory and taxonomy
To reread the history of science through the emotions of scientists, F. Waquet relies essentially on printed sources composed, for the most part, of autobiographies of scientists, extracts from inaugural lectures, university ceremonies, etc. A mass of “ego-documents” (p. 15) that must be assembled and analyzed, through an “extensive reading of the texts” (p. 16), in order to extract the emotions that may be hidden there. The reading work carried out by the author is enormous and the diversity of the primary sources mobilized is impressive.
In the first two parts of the work, she inventories then gathers and classifies scholarly emotions.homo academicus as a sensitive being is thus captured, through multiple examples dating mainly from the 1930s to the present day, and this through several entries. The crucial moments of his career, such as applications for chairs, thus give rise to various emotions, joyful or tragic; the relationships he establishes, within scholarly communities, with his colleagues, or with his master, are other occasions for affects, positive and negative, sometimes violent.
Throughout the chapters, the reader thus explores the different items of this inventory, the different territories of this “emotional ecology” (p. 22). He thus wanders through the “emotional places” of scholarly work, between libraries, the laboratory, the field, and the office. Scholars express themselves, write their satisfaction or, more frequently, their discontent or their suffering in these places. Scholars also invest emotionally in “objects” of ordinary use, whose adventures are as many opportunities to manifest various emotions. From the printed book to the laptop, including laboratory notebooks or the field notes of ethnologists, the daily relationships between scholars and the emotional objects that surround them is made of love, desire, possession, fears, frustration, or anger.
Finally, emotions are also classified according to the place they take in the different stages of the “work-life” of researchers: for example, the intellectual encounters of youth, the choice of the field and the research subject, the economy of daily work, and, more specifically, the activity of writing and publishing a work as well as its reception.
As I indicated previously, the examples used to constitute this landscape are mainly taken from a recent period. Chapter 6 proposes, for its part, to take up the different categories of the previous classification by mobilizing this time examples taken from XVIIe And XVIIIe centuries, the idea being that this approach allows for “a comparison that is worthwhile” (p. 246). Examples of master/disciple relationships, workplaces, objects that carry emotions, or even the pangs of authorship are thus reviewed again, but this time in a more distant past.
Crispy examples
The primary interest of this work probably lies in the examples presented therein. Because even if most of them have already been the subject of publications, they nevertheless remain little known. F. Waquet, for example, uses repeatedly, among many other cases, the (published) correspondence between the historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. We are thus projected, through their exchanges, into the exasperation, the worry, or the fatigue of a Marc Bloch candidate (unfortunate) at the Collège de France in 1928, obliged to a tour of “visits”, each more embarrassing than the last, to professors likely to vote for him (chap. 1). We tremble with fear with Marc Bloch in 1940 at the idea that his personal library could be plundered and dispersed (chap. 3). We curse with Lucien Febvre when he co-wrote his work in 1935 The Rhine with a very little involved Albert Demongeons.
In Chapter 6, the comparison with the XVIIe And XVIIIe centuries can also be the occasion for amused delight when one notes the similarities with the XXe century in the criticisms addressed to libraries concerning the difficulty of access to works. The complaints about the initial difficulties caused by the move of the National Library of France in 1998 (p. 76) thus echo the “catalogue of lamentations and indignations” (p. 259) of the scholars of the XVIIIe century in the face of the considerable obstacles that Italian libraries put up to their visitors. In the Vatican Library, for example, consulting a book was an obstacle course. To do so, one had to find the guard holding the keys to a cabinet that itself contained other keys, including that of the catalogue cabinet. Then find the rating of the manuscript one wanted to consult, and look for it in cabinets locked by two other keys and with no external indication. Enough to provoke a certain “bibliophilic anger” (p. 260)…
Erasure of the social, erasure of historicity
F. Waquet’s choice to favor the identification of different types of manifestations of emotions among scientists poses a certain number of problems and is based on certain presuppositions which would have benefited from being explained.
The emotional history of knowledge that is proposed to us here lacks, it seems to me, a little in historicity. Indeed, the temporal dimension of the analysis is essentially reduced to the comparison, in block and without chronological nuance, in chapter 6, between a recent period (analyzed in chapters 1 to 5, and borrowing indistinctly examples from the 1930s or the 1990s) and an older period covering indistinctly the XVIIe And XVIIIe centuries. As mentioned above, the parallels between the periods, the consistency in the emotions evoked by the texts is striking. The scholars of the Republic of Letters were also moved in their daily work, in their relationships with their colleagues, in their relationships with the objects they handled, or when publishing their texts. Fine. But are we not victims of a teleological optical illusion in seeing identities of nature in what could only be discursive analogies? And is this illusion not reinforced by a certain tendency towards psychological essentialism (“how could it be otherwise?” (p. 320), “How could it be otherwise?” (p. 288))
Is it not possible that the meaning of words has changed between the XVIIe century and the XXIe ? That the transformation of the ecology of scientific disciplines, in particular by the modification of the balances between the human sciences, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, has been able to modify emotional commitments? Has the transformation of the social profiles of scientists, in particular in XIXe century, could not change the collective representations of the emotions of scientists and, therefore, what a scientist could or should admit about what he felt?
As we know, the history of emotions is complicated, often confronted with incomplete, mediated sources that are difficult to interpret and criticize. The work would nevertheless have probably benefited from more analysis of the sources. Unpublished archives could have completed the picture sketched, perhaps by focusing on less prestigious, more anonymous individuals, by moving away from the Collège de France, in order, in this way, to better control the proposed typological generalizations.
Stating obvious reasons?
Throughout the chapters, the book constantly positions itself at the historiographical avant-garde, highlighting the shortcomings of classical literature on science and technology, stating several times that the emotions of scientists constitute a “phenomenon that has been neglected or hidden” (p. 321). This positioning will seem at least surprising to the researcher in the history or sociology of science. While, in the bibliography used by the author, the primary sources are, as has been said, remarkably rich, the secondary sources contain significant gaps. Many researchers have in fact already extensively addressed the question of the emotions of scientists, in particular through that of the motivations for their commitment, their vocations. Consider, for example, the socio-historical work of a RK Merton, who claimed in 1942 that the moral integrity of scientists was not above average and that scientists are men like any other, and therefore capable of experiencing emotions. Consider Steven Shapin, who, in Chapter 2 of The Scientific Lifediscusses in detail the history of this idea. Let us also think of the broad movement of historiographical renewal of the biography of scientists, since the end of the 1980s, which has proposed often innovative articulations between the description of scientific careers, of daily research and life largely “embodied” and “emotional”, and the production of knowledge.
“Scientists are human too.” This statement is probably no longer as radical and provocative as it may have been in the 1940s, and one can doubtless question the real contribution of this work to the current debates of researchers specializing in the scholarly world. Despite this, one must recognize in F. Waquet’s book a certain force of political protest. By deconstructing, again and again, the myth of the purely rational and emotionless scholar, this work will indeed be able to play its part in the defense of knowledge workers against cold and quantifying academic management. If “emotion is the ordinary work” (p. 324) of researchers, it is for the university, as the author invites it to do in conclusion, to “rehumanize” the management of its agents and to finally take into account their daily “suffering” (p. 321).