Difference Machines: Time and Experimental Systems

Difference Machines: Time and Experimental Systems

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin)
Tuesday, April 5 / 5:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Experimental systems and their dynamics are the focus of Rheinberger’s paper. For a long time, identity and contradiction were the categories in which historical trajectories were conceptualized. Rheinberger, following Gilles Deleuze, to use the categories of reproduction and difference instead to convey an idea of how the sciences develop on the basis of experimentation: a development that does not rest on anticipation, as usually thought, but reveals itself as a process “driven from behind” as Thomas Kuhn once put it. I will expose the temporal structure characteristic for experimental systems on the basis of examples from the recent history of the life sciences.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Keeping Time RFG, the NEH and Dept. of German, Slavic and Semitic studies.