2012 Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and ScienceAll rights reserved

issn 15494497 (online) issn 15494470 (print) issn 15494489 (cd-rom)Aestimatio 9 (2012) 374381

A Tenth of a Second:A History by Jimena Canales

Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 269.ISBN 9780226093192. Paper $25.00, 16.00

Reviewed byMax StadlerETH Zrich

max.stadler@wiss.gess.ethz.ch

Modernity is a grand and dicult wordand one all too easilyconjuring up, arguably, the somewhat one-dimensional imagery ofurbane aneurs, bustling trams, and the arc-lights ickering abovethem. And yet, there no doubt is a lot to be said about all those nar-ratives of modernity which center on the ever-intensifying, materialinterminglings of men and machinesof subjectivities and articial,machine-infused spacesthat indisputably dened this so-called mod-ern age; or which center, if you will, on the ensuing, gradual exposureof that very gure human nature through his (or her) own creations:technologically produced stimulias the civilizing agents of the psy-che, as Schivelbuschs history of The Railway Journey once had it[1977, 150151 (my trans.)]. Indeed, the last three decades or so haveseen no small amount of activity in the direction of such civilizingagents on the part, not least, of historians of science, who begancharting the various ways in which the devices of modernity impingedon, transformed, made problematic, and helped fabricate conceptionsof human physiology, perception, subjectivity, epistemology, and soon. A project which had considerable resonances and correspondencesin the history of art, culture. and media, the machines of the 19thand early 20th centuryfrom trains, telegraphs, and precision instru-ments to (more notoriously) gramophones, lms, and typewritersonthese accounts produced, exposed, and eected many features of whatbegan to take shape as human nature, naturalized.

The bigger picture that has here emerged is one that very pro-ductively illuminates the ways in which, say, the physiology of thehuman motor was deeply enmeshed in the rise of factories, balloons,airplanes, industrializing cities, and alpine mountaineering; and much

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the same holds true for a variety of analogous constellations whichhave come under the purview of historians: the mutual entanglementsof laboratory instruments, street-lighting, vision, and attention; ofcolor-blindness, seafaring, and railway safety; of language, voice, ra-dio, and telephony; of wartime cripples, prostheses, and the (nascent)cyborg, and a great deal more.1 The book under review, JimenaCanales A Tenth of a Second, squarely ts into that mold, advancingas it does, an ambitious and complex story of techno-physiologicalmodernity as told through the lens of one such modern man/machine-eect: reaction time. Or, in more dramatic terms, the story it tellsrevolves around that epistemologically worrisome exposure of thenon-instantaneity of cognition, its ineluctable temporality (9). Thisrather elusive temporalitythe lag, crudely, between stimulus andresponsewas something hovering in the range of a 10th of a second;or so it turned out, rather consistently, as the psycho-physiologicallimitations of the human observer were thrown into relief thanks,largely, to the ever more exacting, intricate, and faster workings ofmachines. What is more, Canales is making good use of it, some-what reminiscent of the biography-of-a-scientic-object literature, inorder to bring together a range of indisputably crucial scenes andgures in matters of Modernitysome of them familiar, others lessso. Covering a period roughly from 1800 into the 1920s, in its sixhighly readable chapters, A Tenth of a Second thus moves elegantlyacross pertinent developments in the realms of physics, psychologyand physiology, weaving, along the way, a number of narrative threadsbetween themnot to mention the multitude of cross-references tothe history of photography, cinema, and the philosophy of science;precision instruments (or metrology) naturally loom large in thisstory of micro-temporality, as do such all-time favorites as Hermannvon Helmholtz, tienne-Jules Marey, and Henri Bergson.

Though Canales very well might have capitalized more system-atically, and protably, on the historiographical proximities of hersubject matter to the vast range of modern body/machine eectsgestured at in the aboveher preferences, as we shall see, rest moreassuredly on the intellectual history end of thingsthis is not a dis-ciplined history, then. And it is along these lines that chapter 2

1 See, among others, Crary 1990, Dierig 2006, Homann 2006, Lenoir 1994,Mills 2011, Otter 2008, and Rabinbach 1992.

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(chapter 1 serving as the introduction) sets in with a rereading of theorigins of reaction time in the rst half of the 19th century. Oeredas a revision of the standard accountan account promulgated, weare told, notably by the edgling science of experimental psychology(which merely treated itself to a story of progress)the story aspainted by Canales emphasizes the rather more practical dimensionsof precision measurement in the birth of reaction time; and hence,in such useful sciences as astronomy, which was then quite heavilyinvolved in the business of time and longitude determination. The psy-cho-physical limitations and idiosyncrasies of human observerssooncirculating as personal equations, individual dierences, or ob-server errorsrst turned problematic within such contexts; andmuch eort, accordingly, was directed to controlling, eacing, andbypassing them. The very scale of the issues raised is relevant toCanales retelling of the standard story; the immense spill-over, inother words, of these troublesome revelations beyond the laboratoriesand into the various cultures of reaction which had been coalescingaround the bountiful stimuli delivered by the modern age. By theearly 20th century, as Canales recounts, notions of reaction timeand its variations were pondered by Taylorist eciency experts anda new breed of (so-called) psycho-technicians as much as by armchairanthropologists and psychoanalysts, all of whom had some stake inthe matter.

Readers hoping to learn more about these broader cultures ofreaction will, however, largely be disappointed: the phenomenon inplace, chapter 3 shifts gear again, exploring the crystallization of thevalue 1/10and the controversies surrounding itwithin the nascentscience of experimental psychology. The elaborations of the phenom-enon during the decades around 1870, so the story unfolds, involvedonly few doses of unanimity: a matter of technique, legitimate or no;of what one was inclined to read into the products of ones inscriptiondevices (devices, predictably, not liked by everyone); of accounting forso many sources of contaminationthe apparent inuence of state ofattention, exercise, age, fatigue, sex, and race; and it was, to be sure,an uncomfortable question, smacking of materialism: Is the speedof thought, or of volition, measurable? Adolphe-Mose Bloch, basedat the Musum dHistoire Naturelle, here emerges as the principalbad sport, wasting many years and a great deal of energy on nding

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defective the many attempts to prove that, in fact, there existed ameaningful and measurable entity.

Even so, the opponents of reaction time eventually lost outnoeasy victory, as silencing the Blochs required the victors to alter,Canales suggests, the very meaning of experiment: the legitimationof experimental systems where the subject under experimentationwas an accepted component within a system composed of keys, wires,and automatic inscription devices [86]. If the consolidation of re-action time thus provided a central moment in the formation ofexperimental psychology, chapters 4 and 5 return to astronomy, andmore specically, to the run up to, and the events surrounding, thetransit of Venus in 1874. Expectations were that this would be anespecially delicate and eeting event, and it made acute once morethe problem of individual dierences (unless, that was, that rareoccurrence be lost to science). The French, we learn, took it seriouslyenough to come up with an ocial Transit of Venus Commission. TheCommission, geared towards improving the pertinent techniques ofmeasurement and observation, promptly launched a series of pedagog-ical initiatives devised to come to terms with those vexing individualdierences and personal errors. In this connection, it soon transpiredthat the production of disciplined observers only went so far, how-ever, and the proered solution increasingly involved getting rid ofthe human observer altogether. Under the heading cinematographicturn, Canales here traces the instrumental role played by the Com-mission in the sanctioning of the nascent (and contested) enterpriseof scientic photography; and most notably in this regard, the roleit played in furthering the pivotal doings of the astronomerandpioneer of chronophotographyJules Janssen, whose photographicrevolver was naturally poised, or so the rhetoric went, to captureobjectively that elusive moment of Venus transit.

We are rmly on the terrain of mechanical objectivity, then, orthe constructions thereof, Canales pressing the point that, all told,this was a victory by no means uncontested and total.2 Canalesnarrative throughout tends to emphasize, more so than other writ-ings on the subject matter, the observer who was implicated in allthis mechanical displacing of natural by articial eyes, rather thanthe instruments per se. Indeed, the 10th of a second, that essential

2 On the notion mechanical objectivity, see esp.Daston and Galison 1992.

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limitation of the human observer, it transpires, turned into a saliententity wherever rapid sequences and elusive, microtemporal eventswere to be captured (lightnings and electric sparks, for example);whenever the requisite, chronophotographic and similar such pro-tocinematic technologies of moving, animated images were deployed(zoetropes, phenakistoscopes, and so on); and wherever, as chapter 6narrates, precision and exacting standards emerged as matters of con-cern. Anxiety about individual dierences thus spread still further asthe laboratories of that youngish science called experimental physicsmushroomed toward the end of the century. Dedicated to rigorous,metrological ideals, the deplorable existence of a physiological unitof time threatened to sabotage even its grandest and most usefulendeavors in precision measurementthen launched at places such asthe German Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt or its US pendant,the Bureau of Standards. But it had its loftier eects too: as Canalesis keen to show, by now, the 10th of a second had long turned intoan intellectual specter of sorts, traceable into the inuential musingsof a Ernst Mach or Pierre Duhem. The nal chapter accordingly isdevoted to the fundamental divergences which erupted in the early1920s between two grand thinkers of time indeed: Henri Bergson (nofriend, famously, of sliced up time la cinematograph) and AlbertEinstein (someone not so inhibited).

If their talking past each other hinged on the smallest moments oftimeand their (non)perceptibilityso did, as Canales argues in herconclusion, a great deal of what is called modernity. And sure enough,the story of reaction time, exemplary for that disturbing revelationthat bodily dierences aected knowledge [10], may very plausiblybe read as one crucial ferment in this narrative, forever frustratingthose modern dreams of progress, exactitude, and universality (withintellectual repercussions, as Canales suggests, well into the 20thcentury). Exploring the realms of micro-temporality, as should havebecome clear, also allows her to draw up an unusually wide andsynthetical picture, one which has much to oer to historians ofscience, photography, and philosophy. Indeed, even as many of thecast are familiar, if not canonized, by zeroing in on the 10th of secondCanales still manages to draw together a great many only apparentlydisparate things in a refreshing and very accessible account.

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That said, synthesis tends to come at a price; and most curiousperhaps in this regard, the 10th of a second, ostensibly the books sub-ject matter, remains a strangely unproblematized and under theorizedobject. As other reviewers have noted, its ontological status is neverquite explicated. In itself, this would not be much of a problem, ofcoursefor historians at any rate (who may remain agnostic)wereit not the case that Canales narrative at times borders on imbuingthat elusive fraction of a second with a quasi-causal, historical agency.While one certainly need not worry that A Tenth of Second aspires todeal in psycho-history or some such naturalistic sin, it would take littleimaginative eort to read it as such (were one so inclined); and evenso, the somewhat ill-specied status of Canales semi-physiologicalprotagonist tends to slightly diminish the force of her overall argument.It is not, for example, always clear what the exact stakes were andwho were the various parties involved in the numerous controversiesthat she examines in the course of her book, nor what ultimately con-nected them, their convergence on the temporal nature of cognitionapart. Similarly, despite the obvious emphasis on instrumentation inher account, the detailed workings and the technological backgroundof the production of such minuscule, exacting intervals of timetimemicroscopy, in the words of the great Helmholtzwill largely haveto be inferred. (Readers familiar with, say, Rebecca Solnits story ofchronophotography in the Technological Wild West [2003] will ndperhaps too much credit given in this regard to the European metropo-les). Or again, whence the cuto, or closure, of the story around 1920is an issue likewise given somewhat short shrift; it certainly is one thatmay have deserved better justication, however, assuming that human,cognitive reactions and perceptual competences became more ratherthan less signicant as the world gradually turned post-industrial.

The result is the occasional feel of montage. Indeed, no fullyconsistent, historical explanation emerges as to why reaction timepopped up in so many places, whence it seemed so signicant toso many actors. There are, to be sure, pointers enough. Abovementioned cultures of reaction, for one, may have provided one suchline of historical argument, illuminating the import of reaction timefrom a wider, cultural rather than primarily intellectual perspective.There is mention, for instance, in this connection of the signicanceof the Franco-Prussian war, and of the less academic dimensions ofreacting (quickly), but little is made of it. The same may be said

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for its appropriations and elaborations by psycho-technicians andother folk taking an interest in the optimal, visual performance notmerely of scientists but a much vaster population of laboring men andwomen. On a related note, one might complain that psycho-opticalphenomena such as icker and fusion meant food for thought notonly to aspiring cinematographers but also to those, say, who wereengaged in the more mundane (and emphatically modern) tasks ofstreet lighting and factory illumination.

Reaction time, in other words, may have been a thing with more,and more profound, connections to the real world than what Canalesat times slightly science-centered narrative would seem to suggest. Ora stronger, and even richer, case may have been made by embracinga wider and less aesthetic notion of the modern; by embracing aworld, that is, increasingly, and quite generally, infused with signals,symbols, and messages emitted from all manner of machines.

The fact remains that conveying the intricate genealogy of athing such as reaction time is no trivial task, and these criticismsshould not distract from Canales considerable achievement in thisdirection. Indeed, in the days of Google-based research, we would allseem to be facing the challenge of narrating a somewhat rhizomatic,sprawling, and non-linear kind of material; and here, when it comesto writing the correspondingly complicated histories, one could do agreat deal worse than taking Canales story as a model case (some-thing still rather hard to come by, certainly as regards the historyof science). Whether or not, then, the realms of the microtemporalin fact do allow us to rethink modernity, as Canales claims, bothas a chronologically delimited period and as a conceptually denedcategory, is a quite secondary matter from this perspective [219]; atthe very least, A Tenth of a Second is an unusually well crafted andintelligent complication of a certain story of modernity: one in whichscientists and philosophers set the tone, and one that prominentlyfeatures that classical toposa profound crisis of perception inducedby the irresistible progress of technology.

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Daston, L. and Galison, P. 1992. The Image of Objectivity.Repre-sentations 40:81128.

Dierig, S. 2006.Wissenschaft in Der Maschinenstadt. Gttingen.

Homann, C. 2006.Unter Beobachtung.Naturforschung in Der ZeitDer Sinnesapparate. Gttingen.

Lenoir, T. 1994. Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communica-tion.Osiris 9:184207.

Mills, M. 2011. Deafening:Noise and the Engineering of Communica-tion in the Telephone System.Grey Room 43:118143.

Otter, C. 2008.The Victorian Eye:A Political History of Light andVision in Britain, 18001910. Chicago.

Rabinbach, A. 1992.The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and theOrigins of Modernity. New York.

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