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.Matter began to take on a brittle and visceral character available for worldly observation and measurement.Eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume signaled how this changing conception shaped the understanding and definition of traces when he identified the term information with more or less arbitrary sensory impressions that became intelligible only when submitted to “abstract reasoning or reflection.”9 According to Hume’s conception of information, an immaterial form continued to suffuse matter, but the reasoning labors of the human mind—rather than the tracing of spiritual origins—assumed the task of identifying its features.Analogical procedures of in-forming no longer imparted intelligibility; instead, schemes of rational analysis brought order to impressions adrift in empires of empiricist signs.Philosopher Michel Foucault identified Hume’s analytical strategy with a broader effort in early modern thought to establish identities through a “means of measurement with a common unit, or, more radically, by its position in an order.”10 The undoing of the great chain of resemblance extended from heaven to earth would ultimately disclose new strings statistically distributed in earthly matter.Tracing with Telegraphy in the Nineteenth CenturyIn the nineteenth century technologies of automated inscription took up the analytical slack of exasperated empirical philosophers.Telegraphy—the technique of writing at a distance, often through recourse to electrical signals—took the lead in delineating patterns and series that would eventually be called information.The adaption of telegraphic instruments for inscription and transmission in fields such as physiology, electromagnetism, linguistics, metrology (the science of measurement), spiritualism, and commodity trading generated standardized and discrete traces available for description in technological and mathematical terms.11 Telegraphic tracing allowed proto-informational measurements of the world.Three features of telegraphy proved decisive in creating informational entities: instrumentation, graphical standardization, and economization.Classical tools such as a hammer or a fountain pen invested each impression with singular qualities based in part on the human hand that wielded them.By contrast, the telegraphic instrument invested entities with mathematically determined, standard, uniform features.Schemes of mathematical and industrial efficiency organized factors such as the patterning and spacing of letters, and the frequency of distribution among dots and dashes.Applied to diverse phenomena such as nerve transmissions and railway-switching commands, telegraphy gradually invested a wide range of singular entities with comparable scriptural properties that could be compared to one another.12 Under telegraphic conditions written language, the actions of the nervous system, and the movements of the stock market all are reduced to binary discrete notations agreed upon in advance by sender and receiver.13 Industrial economization provided an imperative for developing a common system of measurement to explain the abstract forms and laws governing the patterning and distributions of these signals.Firms such as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company encouraged engineers to maximize profits by identifying the minimum data and infrastructure necessary to serve customers.14 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engineers initially referred to the data of transmissions as intelligence, swapping out that term for information only as it became clear that intelligibility to humans was not necessarily a factor in discerning these patterns.The Handbook of the Telegraph published in London in 1862 illustrates how telegraphy tended to turn all communications into standardized, quantifiable traces.The guide advises would-be telegraphic clerks that excellent handwriting and basic competency in mathematics (skills associated with creating a standardized and quantified chain of reproduction) will aid them in their quest to become communications professionals.Most remarkable is the one skill it identifies as nonessential: the ability to speak or understand the language being telegraphed.“An ‘instrument clerk,’ ” the manual explains, “may be quite competent to telegraph or receive a dispatch in a foreign language and yet not understand a single world of it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]