Carlo Ginsburg
Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (excerpt)
From Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96-125; the following passage is from pages 102-108:
Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers.
This rich storehouse of knowledge has been passed down by hunters over the generations. In the absence of verbal documentation to supplement rock paintings and artifacts, we can turn to folklore, which transmits an echo, though dim and distorted, of the knowledge accumulated by those remote hunters. An oriental fable that circulated among Kirghiz, Tartars, Jews, Turks, and others relates the story of three brothers who meet a man who has lost a camel or, in variant versions, a horse. They describe it for him without hesitation: it is white, blinded in one eye, and carries two goat-skins on its back, one full of wine, the other of oil. Then they have seen it? No, they have not. So they are accused of stealing and brought to trial. For the brothers, this is a moment of triumph: they demonstrate in a flash how, by means of myriad small clues, they could reconstruct the appearance of an animal on which they have never laid eyes.
Obviously, the three brothers are repositories of some sort of venatic lore, even if they are not necessarily hunters. This knowledge is characterized by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly. Also, the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence, which could be expressed most simply as “someone passed this way.” Perhaps the actual idea of narration (as distinct from charms, exorcisms, or invocation) may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks. This obviously undemonstrable hypothesis nevertheless seems to be reinforced by the fact that the rhetorical figures on which the language of venatic deduction still rests today-the part in relation to the whole, the effect in relation to the cause-are traceable to the narrative axis of metonymy, with the rigorous exclusion of metaphor. The hunter would have been the first “to tell a story” because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events.
“To decipher” or “to read” animal tracks are metaphors. We have tried, however, to take them literally, as the verbal condensation of a historical process which brought us, perhaps over a long span of time, to the invention of writing. The same sort of connection has been articulated, in the guise of an aetiological myth, by Chinese tradition, which attributes the invention of writing to a high official who had observed bird tracks on the sandy banks of a river. On the other hand, if we abandon the realm of myths and hypotheses for that of documented history, we are struck by the undeniable analogies between the venatic model just discussed and the paradigm implicit in the Mesopotamian divination texts, which began to be composed in the third millennium B.C. Both presuppose the minute investigation of even trifling matters, to discover the traces of events that could not be directly experienced by the observer. Excrement, tracks, hairs, feathers, in one case; animals' innards, drops of oil on the water, heavenly bodies, involuntary movements of the body, in the other. Granted that the second series, as opposed to the first, was virtually limitless in the sense that practically everything was grist for the work of the Mesopotamian diviners. But the principal difference between them is something else: divination looked to the future and the interpretation of venatic clues to the past (perhaps a past only instants old). And yet there were great similarities in the learning process between the two; the intellectual operations involved-analyses, comparisons, classifications-were formally identical. Only formally, to be sure; the social context was totally different. It has been noted, in particular, how profoundly the invention of writing shaped Mesopotamian divination. In fact, among other royal prerogatives, the power to communicate with their subjects by means of messages was attributed to the gods-messages written in the heavens, in human bodies, everywhere-which the divines had the task of deciphering (a notion destined to issue in that ageless image of the “book of nature”). And the identification of soothsaying with the deciphering of divine characters inscribed in reality was reinforced by the pictorial features of cuneiform writing: like divination, it too designated one thing through another.
Even a footprint indicates an animal's passing. In respect to the concreteness of the print, of a mark materially understood, the pictogram already represents an incalculable step forward on the road towards intellectual abstraction. But the abstract capacities presupposed by the introduction of pictographic writing are, in turn, of small consequence next to those required for the transfer to phonetic writing. Actually, pictographic and phonetic elements continued to coexist in cuneiform writing, just as in Mesopotamian divination literature the increasing tendency to generalize deductively did not cancel out the fundamental ability to infer causes from their effects. This explains both the way in which technical terms taken from a legal vocabulary infiltrated the Mesopotamian language of divination, and the presence of passages dealing with medical physiognomy and semiotics in divination treatises.
Thus, we have returned to semiotics. We find it included in a constellation of disciplines (although the term is obviously anachronistic) which have a common feature. It might be tempting to juxtapose two pseudosciences, divination and physiognomics, with sciences such as law and medicine, ascribing the disparity in such a comparison to the spatial and temporal distance of the societies under discussion. But this would be a superficial conclusion. Something did indeed link these different methods of seeking knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia (if we exclude divination by inspiration, which was based on experiences 'of an ecstatic type): it was an attitude oriented towards the analysis of specific cases which could be reconstructed only through traces, symptoms, and clues. Mesopotamian legal texts themselves did not consist of collections of laws or ordinances but of discussions of concrete examples. Consequently, we can speak of a presumptive or divinatory paradigm, directed, depending on the forms of knowledge, towards the past, present, or future. For the future, there was divination in a strict sense; for the past, the present, and the future, there was medical semiotics in its twofold aspect, diagnostic and prognostic; for the past, there was jurisprudence. But behind this presumptive or divinatory paradigm we perceive what may be the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race: the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the tracks of his quarry.
What I have been saying explains how a diagnosis of cranial trauma reached on the basis of bilateral squint could turn up in a Mesopotamian treatise on divination. More generally, it explains historically how an array of disciplines could emerge which centered on the deciphering of signs of various kinds, from symptoms to writing. Passing from Mesopotamia to Greece this constellation changed profoundly, following the birth of such new disciplines as historiography and philology, and a new social and epistemological autonomy in medicine and other ancient disciplines. The body, language, and human history for the first time were exposed to objective examination, which on principle excluded divine intervention. We are still today the heirs of this decisive turning-point in the culture of the polis. It may be less obvious that in this transformation, a paradigm definable as semiotic or presumptive played a primary role. It is especially evident in the case of Hippocratic medicine, where the definition of its chosen method depended on the explicit notion of symptom (semeion). The Hippocratic school maintained that only by attentively observing and recording all symptoms in great detail could one develop precise “histories” of individual diseases; disease, in itself, was out of reach. This emphasis on the presumptive nature of medicine was probably inspired by the contrast, pointed out by the Pythagorean physician Alcmeon, between the immediacy of divine knowledge and the speculative nature of human perception. A conjectural paradigm operating on diverse levels found its implicit justification in the denial that reality is transparent. Physicians, historians, politicians, potters, carpenters, sailors, hunters, fishermen, women: for the Greeks these were only some of the groups dealing in that vast world of conjectural knowledge. Its borders-governed, significantly, by the goddess Metis, Jove's first wife, who personified divination by aqueous means-were marked by such terms as “conjecture” and “speculate” (tekmor, tekmairesthai). But as I have stated, this paradigm remained implicit-suppressed by the prestigious (and socially higher) model of knowledge developed by Plato.
The defensive tone of certain passages in the Hippocratic corpus indicates that as early as the fifth century B.C., the polemic against the uncertainties of medicine, destined to last into our own day, had already begun. This continuum is explained by the fact that relations between doctor and patient, characterized by the latter's inability to verify the knowledge and authority professed by the former, have not changed much since the time of Hippocrates. But the terms of the controversy, together with the profound transformation experienced by the idea of “rigor” and “science,” have changed in the course of almost two and a half millennia. Obviously, the decisive point is constituted by the appearance of a scientific paradigm based on Galileian physics, but one which turned out to be more durable than it. Even if modern physics cannot call itself “Galileian” (although it has not rejected Galileo), his epistemological and even symbolic significance for science in general has remained intact.
It should be clear by now that the group of disciplines which we have called evidential and conjectural (medicine included) are totally unrelated to the scientific criteria that can be claimed for the Galileian paradigm. In fact, they are highly qualitative disciplines, in which the object is the study of individual cases, situations, and documents, precisely because they are individual, and for this reason get results that have an unsuppressible speculative margin: just think of the importance of conjecture (the term itself originates in divination) in medicine or in philology, and in divining. Galileian science, which could have taken as its own the Scholastic motto Individuum est ineffabile (“We cannot speak about what is individual”), is endowed with totally different characteristics. Mathematics and the empirical method implied, respectively, quantification and the repetition of phenomena, while the individualizing perspective by definition excluded the latter and admitted the former only as mere instrument. All this explains why history never became a Galileian science. It was during the seventeenth century, in fact, that the grafting of antiquarian methods to historiography indirectly revealed the remote conjectural origins of the latter, hidden for centuries.
This original feature has not changed despite the ever-closer links between history and the social sciences. History has stayed a social science sui generis, forever tied to the concrete. Even if the historian is sometimes obliged to refer back, explicitly or implicitly, to a sequence of comparable phenomena, the cognitive strategy, as well as the codes by which he expresses himself, remain intrinsically individualizing (although the individual case may be a social group or an entire society). In this respect the historian is like the physician who uses nosographical tables to analyze the specific sickness in a patient. As with the physician's, historical knowledge is indirect, presumptive, conjectural.
But our hypothesis is too orderly. In the realm of conjectural disciplines, one-philology, or more precisely, textual criticism-has from its very emergence presented certain atypical characteristics.
Its objective, in fact, took shape through a process of drastic selection of the pertinent characteristics, later to be reduced even further. This internal curtailing of the discipline was expressed by two decisive historical milestones: the inventions of writing and of printing. Textual criticism originated as a consequence of the first (when the decision was taken to transcribe the Homeric poems) and became well established after the second (when the earliest, often hurriedly produced editions of the classics were replaced by more reliable ones). At first, all the elements tied to orality and gesture and later even those tied to the physical characteristics of writing were thought to be irrelevant to the text. This twofold process resulted in a progressive dematerialization of the text, which was gradually purified at every point of reference related to the senses; even though a material element is required for a text's survival, the text itself is not identified by that element. All this seems obvious today, but actually it isn't at all. One need only think of the crucial function played by intonation in oral literature, or by calligraphy in Chinese poetry, to realize that the concept of text I have just mentioned is tied to an extremely significant cultural choice. That this selection was not determined by the mere substitution of mechanical for manual means of reproduction is demonstrated by the well-known example of China, where the invention of printing did not break the link between literary text and calligraphy. We shall see shortly how the problem of pictorial “texts” historically has been expressed in radically different terms.
The abstract notion of text explains why textual criticism, even while retaining to a large extent its divinatory qualities, had the potential to develop in a rigorously scientific direction, as in fact occurred in the course of the nineteenth century. The radical conception of considering only the portions of a text which could be reproduced (first manually and later, after Gutenberg, mechanically) meant that, even while dealing with individual cases, one avoided the principal pitfall of the humane sciences: quality. Significantly, Galileo turned to philology in the very moment that he was founding modern natural science through an equally drastic reduction. The traditional medieval juxtaposition of world and book was based on evidence that both were immediately decipherable, while Galileo, instead, stressed that “philosophy ... written in this great book which is always open before our eyes (I call it the universe) ... cannot be understood if we do not first learn the language and the characters in which it is written,” namely, “triangles, circles and other geometrical figures.” For the natural philosopher as for the philologist, the text is a profound, invisible entity to be reconstructed independently of material data: “figures, numbers and movements, but not smell, nor tastes, nor sounds, which I do not believe are anything more than names outside the living animal.”
With these words Galileo set natural science on the anti-anthropocentric and anti-anthropomorphic direction which it would never again abandon. A gap had opened in that world of knowledge, one destined to enlarge with the passing of time. And, to be sure, there could be no greater contrast than between the Galileian physicist professionally deaf to sounds and insensitive to tastes and odors, and his contemporary, the physician, who hazarded diagnoses by placing his ear on wheezy chests or by sniffing at feces and tasting urine.
From Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96-125; the following passage is from pages 102-108:
Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers.
This rich storehouse of knowledge has been passed down by hunters over the generations. In the absence of verbal documentation to supplement rock paintings and artifacts, we can turn to folklore, which transmits an echo, though dim and distorted, of the knowledge accumulated by those remote hunters. An oriental fable that circulated among Kirghiz, Tartars, Jews, Turks, and others relates the story of three brothers who meet a man who has lost a camel or, in variant versions, a horse. They describe it for him without hesitation: it is white, blinded in one eye, and carries two goat-skins on its back, one full of wine, the other of oil. Then they have seen it? No, they have not. So they are accused of stealing and brought to trial. For the brothers, this is a moment of triumph: they demonstrate in a flash how, by means of myriad small clues, they could reconstruct the appearance of an animal on which they have never laid eyes.
Obviously, the three brothers are repositories of some sort of venatic lore, even if they are not necessarily hunters. This knowledge is characterized by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly. Also, the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence, which could be expressed most simply as “someone passed this way.” Perhaps the actual idea of narration (as distinct from charms, exorcisms, or invocation) may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks. This obviously undemonstrable hypothesis nevertheless seems to be reinforced by the fact that the rhetorical figures on which the language of venatic deduction still rests today-the part in relation to the whole, the effect in relation to the cause-are traceable to the narrative axis of metonymy, with the rigorous exclusion of metaphor. The hunter would have been the first “to tell a story” because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events.
“To decipher” or “to read” animal tracks are metaphors. We have tried, however, to take them literally, as the verbal condensation of a historical process which brought us, perhaps over a long span of time, to the invention of writing. The same sort of connection has been articulated, in the guise of an aetiological myth, by Chinese tradition, which attributes the invention of writing to a high official who had observed bird tracks on the sandy banks of a river. On the other hand, if we abandon the realm of myths and hypotheses for that of documented history, we are struck by the undeniable analogies between the venatic model just discussed and the paradigm implicit in the Mesopotamian divination texts, which began to be composed in the third millennium B.C. Both presuppose the minute investigation of even trifling matters, to discover the traces of events that could not be directly experienced by the observer. Excrement, tracks, hairs, feathers, in one case; animals' innards, drops of oil on the water, heavenly bodies, involuntary movements of the body, in the other. Granted that the second series, as opposed to the first, was virtually limitless in the sense that practically everything was grist for the work of the Mesopotamian diviners. But the principal difference between them is something else: divination looked to the future and the interpretation of venatic clues to the past (perhaps a past only instants old). And yet there were great similarities in the learning process between the two; the intellectual operations involved-analyses, comparisons, classifications-were formally identical. Only formally, to be sure; the social context was totally different. It has been noted, in particular, how profoundly the invention of writing shaped Mesopotamian divination. In fact, among other royal prerogatives, the power to communicate with their subjects by means of messages was attributed to the gods-messages written in the heavens, in human bodies, everywhere-which the divines had the task of deciphering (a notion destined to issue in that ageless image of the “book of nature”). And the identification of soothsaying with the deciphering of divine characters inscribed in reality was reinforced by the pictorial features of cuneiform writing: like divination, it too designated one thing through another.
Even a footprint indicates an animal's passing. In respect to the concreteness of the print, of a mark materially understood, the pictogram already represents an incalculable step forward on the road towards intellectual abstraction. But the abstract capacities presupposed by the introduction of pictographic writing are, in turn, of small consequence next to those required for the transfer to phonetic writing. Actually, pictographic and phonetic elements continued to coexist in cuneiform writing, just as in Mesopotamian divination literature the increasing tendency to generalize deductively did not cancel out the fundamental ability to infer causes from their effects. This explains both the way in which technical terms taken from a legal vocabulary infiltrated the Mesopotamian language of divination, and the presence of passages dealing with medical physiognomy and semiotics in divination treatises.
Thus, we have returned to semiotics. We find it included in a constellation of disciplines (although the term is obviously anachronistic) which have a common feature. It might be tempting to juxtapose two pseudosciences, divination and physiognomics, with sciences such as law and medicine, ascribing the disparity in such a comparison to the spatial and temporal distance of the societies under discussion. But this would be a superficial conclusion. Something did indeed link these different methods of seeking knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia (if we exclude divination by inspiration, which was based on experiences 'of an ecstatic type): it was an attitude oriented towards the analysis of specific cases which could be reconstructed only through traces, symptoms, and clues. Mesopotamian legal texts themselves did not consist of collections of laws or ordinances but of discussions of concrete examples. Consequently, we can speak of a presumptive or divinatory paradigm, directed, depending on the forms of knowledge, towards the past, present, or future. For the future, there was divination in a strict sense; for the past, the present, and the future, there was medical semiotics in its twofold aspect, diagnostic and prognostic; for the past, there was jurisprudence. But behind this presumptive or divinatory paradigm we perceive what may be the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race: the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the tracks of his quarry.
What I have been saying explains how a diagnosis of cranial trauma reached on the basis of bilateral squint could turn up in a Mesopotamian treatise on divination. More generally, it explains historically how an array of disciplines could emerge which centered on the deciphering of signs of various kinds, from symptoms to writing. Passing from Mesopotamia to Greece this constellation changed profoundly, following the birth of such new disciplines as historiography and philology, and a new social and epistemological autonomy in medicine and other ancient disciplines. The body, language, and human history for the first time were exposed to objective examination, which on principle excluded divine intervention. We are still today the heirs of this decisive turning-point in the culture of the polis. It may be less obvious that in this transformation, a paradigm definable as semiotic or presumptive played a primary role. It is especially evident in the case of Hippocratic medicine, where the definition of its chosen method depended on the explicit notion of symptom (semeion). The Hippocratic school maintained that only by attentively observing and recording all symptoms in great detail could one develop precise “histories” of individual diseases; disease, in itself, was out of reach. This emphasis on the presumptive nature of medicine was probably inspired by the contrast, pointed out by the Pythagorean physician Alcmeon, between the immediacy of divine knowledge and the speculative nature of human perception. A conjectural paradigm operating on diverse levels found its implicit justification in the denial that reality is transparent. Physicians, historians, politicians, potters, carpenters, sailors, hunters, fishermen, women: for the Greeks these were only some of the groups dealing in that vast world of conjectural knowledge. Its borders-governed, significantly, by the goddess Metis, Jove's first wife, who personified divination by aqueous means-were marked by such terms as “conjecture” and “speculate” (tekmor, tekmairesthai). But as I have stated, this paradigm remained implicit-suppressed by the prestigious (and socially higher) model of knowledge developed by Plato.
The defensive tone of certain passages in the Hippocratic corpus indicates that as early as the fifth century B.C., the polemic against the uncertainties of medicine, destined to last into our own day, had already begun. This continuum is explained by the fact that relations between doctor and patient, characterized by the latter's inability to verify the knowledge and authority professed by the former, have not changed much since the time of Hippocrates. But the terms of the controversy, together with the profound transformation experienced by the idea of “rigor” and “science,” have changed in the course of almost two and a half millennia. Obviously, the decisive point is constituted by the appearance of a scientific paradigm based on Galileian physics, but one which turned out to be more durable than it. Even if modern physics cannot call itself “Galileian” (although it has not rejected Galileo), his epistemological and even symbolic significance for science in general has remained intact.
It should be clear by now that the group of disciplines which we have called evidential and conjectural (medicine included) are totally unrelated to the scientific criteria that can be claimed for the Galileian paradigm. In fact, they are highly qualitative disciplines, in which the object is the study of individual cases, situations, and documents, precisely because they are individual, and for this reason get results that have an unsuppressible speculative margin: just think of the importance of conjecture (the term itself originates in divination) in medicine or in philology, and in divining. Galileian science, which could have taken as its own the Scholastic motto Individuum est ineffabile (“We cannot speak about what is individual”), is endowed with totally different characteristics. Mathematics and the empirical method implied, respectively, quantification and the repetition of phenomena, while the individualizing perspective by definition excluded the latter and admitted the former only as mere instrument. All this explains why history never became a Galileian science. It was during the seventeenth century, in fact, that the grafting of antiquarian methods to historiography indirectly revealed the remote conjectural origins of the latter, hidden for centuries.
This original feature has not changed despite the ever-closer links between history and the social sciences. History has stayed a social science sui generis, forever tied to the concrete. Even if the historian is sometimes obliged to refer back, explicitly or implicitly, to a sequence of comparable phenomena, the cognitive strategy, as well as the codes by which he expresses himself, remain intrinsically individualizing (although the individual case may be a social group or an entire society). In this respect the historian is like the physician who uses nosographical tables to analyze the specific sickness in a patient. As with the physician's, historical knowledge is indirect, presumptive, conjectural.
But our hypothesis is too orderly. In the realm of conjectural disciplines, one-philology, or more precisely, textual criticism-has from its very emergence presented certain atypical characteristics.
Its objective, in fact, took shape through a process of drastic selection of the pertinent characteristics, later to be reduced even further. This internal curtailing of the discipline was expressed by two decisive historical milestones: the inventions of writing and of printing. Textual criticism originated as a consequence of the first (when the decision was taken to transcribe the Homeric poems) and became well established after the second (when the earliest, often hurriedly produced editions of the classics were replaced by more reliable ones). At first, all the elements tied to orality and gesture and later even those tied to the physical characteristics of writing were thought to be irrelevant to the text. This twofold process resulted in a progressive dematerialization of the text, which was gradually purified at every point of reference related to the senses; even though a material element is required for a text's survival, the text itself is not identified by that element. All this seems obvious today, but actually it isn't at all. One need only think of the crucial function played by intonation in oral literature, or by calligraphy in Chinese poetry, to realize that the concept of text I have just mentioned is tied to an extremely significant cultural choice. That this selection was not determined by the mere substitution of mechanical for manual means of reproduction is demonstrated by the well-known example of China, where the invention of printing did not break the link between literary text and calligraphy. We shall see shortly how the problem of pictorial “texts” historically has been expressed in radically different terms.
The abstract notion of text explains why textual criticism, even while retaining to a large extent its divinatory qualities, had the potential to develop in a rigorously scientific direction, as in fact occurred in the course of the nineteenth century. The radical conception of considering only the portions of a text which could be reproduced (first manually and later, after Gutenberg, mechanically) meant that, even while dealing with individual cases, one avoided the principal pitfall of the humane sciences: quality. Significantly, Galileo turned to philology in the very moment that he was founding modern natural science through an equally drastic reduction. The traditional medieval juxtaposition of world and book was based on evidence that both were immediately decipherable, while Galileo, instead, stressed that “philosophy ... written in this great book which is always open before our eyes (I call it the universe) ... cannot be understood if we do not first learn the language and the characters in which it is written,” namely, “triangles, circles and other geometrical figures.” For the natural philosopher as for the philologist, the text is a profound, invisible entity to be reconstructed independently of material data: “figures, numbers and movements, but not smell, nor tastes, nor sounds, which I do not believe are anything more than names outside the living animal.”
With these words Galileo set natural science on the anti-anthropocentric and anti-anthropomorphic direction which it would never again abandon. A gap had opened in that world of knowledge, one destined to enlarge with the passing of time. And, to be sure, there could be no greater contrast than between the Galileian physicist professionally deaf to sounds and insensitive to tastes and odors, and his contemporary, the physician, who hazarded diagnoses by placing his ear on wheezy chests or by sniffing at feces and tasting urine.