Rom drawing to compasses, tracing papers, measuring rods, statistical tables, or gene sequencers: the tools used to categorize represent and quantify the human have a long history that spans across science, economics, morals, and politics. However, they were recently considered as an object of study, particularly in France where the human body was viewed as a more or less compliant vehicle for social relations of class (Memmi et al. 2009; Jacquot and Voléry 2019). This book aims to contribute to this theoretical and epistemological construction, by reviewing the main analytical frameworks through which the measurement of the human has been understood. It approaches measurement through three key dimensions: as an indicator of distinct worldviews; as a contextualized social activity involving specific tools; and as a practice that produces ontologies—whether those are social hierarchies, subjectivities, or perceptions of time.
Getting the Measure of Things: A Macro Approach
The first perspective draws from macroscopic philosophical or socio-historical approaches, adopting a long-term view of models of interpretation of life in different moments and spaces. Measurement is interpreted as an indicator of particular interpretative frameworks—whether those are examined as historical forms of human cognition, as avatars of power-knowledge dispositifs, or as an expression of the rationalization/individualization of the world.
Measurement as an Indicator of Historical Forms of Human Cognition
In the wake of holistic and structuralist sociologies, which attempt to detect patterns in understandings of the world and to connect them to the social contexts in which they emerged (Durkheim 1968 [1912]), some of the contributions to this book focus on the types of thinking that underpin classifications of life.
This approach is in line with Ian Hacking’s early studies on probabilistic thinking, although these are more related to cognitive and pragmatic sociology than to structuralist one. Hacking attempts to identify wide frameworks through which humans understand the world:
Styles of scientific reasoning have developed over the course of the evolution of human cultures. Each of them has a beginning, which often only subsides in memories as a myth, and each has their own pace of development. Logic, in broadest sense of the term, is a precondition to the emergence of styles of scientific reasoning, but it is not a style in itself. What I refer to as logics includes the rudiments of deduction, induction, the hypothetical method—or what Pierce called abduction—as well as classification practices. The mathematical style, the taxonomic style and all the others have as their prerequisite this combination of cognitive capacities that we call “logics”, which they derive from. It is quite legitimate for the cognitive sciences to investigate these faculties but for the purpose of our argument, we will consider them as facts that belong to “the natural history of human beings” whose character tends to “escape remark because we always have them before our eyes” (Wittgenstein). In contrast, the study of styles of reasoning is the object of philosophical anthropology. (Hacking 2003: 547)
While the study of human logical aptitudes is the remit of cognitive science, the way these aptitudes arrange themselves into styles of scientific reasoning falls within the scope of philosophy. Inspired by Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy as well as by Michel Foucault, Hacking seeks to historicize his epistemological description and analysis. Drawing from the works of historians of science such as Alistair C. Crombie (1915–1996),1 he focuses on probabilistic thinking (Logic of Statistical Inference 1965, The Emergence of Probability 1975, The Taming of Chance 1990). Hacking identifies two understandings of probability, objective or subjective, examining particularly the necessary conceptual conditions for the emergence of a notion which, in spite of its apparent simplicity, was not established until 1650. He thus considers that the prehistory of a scientific concept is more important than its history because “the preconditions for the emergence of probability determined the space of possible theories about probability” (Hacking 1975: 9). In keeping with Foucault’s archaeological ambition, Hacking widely looks at the social conditions that caused the emergence and dissemination of ways of measuring life, as well as their effects. In particular, he examines the way in which understandings and classifications of the human world shape subjectivities (how people define themselves in relation to the categories they are targeted by), but also material conditions (e.g., diets or medical treatments associated with a person’s categorization as obese which can have bodily effects).
Hacking then describes the contemporary characteristics of categories used to analyze the human. Features include the role of quantification (with quantities replacing qualities in our understanding of the human) and biologization (the search for the biological causes of human characteristics, disorders, and behaviors); the inaccessibility of classifications for the people who are classified (e.g., medical and psychiatric categorizations, which become autonomous, depriving those who are classified from the ability to understand the classifications of which they are the object); the weight of administrative classifications (classifications of life are an integral part of the biopower described by Foucault, and are used for administrative purposes); normalization (searching for average human features and instituting these averages into a norm); and the re-appropriation by certain groups of the categories assigned to them (Hacking 2005: 539). According to Hacking, scientific measurement with a small “m” provides insights into broader socio-cognitive styles whose effects reach beyond scientific spaces.
A similar perspective can be found in the writings of Stephen Jay Gould and André Turmel, two major contributors to the studies on measurements of life, including the measurement of human intelligence. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Gould investigates the measurement of intelligence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: craniometry and later intelligence tests are used to measure intellectual and moral abilities and establish a hierarchy of value between persons as well as between sexes or “racial” groups. Gould highlights the scientific weaknesses of these arguments—some due to cultural biases that affect the ways in which well-meaning researchers interpret the data, others due to data manipulation strategies in particular political contexts. In addition, the author shows how measurement models (cranium volume, brain density, or IQ) and the political contexts in which they are elaborated2 and disseminated3 contribute to the construction of the entities that are measured.
More recently, Turmel (2008) approaches measurement from a similar angle: the author starts from an investigation of the methods used to measure children’s intelligence, to shed light on scientific conceptions of childhood and human growth. He identifies six moments. The first moment is clinical observation, inspired by Hippocratic medicine: childhood illnesses are observed on the anatomy tables of dispensaries. The second moment sees the emergence of nineteenth-century populational surveys: children are no longer considered individually but as a populational subgroup whose height, weight, and growth are measured to tackle malnutrition and mortality issues, caused by living conditions and factory work. Comparisons are often drawn between children in urban and rural areas (Villermé, Farr, etc.). The third moment starts from the late nineteenth century, with Charles Darwin (1971 [1877]) taking interest in child development after observing his son during the first months of his life. Darwin thus begins to elaborate a developmentalist and biologizing vision of growth. The fourth moment starts with Pastor and the chemical analysis of the cell: childhood is increasingly biologized and is the object of state-led rationalization policies (see Hacking’s description of the weight of administrative classifications). The fifth moment begins with the implementation of systematic surveys of children’s health, leading to the production of averages and representations of the “normal” child. The sixth moment, during the interwar period, sees an increasing psychologization of childhood, with the influence of three key figures in developmental psychology: Alfred Binet (1857–1911), Jean Piaget (1896–1980), and Arnold Gesell (1880–1961). Human maturation is then understood in terms of development and punctuated by linear, standardized, and irreversible sequences. Doing so, Turmel builds bridges between Hacking’s perspective and cognitive sociology. He also extends Gould’s findings to other spaces and types of measurement, including medico-administrative expertise and public health surveys, which have their own measurement models and their distinctive uses of scientific measurements. He also opens the reflection to other “vital phenomena”, including human maturation and consequently, age—an understudied area in research on the measurements of human bodies, to which this book aims to contribute. A second approach, more inspired by Foucault, opens the perspective to embrace non-scientific spaces, focusing on the political and agonistic dimensions of these categorizations.
Measurements and Powers: Foucault’s Heritage
Foucault is certainly the second most influential author in studies of the measurement of life. His work provides two major foundations for the analysis of measurement: his archaeology of thinking and epistemes developed in the 1960s, and his analysis of dispositifs of power engaged from the 1970s onward. The episteme, a term by which Foucault refers to “all phenomena formed by relations between sciences, or between diverse scientific discourses” (Foucault 1966), is the bedrock referred back to by the knowledges and thinking frameworks of a given period. As such, it underpins both scientific thinking and artistic production, and reflects a specific worldview. For example, Foucault uses Cervantes’ Quixote to illustrate the episteme of difference:
a diligent pilgrim breaking his journey before all the marks of similitude. He is the hero of the Same. He never manages to escape from the familiar plain stretching out on all sides of the Analogue, anymore than he does from his own small province. He wanders endlessly over that plain, without ever crossing the clearly defined frontiers of difference or reaching the heart of identity. (Foucault 1966: 51)
Quijote reveals the crisis undergone by this episteme, which according to Foucault tapered off at the turn of the eighteenth century although in fact it continued to shape the nineteenth century: during this period, the world continued to fold in upon itself, and was organized by a dual principle of synchronicity (analogies and correspondences between forms) and diachronicity (searching for resemblance to situate the human within lineages and genealogies—see Diasio’s chapter in this book). The classical episteme, which according to Foucault began in the eighteenth century, is illustrated by Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”: in this painting, the world is approached through representations of representations, but where the subject of knowing is not represented: “In Classical thought, the personage for whom representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of the ‘representation in the form of a picture or a table’—he is never to be found in that table himself” (Foucault 1966: 336), as Velázquez made sure to hide himself in the nooks of his painting. In contrast, from the nineteenth century, the modern episteme...