I’m revisiting some work I did a long time ago–as a master’s student–on visual rhetoric, embodiment, and the microscope. It’s been pretty interesting to read a paper I wrote back then. For one, I had (perhaps on purpose) not yet internalized American spelling, so the paper is peppered with “colour” and “programme” and my professor’s comments about the odd/rogue spellings I used. I has also net yet learned some of the conventions of academic argument.  I do make some claims that I still think are pretty interesting, such as this one:

“Robert Hooke’s Micrographia develops an argument that positions sight, particularly microscopic sight, as the condition for true scientific knowledge. [...] In order advance this scientific gaze, assisted by the microscope, as the condition of scientific knowledge, Hooke aligtns it with relations of power–the mechanical philosophy of the Royal Society, the discourse of aestheticism and leisure of the British aristocracy, and the religious precepts of Christianity. Under this scientific gaze, everything is a body, and these bodies become compartmentalized, mechanized, aestheticized, and sanctified.”

But I do not situate this claim with relation to any kind of argument about the rhetoric of science, or about Hooke’s Micrographia, or what have you. It reminds me that when I’ve asked my undergraduate students to do this kind of rhetorical move (here’s the conversation, here’s a gap, here’s my claim), I’m asking them to do something pretty sophisticated–something I certainly didn’t know how to do as a Master’s student.