Engineering Ireland: The material constitution of the technoscientific state.

摘要

The argument of this dissertation is that the Irish state created between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries was a technoscientific state: a state in which natural bodies were literally incorporated into a body politic through networks of scientific and government practice. The argument begins with an analysis of the cultural and political forces that created the ideological and epistemic conditions for this process, for instance, colonial conceptions of culture/nature and civility/barbarity, of the role of material engineering in the civilizing mission, and the character of the new science in Restoration England and Ireland. I emphasize the welding together of natural philosophy and engineering in the practices of metering, scoping, and intervening, practices applied to political as well as natural bodies. Modern state formation crucially involved the transformation of natural forms, such as land and bodies, into the political forms of territory and population.;The focus is on three networks through which practices of science, engineering and government acted together upon the Irish body politic. I investigate the information technologies through which Ireland was made both graphic and numeric: the cartographic and statistical surveys, the bills of mortality and censuses, and the institutional forms of political arithmetic. Then I analyze the system of medical policing through which the relationship between the health of the population and the power of the state was made tangible. The focus is on the government of food, drugs and water, the regulation of medical practitioners, and the establishment of medical institutions in which Irish bodies were directly made subject to government. Finally, I analyze the material engineering projects through which "wild Ireland" was made subject to "English culture", for instance, enclosure, drainage, and planting of artificial grasses, inland navigation systems, and sanitary engineering. The analysis brings to light the discourse of moral improvement which animated these material projects.;The profundity of the relationship between science and western state formation is evident when observed through the lens of the "government of natural bodies". It is argued here that the modern state is a material and technoscientific formation which needs to be understood in terms of the "state-idea", through which the various ideas of the state are articulated, the "state-system", through which governments' meter, scope out, and intervene in land and people, and the "state-country", the constitution of land, built environment, and bodies in a material body politic. Neglect of any one of these dimensions, particularly the last, results in a partial and severely distorted understanding of the nature of modern western states and the role that science has played in their formation.