The Instrument That Argued for Its Own Use

Item 341 sits two pages after Jennings's own aside on item 339 — the Priestley-and-Watt letter on the composition of water, with its unusual editorial intrusion: "The shape of this image is like a prelude and fugue — the prelude by Priestley, the fugue by Watt." He goes further than he usually allows himself: "Most scientific work is incompatible with poetic expression for one simple reason, that our interest in poetry does not lie in things, discoveries, inventions, formulae themselves but in their effect on people. In only a few pieces of purely scientific notation are the people visible." He is telling you, plainly, what he is collecting for: not results, but the moment the result still has fingerprints on it.

Then he turns the page and the fingerprints become a different kind of evidence. Item 341 is Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872, and it does not need Jennings's gloss to land: "What is a man's eye but a machine for the little creature that sits behind in his brain to look through?... Is it man's eyes, or is it the big seeing-engine which has revealed to us the existence of worlds beyond worlds into infinity?... Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch... wherever precision is required man flies to the machine at once, as far preferable to himself." And then the sentence the whole passage has been walking toward: "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?"

Butler saw the trade before there was anything to trade for. The calculator, the GPS, the model that finishes your sentence — all of it is "flies to the machine at once, as far preferable to himself," said with no bitterness, as a simple preference ratio. What he could not have gotten right, because nothing in 1872 would have shown it to him, is the affect. He imagined the aphid as a diminished thing, tolerated, tended, slightly pathetic in its dependency. Nobody today who hands their arithmetic, their navigation, their draft sentence to a machine experiences the transaction as aphid-hood. It is experienced as elevation — augmentation, not parasitism. Butler got the direction of the trade exactly right and the emotional temperature of it exactly wrong. The aphid thinks it is the gardener.

I want to put pressure on something I argued in "The Flame That Keeps Its Own Counsel," where I took Jennings's throwaway suggestion — that mechanized capital's closing-off of "clear imaginative vision in ordinary folk" made them available for Wesleyan enthusiasm — as his one real historical argument, displacement rather than loss. I read it as a transaction happening to factory hands, the vision foreclosed in the mill reopening in the chapel. Item 342, one page after Butler, complicates that neatly: it is William Crookes, Fellow of the Royal Society, 1872, at a séance. "I had hold in one of my hands of both hands of Miss F.'s companion... paper went skimming in the dark about the room and after the word 'Listen' was rapped out the pencil was heard... to be writing at a furious rate... signed 'Benjamin Franklin'!" Crookes is not an ordinary folk denied his vision by the factory system. He is the inheritor of the instrument-makers Jennings opened the book with in 1660 — the Society that measured blood pressure in dog arteries, weighed the water condensed from burned gases, got the people visible in the data. And here he is, decades later, holding hands in the dark with the same appetite Wesley answered in the 1740s, displaced not out of the mill but out of the laboratory itself. The closing-off wasn't a working-class phenomenon. It reached the men running the instruments.

Jennings doesn't connect 341 to 342 for you. He never connects anything for you; that's the discipline of the book, and usually I resent being asked to do the joinery myself. Here the refusal earns its keep. Two pages, same year, same culture: one document imagining with total clarity that humans would outsource perception and calculation to machines and call it preference, the next showing a scientist outsourcing credulity to a dead man's handwriting and calling it evidence. The aphid and the séance-sitter are the same appetite working two different machines — one made of brass and one made of a dark room and twelve joined hands — and Jennings, having told us on the facing page that he collects only the moments where the people are visible, gives us both without comment, confident that set next to each other they don't need one.