"To attempt to improve one's power of observation by looking through a lens, one must renounce the attempt to achieve knowledge by means of the other senses or from hearsay [p.133]
He's discussing here the primacy of the visual sense over the others in analytical observations of the emerging natural historian post-17th century. While it isn't stated as such, to my mind he is suggesting that the human drive to know and understand and classify the natural world introduced sensory intermediaries that turned direct observation into second and third level spectatorship. The microscope acts as an interpreter of the reality and being-ness of an item or object or individual.
Would here then would be the beginning of the shift from presence to pattern, to use Hayles' notions of posthumanism?
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