cleopatra's nose

7/30/2019 Cleopatra's Nose

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What is the smallest event in history with the greatest consequence?

In 1669 the mathematician Blaise Pascal calculated that a mere short-

ening o Cleopatras nose could have changed history: The nose o

Cleopatra, i it had been shorter, would have changed the ace o the

Earth.1

Pascal was hardly alone in these speculations. In 1751 Voltaire

ocused on a conspicuous pair o glovesthat were let behind and a

pail o water that happened to all on the wrong person. The gloves

and the water started a dispute between Queen Anne, the Duchess o

Malborough, and Queens new avorite, Baroness Masham. A pair o

gloves o a particular ashion which she reused the queen, and a jar

o water that she let all in her presence upon Lady Mashams gown,

by an aected mistake, changed the ace o Europe. 2 According to

Voltaire these two events eventually led to nothing less than the Peace

o Utrecht, to the ascension o the Tories, and to the beginning o parlia-

mentary democracy in Europe. While according to Pascal, the shorten-

ing o Cleopatras nose could have changed the ace o the Earth,

the incident with the gloves and the pail o water, according to Voltaire,

changed the ace o Europe. When a critic o Voltaire read these lines,

he was not entirely impressed, fnding the writer to be one o those men

who wants to assign the biggest events to the smallest principles. 3

But others continued to speculate. A ew years ater Voltaires publica-

tion, Adrien Richer published his Essai sur les grands venements parles petites causes(1758), explaining how tiny causes had enormous

consequences. In Richers account, womenespecially the attractive,

loose kindwere oten these petites causes. How did these seemingly

insignifcant events create such cascading, ripple eects?

cleoPatras noseanD tHe

DeVeloPment of worlD HIstorY

ji c

mImolette

Mimoletteis a process o the ermentation o ideas. The process

consists o holding ones breath, especially in those moments when one

has so many thoughts and ideas that ones head is about to explode.

It is that moment o almost explosion when the Mimoletteeect

has its best results.

The Yanomamis are not allowed to pronounce their own names.

I someone gets ill, or example, and goes to the doctor, he needs to

be accompanied by a relative, so when the doctor asks, Whats your

name? the other person can answer the question or him.

Secret names are stronger than spoken names; some people believe

there are a limited number o names in the universe, and i something

or someone stays nameless, it is a tragedy.

Ideas, in this process o ermentation, start to have strange shapes

and patterns, marble, crystals, blue, red, purple, yellow, white. Are there

no colors starting with M?

1 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A inconstncia da alma selvagem e outros ensaios deantropologia (So Paulo: Cosac & Naiy, 2002), 183184 . Translation is mine.2 Roy Wagner, Coyote Anthropology (Lincoln: University o Nebraska Press, 2010), 2.3 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2004. Exchanging perspectives: the transormation oobjects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies. In Common Knowledge. 10(3): 463484.4 Roy Wagner, The Invention o Culture (Chicago: The University o Chicago Press, 1971), 71.5 Roy Wagner, Coyote Anthropology (Lincoln: University o Nebraska Press, 2010), 8.

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The idea that everything, no matter how small, counted in the

universe emerged in ull orce at the end o the eighteenth century and

remained strong in the twentieth. Winston Churchill paid close attention

to these petites causes. It always amuses historians and philosophers

to pick out the tiny things, the sharp agate points, on which the ponder-

ous balance o destiny turns, wrote one o the greatest statesmen ever

to master the art o producing a great eect with the least eort. 4

A certain course o action may send ripples o event all over the world

or ever, explained the British writer and historian J. C. Squire in 1931. 5

At the very least, it certainly would make it into the news. The entertain-

ing and growing news category o fait diverssuch as A train derailed

in Alaska: a deer had blocked the switch. An Englishman enters the

Legion: did not want to spend Christmas with his stepmother.

An American student to abandon his studies: his chest (104 raw) causes

uproarwas, according to Roland Barthes, requently defned by this

very rule: small causes, great eects.6

These amusing stories had serious precedents. In 1812 the French

scientist Marquis Pierre-Simon de Laplace developed new mathematical

methods to explain events that had up to then been chalked up

to chance. For practical reasons, he could not yet explain allso-called

chance events in history, but Laplace believed that with enough

calculations all the eects o even the lightest atom could eventu-

ally be traced. Nothing could be uncertain and the uture just like the

past would be present or an intellect who at any given moment knew

all o the orces that animate nature and the mutual positions o the

beings that compose it and who was vast enough to submit the data

to analysis.7As he could not actually trace the movements o so many

individual atoms, he ocused on what he could see.

Others were more imaginative. The great Scottish historian Thomas

Carlyle invented a character intent on tracing the ripple eects o even

the tiniest o pebbles. It is a mathematical act that the casting o

this pebble rom my hand alters the centre o gravity o the universe,explained the proessor in Sartor Resartus(1836). The proessor con-

jured by Carlyle was an avid reader o Laplace, considering his Book

on the Stars as precious as to another.8 Carlyle himsel read the work

o the great mathematician careully, but was intimidated. The idea that

insignifcant events counted so much worried the careul historian, who

could not possibly crunch as many o them, but who instead had to pick

and choose. On what basis? Would his knowledge always remain inerior

to that o the natural historians o the heavens?

Talk o small events creating frst ripples and then waves increased

in light o a new understanding o physics in terms o waves. For Charles

Babbage, known as one o the inventors o the computer, all that wom-

an whispered was stored somewhere in a universe composed o vows

unredeemed, promises unulflled, perpetuating in the united movements

o each particle, the testimony o mans changeul will. The physicist

Hermann von Helmholtz considered the world itsel a variegated crowd

o intersecting wave-systems where any cause, no matter how small,

propagated itsel eternally throughout time. The rustling o silken skirts

excites little curls in the air, he explained, which expand spherically

rom their respective centres, dart through each other, are reected rom

the walls o the room, and thus rush backwards and orwards. 9 The

mere ripple o a dress could cause signifcant waves, and many did.

The achievements o wave physics were soon matched by those o

microphysics. James Clerk Maxwell, and a new cadre o natural philoso-

phers, stepped into the innermost sanctuary o the inconceivably little

and developed increasingly sophisticated methods or studying the

movement and impact o the smallest o particles.10 Little things were

much more powerul than big ones. I molecules were ying in the same

direction, they would constitute a wind blowing at the rate o seventeen

miles a minute, and the only wind which approaches this velocity is that

which proceeds rom the mouth o a cannon. These great velocities

typically canceled each other, but Maxwell speculated how they could

be harnessed or achieving a great eect, writing about an imaginary

entity that others soon dubbed Maxwells Demon. 11

A great event o the 17th century owes its cause to a small act o

the 16th century that no history reports, stated the amous scientist

Henri Poincar. Actions o great men and geniuses mattered, but onlybecause they were oten the reection o something else, something

much smaller, that once deected . . . a hundredth part o an inch rom

its regular course. A millimeter change in the direction o sperm could

make all the dierence in terms o conceiving a genius, or an idiot.

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came rom the movement o much smaller things. For flming the mutiny

that set o the Russian revolution, the flmmaker Sergei Eisenstein

simply showed cooking-pots swaying inside the ships kitchen; to

show the revolution itsel, he displayed a chandelier, shaking gently

inside the Winter Palace.16 In the eyes o a growing number o passive

spectatorsand in a world marked by a growing imbalance between

spectators and so-called actors, these scenes made perect sense.

Ostensibly, they made sense because they reected great events.

But they made more sense because they displayed how great eects

such as mass consciousnesscould arise rom small causes; one only

needed to move a chandelier and flm it instead o actually having to

capture the heavily guarded Winter Palace. Propaganda was the art o

eective propagation o small causes to big eects.

The history and philosophy o science was particularly aected

by the tiny, since the topics to be explained by the historian (such as

Maxwellian microphysics, Pasteurian microbiology, or Marxist microeco-

nomics) were riddled through and through with the causality and agency

o little ones. When the philosopher o science Bruno Latour elt that

he could not write about Pasteur without writing about the microbes

on the petri dish, he concluded: We do not know who are the agents

who make up our world. We must begin with this uncertainty i we are

to understand how, little by little, the agents defned one another, sum-

moning other agents and attributing to them intentions and strategies. 17

Although it was not easy to determine microcauses or microactors

behind macroscopic results, by the twentieth century, most researchers

had come to a radical assessment o who made history.

Petites causesthat create grands effetsunctioned like

Archimedean levers and ulcrums able to sway nothing less than the

World. By working against balanced equilibrium and by upsetting the

usual rules o power, their distorting qualities explained how a very ew

people manage to enslave the greatest number. 18 They created uncanny

situations where the ew were able to subtly dominate the many.19

A central goal o modern civilization has been to optimize labor and

energy by using Archimedean-like technologies or turning small actions

into great ones. But we have come a long way rom using the actual

ulcrum and lever described in ancient mechanics. Even then, these

How little it would have taken to make the spermatozoid which carried

them [the mysterious elements whose mutual reaction is destined to

produce genius] deviate rom its course, Poincar explained. Such a

small deviation changed all o history. It would have been enough to

deect [the sperm] a hundredth part o an inch, insisted Poincar, and

Napoleon would not have been born and the destinies o a continent

would have been changed.12

Men were never the petites causesbehind grands effets, although

sometimes they were what emerged at the end. In 1848 Marx introduced

important qualifcations to the idea that men made history when he

explained that although they did make it, they did not make it as they

willed, introducing the question o the make-ability o history. Marx

was ascinated by causes as small as microscopic cells. The preace

o Capitallaid out the plan or the rest o the book: to ocus on the

economic cell-orm that to the superfcial observer . . . seems to

turn upon minutiae. Marx embraced the tiny as i armed with a micro-

scope, answering deensively that the economy does in act deal with

minutiae, but they are o the same order as those dealt with in micro-

scopic anatomy.13 Since Marx, and because o these minutiae, we have

ailed to be ree.

In activities marked by intense competition (such as war, politics,

sports, fnance, and science), little things matter the most. Tolstoy,

writing in 1869 about the 1812 battle o the Russians against Napoleon,

was no longer sure about who was responsible or victory. It certainly

did not seem to him that the actions o General Mikhail Kutuzov, who

was generously decorated and promoted afterthe battle, had been

that important beforethe successul outcome. Otto von Bismarck

himsel elt less inuential than others oten took him to be, arguing that

my inuence over the events in which I have been involved is indeed

substantially overestimated and adding that certainly no one should

expect o me that I make history.14 For the philosopher Michel Serres,

parasitesthose who know so well how to proft without paywere

the main actors behind historical development. History is ull o them,

or maybe is made solely o them, he ventured. 15

At frst, novels, such as Tolstoys War and Peace, and later, flm,

became the perect medium or showing how macroscopic world events

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environmentally more remote rom him than the picture on the opposite

wall, explained Martin Heidegger. Why not correct or much more than

our vision? For this, we need to start seeing not only each others noses

once again, but what is sitting on them and what lies directly under

them.

1 Blaise Pascal, Penses(1669).

2 Voltaire, Le Sicle de Louis XIV(1751).3 Laurent Angliviel de la Beaumelle, cited in Volaire, Le Sicle de Louis XIV(1753).4 Winston Churchill, I Lee Had Not Won the Battle o Gettysburg, Scribners Magazine,December 1930.5 J. C. Squire, If It Had Happened Otherwise?(London: Longmans, Green, 1931).6 Roland Barthes, Structure du ait divers, in Essais critiques(Paris: Seuil, 1991).7 Pierre Simon de Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilities(1814).8 Lagrange, it is well known, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme,will endure orever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that it could not have beenmade on any other scheme. Thomas Carlyle,Sartor Resartus(1836).9 Hermann von Helmholtz, The Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music, lecture (1857).10 James Clerk Maxwell, Molecules,Nature, Sept. 1873, 437441.11 Jimena Canales and Markus Krajewski, Little Helpers: About Demons, Angelsand Other Servants, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews37 (2012).12 Henri Poincar,Science and Method(1908).13 Karl Marx, Preace to Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, (1867).14 Otto von Bismark, Werke in Auswahl, vol. 4 (1862).15 Michel Serres, Le Parasite(Paris: Grasset, 1980).

16 The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ten Days that Shook the World, (1928).These reerences appear in Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. 1 (1959).17 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France(Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1988).18 Serres, Le Parasite.19 Bruno Latour, Drawing Things Together, in Representation in ScientifcPractice, eds.Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Boston: The MIT Press, 1990).20 Bernhard Siegert, Relais: Geschicke der Literatur als Epoque der Post, 17511913(Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1993).21 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus(1836).22 Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life(New York: Grove Press, 1987).23 Carlo Ginzburg, Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications o Distance,Critical Inquiry21 (1994).24 Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second(Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2010).25 H. Wildon Carr, Lie and Logic, Mind 22(1913).26 Stean Zweig, Decisive Moments in History(1927).27 Andr Maurois, I Louis XVI had had an Atom o Firmness, published in If It HadHappened Otherwise?, ed. J. C. Squire (London: Longmans, Green, 1931).

28 Adrien Richer, Nouvel Essai sur les grands venements par les petites causes (1759).

cylinder, or the idea o a Maxwells demon who times the opening and

closing o a rictionless shutter dominated discussions about petit

causes, grand eets.25 Whatever occurred in a ash ended up being

more important than the slow movements o geological time. Pretty

much every great idea anybody had in the twentieth century occurred

in a ash. In 1927 the Austrian writer Stean Zweig wrote Decisive

Moments in History, explaining that A dramatic instant . . . generated in

a ash, is oten more important or history than what occurs across long

stretches o time.26 Perect timing became perect timing.

The prolieration o switchboards, keys, triggers, and shutters

intensifed a sense o the switly branching nature o history. The French

writer Andr Maurois imagined how an Archangel would see all o his-

tory. He would most likely explain to a humble historian how history

orks like the stem o a tree putting orth twin branches at each and

every instant o Time, however brie you suppose it. One o these

branches represents the sequence o acts as you, poor mortal, knew it,

explained the Archangel, and the other represents what History would

have become i one single detail had been other than it was. 27 But what

makes the history o poor mortals ow into one direction instead o

another? What are the small details that make these dierences?

What remains at the moment o branching?

Let us return to noses. There was a man attached to a nose,

wrote Francisco de Quevedo in the seventeenth century, mocking the

infnite narcissism that matched the near infnite olactory organ o

his rival. Quevedo was clearly jealous o Luis de Gngora, the other

most renowned poet o his day. Jealousy, like other passions, mattered.

When Adrien Richer published his work on small causes, great eects,

he was accused o putting the horse behind the carriage. Passions,

argued his critics, were the real primary causes motivating larger

events.28 But who cares about passions when we can trace how the

means or small causes to produce great eects changed throughout

history, as pushbuttons, typewriter keys, triggers, and shutters became

standard commodities? With them, the world could be orever changed

as it was ever more readily laid down on a page or a screen. And what

about noses? When, or instance, a man wears a pair o spectacles

which are so close to him . . . that they are sitting on his nose, they are

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cleopatra's nose

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