Paper short abstract:

To measure accurately is to weed out discrepancies. Yet in the archives of colonial science, discrepancies persist. They afford affective networks that bypass imperial as well as nationalist frames. As forms of error, these apprehend the planetary as a cartography of that which eludes measurement.

Paper long abstract:

This talk is concerned with standard time and the colonial observatory as a node of scientific archival. While the rationalization of time has largely been framed within narratives of disenchantment and protocols of governmentality, public irritation at time reform—as in the case of Bombay (1890s-1940s)—has been read for nationalist gestures of agency. Such unrest also expresses local standpoints of cosmology as recorded daily at sites such as the Bombay observatory. Amidst anxieties produced by colonial time reform, local and colonial time turned mutually irrational as soon as Greenwich became the (0,0) of temporal common sense. Yet scientific writing had its unrest too, as I show by close-reading two neglected sources: the 1943 records of the Bombay Observatory in Alibaug, and volumes of the Geological Survey of India (GSI) memoirs that cover the 1897 and 1905 earthquakes. In their folding of figurative and metrical registers, these records afford cartographies of shock and nausea from the Himalayas to Bengal to Iran. Are these intimations of the nervous geological body that eludes nationalism? Are they eddies of a wider affective pattern of unease, error, and remainder that anticipate the theme of planetarity? The ethics of empiricism--as I argue, drawing on Isabelle Stenger’s notion of idiocy and its reception in STS—rely on such formal and stylistic discrepancies in the scientific archive.