The Helmholtz Curves Tracing Lost Time [Hardcover]

This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of lost time by engaging with two of the most significant time experts of the nineteenth century: the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and the French writer Marcel Proust.

Its starting point is the archival discovery of curve images that Helmholtz produced in the context of pathbreaking experiments on the temporality of the nervous system in 1851. With a frog drawing machine, Helmholtz established the temporal gap between stimulus and response that has remained a core issue in debates between neuroscientists and philosophers.

When naming the recorded phenomena, Helmholtz introduced the term temps perdu, or lost time. Proust had excellent contacts with the biomedical world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and he was familiar with this term and physiological tracing technologies behind it. Drawing on the machine philosophy of Deleuze, Schmidgen highlights the resemblance between the machinic assemblages and rhizomatic networks within which Helmholtz and Proust pursued their respective projects.

In 1850, Hermann von Helmholtz conducted path breaking experiments on the propagation speed of the nervous impulse. This book reconstructs the cultural history of these experiments by focusing on Helmholtzs use of the graphic method and the subsequent use of his term lost time by Marcel Proust.This is a remarkable book. Starting from two images of graphic curves taken by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1851 in K?nigsberg and preserved in the archives of the Acad?mie des Sciences in Paris, Henning Schmidgen unfolds the universe of physiological time measurement as it took shape around the middle of the 19th century, reaching deep into the 20th century with its reverberations. Like in a burning glass, the book aligns the components of a new laboratory regime and their entanglement with the dawning age of energy conversion and of - electromagnetic  communication and social control. The central fil³›