Measurement, Capital & Semiotics

      Temperature was invented in the 17th century. While cosmologists affirm that fluctuations in heat are as old as the universe, the intensive quantified scale marking these fluctuations has a relatively short history. This dissertation analyzes why temperature developed when it did and what temperature does for and to its users. At its broadest, the concern of this dissertation is the material culture of knowledge production among capitalizing populations--those that believe in and practice the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth.

      To this end, the following zooms in on the ubiquitous and quotidian epistemological artifact temperature, examining its history, construction, social and scientific roles, distribution, politics, and economics. By focusing on the material culture of temperatures, this dissertation situates itself most immediately in the field of contemporary archaeology, drawing on the theoretical and methodological tools of this sub-discipline. In addition, archival research, ethnographic interviews, as wells as insights from linguistics, science & technology studies, and queer theory are brought to bear upon this work.

      This dissertation collects and analyzes the material construction of twenty-eight temperatures, tracing the physical process of eliciting meaning from the average kinetic energy of particles (today's definition of temperature) and the resulting semiotic event this produces. The results reveal that temperatures were not invented simply to know how hot it is. Rather, temperature developed alongside a burgeoning capitalized epistemology, reflecting and reifying the values of this epistemology and the peculiar ontology it facilitates. By investigating the normalization and naturalization of temperatures, this dissertation exposes the inner workings of capitalized knowledge production.

      In analyzing these artifacts (collected temperatures) I employ a novel method--semiotic stratigraphy. Based on C. S. Peirce's semiosis schematic, I attempt to diagram the semiotic transformations that are necessary for the motion of particles (the behavior to which a temperature ostensibly refers) to its public iteration on a billboard next to an Yves Saint Laurent advertisement, for example. The aim of semiotic stratigraphy is not to discern 'what things mean', but rather how meaning is made.