In philosophy, Quentin Meillassoux famously questions the Truth of the “fossil”. He asks whether a dinosaur fossil is proof that dinosaurs existed on Earth independently of any human observer? Whether it be at the level of the empirical or transcendental? The epistemic issue raised here is a limit repressed in modern science discourse: is it crazy to imagine one can gain any true insight into a pre-historical past where one would encounter dinosaurs like the ones reconstructed today?
As a result, if dinosaurs are chimeras, then their prehistoric antecedents are unobservable entities of science; and one cannot even begin to think of the sex life of the T-rex. Thus, dinosaurs birth many theoretical problems just like that of subatomic particles, as both cases require scientists gain negative access to their objects of study by interpreting the effects they produce. Although, dinosaurs are unlike electrons in a number of important ways, for one thing, dinosaurs cannot be experimented upon, and the categories require a highly abstract interpretation of fossil records.
Nevertheless, the first objective dinosaur discoveries consisted of only a few bones and a handful of teeth. Before long, more complete skeletons began to be found in a cluttered material mess. Often, they were distorted by the immense pressures at work during and after the process of fossilization. For that reason, palaeontologists had to work hard to assemble the available evidence via inference, judgment, analogy and their imagination.
The problem of the “arche-fossil” points to the ontological problem of coming into being of “givenness” of “there is”, as such; the problem highlights the mediated transcendental-material structure of thinking the objective. Thus, “dinosaurs” highlight how Science arrogantly thinks a time that cannot be reduced to any givenness; and how it can even think a time that happened to have preceded givenness itself and, more seriously, it can think pre-givenness that allowed givenness to be possible.
Moreover, the connection of dinosaurs to science was made best in Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle (2019). Here Lukas Rieppel, the Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, shows clearly and convincingly how dinosaurs cannot be separated from economic history, as America’s industrial tycoons became avid philanthropists to uplift and educate working people. Consequently, many industrialists birthed their prized possessions of dinosaurs by establishing universities, art galleries, and natural history museums.
Hence, in the mid-19th century, the British anatomist Richard Owen modelled the earlier and less interesting dinosaurs on pachyderms such as the elephant; whereas American palaeontologists chose the kangaroo as an anatomical guide. Thus, it was not until the turn of the 20th century that dinosaurs came to be seen as massive, towering, and unwieldy behemoths of prehistory.
More recently, dinosaurs are revised to have been bird-like, active, and fast-moving, with complex social structures. Thus, dinosaurs simultaneously occupy two widely divergent temporal regimes, as they hail from a world in which humans did not exist, yet they only exist only as a product of human “general intellect”; and thus, dinosaurs allow one to understand how a subject mirrors and distorts one’s own present context from which “they” and the “dinosaur” emerge.
Appropriately, the first dinosaur fossils were uncovered in England during the 1820s and 1830s, or Dinosauria as Sir Richard Owen coined in 1841. During the decades that followed, many additional fossils came to light. Nonetheless, the earliest dinosaurs did not stand out among the strange-looking creatures from prehistory (the Megatherium, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs), their historical “wonder” came later along with profitability.
During the Gilded Age from Reconstruction to Great Depression, financial elites like J.P. Morgan and industrialists like Andrew Carnegie rose to enormous power and influence. In leading the transition of political economy from an unruly and highly competitive form of proprietary capitalism to a more managed economy dominated by large corporate firms. This Age was precisely when dinosaurs from the American West became an icon of science, and corporate capitalism.
Consequently, dinosaurs tell us a great deal about ourselves. Their immense size and outlandish appearance played into the mass public spectacle; but the scarcity of their fragmentary remains and the vast temporal chasm that defies certainty. The mystery and wonder helped to make dinosaurs into a favourite target for the philanthropic elites as the dinosaur shows us that “Our” standpoint is Real and what ‘objectively exists’ is within the entire field of subject-object interaction.
Thus, Rieppel’s (2006) provides a clear insight into how the science of palaeontology grew parallel to the creation of large, corporately organised, and bureaucratically managed natural history museums. Then suddenly dinosaurs took a quantitative and qualitative leap during the late 19th century with a series of new exiting discoveries in the American West. Thus, the dinosaur object of palaeontology left only a remainder simultaneously outside and inside the fossil; a virtual reality sustained by lack and indeterminacy allowed the museums to virtually justify their own booming reality.
Slovenian Sociologist and Philosopher Slavoj Žižek offers direct support for Meillassoux in Less Than Nothing (2012 647 p.); and indirect support for Rieppel. For him, a pure (re)production of dinosaur spectral gadgets is a boomeranged two “lacks”. A double lack sustained by an always-elusive non-strategic place of surplus. Since the dinosaur cannot ever escape the circle of the observer’s standpoint engaging with the “fossil”, this means the reality of a fossil is ‘objective’ insofar as it is observed in the same way a rainbow “objectively exists”.
Accordingly, American dinosaurs became an objective scientific and popular sensation of museums at the turn of the 20th century. In fact, the American dinosaurs struck many to be larger and more imposing than their European counterparts. While simultaneously as dinosaur bones became a public sensation, the U.S. was transforming into an industrial powerhouse of global proportions.
For Rieppel, dinosaurs and their enormous size came to stand in for the power and fecundity of the U.S.; and in a striking coincidence there were three major dinosaur quarries were simultaneously discovered in the American West over the summer of 1877 (Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Allosaurus). With the best specimens hailing from the country’s interior, dinosaurs became associated with its celebrated western frontier. Thus, their discovery was deeply embedded within the extractive economy and exploitation of mineral resources of an economic superpower.
Nevertheless, dinosaurs played into American exceptionalism par excellence. Their origin in the deep past ensured that dinosaurs would be associated with evolutionary theory invoked to explain economic developments. Therefore, the mass extinction event was a warning of evolutionary processes of crisis, a parable for the “boom and bust” emerging business cycle.
The period’s prosperity allowed (in the late 19th century) a small group of financial and industrial capitalists who coalesced into an elite social class. A new money class that supplanted an older generation of merchant families; and for them they preferred natural science over artworks to display status. For them, art offered only refined aesthetic sensibilities, but natural history represented another form of social distinction (offering virtues like objectivity, good stewardship and civic work).
As a result, although the economy was booming, American capitalism was simultaneously in a state of crisis, as there were unprecedented levels of economic growth, financial panics and economic depressions. Working people were especially hard hit during these downturns, and inequality rose sharply. A sense of revolutionary uprising was in the air. In response, the well-to-do literally armed themselves, forming militias and building ostentatious fortresses that doubled as clubhouses in cities across the U.S.
At the same time, as Rieppel’s work demonstrates, these elites became avid philanthropists and founded organisations designed to uplift and educate working people in the highest achievements of modern civilization. The non-profit corporation was created as an institution to demonstrate that capitalism could be altruistic, and the wealth will “trickle down” (a fantasy more creative than dinosaur tales).
In addition to establishing universities, libraries, symphonies, and art galleries, wealthy capitalists used Natural history as a popular and pious leisure pursuit. With dinosaur palaeontology it offered a particularly attractive target for philanthropic investment. Since dinosaurs lent themselves to the building of spectacular and popular displays; “see industrial capitalism could produce genuine public goods!”.
Unsurprisingly, philanthropists were also drawn to dinosaurs as a powerful tool to help naturalise the evolution of American capitalism. During the last third of the 19th century, corporate behemoths gobbled up their small and medium competitors and communities in a wave of mergers and acquisitions where some corporations grew so large to be potential monopolies; and the wealthy elites framed the political-economic transition to vast behemoth corporations as an example of evolutionary progress, a rational administration progression. Thus, dinosaurs offered a powerful historic narrative to support their virtuous claims.
Palaeontologists consistently portrayed dinosaurs as vicious and solitary predators whose terrible reign had come to an end in a sudden mass extinction. An extinction that allowed a kinder and more rational world to emerge and transcend the struggle for existence, an administrated cooperation for the greater good. Therefore, palaeontologists offered a narrative that acquired funding, while wealthy capitalists could claim to be engaged in altruism.
So while both claimed their interests to be in service of a capitalism that offered enlightened administration and organised teamwork, a capitalism “good” over and above the ruthless self-interest and incessant competition of beastly brutal nature. And what better way to support this claim than by investing in a lost world before the industrial economy? The perfect denial of conflict of interest.
Hence, both palaeontologists and capitalists tried to sustain the fiction that science is fundamentally neutral from the marketplace. A contradiction heightened as dinosaurs were not just immensely popular, they were also exceedingly difficult to locate and extract. This contradiction allowed palaeontologists to acquire a steady stream of funding, while wealthy capitalists could claim to be engaged in a genuinely altruistic endeavour. Thus, the link between science and big business resembled the corruption and crosspollination we see now; for instance, just about every important medical trial is funded by the pharmaceutical industry, or that every climate change study is funded by energy companies.
Conveniently, dinosaur reality pursues “impossible” data arising from the material world itself. As with Kant’s noumena, dinosaur materialism requires a disavowed palaeontology libido-gadget, a Real embodying the limits of one’s data knowledge in its coincidence with the ontological external crack of dinosaur reality; a repeated crack captured as a historical gap to be worked through to effect radical change; a dinosaur noumena as something structurally “always not existing”, until it “does”, and emerges from limbo to affirms itself as reality.
As with the Gilded Age industrialists, today’s Chinese industrialists boost their social capital with libidinal dinosaur collections. Many spectacular fossils have been un-earthed since Liaoning in the 90s, where a rural farmer Li Yinfang uncovered the fossil remains of a tiny dinosaur in Northeastern China. So, this breakthrough was the first dinosaur fossil with intact feathers, the Sinosauropteryx prima (“first Chinese lizard wing”), a new ontological external crack of dinosaur reality.
Surprisingly, much like the U.S. did in the late 19th century, China of late has been undergoing a period of rapid industrialisation. So China’s explosive economic expansion resembles that of the U.S. in that it has been fuelled by an abundance of natural resources, including huge tracts of arable land and large stores of mineral wealth. As a consequence, present-day palaeontologists have come to regard China like they did the late 19th-century U.S.
No wonder, then, that dinosaurs have been transformed from lumbering reptile behemoths of the prehistoric into agile, intelligent, and social creatures, with colourful feathers for signalling and mostly hailing from Asia rather than the U.S. For this reality of the dinosaurs to emerge, the disavowal is precisely the void of our activity, a void always-already included in the complexity of external reality.
Hence, dinosaurs emerge from a void requiring our intervention, interpretation, and projection; rather than an understanding of matter as a simple uncovering of empirical knowledge. They resist simple knowledge acquisition as mastery or scientific reproduction, as the dinosaur subject arrives only after a triple negation of moments, an arrival in the objective “moment for concluding” of the fossil observer. Therefore, the “dinosaur” Master-Signifier is a stain of the Real which de-centres the subject-object relation of capitalism from within.