Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Today I'm going to talk about the unbridgeable gulf between the arts and the sciences.
You see, I'm taking this rather horrid Science GEM called Life as a Complex System, and everytime I go for the lectures, I am once more reminded of how East is East and West is West and the twain shall never meet (never mind the 'deconstructing' second part of Kipling's poem).
When I told Joan I was taking this module, she said wasn't complexity something that we have always been talking about in Lit class? Yes, but over at the other end of the world they have a very different conception of "complexity".
So this is what usually happens during the lectures. The lecturer would introduce a concept and I would immediately think of its counterpart (but not equivalent) in 'Lit' terms.
Science lecturer: Living beings are complex systems. Complexity involves complex numbers. Chaos means non-linear systems. But they still can be expressed in the form of a simple equation.
Me: "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged...". It eludes your totalizing grasp. Chaos is the flux which threatens to overwhelm the tiny island of civilization. "Significant form" is a line down the middle of a painting.
Science lecturer: I like mathematics. I like to know things with precision.
Me: I love to read texts and discourses for their "ambivalence", their slippage, their excess of signification. Slide down the endless metonymic chain of desire. In the Beginning, There Were Not Maxwell's Equations of Light.
Science lecturer: Scientists are still trying to discover the origin(s) of life.
Me: Why this metahistorical quest for metaphysical being? Let us write genealogies, not evolutionary narratives of beginning, middle and end. Let us talk about "births", not "origins".
There are of course, several scientific theories which have been appropriated and reinterpreted by writers and theorists of the humanities. The parallel between quantum physics and poststructuralism is clear. I suspect Foucault's concept of "emergence" and Derrida's concept of "iterability" owe much to biological and mathematical discourses respectively. And as Barthes has argued, both science and literature are discourses, neither having any privileged access to 'truth'. But science is still slow to recognize its discursive nature, and I don't think it has really pushed the implications of its own theories.
So, at the present at least, there is still an irreconciliable divide between the arts and the sciences. And this is probably why, as Joan has so wisely pointed out, Arts people don't go out with Science people.
kaoru said at 10:47 PM
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