Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1851

Myth #1: Science is a steady march of progress ("Whig history")

Myth #1: Science is a steady march of progress ("Whig history")

Reality: Scientific knowledge develops in a variety of directions, some of which we still consider to be true and some of which we would now consider superstitious, silly, or unethical, but which did not necessarily seem so at the time.

Myth #2: There is a single “scientific method” that all science disciplines use and that applies to all objects of study.

You can't study these things in the same way.

Myth #2: There is a single “scientific method” that all science disciplines use and that applies to all objects of study.

Reality:The physical and ethical properties of the things being studied matter a lot, and affect what constitutes a good “method.”

Myth #3: Science is autonomous from politics and culture.

I AM NOT SAYING THAT SCIENCE IS FAKE. FOUCAULT IS NOT SAYING THAT EITHER. NO ONE IS SAYING THAT.

Myth #3: Science is autonomous from politics and culture.

Reality: Scientific knowledge is always shaped by social factors, never "pure."

Literature in the Age of Big Science

Three Myths, Two Whales, and an Argument

Natalia Cecire | n.cecire@sussex.ac.uk | @ncecire
University of Sussex Modern and Contemporary Symposium
7 March 2017

Photo: still from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Paramount Pictures, 1986.

"In fact, when one tries to trace the history of the term 'literary experimentalism,' one finds that the term was used in the United States relatively infrequently until the 1980s and 1990s."

Paul Stephens, "What Do We Mean by 'Literary Experimentalism'?: Notes Toward a History of the Term," 2012.

variously:

Language writers, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, Langpo [i.e. Language poetry], active 1970s-present

Selected criticism by Langpo-associated writers about early C20 writing:

Bernstein, Charles. “Stein’s Identity.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996): 485–88.

Davidson, Michael, Larry Eigner, Bob Perelman, Steve McCaffery, Peter Seaton, Rae Armantrout, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Carl Andre, and Robert Grenier. “Reading Stein.” In L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Vol. 6, 1978.

Hejinian, Lyn. “Two Stein Talks.” In The Language of Inquiry, 83-130. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Noland, Carrie, and Barrett Watten, eds. Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996.

———. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley, Calif. ; London: University of California Press, 2003.

Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Beginning with Stein and Zukofsky, and significantly reinforced by the examples of the abstract poems of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and the aleatorical texts of Jackson MacLow [sic] in the fifties, there has been a continuity of experimental work that foregrounds its status as written language.

Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Social Text (1988).

In this situation, modernism was no longer especially important. The discursive tone of later Eliot, the incantatory vaticism of Yeats, the kaleidoscopic novelty of Surrealism minus Marx and Freud, the authoritative common sense and rural cast of Frost (often translated to the suburbs), and an attenuated version of Williams as poet of the quotidian—these echoes might be read everywhere, but the more basic facts of modernism were shunned. The poet as engaged, oppositional intellectual, and poetic form and syntax as sites of experiment for political and social purposes—these would not be found.

Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry (1996). Emphasis added.

Covers for Sagetrieb 1.1 (1982) and 9.1-2 (1999).

From Sagetrieb 4, no. 2–3 (Fall and Winter 1985).

The mainstream poetic avant-garde in America, of which the Duncan faction is a member, has always been curiously pragmatic and therefore often at odds with the European avant-garde, from whom the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets take much of their theory. The great tradition of Whitman-Williams has demanded an AMERICAN language of economy and clarity that will accommodate the transcendent self. [...] The project of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets is derived from a highly theoretical Marxism....

Sloan, “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War,” Sagetrieb, 1985.

[The Language poet Barrett] Watten appears to, and very possibly does, over-read a harmless statement by [Louis] Zukofsky to make him a theoretician of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School. At the time of Watten’s presentation, Zukofsky had been dead for several months, and already factions were fighting over his remains.

Sloan, “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War,” Sagetrieb, 1985.

During the Summer of 1984, a poetry war erupted, escalated, and declined in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was the summer of the Democratic National Convention, and the city had been selected for the event because of its liberal image. [...] In November, the Democrats were soundly defeated and the conservative counter-revolution continued to reign, led by former California Governor Reagan who had once ordered tear gas fired at the students across the Bay in Berkeley. The AIDS epidemic cast a pall over the city’s otherwise vocal and optimistic gay community. [...] Even on a local level, most inhabitants paid little attention to the bickering of a few poets, especially when the city was alive with other issues.

Sloan, “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War,” Sagetrieb, 1985.

[T]here is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics [...]. When we examine the status of scientific knowledge—at a time when science seems more completely subordinated to the prevailing powers than ever before and, along with the new technologies, is in danger of becoming a major stake in their conflicts—the question of double legitimation, far form receding into the background, necessarily comes to the fore. [...] In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979).

[F]or the last forty years the "leading" sciences and technologies have had to do with language: phonology and theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics, computers and their languages, problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information storage and data banks....

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979).

Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985).

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails, and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953).

It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle.—Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others.——And to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form [Lebensform, elsewhere trans. "form of life"].

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953).

The emphasis on language in our writing [i.e. Language writing] can be explained by our sense of urgency of the need to address and, if possible, to redress social fraud […since] fraud produces atrocity.

Lyn Hejinian, "Barbarism" (1995)

ostranenie: estrangement

The word 'barbarism,' as it comes to us from the Greek barbaros, means ‘foreign’—that is, 'not speaking the same language'…—and such is precisely the task of poetry: not to speak the same language as Auschwitz. Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities.

Lyn Hejinian, "Barbarism" (1995)

Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney (1974). Opening sequence.

Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney (1974). Having traveled through time to a nightclub in Chicago in 1943, Sun Ra creates havoc with his dissonant jazz.

Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney (1974). Jimmy Fey asks Sun Ra why he's talking to "ghetto blacks" and not "white nuclear physicists." The young men listening to them on the radio have a poster of Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton behind them.

Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney (1974). Federal agents interrogate Sun Ra.
The tune they make him listen to at the end of the clip is the Confederate anthem "Dixie."

Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985).

Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986). The alien space probe approaches, its signal causing widespread destruction.

Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) prepares his crew to meet the paranoid and primitive people of San Francisco, California, circa 1986.

Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Chekhov (Walter Koenig) and Uhura find the Enterprise docked at Alameda.

Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986). Chekhov (Walter Koenig) is caught on board the U.S.S. Enterprise and interrogated by the U.S. Navy.

The word 'barbarism,' as it comes to us from the Greek barbaros, means ‘foreign’—that is, 'not speaking the same language'…—and such is precisely the task of poetry: not to speak the same language as Auschwitz. Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities.

Lyn Hejinian, "Barbarism" (1995)

Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Gillian (Catherine Hicks) suspects Kirk and Spock's motives.

Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
No Cold War-era cultural object is complete without a comment on modernism.

A bibliography follows this slide.
This presentation was created using reveal.js, by Hakim El Habbab.

Bibliography

Cantor, Geoffrey. “The Rhetoric of Experiment.” In The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, edited by David Gooding, T. J. Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, 159–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Collignon, Fabienne. Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Coney, John. Space Is the Place. Videorecording. Plexifilm, 2003. [Ubuweb]

Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.

Davidson, Michael, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991.

Bibliography (continued)

Erickson, Paul, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Gooding, David, T. J. Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Harris, Kaplan. “Editing After Pound.” Sagetrieb 20 (2014).

Hejinian, Lyn. “Barbarism.” In The Language of Inquiry, 318–36. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Lemov, Rebecca M. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Lyotard, Jean François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and History of Literature, v. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Bibliography (continued)

Nimoy, Leonard, Paramount Pictures Corporation, and Paramount Home Entertainment (Firm). Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. DVD. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2009.

Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Scott-Heron, Gil. Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Vinyl. New York: Flying Dutchman Records, 1970.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Schiebinger, Londa L. “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History.” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 382–411.

Silver, Curtis. “September 24, 1960: 1st Nuclear Carrier, The USS Enterprise Launched.” WIRED, September 24, 2010.

Bibliography (continued)

Sloan, De Villo. “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War.” Sagetrieb 4, no. 2–3 (Fall and Winter 1985): 241–54.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Stephens, Paul. “What Do We Mean by ‘Literary Experimentalism’?: Notes Toward a History of the Term.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 68, no. 1 (2012): 143–73. doi:10.1353/arq.2012.0003.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd ed. repr. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1997.

Wolfe, Audra J. Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America. Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Yeo, Richard R. “Scientific Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain, 1830-1917.” In The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method: Historical Studies, edited by John Andrew Schuster and Richard R. Yeo, 259–97. Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel-Kluwer, 1986.

The C17 natural philosopher Robert Boyle—the son of an earl—had a number of servants who carried out many of his experiments, sometimes without his supervision or presence. But the formula stating the relationship between gas pressure and volume is known as "Boyle's Law" to this day...not "Boyle And His Servants' Law."