Realizing Matter

Could we somehow sort out matters of science and matters of art? That is, can we finally decide what kind of matter each one is concerned with? More specifically, are the objects of science the universal laws it strives to unravel, or the empirical bodies and events these aim to describe? And, correspondingly, are the objects of art the plastic materials it employs, or the subtle conceptual and aesthetic abstractions their use serves to detonate? We could traditionally sustain that sciences are distinguished by the persistent analytical drive that, by sectioning objects into ever smaller pieces, uncovers the fundamental, unifying principles that ideally agglutinate matter all the way up to its most massive manifestations. Arts, on the other hand, we could say, depart from the aim at specific abstractions of expression, and to this purpose summon the attention to the minute concretions of its material facture. As much as we would like to reduce this echoing resonance between material bodies and abstract expressions, it seems somehow to persist as vibrating background noise between both domains of sciences and arts. Yet we are still often inclined to grant sciences the dominion over ultimate materiality, and arts the subtle reign over expressive abstraction. Despite a confusing traffic something seems to persist in each which is repellent of the other.

In particular, it seems to be that arts and sciences, at least in their archetypical form, are at odds in accounting for experience. On the one side, sciences that retreat into the most abstract laws in order to understand matter at its most concrete, and, on the other, arts that make the most thorough use of materials in order to manifest abstractions seem to go past one another without ever meeting. One makes claims footing on actual experience from the realm of piercing intellection, the other, from the empirical realization of sensoriality. But, can we somehow reach a fuller account of experience bypassing neither of these? Can we approach this seemingly contradictory ‘nature’ of experience, “important for no other reason than that it does exist”?

In examining these matters it seems adequate to begin by inspecting materials, since they appear to have a dense presence which often serves to dampen the reverberance of these noisy ambiguities. Both arts and sciences are deeply invested in them: one as an expressive means, the other, as objects of investigation in themselves. Some have pointed out that materials are not the same as matter and that is perhaps something we should elaborate on. Cyril Stanley Smith (1981) contends that matter refers to an abstract idealization of the physical world, while materials are matter as it appears to our senses. More than a mere perceptual or phenomenological argument, what is at stake for Smith is a meeting of physical scales. Materials are intermediates that emerge at the crossing of the macro and microscopic level of structure; namely, that of molecular, atomic and subatomic particles, on the one hand, and that of macroscopic arrangements of these where no longer individual particles, but the composition of aggregates becomes structurally dominant. This is the level where relationships temper the behavior of individual entities, the level of realized matter where whatever results ceases to be accountable as the mere ‘addition of its parts’.¹ We then run into a curious kind of semi-determinacy where, while submitting to described universal laws, matter also exhausts its explanatory power. While abiding to these general laws, the very actualization of materials constitutes the reason of their displacement. Plasticity, simultaneously implying some concrete realization and a certain indeterminacy, becomes, then, the defining quality of materials. As they become manifest to our experience, at an intermediate stage between the micro- and the macroscopic, and in constant mediation between individuation and aggregation, materials have then a semi-determinate obscurity. This is implied in the very notion of the plastic, a material obscurity that, receptive to intervention, change and adaptation, nevertheless affirms its existence as an opaque massiveness that can pose resistance. Every domain of understanding which, like arts and sciences, claims to be anchored on realized experience, must therefore accommodate for this viscous liquidity. But plasticity in materials, it is worth noting, has yet other unfoldings. It not only implies a traffic between dynamic scales, but it mediates between abstract intellection and sensorial perception. As the meeting point of ideal matter and manifest structure, materials are also plasmatic, between empirical solidity and abstract liquidness. Merging both modes of understanding into experience, we could propose that materials seem to require a degree of a combined, sensible appreciation.

Then it would appear that, in the sway of plasmatic morphing, materials share terrain with metaphors, that other anchoring domain of artistic and scientific understanding. Typically, however, metaphors are recognized and valued as the quintessential expression of the freedom of art, a freedom often considered unbound, and certainly independent of ‘rational’, scientific thought. In fact, a staple criterion for their identification is how they run amiss in attempts at ‘literal’ or rational interpretations (Black, 1977). Yet, an extensive body of research has developed in response to this presupposition. In this work it is argued that the functional value of metaphors, the fact that they, somehow, make sense, can be traced back to our relationship with our bodies and with physical space. Metaphors ‘work’ because they relate to experiences empirically immediate to us.² Relations of spatiality, temporal sequence, and topographical relations are projected into diverse domains of understanding, concrete and abstract, in the construction and interpretation of metaphors. Thus understood, metaphors cease to inhabit the exclusive realm of art or of purely verbal language.³ and begin permeating our daily, living spaces as vehicles of common-place understanding. Vaporous metaphors are indeed punctured by materiality.

Yet metaphors do not only vaporize materiality, for they also condense into opaque material. Enrooted in our bodies and in empirical experience, abstracted metaphors return to matter. They take many concrete forms in word, action and experience, but perhaps nowhere they appear more ‘embodied’ than when they materialize into technologies. Writing, thermodynamic machines, armies, digital computers, textiles, liquid crystals are very material technologies born out of metaphors, which were themselves simultaneously brought to us as dense physical tools and as instrumentalized conceptual models. Metaphors again become ground for yet more concepts and more technologies. In this unsanctioned cross-breeding, all genealogy between the abstract and the concrete is forever lost. Heavy with the “traffic between concept and artifact” (Hayles, 1999), these opaque metaphors become “constitutive of determined reflections and characterizations” by providing productive models, analogies and interpretive frameworks (Kay, 2005). In the adaptation of notions, concepts and technologies from other domains of knowledge, metaphors do not effect a simple transmission of understanding from one area to the other, but rather potentiate a bi-directional, mutual reform (Kay, 2005). Metaphors infuse materiality to abstraction, but they also inject abstraction to very tangible materials. They are thus also realized. This, in any case, is the reality that builds up their momentous power in defining and altering disciplinary paradigms (Haraway, 2004). Their material thickness is so pervasive that even the postmodern world-image of radical textuality and depthlessness, threatened with the disappearance of a material world, is only made ‘plausible’ by the mediation of specific technologies (in particular, information and cybernetic technologies) that make such a world conceivable in the first place. In this cosmic confusion not only science, but also arts, as Hayles in her doubly unfolding analysis systematically affirms, are persistent actors-mediators. Where neither mind nor eyes have vantage points of view, it seems we need a hand that can sense its way...

Materializing metaphors and metaphorizing materials we return once more to, or rather, find ourselves indefinitely immersed in, the plastic, where the discriminating mind and perceiving eye seem to have lost their privileged grounding. Fully deployed plasticity requires a closer contact than either the distant eye or mind can provide. Plasticity is not only about appreciation but also about manipulation. It calls for the intervention of a sensible touch, a sensibility that is neither ‘pure’ sensoriality nor mere intellection but the merging of both. Plasticity is the project of hands that understand manipulation in its full implications. Manipulation, that is, as a license to touch, change, adapt and mold only through the acknowledgment of the opacity of a material that knows to resist. Plasticity also as that peculiar ability of materials to effect engagements with the abstractions of intellectual and aesthetic experience. Perhaps above all, the plastic logic of these morphing materials and metaphors calls for a working knowledge: the knowledge of manipulating hands that access the world through the mediation of eyes and brain.

In the plasmic exchange between materials and metaphors, not only these, but science and art themselves are viscously engaged. By the sensible hand of the seducing logic of the organon, that most fundamental of all biological terms, which appears to have been (originally?) borrowed from the vocabulary of artisans and musicians (Canguilhem, 1981), we thus complete a voyage from material to metaphor, from ‘art’ to sciences, and back...

References:

Black, Max. “More about metaphor.” Dialectica 31.3/4 (1977): 431-56.

Canguilhem, Georges. Idéologie et rationalité dans les sciences de la vie: nouvelles études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris: J. Vrin, 1981.

Forceville, Charles. “Non-verbal and multimodal metaphor in a cognitivist framework: Agendas for research.” Applications of Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations and Fields of Application. Eds. Gitte Kristiansen, Michel Achard, René Dirven and Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. 379-402.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos, Berkeley. California: North Atlantic Books, [1976] 2004.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kay, Lily E. Das Buch des Lebens: Wer schrieb den genetischen Code? [Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code.] Gustav Roßler, Trans. Suhrkamp. [2000] 2005.

Lakoff, George. “The contemporary theory of metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought (2^nd edition), Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Smith, Cyril Stanley. A Search for Structure: Selected essays on science, art and history. Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 1981.