The following text is Chapter 6 of "An Intricate Ensemble: The Art-Science of an Ecological Imaginary" published in January 2020, in partial fulfillment of Rhode Island School of Design's Master of Arts program in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies. The paper is available in its entirety at RISD Digital Commons. The abstract is listed in the Leonardo Abstract Service (LABS) Database.
6.
CONCLUSION
At 5:30am on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo
Bombing Range (a place that had been known by Spanish conquistadores as
Jornada del Muerto, the route of the dead man)
in the New Mexican desert, the Manhattan Project completed its Trinity Test,
the detonation of an 18.6 kiloton plutonium bomb.
As he watched the explosion, Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer, director of the
project, famously recalled a line from Hindu holy book the Bhagavad-Gita:
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
If it had not been widely apparent prior to this moment, it certainly became
known immediately afterwards: Homo sapiens—“wise man”—had acquired the
power, previously ascribed only to gods and other supreme forces, to annihilate
itself.
In addition to the nuclear threat, most of Earth’s
human inhabitants now well understand that many other reckless activities
engaged in by some threaten the existence of all. The entire biosphere is being
catastrophically altered by a few hundred years’ worth of exploitative
practices controlled by the wealthiest and most powerful, the majority of whom
are now loathe to abandon the profit motive in favor of more egalitarian, less
oppressive systems of social and economic organization. People around the world
in all sectors of society are currently engaged in resistance to inhumane and
ecocidal forces.
The angst inherent in the Dadaist reaction to the senselessness of the
post-World War I era seems all the more sensible in light of atrocities
currently unfolding.
In fact, the point made by the Romantic Naturalists
and Surrealists—that an awareness of the “marvelous” aspects of existence
serves a vital social function—remains highly relevant to the times at hand:
there is still much to be learned from those who never forgot existence is
intra-active, and from those who refused, and continue to refuse, to submit to
reductive thinking.
For the oppressed, to cultivate and maintain an
ability to imagine parallel or alternate possible presents remains a subversive
act. René Ménil wrote:
The land of the marvelous is the most stunning
revenge we have…Man sees the intolerable limits of everyday life fall from him
like so much tawdry finery. Everything really becomes possible for him. He can
transgress his spatial boundaries: he transforms himself into a tree, an
animal, a peaceful lake, so discovering precious secrets as in a game. He
overcomes space by instantly crossing infinite distances. He holds past and
future, space and time, life and death in his hands…(Ménil 1941 in Fijalkowski
and Richardson 1996,91).
In light of the current state of the world, Ménil’s
words may seem almost excruciatingly optimistic. But giving all power to the
imagination (l’imagination au pouvoir) may remain among the most potent
and accessible tactics available. As philosopher Herbert Marcuse stated
(somewhat paradoxically), “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute
to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change
the world” (Marcuse 1977 [1979],32).
To reiterate: this thesis is intended neither to
assert that art can solve all problems, nor to claim modern science is
inherently flawed. From a position of constructive critique, it has been my
purpose, rather:
1. To establish creative practices as essential
forms of knowledge production in and of themselves. I am suggesting
artistic techniques—ones that arouse the imagination, senses, and emotions—can
be effectively applied in concert with science’s rigorous and dispassionate
methods. Situations that tend to treat art as an embellishment capable only of
serving in an illustrative or support capacity, or that otherwise use art to
uncritically reinforce the authority of a science which fails to take
humanitarian and ecological concerns foremost into account, are, I maintain,
less constructive.
2. To invite science to
critically examine a paradox inherent within itself.
Science’s revered objective stance—undeniably useful as a mindset for the
purposes of research—is neither a scientifically demonstrable condition of
reality, nor is it necessarily constructive when applied in a non-scientific
(social) context. I believe science, in its privileged position as humanity’s
preeminent form of knowledge production, reinforces a “detached” attitude that
runs the perilous risk of preventing the most destructive segment of humanity
from understanding itself (ourselves) as interconnected with one another and
the biosphere.
3. To suggest practices which expand the
imagination are valuable not only to those in the arts, but to those in the
sciences, and to assert that a sound understanding of science can be of great
practical use to those in creative fields.
Umberto Eco describes how “contemporary art can be
seen as an epistemological metaphor”:
What we find in art is less the expression of new
scientific concepts than the negation of old assumptions. While science, today,
limits itself to suggesting a probable structure of things, art tries to give
us a possible image of this new world, an image that our sensibility has not
yet been able to formulate, since it always lags a few steps behind
intelligence— indeed, so much so that we still say that the sun ‘rises’ when
for three centuries we have known that it does not budge (Eco 1989,90).
Ultimately, I am calling for authentic, critical
engagement of the methods of science in tandem with those of the arts. By
bringing Goethe’s delicate empiricism, Schelling’s Naturephilosophie,
Dadaist and Surrealist natural history, and the efforts of musical improvisors
into dialog with the contemporary environmental humanities, I am pointing
toward a mode of thought and action that engages the seemingly paradoxical yet
complementary mindsets of art and science. I believe vacillating between—or the
simultaneous holding of—states of objectivity and subjectivity, individuality
and collectivity, prescription and improvisation can be of use to the
collaborative formation of a constructive image of oikos, our shared
home, regardless of one’s primary discipline.
Alexander von Humboldt expressed similar sentiments
when he stated reason and imagination must be considered equally:
It would be a
denial of the dignity of human nature and the relative importance of the
faculties with which we are endowed, were we to condemn at one time austere
reason engaged in investigating causes and their mutual connections, and at
another that exercise of the imagination which prompts and excites discoveries
by its creative powers (Alexander von Humboldt 1858,78).
As the Surrealists understood, such dialectical
practices are only useful in relation to the revolutionary project:
It is not enough…for man to become the instrument of
his unconscious, for he should occupy himself with finding a concrete solution
to the problems of existence. Surreality is not to be sought solely on ‘the
other side,’ but should become integrated with the attributes of consciousness
in order to recognize this harmony of being that will finally reconcile man to
himself (Duplessis 1950 [1962],109).
And
the revolutionary project at hand is monumental—for life on Earth to continue
to thrive, the Anthropocentric model of the universe must rapidly go the way of
the geocentric one. What practices have the potential to aid humanity in coming
to see itself as part of an intricate ensemble with one another and the
biosphere? What might be the most effective and efficient methods of restoring
a sense of the marvelous, and how can they be implemented?
Can an avant-garde effort succeed now where similar
past movements failed to take hold? I argue “success,” as a constantly-moving
target, is an unfounded concern; there is never a fixed point at which victory
is declared and all struggles cease. Movements inspire and reinforce one
another, reconfigure, reorganize, and re-emerge in new forms, as we have seen
in the twenty-first century with the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Indignados,
#BlackLivesMatter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, and many other social, environmental,
and political uprisings around the world. According to a 1907 definition, avant-garde
started out as a military term referring to the “advance guard” or the
“vanguard”:
The
avant-garde générale, avant-garde
stratégique, or avant-garde d'armée
is a strong force (one, two, or three army corps) pushed out a day's march to
the front, immediately behind the cavalry screen. Its mission is, vigorously to
engage the enemy wherever he is found, and, by binding him, to ensure liberty
of action in time and space for the main army.
Terms like “avant-garde,” “queer,” “utopian,” or
“surreal,” by definition, refer to things that are out of the ordinary, ahead
of their time, or are unexpected, rare, or uncommon in occurrence. “Queer” is
defined as “strange, peculiar, eccentric”
and “utopia” literally means “no place”.
But for those who select these terms, the subtext is that what’s considered
normal is in need of adjustment. When it
is widely taken for granted that quantum particles can leap from one place to
another without having been anywhere in between,
those particles will cease to be “queer,” and some other phenomenon may take
their place in the pantheon of queerness.
Barad poetically describes “queer” as:
…itself a lively, mutating organism, a desiring
radical openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential
dis/continuity, an enfolded reiteratively materializing promiscuously inventive
spatiotemporality (Barad in Kleinman 2012,81).
Ishmael proclaims in the mid-nineteenth century
novel Moby Dick, “Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em,”
(Melville 1902,109). When everything is queer, nothing is. And then something
is again. And so the cycle goes; avant-gardeness, queerness, and utopianism are
never-ending becomings.
It is
my strong impression that the cultivation of an intricate ensemble—in any and
every form this may take—is an appropriate and necessary avant-garde with which
to confront the roaring (boiling, wailing, failing, flailing?) 2020s. Practices and frameworks that
emphasize and enhance collaboration, spontaneity, and care—mad love—in
defying convention, contain the potential to subvert it. Not acting (in-activism) is not an option.
If
[aesthetic vision] arouses us in any practical way, it is because it finds us
ready, one way or another, to act. Not the works of art, therefore, but the
[person themselves] who carries in [their] being the potential of rebellion and
revolution (Fallico 1962,131).
The impossible is realized every time a
“perfect coalescence of feeling with image and image with feeling” occurs in an
act of creativity; we can “know what the possible feels like because we know
ourselves to be its creators” (Fallico 1962,73).
This is a dynamic participatory occasion.
At the same time, the artist should not feel
obliged to force their works into a scientific idiom (i.e.: works need not have
a tangible, quantifiable, or repeatable component) in order to be accepted as
valid by either practitioners or audiences. Science is science; art does not
need to be science also.
Ascending in All Directions 1 (Starfish) and 2 (Octopus), Vintage paper, gouache, ink on birch panel, 12"x12"x.8", 2020
