Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric

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Summary: Poetry, perception, "materialism"
Review: This book's premise grows rather naturally out of the fact that science has often had to be content with theorizing relations or identities that it could not see. Until recently the atom was the several-millenia-old paradigm par excellence of this inability to visualize matter-energy. It is therefore not without irony that during WWII, to cite a pivotal moment in the history of science, the Los Alamos physics team charged with producing equations for the production of the atom bomb was called "Theoretical," or just "T" for short: the irony is of course that "theory" comes from the Greek word "theorein," meaning 'to see,' which was precisely what these physicists could not do with the neutrons and electrons they were working with. As Niels Bohr famously said of his own early solar-system model of the atom in the 1920s -- a model which is still taught today to high school students despite the fact that it is, as Bohr himself flatly stated, "wrong" -- "the period of visualization in physics is over." Tiffany points out in this book that the problem of visualization had always been there, and was expressed in different ways. Science, and the math that underlies it, has grappled over time with ways to visually model its work. Unable to see the subatomic level, scientists have often turned to linguistic metaphors, or as Tiffany asserts, to lyric poetry, to help them "theorize" what could not actually be seen, all depending on how advanced the available scientific tools were at a given moment in history. This book does not deal with the actual mathematical scripts that express these "theories" with the elegance of actual mathematical equations. But in all honesty, physicists don't really visualize their problems according to equations anyway -- they rely on a sense of intuition that remains very murky and hard to explain. In fact, it's perhaps incorrect to call it visualization at all, if by that one means something representational. Physicists working after the advent of quantum theory tend to visualize their work more in terms of a Pollock painting or a painting by Paul Klee: straight lines, squiggly lines, arrows, and the barest indicators of the dimensions of time and space: vertical versus horizontal lines. Quantum theory -- where the greatest divide between empirical research and theory ever emerged in the history of science during and after 1943 -- is not discussed at any length in this book, however. And the non-linearity of modern physics, for example the paradoxes of event-time, where cameras take photographs of colliding atoms before the atoms have even accelerated into each other, defies visualization altogether. How do the facts of non-linearization, science and poetry relate? This most modern aspect of the problem of vision in science is not discussed by Tiffany. Given that lyrical poetry strictly speaking mostly died out by the end of the nineteenth century, one can perhaps see that there are certain limitations on what Tiffany is willing or able to discuss in his book. As a work of history it is a very interesting open-ended read, but it does not attempt to treat seriously scientists's actual working methods in regards to perception, or seek to explain how we should conceive of scientific intuition or equations in relation to either science or poetry. The book stops at the doorstep of truly considering quantum mechanics and concentrates on the scientific history that came before it. The book seems to wish to argue for an intriguing and continuously shifting concept of perception a la Jonathan Crary, but somehow it cannot relate to contemporary science. As a work on perception and language, which this book ultimately is (its concept of matter-energy is strangely out of date) it remains highly interesting but offers little explanation as to why these two should be connected, except for the fact that scientists have preferred or needed to visualize what it was impossible for them to actually see at the time and that this job fell - somewhat obviously - to language to express. If you are looking for a truly historical work on shifts in visuality, try J-P Vernant's two excellent studies of the transformation of the concepts of Greek visuality in his collection of essays "Mortals and Immortals," or one of the numerous recent studies on the relation between medical dissection and its impact on aesthetics in the Renaissance, and to what we refer to as "beautiful."

While full of interesting anecdotes on the relationships between science, poetry and material culture, one has to ask a question that this book for some reason does not even really pose: what is Tiffany's thesis? It seems to only go in one direction: from science's literal inability to visualize, to its necessity to use metaphorical lyric poetry. The literal/figural distinction here that underwrites the concept of poetry is not the most valid distinction that one could possibly draw (and while trying to mix things up a bit in this book between the borders that separate science from fiction, which he actually does a fine job of, Tiffany ultimately must come back, however unwittingly, to understanding the difference between science and poetry as one between the literal and real versus the figural). It has been shown over and over again that there is no degree zero for any such thing as 'literal' language (a fact Tiffany surely would agree on) and that figurality is present throughout all of language. But what does this mean for perception or science? One is left to wonder about the lines that Tiffany supposedly blurs, which for an intellectual historian would be classed as ongoing cultural interactions, or for followers of Kuhn as nice readings of paradigms as each inflects itself with and through other cutural elements.