...
A Blissymbolics diagram of two isotype men in solid color backgrounds like early iPod advertisements, one labeled Tschichold, the other labeled Albers. We completely shift to voiceless sound and vision, visuals and sound.
We follow Jan Tschichold and the New Typography then select points in his work for Penguin.
The New typography: The first scene of visual communication, flash a crossed out energie/vergueding graphic like on page 98 of the English edition of Die Nue Typographie, then “efficiency” on page 99; then page 59.
Page 59 Bulges and fades out.
We next have an animation of the paper standards of Die Nue: Mathematical relationships are demonstrated to show controlling measures of document regulation, to show measures of "control" through "structures" of art and science.
Asymmetrical text then gradually becomes symmetrical as we move into the Penguin Books period. Several images from the covers of Penguin editions are shown as a slide show. Voice over of Tschichold about the rules of book typography from this work at Penguin.
The Penguin cover of Michelet in Deutschland is digitized like the image of Michelet in the 19th century section, until large squares are derived from pixels. We then follow Josef Albers and his work on Color. The squares create entirely new color field images that could have been made by Albers. The Alternative Albers morph into period proper or his actual history proper compositions.
Then we combine both developments in a split screen showing Tschichold's work for Penguin, simultaneously with Albers work at Black Mountain and his color treatise.
The art/art divide (split screen) becomes noise/signal divide and then an art/science divide. C. P Snow is pictured then on the Science Side. He steps to the middle until a split screen divider bisects his body. We then fade into a dialogue between Snow, a literary artist, and a scientist.
Snow in conversation with a literary artist and a scientist.
C. P. Snow to literary artist:
I am two-thirds literary artist in everything I do, yet the problems of industrial culture, my literary work shows, without the invisible hand of a history of literary invention. Look at the indications in the literature of the industrial revolution, and you could see that they possibly come from the so-called mutually exclusive endeavors of physical science.
Literary Artist:
Artists and scientists share the domain of observation, but I don't see how clues to the raison d' être of literature are in science. Techné has no sovereignty over literary thought.
Scientist:
It does in the sense in that it models a view of nature--a mechanism that becomes an integral part of our concept of self--and the writing self. Literary art is inside the domain of science.
C. P. Snow:
Not always. Literature has greater scope; it can imaginatively portray a scientific worldview in ways that science itself cannot. These imaginative pictures cause one to act morally when solving the problems of science and the industrial revolution.
Scientist:
Still nature is outside of culture. Why, we empirically observe nature, our bodies are natural, but our culture is not.
C. P. Snow:
Nature is not outside of culture, but is a different culture, the culture of science. In fact, there are two cultures of art and science, and both are cultural regardless of their so-called "natural content".
Literary Artist:
Definitely. Science is simply an artifact of domination. Technology advances because of arbitrary power being played out in an industrial community. Science is arbitrary, not necessarily grounded in universal reality--as if there could be such a thing.
Scientist:
Surely, if theoretical physics does not convince you of science's power and veracious relationship to phenomena, surely medicine does. Why with the advances of medicine, which are the advances of science, we have an ultimately practical application of science.
C. P. Snow:
Medicine is a technological way in which we solve illness, an illness that may have arisen because of techné. But we need to be able to evaluate that solution. Of course, when it saves lives, it is easy. But what if medicine reshapes our evolution in harmful ways?
Literary Artist:
Indeed, the scientist is often the enemy of the human condition, with his alteration of evolution and the state of human affairs.
Scientist:
No, artists, men of culture, have also been “a rebours” or against nature. They are the “Des Essientes” of world literature--and beyond.
Literary artist:
You really think so? Because literature creates its own universe does not mean that literary artists do not "step outside" to contextualize their uses of language. The literary text does not have to be isolated from the larger world--now I see where C. P. is going
C.P. Snow:
The world is a different world because of science. We cannot appeal to context without acknowledging the science of our world. Too, science cannot encapsulate moral problems without literature.
Snow is again bisected at the lectern that then fades into his Reid Lecture in 1959
During C. P. Snow's Reid Lecture a man appears at the back of the room, like Dr. Rosen in the Nash Beautiful Mind story. It is actually Aldous Huxley who speaks to C. P. Snow after his talk (theoretically).
Huxley:
I am not as interested in the collaboration between artists and scientists, to solve problems of the industrial revolution, but rather am interested in the implications for literature from modern science. Literary works will not come from collaborations but from literary artists writing alone, and with knowledge of science.
C. P. Snow:
If you recall, I am a literary artist myself. I don't think that the poetics you indicate will follow except from intense discussion between members from either of the two cultures.
Huxley:
Literature is metaphoric, not clinical. Literature must use science but it cannot be science.
C. P. Snow:
Nor can science be literature although it must use literature. Similarly the two cultures will become mutually extinct if they each exclude the other.
Huxley:
Agreed. Science and literature need each other and for the reason related to the industrial predicament, but literature and literary artists must encapsulate science. Science is an open topic, that if it undergoes distortion, this distortion is for the good of aesthetic ideas.
Snow:
Literature must not distort the truth of science. Literature can issue an aesthetics, but its conceits about science must be grounded in traditional literary techniques.
Huxley:
Yes, we need a vocabulary for dealing with science, but I am uncomfortable with this notion of tradition. For if literature about science must be seen through traditional conventions, then why does science suggest an experimental nature over literature, and why does science reinvent the paradigms of our technology, and present the traditions of tomorrow? It is literature's object to do the task of presenting future paradigms as well as it is science's.
Snow:
A literary or scientific paradigm?
Huxley:
A literary paradigm informed by a scientific paradigm. As both a literary artist and scientist, I would think that you understand the indeterminacy of science and art in phases of observation.
Snow:
We have a technics in common-- and the world's problems in common. A work of scholarship is never BOTH science and literature but is a work of science that interacts with or influences literature and vise versa.
Huxley:
May not the whole of both literature and science be indicated by the part, either literature or science? Hereby I would say that, in this sense there is no distinction between the science that influences literature and literature that influences science. Although, I find it hard to keep cognizant of this in practice.
Snow:
Truly, through misrecognition science becomes art, and art science. While misrecognition is not foreign to science, science is a distinct entity with values that interact with literature and art, but the disciplinary structures themselves do not interact.
Huxley:
And this is something that we are coming to a consensus on: the maintenance of disciplinary boundaries in either culture's artifact, although each cultures reads and writes the other.
Snow:
And most fruitfully, through dialogues between the two cultures. We are in agreement on the distinctness of disciplinary boundaries however, still present in the inter-disciplinarity for which I am calling.
Another man from the back of the room appears like Dr. Rosen. It is Lewis Mumford, who joins the conversation.
Mumford:
I could not help overhear your conversation. While Weiner and others have shown a significant communications paradigm to objects of the world and its subjects, I believe that at least technological invention, the resultant activity of Huxley’s literary artist working on scientific problems, does not have the distinctness and disciplinary distinctness in its artifacts, as we know from society’s technological objects. I cite Spengler's pseudomorph, a metaphor from rock formation, of old technology in new apparatuses.
According to Spengler, the pseudomorph is a formation of metamorphic rock with elements of its previous state leeched onto the new form. Technological artifacts are part history, part future, and are malleable like the soup of ideas in an inventor's mind. So too, I would think that the objects or artifacts of science or of art are pseudomorphs, misrecognized objects dually of techné and art.
Snow:
How may the pseudomorph be applied to human moral roles within our earthly society? For if we do not have distinct disciplinary boundaries maintained along with communication between disciplines, then the division between nature and culture begins to break down, nature and society. I want to keep a technological society with moral actors who solve the problems of the industrial revolution.
Huxley:
I am rather intrigued by the pseudomorph. I had not thought of specifically, rock formation. That significantly ups the extent to which natural processes are blended with cultural ones--i.e. metamorphic molecules that act with free will and create the universe of ideas paralleling and interacting with the natural world.
Mumford:
Yes, as humans become more interwoven with machines either through prosthesis or through imitation, they need analogies from natural processes to explain them. But along with Snow, I am concerned about how human machine interaction may affect the evolution of man--and I am not as optimistic as Weiner.
Snow:
Can the pseudomorph become less hybrid? In other words, can the technological, scientific, or literary object purge the elements of previous ages or collaborative elements that have leeched upon its modus operandi and opus operatum?
Mumford:
That is a good question, and I don't know if we should affirm it or disclaim it. The pseudomorph is present wherever we have the appearance of a distinct totality. Error and misrecognition are present in all the technological constructions of artists, and the scientific constructions of physicists.
A man appears at the back of the room like doctor Rosen (again). It is a graduate student, Thomas Kuhn, who joins the conversation.
Kuhn:
I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. I am Tom Kuhn, a physics graduate student who has recently become interested in the history of science after taking a course in the history of science. As physicists of a so-called “hard” discipline, we are lulled into eternal constructs and the accumulation of scientific facts without question. Does your pseudomorph deal with the evaluation of scientific facts?
Mumford:
It does so more from the standpoint of a moral evaluation of our culture. Scientific revolutions are quite literally, social revolutions with actors who shape public opinion.
Snow:
My call for collaboration in the arts and sciences exactly.
Kuhn:
But do you see how the pseudomorph is a figure, a ghost that animates the externalization of science in technology? Why, the time periods of the past only hold until the next. Through being in-between technological triumphs, we create an in-between artifact commodified like our so-called successful technology—but a failure, or so-called failure. So too, “outdated science” competes with “updated” science, equally for our pictures of the world and existence.
Mumford:
I am sorry, but we can never totally regain our primitive state, our state of nature. Like Marinetti argues with Futurism: “Stretched out on my bier, I am confronted head-on by speed and mass of an automobile world, a frontal assault and an arrival of mechanization beyond reversibility” (made up quotation).
Kuhn:
Right, in that we won’t lose our technology, but wrong in that we might live in a paradigm with an ideology that harkens back to the middle ages—or to the Greeks. The technological base is reshaped—new science forms progress in techné, but ideology returns to its histories, ever to look upon itself with an affirmation that forgets its own fallacy, discovered in that same development of techné.
Mumford:
Yes, this notion is clear: as in my Art and Technics, the scrawls of the abstract artists are formless; that formlessness is a poverty of ideology—a retrogression to an atavism, to a primitiveness and a state of nature that ignores all our gains in efficiency through techné. The agent nevertheless navigates through a technological society despite whether he or she is a primitive.
Kuhn:
We must visualize ideology, revisiting the past, while having it differ because of technology. We must affirm scientific progress as change and often as an erasure—erasing history to move forward, and continuing to move forward.
Snow:
Moving forward we are forced into a problematics of society. To not revert to an ideology, we must be cognizant of the spectrum of cultural production from science to literary art. Techné is in the middle, giving us similar collections of material from which to work. The artifact of art and science is of its own time, a product of moving forward and looking backward.
...