Brian Holmes on Fri, 8 Dec 2017 19:02:41 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Locating ArtScience


Eric, I totally appreciate and admire your interest in all this, but with due respect I think making ArtScience into a "field" is an archaic twentieth-century delaying tactic, from the days when liberal society could believe itself eternal. Reading this morning about California's winter fires, it seems that much greater things than an academic field could "overheat" and "melt down."

And California is just an anecdote: housing troubles of the excessively rich. The Syrian drought, the Russian wildfires of 2010, the South Asian floods of 2017 spring vividly to mind. These are something radically new: harbingers of the present.

Why can't deal with what's all around us?

Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes the visible meaningful. Politics makes the meaningful actionable. Each of these activities is separate, resting on its own base, delivering what it can. Under present circumstances, each "field" (if you want to call it that) needs the other. Alone or even in pairs, they can make no difference.

Similarly, the notion of "fundamental research," outside applications and consequences, has become fallacious. For example, I believe fundamental research into the constitution of twenty-first century authoritarian racist capitalism is now going on in the US White House and in the vast actor-network of which it is a part. This is highly consequential research into the denial of the present.

The three-field formation of Science-Art-Politics would be much stronger than authoritarianism: more robust, more dynamic, able to integrate vital energies for transformative work in the present. Why not make a vast social movement for urgent times, instead of another specialized niche for all eternity?

thanks for your reflections,

Brian

PS - As the below shows, you yourself are arguing, not for a fusion, but for two "complementary" disciplines. Why not add the third essential one? Because the window of opprtunity is short: in ten years, if nothing changes, "politics" will be replaced by "the military" as the necessary partner in any transformative process.

4) Closing the experiential gap between rigorous scientific enquiry and subjective appraisal

Through the reconciliation of scientific method and subjective experience ArtScience can contribute to efforts to close the experiential gap between the abstractions of scientific enquiry and the experience of everyday life. ArtScience can do for science what art does so well for itself: turn abstract ideas into lived experiences. Here we see the unique intersection at work of two methodological universes considered to be ‘incommensurable’ [7], where in fact they are complementary and mutually reinforcing modes of understanding and experience.
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