Why Modernist Studies and Science Studies Need Each Other

Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Bruce Clarke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. x + 278. $59.50 (cloth).

From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. xx + 444. $70.00 (cloth); $35.95 (paper).

Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth. M. E. Warlick. Foreword by Franklin Rosemont. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv + 309. $50.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

In 1913 Ezra Pound famously wrote, "Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offence, and he is punished or despised accordingly." ¹ Pound went on to castigate the artist who "falsifies his report," arguing instead for "art that is most precise." ² Exploring efforts like Pound's to align art with the rigors and prestige of science in a scientific age, scholars of modernism began long ago to acknowledge the debt of many modernist authors and artists to particular scientific notions. Yet such approaches to science, however insightful, have often been rather asymmetrical as well, taking science as a stable and completed given and a background to the creative and shifting modernist cultural responses to it. As modernist studies have recently started to pay more serious attention to modernity itself, it is time for scholars to move away from a model that assigns science a privileged position of autonomy and purity. Scholars of modernism must instead work toward a richer and more dynamic understanding not only of how science influences the culture of modernity, but also of how the culture of science itself functions within that larger culture. The methodologies and critical goals pursued by what can loosely be called "science studies" provide ready tools to open up this territory.

Science studies is something of an umbrella term, not a specific methodological program. One might broadly say that science studies takes as its subject how science actually works. ³ Not surprisingly, this field has in the past largely encompassed research programs originating in the social sciences, with frequent input from the philosophy of science. Anthropologist David J. Hess's useful and highly readable Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction offers a road map to several decades of the academic study of how science works. ⁴ Covering territory likely to be more familiar to social scientists (sociologists and anthropologists in particular) than humanities scholars, Hess looks back to Robert Merton's institutional sociology of science and to Thomas Kuhn's arguments with Karl Popper in the philosophy of science. Much of the book, though, is devoted to recent research paradigms. Hess traces the emergence of "the sociology of scientific knowledge," or SSK, from the disciplines of philosophy of science and sociology of science. He further examines such programs as productivity studies, "Edinburgh school" interests analysis, the "Bath School," laboratory studies, actor-network theory, Science, Technology, and Society or Science and Technology Studies (both familiar as the STS programs that thrive in many American universities), and others.

Science studies is interdisciplinary at its core, and Hess ends his book by looking at the more recent inroads made into science studies by cultural studies, feminism, and critical studies of the function of ideology in science—fields immediately recognizable to contemporary scholars in the humanities, and, of course, to modernists. Though social scientists doing science studies have had to contend with the fact that their object of study enjoys more prestige and power in the university and in society as a whole than does their corner of the social sciences (and indeed the advent of cultural studies in science studies has led to complaints by some scientists), the so-called science wars and the "Sokal...