Form across Literature, Science, and the Arts

As a scholars of science, literature, and the arts, our research and teaching are concerned with how modes of knowledge inform one another: how literary and artistic forms, themes, and devices migrate to and structure scientific thought, and vice versa. In a now-famous formulation, Bruno Latour argued that one of the defining features of modernity has been to construct a divide between nature (the purview of science) and culture (the purview of literature and the arts); a central aim for scholars in our field, as for Latour, is to examine such construction, to chip away at its foundations while imagining our world anew.¹ So far, however, our efforts have yielded mixed results. Within the humanities, and particularly within science studies and the environmental and medical humanities, the idea that "nature" and "culture" are inextricable from one another is more or less given. Elsewhere, perceived divisions between the two—not to mention between "the sciences" and "the humanities"—are as strong as ever. In his essay for the first Configurations/Journal of Literature and Science joint issue, Richard Nash describes how this works at the level of university administration: he points to his own institution's self-positioning (I should note that I spent seven years at the same institution as a graduate student) as an incubator for the next century's "leaders … in a variety of engineering, design, and information sciences and technologies that will galvanize the most exciting transformations in tomorrow's economy."² As you might imagine, this vision of economic transformation—which makes no gestures toward economic justice, social equality, or environmental crisis—envisions little, if any, role for the humanities. Indeed, as Nash writes, "all those exciting economic transformations for tomorrow require a reduction in support for the unmentioned 'humanities'"—a familiar combination of scarcity thinking, on the one hand, and scientific/techno-utopianism, on the other.³

Zero-sum approaches to "sciences" and "humanities" funding entrench real divisions between two catch-all categories. But they also remind us, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, that when we restrict one, we affect the other. In my own courses on ecological theory, literature and science, and the medical humanities, my students are consistently surprised to learn of the extent to which things they ascribe to the world of "culture" or "society"—from use of metaphor to historical contingency or economic influence—impact the ways in which scientists operate: the theories they put forth, their practices and affects. My students are also surprised to learn that we can read things that aren't literary texts, or even texts at all—illness, environment, laboratory experiments—in terms of their form. Teaching students that there is no science without culture, just as there is no communication without representation or concept without form, is my most basic job as a teacher in Science and Literature courses. But it's something I have to teach my students, and myself, over and over again.

This is the nature of inquiry, certainly. But I do think that our purposes are made more difficult by some of the dominant imaginative forms of interdisciplinary work. We certainly have complex, dynamic forms for interrelationality at our disposal, but the more resonant nonbinary forms among administrators, students, and many scholars lack clear mechanisms for understanding interdependence and mutual construction: the networks of actor-network theory are the most obvious example, at least as they are commonly presented. But what if, rather than think of networks of relation across the university, we thought of the more ecological "lifeway?" Or the assemblage, or ecosystem? And what does it mean to think ecologically anyway?

We've all heard that ecological thinking involves thinking widespread interconnection rather than mere proximity, geographic or otherwise. This is the idea behind Timothy Morton telling us to think "big" as well as countless efforts to limit climate change, species extinction, and social injustice.⁴ It is also behind some of the more promising theories of our ecological moment: the Anthropocene, the Capitolocene, and the many other available ways of imagining something like ecological totality out there right now. And there are...