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Reflections on the "Convergence" between Literature and Science
- MLN
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 118, Number 3, April 2003 (German Issue)
- pp. 740-754
- 10.1353/mln.2003.0061
- Article
- Additional Information
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MLN 118.3 (2003) 740-754
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Reflections on the "Convergence" between Literature and Science
John Neubauer
The invitation to this special issue of the MLN notes that "Literature and Science" have become increasingly prominent over the past fifteen years, due, in large measure, to "complementary tendencies in literary studies and the history of sciences." There is much to be said for this view, though, as I shall try to show, the postulated parallelism proves to be more complicated upon closer inspection. The invitation seems to acknowledge this by closing the sentence with an ambiguous phrase: the complementary tendencies "seemed to eventually converge or even to coincide methodologically." Did the tendencies just "seem" to "converge"? Do they still seem to do so, or no longer? And for whom did (or does) this seem to be the case? I begin with reflections on these questions.
A somewhat schematic overview of the relationship between literary and scientific studies should note that earlier joint studies tended to focus on the impact of science and scientific ideas on writers and literary texts. Studies of this kind, exemplified by the outstanding work of Marjorie Hope Nicholson, belonged to a species of "influence" studies in intellectual history that moved almost exclusively from science to literature and hardly ever the other way. However successful and impressive such studies were, they remained quite marginal to the mainstream of literary studies, and at best a sort of cultural curiosity for scientists. [End Page 740]
I
The new tendencies noted by the invitation originated mainly with two thinkers who are often lumped together but should be kept separate: Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. Neither of them wrote specifically about "Literature and Science" (that was the domain of the once much discussed but now mercifully forgotten C.P. Snow), but they initiated methodological reconceptualizations that deeply affect both fields, individually and jointly. If we date the beginning of the shift with the key works of these two thinkers, namely Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Foucault's Les mots et les choses (1968), we might claim that the new life of "Literature and Science" started already in the sixties and early seventies, by now some thirty—not just fifteen—years back.
We can dispense here with a summary of Kuhn's and Foucault's thoughts. But we ought to ask, whom exactly they inspired to believe in a convergence between literary studies and (both historical and philosophical) studies of science. Though Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Foucault's inter-discursive cultural studies both opened new perspectives, neither author actually believed in a convergence. Kuhn moved away from a cumulative view of a history of science and a belief in the transcendental truth of scientific theories, yet he remained quite skeptical when humanists appropriated his ideas for their own purposes, and in the seldom quoted short article, "Comment on the Relations of Science and Art," he found that the sciences and the arts relate in fundamentally different ways to their past. 1 Foucault, in turn, tended to assign literature a marginal and transitional role in the historical epistemes of knowledge, and he explicitly excluded literature from the epistemic structure of the nineteenth century: "literature becomes progressively more differentiated from the discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical intransitivity" (300). 2
The somewhat obscure intentions of Kuhn and Foucault became available to all once they reached the public, and some degree of convergence did indeed take place in the post-Kuhnian and post-Foucauldian decades. This includes the following, certainly not exhaustive, areas of rapprochement. Scholars of the scientific process [End Page 741] now give more recognition to the role of conventions, institutions, and irrational psychological motivations in individual scientists (Paul Feyerabend, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Bruno Latour). These social and psychological forces make the scientific enterprise less autonomous than it was formerly thought. Another line of research studies the language of scientific texts. While "classical" notions of scientific communication demanded a transparent, denotative, and strictly referential use of language, newer studies have shown that scientific texts are actually permeated with...