The Concept of Force as Modernist Response to the Authority of Science

An organization of forms expresses a confluence of forces. . . . For example, if you clap a strong magnet beneath a plateful of iron filings, the energies in the magnet will proceed to organize form. It is only by applying a particular and subtle force that you can bring order and vitality and thence beauty into a plate of iron filings, which are otherwise as ugly as anything under heaven.

Ezra Pound

This is what Suprematism means to me—the dawn of an era in which the nucleus will move as a single force of anatomized energy and will expand within new, orbiting spatial systems. . . . I think that freedom can be attained only after our ideas about the organization of solids have been completely smashed. . . . There is only energy. Therefore everything is linked and at the same time separate in its own motion. . . . Expressing this dynamic functioning is the primary purpose of consciousness.

Kasimir Malevich ¹

Recently I attended an extraordinary conference, “From Energy to Information,” at the University of Texas at Austin. Scholars there did superb ground-breaking work showing how deeply modernist art was engaged in the issues and the themes developed by the sciences. But the very power of these presentations made me sufficiently anxious to want to address the dangers involved in this historical enterprise. On the most fundamental level, establishing scientific contexts for the arts raises the problem of just how we state the relationship between what seems to be the artist’ss intention and what we can say about the frameworks within which that intention is articulated? And that question requires our clearly addressing two closely related but importantly distinct issues: how such contexutalizing will change our interpretations of these writers and artists as historical agents, and how such a stance will modify our own perspectives as we try to evaluate what claims their work has on our present?

My fear on the first issue is that, simply because we can find analogies or because the artists and writers make vague claims about matters like the fourth dimension, we will go on to use our knowledge of the science to force strong thematic analogies on to the work. If we rely too directly on these invocations of science, we run the risk of underplaying the considerable uneasiness most of the modernists had about such dependencies. Were they fully to embrace science, they might have to accept both the impersonal subject positions cultivated by the sciences and the ideals of impersonal verification fundamental to their sense of community. But such commitments were not easy to correlate with the seductive appeal of the alienation-postures still underlying much modernist work or with the emphases on feeling and on constructive will that the artists and writers hoped might counter or dignify that alienation.

However liberating science’s version of impersonal dehumanization might prove, artists almost always had to restore some aspects of the romantic values they were ostensively denying, as in Eliot’s claim that only those who knew what it meant to suffer from personality would appreciate the impersonality he was calling for. And however exalting science’s models of universalizing abstraction and its promise of progress, the arts had to restore the figurative and exemplifying power of individual compositions as their instruments for realizing how nature’s deep laws took effect. ² So on the most general level I think we have to find a perspective for dealing with responses to science that float warily between two quite different positive appeals—the opportunity for specific thematic allegories drawn from ideas like “the fourth dimension” and the promise of an experimental method that would replace allegorizing entirely by giving access to realities that are immediately present in their abstract elemental force and hence do not depend at all on speculative interpretation.

One way the modernists handled their ambivalence in relation to such appeals was to explore possible allegiances with with more mystical versions of science, versions that Bruce Clarke shows were dangerously close to a scientism in which experimental method yields to allegorical procedures. ³ Therefore it is reasonable to...