Eloge du mixte: Materiaux nouveaux et philosophie ancienne (review)

Eloge du mixte: Matériaux nouveaux et philosophie ancienne. By Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1998. Pp. 358. Fr 130.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent's Eloge du mixte concerns neither new materials nor the history of materials and materials science. Instead, it is an essay on the relationship of antique thinking and modern technology and a proposal for a new philosophy of technology.

Just as various early stages in the history of civilization can be linked with the use of certain materials, such as stone, bronze, and iron, so modern times, argues Bensaude-Vincent, are characterized by matériaux mixtes, which are the most important of the new materials. These in turn reflect what is characteristic of our way of thinking today, mixed thinking. Bensaude-Vincent is not willing to split the sciences and the humanities into two cultures; rather, she sees each as complementing the other. Her aim is to enrich the concepteurs des bureaux d'étude with the idea that materials are active parts in the play. Indeed, she includes in the notion "material" the whole of technology. New qualities are rarely predictable, and the development of new materials has to take into account form, transformation, and purpose. Products made from new materials have dynamics of their own, which cannot be planned in the "rational" way of traditional technology.

Eloge du mixte has four parts. In the first, the author explains her understanding of the notion mixte: composites are more than the sum of their components, and, consequently, "mixing" is a matter of alchemical practice and "magic" thinking. In the second, she tells what "new materials" are like. The notion "new" can be related to a return of something, like the Beaujolais nouveau. "New" also substitutes for something old, as in "Novum Organum." Materials as substitutions appear in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but they are substitutions only in the context of production and application. Hence "artificial" soda replaced "natural" soda, the chemical composition being the same. A "new" material is less a new substance than a solution to a new problem. It is both part of nature and part of culture.

The third part of the book dates the use of composite materials to the early 1930s. The field developed rapidly, with carbon fiber finally changing the conception of composites, which seem now to have more and more unexpected and extraordinary properties. They are comparable to the chimères of Plato's Timaeus: part lion, part dog, and possessed of seemingly supernatural qualities. In the fourth and last section of the book, Bensaude-Vincent stresses that big science in the fields of armament and space research did not contribute substantially to the development of new materials. Rather, their development, especially of composites, was rooted in small shops that produced plastiques renforces in the 1940s.

Returning to Greek philosophy in concluding, Bensaude-Vincent suggests thinking about living beings as a model for new materials. The cover of the book shows a violin made from carbon fiber and wood, a variation of the Causa materialis without a change of the form. The author again asserts that there is no gap between culture and material sciences, but I'm not so sure about that.

Andreas Kahlow

Dr. Kahlow is professor of the history of construction at the University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam, Germany.

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