The Songs of Science

Thefollowing abstract is a summary o f a thesis written by the autho?:Abstracts in this section are published on the recommendation o f members of the Leonardo Editorial Board or the Leonardo Editorial Staff: To receive thefull text of the thesis, phase contact the author. THE SONGS OF SCIENCE Randy Lee Cutler, 4555 BonavistaAvenue #710, Montreal, Quebec H3W 2C7, Canada. My thesis “The Songs of Science” explores how a fascination with the sciences informed the activitiesof the surrealist artists. This fascination had two sides: scientific sources were both attractive as an authoritative voice and rejected for their categorization of knowledge. Most readings of the surrealist movement consider its artistic and poetic activitiesas responses to historical events. Oddly, the prominence of scientific sources is seldom perceived as a substantial component of surrealist history. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap and to discuss science as an important influence. Before engaging in cultural activism, many of the surrealists, most of whom were male, undertook some form of scientific education. This proved to be a point of interest for the future conversion and “deconstruction”of scientific sources. The predominance of one gender as well as training in objective thinking informed many surrealist “experiments .” Using representations of women on operating tables or as hysterics was a surrealist technique of objectifjmg subjectivity. In a sense, this technique was an antidote to a limited and narrow scientific vantage point. The research for my thesis is organized along three points of reference: (1)precursors, (2) early and, therefore, formative surrealist examples and (3) mature exchanges with contemporary scientific thinking. Using works of art, journals and literary material as evidence , the first section examines the surrealist attitude toward classical or nineteenth-century science. Elements of this culture, e.g. scientific illustrations , methods, terminology and instruments , were converted into poetic and ambiguous documents of post-World War I France. The second section continues to explore the impact of classical science by considering certain surrealist influences, mostly from the nineteenth century, which also displayed an ambiguous relationship with scientific discourse . The final section moves back to the period in question and looks at surrealist parallels to contemporary physics , analogies to the writings of Gaston Bachelard and the direct link between Bachelard and Andre Breton,which substantiates these analogies. repositioned scientific terminology, methods and images. Magnetic fields were introduced to represent a passive state of mind for conjuring “themarvelous .”Non-Euclidian geometry became a means for representing dialectical thought. Even as they transvalued scientific paradigms, however, the surrealists maintained the role of the subjects of scientific enquiry, and in a sense women were often the object of surrealist research and experiments. Throughout the movement’s history, the surrealists held a paradoxical attitude toward scientific sources. Toward the end of the 1930s, this evolved into an identification with the writings of Bachelard. The surrealists found in this writer a philosophy of science that included the role of subjectivity in the epistemology of knowledge, reflecting their own break with objective observation. In their art and poetry, the surrealists 236 LEONARDO, Vol. 31,No. 3, p. 236,1998 Q 1998BAST ...