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Poetics for scientists
ESSAY REVIEW
WILLIAM
CLARK*
POETICS FOR SCIENTISTS Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M. Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1990; original French edn, 1987) 367 pp. ISBN o-942299960-4 Cloth E21.50, ISBN o-942299961-2 Paperback. The Poetic Structure
of the World: Copernicus and Kepler is D. M. Leslie’s nice of Fernand Hallyn’s marvelous La Structure poktique du monde. Copernic, Kepler (Paris: Seuil, 1987). The translation was published, 1990, in New York by Zone Books. Like the ‘Foreign Agent Series’, published by Semiotext(e), also in New York, Zone publishes much aspiringly trendy foreign stuff done into English. But, unlike Semiotext(e), Zone’s books, judged by their covers, appear as tarted-up elegance, a Manhattan ‘Parisian’ redlight district for books. The cover of Hallyn’s book-a rich, deep blue dust-jacket, which my sister from afar said to be lovely-seems, compared to some of Zone’s lurid coverings, subdued or even staid, perhaps an indication of their market research on the tastes of science studies consumers. Nonetheless, Zone’s Hallyn, or at least his inside English cover, attempts to seduce the unwary reader with Zone’s other postmodern pleasures of the text in English: Deleuze, Canguilhem, Bataille, Dumezil, Foucault, Blanchot. . But, even in this epigonic era of Late-this and Post-that, is it appropriate to judge Hallyn by his book’s English cover, or the French company it keeps? So turn from academic cornmodification to legitimation. Forget the cover
translation
and consider the apparatus: the notes and index. The former are short-title endnotes numbered by chapter, but neither interreference themselves, nor refer to a bibliography. To find a full reference to note 1, Chapter X, on p. 345, you must find where ‘Keplers Weltharmonik . . .’ by Robert Haas has been cited. You try the index, and find no Robert Haas; but, there is an ‘HAASE, R.’ The first entry says to see note 32 to page 217, but that doesn’t exist. So, ever hopeful about ‘HAASE, R.‘, you decide whether to pursue note 32, or page 217, after having figured out in which chapter’s notes to look. The fortunate choose page 217, which has a note 37, that they trace to page 342, where they *Institut Giittingen,
fiir Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Germany.
Humboldtalle
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol 23, No. 1, pp. 181-192, Printed in Great Britain.
181
1992.
11,
Universitit
Giittingen,
W-3400
0039-3681/92 $5.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press pk.
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
find the full citation and
thirty
notes,
to the article by Robert this sort
of thing
Haas. In a work with six hundred
seems a bit much
to ask of a reader
nowadays. But, even in this high tech era of FAX this and ASCII that, is it fair to judge Hallyn by his book’s French apparatus, or the English index it sports? Somewhere
between
the ‘paratext’
(Genette,
1987) of the cover
and
the
apparatus-between the aesthetics of the commodity and the economy of the evidence-lies the domain of ‘poetics’ and Hallyn’s text. I conceive my office in an essay review as other than evaluating the author’s specific claims. Hallyn’s project, in any case, is not so much a critique or evaluation of current beliefs about Copernicus and Kepler, as rather the exhibition of a ‘poetics’ for scientists, for which Copernicus and Kepler serve as topoi. I presume it is the general project, as opposed to its details, in which I need most to orient myself and the reader. I shall, therefore, devote most space to the project of a ‘poetics’ of science, and then, within it, consider Hallyn’s work, which I find, despite my cavils, pretty nice. Hallyn argues that science, by using hypotheses, falls under ‘poetics’. Pages 7-13 set a historiographic course from Peirce, who guards us from the Scylla of positivism (Hempel), to Simon, who leads us from the Charybdis of archaeology (Foucault). In between, we sail by many names familiar to an anglophone audience: Popper, Kuhn, Toulmin, Koyre.. . . In the light of his survey, Hallyn argues for studying the abduction of hypotheses as a ‘poetics’. I’11 return to that in due course; here I consider the notion of ‘poetics’ generally. Hallyn may be placed in a broad ‘postmodern’ project to restore the premodern status of poetics in the economy of knowledge. Methods of criticism, consigned to the analysis of fictional representations in the Modern Era, would be redeployed to analyze knowledge generally: ‘poetics of culture’ or ‘cultural criticism’, as a sort of latter day Vichean logica poetica. In its humbler forms, this poetics might end up a rather traditional literary criticism, or at best a new Kulturgeschichte. mediate
cultural
domains
as distant
In less humble as science
forms,
and politics.
it might
want
to
Such a poetics
might even hubristically subvert the Modern Era’s notion of science, efface the borders between science and literature, make science fiction. We sever a poetics of culture, or cultural criticism, from the (all too) German ‘hermeneutico-critical’ tradition, which began with Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and reaches a canonical expression, say, in Jiirgen Habermas’s Erkenntnis und Znteresse (1968). The hermeneutico-critical domain, set against a nomothetico-positivistic, recapitulates an old cleft in knowledge (from science versus humanities, to natural versus human sciences, formalized versus interpretive fields), and approaches the latter under an Enlightenment theology: an eschatology of critique and consensus (Lyotard, 1979, pp. 24-29, pp. 98-99, pp. 105-106; cf. Foucault, 1966, pp. 331-333, pp. 351-366). The German tradition tends to ignore the ‘a-rational’ elements of poetics (tropes,
Poetics for Scientists
narrative,
rhetoric,.
183
. .); and,
w h en it sees them,
them, as if poetics were an evil. Lyotard
48, pp. 54-63, pp. 98-99, pp. 105-107) questions the Enlightenment
‘Master
Narrative’
usually
wants
(1979, p. 7, pp. 24-29, the German
to ‘unmask’ pp. 39-41,
tradition,
p.
rejects
(grand Rt5zit, mttar~cit) of critique
and
consensus, and advocates ‘heteromorphology of language games’, ‘le petit r&it’, and scientific paralogy-a sort of poetics of knowledge. Such a postmodern (hubristic?) poetics reclaims hermeneutics and critique, but neither to enforce consensus, nor to divide knowledge, nor to be scientific. And it might unveil itself within scientific practice, though not as an unmasking of evil. ‘Poetics of.. .’ has become part of the postmodern mantra, and thus, eo ipso, possessed of equivocal sense. Many call their work ‘poetics’ who needn’t, and many don’t who might. Whether and where to put them all on the scale of humility to hubris is the hard part. Genette and Todorov edit a series for Seuil called ‘Poetique’ in which nice works have appeared. I’m certain Hallyn knows the Genette-Todorov view of ‘poetics’, and has perhaps taken up a position within, or without, it. But I’ll not speculate about that. Instead, to give a broader view of the scene of poetics, I want to move from Europe to California. Robert
Westman
(Science
Studies)
at UC San Diego
(at UCLA
earlier),
Hayden White at UC Santa Cruz (earlier at UCLA), Stephen Greenblatt (coeditor of Representations) at UC Berkeley, and Fredric Jameson, who was at UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego, but, alas, moved to Duke, where, besides counting his loot, he may ponder academic cornmodification under Postmodernism (or Late Capitalism)-could all these guys form a ‘California School’ of poetics? If so, it would (have) be(en) such in the West Coast sense: less a conscious movement, and more a semi-consciously shared lifestyle. White, Greenblatt, and Jameson form a reference group outside science studies; Westman works in the latter but outside the former. Taken together, their work stakes out a domain that connects intellectual history and criticism with socio-political and ideological studies. Greenblatt (1980, pp. 4-5) speaks of ‘a poetics of culture’, which is the ‘study of the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices’, including ‘how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another,. . . offered for consumption’, and ‘were invested with the power to confer pleasure or excite interest or generate anxiety’ (Greenblatt, 1988, p. 5). Hallyn’s regard for my semi-conscious California School is a problem. He doesn’t cite Greenblatt and Jameson-not an issue since they work at a distance from science studies. The case of Westman and White, whose work Hallyn does cite, is another matter. Both seem, to me, important to his work, though neither is elevated into the text from the apparatus (part of the text’s ‘unconscious’). References to Westman as editor aside, and excepting the work SHIPS23:1-M
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
of Panofsky and Koyre, it seems Hallyn cites the work of no other modern author as often as Westman’s. The debt to Westman’s works, which I cannot list here, is evident, even if repressed into the notes; the possible debt to White, who is cited in the notes but omitted in the index, is even less acknowledged. As schematization of a possible poetics, I wish then to consider this, the basic idea of which stems from White. Politics
Poetics
Ideology
Narratology
Science Tropology
Ontology
This stems from White (1973; 1978) who drew upon Pepper
(1948)
Burke
(1945) and Frye (1957), all of whom Hallyn cites, excepting White (1978). The schema sets poetics, here narratology and tropology (also central for Genette and Todorov), amidst politics and science. What’s the point? For a long time, science has been ‘in conflict with narratives’ (Lyotard, 1979, p. 7) and advocated a writing free of tropes (Ricoeur, 1975, pp. 1777184). ‘Scientification’ (Verwissenschuftlichung) seems to hinge on liquidation of narrative and figurative elements, consigned to fiction in the Modern Era. But maybe these will appear in sciences, seen as disciplines or practices, and bind them to politics. Turn now to Hallyn’s
poetics, which has three tasks: ‘an inventory
an intertextual insertion, schematize this:
Mimesis Unlike
Topics Semiosis
and
a tropological
analysis’
Intertextuality
of topics,
(p. 15). Expand
and
Tropology
Telos
my schematization
here does not intend any elements. I’ll now consider schema above.
of White’s
‘cultural
criticism’,
my schematization
necessary relation by the spatial layout of the these elements, and often recur to the Whitean
Let’s begin with tropology. The locus classicus is Quintilian’s Institutio oratoriae (Lib. VIII, vi, 1). A trope is the use, cum virtute, of a term or phrase in a sense other than its normal (proprius) sense. Quintilian gives a list: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, catachresis, irony, and so on. The tradition held tropes, and other figures, essential to the performativity of language. In the Middle Ages, scripture-and other writings-had four senses: literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical. The tropological concerned the ‘internal’, ‘subjective’, moral sense (moralis scientiu), which, united with the ‘external’, ‘objective’ sense (cognitio veritatis) of allegory, led to the anagogical or eschatological (de Lubac, 1959-64, vol. 1, p. 1, pp. 25-37, pp. 549-620, pp.
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Poetics for Scientists
632-636). One may also easily read Foucault’s ‘La prose du monde’ (1966, pp. 32-59) as an exposition of the consciously tropological structure of Renaissance thought. There is an old prejudice against tropes, a Platonic fear of the materiality of signs: to name a thinker’s tropes is an insult, ‘like praising a logician for his beautiful Foucault
handwriting’ (Black, 1962, p. 25). Platonism aside, Barthes (1953) (1966) and Reiss (1982) see a big break, call it ‘Descartes’, in I’rige classique. The Classical Age, especially the new ideology of ‘clarity’, made tropes generally suspect, even immoral. At first ‘but the usage of the court’, then made a universal value after 1650, the idea of ‘clarity’ embodied the triumph of ‘I’Ccriture bourgeoise’ (Barthes, 1953, p. 38, p. 43). No longer part of linguistic performativity, figures became mere ornament (Ricoeur, 1975, p. 64) concerning the ‘pleasure of the text’. This defined ‘literature’ for the bourgeois, and distinguished it from science. A tendency also arose to reduce all tropes to metaphor (Genette, 1972, pp. 25-36) or ‘analogy’, collapsing the notion of the figurative in science into a question about analogy or ‘models’ (Black, 1962; Hesse, 1963; Ricoeur, 1975). The ideology of ‘clarity’, and reduction of figures to analogies, led to the ideal of scientific discourse as a ‘writing degree zero’: the figurative brought to a vanishing point, a zero degree (Groupe p, 1970, p. 35; Ricoeur, 1975, pp. 177-184). This is, of course, a belief in de-materialized signs, which is a form of Platonic mysticism, for a poetics. Against
this Platonism,
or Cartesianism,
is a view, endorsed
Hallyn (and Blumenberg, 1960), that sees a ‘deep tations of the world. The locus modernus is Vito’s 1744 (Lib. II, ‘Della Logica Poetica’, Cor. 1). Vito master tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,
tropology’
by White and within
represen-
Principj di scienza nova of
uses the Renaissance’s four irony) as the key to unlock
mythical thought, which is tropic, as opposed to logical, in structure. The first three tropes give the Iogica poetica of myths, while irony indicates the transition to ‘modern’, prosaic thought. In this Vichean spirit, Lacan and Todorov have pointed
out that Freud’s
‘unconscious’,
tropological structure, most clear in Die elements of dream-work (condensation, secondary
revision)
das Reich der Unlogik, also has a Traumdeutung
displacement,
can be seen as tropic (synecdoche,
(1900),
where the representability,
metonymy,
metaphor/
oxymoron, irony). Partisans of a ‘deep tropology’ see tropes at work, not just in myths and dreams, but, following Nietzsche, in all thought and language, including science (Hallyn, pp. 30-31). Consider the ‘master tropes’. Metaphor configures likeness and analogy, not seen as univocally substantial (e.g. monads have mirrors). Metonymy and synecdoche substantiate metaphor, oppositely. Metonymy configures reduction and individuation (e.g. nature is a machine). Synecdoche configures integration and representation (e.g. the macrocosm and microcosm represent one another). Irony configures inversion and/or authorial distanciation (e.g.
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Descartes
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
says his cosmology
calls his cosmogony dialectic.
really produces
a ‘relatively’
a ‘fable’). Their relations
Metaphor
/
earth, and
like an Hegelian
Metonymy I
: Synecdoche
\
immobile
are conceived
\
Irony ’
Some, who also wish a minimal list, seem unhappy with these. Popular as substitutes, especially with the French, are catachresis, the abuse of a term, and oxymoron, the union of contraries. Catachresis may replace metaphor as the basic, ‘originary’ trope, while oxymoron may replace irony as the final, ‘dialectical’ trope (Black, 1962, pp. 32-34; Foucault, 1966, pp. 127-130; Groupe ~1, 1970, pp. 102-121). Hallyn (pp. 27-29) uses mostly the master tropes, but trades irony for oxymoron. One can try to dissolve tropology into psychology or logic; but, tropology’s virtue is its ability to prise apart a space between the logical and psychological, and this may better explain scientific change, as Hallyn intends. Cases of scientific change, that don’t seem to involve issues of logical structure per se, may be overhastily pushed into a psychological domain (e.g. Kuhn’s Gestalt psychology), not to mention a socio-political one. As ‘figura’ implies, the tropes, especially metaphor, seem linked to the spatiality of language (Genette, 1966, pp. 1066107) the materiality of signs. Metaphor or catachresis, seen as fundamental, show the role of tropes in effecting distortions, ruptures, jumps in thinking. To succeed as a thinker often means to sell one’s figures, one’s distortions or ‘fictions’, as real-a success all the greater in cases of irony or oxymoron
(cf. the debate
Study of the evolution,
about
T. Lenoir’s
and selling,
oxymoron
of the trope
‘teleo-mechanics’).
‘the mechanics
of nature’
would be, for example, most fruitful. This trope, an oxymoron for the Greeks, then ran the Vichean course, from metaphor, to metonymy, to synecdoche, to irony. Some disciplines and/or eras favor certain tropes. Quantum mechanics used oxymoron and irony much, as do mathematics and jurisprudence generally: numbers (e.g. ‘imaginary’) and persons (e.g. ‘fictive’) often wear those tropes on their sleeves. (Irony goes to synecdoche as ‘imaginary’ go to ‘complex’ numbers.) White (1978; 1987) has shown, without giving credit for architectonic ironies, that the four ‘epistemes’ in Foucault (1966) trace the master tropes: metaphor rules the Renaissance, metonymy the Classical Age, synecdoche the nineteenth century, irony the twentieth, as catachresis rules Michel (cf. Foucault, 1963, p. 24; 1966, pp. 127-130). I’ve devoted much space to tropology, since of Hallyn’s poetics it is the most removed from science studies. The rest of his poetics must get less attention.
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Poetics for Scientists
Under
‘topics: mimesis’ (‘ontology’
‘World Hypotheses’ ism
(e.g.
of Pepper:
Cartesianism,
Contextualism
in the Whitean
Formism
Positivism),
(e.g. Pragmatism,
most ontologies will be a mixture synthetic and dispersive/integrative
schema)
(e.g. Platonism, Organicism
Postmodernism).
(e.g.
we find the four
Thomism),
Mechan-
Idealism,
Vitalism),
These four are ideal types;
of them. Pepper (1948, p. 146) uses analytic/ as axes of definition: Formism and Mech-
anism are analytical, Contextualism and Organicism synthetic; Formism and Mechanism and Organicism integrative. Contextualism are dispersive, Formism and Organicism are thus polar opposites, as are Mechanism and Contextualism. But ri la White, if we associate a leading trope with each - metaphor:Formism, metonymy:Mechanism, synecdoche:Organicism, irony:Contextualism - it looks so:
Formism
/ \\
Mechanism I 0 8 I I I I I Organicism
\
Contextualism
/
Hallyn (pp. 16-l 8) takes these pairwise, related to wholes and causes. Mechanism and Organicism concern the whole-part relation; Formism and Contextualism highlight causality, the former using final or ‘normative’ causes, the latter not. So, like White, Hallyn has a tropology and an ontology, the latter as mimesis. Now emerge the differences. In White’s schema remain narratology and ideology-absent, on the surface, from Hallyn, who has semiosis and telos, and intertextuality. If this opposition proves valid, it would separate Hallyn’s from the fictive ‘California’ poetics: concern with narrative elements, in relation to the socio-political, marks the work of White, Greenblatt and Jameson;
in Westman,
narratology
arises as psychoanalytical
central role of narratology and tropology let’s return to Hallyn’s poetics.
in Freud
analyses.
ties him to poetics.)
(The But
Like any linguistic endeavour of innovation, science involves choices of thematic orientation. For a poetics, this falls under the theory of commonplaces, topics, which Hallyn (pp. 16-24) divides into mimesis, semiosis, and telos. Mimesis concerns the search for ‘the order of things’, and it’s here that Hallyn uses Pepper’s four world hypotheses, or ontologies. Semiosis concerns the paradigmata which relate signs and phenomena, words and things: horizontal/vertical explanation, and systematization/codification, are the axes. Horizontal schemata put things on one level (e.g. as all ‘empirical’ data, or efficient causes), while the vertical distinguish levels (e.g. God’s absolute versus ordained power). Systematization orders (formal? syntactic?) relations among
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elements; codification reads (final? semantic?) relations, and oscillates between ‘hypo-codification’, which elaborates puzzles in an evolving code, and ‘hypercodification’, which articulates an already elaborated code into new dimensions. Finally,
in topics,
completing
mimesis
and
semiosis,
comes
telos,
which
concerns the referential scope and final truth value of representations. Here Hallyn opposes ‘irony’ to ‘anagogy’. Recalling the medieval four levels of writing (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical), and then the four master tropes of the Renaissance, you see Hallyn has replaced the ‘dialectical’ trope, irony, with oxymoron, and moved irony up to a level with anagogy. For Hallyn, the reflexivity of irony makes it meta-tropological (pp. 21-23). But, the Whitean schema, ci la Hegelian dialectics, renders each fourth term reflexive or ‘meta’: Contextualism, irony, and, for example (ending the narrative field: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy) Satire, each includes reflexivity of its category, as respectively, ontology, tropology, narratology, and of its (dis)closure of the field’s antecedent structure. But Hallyn’s logica poetica follows a non-Hegelian path: elements within a category will not be reflexive or ‘meta’. We elevate irony and oppose it to anagogy, which then also lowers anagogy. This gives Hallyn a mundane (horizontal) sense of anagogy, or eschatology. As telos of truth, the irony/anagogy axis marks whether knowledge is abandoned to ephemeral and illusory truths, or can attain ultimate truth. Setting it with anagogy, we can also see irony’s cosmic significance. In the Modern Era, irony pervades the notion of the ‘objectivity’ of research-research’s ephemeral nature, and the researchers’ distanciation (Muecke, 1969). Alongside topics and tropology, 24427). He will insert, differentially
intertextuality forms Hallyn’s poetics (pp. and integratively. texts of science into the
field of culture. General conditions of textuality form the anonymous ‘intertext’ of an era; but, inter-text is also ‘heteronymous’, authorially translated from one discursive
field to another.
We avoid then the mere ‘intersubjective
influences’ traced by a Koyre, and the ‘pure topographical reconstitution’ of a Foucault (p. 24). Hallyn (cf. pp. 14-15) also seems after a post-Derridean position (and the trace ‘Derrida’ is absent from the work). In sum, against Derrida, and the Beatles-era Foucault (1963-70) it seems we’re to get the return of the ‘author’ as a sort of cultural persona, though not as the sovereign res cogituns of Koyre et al. Intertextuality, with tropology and topics, that is, Hallyn’s poetics, seems to promise a post-structuralist role for the ‘author’. However, I fear that, if not to mere Kulturgeschichte, Hallyn tends more to a sort of Derridean pan-textuality, than otherwise: there’s nothing ‘outside’ the text because, as intertext, textuality absorbs culture. Citations of the nice work of Genette et ul., will not give Hallyn Jameson’s simple, thus important, distinction of ‘text’ from ‘work’: the ‘author’ abides in the space of the ‘text’ opened by its existence as ‘work’, in every sense. Hallyn’s poetics, on the
Poetics for Scientists
189
contrary, is a way of ‘dreaming works’ (p. 15). The author of the ‘dream-work’-the dreamer-is, analytically speaking, in a neurotic state, as a Freudian will tell you. This amounts to Barthes’ resurrection of the ‘author’: ‘All writers will thus say: unable to be mad, deigning not to be sane, I am neurotic’ (Barthes, 1973, p. 13; cf. pp. 45-46). Given this, I prefer an Echean alternative: the author as liar.’ If you’ve read this far, I hope you’re convinced that, in light of the general project alone, Hallyn’s book is worth reading. That is, in any case, my conclusion. I’ll now give a prPcis of the specifics of the book. From the brevity of this, please don’t get the idea that these are trivialities. That is, in any case, not my conclusion. Copernicus inserts himself, without problem, into the cultural field of the Renaissance. But, while Galileo, Descartes et al., fit nicely into the Baroque, Kepler must be inserted into a mediate cultural field: Mannerism. This nuance helps articulate the proper intertext generally, and specifically regarding classical philology and fine arts. Semiosis sets Copernicus and Kepler off from Galileo, Descartes et al., under whom explanations in science are increasingly separated, first from theological, then from philologico-philosophical explanation. The latter will become ‘meta-scientific’: vertical gives way to separable layers of horizontal explanation. This coheres with Jardine (1984). Copernicus and Kepler give vertical explanations; but, in Kepler, the ‘modern’ turn also emerges: the notions of a ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ of scientia now make sense. Copernican cosmic systematization and codification also meet unequal fortunes. The hypo-codification of Copernicus’ cosmos (‘symmetry’, ‘harmony’, ‘proportion’, ‘perspective’, and so on), which links astronomy vertically to theology and metaphysics, and culturally with the Renaissance intertext, becomes under Kepler an immense cosmic hypercodification (‘the cosmic mystery’, ‘the music of the spheres’, and so on), which multiplies astronomy’s vertical links, but also moves toward the Mannerist intertext (integration of ‘decorum’, ‘distortion’, ‘dreams’). However, under Galileo et al., Copernican and Keplerian codification, along with vertical explanation, collapses into the systematization.
See Eco (1978, pp. 5-6, pp. 19-22). 1 twist this to mean that, to distinguish between cybernetics (which only has emitters of signals) and semiotics (which has ‘authors’ of signs), the latter needs the concept of the ‘lie’, or ‘fiction’. The peculiarities of semiotic work, the author’s fictions, are not reducible to false information in cybernetic or thermodynamic work. Modern scientists are, alas, too often told that, qua scientists, they are the happiest medium between gods and machines, thus unable to lie. So they are creators and calculators, but not authors: to be an author, one needs to be able to work in fiction. Tropology and narratology explicate the work of the author within the text, since they contain the bases- to create fictions, figuratively (materially) and narratively (temporally). In line with the post-‘60s genealogical Foucault, and the California School, this poetics avoids depoliticization.
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
The telos of representations Ages condemned astronomer
fits with semiosis and the intertexts.
the astronomer
to perpetual
have too many disjoint
truth lay anyway nomer’s practices
irony,
The Middle
for not only
ways to save the phenomena,
did the
but ultimate
with theologians and metaphysicians, who said the astroill-represented reality. The Renaissance intertext, however,
cleared a space for an anagogical astronomy, and so rendered vertical explanation possible for it. Both Renaissance philology and fine arts rejected knowledge by authority; instead, they stressed the ‘mastery of codes’. Humans are confined to a world of representations; but, this world has been made propter nos, ‘for our sake’, so representations can be decoded through mastery of formal systems (metrics, harmony, perspective, and so on). Copernicus mastered the cosmic code. Anagogy via astronomy re-emerged as a problem, however, under Kepler and Mannerism: the world is made ‘for our sake’, but a disjunction obtains between reason and the senses. The ideals of classical form must grapple with the realities of mundane ‘decorum’. The world is as ornate as rational. Kepler’s Mannerist dilemma entails a difficult ontological and tropological synthesis, discarded after him. While medieval Nominalism seemed to be moving from a formistic to a mechanistic ontology, the Renaissance shifted gears (or figures), and moved toward an organicist. The Copernican cosmos fuses Formism with Organicism, a mimetic structure that accords with the Copernican semiosis and telos of representations, and indicates the importance of metaphor and synecdoche, over metonymy. While Nominalism and Cartesianism (Mechanism) favor metonymic configuration of world elements, Copernicus uses metonymy only in relation to astronomical technique (reducing the types of available models), and in interpreting astronomical data (rearranging cause and effect regarding *sunrise’). Copernican configuration: center) inhere organic, anagogical
elements,
gravity and circular
motion,
show synecdochic
properties of any part of the cosmos (excepting perhaps the in every other part, and represent the whole. The cosmos is
a system per se, which also has a code, whose key is the central
sun as
metaphor.
Kepler, cast within the Mannerist intertext, and thus aware of the metonymic properties of ‘force’, but bent on a hypercodification of heliocentricism, and thus loath to forsake vertical anagogy for positivistic irony, moves toward a seemingly impossible ontological position, fusing formism with contextualism, and so becomes oxymoronic: Ecce ellipsis. For Kepler, the ellipse is, first, a fusion of the line and the circle, the two cosmic contraries. Second, his ellipse saddles the Copernican metaphoric-synecdochic solar-system with a metonymic configuration of planetary orbits as the resultant of ‘forces’. Third, instead of then rejecting cosmic codification and embracing a mechanistic ontology, he fuses a formistic conception of causality with a contextualist, giving him dual but contrary causalities. And, fourth, since he won’t forsake
Poetics for Scientists
the anagogical causality
191
metaphor,
into horizontal
cal). ‘The preeminent
or vertical
explanation,
he can’t
resolve
the dual
layers (e.g. a Kantian transcendental versus empiriWunderkammer’, Kepler’s cosmos has ‘an oxymoronic
allure that characterizes it in depth.’ As does Hallyn’s text, which has a nearly perfectly symmetrical trajectory. In between its ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ are two parts: ‘Copernicus or the Renaissance of the Cosmos’ and ‘Kepler or the Mannerist Cosmos’, of almost equal length. The Introduction has a motto (from Melandri) as do Parts 1 (from Diirer) and 2 (from Kepler); the Conclusion makes shift mottoless. Melandri says science needs poetics in as much as it needs hypothesis; Diirer holds that correct form, not only in paintings, but rather in all higher things, comes from correct proportions; Kepler wants the astronomer to be like a philosopher inquiring into the nature of things. Part 1 has five chapters, so Di.irer’s motto motivates five chapters in Part 2, which has, however, six. While the first five chapters of Part 2 thematically mirror the five chapters of Part 1, the eleventh chapter violates Renaissance and artistic symmetry (Part l), and follows Mannerist and philosophical concern with the nature of things (Part 2): the distortion of the text’s perfect circle in the structure of Part 2 mirrors its contents. The final, distorting (elliptical or mannerist) chapter treats Kepler’s Dream (Somnium), the first work of the Modern Era’s most essential oxymoronic genre: science-fiction. Hallyn’s poetics, a way of ‘dreaming works’ addressed to the modern separation between science and literature, thus attains a marvelous end in irony. Or is it oxymoron? I’ll not mitigate your pleasure in reading this book by revealing the twists of its penultimate chapter. Suffice it to say that, along with Jardine (1984) and Reiss (1982), Hallyn finds an essential moment of the ‘modern’ in Kepler. It was June
1990 at Barnard
Bookforum
when I first spied Zone’s
Hallyn,
whose notes promised me eruditio Lila mode, and whose text gave me pleasure that July, when the dazzling Los Angeles sunsets through the Spanish windows made Hallyn’s English cover seem lovely from afar. A year has passed, and familiarity with the text has bred, not contempt. but respect. The project is ecumenical and au cow-ant, the execution erudite and elegant. I’m not sure how it’ll sell in California, but I hope for a paperback.
References Barthes, Roland (1953) Le degrP z&o de I’kcriture (Paris: Seuil, 1972). Barthes, Roland (1973) Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil). Black, Max (1962) Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Blumenberg, Hans (1960) Paradigmen zu einer Metuphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier). Burke, Kenneth (1945) A Grammar qf Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
192
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Eco, Umberto (1978) A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Foucault, Michel (1963) Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard). Foucault, Michel (1966) Les mots et les chases (Paris: Gallimard). Frye, Northrop (1957) Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Genette, Gerard (1960) Figures (Paris: Seuil). Genette, Gerard (1972) Figures III (Paris: Seuil). Genette, Gerard (1982) Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil). Genette. Gerard (1987) Seuils (Paris: Seuil). Greenblatt, Stephen (1980) Renuissunce SelfiFushioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Greenblatt, Stephen (1988) Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Groupe lt (1970) Rhetorique generale (Paris: Larousse). Hesse, Mary (1963) Models and Analogies in Science (London: Sheed & Ward). Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Nurrative as a Socially Syjmbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press). Jardine, N. (1984) The Birth of the History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler’s Defense of Tycho against Ursus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). de Lubac, Henri (1959-64) Exegese medievale: Les quatre sens de l’ecriture, 2 vols in 4 pts (Aubier: Montaigne). Lyotard. Jean-Francois (1979) La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit). Muecke. D. C. (1969) The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen). Pepper, Stephen (1948) World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press). Reiss. Timothy J. (1982) The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Ricoeur, Paul (1975) Lu metuphore vive (Paris: Seuil). Ricoeur, Paul (1983385) Temps et r&it (Paris: Seuil). Simon, Gerard (1979) Kepler astronome ustrologue (Paris: Gallimard). Todorov, Tzvetan (I 967) Litteruture et signification (Paris: Larousse). Todorov, Tzvetan (1971) Poetique de la prose (Paris: Seuil). Westman, Robert (1975) ‘The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of Copernican Theory’, Isis 66, pp. 1655193. Westman, Robert (1984) ‘Nature, Art and the Psyche:. the Kepler-Fludd Polemic’, in B. Vickers (ed.). Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 177-229. Westman. Robert (1990) ‘Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De Revolutionibus’. in D. Lindberg and R. Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 167-205. White, Hayden (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). White. Hayden (1978) Tropics of Discourse: Essuys in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). White, Hayden (1987) 77~~ Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
WILLIAM
CLARK*
POETICS FOR SCIENTISTS Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M. Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1990; original French edn, 1987) 367 pp. ISBN o-942299960-4 Cloth E21.50, ISBN o-942299961-2 Paperback. The Poetic Structure
of the World: Copernicus and Kepler is D. M. Leslie’s nice of Fernand Hallyn’s marvelous La Structure poktique du monde. Copernic, Kepler (Paris: Seuil, 1987). The translation was published, 1990, in New York by Zone Books. Like the ‘Foreign Agent Series’, published by Semiotext(e), also in New York, Zone publishes much aspiringly trendy foreign stuff done into English. But, unlike Semiotext(e), Zone’s books, judged by their covers, appear as tarted-up elegance, a Manhattan ‘Parisian’ redlight district for books. The cover of Hallyn’s book-a rich, deep blue dust-jacket, which my sister from afar said to be lovely-seems, compared to some of Zone’s lurid coverings, subdued or even staid, perhaps an indication of their market research on the tastes of science studies consumers. Nonetheless, Zone’s Hallyn, or at least his inside English cover, attempts to seduce the unwary reader with Zone’s other postmodern pleasures of the text in English: Deleuze, Canguilhem, Bataille, Dumezil, Foucault, Blanchot. . But, even in this epigonic era of Late-this and Post-that, is it appropriate to judge Hallyn by his book’s English cover, or the French company it keeps? So turn from academic cornmodification to legitimation. Forget the cover
translation
and consider the apparatus: the notes and index. The former are short-title endnotes numbered by chapter, but neither interreference themselves, nor refer to a bibliography. To find a full reference to note 1, Chapter X, on p. 345, you must find where ‘Keplers Weltharmonik . . .’ by Robert Haas has been cited. You try the index, and find no Robert Haas; but, there is an ‘HAASE, R.’ The first entry says to see note 32 to page 217, but that doesn’t exist. So, ever hopeful about ‘HAASE, R.‘, you decide whether to pursue note 32, or page 217, after having figured out in which chapter’s notes to look. The fortunate choose page 217, which has a note 37, that they trace to page 342, where they *Institut Giittingen,
fiir Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Germany.
Humboldtalle
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol 23, No. 1, pp. 181-192, Printed in Great Britain.
181
1992.
11,
Universitit
Giittingen,
W-3400
0039-3681/92 $5.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press pk.
182
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
find the full citation and
thirty
notes,
to the article by Robert this sort
of thing
Haas. In a work with six hundred
seems a bit much
to ask of a reader
nowadays. But, even in this high tech era of FAX this and ASCII that, is it fair to judge Hallyn by his book’s French apparatus, or the English index it sports? Somewhere
between
the ‘paratext’
(Genette,
1987) of the cover
and
the
apparatus-between the aesthetics of the commodity and the economy of the evidence-lies the domain of ‘poetics’ and Hallyn’s text. I conceive my office in an essay review as other than evaluating the author’s specific claims. Hallyn’s project, in any case, is not so much a critique or evaluation of current beliefs about Copernicus and Kepler, as rather the exhibition of a ‘poetics’ for scientists, for which Copernicus and Kepler serve as topoi. I presume it is the general project, as opposed to its details, in which I need most to orient myself and the reader. I shall, therefore, devote most space to the project of a ‘poetics’ of science, and then, within it, consider Hallyn’s work, which I find, despite my cavils, pretty nice. Hallyn argues that science, by using hypotheses, falls under ‘poetics’. Pages 7-13 set a historiographic course from Peirce, who guards us from the Scylla of positivism (Hempel), to Simon, who leads us from the Charybdis of archaeology (Foucault). In between, we sail by many names familiar to an anglophone audience: Popper, Kuhn, Toulmin, Koyre.. . . In the light of his survey, Hallyn argues for studying the abduction of hypotheses as a ‘poetics’. I’11 return to that in due course; here I consider the notion of ‘poetics’ generally. Hallyn may be placed in a broad ‘postmodern’ project to restore the premodern status of poetics in the economy of knowledge. Methods of criticism, consigned to the analysis of fictional representations in the Modern Era, would be redeployed to analyze knowledge generally: ‘poetics of culture’ or ‘cultural criticism’, as a sort of latter day Vichean logica poetica. In its humbler forms, this poetics might end up a rather traditional literary criticism, or at best a new Kulturgeschichte. mediate
cultural
domains
as distant
In less humble as science
forms,
and politics.
it might
want
to
Such a poetics
might even hubristically subvert the Modern Era’s notion of science, efface the borders between science and literature, make science fiction. We sever a poetics of culture, or cultural criticism, from the (all too) German ‘hermeneutico-critical’ tradition, which began with Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and reaches a canonical expression, say, in Jiirgen Habermas’s Erkenntnis und Znteresse (1968). The hermeneutico-critical domain, set against a nomothetico-positivistic, recapitulates an old cleft in knowledge (from science versus humanities, to natural versus human sciences, formalized versus interpretive fields), and approaches the latter under an Enlightenment theology: an eschatology of critique and consensus (Lyotard, 1979, pp. 24-29, pp. 98-99, pp. 105-106; cf. Foucault, 1966, pp. 331-333, pp. 351-366). The German tradition tends to ignore the ‘a-rational’ elements of poetics (tropes,
Poetics for Scientists
narrative,
rhetoric,.
183
. .); and,
w h en it sees them,
them, as if poetics were an evil. Lyotard
48, pp. 54-63, pp. 98-99, pp. 105-107) questions the Enlightenment
‘Master
Narrative’
usually
wants
(1979, p. 7, pp. 24-29, the German
to ‘unmask’ pp. 39-41,
tradition,
p.
rejects
(grand Rt5zit, mttar~cit) of critique
and
consensus, and advocates ‘heteromorphology of language games’, ‘le petit r&it’, and scientific paralogy-a sort of poetics of knowledge. Such a postmodern (hubristic?) poetics reclaims hermeneutics and critique, but neither to enforce consensus, nor to divide knowledge, nor to be scientific. And it might unveil itself within scientific practice, though not as an unmasking of evil. ‘Poetics of.. .’ has become part of the postmodern mantra, and thus, eo ipso, possessed of equivocal sense. Many call their work ‘poetics’ who needn’t, and many don’t who might. Whether and where to put them all on the scale of humility to hubris is the hard part. Genette and Todorov edit a series for Seuil called ‘Poetique’ in which nice works have appeared. I’m certain Hallyn knows the Genette-Todorov view of ‘poetics’, and has perhaps taken up a position within, or without, it. But I’ll not speculate about that. Instead, to give a broader view of the scene of poetics, I want to move from Europe to California. Robert
Westman
(Science
Studies)
at UC San Diego
(at UCLA
earlier),
Hayden White at UC Santa Cruz (earlier at UCLA), Stephen Greenblatt (coeditor of Representations) at UC Berkeley, and Fredric Jameson, who was at UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego, but, alas, moved to Duke, where, besides counting his loot, he may ponder academic cornmodification under Postmodernism (or Late Capitalism)-could all these guys form a ‘California School’ of poetics? If so, it would (have) be(en) such in the West Coast sense: less a conscious movement, and more a semi-consciously shared lifestyle. White, Greenblatt, and Jameson form a reference group outside science studies; Westman works in the latter but outside the former. Taken together, their work stakes out a domain that connects intellectual history and criticism with socio-political and ideological studies. Greenblatt (1980, pp. 4-5) speaks of ‘a poetics of culture’, which is the ‘study of the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices’, including ‘how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another,. . . offered for consumption’, and ‘were invested with the power to confer pleasure or excite interest or generate anxiety’ (Greenblatt, 1988, p. 5). Hallyn’s regard for my semi-conscious California School is a problem. He doesn’t cite Greenblatt and Jameson-not an issue since they work at a distance from science studies. The case of Westman and White, whose work Hallyn does cite, is another matter. Both seem, to me, important to his work, though neither is elevated into the text from the apparatus (part of the text’s ‘unconscious’). References to Westman as editor aside, and excepting the work SHIPS23:1-M
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
of Panofsky and Koyre, it seems Hallyn cites the work of no other modern author as often as Westman’s. The debt to Westman’s works, which I cannot list here, is evident, even if repressed into the notes; the possible debt to White, who is cited in the notes but omitted in the index, is even less acknowledged. As schematization of a possible poetics, I wish then to consider this, the basic idea of which stems from White. Politics
Poetics
Ideology
Narratology
Science Tropology
Ontology
This stems from White (1973; 1978) who drew upon Pepper
(1948)
Burke
(1945) and Frye (1957), all of whom Hallyn cites, excepting White (1978). The schema sets poetics, here narratology and tropology (also central for Genette and Todorov), amidst politics and science. What’s the point? For a long time, science has been ‘in conflict with narratives’ (Lyotard, 1979, p. 7) and advocated a writing free of tropes (Ricoeur, 1975, pp. 1777184). ‘Scientification’ (Verwissenschuftlichung) seems to hinge on liquidation of narrative and figurative elements, consigned to fiction in the Modern Era. But maybe these will appear in sciences, seen as disciplines or practices, and bind them to politics. Turn now to Hallyn’s
poetics, which has three tasks: ‘an inventory
an intertextual insertion, schematize this:
Mimesis Unlike
Topics Semiosis
and
a tropological
analysis’
Intertextuality
of topics,
(p. 15). Expand
and
Tropology
Telos
my schematization
here does not intend any elements. I’ll now consider schema above.
of White’s
‘cultural
criticism’,
my schematization
necessary relation by the spatial layout of the these elements, and often recur to the Whitean
Let’s begin with tropology. The locus classicus is Quintilian’s Institutio oratoriae (Lib. VIII, vi, 1). A trope is the use, cum virtute, of a term or phrase in a sense other than its normal (proprius) sense. Quintilian gives a list: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, catachresis, irony, and so on. The tradition held tropes, and other figures, essential to the performativity of language. In the Middle Ages, scripture-and other writings-had four senses: literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical. The tropological concerned the ‘internal’, ‘subjective’, moral sense (moralis scientiu), which, united with the ‘external’, ‘objective’ sense (cognitio veritatis) of allegory, led to the anagogical or eschatological (de Lubac, 1959-64, vol. 1, p. 1, pp. 25-37, pp. 549-620, pp.
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Poetics for Scientists
632-636). One may also easily read Foucault’s ‘La prose du monde’ (1966, pp. 32-59) as an exposition of the consciously tropological structure of Renaissance thought. There is an old prejudice against tropes, a Platonic fear of the materiality of signs: to name a thinker’s tropes is an insult, ‘like praising a logician for his beautiful Foucault
handwriting’ (Black, 1962, p. 25). Platonism aside, Barthes (1953) (1966) and Reiss (1982) see a big break, call it ‘Descartes’, in I’rige classique. The Classical Age, especially the new ideology of ‘clarity’, made tropes generally suspect, even immoral. At first ‘but the usage of the court’, then made a universal value after 1650, the idea of ‘clarity’ embodied the triumph of ‘I’Ccriture bourgeoise’ (Barthes, 1953, p. 38, p. 43). No longer part of linguistic performativity, figures became mere ornament (Ricoeur, 1975, p. 64) concerning the ‘pleasure of the text’. This defined ‘literature’ for the bourgeois, and distinguished it from science. A tendency also arose to reduce all tropes to metaphor (Genette, 1972, pp. 25-36) or ‘analogy’, collapsing the notion of the figurative in science into a question about analogy or ‘models’ (Black, 1962; Hesse, 1963; Ricoeur, 1975). The ideology of ‘clarity’, and reduction of figures to analogies, led to the ideal of scientific discourse as a ‘writing degree zero’: the figurative brought to a vanishing point, a zero degree (Groupe p, 1970, p. 35; Ricoeur, 1975, pp. 177-184). This is, of course, a belief in de-materialized signs, which is a form of Platonic mysticism, for a poetics. Against
this Platonism,
or Cartesianism,
is a view, endorsed
Hallyn (and Blumenberg, 1960), that sees a ‘deep tations of the world. The locus modernus is Vito’s 1744 (Lib. II, ‘Della Logica Poetica’, Cor. 1). Vito master tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,
tropology’
by White and within
represen-
Principj di scienza nova of
uses the Renaissance’s four irony) as the key to unlock
mythical thought, which is tropic, as opposed to logical, in structure. The first three tropes give the Iogica poetica of myths, while irony indicates the transition to ‘modern’, prosaic thought. In this Vichean spirit, Lacan and Todorov have pointed
out that Freud’s
‘unconscious’,
tropological structure, most clear in Die elements of dream-work (condensation, secondary
revision)
das Reich der Unlogik, also has a Traumdeutung
displacement,
can be seen as tropic (synecdoche,
(1900),
where the representability,
metonymy,
metaphor/
oxymoron, irony). Partisans of a ‘deep tropology’ see tropes at work, not just in myths and dreams, but, following Nietzsche, in all thought and language, including science (Hallyn, pp. 30-31). Consider the ‘master tropes’. Metaphor configures likeness and analogy, not seen as univocally substantial (e.g. monads have mirrors). Metonymy and synecdoche substantiate metaphor, oppositely. Metonymy configures reduction and individuation (e.g. nature is a machine). Synecdoche configures integration and representation (e.g. the macrocosm and microcosm represent one another). Irony configures inversion and/or authorial distanciation (e.g.
186
Descartes
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
says his cosmology
calls his cosmogony dialectic.
really produces
a ‘relatively’
a ‘fable’). Their relations
Metaphor
/
earth, and
like an Hegelian
Metonymy I
: Synecdoche
\
immobile
are conceived
\
Irony ’
Some, who also wish a minimal list, seem unhappy with these. Popular as substitutes, especially with the French, are catachresis, the abuse of a term, and oxymoron, the union of contraries. Catachresis may replace metaphor as the basic, ‘originary’ trope, while oxymoron may replace irony as the final, ‘dialectical’ trope (Black, 1962, pp. 32-34; Foucault, 1966, pp. 127-130; Groupe ~1, 1970, pp. 102-121). Hallyn (pp. 27-29) uses mostly the master tropes, but trades irony for oxymoron. One can try to dissolve tropology into psychology or logic; but, tropology’s virtue is its ability to prise apart a space between the logical and psychological, and this may better explain scientific change, as Hallyn intends. Cases of scientific change, that don’t seem to involve issues of logical structure per se, may be overhastily pushed into a psychological domain (e.g. Kuhn’s Gestalt psychology), not to mention a socio-political one. As ‘figura’ implies, the tropes, especially metaphor, seem linked to the spatiality of language (Genette, 1966, pp. 1066107) the materiality of signs. Metaphor or catachresis, seen as fundamental, show the role of tropes in effecting distortions, ruptures, jumps in thinking. To succeed as a thinker often means to sell one’s figures, one’s distortions or ‘fictions’, as real-a success all the greater in cases of irony or oxymoron
(cf. the debate
Study of the evolution,
about
T. Lenoir’s
and selling,
oxymoron
of the trope
‘teleo-mechanics’).
‘the mechanics
of nature’
would be, for example, most fruitful. This trope, an oxymoron for the Greeks, then ran the Vichean course, from metaphor, to metonymy, to synecdoche, to irony. Some disciplines and/or eras favor certain tropes. Quantum mechanics used oxymoron and irony much, as do mathematics and jurisprudence generally: numbers (e.g. ‘imaginary’) and persons (e.g. ‘fictive’) often wear those tropes on their sleeves. (Irony goes to synecdoche as ‘imaginary’ go to ‘complex’ numbers.) White (1978; 1987) has shown, without giving credit for architectonic ironies, that the four ‘epistemes’ in Foucault (1966) trace the master tropes: metaphor rules the Renaissance, metonymy the Classical Age, synecdoche the nineteenth century, irony the twentieth, as catachresis rules Michel (cf. Foucault, 1963, p. 24; 1966, pp. 127-130). I’ve devoted much space to tropology, since of Hallyn’s poetics it is the most removed from science studies. The rest of his poetics must get less attention.
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Poetics for Scientists
Under
‘topics: mimesis’ (‘ontology’
‘World Hypotheses’ ism
(e.g.
of Pepper:
Cartesianism,
Contextualism
in the Whitean
Formism
Positivism),
(e.g. Pragmatism,
most ontologies will be a mixture synthetic and dispersive/integrative
schema)
(e.g. Platonism, Organicism
Postmodernism).
(e.g.
we find the four
Thomism),
Mechan-
Idealism,
Vitalism),
These four are ideal types;
of them. Pepper (1948, p. 146) uses analytic/ as axes of definition: Formism and Mech-
anism are analytical, Contextualism and Organicism synthetic; Formism and Mechanism and Organicism integrative. Contextualism are dispersive, Formism and Organicism are thus polar opposites, as are Mechanism and Contextualism. But ri la White, if we associate a leading trope with each - metaphor:Formism, metonymy:Mechanism, synecdoche:Organicism, irony:Contextualism - it looks so:
Formism
/ \\
Mechanism I 0 8 I I I I I Organicism
\
Contextualism
/
Hallyn (pp. 16-l 8) takes these pairwise, related to wholes and causes. Mechanism and Organicism concern the whole-part relation; Formism and Contextualism highlight causality, the former using final or ‘normative’ causes, the latter not. So, like White, Hallyn has a tropology and an ontology, the latter as mimesis. Now emerge the differences. In White’s schema remain narratology and ideology-absent, on the surface, from Hallyn, who has semiosis and telos, and intertextuality. If this opposition proves valid, it would separate Hallyn’s from the fictive ‘California’ poetics: concern with narrative elements, in relation to the socio-political, marks the work of White, Greenblatt and Jameson;
in Westman,
narratology
arises as psychoanalytical
central role of narratology and tropology let’s return to Hallyn’s poetics.
in Freud
analyses.
ties him to poetics.)
(The But
Like any linguistic endeavour of innovation, science involves choices of thematic orientation. For a poetics, this falls under the theory of commonplaces, topics, which Hallyn (pp. 16-24) divides into mimesis, semiosis, and telos. Mimesis concerns the search for ‘the order of things’, and it’s here that Hallyn uses Pepper’s four world hypotheses, or ontologies. Semiosis concerns the paradigmata which relate signs and phenomena, words and things: horizontal/vertical explanation, and systematization/codification, are the axes. Horizontal schemata put things on one level (e.g. as all ‘empirical’ data, or efficient causes), while the vertical distinguish levels (e.g. God’s absolute versus ordained power). Systematization orders (formal? syntactic?) relations among
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
elements; codification reads (final? semantic?) relations, and oscillates between ‘hypo-codification’, which elaborates puzzles in an evolving code, and ‘hypercodification’, which articulates an already elaborated code into new dimensions. Finally,
in topics,
completing
mimesis
and
semiosis,
comes
telos,
which
concerns the referential scope and final truth value of representations. Here Hallyn opposes ‘irony’ to ‘anagogy’. Recalling the medieval four levels of writing (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical), and then the four master tropes of the Renaissance, you see Hallyn has replaced the ‘dialectical’ trope, irony, with oxymoron, and moved irony up to a level with anagogy. For Hallyn, the reflexivity of irony makes it meta-tropological (pp. 21-23). But, the Whitean schema, ci la Hegelian dialectics, renders each fourth term reflexive or ‘meta’: Contextualism, irony, and, for example (ending the narrative field: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy) Satire, each includes reflexivity of its category, as respectively, ontology, tropology, narratology, and of its (dis)closure of the field’s antecedent structure. But Hallyn’s logica poetica follows a non-Hegelian path: elements within a category will not be reflexive or ‘meta’. We elevate irony and oppose it to anagogy, which then also lowers anagogy. This gives Hallyn a mundane (horizontal) sense of anagogy, or eschatology. As telos of truth, the irony/anagogy axis marks whether knowledge is abandoned to ephemeral and illusory truths, or can attain ultimate truth. Setting it with anagogy, we can also see irony’s cosmic significance. In the Modern Era, irony pervades the notion of the ‘objectivity’ of research-research’s ephemeral nature, and the researchers’ distanciation (Muecke, 1969). Alongside topics and tropology, 24427). He will insert, differentially
intertextuality forms Hallyn’s poetics (pp. and integratively. texts of science into the
field of culture. General conditions of textuality form the anonymous ‘intertext’ of an era; but, inter-text is also ‘heteronymous’, authorially translated from one discursive
field to another.
We avoid then the mere ‘intersubjective
influences’ traced by a Koyre, and the ‘pure topographical reconstitution’ of a Foucault (p. 24). Hallyn (cf. pp. 14-15) also seems after a post-Derridean position (and the trace ‘Derrida’ is absent from the work). In sum, against Derrida, and the Beatles-era Foucault (1963-70) it seems we’re to get the return of the ‘author’ as a sort of cultural persona, though not as the sovereign res cogituns of Koyre et al. Intertextuality, with tropology and topics, that is, Hallyn’s poetics, seems to promise a post-structuralist role for the ‘author’. However, I fear that, if not to mere Kulturgeschichte, Hallyn tends more to a sort of Derridean pan-textuality, than otherwise: there’s nothing ‘outside’ the text because, as intertext, textuality absorbs culture. Citations of the nice work of Genette et ul., will not give Hallyn Jameson’s simple, thus important, distinction of ‘text’ from ‘work’: the ‘author’ abides in the space of the ‘text’ opened by its existence as ‘work’, in every sense. Hallyn’s poetics, on the
Poetics for Scientists
189
contrary, is a way of ‘dreaming works’ (p. 15). The author of the ‘dream-work’-the dreamer-is, analytically speaking, in a neurotic state, as a Freudian will tell you. This amounts to Barthes’ resurrection of the ‘author’: ‘All writers will thus say: unable to be mad, deigning not to be sane, I am neurotic’ (Barthes, 1973, p. 13; cf. pp. 45-46). Given this, I prefer an Echean alternative: the author as liar.’ If you’ve read this far, I hope you’re convinced that, in light of the general project alone, Hallyn’s book is worth reading. That is, in any case, my conclusion. I’ll now give a prPcis of the specifics of the book. From the brevity of this, please don’t get the idea that these are trivialities. That is, in any case, not my conclusion. Copernicus inserts himself, without problem, into the cultural field of the Renaissance. But, while Galileo, Descartes et al., fit nicely into the Baroque, Kepler must be inserted into a mediate cultural field: Mannerism. This nuance helps articulate the proper intertext generally, and specifically regarding classical philology and fine arts. Semiosis sets Copernicus and Kepler off from Galileo, Descartes et al., under whom explanations in science are increasingly separated, first from theological, then from philologico-philosophical explanation. The latter will become ‘meta-scientific’: vertical gives way to separable layers of horizontal explanation. This coheres with Jardine (1984). Copernicus and Kepler give vertical explanations; but, in Kepler, the ‘modern’ turn also emerges: the notions of a ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ of scientia now make sense. Copernican cosmic systematization and codification also meet unequal fortunes. The hypo-codification of Copernicus’ cosmos (‘symmetry’, ‘harmony’, ‘proportion’, ‘perspective’, and so on), which links astronomy vertically to theology and metaphysics, and culturally with the Renaissance intertext, becomes under Kepler an immense cosmic hypercodification (‘the cosmic mystery’, ‘the music of the spheres’, and so on), which multiplies astronomy’s vertical links, but also moves toward the Mannerist intertext (integration of ‘decorum’, ‘distortion’, ‘dreams’). However, under Galileo et al., Copernican and Keplerian codification, along with vertical explanation, collapses into the systematization.
See Eco (1978, pp. 5-6, pp. 19-22). 1 twist this to mean that, to distinguish between cybernetics (which only has emitters of signals) and semiotics (which has ‘authors’ of signs), the latter needs the concept of the ‘lie’, or ‘fiction’. The peculiarities of semiotic work, the author’s fictions, are not reducible to false information in cybernetic or thermodynamic work. Modern scientists are, alas, too often told that, qua scientists, they are the happiest medium between gods and machines, thus unable to lie. So they are creators and calculators, but not authors: to be an author, one needs to be able to work in fiction. Tropology and narratology explicate the work of the author within the text, since they contain the bases- to create fictions, figuratively (materially) and narratively (temporally). In line with the post-‘60s genealogical Foucault, and the California School, this poetics avoids depoliticization.
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The telos of representations Ages condemned astronomer
fits with semiosis and the intertexts.
the astronomer
to perpetual
have too many disjoint
truth lay anyway nomer’s practices
irony,
The Middle
for not only
ways to save the phenomena,
did the
but ultimate
with theologians and metaphysicians, who said the astroill-represented reality. The Renaissance intertext, however,
cleared a space for an anagogical astronomy, and so rendered vertical explanation possible for it. Both Renaissance philology and fine arts rejected knowledge by authority; instead, they stressed the ‘mastery of codes’. Humans are confined to a world of representations; but, this world has been made propter nos, ‘for our sake’, so representations can be decoded through mastery of formal systems (metrics, harmony, perspective, and so on). Copernicus mastered the cosmic code. Anagogy via astronomy re-emerged as a problem, however, under Kepler and Mannerism: the world is made ‘for our sake’, but a disjunction obtains between reason and the senses. The ideals of classical form must grapple with the realities of mundane ‘decorum’. The world is as ornate as rational. Kepler’s Mannerist dilemma entails a difficult ontological and tropological synthesis, discarded after him. While medieval Nominalism seemed to be moving from a formistic to a mechanistic ontology, the Renaissance shifted gears (or figures), and moved toward an organicist. The Copernican cosmos fuses Formism with Organicism, a mimetic structure that accords with the Copernican semiosis and telos of representations, and indicates the importance of metaphor and synecdoche, over metonymy. While Nominalism and Cartesianism (Mechanism) favor metonymic configuration of world elements, Copernicus uses metonymy only in relation to astronomical technique (reducing the types of available models), and in interpreting astronomical data (rearranging cause and effect regarding *sunrise’). Copernican configuration: center) inhere organic, anagogical
elements,
gravity and circular
motion,
show synecdochic
properties of any part of the cosmos (excepting perhaps the in every other part, and represent the whole. The cosmos is
a system per se, which also has a code, whose key is the central
sun as
metaphor.
Kepler, cast within the Mannerist intertext, and thus aware of the metonymic properties of ‘force’, but bent on a hypercodification of heliocentricism, and thus loath to forsake vertical anagogy for positivistic irony, moves toward a seemingly impossible ontological position, fusing formism with contextualism, and so becomes oxymoronic: Ecce ellipsis. For Kepler, the ellipse is, first, a fusion of the line and the circle, the two cosmic contraries. Second, his ellipse saddles the Copernican metaphoric-synecdochic solar-system with a metonymic configuration of planetary orbits as the resultant of ‘forces’. Third, instead of then rejecting cosmic codification and embracing a mechanistic ontology, he fuses a formistic conception of causality with a contextualist, giving him dual but contrary causalities. And, fourth, since he won’t forsake
Poetics for Scientists
the anagogical causality
191
metaphor,
into horizontal
cal). ‘The preeminent
or vertical
explanation,
he can’t
resolve
the dual
layers (e.g. a Kantian transcendental versus empiriWunderkammer’, Kepler’s cosmos has ‘an oxymoronic
allure that characterizes it in depth.’ As does Hallyn’s text, which has a nearly perfectly symmetrical trajectory. In between its ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ are two parts: ‘Copernicus or the Renaissance of the Cosmos’ and ‘Kepler or the Mannerist Cosmos’, of almost equal length. The Introduction has a motto (from Melandri) as do Parts 1 (from Diirer) and 2 (from Kepler); the Conclusion makes shift mottoless. Melandri says science needs poetics in as much as it needs hypothesis; Diirer holds that correct form, not only in paintings, but rather in all higher things, comes from correct proportions; Kepler wants the astronomer to be like a philosopher inquiring into the nature of things. Part 1 has five chapters, so Di.irer’s motto motivates five chapters in Part 2, which has, however, six. While the first five chapters of Part 2 thematically mirror the five chapters of Part 1, the eleventh chapter violates Renaissance and artistic symmetry (Part l), and follows Mannerist and philosophical concern with the nature of things (Part 2): the distortion of the text’s perfect circle in the structure of Part 2 mirrors its contents. The final, distorting (elliptical or mannerist) chapter treats Kepler’s Dream (Somnium), the first work of the Modern Era’s most essential oxymoronic genre: science-fiction. Hallyn’s poetics, a way of ‘dreaming works’ addressed to the modern separation between science and literature, thus attains a marvelous end in irony. Or is it oxymoron? I’ll not mitigate your pleasure in reading this book by revealing the twists of its penultimate chapter. Suffice it to say that, along with Jardine (1984) and Reiss (1982), Hallyn finds an essential moment of the ‘modern’ in Kepler. It was June
1990 at Barnard
Bookforum
when I first spied Zone’s
Hallyn,
whose notes promised me eruditio Lila mode, and whose text gave me pleasure that July, when the dazzling Los Angeles sunsets through the Spanish windows made Hallyn’s English cover seem lovely from afar. A year has passed, and familiarity with the text has bred, not contempt. but respect. The project is ecumenical and au cow-ant, the execution erudite and elegant. I’m not sure how it’ll sell in California, but I hope for a paperback.
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Eco, Umberto (1978) A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Foucault, Michel (1963) Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard). Foucault, Michel (1966) Les mots et les chases (Paris: Gallimard). Frye, Northrop (1957) Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Genette, Gerard (1960) Figures (Paris: Seuil). Genette, Gerard (1972) Figures III (Paris: Seuil). Genette, Gerard (1982) Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil). Genette. Gerard (1987) Seuils (Paris: Seuil). Greenblatt, Stephen (1980) Renuissunce SelfiFushioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Greenblatt, Stephen (1988) Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Groupe lt (1970) Rhetorique generale (Paris: Larousse). Hesse, Mary (1963) Models and Analogies in Science (London: Sheed & Ward). Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Nurrative as a Socially Syjmbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press). Jardine, N. (1984) The Birth of the History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler’s Defense of Tycho against Ursus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). de Lubac, Henri (1959-64) Exegese medievale: Les quatre sens de l’ecriture, 2 vols in 4 pts (Aubier: Montaigne). Lyotard. Jean-Francois (1979) La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit). Muecke. D. C. (1969) The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen). Pepper, Stephen (1948) World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press). Reiss. Timothy J. (1982) The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Ricoeur, Paul (1975) Lu metuphore vive (Paris: Seuil). Ricoeur, Paul (1983385) Temps et r&it (Paris: Seuil). Simon, Gerard (1979) Kepler astronome ustrologue (Paris: Gallimard). Todorov, Tzvetan (I 967) Litteruture et signification (Paris: Larousse). Todorov, Tzvetan (1971) Poetique de la prose (Paris: Seuil). Westman, Robert (1975) ‘The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of Copernican Theory’, Isis 66, pp. 1655193. Westman, Robert (1984) ‘Nature, Art and the Psyche:. the Kepler-Fludd Polemic’, in B. Vickers (ed.). Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 177-229. Westman. Robert (1990) ‘Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De Revolutionibus’. in D. Lindberg and R. Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 167-205. White, Hayden (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). White. Hayden (1978) Tropics of Discourse: Essuys in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). White, Hayden (1987) 77~~ Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).