One hears occasionally that “Science” has made a new discovery or that, “according to science,” this or that social policy or form of personal hygiene is to be preferred over another. Unlike German usage, which calls all scholarly disciplines “sciences” (Wissenschaften), then stipulating further between Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities), “science” took on a more specialized application in English. Perhaps this bias or restriction also helped to obscure how science in the singular, with or without a capital S, has always been a bit of a misnomer. Despite whatever methodological regularities may apply, the singularity of Science is a nominal idealization, a handy abstraction. Students of literature and science, already trained to dissect such linguistic formations, have kicked the habit of referring to “Science,” or its reflexive variant, “science itself,” as a monolithic enterprise or singular practice. In his chapter on Japan in Part III, Thomas Lamarre notes how “those who wish to stress the impact of the sciences on the formation of modern societies tend to posit a unified, almost deterministic historical force, whether their intent is to extol science or to rue its excesses.” The drive for a unitary Science does not necessarily derive from scientists themselves; it can also come from certain kinds of historiography or social commentary. Lamarre continues: “Yet we get a better sense of the efficacy and impact of the modern sciences when we think in terms of specific fields of rationality rather than a massive overarching rationalization or modernization.”
Students of literature and science need to become adept in the specificities of the various sciences – their separate if variously interrelated histories, the particularities of their disciplinary objects, their different schools of thought, and the range of issues and debates that roil their immediate ranks. A decisive opening move for our interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary investigations is to gain clarity both on the current framework of disciplinary distinctions within the sciences, and on the wider histories that render them mobile and relative to specific times and places. For instance, contributor Noah Heringman notes that “Romantic science was predisciplinary. … By attending to predisciplinarity we can see that there were in fact multiple ‘ways of knowing’ and that the shift to modern disciplinarity was neither sudden nor uniform nor (even now) complete.” In addition, innovative approaches in literature and science place transdisciplinary pressures on the sciences at hand. For instance, Arkady Plotnitsky’s chapter on Psychoanalysis does not rehearse yet again the history or terminology of that discipline, but rather proceeds directly to a position of post-Kantian philosophical mediation between Sigmund Freud’s orientation toward biology and Jacques Lacan’s orientation toward mathematical physics, in order to rethink the relations among science, literature, art, and the Real.
Part I sets forward the primary sciences as discrete disciplines, but also subdivides or supplements a number of them. For instance, there are chapters on both Physics and one of its sub-disciplines especially rich in literary traffic, Thermodynamics; on Biology, but also on Ecology, Evolution, and Genetics; on Chemistry, but also on its historically important precursor, Alchemy; on Geology, and also on its significant current spin-off, Climate Science. Other chapters in Part I range from classical disciplines, such as Mathematics and Medicine, to modern and contemporary amalgamations of discrete scientific strands. One might call these synthetic disciplines. Integrating both scientific and technological developments into powerful new formations, these newer “fields of rationality” have already produced profound cultural and creative consequences: Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life, Chaos and Complexity Science, Cognitive Science, Cybernetics, Information Theory, Nanotechnology, Psychoanalysis, and Systems Theory.
This more complex tableau of scientific disciplinary differences enables one to think more precisely about their connections to matters of literary consequence. For instance, certain sciences are more conducive to or apt for literary treatment than others. Biology is especially favored in that many of its objects of study – such as animals – yield easily to sympathetic identification, and reside at or near the human scale of things. Contributor Sabine Sielke adds: “The biosciences’ growing cultural visibility and prestige is partly due to the fact that they can be narrativized more easily than mathematics and physics.” As often as not, the literature in “literature and science” will come forward, as one would expect, as literary works – poems, novels, plays, songs, or scriptures – significantly inflected by ideas or images we now call scientific. Sketching the prehistory of Nanotechnology, Colin Milburn comments that “In the early decades of the twentieth century, a wave of stories depicting molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles as worlds unto themselves flooded the literary marketplace.” And Stacy Alaimo points out how the study of ecology and literature could “include all cultures, all time periods, and all sorts of texts, including oral literatures and ceremonies (such as Shalako, the Zuni world renewal ritual).”
Matters of literary consequence will vary according not only to scientific distinctions but also to the different phases of the “literary”–for instance, as discourses of literary criticism in its commerce with scientific concepts, or as the literatures canonized or produced by philosophical, theoretical, popular-scientific, or other non-fictional fields. Alaimo continues that, with regard to the literature and science of ecology, “It would draw not only upon the disciplines of literary studies, ecology, science, and science studies, but also anthropology, sociology, political theory, history, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.” Similarly, Jay Labinger suggests that “We might even consider the origins of chemistry as primarily literary, not scientific, since the core concept of atomic theory was initially expounded by the ancients (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc.) with little if any appeal to observational (let alone experimental) support.” And as Ira Livingston writes on Chaos and Complexity Theory, “Part of the conversion to chaos involves learning to see structures not as structures but as systems, events in process. This recognition is part of what makes chaos and complexity theory full partners with poststructuralist theory generally.” We see, too, that the discourse of literature and science has broken another habit, that of appealing to Literature with a capital L. There are literatures and there are sciences, and the range of scholarly interests in their interconnections derives from this double manifold of significant differences.