Hoffmann Roald - Beyond the finite: the sublime in art and science

Beyond the Finite

The Sublime in Art and Science

Edited By
Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beyond the finite : the sublime in art and science / edited by Roald Hoffmann and
Iain Boyd Whyte.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-973769-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. ScienceAesthetics.
2. Sublime, The, in art. I. Whyte, Iain Boyd, 1947
Q175.32.A47B49 2010
500dc22

2009054357

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

For striking the initial sparks, our sincere thanks to Felice Frankel, a distinguished artist, an advocate of better seeing in science through photography, and the indefatigable organizer of the Image and Meaning conferences. We are grateful to Suhrkamp Verlag and its editors Hans-Joachim Simm, Regina Oehler, and Sabine Landes for publishing this volume in German as part of its Edition Unseld. At Oxford University Press we found a welcome home, and have received good advice from Jeremy Lewis, Lisa Stallings, Hallie Stebbins, and Theresa Stockton. We also appreciate the expert help of Claudia Heide in obtaining good quality images and permissions for their use. Roald Hoffmann is grateful to Jennifer Cleland and Catherine Kempf for research and editorial assistance.

There are many excellent books on the sublime written by philosophers, aestheticians, and art and cultural historians. This volume represents a first attempt to extend the discussion of the sublime into the realm of the natural scientist. The project originated in a conversation among a chemist, a behavioral neurologist, an art historian, and an architectural historian. The occasion was a conference entitled Image & Meaning 2, held at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in June 2005. The conversation took place in a session of this conference entitled The Sublime in Art and Science, and the ambition, which finds a broader rehearsal in this book, was to search for areas of commonality in which a topic widely discussed in art and aesthetic theory could be shared with and opened up to the discourses of the sciences. Perhaps the exchange might offer science some insights as it discovers and creates the new.

The chosen vehiclethe sublimeis broad enough in its many definitions to stimulate new thinking both in the arts and in the sciences. The sublime has meant many things over its long history as it has been applied to the emotional impact of that which is beyond beautiful. Philosophers have contemplated the The breadth and indeterminacy of the term are central to the project. Rather than address the sublime head-on as a category seeking definition, this volume uses it as a catalyst to provoke responses from a group of distinguished scientists and cultural historians.

In this context, the sublime is not offered either as a veiled religiosity or as a mandate for nihilism. Rather, it is seen as a means of defying conceptual rules and, in the process, relating insights that were formerly unknown to each other. As the philosopher Kirk Pillow has suggested, Sublime reflection can provide... a model for a kind of interpretative response to the uncanny Other outside our conceptual grasp. It thereby advances our sense-making pursuits even while eschewing unified conceptual determination.

The best of science also makes claims to the sublime, for in science as well as in art, each day brings the entirely new, the extreme, and the unrepresentable. How does one depict negative mass, for example, or the propagating, contagious misfolding of a protein? Can one capture emergent phenomena as they emerge? Science is continually faced with describing that which is beyond previous experience and common sense. That, too, might be a definition of the sublime.

And scientists have begun to discern the physiological and genetic basis of our senses of the beautiful and the sublime. Contemporary neurophysiology is charting the landscape of our emotions, while biology addresses the transformation of sensory impulses into aesthetic judgments.

One might not have thought an aesthetic category would be a fruitful meeting ground of art and science. This book, by nine courageous scholars, proves that it is. Their explorations range farfrom the Hubble Telescope images to David Bohms quantum romanticism, from Kant and Burke to the downward spiral-ing infinity of the twenty-first-century sublime, through a denial of utility to the category itself, to Little Nemo and the affective foundations of the sublime. The sublime brings nine free-thinking authors together, offering a uniquely powerful portal into both art and science, and into as yet uncharted spaces between.

A list of major recent monographs on the sublime includes Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Christine Preiss (ed.), Das Erhabene: Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Grenwahn (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1989); Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds.), The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); James Kirwan, Sublimity (New York: Routledge, 2005); Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Philip Shaw, The Sublime (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), which also has an extensive bibliography on the sublime.

Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81.

Iain Boyd Whyte

Jaak Panksepp

Barbara Maria Stafford

Elizabeth A. Kessler

James Elkins

John Onians

Ian Greig

Scott Bukatman

Roald Hoffmann

Scott Bukatman is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and is the author of three books: Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on