Unfortunately I'm not joking.
Last week I attended the 2012 conference of the Art Association of
Australia and New Zealand in Sydney. The final presentation
was by a distinguished American curator, Dr Helen Molesworth, on the
work of Josiah McElheny, an American artist who uses traditional
glass-blowing techniques to make large, more or less abstract
sculptures. Dr Molesworth's presentation was
well-crafted and very interesting and engaging. McElheny has referenced
science, in particular cosmology, in his more recent work, and
towards the end of her presentation Dr Molesworth referred to the
possibility of a "Theory of Everything", and said she
didn't want a Theory of Everything: it would be fascist.
At the drinks and nibblies afterwards I asked Dr Molesworth if the
theory of electromagnetism was fascist. She said she didn't
know: she didn't have enough information. This startled me,
and I said that the name "Theory of Everything" was a physicists'
in-joke (referring as it does to a single theory that would bring
together gravity and quantum mechanics), and that it certainly
wouldn't produce a theory of the psyche or a theory of art. I
also tried to say that the value of a scientific theory was to be
found through observation, deduction and explanatory power, not
political attitudes, but I don't think I explained myself well;
she disagreed with what she heard me as saying.
I chose electromagnetism as it is a successful example in physics of the unification of previously disparate phenomena, and it would be part of a Theory of Everything, but I didn't explain this during our brief conversation.
I don't want to make too much of this, as it was a noisy environment
and not a good time for serious discussion. I hope
that we were talking at cross-purposes, but surely even to
consider that the theory of electromagnetism might be fascist is to
be grievously confused about the nature of theories in physics.
I was regrettably reminded of one of the silliest episodes in post-modernism, the (by now widely quoted) statement by the
otherwise respected feminist scholar Luce Irigaray about Einstein's
equation E = mc²:
Is E=Mc² a sexed equation?
Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it
privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally
necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed
nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear
weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster.
I have seen attempted defences of this sort of writing along the lines that although the people writing like this appear to be
using scientific terms, they actually have different meanings in
mind for the words. I have not seen the source for the
quotation from Irigaray above, but it is hard to give it any reasonable interpretation.
I did find a related article by Irigaray, "Is the Subject of Science Sexed?", Cultural Critique No.1 (Autumn 1985), pp.
73-88. In this Irigaray comments on a range of sciences, from
psychoanalysis through biology to mathematics and physics, and by
the time she gets to mathematics it is clear that she is using terminology from the subject without understanding it.
There is of course room for a serious study of what scientists do,
what biases they bring to their work, who funds it, what questions
are studied and what are not, and so forth, and indeed many
scientists themselves are very much concerned about these
questions. But statements like Irigaray's had the effect of
bringing the whole area of so-called science studies into disrepute, and
calling physical theories "fascist" does not help.
