May 17, 2000 Critical Studies Workshop: Writing Science Modernism's Fourth Dimensions Bruce Clarke, Linda Henderson, Steven Meyer Bruce Clarke Bio: Bruce Clarke is professor of English and the founding director of the Center for the Interaction of the Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (SUNY Press, 1995) and Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Michigan, 1996). He edited The Body and the Text: Comparative Essays in Literature and Medicine (TTU Press, 1990), and is the guest editor of the special issue "Webs of Discourse: The Intertextuality of Science Studies," in Intertexts 3.2 (Fall 1999). His book Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, and he has co-edited with Linda Henderson From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Abstract: Aether and Phonograph: D. H. Lawrence Fourth Dimension The aether medium the nineteenth century hypothesized as a universal substance supporting the propagation of radiation through space served as a cultural screen for the anticipatory or hallucinatory projection of communication technologies. The late-classical doctrine of the aether was a conceptual preparation for the theory of general relativity, but it was also a profound occasion for visionary scientisms, providing a textual if not a substantial medium between material sciences, spiritual systems, and science fictions. The aether provided transcendentally-inclined modernists with a powerful cultural amalgam of natural science and metaphysical doctrine. LawrenceÌs theologized aether medium enables human and divine intercommunication, in the context of the different attitudes the human will can take toward its presumed capacities to induce psychical effects by transmitting or receiving the frequencies of aethereal waves. Some of LawrenceÌs writings echo those of Charles Howard Hinton. This late-19th century British expositor of the fourth dimension of space questioned the nature of free will in a physical universe of aethereal materialism by hanging this ethical issue on the imagery of an exciting new technology of audio wave functionsÛthe phonograph. In Hinton's cosmic adaptation of the phonograph to the aether, the rotation of the audio cylinder is analogized to the revolution of the earth in its orbit, which orb then becomes both the needle plying the aether grooves and the informatic datum manifested by the vibratory registration of those indentations on the membrane of matter. LawrenceÌs related idiom of a spiritual aether alludes to a fundamental cosmic fixture informing his prophetic pronouncements about the ways and means of what he called "vital relation." However, Lawrence's encounter with Einstein's popular exposition of relativity appears to have affected his subsequent writings, compounded, moreover, by his further encounter in 1924 with P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World. The physicist Einstein and the occult philosopher Ouspensky both offered a cosmological discourse of the "fourth dimension" along with a critique of the concept of the aether. The new physical currency Einstein gave to the concept of the fourth dimension, along with the renewed philosophical currency provided simultaneously by Tertium Organum, moved Lawrence to refashion his vitalism through dimensional rather than aethereal tropes. But the luminiferous and electromagnetic aethers remain embedded in his description of the fourth dimension as a medium for the propagation and reception of vital "sparks". The metamorphoses of the electromagnetic field that accompanied a geometrical revolution climaxed by the local and universal relativities of Einstein have arrived in Lawrence at a moment finely poised between doctrinal obsolescence and mythopoetic stability. Complete Clarke Paper Background Reading, Bruce Clarke, "Dark Star Crashes" Clarke's essay:A Scientific Romance: Thermodynamics and the Fourth Dimension in Charles Howard Hinton's "The Persian King" Linda Dalrymple Henderson Bio: Linda Dalrymple Henderson is Professor of Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches 20th-century European and American art. Her research and teaching focus on the interdisciplinary study of modernism, including the relation of modern Eureopean and American art to fields such as geometry, science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. Professor Henderson is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 1983) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the 'Large Glass' and Related Works (Princeton University Press, 1998), as well as numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogues. She is currently co-editing two anthologies with Bruce Clarke: From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, to be published by Stanford University Press; and Modernism's Fourth Dimensions, a volume of essays by scholars of art and literature to be published by Penn State Press. Abstract: Rethinking Cubism and the Fourth Dimension At the turn of the 21st century, what can we now say about the impact of the hugely popular "fourth dimension" of space on early 20th-century art and, specifically, Cubism? By 1950 art critics had for some time been making a valiant attempt to legitimate Cubism by linking it to Einstein and Relativity Theory. In 1975 I completed a dissertation that critiqued the Cubism-Einstein hypothesis and argued instead for the relevance of a long-forgotten tradition of interest in a higher, fourth dimension of space, beginning with the work of figures like E.A. Abbott and Charles Howard Hinton and pursued, importantly for the Cubists, in the work of Henri Poincare. Since that time, my own work and that of others has worked to recover the actual scientific context of pre-World War I Paris, where X-rays, radioactivity, and the luminiferous ether dominated the imagination of the public. Indeed, I would now assert that the X-ray's proof of the inadequacy of the human eye as a perceiving instrument played a vital role in supporting artistic speculation on the possible existence of a suprasensible fourth dimension of space, to be revealed by the visionary artist. Such a contextual view of Cubism has hardly been embraced across art history. That resistance is rooted, in part, in the fact that Picasso's Cubist paintings, when exhibited on the walls of museums like the Museum of Modern Art, have come to look so "natural" to our eyes in the later 20th century. In the dominant formalist narrative of Cubism (also promulgated by MOMA), all that the great man Picasso apparently needed to create his remarkable, dematerialized Cubist works of 1910-1911 were African art and the paintings of Cezanne. From the perspective of the end of the century, we need to "make strange" Picasso's paintings (as the Russian linguist Victor Shklovsky would term it) and see them outside the formalist teleology that has made their development seem so logical. The cultural milieu of the early 20th century (and particularly popularized science and ideas such as the fourth dimension) is the backdrop against which we should ask ourselves why Picasso would break down the very structure of the objects that had been the artist's focus for centuries--or why he would create purposefully indeterminate relationships between objects and the space around them.Ý This paper will focus on Cubist paintings by Picasso and Juan Gris to examine the ways in which contemporary ideas about four-dimensional space--as well as X-rays, radioactivity, and the ether--would have stimulated the imaginations of these pioneers of Cubism. It will also take note of the treatment of the subject of the fourth dimension and Einstein in recent work by several scholars, including Tom Vargish's and Delo Mook's Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative and William Everdell's The First Moderns. Background Reading, Linda Henderson, "Vibratory Modernism" and Henderson's essay: Marcel Duchamp's The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) and the Invisible World of Electrons Steven Meyer Bio: Steven Meyer, visiting fellow this year at the Stanford Humanities Center, is currently on leave from Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches modern and contemporary poetry. His study Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, due out early next year from Stanford University Press, examines Stein's radically experimental writing in terms of late 19th- and early 20th-century, as well as late 20th-century, literary, philosophical, psychological and neurophysiological contexts. He has published articles on the poets Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, and Laura Riding, and is editing Stein's complete lectures for Stanford University Press. Abstract: Hyperdimensionality or Interdisciplinarity? Gertrude Stein and the 4th Dimension I examine several concepts of the fourth dimension--four in all--with which, at various points in her career, Gertrude Stein came into contact. The first two may be termed, respectively, the mystical and the intellectual fourth dimensions. (These are the principal variants of the spatial fourth dimension, or fourth dimension of space, whose broad significance in modern art and spiritual thought has been compellingly demonstrated by Linda Henderson in her literally ground-breaking study, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1985), as well as in Duchamp in Context (1998) and in articles on, among others, Edward Carpenter, Max Weber, Guillaume Apollinaire, and P.D. Ouspensky.) The penultimate version of the fourth dimension is of course the temporal, or Einsteinian, one--the ultimate dimension of spacetime. Mystical, intellectual, and temporal dimensions are all proper fourth dimensions, in the sense that when the fourth dimension was discussed in association with the arts in the first half of the twentieth century, one or another, or some combination of these, was intended. To these three, I propose adding a fourth--a neurophysiological dimension, which, although I can find traces of it in the others, was surely not regarded at the time as a fourth dimension; hence, in this context it may only be described as such improperly. Yet I shall be arguing that it is this sense which corresponds most closely to Stein's own understanding of the "xtra consciousness" to which, in a 1934 letter to Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Altlantic Monthly, she attributed her astonishing literary achievements. In any case, an improper description seems quite appropriate with regard to Stein's deliberately errant compositional practices. In addition to discussing each of these aspirants to the title of the fourth dimension, I have appended an abbreviated reading of Stein's 1912 "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia" to my remarks on the mystical fourth dimension. Finally, at the end of the talk, I will say something about what all this hyperdimensionality has to do with interdisciplinarity. Background Reading, Steven Meyer, "Prefatory Remarks to Irresistible Dictation"