Modernism, Science, and Technology 9781474233415, 9781474233422, 9781474233453, 9781474233446

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Modernist culture, modernist science
Science in transition
Tools for modernist studies
New modernist studies, science, and technology
Two cultures?
Print culture of modernism and science
Summing up
Overview
Notes
Chapter 2 The physical sciences and mathematics
Nineteenth-century paradigms
Modernism and entropy
The spatial fourth dimension and ether physics
Radioactivity and the subatomic world
Relativity and quantum mechanics
New research on the new physics
The new physics of modernism
Periodicals and the new physics
Notes
Chapter 3 The life sciences
A word about the porosity of scientific disciplinary boundaries
Nineteenth-century cells
Vitalism, mechanism, organicism, and the new biology
Optics and physiology
Reproductive technology
Environmental science
Notes
Chapter 4 The social sciences
Sociology, anthropology, psychology
Institutionalizing sociology and anthropology
Historicizing psychology and its practices
Intersections of biology and the social sciences
Back to nature
Notes
Coda
Critical disability studies
One culture?
Note
Glossary of key terms from science studies
Works cited
Index

Citation preview

Modernism, Science, and Technology

NEW MODERNISMS SERIES Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms series introduces, explores, and extends the major topics and debates at the forefront of contemporary Modernist Studies. Surveying new engagements with such topics as race, sexuality, technology and material culture and supported with authoritative further reading guides to the key works in contemporary scholarship, these books are essential guides for serious students and scholars of Modernism. Published Titles Modernism: Evolution of an Idea Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers Modernism in a Global Context Peter J. Kalliney Modernism’s Print Cultures Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey Forthcoming Titles Modernism, War, and Violence Marina MacKay Modernism and the Law Robert Spoo The Environments of Modernism Alison Lacivita

Modernism, Science, and Technology Mark S. Morrisson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Mark S. Morrisson, 2017 Mark S. Morrisson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-3341-5 PB: 978-1-4742-3342-2 ePDF: 978-1-4742-3344-6 ePub: 978-1-4742-3343-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Modernisms Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Grey Cover image © Getty Images

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Laura, Devin, and Ciara

vi

Contents

Acknowledgments  viii

1 Modernist culture, modernist science  1 2 The physical sciences and mathematics  37 3 The life sciences  83 4 The social sciences  117 Coda  149

Glossary of key terms from science studies  157 Works cited  160 Index  171

Acknowledgments

Bringing together the diverse and seemingly disparate threads of scholarship on modernism, science, and technology into a recognizable pattern, useful to students new to the field and scholars with some familiarity, is a project I had long wished to undertake. But it took the confluence of two remarkably persuasive forces to make it realizable: an enthusiastic invitation to contribute such a volume to the exciting New Modernisms Series at Bloomsbury, and a sabbatical in the middle of my term as head of a large English department. For the former, I thank Sean Latham, Gayle Rogers, and David Avital, whose generous encouragement and welcome advice made the new series the ideal venue in which to publish the book. For the latter, I am grateful to the College of the Liberal Arts and Penn State University for the precious research leave that allowed me to read and write, and read some more. I thank the Tate for generous permission to reproduce Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Chris Sutherns for his gracious assistance; ARS and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for permission to reproduce Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass); and the Kröller-Müller Museum for permission to reproduce Fernand Léger’s Nudes in the Forest. In addition to David Avital, I thank the Bloomsbury editorial and production team, including Mark Richardson, James Tupper, and Grishma Fredric at Deanta, for bringing this project into print with welcome speed and courtesy, and I am grateful to Ryan McGinnis for his expert work on the index. Finally, I must thank my children, Devin and Ciara, for reminding me daily of the pleasures of the present even as I immersed myself in the fascinations of the past, and my wife, Laura Reed-Morrisson, who expertly commented on every page of this book and inspired me when I needed it most.

1 Modernist culture, modernist science

“Make it new,” prescribed Ezra Pound—the modernist poet, impresario, political lightning rod, contrarian, coiner of phrases, and launcher of movements. Modernists and avant-gardists of the early twentieth century exceled at bold statements heralding a brave new now. In 1924, Virginia Woolf famously observed that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed,” and five years later, Eugene Jolas proclaimed that “the revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact.” Moreover, this reconfigured present of modernism often hinted at an alluring—or frightening— future that was already in the process of coming into the world, an ontological eruption. The Great War and other violent upheavals of the period could render those invocations simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, even apocalyptic. William Butler Yeats, in “The Second Coming,” powerfully captured this tone: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”1 As the war drew to a close, four empires had collapsed, and the old aristocracies had lost much of their privilege. Future wars, totalitarianism, social, cultural, economic, political, and religious tumult, and the postcolonial world of later decades were visible on the horizon. Scholars have focused on modernism’s emergence in the context of such globally significant events, and rightly so. An “age of empire” and the “long nineteenth century,” to use Eric Hobsbawm’s phrases, were ending. Yet some of these dynamics looked quite different across the Atlantic, where America was

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rising as a world power, more confidently signaling its own imperial ambitions and industrial and technological modernization. In England and the United States, experiences of loss and vulnerability in a rapidly changing world were balanced by palpable excitement about a future in which the imagination’s wildest flights of fancy might be realizable—for good or perhaps for ill. Whether causing apocalyptic dread or inspiring futuristic excitement, this modernization was technological and scientific. As this volume will show, many of the developments that fueled a growing modernist self-consciousness were precisely these rapidly paced technological and scientific changes. Science had achieved a formidable cognitive authority across the nineteenth century. By the twentieth, it seemed to augur swift, perhaps even limitless, progress in knowledge and technology. While many people began to see science and technology as the greatest agents of transformation, some began to doubt that these changes were necessarily uniform, continuous, progressive, or even necessarily beneficial. The vocabulary of “progress,” “improvement,” “advancement,” “growth,” and “prosperity” was a legacy of the Victorian period, but the dizzying pace and nature of change in the early twentieth century caused some to question the inherited narratives of progress. It was not just the new scientific developments but the fact of flux, the unsettling nature of fundamental change itself, that defined modernist science and modernist culture. Alex Goody contends that technology was “the dominating episteme” of the twentieth century. “What the twentieth century reveals about technology,” Goody argues, “is its profound fusion with the human; as the century progressed it became impossible to maintain an absolute distinction between the organic expressions of human nature and the technological processes, forms and devices which recorded and communicated those expressions as culture” (1). Hints of that revelation were already present as the century began. Few modernists could be accused of neo-Luddism. But they understood and even created their technological and scientific culture in many different ways. Italian Futurism, often seen as the defining European avant-garde arts movement of the early twentieth century, offers a useful starting point for our inquiry into the modernist science and technology at the epicenter of the culture of modernism. Like a garish advertising poster whose newly liberated typography had broken its mooring on the line, Italian Futurist

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F. T. Marinetti’s visually bold artist’s book Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) declared: “No poetry before ours / with our wireless imagination words / in freedom longggGGG live FUTURISM fi- / nally finally finally finally / finally / FINALLY / Poetry being BORN” (“Correction,” 57). Simultaneously sound poem and concrete poem avant la lettre, Zang Tumb Tumb imagines the dynamism of words visually scattered and even freed from the page not only through the voice, but also, above all, through technology. Words could be spread out across foldout pages through the technologies of industrial typography. Or they could be freed from print itself, and even from the spatial limitations of human vocalization: the electromagnetic waves of telegraphy could propagate them across space wirelessly. Paradoxically, to liberate the imagination from all boundaries required fusing it with technology. And perhaps no technology was more important to Marinetti at the time than that of Marconi’s wireless (Toscano 109–30). Even the exhaust-belching, cyborg-like hybrid of driver and race car that Marinetti celebrated in his “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) was a mid-nineteenth-century innovation. Internal combustion improved on the even older eighteenth-century external combustion reciprocating steam engine that helped launch the Industrial Revolution, so it was not new, just better. And the engine could not transgress geographical boundaries like the electromagnetic waves of the wireless could. Moreover, the wireless was important not just for its technology but also for the science that produced it. Guglielmo Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in December 1909 with Karl Ferdinand Braun for their work on wireless telegraphy. Marinetti drew Marconi’s innovation into his modernist vision of a new world already coming into being, a world of efficiency, dynamism, human control over nature, freedom from material constraint through material technological and scientific progress—a future riding the electromagnetic waves.2 Marinetti and the Italian Futurists enthusiastically aligned their modernism with the expansive possibilities of technology and science to augment the intensities of human existence. The airplane, the racing car, the factory, war itself, which Marinetti controversially proclaimed “the world’s only hygiene”: the confluence of poetry and a new machine age energize and authorize the “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” Adopting another marvel of modern efficiency and expansive communication technology—the modern

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newspaper—Marinetti published his manifesto on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro in Paris some ten months before Marconi was awarded his Nobel Prize. In the manifesto, he wrote, “We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot—is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” (“Founding,” 41). And the contemporaneity of that “new beauty” of industrial modernity was figured in tropes of youth. “The oldest of us is thirty” (“Founding,” 43), asserted Marinetti, himself already 32. With his keen insight into modern promotional culture, Marinetti knew that he could knock a few years off his age. What mattered was Marinetti’s specific program: to break the chains of Italy’s past, which, in his view, had sealed it in a museum or mausoleum for the inspection of tourists, and to position the young Italian state as resurgent, avant-garde, at the head of a technologically modern world. With their “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” (1910), Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini addressed the “young artists of Italy”: “The triumphant progress of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable, changes which are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of past tradition and us free moderns, who are confident in the radiant splendor of our future” (24–25). But the Futurists carefully avoided positioning humans as passively transformed by an abstract and independent agent, “scientific progress.” Rather, humans actively remake the world in more extreme and ambitious ways through their new technologies, scientific knowledge, and unfettered imagination. Italy would be reborn as a land where “millions of machines are already roaring; in the land where traditional aesthetics reigned supreme, new flights of artistic inspiration are emerging and dazzling the world with their brilliance” (25). These “new flights of artistic inspiration” and the new technologies were mutually generative. In his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (1912), Boccioni lauded science’s technological achievements, mathematics with its new geometries of the “plastic infinity” (52), and human and machine hybrids of modernity, all of which offered a nonfigurative aesthetic to sculptors in countries enslaved by their histories,

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“bowed down under the opprobrious burden of the Greeks and Michelangelo” (51). But there were many modernisms. As much as Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” has come to summarize for many a key impulse in modernism, one we can easily discern in Marinetti’s quintessential avant-gardist pursuit of the disruptive energies of a dynamic technological and scientific modernity for the new century, Pound and Marinetti were not saying the same thing. Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and many figures in their Vorticist group (a London-based response to the provocations of Marinetti and the Italian Futurists) came to dismiss Italian Futurism as trivial technophilia: “AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism) bores us,” they wrote in the first issue of their shortlived little magazine, Blast, in the summer of 1914 (“Long Live the Vortex,” 8). In a further slap at the discourses of novelty and Italian nationalism that were at the core of Marinetti’s movement, they rejected Futurist technophilia not from an antitechnology position, but by arguing that it was neither new nor specifically Italian: “Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of machinery. Gissing, in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was futurist in this sense. The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870” (“Long Live the Vortex,” 8). But even beyond this polemical effort to expose Italian Futurism as all of the things it most rejected—passé, sentimental, derivative, foreign—Pound most damningly tethered it to an outmoded version of the old aesthetic of mimesis, calling Futurism “only an accelerated sort of impressionism” (“Vortex Pound,” 154). Ultimately, the most significant division between Pound and the Italian Futurists lay in their stance not toward technology but rather toward the resources of history. The very past that Marinetti dismissed, along with the Victory of Samothrace, engaged Pound profoundly. Along with the ultramodern “flenites” of the Vorticist sculptor Jacob Epstein, Pound saw that ancient Greek sculpture as a work of the “first intensity” (Pound, “Vorticism”). So if Pound did not subsume the “new” in technoscientific modernization or place it in an antagonistic relationship to history, as the Futurists had, what did Pound mean when he urged readers to “make it new”? Michael North has recently reminded us that the phrase “make it new” arrived relatively late in Pound’s critical writing, in 1928 (and it did not gain critical currency until the 1960s). Moreover,

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the phrase itself was not even new: the modernist poet’s repetition of the inscription supposedly adorning the wash basin of Ch’eng T’ang, the first king of the Shan dynasty (1766–1753 BC), was a deliberate act of “historical recycling” (168), as North put it, not a rejection of the past.3 My aim here is not to rehearse the many significant differences between Pound’s and Marinetti’s modernisms, or those even greater differences among the many writers, artists, and scientists who will appear in this volume, but rather to emphasize the key point of convergence for Pound, Marinetti, and most of the modernists I address: simply put, they all understood science and technology as a central feature of the modern world, and in many ways key to its newness. But the terms in which they understood their own technological and scientific modernity varied greatly. Moreover, this transformational capacity of science and technology placed them at the center of a modernism in which transformation itself had to be understood in relationship to historical processes. It is no contradiction that Pound valued the works of the distant past even as he turned seriously to contemporary science to propose a critical framework for modernism. More than three decades ago, Ian Bell identified Pound’s engagement with science in his rejection of Symbolism’s unseen world of the spirit: science offered a “new materialism . . . as a means of access to the interstitiality of the corporeal and the non-corporeal that was the habitation of the modernist writer” (2). More recently, in an exploration exemplary of the new modernist approaches to science and technology, Robin G. Schulze clarified some of the implications of Pound’s engagement with science by locating Pound’s modernism (and also those of Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and other key American modernist poets) within Progressive Era concerns about racial and national degeneration and eugenics. Scientists and reformers urged Americans to return to nature and America’s rapidly vanishing “frontier” in order to rejuvenate modern life, not to reject it. In this interpretation, Pound seeks a modern nature—and a modernism drawn from scientific discourse (Schulze 158–60). Let us return briefly to Michael North’s work on novelty, as it finds in modernism an approach to “the new” different from that of revolutionary political change, which seems to lead to facile repetition, mystification, or ineffective reform (154–55). Evolution and science more broadly, North suggests, seemed to offer a

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more viable foundation for modernism than religious or political discourse: The implications of the evolutionary model of artistic change and renewal are obviously very different from those of the revolutionary model. Instead of cataclysmic and total change, there is slow, steady, incremental advance. And the prototype for artistic novelty comes not from religion and politics but rather from science, so that the motives and practices that foster novelty seem completely different—rational and dispassionate instead of inspired. In this role, modernism wears a white coat, and potters amongst its test tubes. (156–57) Modernists pottering among the test tubes is an apt image. Yet modernist writers, artists, and even scientists and philosophers of science during the period seemed less certain that science could still be characterized by “slow, steady, incremental advance.” The history of science was about to receive its own modernist intervention. A crucial feature of this age was the high degree to which many people self-consciously understood themselves to be participating in a present intensely marked by its modernity and modernization. And this self-consciousness was not only prevalent among artists and writers we now speak of as “modernist,” but also shared by many scientists and engineers, inventors, and marketers of new technologies—so much so that we might speak of a “scientific and technological modernism.”

Science in transition History of science As literature and the arts were transforming and being transformed by this modernist sensibility, scientific and technological orthodoxies were similarly in flux in almost every field. We will use the now common term for such changes—“paradigm shifts”—and will momentarily review what Thomas Kuhn meant (and did not mean) by it. Paradigm shifts were occurring at a high frequency in the modernist era. Non-Euclidian geometries revolutionized mathematics, and differential geometry contributed to Einstein’s

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theory of general relativity. Relativity undermined Newtonian and ether physics. Chemistry discovered that its fundamental particles, atoms, were not indivisible (or stable) after all. While quantum mechanics posited a mind-boggling subatomic world, extragalactic astronomy showed how almost unimaginably vast the macrocosm really was. Just as fundamentally, centuries of medical assumptions gave way to germ theory, cell theory, and the neuron doctrine shaped by the “new biology” of the period. Perhaps the most compelling sign of the newly complex understanding of the psyche, even within scientific circles, was the birth of psychoanalysis and sexology. This age of scientific rationality paradoxically envisioned the mind itself as an arena of primitive and largely unconscious forces and provided controversial accounts of human sexuality. The emerging discipline of anthropology eroded long-held beliefs about humanity. Scientific and technological developments began to seem increasingly difficult to separate: this was the age of the automobile, airplane, synthetic plastic, radio, film, neon sign, audio recording, mass-market tabloid, X-ray machine, cyclotron, skyscraper, tissue culture, and penicillin, but also of chemical warfare, machine guns, eugenics, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the electric chair. Even during the Great War, American journalists had begun to refer to the conflict as “the chemists’ war” (LaFollette 9). Artistic expression was certainly transformed, but even more strikingly, it contributed to the construction of this brave new technoscientific world. For the most part, modernist studies has turned away from grand unifying claims about a monolithic modernism and instead has attended to interdisciplinary investigations, microhistories, material culture, and an expanded range of cultural texts and dimensions of (plural) modernist cultures. The field has increasingly looked at developments in the field of history of science that have emphasized the embeddedness of science in a broad array of social, cultural, institutional, and even textual practices. As Henning Schmidgen argues, post-positivist historians of science investigate “the spaces ‘in between,’ i.e., transitional zones populated with numerous actors: scientists and technicians, instruments and organisms, but also and above all, inscription devices of all kinds” (337). While offering extraordinarily focused and compellingly detailed microhistories of laboratories, instrumentation, and specific institutional dynamics, historians of science have also significantly contributed to our understanding of the larger institutional landscape of science,

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revealing modernist-era institutions of science and technology to be as much in flux as the scientific theories and disciplines were.

Institutions of science and technology The early twentieth century can be seen as a period of transition culminating in the “big science” that characterized the post–Second World War era in the United States and Europe. Across the nineteenth century, the primary site of scientific research in many fields shifted from the natural philosopher’s private laboratory or voyage of scientific exploration, which had been supported by patronage or personal wealth, to the modern university, which employed professional scientists. In the age of the great university laboratories, the programs at Giessen, Göttingen, and Heidelberg gave Germany an edge in nineteenth-century chemistry and physics. That German academic chemistry was intended to support technology and manufacturing, while in nineteenth-century England the last vestiges of the amateur gentleman scientist were only beginning to give way (Merricks 24). British universities, too, had created some strong research facilities, such as the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Founded in 1874 by the university’s first professor of experimental physics, James Clerk Maxwell, as a teaching laboratory to help support engineering and industry in the United Kingdom, the lab emerged as the site of pioneering work in what became “nuclear physics” in the first half of the twentieth century. And the remaining philanthropic imperatives of the age still left some room for significant research performed at independent privately endowed facilities, such as the genetics research at the John Innes Horticultural Institution under William Bateson and then J. B. S. Haldane. We have come to think of “big science” collaborations as a feature of the mid-century defense contract era. These enterprises were established on a scale that would have seemed unimaginable in the early twentieth century, as Peter Galison notes (“Many Faces,” 1). But historians of science have recently shown how the entrepreneurial, complex, and messy modernist-era science could produce precursors to big science already in the 1930s and even earlier. In the 1920s, for example, Stanford University, Caltech, and the University of California at Berkeley were involved in collaborations with industry and the state of California, working

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on, for example, hydroelectric power to meet the increasing needs of the rapidly transforming state (Galison, “Many Faces,” 3; Seidel, Chapter 1). E. O. Lawrence worked with California companies, such as the Pelton Waterwheel Company, to supply the power needs of California industries, and, in turn, Pelton helped Lawrence build an industrial-strength magnet for his early large-scale cyclotrons (Galison, “Many Faces,” 3). Moreover, collaborations, such as those between the Sperry Company and physicists at Stanford before the Second World War, encouraged the patenting of research done in university microwave labs (Galison, “Many Faces,” 3–4). As Marcel LaFollette puts it, the period “from the 1910s through the mid1950s . . . was not only a time of significant growth of science in the United States but also the time when the model for current science policy was drafted” (7). The public understanding of science as an activity of public policy and national interest in the United States emerged during these years (LaFollette 7). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological innovation, too, was rapid and exhilarating—but it was simultaneously so risky that governmental and corporate responses would be demanded by the 1920s to stabilize society and mitigate risk. As Adam Davidson puts it, “The original age of innovation may have ushered in an era of unforeseen productivity, but it was, for millions of people, absolutely terrifying. Over a generation or two, however, our society responded by developing a new set of institutions to lessen the pain of this new volatility, including unions, Social Security and the single greatest risk-mitigating institution ever: the corporation” (44). Corporations, as Davidson explains, spread risk across millions of investors. Though the earlier highly innovative period, roughly between 1870 and 1920, produced the major innovations that fired the modernist imagination—Davidson lists “cars, planes, electricity, telephones and radios”—beginning in the 1920s, companies became more conservative with innovations, focusing on making money on the core technologies that had been developed in the pre-corporate age.4

Modernist science With Pound’s and Marinetti’s modernism in mind, let us now turn briefly to an example of a similar sensibility from the sciences (discussed in more detail in the next chapter). One of the major

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events in chemistry and physics in the first half of the twentieth century occurred in part through a collaboration across the far-flung reaches of the British Empire. In 1902 and 1903, New Zealand–born physicist Ernest Rutherford and English chemist Frederick Soddy published communications of their interpretation of radioactivity as a spontaneous transformation of what Rutherford later understood to be the nucleus of an atom. Their research, which overturned the bedrock assumptions of nineteenth-century chemistry and atomic theory, was published in the most venerable of English scientific periodicals: the Philosophical Magazine. As a sign of things to come, the staid and conservative old journal was publishing a revolutionary article by two young men in early academic posts, performing their research in the new modern physics and chemistry facilities at McGill University in Montreal, far from the imperial metropole and the prestigious colleges of Cambridge and Oxford. Orthodoxies could crumble under such circumstances, for reasons we shall explore in this volume. In 1908, Soddy gave a series of six free experimental lectures on “The Interpretation of Radium” at the University of Glasgow (Merricks 45). These lectures were published a year later in a book with the same name. Soddy began The Interpretation of Radium with a prescient alignment of the public enthusiasm for “new discoveries in science” with that “for new works in art, literature, or music” (ix); he then launched into a thrilling 250-page tour of the “revolution” (Soddy’s term) in physics and chemistry that he had helped initiate. Emphasizing the fundamental innovation of this “newly-born science of radioactivity,” Soddy proclaimed that its importance “may surprise those who hold to the adage that there is nothing new under the sun. Frankly, it is not possible, because in these latest developments science has broken fundamentally new ground, and has delved one distinct step further down into the foundations of knowledge” (2). Soddy was quick to praise his scientific predecessors, and, like Pound, he had a deep sense of the history of his field: “During the century which has just closed there occurred, it is true at an ever-increasing rate, a ceaseless extension of our knowledge of the nature of matter upon which physical science is largely based” (2). He nevertheless insisted that “this advance was for the most part an expansion rather than a deepening” (2). In other words, the great research of the nineteenth century had expanded knowledge only within a framework fundamentally incapable of explaining the anomaly of radioactivity.

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The “revolution” that Soddy and Rutherford had sparked with their theory of radioactive decay required relative outsiders to cross disciplinary boundaries—with Soddy as a physical chemist able to work with the physicist Rutherford to understand the results they were seeing in their provincial lab. Truly new scientific insight required institutional shake-ups. As Soddy wrote, “Radioactivity is a new primary science owing allegiance to neither physics nor chemistry, as these sciences were understood before its advent, because it is concerned with a knowledge of the elementary atoms themselves of a character so fundamental and intimate that the old laws of physics and chemistry, concerned almost wholly with external relationships, do not suffice” (3). Calling radioactivity a “new primary science” was a bold, even radical, provocation. Soddy knew well that science, like other institutions, resists sweeping change. But his understanding of the “revolution” that had transpired looked ahead to later-twentieth-century work in the history and philosophy of science and even science studies: So drastic an innovation was, it is true, unanticipated. Radium, however, is an undisputed fact to-day, and there is no question, had its existence conflicted with the established principles of science, which would have triumphed in the conflict. Natural conservatism and dislike of innovation appear in the ranks of science more strongly than most people are aware. Indeed, science is no exception. (4–5) But the rhetoric of Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium was not all that different from the challenges to conservative institutions in Pound’s or Marinetti’s writings. Even ignoring five appearances of “newly” and four of “newer,” Soddy’s relatively short book contains 108 instances of the word “new”—such as the “new epoch” and the oft-repeated “new science.” And when K. B. Hasselberg, president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, presented Rutherford the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in December 1908, he walked a thin line between a revolutionary and a conservative understanding of Rutherford’s accomplishment. Affirming the continuity of scientific research (and the wisdom of the Nobel Prize committee), he first noted that Rutherford’s research efforts were “closely allied to, and form a worthy continuation of, work which has already met with recognition from the Academy in the shape of Nobel Prizes

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on former occasions,” mentioning the work of J. J. Thomson, Henri Becquerel, and Marie Curie. Institutions augment their authority with such rhetorical strategies, and the relatively new Nobel Prize (first awarded in 1901) and the far older Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (founded in 1739) were no exception. Hasselberg then highlighted the blurry disciplinary boundaries of research in radioactivity. Though Rutherford was a physicist, his work was of absolute importance to chemistry: “The above-mentioned disintegration theory and the experimental results upon which it is based, are synonymous with a new departure in chemistry, involving a fresh and decidedly extended comprehension of the very basis of that science” (Hasselberg). Continuity with the “old” innovators whom the Nobel had recognized over the previous seven years, a new departure in a field (chemistry) that was not even the disciplinary home of the award winner, a fundamental “fresh” comprehension of the “very basis of the science”—such were the demands of a major award for scientific revolutionaries.

Tools for modernist studies In order to approach a period when science and technology seemed more dynamically transformative than in perhaps any earlier era—when change itself seemed to be at the heart of science and technology—scholars engaging with science and technology in modernist studies have had to transform their own methods to become increasingly interdisciplinary. Developments in the historiography of science mark this field, but so do significant interactions with research in the fields of literature and science, science studies, and STS (science, technology, and society, or science and technology studies). These fields saw major developments during the 1980s and 1990s.

Literature and science James Bono has noted the decline by the late 1970s of a first wave of work on literature and science, a field that had primarily explored the influence of science on literature and had, essentially, been limited to annotating scientific engagements in literary texts.

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Bono sees a renewal of the field beginning in the 1980s, as literary and science studies scholars paid a “new and intensive attention to the practices of ‘scientists’ themselves” (556). Bono explains: From the early 1980s on, a new generation of scholars increasingly turned their attention to the performative dimensions of the different kinds of work avidly pursued by scientific practitioners in the making of knowledge about nature. The common thread that bound together emerging work in the reconfigured field of literature and science was analytic attention to the performative effects and affordances of literary and linguistic dimensions of science, attention turned in parallel fashion to the material practices associated with different sciences and thus to the performative effects and affordances of laboratory and experimental protocols; collecting, observing, recording, and categorizing devices and procedures; the material regimes constituting such analytic practices, from mathematical and statistical techniques for “reading” particular kinds of data critical to specific scientific subspecialties; and, finally, the networks of exchange that foster the circulation of the objects, material practices, and epistemic things that contribute to the making of scientific knowledge. (556–57) Most of the interdisciplinary explorations that helped revive literature and science as a field rejected the influence model, in which science is seen as a stable given that, in turn, influences literature, itself cordoned off as a separate practice. By the late 1990s, Susan Merrill Squier was calling for strong scholarly engagement at precisely this reconceived intersection of literature and science: “I suggest that we need to shift the kinds of questions we ask away from ‘Is this discourse primarily scientific or literary?’ and ‘Is it engaged primarily in the explorations of subjects or objects?’ toward ‘What kind of cultural work is this doing? Where? And in what ensemble of social relations?’” (“From Omega,” 144).5 And scholarly arguments about the role of rhetoric, metaphor, literature, and culture in the development and reception of scientific fields and facts had begun to flourish. Significantly, much of the work that shifted modernist studies in this direction had reached a critical mass across multiple fields. Evelyn Fox Keller, author of Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology

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(1995), taught in a program in the history and philosophy of science. Drawing on his disciplinary background in rhetoric, Alan Gross examined the role of rhetoric in the ways scientists establish and persuade each other of scientific truths. In the second edition of his groundbreaking The Rhetoric of Science (1990), Gross noted that the rhetorical study of the history of science had attracted enough attention to have become a site of controversy (vii). In 1994, Squier published a key work for modernism and feminist science studies titled Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. The interdisciplinary commitment of these and other scholars helped inspire a new generation approaching science and technology in modernist studies. This second wave of literature and science studies is now a thriving area of scholarship, with the support of a scholarly infrastructure—found, for example, in the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts and its journal, Configurations, in the United States and the British Society for Literature and Science in the United Kingdom.

Kuhn’s “paradigms” and “scientific revolutions” As an entry point into the large and diverse fields of literature and science and science studies, we shall turn to Thomas Kuhn, a figure who addressed some of the same issues Soddy raised in The Interpretation of Radium and gave post–Second World War academia a set of terms that quickly spread well beyond his original intentions for them. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) would become the most widely read twentiethcentury account of how science comes to “make it new.” What Soddy identified as the “expansion” efforts of nineteenth-century chemistry, Kuhn would term “normal science.” And Kuhn provided the enduring and now widely circulating term “paradigm shift” to describe the phenomenon that the 1908 Nobel Prize committee had seen in Rutherford’s research. Turning from a stalling career in physics in the 1950s to work instead at the intersection of the history and philosophy of science, Kuhn explored the mechanisms of change in professional science. Though it hardly advances a heroic conception of the scientific enterprise, one of Kuhn’s most important assertions was that

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the vast majority of scientific research comprises puzzle-solving activities undertaken by scientists freed from basic metaphysical and conceptual quandaries. He describes the paradigm or matrix upon which scientific research programs can be mounted as the “implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16–17). Kuhn’s “normal science” is inherently conservative, but he argues that it must necessarily be so in order to provide the metaphysical stability for professional science to proceed. Kuhn looks at how science as it is institutionalized sustains its principles, questions, and methods of inquiry: “No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies” (24). Inevitably, though, normal science will not always be up to the task. Sometimes the powerfully conservative forces of the paradigm fail to preserve equilibrium. Even within an established paradigm, anomalies appear. Indeed, the process of normal science generates these moments, as the puzzle solving is tested time and time again and eventually fails. Soddy approached this understanding when he asserted that radium itself would have “triumphed” even when it “conflicted with the established principles of science” (4). Radium and other radioactive elements presented the anomaly. But Soddy did not have a systematic theory of how normal science changed in the face of such refractory phenomena. Kuhn did. When serious anomalies cannot be assimilated to the paradigm, a crisis occurs, and new theories can proliferate. These new theories meet with great resistance, and those scientists whose careers have been staked upon the old paradigm often never accept any new one. Sir Oliver Lodge, for instance, went to his grave in 1940 still defending the nineteenth-century ether physics through which he had attained his eminent position but which had been rejected by most physicists for at least two decades. For Kuhn, a scientific revolution is not simply the acceptance of a new theory. As he argues, A discovery like that of oxygen or X-rays does not simply add one more item to the population of the scientist’s world. Ultimately

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it has that effect, but not until the professional community has re-evaluated traditional experimental procedures, altered its conception of entities with which it has long been familiar, and, in the process, shifted the network of theory through which it deals with the world. (7) Kuhn proposed that true scientific revolutions, or paradigm shifts, are rare because of the incommensurability of different paradigms. Their practitioners are, essentially, not even talking about the same world: “Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice. That is why the unexpected discovery is not simply factual in its import and why the scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory” (7). “Outside the laboratory everyday affairs usually continue as before,” Kuhn explains. “Nevertheless, paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the world of their researchengagement differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world” (111). Thus what Kuhn calls a “scientific revolution”—a “non-cumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one” (92)—happens very infrequently.

Kuhn and modernism The Structure of Scientific Revolutions speaks remarkably well to modernist-era concerns about the Victorian imperative of scientific progress. Kuhn’s model did not conform to the common view of science as a gradual, steady, and progressive accumulation of knowledge and methods. Instead, he offered an interpretation he called “progress through revolutions.” As Michael North describes it, this model “shares with evolution a particularly elegant solution to the basic problem of novelty, for it turns out that normal science produces anomalies, or deviations from its paradigm, in the course of the same process that ordinarily produces confirmations of it” (122). “Normal science and revolutionary science,” North continues, “are thus like two sides of a Möbius strip” (123).

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The assault of the strange and unassimilable on the conditions of workaday normalcy, the role of crises in producing not only incommensurability but also endless change and even rejuvenation— these aspects of Kuhn’s thought resonate with many facets of the earlier period’s modernisms. Structure has deep roots not only in the scientific and technological tumult of the modernist period but also in developments in the historiography and philosophy of science that emerged from that earlier period. Kuhn’s thought owes significant debts to directions in the philosophy and historiography of science emerging from the tumultuous height of the modernist era. In the philosophy department at Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s, A. N. Whitehead argued for a “process philosophy” that returned a metaphysical focus to the philosophy of science and made change central to an understanding of science, though his approach was much more radical than the one Kuhn ultimately adopted. And C. I. Lewis brought an American pragmatist approach to European logical positivism and tested the waters of arguments about incommensurability that Kuhn would much more confidently affirm in the next generation.6 Key influences on Kuhn also included European modernistera thinkers such as Alexander Koyré (1892–1964), a Russianborn French Jewish philosopher and historian and philosopher of science. From 1908 to 1911, Koyré studied with Edmund Husserl in Göttingen and then went to Paris in 1912 to work with Bergson. Though an academic, Koyré’s life, like those of many modernist writers and artists, was lived across multiple countries and languages.7 In his scholarship on the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science, Koyré argued that outlook or theory, rather than an objective and neutral uncovering of truths about nature through experiment, was primary to scientific development.8 Koyré also played an instrumental role in Parisian surrealism’s engagement with science in the 1920s and 1930s, beginning a vivid and influential seminar at the École pratique des hautes études in 1926, which was then carried on by his friend Alexandre Kojève. As Gavin Parkinson has recently shown, Kojève’s seminars brought Hegel back into vogue in France and were attended by Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klosowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Queneau. Koyré and Kojève drew these philosophical discussions together with a strong interest in the

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philosophy of science, and ultimately with discussion of quantum physics through the journal Recherches Philosophiques, edited by Koyré and others in the 1930s (Parkinson 122–27). Another modernist-era thinker important to Kuhn was the Polish Jewish physician and historian of science Ludwik Fleck, who lived in the Ukraine, Austria, Poland, and for some time, in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, ultimately spending his final days in Israel.9 Fleck offered to Kuhn the concepts of “thought style” and “thought collective,” which Fleck developed in part as a critique of the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and the Vienna Circle of the 1920s.10 Opposing what he saw as the Vienna Circle’s effort to construe “an ideal, or thinking as it should be,” “something fixed and absolute” (50), Fleck argued that knowledge “does not repose upon some substratum. Only through continual movement and interaction can that drive be maintained which yields ideas and truths” (51). And, as Fleck maintained in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), through a “thought style,” knowledge is socially and historically produced, not just described. When comparing the thought style of modern science with that of an earlier period—for example, the alchemical writing of Paracelsus or other medieval chemists—he writes, “Our physical reality did not exist for them” (127). This concept of thought style in Fleck ties together sociology, history, and epistemology: “We can therefore define thought style as [the readiness for] directed perception, with corresponding mental and objective assimilation of what has been so perceived” (99; emphasis in original). In Fleck’s work, we can see the path that Kuhn would take; we can also see some affinities with the interests of Pound and other modernist writers. The Kuhnian concepts with which (with some modification) this volume approaches its topic are rooted in the tumult of the modernist period itself and its stoking of interest in how science addresses radical change.

Bijker’s technological frames Some scholars, most prominently Steve Fuller, have argued that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, while enjoying enormous influence in the second half of the twentieth century,

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had a negative impact in many ways. To Fuller, Kuhn’s work is “an exemplary document of the Cold War era” that, by locating normal science and scientific revolutions in the abstract and relatively depoliticized institutional space of academia, shielded a Cold War agenda for science from critique (5).11 Though Fuller lands many blows on Kuhn’s theory in the context of its success during the Cold War and beyond, Kuhn’s work has, nevertheless, inspired applications to other areas well outside the seemingly insulated institutions of academic science. Moreover, seemingly contrary to Fuller’s criticism, Kuhn’s work has resonated with academics most committed to opening academia to radical critiques of science and technology in contemporary society. The Dutch engineer-turnedacademic Wiebe Bijker, for example, followed his interests through the STS movement’s efforts to offer more powerful academic perspectives on nuclear arms as well as on environmental and other important concerns in the 1970s (Bijker 4). Working within what came to be known as the social construction of technology (SCOT), he developed a sociological and political framework for the history of modern technological change akin to Kuhn’s approach to the paradigm shifts of science. In a monograph published in the mid-1990s, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs, Bijker used three key case studies to explore how technologies emerge and either succeed or fail. His concept of the “technological frame” was, as he himself notes, in some ways “one of the many children” of ideas in Kuhn, but he sees it differing in important ways: First, technological frames are more heterogeneous than disciplinary matrices and related concepts. Although disciplinary matrices contain symbolic generalizations and metaphysical assumptions as well as values, their character is primarily cognitive. Technological frames are not purely cognitive, but also comprise social and material elements. Second and most important, the concept of technological frame is meant to apply to all relevant social grounds, not only to engineers. (126) The technological frame offers both problems and strategies for solving them and serves as a constraint on what can even be posed as a problem, but also, like Kuhn’s paradigms, has a stabilizing effect. And, recalling Soddy and Kuhn, actors who

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are disciplinary outsiders can add the alternative perspectives and problem-solving techniques that help shake up a paradigm or technological frame. The technological frame, like Kuhn’s normal science, explains stability, but Bijker also proposes that “the different degrees of inclusion in a technological frame” of some actors explain the “built-in incentives for change” in technologies. A prime example is that of Leo Baekeland, who, in 1907, succeeded in creating the first synthetic plastic: “partly working within the celluloid frame, but also partly in the frame of electro-chemistry, Baekeland could become an agent of change” (192). Bijker goes on to explain the constraints and possibilities for change that competing technological frames and their actors bring to historical and sociological interpretation.

Science studies and the influence of Bruno Latour The confluence of modernist historiography and philosophy of science, Kuhn and Bijker brings us to an area of scholarship that has been of increasing significance to modernist studies: the insistently interdisciplinary and at times intellectually controversial field known as science studies. While Kuhn’s provocative framing of the disciplinary matrix and paradigms of science in terms of incommensurability suggested sweeping epistemological as well as social, cultural, and even political concerns, his own scholarship tended to isolate the workings of science from larger connections outside of science, even while emphasizing the productive disciplinary boundary crossings among scientific disciplines that often contributed to new paradigms. Nevertheless, Kuhn helped set the stage for science studies, in that he helped turn the focus onto how scientists go about the production of scientific knowledge. Like Kuhn’s term “paradigm,” “science studies” has come to be used so widely that it sometimes risks scholarly incoherence. Nevertheless, it can still be conceptualized fruitfully. As David J. Hess puts it in one of the most lucid and useful efforts to map the field (as it existed through the late 1990s), “Science studies provides a conceptual tool kit for thinking about technical expertise in more sophisticated ways. Science studies tracks the history of disciplines, the dynamics of science as a social institution, and the philosophical

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basis for scientific knowledge” (1). That basic formulation covers work being done in several disciplines—history of science, philosophy of science, institutional sociology of science, social studies of knowledge, and what Hess loosely labels the critical and cultural studies of science and technology. This last area has been the one most engaged by modernist studies. I have described the modernist era in decidedly (if loosely) Kuhnian terms as a period in which many paradigms were shifting in science, technology, and even the social organization of the economy as new modes of responding to the risks of innovation arose. But, in the decades after Kuhn’s work rippled across multiple scholarly and popular arenas, another thinker helped open a productively interdisciplinary approach that drew science studies into the orbit of the literary and cultural critical work of modernist studies: Bruno Latour, the French philosopher and sociologist of science. In their 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Latour and Steve Woolgar helped bring a development in STS in the 1970s known as “laboratory studies” into broader discussion in humanities fields. In laboratory studies, researchers follow scientists in their labs and through the networks of people, institutions, laboratory equipment, and nonhuman participants in their research to conceptualize how scientific knowledge is produced. Woolgar and Latour’s approach to the workings of Roger Guillemin’s laboratory at the Salk Institute came to the attention of literary scholars in part because it often conceptualized the productions of the lab in textual and rhetorical terms. And Latour’s 1987 book, Science in Action, offered STS an approach emerging from the actor-network theory being developed by Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and others. In actor-network theory, human and nonhuman actors (or “actants”), material and conceptual, join together in social networks whose performances create meaning. Science in Action drew together key concepts— such as “technoscience,” “black box,” and the social construction of knowledge—from other thinkers into a form that has inspired a great deal of work across the disciplines. Though the term had been used by others, such as Gaston Bachelard in the 1950s and the Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois beginning in the late 1970s, Latour put “technoscience” into many scholars’ critical vocabularies by adopting this term in Science in

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Action. It is meant to “describe all the elements tied to the scientific contents no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they seem” (174). The term thus encompasses not only the people and methods we might traditionally see as “scientific” but also the material technologies and concerns involved across the scientific enterprise, as well as “supporters, allies, employers, helping hands, believers, patrons and consumers” (175). While Latour’s broad approach to technoscience refuses distinctions that some scholars would like to preserve, Science in Action targets the artificiality of distinctions between “science” and “society,” for instance, as well as “science” and “technology.” As literature and science scholars Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini sum it up, One can say that the sciences seek to know natural objects while the technologies aim to make artifacts that are instrumental for cultural purposes. It is nevertheless the case that neither practice can be adequately contemplated in the absence of the other. One is always already concerned, in Latour’s coinage, with technoscience. Only technological artifacts allow the sciences to construe natural objects scientifically, and this inscribes the objects that science describes (and most certainly, those it creates) with significant cultural traces. Similarly, the discipline of literature and science theorizes texts as technologies of communication and meaning embedded in some material medium of discourse or narration. (xvi) Another key concept that Latour espoused for science studies that, as we shall see, was also adopted in modernist studies was that of the “black box,” a term derived from cybernetics. Facts or machines have been blackboxed when, “no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count” (2–3). Latour called for an approach to science that has inspired a great deal of work in modernist studies: “If you take two pictures, one of the black boxes and the other of the open controversies, they are utterly different. They are as different as the two sides, one lively, the other severe, of a two-faced Janus. ‘Science in the making’ on the right side, ‘all made science’ or ‘ready made science’ on the other” (4). The focus of Latour’s actor-network approach is on the former: “our entry into science and technology

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will be through the back door of science in the making, not through the more grandiose entrance of ready made science” (4). Latour articulates this imperative as his first rule of method: “We study science in action and not ready made science or technology; to do so, we either arrive before the facts and machines are blackboxed or we follow the controversies that reopen them” (258; emphasis in original). Latour’s imperative to concentrate on science in action, rather than ready-made or blackboxed science, is in part why his work has been of such interest to scholars of modernism, science, and technology, whose work treats the periods before many facts and machines had become blackboxed—that period Kuhn would describe in terms of the anomalies, crises, preparadigms, and ultimately establishment of new paradigms within scientific revolutions. But Latour had something at stake that Kuhn had not pursued: the goal of breaking the habit of circular explanation he saw around key concepts such as “nature” and “society,” and instead focusing on the production of knowledge as the settlement of controversy. Among his “Rules of Method,” he includes the following rule: “To determine the objectivity or subjectivity of a claim, the efficiency or perfection of a mechanism, we do not look for their intrinsic qualities but at all the transformations they undergo later in the hands of others. . . . Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. . . . Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Society’s stability, we cannot use Society to explain how and why a controversy has been settled” (258; emphasis in original). This approach is rooted in an area of sociology significant to science studies known as actor-network theory. Reexamining the sciences or technologies before they have become blackboxed has become a key feature of new modernist studies of science and technology, as we will see in the work of Peppis and others.12 In his TLS review of Science in Action, British mathematician and philosopher and historian of science Nicholas Jardine predicted that the book would “have an impact comparable to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions both as a provocation to philosophers and as an inspiration to sociologists and historians of science” (1291). While Kuhn’s book has actually had much more impact outside of academia than Latour’s, Jardine had anticipated its use

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for modernist studies in its shared concerns with literary theory. Jardine had in mind the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. “Like them,” Jardine writes, Latour constantly emphasizes flexibility of interpretation and the “translations” whereby readers assimilate texts to their own expectations and appropriate them for their own purposes. Like Jauss and Iser, Latour is much concerned with the affective powers of “scenes,” whether staged, portrayed or framed in narrative. All of this suggests that what he needs if he is to oust epistemology is an aesthetics of reception of scientific texts and images. (1291) Indeed, while the reception theories of Jauss and Iser have waned in their academic influence since Jardine wrote his review, Latour’s work itself has, in fact, generated a great deal of humanities-based scholarship.

New modernist studies, science, and technology The strong resurgence of scholarly attention to science and technology in what we might now style the “new modernist studies” followed, not coincidentally, within a decade of the second rise of literature and science in the 1980s and owed much to the concerns of that field with the latest developments in the history and philosophy of science, science studies, rhetoric of science, and any number of interdisciplinary engagements of the production of scientific knowledge. By the 1990s, that resurgent field of literature and science had opened several new paths to scholars of modernism in literature and the arts looking to offer richer accounts of modernism, science, and technology during the period when modernist studies diversified its methodologies, approaches, and objects of study. Essentially, modernist studies followed the trajectory Bono tracked in literature and science, moving from approaches simply elucidating the influence of science upon literature (and the references to science in literary works) to asking different questions from different methodological starting places.

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One can see a proliferation of strong exemplars of this shift by the mid-1990s, and many of them were quite explicitly engaged in feminist projects. Squier, whose first monograph had been on Virginia Woolf and the sexual politics of London, had, in Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology, seen her research on “the role of literature in the construction and representation of science” as owing some debt to Kuhn (11). In her groundbreaking work on modernist-era discourses in the life sciences, which we will examine in more detail in Chapter 3, Squier pushed Kuhn’s theories of the paradigm and paradigm shift into directions Kuhn himself had not ventured with them, arguing that paradigms “are often contained and perpetuated by the literary structures and forms that escape our examination when we study the production of scientific knowledge: by analogies, origin stories, metaphors” (Squier, Babies, 203). As Evelyn Fox Keller argued, “the ways in which we talk about scientific objects are not simply determined by empirical evidence but rather actively influence the kind of evidence we seek (and hence are likely to find)” (35). Latour becomes essential to Squier’s call for feminist literature and science studies to turn to the “micro-processes that produced” literature and science as disciplines, to “literature and science in action and not ready made literature or science.” As scholars of modernism had excelled at the critical analysis of text, image, and discourse more broadly and had long mined the rich veins of popular culture of the period, their turn to literature and science and to science studies has significantly enriched our understanding of the modernist period of science and culture in transition.

Two cultures? I would like to suggest that scholarship on the modernist period has also offered new perspectives on a commonplace that, while it has been critiqued for many decades, still remains in our twentyfirst-century society to some extent. While the modernist period of shifting scientific paradigms, emerging technological frames, and proliferating modernist and avant-garde manifestations in literature and the arts certainly witnessed an increasing specialization of scientific knowledge and professionalization, it would be anachronistic to read the motivations of post–Second World War

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arguments about the “two cultures” back into the 1910s or 1920s. Indeed, it has become almost a familiar critical gesture over the past few decades for scholars working in the history of science or science and literature to warn against a too-ready acceptance of the bifurcation asserted by C. P. Snow’s famous catchphrase, “the two cultures,” and his bemoaning the separation of the sciences and literature among intellectuals. In May 1959, long after modernism had waned in the United States and Western Europe, C. P. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture on “The Two Cultures” and then expanded it into a book of the same name. (In 1995, the TLS called it one of the 100 most influential books since the Second World War.) Snow argued that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. When I say the intellectual life, I mean to include also a large part of our practical life, because I should be the last person to suggest the two can at the deepest level be distinguished” (4). As he saw it, “Literary intellectuals at one pole— at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension— sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding” (4). By the 1980s, an influential series in the rapidly growing field of literature and science could dismiss the “two cultures” thesis as a “not very helpful cliché” (Levine 3). George Levine argued that “it is possible and fruitful to understand how literature and science are mutually shaped by their participation in the culture at large—in the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, economic, and political communities which both generate and take their shape from them” (5–6). The editors of a recent volume on the field of literature and science not only note the inapplicability of Snow’s opposition of literature and science in earlier historical periods but also acknowledge its marking of the sense that “knowledge production in the modern world increasingly proceeds through the specialized or technical languages that enclose separate disciplinary spheres” (Clarke and Rossini xvi). But recent scholarship on the modernist era has worked to “bridge” the “two cultures” divide, as Mark Micale puts it in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (vii), and to contextualize Snow’s comments in the culture of postwar Britain (Ortolano; Bowler; Small).

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Print culture of modernism and science One might turn to the print culture of the modernist period as a general index of the extent to which scientists and others, to use Angelique Richardson’s phrase, “spoke a common language,” or to test Snow’s alarmist formulation of the “two cultures” as characterized by “a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Historians of science have taken up science’s public representation and its engagement with broad audiences and public issues, and they have identified popular science writing in books and periodicals as key resources for understanding these issues in the first half of the twentieth century (before television, much less the internet, changed the media through which science is disseminated outside of the education system). From her vantage point in the last decade of the twentieth century, LaFollette could note that “we routinely accept as a fashionable truism the argument that there are ‘two cultures,’ but we have insufficient information on how any such separation operates; we observe tensions between the citizenry and the scientific establishment, yet we propose few plausible explanations for their existence other than ‘disillusionment’ or ‘loss of confidence’” (2). To sort out how understandings of science and scientists developed in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, LaFollette turned to popular periodicals: Descriptions of science were especially vivid in the popular periodicals of early twentieth-century America. Curled up by the fireside, teenagers could learn about the latest exploits of physicists and chemists; their parents could read how research could help win a war or cure disease. Until the rise of television in the late 1950s, mass magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan were information sources about the world of science that were easily accessible to millions of readers in all parts of the country and from all walks of life. (3) In the United States, this attitude that science should be made available to mass audiences led, in LaFollette’s account, to a demand for science articles in popular magazines that did not sharply decline until the 1930s. Other historians have traced an increase in popular science writing in America during the 1920s, and Ronald C. Tobey has suggested that the increase was at the prompting of the scientific

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community itself, after the First World War, in an effort to establish a national science program (Tobey chapters 1–3). But the period from roughly 1900 through the early 1930s also featured a number of high-profile scientists in Britain publishing books meant to bring a broader audience accessible accounts of the new scientific paradigms. While highly technical articles in specialized scientific journals had become the norm for scientific professions by the beginning of the twentieth century, Bowler has pushed back against the “myth of the isolated professional,” the common misconception that the full professionalization and specialization of science made scientists reluctant to engage general audiences, as they had done earlier in the Victorian period. Bowler has shown that “in the decades after 1900 a significant proportion of Britain’s scientists tried their hand at nonspecialist writing, and some of them made a regular habit of it” (3). Publishers of books and mass-circulation periodicals, including newspapers, reached out to those who wished to engage in home study or evening classes (Bowler 1–2). And scientists such as Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, Frederick Soddy, James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, and Sir Oliver Lodge published several books that reached literary figures and educated intelligentsia. Einstein himself published such works (in translation) with British publishers, and, of course, James and Alix Strachey were publishing their translations of Freud in English through Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Through books such as these, writers from Woolf, James Joyce, Edith Sitwell, H. G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence to Lawrence Durrell engaged with science as published by scientists themselves. (And, of course, many modernists were reading classics of nineteenth-century science, such as those by Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz, Hermann von Helmholtz, and many others.) Recent work, such as that of Elizabeth Leane, has focused on the textual strategies of popular science writing. Leane argues that popularizing science books, often by scientists, “can be usefully viewed as an interface between the ‘two cultures’” and are instances of “cross-disciplinary exchange” and even “disciplinary skirmishes” (3). Michael Whitworth has shown that such books had significant sales: “Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World sold over 10,000 copies in its first fourteen months; Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe sold 70,000 copies in its first two months” (46). Moreover, the literary periodicals

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important to modernism (The Athenaeum and The Criterion, for example), as Whitworth shows, “demonstrate that science was deeply embedded in literary culture” (45). The little magazines so significant to modernist literary publication (such as the New Freewoman and The Egoist) also engaged science as well.

Summing up The concerns and methods that animate research in modernism, science, and technology can be summarized in the following (far from exhaustive) list: 1 Primary focus on science and technology as constituents of the broader society and culture of modernism. Though different theoretical perspectives inform the approaches by scholars of modernism, science, and technology, virtually all are avidly interdisciplinary. 2 Emphasis on material artifacts, whether textual or not, in the production of scientific fact and sociocultural meaning. Science and technology are often considered together. 3 Examination of literary, rhetorical, and aesthetic forms of science and literature—not simply thematic engagements. 4 Turn to periodicals as well as science writing, popular science, science fiction, both in the periodicals and in books, as an archive through which to map the cultural, social, and intellectual connections in modernism, science, and technology. 5 Recognition of the important social, cultural, and epistemological implications of the new scientific and technological paradigms of the modernist era, along with a similarly sophisticated understanding of the persistence of features from nineteenth-century and earlier paradigms in frequently mutated form during the paradigm shifts of the early twentieth century.

Overview The chapters that follow will be organized around broad domains of science not entirely demarcated from each other during the

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period, but generally gaining recognition in the academic contexts that were becoming the institutional home of much science of the period: the physical sciences, life sciences, and social sciences. Chapter 2, “The Physical Sciences and Mathematics,” draws upon recent scholarship in modernism, science, and technology to chart the shared engagements of modernism and the physical sciences and mathematics that helped inform the paradigm shifts of the period. Focusing on modernist culture’s emphasis upon tropes and themes of energy, and the developments across the physical sciences that drew the nature of energy and of matter increasingly together, this chapter shows that, in terms of its relationship to science, modernism loosely breaks down into two stages. An early modernism emerges within the context of Victorian scientific paradigms that were undergoing an unsettled phase—some in crisis, some reaching widespread circulation and taking on ranges of implication well beyond their original scientific or technological origins, and some soon to be abandoned or transformed in unanticipated ways. These included thermodynamics, late classical ether physics, extradimensional geometries, and the birth of radiochemistry and what later became known as nuclear physics. This period was fascinated by invisible energies driven by a mutually reinforcing loop of engineering breakthroughs and scientific interpretations, all shared as part of a rapidly modernizing culture at the turn of the century. Hertz’s radio transmitter through Marconi’s wireless, the discovery of X-rays and of radioactivity, the use of the cloud chamber and new detecting devices were key events in a cultural moment obsessed with such energies. A later period encompassing roughly the 1920s and 1930s, including high modernism and the advent of surrealism, demonstrated the shared concerns of modernism and the new physics, as the mathematical formalism and increasingly unvisualizable sciences of relativity and quantum physics signaled a final break with classical physics. The crises of representation and realism in literature, the arts, and sciences and the move from the causal and mechanical explanations of classical physics to the descriptionist and statistical bases of the later sciences all had their seeds in the earlier Victorian sciences that participated in the emergence of early modernism. These latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century concerns with unraveling or shifting paradigms and the emergence of early modernist literature and art reveal the sharing and expansion of resources among the

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sciences, technologies, arts, and literatures of this period of rapid modernization and scientific upheaval. Chapter 3, “The Life Sciences,” turns to the modernist culture contributing to and arising from upheavals in the life sciences that were almost as radical as those in the physical sciences. If the primary focus of the physical sciences was on the subatomic particles, strange radiations, even stranger geometries and quantum mechanics that came to describe them, the attention of the life sciences was directed toward cells. Paradigm shifts in biology involved the nature and organization of cells in living organisms, and the life sciences came to reinterpret the very nature of life itself. This chapter explores the shifts in metaphors guiding biology, with the conceptual and metaphorical binary of mechanism and vitalism giving way to a new organicism. Issues of organic form, and of the murky boundaries of the organic and inorganic, were probed and explored in modernism throughout literature, art, film, and even architecture. The new neuron doctrine in neurobiology (a key aspect of Gertrude Stein’s medical education and research at Johns Hopkins University) understood the nervous system not in terms of a continuous network, seen in the metaphors of telegraph or railroad lines by which Victorians understood it, but rather as individual, adjacent neuron cells, separated by synapses, with implications for modernist culture and writing practices. Moreover, advances in laboratory research permitted tissue to be cultured outside of a living body, and allowed scientists steeped in evolutionary, embryological, and early genetic research (in the era after Mendel’s work was reinterpreted) to deploy the resources of imaginative literature to understand the implications and possible paths of their research. The chapter will situate in modernist culture the growth of genetics and embryology and its attendant technologies of reproduction, as well as research in areas including cell culture, germ theory, epidemiology, neuroanatomy, nonvitalist organicism, biocentrism in art and literature, optics and physiology, and even that most positivist of practices—medicine. Finally, it will turn briefly to new ecocritical interpretations of modernism and nature study that are reinvigorating modernist studies. Chapter 4, “The Social Sciences,” turns to the relatively recently emerging human sciences such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology, which were creating validity for themselves as sciences

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through the institutional power of academia and professional associations. These new sciences gained political and social urgency and credibility across the United States, Britain, and much of Europe as they confronted concerns about degeneration in the face of urban modernity, or about the nature of crowd mentality, or the psychological trauma inflicted by modern warfare as seen in shell shock. New disciplines such as sexology or the new psychology of psychoanalysis, and new social research, such as that conducted by the Mass-Observation movement in Britain in the 1930s, gave a scientific imperative to questions about human motivation, behavior, and emotion that were central to modernist literature and culture. These newly professionalizing sciences behaved differently than the physical sciences that Thomas Kuhn described with the concept of paradigms. Multiple paradigms could coexist—multiple schools of psychology, for instance—and proliferate without undermining one another. Moreover, virtually all of these social sciences intersected fairly directly with the biological sciences, just as neurochemistry and neurobiology today inform psychology and psychiatry to a great degree. The chapter culminates in two broad social movements that turned to the social and biological sciences in response to fears of degeneration at the heart of urban modernity—namely, the eugenics movement and the “back to nature” movement in the United States. Finally, in its coda, the book turns to critical disability studies as a new arena of inquiry for modernist studies that allows new purchase on the sciences, modernisms, and legal and ethical issues of the period. Like ecocriticism (discussed in Chapter 3), critical disability studies orients modernist studies toward significant political, social, and cultural concerns not only of the modernist period, but of the present. We then conclude by returning to the “two cultures” debate discussed above, exploring how the study of science and technology in modernism reengages such debates around the key imperative of much of this research—interdisciplinarity. We shall now turn to the physical sciences as the area that saw the most sweeping paradigm shifts during the modernist period, the one that most alerted the broad reading public to the fundamental reconceptualization of the universe and of the sciences by which we approach it.

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Notes 1 Even before the Great War, religious historian Philip Jenkins notes, a widespread apocalypticism emerged as a response to rapid modernization. As Jenkins argues, “From the late nineteenth century these [apocalyptic] ideas experienced a worldwide vogue, as believers tried to make sense of the sweeping changes they witnessed around them—the collapse of old social assumptions, the rise of gigantic cities and mass society, and the spread of seemingly miraculous technology. Across cultures and denominations, the resulting mood of expectation was peaking just as the war began” (137). Each of the major combatant countries had their own interpretations of the war as the battle at the end of times. In the United States, Billy Sunday and other religious leaders described combat between Hell (with the Kaiser as the Beast) and the forces of Heaven, while Germany’s Ludwig Ganghofer would describe England as “Babylon, the great Whore” (Jenkins 140–41). 2 As John White put it, “Marinetti singles out the invention of wireless telegraphy as one of the great milestones in civilization’s progress towards the Futurist electric millennium of the twenty-first century’’ (148). See Toscano (109–29). 3 North concludes: “With this history, running from ancient China to Fascist Italy and back in place, Make It New can be seen to imply a complete history of the concept of novelty. Of course, the explicit emphasis of this history is on models of recurrence, from organic renewal to Fascist revolution, and there is no doubt that Pound felt the appeal of the total transformation that such models promise. But it is also hard to miss the fact that Pound’s actual practice in his successive repetitions of this slogan is one of quotation and combination. Pound habitually worked by arranging and rearranging certain bits of knowledge that had been canonized within his own idiosyncratic system, and the ancient Chinese saying is but one of many nodes in this system, attracting to itself over the years bits of Mussolini and bits of Neoplatonism and even bits of modern anthropology. The form, then, of Make It New is recombinant, as it comes to signify a whole anthology of Pound’s efforts and interests. As he says himself in ‘The Serious Artist,’ major poets ‘heap together and arrange and harmonize the results of many men’s labour. This very faculty for amalgamation is a part of their genius’” (168). 4 Davidson notes that “most firms found that the surest way to grow was to perfect the manufacturing of the same products, year after year. G.M., U.S. Steel, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola and

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other iconic companies achieved their breakthrough insights in the pre-corporate era and spent the next several decades refining them, perhaps introducing a new product every decade or so” (44). 5 Bono explains that this revived field of literature and science, which draws upon science studies and history of science, targeted “an abiding, if false dichotomy: that between discourse and (material) practice, or, to put it differently, between text and action. . . . The world as we know it and study it is filled with material-textual, or material-discursive, hybrids—instruments; machines; illustrations; diagrams; maps; charts; physical models; computer simulations—that are simultaneously part of the material world and instruments for our knowing and manipulating it. They are all, in their own way, what I like to call material metaphors: embodied metaphors in action” (558–59). 6 See Fuller (266–80) for a detailed examination of Lewis’s work in relationship to Kuhn’s. 7 He fought for France in a Russian brigade in the Great War, ultimately abandoning Russia because of the Revolution. While primarily teaching in Paris, he also took positions in Cairo and in the United States, where he moved because of the Nazi occupation of France. 8 Though it was published late in his life, Koyré’s From Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) perhaps provides the best statement of his research and arguments from across his career. Ultimately, Koyré sought an internalist account of science to protect it from subsumption in the realms of politics, technology, economics, and modern warfare, imagining the possibility that science could simply disappear entirely under these conditions (Fuller 66). 9 Kuhn acknowledged his debt to Fleck in his preface (xiii–ix), though he positions Fleck’s Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache as “an essay that anticipates many of my own ideas” (ix), rather than the source of them. 10 Indeed, following Peter Galison, Henning Schmidgen, and others, one might characterize Kuhn’s thought as more of an “antipositivist” project in the aftermath of Carnap’s positivism than a “post-positivist” approach like those of some more recent historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science (Schmidgen 337; Galison, Image 781–844). As Schmidgen puts it, “Whether it be the grand story of single observations resulting in theories or, instead, a macrohistory of paradigms that successively break down, only to yield new ones, Carnap as well as Kuhn were convinced that the existence and development of science can be depicted by master narratives, or grands récits” (337).

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11 This agenda is represented, in Fuller’s history, by Kuhn’s mentor, James Bryant Conant—president of Harvard during Kuhn’s early years there, then the director of the National Defense Research Committee that oversaw the atomic bomb program, and later chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, overseeing 1950s attacks on communism. In Fuller’s critical interpretation, Kuhn’s formulation of normal science and scientific revolutions insulated science in academic arenas of abstraction: “Arguments that would be understood as contestable in a political setting, because agents see them as potentially affecting the course of events, can easily acquire the status of fact when transferred to the depoliticized environment of the academy, where agents are removed from the levers of change. In other words, we may have a situation in which abstraction implies less, not more, critical reflection on the material conditions of thought” (6). Indeed, as we shall see in later chapters, in many ways Soddy had anticipated Fuller’s critiques of Kuhnian “normal science” and would eventually retreat from laboratory research entirely into areas that would appeal to other modernists—monetary policy, political critique, and even ecological thinking. 12 To return to our example of the Italian Futurist Marinetti, Toscano invokes Latour to argue that, before wireless technology got blackboxed as radio, audiences to whom it had been presented, and who had learned about it through representations of the science and technology and ideologically saturated representations of the meaning of wireless, in part created their understanding of wireless through the representations by Marinetti and the Futurists (xiii).

2 The physical sciences and mathematics

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx and Engels summarized the experience of modernity in the oft-quoted phrase “All that is solid melts into air.” Expanding upon Marx and Engels’s phrase, Marshall Berman argued that “to be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air.” But, he continued, “to be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom” (Berman 345–46). Scientists were not immune to this experience of disintegration and renewal. Indeed, though science might at times be invoked as a stabilizing force of progress, it also productively generates its own endless cycle of destruction and renewal. Around 1905, Einstein suffered an epistemological crisis at a moment of scientific revolution. Unable to reconcile the old classical physics paradigms with the new science of quanta, the twentieth-century icon of scientific insurrection fretted, “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built” (qtd in Parkinson 21). Yet many of the physicists and chemists of the modernist era— Einstein with some struggle, Soddy with infectious enthusiasm— would find themselves at home in the maelstrom of modernity. And the physical sciences and technologies of the period, as well as the modernist arts and literatures that engaged with them, helped

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sweep away many of the cognitive and epistemological certainties of the nineteenth century. Major developments in the physical sciences and related technologies were so significant a feature of the culture of modernism that a comprehensive engagement with recent scholarship on the subject would easily overwhelm this volume. The role of fin de siècle photography, drawing, and painting in scientific understandings of the nature of evidence; the part played by the advances in telescope optics in Edwin Hubble’s paradigm-shifting work in extragalactic astronomy; or the new possibilities for mass production and mass destruction brought about by advances in industrial chemistry—any of these topics, and others, could occupy much of this chapter.1 But many of the fundamental paradigm shifts of the physical sciences can be organized around new understandings of energy and matter that were perhaps the most significant scientific, technological, and cultural achievements of the modernist period. Looking at modernism through the lens of these sciences and technologies, as scholars have done with an increasingly interdisciplinary sophistication, one immediately perceives the “centrality of the theme of energy in modernist discourse” (1), as Linda Henderson and Bruce Clarke put it. To be sure, From Energy to Information, their influential 2002 volume, makes a compelling case that a shift from modernity to postmodernity might be viewed “in terms of the conceptual crossover from energy to information” (1). But even before Einstein’s famous E = mc2 quantified the interchangeability of mass and energy in 1905, the sciences of energy had already begun to raise paradigm-shaking questions about the nature of matter, of life and death, and even of the existence of undetectable yet omnipresent particles, extradimensional space, and an unseen universe. The physical sciences of the modernist period made claims that were simply bizarre by the standards of classical physics and chemistry. Late-nineteenth-century science had dealt with invisible yet at least visualizable matter, forces, and geometries. As Michael Whitworth sums it up, “Scientific research into matter in the period 1880 to 1930 began with a world that was so minute as to be invisible, and ended with one that was so strange as to be unvisualizable” (“Physics,” 206). Although Darwinian evolutionary theory was perhaps the most widely noted scientific paradigm shift of the nineteenth century and Freudian psychoanalysis one of the most influential new paradigms

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to emerge at the fin de siècle, the physical sciences and mathematics of the late nineteenth century through the first third of the twentieth are an essential starting place for our exploration of modernism, science, and technology. The physical sciences enjoyed a special prestige during the period.2 As we shall see, the way modernist-era science came to understand or describe energy and its relationship to matter shows paradigm shifts in specific sciences collectively signaling much broader changes in culture and epistemology during the modernist era. Clarke’s term “technoscientism” usefully describes the intermingling of concepts among the sciences and other social or cultural fields, or the outright appropriation of scientific terms and ideas outside of their original scientific context. It draws together the sociohistorical term “scientism”—indicating, often negatively, the appropriation of science for nonscientific activities— with the theoretical work by a host of scholars, including Bruno Latour, Gillian Beer, and Donna Haraway, “in which the splicing together of science and technology also implies their inextricable relations to society as a whole” (Clarke, Energy Forms, 7). For historians of science, it is a crucial concept.

Nineteenth-century paradigms Across the nineteenth century, the physical sciences and mathematics had been phenomenally successful at professionalizing, building institutions and public interest, and contributing to the technological and engineering developments that reshaped industrial nations.3 Narratives of scientific progress seemed easily supportable by successes in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy as well as in engineering triumphs, including in chemistry and electricity. It was an age of energy as much as it was an age of empire. Yet in retrospect, it might be seen as an extraordinarily successful period of “normal science,” in Kuhn’s language, rather than one of revolutionary paradigm shifts in the physical sciences. Revolutions were plentiful indeed—think of the European political revolutions of 1848, or, within the life sciences, the advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory. But some scientific and technological developments would prove their revolutionary consequences only many years later. Victorian thermodynamics, as we shall see, was a product of an age during which energy most

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significantly meant steam power, rather than electricity, and the transfer of energy central to the science was laden with concerns about work during the Industrial Revolution and about force going back to the age of Newton. The centrality of entropy to thermodynamic thinking, its application to areas of science and culture well beyond engineering and the physics of inanimate systems, and the nonclassical, Newtonian demands of statistical analysis in thermodynamics became crucial in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

New geometries Non-Euclidean geometries emerged in Germany across the nineteenth century. Carl Friedrich Gauss’s early work in the field was not published, but his student at the University of Göttingen, Bernhard Riemann, developed a strong non-Euclidean geometry a half century later, which was then further elaborated by Felix Klein and others. This development became crucial to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in the new century. Klein and other mathematicians, including Arthur Cayley, the Sadlerian Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge, argued over the relationships among Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries, with Klein ultimately seeing Euclidean, hyperbolic, and elliptical geometries all as independent and self-subsistent (Struve and Struve 152). But the full impact of these and other non-Euclidean geometries (and their challenge to the cognitive authority of Euclid) can be registered early in the twentieth century in modernist culture and the “new physics.” Likewise, the noncommutative properties of matrix calculus, though understood in the nineteenth century, became crucial when Max Born suggested the little-known branch of mathematics to Heisenberg to solve problems in his quantum theory and thus to create matrix mechanics in the 1920s (Parkinson 29).

Ether physics While thermodynamics and non-Euclidean geometries are examples of Victorian-era sciences whose paradigm-shifting implications

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were realized later, during the modernist era, other highly prominent physics paradigms of the earlier period also began to collapse. Perhaps most significant of these was the ether physics that had dominated the nineteenth century and raised issues about the nature of fundamental forces, setting the stage for wave/ particle tensions that eventually led to the dualities of quantum physics. While the notion of a “luminiferous ether” helped unify electromagnetic energies and make them central to physics, the approach of ether physics, as we shall see momentarily, was thoroughly classical Newtonian. Efforts to explain Newton’s force of gravity itself in terms of particles of something like ether had occurred as early as the late seventeenth (Nicolas Fatio de Duillier) and mid-eighteenth centuries (Georges-Louis Le Sage). By the nineteenth century, scientists assumed that electromagnetic waves must propagate through a medium. Victorian physics thus made increasingly significant demands for all space to be filled with a mysterious, rarified, and virtually undetectable medium, the ether. Though attempts to detect the existence of such a medium obtained negative results, the ether paradigm was held by some physicists well beyond 1905, when Einstein had shown it was unnecessary. Moreover, modernism emerged at a moment when ether was not only increasingly discredited by some scientists but also lingering in popular culture through its late-Victorian-era propensity to spark speculation, even by scientists, about areas outside the realm of Victorian physics—such as telepathy, the afterlife, and the physical existence of a spatial fourth dimension.

Thermodynamics Another arena in which the move away from classical mechanics was later understood as a paradigm shift was in the use of probability and statistical mechanics to understand large thermodynamic systems. The laws of thermodynamics were a striking achievement of the steam age, a mid-nineteenth-century confluence of classical physics, industrial technology and engineering, and social and cultural imperatives. One can locate the emergence of classical thermodynamics in the period from the 1820s to the 1860s, during which key principles were formulated by British, German, and French scientists and engineers.4 That these thinkers worked

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within shared seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paradigms helps explain their more or less simultaneous contributions to classical thermodynamics. But developments in thermodynamics in both the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries strongly illustrate the benefits of interdisciplinary understandings of science and technology as aspects of a broader social and cultural milieu and not simply isolated institutions emerging from a narrowly conceived discipline. From the start, cultural, social, and political conditions made the articulation of the laws of thermodynamics not only possible but also widely resonant. Decades ago, historians of science, including Kuhn himself, began to demonstrate the significance of social and theological metaphors and concerns (Myers 35) to the development of thermodynamics—especially in the writings of Kelvin, Clerk Maxwell, and von Helmholtz. Historians of science and literature, such as M. Norton Wise, Crosbie Smith, Anson Rabinbach, George Levine, and Greg Myers, have shifted the focus from the pessimism and cosmic decay implicit in the second law to much more widely circulating implications of the first law, and thermodynamics in general, for waste, efficiency, and work (MacDuffie 207). Myers, for example, explored “how the language of social and moral criticism came to permeate the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century British popularizers of physics, and how the language of physics came to be used for social and moral criticism” (36). M. Norton Wise has continued to investigate the reach of thermodynamics into even wider cultural issues—for example, the role it played in the gendering of concepts of time (“Time Discovered,” 39). Victorianists Gillian Beer and George Levine reject categorical separations of literature and science in their work. And Tina Young Choi has recently argued that the idea of conservation of energy formulated in the first law was applied widely to both scientific and social issues, particularly in tandem with ideals such as national and social selfsufficiency, which related to thermodynamic conservation’s sense of a containable system informed by cause and effect. It also served as a strong example of “the ways in which nineteenth-century scientific and literary discourses enabled each other’s articulation . . . [and] were engaged in the same discursive struggles” (303). Rather than looking simply at thematic representations of thermodynamics, Choi explores the relationships between thermodynamics and

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literary forms and conventions, such as narrative closure and omniscient narrative. If the conservation of energy articulated in the first law of thermodynamics—that energy could transform from one form to another but not be created or destroyed—preoccupied the minds of many in the mid-nineteenth century, by the end of the century (and during the nascence of modernism), the second law of thermodynamics had become more urgent. Engineers and physicists theorizing the conversion of forms of energy described by the first law of thermodynamics could see that, while energy was not destroyed as it was converted into the work of a mechanical engine, some of it was always lost, often through friction, as wasted heat. In 1850, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius gave this dissipation, this increasing lack of availability of energy for work, a name: entropy. William Thomson (later Kelvin) and Hermann von Helmholtz continued to formalize it as the second law (Whitworth 59).

Modernism and entropy Thermodynamics, and especially entropy, has been of special significance to scholars of modernism, science, and technology. The shifting modes of scientific understanding that classical thermodynamics straddled have allowed modernist studies to be particularly in tune with the ideologies and formal reach of thermodynamics in early modernist culture. Energy itself, as Clarke points out, is a notion with theological and humanistic origins that only later became a key concept for physics, and the term never entirely lost its earlier resonances (Energy Forms, 2). Moreover, the birth of thermodynamics in a period during which Newtonian physics still reigned supreme, along with the concepts and language of dynamic chaos, allowed for particularly wide-reaching allegories and forms (8). Clarke describes early modernism’s move away from nineteenth-century naturalism’s “empiricist and deterministic literary scientism,” and an emphasis on “the detached description of discrete items,” toward an “immaterial and energic scientism patterned after the force fields and energy transformations of latenineteenth-century electromagnetic and atomic physics”: witness Ezra Pound’s “rose in the steel dust” (Dora Marsden, 5).

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What we see in early modernism’s engagement with thermodynamics, and especially with entropy, is a period of rampant boundary crossing in the sciences and interactions with broad­ er cultural, social, ideological forces, with all of the muddle and ­generative creativity of shared linguistic resources. For example, ­vitalism, the enduring legacy of eighteenth-century reactions against mechanical explanations of life, in its effort to conceptualize what distinguished living from inanimate systems, nevertheless adopted Newtonian terms and concepts—Newton’s gravitational force ­appears in the “life force” of vitalism (Clarke, Dora Marsden, 28), and dances around the edges of biology and a path not taken by most energy physicists of the period. And the dissipation of energy in a closed system in thermodynamics was tied to concerns about biological and cultural degeneration and even the end of life on earth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Entropy offered up much more horrific possibilities than the inefficient functioning of steam engines. It was quickly applied to a wide variety of issues involving inanimate matter. Kelvin himself helped raise a disturbing implication of the second law of thermodynamics in a popular article titled “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat” in ­Macmillan’s Magazine in March 1862, highlighting the consequences for life as stars cool and energy dissipates: a seemingly irreversible slide ­toward entropy creates a cold, exhausted universe, whose energy is incapable of supporting work of any kind. It was all just a matter of time. But how much time? Kelvin used the cooling of the sun to estimate how long the sun had made life sustainable on earth—and hence whether such a world had existed long enough for evolution to have generated its current life forms. More interesting to many, though, was how much sun we had left. Using thermodynamic calculations, Kelvin concluded, “As for the future, we may say, with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation” (“On the Age,” 393). Science fiction of the late nineteenth century produced some classic images tying together the degeneration of humanity and a dying sun. French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s 1894 classic, La Fin du Monde, portrayed humanity surviving a narrow miss by a comet that would have destroyed all life on earth only to contemplate a frozen, lifeless, dark end. In 1925, Eliot’s “The

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Hollow Men” concluded thus: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Some thirty years earlier in a story Flammarion published in English in the Contemporary Review as “The Last Days of the Earth,” a dog whimpers over the bodies of the last human couple on a dying, frozen earth: And the snow continued to fall in a fine powder on to the entire surface of the earth. And the earth continued to turn on its axis night and day, and to float through the immensity of space. And the sun continued to shine, but with a reddish and barren light. But long afterwards it became entirely extinguished, and the dark terrestrial cemetery continued to revolve in the night around the enormous invisible black ball. And the stars continued to scintillate in the immensity of the heavens. And the infinite universe continued to exist with its billions of suns and its billions of living or extinct planets. (569) Depictions of this inevitable “heat death” did not simply ­concern the future of energy and inanimate matter. Looking at nineteenthcentury popularizations of thermodynamics, Greg Myers has ­argued that, “like Darwinism, thermodynamics has been intertwined with social thought, influenced by it and influencing it since the earliest formulations” (“Nineteenth-Century Popularizations,” 35). Thermodynamic scientists, such as von Helmholtz, Kelvin, and Clerk Maxwell, drew on concepts and metaphors from theology in their science, just as later thinkers important to modernism, such as Henry Adams and Gustave Le Bon, turned to thermodynamics “as a vision of universal history, a scientific explanation for what they see as the growing disorder of society” (36). At the fin de siècle, social and cultural concerns that modernity itself was causing social and even biological degeneration tied directly to heat death. As the above discussion suggests, much modernist scholarship on thermodynamics has involved a capacious sense of text. Scholars have engaged with periodicals—generalist journals such as the Fortnightly Review or Athenaeum (in Whitworth’s work), the Freewoman/New Freewoman/Egoist constellation, or the New Age (in Clarke’s)—and popular science writing and science fiction, alongside scientific articles and books and modernist literature in periodical or book form. This scholarship has carefully attended to

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issues of form and figurative language in modernism and science, whether Whitworth’s focus on metaphor, or Clarke’s on allegory, and epistemological issues of science as they emerge in relationship to social, cultural, and political discourse. To H. G. Wells in his most famous novel, The Time Machine (1895), all the social and biological evolution caught up in his Darwinian and Marxian tale of the Morlocks and the Eloi essentially amount to the same cold silent end as Flammarion had imagined. As the time traveler recounts of his trip to the distant future of a dim sun and dying earth: “The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it” (70). The interplay between the science of thermodynamics, the technologies of the steam age, and the social and cultural and even religious imperatives with which thermodynamics was caught up produced different consequences and interpretations over time. The engagement of various modernist authors such as Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield has been an important focus in modernist studies. By the later nineteenth century, as we have seen, the thermodynamics of entropy and dissipation was already connected to cultural fears of degeneration as a consequence of modern, technologized, urban civilization (as in the works of Nordau and Le Bon, as well as in Flammarion’s fiction). Indeed, social energetics models arising in the Victorian period made the dissipation of energy in a mechanical system and in a society or civilization more or less functionally equivalent. But the efficiency and conservation ideologies of the mid-Victorian period found a further scientistic complication in the pairing of vitalism with thermodynamics at the individual human level. By the early modernist period, the mechanistic underpinnings of vitalism (which gave us phrases such as “life energy” or “life force”) had been synthesized into “electrovitalism” as a bulwark against the inevitable dissipation of energy in an inorganic system that led to the fears of heat death. Victorian concerns from Darwin that species were not essential—and were neither permanent nor planned—and from Kelvin that the material universe itself was not permanent (Rabinbach 69) were answered by modernists’ appeals to individual vitalism.

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For a quick example of scholarship on this issue, we can turn to Bruce Clarke’s reading of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Vitalism as an answer to entropy cut across disparate political ideologies. As Clarke writes, The imperative to escape from the rule of entropy tied progressive and reactionary evolutionisms together: they diverged merely in their counterentropic strategies. Edward Carpenter envisioned a spontaneous and uncoerced individual and communal exfoliation beyond the rule of entropy, whereas social Darwinists in the wake of Spencer and Huxley would make themselves fit for survival by defying entropy and hoarding their prerogatives, by maintaining and strengthening defensive differentiations of class, gender, and race. (Dora Marsden, 162) Lawrence, as early as his Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), had posited a mystical vitalism as a life source separate from the functioning of materialist dissolution. In Women in Love (1920), Lawrence’s character Gerald Crich offers his ever more efficient management of industrial coal mining and production as a bulwark against entropy, and he engages in a kind of erotic entropic struggle with Gudrun, whose energy is diminished while Gerald’s increases in their sexual relations. But, as Clarke shows, “Lawrence inserts Gerald’s industrial sorting into the antivital register of destructive mechanism. In the narrator’s evaluation, Gerald’s mechanical willfulness promotes rather than reduces entropy: ‘It was the first great step in undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic’” (Dora Marsden, 165). Gerald’s icy death late in the novel demonstrates the failure of his counterentropic strategy. Moreover, the novel tests out a different counter-entropic sorting strategy through the character of Rupert Birkin, who introduces the gender polarities of Weininger and other gender theorists of the day into his thermodynamic scheme. As Clarke puts it, “Birkin now interweaves the vitalist and thermodynamic threads of his thought with an electromagnetic schema of gender polarity, giving ‘coolness’ a positive valence, as of crisp spring mornings, relative to the negative fires of mechanical passion, and then complicates the whole complex with the added twist of a daemonic evocation of superhumanity” (Dora Marsden, 166). But Birkin’s efforts are not

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seen simply as Lawrence’s solution to the problems of dissipation posed in materialistic physics or vitalist evolutionary schemas: “Despite the manifest organic motives of Lawerence’s vitalism, Birkin tendentiously analogizes the sexual polarity of male and female to thermodynamic or electrical differentials, that is, to the mechanics of physical system. If thermodynamic difference is necessary to produce usable energy—if there must be polarity to generate an electrical current—then, by analogy, polar sexual differences are needed to maintain any possibility of a ‘productive exchange’” (168). Here, the sexual binaries break down the homoerotic tensions between Birkin and Gerald. The narrator even distances himself from the excesses of Birkin’s musings on polarity: “So Birkin meditated whilst he was ill” (qtd on 168). Where Clarke goes with this thermodynamic quandary in Lawrence’s work, as well as in that of other modernists (Marsden and William Carlos Williams, for example), is toward the development his later work tracks from modernist cultures of energy to postmodern information: One small benefit of our postmodernity is the relatively recent scientific affirmation that thermodynamic entropy does not pose an imminent or elemental threat, that an “escape from entropy” is both impossible and unnecessary. We now think of entropy as the partner of information. Disorder is not entirely random—it can be made to signify—nor is it necessarily destructive—it may herald or provoke higher organizational levels. . . . If Lawrence often fashions elaborate defenses against “dissolution” and “corruption,” it may also be said that on occasion he saw past the ideological chimeras of his culture and seized upon the utility of dynamical chaos, as we now understand the term: at times he grasped both the promise of anarchic creativity and the positive energies to be derived from entropic processes of “waste.” (Dora Marsden, 169–70) Though modernist scholars have explored the implications of the mechanical and social discourses of entropy across a wide range of authors,5 one frequently invoked text that gives an even earlier modernist exemplar of the concerns Clarke identifies is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Conrad’s novel critically probes narratives of progress by demonstrating a thermodynamic

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entropic breakdown in London that faces a plot to bomb the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The plot ultimately unravels as Stevie, portrayed as a figure of “degeneration,” accidentally sets off the bomb early, killing himself and precipitating a narrative equilibrium. Jill Clark has recently read the novel in ways that align its thermodynamics with more recent chaos theory: “The anarchists are personifications of systemic chaos, through which chaos works for the self-organization of London’s culture. They are parts of Conrad’s holistic system of London, each essential to its construction. Conrad reveals his characters as mechanisms maintaining London’s social and cultural order” (2). Conrad, as the author, becomes the renderer of “cosmic chaos” (2). Whitworth locates Conrad’s masterwork of entropy in the rich constellation of scientisms and metaphors of the later Victorian and early modernist period that Clarke and others have charted over the past few decades. He both highlights the container metaphors used to voice concerns with the dissipation of energy and draws attention to the late Victorian descriptions of crowds in terms of “abstract flows of matter.” These metaphors link writing across fields, from the thermodynamic writings of Clerk Maxwell, the early crowd psychology of sociology of Gustave Le Bon, the work of astronomer and science popularizer Arthur Eddington, and modernist writing by Lawrence, Woolf, and others. Whitworth suggests that Conrad may have been inspired by Wells’s treatment of the biological and physical decay of an increasingly dissipated solar system in The Time Machine and tracks the confluence of thermodynamic thinking across multiple registers—economic, political, biological, temporal, and social—and the Victorian anxieties about entropy in the face of fragile national and racial unity (Einstein’s Wake, 73–77).

The spatial fourth dimension and ether physics Before turning to the twentieth-century paradigms of the new physics that will occupy much of the rest of this chapter, we must look briefly at two other nineteenth-century developments that contributed greatly not only to the physics and chemistry of the next century but also to the emergence of early modernism: the

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innovations in non-Euclidean geometries and the increasingly elaborate ether hypotheses of the Victorian era.

The spatial fourth dimension Though non-Euclidean geometries were developed across the nineteenth century (as in the contributions by Gauss, Riemann, Klein, and Cayley mentioned above), Euclidean geometry was still seen as a basis for epistemic certainty, as it had been by philosophers from Descartes to Kant (see Torretti). Nineteenth-century British school editions of Euclid’s Elements, Whitworth explains, “reinforced the use of ‘Euclid’ as a byword for infallibility and for self-evident truth, presenting his geometrical axioms as the very foundation of civilization” (199). Yet, before they became a mainstay of the new physics, the non-Euclidean geometries of a spatial fourth dimension became an important feature of early modernist art and literature, of popular culture, and even of religious and occult speculation. One of the most influential scholarly interventions in the area of modern art, science, and technology emerged several years before the full fruition of the current wave of modernist studies on the subject: art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s innovative work on modern art and the spatial fourth dimension, titled The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983). Henderson’s research began as the correction of an error of anachronism in critical writing connecting analytical cubism with relativity and an Einsteinian temporal fourth dimension.6 Einsteinian relativity, Henderson argues, was never cited in Cubist literature and was scarcely known to artists until after its observational confirmation by Arthur Eddington during a solar eclipse in 1919. What Henderson found instead was the influence of a massive vogue for the spatial fourth dimension (a vogue that had largely been forgotten by the mid-twentieth century). She draws on a wide range of philosophical speculation, such as Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904), Edwin Abbott’s satirical novel Flatland (1884), and the efforts by Leipzig astrophysicist J. C. F. Zöllner to provide a scientific basis for spiritualism in fourth-dimensional space; writers including H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein (Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, 98); as well as French periodicals and even

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the 1909 Scientific American essay contest for “the best popular explanation of the Fourth Dimension” (142). Henderson examines the enormous impact of this rich vein of scientific and scientistic speculation on the emergence of cubism, from Picasso to Duchamp, and of lesser-known efforts (such as those of New York architect and theosophist Claude Bragdon) to bring extradimensional thinking into architectural design. She also describes the heady years of the Russian avant-garde as it adapted the mystical hyperspace philosophy of P. D. Ouspensky and others to its painting and poetry in the early twentieth century, and she discusses postwar France and the Holland of Mondrian and Van Doesburg. As Henderson puts it, “Emerging in an era of dissatisfaction with materialism and positivism, ‘the fourth dimension’ gave rise to entire idealist and even mystical philosophical systems. . . . Only the popularization of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, with its redefinition of the fourth dimension as time instead of space, brought an end to this era in which artists, writers, and musicians believed they could express higher spatial dimension” (97–98). Other scholars of modernism have also addressed the fourth dimension. Ian Bell, whose Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (1981) set the terms of many later investigations of Pound’s relationship to the science of the modernist era, has recently returned to the scientific contexts of Pound’s Imagist poetry and its movement into the Vorticist project of Blast during the war and finally into the Cantos. While Pound rarely directly invoked the fourth dimension in his writings, Bell makes a compelling case that “modernist poetics did avail itself of trajectories within fourth-dimensional thought through a telling obliquity” (Bell, “Ezra Pound and the Fourth Dimension,” 131). Drawing on the classic popularizing texts of a spatial fourth dimension, such as Bragdon’s Four-Dimensional Vistas (1916) and Hinton’s Fourth Dimension, the latter of which explained electrical current as a “four dimensional vortex” (qtd in Bell 132), Bell shows that ideas from fourth-dimensional geometry informed Pound’s Imagism and his Vorticist work, “Before Sleep,” H. D.’s “Oread,” as well as the later Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and cantos as late as The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937). A different kind of historicist argument sets the non-Euclidean geometries involved in Vorticism (and Pound’s work in particular) in dialogue with contemporary poetry, as in Lori Emerson’s work

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on hyperspace poetics. Emerson sees in Pound and other poets (she looks also to William Carlos Williams) an interest in the potential of non-Euclidean geometries “to capture a general conceptual shift, one from viewing space as that which is stable and can be mapped using a transcendent model of counting to a view in which space is constantly in flux and shifting along with the counter” (173). This kind of argument asks for more dialogue with present writing than the rigorous historicizing of new modernist studies has often provided, and it demonstrates that our understanding of the current digital culture can be enriched by a deeper engagement with the media of the modernist age. The Euclidean paradigm continued for more than half a century with remarkable cognitive and epistemological authority, before alternatives to it helped change science and foster an efflorescence of modernism in the arts and literature.

Ether physics and vibratory modernism Ether physics, too, continued as a paradigm for some years after physicists started having doubts about its explanatory capacities. But its unraveling as a paradigm was, to speak loosely, messier and much more contentious and final. To put it simply, while Euclidean geometry is still useful in many circumstances and is still taught to all schoolchildren in the early twenty-first century, ether physics is not. Though it may have seemed an elegant hypothesis within the classical Newtonian sensibility of nineteenth-century physics, at the height of modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, it had lost that paradigmatic power. Yet for the first few decades of European and American modernism, while the ether was waning as a physics paradigm for electromagnetism and gravitation, it was reaching its zenith in the arts and in broader popular culture. As Henderson recently put it, “The ether could be all things to all people” (“Vibratory Modernism,” 129). It served as a basis for occult thinking, as in the work of Rudolf Steiner, Annie Besant, and C. W. Leadbeater, or the connection to the “Unseen Universe” that Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait had explored in their 1875 volume The Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Future State, or as an avenue to representations of newly conceived space and matter

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through modernist art. Indeed, Henderson’s new edition of Fourth Dimension (2013), with its 100-page-long “Reintroduction,” has helpfully brought her 1983 volume up to date by showing that the spatial interpretation of a fourth dimension, which dominated modern art before the temporal focus of relativity became dominant, reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, and the Park Place Gallery Group, among many others. But more significant for the modernist studies at hand is her work over the past decade to connect the influence of the spatial fourth dimension to that of ether physics in modernist art. In the face of technological innovations in the late nineteenth century—for example, the wireless telegraph broadcasting from the Eiffel Tower that expanded the boundaries of communication, or the X-rays, discovered in 1895, that revealed the permeability of matter and the further powers of unseen energies—artists, Henderson argues, turned to what she has termed “vibratory modernism” to shape their understanding of newly conceived space and matter. The major physics concerns that the ether hypothesis tried to explain— the propagation of electromagnetic waves and of gravity—were soon to be understood without the help of the mysterious, imponderable particle that had seemed so necessary to Victorian physicists. But that simplified version of the history of sciences suggests that ether was a failed paradigm that scientists simply dispensed with after it had outlived its usefulness. Rather, as suggested above, some eminent scientists committed to the mechanical explanations of ether physics held on to it in the face of the new physics—Sir Oliver Lodge perhaps being the most commonly cited example. The turbulent period of the ether’s demise can be dated (somewhat arbitrarily) from the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 through 1919, when Arthur Eddington’s eclipse expedition brought public attention to the success of Einstein’s general relativity. During that period, artists, writers, popular science readers, occultists, and even scientists saw in the ether the hint of the radical new understandings of matter, energy, and space that were coming into their own during the paradigm shifts of the new physics. The impact of the widespread equation of the ether with conceptions of space registered in the visual arts, of course. For Henderson, the emergence of a “vibratory modernism,” probing the nature of electromagnetic waves through the supposed ether, ties together seemingly disparate modernist painters. She identifies

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Figure 2.1 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, cast 1972. © Tate, London 2015.

two major responses to the ether. The first can be seen in the work of the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, who “sought to give physical form to the ether as a space-filling medium” (128) (see Figure 2.1). The other, exemplified in the work of Czech abstract painter František Kupka, imagined the implications of wireless telegraphy for artistic communication (128). A third response to the vibrating ethereal medium can be seen in the development of Marcel Duchamp’s work, in which, rather than trying to follow Kupka’s response to Hertzian waves and paint “exteriorizations of thought,” Duchamp turned away from painting entirely and

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Figure 2.2  Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952. © ARS, NY. Photo: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

took on the role of the engineer to create a kind of machine of the electromagnetic in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass (1915–23) (see Figure 2.2). These two threads of nineteenth-century physics and mathematics—the fourth dimension and the ether—were never far apart either in the writings of scientists or in popular literature and periodicals. This same constellation of scientific ideas and

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technological inspirations, as we have seen in the introduction, was taken up by modernist authors, including Boccioni’s fellow Italian Futurist Marinetti, whose celebratory affirmation of technoscientific modernization, Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), responded to the challenge of the wireless imagination with its bold typographic experiments. As different as Pound and Marinetti were, scholars of Anglophone modernist poetry have detected similar investments and interventions in the modernist culture of the fourth dimension and the ether. Pound’s Vorticism grappled with the “whorls” and “knots” and “vortexes” of the extra-dimensional mathematics of Bragdon, Hinton, and others. But the vortex in Pound’s work also deeply touches the ether mechanics that pervaded much early modernism. As Bell had explored in 1981 and as Antje Pfannkuchen has taken up as well, the prehistory of Pound’s vortex can be located in Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1858 article “Über Wirbelbewegungen” [“On Vortex Motion”], in which Helmholtz not only helped launch the field of hydrodynamics but also proposed a novel interpretation of the atom that remained in the mix with other theories until the ether hypothesis lost its place in physics in the twentieth century. Helmhholtz’s paper offered up a conception of an “ideal fluid,” a frictionless environment in Helmholtz’s mathematical model in which eternally rotating particles remain constant in vortex threads, which, in turn, form vortex tubes, or, as Helmholtz called vortex tubes turning in on themselves, vortex rings. As Pfannkuchen explains, “Helmholtz’s vortices thus exist permanently and indestructibly and are all within the fluidity of the liquid as durable and lasting as the hardest solid. With this description Helmholtz defined an element of an ideal fluid that has all the properties of a solid” (65), and he thus influenced Kelvin’s model of the atom as a vortex in the ether in his 1867 article titled “On Vortex Atoms,” which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Philosophical Magazine. Kelvin’s model gave the ether and its special form of motion a central role in the nature of all matter: The concept of the vortex atom was based on the presumed existence of the ether and implied the chimerical claim that matter and ether consist principally of the same substance and that their only difference is the substance’s state of motion. This would mean that vortex motion alone transforms imponderable

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ether into ponderable particles of matter that are—in contrast to the ether—subject to gravitation. In other words, vortex motion would be the origin of all (material) things. (Pfannkuchen 66) Pfannkuchen’s research aligns with current modernist studies approaches to physics in its turn to popular science writing and to the circulation of such ideas in broader reading publics through periodical literature. Stewart and Tait’s Unseen Universe (1875) used ether theory and thermodynamics to address religious and even occult speculation, for example. Indeed, the ether and Kelvin’s vortex theory of matter were still widely discussed in popular science writing such as C. W. Saleeby’s article on “Gravitation and the Ether” in the July 1905 Harper’s Monthly Magazine that Pfannkuchen examines in relationship to Pound. Both Kelvin in his vortex theory of the atom and Pound in his Vorticism, Pfannkuchen argues, demonstrated the “ambition to produce a theory that was not simply new but that answered fundamental questions of its object . . . and that explained the basic mechanisms operative in master works” (71).

Radioactivity and the subatomic world Kelvin’s exquisite but vague vortex atom concept and, indeed, the entire ether hypothesis were soon to fall to the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics.7 But before that could happen, another form of electromagnetic energy would catch the imagination and test the mettle of scientists, artists, and writers alike, ultimately resulting in a major paradigm shift affecting physics and chemistry as well as the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century history and culture, one that changed the way the building blocks of all matter came to be understood: the strange energies of radioactivity. In radioactivity, we see the ascension of a new paradigm sweeping aside the Victorian paradigms of both physics and chemistry so definitively, and so quickly, that one of the key architects of the new paradigm, chemist Frederick Soddy, could view all of the accomplishments of nineteenth-century physical sciences as far from revolutionary. Radioactivity put the “new” in the new physics. The first paradigm that radioactivity helped overthrow was the very one upon which most nineteenth-century chemistry rested,

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elaborated clearly and fruitfully by John Dalton in his 1808 treatise, A New System of Chemical Philosophy. Dalton used the word “atom,” from the Greek “atomos,” indivisible, to denote the fundamental nature of each chemical element. The atom was the smallest particle, indivisible and unalterable, and, as Dalton argued, the ultimate particles of all homogeneous bodies are perfectly alike in weight, figure &c” (1: 143). Chemistry, then, was based upon the interactions of these atoms with each other: “Chemical analysis and synthesis go no farther than to the separation of particles one from another, and to their reunion. No new creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of chemical agency. We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen. All the changes we can produce consist in separating particles that are in a state of cohesion or combination and joining those that were previously at a distance. (1:212) To be fair, one might see Dalton’s continued relevance even in twentyfirst-century chemistry, in that the field, as opposed to physics, still largely focuses on the interactions of atoms. But the basis of current chemistry’s understanding of those interactions is now completely different from Dalton’s, and it is tied very differently to the research of physicists than it could have been in 1808. Since Daltonian chemistry had become established as the paradigm for the field in the early nineteenth century, though, the disciplinary boundaries between physics and chemistry were increasingly blurred in the emergence of the subfield of “physical chemistry,” in which key scientists in the new study of radioactivity were trained: Soddy and Sir William Ramsay, for example. Occupying the borderland between physics and chemistry were Ramsay’s friends and European colleagues: the Dutch physical chemist Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff; the Latvian-born chair of physical chemistry at Leipzig, Wilhelm Ostwald; and the Swede Svante Arrhenius. Mary Jo Nye notes that physical chemistry’s institutionalization as a subfield was marked by the launch of the Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie in 1887 and the Journal of Physical Chemistry in 1896. Indeed, “the disciplinary boundary between physics and chemistry became less well defined after 1900 . . . [and] physical chemistry played

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an important role in this development” (Nye 110). Radioactivity, initially approached by physicists and by physical chemists, spawned two disciplines—radiochemistry and, eventually, nuclear physics—which would then briefly struggle for ownership of the new research in radioactivity. Nuclear physics was clearly winning that struggle by the beginning of the 1920s. Radioactivity and the search for understanding of an expanded range of electromagnetic energies very quickly undermined the bedrock assumption of Dalton’s Treatise—that atoms are, by their very nature, fundamental particles, indivisible, unalterable. Let me briefly provide a sketch of the narrative of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century developments in these sciences that recent historiography of science and modernist studies help complicate. In a greatly simplified form, it goes something like this. While testing several vacuum tube apparatuses in November 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen unexpectedly discovered mysterious rays that can penetrate soft substances. Invoking the use of X for an unknown quantity in mathematics, he named these unknown rays “X-rays.” Two weeks later, he took the first X-ray photograph—of the bones inside his wife’s hand (see the front cover of this book). A few months later, in January 1896, Dr. John Macintyre lectured at Glasgow University on “The New Light—X-Rays,” and by March of that year, he had set up the world’s first X-ray department, which used X-rays as a medical tool at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. More eventful surprises followed. A few short months after Röntgen’s discovery, French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered that the uranium potassium sulfate crystals he had left in a drawer of photographic plates emitted another new kind of ray of their own. Marie Curie (both a chemist and physicist) named this phenomenon “radioactivity.” She and her physicist husband, Pierre Curie, went on to show that thorium and other elements exhibited radioactivity as well, and, in a story that was to attract major attention from the press, discovered the highly radioactive element radium in 1898.8 The Curies’ shared Nobel Prize in 1903 was the first in a long series of Nobel Prizes awarded to the pioneering researchers in atomic physics and radiochemistry, as the new chemistry subfield was quickly titled. These new rays demanded explanation, and the early efforts quickly began to suggest serious problems with the Daltonian atomic paradigm. In 1897 at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge

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University, which would become the site of much of the pioneering research in nuclear physics, British physicist J. J. Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of negatively charged particles. Using Johnstone Stoney’s word, Thomson named the newly discovered particles “electrons.” Thomson immediately recognized the implications for Dalton’s atomic paradigm, arguing in February 1897 at Cambridge and again in April 1897 at the Royal Institution that atoms were not, as Dalton had thought, indivisible. He described electrons as tiny (with a mass less than a thousandth of the mass of a hydrogen atom) negatively charged particles that can be torn from atoms. In 1904, he proposed the “plum pudding” model of the atom as a positively charged fluid orb containing negatively charged electrons. Then a breakthrough occurred that set the physics and chemistry of radioactivity on the path toward the new physics. As we saw in the introduction, Soddy, a chemist trained at Oxford, and Ernest Rutherford, a physicist who had studied under Thomson at the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge, performed experiments at the provincial physics lab at McGill University in Canada in 1901 and 1902 that allowed them to offer a novel theory with enormous consequences for Dalton’s atomic theory. Radioactive elements, they showed, disintegrate, releasing radioactive rays and transforming into other elements in the process. Back in England, Soddy worked with chemist Sir William Ramsay to identify helium as the gas released in the process. In 1911, now at the University of Manchester, Rutherford bombarded gold foil with alpha particles, essentially a helium nucleus, emitted by radioactive elements, and used the scattering of the alpha particles to demonstrate what would soon be called the nucleus of an atom. As early as 1904, the Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka had already objected to Thomson’s plum pudding model, noting that the negatively charged electrons, the “plums,” could not be contained in a positively charged “pudding,” as the charges would repulse each other. Rutherford invoked Nagaoka’s alternative proposal of Saturn as a metaphor, with a positive charge surrounded by negatively charged rings. Rutherford proposed a positively charged nucleus around which negatively charged electrons orbited, in what became the briefly dominant solar model of the atom. One staggering implication of this model was that atoms were composed primarily of empty space.

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In the period from the late 1890s through the birth of quantum mechanics, even though this understanding of the subatomic world was not nearly as radically strange as it would become in the 1920s, it nevertheless involved a radical paradigm shift in the understanding of the fundamental particles and energies of the universe. That change and its implications were partly shaped by and interacted with literature and the arts.

Material histories of science Recent work in the history of science and in modernist studies complicates this fairly clean narrative of science occurring in laboratories and through the hermetically sealed set of scientific labors by heroic scientists—including the turn to the material, nonhuman actants in actor-network theory by Latour, Callon, Law, and others in the anthropology and sociology of science. Scientists and their instruments do not exist only in labs, and both humans and nonhumans exist within their cultural contexts. The cathode ray tubes with which J. J. Thomson did his research on the electron were modifications of the tubes Sir William Crookes had fashioned thirty years earlier, which, in turn, were preceded by tubes made by the German glass blower and traveling instrument maker Heinrich Geissler. Geissler tubes were not only used by universities but also became so popular that they were used in homes for entertainment. After 1895, X-ray devices, too, quickly jumped out of purely scientific and medical uses into such uses as shoefitting fluoroscopes, “shadow photographs,” and “bone portraits” that were demonstrated at high schools and department stores.9 The sense of the presence of an unseen universe, of invisible rays making unseeable structures of space visible, was felt in popular culture as well as within the history of scientific instrumentation. The material history of technologies in atomic science has produced some fascinating research in recent years. Peter Galison, for example, offers a history of nuclear physics through an account of its major instruments—the Geiger counter, scintillation counter, cloud chamber, cyclotron, and bubble chamber—and argues for microhistories of disciplinary cultures around instrumentation (Galison, Image and Logic). The ability to “see” invisible particles through their trails in condensation lines or bubble lines in C. T. R.

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Wilson’s 1895 cloud chamber and Donald Glaser’s 1952 bubble chamber allowed important breakthroughs in low-energy and high-energy particle physics and won both men Nobel Prizes for the inventions. But, as Galison shows, there were two contrasting traditions of instrumentation in twentieth-century nuclear physics: “One embraced the visual detectors, such as the cloud chamber and the bubble chamber, which etched onto film the fine details of individual events. Quite another tradition formed around electronic detectors” (Image and Logic, 248–49). Perceiving an invisible world of radiation and particles was central not only in the popular reception of physics (and the modernist interaction with it) but also in the development of the physics itself.

Modernism and radioactivity As modernist scholars and historians of science have noted, a key interpretation of the phenomena of radiation and the host of recently discovered rays—cathode rays, X-rays, and the alpha, beta, and gamma rays given off by radioactive elements—involved metaphors of porosity and solidity, of permeability and continuity shared among the physical sciences, psychology, occultism, and modernist art and literature. As Henderson notes, although “the science of radioactivity would contribute to the determination of the substructure of the atom (and thereby verify the discontinuous nature of matter), initially the discovery of radioactivity augmented the view of the physical world as fluid and continuous interaction between matter and ether, form and space” (Duchamp in Context, 7). X-rays and the emissions of radioactive elements highlighted the sensitivity of the registering photographic plate, of tools more sensitive than the eye, and this tied together occult claims of spiritual connection, psychic projection, and the like, that, as we have seen in Henderson’s work on the ether, were elaborated in the modernist art of Kupka, Boccioni, and others. In the Large Glass, Duchamp went so far as to document in his notebooks the work’s relationship to physical chemistry and to the early years of radioactivity. Henderson explores Duchamp’s significant engagement with the work of Perrin, Rutherford, and many other nuclear physicists and chemists in the Large Glass, and she argues that “Duchamp contemplated or actually played the role of chemist,

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just as his placement of the netting [resembling a photograph of a netted mantle taken by Becquerel rays published in the Century magazine] of the Air Current Pistons onto the Large Glass seems to have rehearsed Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity” (Duchamp in Context, 132). Whitworth explores the frequent allusion to X-rays, radiation, and atomic theory in modernist work, positing the origin of Eliot’s line “as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in an 1897 newspaper article on X-rays, and exploring the comparison of Gerald in Lawrence’s Women in Love to “a piece of radium,” or the appearance of radium in a draft of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (“Physics,” 208). Whitworth sees in these many allusions to atomic structure and radiation confirmation of a much more significant point, that the shared resources of physics and modernist literature were metaphors that touched multiple realms of modern culture: “Knowledge of atomic structure would be of little use to a novelist or poet were it not for the circulation of metaphors between scientific discourse and the discourse of everyday life. The early developments in the theory of matter acquire greater significance because of the ubiquity in everyday speech of half-forgotten metaphors of opacity and transparency, stability and instability, and solidity and porosity” (208). Another dominant metaphor was alchemical transmutation.

Radioactivity and alchemy Historians of science have greatly enriched our understanding of the sciences themselves, along with their elaboration across modern culture, through a careful examination of images and tropes through which scientific knowledge emerged and by which it circulated through society. Radioactive transformation, or “transmutation,” was commonly understood in alchemical tropes (“modern alchemy” was an extremely common term in books and articles about the chemistry and physics of radioactivity) from Rutherford and Soddy’s initial laboratory experiments in McGill through the mid-1940s, when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the terms in which nuclear physics was understood (see Weart, Nuclear Fear, and Morrisson, Modern Alchemy). Weart relates a much-quoted exchange between Soddy

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and Rutherford in their lab at McGill in 1901 when they realized that radioactive thorium was transforming into an inert gas: “Soddy recalled, ‘I was overwhelmed with something greater than joy—I cannot very well express it—a kind of exaltation.’ He blurted out, ‘Rutherford, this is transmutation!’ ‘For Mike’s sake, Soddy,’ his companion shot back, ‘don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists’” (5–6). As I have argued elsewhere (Modern Alchemy), the tropes and images of alchemy from this original moment shaped the discussion of radioactivity in texts by scientists themselves,10 journalists, pulp fiction writers—the Gernsback pulps published several stories about nuclear scientists with alchemical themes in the 1920s and 1930s—and modernists. They fostered connections among scientists interested in the history of alchemy and the spiritual possibilities of the new study of radioactivity and occultists who saw in the new science confirmation of their occult and alchemical beliefs and projects. (Several gold manufacturing transmutation schemes by quacks and the deluded made newspaper headlines during the period.) This surprising understanding of modern atomic science had a context of its own. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German historians of chemistry had begun to examine alchemy as an ancestor of chemistry, but they primarily portrayed it as an intellectual error. By the mid-nineteenth century, some authors, such as Hermann Kopp and Ernst von Meyer, began to acknowledge alchemy’s technical contributions to laboratory practice. But in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, historians such as the French chemist Marcellin Berthelot began to publish research on original alchemical texts themselves. This period also witnessed a major occult revival that brought alchemical texts back into print in widely disseminated translations and inspired serious grappling not only with the laboratory methods but also with the tropes, images, and even spiritual dimensions of alchemy. In its vast network of spiritual and physical correspondences, its metaphor-laden language, and its hermetic images, alchemy embodies what Fleck would call a “thought style” quite different from that of twentieth-century science. Yet just as Pound turned to the resources of history, of past thought styles, to make it new (even writing poems invoking the alchemists), what I have loosely been calling “modernist science” also could bring different thought styles to bear on very modern, very scientific problems.

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Soddy himself saw alchemical thinking as a disciplinary marker of modern chemistry, as opposed to modern physics, and attributed to it his immediate ability to see what Rutherford could not in their laboratory at McGill—that the thorium was not just giving off the rays that interested Rutherford as a physicist, but was doing so by transmuting into other elements. As he put it, “I was, of course, tremendously elated to have discovered transmutation—the goal of every chemist of every age” (Howorth 82), but he added that his thoughts were “always occupied with transmutation. That is natural: I was a chemist. . . . I only want to show how our brains were working, mine on transmutation and gases, Rutherford’s on thorium and alpha ray emission” (Howorth 82, 84). At this moment of radical paradigm shift, alchemy became not just an ancient thought style appropriated and retooled for contemporary science and culture, but also an actant in the dynamics that sociologists of science have theorized. Concepts such as “boundary-work” (Gieryn and Hess) or “sanitization” (Wallis) tend to focus on skirmishes over the boundaries between science and “pseudoscience” (between, say, occult and scientific beliefs) or between different scientific disciplines, ultimately showing how widely these demarcation strategies can extend. Hess shows not only how scientists engage in boundary-work to distinguish science from nonscience, but also how a variety of other groups construct boundaries (and consequently themselves as groups) not only with respect to more orthodox scientists and skeptics but with respect to each other. In short, scientific boundaries are recursive, nested, and multiple; there are layers of scientificity that become clearer as one unfolds levels of skepticism and “pseudoscientificity” both within and across discursive boundaries. Boundary-work therefore is going on in all directions, not just in the direction of orthodox science toward religion and “pseudoscience.” (Hess, Science in the New Age, 145–46) Traweek’s work emphasizes more creative and fluid negotiations in what she terms “borderlands” in her anthropological work on modern particle physics. Star, Griesemer, and Bowker approach these dynamics from yet another perspective, emphasizing the use of “boundary objects” that break down discourse boundaries

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and facilitate interactions of actors with very different sets of interests and objectives, and Galison turns to linguistics and anthropology for the concept of “trading zones” as a context for collaboration. All of these conceptual approaches inform my research on the alchemical tropes by which radioactivity was explored; on the institutions, such as the Alchemical Society in London (1912–15), that brought together occultists from Yeats’s circles with academically trained chemists and psychotherapists; on the research agendas of radio-chemists and nuclear physicists; on the writings of the so-called money cranks (like Pound, Soddy was a devotee of Kitson, Douglas, and other monetary theorists) at a moment when the very real possibility of transmuting elements threw the basis of money, especially the gold standard, into radical question; and on the broader culture of popular science writing, pulp fiction, and modernist literature.

Relativity and quantum mechanics As we have seen, the stable normal science of Victorian physics and chemistry, as Kuhn would argue, planted the seeds of its own instability and necessitated the new paradigms that set twentiethcentury particle physics and chemistry on their modern courses. But the relationship of newly conceived matter and energy would soon make still more radical demands on the scientific imagination. Over the first quarter of the new century, another set of interrelated paradigm shifts would mark an even more complete break with classical Newtonian physics. Relativity and quantum mechanics seemed to question the very nature of scientific inquiry in ways that resonated across the “high modernist” period of the 1920s and beyond. In (over)simplified form, here is a basic narrative. A young Albert Einstein, while a student at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic school in Zürich between 1895 and 1900, reflected upon the velocity and propagation of light. While these issues had been investigated as far back as Galileo, nineteenth-century work on electromagnetism by Maxwell and others led Maxwell to predict the propagation of electromagnetic energy in a vacuum. (Remember that Victorian physics had stipulated the need for a medium through which light could propagate—thus the luminiferous ether.) Heinrich Hertz, in the late 1880s, demonstrated Maxwell’s

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claims and was able to show that electromagnetic waves traveled at the speed of light, suggesting that light was an electromagnetic energy and could propagate in a vacuum. Reading the work of Hendrik Lorentz and writings by Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré, Einstein tossed over classical mechanics and electrodynamics entirely through his thought experiments about the speed of light in relationship to moving perceivers. His September 1905 paper on special relativity titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” published in Annalen der Physik, argued that the laws of nature were consistent from one frame of reference to another, and that the speed of light was constant regardless of the motion of its source. The ether hypothesis was simply unnecessary, and, lacking experimental verification, it began to lose credibility among younger physicists. The most famous fruit of special relativity was the equation E = mc2, which showed that matter and energy were interchangeable, with mass increasing at higher velocities, and with E (the quantity of energy) associated with m (any mass), being fantastically large—multiplied by the square of c (the velocity of light). Einstein continued to work on these issues in relationship to gravity. His former math professor in Zürich, Hermann Minkowski, provided a mathematical formalism that allowed Einstein to translate the Lorentz transformation equations of relativity into a four-dimensional space-time, and Einstein’s notions of a fourdimensional space-time continuum were born. Einstein expanded his work on relativity to include his theory of gravitation in the general theory of relativity of 1916, theorizing gravity not in the old terms of force, which Newton used, but rather in terms of the geometry of space. One prediction of general relativity was that the gravity of massive bodies could modify both time and space in measurable ways. And Einstein was also busy on another issue that would help launch quantum mechanics. In 1900, Max Planck discovered that the emission and absorption of black body radiation was not continuous, as would be predicted in classical physics, but occurred in discontinuous, discrete units, or “quanta.” Einstein, in turn, used Planck’s work to propose that light itself was not composed of waves but of quanta, which would later be called “photons.” Gavin Parkinson notes that both Planck and Einstein were deeply uncomfortable with their new theories’ resistance to the older models (21).

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Yet assaults upon classical Newtonian physics continued rapidly. In his position at the University of Manchester, Rutherford in 1911 proposed the solar system model of the atom, in which negatively charged electrons orbit a positively charged nucleus. But classical descriptions of these orbiting electrons could not account for the stability of atomic structure or for the patterns of radiating energy given off by orbiting electrons. In 1913, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, working with Rutherford at Manchester, then proposed using Planck’s work on the discontinuous energies of radiation to propose that the electrons could only exist in specific energy levels, specific orbits allowable by quanta. Then, in 1923, the American physicist Arthur Compton at Washington University demonstrated that the scattering of X-rays, when fired at electrons, was also a quantum phenomenon. At the Cavendish Lab, Rutherford and his fellow researchers continued to expand the stable of subatomic particles, with Rutherford adding the proton in the atom’s nucleus in 1919, and his assistant director, James Chadwick, adding the neutron in 1932. But the key elements of a fully elaborated quantum physics were coming into place on the Continent. In 1923 and 1924, the French physicist Louis de Broglie used Einstein’s theory that photons exhibit properties of both waves and particles to suggest that electrons, too, have such dual properties. De Broglie argued that electrons should not be thought of as localized particles in space around a nucleus, but rather as something like a cloud of negative charge. Following de Broglie’s theories, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed an equation allowing him to predict the future behavior of electrons. German physicist Max Born used the wave functions of electrons to calculate the possibility of finding a particle at a specific region at a specific time. Bohr and the German physicist Werner Heisenberg began working on quantum mechanics in 1924, and, in 1927, Heisenberg propounded his uncertainty principle—the theory that one cannot simultaneously know a particle’s exact position and velocity. Quantum physics was thus fully elaborated between 1924 and 1927, mostly as an achievement of young men. Wolfgang Pauli styled it Knabenphysik, or “boys’ physics” (Parkinson 23). What a standard chronology like this can do is simplify an enormously complicated and specialized set of ideas in physics, many of which were derived from very complex mathematics

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beyond the abilities of most readers (including myself) at the time, or even today. Ideas of space-time, reference frame, mass-energy conversion, and geometries of space with macrocosmic implications stood out during the high modernist period as they do now. And key ideas from quantum physics likewise caught the attention of an educated audience—quanta, uncertainty, and duality, for example. Such a thumbnail sketch can also highlight the complete break with classical physics that these ideas represented. So much did the new paradigms eclipse the old that the new physics garnered a great deal of attention in the media and popular culture.

New research on the new physics Recent research in modernist studies on the massive paradigm shifts accomplished by relativity and quantum mechanics has done for those paradigms what the works of Henderson, Clarke, and others have done for the ether, thermodynamics, and geometrical shifts at the turn from Victorian to early modernist art and literature. This scholarship has situated relativity and quantum mechanics within the larger print culture of the period and has carefully calibrated the textual and epistemological strategies of the new physics. One immediate difference between these two components of the new physics was that relativity was much more widely disseminated across nonspecialist reading publics than was quantum mechanics. At a moment when modernism was inextricably caught up in an emerging twentieth-century celebrity culture,11 relativity had its celebrity in Albert Einstein, who became the face of genius, of the new science. And it had a newsworthy event to put it on the map. Several significant explorations of popular science writing, other forms of journalism, and popular literature have recently taken up the vogue for Einstein and relativity in the 1920s and 1930s. As Katy Price notes at the beginning of Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe, “On November 7, 1919, newspaper readers in Britain awoke to a ‘revolution in science.’ . . . Announced to the public just four days before the first anniversary of the Armistice, relativity theory made headlines in Britain because Newtonian physics had apparently been overthrown by a German Jew” (1). Arthur Eddington had confirmed some predictions of Einstein’s theories on his 1919 expedition to observe a total solar

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eclipse, and as director of the Cambridge Observatory, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society during the Great War, Eddington was among the first British scientists to receive communications about Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He was perfectly positioned to bring relativity to a fascinated if baffled British public. Eddington was an astrophysicist, mathematician, Quaker, and pacifist; he objected to military service on religious grounds but was granted an exemption during the war due to the scientific importance of his work at Cambridge, including his role in organizing an expedition in May 1919 to Principe, off the coast of Africa, to attempt to confirm Einstein’s predictions about the effects of a massive object (in this case, the sun) on the path of light (from the stars behind it only observable during the eclipse). As Peter Bowler notes, after the headlines about Eddington’s findings, Even the popular newspapers picked up on a theory, which, they were told, was the basis for a conceptual revolution that would upset both the scientific and the commonsense worldview. Much nonsense was talked around dinner tables by people who equated relativity with the general idea that all knowledge and values were relative. By the end of 1922, the craze was beginning to abate, by which time the public had been regaled with a host of newspaper and magazine articles and books attempting (with varying degrees of success) to convey the gist of the new theory to the nonscientist who had no mathematics. (40) The London Palladium even tried to engage Einstein for a threeweek stage show (41). The popular papers and magazines were swept up as well: to a newspaper’s assertion that every Englishman knew Einstein’s theory of relativity, Punch replied, “it can now be sung in public without fee or licence” (qtd in Bowler 193). The masses of writings in genres ranging from popular science writing to popular romance fiction that engaged relativity in this British postwar context reveal much about the class politics of the interwar years and the heady expansion of newspaper-reading publics that Price examines in her study. She adopts Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey’s call to avoid viewing popular science writing “as a one way process in which knowledge is transferred from

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experts to public audiences, with an inevitable distortion along the way” (10). Instead, she uses their concept of enrollment, as an alternative description of what happens when “representatives of learned science” appeal to an audience’s interests in order to enlist support for scientific work: When the lay audience accepts the appeal, it allows itself to become (indeed makes itself) part of a network of alliances which sustains that scientific enterprise. While the scientists have enrolled a public, so too have the public enrolled the scientists. According to its position and influence in the “network,” the public alters the kind of science pursued in the future. (10) But this process of enrollment, Price shows, is exceedingly “messy,” and can create networks other than those intended by the representatives of science (10). Relativity was discussed widely, even if understood rarely, and was immediately caught up in class struggle: “A reader between the wars was a voter, and reading about Einstein was caught up with concerns about how the newly enfranchised masses would determine Britain’s future” (4). The term itself brought baggage. Price writes that these “political associations were compounded by the new theory’s familiar name: the concept of ‘relativity’ already had distinct philosophical connotations, and Einstein’s theory was inevitably perceived through the Victorian debate about absolute versus relative values. A nineteenth-century relativist was a radical philosopher or scientist upholding secular values against the more conservative believer in absolutes” (4). In addition to participating in the sociopolitical dynamics of the media, the new physics also raised serious epistemological issues across the modernist period. The young scientists who generated quantum mechanics were acutely aware of the revolutionary nature of these epistemological issues. “The implications of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle were vast for both physics and philosophy,” Parkinson argues. “If the location and velocity of a particle could not now be measured with precision, then the epistemology inherited from the Newtonian-Kantian causality—insisting on the universe as a teleological mechanism, the future state of which could in theory be predicted from measurement of the location and velocity of a particle and any outlying conditions—was now obsolete” (Parkinson 34). And Heisenberg gleefully proclaimed it at

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the end of his paper on the uncertainty principle: “Invalidity of the law of causality is definitely established by quantum mechanics” (qtd in Parkinson 34). While physicists of the older generation, as we have seen in Kelvin, required mechanical and visualizable models as rhetorical prerequisites for the construction of scientific facts, and many could reject the new physics for its mathematical and theoretical abstraction, key architects of quantum mechanics saw their approach as rigorous. As Paul Dirac noted of Heisenberg’s empiricism: Heisenberg’s idea was that one should try to construct a theory in terms of quantities which are provided by experiment, rather than building it up, as people had done previously, from an atomic model which involved many quantities which could not be observed. By this brilliant idea Heisenberg really started a new philosophy, a philosophy that physics—physical theory—should keep close to the experimentally obtained data and should not depart into the use of quantities which are only very remotely connected to observation. (qtd in Parkinson 29) Keep in mind how quickly the terrain could shift. In 1908, Soddy had emphasized that the material fact of radium would inevitably have swept away all the old chemistry that could not explain it. In 1897, J. J. Thomson’s experiments to probe the nature of the electrical discharge in the vacuums of cathode ray tubes showed that the rays were deflected by magnets and electric fields, suggesting that they were negatively charged particles—electrons. Rutherford’s 1911 gold foil experiments had suggested a positive particle nucleus of the atom with orbiting electrons, and, a few years later, Bohr had attempted to use Planck’s quanta to provide the stability of the orbits needed in the solar model. To a classical physicist, the solar model would at least provide a mechanical explanation, even if only through analogy, to experimentally observable events. To Heisenberg’s empirical mind, the entire model, along with its concepts of electrons and orbits, was already misleading. The model drove the theory derived from it, rather than allowing the experimental data to suggest the theory. As Parkinson notes, Heisenberg then rejected “electrons” and “orbits” entirely: “Instead, he opted to attend to the associations between energy states given numerically, developing in the summer of 1925 a tabular

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mathematics that allowed the description of pairs of states of the atom with a finesse unachievable using ordinary numbers” (29). An obscure nineteenth-century noncommutative matrix calculus Born provided to Heisenberg to refine his algebraic formula then became a key part of Heisenberg’s “matrix mechanics.”

The new physics of modernism What these standard chronologies of progressive discovery do not show is the broad circulation and even interrelationship of scientific ideas within the broader cultures of modernism in which they emerged and which they helped shape. Panning out from a narrow focus on successive laboratory results and theoretical refinements enriches both the history of science and of modernist culture. But it can also highlight conceptual and methodological differences still not always acknowledged even in recent scholarship on modernism, science, and technology. In short, in this area of the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics in particular, the nature of claims about the relationship of a scientific concept to modernism has run quite a range: from fairly facile resemblance to provocative and significant resemblance, from simply anachronistic to self-consciously historicized relationships between current and past reading practices and scientific frameworks, from broad “zeitgeist”-type claims to careful constructions of networks and processes of dissemination, from simple annotations of allusions to sophisticated engagement with the historiography of science. Anachronistic or overly vague assertions of connections and influences have at times undermined research on modernism and science. The problem with anachronistic interpretations isn’t simply that they are anachronistic—not all scholarship need be as historicist as the new modernist studies has tended to be. Rather, it is that they can obscure the wealth of understanding available through more careful attention to the scientific contexts of the period. For example, there is more than half a century of research on James Joyce’s use of science in his fiction, some of which has made fairly extreme claims for its relationship to relativity and quantum mechanics—even though Joyce himself had a very limited scientific education, performing badly in the physics, chemistry, and mathematics curricula at Belvedere College and failing on more

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than one occasion to launch his studies in medicine (Salvadori and Schwartzman 339–40). As S. B. Purdy puts it, “There is . . . little evidence that Joyce knew more of the revolution going on in physics and cosmology during his lifetime than the newspapers would have told him, or that he read deeply in any other field of science” (207). While some scholars have interpreted Joyce’s Ulysses in relationship to relativity and even quantum mechanics and styled it an “epic of relativity,” others, looking more carefully, have noted that the mechanics of Ulysses are “constructed on a fairly Newtonian model” (Landon 360). Salvadori and Schwartzman assert that the novel is “totally Newtonian with a strong emphasis on the importance of Newton’s gravitational law” (354). Still others have observed the provocative affinities between Ulysses and relativity while remaining cautious about the nature of these claims. Alan David Perlis, for example, notes that “the characters’ multiple perceptions of the same event and their wildly various internal time clocks in general suggest that Joyce is an exemplar of relativity” (191), but he also cautions that if Joyce needed a predecessor or a contemporary to establish his credentials for demonstrating how different individuals perceive the same duration of clock time as different spans of internal time, he did not need to go to Einstein and the Special Theory of Relativity. Bergson’s “durée” and Proust’s “moment privilégié” could have served Joyce’s fictional purposes better, their notions of perception being far less restrictive than Einstein’s. (191) While similarly critiquing what he calls the “conceptual affinity approach” of much earlier work on the subject, Jeffrey Drouin has recently launched a new examination of Joyce’s relationship to relativity through periodical studies (5).12 Claims about quantum mechanics in Ulysses face even greater problems. Physicist Alan J. Friedman and Joyce scholar M. Keith Booker have both noted that the major implications of quantum theory were announced between 1924 and 1927, while Ulysses was published in 1922. Nevertheless, Booker maintains the significance of the general similarities between Ulysses and some aspects of quantum physics, seeing the resemblance as “symptomatic of important philosophical trends fundamental to Western thought in the twentieth century” (585).

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Sometimes charges of anachronism leveled by historicist scholars can be brushed aside in the service of the creative possibilities allowed by our own admission that no reader is without his or her own present frame or orientation, or horizon of expectations. Jill Clark’s use of chaos theory to interpret Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent serves as one example, as does Bruce Clarke’s look backward from a contemporary understanding of postmodernity and information theory to see in D. H. Lawrence an occasional suggestion that entropy may not always be a threat but can rather be, as Clarke put it, “the partner of information.” “At times,” Clarke notes, Lawrence “grasped both the promise of anarchic creativity and the positive energies to be derived from entropic processes of ‘waste’” (Dora Marsden, 169–70). Similar arguments have been made in favor of reading Joyce’s work in relationship to the nonlinear dynamics of chaos theory that clearly postdate Joyce’s writing career. Thomas Jackson Rice, for instance, has argued that “if the rehistoricization of the literary work ultimately affects the present reading of that work, the historicization of the present reader, positioning this reader within the cultural field of the work, will likewise open new possibilities for reading in a ‘different world’” (10). Rice and Peter Francis Mackey have applied chaos theory to Joyce’s work, seeing it as providing insight into the emergent order within dynamic systems in Ulysses. For strongly historicizing critics, claims for Ulysses’s invoking relativity and quantum mechanics are based on little to no evidence. But Joyce’s last novel, Finnegans Wake, clearly demonstrates his fascination with the new physics. Chemistry and physics are the sciences most frequently invoked in the Wake (Burrell 194). Rutherford’s splitting of the atom and Joyce’s process of splitting the “etyms” of language in the Wake are drawn together in the “abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of Hurtreford expolodontonates through Parsuralia” (Finnegans Wake [hereafter FW] 353.22–24). Andrzej Duszenko has shown that, through frequent allusions to Einstein himself (as “Eyeinstye” for example), and through conflations of special and temporal references (bringing the four-dimensional space-time of Einstein’s cosmos together in the Four Old Men, “facing one way to another way and this way on that way, from severalled their fourdimmansions” (FW 36.26–27), Joyce brought relativity into his text to emphasize

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themes already emerging in the novel, such as the unity of opposites and the joining of space and time (Duszenko, “Relativity Theory,” 62). Andrzej Duszenko similarly finds allusions to quantum physics in the Wake: “The writer’s resolve to break up the smallest units of meaning and experiment with subsemantic particles strikingly paralleled the goals and methods of quantum physics” (“Joyce of Science,” 274). Yet Duszenko also freely admits that Joyce had not read deeply in any of this physics: “His method consisted of selecting those elements that had a direct bearing on his work and disregarding whatever did not suit his purpose. . . . [Joyce’s] method of composition was accretive. He constantly added to Finnegans Wake, but those additions rarely involved new ideas. Rather, they were meant to enrich the texture of the book by providing new points of view, or commenting on the text, or even contradicting it to bring out its meaning” (“Relativity Theory,” 62). These lines of argument—that the similarities between Joyce’s fiction and the new physics simply demonstrate the rather vague claim that they share a Western intellectual development, or that Joyce’s direct allusions to specifics of the new physics are appropriative, one might even say idiosyncratic, efforts to reinforce his own already existing concerns in the novel—might be further enriched by the approaches to the new physics in recent modernist studies. Michael Whitworth’s Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature and art historian Gavin Parkinson’s Surrealism, Art and Modern Science explore art and literature that have been seen as part of international modernist movements, and they both focus to some extent on fairly local networks. Whitworth explains that while most readers and critics have argued that modernism was an international movement, I have foregrounded the local and British aspect of its networks and publications. This divergence here is perhaps more apparent than real: after all, this study has examined theories which were mostly developed in continental Europe; if local networks have been emphasized, it is because even an international movement must manifest itself in local and material media. To speak of the international character of modernism without recognizing this is to come close to speaking of a zeitgeist that transmits its force instantaneously without regard to national or social boundaries. (233)

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Parkinson, too, while taking up an art movement and scientific ideas that were international in their origins and scope, focuses on the French surrealist milieu of the 1920s and 1930s (with its Parisian epicenter) and the French reception of the new physics during that period.

Periodicals and the new physics A second key decision by both Whitworth and Parkinson is the emphasis they place on periodical research in their interpretation of networks and the construction and circulation of scientific facts. In order to avoid the nebulous excesses of zeitgeist claims, both Whitworth and Parkinson attempt to construct networks and to highlight the metaphors, tropes, and conceptual terrain of those networks by appealing to popular science writing and periodicals. As Whitworth puts it, his project is “not so much examining relativity and modernism as examining certain metaphors in their textual and historical context,” and these metaphors “may be found in both scientific theories and in descriptions of modernist literary form” (1). Popular science best sellers such as Arthur Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World and James Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe play a role in Einstein’s Wake, but Whitworth finds the most useful resource for reconstructing the “conversation” about the new physics in the “particular social networks responsible for modernism” to be generalist journals, such as the Athenaeum, in which J. W. N. Sullivan’s writings on the subject were read by modernists, or the Nation (and the New Age and Criterion, famous for their espousal of modernism). Periodicals are similarly crucial to Parkinson’s account of the networks that brought together surrealism and the new physics. He turns to interdisciplinary journals, such as Arnold Berliner’s Die Naturwissenschaften, where Max Ernst read about quantum physics; the French physics and chemistry journals that published in the new physics; and popular science and philosophy journals, such as Scientia and the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, which featured writing by Planck, de Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger as well as Bachelard in the 1930s. For both Whitworth and Parkinson, approaching these local networks around modernism and the new physics through

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periodicals helps highlight the limitations of Snow’s “two cultures” claims. Though the Great War may have strengthened distinctions between applied and pure sciences for British audiences, Whitworth argues that “the pure sciences provided a language—though by no means the only one—in which British modernist writers expressed their response to modernity. Because this ‘language’ consisted of scientific models and metaphors, it does not manifest itself primarily as a specific vocabulary, though certain key images recur in novels and poems, and more frequently in essays and reviews. Rather, it manifests itself as literary form” (234). Moreover, as the paradigm shifts of the new physics became better known in the literary culture of the 1920s, the period suggests an “Entente Cordiale” between literature and science, at least during that period in Britain. Parkinson likewise shows that the surrealists were already viewing the logic of Enlightenment skeptically and, in the 1920s and 1930s, were deeply engaged with relativity and quantum mechanics, even if they later rejected nuclear physics during the Cold War (8). Perhaps most significantly, though, both Whitworth and Parkinson use their careful elaboration of networks and contexts to show epistemological concerns shared by modernist authors and artists and the scientists of the new physics that registered in linguistic and even aesthetic terms for both. It is worth noting the significant emphasis on British and European modernism in my presentation of the new physics here. While significant work has been done on the evolution of the tropes and images concerning radiation and nuclear energy in the United States, and on the issue of American popular science writing, much research is needed to elaborate the relationships between modernism and the new physics in the United States in the 1920s. Indeed, the context of popular science writing looked different in the United States. It was often not written by scientists, and the relationship between science and technology and the issue of science in public policy looked rather different in the United States than in Britain or France during the same period. Similarly, research on these issues in the context of German-language modernism, and the heavily German and Austrian genesis of much of the theoretical work in both the physics and the philosophy of science, has not yet been brought into strong conversation with the scholarship on American modernism. But let me briefly return to Joyce, whom we left drawing together the new physics, the splitting of atoms and linguistic “etyms,” and

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the new understanding of space and time, matter and energy in Finnegans Wake. In spite of his provocative title, Einstein’s Wake, Whitworth notes up front that Joyce “is less prominent than might be expected [in his study], because he was less closely connected with the literary periodicals I have examined, and because, compared to Eliot and Woolf, he was unproductive as a critic and theorist” (x).13 Given Joyce’s continuing significance in modernist studies, perhaps it is time to take the methodological approach of Whitworth’s and Parkinson’s studies and apply them to Joyce’s engagement with the new physics. As Whitworth explains, Joyce in the 1920s and 1930s was not closely connected to the British periodicals (his British and Irish periodical outlets, after all, had been primarily little magazines before the collapse of the Egoist), and he was not present as a critic or theorist in British circles. But perhaps this is simply the wrong conversation for a closer understanding of the new physics in his work. Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” which became Finnegans Wake when it at last saw publication as a book in 1939, was a sensation in the Parisian modernist and avant-garde world of the 1920s and 1930s and its little magazines such as transition and Tambour, and it was also taken up by broader-circulation French periodicals as well, such as the Mercure de France. In other words, perhaps Finnegans Wake belongs more to the conversation of Parkinson’s book than Whitworth’s. Moreover, the appeal of Joyce’s late work to twentieth-century atomic physics might itself be explored in more than trivial detail. Murray Gell-Mann found in the Wake a name for his new trio of very strange particles among Joyce’s rich “etyms”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (FW 383.1). And the name of an early experimental laser fusion reactor experiment, “solase,” was derived from the phrase “their solase in dorckaness” (FW 470.7). Perhaps it is time to explore in more depth the appeal of Finnegans Wake to post–Second World War particle physicists. Ihab Hassan noted in the early 1980s that modern science and technology and Finnegans Wake were part of a “trend toward dematerialization, the dispersal of languages, thus the (near) immanence of mind” (187). Rather than simply seeing Finnegans Wake as the first postmodern text, as Hassan did, we might instead pay careful attention to the interrelationships of the new physics and modernism, following them forward into the later period in ways that challenge the temporal and conceptual boundaries of much Anglophone modernist studies. As we shall see in the next

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chapter on the life sciences, scholars of literature and science have increasingly explored the role of literature in the construction and representation of science.

Notes 1 Recent strong contributions to the study of modernist culture in these areas include Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey; Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy; and Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure. 2 As Elizabeth Leane has explained, writings such as Auguste Comte’s about the developmental order of the sciences (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and, finally, the social sciences) popularized in the Anglophone world by Harriet Martineau’s translations in The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853), augmented a perception of the preeminence of physics and mathematics, and the increasing mathematical rigor and difficulty of physics further gave it status (Leane 6). Leane notes that “Ernest Rutherford’s famous dismissal of all scientific disciplines except physics as equivalent to ‘stamp collecting’ is a notorious example of this attitude” (6). 3 The arrival of these disciplines at a professional critical mass might loosely be correlated with the emergence of major societies, associations, and institutions organizing and facilitating their growth, development, and public reception. Of course, the oldest such society—the Royal Society, founded in Britain in 1660—predated the modern disciplinary lines that emerged later. But just to take a few nineteenth-century examples from the United Kingdom and United States, notable British societies included the Royal Astronomical Society (1820), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831), the Chemical Society (1841), the Physical Society of London (1874), the Society for Analytical Chemistry (1874), and the Institute of Chemistry (1877). In the United States, the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1848), the National Academy of Sciences (1863), the American Chemical Society (1876), the American Mathematical Society (1888), and the American Astronomical Society (1899), among others. The century also saw the founding of several engineering institutions. In the UK, these included the Institution

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of Civil Engineers (1818), the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1847), and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (1871), and, in the United States, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1880). 4 Clarke’s list of those who helped formulate the key principles includes Kelvin, James Joule, Robert Mayer, Macquorn Rankine, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Rudolf Clausius (Energy Forms, 2–3). One should add to this list the French military engineer and physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, whose 1824 work on the efficiency of steam engines influenced Clausius’s and Kelvin’s thinking about entropy and make him a kind of father of thermodynamics. In her exploration of the mid-Victorian culture of thermodynamics, Choi reminds us that Kuhn had proclaimed that “history of science offers no more striking instance of the phenomenon known as simultaneous discovery” (qtd in Choi 301). 5 For an example outside of the authors most commonly discussed in these terms—Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, or Eliot, for instance—recent scholarship attempting to specify Katherine Mansfield’s contributions to modernist aesthetics has focused on the thermodynamic tropes and themes of her fiction, seeing heat transfer as not just a theme, but a central structural dynamic in her experimental short fiction (Moffett). 6 Paul Laporte’s 1949 article “Cubism and Science” serves as the classic exemplar. 7 While admiring its ingenuity and the possibility of adapting some of its aspiration to work in quantum fluids, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek has recently written about Kelvin’s ether vortex atoms and Peter Guthrie Tait’s efforts to find ether knot structures for atoms: “Alas this beautiful and mathematically fruitful synthesis is, as a physical theory of atoms, a Beautiful Loser. Its failure was not so much due to internal contradictions—it was too vague and flexible for that!—but by a certain sterility. Above all, it was put out of business by more successful competitors. Eventually the mechanical Ether was discredited by Einstein’s relativity, and the triumphant Maxwell equations for electric and magnetic fields do not support vortices. The modern, successful quantum theory of atoms is based on entirely different ideas” (Wilczek). 8 As a testament to Marie Curie’s celebrity as a scientist, perhaps eclipsed only by Albert Einstein in the first half of the twentieth century, Irene Dunne and Greta Garbo were both considered to play her in the 1943 MGM movie Madame Curie, ultimately starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in its box office–friendly heroic scientific romance.

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9 Leslie Brown explains, “After Thomas Edison’s invention of the fluoroscope in 1896 (a kind of hood camera fitted with a screen), many X-rays were performed as demonstrations. People lined up at department stores, high schools, and other public venues to get ‘bone portraits.’ Dubbed ‘shadow photographs,’ X-rays soon after needed no camera, a capacity shared with some of the earliest forms of photography, and no film” (1517). But the little understood risk of overexposure led to many amputations, burns, and even deaths, and concern grew when Edison’s assistant died in 1904 (Brown 1518). 10 Including several by Soddy, and even Rutherford titled his last book The Newer Alchemy. 11 For a few of the many strong works on the subject, see Hammill, Goldman, and Jaffe. 12 Drouin notes that Dora Marsden’s article in the Egoist, which was serializing Ulysses and which Joyce was known to have read, was the first article about Einstein in a British literary periodical (11). 13 Drouin has recently criticized Whitworth’s portrait of a Joyce far removed from Anglophone periodical culture (3–4). However, the periodical networks in which Drouin has definitively shown Joyce to have participated are those created largely through modernist little magazines at first, rather than the larger generalist journals at the heart of Whitworth’s study. Both locate periodical studies as a key tool of their historicizing research.

3 The life sciences

Just as modernist culture participated in the reconceptualization of the physical sciences during the period, so, too, it became an imaginative laboratory for the constellation of disciplines clustered around the capacious term “life sciences.” As the physical sciences probed the nature of matter and energy, the life sciences similarly offered new paradigms for understanding cells—their organization and roles in communication across systems—and, indeed, the nature of life itself. The organism came to challenge the machine as a guiding metaphor for biology, and the generative instability of biological paradigms in the process of shifting marked the culture of modernism profoundly. This chapter will explore the resonance for modernism of major paradigm shifts in the life sciences. With the renewed attention to and reinterpretation of Mendel’s work in 1900,1 the twentieth century witnessed the exponential growth of genetics and embryology, among other areas of research, and this chapter will explore the modernist culture of these renewed life sciences, as well as topics such as cell culture, germ theory, epidemiology, neuroanatomy, nonvitalist organicism, medicine, biocentrism, and new ecocritical interpretations of modernism and nature study.

A word about the porosity of scientific disciplinary boundaries If the disciplinary boundaries in twenty-first-century science had not yet been fully constructed in the modernist period and

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if they tended to blur even when they existed (take the case of electrovitalism, discussed in Chapter 2, for example), most of the scientific and technological issues discussed in this chapter exist at the porous boundaries between the life sciences and what we now call the social sciences. I will treat psychology in the next chapter on the social sciences, though anyone familiar with the rise of the discipline in the nineteenth century will immediately recall the research programs and conceptual and methodological cross-traffic at the nebulous boundaries between physiology and psychology in the work of such pioneers as Wilhelm Wundt and William James. While one could with justification ascribe to the realm of psychology the concerns with subjective vision and selfhood or identity, for example, or the neurophysiological basis of Stein’s composition practices in Tender Buttons, I include those topics in this chapter as they significantly originated in the disciplinary discourse and the material experimental practices of biology. Sexology, eugenics, and the “back to nature” response to fears of national degeneration in the United States could have been treated in this chapter, as they have a decidedly biological basis, but I shall address them in the next chapter, on the social sciences, as they all take as their subject the human in his or her social environment. My decision about the basis for discussing some concerns in this chapter and others in the life sciences chapter that follows should not signal a rigid clinging to disciplinary demarcation. On the contrary, the methodological tools and perspectives many current modernist studies scholars have learned from the scholarship of science studies, contemporary philosophy and history of science, and the wide field of literature and science have highlighted the porosity of disciplinary boundaries, the border crossings frequently at work, the stakes and strategies of erecting boundaries (thus proscribing some knowledge as outside the sanction of a scientific discipline), and the ways in which sciences and technologies exist within broader social, cultural, and linguistic fields rather than comfortably insulated from them. We have explored some conceptual approaches to modernist culture’s wide-ranging circulation and sharing of metaphors, scientific analogies, concepts, and technologies in the introduction and in the previous chapter on the physical sciences, for instance, in Bruce Clarke’s neologism “technoscientism.” Allow me to add another term to the conceptual tool kit related to scholarship in

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modernism, science, and technology: “domaining.” Susan Merrill Squier, a scholar of literature and feminist science studies whose work beginning in the 1990s on reproductive technologies of the modernist era and beyond is foundational for much of the material covered in this chapter, adopts “domaining” from British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. In her 1992 volume Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies, Strathern explains, In cultural life, in those habits of thought about which for most of the time we are very much unaware, the ideas that reproduce themselves in our communications never reproduce themselves exactly. They are always found in environments or contexts that have their own properties or characteristics. . . . Moreover, insofar as each is a domain, each imposes its own logic of “natural” association. Natural association means that ideas are always enunciated in an environment of other ideas, in contexts already occupied by other thoughts and images. Finding a place for new thoughts becomes an act of displacement. (qtd in Squier, Babies in Bottles, 26–27; emphasis in original) Squier’s work, as we shall see, focuses on the domaining that is a feature of the construction of scientific knowledge in the modernist period and beyond: “I believe that reproductive ideas circulate through the overlapping realms of literature, popular culture, and science via the operations of analogy, and that an understanding of the domaining effect, as it functioned in that circulation of ideas in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, can illuminate our present understanding of reproductive technology” (Babies in Bottles, 27). This understanding of domaining is both attentive to disciplinary boundaries but also fully aware of the creative effect of their frequent transgression. We shall see in this chapter the extent to which contemporary scholarship on modernism, science, and technology locates in the domaining effects and boundary crossings of modernist scientific culture the seeds of contemporary conceptions, whether of reproductive technologies, affect theory, or the numerous other issues this chapter will address. But first, we must look further back into the nineteenth century to understand some of the basic paradigms of the life sciences that were increasingly unstable during the modernist era.

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Nineteenth-century cells Standard histories of biology credit the German biologists M. J. Schleiden and Theodor Schwann in 1838 with the general statement of cell theory that all animals and plants are made up of cells or the products of cells (Gardner 314). Such histories all acknowledge the crowded field of research, from the seventeenth century onward, that contributed to this understanding of the basic structural units of life. And most accounts acknowledge the centrality of advances in material practices, and, in particular, in instrumentation. Increasingly sensitive and accurate balances, such as those made by the French instrument maker Jean Nicolas Fortin for Antoine Lavoisier, or the ice-calorimeter Lavoisier used in experiments on guinea pig respiration, for instance, were key to late-eighteenthcentury biological research. But no single laboratory instrument could rival the role played in that history by the microscope. As Isaac Asimov puts it, “The discoveries of the microscope in the mid-seventeenth century seemed to blur the distinction between living and nonliving matter. It reopened a question that had seemed on the verge of a settlement. That question involved the origin of life or, at least, of the simpler forms of life” (31). The microscope, and the developments in lens making and optics that improved it, contributed to the development of the cell paradigm: “The basic discovery that bodies of animals and plants were organized around small units that were eventually called cells gave biologists new direction. Theorizers, who suggested the broad significance of isolated observations and postulated a unity among all living things with reference to their fundamental organization, came into their own. Then numerous investigators tested such generalizations and extended the theories. Thus the cell eventually came to be recognized not only as a unit of structure but as a unit of function (metabolism), reproduction, and growth and differentiation” (Gardner 311). Scientists such as the Dutch “father of microbiology,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, or the English scientist Robert Hooke, could use the microscope—as primitive as it was in the seventeenth century— to catch a glimpse of a strange world of tiny structures. In his 1665 volume Micrographia, Hooke called the tiny chambers in a slice of cork he saw through his microscope “cells,” since they seemed like the small rooms denoted by the word at the time (Asimov 30). For Asimov, the limitations on this early modern biology were in part

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simply those of its instruments. More than a century passed before the Danish microbiologist Otto Friderich Müller had an instrument capable of seeing bacteria clearly. By the nineteenth century, with the development of the “achromatic microscope,” the distorting effects of color in primitive lenses were finally resolved (Asimov 30–31).

Vitalism, mechanism, organicism, and the new biology The cell theory elaborated in the 1830s, though two centuries in the making, was certainly a paradigm shift, and it provided conceptual tools still significant to biology. But the elaboration of cell theory could not answer all questions about the nature of living organisms. What, for example, distinguishes living cells from inanimate matter? For mechanists, the animate and inanimate realms—the worlds of biology and of physics and chemistry—were governed by the same natural laws. The living organism is essentially a machine. Vitalists, on the other hand, argued that the living and nonliving were fundamentally different and operated under two different sets of natural laws. Yet these conceptual lines were not always so clear. We saw in the previous chapter, for example, these seemingly antithetical understandings brought together in the metaphors of the physics of energy in ways that complicated vitalist thinking during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century, not only was the vitalist/ mechanist dichotomy showing its limitations for biological paradigms, but cell theory itself, as used by “elementalist” biologists to explain biological development in terms of cells alone, was unpersuasive for developmental biologists and especially for embryologists. In what one might term a “new biology” to parallel the “new physics” discussed in the previous chapter, biology became a laboratory science concerned with processes of life that could be explained only through the functioning together of all the cells and organs of an organism through developmental stages in its environment. In the Silliman Memorial Lectures he gave at Yale University in October 1916, the Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane (not to be confused with his son J. B. S. Haldane, whom we shall encounter momentarily) argued that “neither the vitalistic nor the mechanistic theory of the relation between organism and

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environment is tenable” (2). Haldane chose a different word for the alternative perspective he and other biologists were offering: “It has been suggested to me that if a convenient label is needed for the doctrine upheld in these lectures the word ‘organicism’ might be employed” (3). Convinced of the conceptual problems of the elementalist perspective on ontogeny, the American zoologist William Emerson Ritter offered a fully articulated theory of biological organicism in The Unity of the Organism; Or, The Organismal Conception of Life (1919). In this two-volume magnum opus, Ritter assailed the “miscarriage of the elementalist mode of reasoning” (2:229) not only in biology but in other areas of scientific thought as well, such as in psychology.2 We saw in the previous chapter how the resources of language— those resonances accruing to particular words, the power of metaphors—played roles in the shifting paradigms and cultural transmutations of the physical sciences in the modernist period as concepts spread across multiple domains. Recall, for example, the telling presence of mechanistic and Newtonian resonances even in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vitalism in the phrase “life force,” or the unhelpful presence of Newtonian conceptions in the planetary or solar models of the atom proposed by Nagaoka and Rutherford that made those models ultimately problematic during the development of quantum mechanics. Similarly, metaphors of porosity and solidity in atomic physics, of curvature of space in Einsteinian relativity, and the tropes of alchemical transmutation in the early years of radiochemistry and nuclear physics played roles not only in the paradigm shifts of their fields but also in the boundary-work between the occult revival and the science of the period (Morrisson, Modern Alchemy). The microscope gave the life sciences a powerful tool that, in turn, privileged observational methods and fine-tuned description as part of its empirical method. But to recent scholars, those processes of observation, description, and theorization have suggested the need for careful attention to the cultural and linguistic resources of cellular biology. Indeed, Evelyn Fox Keller’s argument discussed in the introduction to this volume, that “the ways in which we talk about scientific objects are not simply determined by empirical evidence but rather actively influence the kind of evidence we seek (and hence are likely to find)” (35), was developed explicitly in the context of twentieth-century biology. The special difficulty in identifying the nature of life itself, much less scientists’ roles in understanding or manipulating it, brought

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particular urgency to the guiding metaphors and paradigms of the life sciences in the twentieth century. In spite of the explanatory limitations of vitalist and mechanistic conceptual approaches to biology, both persisted in various forms from the early modern period into the twentieth century. In 2004, from his vantage at the beginning of the twenty-first century, microbiologist Carl R. Woese has called for a “new biology for a new century” that rejects the fundamentalist reductionism of twentieth-century biology that was marked by the Watson-Crick work on the structure of DNA that gave molecular biologists a tool of understanding genes (175). Molecular biology had essentially embraced a mechanistic mode of thinking about cells after the modernist period. At the beginning of the twentieth century, classical physics boldly imagined that it had solved all of the important problems, only to go through the major paradigm shifts away from classical physics that our previous chapter discussed. But, for Woese, later-twentieth-century molecular biology’s reductionist mechanistic perspective represented an allegiance to only one aspect of the legacy of nineteenth-century biology—its focus on the cell and what came to be understood as the gene—at the expense of issues of emergence, form, and evolution. He quotes physicist David Bohm’s 1969 complaint that “just when physics is . . . moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology are moving closer to it. If the trend continues . . . scientists will be regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism” (qtd in Woese 175). In other words, physics left its classical nineteenth-century mechanics behind long ago, but molecular biology—quite unexpectedly—only strengthened it. But in between that nineteenth-century emergence of modern biology and the entrenched molecular biology paradigm (about which Woese complains) came the organicist movement during the interwar modernist period. Daniel J. Nicholson and Richard Gawne have called the organicist movement “neither logical empiricism nor vitalism” but “the most important tradition within early twentiethcentury philosophy of biology” (345). Biological organicism emerged during the modernist period as a serious challenge to both mechanism and vitalism. As Donna Haraway puts it in Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos, the first half of the twentieth century was “a time of basic crisis in which the age-old dichotomy between mechanism and vitalism was reworked

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and a fruitful synthetic organicism emerged, with far-reaching implications for experimental programs and for our understanding of the structure of organisms” (2). In this most Kuhnian of Haraway’s books, she explores the shifting metaphors and discontinuities marked by the emergence of organicism as a competing paradigm, testing its relationship to the machine metaphors of mechanistic thinking and arguing that organicism is not simply a modern form of vitalism, as some had argued (193). While much of Haraway’s interpretation is beyond the scope of this book, it is worthwhile to rehearse some of her conclusions about the clash of categories and metaphors in the early years of organicism, as it sets on the table key positions alive in the modernist era that inform contemporary modernist studies scholarship. Following the research of key proponents of interwar organicism—particularly the American embryologist Ross G. Harrison, British biochemist Joseph Needham, and Austrian biologist Paul Weiss—Haraway assesses the shifting understanding in their work evident in, for example, the change in images and metaphors in Needham’s writing “from automotive gear shifts to fields, organizers, and liquid crystals” (202). Organicism, Haraway concludes, “transcended the dichotomies of mechanism and vitalism but maintained a special place for the whole organism by proposing unique biological laws of integration and organization” (194). Organicism resists efforts to reduce biology to the laws of chemistry or physics, but also the occasionally metaphysical claims of vitalism: “Organicists of every hue have averred that it is not appropriate to look outside science for an understanding of organisms. Vitalists were, at the very least, not so sure. Therefore, although both vitalists and organicists share a devotion to the idea of wholeness and a rejection of mechanistic physics and chemistry as adequate to the solution of biological problems, they diverge on a very critical issue. Organicists declare that it will be possible to state positive, unambiguous, empirically grounded laws for all aspects of the behavior of organisms. Form and organization are not mysteries, but challenges” (197). Recent work in art history has explored in great detail some of these challenges at the intersections of the organic and inorganic, vitalism and mechanism, the life sciences and physical sciences, and the aesthetic, technological, and scientific. In his wide-ranging monograph, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture,

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and the Extension of Life, for instance, Spyros Papapetros explores early-twentieth-century art, aesthetic criticism, biological and physical sciences, technology, popular science writings, anthropology, and psychology and suggests that “empathy, the ability to identify with the objects of the external world, was not erased but repressed by modernist subjects; thus, it had to return metamorphically projected, objectified, and finally reified in the inorganic form of the animistic artifacts of twentieth-century modernity” (vii), such as automobiles and other machines, skyscrapers, and the crystalline structures of modernist art and architecture. “One could indeed describe the fin de siècle as the time when artifacts start having cataclysmic effects on people,” Papapetros continues. “Real and textual subjects collapse at the sight of these new mesmerizing objects. Although glacial and inorganic, modern artifacts are radiant and electric; they emanate magnetic powers and vibrate with energy, life, and desire of their own. In all their metallic coldness and austere sublimity, the industrial artifacts of the early twentieth century do not lack either pathos or sexual appeal” (viii). His argument takes into account many of the sciences, technologies, and aesthetic practices that existed at that intersection of the living and inorganic, such as those demonstrated in Ernst Haeckel’s final publication, Crystal Souls: Studies of Inorganic Life (1917), for instance. Haeckel used the microphotographs of liquid crystals taken by Otto Lehmann to demonstrate the lifelike qualities of form, and something like respiration and reproduction, to posit something like inorganic life, just as his earlier exploration of the crystalline animals— the zooplankton called radiolarians—ultimately broke down distinctions between the organic and inorganic. No wonder, then, that Needham, in Haraway’s account, would turn to liquid crystals for metaphors of organicism. As Papapetros summarizes Haeckel, “All matter was animate; all substance was one. This was the main principle of Haeckel’s doctrine of monism, which encompassed physics, biology, ethics, and religion. All matter had force and energy. In the organic, this force was active; in the inorganic, it was latent yet potent, and much more potent than the matter we call living” (125). Similar ideas were developed in key modernist works, whether of monism or critiques of humanism, in writings such as Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy as well as the works of T. E. Hulme and those of his protégé Herbert Read. In Read’s novel The Green Child, a utopian community lives in caves, aspiring

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only to cultivate crystals in their form of “inorganic collectivity,” to use Papapetros’s phrase (147). The liquid crystal, which was used to negotiate so many discourse boundaries, had an extraordinary place in the aesthetic and scientific debates from the later nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century, enjoying a revival of interest in György Kepes’s The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956) and beyond (150). At the heart of Papapetros’s work is an extended exploration of Fernand Léger’s 1911 work Nudes in the Forest (see Figure 3.1), which drew together the biological and physical sciences, mineral and organic forms, the primitive sacrifices to vitality enumerated in the anthropology of Durkheim and others, and the pneumatic technologized French landscape of velocipedes and cars—in short, of the colonial world of rubber trees and the technologies of Michelin tires and travel guides. Papapetros concludes that “Nudes in the Forest proposes a pictorial model equally methodical and arbitrary to concocting histories of the world. By collecting fossils and other mineral specimens, the painter ultimately creates

Figure 3.1  Fernand Léger, Nudes in the Forest, 1910-1911. Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.

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an Histoire naturelle or a condensed version of the Création du monde—an encyclopedia of the natural sciences in its modernist redaction into a four-by-six-foot canvas” (208). While we have seen the thermodynamic nightmares of physics offering an end of the world and all biological systems in Chapter 2, the new biology of organicism and monist, vitalist, or other conceptions of inorganic life offered a new, expanded sense of the proliferation of life that turned to epistemological more than metaphysical concerns. The vibratory modernism of the unseen, pulsing ether that we saw in Chapter 2 is complemented by the latent energies of inorganic form. While Papapetros’s study sees in Haeckel, Worringer, Hulme, Read, and others a destruction of the boundaries between organic and inorganic and a concern with the animation of the inorganic, another strong but very different engagement on this terrain is Jessica Burstein’s innovative study Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (2012), which highlights a current of modernism engaged not with the psychology of mind and its libidinous embodiment, but rather with a cold exteriority of the body, of the world of matter. Burstein’s “cold modernism” is not so much concerned with the mechanist/vitalist paradigm that was ceasing to suffice in biology of the period. Turning to the literature of Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy, the art of Hans Bellmer and of Balthus, and even to the fashion of Coco Chanel, Burstein’s cold modernism does not attempt to animate the inorganic or seek the distinctive nature of humanity but rather to emphasize cold, inhuman, mechanical exteriority for its own sake: By saying that cold modernism valorizes exteriority, I mean that the body is taken as the start and finish of all explanation. What precisely cold modernism explains, however, is not the question of what it is to be human, but what it is simply or merely to be; the status of the human has no especial purchase, and thus the human form is on par with seemingly dissimilar entities in the world: clothing, cars, and curtains, for example. . . . The body is a machine to be toyed with, one that toys or ticks, or tics. In its most extreme form, cold modernism offers an account of the human form in which the mind plays no role; or, in a slightly less extreme form, in which the mind is so physicalized as to have no more or less purchase than pure anatomy. (13; emphasis in the original)

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Early-twentieth-century proponents of biological organicism focused their research on areas that have become key to recent scholarship on modernism and biology. Embryology was among the subfields that captivated these researchers. Ross Harrison, for example, turned to the development of the nervous system to explore issues of form, complex relationships, and integration, and, as Haraway notes, he fused an aesthetic appreciation of organic form with an insistence upon the dynamic developments of matter: “Organic form is the product of protoplasmic activity and must, therefore, find its explanation in the dynamics of living matter, but it is the mystery and beauty of organic form that sets the problem for us. Structure is a product of function, and yet at the same time, is the basis of function. The activities of an organism may be nothing more than the continuance of those changes that produce development” (qtd in Haraway 43–44). As Harrison emphasizes in this 1913 paper, “Organic form must find its explanation in the dynamics of matter, and the distinction between living and nonliving must fade” (qtd in Haraway 44).

The neuron doctrine and nonvitalist organicism Laura Otis, whose work on nineteenth-century literature and science has yielded rich results, notes that “changing understandings of personal and national identity encouraged people of the 1830s to see living things as associations of independent units. In the 1880s, this concept of boundedness helped people to associate diseases with invasive microbes violating individual and national borders” (Networking, 7). But the dominant metaphor of the nervous system during the Victorian period, Otis argues, was the continuous net. “In 1887,” Otis explains, “when some neuroscientists proposed that the body’s communications system consisted of independent cells, bitter debates arose between ‘neuronists’ and ‘reticularists.’ Clearly, the notions of boundedness and continuity coexisted in time, leading to conflicting visions of the body. In nineteenth-century Western culture, a discourse celebrating individuality collided with an ideology of connectedness, and the interference pattern they created can be seen in scientists’ and novelists’ representations of communications systems” (Networking, 7). Otis draws together nineteenth-century science, literature, and communications systems

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such as railroads, the telegraph, and, ultimately, neurological systems to suggest the early origins of current comparisons of computer networks and nerve networks. The “neuronist” position was to be especially significant for modernism. Just as painstaking research by increasingly sophisticated microscopes had generated and refined the cell theory, so, too, the neuron doctrine emerged from careful microscopical observations by Santiago Ramòn y Cajal. The Spanish histologist’s observations of the nervous system established that it comprised individual, distinct cells—neurons—separated from each other by the gaps that would come to be known as “synapses.” This undermined the rival reticular theory, which hypothesized the nervous system as a continuous network (Allan 88). Cajal’s work then allowed Charles Scott Sherrington and others during the modernist era to map the actual pathways of nerve impulses. New directions in biology could clearly be registered in the neuron doctrine and the recently honed theories of organicism to which neurological research contributed. In his groundbreaking 2001 monograph titled Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, Steven Meyer notes the tendency of key recent studies of science and modernism to map “modern literature along coordinates derived chiefly from the new physics, whether in terms of late nineteenth-century wave theory, or the quantum theory contemporaneous with Stein, or the physics-inflected chaos theory of our own day” (74–75).3 Meyer offers modernist studies a detailed understanding of Stein’s importance to modernism not simply as an experimental writer, but as a modernist whose writing emerged in the cutting-edge biology of the period, rather than physics: “Stein’s extensive exposure to the New Biology offers an invaluable opportunity to consider the influence on literature of modern biological theory, with its distinctive experimental praxis, as well as the related question of the extent to which literature may be regarded as an appropriate, and perhaps inevitable, domain for physiologically based scientific experimentalism” (75; emphasis in the original). Asking such questions of Stein’s relationship to the new biology inevitably leads Meyer to portray her work as neither divorced from her training in neuroanatomy nor simply inherited from it (54). In his rich study of the multiple domains in which her writing participated—literary, philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological—Meyer

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argues that the way Stein drew these contexts together marks the distinctive nature of her modernist practice (xvii). Stein was perfectly positioned at a moment of major paradigm shift in neurology. She had begun her studies at Radcliffe in 1893, two years after the articulation of the neuron doctrine, and took philosophy and psychology classes from William James. She also worked with his assistant, the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg. While much scholarship has focused on William James’s legacy in Stein’s work (see Hawkins or Olson, for example), James had not made the leap to the neuron paradigm. In 1897, as Stein entered medical school, the English neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington introduced the concept of the synapse as “an anatomical and functional explanation for the mechanism by which the individual neuronal units could communicate with each other.” Hence Stein, in her first two years at Johns Hopkins, much of the time spent conducting laboratory research, found herself in the midst of a paradigm shift if ever there was one. The crucial thing to note here is that in taking neurons, as described by the neuron doctrine, as paradigmatic of organic life (and thereby presuming that nerve cells, like other cells, don’t form “actual unions,” or organic unities, but are only exceptional in that they “do something very different from other cells of the body,” namely, they “process information”), it becomes necessary to reconceive organicism as a function of contact or contiguity, rather than of organic connection. (Meyer 79–80) Cutting-edge laboratory training and theoretical innovations like these taught at medical schools informed the experimental writing of modernism in diverse ways.

Medicine and modernist writing Like the other sciences discussed in this chapter, medicine, too, was undergoing significant changes during the modernist period. Yet it is also something of an outlier: it was the site of numerous intersections among institutions, technologies, and scientific paradigm shifts, but also followed a somewhat different trajectory from the other

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sciences we have considered in this volume. Mark S. Micale has noted of many modernist sciences, arts, and philosophical positions that “the revolution of Modernism entailed an increasing separation of representation from ‘the real.’” Yet, Micale continues, the medical sciences in Europe and North America experienced their high, positivist period precisely during the later nineteenth century. In France, the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s were the heroic age of Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur, an era during which the causes and courses of one infectious disease after another were discovered. The intellectual prestige of the homme de science reached a historic high point. Throughout the period, the orthodoxies of medical positivism remained firmly intact: in sickness and health, the human body and mind were to be studied, understood, and eventually mastered through precise and detailed observation by a community of experts. Pathology was seen to have rational causes, subject to immutable and ascertainable patterns of laws. . . . Positivist medical science was the ultimate “discourse of the real,” seeking to produce an authoritative account of an unproblematically real world of the human body and mind. (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 89–90) We shall leave Micale’s widely influential work on the “mind of modernism” to the next chapter, but the recent engagement of modernist studies with science studies and enriched work in the history of science has also left its mark on the exploration of modernism and medicine. During the later nineteenth century, the era during which Micale charts the triumphs of positivist medicine and germ theory, the authority of doctors in the United States was somewhat different. As Hugh Crawford explains, skepticism toward doctors and toward institutionalized power in general in nineteenthcentury America, and infighting among different medical “sects,” led many to turn to home remedy books and medical self-reliance (13–14). But during the early years of the twentieth century, as the American Medical Association expanded its membership from eight thousand physicians in 1900 to seventy thousand a decade later, the nature of medical authority changed: Physicians now controlled hospital privileges and referrals, and they instituted a code of ethics that resembled a code of silence.

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In the space of thirty years American medicine was transformed from a hack profession anyone with one or two years’ education or an apprenticeship could enter to an exclusive club that rigorously controlled both the admittance and the behavior of its members. These medical initiates were privy to the sacred and henceforth generally unavailable truth of health. (Crawford 14–15) “Germ theory, aseptic surgery, professionalized hospitals, and an increasingly effective pharmacopeia not only raised respect for the medical profession but also rarefied its knowledge and reified its practitioners,” Crawford adds. During this period of ascendancy and institutional legitimization of the medical profession in the United States, William Carlos Williams became a doctor—and a modernist poet. In order to test the implications of Williams’s profession for modernist poetry, Crawford turns to the insights of several of the theorists and epistemological explorations surveyed in the introduction to this volume. Other readers of Williams have emphasized his estrangement from his dual roles as doctor and poet (e.g., Bernard Duffey’s Poetry of Presence), but Crawford seeks to explain the relation of medicine to Williams’s poetry by turning, for example, to Ludwik Fleck’s concept of “thought style” in The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, arguing that Williams participated in two different thought collectives, those of medicine and literature, internalizing them but also encountering contradictions in their ways of knowing (7–8). Williams could claim that to him, poetry and medicine essentially amount to the same thing (5), and Crawford’s work explores the common concepts of clarity and cleanliness that inform Williams’s poetry and medical practice, looking with equal interest at medical texts of the period and issues of clarity in Imagism, for example. Bruno Latour’s Pasteurization of France, with its critical analysis of the construction of scientific authority and its key concept of reproducibility, informs Crawford’s understanding of the construction of networks across the various dimensions of Williams’s practice: “Williams’s work can be viewed as a node through which pass numerous overlapping lines of force—poetry, modernism, science, medicine, technology, aesthetics, gender, and visual arts. They create a network that is strengthened through various associations” (10–11).

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Indeed, much of Williams’s struggle over concepts of clarity involves a central tension in the medical profession at the time, between authority, tradition, and abstraction and the empirical experiences of the individual doctor. In Crawford’s account, the microscope and other technologies privileged sense over erudition, and the rise of empiricism and the clinical method in laternineteenth-century France, along with the laboratory revolution, led to the rise of scientific medicine, of hospitals with laboratory equipment and scientific floor plans, of medical schools such as the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Medical Laboratories Building at the University of Pennsylvania, which Williams attended (33–37). Crawford sums up the views of medical education reformer Abraham Flexner and others of the day, noting that “The history of modern medicine can be seen as the systematic rejection of abstraction” (37), a view also found in Williams’s reflections on writing in The Embodiment of Knowledge. The “contact” (Williams’s phrase, and the name of his little magazine) Williams sought and the embodied knowledge of his poetics put him at odds with the forces of abstraction and tradition in science. Both Williams and Thomas Kuhn saw the necessity of paradigms for the production of knowledge but also saw how much is lost by subordinating the particularities of specific bodies and things to conceptual categories. Williams’s critique of science is explicit in A Novelette: “Science is impotent from all the viewpoints from which in its inception it seemed to promise enlightenment to the human mind. It is going nowhere but to gross and minute codification of the perceptions” (qtd in Crawford 41). Hence, Crawford does not read Williams as rejecting science and technology, but rather as aligning himself “with that medical tradition whose business is the rejection of medical tradition” (41). Crawford shows us a Williams who is deeply aware of the opportunities and limitations afforded his practices, both medical and poetic, by his profession. The rhetorical construction of medical authority—the performances of it in the diagnostic exchanges with patients—also leaves Williams uneasy. If Williams’s medical training and practice and his poetics of clarity and his critique of abstraction went hand in hand, the neuron doctrine and the nonvitalist organicism it supported informed Stein’s experimental writing after her departure from medical school and led, in Tender Buttons and elsewhere, to a “self-organizing” form of writing “premised on and exemplifying an organicism divorced from traditional notions of organic form” (Meyer xviii). This

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writing exemplifies what Meyer calls Stein’s “neurophysiological imagination” (xviii). Meyer emphasized Stein’s writing not as simply reflecting neurophysiological science, but in fact serving as “a form of laboratory science, descending, by way of the psychological and anatomical laboratories at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, from the medical laboratory” (81). Stein’s developing practice can be traced in the evolution of her writing: “The shift from writing in what Stein termed her ‘first manner’ to the Mannerism of Tender Buttons (from ‘It is a simple thing to be quite certain that there are kinds in men and women. It is a simple thing and then not anyone has any worrying to be doing about any one being any one’ to ‘Suppose it did, suppose it did with a sheet and a shadow and a silver set of water, suppose it did’) occurred because James’s scientific psychology, as she understood it, had ceased to interest her” (Meyer 5–6). Meyer describes Stein’s practice of attention and sensitivity to the functioning of her own nervous system through her writing as a “neuraesthetic” (58), and argues that her middle-period dissociative writing requires the reader to reproduce the recursive act of reading which, in line with the parameters under investigation, was part and parcel of the original process of writing. Such experimental reading, as it were, is not a matter of reductively decoding Stein’s writing word for word or phrase for phrase but of neuraesthetically reproducing her “stud[ies] of the relation of words in meaning sound and volume” in ways specified by the compositions themselves. (83; emphasis in original) Hence Stein’s writing does not offer the reader tools for thinking about its objects, but rather “permits one to become increasingly attuned to the complex interrelations that actually compose the objects of one’s thought (as well as one’s sense of oneself)” (295). Stein’s middle period compositions set lines, words, and even interspaces within the composition’s syntax in vibration with each other, in a way that Whitehead would articulate as “vibratory organicism” in the following years (Meyer 4). Ultimately, then, Meyer points out that, in Stein, writing and the biological sciences are not merely correlated. Viewed from one direction, biological investigation (like all

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scientific investigation) involves ever more complex extensions of writing practices, ever more broadly distributed technologies of writing; viewed from the other direction, writing is itself an extension or externalization of the human central nervous system. Writing, then, is a function of neurology; the life sciences are a function of writing; and investigations such as Stein’s of the organic mechanisms involved in writing ought to prove no less suggestive for biological research than Stein found James’s biocentrism to be for achieving her own experimental objective of an ever “fuller” understanding of her “self-understanding” compositions. (320; emphasis in original) The freshness of Meyer’s approach has borne addressing in some detail, but it has not been without its critics. Following Haraway’s path lauding the achievements of nonvitalist organicism, Meyer is careful to distinguish Stein’s organicism from other varieties available to modernism, such as D. H. Lawrence’s “social organicism, as against the more strictly biological organicism that informed Stein’s writing, as well as the tendency to a Bergsonian vitalism, so widespread in the early decades of the century and from which Lawrence, in particular, suffered greatly” (56). Yet other scholars exploring Stein’s scientific engagements have sought a more positive interpretation of vitalist modernism and the thought of Henri Bergson, one of its most prominent proponents. Omri Moses, for example, has recently argued that Meyer “associates Bergsonian vitalism, quite misleadingly, with models of organicism that succumb to ‘temptations to totalization (aesthetic and political)’” (227, note 50). Indeed, the waters are muddied by the late-nineteenth-century emergence in France of an organicist sociology that was often tied to developments in the biology of cell theory (see D’Hombres and Meddaoui). Still, despite real differences of interpretation, Meyer and Moses are both engaged in a similar project, seriously exploring the interrelationships of modernist experimental writing and the emerging scientific engagements among biology, philosophy, and psychology. Moses turns to Darwin, Bergson, William James, and Nietzsche, for example, for their vitalist investigations of change in biological systems, and he offers a reading of Stein’s early fiction rooted more in Bergson and in Darwin’s work on the nervous system, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,

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than in the more commonly explored context of William James’s thought. For Meyer, the payoff of Stein’s work in the laboratories at Johns Hopkins and her move away from William James and Hugo Münsterberg was the neurological experiment of Stein’s composition practices and aesthetics during the period, beginning loosely with Tender Buttons. Moses focuses instead on the early writings, such as Three Lives, and her experimental work on automatism at Radcliffe: “It seems clear that the repetitiousness of the prose in ‘Melanctha’ is meant to mirror the patterns and forms that habits acquire as they develop over time, as they gather duration and move in a progressive direction” (131). Focusing on Bergson’s understanding of habit as “a form of memory created by repetition” (132), and on Darwin’s conjectures on the role of sympathetic or conflictual interactions in the development of character, Moses emphasizes Stein’s nonmechanistic understanding of biology: “Nature may regulate life, but it also deregulates it. Biology does not put a fundamental limit on the capacity for inventiveness, and, as regards habit, it works in combination with choice” (131). Where Meyer emphasizes a nonvitalist organicism in Stein’s neurological approach to writing, Moses gives us a Stein grounded in vitalism: “By using a vitalist lens, however, we can begin to see how much Stein’s ideas connect to something beyond thematized pragmatist social policy. Stein’s well-known interest in repetition and time, along with her early fascination with Darwin, points in the direction of nonmechanistic ‘life’ philosophies and an interest in the nature of psychic change” (133). What we see at play here is a resurgence of interest in exploring vitalism in the past few decades of modernist studies as well as the fact that vitalism itself came in multiple forms and was connected widely to many different areas of modernist culture, having perhaps always been an example of the technoscientism discussed in the previous chapter.4

Optics and physiology The “neurophysiological imagination” that Meyer locates in Stein has also been the focus of new modernist scholarship on the senses. Art historians have long debated the impact of optical technologies and theories in the development of modern art. Impressionism in particular has been explored in relationship to nineteenth-century

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theories of optics and color, such as those in Eugene Chevreul’s On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colors (1839), and as a response to the rise of photography.5 But the rise of neurology and physiological psychology, new developments in the physiology of vision, and a thriving technoscientific visual culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought vision and physiology together with modernist literature in transformative ways that have only recently been strongly articulated in scholarship. Christina Walter’s Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism reopens a very old subject in modernist studies—impersonality— and significantly broadens our understanding of that key concept. Walter locates a “new visuality” in later-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century culture not only in the rise of photography and film but also in the many popular optical devices of the period, noting that inventions such as “stereoscopes, kaleidoscopes, phenakistoscopes, kinoras, cinema” had their origins in the laboratory. “These gadgets,” she writes, “exploited the embodied limits of the eye in order to produce their effects and also offered an image that was fragmented and that unfolded temporally as those effects” (14–15). X-rays, explored in Chapter 2, showed that the light spectrum extended beyond the light visible to the naked eye, and the early twentieth century saw a rise in popular visioncare manuals as well as in illusionistic performances based on new scientific knowledge and technologies. Walter suggests that a new model of vision was at play that subverted the venerable understanding of vision passively collecting images of the physical world for a disembodied mind to contemplate: “In the new model of vision . . . a rational subject no longer actively reflected upon visual percepts that passively recorded the physical world. Instead, the perceiving subject was itself part of that physical world, and its embodied processes, structures, and defects shaped perception, including the ocular apparatus, visual cognition, and visual memory” (3). This led to a modern “optical impersonality,” through which “modernists developed a vernacular science in aesthetic form, and they used this form to consider how the new physiology of vision affected notions of selfhood and identity. The attempt to interrogate these notions and indeed to turn them into a social politics is the defining work of modernist impersonality” (3). Various versions of the “imagetext,” which Walter defines as “works that blend the respective territories of the seeable and the sayable” (2–3),

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become the key aesthetic laboratory for optical impersonality in modernism. Walter thus challenges older critical assumptions about the discourse of impersonality in modernist literature—that it was committed “to a self-contained ‘I’ removed from social reality,” that “modernists used impersonality to oppose embodied experience, including emotion, and that modernism was solipsistically devoted to an autonomous, coherent ‘I’” (3). Walter’s reading of this embodied optical impersonality allows us to reconsider a key passage in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End that might have served as a strong example of the literary impressionism and impersonality that thread their way through the tetralogy. At the front during the Great War sits Ford’s protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, who is writing (in a detached, scientific manner) a report on “his own case” in his notebook while thinking about his estranged wife and a recent conversation with another soldier. When he looks back at the white page, he perceives “thin films of reddish purple,” which become “fainter” and “luminous green” as they float toward the darkness beyond the top right of the page. Walter explains that Tietjens is experiencing what scientists of the period were calling “subjective color,” an experience of color originating in the eye and brain rather than in the world of external objects. Indeed, she notes how much Tietjens’s experience resembles an experiment in biologist T. H. Huxley’s Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1866; reprinted until 1930) (Walter 5). Tietjens is thinking about a fellow soldier, O Nine Morgan, who was recently killed. Tietjens believes that “his retina [is] presenting him with the glowing image of the fellow’s blood” (qtd in Walter 5). The rest of the passage Walter analyzes is worth quoting at length: But that was as far as Tietjens got in uninterrupted reminiscence of that scene. He was sitting in his flea-bag digging idly with his pencil into the squared page of his note-book which had remained open on his knees, his eyes going over and over again the words with which his report on his own case had concluded— the words: So the interview ended rather untidily (emphasis in original). Over the words went the image of the dark hillside with the lights of the town, now that the air-raid was finished, spreading high up into the sky below them. . . . But at that point the doctor’s batman had uttered, as if with a jocular, hoarse irony, the name:

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“Poor—O Nine Morgan! . . .” and over the whitish sheet of paper on a level with his nose Tietjens perceived thin films of reddish purple to be wavering, then, a glutinous surface of gummy scarlet pigment. Moving! (qtd in Walter 6, ellipses and emphasis in the original) Walter sees in this passage an example of the imagetext in Ford’s optical impersonality’s “blended visual and verbal representations” that “broadly blurred the borders of the seeable and the sayable and at their strongest highlighted how the interaction of images and texts is in fact constitutive of all representation” (7). In Walter’s account, Ford “overwrites Tietjens’ record of ‘his own case’ with subjective visual images, he isn’t weighing an impersonal social science against a personal impressionism; he’s making optical science a window onto the impersonality that already resides within the human subject” (5). But Ford is just the tip of the iceberg in Walter’s expansive study. She connects T. S. Eliot’s long canonical espousal of impersonality to his studies of the science and philosophy of vision and his exchanges with J. W. N. Sullivan, the science writer whose work in the Athenaeum we encountered in Chapter 2, and she greatly expands the range of authors whose work can fruitfully be understood in terms of what she calls “optical impersonality” to include Pater, Michael Field, Lawrence, Woolf, Loy, and H. D., among others. In her reading of the social and political critiques afforded by engagements with an embodied personality, Walter shows that the issue did not have a specific politics. Loy and H. D., for instance, turned their engagements of impersonality toward progressive political causes, while Lawrence’s impersonality supported a more conservative vision of gender and race. But what these writers all shared was an aesthetic and formal, rather than thematic, engagement with the new embodied optics that they turned upon notions of identity in the self central to modernist literature.6

Reproductive technology While Gertrude Stein was in the new medical school at Johns Hopkins—attending between 1897 and 1902, just a few years after the medical school’s founding in 1893—the embryologist and

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proponent of biological organicism Ross Harrison was serving as an instructor in anatomy there (from 1896 to 1907). Their paths must have crossed. But three years after Stein left Hopkins without taking her degree, Harrison began work on one of his most significant laboratory contributions—performing the first successful tissue cultures between 1905 and 1907.7 In order better to understand the development of embryonic nerve cells, he took portions of frog nerve tube at an early stage of embryonic development and grew them in a drop of frog lymph, thus observing their development directly. Harrison went on to become professor and head of the Department of Zoology at Yale in 1907 and continued to improve his tissue culture techniques to aid his embryological research, while his Johns Hopkins colleague Florence Sabin used his tissue culture techniques there and in her later headship of a department at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City.8 Of course Harrison’s frog nerve cells were a long way from growing human tissue outside of the body, but it would not be long before tissue culture techniques would become a key element of fantasies about ectogenesis, or extrauterine gestation, that fired debates among sexologists, eugenicists, scientists in several fields, and the broad reading public of the modernist era. Squier’s groundbreaking Babies in Bottles (1994) led the way in studies of analogy, literature, technology, science, and gender in the modernistera roots of debates about reproductive technologies still relevant today. Using scientific texts, popular science writing, and literary works by Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Charlotte Haldane, and several other writers, she explores the evolving conceptions of fields and possible techniques of reproductive technologies imagined in the 1920s—endocrine treatment (artificially using hormones to initiate development or alter an organism), experimental embryology (which explored the processes of transformation and differentiation during physiological development), artificial parthenogenesis (techniques for causing cell division by an egg in the absence of sperm), and tissue culture (processes for keeping cells alive after they have been removed from an organism) (Squier 39–42). These nascent scientific techniques had far-reaching social consequences. Squier’s study charts the key process of domaining and some of the roles played by literature in the development and understanding of these new sciences through a series of detailed case studies. For example, she describes how, in 1892, a four-year-old Julian Huxley read Charles Kingsley’s Victorian children’s classic

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The Water-Babies (published serially in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1862–63 and in book form in 1863), marveling at an illustration featuring two prominent biologists—T. H. Huxley (Julian’s grandfather) and Richard Owen—looking at a “water baby” in a bottle of water. Kingsley’s pro-Darwinian but also highly moral fairy tale features a Mother Carey, who “makes things make themselves,” and explores individual human embryological development in relationship to the development of the human species and the broader biological world. Julian’s reading provoked a charming exchange of letters about water babies with his grandfather, T. H. Huxley. In 1919, Julian, by then a zoologist, read the work of J. F. Gudernatsch, who caused a premature metamorphosis of tadpoles into froglets by feeding them thyroid hormone, and Huxley successfully performed a similar experiment feeding minced thyroid to his own water baby, a Mexican amphibian called an axolotl. In his experiment, the axolotl, which naturally lives permanently as a tadpole or eft, artificially and astonishingly matured into a large salamander-like creature capable of breathing air. Connecting his work with the axolotl and the development and birth of his own child, Huxley published his experiment in Nature and was quickly greeted by sensationalized newspaper headlines in the mass-circulation Daily Mail: “Young Huxley has discovered the Elixir of Life”; “A Great Discovery. Thyroid Gland Marvels. Control of Sex and Growth. Renewal of Youth” (Squier, Babies, 36). Huxley received so many letters that he wrote an article to clear up misconceptions and thus launched his career as a popular science writer. Squier explains, The axolotl experiment . . . illustrates the domaining effect: the subtle shift that takes place in ideas when they move from one cultural or social context to another. As the ideas moved from Kingsley’s fairy story to Huxley’s adult scientific work, they continued to reflect Kingsley’s interest in development and differentiation. But—and here’s the domaining effect—reflecting the new instrumental preoccupation of the scientific realm, Huxley did more than observe development and differentiation. He tried to reconstruct it. Moreover, as he transferred those principles—embodied by the water-babies and Mother Carey— from fiction to fact, what got lost was Kingsley’s warning against meddling in nature’s secrets. A fictional affirmation that there are limits to human knowledge became a scientific assertion that there should be no such limits. (38)

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Further, as Squier documents, Huxley continued in 1922 to explore possible reproductive technologies from scientific experiments, publishing an essay provocatively titled “Searching for the Elixir of Life” in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. In the piece, he speculates about human tissue culture, immortality, and how “primitive man” might use such technologies if they were available. Huxley refers to the research of French surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, a hotbed of tissue culture research.9 Highlighting the work of analogy in science, Squier explains, “The tissues cultured by Carrel were not human, but avian. But when Huxley addressed the implications of tissue culture, he characteristically worked by analogy, shifting to consider the implications of the tissue-culture process for the human being. He also shifted the context for considering tissue culture from science to fiction in the course of his essay, mirroring a process of discursive drift common in the culture at large” (42). That movement into fiction led Squier to an archive now rich for the new modernist studies: the wildly popular science fiction pulp magazines of the 1920s. In August 1927, Huxley published “The Tissue-Culture King,” a fictionalization of the issues his Century essay addressed, in Hugo Gernsback’s quintessential sci-fi pulp, Amazing Stories. The issue also featured a reserialization of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and another story, by A. Hyatt Verrill, entitled “The Ultra-Elixir of Life,” that, as Squier explains, “fictionalizes the process of developmental reversal through endocrine treatment that Huxley discussed in ‘Searching for the Elixir of Life’” (Squier 43). Francis Flagg’s “The Machine Man of Ardathia,” published in the November 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, “not only anticipates the machinery for embryo culture as part of in vitro fertilization, but is an uncanny anticipation of our dominant current representation of the product of IVF—the test-tube baby—in the sketch of a dome-headed, naked creature enclosed in a transparent oblong glass tube” (Squier 45–46). Huxley’s “Tissue-Culture King” has its roots in the descriptions of king worship in West Africa in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough; it shifts tissue culture into the human realm of imperial adventure, scientific experiments on life, and primitivist religious fantasy; and it moves the horrors of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into the biological realm (Squier 49). Huxley’s protagonist, Hascombe, is a medical researcher who saves his own life by giving an African king the secrets to culturing his own tissue,

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thus deliberately grafting tissue culture, experimental embryology, endrocrine treatment, and artificial parthenogenesis onto the tribal religion of his captors.

Environmental science This chapter has largely been concerned with the emerging sciences of life at the level of the organism or even the cell. But global warming, mass extinction, environmental toxicity, precarious food supplies, and other imperatives of early-twenty-first-century ecological crises have led scholars to focus on nature and the environment in the modernist period. Seeking methodologies for addressing these broad concepts, over the last decade scholars of modernism have registered the considerable impact of ecocritical and ecofeminist concerns on their work. While most of the sciences and technologies we have examined in this volume were in considerable flux or even undergoing paradigm shifts during the modernist period, much of the ecocritical turn in modernist studies stems from unsettling changes in our own era; nevertheless, this research has produced stunning new views of the culture of modernism. Let us turn here to a few examples grounded in the biological and ecological discourses of the modernist period.

Biocentrism Along with concepts of “nature” and the “natural,” the Enlightenment and modernity also bequeathed us an industrial capitalist society and economy that now imperils the natural world and the ecosystems that sustain life on our planet. There has long been a propensity to view modernist culture in association with industrial and urban modernization, and, indeed, with some of the ideologies and forces that most militate against the flourishing of the natural world. Recently, scholars have sought to balance those aspects of modernism with a neglected current of modernism rooted in nature-centric ideologies. Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche’s edited collection Biocentrism and Modernism (2011), for instance, includes work that explores the many strands of nature-centric modernism under the rubric “biocentrism” (derived

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from the German term Biozentrik, from German philosophical and popular science writing of the period): In defining “nature-centrism” or “Biocentrism,” what we have done is to identify a series of discourses which, while differing from each other in certain respects, shared a set of themes, attitudes, and topoi relating to nature, biology, and epistemology. While distinguishable from each other, these discourses held in common a set of tenets that included a belief in the primacy of life and life processes, of biology as the paradigmatic science of the age, as well as an anti-anthropocentric worldview, and an implied or expressed environmentalism. (2) In short, Botar and Wünsche, and the several art historians whose research is represented in their volume, are not arguing that there was a formal Biocentrism movement, like Surrealism or Futurism, or even a single set of ideologies or origins to the work they explore. Rather, they chart the “pervasive interest on the part of many early to mid-twentieth-century Modernist visual cultural practitioners in this particular set of ideas” (3). The volume’s research ranges from the concept of the city as an organism in German urban planning and gardening (Haney and Sohn), or on how microbiology influences the natural forms in the late work of Kandinsky, or on Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró (Barnett), or the organic and biological in the Russian avant-garde (Wünsche) to essays on a “Nature Romanticism” or “Neo-Romantic tradition” in modern art, such as that of Paul Klee (Wucher; Henry). Other contributors expose the anarchist politics of biocentrism in Herbert Read’s modernism (Antliff) and provide a keen account of the meanings of the term “biocentrism” (Botar). The research in Biocentrism and Modernism shows an impressive critical mass emerging in art history to rebalance accounts of modernism to include this biocentric current as deserving the attention that, say, technology or pure abstraction have received in the scholarship.

Nature study, ecocriticism/ecofeminism Moving from the wide-ranging scholarship on biocentrism in modernist art history, we now turn to a much more narrowly focused example of the influence of current ecologically based

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methodologies on modernist studies: the proliferating research on Virginia Woolf and the study of nature. Though this critical inquiry has been sharpening over the last decade, it has resulted in a number of key conference papers, impressive monographs, and edited collections in the past few years, such as the papers in Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Roman’s collection, Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers of the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (2011), Christina Alt’s Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (2010), and Bonnie Kime Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (2012). The confluence of modernist studies and science and technology studies that has been the subject of this volume may productively be broadened to include developments in ecocriticism and ecofeminism that are animated by similar concerns in many areas. Often, even the same scholars serve to inspire or elucidate arguments in all of these arenas. In her 2012 volume, In the Hollow of the Wave, Bonnie Kime Scott, for example, turns to the writings of Haraway, whom we have encountered in the modernist scholarship of Squier, Meyer, and others in this chapter. Invoking her as an ecofeminist, Scott adopts Haraway’s term, “natureculture,” for its rejection of the binary commonly held since the Enlightenment (In the Hollow, 2). Haraway, as Scott points out, “began blurring the borders between nature and culture with ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women,” but Haraway’s more recent work, When Species Meet, “concerning dogs and humans, develops the concept most deliberately” (In the Hollow, 221, note 1). As Haraway herself puts it in When Species Meet, “I am a part of the Kindred Spirits human and non-human animal community in many of the same ways in which I have been part of the ecofeminist world, in response to whom I wrote the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in 1985. I also was and am part of the experimental biological science community to whom that cyborg paper was equally addressed” (86). But these communities have all developed and shifted since Haraway’s first book, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos (1976), that has been so relevant to later science and literature work in modernism. What one might see in recent scholarship on Virginia Woolf and nature study are two impulses that, at times, proceed comfortably in company, and at others times less so. Scott’s volume is a strong example of the confluence. She draws upon and further work on

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Woolf’s life and writings in the context of key scientific issues of her day, citing not only the emerging scholarship on Woolf and biological and natural history traditions changing during her lifetime, but also work grounded squarely in the physical sciences, such as Holly Henry’s work cited elsewhere in this volume on Woolf and astronomy. Scott’s is a project perhaps best described by a chapter titled “Toward a Greening of Modernism” in her book. In the Hollow of the Wave takes on a range of entries into the cultures and ideologies of “natureculture” in Woolf’s work, from its relationship to Darwinian and other natural history traditions that emerged in Woolf’s childhood and early adulthood—the Stephen family, as Scott compellingly points out, had many connections with Darwin himself and his work and family—to landscape and gardening, collecting, and species barrier crossing. She ultimately makes an argument for turning to Woolf for ideas of “environmental holism.” Like much of her earlier feminist work, Scott’s volume takes a stand against what she sees even in the new modernist studies (and even by key Woolf scholars) as an ongoing dismissal of nature and the natural world: “Despite their growing critique of the old modernism, proponents of the new modernist studies, and even feminists writing recently on Virginia Woolf, seem little more interested than their predecessors in modernist uses of nature” (2). Cultural studies itself, still informing the new modernist studies, seems to Scott to continue the nature/culture binary and focus upon only one of that pair. While attempting a “greening” of scholarship on several modernist figures—looking at the natural world as it touched writers from Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence to H. D., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes—Woolf ultimately takes the central position in her study, in part because she is seen as a kind of ecofeminist avant la lettre. From the conception of holistic order evident in Woolf’s texts, to her interest in breaking down species barriers, even in Woolf’s focus on goddess figures and reappropriation of “classical and pagan myths to explore the ideas of balanced and sustainable order” (12), Woolf is shown as, essentially, a modernist ecofeminist. Scott’s goal is clearly focused on the present in its turn to the resources of the past: “Undeniable global warming, costly, diminishing supplies of oil, and the global spread of technological modernity contribute to our present cultural and natural crisis. One way to reach toward a sustainable future is to develop awareness

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of previous uses of nature” (12). Scott concludes that she hopes her book will “demonstrate that Woolf’s writing is both sustaining and renewable. Sustaining and renewing require questioning and resisting discourses and practices of the past, leading to a creative, concerted effort to apply to new circumstance what we find of use” (12). Scott’s call to use the emerging ecofeminist consciousness of a writer such as Woolf to augment our resources for understanding the present is akin to Squier’s efforts, discussed earlier in this chapter, to look at the early history of the images and discourse of contemporary reproductive technologies in order to better understand the complexities of controversies that can all too easily seem settled or more simple than they really are. Other key voices in this recent turn in Woolf studies have been more cautious about the ecocritical orientation of Woolf’s writings toward contemporary ecofeminism. Though sharing the salutary interest in Woolf’s engagements with the natural world and discourses of science of her period, Alt nevertheless cautions against the reading of Woolf as a proto-ecofeminist: “the arguments of Woolf’s prescience can be disputed through reference to Woolf’s contemporary scientific context” (9). Alt’s carefully and meticulously researched Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature augments the case I have been making in this volume that modernism emerged during and contributed to major paradigm shifts in virtually all of the sciences and many technologies. For Alt, the important shift occurs from Victorian to twentieth-century attitudes and methods involved in the study of nature. She thoroughly documents with Woolf’s letters, diaries, and other writings her own engagement with and shifting understanding of Victorian-era taxonomic sciences of nature study toward newer disciplines and systems of ecology, ethology, the science of animal behavior, and laboratory biology of the living environment, in its complexity and vitality, rather than in the dead specimens of her Darwinian and specimen-collecting childhood. Alt relies upon revisionist historians of science, such as Adrian Desmond and Paul White, who “assert that modern biology is as much a product of the nineteenth-century displacement of taxonomic museum work by the new biology of the laboratory as a result of disputes over evolutionary theory” (11). As Alt explains, Woolf uses analogies from the study of nature in her understanding both of criticism and writing: “Woolf employs analogies drawn from the study of nature as a means of articulating

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not only the fictional method under critique but also the alternative approaches possible. These alternatives take different forms and might be variously described as a protectionist, an ethological, or an ecological perspective, regardless of the specific alternative that she chooses in a given situation, however, Woolf describes each through reference to contemporary trends in the study of nature” (174). The tensions among these different forms of nature study and the shifts in the ethics and discourse of science that they embody can nowhere be more compellingly seen than in Alt’s brilliant work on the revisions Woolf made in her most famous essay, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” in 1924 (174–79). Her criticism of the “Edwardian” approach to fiction (seen in Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy) leads to her affirmation of a new “Georgian” approach in modernist writers, including, of course, herself. The taxonomic approach of ranged static specimens set out for display gives way to an emphasis on the living, mutable subject. The impulse to classify, with which Woolf fought in herself, led her to revise the language about Mrs. Brown from one of “capture” to one of “protection” (176–77). Even with all of the collecting of specimens that goes on across Woolf’s novels, for Alt, Woolf participates in the shift toward contextual observation— rather than detached classification—that was sweeping the nature study of the period. Rather than making Woolf a proto-ecofeminist of a later period, Alt shows us a Woolf very much of her period, but more richly interesting in these areas than we might have suspected: Reading Woolf’s representations of nature and its study with modern developments in the life sciences as a frame of reference reveals the complexity and coherence of her use of imagery taken from the study of nature. Woolf drew upon the scientific understanding of nature to enhance the particularity and power of her own representations of the natural world, but her engagement with the life sciences was not limited to a sampling of biological facts. She was alert to disciplinary disputes that divided practitioners of the life sciences and conscious of the shift in focus and approach that altered the study of nature during her lifetime. These tensions and trends provided her with analogies through which to juxtapose contrasting approaches to the representation of life in fiction and metaphors with which to describe the shifts in method and objective that characterized literary modernism. (191)

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Beyond a doubt, the life sciences had come into their own in the nineteenth century. After some seven decades of successes, though, even the paradigmatic cell theory and other nineteenthcentury orthodoxies were in need of paradigms capable of handling the complexities of organisms and ecosystems, of form and development. Moreover, the amateur naturalists or natural historians of the early nineteenth century had given way to the professional biologists and neurological researchers working in modern laboratories in university graduate and medical schools at the fin de siècle. We have been exploring modernist culture’s emergence in the collective ferment of the scientific, technological, and social changes of the period. In this chapter, we have seen the old vitalist/mechanist binary breakdown, yielding revolutionary results not just in organicism and neurology, or in our understanding of the boundaries of the body or even the species, but also in modernist experimental writing practices and visual arts. What remains for us to consider are the results for modernism when the lens of rapidly professionalizing science focused sharply on the human mind and the human in its social and cultural environment. We now must turn to the modernist-era social sciences, whose diversity of approaches and whose subject matter might cause us to question whether they espoused new paradigms or simply operated without paradigms altogether.

Notes 1 Historians of science have recently made clear the inaccuracy of the mythology that Mendel’s work was neglected as ahead of its time when originally published but then “rediscovered” in 1900. Rather, revisionists have shown, Mendel’s work was known and discussed upon its publication as a contribution to the understanding of hybridization and speciation (neither “heredity” nor “inheritance” was mentioned in the publication, which was, in fact, fairly typical science of its period), and Mendel’s work was reinterpreted with an understanding of its current significance as the result of a priority dispute between two scientists in 1900 (Moore 13–24). 2 Ritter invokes William James’s critiques of associationist psychology, and argues, “Now the objection to the doctrine of ‘atomistic ideas’ does not so much concern the conception of ideas as atoms as the

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nature attributed to these atoms, namely in assuming them to be immutable, and sufficient in their isolate capacities to account for the thought and other products arising from their ‘association’” (2:229). 3 He cites the important work of the previous decade, including Gillian Beer’s Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), Daniel Albright’s Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (1997), and Ira Livingston’s Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Post-modernity (1997). 4 Tellingly, a review of Moses’s Out of Character laments that he misses opportunities to develop vitalism further as a critical framework (Posman E3). 5 See, for example, Van Deren Coke’s The Painter and the Photograph (1964) and Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography (1968), and also Kirk Varnedoe (1980) for a critique of Coke’s and Scharf’s arguments. 6 Connecting her scholarship on the modernist period to the work of Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Walter even suggests that we might recognize “modernist impersonality’s afterimage in something like contemporary affect theory,” but also that “affect theory’s understanding of the political as a force that operates both within and beyond ideology may help to explain modernist impersonality’s political nature and why its diverse politics have long been overlooked” (31). 7 Harrison had focused his research in two areas that would be swept up in modernist literature of the period: the new neuron doctrine and his laboratory technique of tissue culture that, as Haraway notes, “inaugurat[ed] study of parts of the organism outside the body of the animal” (71). 8 Harrison’s tissue culture techniques inspired his colleague at Hopkins, Florence Sabin, to undertake her research into blood cells using Harrison’s tissue culture techniques with cells from chicken embryos. Incidentally, it was Sabin who worked with Stein on a project mapping the anatomy of a newborn brain. Stein’s anatomy professor, Franklin Mall, asked Sabin to unravel a wax model of a brain and brainstem he’d asked Stein to make to salvage her medical degree. Stein flunked out of Johns Hopkins medical school over this project, but Sabin went on to promotion to full professor at Hopkins and ultimately to be head of a department at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City where tissue culture began to make the press headlines (See Nicholas 407; Firkin 7). 9 In 1912, Carrel published a scientific article, “On the Permanent Life of Tissues outside of the Organism,” that reported on his experiments to maintain tissue in culture media.

4 The social sciences

Sociology, anthropology, psychology One might see sociology and social psychology, anthropology, and psychology as quintessential sciences of modernism. Across the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social sciences rapidly professionalized and began to consolidate authority in academia. These developments suggest that the social sciences had reached a critical degree of professional self-awareness during the modernist period—and that the institutionalization of the nineteenth-century physical sciences in the university and its attendant academic associations had offered a strategic model for the new social scientists, who sought to legitimate themselves to other scientists and to the broader public. Perhaps there was additional urgency for institutional structures to confer the imprimatur of science upon these relatively young fields, as they all confronted thorny issues of the nature of evidence in scientific claims about the human mind, society, and culture, and they increasingly informed responses to some of the most difficult issues in modernist culture. Following physician and social commentator Max Nordau’s 1892 book Degeneration (Entartung) and similar works by others, many began to fear that a technologically frenetic urban modernity and a decadent fin de siècle culture, coupled with the seemingly merciless logic of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory—now transferred to the domain of the human psyche and society—would inexorably lead to the biological and mental degeneration of the human species. Moreover, an unimaginably violent world cataclysm—the Great War—maimed and destroyed not just the bodies but also the minds

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of its survivors and provoked many to ask how civilized humans could have reached such “primitive” levels of violence, aided by advanced technologies of destruction that seemed to deprive those survivors of the narratives of valor and honor that had given meaning to previous wars. Changing views of human sexuality were transforming society and culture in ways that liberated some and incensed or frightened others. And the fact of physical and cognitive difference in human life erupted into public spaces in new ways. Given the very subject matter of the emerging fields of modern psychology, sociology, and anthropology, these sciences were inseparable from social and cultural conflict. Their newness and lack of strong paradigms led to public controversy about the legitimacy of their claims. (By comparison, the physical and biological sciences had not faced such controversy since the advent of evolutionary theory in the mid-nineteenth century.) The lack of established paradigms forced the social sciences to engage directly with the world outside the academy. Moreover, their extraordinarily permeable disciplinary boundaries demonstrate the phenomenon of “domaining” discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, the confluence of the political and social turbulence of the period (which helped inspire theories of crowd psychology); evolutionary and developmental paradigms of the life sciences; literary interchange; and re-envisioning of human nature in terms of the primitive, irrational, and unconscious (as well as by cultural, racial, and shared social determinants) defines much of the social sciences of the modernist period. Sexology, eugenics, and the American back to nature movement emerged from this environment, and these areas have drawn the most interest in modernist studies in recent decades.

Institutionalizing sociology and anthropology Sociology sought its own professional identity within an already existing field of other social science disciplinary organizations. The American Sociological Association was founded in 1905 by C. W. A. Veditz of George Washington University. Respondents to his survey of prominent American sociologists (all at universities) suggested the possibility of simply forming a new section of the

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Economic Association, to which many of the sociologists belonged, or of forming a society like the Historical or Political Science Association. Ultimately, they decided to form their own separate association. Beyond the concern about the public perception of sociology as a science, as Veditz explained, “sociologists have been so largely accustomed to working along divergent lines, and so frequently hold radically different views, that there seems to be peculiar justification for some sort of an organization which shall bring together at regular intervals those interested in the same group of problems, and permit of that interchange of ideas and comparisons of projects which in other fields of knowledge has so frequently contributed to the advancement of science” (qtd in Rhoades, Chapter 1). American sociology in 1905 had neither a “paradigm,” in Kuhn’s sense, nor really even the institutional infrastructure for the functioning of “normal science.” The situation was much the same in anthropology. There were already several anthropological societies in the country, and the American Anthropological Association was founded in 1902 to provide a national organization “to promote the science of anthropology, to stimulate and coordinate the efforts of American anthropologists, . . . and to publish and encourage the publication of matter pertaining to anthropology” (“A Brief History of Anthropology”). While sociologists and anthropologists of this generation in America and Britain were successfully building their profession within university departments and academic associations, they also kept abreast of important claims coming from European intellectuals, such as those about the psychology of crowds made by Gustav Le Bon or about the degeneration caused by urban modernity according to Max Nordau.

Studying crowds and peoples Gustav Le Bon’s most important book, La psychologie des foules (1895), translated into English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), serves as a prime illustration of the porous boundaries of these newly emerging sciences. Trained in medicine, but exploring archaeology, anthropology, and ultimately the confluence of psychology and sociology, Le Bon became a key voice in the fin de siècle and modernist period’s effort to conceptualize

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the “crowd” in scientific terms (see McClelland 151–81). As Mark Micale notes, “Le Bon was trained medically but made his career in social commentary. . . . Le Bon was strongly nationalistic, fearful of the new social egalitarianism, and rabidly antisocialist. He was also highly impressed by recent scientific research on animal magnetism, somnambulism, hysteria, and hypnosis” (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 80). Le Bon conceptualized crowd behavior in terms of atavism, primitivism, and irrational influence, noting that the individual is no longer an individual in a crowd, but an “automaton.” “Moreover,” he continues, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian— that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. (19) In other words, the individual in the crowd loses his or her selfcontrol and is susceptible to some kind of shared primitive racial unconscious.1 Le Bon’s argument synthesized the biological theories of Lamarck, Darwin, and Haeckel on heredity and the human with the anthropology of primitivism and the psychological discourse of hysteria (which also influenced the new criminology represented by Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Mind of 1893). As Micale explains, “Le Bon drew the building blocks of his psychology from Lamarck’s evolutionary biology, Charcot’s theory of hysterical pathology, and Hippolyte Bernheim’s ideas about hypnotic suggestion” (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 80). Moreover, The Crowd was to become a key source of fascist theories of leadership. Both Hitler and Mussolini read it for its insights into the use of the myths of the masses in the manipulation of the mass mind (Mosse 192). The example of The Crowd demonstrates a key tension between conceptions of the self in the modern period. Some modernists envisioned the individual as discrete from and able to resist the

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crushing weight of mass culture, social influence, and political and ideological determination. (See, for instance, the echoes of the Egoist philosophy of Max Stirner in early Anglophone modernism via Dora Marsden in prewar London.) Others understood the self as ineluctably formed by forces well beyond the conscious control of the individual ego—whether the primitive unconscious force of the drives, or of an evolutionary inheritance, or the social, cultural, and even aesthetic construction of the self in a matrix of discourses. The historicizing turn of modernist studies scholarship over the past two decades has produced sophisticated accounts of those slippery and recursively defined boundaries between the biological and social, the scientific and humanistic that have focused on the complex nature of the self in society in early social sciences. In Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (2014), Paul Peppis situates his work as “a provisional work of cultural archeology that aims to contribute to a broader and ongoing culturalist effort to recover, re-view, and reassess” the relations between modernist literature and science (13). Peppis thereby signals his work’s rootedness in the so-called new modernist studies, even while noting his debt to “an old modernist/new critical sense that modernism is a literature of disjunction and disorientation” (12) and appealing to close readings of individual modernist texts—in his case, works by Claude McKay, E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Rebecca West, Wilfred Owen, and others. But Peppis’s archaeological close reading also demonstrates the “analytic attention to the performative effects and affordances of literary and linguistic dimensions of science” (557) that we have seen Bono and others identify as a hallmark of the recent, or second, generation of literature and science. Peppis also focuses his literary lens on the scientific texts themselves, rather than simply using them as contexts or references for modernist literature. And, perhaps signaling the crucial significance of early anthropology and its wrestling with the role of the observer in fieldwork, Peppis begins his account of the sciences of modernism not with the more settled participant-observer classic of British anthropological fieldwork, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), or with Franz Boas’s studies (which influenced, among others, Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston), but rather with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and an extended reading of Alfred Cort Haddon’s Head-Hunters: Black, White, and Brown (1901). Later becoming

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Cambridge University’s first chair in ethnology, Haddon’s major early fieldwork was as a member of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898–99 (coinciding with the publication of Heart of Darkness in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899). As Peppis notes, what distinguishes Haddon’s work from that of other anthropologists of his time also most closely aligns it with “early works of modernism in literature concerned with cross-cultural encounters at empire’s outposts, especially Heart of Darkness and Woolf’s The Voyage Out” (20). “The form and vision of Head-Hunters,” Peppis continues, “are considerably less holistic than those of Argonauts; Haddon’s text is more disjointed and varied. . . . A generic mongrel, Head-Hunters draws extensively, like Heart of Darkness, on the late nineteenth-century ‘amateur productions’ that Malinowski disdains—travel ethnographies, adventure fiction, popular science books” (21). What Peppis shows, ultimately, is the extent to which “a popularizing science book written by a recognized white scientist . . . uses literary tools to justify a new science and set of scientific methods” (55).

Mass-Observation On the other side of Malinowski, another focus of modernist studies has been on the work of the 1930s Mass-Observation movement associated with the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, and surrealist poet (later turned sociology professor) Charles Madge. The project, created in 1937 to enlist hundreds of volunteers to observe and record the daily lives of the British, resulted in a number of research projects and publications, the most famous of which was the first: its survey report on the coronation day of George V, entitled May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by over two hundred observers. Emerging from the rise of anthropological observation, sociology, literary modernism, documentary film, and British surrealism, Mass-Observation’s special role in interwar British modernism continues to preoccupy modernist studies. Recent scholarship sees Mass-Observation arising at a moment when, as James Buzard puts it, modernism in Britain had “made its peace with nationalism” in late Eliot and early Auden, in Pound’s departure, and in the supplanting of Lewis’s early avant-garde

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rebellion. Anthropology, too, “had passed through its militant self-advertising stage and taken its place among the accredited disciplines; it too had gone from stressing its boundary-defying aspects to stressing its boundary-securing ones” (Buzard 98). The tension in the Mass-Observation project and in literary modernism emerges in the position of the ethnographer, or the observing subject: “One account implies a narrative sequence in which the successful ethnographer proceeds into the alien culture and then out again; the other invokes a single image of the ethnographer’s simultaneous appearance on either side of the subject/object divide, a splitting of the self that increases rather than diminishes its authority” (Buzard 104). Mass-Observation’s May the Twelfth began its mass observation of the quotidian life of British citizens in February 1937 in anticipation of the coronation to take place three months later. Of it, Buzard concludes that Madge and Jennings seem to have been unable to avoid giving about half of their energy to the task of completing the one great national portrait or story, the one grand auto-ethnography, rather than to the single-minded construction of the picture or story of difference-within-the-nation, of difference that would never need or tend to become “nation.” In this they aligned themselves once more with the latter-day modernism of their time. This was an aesthetic whose newly learned hospitality to national traditions and resonances was impelling it toward figurations of cultural authority from the perspective of which a nation’s factions might appear, as T. S. Eliot would put it, “united in the strife which divided them.” (117; emphasis in original) Building on the work of James Hinton and Mike Savage, Nick Hubble further clarifies this moment as one of “middlebrow” modernism, or, more specifically, “intermodernism,” exploring “the dissemination of the ideas of imagism and surrealism by the Mass-Observation founders to its lower-middle class membership as an example of the interaction between modernist techniques and middlebrow culture, which transformed that culture in the late 1930s and contributed to the wider socio-cultural changes that took place in mid-twentieth-century Britain” (202). Sociologist Mike Savage sees the methods of social science as allowing the MassObservers to break the constraints of the class categories (461).

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Indeed, Harrisson, Jennings, and Madge, in a letter of January 30, 1937 to the New Statesman, offered the tools of the social sciences not for the sake of academic research itself, but rather for social and cultural transformation: Mass Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study man—but it plans to work with a mass of observers. . . . It does not set out in quest of truth or facts for their own sake, or for the sake of an intellectual minority, but aims at exposing them in simple terms to all observers, so that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly transformed. Whatever the political methods called upon to effect the transformation, the knowledge of what is to be transformed is indispensable. (qtd in Hubble 204–05) Tracking the role of early modernist Imagism and later British surrealism in the social science research of the movement, Hubble shows that Mass-Observation can “be seen as a paradigmatic example of the manner in which the 1930s middlebrow transformation from a defensive anti-working-class culture to a confident progressive one was due in part to the extension and incorporation of modernist techniques” (208). Mass-Observation, then, was an organization that recruited the type of younger lower-middleclass progressive individuals that were attracted to Penguins and the Left Book Club, while promoting examples of modernist imagism . . . deliberately seeking to bring art and science together. By calling for an anthropology of British life, it invited its respondents to think about the extent to which they were both part of, and part outside, that society. It thereby reconciled individualism to the collective without subsuming it, diminishing potential feelings of isolation and alienation while supporting self-reflection and promoting its development into a conscious self-reflexivity. (210)

Historicizing psychology and its practices The American Psychological Association (APA) was founded in 1892, and psychology expanded rapidly inside academia and, even more so, in a new class of applied clinicians that gained admittance

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to the APA as associate members in 1926.2 The British Psychological Society was founded at the University of London in 1901, by, among others, W. H. R. Rivers, who would then found the British Journal of Psychology in 1904. As an academic and laboratory discipline, psychology had already emerged in the mid-Victorian period against the backdrop of legislation such as the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1860. Often interpreted in modernist studies through the lens of Michel Foucault’s “biopower,” psychology was a willing participant in the modern state’s “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (History of Sexuality 1:140, 1976).3 But these British and American psychological societies also had institutional competition from the rapidly emerging institutional infrastructure for psychoanalysis. Freud himself had founded the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910, and Ernest Jones had founded or cofounded several other institutions serving the Anglophone world—the American Psychopathological Association in 1910, the American Psychoanalyticial Association in 1911, the London Psychoanalytical Society in 1913, and the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1919. Continental psychiatric and other medical journals were early publishers of psychoanalytic texts, but, in 1920, Jones launched the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press would eventually publish the definitive English translation of Freud’s works: James Strachey’s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in twenty-four volumes. Psychology has perhaps been the social science that has received the most attention in modernist studies for many decades. Until recently, I would argue, psychology (and, in particular, psychoanalysis) has been more prominent as a theoretical tool in literary interpretation than it has been as a historicized aspect of modernist science. It would be well beyond the scope of this volume to address the vast literature of Freudian, Lacanian, Kristevan, and other psychoanalytic readings of modernist literature. Recent efforts have begun to consider neuroscience and neuropsychiatry in this mix of psychoanalysis and modernist aesthetics.4 Two trends that I would identify with the new modernist studies have emerged in the exploration of psychology and psychoanalysis. First, the approach to psychoanalysis has shifted from seeing it primarily as a contemporary critical methodology—from using psychoanalytic concepts as tools for interpreting modernist work

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in a largely ahistorical way—to historicizing psychoanalysis itself as a feature of modernism. For example, Dana Seitler, in Atavisitic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (2008), provides a fascinating exploration of the psychoanalytic case study and of psychoanalysis’s broader project. She turns to science studies scholarship, such as Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and the work of Isabelle Stengers and Foucault, as well as to Lorraine Daston’s practice of “historical epistemology”— “the history of the categories that structure our thought” (qtd in Seitler 34). Psychoanalysis was undoubtedly popularized during the modernist period—emphasizing an alienated conscious “in need of cognitive restoration (in the idiomatic forms of ‘finding oneself’ or ‘getting in touch,’ for example)” (Seitler 35). Seitler then sees this psychoanalytic project of self-restoration as part of the “deep architecture of modernity,” and, indeed, as a continuing discourse in the enterprise of the modern liberal subject. Precisely by refusing enlightenment concepts of unmediated consciousness, self-identical personhood, and self-possession, the therapeutic process proffers itself as both the discoverer of the split self and the bridge between its parts, thus restoring the self to the self as a self. And by positing the psychoanalytic subject as the transhistorical, transgeographical subject of modernity, Freudian psychoanalysis participates in the insistence of the universality of the human subject more generally. (36) More common than this philosophical historicization of psychoanalysis, though, has been the historicizing turn of many scholars to a broader range of contexts for a mutually developing modernism and psychology. A key work in this growing line of inquiry is Judith Ryan’s The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (1991), which takes Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, and William James, rather than Freud, as key figures for early modernism, and explores a growing detachment of the idea of consciousness from a personal self. More recently, Micale and the scholars whose work he collects in The Mind of Modernism show an even broader range of significant figures, emerging from schools of hypnotism in the 1880s (Charcot in Paris, for example) and elsewhere. For Micale, who explores both a very literary,

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novelistic form of the psychological case history and also a wide field of interaction among modernist literature and psychology, a defining guideline has been “the need to move beyond Freud. An astonishing share of the scholarship about this subject continues to take the form of influence studies of psychoanalysis in which Freud—and occasionally Jung—are presented as the sole exemplars of psychological modernism. In contrast, this volume reflects a growing scholarly desire to explore the larger world of ideas, attitudes, and practices around Freud. Recent psychiatric historiography establishes unmistakably that, for all of its eventual cultural influence, which was immense, psychoanalysis was only one of many emerging models of mind that comprised the coming of early dynamic psychiatry and that contributed to the constitution of the modern psychological self” (“The Modernist Mind: A Map,” 7). Indeed, as Eric Kandel has noted, “Unlike the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, the realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche in the middle of the nineteenth century. . . . Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life” (14–15). Ascribing a paradigm shift to one individual, Freud, would be problematic—though Kuhn was well aware that science does not function on this kind of great man theory. The historicism of the new modernist studies has produced some highly significant accounts of a much more diverse field of psychological research— some of it crucial for the development of psychoanalytic theories of hysteria, some of it demonstrating very different disciplinary assumptions, all of them important as we try to account for the rise of both psychology and modernism. Micale notes several areas of “cultural affinities between aesthetic and psychological Modernism” (2). These include a “turn inward,” an “ongoing psychologization of . . . methods,” an engagement “beneath surface reality of reason in order to uncover deeper irrational or nonrational levels of human experience and cognition,” an understanding of multiple levels of mental life (conscious, unconscious, and other supposed dimensions), a destabilization of the self, a response to the “subjectivity of individual consciousness and its relation to the external world,” a concern with the “nature and structure of individual personality,” an investigation of the psychology of sexuality and states of psychopathology and of the so-called

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savage or primitive mind, an antirealist turn in response to the epistemological problems of positivism, and “new techniques of narration to capture the inner workings of the human mind and the moment-by-moment experience of individual consciousness” (2). As Micale concludes, “The links between the arts and psychiatry are closer than those between the arts and any other branch of medicine; and arguably, in no period were they closer than during the turn of the last century” (2). Even as the professional organizations and academic institutions increasingly insisted upon professional credentials, during the modernist period a number of self-trained practicing therapists drew together a mixture of psychoanalysis (usually Freudian- and Jungian-inspired), self-help and lifestyle coaching (advocates of vegetarianism, meditation, and country retreats), and occasionally even ritual magic or hermetic alchemical ideas. A psychoanalytic interpretation of alchemy, for example, informed not only Jung’s work but also that of Freud’s protégé Herbert Silberer, whose 1914 book Probleme der Mystik und Ihrer Symbolik (Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism) was criticized by Freud (possibly contributing to Silberer’s suicide). Silberer’s psychoanalytic interpretation of alchemy influenced Jung, whose substantial engagement with alchemy in turn inspired Israel Regardie’s practice and writings. And Elizabeth Severn’s prominent role in the Alchemical Society of London during the war preceded her controversial mutual analysis with Sándor Ferenczi.5 Many of these alternative therapeutics aimed either at a kind of spiritual self-transformation of the psyche or at an epistemological insight gained through the experience of ritual. As could be said of psychoanalysis, these therapies became an epistemological practice, a form of knowledge production, though they often gestured outside of the mind of the patient for the source of this new knowledge and self-transmutation.6 Indeed, the very range of therapeutic approaches spoke to the difficulty of reducing the mind to the imperatives of scientific medicine. The challenge for psychology emerging in the late nineteenth century was, essentially, the problem of hysteria, which, as Micale notes, did not lend itself well to the reigning positivist understanding: Throughout the period, the orthodoxies of medical positivism remained firmly intact: in sickness and health, the human body and mind were to be studied, understood, and eventually mastered

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through precise and detailed observation by a community of experts. Pathology was seen to have rational causes, subject to immutable and ascertainable patterns or laws. Conversely, nonempirical methods of investigation and sources of insight were to be rejected as corrupting, contaminating forces in the quest for objective value-neutral knowledge. Positivist medical science was the ultimate “discourse of the real,” seeking to produce an authoritative account of an unproblematically real world of the human body and mind. (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 90) For Micale, modernism “entailed an increasing separation of representation from ‘the real’” (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 89), and the inability to fix an identity or medical interpretation of hysteria made it a key challenge to the psychology of the period and made it especially relevant to modernism: “Shapeless and ever-changing, unfixed and indefinable, endlessly open to interpretation, a signifier without a signified, hysteria is Modernism” (Micale, “Discourses of Hysteria,” 90; emphasis in original).

Shell shock One of the most noted phenomena of the Great War was both a product of the age’s technologies and, in many ways, invisible in comparison to the missing limbs, gas-ravaged faces, and destroyed bodies coming home from the front. The diagnosis of shell shock brought together several technologies and differing areas of psychiatric discourse. As Wyatt Bonkowski highlights in Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in PostWorld War I British Fiction (2013), the British press noted as early as 1916 that soldiers were being wounded by invisible forces (of concussive shells) in body but also in the mind. One such report noted that the new technologies of war produced “a force which killed without injuring, which seemed to unseat the mind itself, and to deprive a man of all his faculties while yet not a scratch could be detected upon his skin” (qtd in Bonkowski 17). Papers such as The Times were not allowed to publish photos of the dead, but could focus, instead, upon those wounded, physically (gas victims, for example) or mentally: “Photographs of shell-shocked soldiers, on the other hand, were printed for public consumption, showing

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blank faces and twisted limbs, suggesting a haunting excess written on the surface of the body but pointing to a deeper, invisible disturbance” (2). For Bonkowski, the return of these soldiers “presented a problem of representation and memorialization” (2). They also marked an infusion of psychoanalytic thought into the British medical establishment, Bonkowski argues (21), and he reads the novels of Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf as seeking modes of expression for trauma that he reads in largely psychoanalytic terms. The ethical dimension of his monograph culminates in a reading of Freud’s notion of the death drive, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and later works, as “a concept for what remains unknowable and unthinkable in human experience [that] serves to mark the limit of knowledge that we must pursue . . . [and] encourages us to remain wary of ideologies, both political and aesthetic, that reinforce illusion and reclaim fantasies of health and wholeness or that insist on a notion of ‘cure’ as a return to normalcy” (176). This turn to Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of shell shock elaborated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is still a common feature of modernist studies accounts, even as they bring them into conversation with more recent trauma-theory frameworks. Modernist studies has increasingly complicated the institutional histories of medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis that Bonkowski sees coming together in psychoanalytically inflected responses, even within British psychiatry, to shell shock. Exploring the founding of the London Psychoanalytic Association in 1913 and the launch in 1920 of the London-based International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, along with the notions of madness in psychiatry during the interwar period, Kylie Valentine argues in Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Modernist Literature (2003) that, while it would be an oversimplification in the history of interwar English psychiatry to see an absolute polarization between somatic and mentalist approaches, those dynamics were part of the institutional struggle that shaped their fields: “Very few of even the most ardent somaticist psychiatrists rejected altogether any psychological factors; most psychoanalysts, including Freud, noted the primacy of physical processes in certain kinds of mental distress.” But, she continues, “during this period the struggle for dominance between somaticist and mentalist approaches was important to the formation of modern psychiatry, and psychoanalysis played an important role in this struggle” (8–9). Jeffrey Sconce tracks the confluence of nineteenth-century ether

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physics, technologies of wireless transmission, imaginings about occult telepathy, and psychoanalysis, noting that Freud’s postwar works on telepathy “placed psychoanalysis in implicit dialogue with wireless as the era’s other mysterious new science of occult agency and communication. Underlying all of these phenomena— psychoanalysis, telepathy, wireless—was a shared foundation in energetic speculation about the transference of thought, an attempt to explain seemingly occult phenomena in the air and in the mind through the language of scientific naturalism” (34). Viewing Grafton Elliot Smith and Tom Hatherley Pear’s claims in Shell Shock and Its Lessons (published in 1917 by Manchester University Press) as a shot across the bow of Victorian hereditarian interpretations of mental illness and an institutional defense of “psychiatric modernism,” Paul Peppis emphasizes that the book contributed to a modernism that blurred the lines between sanity and insanity and “diagnos[ed] modernity as a condition of psychological trauma” (197). As Peppis shows, that project had begun even before the first troops returned from the front with the seemingly intractable condition at first diagnosed (by the military) as cowardice and weakness and finally by the rising psychiatric medical field as shell shock, a psychological condition that could be caused by both physical and emotional trauma. Moreover, Smith and Pear made the provocative claim now widely accepted today about Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): it is not confined to the battlefield. The lessons of Shell Shock and Its Lessons, its authors argued, are “not only for our soldiers now, but also for our civilian population for all time” (qtd in Peppis 197; emphasis in original). Peppis reads together Bernard Hart’s early psychiatric modernist volume, The Psychology of Insanity (1912), and Rebecca West’s early modernist classic of shell-shock literature, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as contributing “sometimes similarly, sometimes differently, to two significant and intertwined cultural shifts crucial to what modernism would become after the war, shifts in relations between literature, science, and modern minds: the psychologizing of fiction and science and the rendering of modernity as a psychologically traumatizing historical condition” (198). The public judgment of the new psychiatry emerging before the war, but gaining momentum in part as a result of the frightening demands of shell shock, would in part depend upon just how “scientific” the field could claim itself to be. Hart knew this, and argued forcefully that the new psychology

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was based upon the scientific method: the “scientist who devotes himself to psychology proceeds in exactly the same manner as the scientist who devotes himself to chemistry” (qtd in Peppis 201). The most common claims for the new social sciences, however, would be for their relationships to biology.

Intersections of biology and the social sciences Intervening in the “natural” processes of life—the material of science fiction as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—became tenable in the laboratory and thus changed the stakes in efforts to apply biological concepts to larger questions of social and cultural organization. It is no doubt clear by now that what might seem like a demarcation problem—the ineluctable entanglement of the “life sciences” and “social sciences” during the modernist period—is not so much a problem as a common and almost defining feature of the science. These “human” or “social” sciences, often rooted in the discoveries of biology (psychology and neurology, for example) and often reflecting Victorian evolutionary theory as adapted to the everincreasing technological modernization of the early twentieth century, could manifest themselves in issues that crossed multiple disciplines, ideologies, politics, and even aesthetics. Since all of these sciences dealt with human behavior, subjectivity, and identity, they also, even more than the others this volume has examined, hotly engaged with the social conflicts and shifting social mores and ideological struggles of modernism. The concern with “degeneration,” for example, was so omnipresent and variable that endless books and articles and even political agendas were launched over it.7 The sciences that understood their subjects in terms of biology, or the interaction of the cellular/biological and technological, social, and cultural realms—early sexology, eugenics, and degeneration theories—were arguably as significant to the modernist period as psychoanalysis and anthropology were. In the face of advances in laboratory science, even the most seemingly biologically determined phenomena came to seem potentially alterable—intervention, or tinkering with the machine, to use the mechanist’s favorite trope, seemed within the grasp of the modern scientific thinker—and writers, scientists, and an excited if anxious population could imagine a jump

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from selective breeding of livestock or even tissue culturing of frog neurons or chick embryonic tissue to experiments on human subjects. In Chapter 2, we saw John Canaday lay out the sequence of transformations from Soddy’s scientific lectures in The Interpretation of Radium, to H. G. Wells’s fictional account of nuclear bombs in The World Set Free, to the real bombs of the Manhattan Project, where Leo Szilard and his colleagues were reading Wells’s novel. Similar dynamics can be found that cross the fields of biology, sexology, and eugenics. Susan Squier, for example, traces the lineage from Julian Huxley’s reading of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, his scientific research on endocrine treatments, the scientific work on tissue culture, and his fictionalization in “The Tissue Culture King,” to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World five years after Julian’s story, and on to John Rock and Arthur Hertig’s foundational work on in vitro fertilization of human ova, as both Rock and Hertig acknowledge that they were partially inspired in their work by reading Brave New World (55). Again, though, in the process of domaining, “The dystopian vision of reproductive technology embodied so forcefully in both Julian and Aldous Huxley’s texts did not travel along with the technology” (Squier 55). The domaining effect that Squier and Canaday discuss is especially prominent in sciences that circulated widely across multiple social, cultural, and historical contexts. One such science emerging from the intersection of biology, social science, and sociopolitical debates of the modernist period was sexology.

Sexology Many modernist scholars, such as Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller and others with essays in their collection Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature After Sexology, find it necessary to discuss sexology and psychoanalysis together, highlighting the late-nineteenth-century secular shift from understanding “sexual deviance” not in ethical or religious terms but rather in terms of pathology (1). But Schaffner and Weller note an important distinction: Most of the early sexological studies either embraced biological (or what might now be seen as biopolitical) models, positing degeneration and the inheritance of contaminated genetic material as the origin of sexual perversion, or else argued that

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the particular cultural conditions of modernity, and the adverse effects of a decadent culture in rapid decline, were responsible for the perversions that they encountered and sought to classify. In the case of the latter interpretation, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892–93) proved to be a powerful influence. It was only with the publication in 1905 of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that a theory transcending the innate-acquired binary emerged. (2) Freud’s volume, they note, drew upon the earlier sexological work but also “rejected both the notion of biological determinism and the degeneration paradigm, shifting the emphasis onto the terrain of Oedipal struggles in childhood and arrested psycho-sexual development” (2). Much of the recent modernist studies scholarship on sexology and eugenics emphasizes the active role of literary resources— specific texts, tropes, or metaphors—in the development and dissemination as well as critique of these sciences. The first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) inspired and continues to influence the scholarship on sexuality in the modernist period. Nineteenth-century efforts, such as those in Richard von KrafftEbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), to combat perversion by scientific classification of sexual deviance, instead, as Schaffner and Weller summarize Foucault’s argument, “facilitated their discursive proliferation” (1). “In effect,” they continue, “the sexologists invented the homosexual, the masochist, the fetishist and a host of other perverse types who, significantly, would soon go on to populate in ever greater numbers naturalist, decadent and, above all, modernist literature” (1). The major turn in recent modernist studies has been not simply to see these sexological classifications played out in literature, but rather to chart the role of literature in the development of sexology itself. For Schaffner and Weller, “the discursive traffic was . . . far from being simply one-way. Just as sexological and psychoanalytic works impacted on the literary imagination, so literary examples of perversion influenced the sexologists. Krafft-Ebing, for instance, drew on a wide range of literary texts to support his arguments, the works (and the reputation) of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von SacherMasoch’s Venus in Furs (1869) playing particularly important roles in sexological concept-formation” (2).

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Paul Peppis’s Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (2014) argues that “the modernizing sciences of ethnography, sexology, and psychology should be viewed as no less integral to modernism as a cultural movement and set of selfconsciously modernizing texts and linguistic techniques than the literary and artistic movements of Imagism, Vorticism, or Bloomsbury, and their ‘experimental’ textual and artistic productions” (11). Building on research by Jeffrey Weeks, Joseph Bristow, and others, Peppis focuses on one of the most prominent modernist-era works of sexology, Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion (1897), as “confirming the text’s participation in period collaborations between social-political liberalism and psychosexual biologism” (108). In his chapters on sexologies, Peppis reads together pairs of texts, including Sexual Inversion and E. M. Forster’s Maurice, the (posthumously published) novel in which Forster directly engaged with homosexuality, as well as the seemingly disparate texts of paleobotanist Marie Stopes’s best seller Married Love, and avantgardist “modern woman” Mina Loy’s aesthetically and sexually radical Songs to Joannes, both of which Peppis reads as actively participating in the sex reform debates of the day. Invoking Bruno Latour’s calls for examining “science in the making” and returning to those moments before a scientific concept has been “blackboxed,” Peppis argues against a tendency to see “modernist literature’s use of science as always metaphorical, as chiefly a defensive rhetorical strategy of cultural legitimation,” in order to “adequately acknowledge or account for the range of ways that relations between modern science and modernist literature were actually configured” (2). “Reading Sexual Inversion alongside Maurice,” Peppis argues, “elucidates the powerfully literary and politically interventionist nature of Ellis and Symonds’s putatively disinterested science” (103). Ellis and Symonds used the scientific approach of sexology to normalize homosexuality as a congenital condition rather than a moral failure (Peppis 104), but they also resisted the pathologization of homosexuality in eugenic accounts of heredity and degeneration by insisting in some case histories (including Symonds’s own veiled third-person account) on the physical and social health of the subject’s family (113). Unlike Squier’s readings of the direct interconnections among the literary and scientific realms in Julian Huxley’s life, Peppis illuminates a shared cultural field informing both Ellis and Symonds’s work and Forster’s. Though Maurice

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at times seems almost to be a fictionalization of a case history in Sexual Inversion, what they share is not only a recoil against Victorian moral outrage against homosexuality (an outrage that destroyed Oscar Wilde, among others) but also a reworking of a literary inheritance of the Enlightenment concept of bildung and its novelistic genre, the bildungsroman. Emerging from this literary heritage, Sexual Inversion presents its case studies as narratives of homosexual bildung, offering a vision of homosexuality not in terms of degeneration but of harmony with English society, in an effort to “balance the claims of homosexual liberation with those of socialization” (105). In spite of the limitations both of Sexual Inversion and Maurice (both largely ignore lesbianism; Maurice falls into a sentimental ending in which the lovers reject conventional English society entirely; Ellis and Symonds asked for much restraint and conformity from gay men in the name of social harmony), both works use the discourses of science and literature to legitimize same-sex desire and understand homosexuals as modern subjects (103). But Peppis also argues that “what makes Sexual Inversion most interesting, most modernist, is its inclusion of testimony from subjects less socially accommodating than the volume and its authors, homosexuals less willing to minimize their sexuality and limit their sexual practices in favor of social acceptance. These less-compliant voices and narratives anticipate the more dissident position that Forster’s Maurice will later articulate—but which Forster will closet for nearly sixty years” (105). Even when the sexology of the pre–First World War era and the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis were both decades old, later modernist writers continued to push against the still-common legacy of late-nineteenth-century sexology’s cataloguing of types and varieties of sexuality. Sexology itself demonstrated conflicting motivations for its scientific project—Krafft-Ebing could question the normativity of sexual desires while still pathologizing types of “perversion” and sanctioning sex only for procreation, whereas Ellis and Symonds eschewed both moral and hereditary views of nonnormative sexuality, and Freud, in later years, would reconfigure the entire debate about the innate or acquired nature of sexual desire—and the taxonomizing of sexuality at the heart of sexology, as Foucault noted, both contributed to a discursive proliferation of “perversions” but also continued to reinforce the binary logic of normal/perverse and inside/outside subject positions from which to assess sexuality. If, as recent modernist

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scholarship has argued, writers such as Forster and Loy could both participate in contemporary sexological debates in their work while using literary genres and linguistic experiments to undermine the normative assumptions of their day, that project, and its necessity, continued into later modernism as well. Daniela Caselli, for example, has recently argued that Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), while not directly engaging with Freud or specific sexological texts, explored female and male “inversion” through its linguistic experiments: “Normality and deviance in Nightwood are not simply themes that can be read as historical reflections on contemporary sexological and psychoanalytical discourses, but are instead constitutive properties of a writing that boldly engages with eroticism while unapologetically performing a demanding linguistic experimentalism” (152). Caselli notes that critics within and outside of queer studies have not always agreed whether the novel parodies sexological discourse, critiques it, or even displays some form of homophobia (154), but she argues that the language, multiple points of view, and other modernist literary experiments push against the language of perversion and of normality, suggesting that “authentic love is fashioned as the outcome of stories, so that gender is no longer a point of origin and authenticity” (155). But even as the nascent science of female sexual desire could be expressed in sexological texts, normative bourgeois manuals of birth control such as Stopes’s Married Love, and radical avantgardist challenges such as Loy’s Songs to Joannes or Barnes’s Nightwood, some of the realms into which sexology traveled could pose formidable challenges for modernism. For example, the activist projects that drew eugenics and sexology together confronted female modernists with acute quandaries. Drawing on Suzanne Clark’s work in Sentimental Modernism (1991) to unpack the gender politics of sentimentalism (used by some male modernists and critics as grounds to reject female writers), recovering a strategy within modernism itself often explored by female writers, Squier reads the writings of Charlotte Haldane, wife of J. B. S. Haldane, in terms of their strategic use of the romance genre. Of Haldane’s 1926 novel Man’s World, in which reproductive technologies allow male scientists to control the gender of babies (the novel was published six years before Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World), Squier argues, Fundamental to the structure of Man’s World is the double bind of female modernism. Charlotte Haldane adopts a romance

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plot centered on the (otherwise aesthetically unrepresentable) embodied female subject in order to confront from a woman’s perspective the social implications of the scientific control of reproduction. And she adopts the discourse of modern science, in particular its valorization of an empiricist perspective, in order to legitimate her main agenda: a celebration of female maternal agency. (121; emphasis in original) But, Squier argues, there are dramatic contradictions of effect between these two strategic positions. Casting her advocacy of female agency within the discourse of masculinist science, she seems to devalue genderrole atypical women, especially in relation to the scientifically authorized position of so-called normal motherhood. Using the trajectory of the romance to organize her narrative, she articulates female subjectivity at the price of trapping it within a love-and-marriage plot. But even in these strategic choices, “double-binding” as they are, Haldane’s novel reveals the resistant doubling of meaning through which female modernist writers managed to find voice. (121) If sexology as a response to fears of biological and cultural degeneration can be seen both as a point of intersection between science and literature, and as a compelling proof that the two domains are not so neatly separable but are always generatively intermixed, so, too, has eugenics become a central focus of modernist studies of literature and science.

Eugenics Sexology, as Weeks, Bristow, and Peppis have shown, demonstrates what Peppis has styled as “period collaborations between socialpolitical liberalism and psychosexual biologism” (Peppis 108). Such collaborations are nowhere more stridently demonstrated than in the eugenics movements in the United States and Europe during the modernist period. (The term “eugenics” was coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1883 to name “the science of being wellborn.” It became recognized by many as untenable and morally

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abhorrent only with the atrocities of the Second World War.) For modernists, eugenics was essentially the promotion of human genetic engineering to breed “better” humans, and in it we see the confluence of varying racial ideologies and political agendas of the period with the newly institutionalized social sciences, social and cultural interpretations of evolutionary biology, recently developed technologies such as photography and film, and, ultimately, modernism across domains and genres. Most recent work on eugenics sees it as a response to fears of degeneration that Nordau was articulating in his 1892 volume (Seitler 3; Turda 24–25), a response both made possible by and contributing to the social and psychological imperatives of a modern scientistic society. Indeed, Marius Turda argues that “eugenics should be understood not only as a scientistic narrative of biological, social and cultural renewal, but also as the emblematic expression of programmatic modernism” (2). Turda borrows the term “programmatic modernism” from Roger Griffin’s 2007 book, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, to describe a modernism that “encourages the artist/ intellectual to collaborate proactively with collective movements for radical change and projects for the transformation of social realities and political systems” (Griffin 62, qtd in Turda 2). For Dana Seitler, atavism, eugenics, and degeneration are dynamics of a history that “is not a concrete, observable thing; it has no material existence outside its manifestations in culture. An ineffable source, history is only to be grasped by way of its various mediations, and even then imperfectly” (3). In the striking “eugenics tree” logo from the Eugenics Record Office with which Tamsen Wolff opens her compelling study of eugenics in modern American drama and performance, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (2009), eugenics is defined as “the self direction of human evolution.” It proclaims boldly, “Like a tree, eugenics draws its materials from many sources and organizes them into an harmonious entity” (see Figure 4.1). Those “many sources” are, in part, key organizing principles of modern society. The tree’s roots bear the labels of “law,” “politics,” “geography,” “economics,” “education,” “genealogy,” “biography,” “history,” and “religion,” but they also include most of the new social sciences—“psychology,” “psychiatry,” “anthropology, “archeology,” “ethnology,” and

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Figure 4.1 Eugenics tree logo, Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor, NY.

“sociology”—and the life sciences that authorized them, “biology,” “genetics,” “anatomy,” and “physiology” (and even an outlier on the list, the sole physical science, “geology”). The roots also name the attendant practices of modern medicine and biopower that supported the enterprise, “mental testing,” “anthropometry,” “statistics,” “medicine,” and “surgery.” Wolff explores the nineteenth-century origins of eugenics in various efforts to understand heredity, but notes that hereditarianism itself became prominent only after Mendel’s mid-nineteenth-century work on the transmission of hereditary material in garden peas received renewed attention: “The resurrection of Mendel’s theory in 1900 was electrifying to its early proponents for several reasons: it was predictive, generalized, experimentally defensible, and applicable to all living organisms, including humans” (2). Wolff’s account, though, uncovers the major factors in the American eugenics movement that the tree logo leaves unmentioned (though perhaps implied in the general categories of law, history, and politics). Eugenics, as Wolff explains, reached the height of its popularity in the United States in the years just preceding and following World War I. Pressing

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historical and social contingencies helped produce American eugenics. They included the emergence of the United States as a dominant world power; unprecedented levels of immigration; mass African American migration to Northern cities; the women’s rights movement and especially the related issue of reproductive rights and sexual freedom; rapid urbanization; and World War I. (3) In response to these “historical and social contingencies,” eugenics offered “tyrannical public policies, like coercive sterilization, and provided scientific rationalizations for class and race prejudices” (4), and it became a dominant subject in print culture. Wolff mentions more than 500 American popular science books being published between 1900 and 1925, and more than 4,000 publications appearing in a 1924 Bibliography of Eugenics (4). Moreover, eugenics appears as a major issue in the works of many of the most significant modernist and other writers of the period. This explosion of eugenics in print culture and modernist poetry and fiction has been discussed by other scholars,8 but Wolff’s major insight is that eugenics inhabited the social and cultural spaces created by modern drama and performances of many varieties. If the modern European drama of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw variously addressed heredity, modern drama and performance in America, from Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell to the fairground exhibits and performances of “Mendel’s Theatre” for the masses, occurred in a specifically eugenic context: “American theatre and the American eugenics movement both enjoyed unparalleled popularity from about 1910 to 1930. Linked by their investment in the relationship between performance and heredity, each of these phenomena galvanized the other. American eugenicists relied on theatre to promote the message that biological heredity is visible in the embodied present and that it is controllable” (1). Another key dimension of the development and dissemination of eugenics in American and Britain and beyond was technology—in particular, film and photography. Though the revolution in social science methodologies and research programs that academic computing initiated was decades away, and it might at first glance be easier to identify the interplay between technology and the physical and life sciences, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

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the social sciences also emerged in the context of technological developments that are often seen as crucial to modernism. Tamsen Wolff shows that the performance of eugenics was an important component of film in the period: “Beginning around 1910, all types and sizes of film companies produced full-length and onereel movies that addressed eugenics, including pro- and anti-eugenic dramas, anti-eugenics farces, and educational medical films” (4). But one technology in particular has been especially crucial to that confluence of modernist science and art: photography. More than three decades ago, art historian David Green argued that the photograph achieved an important position in the emerging sciences of the later nineteenth century because of “its apparent consistency with the empiricist assumptions and methodological procedures of naturalism” (3). Photography, understood as a passive process for recording external reality, made it a significant tool of scientific inquiry. Yet more important, Green argued, was “the assertion of a seamless relation between the photographic image and appearances whereby, under certain conditions, the image could function as reality itself” (4). The interpenetration between the early social sciences and natural sciences came at a key moment in the development of the modern state, Green argues. One might add “imperialist,” “nationalist,” or even “liberal” to capture the specificity of that modern state in the modernist era. Though the modern social sciences had their origins as far back as the eighteenth century, Green argues that “their establishment as discrete and legitimate scientific disciplines needed the reorganisation of an existing field of intellectual and academic activity which did not properly take place until the middle of the nineteenth century” (6). Moreover, the developing modern state and its modes of authority and social control (6) became central to the social sciences in that later period. The technological development of photography entered the social sciences “at a moment when the demand for modes of empirical observation and documentation, and techniques of quantitative measurement and analysis, were uppermost. The belief in the objectivity of the photographic process was the prerequisite to photography’s eventual success, but this was also dependent upon a series of discursive and technical transformations which resulted from a unique conjuncture of the natural and social sciences” (6). The photographic evidence contributed to what Green calls a “biologisation of history” visible

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in the photographs of the human body (6). In short, physiology, or, more precisely, photographs of human bodies, came to define characteristics of race, class, or social group (8). Key to Green’s project is his investigation of eugenics through Francis Galton’s photographs—a project that continues to inspire art-historical research. In the case of eugenics, the technologies of photography and film converged with the nascent modern social sciences and modern state in ways that gave a scientific imprimatur to racial and social attitudes and created new types of humans, just as sexology had created new types of sexuality. In Europe and the United States, the new technologies and sciences responded, with eugenics, to the new scientifically established problem—degeneration. But, in perhaps one of the major distinctions between the modernist cultures on opposite sides of the Atlantic, following Progressive Era concerns about national degeneration and the waning frontier character imagined to be at the heart of American national identity, many Americans heeded a scientifically sanctioned call of the wild that, as we shall see, was more modernist than antimodernist.

Back to nature In the introduction to this volume, we looked at the most technologically euphoric stance toward modernity in the manifestos, art, and literature of the Italian Futurist movement, which lauded the extension of the human imagination by fusing it with technology, the control over nature exacted by industrial modernity, the hygienic rigors of war, speed, and energy that the Futurists imagined would cure the moribund decadence of fin de siècle aesthetic culture. To these Futurists, the worship of nature signaled a soft, weak, passé Romanticism. Mastering and reshaping the natural world, now subordinated to the energies of industrial modernization, would be the salvation of modern civilization: this was what the age demanded. I would like to close this chapter with one of the most radical revisions of the new modernist studies to emerge from the intensive historicizing of modernism in relationship to science and technology, and that is Robin G. Schulze’s exploration of modernist American poetry and the back to nature movement of the early twentieth

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century, The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene (2013). Rather than follow the common understanding that a desire to return to nature cannot be modern—and thus only signified an antimodern dimension of some of the literature of the period—Schulze argues that a distinctly modern sense of nature emerged from Progressive Era scientific and political discourses and the modernist poetry animated by its concerns. This interdisciplinary research serves as something of a bridge between ecocritical and new modernist approaches to the literature of the early twentieth century, even as Schulze notes that it “is not itself a work of ecocriticism as the field is commonly understood”; rather, her “approach is historical rather than ecocritical in that it makes no effort to draw lessons about either current or past environmental praxes. Like many studies that fall under the rubric of the New Modernisms, this book attempts instead to demonstrate how a variety of literary texts are productively read as reflections of, and responses to, the dominant currents of modernity” (37). Schulze’s capacious exploration of American responses to the fear of the degeneration of the “American race” highlights a scientific and Progressivist understanding of nature as a distinctly modern choice in the battle against that degeneration: Overlooked in the accounts of the “Back to Nature” movement in America are the ways in which white upper- and middleclass Americans imagined the return to nature as itself a vital tool of national progress. The full force of the progressive ideology underlying America’s seeming yearning for the simple life becomes clear when the nature craze is pitched against the backdrop of the scientific discourses of social reform that dominated the early years of the twentieth century. . . . The villain in the piece for Progressive reformers, however, was not modernity, per se, but the potential decay of the American nation and the decline of its unique racial stock, the degeneration that followed in the wake of over-civilization. Degeneration was a product of the excess cultivation that followed in modernity’s wake. As such, American Progressives could envision a cure for degeneration that did not contradict their drive to be modern. . . . The specter of degeneration fueled the “Back to Nature” impulse and granted American Progressives the means

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to cast their desire to head for the hills in the hard, cold light of science. (12) Such an account highlights the roles of little-known scientists and medical reformers, such as Cyrus Edson, chief inspector of the New York Board of Health, who advocated that Americans head to the wilderness to stave off degeneracy, or Dr. Eugene L. Swan, who in 1911 urged young men to “get out into the open,” explaining that “the great cry of ‘Back to Nature’ that is spreading abroad over our land is full of deep significance, and the heeding of Nature’s evercalling voice and an adaptation of our lives to her laws, is going to become the salvation of the American race” (qtd in Schulze 23). But Schulze’s account also features canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. Above all, it makes a strong case for Harriet Monroe as one of the most significant and fascinating writers of American modernism, and not simply a transitional figure or a figure more important as editor of the crucial modernist little magazine, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, than a writer herself. While focusing on Pound, Monroe, and Moore, Schulze argues that her rubric would apply to a much wider range of American modernist poets—such as William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Wallace Stevens, though not to Robert Frost. “The desire of American modernist poets to stave off the threat of degeneration through their poetic approaches to nature was a ubiquitous drive that has gone unremarked in the scholarship on modernist poetry,” Schulze argues. Schulze’s research demonstrates the power of a supple approach to modernism and science to challenge and revise some of the basic assumptions we have too long made about modernism.

Notes 1 For Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), similarly, the unconscious mind is unlocked in the crowd, and the charismatic crowd leader displaces the control of the superego. 2 The APA grew rapidly, from 31 members in 1892 to 308 in 1916, and 530 members by 1940. But the APA designates 1926 as the key year in its early growth, as it then created a new class of nonvoting membership, the associate members, and there were 2,079 associate

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members by 1940: “Many of these associates were individuals doing practical or applied work in psychology, and who also belonged to one of the applied associations that emerged in this time” (APA). 3 The “Chronology of Psychology in Britain” explains that, in 1902, “W.H.R. Rivers, Charles Myers and William McDougal [were] appointed as the psychological subcommittee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), set up to recommend methods of conducting anthropometric surveys of the British population at large. Their 1908 report [was] the first explicitly to suggest the inclusion in such surveys of measures of higher psychological processes, by means of ratings of character and capacity by trained observers, as well as of sensory and motor capacity” (“Chronology of Psychology in Britain”). 4 See Eric Kandle, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012). Kandle’s research on the neurophysiology of memory earned him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 5 On Severn’s and others’ meldings of hermetic alchemy and psychoanalysis, see Morrisson (Modern Alchemy, 185–93). The issue of Severn’s work with Ferenczi has seen recent attention and will shortly result in new publications revising the history in which Freud referred to her as the “Evil Genius” and expressed concern that she was damaging Ferenczi. The Library of Congress recently held a symposium on the subject: “The ‘Evil Genius’ of Psychoanalysis: Elizabeth Severn, Dr. Sándor Ferenczi’s Partner in the Pioneering Study and Treatment of Trauma” (2013), and in September 2015 the New School held a symposium on “Elizabeth Severn, Sándor Ferenczi, and the Origins of Mutual Analysis.” Arnold Rachman’s Elizabeth Severn, the Evil Genius of Psychoanalysis is forthcoming from Routledge. 6 See Morrisson (Modern Alchemy, 185–93). Rather than understanding ritual as consciously passing on information, in this occult, epistemological and psychological interpretation, as occultist E. J. Langford Garstin explains in a 1930 article on “The Value of Ritual,” “although instruction may in many instances be the ultimate object, it is not obtained from the study of the ritual itself, but is made possible by its performance. In other words the ritual is carried out to enable the operator to obtain knowledge, but not to instruct him by the ceremony itself” (539). 7 For a wide-ranging account of the scientific, medical, and historical narratives of this phenomenon in Europe, see Pick. See also

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Härmänmaa. For the American concerns about degeneration, see Schulze. The literature on degeneration in Nazi “science” and culture and on the Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition in 1937 is voluminous and beyond the scope of this book. 8 Wolff cites work on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein (5).

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A relatively recent development in interdisciplinary modernist studies promises to shape research on modernism, science, and technology in the coming years: the increasing prominence of critical disability studies.

Critical disability studies Just as ecocriticism and ecofeminism have recently begun to register significantly in new scholarship on modernism, so too is a field that has only over the past few decades emerged and consolidated itself as a major area of study in the humanities: disability studies. A field once dominated by applied health sciences and eventually the social sciences of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, disability was long defined in negative terms of abnormality, lack, problems needing medical attention. But, since the 1980s, a different response to disability has gradually crystalized that reframes disability as a culturally constructed category very different from the medicalized understanding of it. Above all, it approaches disability through a rights-based paradigm. Sometimes called “critical disability studies,” this vibrantly interdisciplinary field had reached enough critical mass that then Modern Language Association (MLA) president Michael Bérubé could announce at the 2012 MLA conference that it was no longer emerging, but emerged (Garland-Thomson 915). As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it in a brief history of critical disability studies,“This expansion beyond health science perspectives on disability to consider it a civil and human rights issue, a minority identity, a sociological formation, a historical community, a diversity group, and a category of critical analysis in culture and the arts constitutes the signature move of critical disability studies” (917). Critical disability studies thus rejects the authority over disability of the very sciences that were professionalizing and laying claim to

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the field in the modernist period: medicine, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, for instance, with their modernist-era influence on such areas as eugenics, and legal and public policy. Exerting an increasing influence on recent modernist studies publications and at conferences, such as the Modernist Studies Association and MLA, disability studies, not unlike the domains of science studies, literature and science, and ecocriticism that we have explored in this volume, is shaping the ways we understand important scientific and social issues in modernism: issues such as shell shock, degeneration, eugenics, subjectivity, and agency. Understanding modernist visual aesthetics in terms of disability studies is not simply a matter of calling attention to representations of the disabled body or mind in art. Rather, as Tobin Siebers argues, disability is central to modern art and has evolved an aesthetic value itself: What I am calling “disability aesthetics” names a critical ­concept that seeks to emphasize the presence of disability in the tradition of aesthetic representation. My argument here conceives of the disabled body and mind as playing significant roles in the evolution of modern aesthetics, theorizing disability as a unique ­resource discovered by modern art and then embraced by it as one of its defining concepts. Disability aesthetics refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body—and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—as the sole determination of the aesthetic. Rather, disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and yet it is not less beautiful, but more so, as a result. (2–3) Siebers looks anew at the attack on modernism in the Nazis’ Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937 that prominently featured the art of such modernist pioneers as Paul Klee, whom they portrayed as schizophrenic, or German expressionist Ludwig Meidner, who was labeled a Jewish defective, or artists such as Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Dix, who featured disability in antiwar art and were seen as degenerates. Siebers highlights several modernist techniques from Dada to Expressionism—the flattened canvas, the aesthetic deformation of bodies, even the choices of color; “the palette of modernism paints human faces in greens, yellow, and purples, embracing discoloration without rejecting attending associations of

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disease” (35). Ultimately, Siebers concludes, “if modern art has had such enormous success, it is because of its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful. The Nazis grasped the nature of this aesthetic, but they rejected it, misreading the future of art as they misread many other things about human culture. Instead, they attacked modern art for the very features that give it such remarkable imaginative and transformative power to represent the human condition” (35). If the disability aesthetics central to the “degenerate art” of modernism shocked the Nazi government, it also emerged in modernist literature in ways that disability studies helps us to interpret. For Garland-Thomson, “critical disability studies attends to how the discrepancies between actual bodies and expected bodies are characterized within particular cultural contexts” (917). This critical attention in recent modernist studies has produced compelling new understandings of authors—ranging from the canonical to those garnering less critical attention—that move in different directions from the explorations of shell shock and disfiguration in the Great War that have monopolized the attention of modernist studies for many years. In a recent tour de force article in Modernism/Modernity that asks “What can disability theory bring to modernist studies?” Janet Lyon attends not so much to the “discrepancies” between bodies but rather the discrepancies between minds in mental disability. Beginning with a moment that was both shocking to Virginia Woolf and, because of the violence of her phrasing, shocking to readers a century later, Lyon discusses Woolf’s diary account of an encounter on a towpath near Kingston of “a long line of imbeciles.” What is shocking is not the dated and now discredited term, “imbeciles,” for the group, but rather what Woolf concludes: “It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed” (qtd in Lyon 551). Beginning with what Lyon takes to be the “uncontroversial proposition that modernist aesthetics, with its emphasis on disproportion, fracture, and incompleteness, shares with disability theory a foundational contestation of the category of ‘the normal’” (552), she then explores the history of asylum building, laws stripping the mentally “deficient” of all rights, civil and human, and the expansion of biopower and the discourse of mental deficiency. This institutional and legal history is crucial and covers a great deal

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of ground, from the Lunacy Act of 1845 to the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. The latter, championed by the eugenics movement, created several new categories of deficiency and aimed to “effectively eliminate defectives from the public world” (553), stripping them of rights: “Once singled out and signified as feeble-minded for feeble-minded asylums, they became a part of an institutional sign system associating mental deficiency with the condition of civil death—civiliter mortuus, the stripping of civil rights and political identity from persons deemed to be law-breakers or non compos mentis” (553; emphasis in original). In this context, rather than the much more pervasive one of shell shock during and after the Great War, Lyon reads across multiple writings the encounters with the mentally disabled in public by Woolf and Charlotte Mew (both of whom had experienced the expanding realm of psychiatry and asylums, and both of whom committed suicide at fifty-nine) (552). The Mental Deficiency Act (MDA) created the expectation that humane public policy would remove the mental “defective” from public, so their appearance in public, recounted or imagined in the modernist texts at hand, in Lyon’s argument, “could and did constitute the conditions for a certain kind of shock, in the manner of Freud’s Unheimlich—that is, as something that shocks because it ‘ought to have remained hidden and secret.’ From this hypothesis I mean to ask: what were ‘they’ to ‘us’—we modernists—in the epistemic moment crystallized by the MDA?” (554). Modernist attention to interiority goes hand in hand with this moment in the history of disability. Lyon argues, then, that “one significant aspect of the modernist aesthetic project . . . involves the deliberate experimental creation (rather than short-circuiting or collapse) of new aesthetic domains out of the encounter with non-normate bodies and affects. In line with recent work by Tobin Siebers and Michael Davidson, I will extend my proposal that modernism’s interest in aporia and fracture, disproportion and asymmetry, are rooted in aesthetic and epistemological challenges to ‘normal’” (560–61). In this reading of Mew and Woolf, the dialectical sophistication of Mew’s poetry becomes evident. Her 1916 poem “On the Asylum Road” produces a proto-Levinasian critique in its play with historical genres and engagements with another group encountered in public. But Woolf’s diary entry, and the later essay and novelistic writing

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discussed (including, of course, Mrs. Dalloway), not only show the long-term provocation of mental disability to Woolf’s imagination and aesthetic practice, but also leaves Lyon with an ethical concern: “If mental disability—and specifically the idiocy haunting Woolf’s memoirs—delivers a ‘sledge-hammer blow,’ it is precisely because Woolf cannot enter into or dwell in its consciousness” (569). But, as Lyon argues, one may plan (heroically) to kill Septimus in order to save him from the Foucauldian nightmare of the institution, while at the same time wishing death upon “defectives” for their insufficient institutionalization. Surely Woolf recognizes the violence of this ethical contradiction on some level, for the idiot boy remains with her to the end of her life, in both his real tactile form, with hand outstretched, and as an enigma haunting the bestial face that she dreams about in the mise en abyme of a hall mirror. He is her frère, her semblable. (569) In this growing subfield of critical disability studies in modernist studies, the scientific, social, cultural, legal, and institutional histories of modernist social sciences come together and offer sophisticated but tough analyses of disability’s role in the aesthetics of modernism.

One culture? At the beginning of this book, we examined C. P. Snow’s 1959 “two cultures” argument and the critiques of it launched by literature and science scholars from the 1980s through the present day. Helen Small has recently reminded us that these “two cultures” debates have a long history—before Snow (and a strident rebuttal by F. R. Leavis) came the science and literature debate between T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold in the 1880s, and several earlier examples can be traced back to antiquity. After Snow’s argument came the “Sokal affair” of 1996, when the physicist Alan Sokal attempted to discredit humanities theory, science studies, and cultural studies more generally by placing a hoax article on the social construction of gravity in the prominent journal Social Text.1 As Small notes, these debates tell us little about actual academic research in the

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disciplines simplified by the participants, and, instead, tell us more about the “wider social, cultural, institutional, and political factors that had a bearing on the argument” (35). The kind of scholarly inquiry we have been exploring across this volume participates in varying ways in what Small calls a “one culture” model that “consciously rejects the imprisoning power of specialization and seeks to establish the depth of cultural overlap and productive interaction between different spheres of knowledge” (Small 33). This “one culture” model is familiar to scholars working in modernism, science, and technology. As George Levine put it in his influential collection One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (1987), “It is possible and fruitful to understand how literature and science are mutually shaped by their participation in the culture at large—in the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, economic, and political communities which both generate and take their shape from them” (5–6). In the United Kingdom, Ludmilla Jordanova’s Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (1986) turned to textual analysis methodologies from literary criticism to read science books (20). Inevitably, a word that we have seen rather frequently in this volume, “interdisciplinary,” becomes a critical term in the functional logic of fields, associations, and universities. Small notes that most cross-disciplinary collaborations (she includes history of science and science studies) and most interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching are “sustained by forms of training that are recognized as discipline-particular” (34). Small does not raise this point to reject interdisciplinary work, but rather to point out how entrenched disciplinarity is. But, contrary to much of the rhetoric of the past few decades, Andrew Abbott argues that “the emphasis on interdisciplinarity emerged contemporaneously with, not after, the disciplines. There was no long process of ossification; the one bred the other almost immediately” (134). He highlights the calls for interdisciplinary research and teaching going back to the 1920s: “the Social Science Research Council and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation were already focused on the problem of eliminating barriers between the social sciences by the mid-1920s” (133). Looking back to the early-twentieth-century American university (where some social science disciplines such as sociology and economics were routinely combined as late as the end of the 1920s), Abbott traces the long institutional history

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of interdisciplinary studies, concluding that they “are ultimately dependent on specialized disciplines to generate new theories and methods. Interdisciplinarity presupposes disciplines” (137). The very structures of academic hiring, degree programs, and promotion require scholars to be structured around disciplines rather than a seemingly endless array of problems that might organize their work—and that has been so since the beginning of academic disciplines in the modern American university. Yet the kind of scholarship on modernism, science, and technology we have been exploring does not presuppose a lack of specific disciplinary training in some field, nor does it require specialized doctoral training in multiple fields. Individual disciplines are often in the process of being reshaped by new crossdisciplinary collaborations (such as those of critical disability studies, science studies, and ecocriticism). This is how disciplines avoid ossification. What such work does require, however, is the will to cross disciplinary boundaries in the company (whether in person or simply through reading) of those who do have the intensive disciplinary and professional training in fields other than one’s own. Undergraduate students should be encouraged to study deeply in the necessary fields that inform their interdisciplinary interests (whether through course work or directed reading). Graduate students and faculty should not only read with a mind open to disciplinary perspectives other than those of their fields, but they should also try to build networks of scholars from those fields with whom to discuss their shared research interests. The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts and the British Society for Literature and Science can expose one to scholars from a broader range of disciplinary backgrounds than can the associations largely devoted to single specific disciplines. Disciplines will not disappear, nor should they. But, as Abbott has shown, and as we have seen in much of the modernist-era science discussed in this volume, disciplines, since at least the 1920s, have generated interdisciplinary collaborations, research, and teaching. In the aggregate, the past few decades of scholarship on modernism, science, and technology show the highly fertile ground of interdisciplinary fields, such as science and literature, science studies, history of science, and now critical disability studies and ecocriticism, and concepts such as paradigms, technoscientism, domaining, and other critical terms in this volume. This scholarship

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has helped capture the creative and sometimes contentious or even destructive joint emergence of modernism, science, and technology in an age of the falling and rising of paradigms, of making it new.

Note 1 See Small (30–39) on the history and function of these “two cultures” models. Ortolano locates the significance of Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, and F. R. Leavis’s rebuttal of it (and seemingly personal attack on Snow as a novelist) in a February 1962 lecture at Cambridge, in what it reveals about the culture of postwar Britain and the clash between what he styles the “technocratic liberalism” of Snow and the “radical liberalism” of Leavis (Ortolano 4–5). Noting that Britain “had invested heavily in scientific and technological developments through the interwar years (the total number of scientists increased from approximately 5,000 in 1911 to 49,000 in 1951), and this investment continued through the period of austerity and into the more expansive years of the 1950s” (Bowler 264), Peter Bowler sees Snow’s alarm about the “two cultures” in 1959 as “the war cry of a technocrat anxious to gain even more power for the experts” (264).

GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS FROM SCIENCE STUDIES

Actor-network theory. A theory developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and others, in which human and nonhuman actors (or “actants”), material and conceptual, join together in social networks whose performances create meaning. Black box. A term adopted from cybernetics by Bruno Latour. Facts or machines have been blackboxed when, “no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count” (2–3). Domaining. A term from British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern brought into literature and science by Susan Merrill Squier. Strathern explains of the dynamics she calls “domaining,” “In cultural life, in those habits of thought about which for most of the time we are very much unaware, the ideas that reproduce themselves in our communications never reproduce themselves exactly. They are always found in environments or contexts that have their own properties or characteristics. . . . Moreover, insofar as each is a domain, each imposes its own logic of ‘natural’ association. Natural association means that ideas are always enunciated in an environment of other ideas, in contexts already occupied by other thoughts and images. Finding a place for new thoughts becomes an act of displacement” (qtd in Squier, Babies in Bottles, 26–27). Laboratory studies. In laboratory studies, researchers follow scientists in their labs and through the networks of people, institutions, laboratory equipment, and nonhuman participants in their research to conceptualize how scientific knowledge is produced. In their 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction

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of Scientific Facts, Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour’s approach to the workings of Roger Guillemin’s laboratory at the Salk Institute came to the attention of literary scholars in part because it often conceptualized the productions of the lab in textual and rhetorical terms. Paradigm. A central concept in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the paradigm is the “implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16–17) upon which the research programs of what Kuhn calls “normal science” can be mounted. Kuhn’s work examines how science as it is institutionalized sustains its principles, questions, and methods of inquiry. A paradigm eventually loses its explanatory power in the face of anomalies generated through the workings of normal science. In what Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift,” the community of scientists in the field eventually assents to a new paradigm that is able to explain the anomalies that caused the previous paradigm to be revealed as inadequate. Technoscience. A key term in science studies, used by Gaston Bachelard in the 1950s and Gilbert Hottois, beginning in the late 1970s, and popularized by Bruno Latour through his 1987 volume, Science in Action. Latour uses “technoscience” to target the artificiality of distinctions between “science” and “society” as well as “science” and “technology.” In Latour’s usage, the term encompasses not only the people and methods we might traditionally see as “scientific” but also the material technologies and concerns involved across the scientific enterprise, and the “supporters, allies, employers, helping hands, believers, patrons and consumers” (Science in Action, 175). Technoscientism. A term coined by Bruce Clarke to describe the intermingling of concepts among the sciences and other social or cultural fields, or the outright appropriation of scientific terms and ideas outside of their original scientific context. It draws together the sociohistorical term “scientism”—indicating, often negatively, the appropriation of science for nonscientific activities— with the theoretical work by a host of scholars, including Bruno Latour, Gillian Beer, and Donna Haraway, “in which the splicing

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together of science and technology also implies their inextricable relations to society as a whole” (Energy Forms, 7). Thought style. A central concept in Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935). Fleck argued against the efforts of logical positivism to derive a fixed and absolute basis for meaning and knowledge, instead arguing that cognition itself is historically and collectively produced. Drawing from historicism, sociology, and epistemology, Fleck defined “thought style” as the readiness for “directed perception, with corresponding mental and objective assimilation of what has been so perceived” (99), and he suggested that different periods (or even people within the same period) had different thought styles. When comparing the thought style of modern science to that of an earlier period—for example, the alchemical writing of Paracelsus or other medieval chemists— he writes, “Our physical reality did not exist for them” (127).

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Index

Note: Page locators followed by “n” indicate notes section. Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abbott, Andrew  154–5 Abbott, Edwin  50 actor-network theory  22–4, 61, 157 Adams, Henry  45 affect theory  85, 116 n.6 Agassiz, Louis  29 airplanes  3, 8 alchemy  63–5, 128, 146 n.5 Alt, Christina  111, 113–14 anatomy  83, 140 anthropology  8, 91–2, 117–18, 121–3 and critical disability studies 149–50 and eugenics  140 and Ezra Pound  34 n.3 and Gustave Le Bon  120 and Mass-Observation  124 professionalization of  119 Arnold, Matthew  153 Arrhenius, Svante  58 Asimov, Isaac  86–7 astronomy  8, 38–9, 49, 80 n.2 automobiles  3–4, 8, 10, 91 Bachelard, Gaston  22, 77, 158 Baekeland, Leo  21 Balla, Giacomo  4 Balthus 93 Barnes, Djuna  112, 137 Becquerel, Henri  59, 63 Beer, Gillian  39, 42, 158

Bell, Ian  6, 51, 56 Bellmer, Hans  93 Bergson, Henri  18, 101 Berman, Marshall  37 Bernard, Claude  97 Berthelot, Marcellin  64 Besant, Annie  52 “big science”  9–10 Bijker, Wiebe  19–21 biocentrism  32, 83, 101, 109–10 biology  32, 80 n.2, 101, 115, 118. See also life sciences and biocentrism  109–10 and cell theory  86 and eugenics  140 guiding metaphors of  83 and Henri Bergson  102 and neuron doctrine  8, 95 and organicism  87–94 and psychology  84 and sexology  133–5 and social sciences  33, 132–3 and thermodynamics  49 and Virginia Woolf  112–14 and vitalism  44 biopolitics  125, 133, 140, 151 black box  22–4, 36 n.12, 135, 157 Bloomsbury Group  135 Boas, Franz  121 Boccioni, Umberto  4–5, 54 Bohm, David  89 Bohr, Niels  68, 72

172

Index

Bonkowski, Wyatt  129–30 Bono, James  13–14, 25, 35 n.5 Booker, M. Keith  74 Born, Max  68, 73 Botar, Oliver A. I.  109–10 Bowker, Geoffrey C.  65 Bowler, Peter  29, 70 Bragdon, Claude  51, 56 Braun, Karl Ferdinand  3 Brentano, Franz  126 Burstein, Jessica  93 Buzard, James  122–3 Callon, Michel  61, 157 Carnap, Rudolf  19 Carrà, Carlo  4 Carrel, Alexis  108 Casella, Daniela  137 cell theory  8, 32, 86–7, 95, 101, 115 Chadwick, James  68 chemistry  8, 11–13, 38–9, 49, 66, 80 n.2 and alchemy  64–5 and James Joyce  75 and Marcel Duchamp  62 and mechanism  87 and organicism  90 professionalization of  9, 80 n.3 and radioactivity  57–60, 63, 72 Chevreul, Eugene  103 Choi, Tina Young  42–3 Clark, Jill  49, 75 Clark, Suzanne  137 Clarke, Bruce  46, 49, 69, 81 n.4 on D. H. Lawrence  47–8, 75 on energy and modernism  38, 43 on technoscientism  23, 39, 158 Clausius, Rudolf  43

Cold War  20, 78 Compton, Arthur  68 Conrad, Joseph  46, 50 Heart of Darkness  108, 121–2 The Secret Agent  48–9, 75 Cooter, Roger  70 Crawford, Hugh  97–8 Crick, Francis  89 critical disability studies  33, 155 formation of  149 and modernist aesthetics 150–3 crowd psychology  33, 49, 118–20, 145 n.1. See also Mass-Observation movement; psychology; social sciences; sociology cubism 50–1 cultural studies  112, 153 Curie, Marie  59, 81 n.8 Curie, Pierre  59 Cybernetics  23, 157 Czarnecki, Kristin  111 Dada 150 Dalton, John  58–60 Darwin, Charles  38–9, 102, 112 and Gustave Le Bon  120 modernist readership of  29 and vitalism  101 Daston, Lorraine  126 Davidson, Adam  10, 34 n.4 Davidson, Michael  152 de Broglie, Louis  68, 77 degeneration  6, 33, 49, 84, 117, 119, 132, 146 n.7, 150. See also eugenics; Max Nordau and “Back to Nature” movement 144–5 and eugenics  139, 143 and sexology  132–8 and thermodynamics  44–6 Desmond, Adrian  113

Index

Dirac, Paul  72 Dix, Otto  150 domaining  85, 106–7, 118, 133, 155, 157. See also Marilyn Strathern; Susan Merrill Squier Doolittle, Hilda. See H. D. Duchamp, Marcel  51, 54, 55, 62–3 Duszenko, Andrzej  75–6 ecocriticism  33, 155 and modernist studies  109–11, 113, 144, 149–50 ecofeminism  109–14, 149 Eddington, Arthur  50, 53, 69–70, 77 Einstein, Albert  37–8, 53, 66–8, 88. See also Newtonian physics; quantum physics; relativity; physical sciences and cubism  50 and differential geometry  7, 40 and ether physics  41, 81 n.7 and “the fourth dimension” 51 and James Joyce  74–5 popular reception of  29, 69–71, 82 n.12 electricity 10, 39, 51 Eliot, T. S.  44, 46, 63, 81 n.5, 105, 122–3 Ellis, Havelock  135–6 embryology  32, 83, 87, 94, 109 Emerson, Lori  51–2 energy 87. See also entropy; matter; physical sciences; thermodynamics as modernist trope  31, 38 nineteenth-century paradigms of 39–40 and quantum mechanics 67–9, 72 and thermodynamics  42–9

173

Engels, Friedrich  37 engineering  31, 39–41, 43, 80 n.3 Enlightenment  78, 109, 111, 126, 136 entropy  40, 43–9, 81 n.4. See also degeneration; energy; physical sciences; thermodynamics and information theory  75 epidemiology  32, 83 Epstein, Jacob  5 ether physics  8, 16, 31, 40–1, 50, 67, 81 n.7. See also quantum physics; relativity and radioactivity  62 and “vibratory modernism” 52–7 ethnography  122–3, 135 eugenics  8, 132–3, 140. See also critical disability studies; degeneration; social sciences and disability  150, 152 and Ezra Pound  6 and modernist studies  134–5, 137–43 and Ross Harrison  106 and the social sciences  118 evolutionary theory  32, 38, 44, 113, 118, 132, 139. See also Charles Darwin; eugenics Expressionism 150 Ferenczi, Sándor  128, 146 n.5 film  8, 32, 103, 139, 141–3 First World War  1, 8, 34 n.1, 78, 104, 117 and shell shock  129, 151–2 Flagg, Francis  108 Flammarion, Camille  44–5 Fleck, Ludwig  19, 64, 98, 159 Ford, Ford Madox  50, 104, 130 Forster, E. M.  135, 137

174

Index

Foucault, Michel  125–6, 134, 136 Frazer, James  108 Freud, Sigmund  38, 125–6, 130. See also psychoanalysis; psychology; sexology; social sciences and crowd psychology  145 n.1 popular reception of  29 and psychiatric historiography 127–8 and sexology  134, 136–7 and telepathy  131 Friedman, Alan J.  74 Fuller, Buckminster  52 Fuller, Steve  19–20, 36 n.11 Futurism  2–5, 34 n.2, 36 n.12, 54, 56, 110, 143 Galison, Peter  9–10, 35 n.10, 61–2, 66 Galton, Francis  138, 143 Gardner, Eldon J.  86 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie  149, 151 Garstin, E. J. Langford  146 n.6 Gauss, Carl Friedrich  40 Gawne, Richard  89 Geissler, Heinrich  61 Gell-Mann, Murray  79 genetics  32, 83. See also life sciences and eugenics  139–40 geology 140 geometry  7, 31–2, 38, 40, 69. See also the physical sciences and spatial fourth dimension 50–2 germ theory  8, 32, 83, 97–8 Goody, Alex  2 Great War. See First World War Green, David  142–3 Griesemer, James R.  65

Gross, Alan  15 Gudernatsch, J. F.  107 Haddon, Alfred Cort  121–2 Haeckel, Ernst  91, 93, 120 Haldane, Charlotte  137–8 Haldane, J. S.  87–8 Haraway, Donna  39, 89–91, 94, 101, 111, 116 n.7, 158 Harrison, Ross  94, 106, 116 n.8 Harrison, Tom 122, 124 Hart, Bernard  131 Hassan, Ihab  79 Hasselberg, K. B.  12–13 H. D.  51, 105 Heisenberg, Werner  40, 68, 71–3, 77 Helmholtz, Hermann von  29, 43, 56 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple  38, 50–2, 62–3 and “vibratory modernism” 53–4 Hertig, Arthur  133 Hertz, Heinrich  66 Hess, David J.  21–2, 65 Hinton, Charles Howard  50–1, 56 history and philosophy of science  12, 15, 18–19, 21–2, 25, 84. See also literature and science; science and technology studies; science studies Hobsbawm, Eric  1 Hooke, Robert  86 Hottois, Gilbert  22, 158 Hubble, Edwin  38 Hubble, Nick  123 Hulme, T. E.  91, 93 Husserl, Edmund  18 Huxley, Julian  106–8 Huxley, T. H.  104, 107, 153 hypnosis 120 hysteria  120, 127–8

Index

Imagism  51, 98, 123–4, 135 Impressionism 102 Industrial Revolution  3, 40 Iser, Wolfgang  25 James, William  84, 96, 100–2, 115 n.2, 126 Jardine, Nicholas  24–5 Jauss, Hans Robert  25 Jean, James  77 Jenkins, Philip  34 n.1 Jennings, Humphrey  122–4 Jolas, Eugene  1 Jones, Ernest  125 Jordanova, Ludmilla  154 Joyce, James  29, 83 n.13, 112 and new physics  73–6, 78–9 82 n.12 Jung, Carl  127–8 Kandel, Eric  127 Keller, Evelyn Fox  14, 26, 88 Kelvin, Lord  43–4, 46, 56–7, 81 n.7 Kepes, György  92 Kirchner, Ludwig  150 Klee, Paul  110, 150 Kojève, Alexandre  18–19 Kopp, Hermann  64 Koyré, Alexander  18–19, 35 n.8 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von  134, 136 Kuhn Thomas  7, 22, 33, 35 n.10, 36 n.11, 39, 42, 81 n.4, 99, 127. See also paradigms; history and philosophy of science; science studies and Bruno Latour  24 and Ludwig Fleck  35 n.9 and science studies  21 Structure of Scientific Revolutions  15–20, 158 and Susan Merrill Squier  26 Kupka, František  54

175

laboratory studies  22, 157 LaFollette, Marcel  10, 28 LaMarck, Jean-Baptiste  120 Latour, Bruno  21–6, 39, 61, 98, 126, 135, 157–8. See also actor–network theory, black box, laboratory studies, science studies Lavoisier, Antoine  86 Law, John  61, 157 Lawrence, D. H.  75, 101 Women in Love  47–8, 63 Leadbeater, C. W.  52 Leane, Elizabeth  29, 80 n.2 Leavis, F. R.  153, 156 n.1 Le Bon, Gustave  45–6, 49 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind 119–20 Leeuwenhoek, Antoine van 86 Léger, Fernand  92 Lehmann, Otto  91 Levine, George  27, 42, 154 Lewis, C. I.  18 Lewis, Wyndham  5, 93, 112, 122 life sciences  26, 32, 39, 83–5, 89, 115, 118. See also anatomy; biology; genetics; physiology and microscope  88 and technology  141 and Virginia Woolf  114 literature and science  13–15, 25–7, 35 n.5, 80, 157. See also domaining; science studies; science and technology studies logical positivism  18–19, 159 Lorentz, Hendrik  67 Lowell, Amy  145 Loy, Mina  93, 105, 135, 137 Lyon, Janet  151–3

176

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Mach, Ernst  67, 126 Macintyre, John  59 Mackey, Peter Francis  75 Madge, Charles  122–4 Malinowski, Bronislaw  121–2 Mansfield, Katherine  46, 81 n.5 Marconi, Guglielmo  3 Marinetti, F. T.  5–6, 10, 12, 34 n.2, 36 n.12 “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” 3–4 Zang Tumb Tumb  3, 56 Marsden, Dora  82, 121 Marx, Karl  37 Mass-Observation movement  33, 122–4 mathematics  39, 80 n.2. See also geometry matter. See also energy; physical sciences paradigms of  38–9, 53, 56–7, 63, 66–7, 89, 91 Maxwell, Clerk  49, 66 mechanism 132. See also organicism; vitalism and D. H. Lawrence  47 and organicism  32, 87–90 medicine  32, 83, 128, 130 and critical disability studies 150 and eugenics  140 and modernist writing 96–102 Meidner, Ludwig  150 Mendel, Gregor  83, 115 n.1, 140 Mew, Charlotte  152 Meyer, Ernst von  64 Meyer, Steven  95–6, 100–2 Micale, Mark  27, 97, 120, 126–9 microscopes  86–8, 95, 99 Minkowski, Hermann  67

modernist studies  8, 57, 59, 73, 90, 143 and biology  95 and critical disability studies  149–51, 153 ecocritical turn in  109, 111–12 and eugenics  138 and impersonality  103 interdisciplinarity of  13–15, 84 and Mass-Observation movement 122 and material histories of science 61 and new physics  69, 76 and non-Euclidean geometries 52 and psychology  125, 127, 133 and pulp science fiction magazines 108 and science studies  21–6, 97 and sexology  134 and social sciences  118, 121 and spatial fourth dimension 53 and thermodynamics  43, 46 and vitalism  102 Monroe, Harriet  6, 145 Moore, Marianne  6, 145 Moses, Omri  101 Müller, Otto Friedrich  87 Münsterberg, Hugo  96, 102 Myers, Greg  42 Nagaoka, Hantaro  60, 88 natural history  112, 115 naturalism  43, 115, 142 Needham, Joseph  90 neuroscience  8, 125 neuron doctrine  32–3, 94–6, 99–101, 116 n.7 and optics  103 and psychology  125

Index

new criticism  121 newspapers  4, 29, 70 Newtonian physics  8, 40–1, 43–4, 52, 66–9, 71, 74, 88. See also Albert Einstein; ether Physics; quantum physics; relativity Nicholson, Daniel J.  89 Nietzsche, Friedrich  101, 127 Nobel Prize  12–13, 59 Nordau, Max  117–18, 134, 139 North, Michael  5–7, 17, 34 n.3 Nye, Mary Jo  58–9 optics  38, 86, 102–5 organicism. See also mechanism; vitalism and embryology  94 and Gertrude Stein  99–102 and the mechanism/vitalism binary  32, 88–90 and neurological research 95–6 Ostwald, Wilhelm  58 Otis, Laura  94 Ouspensky, P. D.  51 Papapetros, Spyros  91–3 paradigms  15–17, 21, 24, 26, 30, 33, 35 n.10, 99, 158 Parkinson, Gavin  18, 67, 71–2, 76–9 Park Place Gallery Group  53 Pasteur, Louis  97 Pauli, Wolfgang  68 Pear, Tom Hatherley  131 Peppis, Paul  121–2, 131, 135–6, 138 periodicals  28–30, 45, 50, 55, 57, 74 and new physics  77–9 periodical studies  74, 82 n.13 Perlis, Alan David  74

177

Pfannkuchen, Antje  56–7 photography  38, 91, 103, 139, 141–3 physical sciences  31–3, 62, 83–4, 88, 90–2, 118. See also astronomy; chemistry; energy; ether physics; geology; matter; Newtonian physics; quantum physics; thermodynamics and new geometries  40 paradigm shifts in  38–40, 57 and technology  141 and Virginia Woolf  112 physiology 32 and eugenics  140, 143 and optics  102–5 and psychology  84 Picasso, Pablo  51 Planck, Max  67–8, 77 Poincaré, Henri  67 positivism  35 n.10, 51, 97, 128–9 postmodernity  38, 48, 75 Pound, Ezra  1, 5–6, 10, 12, 29, 34 n.3, 64, 122 and alchemy  66 and “Back to Nature” movement 145 and Ludwig Fleck  19 and nature study  112 and spatial fourth dimension  51–2, 56 and thermodynamics  43, 46 and vortex theory  57 pragmatism 18 Price, Katy  69–71 print culture  28–30 Progressive Era  6, 143–4 Proust, Marcel  50, 74 psychoanalysis  8, 33, 38, 132, 136–7. See also psychology; sexology; Sigmund Freud historicization of  126–8

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and modernist studies  130–1 professionalization of  125 psychology  33, 62, 88, 91, 101, 103, 117–18, 146 n.5. See also crowd psychology; Gustave Le Bon; hysteria; Mass-Observation movement; psychoanalysis; sexology; Sigmund Freud and biology  84, 132 and disability studies  149–50 and Gertrude Stein  95–6, 100 and mechanism  89 and modernism  126–7, 135 professionalization of  125, 145 n.2 and the somaticist/mentalist binary 130 of trauma  131 Pumfrey, Stephen  70 quantum physics  8, 31–2, 40, 88. See also Albert Einstein, ether physics, Newtonian Physics, relativity, the physical sciences emergence of  66–8 and epistemology 71–2 and ether physics 41, 57, 81 n.7 and James Joyce 74–7 and modernist studies 69, 73, 78, 95 queer studies 137 radio  8, 10, 36 n.12 radioactivity  11–13, 31. See also physical sciences; X–rays and alchemy  63–6 and modernism  62–3 and new paradigms in the sciences 57–60 Ramòn y Cajal, Santiago  95

Ramsay, William  58, 60 Read, Herbert  91, 93 Regardie, Israel  128 relativity  8, 31, 40, 51, 53, 66–9, 88. See also Albert Einstein; quantum physics and cubism  50 and ether physics  57, 81 n.7 and modernism  73–8 popular reception of  69–72 Rice, Thomas Jackson  75 Richardson, Angelique  28 Riemann, Bernhard  40 Ritter, William Emerson  88, 115 n.2 Rock, John  133 Roman, Carrie  111 Röntgen, Wilhelm  59 Rossini, Manuela  23 Russolo, Luigi  4 Rutherford, Ernest  11–13, 60, 62–5, 68, 72, 75, 80 n.2, 88 Ryan, Judith  126 Sabin, Florence  106 Savage, Mike  123 Schaffner, Anna Katharina 133–4 Schleiden, M. J.  86 Schmidgen, Henning  8 Schrödinger, Erwin  68, 77 Schulze, Robin G.  6, 143–5 Schwann, Theodor  86 science and technology studies (STS)  20, 22 science studies  13–15, 21–6, 84–5, 97, 126, 150, 154–5, 157–9. See also history and philosophy of science; literature and science; science and technology studies scientism  39, 43, 49

Index

Sconce, Jeffrey  130 Scott, Bonnie Kime  111–13 Second World War  9–10, 139 Seitler, Dana  126, 139 Severini, Gino  4 Severn, Elizabeth  128, 146 n.5 sexology  8, 33, 84, 106, 118, 132–8, 143. See also psychoanalysis; psychology shell shock  129–31 Sherrington, Charles  96 Siebers, Tobin  150–2 Silberer, Herbert  128 Small, Helen  153–4 Smith, Grafton Elliot  131 Smithson, Robert  53 Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures  27–8, 78, 153, 156 n.1 social sciences  32–3, 80 n.2, 84, 117, 121, 142–3, 149, 154. See also anthropology; crowd psychology; eugenics; Mass-Observation movement; sexology; sociology; psychoanalysis; psychology and biology  132–3 professionalization of  118 sociology  19, 32, 101, 117–19, 140, 149–50, 154, 159. See also crowd psychology; Mass-Observation movement; social sciences Soddy, Frederick  29, 36 n.11, 37, 57–8, 60, 63–6, 72 The Interpretation of Radium  11–12, 15–16 Sokal, Alan  153 Squier, Susan Merrill  14–15, 26, 85, 106–8, 133, 135, 137–8, 157 Star, Susan Leigh  65

179

Stein, Gertrude  112, 116 n.8 and neuroscience  32, 84, 95–6, 99–102 Steiner, Rudolf  52 Stengers, Isabelle  126 Stevens, Wallace  145 Stewart, Balfour  52, 57 Stopes, Marie  135, 137 Strathern, Marilyn  85, 157 Sullivan, J. W. N.  77, 105 surrealism  18, 31, 77–8, 110, 123–4 Swan, Eugene L.  145 Symbolism 6 Symonds, John Addington  135–6 Tait, Peter Guthrie  52, 57, 81 n.7 technoscience  8, 22–3, 103, 158 and Ezra Pound  5 and F. T. Marinetti  56 technoscientism  39, 84, 102, 155, 158 telegraphy  3, 32, 34, 53–4, 95 telepathy  41, 131 telephones 10 thermodynamics  31, 39–40, 57, 81 n.4. See also energy; entropy; physical sciences emergence of  41–2 and modernism  43–9 Thomson, J. J.  60–1, 72 Thomson, William. See Lord Kelvin thought style  19, 64–5, 98, 159. See also Ludwig Fleck Tobey, Ronald C.  28 Toscano, Aaron A.  36 n.11 Traweek, Sharon  65 Turda, Marius  139 Valentine, Kylie  130 Van’t Hoff, Jacobus Henricus  58 Veditz, C. W. A.  118–19 Verrill, A. Hyatt  108

180

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Victorian era  2 Vienna Circle  19 vitalism  48, 116 n.4. See also mechanism; organicism and organicism  32, 87–90, 99, 101–2 and thermodynamics  44, 46–7 Vorticism  5, 51, 56–7, 135 Walter, Christina  103–5, 116 n.6 Watson, James  89 Weart, Spencer R.  63–4 Weller, Shane  133–4 Wells, H. G.  46, 50, 108, 133 West, Rebecca  121, 130–1 White, Paul  113 Whitehead, Alfred North  18, 100 Whitworth, Michael  29–30, 38, 46, 49–50, 63, 76–9, 82 n.13 Wilde, Oscar  50, 136 Williams, William Carlos  98–9, 145

Wise, M. Norton  42 Woese, Carl R.  89 Wolff, Tamsen  139–42 Woolf, Leonard as science publisher  29, 125 Woolf, Virginia  1, 79, 105, 122 and disability  151–3 and nature study  111–14 and radioactivity  63 as science publisher  29, 125 and thermodynamics  46, 49 and trauma  130 Woolgar, Steve  22, 158 Worringer, Wilhelm  91, 93 Wundt, Wilhelm  84 Wünsche, Isabel  109–10 X-rays  8, 16, 31, 53, 59–63, 68, 82 n.9, 103. See also radioactivity Yeats, William Butler  1, 66 Zöllner, J. C. F.  50

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184