Nathan Brown - Art and the Scientific Image: the Clash and Confluence of Natural and Scientific Languages
If art, science and mathematics bear specific relations with both the idea of ‘reality in itself,’ and the reality that we perceive in an everyday sense, how do they speak to the internal dynamics of these two realities, and how do they speak to each other? Is there a hierarchy amongst these languages or disciplines? Can art think science; can science think art? Lastly, if art, science and mathematics all require natural language to mediate and understand each other, is the space of language taken as given, or should we also address the norms, rules and ideologies of mediation?
Presentation Title: Hegel's Kilogram: Taking the Measure of Metrical Units
Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montréal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (2021) and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017), both from Fordham University Press. His complete translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and his critical study, Baudelaire’s Shadow: An Essay On Poetic Determination, will be published in tandem by MaMa in Fall 2021.
Reading: Please read the introduction to Rationalist Empiricism, A Theory of Speculative Critique, Nathan Brown, Fordham University Press, 2021 (attached).