The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science

Bruce Clarke, Manuela Rossini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136950421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science traces the network of connections among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. Divided into three main sections, this volume:

• links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics
• surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics
• traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism.

Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.

With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.

Part I
LITERATURES AND SCIENCES

One hears occasionally that “Science” has made a new discovery or that, “according to science,” this or that social policy or form of personal hygiene is to be preferred over another. Unlike German usage, which calls all scholarly disciplines “sciences” (Wissenschaften), then stipulating further between Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities), “science” took on a more specialized application in English. Perhaps this bias or restriction also helped to obscure how science in the singular, with or without a capital S, has always been a bit of a misnomer. Despite whatever methodological regularities may apply, the singularity of Science is a nominal idealization, a handy abstraction. Students of literature and science, already trained to dissect such linguistic formations, have kicked the habit of referring to “Science,” or its reflexive variant, “science itself,” as a monolithic enterprise or singular practice. In his chapter on Japan in Part III, Thomas Lamarre notes how “those who wish to stress the impact of the sciences on the formation of modern societies tend to posit a unified, almost deterministic historical force, whether their intent is to extol science or to rue its excesses.” The drive for a unitary Science does not necessarily derive from scientists themselves; it can also come from certain kinds of historiography or social commentary. Lamarre continues: “Yet we get a better sense of the efficacy and impact of the modern sciences when we think in terms of specific fields of rationality rather than a massive overarching rationalization or modernization.”

Students of literature and science need to become adept in the specificities of the various sciences – their separate if variously interrelated histories, the particularities of their disciplinary objects, their different schools of thought, and the range of issues and debates that roil their immediate ranks. A decisive opening move for our interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary investigations is to gain clarity both on the current framework of disciplinary distinctions within the sciences, and on the wider histories that render them mobile and relative to specific times and places. For instance, contributor Noah Heringman notes that “Romantic science was predisciplinary. … By attending to predisciplinarity we can see that there were in fact multiple ‘ways of knowing’ and that the shift to modern disciplinarity was neither sudden nor uniform nor (even now) complete.” In addition, innovative approaches in literature and science place transdisciplinary pressures on the sciences at hand. For instance, Arkady Plotnitsky’s chapter on Psychoanalysis does not rehearse yet again the history or terminology of that discipline, but rather proceeds directly to a position of post-Kantian philosophical mediation between Sigmund Freud’s orientation toward biology and Jacques Lacan’s orientation toward mathematical physics, in order to rethink the relations among science, literature, art, and the Real.

Part I sets forward the primary sciences as discrete disciplines, but also subdivides or supplements a number of them. For instance, there are chapters on both Physics and one of its sub-disciplines especially rich in literary traffic, Thermodynamics; on Biology, but also on Ecology, Evolution, and Genetics; on Chemistry, but also on its historically important precursor, Alchemy; on Geology, and also on its significant current spin-off, Climate Science. Other chapters in Part I range from classical disciplines, such as Mathematics and Medicine, to modern and contemporary amalgamations of discrete scientific strands. One might call these synthetic disciplines. Integrating both scientific and technological developments into powerful new formations, these newer “fields of rationality” have already produced profound cultural and creative consequences: Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life, Chaos and Complexity Science, Cognitive Science, Cybernetics, Information Theory, Nanotechnology, Psychoanalysis, and Systems Theory.

This more complex tableau of scientific disciplinary differences enables one to think more precisely about their connections to matters of literary consequence. For instance, certain sciences are more conducive to or apt for literary treatment than others. Biology is especially favored in that many of its objects of study – such as animals – yield easily to sympathetic identification, and reside at or near the human scale of things. Contributor Sabine Sielke adds: “The biosciences’ growing cultural visibility and prestige is partly due to the fact that they can be narrativized more easily than mathematics and physics.” As often as not, the literature in “literature and science” will come forward, as one would expect, as literary works – poems, novels, plays, songs, or scriptures – significantly inflected by ideas or images we now call scientific. Sketching the prehistory of Nanotechnology, Colin Milburn comments that “In the early decades of the twentieth century, a wave of stories depicting molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles as worlds unto themselves flooded the literary marketplace.” And Stacy Alaimo points out how the study of ecology and literature could “include all cultures, all time periods, and all sorts of texts, including oral literatures and ceremonies (such as Shalako, the Zuni world renewal ritual).”

Matters of literary consequence will vary according not only to scientific distinctions but also to the different phases of the “literary”–for instance, as discourses of literary criticism in its commerce with scientific concepts, or as the literatures canonized or produced by philosophical, theoretical, popular-scientific, or other non-fictional fields. Alaimo continues that, with regard to the literature and science of ecology, “It would draw not only upon the disciplines of literary studies, ecology, science, and science studies, but also anthropology, sociology, political theory, history, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.” Similarly, Jay Labinger suggests that “We might even consider the origins of chemistry as primarily literary, not scientific, since the core concept of atomic theory was initially expounded by the ancients (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc.) with little if any appeal to observational (let alone experimental) support.” And as Ira Livingston writes on Chaos and Complexity Theory, “Part of the conversion to chaos involves learning to see structures not as structures but as systems, events in process. This recognition is part of what makes chaos and complexity theory full partners with poststructuralist theory generally.” We see, too, that the discourse of literature and science has broken another habit, that of appealing to Literature with a capital L. There are literatures and there are sciences, and the range of scholarly interests in their interconnections derives from this double manifold of significant differences.

1
AI AND ALIFE

John Johnston

I

What is life, and what makes human life unique? With the rise of the life sciences and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century, new answers to these questions were proposed that were deeply at odds with traditional understandings and beliefs. With the advent in the twentieth century of new, life-altering technologies like genetic engineering, and life-simulating sciences like Artificial Life (ALife), these questions became even more insistent. Moreover, after World War II, efforts to build fast, intelligent machines and the subsequent development of the computer made the assumption of human intellectual superiority seem uncertain and sure to be challenged, especially since the new science of Artificial Intelligence seemed to lead inexorably to the construction of superhuman machine intelligence. Indeed, both ALife and Artificial Intelligence (AI) dramatically encouraged the thought that the opposition between the natural and the artificial, the born and the made – an opposition dating back to that of phusis versus techne-in ancient Greek culture – was no longer so hard and fast, and certainly not inevitable. Yet this philosophical conundrum was hardly the central issue or worry. Rather, it was the nagging possibility that henceforth the evolutionary dynamic might begin to act on a biosphere soon active with non-natural life forms and that its crowning achievement – namely humanity itself – might eventually be displaced and superseded by its own technical invention. In short, many feared that the future would be determined by some cyborgian, post-biological form of the posthuman, or that the human species might be eclipsed altogether as evolution’s torch of life and intelligence passed to its artificial progeny.

It was inevitable, therefore, that the possibilities of both ALife and AI would begin to be explored, variously and even idiosyncratically, by literary writers. Here, “ALife” will simply refer to new and non-natural forms of life brought into existence through external and technical means at least initially under human control; similarly, “AI” will refer to some kind of human-constructed machine intelligence (usually an advanced computer) capable of performing actions of such complexity that they require a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans.¹ As we might expect – given that life has always been assumed to be a precondition for intelligence – ALife was of interest to imaginative writers long before AI.

Specifically, ALife became possible as a fictional interest with the beginnings of the properly scientific study of life, that is, with the emergence of biology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whereas AI, with rare exceptions, became a serious fictional interest only after the birth of the computer.² Interestingly, the official births of the professional scientific disciplines devoted to ALife and AI – in 1987 and 1956, respectively – reverse this chronological order. However, in regard to ALife and AI as fictional themes, the most important background influence was not only the computer but also the immense transformation of biology and the life sciences by cybernetics, information theory, and modern genetics (specifically, the discovery in 1953 of how DNA functions). For many readers, in fact, the contemporary emergence of these themes in fiction will be associated with the historical amalgamation of technics and science in what has become known as technoscience and its more recent condensation, cyborg science.³

No doubt the first modern narrative about ALife is Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. It was followed by a number of well-known literary classics that, from the contemporary perspective that now post-dates the official inauguration of the new science of ALife, could well be said to be concerned with ALife avant la lettre. Specific examples would include H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You. However, with the accelerated development of computer technology, machine intelligence as a source of worry or “problem” theme becomes more prominent, particularly in the rapidly growing new popular genres of science fiction and film. Nevertheless, although ALife and AI can be clearly distinguished as two new sciences of the artificial, they do not always operate as distinctly different fictional interests, but are often intricately related in a number of interesting ways. For example, in Astro Teller’s novel exegesis (1997) a computer program – specifically, a data miner called “Edgar”– unaccountably becomes “smart”; in the special terms of AI, he or “it” is smart enough to pass the Turing test. However, the protagonist Alice, the human with whom Edgar regularly communicates, openly doubts that he is in any real or biological sense “alive.”⁴ Conversely, Michael Crichton’s novel Prey (2002) combines both ALife and AI: the nano-swarms engineered by the company Xymos Technology, while clearly of unnatural origin, seem “alive” by any standard biological definition – they require food, reproduce, and evolve – and thus are a form of ALife. But they are not especially intelligent. In fact, their intelligence is based exclusively on a few algorithms that model simple predatory and learning behaviors. Thus the swarms never display anything approaching human intelligence and remain a very limited form of AI.⁵

In what follows I examine in more detail the specific ways in which ALife and AI are related, intermixed, or remain separate, albeit sometimes only implicitly, in a range of examples from contemporary fiction. But before doing so I want to consider Frankenstein as a first rough template for what I shall call ALife fiction’s characteristic “thematic”–in what sense can it be said that this non-natural form or entity is “alive”? – as well as its accompanying and necessary “problematic”– does this life-form participate in or have anything to do with a life cycle? does it grow, learn, die, and, most important, reproduce? Within this framework, we shall then consider what happens with the ...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• Part I LITERATURES AND SCIENCES
• Part II DISCIPLINARY AND THEORETICAL APPROACHES
• Part III PERIODS AND CULTURES
• INDEX