| One thing I've always kind of had in mind about the notion of combining physics and culture is that each field has a specific way of looking at the world. It worries me when people apply the rules of physics to the "social sciences," and especially internet culture--although of the two internet culture, being based strictly on codes and algorithms and the human egos that engage the two, is a little more open to that application than non digital "analog" culture. But, as always, there's room for argument.
Personally, I think that the myths that hold our society together are undergoing a profound "remix" under the weight of information culture. People like Marshall McLuhan, Alan D. Sokal, Tricia Rose, and a host of others have written about the same effects of digital and electronic media on the minds of America. The social sciences have always had a strange place in the academy, and in a sense, the way people describe african american culture seems to have a little more than its share of weird interpretations, as we saw earlier on the list with Ben Williams presentation of Killah Priest's descriptions of how "Things Go." I like Killah Priest (he's even on my latest album Riddim Warfare), and consider myself to be a fan of physics and most of the underlying notions of science (hypothesis should be replicatible, evidence, proof, stuff like that). But I do draw the line when people really go ultra far out with the different myth systems they generate. Let's look at Sun Ra, one of my all time favorite composers. His situation was a metaphor, and he became a way for people to analyze their situation and create alternate myths, so that they could truly break down the situations they were inhabiting. Is that social science? Or look at Freud, whose analysis of the roots of civilization as applied to his psychoanalytic methods, created a whole new industry. Is that social science? So many times, people use the rhetoric of physics, and end up a bit, as I like to call it, "new agey." I try to avoid that kind of stuff--it leaves you too open to weirdo stuff, and doesn't allow for real dialog except along the lines of crushing other people into believing what you believe--i.e. brainwasing--and in general I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to applying the rules of one game to another. Sometimes, not everything is translateable.
There's a classic description of metaphysics and culture that Henry Louis Gates uses in his Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self that discusses how black people have encountered really different approaches to the science of culture and the the physics of "reality" (that, too, is an undefined term, really). I think back to Ellison's "Invisible Man" where, at the end of his above titled essay, Gates cites Ellison's novel "Brothers and Sisters, my text this morning is the Blackness of Blackness'" And a congregation of voices answered: "That blackness is most black, brother, most black..." "In the beginning..."
"At the very start," they cried.
"...there was blackness..."
"preach it..."
"...and the sun..."
"...was bloody red..."
"Red..."
"Now black is..." the preacher shouted.
"Bloody..."
"I said black is ...."
"Preach it, brother..."
"...an' black ain't...".....
"Black will make you..."
"Black..."
"...or black will un-make you"
"Ain't it the truth, Lawd?"
Gates in his excellent exegesis, points to a place where African American narrative and the diversity i.e. heterogeneity it comes from, seem to paint a picture of caricature. But it's a transcendant caricature. I like Gates and Ellison, for precisely those reasons. As Gates says "this sermon is a critique both of Melville's passage in Moby Dick on "the blackness of darkness," and of the sign of blackness as represented by the algorithm signified/signifier. As Ellison's text states, "Black is" and "Black ain't," "It do, Lawd," "an' it don't." Ellison parodies here the notionof essence, of the supposedly natural relationship between the symbol and that symbolized."
But when cameras, surveillance, prisons, and the media become involved with how people view the world around them (not to mention themselves), then that's where social science begins and physics becomes a helper - a narrative tool, it's a milieu where people as diverse as Rodney King and Bill Clinton can have something in common. It's a strange world. There's a great book a physicist named Alan D. Sokal wrote (with a Belgian physicist named Jean Bricmont) called "Fashionable Nonsense: Post-Modern Intellectuals Abuse of Science" that I really enjoy. Sokal rose to fame (for better or for worse, really) on an essay called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which was a hoax he perpetrated on a magazine called "Social Text" edited and run by a group of professors and basically one of the premier cultural studies journals in the country.
At the end of his "hoax" essay, Sokal wrote "finally, the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics. But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for as Aronowitz has observed, "neither logic nor mathematics escapes the contamination of the social." And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal, and militaristic: "mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other." Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics. As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exist, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content. We can see hints of it in the multi-dimensional and non-linear logic of fuzzy systems theory, but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations. Catastrophe theory, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis. Finally, chaos theory - which provides our deepest insights into the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomenon of nonlinearity - will be central to all future mathematics. And yet, these images of the future mathematics must remain but the haziest glimmer: for, alongside these three young branches in the tree of science, there will arise new trunks and branches - entire new theoretical frameworks - of which we, with our present ideological blinders, cannot yet even conceive." The text is available at http://www.nyu.edu/pubs/socialtext/1996.html#46 but you might have to do some digging to really get the idea how this really affected things.
All of the above was a joke. Is there any real sense to what Sokal was saying? Is there a way to get out of the bullshit that people have been learning in the academy with regards to the "social sciences"? Perhaps. I don't even agree with alot of what Sokal was saying, but at the same time, I do feel that we as African americans, and indeed, most of the truly progressive left - have left any sense of real engagement with the narrative that Sokal is describing, far behind. When I hear Killah Priest or RZA kick their mathematics, I always wonder - is it replicatible? Whose minds are these ideas flowing through, and what codes are being transmitted? It's only questions, and trust me, I've met and dealt with both Killah Priest and RZA, and I've even had Andrew Ross over for dinner. The thing is, is that in a culture of myths - there's room for all the different perspectives. Science itself becomes a myth. How does that look for the future?
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