Eric, I totally appreciate and admire your interest in all this, but
with due respect I think making ArtScience into a "field" is an archaic
twentieth-century delaying tactic, from the days when liberal society
could believe itself eternal. Reading this morning about California's
winter fires, it seems that much greater things than an academic field
could "overheat" and "melt down."
And California is just an anecdote: housing troubles of the excessively
rich. The Syrian drought, the Russian wildfires of 2010, the South Asian
floods of 2017 spring vividly to mind. These are something radically
new: harbingers of the present.
Why can't deal with what's all around us?
Science makes the invisible visible. Art makes the visible meaningful.
Politics makes the meaningful actionable. Each of these activities is
separate, resting on its own base, delivering what it can. Under present
circumstances, each "field" (if you want to call it that) needs the
other. Alone or even in pairs, they can make no difference.
Similarly, the notion of "fundamental research," outside applications
and consequences, has become fallacious. For example, I believe
fundamental research into the constitution of twenty-first century
authoritarian racist capitalism is now going on in the US White House
and in the vast actor-network of which it is a part. This is highly
consequential research into the denial of the present.
The three-field formation of Science-Art-Politics would be much stronger
than authoritarianism: more robust, more dynamic, able to integrate
vital energies for transformative work in the present. Why not make a
vast social movement for urgent times, instead of another specialized
niche for all eternity?
thanks for your reflections,
Brian
PS - As the below shows, you yourself are arguing, not for a fusion, but
for two "complementary" disciplines. Why not add the third essential
one? Because the window of opprtunity is short: in ten years, if nothing
changes, "politics" will be replaced by "the military" as the necessary
partner in any transformative process.
4) Closing the experiential gap between rigorous scientific enquiry and
subjective appraisal
Through the reconciliation of scientific method and subjective
experience ArtScience can contribute to efforts to close the
experiential gap between the abstractions of scientific enquiry and the
experience of everyday life. ArtScience can do for science what art does
so well for itself: turn abstract ideas into lived experiences. Here we
see the unique intersection at work of two methodological
universes considered to be ‘incommensurable’ [7], where in fact they are
complementary and mutually reinforcing modes of understanding and
experience.
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