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Authors:

 Rosenberg, Martin E.

Title:

 Chess RHIZOME Visualizing the Role of Metaphor in Interdisciplinary Science Studies

Keywords:

Abstract:

 Chess RHIZOME explores hypertextually the range of references to chess,
the chessboard, its pieces, its rules, and the peculiar role that time
plays in the process of unfolding the game itself, across disciplinary
boundaries. The method informing its design requires applying metaphor
theory from the philosophy of science, with reference to the work of
Gilles Deleuze on the role of forging contingent alliances across the
disciplines of science, philosophy and the arts in epistemological
investigations. The motive for this project is to explore the
interdisciplinary dimensions of metaphor: particularly, it models the
unstable nature of Boyd’s Theory Constitutive Metaphor (TCM) as a
grounds for Deleuzian épistémocritique by mapping the tropical drift of
chess to make visible its cultural work.
This approach to the study of metaphor in science may add a level of
rigor to concerns over the value of investigations into scientific
knowledge and practices by those outside the sciences proper, by forcing
scientists to recognize the need to take the role of metaphor much more
seriously. Recent debates over the cultural studies of science have
brought to the foreground the problem of metaphor in scientific
discourse. This problem manifests itself in particular through a series
of recent challenges to the ways in which cultural theorists attempt to
construct correspondences between the laws governing physics and human
cognition and laws governing the behavior of human beings and their
institutions. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Alan Sokal and Alan Bricmont
and others disparaging such interdisciplinary inquiry have scorned such
constructions. In an e-mail message to me last February, the
mathematician Norman Levitt states that he sees no middle ground between
the construction of is and is not in representing, for example, the
relationship between the behavior of atoms and the behavior of thoughts.
He takes exception to such theorizing. He does so even though such a
correspondence has been suggested by both Jacques Derrida, the
philosopher and literary theorist, in an essay entitled "White
Mythology," and by Henri Poincaré, the last great renaissance
mathematician of the modern era, in an essay on scientific creativity
entitled "Mathematical Discovery." We will return to this essay a bit
later.
In her recent (September, 1998) essay in Physics Today, Mara Beller
demonstrates convincingly the pervasiveness of the construction of such
correspondences between physical and cultural processes by such eminent
physicists as Max Born, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli,
John Wheeler and others. She observes:
Like the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, whom Steven Weinberg
attacked in his 1996 New York Review of Books article on Sokal’s hoax,
Bohr was notorious for the obscurity of his writing. Yet physicists
relate to Derrida’s and Bohr’s obscurities in fundamentally different
ways: to Derrida’s with contempt, to Bohr’s with awe.
The circumstances generating this debate perhaps have more to do with
academic politics between disciplines in a period of scarce resources
for scholarly research, but there is something more important going on
here. A fundamental question needs to be asked about the role of
metaphor (and tropes generally speaking) in the formation of
epistemology at the heart of scientific practices.
Questions about the poetics of culture raised by Giambattista Vico and
Friedrich Nietzsche as well as by Jacques Derrida and Hayden White, have
become linked methodologically to the work on metaphor within the field
of the philosophy of science. The issue of metaphor in science isn’t
simply subsumed by the question of competing concepts of reality: as
objectively there; as simply the construction of a model registering a
scientist’s observations. Metaphor becomes the ground upon which these
competing concepts of reality struggle.
Since my current book project Fables of Self-Organization: The Cultural
Work of Complexity in the Avant-Garde confronts this problem directly, I
thought it might be useful to perform what in the field of science is
called a "thought experiment" which would model how certain kinds of
tropes become implicated in certain scientific epistemologies and not
others. I wondered whether it might be possible to model how certain
kinds of tropes drift across disciplinary boundaries and perform certain
kinds of cultural work. I wondered whether it might be possible to make
visible the ways in which metaphors might become symptoms for basic
questions concerning the nature of reality through the lenses of a range
of disciplines.
Hypertext environments seem ideal for these kind of "thought
experiments." Furthermore, there might be a certain kind of "irony" that
becomes possible, when, as I have written about elsewhere, the very
kinds of tropical speculations over the nature of hypertextual space and
time have led, in turn, to similar kinds of debates over the role of
metaphor. So, keeping in mind the metaphor of the mobius strip, what I
would like to do is to foreground the additional problem of representing
structures and processes of thought in hypertext using tropes derived
from the sciences, by modeling hypertextually the problematic role of
metaphor in interdisciplinary science studies.
Martin E. Rosenberg, mrosenbe@kettering.edu Assistant Professor of Communication
Kettering University