| Blog entry: Paper presentation at the MLA Convention 2008 |
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| Written by Sean Miller | |
| Friday, 09 May 2008 | |
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I’m happy to announce that I’ll be presenting a paper this coming December 2008 at the annual MLA Convention. It’s part of a panel in the Literature & Science Division organized by Professor Henry Turner of Rutgers University. Here’s the topic of the panel: Beyond Representation: New Work in Literature and Science To what degree is the notion of "representation" inadequate to describe problems of form, interpretation, information, communication, system, etc. encountered in science studies? At a moment when much literary criticism remains stuck in an implicitly linguistic or textualist paradigm and when emergent fields such as Visual Studies, Performance Studies, or New Media are all, in different ways, evolving in response to the limitations of traditional notions of representation, can we find in scientific practice resources for thinking "beyond representation"? What do we really do when we "close read" and what is the analogue or the equivalent operation in a laboratory, where information-rich materials are "handled," translated, or given form according to a variety of techniques, where the relationship between evidence and argument is often very open-ended and provisional, where the problem of "meaning" or of "artifice" and even "fiction" arises in provocative ways? And here’s an abstract of my paper: Hybrids at hand: the problem of representing the heterotic superstring Most physicists would agree that the heterotic superstring, which four theorists working at Princeton University developed in 1985, is the most “realistic” of the various versions of superstring theory. The heterotic superstring is realistic in that it constitutes a mathematically consistent model that generates to close approximation the empirically validated physics of the Standard Model. An objectivist phenomenology would define representation as the correspondence of a complex of abstract symbols to things in the world, where meaning arises from the rigor of that correspondence. In string theory, then, the heterotic superstring model becomes a “mirror of nature” where mathematical concepts are internal representations of an external reality. Objectivism contends that inasmuch as mathematical concepts accurately reflect a transcendent, monologic rationality, they unambiguously speak for themselves—as the nature of the physical world. But within string theory technical discourse there is a close textual proximity between exposition and mathematics. Exposition necessarily presents an imaginary—a complex of images that doubles for mathematical argument. Accordingly, we must ask: when theorists work to “expose” mathematical argument, however internally consistent and empirically valid, through imagery, to what extent does the radical heterogeneity of such imagery complicate attempts to venture a coherent “physical interpretation” of phenomena such as the superstring? This paper will explore the ways in which an objectivist notion of representation, ostensibly abstract and disembodied, is inadequate to substantiate a phenomenology of the heterotic superstring. Such an investigation has interesting implications for the role of imaginaries within scientific discourse in general. |
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