Category: Politics of Aesthetics

In his preface an introduction of Six stories from the End of Representation, James Elkins writes about how he first started thinking about a relation between six deferent fields, painting, photography, and four branches of physics and the things that belong together in those fields and at the same time their irreducible differences because the purpose of the book is to create a common representation of both Science and Humanities at the same time, or a common way of thinking for scientists and humanists. Elkins starts by focusing on the differences between sciences and humanities. The main misunderstanding of the “two cultures” is in the writing mode, a scientific text may include mathematical equations and problems to solve that may lead to a different way of reading. However, in a humanities, the texts are written in a way that the readers don’t interrupt their lecture because the ideas are constantly developing and sometimes repetitive and taking further interpretations. Elkins also suggested a new way of learning: Scientists have to be more interested in humanities and vise versa. However, none of the two disciplines can illuminate others alone, they have to be compatible to express a true meaning that has never been experienced till now. There are three different configurations on how art and science can work together (sometimes by the intervention of philosophy) where the scientific discipline explains the nonscientific one. Elkins suggests to avoid making one discipline dependent on others by adjusting cause-effect relations between disciplines. By that, he means creating a parallel connection where each discipline gives equal amount of understanding and consciousness by including, first, texts in which art explains science, second, texts in which science explains art , texts in which philosophy (the most common third discipline used for aesthetic) is called upon to provide the explanation of both science and art, and finally texts in which science and art explain one another in an evanescent or inconsistent fashion, with ambiguous implications.

Representationalism which is in my point of view a word that describes every possible phenomena that occurred. From example religions, countries and languages are representations. So I think that for things to change between the two cultures, a new representation which includes non-physical must occur. Until now science has problems dealing with attempts to “explain” phenomena in terms of the non-physical which will demand a new way of dealing with science and nature that can be easy to relate to art because it consist of using imagination more that equations and mathematical problems (that are useful but only in a really down to earth way). But for the artistic side to get along, representation art should focus on creating meaning and relations for each race, religions, culture, language and art so that everything finds its own value.