In 1969 Werner Heisenberg presented a paper at a symposium initiated by the Karajan Foundation in Salzburg. The theme of this symposium was the ‘significance of modern scientific knowledge—in medicine, physiology, and physics—for art, music, pedagogy and aesthetic practice.’ Heisenberg’s paper was titled “The Tendency to Abstraction in Modern Art and Science.”1. Heisenberg dissembled, preferring to avoid an approach from a technical point of view, in favour of a consideration of principle, or of a “philosophy of culture”, in order to ask whether certain tendencies in modern art, at times strange or incomprehensible, might have some parallel in the form of similar phenomena in modern science. Heisenberg was not concerned with specific forms or techniques of contemporary aesthetic or scientific practice, but with what he described as their “overall shape”. It is an interesting position, not because it afforded Heisenberg a necessarily new or privileged insight, but because unlike most discussions of the relations between art and science it did not proceed in a hegemonic manner wherein one discipline annexes and establishes sovereignty over another. In Heisenberg’s query scientific procedures did not circumscribe or annex art (as mere illustration, exemplar or ornament) and aesthetic practices did not circumscribe and annex scientific data (as argument, justification, evidence or authority). Neither was he overly concerned with an equanimity or symmetry in the relationships of these various disciplines; he was interested in certain affinities, the possibility of common grounds, in science and art as they are practised.
. . .the step towards greater generality is always itself a step into abstraction—or more precisely, into the next highest level of abstraction; for the most general unites the wealth of diverse individual things or processes under a unitary point of view, which means at the same time that it disregards other features considered to be unimportant. In other words, it abstracts from them.2
It is in this context that I will situate my remarks on certain affinities and differences between scientific and aesthetic practices, by considering the possibility of their common ground in terms of abstraction, technics, and capture, (i.e., what it is that is purported to be captured, secured or preserved, in order to be represented).
Remarks on Certain Affinities and Differences Between Aesthetic and Scientific Practices
