Reassembling Visionary Physics : Donald Ault, Bruno Latour, and William Blake’s Mathematical Scenographies

Abstract

Donald Ault’s work on William Blake constructs what Bruno Latour calls a scenography of a fact: an aesthetics that shifts “attention from the stage to the whole machinery of a theater.” Instead of the purified, sterile aesthetics typified by images of scientists engaged in total absorption on their object of analysis, Blake presents mathematical scenographies as visionary experiences continuously unfolding the aesthetics of fragile facts as matters of concern. Starting with his 1968 book Visionary Physics and continuing through his early unpublished work using complex variables to map the ontological transformations depicted in The Book of Urizen , this article suggests that Ault’s scholarship can be understood as a series of visionary experiments on the aesthetics and ontology of scientific facts. Ault envisions that every act of preservation in Blake’s work is also an act of transformation and becoming. As such, he anticipates later developments in Latourian lab sociology, actor-network theory (ANT), and media archaeology. Along with Latour’s pamphlet What is the Style of Matters of Concern? and its meditation on Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of the bifurcation of nature, Ault’s mathematical scenographies provide an alternative to the neo-realist defenses of science that would reduce all experiments to acts of objectivity-making.