The String in Art and Science: Rediscovering the Material Mind

Abstract

String has played a formidable, though largely unacknowledged role in twentieth-century art and science. Its rise as a material technology was made possible by the fact that string embraces a material way of thinking, one that is uniquely capable of binding together what is invisible with what is phenomenal to experience. String today thus signals the resurgence of a chemical revolution, which, in parallel to a modernity fashioned by a mechanical revolution, has created a material world that is capable of provoking attachments in ways once attributed to the mind. We are now readily inclined to think in terms of relations of affinity that pertain between materials; yet this material thinking has remained largely confined to the creative centers of art and science where it continues to provoke innovations at a material level. This article argues that social and historical disciplines and institutions that serve the transmission of much of socially efficacious knowledge have remained ignorant of this development of a new technological materiality, by continuing to reduce the material to a mechanical aide for ideas that alone are believed capable of drawing things together.