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Article Excerpt
A Membrane ingirting the whole cauity of the lower belly.
--Crooke, Body of Man (1615), 77 The boulke, called in latyn thorax, whiche conteyneth the brest, the sides, the stomake, and entrayles.
-Elyot, Castel of Helth (1541), 89
Introduction
Recent work in string theory cosmology has seen the emergence of what is called the "braneworld scenario."1 String theory itself, generally speaking, attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity into one coherent formalism by positing the string as the fundamental constituent of the universe. Theorist John Schwarz defines the string as an ultramicroscopic vibrating "one dimensional extended object." The braneworld scenario is predicated on a modification of string theory in which a new fundamental object is introduced, the "brane" (from membrane), which theorists define qualitatively as a two or more dimensional extended vibrating object with special properties. While strings are incredibly small, on the order of the Planck scale, or 10-33 centimeters, in a braneworld scenario, branes are vast, on the scale of the entire universe. (2) A multitude of braneworlds, each with its own formally defined variation on fundamental physical laws, is envisioned to exist within an encompassing ten or eleven dimensional meta-verse, what theorists call "the bulk."
This paper will examine the ways in which string theorists construct what I call a "scientific imaginary" as manifest in two technical articles concerned with branes and the braneworld scenario: Joseph Polchinski's "Dirichlet-Branes and Ramond-Ramond Charges" and "Brane World" by Zurab Kakushadze and S.-H. Henry Tye. Such an examination will address issues of corporeality, animality, visuality, tactility, permeability, and boundaries as they pertain to the core image of the brane within these articles. Rather than an exhaustive survey of brane imagery, I offer an analysis of the particular imaginaries that these string theorists employ within technical discourse. It is worth bearing in mind that such discourse is, by design, intended for a specific, exclusive audience and as such, assumes a certain specialized training in the discipline, as well as familiarity with current debates on the topic. To the uninitiated, such a highly specialized discourse can appear impenetrably opaque. I will make every effort to avoid overexposing readers to technical jargon that runs tangential to the thrust of my argument. Nevertheless, a certain amount of exposure would seem inevitable. While I will attempt to provide clear definitions of the pertinent technical terminology, what I am most concerned with is the overlap between these terms' ostensibly precise technical meanings and the inferential structure of the images from which the terms originate. I will argue that such images bear with them a set of more familiar and earth-bound associations that are both necessary and productive. The cumulative effect within each of these technical articles, then, is the evocation and employment of a scientific imaginary.
The Scientific Imaginary
Since some readers may be unfamiliar with the notion of a scientific imaginary, it merits a careful explanation. I am adapting the expression from Michele Le Doeuff's The Philosophical Imaginary. In that work, Le Doeuff describes a fundamental dichotomy in philosophical discourse, where the formalist "concept" is privileged at the expense of the rhetorical "image." She argues that philosophical discourse traditionally views the image as superfluous and attributes it to one of two sources, to "infantile or primitive thought" or to "adaptation" for "didactic" purposes:
Let us stress once more that imagery and knowledge form [...] a common system. Between these two terms there is a play of feedbacks which maintains the particular regime of the discursive formation. Philosophical texts offer images through which subjectivity can be structured and given a marking which is that of the corporate body. (5)
By philosophy's own accounting, images are didactic, primitive, or fanciful. They are associated with subjectivity, affect, and the "corporate body." The concept, on the other hand, possesses an epistemologically "pure" truth-value; it is objective, and thus free of affect. Philosophical discourse conscripts the image to ground--surreptitiously, Le Doeuff suggests--its claims of objectivity to the subjective body through structured affect. By situating image adjacent to concept, philosophical discourse betrays a dynamic tension between the two, where image problematizes concept while ostensibly adumbrating it for didactic or ludic purposes. Yet Le Doeuff sees the accumulation of imagery within a philosophical text as forming a whole, with its own internal structure, while also relating to the conceptual content of the text through juxtaposition:
Images generally need to be decoded before one can relate their meaning to the thought made explicit in the text, in order afterwards to reintroduce into the discourse the question which the image both resolves and helps to evade. But this reinsertion allows the hypothesis of a converse: if the images of philosophical texts are so functional, so organic in their very dysfunctionality, might we not guess that they are made to measure, that there is not just an imaginary in philosophy but a properly philosophical imaginary. (4, emphasis in the original)
It is worth noting that Le Doeuff is specifically critiquing an Enlightenment philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, that tradition's fastidious sorting of concept from image is very much in keeping with the kind of purification that scientific realism, as one of its contemporary incarnations, insists upon. Scientific realism is relevant to this study of braneworld scenarios in that string theorists, almost unanimously, subscribe to its fundamental assumptions. 3 It is a rather small leap to speak of a scientific imaginary, in the realist tradition, in a manner consistent with Le Doeuff's critique of Enlightenment philosophy. One may then also identify a scientific tradition by the continuity of its imaginary from text to text, generation to generation. In effect, a scientific tradition necessarily includes a repository of stock imagery that provides a scaffolding for structuring both affect and ideological possibility.
The two technical articles that concern us, "Dirichlet-Branes and Ramond-Ramond Charges" and "Brane World," consist of essentially two textual components: mathematical argument and a surrounding exposition. Scientific realism would only acknowledge the mathematical argument as possessing truth-value, as actual scientific practice. Yet this, in turn, prompts the question of how to interpret the rest of an article's content: the exposition and its concomitant imagery--that which surrounds scientific practice. In spite of its supposed subordinate status, there is a close textual proximity between image and concept. Exposition would seem to frame, link, and sustain mathematical praxis. Yet, by a scientific realist's own definition, that exposition lacks a positive truth-value. Nevertheless, as soon as theorists "expose" the formalism, they invoke an imaginary. The gap between concept and image, then, is the space on the page between a calculation and its surrounding explication.
In keeping with Le Doeuff, I will define an imaginary as a complex of images. This complex is structured such that the internal relationships between the images exhibit an intricacy that both allows for a freedom of signification among the images, while also imposing constraints on that freedom. An imaginary is a space of possibility, plausibility, and impossibility. Its structure implies a logic of organization whereby some images are central, others peripheral, and their placement and patterns of interaction display regularities. Within an imaginary, the images that constitute it function as what Gaston Bachelard calls, playing off the word's etymology, an "idealized double" (176). Images point to and double for mathematical formalisms, the conceptual content of a technical article. As Bachelard puts it, "there is more to mathematics than formal structures, and [...] every pure idea is accompanied by an imagined application" (4). Yet an imaginary also evokes a distinct and autonomous materiality--the materiality of its constituting images' connotations with respect to imagined human-scale experience. This is yet another doubling, what Bachelard calls doing "duty for reality" (4). An imaginary incorporates images based on what a cultural consensus considers real objects and events, while also allowing for the recombination of those images into novel configurations along radically heterogeneous planes. Nonetheless, the images that constitute an imaginary originate in a known world, that is, an intertext of yet more imaginaries--a cascade or tangle of images whose relative truth-values are under perpetual negotiation.
An imaginary constitutes an intermediary between a world "out there" and human agency, the capacity to intervene in that world. It mediates interventions into a causal structure that exists independently of human desire or cognition. If mathematics is a kind of abstracted tool for conducting interventions into the causal structure of an objective world, then a corresponding imaginary functions as an ergonomics. A good tool must not only fit the material one is working with; it must also fit the hand well. Compressions and expansions to human scales through an imaginary allow it to have a certain comprehensibility. The stability of an imaginary's comprehensibility is predicated on the familiarity of the images that constitute it. Yet, as a complex, images with radically disparate qualities may well be juxtaposed. In effect, the structural logic of an imaginary--its composition and internal relationships--is not necessarily bound by the...
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