I take it, however, that the general idea is to go beyond Bertrand Russell's claim that modern scientific developments required changes in how we imagine the world (made in his 1925 book The ABC of Relativity) to suggest that the anamorphic or allegorical mode of lyric poetry was already, long before 1925, modeling how matter is understood to be (or understood and so) constituted. On the other hand, Tiffany's "lyric substance"-"the ephemeral nature of the lyric apparatus," a body or picture that "has no thematic identity"-is less easily grasped (15, 277). Thus the inaccessible and invisible material realit y of physics (and of the philosophy of materialism) turns out to be poetic, not simply by virtue of a series of shared icons or a common reliance on analogy but, Tiffany ultimately suggests, intrinsically.įor this argument alone, Toy Medium should be required reading for anyone pursuing cultural studies or material culture, fields that Tiffany persuasively suggests have ignored how the category of the material is, and has long been, a highly problematic one. And the material substances thus modeled-from Epicurus's atoms to contemporary subatomic reality-have most often been invisible, only imagined through material images. That is, tropes, pictures (or representations), and models (or simulations) have traditionally served to explain corporeality in science. Through the uncovering of such associations, we get a history and a critique of the science, philosophy, and iconography of materialism, going back to the ancient Greeks and concluding with a discussion of contemporary science.Īs Tiffany examines the iconography of materialism, he reminds us of an "open secret," namely that materialism itself has never been inherently realistic (268, 160). Linked with both song or air and divination, like poetry, such toys were understood as pneumatica, a special application of corpuscular physics. For example, the unintuitive yet persistent (if historically shifting) confluence of images of automatons with those of the weather-or meteors, which is to say any atmospheric phenomenon-is nicely rooted in the origins of mechanical toys. On these scores, the book succeeds by taking often surprising routes to its end, especially as it "historicize and aestheticise science" (5). to show how poetry and atomic physics often converge, especially in the context of modernism, in their representations of material substance and the nature of corporeality" (287). lyric dimension of scientific and philosophical theories of matter. Tiffany's self-proclaimed project is to present "evidence from diverse historical periods demonstrating a problematic. At the same time, however, the vocabularies of the historian of science and the literary theorist ironically recapitulate the divide between the conception of science as "legitimizing" and the nebulous image of lyric poetry that Toy Medium itself seeks to overcome. These responses nicely gesture toward the sometimes mixed but always compelling nature of this erudite and original study. On the back cover of Daniel Tiffany's Toy Medium, the literary critic Marjorie Perloff applauds how the book shows that lyric substance constitutes a world "whose inaccessibility is legitimized by the principles of scientific materialism," while the historian of science Peter Galison praises the book as a "lyrical inquiry" exploring "poetically" the relations between the arts and sciences. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric. Book Review Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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