Global Blake: In Conversation with Roger Whitson. Reassembling Visionary Physics: Donald Ault, Bruno Latour, and William Blake’s Mathematical Sceneographies
Starting with his 1968 book Visionary Physics and continuing through his unpublished work using complex variables to map the ontological transformations depicted in The Book of Urizen, Donald Ault’s research on William Blake can be understood as so many visionary experiments on the aesthetics and ontology of scientific facts. By aesthetics, I mean not only the representation of science in art and photography, but also what the philosopher Bruno Latour calls a fact’s sceneography: a presentation or arrangement of facts that shifts “attention from the stage [of science] to the whole machinery of a theater.”
Ault explained Blakean concepts and the narrative transformations in Blake’s work with strange engineering diagrams that exploited the tensions between word and image to enable a shift from sterile facts to sceneographic theaters. Instead of assuming that facts speak for themselves in scientific experiments, Ault conceives of facts as continuously unfolding, fragile, visionary experiences that depend upon an infrastructure of humans and non-humans to exist. As such, Ault’s Blake anticipates later developments in Latourian lab sociology, actor-network theory (ANT), and media archaeology. Along with Latour’s Spinoza lecture What is the Style of Matters of Concern? and its meditation on Alfred North Whitehead’s understanding of the bifurcation of nature, I show that Donald Ault’s work on Blakean physics and mathematics provide an alternative to neo-realist defenses of science that ultimately takes facts for granted.
Roger Whitson
Roger Whitson is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University. His work explores media time and history in the context of British Romanticism, steampunk, and science fiction. He has an article forthcoming on Ault and Latour in Essays in Romanticism as well as a book chapter forthcoming on William Blake and media archaeologies.