IV. Science Has Peers. Where Are Poetry’s?
Murielle Mobengo: You mentioned scientists having ego trips, and that caught my attention. Because I think one of the things that determines whether scientific, artistic, or poetic creativity is of value to anyone is the relationship to the self.
Scientists obviously have egos — God knows poets and artists do too — but science seems to have developed ways of confining them. Not eliminating them, but preventing the individual ego from becoming the final authority.
You’ve created structures that allow the discovery to take over.
I don’t think poets and artists are there yet.
Loïc Yengo: I think science has ways of bringing you back to what you’re actually trying to do.
For me, science is essentially an exercise in observing and describing the world. You observe something, you build expectations from your observations, and then you test them.
If what you observe doesn’t match what you expected, that’s interesting. You have to understand why.
But you’re not doing this entirely alone. Someone else should be able to observe what you’ve observed.
Murielle: So there’s a protocol.
That’s what I’m trying to get at. David’s question reminds us that scientific discoveries are true until they’re challenged or replaced. But there is still a protocol through which they enter knowledge.
What’s the protocol for poetry and art?
Loïc: From what has emerged in our conversation, I think one element is training.
And training can take different forms. Peer culture is one of them.
Science has a peer culture partly because we’re trying to produce forms of knowledge that are falsifiable, so we have standards and criteria. But even if you put those criteria aside, there is something else: we’re in this together.
I think that’s a very powerful cultural drive.
We recognize that what we’re trying to understand is a big challenge. If, as you said earlier, we’re trying to describe the pot rather than simply our individual experience within the pot, then there’s value in working together toward that.
There’s a sense that this is bigger than us.
Murielle: And that’s precisely what I find missing in poetry.
Poets have peers, obviously. They know other poets. They read one another, publish together, sometimes criticize one another. But I’m not sure that we have the equivalent of that deeper scientific conviction: we are collectively trying to understand something.
What is the thing that poets are trying to discover together?
Loïc: And science also sustains a belief — perhaps even an illusion — that there will always be something else to discover.
That matters culturally. Science keeps moving because scientists have found a way of communicating this belief that knowledge isn’t finished.
Murielle: And the discoveries reinforce the belief. There are breakthroughs.
Which raises a difficult question for poetry, philosophy and art: what are our breakthroughs?
How do we recognize them? How do they enter a collective body of knowledge? How does the next generation build upon them?
Because if each artist essentially begins again from themselves, you don’t have the same cumulative structure.
Loïc: Which brings us back to training.
What is the ethos in which poets are trained? What do they inherit? What do they expect of one another?
Maybe the scientific model can’t simply be transferred to poetry — the objects are different, the criteria are different — but the culture of working toward something larger than yourself may be transferable.
Murielle: That’s really the question.
Not how to turn poets into scientists, but what can we learn from the culture that science has built around knowledge?
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