on Cyril Smith’s Structural Hierarchy in Science, Art, and History
the structures underlying art and science
Cyril Smith was a celebrated metallurgist who wrote extensively in his later years on philosophy and history of science, as it relates to art, history and culture. This essay opens the collection *On Aesthetics in Science*, a charming find from the MIT press from 1978. So he’s writing during a time that’s still coming to terms with late modernism but before the full-blown “culture wars” between art and science took hold.
Smith skillfully weaves in his extensive background in the chemical structure and dynamics of metal, on microscopic scales, into a language of visual metaphors for structure, dynamics, and systems and how they relate to the art and science both. He uses these metaphors to elaborate how new artistic paradigms evolve as structural shifts from independent “nuclei”, different from the broad “crystal lattice” of conventional style. Smith evokes the crystal lattice structure of metals, and how they contain pockets of difference that can either die out, or *communicate* with other similar pockets of difference (corresponding to nuclei of innovation) to spark more persistent shifts in style. These innovations are subsumed until they become conventional — and the cycle starts again. He relates the process to the problem of categorizing *phase* in materials: a constant tension between singular substructures and overarching structure that arises from “neighboring weak interactions” in artistic and metallic spheres.
Smith also breaks down the aesthetic experience into one of recognizing structure at different resolutions: proceeding from perception of formal structures and elements to impressions derived by the “accumulation of nuances”, instead of a singular, clear statement in art, all the way to a consideration of cultural and contingent contextual structures that frame any aesthetic experience at all.
All this parallels structuralist formulations of similar questions, and similar arguments worked through by systems thinkers — but thankfully, Smith presents this alternative formulation based on his own deep knowledge of the underlying structure of physical materials. He presents his case for the bridges between art and science without resorting to popular narratives of the “elegance, beauty, simplicity” of scientific formulae and theories, or elevations of the idea of symmetry as some unifying principle.
He introduces the notion of “funicity”, named after one of the characters in Borges’s stories who remembered everything. For Smith, “funicity” describes the state-memory of systems. To the extent that the current structures encode historical changes, and necessarily frame the development of the future, a system maintains some collective structural memory, or inertia — its *funicity*.
Smith’s literally materialist lens for his abstract structural observations is a refreshing and challenging take on a problem that still remains open, and keeps it from reduction to a problem of correspondences of visual evidence.
lingering questions:
+ Smith doesn’t address how the observer factors into all of this. and, though he refers to structuralist and systems narratives at the end of the bibliography, doesn’t quite put his work into their context.
+ what are the grounds for leaning on metaphors as an epistemological lens? and, is it relevant at all that smith’s material lens (grounded in literally what makes up material at all) provides the abstracted epistemological vocabulary for understanding macro-structures of discourses? It’s certainly an interesting path for an abstraction to take.
