“When an apple fell on his head, Isaac Newton was inspired to describe his three laws of motion. These became the foundation of our ideas about physics. Being essentially objective, Newton ignored what it feels like to be the apple.”
This is the introduction to Fall After Newton, a video describing Steve Paxton’s modern dance technique contact improvisation which was developed at Oberlin College during the 1970s. This week in my contemporary dance class, we explored the basics of this technique, reacting to partners movements and directions while maintaining agency of our own movements all the while being in weight-sharing contact with some part of their body. Gravity, which is a huge aspect of movement and dance in general, is particularly heavy and active in this technique. The experts and pioneers of contact improv dance their duets in daring and risky ways, lifting one another and falling to the ground only to roll through the bruises and continue the dance. As Paxton explains in the video, “In the play of moving and being moved, specific movements are unpredictable, but they occur within a knowable field of gravity, centrifugal force, support, and dependency.” While watching this video during class, I found myself connecting this dance technique and Paxton’s descriptions to topics of environmental theory.
This week in Environmental Theory, our topic was the philosophy and social construction (or not!) of science, as debated in The Science Wars of the 1990s. We waded through papers such as E.O. Wilson’s keynote address “How to Unify Knowledge” that defends science as the foundation of all things, including aesthetics, color, and taboo. His views were countered by papers such as David Livingstone’s “Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge” which argues that the creation and acceptance of scientific knowledge is related to where, when, and by whom the science is the conducted and proposed. These two viewpoints are samples in a wide breadth of arguments for and against the objectivity assumed in scientific inquiry.
Paxton’s reference to Isaac Newton similarly complicates the perceptions of scientific objectivity by placing dancers in the position of a different actor in the classic gravity-discovery narrative: the apple. This inversion of apple and scientist poses the same questions of sensory dependency, positionality (which could be extrapolated to geography from the position a body takes in space in dance), and power structures of agency that the science wars debate. While dance is the interaction of a body with space, contact improvisation is the interactions of two bodies together in space exploring movements with a range of balance, imbalance, agency, flow, communication, and adaption. While a scientists would argue that whether one is Newton or the apple, gravity remains constant. However, Paxton’s technique asks us to consider how the perception and sensation of gravity might change depending of how a body in space is positioned in relation to the floor, their partner, and the space around it.
The arts and humanities were often posed in opposition to science in the discourse of the science wars, with humanities and social science scholars arguing for constructivism against natural scientists. Literary critic and former chemist Katherine Hayles, attempts to bridge the gap between objectivists and constructivists. She has papers in both William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature and Michael Soule and Gary Lease’s Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, two collections which fundamentally disagree with one other. In her paper for Reinventing Nature, “Searching for Common Ground,” Hayles attempts to carve out a space between constructivism and anti-constructivism where hard objective scientific truth is complicated by interactivity and positionality but meaning does not necessarily become lost in the void of social construction and relativism.
Her term for this intellectual space is “constrained constructivism,” the concept that we can only feel reality “through isomorphic constraints operating upon competing local representations” (Hayles 1995). Constrained constructivism acknowledges that knowledge is acquired through human senses and is communicated via representation (as language, numbers, graphics, or as a concept that is a inevitably an interpretation and subsequently a representation of an observation). The constraints, on the other hand, address the consistency of experience and interaction that is evaluated by science. Here, Hayles attempts to curb the existential crisis of constructivism by saying that we don’t need to make hard-truth claims about reality to be able to say that gravity and electrons act consistently from the perspectives of human scientists who study them in human contexts. Staunch objectivists and constructivists on either side might reject her attempted marriage of the two because of concessions from both camps (and certainly more concessions from the objectivity camp), but I tend to find her argument convincing. As a tentative constructivist myself, I see constrained constructivism moving past the yes/no debate into a territory that has the ability to move forward. While constructivists advocate for thoughtful thought to acknowledge the nuances and inner structures of assumptions and objectivists advocate for instrumental action, constrained constructivism permits thoughtful action with both acknowledgement and instrumentalism.
Hayles’ constrained constructivism shares an aesthetic of bounded chaos with Praxton’s contact improv. While contact improv occurs under the conditions of “gravity, centrifugal force, support, and dependency,” constrained constructism operates under consistency. Certainly, just as gravity as a “knowable field” is controversial, the concept of consistency could arguably ignore certain perspectives. While Hayles and Paxton perceive gravity from vastly different academic and artistic lenses, they each manipulate the concept of gravity in language and movement to illuminate perspectives that science doesn’t necessarily touch or acknowledge. However, both these manipulations and complications of science still hold scientific “truths” to be constant, consistent, and relatively knowable for the work of movement, artistic and intellectual, to be done. These constants keep dancers and scientists safe physically and existentially. In this way, the science of gravity creates a reality for those of us who move in this world just as much as gravity describes the properties of it. This leads me to one possible upshot of constructivism: just because something is socially or historically constructed does not mean that it doesn’t have cause and effect in the world. There no reason not to engage with these causes and effects when searching for solutions or making art.