ART FORM OF THE ARIGIDITY OF THE WORLD
Einstein’s relativity abolished the belief in the existence of rigid macroscopic objects. Matter, space and time deform. In resonance with the contemporary scientific vision, both quantum and relativistic, Richard Texier’s elastogenesis orchestrates the circulation of fluid laboratory concepts and artistic creation, as a theoretical and practical tool to decompartmentalise the gaze. Like the principle of arigidity (non-rigidity), elastogenesis defends indiscipline. Science, incidentally, has identified the only anti-elastogenic object, the black hole, which nothing can deform.
SCIENTIFIC QUIVER
RichardTexier introduces his concept of elastogenesis as “an elasticity of the imagination, [...] a plasturgy of dreams.” According to his definition, (1) it is “an unctuous and intuitive force, a major component of the universe, on the same level as the notions of mass and energy.” This literary and artistic tool praises slackness and the hybridisation of forms, the fluid, deformable and elastic forms that surround us, which seek to insinuate themselves between the solid fragments of the world, to bypass them. “Slackness is stronger than hardness,” he asserts, by way of a principle. “Water is stronger than rock [...]. Wind is stronger than stone [...].” Science cannot keep silent about such a principle, which may have escaped it and which it certainly does not want to confuse with erosion or dissolution, as these two examples might suggest. It instantly quivers when it hears the words “force,” “matter” or “energy.”These are both common words and ones that science has appropriated with precise and often abstract definitions. This duality is a source of interference, semantic shifts and cosmo-poetic games.
Scientific research regularly confronts us with new realities, particularly in the microscopic and cosmological worlds which are populated by phenomena that challenge our common sense, are stranger than fiction, and can frighten or repel us as long as they remain untamed. It stimulates the fluidity of concepts, distorting them to fit the rough edges of nature. It regularly challenges our common sense and asks us not to be afraid, and above all, not to be rigid. The cosmologist in me is excited by the revelation of this “major component of the universe.” The historian of science will be surprised to learn that “Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson and Philip Glass are elastogenic, as were Pasteur, Einstein and Stephen Hawkins,” but not Galileo and Newton, an anomaly that calls for an explanation.The concept clearly requires scientific investigation.
The principle of the arigidity of the world (2) asserts that no material body or theoretical concept can be rigid or immutable.This principle is emerging in various branches of science, from materials to biology, by way of metrology, relativity and cosmology. It plays a key role in decompartmentalising disciplines and achieving a multi-situated view of the world. It encounters curiosity, thus becoming one of the threads of what I call indiscipline, (3) an attitude which proposes to embrace the world by refusing disciplinary barriers, to consider the multi-layered theories of nature as a whole, to plunge into the interstices between their boundaries to reveal the small defects of continuity. It invites us to go beyond the dichotomy between the arts and the sciences, to slip uninhibitedly between measurable objects, into the narrow, obscure and exciting margins between disciplines, because that is where the visions of tomorrow’s worlds slumber. It offers a way to weave new links with nature, (4) to make it cosmic again. (5) Thus, elastogenesis, arigidity and indiscipline are intertwined threads that oscillate between science and art on a sea of fluctuating concepts.
I will limit myself here to summarising the dimension related to physics, to show how objects which are considered to be rigid and non-deformable are in fact slack and elastic. This description will echo Richard Texier’s sources of inspiration and his theory of elastogenesis.
MATERIALS AND MEASUREMENT
Let’s start with materials. We encounter slackness when we sit in an armchair or sample the creaminess of a sponge cake. But not all slack materials are identical. We distinguish between fluids, which take on the shape of their container, like liquids and gas. The less contortionist solids appear to be hard; they cannot be passed through and have their own shape. Some are elastic (temporarily deforming when subjected to an external force), deformable (if they do not regain their shape) or breakable. A body is said to be rigid if it does not change its shape. According to the Larousse, it “resists torsion and shearing, [...] does not bend.” However, observation teaches us that all bodies can be deformed. Gases dilute, very quickly; liquids flow, quickly; honey, more viscous, flows more slowly; the glass of church windows flows religiously under its own weight over the course of hundreds of years; a pebble flows over geological time; mountains deform. Time makes everything fluid: absolute rigidity does not exist. The physics of materials describes these deformations, such as expansion under the effects of temperature or pressure. These are problematic for mechanical and technological constructions. One can only speak of a rigid body according to a time scale, having defined and specified a measurement. According to elastogenesis, “slackness is stronger than hardness”; in fact, hardness does not exist, only some slack materials are a little less elastic than others! Some slack materials freeze for long enough to give us the illusion of rigidity.
This has far-reaching consequences for measurement, because how is science, trading or building possible without a ruler that can be guaranteed to measure one metre at all times and in all places? How can
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Jean-Philippe Uzan. Fabrique de l’univers. 2022. Matière en cours d’organisation, étape de travail de recherche sur tableau noir matter being organised, research stage on blackboard. (Ph. J.-Ph. Uzan). Cette page, de haut en bas this page from top: Élastogénèse. 2018. 54 x 70 x 5 cm. Élastogénèse. 2018. 37 x 42 x 5 cm. Techniques mixtes et isolant en porcelaine organique mixed media and organic porcelain insulation
we live in a world where everything is slack and deformable? Although no material body is infinitely rigid, we know how to build rigid objects with a very high degree of precision. This was at the heart of the creation of the International System of Units, a pragmatic system that has had to adapt to the multiple fluidities that Nature imposes on us. Its long history (6) began on May 8th, 1790, when the principle of measurement uniformity was adopted by the Constituent Assembly. It tasked the Academy of Sciences with establishing the best definition of the unit of length, which would be called the metre. The choice was made to use a fraction of the length of the Earth’s meridian. By decree adopted on March 30th, 1791, the Earth’s meridian circumference was fixed at 40,000 km, for ever! But the Earth is not stable, and therefore neither is the metre. There was a long search for a reference standard: a platinum ruler, the wavelength of an atom, a quest for the most fundamental objects of nature in the hope that they would not be deformable. This anti-elastogenic struggle led to a complete dematerialisation of the metre, which has been defined since 1983 on the basis of a fundamental constant of nature: the speed of light in a vacuum. We can only hope that the concepts are sufficiently stable.
RELATIVITIES
Everything therefore seemed to be under control in the laboratories. But the real trouble began in 1905. According to Newton, the classical study of bodies in motion required rigid flat space and immutable time. The scientific revolutions of the early twentieth century turned this theoretical assumption on its head.
First of all, according to special relativity, a body in motion undergoes a contraction of its lengths in the direction of motion. Thus, the classical definition of a rigid body was no longer appropriate since its dimensions depend on its motion. In 1909, the physicist Max Born proposed to change the definition: a body is rigid if its own distances remain constant, i.e. the distances measured by an inertial observer momentarily at rest with respect to this object. We moved from the infinitely rigid body, incompatible with special relativity, to an elastically rigid body.This temporarily saved face. At the same time, relativistic dynamics has taught us that the speed of light is a speed that cannot be exceeded by any material body. No information can propagate faster. As a consequence, no rigid body can exist. To understand this, imagine a vertical bar. Move it from its lower base. If it were rigid, its top would move instantaneously, in contradiction with relativistic causality, because otherwise the information about the movement of the base would propagate faster than the speed of light. The existence of a rigid body would imply an instantaneous transmission of information within the material, which would be fundamentally incompatible with the principles of special relativity. Kinematics became the primary vector of arigidity and elastogenesis. Second revolution, in 1915. According to the theory of general relativity, gravitation is the expression of the geometry of space-time. The force that causes us to fall is simply the manifestation of the curvature of our spacetime.The latter becomes a mollusc deformed by matter. Matter and space collaborate in an elastic dance dictated by mathematical equations. This theory predicted three phenomena: the expansion of the universe, gravitational waves and black holes. The consequences were profound. Rulers were no longer rigid. Move or turn a ruler or a set square and its length and shape will change. They depend on their position and state of movement. Common concepts, such as the straight line, had to be redefined. (7) The notion of a rigid body, even on a theoretical level, completely disappeared from physics. There are gravitational waves, waves of geometry that induce deformations of matter. They knead it, mould it: we can no longer speak of a body’s own form. As for watches, the durations they measure also depend on their state of motion and the gravitational field in which they are located. Culmination. General relativity predicted that on astrophysical scales, space is expanding, as confirmed in 1929 by the astronomer Edwin Hubble. The expansion of space, the dilution of matter, now mapped over nearly 13.8 billion years. Counterpoint. Relativity reveals the greatest exception to the arigidity of the world and to elastogenesis, the inherently non-deformable object that is the black hole. This star is the simplest object in the universe. It is spherical, non-deformable, so smooth that it has been conjectured that “a black hole has no hair,” (8) no rough edges, and is not subject to deformation by gravitational tidal forces.
Relativities sounded the final death knell for rigidity. Relativistic elastodynamics is nothing other than a hermeneutics of Einsteinian geometrodynamics, identifying elastogenesis with the artistic dimension of the way in which matter and its gravitation
fashion the cosmic geometry. Einstein and Hawking were elastogenic, obviously. As for Galileo and Newton, their minds were clearly elastogenic, given how they distorted Aristotle’s concepts, but the worlds they proposed to us are too rigid and perfect, too Platonic to be elastogenic.
QUANTUM MECHANICS
The twentieth century was also the century of quantum mechanics, which requires us to explain why macroscopic objects are apparently hard and impenetrable. In fact, under the microscope, their constitutive matter is extremely condensed into atoms, tiny material points surrounded by an immense void. So why do two solids not pass through each other, if they are mainly empty? The answer lies in quantum physics and one of its founding principles, the Pauli exclusion principle: two fermions—the jargon for the vast majority of material particles—cannot exist in the same quantum state. Matter contains many electrons. These are fermions. The electrons in the floor and the electrons in your feet cannot be in the same state, which is what prevents your foot from passing through the floor. If matter seems hard and impenetrable, it is because it is quantum! The same theory paradoxically predicts that no container can hold its contents forever. The tunnel effect enables any particle to leave the enclosure that contains it. Fortunately, this takes a very long time. Quantum mechanics dealt the final blow to our ordinary conceptions. Nothing is really hard, everything fluctuates, solids are mostly empty, letting elastogenesis seep into the interstices of all matter in order to sculpt it from within.
Science teaches us that all forms are only temporary snapshots, stolen from a history
without which they have no meaning or origin. On the one hand, astrophysics and cosmology have taught us that the matter of which we are composed was synthesised in the foundries of the cosmos and in the heart of the stars. “These elements [these particles, these atoms] are always the same, but they move from one to another, circulating in different forms, given the many changes produced by their exchange.” (9) Together with a sprinkling of biology, this microscopic vision of matter opens up infinite perspectives to the elasto-speculative gaze, which we cannot fail to mention here. The matter in our bodies is constantly being replaced. Our bodies capture it, often in a very enjoyable way, and release it by means of various mechanisms. By training our gaze, not on the individual, but on the cloud of atoms that make up the individual, all beings appear as waves of entangled matter, woven into long lines of universes that pass through plants, other humans, rest in peaty soils or in the depths of the sea, and all have their origin in a star. Empedocles was also elastogenic. At the atomic level, everything is only circulation and passage through temporary forms, the world is only a fabric of waves that hybridises and recomposes itself. Moreover, concepts and definitions are challenged as soon as our curiosity is aroused: our categories are fluid, metamorphosis and hybridisation are at work everywhere. (10) These images are destabilising, but we have to get used to changing our perspective all the time, to never being satisfied with a single image. Scientific thought cannot tolerate entrenchment; rigidity would be the death of it. Research teaches us to make our thinking more flexible, to make it slack and capable of adapting. No concept is eternal. There is no fixity, no essentialism in nature. This is where indiscipline, arigidity and elastogenesis find their vitality. The artist, for his part, invites us to take a sidestep, to shift our gaze, to share his view and thus to grow accustomed to these stereoscopic changes. The artist and the scientist meet on the level of this curiosity, of this caritas, for the details of the world, their adaptability to a changing nature and their will to resist a too-rigid and deadening discipline. In order not to become fossilised, they let their minds flow from form to form.They follow Baudelaire into the
muddy gaps at the margins of worlds because they know that “astronomical certainty is not so great that reverie cannot shelter in the vast gaps as yet unexplored by modern science.” Arigidity reveals and amplifies the porosities between science, poetry and reverie. I suggest that we slip into them to rediscover the enchantment, the primary and sensual joy that physics and mathematics offer when we manipulate them and become intimate with them, a prerequisite for any research activity. Richard Texier’s elastogenesis orchestrates these fluid concepts, inspired by contemporary scientific descriptions, into artistic creation, as a theoretical and practical tool to decompartmentalise views, ontologies and thoughts. It resonates with the evolution of ideas and concepts that describe our world and, from a practical point of view, it is a manifesto for indiscipline.
Translation: Juliet Powys
1 Richard Texier, Manifeste de l’élastogenèse, 2018, pp. I-XXIV of this issue. 2 Jean-Philippe Uzan, L’Arigidité du monde, 2022. 3 Jean-Philippe Uzan, L’Harmonie secrète de l’univers, La Ville Brûle, 2017. 4 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press, 2016. 5 Augustin Berque, Recosmiser la Terre, Éditions B2, 2018. 6 See Jean-Philippe Uzan and Bénédicte Leclercq, L’Importance des constantes, Dunod, 2020, and the technical discussion in Jean-Philippe Uzan, “The Fundamental Constants and Their Variation: Observational Status and Theoretical Motivations,” Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 75, n°2, 403, April-June 2003. 7 Einstein believed that the axiomatic, “purified” conception of mathematics made it “unsuitable” for stating anything, either about the objects of our intuitive representations or about the objects of reality. This is a major difference between mathematics and physics. 8 Expression coined by John Archibald Wheeler and Jacob Bekenstein. 9 Empedocles, The Genesis of the Elements. 10 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1984.
Jean-Philippe Uzan is a research director at the CNRS. He is a theoretical physicist, specialised in relativity and cosmology, and works at the Institut d’astrophysique de Paris. He recently published Big-Bang (Flammarion, 2018) and L’Harmonie secrète de l’univers (La Ville Brûle, 2017). He is currently performing his play 5.Tera-Nuits+1 with the actor Étienne Pommeret and has just finalised the composition of his Hawking Songs, nine melodies for soprano in tribute to Steven Hawking, with Fabien Waksman.