The premise is simple: just six fantastic science books and their spirit animals in the zoo of music. “1” because it feels like I forgot some obvious ones.
Claude Lévi-Strauss – The Raw and the Cooked (1964)
Vague Imaginaires – L’île D’or (2020)
Mysterious, eclectic, French, neo-exotica vs. Scientific, eclectic, French structural anthropology. Lévi-Strauss is one of my favorite writers among scientists. Many science books change perspective quickly, going from abstract to concrete, from subjective to objective, but Lévi-Strauss’s writing does so without spinning the head of the reader.
N Katherine Hayles – Unthought (2017)
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – The Mosaic of Transformation (2020)
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has a posthuman / machine-organic sensibility that would probably match other of Hayles’s work better, but reading Unthought was like reading my own words, only better formulated.
Wolfgang Köhler – Gestalt Psychology (1929)
Kurt Weill – The Threepenny Opera (1928)
Of course, the Threepenny Opera is about outcasts in London and has Marxist undertones, while academic science, its Gestalt-psychology incarnation included, has a more bourgeois vibe. Moreover, Köhler himself was into Wagner (which gives me cognitive dissonance), but anyway, my desire to have an academic counterpart to expressionist-era Berlin is stronger than that of historicity.
Jacques Bertin – Semiology of Graphics (1967)
Jacques Lasry – Chronophagie (1969)
This is maybe too obvious. Two Jacques that clearly are living in a parallel abstract universe of random(ish) symbols. Jacques Lasry makes sculptures that generate random sounds (pretty good working BGM!). Jacques Bertin complicates something as straightforward as information visualization into a delightfully French cloud of obscurity.
Pierre Bourdieu – Distinction (1979)
Daft Punk – Discovery (2001)
A book that manages to be serious, creative, eclectic, and (for scholarly literature) even funny narrows down the selection of albums pretty much. If it also should be French and something that (of course! that’s a point of Distinction) gives away my own social class & context, it’s gotta be Daft Punk’s most syncretic album.
Mancur Olson – The Logic of Collective Action (1965)
Seals & Crofts – Greatest Hits (1975)
This list just wouldn’t be complete without an economics book and a yacht rock album, I thought. But then the obvious book choices Capitalism and Freedom or The Affluent Society, don’t really float my boat (yacht). The Logic of Collective Action, on the other hand, is a masterpiece and definitely consistent with some of the collective actions (not by the farmer’s unions then) being decided onboard a yacht. So, since the book misses the target, let’s take an album that is a bit left of the yacht-rock center.
Petter Holme 