Poetry, or poiesis, has long been understood as a practice of making. But how are experiments in the making of poetic forms related to formal making in science and engineering? The Limits of Fabrication takes up this question in the context of recent developments in nanoscale materials science, investigating concepts and ideologies of form at stake in new approaches to material construction. Tracing the direct pertinence of fields crucial to the new materials science (nanotechnology, biotechnology, crystallography, and geodesic design) in the work of Shanxing Wang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Ronald Johnson back to the midcentury development of Charles Olson’s “objectist” poetics, Nathan Brown carves out a tradition of constructivist, nonorganic poetics that has developed in conversation with science and engineering.
While proposing a new approach to the relation of techne (craft, skill) and poiesis (making, forming), this book also intervenes in philosophical debates concerning the concept of the object, the distinction between organic and inorganic matter, theories of self-organization, and the relation between “design” and “nature.” Engaging with Heidegger, Agamben, Whitehead, Stiegler, and Nancy, Brown shows that materials science and materialist poetics offer crucial resources for thinking through the direction of contemporary materialist philosophy.

Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham, 2017).

Nathan Brown's profile page

Brown's work here opens many promising new paths to follow.

Radical Philosophy

In this ambitious and exciting book, Nathan Brown aligns two practices that occur at the limits of fabrication: one, at play in scenes of reading and writing, involves the poet’s ability to structure language mark by mark; the other, at play in materials research and manufacture, involves the nanoscientist’s ability to manipulate matter atom by atom. These forms of making open an understanding of the methods, techniques, and procedures that structure the world we now inhabit. Unfolding across five carefully sequenced chapters, the book concludes with a brilliant reading of Mad Science in Imperial City, a volume of poems by the engineer and poet who provides Brown’s epigraph and sets the scale for his important expansion of materialist poetics. 'Work nano,' Shanxing Wang urges, 'think cosmologic.' The Limits of Fabrication shows us how such a feat might be accomplished.---—Adalaide Morris, The University of Iowa

The Limits of Fabrication brings an essential argument to discussions concerning the end of art. Where Hegel affirms that poetry accomplishes the dematerialization of aesthetic expression by reducing it to linguistic transparency, Brown on the contrary demonstrates that a poem is always a factory, where meaning is fashioned, even if invisibly, through the crystals, quanta, or nanotubes of language. No metaphorical abstraction in this, but the revelation of the elementary technology at work in words. A strikingly singular, beautiful, and important book.---—Catherine Malabou, author of The New Wounded

What are the materials of poetic writing? How are they configured? And how are we able to track in and after modernism the way avant-garde poetics stretched the limits of poetry’s material form? Nathan Brown’s outstanding and challenging The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics attempts to answer these questions, offering a powerful revisionist literary history of the legacy of modernism’s scrutiny of the very matter of poetry.

Affirmations

Poems are material things. From that simple observation, Nathan Brown teases out startling sequellae: experimental poetry is materials research, and materials science – in its concern with form and organization – is a branch of poetics. In the language of materials science, Brown’s synthesis – of poetry, philosophy, and nanotechnology – is imaginative, while his characterizations are rigorous and enlightening.---—Cyrus Mody, Rice University

...The Limits of Fabrication is a serious and critically acute book... Many readers will be unfamiliar with at least some of the poets here, and Brown makes a compelling case for why they should be read by critics with interests in the intersections between literature and science.

The British Society for Literature and Science

This book is a major achievement for its exposition of nanoscience, for its powerful engagements with Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben on the topic of “life,” and for its general analysis of how the figure of the engineer-scientist provides contexts by which to understand what contemporary writers have achieved.---Charles Altieri, American Literary History

This is one of the very finest works of speculative poetics to emerge in quite some time, and one hopes that its highly creative deviations from the historicist-contextualist hegemony in literary studies will spark equally incandescent acts of theoretical disobedience in its wake.

Boundary 2