Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything
By addebook • Jul 2nd, 2008 • Category: Physics
Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything
By Joe Milutis
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2006-03-13
Sales Rank: 821055
ISBN / ASIN: 0816646449
EAN: 9780816646449
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Binding: Hardcover
Manufacturer: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Studio: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Average Rating: 4.5
Book Description:
Every culture has its own word for this nothing. Synonymous with the idea of absolute space and time, the ether is an ancient concept that has continually determined our definition of environment, our relations to each other, and our ideas about technology. It has also instigated our desire to know something irrepressibly beyond all that.
In Ether, the histories of mysticism and the unseen merge with discussions of the technology and science of electromagnetism. Joe Milutis explores how the ideas of Anton Mesmer and Isaac Newton have manifested themselves as the inspiration for occult theories and artistic practices from Edgar Allan Poe’s works to today. In doing so, he demonstrates that fading in and out of scientific favor has not prevented the ether, a uniquely immaterial concept, from being a powerful force for material progress.
Milutis deftly weaves the origins of electrical science with alchemical lore, nineteenth-century industrialism with yogic science, and network space with dreams of the absolute. Linking the ether to phenomena such as radio noise, space travel, avant-garde film, and the rise of the Internet, he lends it an almost physical presence and currency. From Federico Fellini to Gilles Deleuze, Japanese anime to Italian Futurism, Jean Cocteau to NASA, Shirley Temple to Wilhelm Reich, Ether traverses geographical boundaries, spiritual planes, and the divide between popular and high culture.
Navigating more than three hundred years of the ether’s cultural and artistic history, Milutis reveals its continuous reinvention and tangible impact without ever losing sight of its ephemeral, elusive nature. The true meaning of ether, Milutis suggests, may be that it can never be fully grasped.
Joe Milutis is assistant professor of art at the University of South Carolina. His writing has appeared in such publications as ArtByte, Wide Angle, Film Comment, and Cabinet.
Date: 2006-11-05 Rating: 5
Review:
Ether, surprisingly, has some three hundred years of influence
ETHER: THE NOTHING THAT CONNECTS EVERYTHING explores the early history and ideas of ether, moving from Newton and early scientists whose ideas bordered on and sometimes influenced the occult to modern scientists and non-scientists. Here the ideas of electricity are woven with alchemical lore in a presentation that surveys the ether to ideas of space travel, film, and even computers. Ether, surprisingly, has some three hundred years of influence: chapters here consider religious influence, paradigms of belief, and scientific borders alike.
Date: 2006-08-18 Rating: 5
Review:
Milutis succeeds with ethereal topic
Joe Milutis has written a brilliant study of a topic central to–but missing from–histories of culture, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. Einstein and Relativity did not mark the end of the ether’s role in science and popular culture; it gripped the popular imagination long after 1905, as Milutis demonstrates so effectively. Well-written and remarkably wideranging, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in modernism and periods before.
Date: 2006-03-22 Rating: 4
Review:
Techno-culture criticism at its best
_Ether_ is an excellent, informative, and thoroughly yummy mindwaltz through the intermingling fields of cosmology, avant-garde art, media machines, and techno-mysticism. Milutis dives deep into the fertile oceanic void of “the ether:” the magnetic communicating vapor that once was imagined to fill all of space and which continues to influence our sense of spiritual and technological experience. In Milutis’s hands, the concept of the ether becomes a kind of theoretical and cultural quantum vacuum (our current version of the ether), spewing out a wide variety of charged particles: Fellini, Mesmer, Poe, Cage, Reich, Blavatsky, Artaud, Philip K. Dick, the psychedelic cinema of Jordan Belson and the Oedipal apocalyptic anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Fun stuff.
But don’t mistake this for scatter-shot Googlethink. Because the ether is “a mediating substance between technology, science, and spiritualism,” its analysis is necessarily interdisciplinary, but also haunted, fluid, and synchronistic. And so Milutis moves comfortably from Shirley Temple movies to the aesthetics of the absolute, from Sprint ads to Tai Chi. But Milutis does more than analyze — he risks wisdom. Though Milutis is an insightful art critic and scholar, and knows his way around the history of science, he is also one of those rare contemporary intellectuals with a genuine feel for and understanding of modern metaphysical and spiritual currents. Yes, there are references to Derrida and Deleuze, some knotty philosophical passages, and some blind allies, but _Ether_ is by no means theory-damaged or uselessly arcane. In fact, its very well-written, often funny, and, perhaps best of all, no longer than it needs to be.
Does the book have a “final point,” a sound-byte message to inject into our increasingly claustrophobic tower of virtual babble? No, but it does end with a fascinating and deeply resonant meditation on the relationship between the digital and the ethereal, the latter of which Milutis sees, convincingly, as irrevocably analog. In the end, Milutis makes a refreshing gesture towards the return to the ether as a creative void, a magnetic and meaningful nothingness that trumps conventional materialism and exhuasted modes of cultural analysis.
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