Any theory that does not culminate in a law or in a demonstration is improbable, because all theories are conjectures about the nature of things. Theory is the field in which the order of things that generally flow into the mare magnum of speculation and fantasy takes hold and spreads.
The protean or universal condition of any theory allows us to conceive it as a genre of art. No one is surprised by the existence of a discipline of the spirit called theory of art, but I am sure that there are many who would be scandalized by the mere notion of an "art of theory," above all because it suggests, in principle, an unattainable form and, moreover, the idea of an impossible art. Let us imagine, at least for a brief moment, the artist of universal gravitation; we know the law upon which his art rests, we know exactly how we fall, but we have not the faintest idea why bodies attract as Newton states.
Any theory that does not culminate in a proof ends in an axiom; that is, in the unprovable truth of form: human beings have managed to avoid that law through technique, through dreams, through poetry and art. These considerations may seem unexpected; they came to me after a swift reread of Octavio Paz's book about Marcel Duchamp, Naked Appearance, in a passage in which its author invokes not the proofs, but the axioms of non-Euclidean geometries. The beauty of the axiom, "From a point outside a given line an infinite number of parallel lines can be drawn," is greater than the truth of its Euclidean correlative and, moreover, justifies the theoretical presumption, splendidly excessive, of Valéry, which conceives a science of art as an entelechy of poetics. There is no doubt that theory as a form of expression has been the exclusive province of men of science and that the majority of artists have rather thrown themselves into the practice of their art. Still, a few of them—a Leonardo, a Dürer—have used theory as a vehicle for expression. Paz's book illustrates this dimension of poetry (in a wide sense) with Marcel Duchamp, each of whose works is not the expression, but the immediate incarnation of the theory that animates it in the moment in which it is perceived or known as form, or in the instant of its origin.
Judged with an artistic criterion, the most beautiful theories are almost always those that science routinely tries to prove false: Ptolemy conceives light without origin and the universe as an astronomical theater made up of concentric spheres with small orifices like those carved balls of the Chinese; Plato conceived the universe—in his theory of the cave— as a modern cinema hall or a Museum of the Forms; by contrast, the portentous and apparently true theory of Einstein about the relation between matter and energy collects only, for the literary genre to which it should belong, the sad equation of E = mc²; the weakness of its literary expression does not, however, subtract from its power as a practical demonstration.
It should be asked in what measure the beauty of theories is in direct proportion to their probability. The aesthetics of Des Esseintes has hydraulic faults in his liqueur casks, the combinations that Sade extols are anatomically and physiologically impracticable; that is why they belong to the order of literature—they are the substance of a theory that does not seek in practice its verification, but its formula.
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