25 Fuller as a Poet of Technology
23 An appreciation presented on the occasion of the opening of the retrospective exhibit Your Private Sky—R. Buckminster Fuller, Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich, June 1999, and reprinted by permission of the author.
5 Throughout his career, Buckminster Fuller—not without reason—was despairing of being misunderstood. He said he could endure that people might not understand what he was trying to say, as long as they did not misunderstand him. The risk prevailed, even when Fuller was using the plainest colloquial diction. His constant refrain of exhorting young people not to feel they had to ‘‘earn a living’’ is an example. What he wanted them to do instead was ‘‘doing what needs to be done.’’ The corollary was often overlooked, and many people in the generation of hippies (and their parents) misunderstood the point.
6 Some of the simple metaphors he introduced, notably ‘‘Spaceship Earth,’’ were powerful and unambiguous. But when he ventured into engineering and geometrical abstraction, he became more demanding. His coinage of ‘‘tensegrity’’ (for structural design derived from tension rather than compression) was challenging to the reader and listener. And when it came to the writing style of his synoptic geometrical philosophy in Synergetics, he abandoned convention altogether. Its unfamiliar, polysyllabic vocabulary was deliberately oblique in its challenge to rectangularity. Some of his contemporaries and legatees are still waiting for Synergetics to be translated into plain English. I suggest that putting it all into an orthogonal vocabulary cannot be done—not without great loss to its subversive intent. Synergetics is a work without genre: it will never be admitted into the scientific canon; if it has a home anywhere it is as a work of literature.
8 Fuller had a penchant for mythic projection of events and artifacts—real or imagined—for largely heuristic purposes. For example, his protestations that he was just a ‘‘normal ordinary human being’’ invited the audience to share his daring personal epiphany. Just as Fuller abandoned all established academic disciplines in favor of his own heroic self-discipline, he had to employ a new vocabulary—very unwelcome, even threatening—because he wanted to force the reader to venture into new pathways of mental reception: pathways subversive of the conventions of philosophy and mathematics of (what he regarded as our culturally imprisoned) intellectual establishment. The price has been a heavy one: few academics—except for Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (and Arthur Loeb and Hugh Kenner)—have been willing to stop what they have always been doing in order to master his peculiar idiom.
9 I submit that the license Fuller invokes is that of a poet—a calling that he never arrogated to himself. He said it was not a profession. It was not something that you could proclaim or put on a calling card; it could only be bestowed by others, an accolade. (Anyone can say she’s a painter; only others can say she’s an artist.) As Fuller put it to an audience of UNESCO delegates in Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia) in 1968, ‘‘The term ‘artist’ is not really professable. It is a term which society alone can bestow and then only retrospectively.’’
10 In 1962, Fuller was appointed to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard. He liked that, and he wore the cap and gown of his thirty-some honorary degrees with pride and dignity. But the very notion of a professor of philosophy (or a fortiori poetry) to him was hilarious. How could you pay such a compliment to a mere institution?
11 His idea of poetry was devoid of any precious aesthetic or literary taint. Who but Fuller could describe Henry Ford and Einstein as poets? ‘‘Ford,’’ he proclaimed, ‘‘was a great conceiver. His logistics were like conducting a great orchestra.’’ And Einstein was ‘‘the prototype scientist-artist…of the twentieth century. ’’ He defined language as the first industrial tool, to be reinforced by emerging technology as a worldwide integrator of human activities.
12 For Fuller the vast world patterns of industrial energy and the geometrical relationships of the events of experience—these invisible trails of our manufacturing processes and these polyhedral forms of our consciousness, not mere words—are the stuff of poetry. He is a poet of geometry. He defined thinking itself as the dismissal of irrelevancies, a process he saw as inherently tetrahedral. His favorite line of poetry was E - me2. And for him the most beautiful event in nature was the hydrogen atom in its minimal orbital simplicity. His use of ‘‘trim tab’’ shows the dynamic propensities of any mechanical device. In his script even chemical bonding becomes geometrically metaphorical.
13 This kind of apprehension is not accessible by nouns, and barely by verbs. He was a poet of energetic patterns mediated beyond all language by the artifacts of technology we behold in this exhibit.
14 He disdained the Bauhaus aesthetic as an irrelevant phase of superficial design sensibility, oblivious of ‘‘performance per pound’’ and the invisible tensile strength of materials. Modernism per se was almost as bad as the modernistic, doomed as a retrograde cultural backwater. The aim of the comprehensive designer should be to reform the environment in order to release humans from the doctrine of scarcity. Here we have a technological ethic by which engineering design has an imperative to turn the energies of the universe to human advantage.
15 Fuller rejected the relentless critical search for the source of artistic ‘‘creativity.’’ He deplored the pedantic sociological inquiry into the supposed conditions attracting the cohort of young talented artists to Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1930s—as if there were something in the water there. To him it was like stalking the Swiss patent office in Berne to look for another Einstein.
16 He did not use the word ‘‘creativity’’ in the ordinary sense. ‘‘I would not suggest that it is the role of the individual to add something to the universe. Individuals can only discover the principles and then employ them to move forward to greater understanding.’’ In matters of artistic imagination, Fuller—like Coleridge—believed the role of the artist is limited: there is only one creator.
17 Indeed, his use of geometry and mechanical devices is programmatic and didactic. The ethical imperative is inescapable. He has been called the first poet of industrialization. And, more extravagantly—by Arthur C. Clarke—the first engineer-saint.
18 Writing these words on the occasion of the auspicious June 1999 opening of the Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich exhibition of Fuller’s artifacts, I recall several times when critics said that his Synergetics reads as if it had been translated from the German. If their intent was disparaging, I dismiss it: I think the suggestion is a tribute to the compound-word-making facility of die deutsche Sprache.