User:Amy Suo Wu/project proposal

Tentative titles:

Imagining the imagination The imaginary history of science

Research aims:

-To challenge the idea of 'fact', 'real', 'truth',or 'reality'. Fact is constantly going through construction and renovation. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn's idea of "paradigm shifts" is that scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. But why are they only defined by the scientific community?

-To challenge the view that science is vastly superior to all other attempts at securing knowledge: that it's law provide certainty. "Scientists, present-day sceptics like to argue, are nothing but dogmatic believers. For this reason, these sceptics – or postmodernists and relativists as they are now called – have attacked science for monopolizing truth. There is no proof whatsoever in science, they assert. It is not certain knowledge that keeps the building of science standing: it is faith. These postmodernists argue that contemporary science is the product of failed ideologies deeply rooted in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment." -Intro of Exploring Humans, An Introduction to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences.

-Therefore to uphold that imagination plays a productive role in all endeavors including science. Look at the myth of scientific research as a rational, objective, ordered, and systematized production of knowledge. Furthermore, built on the knowledge of predecessors. Because of this, the production of knowledge in the scientific discourse holds incredible authority. Science, for me, is perhaps even more irrational due to the fact that it self-appoints such absolute pretense. It is definitely subjective: entangled in (power) politics, personal desire, motivations and compromised by industry. Where science fails to explain the unknown, the imagination bridges the gaps of the mysterious. Imagination as a private faculty has accelerated the development of scientific theory. I would also like to continue researching through the 'case studies' model.

Thomas watson and his vision of electricity as the occult that lead to the discovery of the telephone.
Famous case of Kekule daydreams revealing the true structure of the chemical called Benzene. This basically paved way to the birth of the structure theory.
Invention of madness. discourse producing the object (and subject). Foucault's idea that if you have enough to prove a case, then you can create the conditions in which it can become possible.
more to come....

Research objectives and hopeful outcomes:

Blurring the dividing line between scientific and non-scientific approaches to (representing) 'reality'. Or to open up the definition of reality (attempt to free reality of its perceived ontology). I would like to take up the 3rd option: the experimental mode as my framework. In this mode, i want to experiment with treating so-called fact or real events as fiction and treat the imaginary as fact. Melding scientific rhetoric and fantastical language into a piece that is pseudo-scientific, philosophical and literary. Perhaps even to celebrate the nature of the pseudo-falsehood….

Relationship to previous work:

First strand seems to be interest in the productiveness of desire in creating realities, new subjectivities and how the imagination constructs and informs the material world. Second strand seems to be the relationship of the immaterial to the material - how thoughts inform action and vice versa. The interplay between fiction and reality and how they are blurred or hybrised. Third strand seems to be the questioning of control in the process of knowledge production - be it the state, scientific community, religion, technology. Why do they get to decide what is real (or not), true (or not), mad (or not), good (or not), bad (or not)…etc you get the message.

initial bibliography:

Words Made Flesh. By Florian Cramer 2005
Exploring Humans, An Introduction to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences.By Hans Dooremalen, Herman de Regt & Maurice Schouten 2007
Somnium. By Johannes Kepler 1620
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. By Thomas Kuhn 1962
Book of imaginary media. edited by eric kluitenberg 2005
IMAGE AND REALITY: Kekulé, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination. Alan J. Rocke. The University of Chicago Press, 2010
The Telephone book. Avitel Ronell 1989
Monstrous imagination. By Marie-Helene Huet 1993
invention of madness. By George Didi-Huberman 1982
Labatory life. Bruno Latour 1979

practical:

re-contextualisation of my writing.