Images of Reason:
Scientific Method in Contemporary Culture

Instructor: Amanda Beech Date & Time: Sundays, November 24, December 1, 8, 15 2 PM - 4:30 PM ET

DESCRIPTION In critical theory, post-structural thought and critical cultural practices, technology, reason and science have been labeled as the tools of both socio-political dominance and emancipation. This Seminar asks how we might purchase scientific reason in the context of culture today, that is, without a comprehensive explanatory system of logic, nor a tenable proof from empirical correlations that would offer symmetries between world and word, reality and referent. How do we judge the content of our expressions, explications and communications manifested in culture? Can they be labeled as a form of scientific reason? Images that are claimed to explicate the structure of reality produce concepts, politics and behaviors expressed in the lived world. These cultural expressions come in a range of poetic, representational, abstract and sensory forms. But are they adequate to reason and the real, or is their critical value based in explicating their failure in a perennial dissatisfaction of their own capacity in which their destiny is to expand the world as mythology? If reason acts as the force that divides, dis-identifies and deconstructs the concept and the image then what is the future for philosophy or art if the former cannot be adequate to the image that it presents or the latter adequate to the concept that it locates? Can art be understood as a constructive space within which new forms of reason are possible and if so what philosophy is this? Moving between the problematic necessities of non-teleological and regulative principles, we ask how a project of science can take place for art and philosophy, within the complexity of categorical given. Our four-week seminar begins with negative dialectics, moving to read across Continental and Analytical philosophy. We will examine the question of idealism; science and the absolute, the practical consequences of principles, and how the question of identicality between the idea of a science and what constitutes the world, can be distinguished axiomatically as correlative and process-time-based. In each of these sessions we will draw together what might be seen to be disparate modes of inquiry and forms of culture in order to experiment with the question of language and the actual practicalities we face in the world of images. In doing so, we will develop methods by which to posit speculative proposals for a new realist approach to the images we use to communicate our understandings.

Image: Robert Smithson, Rocks and Mirror Square 1969-71

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