Just like everyone else, I am unique. My experience--my history--is one of a kind. The world in which I live is one which only I know. However, there is something I share with the others: I know that the other also is a unique individual, that she or he too is living in their unique world and struggles to understand it just as I do.
My broad project is the investigation of people as individuals attempting to understand the world in which they live. This is a very broad project, and in my professional job I deal with a small aspect of it as a historian of science. This blog is dedicated to exploring this topic outside the conventions of an academic discourse.
The main thesis underlying science studies is a claim that science is social. I agree with that thesis, but I explore a parallel claim that science provides understanding of the world for the individual. What interests me is not how groups interact to make science, but how individuals use science to understand the world in which each one us lives. For me then, studying science is studying one of the ways in which individuals understand the world.
The second question that interests me is how some ways of understanding survive outside of the time and place of their origin and continue to exist in the different places and times of their creation. That is, individual understanding of the world always applies to the exact time and place occupied by the individual, yet each individual takes from much more global systems of knowledge and tries to contribute to them as well. What happens during this transition from here and now to there and then and vice versa? And again, I am less interested in how those transitions happen in societies, and more interested in what are the consequences for the individual who tries to understand the word from his or her unique position.
To those broad questions, very loosely interpreted, this forum is devoted. It is a scrapbook of thoughts presented in public so they might be useful to others before they are presented in a more organized manner, and so that my thinking about them might become clearer as a result of public discussion.
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confabulations on how we as individuals struggle to understand our world
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2 comments:
Reading Donna Haraway's Primate Visions is an experience in the dilemma of communication between an individual and the world. But it also sparked a conversation with a professor of mine about what constitutes an 'individual.' Is the individual self an impermeable, autonomous thing? If your physical body is capable of producing another, those boundaries seem artificial. I'm curious what your notion of the individual is, if you are exploring its attempts at communication with society.
Can one communicate with the society? It seems that we always address our utterances to a specific individual other, even if that individual is some imagined community member. For me, central characteristics of an individual are its uniqueness in time and space its and uniqueness of history, experiences and vision. The awareness that one is an individual, is the realization that no one, no thing will exist the way that I exist, will not experience what I am experiencing. It is the realization that while how others understand the world maybe a guide for my understanding the world, it will never be fully satisfactory.
However, this is not to say that an individual is an autonomous entity. Who I am, what I am is from the very beginning an entanglement of me and others. One does not have to be autonomous to be unique (i.e. individual).
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