Clarification?

When I wrote about my academic goals yesterday, I mentioned in passing the idea of aesthetics and its relationship to media systems. I wanted to draw out what I meant by this term to perhaps set me on a firmer course. TS Khun in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that at the turning point of a paradigm shift, scientists are presented with two potentially internally consistent views of the world, each with different accounts of scientific reasoning and potential errors. One way that two mutually exclusive paradigms resolve themselves into a situation of normal science (where scientists and institutions practice science under the conditions established by a single paradigm, which is universally accepted) is through aesthetics. Basically, adopting one paradigm over another may make the practice of normal science more appealing, and so that particular paradigm prevails. I think this example clarifies what I mean by questions of aesthetics: the political and rhetorical forces that privilege certain internally consistent systems of knowledge over others. I think this is a question of visual form as well as more explicitly political questions. For the relationship of media ecology to aesthetics, I think my primary concern is visual – how does the internet transform the aesthetics of other visual mediums, etc. For the science example, scientific practice presumes a stable and immutable natural world as the object of its study. In conjunction with that, it privileges an aesthetic of permanence and stability, which creates a tendency towards singular, simple explanations of the natural world over more complex and seemingly arbitrary ones.

Duncan