Punishing Disciplines

Nathan K. Hensley Punishing Disciplines (on Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siede, Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, eds. [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002]) This is an article in a literary journal, but as such it could take a turn toward Polynesian dress habits (Johnston), atonal music (Krukowski), or the Ferris wheel (DiMuro): nearly any topic in nearly any field is currently available to the practitioner of English, and the free-range intellectuals now involved in "interdisciplinarity" are performing what is in certain ways the most exdting work going on in academia today. Interdisciplinary scholarship crosses boundaries, breaks down walls, expands the possibilities of knowledge-building. These are exhilarating metaphors. But much of the late twentieth century 's interdisdplinary rhetoric, redolent of liberation's heady scent, is also clouded by less fragrant air: skeptics have sniffed out inconsistendes, pointingout , for instance, that "radical interdisdplinarity"—interdisdplinarity as spedes of academic revolution—presupposes the methodologies, training, and skills of existing disdplines. To move across and between "discursive knowledge structures," borrowing content from one to bring to another, those knowledge structures must themselves retain at least a semblance of unity, critics say, if only to create the stable foundation from whichnontraditional analyses may develop. "At this historical point," notes Julie Klein, de facto spokesperson for contemporary interdisdplinarity (she's written three books on the subject), "the interactions and reorganizations that boundary crossing creates are as central to the production and organization ofknowledge as boundaryformation and maintenance" (Crossing 2, my emphasis). In short, the very concept of interdisdplinarity depends on the integrity of extant disdplines. As Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn put it: "[Disciplinary] boundaries can be crossed, confused, consolidated, and collapsed; they can also be revised, reconceived, redesigned, and replaced. The one thing they cannot be in literary studies is entirely abolished" (4). Further deflating discussions of the new interdisdplinarity is the fad, also noted by critics, that it is old. Klein lists "Plato, Aristotle, Rabelais, Kant, Hegel, and other historical figures" in her own interdisciplinary rollcall (Interdisciplinarity 19), but it is not difficult to think of other, more recent examples of intellectuals whose work defies simple generic or disdplinary categorization. Besides the Great Authors just dted, Eridi Auerbadi and Raymond Williams undertook to perform wide ranging cultural studies before that phrase could be capitalized,1 and other writers not interested in proto-cultural studies have tested the confines of conventional academic disdplines to exceptional effect. Michael Fried, among others, has written on the intersections of painting and fiction for years; Adorno theorized 312 the minnesota review modernism through Stravinsky and Klee; and Vladimir Nabokov may have found confirmation for his concept of mimesis in butterflies. But it is not only literary history's acknowledged titans—the "public intellectuals" of Western Civ—who have attempted and succeeded at such boundary-testing work: scholars at all levels of distinction have for many years involved themselves in multiple disciplines simultaneously (d. Klein, Crossing 137167 ). Predecessors of today's American Studies programs, for example, were advocating ooss-disdplinary academic practices as early as the 1920s and 30s. Disciplinarity at the Fin de Steele, edited by Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, intervenes into the discussion of interdisdplinarity by pushing its history back even further, providing a "longer perspective" on the argument over the most basic academic structure (1). The volume's twelve essays vary widely in subject matter and style; there are chapters on quantum physics and Indian pedagogy, sodology and Oscar Wilde, and methodology ranging from the calmly detached to the outright incendiary. Guari Viswanathan's framing of English Studies' development in India in terms of changing modes of subjectivity, for example, is both convincing and cooly argued, while other essays in the collection (also convincing) veer more openly toward the kind of radical revisionism the editors announce as the volume's intention. There can be no complaint about mincing words. "In plainest terms," writes Liah Greenfield in "How Economics Became a Sdence: The Surprising Career of a Model Disdpline," "[Economics] is a fraud" (120). Likewise James Buzard's exposure of the contradictions native to Cultural Studies is unfurled in prose as energetic and amusing as any in recent criticism. As widely as these artides range in content...