Romanticism Across the Disciplines (review)

Romanticism Across the Disciplines. Edited by Larry H. Peer. Lanham, Maryland: The University Press of America, 1998. vi + 263 pp. $60.00.

Several conventions of the Modern Language Association ago, Stanley Fish presented a paper on a panel devoted to interdisciplinarity in which he argued that the mode of inquiry so denoted was in point of fact impossible. Fish's talk submitted conventional academic wisdom to the unimpeachable logical proposition that, all metaphors of hybridity and open boundaries, and all good will, nothwithstanding, none of us can be in two places at the same time; that, no less than one's body, turning one's attention in a second direction means turning from some other place, leaving it behind. In learning another discipline--its information, its methods, its goals and values--one stops "doing" one thing (to use Fish's plain Austinian speech) and starts "doing" something else. ("Practices may be interrelated but you cannot do interrelatedness" is how Fish puts it in "The Young and the Restless," The Stanley Fish Reader, ed. H. Aram Veeser [Oxford: Blackwell, 1999], p.220.) Nor, Fish implied, can one be "between" two disciplines and do anything either one of them will not disavow or, worse, ignore. It could be added to Fish's analysis that, by dint of repetitive practice, we may start to fashion another place of inquiry strictly unidentifiable with those that came before. Still, any such new "field" (and this includes the field of "interdisciplinarity") will inevitably itself become a discipline, a form of doing with rules, protocols and conventions of its own.

The reaction of Fish's audience--all appeared appalled--presented this listener with something of a surprise. When not squarely disciplinary in themselves, Fish's public addresses tend to offer unflagging demonstrations that truth and falsity (and, with them, dominant "beliefs" regarding moral and aesthetic propriety) are the products of persuasion successfully performed. In logic if not in tone Fish's argument recalls "the truth" Oceanus urges upon Keats' despairing Titans, to wit, that supremacy is neither eternal nor earned but a blunt consequence of circumstance: "'for tis the eternal law/That first in beauty should be first in might." According to Fish, the "best" (meaning the most effective) is not what "may" but does (and should) by definition, "win." Delivered with irrefutable good humor, Fish's message, unlike the retiring sea god's, is usually accepted without rancor. What the antagonistic reception of the talk disallowing interdisciplinarity indicated, by contrast, was a public far less discomfitted to learn that saying something (well) could indeed make it so than they were to be told they could not do what they thought. It was as if the acceptance of the premise of the performative nature of truth made its natural professional consequence all the more unpalatable, for on that logic the performance of each discipline would define a different truth. Although the contextual definition of truth by a particular set of practices is but another name for disciplinarity, this should not stymy--Fish's listeners seemed to insist--let alone disqualify the pursuit of no particular truth, interdisciplinarity. If not occupying two places or disciplinary contexts at once they could instead use different disciplines to inhabit an elusive place of greater truth and have it, contextually speaking, both ways. Interdisciplinarity on that model would produce a peaceful cohabitation of Olympians and Titans.

Another name for interdisciplinarity, and another way of understanding it, could well be the mode of inquiry called "romanticism," not in the sense that romanticism is in two places at once or promotes the possibility cohabitation (it is in more places than we can number, and Keat's Hyperion falls) but insofar as it has never achieved or even believed in the governing power of truth defined by context. Practiced by highly skilled professionals of individual disciplines (poets, novelists, composers, philosophers, essayists, artists, and literary critics), romanticism is not defined by those disciplines or even by those practitioners. (We call Keats "a...