Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy

3. FORGING THEORY, PRACTICE, AND INSTITUTIONAL PRESENCE

Chapter 3 FORGING THEORY, PRACTICE, AND INSTITUTIONAL PRESENCE Any nomenclature, Kenneth Burke taught us, acts as a terministic screen that filters, directs, and redirects attention along some paths rather than others. Terminology is not only a reflection of reality. It is also a selection and a deflection. Much of what we take to be observations about reality may well be the playing out of possibilities implicit in our choice of terms (45–46, 49). The most commonly used terminology for interdisciplinarity dates from the first international conference on the subject, sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in France in the year 1970. The OECD typology distinguished multi, pluri, inter, and transdisciplinary forms of interaction (25–26). Most humanists are unaware of the origin of the typology, but several terms passed into wide use. The difference between “multi” and “interdisciplinarity” is the most basic distinction. Multidisciplinary approaches juxtapose disciplinary perspectives, adding breadth and available knowledge, information, and methods. They speak as separate voices in an encyclopedic alignment. The status quo is not interrogated, and disciplinary elements retain their original identity. In contrast, interdisciplinarity integrates separate disciplinary data, methods, tools, concepts, and theories in order to create a holistic view or common understanding of a complex issue, question, or problem (Klein and Newell 393). Not all interdisciplinarities are the same, however. Disagreements about definition reflect differing views of the purpose of research and education, the role of disciplines, and the role of critique. The developments traced in chapter 2 fostered a new rhetoric of interdisciplinarity in humanities. “Plurality ” and “heterogeneity” replaced “unity” and “universality.” “Interrogation ” and “intervention” supplanted “resolution” and “harmony.” “Synthesis,” “holism,” and “integration” became pejorative notions, and even “interdisciplinarity” was challenged by new “anti,” “ post,” “non,” and “de-disciplinary” stances. Taken together, the keywords of the new rhetoric signaled the evolution of a form of “critical interdisciplinarity” that aims to transform existing structures of knowledge and education. It highlights the difference between what Joe Moran calls a “retrospectively interdisciplinary” model of an organic society of the past, when culture and society were presumably joined, and a “prospectively interdisciplinary ” vision of a future society, when divisions between culture and history would no longer exist (132). Chapter 3 completes the foundation for the case studies by introducing three sets of questions that will recur throughout the remainder of the book. How is interdisciplinarity theorized, and what are the tenets of the “new interdisciplinarity” in humanities? What are the major factors shaping practice , what role does disciplinarity play, and what are the interdisciplinary work practices of humanists? And, how are practices institutionalized? Theory Three pronouncements mark the tenets of critical interdisciplinarity. In a 1983 essay on “The Principle of Reason,” Jacques Derrida critiqued the rational calculus of programmed research on “applied” and “oriented” problems of technology, the economy, medicine, psychosociology, and military defense. Much of this research, he observed, is interdisciplinary (11– 12). Jean-Francois Lyotard presented a similar conclusion in La Condition Postmoderne, which appeared in this country in English translation in1984. Lyotard critiqued metanarratives for attempting to totalize knowledge around a new paradigm and called the interdisciplinary approach speci fic to the age of delegitimation and its hurried empiricism. The relationship to knowledge, Lyotard argued, is not articulated in terms of the life of the spirit or the emancipation of humanity. It serves the users of a complex conceptual and material machine. Lacking an emancipatory metalanguage or metanarrative in which to formulate the final goal and correct use of that machine, they practice performative techniques of brainstorming and teamwork to accomplish designated tasks. Even imagination is channeled into instrumental production, implicating humanists in the production of “excellence” and training workers (52). In 1996, Bill Readings extended 56 Historical Warrants these earlier critiques in The University in Ruins. Readings linked interdisciplinarity with the transformation of the Western university into a “transnational bureaucratic corporation” in the service of the marketplace and an empty notion of “excellence” that is replacing the older appeal to “culture.” The swift embrace of Lyotard, Derrida, and Readings in American humanities signaled an expanding backlash against older forms of interdisciplinarity . The first objection was directed at research and problem solving that produce technologies of information and application for “instrumental ,” “strategic,” “pragmatic,” or “opportunistic” purposes. During the 1980s interdisciplinarity gained heightened visibility in science-based areas of intense international economic competition, especially computers, biotechnology , manufacturing, and high technology. In this...