Re: interdisciplinarity

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

Dealing with young graduate students is fraying my last nerve.  And now
there are so many digressions, the beloved Frankfurters have faded into the
background and this is now a general culture list.  Maybe it's time to
generalize and sum up and then to move on.

At the bottom of all this hostility is not the side issue of which little
quirk is awakened in various disputes, my animus against the French or the
Germans or Europeans.  Nope, it is my implacable hostility to academia, and
how it trains its students.  The rejection of academia is the first
principle of all discussion in which I engage.  If this rejection is not
understood and accepted, perhaps this list is not the place for me to
engage in discussion.

Since you asked a general question, I should attempt to answer it, albeit
generally.

If you were a biochemist or an astrophysicist, interdisciplinarity is not a
big problem.  However the division of labor is divided up among the study
of physical nature, there is but so much at stake in this division,
intellectually speaking.  The natural sciences differ fundamentally from
the "human sciences" with respect to the relation of data to theories.  I
will oversimplify the picture so I can keep this brief.  The data must be
accounted for, but have no special interest in themselves.  Theories have
to prove themselves in respect to data, and competing theories are tested
nd compared with respect to data.  In the process of building up a
discpline, the role of citation plays a simpler role.  A scientist engages
in a direct encounter with nature.  In reporting on his contribution, he
cites other scientists who also had direct encounters with nature.  So the
object is still some aspect of nature, even though one cites other
scientists and fights over the data, the theories, etc.

In the humanities, the object is us: the data is our cultural products, our
theories about them, studies of our studies and theories of them, and so
on.  So whether our theories are right or wrong, they are equally as
valuable in their own right as objects of study, since they are cultural
phenomena too.  While for some people there is some mutual responsibility
for a fit between "data" (primary objects) and theory, the data is not just
grist for the mill of theory (hypothetically!) and competing theories may
be partially applicable to the data, without one or another getting knocked
out as viable theories.

Finally, there is the question of INTERPRETATION: there is no algorithm for
applying a possibly usable general theory to a concrete phenomenon to get
the proper results.  Interpretation always remains an art form.  We can all
agree on generalities and still fight over what means what in a given movie
as we are doing.

Hence, although all knowledge production is vulnerable to being misshapen
by its institutions, by funding, direction, economic interests, personal
power interests, inertia, ideological factors, the actual intellectual
content of the humanities is vulnerable in unique ways to the artifact of
institutionalization.  Not that there is no legitimate specialization
involved--specialized knowledge and capabilities may be required, but what
matters in the relation to the social environment of one's colleagues and
to the social environmment of the rest of the world is particulary
sensitive to socialization.  What questions do you learn to ask?  To whom
must you answer?  What are the important issues?  Where does your wisdom
and sense of the world come from?  What is your practical experience and
engagement with any given part of the social world?  If you've spent your
entire life from the age of 18 living in a university environment after
growing up in the burbs and what you know outside of reading comes at best
from working as a cashier or waiter to help pay your way until you have a
full-time appointment, well, what is your experiential base in learning
what is important, in applying abstract notions to some real content?

Now if you know what the bureaucratization of knowledge can do in one
discipline, what is interdisciplinarity but compounding and interlocking
bureaucratic components?  Does one cure the fragmentation of existence by
pooling all the alienated fragments?

At 09:17 AM 6/4/99 -0500, shandley wrote:
>>I never accepted the division of knolwedge
>>accroding to class and the division of labor, and hence the immediate
>>problems around me have motivated my studies much more than following the
>>needs an trajetories of a "discipline", not to mention the joke called
>>"interdisciplinarity" (compound bureaucracy).
>
>I'm curious about this.  What's wrong w/ interdisciplinarity?  This may be
>code, and I may not be reading far enough.  Perhaps it's a ridiculous
>overemphasis, a redundancy that's always existed in good scholarship which
>defies the alienated "division of knowledge"?
>
>----s, energy is eternal delight