Re: interdisciplinarity

[Matthew Levy <mlevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph said :

> Dealing with young graduate students is fraying my last nerve.

I will struggle to repress my irritating youthfulness so that we can have
a conversation.  If you don't feel I'm capable of this please delete my
post, I would not want to feel responsible for pushing you into
neurasthenia ...

 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.
>

What exactly is it that you want us all to accept about this rejection?
That you have announced it, or that we must agree with it?  As it so
happens I agree with you that the current situation of academia is pretty
ricidulous, but I also see it as a practical fact which we might as well
deal with head on.  Given that academia is what it is, how can we modify
or manipulate it to serve our values?

> 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?
>

I agree with you up until the last sentence.  The academic environment
may well be morally corrupt but it is as much a part of the real world as
any other place you choose to hang your hat ... and based on two years of
experience organizing teaching assistants into a viable union, I can say
that while the middle class background and social isolation of some
graduate students impedes their ability to grasp the meaning of collective
action or institutional power relations, this is not usually the case...
knowledge of critical perspectives, however abstracted, does actually
lead to a more practically embodied political consciousness in many.
Besides, your image of the archetypal apprentice academic probably
corresponds to far less than half of the grad students I know.

	As for the wisdom of experience, I can't say much except that I am
learning all the time.  I can't say that the choices I've made have been
brave ones (there is something safe about staying in school) but this
doesn't even seem to be what your criticisms are aimed at.  Then again,
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here; if this were all about life
experience then "real" proletarians would always make the best organizers,
but they don't - because they don't often have access to the leisure time,
financial resources, or literacy necessary to educate themselves in the
ways that the situation demands.  So academia is relevant not because it's
a good thing in itself (it's not) but because it's one place where those
who would very much like to develop the skills necessary to practice
Gramsci's "organic intellectualism" can get a little support for a while
from a State which is otherwise totally hostile ...  And anyway, you can
disdain bourgeois radicalism all you want, but the survival of some form
of leftism in the academy and in campus culture does produce a certain
number of committed activists from among the ranks of undergraduates where
otherwise the universities would merely be training grounds for yuppies.

but I don't suppose I'm selling you this particular encyclopedia set today
...

 > 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?

no, it doesn't cure anything ... what it does is makes spaces where
individual, motivated students and faculty can try to alleviate some of
the symptoms by lessening some of the strictures of more established
disciplines.

Matt