The ritual of introductions with which we began was already so fruitful; let me just identify a few questions that we might keep after. Hazal got us thinking about childhood, and Grace did too. How do disciplines account for children; how might they; is there anything to be learned from how we teach the disciplines to children (dividing them into school “subjects” etc.)? The language of boundaries and limits recurred, especially with Grace and Paul. (For Paul, in regards to tragedy and death: what is the relation between genre and discipline, by the way; is generic hybridity any model of interdisciplinarity?) How far will the metaphor of a bounded space take us, thinking about disciplines? (See “field” below.) Monica and Hazal’s interdisciplinary work, and others’, has to do with decolonialization—how are disciplines sites of colonialism? (What work does that metaphor do?) What does inter- or antidisciplinarity have to do with unmaking colonial formations? Joyce’s evocation of synesthesia is something we might carry with us too: an intimately experienced juxtaposition, or synthesis, of sensory modalities. Could we imagine an interdisciplinarity at the level of perception? (Cue the discussion of experience next week.)
Next, equipped with our set of readings on knowledge, we considered three possible objects of interdisciplinary attention: the opening paragraph of the Graduate School’s description of the “Dissertation and FPO,” a Pendaflex file folder, and an image of a space where our disciplines to their thing. I’ll pull out some questions that arose at each stage.
First that GS text: “The dissertation must show that the candidate has technical mastery of the field and is capable of doing independent and original research. It must enlarge or modify current knowledge in a field or present a significant new interpretation of known materials.” As a general project, we shared an interest in surfacing its contradictions—a paradigmatically critical procedure (per Adorno, e.g.), with its equivalents in other disciplines (structuralist anthropology, e.g.). What else might we have done—looked for patterns, considered cases; why was contradiction such an important, revealing phenomenon for us? And how should we regard those contradictions: is their suppression a power effect? Inevitably? (Might it be done as care, as protection; how would we talk about that?) But to those questions:
- How is the individual defined by a given discipline? As a unit of production (and of what: knowledge?), as a candidate for a credential, as the master of a preexisting body of knowledge, as an enlarger/contributor, as a modifier/disruptor/reformer etc.? We noticed that the first sentence emphasizes what the dissertation “shows” about the candidate, the second the dissertation’s meaning within a field. How are the work and the person connected? How do disciplines manage the requirement of “independent and original research” in relation to practical collaboration etc.? Cf. Moten’s thinking about communities of “study.”
- Does the dissertation aim at producing a capacity (at shaping a subject), or at affecting a field? There seemed to be a tension between the idea that the dissertation was a completed piece of scholarship, and that it exists primarily to prepare the student for future work. (Here Wittgenstein and Ryle are apropos.)
- What is technical mastery; what is its relation to the requirements of the second sentence, especially a “significant new interpretation of known materials”? We sensed some chafing between techne and interpretation. Is techne a form of knowledge? Is interpretation? (“An” interpretation?) Another word that detained us: method. Must a discipline have a method? Methods?
- Why the word “field,” rather than “discipline”? We considered its ambiguity: between a bounded, cultivated, owned space, already marked out, and an openness or a clearing awaiting survey. And where (per Haraway) does the student stand, or the teacher—at the edge, above, somewhere in the middle? How much of it can we see at one time? Territory is a basic metaphor for discipline and we’ll want to track it. (Does each discipline have its own? Or do disciplines compete for territory, coexist in it, etc.? Jerry Jacobs has a good account of these concepts in his In In Defense of Disciplines, which we might take up in a future week.)
- Who gets to decide what meets these requirements? Moten’s query of the supervisory character of university life, and its relation to work under capitalism generally, surfaced here.
- What is the power and use of genealogical inquiry—that is, inquiry into the origins of words, concepts, practices? We did some work with the history of “techne,” the contradictions at its origins; we also asked some larger questions about the place of philology among the humanistic disciplines. Can we do that work as part of a larger project of decolonialization? How? We might think about the prominence of language generally—which disciplines have been most defined by a “linguistic turn”? (Julie Thompson Klein and Robert Friedman discuss this in “Interdisciplining Humanities: A Historical Overview.”)
Next, that Pendaflex:
- There was the choice of intensive or extensive reading, into the object itself (close reading) or outward into its uses, origins, affinities, place in a structure or network etc.
- Does the object have a history? (In the sense of a technical history, an account of how filing and filing systems have developed, the place of the Pendaflex in American offices and offices elsewhere, etc. etc.) Does it have a story? (Does this particular artifact bear marks of its use, its travels?) Who asks these questions and how do they differ?
- The file as an instance of or figure for (there’s an interesting distinction, too) prosthetic memory. How do different disciplines remember? Do some value memory more than others? How do they conceive it—perhaps in relation to Ryle’s that/how distinction?
- Can we touch it? An interesting moment—we decided not, in our ongoing pandemic prudence/bewilderment. But what kind of knowledge would that afford? And a step further, could one try to use it, for what it is intended for, or for something else? Which would move us perhaps in the direction of a kind of maker’s knowledge, at which Vico gives us a glimpse.
Finally, the place-images, a little more telegraphically, since this is going on…
- The transparency and clean, corporate lines of the School of Architecture: how do disciplines project the accessibility or inaccessibility of their knowledge, their expertise? Compare the neo-gothic McCosh Hall. How do both hold knowledge?
- Again the SOA: how do its corporate affinities project its relations to professions outside the university? Which disciplines prepare candidates for careers outside the academy, which do not, how does that affect their structures?
- How do spaces reflect and reinforce the conditions of student work, especially solitude and collaboration? Who works in private, who works in public or under surveillance? (We thought esp about architects.)
- How do spaces reflect the relative wealth and prestige of departments as disciplinary units within the university? How do they reflect the degree of autonomy the department has to shape its spaces (are they disciplinarily idiosyncratic and legible, or versions of a corporate office design)?
- Can we read, in spaces, a discipline’s internal account of the conditions of success—for example, native brilliance vs. hard work?
- Which disciplines are attached to history in their spaces, which not? And what kinds of history? How do they preserve or efface architectures and practices that evoke or perpetuate the colonial history of the university?
Phew! My plan was to stop at 500 words—and I’m sure there are vital questions that I have missed here. The use of going on, I hope, will be laying out a range of the preliminary curiosities that we bring to our visitors and the texts they share. Some of the questions we will follow up, some may fall away; the first hour of our seminars will be an opportunity to identify particular interests, set ourselves some useful reading, and talk things through.
