From Hazal:
In the first part of our discussion last week, we approached some of the main questions, that we inherited from our earlier conversations throughout the semester, in the light of Jacobs’ rather conservative defense of disciplines and disciplinary boundaries. Prominent among these questions were the problem of “knowledge production” as a paradigm of humanistic research, and the dualisms ranging from objectivity vs. subjectivity to collaboration vs. autonomy that have long been central for making and remaking of the boundaries between “sciences” and humanities.
While Joyce set up our discussion by inviting us to think the extent to which we achieve to go beyond our disciplinary silos even in interdisciplinary settings such as our seminar, Fedor drew our attention to the circularity of Jacobs’ argument for defending disciplinary boundaries with reference to already existing institutional logics that assert disciplinary boundaries as efficient mechanisms to “manage” the “knowledge unmanageable.” Our focus on “manageability of knowledge” and/or lack of universal language across disciplines that are becoming increasingly self-referential brought questions pertaining to profit vs. social good and instrumental vs. ethical research that we identified earlier to the center of our discussion. We discussed objectivity claims’ relationship to logic of profit; the political economy of disciplinary boundaries and in what ways they correspond to capital’s interest; universities’ tendency to prioritize institutional interests over public good; and implications of all these for interdisciplinary research. Likewise, we discussed in what ways institutional factors that separate disciplines from each other are also complicit in demarcation of boundaries between academia as the site of “knowledge production” and wider society, and how interdisciplinary research can complicate this multiplicity of boundaries while also rendering knowledge more accessible. The conversation we started with a focus on knowledge “production” and different forms it takes in the opposite ends of the listed dualisms opened up new questions pertaining to reproduction, circulation, and accessibility of the knowledge produced, such as: What does interdisciplinarity mean for pushing the boundaries of academia itself, particularly as they pertain to who is included/excluded from configurations of knowledge production to whose benefit? Is interdisciplinary research simply about a dialogue across disciplines (as Jacobs seems to suggest) or an urgent need that derives from a research agenda that prioritizes accessibility of knowledge? Or else, is it the nature of the subject that one studies that turns interdisciplinary lenses into a need?
The second half of our discussion, where we discussed Lefebvre’s chapter on “Industrialization and Urbanization” with Marshall Brown was also a reminder that how the topic in hand can demand an interdisciplinary approach: such as complexities of contemporary metropolitan conditions. Expanding on Lefebvre’s discussion on industrialization, we addressed how complex social problems associated with urbanism and attempts to contain and control urban space paved the way for “invention” of various disciplines such as urban planning and transportation engineering. These emergent disciplines, Brown suggested, involve what he called “industrial savior complex” and/or “an action bias” to “efficiently” respond to various urban problems. Contrasting the diversity and ever-changing character of cities to various disciplines’ rather generalizing formulations of urban landscape, he drew our attention to how disciplinary boundaries that “discipline” our gaze limits our understanding of various configurations and the vitality of “the city.” Similarly, Brown problematized architecture’s claim to produce social realities and underlined that it is rather social, economic, political phenomena that encourage and/or discourage certain physical and intellectual products (not the other way around). Hence, he suggested moving away from the ideals of control, problem solving, and efficiency that mark the disciplines that address urban problems in favor of negotiation between realities and imagination. This latter point, I believe, also relates to disciplines’ investment in and relationship to aesthetics that we discussed at length. Reminiscent of Lefebvre’s emphasis on the ways in which the paintings of artists such as Kandinsky land themselves as instruments of cognition of social space, Brown in his short piece that he shared with us underlines the power of drawings for shaping the urban imagination. In the light of all these, I wonder how the claims to “produce realities” present themselves in other disciplines. What kind of implications does negotiation of social realities and ideals have for interdisciplinarity? Similarly, I am curious to think further about the “aesthetic value” of various forms of knowledge production and how it relates to the diverse ways in which realities and imagination are/can be negotiated.
Drawing on Lefebvre’s formulations, we also discussed use and exchange value of the city and urbanization’s relationship to commodification of space over its use value in diverse settings ranging from western post-industrial towns to neo-liberal authoritarian settings. Beyond our rich discussions on urbanism(s), I wonder how we can address making and dissolution of disciplines and/or the form of knowledge produced by academic research through the analytics of use vs. exchange value. Is academic knowledge production related to use value? Does it produce oeuvres in the way Lefebvre defines them? Or does the neoliberal logic turn campuses into sites of consumption and equip the knowledge produced with exchange value? If so, what kind of implications does this have for our problematization of accessibility of knowledge?
From Angelika
In this week’s seminar with Professor Marshall Brown (Architecture), we revisited several of our recurring themes in this course such as the question of problems and disciplines. To start off the seminar, Professor Brown invited us to consider what field is best equipped to deal with contemporary urbanism. He then explained that many different disciplines, including landscape architecture, architecture, sociology, and engineering, would argue that they were, in fact, the discipline where urbanism belongs. Professor Brown concluded that if all these disciplines were making a case for their ownership, or perhaps expertise in urbanism, then urbanism must belong to nobody.
Professor Brown defined urbanism as something that was not a discipline, but a set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs. In general, these beliefs were that the contemporary city was a good thing that was also a sort of problem that could be solved, through a process that was definitely not science. When first offered this definition of urbanism, I wondered if there were any other programs or introductory courses at Princeton University that could be described as “a set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs.” Could “Introduction to American History,” “Introduction to English Literature” or the “Program in Latin American Studies” be, or be guided by, “a set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs”?
Professor Brown’s conceptualization of urbanism also brought us back to our recurring interests in the interdisciplinary or antidisciplinary of problems. In our discussion on Tuesday, we had already been considering in what way interdisciplinary work such as Professor Keulemans’ might use interdisciplinary methods to solve a motivating problem, without so much working to answer the problems of other disciplines. Professor Brown introduced us to “action bias” which describes the fact that when we perceive a problem, we feel compelled to do something about it, even when we cannot really do anything about it. Action bias could explain urbanists’ perpetual desire to do something about problems such as traffic or crime, despite the fact that urbanists have worked to address the problems for years without actually managing to fix them.
At the end of the class, Professor Brown pulled out his own interdisciplinary objects – little disks with a different problem of urbanism printed on each side such as “crime” and “congestion”. The disks functioned like tarot cards to guide thinking and conversations about contemporary urbanism. The final versions of these disks were in an archive at another university, but Professor Brown had managed to keep these protypes. Of course, making and archiving these disks did not solve the problems they listed. But the little tokens allowed each of us to fulfill our own “action bias”; sliding them across the seminar table and flipping them in our hands we too got to participate in the “set of loosely defined, strongly held beliefs” of which urbanism is made.
