Some synoptic thoughts here; see also Ayluonne’s reflections below on our discussions in week 6.
We have had a few basic metaphors in play over the six weeks so far. One is field, where the discipline is imagined as a territory. It may overlap or underlap with others—that is, disciplines may share or dispute the same terrain, or they may concentrate their attention on particular problems tractable to their practices and leave (socially, politically) important gaps in-between. Those diagrams from Jacobs are useful:
a) is the “siloed” academic landscape; b) is Campbell’s idealized fish-scale pattern of disciplinary coverage; you can imagine c) a diagram in which the scales overlap wantonly, as a figure of Taylor’s critique of disciplinary redundancy. See Jabobs 14ff.
If a discipline is a territory, how does it mark and control its boundaries? How far do the languages of nationalism and colonization help us understand those relations? Another important metaphor, or perhaps metonymy, for discipline is method. Disciplines are not defined by the map of their objects, but rather by the way they do things. This was a particularly important framework for Huang. We thought just a bit about a discipline as a game, an account that allows for the boundedness of its practices and its quasi-autonomous values. Are there others that would be useful? For example, from Bourdieu (a student of the academic landscape), habitus.
We have also seen a few different basic approaches to managing the relation among disciplines. One is methodological transfer, applying a method from one discipline to the material of another (as with game theory and early modern Chinese literature). Another is translation, rearticulating a problem native to one discipline in the language of another. The distinction between the two perhaps wants more thought?—as does their distinction from something like interdisciplinary leverage; perhaps we want a better word for that, but the basic idea is adopting the perspective of one discipline to renew and/or critique the approach of another. The relation between the two can be more or less dialectical: that is, one can hold one term steady (e.g. applying the lessons of COM to EAS), or allow them to reshape each other (resulting in an account of COM as European area studies). All of these approaches depend upon the differences of the existing disciplines and the gaps between them, understanding those gaps to be spaces of work and thought (whether opportunities, or urgencies). We also have thought about something like the Mark Taylor critique, that the disciplines need to be dismantled in order to reorganize research around problems, and to respond, in hiring and in the allocation of resources, to how those problems change over time. And we have from Marshall Brown our strongest resistance to the problem-based strategy, an alternative that is difficult to name, but that might be considered antidisciplinarity, preferring occasions and opportunities to programmatic or systematic reform, and seeking alternate genres (e.g. fiction) for expressing ideas and persuading readers. As we observed, Brown also seemed to be the most comfortable within his discipline, Architecture, because its historical and contingent character provided better cover for his work than a rationalized, team-based, neoliberal workplace might.
Speaking of neoliberalism—a critical relation toward neoliberalism has been a recurring theme, a promising orientation for the humanities broadly construed, or even a definition: the humanities allow for the study and cultivation of alternative values (cultural, aesthetic, etc.). We all have sympathy with this view (Wendy Brown being the strongest voice we have heard), but also some concern that the opposition, drawn too sharply, allows the academy to mis-recognize the ways in which its practices are implicated. That concern aligns with reservations about the promotion of critique as the humanities’ basic project, a powerful version of which we heard from Judith Butler early on. Should the humanistic project be defined by its restlessness with premises? Whether or not that is essential—how often do we live up to that account? At the same time, the clean (and of course polemical, and strategic) separation the AAUP proposed between politics and the disciplines seemed like an obvious and potentially dangerous error. We have more thinking to do about this debate and the productivity of its terms in 2021.
A handful of other terms have been prominent. One is knowledge, and how to define it in a humanistic context; what the place of positivist knowledge is in relation to projects of critique and interpretation. Are the humanities too deferential to a scientistic account of what knowledge is and how it is represented? Graham Burnett preferred “understanding,” and that ideal of “being surprised together.” Another term is experience, and the question of whether the humanities renew themselves by insistent contact with the somatic, affective encounters that ground disciplinary concepts. Devin Fore’s showed us, for example, how Kluge gives “phenomenological depth” to questions of political economy. (A phrase that just now strikes me as paradoxical!—but maybe usefully so.) Finally, recurring but still wanting development, is the idea of access. Who gets to participate in disciplinary inquiry, and in what ways; how do the disciplines access one another? What is the relationship among their constitutive barriers: barriers to entry, barriers to (criteria for) credentials and awards, barriers among and against one another? How would thinking about access as a sociopolitical question affect the exchange of people, ideas, knowledge within and across and beyond disciplinary formations?
And just a few more terms that have cropped up and might bear further, future thought. Aesthetics: for which disciplines does the category matter; how much disciplinary judgment can be explained in terms of an aesthetics of production? (What looks good to disciplinary citizens, how it can be made to look good?) Memory: is memory a basic humanistic task (and under what aspect: archive, testimony, etc.); what are the different ways different disciplines keep it, and lose it? Childhood: we haven’t figured out a way to activate this concern yet, but it is shared by many of us: how might disciplines converge on childhood; what sort of model might childhood offer us for thinking interdisciplinarily (pre-disciplinarily?).
