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POSTMODERN INTERDISCIPLINARITY (Published
in Profession 2000. New York: Modern Language
Association, 2000: 124-31) 1 My first proposition is that university professors in North America are disciplinary subjects, which I take to be a noncontroversial claim. Although we all occupy multiple subject positions, we as credentialed professionals typically hold primary identities as specialists in a specific field or occasionally two fields. If we work, for example, in an English Department, while we may teach composition and introductory literature courses to non-majors, we self-identify by the specialty courses we teach to majors. Such courses are normally in the area in which we did our specialized graduate course work, our doctoral examinations, our dissertations, possibly some postdoctoral study, and our research and publications. We often hold memberships in specialty associations and attend their meetings and stay current with research in the area, regularly monitoring the key journals and book publications in the special field, keeping an eye out for specialized grants and other opportunities, and informing ourselves about the latest textbooks and course materials. When you meet someone early in the morning in an empty elevator at the MLA convention and they ask what you do, your answer, necessarily succinct, contains a word or two naming a specialty followed, if time permits, by a few quick specifics. Something like--American modernism; poetry; Eliot and Pound, or English Renaissance; Shakespeare; early comedies. It is generally a nation, a recognized historical period, a genre or major figure (or both), and a theme or topic. (All of these common categories, namely nation, period, major figure, theme, are highly problematic.) Of course, we university regulars know all this, it is part of our professional unconscious, but I want to underscore two points here, however obvious they may seem. North American colleges and universities consist of academic departments that house disciplines which train and credential students and faculty in the disciplines.1 Knowledge is divided up in certain ways, which is to say knowledges are social constructs and practices bearing specific histories (Messer-Davidow, Shumway, Sylvan, vii-viii).2 When I say university professors are disciplinary subjects, I mean to foreground several things. To begin with, whatever professional identities and standpoints we develop, they make sense (contradictions included) within the framework of the disciplines. There is no outside disciplines.3 Moreover, we all continuously do boundary work or border patrol, sometimes unconsciously. We rule in and out, for instance, certain research topics, courses, program proposals, and job applications, using more or less strict disciplinary criteria in doing so (Shumway and Messer-Davidow, 208-10). Despite rumors, the attitude “anything goes” does not exist. Certain topics, methods, and subjects “simply” appear beyond the pale. The disciplines are at once enabling and productive and restrictive and confining. Not surprisingly, they engender interdisciplinary projects as well as cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, counterdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and antidisciplinary enterprises, all of which usually conceive themselves as resistant to both disciplinarity and departmentalization. 2 My second proposition is that most interdisciplinary work supports or modifies, but does not transform--that is, change--existing disciplines. This claim is based on several decades of interdisciplinary work of various kinds--in a large Humanities Department; in a small Honors Great Books Program; in a medium-sized graduate Comparative Literature Program; in a small doctoral Program in Philosophy and Literature; and in a small graduate Concentration in Theory and Cultural Studies. Each of these endeavors has a complicated history, but each bears witness to the endurance of the disciplines and a certain fragility of interdisciplinary enterprises. As long as there are disciplines (in the current sense), there will be interdisciplinary formations framed as minor offshoots and faced with precarious futures. And these futures will be structurally marked by the possibility of becoming disciplines and departments. The origin and end of interdisciplines is the discipline. I can make this point another, more poignant way. Cultural studies, an interdiscipline if there ever was one, has been around for more than a decade in the US and longer in Canada, and not one full-blown department of cultural studies exists in the US and only one exists in Canada. There are numerous programs, centers, institutes, concentrations, and tracks, but no departments per se. Neither literary studies, nor sociology, nor communications, nor film studies are about to reconfigure themselves around this emerging “discipline.” We all know how this works. Many self-identified cultural studies people are currently in drag, holding posts in English and communications departments, teaching the usual array of standard disciplinary courses with the odd cultural studies course in the mix and the standard courses inflected toward cultural studies concerns. This institutional bottlenecking of cultural studies will probably last another decade or so until the current generation of cultural studies scholars assumes enough administrative clout to departmentalize cultural studies and escape from more or less hostile environments and ineffective arrangements. At the end of the road--as well as along the way--is discipline with the usual array of requirements, examinations, and certifications; with training in specialized skills, vocabularies, canons, problematics, and traditions; with more or less clear criteria for admission and advancement; with relative autonomy in setting goals, standards, and rankings; and with border work. This disciplinary border labor entails protecting the inside from the outside, insuring the distinctiveness of the discipline and thereby solidifying the division of knowledges. Cultural studies needs to undertake all of these disciplinary tasks, which illustrates my point that interdisciplinary work supports or modifies, but does not change, existing disciplines. 3 Thus far I have asserted that university professors are disciplinary subjects and that interdisciplinary projects shore up the disciplines. As part of overarching national school systems, North American colleges and universities are themselves disciplinary institutions situated in disciplinary societies. This observation, my third proposition, derives from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and is, I take it, noncontroversial in its broad outlines. Foucault’s main point in this book, it will be recalled, is that from the 1760s to the 1960s--the modern era--Western societies became increasingly regulated by norms directed at the “docile body” and disseminated through a network of cooperating “disciplinary institutions,” including the judicial, military, educational, workshop, psychiatric, welfare, religious, and prison establishments, all of which entities enforce norms and correct delinquencies, using identical techniques of insertion, distribution, surveillance, and punishment. The university, like the prison, “continues, on those entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline” (302-03). In casting the school as a “disciplinary institution,” Foucault has in mind specifically the use of dozens of so-called disciplines, that is, micro techniques of registration, organization, observation, correction, and control, all maximally synergized. Among these tiny ubiquitous “disciples” are, to name a dozen or so, examinations, case studies, records, partitions and cells, enclosures, rankings, objectifications, monitoring systems, assessments, hierarchies, norms, tables (like time tables), and individualizations. The disciplines, invented by the Enlightenment, facilitate the submission of bodies and the extraction from them of useful forces. These small everyday physical mechanisms operate beneath our established egalitarian laws and ideals, producing a counterlaw that subordinates and limits reciprocities. Of teaching, Foucault observes: “A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it . . .” (176). Universities and colleges deploy the micro disciplines to train and discipline the students in preparation not only for jobs and professional disciplines, but for disciplinary societies. For Foucault this is the legacy of the post-Enlightenment era and a grim birthright of modernity. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the most celebrated of interdisciplinary works of postmodern times. It invents new objects of inquiry, such as the “disciples,” the “docile body,” “Panoptic power,” the “knowledge/power” nexus, and “disciplinary society.” It works in between the fields of history, philosophy, sociology, political science, criminology, and discourse theory, combining their methods and problematics in an original way while resisting classification. Paradoxically, Foucault’s book provides a model of how to do interdisciplinary work as well as of what to fear in the convergence and cooperation of disciplines. The concatenation of disciplines promises more knowledge/power, more organization and efficiency, more monitoring and docility, more records and objectifications, more rankings and norms, more sinister enlightenment, solidifying disciplinary society while assuring the continuation of disciplinary institutions like the prison and the university. 4 At this point I want to resituate the question of disciplinarity and its complications within a postmodern frame.4 My fourth proposition is this: During postmodern times interdisciplinarity has been undergoing a process of reconceptualization, and this is happening in a period when the aging modern university still dominates the educational landscape. While disciplinarity survives intact, interdisciplinarity has lately been changing its character and focus. In its present departmentalized form, the North American university appears a throwback modern organization designed in the nineteenth century; crystallized in the mid-twentieth century; and in many ways frozen in that time of big business, big government, and big labor.5 From the point of view of today’s traditional disciplines and departments, postmodern implosion and fragmentation or, more accurately, disaggregation have been fairly well resisted and finessed.6 The proliferation in recent decades of challenging new (inter)disciplines, often housed in insecure programs and centers, not in well-funded departments, bears witness to the finessing. Among these many “new” (inter)disciplines, I list here only a few in the humanities and social sciences, skipping over the sciences and professions: women’s and gender studies, black studies as well as other ethnic studies, film and media studies, semiotics, body studies, Third World studies, and cultural studies. These are all postmodern (inter)disciplines, formed in the late twentieth century, and in certain specific ways also counterdisciplines, that is, constructed self-consciously against the oversights, blindspots, or ingrained prejudices of the modern disciplines. They are also, in part, multidisciplines, meaning built on the assumption that close cooperation among many different disciples is a wholesome thing. While proponents of the new (inter)disciples exhibit mixed emotions about departmentalization, in my experience they readily submit to disciplinarity with its special training, requirements, standards, and certifications, and they readily rely on the micro disciplines as well, that is, exams, exercises, records, rankings, monitorings, norms, etc. Discipline endures. Yet as the cultural wars of recent times, pitting neo-conservatives against liberals, demonstrate, the postmodern (inter)disciplines threaten the moral and political order of the conservative establishment, though not disciplinarity per se. For neoconservatives, university disciplines, new or old, must meet the litmus test of “objectivity”--an objectivity fetishized in the early Cold War era, a time of both the “end of ideology” and of vicious political purges. The postmodern university (inter)disciplines, then, threaten not disciplinarity, but the moribund modernist image of the university as ivory tower, peaceful, well-organized, and disengaged, a place where the great books ideally crown the curriculum. From a postmodern perspective, interdisciplinarity has two forms. In its most ambitious modern version, it dreams of the end of the disciplines with their hideous jargons and false divisions of knowledge; it wants to unify the disciplines, rendering them translucent (Fish, 135-40). Insofar as postmodern thinking seeks to multiply the differences and respect heterogeneities (Lyotard, 81-82), the recent proliferation of (inter)disciplines is an encouraging turn. The postmodern version of interdisciplinarity seeks, therefore, not to unify or totalize, but to respect the differences. And, significantly, it predicates internal and external differences as ineradicable. Here’s how Jacques Derrida puts this latter point: “What happens is always some contamination” (“Strange Institution,” 68). In this context, each discipline itself is always already infiltrated by some other discipline(s). Physics has mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry not only as neighbors but as guests. Literary studies, a more permeable discipline than most, is entangled with history, mythology and religion, psychology, linguistics, philosophy (especially aesthetics), folklore and anthropology, and political economy. And I have omitted areas at that (theater, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, etc.) In this postmodern conceptualization, there is no denying the existence, necessity, and value of the disciplines, nor of their boundaries and struggles. Interdisciplinarity during postmodern times designates the de facto intermixture of the disciplines, new and old, plus recognition of their differences and conflicts. One can understand why Foucault ended up famously promoting the “specific intellectual” over the general intellectual (“Truth and Power,” 126-33) : he understood the dangers of modern interdisciplinarity, and the benefits of its postmodern transformation. Let me end on a positive note. While I believe that North American college and university professors are disciplinary subjects, that our universities are disciplinary institutions serving disciplinary societies, and that interdisciplinary enterprises tend to buttress the disciplines, I also know that innumerable local subversions, creative misuses, and antidisciplinary moves continuously loosen the rigidities and holds of the modern disciplinary system. And too, interdisciplinary projects--whether inside, between, or among disciplines--frequently increase permeabilities and deterritorialize fixed cognitive maps. There is, in addition, amongst university professors and students everywhere today an unacknowledged party of interdisciplinarity, whose existence and size are unknown, whose programs are unclear or unformulated, but whose underground members seem to recognize one another. I am among these nightcrawlers. It is not clear, however, what connections might exist between the aims of this party and the logic of today’s market economy, with its need for rapid change and renewal, its disregard for established ways and traditions, its preference for flexibility and temporary contracts, and its devotion to productivity. Nor is it always clear when a particular interdisciplinary initiative is intellectual vanguardism, obsessed with the new and the cutting edge whatever they may be. But for all that, I take my stand with interdisciplinary projects, in the future as in the past, only without the dispiriting hopes of putting an end to disciplinary rituals and interests or of unifying the fragmented disciplines and faculties, in damaging pursuits of elusive harmonies. NOTES 1. University disciplines and departments are two different things that may overlap or not (Klein, 53-54). An example of discontinuity would be a large English department that housed programs in linguistics and comparative literature as well as creative writing, rhetoric and composition, English as a second language, and British and American literatures. Here we see a combination of disciplines and subdisciplines joined together in one department. 2. The disciplines, therefore, need constant care and attention, being more like Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses that Plato’s ideal forms. 3. Here I echo Derrida. See “The Principal of Reason,” where he maps the place of deconstruction vis-á-vis the tradition of disciplines (17). 4. For my take on postmodernism, see Leitch, esp. chap. 10, which assesses Fredric Jameson’s landmark Postmodernism, a book I am indebted to. See also Jameson’s provocative comments concerning (inter)disciplinarity and Marxism in “Interview with Fredric Jameson,” 89. 5. I am extending here the influential accounts of modernity developed in Lash and Urry; Hall and Jacques; and Readings. 6. Jean Baudrillard’s many fin-de-siècle books develop the theme of postmodern social implosion--see, for one intense and memorable example, his The Transparency of Evil, 9-10. WORKS CITED Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Baudrillard, Jean. The
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