Interdisciplinarity: The Undisciplined Discipline

Think about your own education, past, present and future (as you imagine it), with reference to Callahan’s distinction between content-based knowledge and rhetorical expertise (4) and the role of “intellectualism”. How do you see these forms of engagement balanced (or not) in your own schooling? How do you rate their importance to your training as a scholar? Do you agree with Callanan that “flexibility, creativity and curiosity” are “the first casualties of a disciplinary framework that demands expertise in a particular body of material (5)?

Casualties exist in essentially two varieties: fatal and non-fatal. After all, wars kill and maim alike. To apply this shading to Laura Callahan’s colourful language (as implemented in her article “Defining Expertise in the Interdisciplinary Classroom” ), I would agree that “flexibility, creativity, and curiosity” are “casualties” of a disciplinary framework that demands expertise in a particular body of knowledge, however, these victims ultimately survive. Despite their compromised state, they nevertheless endure and contribute to their fields of study. The ‘spirit of intellectual curiosity’ and the ‘goal of mastering a body of knowledge’ are, for me, by no means mutually exclusive, however I strongly feel that the pursuit of the latter [i.e., the ‘goal of mastering a body of knowledge’] greatly curtails the freedom of the former [i.e., ‘spirit of intellectual curiosity’]. Intense, focused pursuit of specific data in the context of a set of specific pedagogical parameters would necessarily limit a scholar’s range of motion, excluding questions and subjects which she may entertain. For example, one does not augment one’s knowledge of the lifecycles of insects by studying hippopotami (presumably). So, one must suspend one’s curiosity about hippopotami in order to devote time, energy and thought to, e.g., grasshoppers, praying mantises, and the like. Although the curiosity about hippopotami is sacrificed in the name of insect expertise, curiosity itself is not at all sacrificed. It is perhaps, injured, curtailed, quarantined, subjugated, etc., but it is not destroyed. If I may draw on a parallel, a colleague of mine (whom I hold in great esteem) gently criticized once that in tackling a breadth of ideas in my writing, I jeopardize exploratory depth of any one issue. She appeared to enjoy the food for thought, but was left unsatisfied with the meagerness of each ‘dish’. I agreed with her: breadth of coverage necessarily encroaches upon depth thereof, and vice versa. After all, there’s only so much ‘page’ to go around. I, too, wonder what would unfold if I devoted some effort to a sustained, focused, probing discussion on Topic Q. The distinction between ‘touching upon several intriguing issues’ and ‘more deeply probing a lesser amount of issues’ is congruent, for me, to the ‘spirit of intellectual curiosity’ and the ‘goal of mastering a body of knowledge’. Pursing a deep mastery of knowledge (i.e., a thorough treatment of an issue) will necessarily detract from an unfettered spirit of intellectual curiosity (i.e. a nebulous treatment of numerous interrelated notions), but focused expertise certainly does not eclipse that intellectual curiosity – indeed it relies upon it. If you’ll pardon the ‘lunacy’ of this metaphor, “flexibility, creativity, curiosity” do not undergo an ‘eclipsed’ by the demands of focused expertise, but merely undergo a ‘waning’ of sorts.

However is a focused, sustained investigation not THE telling sign of good academic writing? Does depth of knowledge not constitute good scholarship? Do we not need to read practically every word written on our topic in order to synthesize the vastness of data into a coherent, defendable, probing, academic standpoint? And what we don’t? Does forgoing a grounded standpoint and wandering from notion to notion, within and without our ‘topic’ not make us less of an intellectual? Gitlin argues that an ‘intellectual’ is NOT one who advances a totalizing discourse on knowledge from a removed perspective, but rather one who is instrumental in advancing the state of society (locally, and globally), essentially one who is an active agent for change. She construes the intellectual as one who transcends the compartmentalized, insulated parameters of their ‘area of study’ in order to become an intelligent, responsible, ethical citizen of the world. But what does social interaction, or interdisciplinarity really have to do with refining one’s intellect? Are intellectuals no longer permitted (expected?) to remain antisocially cloistered, removed from the ebb and flow of ‘practicality’ so as to effectively read, think, write, reread, rethink, rewrite, etc? The social dimension to Gitlin’s construction of the intellectual is interesting because it serves to remind us that we do not exist in a vacuum, that we are more than walking encyclopedias, and we do not pursue knowledge for its own sake, but rather for the welfare of our kind. How may we avoid the social dimension of intellectualism when our broader field is defined as the ‘humanities’. However, socially oriented or not, surely academics are expected to narrowly focus their efforts. Are we all not currently engaged in an arduous process, the fruit of which is mastery of our field of knowledge? Have we not consented to leading lives of rigorous academic austerity, lives of focus and discipline (and periodic pubbing)? Is not the name of our field of study itself a ‘discipline’? We all intend (on some level) to work hard and apply ourselves (with discipline!) in order to acquire and advance knowledge in our field. As graduate students, we are engaged in the pursuit of content-based knowledge in order to masterfully lord over our minute plots of intellectual real estate. This self-imposed yolk is a necessary aspect of being an academic, else our thoughts would stray and wander into the realm of Rambling, Ambiguity or Irrelevance (like most of my blog entries). In thinking of the tension between content-driven ‘discipline’ and ‘free reign’ interdisciplinarity, the image of a horse comes to mind. Unbridled, his travels are more expansive, covering vast regions, though his stays in each region is brief, and potentially unsatisfying. Once harnessed, however, he goes farther and faster toward any one destination. So, do we charge on towards our disciplinary findings, with little care for what we miss along the way, or do we meander aimlessly enjoying the interdisciplinary journey? Call me undisciplined, but I’ve always been partial to the scenic route. And it appears that I’m not alone.

According to Hugo Caviola, expertise ought to emphasize the PROCESS of interaction rather than the GOAL of synthesis (5). Furthermore, synthesis, for him, is personal, subjective, and individually meaningful. However in emphasizing the personal and the subjective, do we not draw dangerously near to intellectual relativism, pursuing opinion rather than knowledge? Surely, there are ‘personal syntheses’ which steer closer and further from ‘the facts’ than others. How do we classify them? Scholarship, humanities’ based or otherwise, is intrinsically tied to an evaluative process whereby the opinion of one individual is ranked against that of another against the backdrop of what we consider to be objectively true. Isn’t this the basis behind ‘peer review’? Giesler’s, in her exploration of the extent to which the academy “negotiates the terrain between experiential knowledge, various bodies of information, and the question of expertise” (388), advocates a dichotomy between context-based knowledge and rhetorical expertise. She appears to align well with Caviola in favouring ‘rhetorical expertise’. She brings our attention to a peculiar but prevalent “circularity” in academic pursuit: one takes interest in a specific subject matter due to personal, subjective factors, one then pursues ‘objective findings’, only to revisit one’s subjective concerns equipped with supposedly objective research. In this setting, content-specific knowledge is merely an intermediary between uninformed and informed subjective reality. One’s interest begins broadly, narrows, then broadens once again. This seems in alignment with the ‘hour-glass’ structure of all academic work: start broad, refine, then broaden once again – or so my Grade 13 English teacher told me. Callahan herself starts her essay quite broadly. She begins with the words of another individual, from another discipline. She quotes Mikhail Bakhtin, from ‘Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics’ as follows:

“The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into dialogic relationship with other ideas, with the ideas of others.”

To employ another metaphor, an idea, once first conceives may be likened to a stone, at first rough and jagged, only attaining a polished state upon entering a ‘dialogic relationship’ in the external stream of consciousness surrounding it. The stone/idea, susceptive to the exchange with its medium, eventually renounces its rigidity, allowing the contextual currents to shape it. The idea succumbs to the resistance of its context in order to become refined. I find it interesting that Bakhtin specifies the need for the contribution of ‘others’ in order for an idea to take shape. This resonates with the definition of the intellectual as one who engages his social setting. My fondness for the scenic route is second only to my fondness for metaphor, and again, I’m not alone. Gotta love that Caviola!

Caviola argues that interdisciplinarity itself exemplifies and upholds the extent to which both “literary and scientific language are inextricably metaphorical in nature”. But what do the metaphors represent? Is there no reality that is not metaphorical? Are all claims to non-representational ‘knowledge’ false? Surely there is nothing metaphorical about a statement such as: “there are currently 27 students enrolled in the MA Program at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto”, is there? Caviola appears to think so, and although I ultimately agree with him, I cannot gloss over the controversiality (is that a word?) of that claim. After all, do we not operate under an overarching method which commences with hypothesis, develops with evidence and culminates with conclusion? How could a claim be both conclusive and metaphorical? This alludes to what I believe to be THE thematic tension central to all of our discussions. All issues inevitably gravitate around the subjectivity-objectivity axis. How do we churn fact from fiction? How do we distil knowledge from a sea of opinions? What is TRUE? We are told to leave our personal biases out of the equation, or to at least account for them and compensate for them, and we do so in order to operate as agents of pure ‘scientific’ rationality. Our personal experiences are to relegated to the back seat, if not the trunk. We are trained to be ‘intellects’ first, and ‘people’ second. Our subjective experiences, notions, ideas, etc. need to be validated by objective demonstrable evidence. We have thus far encountered numerous variations on this theme, e.g., ‘who is the REAL authority of ritual?’, ‘what is the ACTUAL meaning of this text?’, ‘what do those practitioners REALLY experience?’. To me these are all manifestations of the impulse to ascertain the distinction between the subjective and the objective. We tend by and large to prefer the latter with respect in academia. So, Caviola’s claim that all exists as metaphor – be it literature, biology, sociology, anthrolpology, religion, etc. – highly problematizes our academic pursuit of ‘knowledge’. If we can’t really KNOW anything directly, then how do we LEARN, or TEACH? Are we merely chasing allegorical shadows on the wall of some Socratic cave? What could ‘expertise’ possibly mean in this context? Callanan asserts that expertise amounts to the relationship between information, colleagues, texts, institutions and students. This model appeals to me. I like the idea of the ‘teacher’ being a facilitator, equally participating in the process of learning rather than being an instructor, one who possess conclusive knowledge which she must download to her students. An expert, for me, is not someone with all of the answers, but merely someone who has devoted much time and thought to specific questions. To limit expertise to mastery of knowledge is to stifle creativity and originality, to obstruct the expansion of any given discipline, and to prevent the development of new disciplines. Genius, after all, is extolled in juxtaposition to traditional, content-based modes of thought. If knowledge, then, is not something we can readily pursue, since it’s a process rather than a result, what is the actual fruit of our labour? Surely our pursuit is not a fruitless one. It seems that perhaps the fruit is the pursuit itself, where the emphasis is on dialogue, not data. The scholar ought not to engage in conversations as a means for conclusion, but, rather, should regard conclusions as means for conversation.