Moving Forward, Sideways, and Backwards

I presented a paper at Moving Forward, the 6th Annual College of Arts and Social Sciences Postgraduate Conference at Aberdeen University last week. But that's not what I'm writing about here.

The theme of the conference was "interdisciplinarity", a word that's very hard to say but which is becoming something of a buzzword in academic circles. Or so I'm told. In addition to the 130-odd postgraduate delegates presenting papers ranging from "literary reflections" to "resistance and artistic output" to "military security" to "European community law" were four plenary speakers, talking about various subjects they felt fitted into the theme of interdisciplinarity.

I only went to two of them, but they were the right two insofar as they acknowledged each other and in many ways trod similar ground, albeit in different shoes.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology and has just taken on the post of Head of the School of Social Sciences at Aberdeen university. He got the conference off to an "interesting" start by suggesting that it wasn't actually interdisciplinarity that should be the aim of scholars and academics, but more a determination to let the path of scholarship follow itself, wherever that may be. To be interdisciplinary, he said, was actually not to "move forward" like the conference's title suggests, but to move sideways. It was to be self-consciously interdisciplinary by "setting targets" for knowledge before the scholar knew what knowledge they would find. Academics shouldn't set out to be interdisciplinary at the start, he said, because that's just as prohibitive as strict disciplinary work. More it should be an accidental act; scholars should improvise pathways, resist closure.

And anyway, disciplines aren't really as bounded and strict as everyone thinks they are. Scholarly work is a "tangled field", and what we call interdisciplinarity has always existed in those moments where unexpected joinings occur.

It is management structures that impose disciplines, he said. They set targets for "knowledge production". We should be aiming for a more holistic mode of thought, where the whole matters more than the parts, where one creates an "architectonic museum of knowledge". I'm not entirely sure what that means.

That's all very well, but those management structures that impose disciplines also run universities and govern how courses are set up and ran. And so his ideas of resistance come face to face with the cold face of reality telling anthropologists to be anthropologists and mathematicians to be mathematicians and literature scholars to be literature scholars. He didn't really seem to accept this.

This may well be because he is -- to be disciplinary -- a social scientist, and therefore does not suffer from quite the same management strictures as Chris Fynsk, the next day's plenary speaker does as a humanitarian.

Four years ago, Fynsk set up the Centre for Modern Thought. Besides boasting a lovely font, the centre exists "in order to foster dynamic and theoretically informed cross-disciplinary research. It was established as a forum for rethinking the key intellectual movements of modernity in the context of the most urgent questions of our time."

To quote further:
"In its activities, it traverses the fields of literature, philosophy, theory of art, political and legal thought, and science studies. With a strong emphasis on intellectual history and philosophical foundations, we seek to give a new impetus to contemporary theoretical research. We also want to explore what is possible in the academy and to create a new interface between it and other sectors of cultural and political activity."

Fynsk's plenary address was to give an overview of the centre's work and its raison d'etre. He sees interdisciplinary work as revealing both the lines of convergence and those of divergence between disciplines. The centre's work is to ask what philosophy's role is in the modern university, and where the humanities fit into the academy as a whole. The word "humanities" is not an empty one, he said, it "answers to something". It means something. And it is under threat, a threat the social sciences may not feel quite so keenly.

The centre has a "strong respect for difference", he said, noting that the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities are different, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact it's a good thing, because it can bring together different viewpoints on key issues. Climate change, for example. Such a vast problem cannot be "solved" by one discipline alone. Just as it needs the natural sciences to work out alternative fuels, it needs the social sciences to suggest ways of using those fuels and the humanities to examine the effects of using those fuels. Each discipline can only "grab a certain type of truth". It "goes as far as it can" but it has to recognise its limits. It is akin to a relay, where each discipline hands on to the next, giving the problem a different voice that compliments the others whilst retaining its difference.

It is wrong, he said, to ignore the ways disciplines have been traditionally set up, and how they continue to be informed by those parameters. It is simply unrealistic. These institutional frameworks have in the past and continue to create limits for knowledge in certain disciplines. What Tim Ingold talked about in relation to setting paths and tracing routes can be looked at as creating lines. Lines show a path but they are also a function of tension, difference and resistance. That is why interdisciplinary work is needed.

Fynsk paraphrased Georges Bataille, who remarked of the boredom a person must feel to want to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. His point was that we should want to be all of them!

To champion interdisciplinary work is not to denigrate specialised knowledge. From a purely practical point of view, universities employ people because they have specialised knowledge. No-one would get anywhere without it. And in fact, interdisciplinary work would not be able to exist were it not for specialised knowledge: it is precisely the coming together of specialists! What interdisciplinary work aims for, said Fynsk, and I was inclined to agree, is to resist the traditional frameworks of knowledge in order to take practical and real steps forward in answering the key questions of our era.