Thinking Without Discipline

Crispin Sartwell

Penn State Harrisburg

I'm going to try a notion out on you: that the way we represent the world is not neutral or transparent but, as it were, ideological: ways of representation embody a way of being in the world, a collective decision about how to live. And now I'm going to propose that the disciplinary matrix that we inhabit in academia is not just an organization of the profession, but is a way of representing the world: like a language or a pictorial system or a medium: it's like English, or like perspective rendering, or like video: it is a way we present the world to ourselves and to other people.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophy spun off the other disciplines of inquiry, such as mathematics and the empirical sciences (though the arts, for example, were never included in philosophy). So inquiry into the world went from being a sort of holistic or synthesizing activity in which the big picture preceded and controlled the understanding of specific facts and became a much more collectively chaotic but individually systematic set of proliferating discrete subject matters. Now this is usually presented as a result of increasing knowledge: where it was supposedly possible, though perhaps barely, for a figure such as Milton to know more or less everything worth knowing in his lifetime (actually that is a ridiculous myth, isn't it?), the explosion of knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries finally reached a point at which specialists were required: you couldn't master everything, so you had to choose something. Figures like Descartes or Leibniz were experts on the physical sciences, on metaphysics, on mathematics, on medicine, on diplomacy, etc. But it would be almost impossible today to make significant contributions in all of what we now think of as these disciplines, because there is just too much material in each to master them all at a high level.

I want to suggest something different, however: that the new ways of thinking about the world that are associated with "the modern era," which we might locate in Descartes or Newton (but which we might more easily find in folks like Leeuwenhoeck, an early developer of the microscope) actually drive a new distribution of knowledge in a wide variety of ways: the disciplinary matrix is an ideology that articulates certain ranges of facts as facts rather than reflecting the professional exigencies of the academy (really the full professionalization of these disciplines in the academy did not take place until the turn of this century) or the increase in knowledge. We in modernity have a different conception of fact, of truth, of reality than, for example, the ancients or the medieval church had. We think of the world, fundamentally, as something to be subdued, and we divide it to conquer it. We divide it at the widest level by sorting directions of inquiry into discrete disciplines, but we divide it at the smallest level by dividing the world itself into discrete facts which get ranged under these disciplines. (An early statement of the ideology that makes the disciplines is found in Francis Bacon.) These facts must become more and more refined, more and more microscopic, as it were, in order for us to exert control at ever more fundamental levels. In fact, whole new ranges of fact get defined and distributed into disciplines, into sociology, for instance, or demography.

Often, technology is conceived as being the practical application of science. I actually think the reverse is nearer the truth: science is a particular application of a way of being in the world that, following Heidegger, we could call technology. The distribution of facts into disciplines, and the distribution of the world into facts, are reflections of a way of being that conceives itself as dedicated to mastery of knowledge and hence of the environment. What we want to accomplish drives what we want to know. The academic disciplinary matrix is just a particular expression of this approach.

This project for the technological domination of the earth, which really does require specialization or of which specialization is an expression or which takes the form of specialization, has been by and large a spectacular success in its own terms: we have created ever more effective systems for controlling the world and one another. But it is also a deeply dangerous and impoverishing fragmentation: it divides people from the world (makes the world into an object to be used) divides people from one another (an obvious example in our lives would be our very division into disciplines) and fragments personalities internally into a series of tasks, competencies, or roles.

Certainly, we know a lot more now than we did in 1500. But we also know what we know in a very different way. The structures of human knowledge in Europe up to that point-think of Aristotle or Aquinas-were grand systems that had a certain hallucinatory quality. But they also had a holistic quality: their basic strategy was to join together apparently disparate facts and disciplines. In the intervening centuries, we lost this holism to specialization. Philosophy, once conceived as a synthesis of all knowledge, is at least as specialized today as any other discipline, and the sub-disciplines of philosophy are as specialized as anything you could name. It is not unusual for a philosophy professor to spend a career on the theory of reference, for example, or the problem of free will.

The basic complaints about disciplinarity are familiar but worth rehearsing briefly. The distinctions between history and philosophy, or history and art history, or history and literature, or history and sociology, seem almost entirely arbitrary, and the distinctions, though often violated, have unspeakably impoverished all of those disciplines. The insularity of jargons keeps us from encountering or understanding important work that could be useful in our own. Extremely specialized scholars seem useless to everyone, including their students, except one another.

But it seems to me that physics, literary theory and other disciplines have also been moving in the opposite direction through this century: to a more holistic and perhaps less technological conception of the universe: a less mechanistic conception. And I would like to see the drive toward interdisciplinary inquiry as a movement in the same direction: as a movement toward some sort of post-technological holism that would again allow us to perceive our connections to each other and to the world in a rich way, rather than dividing us from the world or dividing the world into discrete bits for intellectual processing. I'd like actually to watch the disciplines melt away for awhile, because I think this would signal or reflect a different sense of what the world is and what we are in the world.

One tries to ignore disciplinary borders, or live in the demilitarized zones between them. But disciplines police their borders, and academic institutions police the very idea of borders. Your course must have a designation; your book must be categorized on the upper left of the back cover; your students must have majors; your position comes with a title. I personally have switched disciplines, from philosophy to communications (both of which should have pretty squishy borders anyway), and I teach in an interdisciplinary humanities program. My title is "Associate Professor of Humanities and Communication," which is about as close as you can get to no designation at all. I really don't know what discipline my last book was in, though I think they called it African-American Studies and Literary Criticism. So I guess in that sense I've been subject to less discipline than a lot of other folks, which I appreciate.

But I am untenured, and I can't just write whatever I want about whatever I like. I'm supposed to be going to communication conferences and publishing in communication journals, which is going to be kind of tough considering it's been many years since I could really write anything that could be published in any academic journal. Even in my little interdisciplinary program, there's an enforcement of disciplinary boundaries. The fundamental locus of such enforcement, however, is not the tenure system, but the process of graduate training. It's going to be very hard to ditch the disciplines, because graduate training is defined by disciplinary distinctions, and because it is dedicated to reproducing the existing university system. See, the professors of philosophy or literature or art history received an extremely specialized training in the technique and jargon of a specific discipline, and their job as they see it is to give it over to their students, who in turn train the next cohort of profs.

There's something extremely seductive about disciplinary specialization. I remember my first year of grad school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins, a purely analytic department where everything emerged from certain moves in logic and linguistic analysis. The teachers and more advanced grad students seemed so sophisticated, and they wielded a very insular jargon with great expertise. And despite myself I wanted initiation into their language. But such initiation can only be achieved through intense, rigorous study over a period of years, and by the time I was finished with the initiation, I was much more interested in what Quine thought about how words mean than I was about the sort of existential questions that had brought me to philosophy in the first place. With my little buddies, I sneered at people who addressed those questions, and at, say, the folks studying literary theory, with their muddy jargon and what we took to be its literal meaninglessness. We spent a lot of time equating Derrida's work to "Twas Brillig, and the slithy toves," and no time at all groping for what he was saying. And of course we took our own jargon to be perfectly transparent, and everyone else's to be sheer lunacy. One of my profs had a comedy routine on a sentence by Heidegger: "The nothing nothings."

My first job, on the other hand, was at Vanderbilt University, where there was a cult of Heidegger, and a cult of the people who taught Heidegger. The grad students were acolytes: they should have had tonsures or something. They were slavish: arguing for hours about the interpretation of page 49 of "Heidegger and the Question of Ethics," which was a book by one of the profs. Everyone's goal was cloning: the prof wanted to clone himself for the next generation; the students desperately wanted to be clones. Now these students are everywhere, teaching other people; one can only pray that they have developed by now some rudimentary capacity for independent thought.

So I think we are a long way from really challenging the disciplinary matrix. My analytic compatriots can still spend an entire career, say, on the word 'I', while my continental colleagues devote forty years to the interpretation of Derrida, or maybe even to the interpretation of interpretations of Derrida. Of course, there are analogues in other disciplines: you could easily get a career out of English women novelists of the nineteenth century, or perhaps a single woman novelist of the nineteenth century.

I know the seductions of specialization firsthand, and it is true that a person who devotes forty years to George Eliot is going to have a more sophisticated interpretation of Middlemarch than someone who alights on the book as they flit between nineteenth-century economics and art history, postmodern literary theory and stoicism. On the other hand, as is a commonplace, the specialist's interpretation of Middlemarch is likely to be more sophisticated than most folks can actually use or even bear. The only people who can be swept up by a 500-page scholarly tome on Middlemarch are the other fifty scholars who've also spent thirty years on Eliot, and I will guarantee you that their basic interest in it will be to attack and refute it. And there is certainly something to be said for an interpretation of Eliot that would make use of economics and art history, Foucault and Epictetus: if it were any good, you'd learn a lot about a lot of things and potentially Middlemarch could be illuminated in some pretty fun ways.

I think it's fair to say that academic publishing could rollick a bit more. The sheer crushing boredom of most academic books is an unforgivable sin, and one way that we've reached this pretty pass is through crazed specialization. "Scholarship" has become a term of abuse, basically synonymous with dullness or a condition in which one tiny bit of the brain grows to hideous proportions while the rest atrophies.

Another area in which extreme specialization causes harm is undergraduate pedagogy. No undergraduate needs to be provided with the results of a lifetime devoted to Middlemarch, and by the time she's done taking the class, everyone is frustrated. The student is frustrated because she just sat through lectures on which her brain could get no traction; the professor is frustrated because the student doesn't seem to give a damn or to have emerged with much knowledge about Eliot. There are certainly things you can do with Middlemarch that would interest undergraduates, but you'd better be prepared to open it up, to decompress it from your extreme specialization. Graduate programs need to be aware, much more aware than they are, that they are teaching teachers as well as scholars, and that if you teach people to speak a language no one understands but fellow specialists, their own teaching is likely to go very poorly. One easy way to do this would be to encourage graduate students to take courses in a variety of disciples, or even, in my fantasy, in no discipline at all.

Finally, what's seductive and also wrong about the disciplines is exactly what the word implies: disciplines are all about power. It's a pretty Foucauldian situation, actually: your initiation into a discipline is conducted by a process of surveillance that is backed up by the threat of extrusion from the academy. This process usually continues at least until you get tenure, by which time you are so thoroughly conditioned that you are very unlikely to present any sort of threat to the going categories. And of course the disciplinary matrix and your little place within it are also comforting and enabling. They give you a place to work, and a group of colleagues with whom to exchange offprints. The idea that one could do anything one damn well pleases is initially exhilarating, perhaps, but it could also be debilitating: where you can do anything, it's hard to do something; no range of tasks is actually specified. It might be like someone trying to make music without deciding on any sort of form: I'm going to write something that is not jazz, blues, rock, classical, or whatever; it could be played on any instrument or non-instrument. Where everything is permitted, it's very hard to figure out what the hell to do first or at all.

And I guess that too is a Foucauldian insight: that power wielded over one can be liberating as well as enslaving. And it's not like we are going to be able simply to remove relations of power from institutions like the university: though I'm an anarchist, I'm realistic enough to see that the university almost simply is a structure of power relations, and that if we did away with these relations we'd no longer have any place to teach or from which to draw a paycheck (God forbid). So then the question is: could these power relations be loosened or reconfigured without destroying the institutions entirely?

There are the usual suggestions: talk more to your colleagues across the hall; team teach with folks from other disciplines; maybe even write some papers together. But as it stands now, you probably don't really speak the same language as the people across the hall, which makes it damn hard to teach or write with them. I've taught courses with an art historian and someone from comp lit: they were stimulating and had their fun moments, but I also was aware that they lapsed often into incoherence, and that the conversational abilities even of the students seemed attenuated by the distances between the disciplines. Ultimately I wonder whether we might find a different way of organizing universities than into departments. But that seems to entail such radical institutional and educational changes that the suggestion is utopian, and actually I'm not too sure how you would distribute professors and students in some other way. You could, I suppose, divide the place by eras, or issues, or something, but then such moves would simply constitute the creation of new disciplines, possibly as limiting as the old ones. My u. is divided into schools, and I share a suite with art historians, American Studies folks, literary critics, and so on. But that is only possible in a relatively small institution: you're not going to be able to do it someplace that has 30,000 undergraduates. And actually even though interdisciplinarity is our little theme at the school of humanities, we're all acutely though perhaps secretly aware of our disciplines, always fighting for more money and students for our bit of the humanities. We can't resist the way the entire profession is managed.

So here's my suggestion: small individual acts of subversion. Think of yourself as urban guerrillas and blow some shit up. I'm working on a book right now. The basic argument is that meaning is a barrier to communication. Well, that I guess is more or less in my discipline. But I'm writing about everything from Marilyn Manson and piercing to Habermas (whom I hate) and Bataille (whom I love, in a spiritual sense). The thing has no footnotes and really I think it's going to be hard to figure out what to put on the back cover. Of course, I'm having a little trouble getting a contract for this particular effort. This year I'm teaching courses in communication, philosophy, and literature, and I'll bring all the disciplines to each. So, try this kind of stuff. I definitely look like a crackpot, but what the hell. It beats being disciplined all the time.

I said at the beginning that the old holistic sense of the world fit everything into an a priori structure, and I would actually not like to see us go back there. Really where I'd like to head is chaos: where we do both without the grand systems and without the finegrained distinction into disciplines: where we're all free to do whatever beautiful crazy crap we're in the mood to do. That is not going to happen any time soon, and it would have to follow from a profound reconceptualization of knowledge and how we live. But perhaps, as I say, this is already occurring: perhaps the theme has shifted from making the most possible distinctions, a la Bacon, to finding the underlying unities, a la Hawking. In fact, maybe eventually these strategies converge: finding the most fine-grained fact just is finding the underlying unity. If that's right, the disciplines will melt and reconfigure inevitably. Anything we can do to try to hasten this process is good, and there really are things we can do.