When everyone in academe agrees on something, you’ve got to be worried. The university is a famously noisy kennel, and if you propose X, you’ll always hear barks from those watchdogs who strongly suggest Y. So why is it that when you say the word “interdisciplinary,” all the breeds, large and small, lie down, roll over, and wag their tails?
I first heard the term about 15 years ago, used by a provost who had recently come to a university where I was teaching. The faculty members there were unionized, and so they were pretty savvy. Right away people recognized that this provost was angling to dissolve some departments and combine them with other departments. “Interdisciplinarity” seemed more like a reorganizational and cost-cutting measure than it did a genuine intellectual pursuit. You could get rid of that spindly comparative-literature department by com-bining it cleverly and “interdisciplinarily” with the heftier English department, and then you’d have to pay only one secretary instead of two.
But aside from its appeal to administrators, interdisciplinarity is a powerful idea because it implies that different branches of knowledge can benefit from talking to one another. We have an enduring fantasy of a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building blocks to a seamless edifice. How can we know the ways we are unified if we don’t talk to one another?
What we see in practice, however, when broad categories like the sciences, humanites, and social sciences are supposedly bridged, are a lot of courses on “Women and Health” or “Shakespeare and Art.” Those are billed as interdisciplinary, and they are if you consider that an English professor who has some interest in visual arts is teaching the latter or a historian who has read about the history of medicine is teaching the former. But such courses aren’t really interdisciplinary because both are taught by people trained in one discipline who are essentially amateurs in the other.
Can one person ever be a master of two trades? A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge can be even more dangerous. Careering off in varying directions isn’t what our current educational system is about. After all, it takes a lifetime to learn a single discipline. In English, for example, to be expert you have to read a vast body of literature over a long period of time. If a physicist decides to teach an interdisciplinary course on literature and cosmology, will she really be proficient in both fields? Or if I decide to venture into medicine or science, will I have the training of a scientist or a physician? Obviously not.
Of course you could argue that the casual visitor is the one who sees the country more clearly than the resident. When I study the history of psychiatric diseases, as I’m doing now, I can bring to bear my “unprofessionalized” eyes that haven’t been dulled by use and repeated, habit-forming sights and preconceptions. There is an advantage to breadth over depth, but the reality is that the newcomer may have leapfrogged over the most important bits of knowledge in the profession. I could read a couple of books on brain surgery, but you wouldn’t want me to operate on you.
To prevent disciplinary cultures from clashing when brought together, we in academe have invented something that might accurately be called multidisciplinarity — not really a synthesis of disciplines, which is what true interdisciplinarity would involve — but just a kind of sequential movement back and forth from one discipline to another, like serving eggs followed by mushrooms rather than a mushroom omelet. If I know about musicology and art history, for my work to be interdisciplinary, I would need to integrate both fields, not just skip back and forth between the two.
True interdisciplinarity would steer clear of amateurism and intellectual voyeurism. Instead, it would involve subjecting disciplines and the rules by which they operate to a thorough scrutiny, and it would require scholars to listen to those critiques. In the sciences, we can look to models like biochemistry, which combined and changed its predecessors of biology and chemistry. But things get stickier when you cross the boundary between less-compatible fields. Today, when we try to bridge the disciplinary boundaries among the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences, we often try to keep our disciplines intact by preventing other disciplines from prying and asking hard questions.
A truly interdisciplinary approach is potentially dangerous: Some kinds of knowledge might refute or negate other kinds of knowledge. For example, if we took the advances the humanities have made over the past 20 years in developing complex ideas about race and applied them to medical research, much of the work already done on disease and ethnicity might have to change dramatically. That is because the current research standard in medicine and medical research for assessing race is based on the simple fact of self-reporting. But the interrogation of race in the humanities and social sciences indicates that race is a complex and multifaceted social construction, not easily translated to a check-off box.
Interpreting literature in a historical context involves a rather different set of assumptions from those used in interpreting history. Historians tend to think of culture as history, while literary types tend to think of history as culture. Another way of saying this is that historians see texts as facts, while folks like me see facts as texts. If they were to adopt my standards of proof, they would have to dismantle some cherished rules of their game; and if I were to adopt theirs, I wouldn’t be a literary critic anymore. So, being truly interdisciplinary means being willing to let go of what you know so well and free-fall into what is only beginning to be formulated.
I am now working on Project Biocultures, an effort to bring together science, medicine, technology, and culture to see how they are all inter-related. In trying to merge the “two cul-tures” of science and the humanities, we are envisioning culture as having strong biological elements, and biology as having strong cultural elements. It’s easy to want to link those diverse disciplines together, but it’s much harder to find scholars who can talk about and do collaborative research on how those areas of knowledge interrelate.
We’ve shown movies like ExistenZ, David Cronenberg’s bizarre exploration of virtual reality, and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, a noirish thriller about a detective with short-term-memory loss, and we’ve invited campus scholars in the sciences, medicine, philosophy, economics, history, and literature to attempt to interpret those films. (A biologist and a philosopher tried to wrestle with issues around memory, while a computer scientist and an English professor chewed over what reality is in a cyberworld.) We’ve also held monthly seminars for students and faculty members to discuss the idea of interpretation and how that concept applies to our respective disciplines, so that we can begin to find common ground among diverse ways of knowing the world. And I’ve been teaching a graduate course on biocultures for a couple of years, in which students in English, gender studies, Latino/Latina studies, and disability studies examine how science looks at the body and how society thinks about that framing.
I’d like to claim huge success for this project. The discussions have been enlightening, but we keep coming back to some fundamental problems. We’ve agreed that we all make interpretations, for example. But the scientists have stuck with the idea that data are the most important thing, and that, as one biologist put it, “the data is the data.” Of course, those of us in the humanities, having taken our dose of postmodernist medicine, question the notion that data can just be data. We want to introduce the notion that social, cultural, and political forces can create and shape the data. We claim that the interpretation itself can make the data, or that the data aren’t as solid as they look. For example, “data” in the 19th century led scientists to conclude that women and blacks were mentally inferior to white males, but now we see that the data were shaped by interpretation. And an experiment to find data about women and depression will depend a lot on how the research question is framed in the first place.
But the scientists participating in the biocultures project aren’t having any of that. The whole purpose of experimental protocols, they argue, is to eliminate variables and make the data be just and simply the data. Clearly the scientists recognize that the questions asked in putting together an experiment will shape the nature of the results. But they resist the notion that the data produced by some platonically perfect experiment can be subjected to any kind of skeptical doubt. Yet literary-philosophical types doubt even the existence of “hard facts.”
In the example I just gave, the notion of hard facts on the one hand and the idea of social construction on the other cannot seamlessly merge into each other. Naïve calls for interdisciplinarity might assume that they could. A more sophisticated interdisciplinarity might mean coming up with new disciplines altogether. It might even mean that the traditional divide between the two cultures of science and the humanities might have to break down. Knowledge might look very different from what we know, from what our ossified departmental and professional structures look like now. But how many universities are willing to transform the blueprints of their internal structure? If we don’t radically restructure how we approach knowledge, “interdisciplinarity” will remain just a buzzword for administrators and a code word for amateurs to teach whatever they want.
Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English, disability and human development, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of a forthcoming book tentatively titled “Obsession: The Biography of a Disease.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 40, Page B9
