AHRB Research Strategy Seminar
Interdiscipplinary/Crossdisciplinary/Transdisciplinary
London 7 May 2004
Four images are pinned to my powerpoint noticeboard.
Perhaps this technology is merely a digital shortcut to a Mnemosyne Atlas, a favoured form of late nineteenth century Germanic thought made famous by art historian Aby Warburg 1866-1929.
The
first photograph, upper right, shows the reading room of the Kutlurwissenschaflichen
Bibliotek Warburg in Hamburg in 1926. It is a circular space was designed
by Gerhard Langmaack from a model by Aby Warburg, the library's founder. Warburg,(upper
left) eldest son of a the great banking family, gave up his birthright
to his younger brother for a book allowance, on which, much to his brother's
growing alarm, Aby Warburg created, around 1903, a private and highly symbolic
library, that, later in 1921, became a research institute. 
Trained as an art historian in Germany and Italy, Warburg rebelled against the emerging subject's disciplinary narrowness and proposed another mode of cultural analysis he named Kulturwissenschaft in honour of the intersections of aesthetics, history, psychology and anthropology. I introduce this case to underscore that this issue of the tension between disciplinary and transdisciplinary creation of knowledge is not new. Perhaps we can learn from already historical examples.
Warburg attributed considerable significance to the mobility of arrangements he made between books in his collection begun in 1903. His library's constantly changing dispositions – a librarian's nightmare - were the index of the movements and relations between their contents that alone could catch the movements and relations of the cultural histories and meanings that he sought to interpret under the rubric of Kulturwissenschaft. Begun as a private enterprise before the city of Hamburg had its own University ( only founded in 1923), Aby Warburg's Bibliotek which became part of the Warburg Research Institute in 1921 that challenged not only the limitations of formalistic and stylistic art history of the time, but the disciplinary model of the Germanic universities which are, in fact, the template for most modern European and American universities built around discrete disciplines and departments creating for the first time modern, methodologically specific modes of study of newly specified domains of human action and knowledge. It was precisely in breaching the divisions and enlarging the methodological focus of what were then still newly distinct disciplines that Warburg devised a form of cultural analysis that involved philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, theatre and musicology incorporated as in an archaic dancing chain around this circular library.
The Warburg Library and the Institute were transferred to London in 1933 as its predominantly Jewish and/or anti-Nazi personnel fled the rising tide of fascist persecution, bringing to this country a first generation of rigorously, German university trained practitioners of the discipline of art history. It is worth recalling that it was from contact with the Warburg groups' methodical and intellectually enlarged understanding of their subject that the young Cambridge French literature scholar and amateur art critic, Anthony Blunt would draw inspiration, and self-doubt, that he fed into the Courtauld Institute he came to direct after WWII, the institute where I trained as part of only a second generation of formally trained British art historians. I too would revolt against the narrowed focus of a single discipline orientation with its pure stylistic histories in favour of an extended dialogue with history, sociology, anthropology, film and philosophy.
The Warburg scholar and social historian of art, Kurt Forster declares that Warburg's original library must be understood firstly as itself as a mental construct, hence a symbolic if not ritual space, that paralleled in its ordering and formulation the deepest insights Warburg's scholarship attempted to generate about human culture through a transcultural and transdisciplinary practice. Forster states:
The library which demanded a building of its own and the scholar's desk, which, as the mensa of mental labour, signifies a ritual site of mental sacrifice, present positive analogies with the world of primitive religious ritual.
By way of explanation, Forster illustrates a drawing of a circular medicine bowl altar of the Hopi Indians that images the structure of a coherent system of thought about the tensions and relations of the cosmic forces that control Hopi existence whose contacts and repulsions must properly interact for the group to survive.
Forster concludes:
In the same way Warburg sought to create by way of experiment a precise ordering of reified ideas that would set up a flow of thinking, like a galvanic current. The library becomes a battery, an accumulation of thinking in which through books connected in parallel by Warburg's ordering principle, the current of ideas is induced to flow. The scholar's desk is the site of ritual invocation of those forces that impel, and those that assail, human beings within their culture. Not only the scholar's desk, but also the painter's paper and canvas can serve to invoke forces far older than the practice of Western art.
I have chosen this rather esoteric approach to our topic today to root the discussion in historical research practices and in the symbolic image of the circular library, the ritual altar and a notion of force, energy or galvanising current practised as religious ritual amongst non-literate peoples and as scholarship by the literate: what we do in the arts and humanities, according to Warburg is examine and attempt to understand who we are and what we do according to models of understanding that we ourselves produce.
FORSTER ON WARBURGFor Structural Interdisciplinarity within an expanded disciplinary specialism Private spaces of intellectual labour and academic institutes and resources must reflect the complex interplay of forces and factors that constitute the domain of humanistic study Argument against balkanisation or departmentalistion of knowledge production and scholarly training: hence function of research institute/centre as enriched and expanded research environment allowing individual research projects informed by interrelations with expanded resources for resolving specific research questions |
Warburg's partner in on introductory atlas was Sigmund Freud, the so often overlooked exemplar of early twentieth century transdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities. Freud, however, introduced something else which we can learn from a study of his work space
Like Warburg, Freud offered a non-progressivist and non-redemptive model of cultural study and a psychology of the image as well as a chronotopography of subjectivity that avoided nostalgia, sentimenality and aestheticisation in favour of much tougher and less pleasant rigours of critical and self-reflexive thought never dissociable from the spaces and theatres of its practice in interaction and what we might name intimate movements. The location of Freud's psycho-anthropological field work at 19 Berggasse, Vienna is preserved for us by Edmund Englemann's famous 1938 photographs of the consulting room and study the decoration of these rooms, the furnishings, pictures and objects, raise interesting questions:
Why so much art in the space of psychological medicine?: Why did the atheist neuropsychologist promoting his work as a new science live intellectually and affectively in a world populated by these fragmentary image-bearers of its antithesis, mythopoetical, cultic and pagan religious thinking? Not for Freud Gauguin's Oceania or Picassso's Africa, but above all Egypt, Greece, Rome and China mutely questioned him through this cluttered thinking space that is emblematic of Freud the transdisciplinary scholar, reading more archaeology, art history and anthropology than psychology books and passionately collecting newly discovered antiquities, using their presence, what Rita Ranshoff calls the sense of the ages, to frame his own researches into a living archaeology of the human mind. Hence the monitory importance I attach to the co-presence of analysis and the antiquities in Freud's working environment. He too, while listening, was like his one time mentor Charcot - 'un visuel', wanting himself to be challenged as he searched these encoded emblems- memory bearers of human subjectivity and culture - for a warning against the arrogance of modernist teleology and of the claims of science, necessary as there were.
Apart from the pleasure of talking about images and great thinkers, why have I introduced these images in this research managerial context?
MAIN POINTS the modern university: discipline = department the postmodern university: the emergence of new interdisciplines (e.g.cultural studies, gender studies, information studies, postcolonial studies, gay and lesbian studies, computer studies) the interdisciplinary object and the interdisciplinary team: convergence from diversity the transdisciplinary process: creation through the encounter with difference shifting the focus from the science model of the research team to an arts and humanities model of the research culture |
I want to argue somewhat polemically that we have been more than obtuse in continuing to find the relations between the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary an issue for debate. The necessity for the challenge of enlarged perspectives is nothing new and indeed the debate has been a part of modernity since its inception. Reviewing the recent publication of the proposed RAE panels and sub-panels, however, and reading the inevitable protests against the shockingly limited disciplinary vision raised by interdisciplinary centres and research groupings submitted in the consultation documents, I am impatient. Why in 2004 can we be confronting a research exercise that is so rigidly and exclusively reinstates the purely disciplinary when the interdisciplinary formation has been creatively a part of the academic enterprise for over thirty years already, and longer. When was Sussex founded, Bradford, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies?
Put simply my argument goes like this. First, we had the classical university based on the trivium and quadrivium. Then we had the modern university built on the Germanic model of disciplines that reflected both the emergence of the sciences and the scientific model of knowledge production based on the relation between object and method of study. This model was challenged or perhaps better supplemented in the mid twentieth century by not only new social sciences and the emergence of literary, interpretative studies, but by the creation of new interdisciplines defined by objects of study that were not confined to existing disciplines: gender, sexuality, race, postcoloniality, cultural studies, information studies etc.
Interdisciplinary/Interdiscipline? New domains that traverse disciplinary boundaries: gender, the postcolonial, information systems, sexuality, race etc New constituencies/ minorities demanding integrated special studies Well-established academic programmes from BA to PhD and beyond |
These were supplemented further as new social movements gave voice to hitherto ignored minorities who demanded the proper study and analysis of their histories and cultures . The ideological challenge to phallocentric, Christianocentric Eurocentrism has been playing through the academic world for nigh on forty years. Side by side, most Universities house the old disciplines and what we have to call the new interdisciplines. I call them interdisciplines – the studies – because they constitute now subject areas with benchmark documents, degree programmes and emerging canons of content and methodologies. As far as RAE is concerned it is to me a scandal that reflects the undue dominance of the older models of the disciplinary and a complete failure of imagination in most areas of higher education to acknowledge that the arrival and creativity of the interdiscipline is a well established fact. The eradication of gender/women's studies from any dimension of the RAE is only the most egregious of these wilful acts of academic anachronism.
SIGNIFICANT DISTINCTIONS Interdisciplinary objects required multi-disciplinary teams : the scientific model: outcome oriented-CONVERGENCE Interdisciplinary cultures: the humanities model: process oriented -CROSS-FERTILISATION THROUGH DIFFERENCE Transdisciplinary processes use traveling concepts: DIFFERENTIAL INTERNAL TRANSFORMATIONS resulting from ENCOUNTER AND EXTENSION |
If we can accept that the interdisciplinary model of research and knowledge production has been in practice and creatively present for over thirty years, can we then move on to more interesting questions? The one in which I am interested in precisely the tension between the two models, not the question of aspiring to replace the disciplinary with some very indefined notion of the interdisciplinary. Hence my interest in the transdisciplinary, a term I think I invented for myself when we proposed CentreCATH.
WHY THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY? Interdisciplinary is a specific form of collaborative research process in which a specific outcome is greater than the sum of its parts and may necessitate a new academic formation Transdisciplinarity may take place in either disciplinary or interdisciplinary models of practice. It is an creative effect of the environment or symbolic space and process of research It also enables us to pose as a research question, historically delivered to us, the varying merits and purposes of disciplinary training and interdisciplinary formation Is the interdisciplinary the privilege of the disciplinarily-trained scholar? Do we need always to practice disciplinary knowledge in transdisciplinary environments to produce critically self-aware knowledge? |
This term trandisciplinary is not merely a gambit for novelty now that interdisciplinarity is de rigeur. It is a way of making the very problem of the differences between the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary models of knowledge creation a research question that necessitates its own process-based practice. As a centre, CentreCATH firstly conjugates - a grammatical term - a series of disciplines each of which already has its own distinctive models of knowledge, practice and process: fine art, histories of art and architecture. The academic identity of these disciplines looks back to the nineteenth century Germanic university in which modern academic subject areas emerged. To this core is added a new interdiscipline in the form of a philosophically based cultural studies. across these domains, we then pass questions of presence/difference posed by Jewish, feminist, queer and postcolonial studies in creative and interpretative cultures. From the core of different yet germane constitutencies that link cultural analysis, theory, history and creative practice, each with its equal space, CentreCATH incites or provokes new research through transdisciplinary encounters between them based on strategic questions. In these carefully researched and choreographed events, each discipline/interdisicpline is challenged in its own terms to think through the concepts we set travelling through them both in their difference as well as in their unexpectedly discovered convergences. The concepts emerge from contemporary historical and social experience, and thus often extend into social sciences, humanities, physical or information sciences and historiographical and philosophical studies, forging collaborations with museums, theaters and other cultural units beyond the academy. This strategic map will give you some idea of the ways we plot out the complex relations between these various constituents, fields, research questions and this second model exemplifies out methods of delivery that stress research process, encounter and exchange.
I am often asked by perplexed students and scholars to define the precise difference between the inter and the transdisciplinary. Historical analysis of the shapes of academic practice are one route. Another is the distinction between the intended outcome and the process. I would propose a difference between an interdisciplinary object and a transdisciplinary process.
In the medical or mechanical sciences, you might be planning for instance a new heart valve. To produce this object you may need to draw on various areas of expertise, medical, mechanical, physical, electronic, surgical, material and so forth. The outcome is interdisciplinary because it would be impossible to produce the object without this range of knowledges working together on a common outcome. Thus the form of their research work is often teams of differently qualified experts exercising skills in relation to a shared objective. I do not see that as typical of research in the arts and humanities. We are more interested in the fertilisation of specific research projects that arises from the exchange and confrontation with different ways of seeing a common problem. The encounter with the other's modes of analysis fertilises the ways within which any one of the parties thinks about the issue introducing into the disciplinary process its difference while allowing that otherness of the discipline to shift the very understanding of the topic or concept under investigation.
Let me give you an example from my own field: when I turned from medieval and modern history – the topic of my excellent old fashioned Oxford degree in Modern History to take up art history, I was appalled at the intellectual poverty of what I was being offered even at graduate level even while I was enthralled by the possibilities of a subject that I had only discovered in the final year of my own history degree. During the 1970s, I was able, informally, to leave the confined circle of my just acquired discipline and learn from film studies which were then undergoing a radical emergence and transformation through the work of Screen magazine and its new editors, who were translating into English texts on semiotics, psychoanalysis and structuralist Marxism while recovering Brechtian and Soviet modernism. Fed into British academe via this strange channel new theorisations of meaning, image, text, subjectivity and social totality from scholars in history, linguistic, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, etc offered a new range of theorisations, none of which was so significant as the theory of the gaze and the notion of the apparatus of spectatorship. From an object-based study driven by positivist empiricism or Kantian connoisseurship, art history was to be transformed by turning our attention to the space between viewer and painting/building/sculpture, a space that was both the very web of meaning production and the index of social relations larger than this singular instance of detached viewing pleasure. The theory was evolved in a specific trajectory of studies about the cinematic apparatus, itself a legacy of Freud. Spectator- theory could not be applied simply to the sphere of fine art since the industrial-technological and viewing institutions were different. But being able to theorise spectatorship and the gaze enabled art historians to pay attention to a whole new domain that had until that moment remained invisible to the discipline for which there had only existed artists and art objects, not conditions of viewing and subjects of visuality. Indeed museum studies – an analysis of the social production of relations of viewing and meaning production based on framing and choreographing visual encounters is an outcome of this leakage from film studies to the study of art's histories and institutions. At the same time, because art history is a historiographical enterprise, new questions arose because of this transposition about the history of visuality, the changing economies of conditions of viewing and the subjectivity of spectatorship which, in turn, would return to feed back into a genealogical analysis of the relations of the cinematic apparatus to such histories of the gaze and spectacle over many centuries preceding the emergence of cinema proper. This model is, I would stress, different from the recent attempts to create a new interdiscipline called visual culture to replace art history with what is a subcinematic, cultural studies version of the study of visual representation and its practices. Necessitated by deeply entrenched resistances within the establishment of art history defending its disciplinary purity against alien intrusions from sociology and philosophy, gender, sexuality and postcolonial imperatives, visual culture is a sign of contestation for a territory that immediately runs into the problems that I am interested in considering in a more cautious manner: what is it to train a scholar in the changing conditions of both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity?
What is the price of the current
failure to acknowledge the historical genealogy of the pressures
for interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinary process? |
Finally, I want to use Freud's insights to explain the traumatic repetition of the problem of the interdisciplinary: what is the anxiety against which disciplinarity is defending itself, even in the face of such a long history of co-existence with the domains of interdisciplinary studies? The anxiety, I suggest, concerns the nature of scholarly or research training far more than it concerns imaginative research planning.
So we might have to argue that interdisciplinarity is the privilege of the already disciplinary scholar, expanding their range on the clear foundations of a deep apprenticeship that alone can mobilise the necessary structures of already 'disciplined' scholarly thought? Can we train interdisciplinary scholars from the ground up without loss of quality? This is not a trivial question, as it concerns the very function of defined models of study in the generic training of the scholarly mind. Understanding how one discipline thinks precisely enables us to recognise the differences within models of knowledge, to learn to think with another practice and thus to create some kind of creative tension between models and their potential which is for me, the very purpose of interdisicplinarity as it becomes the transdisciplinary effect.
Is interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, to be the hallmark only of collective research projects that struggle with the relations between shared concepts or questions while producing conglomerates of disciplinary approaches to the said concept or question: Let us take migration: literature and migration, law and migration, images of migration, urbanism and migration and so forth. This is a cumulative not a transformative effect.
All that is a problem remains trapped in the 'and' that is implied in the inter- space of the inter-disciplinary. Thus, in the case of the arts and humanities, I would argue two main points. One is that as a result of the now consolidated presence of the interdisciplines and the interdisciplinary models, almost no disciplinary work is strictly disciplinary. Most scholars are conceptualising their research and its methods in much broader and more inclusive ways and the publications in areas formally named as history or literature or geography show their permeability to other theoretical resources, models of analysis or the pressure of the non-disciplinary concepts such as gender, or migration, land, environment, the other or whatever. Secondly, I propose the transdisciplinary as a research operation replacing the 'and' or the 'inter' of the above with the idea of a creative current and a transformative movement that allows us to think forward via Warburg and Freud: what matters is the spaces we create for scholarly work: the environments for research as networks of creative interaction and perpetual translations founded, however, on a critical position from which to assess the validity and verifiability of the research being produced in the encounters between scholars. The model of the autonomous scholar is as exhausted as the model of the isolated discipline. Yet the trained mind arises from the combination of grasping the discipline of thinking through specific questions and genealogies of models, concepts and practices of researching its questions. If the interdisciplinary becomes a management by-word so that you cannot get funding unless you are doing something in a team, we will fail to support important research that is rigorously based in proven modes. Yet, the quality of disciplinary and individual research can only achieve its highest levels when constantly confronted, as Freud allowed himself to be, by its most demanding, and monitory, other.
Conclusions? Should the AHRB promote interdisciplinarity? No If it means penalising individual, disciplinary-based research of quality and proven relevance Yes If it means non-normative valuing of daring, novel and creative boundary crossing, collaboration and innovative research Should the AHRB accept and foster the importance of the transdisciplinary context for advanced research within universities built on the creative mix of disciplines and interdisciplines/interdisciplinary centres/studies? YES |
