Fundamentals of the Humanities

1. Fundamentals of the Humanities Seminar 4 The challenges of interdisciplinarity

2. Interdisciplinary research is about recognizing parallel movements • “We need to approach other disciplines with an educated and open-minded appreciation of differences. Navigating between disciplines demands a deep immersion in the practices of another field, and a clear understanding of the points at which ‘translation’ between disciplines is most difficult” (Maza 2004: 265). • We cannot understand interdisciplinarity without first examining the existing disciplines, since interdisciplinary approaches are always an engagement with them, and the modes of knowledge that they exclude by virtue of their separation from each other” (Moran: 3) • Moran: interdisciplinarity is not an addition but an approach: “Interdisciplinarity is always transformative in some way, producing new forms of knowledge in its engagement with discrete disciplines” (Moran 2002: 16). “a way of living with the disciplines more critically and self-consciously, recognizing that their most basic assumptions can always be challenged or reinvigorated by new ways of thinking from elsewhere. Interdisciplinary study represents, above all, a denaturalization of knowledge” (Ibidem: 187). • Question: Could we say that an argument, though linguistically constructed according to the principles of a discipline, is by nature always already interdisciplinary?

3. Interdisciplinarity according to Rigney and Blok… and more • Disciplinarity • Scholars working according to a paradigm (N.B.: 2 definitions); • Foucauldian discipline (N.B.: power as potestas and potentia). • Multidisciplinarity • Additive epistemology (paradigm 1 + paradigm 2). • Interdisciplinarity • “It can suggest forging connections across the different disciplines; but it can also mean establishing a kind of undisciplined space in the interstices between disciplines, or even attempting to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether” (Moran 2002: 15). • When interdisciplinarity is defined as “forging connections across the different disciplines” then trans-/ anti-/ post-disciplinarity is used to do justice to the cartographical/ situated methodology. • Blok: disciplinarity is in itself always already multidisciplinary • Also: Neo-disciplinization • Inter-/ trans-disciplinary scholarship gets (temporarily) fixed.\ • Question with Ortega: disciplinarity is a consequence of capitalism and the rise of the State apparatus. It is designed to be controlled by bureaucracy and money

4. Materials for discussing (inter)disciplinarity • Marxism and Linguistics (Semiotics/Structuralism) have had great influences in all fields of the humanities Can you, with De Certeau, find some strategies and tactics that show this heritage? 2. Moran claims that the nostalgia behind interdisciplinarity is that it aims at a wholeness/completeness. Is interdisciplinarity a political statement, only applied to make an argument more ‘true’? Or is the opposite the case? Can you give examples? 3. In the literature discussed interdisciplinarity is necessarily considered a theoretical move. Could we also consider it a practice? Rethink the opposition between internalism vs. externalism in your answer. • Looking at the un/disciplined with or without taking into account the university structure = internalist philosophy of science • E.g. logical positivists, Kuhn, Snow, Rubin, Maza, ... • Placing the university (incl. the un/disciplined) within society, thus moving away from the idea of the Ivory Tower = externalist philosophy of science • E.g. Foucault, Kloppenberg, Lee&Wallerstein, Moran, ...