FADP Colloquium on Interdisciplinarity

--Kathy Kelley

Here Griselda Pollock admits her frustrations about proceeding with a feminist critique of Van Gogh, because the male-centric analysis Barthes employs in his “Death of the Author” promotes the male-centric analysis of art history, unintentionally reviving the Author-role into criticism and marginalizing the scholarship of feminists like Pollock.  This revived male-centric Author-role concerns Pollock who asks why she should have to assume this type of authorship ("transvestism") to legitimize her analysis of a male artist.  While appreciative of Barthes’ contributions, Pollock balks at the prospect of re-examining Van Gogh until, or if, questions she raises about sex in the authorship debate are better explained and satisfactorily answered. 

In this article, Ferguson carefully exams the artwork of Self-Portrait 2000, by Adrian Piper, by addressing how minority subjects in institutions emerged and changed during sixties, seventies, and post civil-rights period, Ferguson analyzes the relationships of power and academy. After explaining the job and social and political purpose of the academy, this quote presents Ferguson’s idea about the limitation of minority subject and study in the contemporary institutions, and leads to his conclusion.

By analyzing the concepts of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, antiprofessionalism, disciplinary territory, and etc, Fish points out that the true interdisciplinary is very hard to do. Fish thinks that “the task of particular disciplines to contribute to that fullness and avoid the temptation to become ends in themselves, to become nothing more than training schools for entrance into a trade or profession” (101). Then Fish addresses the fear of blurring boundaries and territories in the academy power structure, here he indicates the forms of interdisciplinary, and states that interdisciplinary encourages “releasing cognition from the fetters of thought and enlarging the minds of those who engage in it” (111).

The main point of the article is summarized in this statement: “Being interdisciplinary is impossible.” In one of his argument, Fish claims that a practitioner cannot both think about the discipline and work in it at the same time. In the other argument, he states interdisciplinary, unlike to majority, doesn't let us to experience a liberate academic space.

After describing Adrian Piper's Self portrait, Ferguson made relation between the piece and some historical events in the "sixties," the decade of protest and rebellion. Ferguson believed, interdisciplinary was born because of changing that happened on that decade. Opposing students decided to change the world, so changing the university also was in their plan. Interdisciplinary was an alternative for the old system of university.

We are looking at the history and the theory of the different disciplines that were used to displace the economy.  We are also looking at the history and theory used to develop the thesis that the institution is reflected and derived from political economy.

  The lesson looks puzzling because it is such a historical achievement.  It can alter, but it can also exert at times.  It is a force that cannot be ignored.

Indeed, the diverse social formations that made up the U.S. student movements suggests that the academy is not simply an entity that socializes people into the ideologies of political economy. In many ways, those movements point to an institution that socializes state and capital into emergent articulations of difference. Framed as such, the anti racist and feminist movements and the changes that they inspired in the American academy constitute a history that compels us to once again think the limits of economic narratives in theorizations of power. P.9 Roderick Ferguson, Affirmative Actions of Power In this quote, Ferguson is making a connection between power creation and political and educational economy. Before he makes the above statement, he explores the history leading to the emergence of ethnic and women's studies, their revolt against exclusion and regulation, and their ultimate inclusion/power gain. In terms of political and educational economy, this translated to the academy producing those transformations as interdisciplines. He goes on to explain that though minoritized voices have gained legitimacy within the institution, they are still regulated, as demonstrated by the opening example of the article, Piper's Self Portrait 2000.

  Roderick Ferguson concluding argument is bookended by his inclusion of Self Portrait 2000 to help crystalize his point. He identifies the academy as being an institution that by archiving information also institutionalizes that information. As the student movements of the sixties and seventies opposed the exclusion of minorities from this archive, the eventual inclusion of minorities did not change how the academy institutionalizes and legitimizes information. By their very inclusion into the academy, minority issues became legitimized, but also, as part of the archive, adopted the tendency to choose what is the canonized history of a particular group.

  Here, Stanley Fish, cinches his point. He finds fault with any prevalent ideas that interdisciplinarity through "blurring of genres" is problematic. He points out that, in practice, things in the academy that are mentioned as interdisciplinary are, in fact, not a freeing of the original discipline by its inclusion of another. Rather, the included discipline is limited and contextualized by the former. As he unpacks his argument, his claim isn't in opposition of interdisciplinarity, but more of a recalibration of how it is perceived. If we are more aware of the tendency of interdisciplinarity to reinforce division by its inclusion of other disciplines, those in the academy can be more aware of this pedagogically.

To me, this seems to be the pinnacle of the argument that Ferguson makes, with help from Derrida's theories. This is the moment that the activism of the 50's, 60's, and 70's is married to the political/economic superstructure of the university system in the most unsavory way. Through incrementalism, using the tools offered by academia in an attempt to subvert the system only plays into a trap of being recognized as an entity and then being subjugated to new laws, new orders, new restrictions, and new definitions of "good enough". When activists become accepted, new strictures are put in place (probably in the name of new changes ushering in more "prestigious standards" for a university) which require even more of the university's citizens and often seek to displace the recent activist additions.

It seems that in Fish's article, the goal is to diminish or dismiss the walls built between areas of study to obtain true interdisciplinarity. In the second phase of this article, several methods for this purpose are explored. The most rousing of them is the idea of a revolution--an overturning of pre-existing (perhaps Modernist?) structures in favor of ontological truth rather than an epistemological guise of truth. Fish makes the idea seem appealing, exciting, sexy--and then dismisses it with the point that for illumination to be cast, there must be something hidden in shadow. For the act of truth-seeking to be revolutionary, there must be an implied lie. Not only does this make our disciplines out to be harbingers of lies and non-Truth, but it also builds an entire worldview that assumes a lie until otherwise proven. This does not inspire the spirit of cooperation and wall-tearing-down necessary to achieve harmonious interdisciplinarity.

The idea of truly “inter-disciplinary” studies is so fraught with inconsistencies as to suggest an impossibility in Fish’s treatise, and attempts to breach what each discipline has laid down as revolutionary distinctions, instead becomes anti-disciplinary.  Fish asks if the reason that interdisciplinarity has become such a used (or misused) term is a reflection of the failure of disciplines to roll up their sleeves and tackle the inherent limitations each imposes on themselves, or that the widening of perspectives that interdisciplinarity seeks, is actually attainable within the disciplines themselves if pedagogies were adapted or adopted that facilitated this. In every instance where Fish prods the reader to consider an academic need to incorporate interdisciplinarity, he finds faults within the considerations that he sees as academically unsupportable,  even fatal, in the absence of a reflective distance devoid of “political or conceptual entanglements” (p.101) which he offers no way to achieve.