|
|
all knowledge
is to know the ledge you stand on
half way between earth & sky
where the clouds s lide
form & dissolve around you)
a way of moving in the fluid surely
not as a man who walks in water
where swimming would better do
or as Christ did
walking out upon it
to teach them
the stupidity
of rigid category
- bpNichol
Professor Browne, Colleagues, and Companion Learners:
I'd like to begin by expressing my gratitude for the opportunity to address the University on the scholarship of integration. It's a topic close to my heart, and thus an appropriate one for Valentine's Day. At the risk of being advised to "get a life," I confess that interdisciplinarity has been my primary passion for several years, and I leap at every chance to wax ecstatic about its possibilities. Since my arrival at the University of Saskatchewan 18 months ago, I've met so many fine interdisciplina ry thinkers, representing almost every College, that I feel sure I'm not alone in my enthusiasm.
My title, "Feminist Pedagogy and the Integration of Knowledge," was chosen because the feminist scholars on campus, with the help of the Instructional Development Office and the Division of Audio/Visual Services, are celebrating this year as "The Year of Feminist Pedaogy." So I thought I would make this occasion an extension of that celebration. I'm subtitling my presentation "Toward a More Interdisciplinary University" because I regard this year's colloquium series as part of the current endeavour to prepare our institution for entry into the twenty-first century. This will involve our examining the late Victorian assumptions about knowledge upon which this University and its curriculum were founded. It's sometimes difficult for us to accept tha t the current financial crisis in universities is not an isolated phenomenon--that it's part of a larger quandary, namely the crisis in Western knowledge generally, and that what's at stake is the academy's credibility and status as the primary site of kn owledge production and the final arbiter of what is valuable and what is true. Here in Canada, the enormously popular reduction of universities to the status of beauty contest hopefuls by MacLean's Magazine might be interpreted as evidence of a gr owing public perception of the learnèd class as no longer entitled to unquestioned authority and privilege.
But despite this crisis, which goes to the very foundations of all our individual disciplines, I'm looking forward to the twenty-first century because I'm certain it will feature the further development of interdisciplinary studies in general and femi nist studies in particular. The University of Saskatchewan is a decade or two behind other major universities in this regard. But that can be turned to our advantage in that there's now a growing literature available for consultation on the successes an d failures of interdisciplinarity at other North American institutions. We don't have to repeat anyone else's mistakes; we're free to make a whole new batch of our own!
So far in this colloquium series, we've heard from two excellent scholars who've approached "the scholarship of integration" in very different ways. Each of them has made a particular observation around which I want to speak today. Professor Don Bai ley spoke of this University as having an exceptionally welcoming climate for the fostering all kinds of interdisciplinary work, and he presented us with a superb example of cooperative research to back up his claim. Don's enthusiasm prompts me to share my perception of the kinds of interdisciplinary activities and opportunities that characterize the institutions where I've taught, as well as those I've researched in the process of developing a model for Women's and Gender Studies.
Focused more centrally on the philosophy of interdisciplinarity, Professor Len Findlay identified the classroom as "a set of interdisciplinary opportunities." This observation invites a shift of emphasis from the level of research and program structure to the level of pedagogy as it's practised in the undergraduate classroom, where interdisciplinarity must of necessity begin. Woven through these responses to my colleagues are some reflections on the evolution of feminist knowledge, from its o rigins in political activism, through the traditional disciplines and, finally, to its integration across all the arts and the sciences.
I heartily agree with Don Bailey insofar as he suggests that a lot of interdisciplinary work goes on in this University--so much, I would add, that some faculty are becoming concerned that their work will not be recognized as a contribution to the dis cipline in which they were trained. In addition, there are some departments who expend a lot of energy trying to keep their subdisciplines distinct from one another. An outstanding example is Anthropology, whose legitimate sphere of operations makes a d elightful mockery of traditional disciplinary thinking, embracing as Antropology does biology, geology, medicine, law, economics, ethnography, linguistics, ancient and modern languages, art and art history. But having said that, I would hasten to add tha t in our quest for a more integrative approach to knowledge, we need to be careful to avoid what interdisciplinarian Robert Scott calls "the complacency that easily assimilates suggestions for change to what already exists." In some universities, interdi sciplinarity functions largely as a generic term, rather than an actual practise--a rubric encompassing a variety of disciplinary reconfigurations, some of which suggest integration but never actually achieve it. These kinds of interdisciplinary activiti es are favoured because they don't cost any money and they leave the status quo intact. In keeping with the rhetoric of liberalism and academic freedom, one only has to acknowledge that these activities are taking place and then carry on with business as usual.
The current interdisciplinary movement, which attempts to break through that complacency, has its origins in those disciplines that were created largely for administrative and bibliographical convenience. One such case among several is my own discip line of origin, English Studies, described by literary theorist Terry Eagleton as "no more than a branch of social ideologies, utterly without any unity or identity which would adequately distinguish it from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, [or] cultu ral and sociological thought." Many traditional literary scholars would not find Eagleton's definition of English very flattering. But what he characterizes as the weakness of the discipline, I see as its interdisciplinary strength.
While many poets and novelists are also academics, and hence are in the unenviable position of having to live out the schizoid split demanded of them by the processes of art and the structures of knowledge, this is a relatively contemporary phenomenon . The vast majority of writers, past and present, are for the most part unencumbered by a perception of knowledge as a fragmented group of hostile nation states, surrounded on the curricular level by the barbed wire of course prerequisites, and defended by an academic border patrol, heavily armed with credentials, who guard against unlawful trespass. Poets and novelists are largely impervious to these fortified boundaries between disciplines. They dance through the minefields of alien discourses, exper iencing widely, and then they create poems and novels that draw upon that experience. Literary analysts are obliged to follow the text, regardless of the combat zones it leads them through. If a poet has a passion for the work of Freud or Marx, Darwin o r Einstein, then the critic must become something of a specialist in Oedipal configuration or historical materialism, or in the theories of evolution and relativity--regardless of how all those discourses contradict or obscure one another.
The literary analyst may need to undergo an especially onerous journey through the disciplines if the text that demands it is one which has languished in obscurity for many decades, or is written in a tradition previously unrecognized by literary hist orians. This was the situation faced by all feminist literary scholars during the late 1960s and early seventies. We learnt history, texual criticism, biography, and the recovery of manuscripts; we learnt linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and myth to braoden our grasp of the work of women writers. Many female sociologists and historians, psychologists and scientists underwent a similar process of interdisciplin-ization when they became feminist scholars. The introduction of a gender perspective i nto gender-blind disciplines demanded it. Most feminist scholars in Canada continue to work in departments devoted exclusively to a monodiscipline, and many continue to work in an interdisciplinary way. But some are censured for it. The annual meeting of the Canadian Women's Studies Association is an opportunity for us to exchange horror stories on this theme. For example, it's not unheard of for the work of a feminist scholar in a department of sociology to be dismissed by a tenure and promotion comm ittee as being too literary, or too historical--in short, for not being purely sociological--whatever that means in a field as metadisciplinary as Sociology. Nor is it rare for a journal of philosophy to reject a feminist article as too sociological. As for feminist science, it's often considered either a contradiction in terms or an unwarranted assault on the scientific status quo--a point to which I shall return. The point I want to make here is that interdisciplinarity as a practise--a way of contex ualizing specialization in any number of disciplinary combinations--often proceeds in spite of the institutional climate, rather than because of it. While the establishment of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Saskatchewan was 15 or 20 year s behind most other universities, the fact that it's here now, along with Native Studies, may be seen as evidence that the disciplinary climate is finally changing.
What is unique about feminist interdisciplinarity is that a scholar outside a given discipline can have a significant impact on the development of scholarship within that discipline. For example, amazing as it may seem to those with an unflinching fa ith in the exclusive authority of traditional disciplinarity, among feminists, historians have from time to time learnt something of their craft from literary scholars, while scientists have helped to teach philosophers how to do feminist philosophy. Fem inist art historians have shown feminist sociologists better ways of doing sociology, and feminist psychologists have suggested new theories for the reading of women's literary texts. This is disciplinary interdependence and mutual fostering, a phenomeno n that goes a step beyond integration. This can be partly accounted for by the fact that women's studies is as much the product of cultural REVolution as it is of disciplinary EVolution. That phenomenon is by no means characteristic of what passes for i nterdisciplinarity generally, which from the vantage point of women's studies doesn't move with quite the same urgency.
What's often called interdisciplinary research consists largely of liaisons between independent disciplines for the purpose of getting access to each other's data. This represents the reorganization of knowledge along the lines of its application rat her than its origin. Robert Scott labels this practise "crossdisciplinary and its practitioners pluridisciplined." He cites engineering curricula and practices as premier examples. Examples unique to this campus might also include agriculture and veter inary medicine, where problems specific to those professions require the expertise of a variety of specialists. The advantage of crossdisciplinary research can hardly be overstated. It represents a cooperative model of knowledge production--an alternati ve to the myth of the individual genius toiling in isolation to realise his solitary vision. But while the usefulness of one discipline to another has been recognized, on the curricular level the idea that disciplines can mutually illuminate and critique each other to the benefit of both has not yet caught on. In our roles as teachers and administrators, if not always as researchers, many of us still find it difficult to understand interdisciplinarity as complementing specialization, rather than opposing it.
Interdisciplinarity on the undergraduate level is largely limited to a reorganizing of existing courses into alternative constellations, which are then labelled an interdisciplinary major in the university calendar. While these multidisciplinary grou pings constitute a legitimate alternative to traditional monodisciplinarity, they should not be confused with interdisciplinarity as a process--a process for overcoming problems created by differences in disciplinary language and world view, and he nce for achieving an integrative synthesis. Rather, these regroupings should be recognized for what they are--namely, a variation on the theme of traditional liberal education. At the vast majority of universities, they rest upon an initial year of indo ctrination into the ideology of traditional monodisciplinarity, where in first-year English, the professor says A about X, while in Sociology, the professor says B about X, and the hapless student is left on her own to grapple with the contradiction--prov iding, of course, she even notices it.
Given the current fiscal restraints, multidisciplinary programs are likely to be our chief alternative to traditional disciplinarity, but I think we will need to proceed very thoughtfully. Senior capstone seminars are not necessarily effective as the sole integrative device in a given program, as their purpose may be analogous to closing the barn door after the horse has fled. In other words, after four years of convincing students that knowledge exists in discrete components, interrelated chiefly o n the level of calendar description, do we then want to cap their education by telling them that we were only kidding?
As new multidisciplinary majors develop, faculty involved might wish to consider a recommendation made by the Association of American Colleges, who suggest that "Faculty members in the major should know and make explicit to their students how their co urses relate to the organizing principles of the major as a whole and structure their courses accordingly." If this kind of integration isn't built in to a new multidisciplinary program, then it won't go much beyond the ideology of liberal arts and scien ce which, as Jos Lennards has written, "does not require the faculty to deviate from its academic vocationalism and . . . expects students to integrate something which the faculty is no longer prepared to integrate themselves." Insofar as interdisciplina rity is, among other things, a skill and an epistemology, students need to be introduced to it at the beginning of their undergraduate career, rather than at the end of it.
I don't want to leave the impression that multidisciplinary majors are hopelessly inferior, only that they may not be as integrative as we would like to believe. Those precious few that do exist at this University have inspired a remarkable enthusias m and commitment in the faculty who teach in them. I would venture to say that at least half the difficulties they face are administrative and bureaucratic. Integrative mechanisms, such as team-teaching, the cross-listing of courses, and the assignment of alternative course prerequisites--to name only three--are often frustrated by a situation in which the cart is firmly before the horse. Administrative structures, which should flow from the curriculum, are in many cases driving it. Indeed, the chief obstruction to integration is not specialization, but rather, departmentalization. The idea that curriculum is a process, rather than a structure, or that departmental and decanal functions should be, above all, facilitative and enabling, rather than bur eaucratic, is highly suspect in an environment where issues of control can border on the obsessive. But rather than do away with departmentalization, we need to reinvent it to serve multi- and interdisciplinary programs, and stop insisting that these pro grams comply with the territorial demands of departments. And while we're reinventing the department, we might also work on the college as a mechanism for actively fostering cross-college interdisciplinarity. From central adminstration, we need leadersh ip and imagination, and we need incentives and support for those who might have alternatives to bureaucratic determinism.
The intrepid few on this campus who struggle to keep a tiny handful of multidisciplinary programs afloat are a testimony to the dawning of an awareness that we should not be in the business of cloning ourselves in the next generation of thinkers--that we are here to provide students with opportunities to think beyond anything we are capable of thinking ourselves. Which brings me to Len Findlay's allusion to the importance of an interdisciplinary pedagogy. Interdisciplinarity is not about changing the calendar; it's about changing the classroom, and that means changing our objectivist conception of knowledge as content, and our perception of students as repositories for it. If our efforts on the curricular level begin and end with the repackaging and relabelling of so-called "bodies" of "objective" knowledge, what we shall be engaged in is a rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. The allusion to death and bodies is intentional. As interdisciplinarian Vincent Kavaloski has noted, if we have no conception of the student as subject--"a creator or recreator of meaning, . . . a subjectivity capable of an ongoing process of inquiry," these Objective "'bodies' of knowledge become inert, lifeless--in a word, corpses--with professors authoritatively performing the appropriate mortuary rites." Kavaloski views the "mortuary model" of education as a profoundly serious threat to the interdisciplinary effort. Here's what he writes:
The tragedy of the contemporary interdisciplinary movement is that despite its high humanistic aspirations, it has not yet fully extricated itself from the mortuary concept of education as the assimilation of bodies of knowledge--however interrelated- -which are realities-in-themselves. It is thus still enmeshed in a lingering objectivist illusion, a philosophical blindness that conceals "the subjectivity which ultimately brings about all world-validity" and is indeed the very ground and condition for the possibility of knowledge. Interdisciplinary education is to that extent blocked from taking full account of the meaning of the human being engaged in the active process of intellectual growth.
Kavaloski insists upon "the necessity for interdisciplinarity to reflect not only on the content of education but also on the process, as it occurs between teachers and students"--and, I would add, among students themselves. Redefining knowledge to inclu de, and even privilege, the processes of enquiry is, I venture to say, what Len Findlay would regard as taking advantage of the set of interdisciplinary opportunities present in every classroom. But how can specialists take advantage of these opportuniti es?
Before I can suggest an answer to that question, I need to address somelll misconceptions about what interdisciplinarians actually do. Among those with a belief in knowledge chiefly as content, half think we must be superscholars--people with the equ ivalent of a doctorate in any number of traditional disciplines. The other half think we are dilettantes--people who increasingly come to know less and less about more and more. We are, of course, neither and maybe a bit of both. More to the point, int erdisciplinarians are by inclination risk-takers. We see nothing to lose and everything to gain by championing what one of my interdisciplinary mentors, Robert Weyant, calls "the importance of being academically incompetent and politically incorrect." As Weyant has written, "it is difficult to see how any change could ever occur in university curricula and academic structures if some people didn't engage in activities for which they were traditionally unqualified." Weyant is referring to the fact that most interdisciplinarians are engaged in academic work for which they are not officially credentialed, and in advance of any established standards governing that work. Such activity is seen as dangerously political by those who view themselves as protec ting academic values, "convinced that any changes in standards and criteria must necessarily involve their lowering." Such was the case against ecostudies (as distinct from environmental science), aboriginal studies, and women's studies. There's still a lingering suspicion of these new knowledge paradigms.
"All knowledge," as the poet bpNichol has written, "is to know the ledge you stand on." To extend that play of meaning, all of us--whether we ac/knowledge it or not--stand on a ledge overlooking the precipice of our own incompetence and incorrectness . That ledge is the dangerous place where real interdisciplinarity begins. What Nichol also means is this: Knowledge is what you know. Everything else is just raw data, unprocessed content. This was brought painfully home to the feminist academics who developed the first women's studies curricula. They began by creating knowledge out of their own experience--as activists for new divorce legislation, equality rights, abortion reform, constitutional change. They also began to investigate the past. Wh at they discovered is that it had all been done before. The massive impact, the enormous centrality of the first wave of the women's movement, the one which, after almost a hundred years of struggle, climaxed in the enfranchising of women across the West ern world had sunk with hardly a trace. A whole tradition of knowledge, a century of feminist process, had somehow been reduced to the content of one sentence in the history books of the 'fifties and 'sixties: "Women got the vote in 1918." Period.
Knowledge is what you know. If you don't know it, it's not knowledge. Interdisciplinarity creates a web of connections, a safety net through which whole traditions of knowledge do not so easily fall into obscurity.
Extending, then, Kavaloski's conception of knowledge as both content and process, I would suggest that the disciplines as we have constructed them are chiefly containment structures, while interdisciplinarity is a process. Students enter our classroo ms as interdisciplinarians by inclination because they were born into a world that is not, for the most part, ordered and structured on the disciplinary model. Moreover, they enter, for example, our Philosophy classroom, having just left the chemistry la b, and hence bring with them their immediate experience of another discipline. They cannot help but hear us within the context of the chemistry experiment they have just written up in their lab notes. How, then, in that context are they recreating the m eaning of what we are telling them about philosophy? How is their subjectivity being formed and re-formed by that ongoing process of enquiry that moves from their experience in the wider world, through the experience of the chem lab, and continues as we deliver our philosophy lecture? Why not just ask them? Make asking them on a regular basis a part of every course, because it's not so much the content of what we teach them, but rather, what they make of it--make out of it--that counts as knowledge. I t is, after all, the only knowledge that will leave our classrooms with them.
I am always amazed at the difficulty many mathematics students have getting through the obligatory first-year English course. It never seems to occur to them to use a little basic arithmetic as a way of initially getting into a poem. It doesn't occu r to them, clearly not because they can't do math, but because they don't know why it is that humans do math, or value so highly the doing of it, or project beauty and elegance on to its logical structures, or ignore what Galileo was really up to when he argued poetically that nature speaks the language of mathematics. To be scrupulously fair to math students, neither do most students in the Arts recognize the importance of mathematics to the art of making a poem. Until we can make some space in our poe try and our mathematics classrooms for the emergence of these interdisciplinary connections, the scholarship of integration will remain not much more than a fine-sounding phrase in the Mission Statement.
I regard the University's decision to establish Women's and Gender Studies as a commitment in principle to the scholarship of integration. As I have suggested, feminist scholars are by definition interdisciplinarians, although many of them who work i n traditional departments don't often get the chance fully to develop their interdisciplinary skills. Often, moving from a traditional discipline into a women's studies program requires a lot of catching up in the scholarly literature. That's because of the special nature of women's studies: it's not merely one program, or even one department among many. Gender is a phenomenon that cuts across all disciplines, bar none. In other words, women's studies is the interdiscipline par excellence. Gender als o cuts across all other interdisciplinary programs in a way that virtually no other interdisciplinary theme does. Moreover, women's studies has its own discourse, its own burgeoning body of scholarship, its own highly sophisticated array of interconnecti ng theories, and its own set of methodologies. Hence, it's also what I can only call a megadiscipline.
Let me elaborate on that by quoting what a group of feminist scholars in the United States has written about the complex integrative role of Women's Studies:
[I]t is one of the objectives of women's studies to integrate the new knowledge [about gender] into the mainstream curriculum, thereby affecting the education of all men and women. . . .
We use the word "integrate" advisedly, rather than the word "add," since one cannot as a rule simply add new perspectives without changing traditional ways of thinking. . . . one cannot simply add the idea that the world is round to the assumption th at it is flat. One must revise the whole conceptual framework. In that sense, women's studies scholars speak of new paradigms and of "transforming" the curriculum.
In other words, in its interdisciplinarity and its multidisciplinarity, women's studies is a megadiscipline that seeks to influence and even transform all other disciplines and interdisciplinary programs. Women's studies is both additive and critical, in that it seeks to support specialization by expanding the knowledge base of the traditional disciplines, even while it functions as a corrective to the faulty definitions of what it is to be human in a culture characterized by gross inequities of race and class as well as gender. Traditional disciplines, whether explicitly or implicitly, rest upon a set of assumptions about human nature, many of which do not take account of gender as a significant defining factor. I think, for example, of homo economicu s, around whom classical economic theory was constructed, and "the man of reason" as he informs philosophical discourse--"reasonable man" as he is known to legal scholars. But equally as important as these masculine constructions of human nature is the p roblem of how, for example, philosophers and economists can speak to each other across the boundaries of their disciplines without first establishing a common frame of reference. By encouraging--even pressuring--individual disciplines to revise and enlar ge their currently competing conceptions of human nature, women's studies seeks to foster alternative, interdisciplinary discourses.
The origins of feminist scholarship and pedagogy are chiefly in the disciplines of English literature and Sociology; from there, feminist analysis quickly caught on in virtually every discipline across the Humanities and the Social Sciences. It's a m isperception that this is the extent of the interdisciplinary influence of women's studies--a misconception that gender considerations are confined to the arts and have nothing to do with science, whose practises are presumably as androgynous as the angel s. Many feminist scholars are familiar with a question which I am regularly asked. It goes like this: "I can understand how gender is relevant to literature and the fine arts, and even to sociology and psychology. But how can women's studies be integr ative with something like physics or chemistry?"
My answer to this question never varies in substance, and when I'm permitted to get it all out, it goes something like this: "The scientific method is not so much a method as an epistemology, a dualistic and hierarchical way of knowing the world whic h, during the scientific revolution, was appropriated by scientists from the ancient philosophers, whose "man of reason" became the "man of science," and whose binary logic makes "woman of reason" ipso facto a contradiction in terms. Feminist scholarshi p gives us an important perspective on the cherished ideology of value-free science and scientific objectivity by recontextualizing it in the historical praxis of Western science. Following tradition, that praxis continues as predominantly white, male, a nd middle class. It determines the questions science asks, what evidence is persuasive in answering them, and what counts as legitimate knowledge. Feminist science recognizes alternative epistemologies of knowledge, ways of knowing that are pluralistic rather than dualistic, equalitarian rather than hierarchical. These alternative ways of knowing are already operative in science, but they are forbidden among the rank and file, and indulged as the quirky idiosyncrasies of a Nobel Prize winner or other s cientific "genius." The recruiting of more women in science, especially women who are feminists, can broaden and diversify scientific culture and, in the process, strengthen the relative objectivity of its knowledge products--a proposition which should b e of interest to even the most orthodox traditionalists. That, in brief, is how women's studies integrates the sciences, making them more interdisciplinary with each other, and with the arts."
The response to that answer never varies; it goes like this: "Oh, but that's not science; that's philosophy, that's sociology, that's history." End of discussion. Abrupt change of subject.
Of course, it's not women's studies that's being resisted in that confident dismissal. What's really being resisted is interdisciplinarity itself. The feminist perspective in science--or any other currently marginalized perspective--will not be wide ly acknowledged until science fully recovers from its fear of contamination by what are implicitly regarded as the lower orders of knowledge. Here's how Vincent Kavaloski addresses science's objection to interdisciplinarity:
This objection is underlain by a narrow conception of science as mere technical intelligence and problem-solving expertise stripped of its philosophical, historical, social, and ethical meaning. Such an interpretation of science, today the prevailing one, is directed toward a blind mastery of the world without questioning ends. It is indeed intimately tied to that dangerous fragmentation of human knowledge that interdisciplinarity seeks to challenge.
Science and mathematics are the only disciplines largely exempt from having to take responsibility for their own history, their own philosophy, and their own sociology. As a concession to the ideology of liberal education, students in the sciences may, i f they choose, study the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, but they will study it not in science departments, but rather, in Faculties of Arts, where specialists there shoulder the burden on behalf of their colleagues in the sciences. Moreov er, students are expected to leave all that value-laden knowledge behind when they enter the value-free, gender-free laboratories and classrooms of so-called "pure" science, where interdisciplinarity tends not to go beyond the bounds of such configuration s as biochemistry and geophysics. If we can recognize that what's being rejected as "merely" philosophy, sociology, and history is, in actual fact, the science of science, then we will have no more need for a myth of scientific purity.
The alienation of the arts and the sciences was problematized at least as long ago as 1959, when C.P. Snow presented his "two cultures" theory of education. Indeed, Snow may be seen as one of the initiators of the current interdisciplinary movement. However, back then, most of the Western world at large was still relatively confident that there was only one true story of reality, and that only science could properly interpret it. The arts, on the other hand--and most especially the messy humanities --were more often regarded as standing upon the shifting sands of multiplicity and relativity, ambiguity and paradox, and hence were obliged to maintain their respectful distance, slightly lower than the sciences on the hierarchy of disciplines.
But increasingly, scholars--many scientists among them--are learning that the shifting realities acknowledged by the arts are the product of an empowering reflexivity, and it's that empowerment which science stands to gain through interdisciplinarity. Here, in the words of a chemist and literary scholar, is a celebration of reflexivity:
It's empowering because it is about positionality. Somehow the idea got started, sometime in the seventeenth century [when the social practise of science was modernized], that we know the world because we are separated from it. Objectivism led to som e scientific advances but also to a profound alienation about which many writers and philosophers have meditated. What if we started from the opposite premise that we know the world because we are connected to it? Then to discover that one's views have been shaped in conscious and unconscious ways by one's experiences, culture, history, and traditions (including disciplinary traditions) is to discover that one has a position from which to interact with the world. . . .
The result is a much less alienated vision of the world, and also a truer vision of the world, since it acknowledges that positionality is always already affecting the picture we see. It surely affects fundamental questions about the nature of the sc ientific enterprise as "OBjective" and the literary enterprise as "SUBjective," providing a very powerful common ground from which to think literature and science together.
Literature and science together--an unthinkable proposition to many. It evokes intimations of science fiction, if only as a metaphor for interdisciplinarity across the arts and sciences. Science fiction, that debased form of literary production, despise d by many traditional literary critics as unworthy of scholarly notice, and equally vilified by many scientists as an insult to scientific truth. The term "science fiction" raises the spectre of Isaac Azimov, a good scientist but a lousy novelist--and Ur sula LeGuin, a superb novelist but a scientific dilettante. Yet I would venture to say that Azimov knew more about literature than the vast majority of the general population, while LeGuin knows far more about science than the mass of scientific illitera tes among us. Would that we were all such promising interdisciplinarians!
The integration of the arts and the sciences exists not merely on the metaphorical level, in such configurations as science fiction; it also exists on the rhetorical level, largely as a corrective to mutual misperceptions between scientists and non-sc ientists. The level upon which such integration does not yet exist in any really meaningful way is the curricular. To be specific, much has been written about the pressure on science to clean up its image--undo the popular caricature of scientists as th e prima donnas of knowledge who have sacrificed their humanity and our planet to the greedy god of progress. Scientists have countered by wisely insisting upon the necessity of all society to become scientifically literate. Yet in our institutions of le arning, we are not prepared to admit into our most important science programs anyone but science's elect. Nor have we shown more than a token interest in actively encouraging our future scientists to contextualize their everyday practises in the discours es of social responsibility and ecological ethics. A close reading of our University calendar reveals some genuine interest in these crucial issues, and I find that an exciting and encouraging beginning. But only by creating a truly interdisciplinary sp ace between the arts and the sciences can we hope to address social and scientific concerns together, and cultivate in future generations an interconnected vision of knowledge, an understanding of knowledge as reverence for life, rather than mastery over it. Hence we need to regard the current crisis in our University, and in knowledge generally, as an opportunity, rather than a punishment. Nothing less than the twenty-first century is at stake.
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