Comments on: Department of Everything Studies (Expressive Culture Division)

By: Sdorn

Sdorn — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:59:08 +0000

This is the most thoughtful and persuasive argument for transdisciplinarity I've seen. I disagree, but that's not because I disagree with the fundamental argument you're making about the constructed nature of disciplines. It just took me six weeks to carve out enough time to explain where and how and why I disagree in the institutional regards. Incidentally, what happens if the cognitive bits you're inviting into the Department of Everything Studies implies that disciplinarity matters to learning?

By: dave mazella

dave mazella — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:45:53 +0000

Excellent post, Tim. I had some thoughts about this, and posted about it at my 18th century studies blog, The Long Eighteenth, here:

http://long18th.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/autobiography-travel-writing-and-everything-studies/

Best wishes,

By: William Benzon

William Benzon — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 09:49:15 +0000

…only by choosing some constraints can you produce knowledge.

Because knowledge is found in patterns of detail. Constraints narrow the field so that you can accumulate a critical mass of detail. At the same time we need the freedom of multiply shifting conceptual lenses because different lenses pick out different kinds of detail and thus reveal different patterns.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 03:13:52 +0000

I think the key is emphasizing that these choices are heuristic rather than political or philosophical or theoretical. E.g., study Bugs Bunny in a particular way because only by choosing some constraints can you produce knowledge. Not study Bugs Bunny in a particular way because that’s a dogmatic or even empirical necessity for studying Bugs Bunny.

And if these choices are heuristic, that means they’re particular to the moment of study–in the field in general, yes, there might be animation aesthetics, the industry of Latin American music, and cultural representations in Russian novels. You wouldn’t expect students to know or study that all, but neither would you want them (or their professors) to make a final statement that excludes one or the other of those from the Everything Studies Department for some principled or theoretical reason.

By: Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 03:06:42 +0000

Tim – interesting ideas, and I must say that I generally find my own inter-disciplines of Media Studies and American Studies fairly invested in most of these questions. Here’s the question – is it preferable to put a boundary on the field of inquiry, such as specific object of study (mass media) or national culture (American), or just let it truly be the study of all possible cultural forms & sites & contexts? I’d be a bit leery to build a curriculum for a major in Everything Studies without it simply being a smattering of miscellany.

One key advantage of bounding the object of study is that it forces students to think about the same type of cultural practice using different lenses – studying Bugs Bunny in terms of industrial history vs. cultural representations vs. formal craft. Otherwise, students might study animation aesthetics, the industry of Latin American music, cultural representations in Russian novels, etc. – how could that be presented as coherent to students? Can you just present a range of methods without some sense of a shared object of analysis?

By: Gavin Weaire

Gavin Weaire — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 13:55:06 +0000

It sounds way more scary when you don’t have tenure

Seriously, though, I do think that disciplines provide useful heuristic points of reference for making such judgements.

(Not that they save us from their ultimate subjectivity or anything like that. We absolutely should be modest about this. Disciplinary histories are useful tools, as you say. They’re not religions.)

I’m married to a musicologist, and I know that, while there are some types of musicological work I can appreciate, there are others that I just can’t – I simply don’t have the training.

I think that disciplinarization and departmentalization are also in their way forces for pluralism in the academy – they give a measure of institutional protection to the distinctiveness of smaller, quirkier areas like religious studies and classics, which might otherwise get trampled by the 800-pound ubergorillas of English and History.

(Classics also is a field which offers a fair amount of what you want. Anything goes within our chronological and geographical range, and the reception of same outside that. At least in principle, and to some extent in practice. It’s what attracted me to the field, in fact.)

I can see that, if one started from scratch, it would make sense for classics to be a interdisciplinary program, scattered across a number of departments. Like medieval studies tends to be. I’m selfishly glad we’re not.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 13:13:03 +0000

Bill, I definitely think of you as a model of this kind of polydisciplinary study of culture.

When I say smattering, the only thing I want to avoid is inviting in the kind of cognitivism that is aggressively dismissive or wildly reductive about hermeneutics, of which I think there is sadly more than a little. That and bad evo-psych of which I also think there is unfortunately quite a lot of. But I’m 100% in agreement that we need a lot more attention to mind, brain, vision, embodiment (in the natural science sense, not the neo-Foucauldian sense), and so on when we study culture.

I like that course sketch.

By: William Benzon

William Benzon — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:40:38 +0000

I've been doing that sort of cultural studies for the last 30 years and, yes, we need it. And we need a little more than a "smattering" of well, cognitive science. If you're going to think seriously about culture in the 21st century you need to know something about the mind and brain. Freud, psychoanalysis, and philosophy don't cut it anymore. The cognitive and neurosciences don't really cut it, not just yet. Perhaps they need some well-informed pressure from humanists who've read beyond the popularizations. In any event, my response to the Bauerlein discussion was to sketch out a graduate course in the theory of literature (which is not the same thing as literary theory) moves from texts to groups to history in which I consider to be an intellectually contempory fashion. It doesn't cover all the disciplinary and conceptual bases (it wasn't designed to do that), but it's plenty broad enough for a single semester. Some of the cognitive science issues get talked about in the comments. You might also check out Chris's discussion of Extended Cognition and Literary Criticism at Mixing Memory.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 23:06:39 +0000

I agree that’s not easy, Gavin. At the same time, it’s what we already do (or claim to do) now: we talk about the quality of mind or how articulate a potential collegue is when we’re doing searches, we appraise some of the same when we’re looking at grad students, we talk about how smart an article is, and on occasion, we’re not just egotistically saying, “Because this person agrees with me”. Now it can be hard to say what makes someone smart or interesting in this sense, but we wouldn’t be any worse off if we abandoned the idea that a narrow commitment to a particular disciplinary ideology would somehow save us from such horribly subjective judgements.

Jerry, religion departments do seem to have that nice mix of people who do ethnography, sociology, hermeneutics, etcetera. A good model, I agree.

By: Jerry White

Jerry White — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:35:15 +0000

It seems to me that a lot of what goes on in language departments, and in Religious Studies, is very close to what you’re identifying here. In many religion programmes (ours at Alberta, anyway) you would find some people both poring over the Hebrew bible and others trying to figure out the formal roots and contemporary reception of Egyptian film melodrama. Something similar goes on in our French department, where some folks pore over SONG OF ROLAND, some do quasi-statistical analysis to demonstrate that LE MONDE really is a tool of neo-colonialism, and some talk about really bad Quebec films like the LES BOYS (yes, yes, the the) series in terms of subaltern Francophone masculinity or whatever. I genuinely think that if English started to model itself more after language departments it would lead to a lot less hand-wringing and a lot more interesting, and I daresay disciplinarily coherent, research. I suppose that’s not so easy in the Anglophone world, but still, I don’t get the sense that colleagues in French programmes at Francophone universities have quite the same identity crisis.