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Creative Co-Dependents:
Science, the Arts and the Humanities Every culture organizes its norms and its
intellectual and imaginative activities. That is what makes a culture a
culture. These systems and schemes change over time. Driven by external and
internal forces, they evolve. Today, in university culture, evolution has
brought us three great divisions: the arts (be they visual, performing,
literary or media); the professional schools and their work; and the arts and
sciences. The arts and sciences themselves consist of three divisions: the
humanities, the social sciences and the sciences. My cataloguing is, of
course, too neat and tidy. These fields are in great internal flux. Moreover,
they overlap and interact, a messy process we call interdisciplinarity. To
add to the confusion, within the arts and sciences, various disciplines slide
and shift around. For some, the arts and sciences are synonymous with the
liberal arts. For others, only the humanities and the softer social sciences
are the liberal arts. For some, history sits squarely in the humanities. For
others, it has straightened up and joined the social sciences. For some,
psychology is a social science. For others, it too has straightened up and
joined the sciences. For some, anthropology rests on four corners. For
others, cultural and physical anthropology should bid farewell to each other.
I could go on and on with my taxonomy.
Differences and distinctions matter enormously. Indeed, I fear any effort to
reduce life's many pluralisms and to smoosh everything together under one
overarching law, or under one monolithic identity. However, my purpose is to
praise the co-dependency of these fields of activity, a co-dependency that
will persist no matter how these fields evolve. You may find co-dependency a
strange term of praise. Co-dependency can mean interlocking weaknesses, the
relationship between the sadist and the masochist, or the relationship
between the alcoholic and the enabler. However, co-dependency can have the
far more affirmative meaning of a relationship among equals who recognize
that they have common interests as well as complementary strengths and who
know their individual well-being depends upon the well-being of the others. Before going any further, let me confess
that my original approach to this brief exploration of co-dependency
consisted of two parts: the argument and the feeling about the argument. In
the last few weeks, I have modified both elements. The shifts in the argument
are the more minor. I was to say that the arts, the humanities and the
sciences were co-dependents that need each other for fresh insights, methods
and tools. I am now adding the social sciences to this group. The arts, the
humanities, the social sciences and the sciences are co-dependents. Whether
they admit it or not, and often they don't, they need to rely on each other.
Moreover, I am no longer going to say only “arts,” “humanities,” “social
sciences,” and “sciences.” I will also talk about artists, humanists, social
scientists and scientists. I am supplementing the language of impersonal
fields with the language of human agency and action. My primary reason for
doing so is to remind us of a simple truth. Although in complex ways, people
create fields, their structures, their networks and their modus operandi.
People strengthen fields over time. Alternatively, people allow fields to
atrophy and decay. People are responsible for fields. Fields are not
responsible for people. Similarly, a farmer, given the right tools and
security, is responsible for the proper husbandry of her or his fields. The
acreage is not responsible for the farmer. To speak only of fields is to run
away from the human matrix and ethical consequences of our creativity. The shifts in my feelings are the more
significant. I was going to be light-hearted and a trifle droll, but like
many of us, I have experienced a change of mood since September 11. I am much
more impatient with the neuroses of my four co-dependents that impede
co-dependency---with their seemingly endless self-absorption and anxieties
and vanities and bouts of self-definition. Even interdisciplinarians, and I
count myself among them, are self-absorbed and anxious and vain and prone to
bouts of self-definition. When I write a piece for a women's studies journal,
or when I team-teach my course in law and literature, am I doing
interdisciplinary work? Or multidisciplinary work? Or transdisciplinary work?
Interdisciplinarians, of course, are hugely dependent, since they need all
the disciplines to be there to be transcended if they, the
interdisciplinarians, are to transcend disciplinary borders. My impatience,
even irritation, has one great source. I believe that our survival depends on
artists, humanists, social scientists and scientists collaborating
creatively. By “our survival” I partly mean the
modern university. Numerous though they are, huge though they can be, rich
though some of them are, universities can be vulnerable institutions in terms
of financial support and social acclaim. People within them need to
understand and defend each other. People within them also need to understand
and defend the whole. For what should these historic and precious
institutions do? They simultaneously make discoveries and cut paths back into
our past. They provide pictures of reality and models of interpretation. They
seek to heal our wounds and generate the growth of ideas, policies and the
built environment. At their best, they are primary public sites of civility
and freedom. Although it is the custodian and steward of the analytical and
the true, the university as a whole -- not just the arts -- shows the
imagination in action. Or, in corporate parlance, universities should
permanently think outside that poor, old, much-maligned box. I don't know
what we would say if we did not have that box to kick around. Alfred North
Whitehead, the philosopher, thought that the great function of universities
was to animate the imagination. He declares flatly: Imagination is not to be divorced
from facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the
general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an
intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with
these principles. It enables men (sic) to construct an intellectual vision of
a new world, and it preserves the zest of life by the suggestion of
satisfying purposes. (Whitehead, p. 93) Armed with these values and ambitions,
the university trains the next generation of scholars, researchers,
professionals and citizens. Despite these virtuous activities, the
university often meets with social suspicion or indifference. The knowledge
it generates may seem notoriously arcane, useless, frivolous, worthy of
nothing but the Golden Fleece award that Senator William Proxmire once
invented. However, when trouble comes, and it always does, the knowledge that
has seemed arcane becomes essential. Scholarship about Afghanistan, to give
but one example, no longer seems so peripheral to American officials and
citizens. I often think that universities are like gas stations. Drivers
speed and zoom past them cavalierly, but then, a driver suddenly needs gas or
oil or spare parts, and heads straight for the station. Society likes the
credentials the university offers, but speeds past us--until it has to know
something unexpectedly. Happily, there we are, with our robes and funny hats,
fussing around with our footnotes and eager to share our suddenly useful
knowledge. Even more importantly, by “our survival”
I mean life itself. We cannot comprehend, nurture or enhance life unless we
bring a number of perspectives to bear upon its movements and complexities,
its ranges and its matters. These perspectives should come from any or all of
us. Our constructed sense of life must be as rich and thick and hybrid and
multiplicitous as life itself. Let me offer one stark, contemporary example:
a man planning a major act of bioterrorism. We won't get him -- in all
meanings of that word – if all that we do is to declare war and have law
enforcement target him. We also need the artist to imagine him; the humanist
to hear his own words and translate his languages, and understand his history
and religion; the social scientist to map his politics, ethnography and
psychology; and the scientist to decipher what his weapon is and how to
disarm it. Only with this collaboration will we begin to be able to
understand him, and only if we understand him can we really stop him and the
next generation of terrorists he might be recruiting. Given how essential it is for us to act
as co-dependents, why are we so reluctant to practice co-dependency? One
major reason is familiar: our structures and cult of specialization. To be
sure, as our life becomes more and more complex and differentiated,
specialization is inevitable. To be sure, too, specialization has much to be
said for it. It does focus thought. It does force us to push further and further
into a question. Encouraging depth, it discourages shallowness and
superficiality -- a constant risk of interdisciplinarity. Whenever I am
really sick, I want a specialist who has seen hundreds if not thousands of
cases like mine. However, specialization does breed rigid and isolated
departmental structures, the “silos” of contemporary jargon about advanced
inquiry. These isolated departments then fear and disdain The Other,
departments in another field or budgetary unit. Specialization also nurtures a
fetishistic attachment to one subject, activity or method. Francis Bacon, a
founder of modern scientific thought, was aware of these dangers. In Novum
Organum in 1620, he sought to reconstruct the sciences. The book is also
a profound analysis of the ways in which the mind can go wrong. Of
specialization, he writes: Men become attached to
certain particular sciences and speculations, either because they fancy
themselves the authors and inventors thereof, or because they have bestowed
the greatest pains upon them and become most habituated to them. But men of
this kind, if they betake themselves to philosophy and contemplations of a
general character, distort and color them in obedience to their former
fancies; a thing especially to be noted in Aristotle, who made his natural
philosophy a mere bondservant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious
and well nigh useless. (Bacon, p. 39) The cult of specialization mars every
field. Each field also has its own defences against and resistance to a
mature co-dependency. The field I know best is the humanities. They are among
my life's passions, but they are a problem.[1] To their overwhelming credit, since the 1960s,
humanists have become increasingly diverse – socially and intellectually. In
part because of their increasing social diversity, they have been
intellectually active, often prodigiously so. Not only have opened up
individual disciplines. Not only have they created new field after new field.
They have often been ardently interdisciplinary. I think, for example, of
women's studies or of African-American studies. Humanists have also renewed
the most searching of questions, especially about the relations between
objectivity and interpretation, and about the powers of discourse and
rhetoric. The work they do is necessary for our grasp of the past, our sense
of form and beauty, our theories of value, and our interpretations and
representations of the human world. One shocking, contemporary example of
where we need a humanist's insights. A columnist for the Hamas weekly Al-Risala,
based in Gaza, writes open letters to people, ideas and events. In November,
he wrote No. 163, “To Anthrax.” It begins, “Oh Anthrax, despite your
wretchedness, you have sown horror in the heart of the lady of arrogance, of
tyranny, of boastfulness! Your gentle touch has made the US's life rough and
pointless…” The “Letter” then continues: You have entered the
most fortified of places…the White House…and they left it like horrified
mice….The Pentagon was a monster before you entered its corridors…And behold,
it now transpires that its men are of paper….Nevertheless, you have found
your way to only eight American breasts so far….May you continue to advanced,
to permeate, and to spread.” (Al-Subh, 1) Perhaps a reasonable person would throw
away this piece of trash, but I would first call on a humanist to translate
it from Arabic into English. Then the humanist would tell me why might this
be effective rhetoric and propaganda. Why is anthrax being personified as a
seducer, at once wretched, powerful and gentle? Why is a disease being
sexualized in this fashion? And why is the reviled enemy represented as a
woman? Is this the rhetorical act of ultimate contempt, to feminize the
enemy? If so, what does that say about the cultural forces for which the
letter writer speaks? Despite the valuable developments in the
intellectual work of humanists, they are less than mighty presences in higher
education. This was not always the case. The classical liberal arts were
central to their society. They provided the training, largely in rhetoric,
that free men were thought to need if they were to develop morally and to
grow into their civic role. Significantly, and sadly, only free men were to
benefit from the liberal arts. However, in the last century, even though
higher education has expanded, the figure of the humanist has shrunk. A
common third person identity of humanists -- that is, what people think of
them -- is that humanists are nice enough, and valuable enough, but not
really all that important. On some campuses, they belong to “service
departments,” the housekeeping staff of the curriculum. This diminution in
the United States leads to a common feminization of both humanists and
artists--despite the macho swaggers of Ernest Hemingway and Jackson Pollock.
The arts and humanities are women's work, or, at best, a gentleman's work.
Far more important are the men and the tough-minded women in business, the
professions and in the sciences. These attitudes are embodied in our
practices everywhere. I think, for example, of the decline in baccalaureate
degrees in the humanities, or of the comparative funding of the National
Science Foundation and of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
National Endowment for the Arts, which were in part modeled on NSF. Another
way to measure the place of the humanities is to walk or ride around the
campus of a research university. You will note, of course, the size and glitz
of the non-academic buildings, the stadiums and gymnasiums and student
centers. Youth and the alumni must have their pleasures. Of the academic
buildings, you will see huge medical centers, with a school and laboratories
and a teaching hospital. You may also pass by schools of dentistry, pharmacy
and nursing. The other professions -- law, engineering, public
administration, education -- will each have their edifices. In some
universities so will communications and library science. Social work will no
doubt have its home. Business will be housed handsomely. It does, after all,
teach 20 percent of the undergraduate majors in the United States. The
performing and visual arts will have a building, exhibition spaces and
theatres. And then you will search for the arts and sciences. You will see a
library, now wired and digitized. In part because of the federal support of
scientific research since 1945 and the end of World War II, you will usually
find that science has its spaces, but then you will pause before the
humanities and social sciences, often in older buildings, even the original
buildings on the campus, frequently huddled together, and more apt to be
brick than marble. As a consequence, the first-person
identity of humanists -- that is, what humanists think of themselves -- is
often understandably riddled with a sense of loss, of being beleaguered,
anxious about the future, aware that low enrollments in the humanities will
affect faculty hiring. Some respond stoically. Some generate smart strategies
of survival. Others, however, are given to rhetorical outbursts, quarrelsome
amongst themselves, and, no matter what their ideology, even self-pitying.
Robert Weisbuch, now the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation, once served a term as the interim graduate dean at the University
of Michigan. He has written that when the scientists came to his office, he
reached for his checkbook. When the humanists arrived, he handed out Kleenex.
Given this situation, it was perhaps
inevitable that many humanists would be drawn to a particular cluster of
theories that they have then adapted and developed. These theories have many
sources: Marx, Foucault, the Birmingham School of Culture Studies, women's
studies and gender studies, various studies of race and ethnicity and
post-colonial studies. Whatever the sources, this cluster of ideas has
postulated that the heart of culture and society is a set of power relations,
hierarchies of the powerful and powerless, dominant and subordinate. The
humanities are on the short end of the stick of power, among the powerless
and subordinate. They seem to have internalized their ideas. Unfortunately,
they lack the psychic support that modern artists have, the buoyant,
historically burnished and consoling belief that they are members of a
subversive avant-garde, cultural and moral visionaries, pioneers who will do
their work and wait for society to catch up to them. To be sure, the humanist
has a rhetorical equivalent, “My obligation is to tell truth to power,” but
humanists rarely possess the glamour and cachet of artists, especially in
more urbane and sophisticated circles. When humanists fit my admittedly
oversimplified psychological profile, they cannot be confident, persuasive
spokespersons for the humanities, an inability that intensifies their
marginality for the public. They cannot, for example, winningly argue that
the humanities are a splendid vehicle of life-long learning. This is a pity,
because the vehicle of life-long learning will carry the humanities far. Nor
can humanists happily, consistently connect the academic humanities with all
the humanistic activity outside of the academy -- with the museums and
historical societies, the programs and Web sites of public broadcasting, the
African-American reading groups and the Trollope societies. The academic humanists,
with some exceptions, remain intellectually far-flung but institutionally
insular. Not surprisingly, many humanists have
different feelings about different fields. Affinities exist between the arts
and the humanities, although they follow different rules for what good work
is. In great part because of the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences,
humanities feel comfortable with many anthropologists and sociologists.
However, they feel resentful towards “the harder” about social scientists,
especially economists, and towards scientists. Humanists believe that
economists and scientists have power, prestige and resources, and they do
not. Accompanying these feelings and beliefs can be a paltry knowledge of
what scientists actually do. Although we humanists pride ourselves on being
readers of texts, many of us do not know how to read contemporary scientific
papers, let alone know how do to science. We could not check out the recent
proof of Fermat's last theorem. I believe that more scientists practice the
humanities than humanists practice science. This lack of professional
scientific training shows in the thinness of some (but by no means all) of
the work done under the rubric of “science studies.” Some of us also fear what science and
technology have created and are creating. Our text is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
written in 1817 by a 19-year old woman, the daughter of a radical feminist,
the wife of a radical poet, conversant with the scientific theories and
interests of her time. Mary Shelley is, in brief, an artist who provides
humanists with materials about scientists. Victor Frankenstein is a gifted
scientist who wishes both to discover the causes of life and to create new
life. He succeeds, but he then finds the man he has manufactured monstrous,
and runs away from him. Alone, despised, without a name, Frankenstein's
creation goes on a rampage of arson and murder. Frankenstein's sin is
two-fold: his hubris in imitating God and creating life, and his
heartlessness and cruelty in refusing to nurture and educate and love his new
Adam. However, humanists' responses to
scientists are ambivalent rather than wholly resentful and fearful.[2]
And fortunately, some humanists and scientists, like some artists and
scientists, are collaboratively building bridges among the fields. Some
talented polymaths among us even embody these patterns in their individual
lives. They follow the traditions of Aristotle, Da Vinci, Kant, Goethe or
George Eliot, a novelist who explored science, medicine, history, languages
and religion. Obviously, all but the most resolutely old-fashioned humanists
use the new technologies that modern science and engineering have invented.
We send e-mails complaining about administrators who don't understand the
humanities. Intellectually, the landscape holds comparisons of science and
literature, and of music and mathematics. We have histories of science and
technology. Cultural studies is trekking through the narratives of
speculative and science fiction, be they in literature, film or the media.
Medical anthropologists are producing ethnographies of the use of the new
reproductive technologies. The descendents of Mary Shelley are exploring the
moral consequences of scientific work from the invention of nuclear weapons
to the cultivation of stem cells. Perhaps most profoundly, humanists are
asking if scientific creativity is not changing the very definition of being
human. The borders between man and machine, especially between mind and
computer, are no longer so sharply demarcated. Nor are the borders between
the human and other species. How purely human am I if I have a pig valve
implanted in my once-failing heart? Happily, ambivalence is a better platform
on which to build co-dependency than resentment and fear. Partial bridges
among the fields are better than none. With ambivalence and partial bridges
as our starting points, how can we pursue co-dependency? One place is the
reform of graduate education. If graduate students do not have or learn
co-dependent temperaments and practices, when and where will they? They are,
after all, to be the next generation of scholars, researchers, artists and
teachers --whether they have academic or other careers. But the organization
of graduate education, with its stress on individual programs and mentors, mitigates
against co-dependency. It fosters both academic specialization and social
atomization, the clustering of lectures, seminars, brown bag lunches and
holiday parties within the program. Programs that demand that graduate
students work in the field or on papers as individuals -- rather than as
teams in the field or in labs – split the social atom and produce even more
isolation. One of the appeals of graduate assistant unionization is its
promise of solidarity across a graduate school or university. Co-dependent temperament and practices
are nothing new. They have long characterized esteemed, productive and
beloved scholars. A co-dependent is collaborative, willing to exchange
insights and ideas, even at the risk of making a damn fool of yourself. A co-dependent
is connective, able to function as a part of various networks of information.
She or he prizes curiosity, wondering what might be around the corner, or
between the lines or in the folds of the cosmos. Crucially, a co-dependent is
comparative, able to see similarities without wanting all phenomena to
converge, and equally able to see dissimilarities without wanting all
phenomena to fall away in showers in fragments. Finally, a co-dependent in
temperament and practice is cosmopolitan, a citizen of a homeland and of the
ever-expanding, head-banging universe of ideas. My most recent ways of nurturing such
collaborative, connective, curious, comparative and cosmopolitan temperaments
and practices may seem like a slender vessel for such ambitions. Last year,
with the support of two private donors, my graduate school constructed a
small seedbed, a group of 10 students that was drawn from across the
university and from a variety of disciplines. They study epidemiology,
history, comparative literature, economics, music, neurosciences, public
policy and education. They are known, not very imaginatively, as the Graduate
Forum. They meet at least once a month, and their deliberations are to be
summarized on their Web site. The Forum has two faculty members who serve as
academic facilitators: one is a chemist who takes her graduate students to
the theatre at least twice a year; the second took his graduate degrees in
interdisciplinary fields and studies violence in the media. The purpose of
these deliberations is deceptively simple. They are to discuss their work
with each other, baring the fundamental assumptions and methods behind it and
justifying its importance. Their first evaluations are now in, and this is
what the graduate students praised: the chance to make friends with different
ideas, the new clarity about their own work they achieved by having to
explain its assumptions to peers and by comparing these assumptions to those
that governed their peers. What they wanted next, they said, was a common
project, something they could do together, an opportunity to engage in
inquiries that might become more than the sum of their parts. I am still searching for support for a
second ambition: to experiment with general education for graduate education.
General education has been construed as an element of the undergraduate
curriculum, and I can hear howls of protest about its possible introduction
to the graduate curriculum now from graduate faculty and students now.
Graduate education means specialization, they will cry. We want to get on
with our specialized research. We don't want to waste time on subjects
outside of our field. These howls, I suggest, are symptoms of the illness
that general education for graduate education is meant to ameliorate. Lurking behind the explicit
justifications of general education in undergraduate education in the United
States is, I believe, an unconscious nostalgia for the role of the liberal
arts in the medieval university. There were set books. Eventually, there was
in scholasticism a set methodology. The faculty of arts was the only gateway
to the professional schools of theology, law and medicine. However, the
explicit justifications of general education respond not to the pull of
medieval university but to the push of the burgeoning, growing modern
American one. General education was to cultivate American democratic values
and to provide a common educational experience to cohorts of very diverse
students chosen, not for their common social background, but for their
abilities. Its philosophy was succinctly expressed by James Bryant Conant
when he was the president of Harvard and a moving force behind the 1945
Harvard report on general education, colloquially and commonly known as the
Red Book. The introduction to the Harvard report emphasizes the influence of
historical events on educational change. “The war,” it declares, “has
precipitated a veritable downpour of books and articles dealing with
education…There is hardly a university or college in the country which has
not had a committee at work in these war years considering basic educational
questions and making plans for drastic revamping of one or more curricula.”
(President and Fellows of Harvard College, p. v) A basic assertion is that education is
fundamental to a free society. One reason why lies in the connection, which
Conant makes in his continuation of Enlightenment traditions, between
cognitive powers and the will. You must be able to make choices freely, but
you cannot make choices freely unless you have the complete truth about the
nature of these choices, or as much truth as you can derive, muster and
accumulate. Freedom is regulating one's life according to truth. (p. 105) If
education teaches us to balance the freedom to choose and the capacity to
make disciplined choices, it also teaches the young to balance
self-fulfillment and citizenship, active membership in shared, democratic
public sphere. The function of education is to help young persons fulfill
whatever unique functions in life are theirs to fulfill, and to “fit them so
far as it can for those common spheres which, as citizens and heirs of a
joint culture, they will share with others.” (p. 4) The assumptions behind general education
for graduate education should include the vital importance of the linkage between
cognitive powers and the will, between thought and the exercise of freedom.
However, general education for graduate education would focus more tightly on
the history of inquiry itself, the history of its institutions and on the
conditions that make the most creative of inquiries possible. If general
education for undergraduate education builds intellectual and social capital,
general education for graduate education explores the conditions for the
production and distribution of the most interesting intellectual capital.
Surely, these conditions include the ability to oscillate between breadth and
depth, between an ability to engage with many ideas but to understand one or
more of them fully. Surely, too, these conditions include the capacity to make
connections among activities. What, for example, are the relations between
20th-century theories of gravity and that greatest of post-modern American
epics, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon? Today, understanding how
inquiry best works would also entail the exploration of academic and
intellectual freedom. A task of therapists is to cut the bonds
that tie neurotic co-dependents. The cultural task now is the opposite: to
weave bonds that tie emancipated but mutually respectful artists, humanists,
social scientists and scientists. A straw in the wind: In the terrible autumn
of 2001 in New York City, five murals went on display at Polytechnic
University in Brooklyn. They were large charcoal drawings, nine feet high and
six feet wide. The artist was an American muralist, Mordeca Glassner, whose
purpose was to represent the unity of the sciences and the humanities. He had
learned about science and technology by reading in the New York Public
Library. Done between 1929 and 1930, they had been crated up for decades
until the muralist's family brought them to the attention of the president of
Brooklyn Polytechnic, David Chang. He examined them in the company of the
family and a humanistic scholar. He wants the murals in his university to
tell students to place their work in a larger context. “Our students,” he
says, “whether they're engineers, computer scientists, or chemists, come to
us totally focussed on their own field…Students can be too one-dimensional.
We want them to think about how their work fits into society as a whole. I'm
hoping,” he added, “these art works will help remind them of that.”
(Seabrook, p. 26) This article first appeared in the Sigma Xi Forum, Science,
The Arts and The Humanities: Connections and Collisions, held
November 8-9, 2001, Raleigh, North Carolina.
A much shorter version of this piece was published as “General
Education for Graduate Education”, Chronicle
of Higher Education, 1st November, 2002. |
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