COLUMN: The right discipline for a question

From Carl Seaquist's, "Ahann Ahim," Fall '97 From Carl Seaquist's, "Ahann Ahim," Fall '97Look at the Arts and Sciences' Academic Bulletin and you get a certain view of the University: departments that vary in size enormously are laid out in alphabetical order, each taking up a single line on the page. It gives a certain egalitarian feel to the University. Since much business in the University is organized on the basis of departments, we tend to think of knowledge as being partitioned along the same lines. But the distinction between many departments is based on historical happenstance rather than principled reasons. If we were to make a list of all the courses currently offered at the University and distribute them into departments based on similarities and differences between the courses, we would end up with a very different grouping of departments than we currently have. And yet departmental organization has wide implications for the educational mission of the University. If departments are laid out so arbitrarily, does this mean the way we connect knowledge from different areas is arranged in equally arbitrary ways? And is this a bad thing? The answer is, in some ways at least, yes. Or rather, we fail to connect knowledge from different areas because of these divides. And more importantly, some subjects never get studied at all because they fall through the cracks between disciplines. Now, the first of these claims will surprise nobody. This is why the University has a culture that encourages interdisciplinary study. More often than not, hybrid disciplines end up being created, and these are used to bridge the gap between fields. Examples familiar to us at Penn include Cognitive Science, the Biological Basis of Behavior, and the History and Sociology of Science. But even here, the tendency is to create new fields of study, to expand in one way or another the number of departments and the number of specializations available to us as we try to classify our knowledge of the world. This is useful, but such an approach does not answer the second of my claims -- that many types of inquiry fall through the cracks. Disciplinary fields are required to establish standards as to what constitutes proper scholarship in order to remain viable social entities. And these standards tend to approach the norm of practice within the field on one hand, and aim for some particular ideal at one extreme end of the discipline on the other. If the field does not validate average work within its field, it will lack authority because it will not be able to coordinate a community. If it does not identify a largely unattainable goal of scholarship, however, it will not have standards by which to compare different practitioners, and thus will lack the authority to make judgments within the boundaries. For the scholar within a given field, all this means that many topics cannot, as a practical matter, be studied within the University. This will come as no shock to those who study gender, race, radical politics, etc. --- all those currently hot areas that until recently were largely kept out of mainstream scholarship. But the issue is not just that certain topics are intentionally kept outside of public discussion as a result of fear, repression or other reasons. As a practical matter, certain sorts of questions cannot be raised because they violate the principles by which disciplines distinguish themselves from one another. In particular, I have in mind foundational questions. How do we know what constitutes good history? Because professional historians have developed standards against which particular historical accounts can be compared. How many primary sources were consulted? How was the sampling of evidence made? Were the written documents consulted in the original languages, and within the proper historical context? And so on. It is only in the last few decades that serious attempts have been made to focus on the foundations of the discipline of history, and these attempts are bound to experience more failure than success if the field is going to survive. To take but one example, scholars of South Asian history -- the "subaltern" movement -- have questioned the idea that history can be told as a linear story. If many interests are not represented in the historical record, then the contribution of those interests can only be told in a fragmentary fashion. And these fragments, when inserted into large-scale histories, will break apart the continuous narrative that those large histories provide. But there cannot be an overarching theory of the fragmentary nature of history. And indeed, as far as I can tell, the subaltern movement has itself already started to break up as an institutional alternative to mainstream history. The response in English and modern literature departments to the onslaught of critical theory tells the same story. Let me now return to the issue I posed at the beginning: does the contingent nature of our current departmental divisions inhibit the way we connect knowledge from different domains? In at least one regard, the answer is no. Regardless of how disciplines distinguish themselves, certain approaches will always remain outside the bounds of any recognized field. So the current state of affairs is no worse than a more rational order. This has mixed results. On the plus side: any re-organization of the disciplines will not provide any net improvement in our coverage of human knowledge, so the current state of affairs is tolerable. On the minus side: some discourses will always remain outside any disciplinary field, and we will consequently lose.