PhD Research

Mick Wilson
'Conflicted Faculties? Criticism, Interdisciplinarity and the University'

This research project takes as its point of departure the following observations: (i) there has been a significant growth in discussions of interdisciplinarity within the academy in recent decades; (ii) within this context there has been a revival of interest in Kant's Conflict of the Faculties and other related texts believed to be foundational with respect to the modern university; (iii) questions of critique and judgement are often displaced by a technocratic imperative to makeover university education as primarily a matter of economic production and career-training. The call for interdisciplinarity has been cited in this context as both agent of change and means of resistance.

The research has begun with the following set of questions, though not necessarily specified in this precise order: (i) What is the method, most appropriate to the study of interdisciplinarity in the current context? (ii) What is specific to contemporary debates on disciplinary boundaries, rivalries and cross-overs? (iii) What is a "discipline"? How is it constituted? Why has it mattered? (iv) What are the institutional bases and practices shared by the disciplines? What is their, already given, commonality? (v) What are the common themes emerging in cross-over situations? (vi) What do specific controversies indicate about the general nature of interdisciplinary conflicts? (vii) What are the implications of specific attempts to impose a "metadiscourse" as the basis of interdisciplinarity? (viii) Can criticism be constructed as an alternative to a "metadiscourse" but also as an alternate to a discrete "discipline"? (ix) In the current context how might critique work? What does criticism do? (x) Is there a positive and intellectually defensible refusal of interdisciplinarity?

The research then seeks to address questions of interdisciplinarity and criticism in the broad context of the contemporary University. It seeks to do so by utilising a genealogical account of disciplinary formations and knowledge taxonomies. It is thus a research project that is both historical and critical. The primary point of entry into these questions is through a consideration of the discourse of interdisciplinarity as it is currently played out. A significant component task then will be to interrogate the metaphorical and rhetorical construction of disciplines (as territories, domains, jurisdictions, communities etc). The ultimate objective of the research will be to establish a critical framework with which to evaluate dialogues and exchanges across and outside of disciplinary boundaries while also re-evaluating the specificity and distinctness of discipline distinctions and the changing organisational structures of knowledge. The outcomes of this enquiry are open and moot at this point, and it is expected that the framework of the research will facilitate discovery rather than simply providing a recipe for the generation of a pre-established conclusion. (Therefore the proposed chapter structure attached is a tentative outline, which is designed to indicate the scale and ambition of the project, rather than finalise its outcomes.)

Introduction: "Conflicts New and Old."

The two cultures paradigm, the Sokal Affair, and the critique of the "knowledge factory." The metaphors of conflict: territory, jurisdiction, property, etc. and the rhetorical construction of disciplines.

Key Question: Do contemporary disputes (in respect of disciplinary boundaries, and interdisciplinary exchanges) represent continuity or novelty (with respect to historical precursors of such debates within the history of the modern university)?

Chapter 1: You will know them by their methods.

The question of method in the context of the study of interdisciplinarity.

Key Question: How do we proceed?

Some problems identified:

the problem of ideology
the problem of textuality
the problem of form and content
the problem of instrumentalism

Some solutions proposed:

discourse analysis
deconstruction
heteroglossia
dialectic

Key Question: But, then what if method is, in part at least, the stake of the enquiry?

Chapter 2: The Conflict of the Faculties

Constructing an outline genealogy of discipline rivalry and conflict in the modern university system. Kant's The Conflict of The Faculties and the "New Learning," and the Enlightenment roots of contemporary discipline formations. Expansion on the question:

Key Question: What is specific to contemporary debates on disciplinary boundaries , rivalries and cross-overs?

Chapter 3: Innovating Disciplines

Discipline formations and the role of the taxonomy of disciplines in the key University reforms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Key moments of the modern University reform: Humboldt, Tsar Alexander I, Newman, Morse).

Key Question: What is a discipline? How is it constituted? Why has it mattered?

Chapter 4: Institutional Epistemologies

Disciplinary Spaces and the Idea of the University: A review of the commonality of disciplines and their shared "common knowledges" realised through an exploration of core concepts and practices as these pertain to the "integrity" of the disciplines: research, accreditation, expertise, self-governance, taxonomies of knowledge, textual transmission, the lecture, the demonstration, the seminar, the thesis, the question of method in knowledge production.

Key Question: What are the institutional bases and practices shared by the disciplines? What is their, already given, commonality?

Chapter 5: The practices of "and"

A review of some key twentieth century attempts to cross disciplines and / or place them in some form of conjunction.

Physicists write philosophy: who owns uncertainty in principle?
Artists make machines: what does the "and" mean in "art and technology"?
The inherent interdisciplinarity of "Big" Science: what does the Manhattan project have to tell us about crossing disciplines?

Key Question: What are the common themes emerging in cross-over situations?

Chapter 6: Logomachia

Disciplines in confrontation, internecine disputes, and border patrols.

The Privilege of the Text
The Priority of Experiment
The Denigration of Vision

Key Question: What do specific controversies indicate about the general nature of interdisciplinary conflicts?

Chapter 7: Mathesis Universalis

The search for a metadiscourse as ground of interdisciplinarity: Some of the contenders having been Mathematics, Philosophy, Scientific Method, History, Psychology, Creativity.

Key Question: What are the implications of specific attempts to impose a metadiscourse as the basis of interdisciplinarity?

Chapter 8: Against the Territorial Metaphor

Critical review of the metaphor of discipline as territory and proposal of groundless criticism as the ground of interdisciplinarity.

Key Question: Can criticism be constructed as an alternative to a "metadiscourse" but also as an alternate to a "discipline"?

Chapter 9: Madness in the Method

Criticism, circularity and viciousness

Key Question: How does critique work? What does criticism do?

Chapter 10: The knowledge corporation and its discontents

Contemporary pedagogies, global universities and the failures of criticism.

Key Question: Given the momentum of current tertiary education reform, what might criticism fail to do?

Conclusion: Retrieving The Incommensurate OR Against Interdisciplinarity.

Key Question: Is there a positive and intellectually defensible refusal of interdisciplinarity?