Sunday, July 02, 2006

relative universalizations


I began college at UCSC in 1970, within a formation Lattuca calls 60s interdisciplinary curricula. She talks about the University of Wisconsin's humans and environment curriculum, in which colleges were organized on environmental themes rather than academic disciplines. At UCSC in 1970 colleges were organized around interdisciplinary themes too. I was in Cowell College. I remember our college slogan, "the pursuit of truth in the company of friends," and I guess in some form I still find myself there. I'm not sure I remember the exact wording of our theme if this slogan was not it, but we did our college general education work in two years of "World Civilizations." Harry Berger, Jr. was one of the synthesizing figures in all this, and our work was a combination of literature, anthropology, art history, and cultural theory.

We were also willy-nilly in the midst of student movements too: the second year of World Civilizations was taken over and reorganized politically to focus on political movements. I took courses on revolutionary theory, in which we studied Paris May 68 for example, and my first women's studies course in Merrill College, with Ruth Needleman, on women and literature. This was also when Wally Andrews, Luita D. Spangler and I founded the Gay Students Union.

Lattuca also notes the year 1972 for a new kind of interdisciplinarity based in general systems theory and structuralism. When Gregory Bateson arrived at UCSC I started classes with him and learned about systems, cybernetics and structuralism. I had already been reading about the Bourbaki group and set theory and trying in my naive way to express cultural concepts in such terms as I understood. I guess reading Bourbaki stuff was the beginning of my current interests in category theories and cognitive sociology.

Lattuca notes that systems work attempted to unify theory from various areas without regard to disciplinary divisions. I've written a bit about this in relation to Bateson in my "Queerish Travels" essay. From Harry Berger and Shelly Errington I studied oral and written consciousness in Havelock's terms, out of the Toronto school's work engaging McLuhan, Ong and others. I continued these studies and more on cross-cultural poetics and structuralism in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, studying with Ramanujan, Redfield and others. It was there I also learned critiques of the Toronto school and the beginnings of poststructuralist thinking.

When I returned to UCSC and the History of Consciousness in the early 80s poststructuralism and postmodernism became the theoretical resources for my work in feminist theory. When I met Donna Haraway for the first time we connected across the work of our teachers, hers Evelyn Hutchinson and mine Bateson. Haraway's was the first critique of systems theory and organicism that I encountered too.

My BA was in Anthropology and Literature, my first graduate work in Social Thought, and my PhD in the History of Consciousness. I am an instantiation of a trajectory of entirely interdisciplinary training both undergrad and grad in a particular set of venues of interdisciplinarity. In the Committee on Social Thought we were told that it was founded to provide social scientists with a "classical education." The Committee and the University of Chicago come out of movements Lattuca describes as in the 20s promoting integration across social science disciplines, and applied social sciences adopted by academics, in the 30s support for area studies by the Ford Foundation, and in the 50s to 70s the National Defense Act. The Committee was a venue for nondisciplinary knowledge formations.

My undergraduate teachers were themselves examples of individuals whose work was interdisciplinary, whose general education teaching was team focused, but whose research was not. Berger, Norman O. Brown, Errington and others, produced examples of idiosyncratic individual studies and critiques of area studies, while women's studies I understood then as anti-disciplinary. Thus my early intellectual experiences mixed together theory, politics, epistemology, and critiques of disciplines, together as "interdisciplinarity." Far from gaining the impression that only projects were interdisciplinary, not individuals, or that polymaths were dilettantes, my role models were intellectually playful yet concerned with a variety of forms of rigor.

In the History of Consciousness I learned from Donna Haraway what she would eventually be calling feminist technoscience. I moved among peers studying with and took classes from Hayden White on meta-history and James Clifford on transnational intellectual travel, TAing for Vivian Sobchack on media technologies and discussing editing epistemologies with Michael Warren. Some of my graduate peers were Sharon Traweek, Bill Pietz, TV Reed and Noel Sturgeon, Caren Kaplan and Debbie Gordon, Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, Chela Sandoval and Gloria Watkins.

While to some extent those early general ed courses on World Civilizations involved the collaborative tasks Lattuca discusses, planning, content integration, teaching and evaluation, I think what I actually if indirectly learned there and later were positive noncommensurabilities: contrast in worldviews, objects, evidence, argument, practices, membership, initiation, gatekeeping and boundaries. In other words, not a universal "integration" but a range of multiple mappings and paradigms, seeing how travel among them is achieved or not, how communication works or doesn't and so. Sometimes but not always a "critique of the disciplines."

My own history would corroborate Lattuca's generalizations connecting feminism and postmodernism as challenging conceptualizations of interdisciplinarity based on collaboration by individuals from different disciplines, challenging disciplinary knowledge as such rather than attempting to integrate disciplines, and highlighting epistemological reflection and theory in women's studies, ethnic studies, cultural and literary studies, as well as in anthropology, history and science studies. It would also corroborate her contention that this sort of interdisciplinarity is part of a project to redefine knowledge and that therefore reflection on epistemological assumptions is paramount. This indeed was what we called "feminist," thus entailing dismantling disciplinary perspectives, not maintaining and integrating them. Lattuca links feminism and postmodernism as viewing disciplines as power structures to be altered and in which the political and the epistemological are inseparable. In this view disciplinary approaches can only be partial, distorted, serving those in power, while interdisciplinary approaches are intended to be less distorted and to redistribute power, both a means to an end and an end in itself.

Today, however, I belong to feminist communities that do not necessarily share those commitments, and my own projects have shifted somewhat. Now I would like to be able to describe cycling through ranges of interdisciplinary practices – meta-movement among many cognitive mappings of interdisciplinary workings. Rather than whole-scale rejection of say, universals to be discovered, with Bruno Latour I am interested in relative universalizations – maybe universals to be created among knowledge producers at political moments of importance. Rather than working within a feminist postmodern interdisciplinarity that would exclude modern, positivist scholarship, with Latour I wonder about the amodern, in which meta-mapping acknowledges as simultaneous cognitive maps valorizing either purification or hybridization. Following Latour, Haraway and others I want to learn to describe interdisciplinarities that allow for disparate epistemologies, rather than prioritizing partisan alliances within them.

5 comments:

freespeechlover said...

Hi Katie,
I like this blog a lot. I confess to skimming what you wrote. I am writing an article intended for Palestinian "politicos" who I know called "Toward Another Secular Authoritarian Arab Regime?: Fatah's Quagmire." Because my audience is no where near the kind of His. Con. background we take for granted, I have to write and maybe even "do" more "traditional" kinds of "interdisciplinarity," although I balk at calling it "traditional" methodologically, since as you point out it depends on your location. I like the idea of disparate epistemologies but I'm not sure what you mean in the last sentence where you contrast that with "prioritizing political alliances," since I do want to prioritize being in political alliance with my audience and am writing for them and not so much the U.S. academy. Does that make sense?

It's tied to what I think of as a political and epistemological location that I am trying to craft for myself of "the ex patriot who refuses to leave." I suppose that makes me a kind of "pain in the ass" here and there.

Debbie Gordon

freespeechlover said...

Okay another thought. I reread the last sentence again more carefully. Partisan allying WITHIN. That's key. I think the word "political" for me has become very much tied to the Palestinian national movement.

The flip side of that "ex pat who refuses to leave" is I think the ethnographer who refuses/can't go native. As in I don't want to run over by an Israeli bulldozer.

The article I'm currently writing is from that position of being neither quite here nor there.

Katie King said...

Debbie --

Sorry about not spelling your name properly -- I'll change that soon.

What I meant was the political alliances of being pro-postmodernism or anti, or conversely pro-positivism or anti. Those are the alliances that are salient in my neck of the woods I think broadly.

Yeah, pesky things words: "political" does do an awful lot of work!

Thanks for reading this so promptly and writing a post! And it got even emailed to me too, which I didn't expect.

It's so hard to unpack everything!

A phone call soon! Katie

Anonymous said...

Katie,

In reading your intellectual itinerary, I am intrigued about the possibilities of spreading the term "local ontologies" beyond the field of semantics. And a wee bit of search engine application and I locate a resource rehearsing the emic/entic distinction.

Thanks for provoking this train of thought.

F.

freespeechlover said...

More on flexible knowledges. My challenge--how to negotiate the U.S. academy after trying to locate myself in another national academic context--the Palestinian one, where academic disciplines matter disparately. Political science and political sociology, sociology, for example, are very important, due to the fact that politics trumps everything. People value very quick kinds of writing--rapid response, because the situation on the ground is a war zone, very unstable, etc. Constant revision is not a choice.

I remember when I was first in the W.B. talking to feminists the ease with which they could reconstruct the history of the Palestinian women's movement. The "book" is not the same kind of entity over there. It's more like a pamphlet, produced relatively inexpensively to circulate quickly among a relative small population where people also know each other via experiences of political activism, imprisonment in Israeli jails which functioned and function as a kind of "school," where Palestinian prisoners continue activism via cell phones, visits, etc. Political activism and universities are impossible to separate; students recruit each other into political parties. Student council elections are contests between the political parties. A lot is at stake in their outcomes, as the society itself is young demographically.

In fact, much of the "internal" Palestinian political struggle in the Occupied Territories today is about a large young population and an older leadership that has been unable to deliver the goods wanted by this largely young society.

I wonder how much the aging of America has to do with the patterns of struggle among academic generations over questions of interdisciplinarity.