Disciplines Punished

Now that I’m tingling at the first signs of thaw, shambling along the slow exit from the longest winter of my life, it seems a good time to emerge from blog hibernation. Sorry for the delay. I can only hope you thought I was dead, so that the bland fact of my return offsets the disappointment of reading a rusty post. May your impatience with my decrepit prose be swallowed up in your relief - that I haven’t yet tired of coming up with innovative ways to make you yawn. This blog is mettlesome like that.

But death, dear cyberspace, would have been a reasonable guess on your part. For I have died many miniature deaths over the last months. I have faced down that frightful mill of crisp shirts and polished shoes and hair cuts, hitherto only glimpsed through the frosted windows of the kebab shop over my years as a student; I have tugged and tugged on the inoffensive, sensible jumpers of The Man as he has walked grimly away; I have chased the slip stream of deoderised respectability and patted down my uncouth edges, risking not even the faintest puff of broken wind.

I have been trying to get a job.

Because ‘job’ is such a nice short word, I assumed it wouldn’t be too hard to get one. I was wrong on that, by a measure of approximately forty applications and seven interviews. Jobs are hard to come by as the suits and shoes that must lead to them. And I’m not even in Spain or Greece. Seeing a job in those places would require one to dial some kind of yeti hotline and report the elusive man-shaped shadow before it fades forever into the forests of the unemployed: a waif dissolved into nothing for nobody.

Nor does the job I eventually and gratefully got allow me a moment to exhale some air and inhale a cocktail – for that job only lasts a year, and while I do that job I’ll have to apply for other jobs, and so on, ad infinitum, till I reach a point where my permanent job will be job applications. And then retirement from a career I only just managed to apply for by the midnight age 70 deadline. Great job.

This endless process asked me to package myself with the slick ribbon of the ideal employee. Or at least make a feeble, infantile attempt to giftwrap myself in the favoured patterns of serious scholar and responsible adult. Springing up naked from a fake cake was probably a bit much, and may have had something to do with one or two rejections. But the root problem was twofold: before I could even gain amateurish command over (let alone master) the art of seeming like the ideal employee, I had to understand what that ideal employee was. And that’s meant some long nights staring at the ceiling of my mind to ask myself: not just what a good classicist should look like, but what form a good modern academic should assume. And that’s meant a whole lot of further splayed ruminating on the question: What Universities Want. After the obvious, i.e. to be dramatised in a film of that name starring Mel Gibson as prospective employee and Helen Hunt as Universities, then…what do they want?

In the wake of that serpentine prelude, I wanted to air some shivers and goosebumps induced by a particular answer to that question: Interdisciplinarity. I wrote a post some time back about the floppy commonality of the ‘Interesting’ as a category in academic circles. That post was itself pretty floppy. But the ‘Interesting’ is nothing compared to the hottest inter-word on international campuses having intercrural intercourse with every interested academic. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is that sexy polysyllabic pheromone that promises to win you that funding no matter what. It’s the wonder-drug boosting your research all the way to a nice employable sweet-spot. Some people are actually doing it. Everyone wants to be doing it. Where did this verbal substance come from, where can I get some, and how can I start lacing the sentences of my research proposal with it STAT?!

The idea (as far as my one-track disciplinary mind can grasp it) is pretty simple: interdisciplinarity means research that combines the methods, insights, approaches etc. of two or more academic disciplines as they are conventionally conceived and constituted. So if you’re a philosopher thinking about concepts of ‘The Self’, working with a psychologist or literary critic, or foraying yourself into psychology or literature, might be a good way to throw up unexpected and innovative findings. Most scholars humming along nowadays are trained in one discipline to the exclusion of others, and each discipline inculcates a thousand particular habits which both enable and hinder; pool your expertise with a differently trained thinker on campus and explosive new growths emerge, as each academic pollinates and is pollinated in turn. That old hermetic specialism now looks like a mangy tumbleweed against these lush plains of free-flowing influence, which positively lactate New Knowledge. So collaborate with others, or reinvent yourself and collaborate with it, or die.

Sniffs pick up scent of creeping cynicism here, but I want to convey no such sneers. I’m a big fan of almost all interdisciplinary work, and have long admired the interdisciplinary stuff produced before ‘interdisciplinary’ was a word, and before I learnt the word. The term cuts deep into my own sense of inferiority as an aspiring scholar: it captures the kind of wide-ranging explorer I fear I can never be, stuck in my obstinate customs of thought, bogged in the habitus of my single overrun field. I have the utmost respect for the interdisciplinary project and its heroic practitioners. Every time I set myself the task of making my work sound interdisciplinary on a job application, and every time I come up short, the pain sets in, but the self-loathing gets displaced onto the nomenclature itself. Interdisciplinarity, I hate you, because I’ll never be part of you: never be inter your disciplines.

But the more I dwell on it, the less I can chalk up all my antipathy to a sense of exclusion and be done with it. ‘Interdisciplinarity’ trades on its feel-good ring, its appeal to the noblest traditions of the uni-versity: a community of truth-seekers all working together to the advancement of knowledge. It almost feels as if we’re trying to restore an originary identity, temporarily misplaced under the distracting piles of specialisation. Co-ordination, collaboration, cooperation, all under the comfy umbrella of a college. Breaking down the artificial barriers between individuals in their disciplinary garrets. The principles seem so deeply inscribed into the very foundation charter of the higher education institution. Yet they bubble up at precisely the time when neoliberal strangulation has made universities more competitive, poisonous, individualistic laboratories for producing the new humanity. So university employees are gently massaged into a desire for happy fun interesting teamwork, just as they are ever more ruthlessly reduced to vessels of labour for maximum exploitation…co…incidence?

Me in my pseudo-Marxist mode is like a kid playing dress-up with imaginary clothes, so I’ll spare you the attempted in-depth analysis. Nevertheless, I will say: the burgeoning of interdisciplinarity seems a bit fishy in this climate, right here right now. In bare terms, the interdisciplinary project can do two big things to make our good universities some sweet dosh. First, it can inflate the ‘impact’ factor of each researcher, whose interdisciplinary work could well be read and cited by double the people, in more than one discipline. And that’s not to be sneezed at when impact ratings are the key stats that dole out government cash to spluttering, money-hungry institutions. Second, it can train teachers outside their comfort zone, so that they are equipped to teach more courses beyond their disciplinary homestead. Of course it suits the modern university to have as many ‘flexible’ teachers as possible. Fewer people doing more for less is every manager’s wet dream – and universities are no exception to that sticky rule. I fear interdisciplinarity could be at the vanguard of this sorry squeeze.

In a parallel but related phenomenon, university administrations have long been trying to ‘break down disciplinary boundaries’ by those very ‘rationalising’ reorganisations that put the fear of god into every academic with bills to pay (i.e. every academic). Upscaling ‘integration’ or ‘co-operation’ is surely the kind of dejected rhetoric used when departments get stripped of their status as departments, and merge with other downcast departments; this is the enforced, top-down version of ‘interdisciplinarity’ that has made disciplines disappear. Suddenly a classical literature scholar is rubbing shoulders in cramped office quarters with an archaeologist; before you know it, they’re both in the dungeon of the History department; then without warning, History is history, subsumed under the straining arch, the shrunken conglomerate of Arts and Humanities. And that’s another thing that vexes me about eroding disciplines as an academic enterprise: if we break down these borders under the lofty sign of interdisciplinarity, we could be losing a whole lot more than just arbitrary intellectual constraints. We could be inadvertently participating in the demise of the last-ditch bulwarks against further cuts and ‘consolidations’. Disciplines are pitched camps from which to defend embattled fields; forts of ready-made legitimacy. Disciplines are intellectual spaces usually coterminous with their sheltering political spaces (departments).  So the less ‘disciplined’ staff become, the less purchase they have on the institution that bleeds them.

The point probably boils down to nothing more than a basic one about group identity and solidarity. As disciplines and departments lose their outlines, and scholars start to explore the cracks in between, those very cracks swallow them up and spit them out as independent agents without a group attachment. Next time the philosophers are on the chopping block, young Johnny, keen philosopher-cum-historian-cum-quantum physician, feels no sympathy, for he is not (just) a philosopher. The new academic is urged to carve her niche without the security blanket of the discipline, leaving her at any savvy manager’s mercy; and her spiritual secession from the discipline weakens that security blanket out of use anyway. Customisation breeds atomisation. The more you’re between, the less you belong – and the less you care.

This is definitely an unfair caricature of interdisciplinary projects, which ultimately create their own sense of shared purpose and solidarity; but it is the very temporariness of that term ‘project’ that stresses me out, with its sense of ad-hoc allegiance, its deeply unstable chemistry. Projects are begun in a rush and over in a flash. And with multiple projects on the burner at any one time, it’s easy to see why academics plead nausea. Constant combination and recombination in various interdisciplinary collaborations must make you feel part of everything and nothing. The churning, scattered attention of an interdisciplinary life distracts from the morning memo that announced they’re scrapping your maternity leave. Oh well. Better familiarise myself with another discipline.

All up, I can’t say a bad word against the intellectual headway made by interdisciplinary ventures. The big doubt is political: whose interests does this trend really serve? In any case, the fact that it often produces groundbreaking results – in short, that it works – is the most dangerous thing about it. It chimes with native academic impulses to curiosity and originality, all through the honourable route of knowledge-sharing. While it seduces us with promises of untold vistas, I can’t help the paranoia that something vital is being robbed out the back.

So I’ll have to fudge something for those interdisciplinarity-hungry applications. But my heart won’t be in it. It took a long time and a lot of hard work to call myself a classicist without red cheeks, of apology or (much) irony. I’d like to use the tag at least a little more before abandoning it to the interdisciplinary oblivion.