Collaboration and Confrontation?

I’m interested in Bill Readings’s suggestion that “the dualist split between humanities and natural sciences that has been the most apparent structural reality of the university in the twentieth century is no longer the practical certainty it once was.” The link that I posted earlier is a letter from a biochemist arguing for the importance of language and humanities programs in response to SUNY Buffalo closing their French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts programs. The letter points out the relevance of these programs to a variety of questions and contemporary issues. It may be a cliché, but we need to learn from past learnings; we’re not reinventing calculus with every generation so why not read Machiavelli to learn the basics of leadership (or something like that). In one of my classes last week, we talked about how cognitive neuroscience is moving into literary studies. People are doing empirical research on affect (which is fine, but could we say it's more suited to psychology or sociology?) and English professors are getting their students to write about their feelings (who cares?) instead of looking at the texts in a more rigorous (traditional?) fashion. I wanted to talk about the relative merits or usefulness of the methodologies themselves, but the conversation turned to whether or not this interest in cognitive neuroscience comes from institutional pressure to make the humanities more scientific. I feel like we should support research in all areas as long as it’s advancing understanding of the objects of study and not merely because of some superficial institutional imperative; otherwise we should just be a bunch of separate institutes instead of a university. Most of our projects are to a lesser or greater degree interdisciplinary—how can they not be? Readings writes, “philosophy departments are spinning off into applied fields in which experts provide answers rather than refining questions—medical ethics being the most obvious example.” I was listening to a debate on euthanasia on CBC Radio a few days ago and both sides kept using the word “dignity.” They had a question from a philosophy student asking how they can use such an ambiguous term without defining it, since each side seemed to be appropriating different meanings to suit their position. Someone on the panel responded that they don’t need to define their terms because the point is that it’s a placeholder (empty signifier?) for a host of meanings and doesn’t need to be defined, then turned the question around to the student and asked how he would define it. This guy didn’t have an answer, so the moderator and everyone had a good laugh about how philosophers don’t need to know answers. Isn’t precisely “what’s at stake” the definition of dignity when talking about euthanasia? And of course it's important for people who don't really think about language in that way to have someone ask that question.

Readings writes, “the idea of culture in Cultural Studies is not really an ‘idea’ in the strong sense proposed by the modern university. Cultural Studies, that is, does not propose culture as a regulatory ideal for research and teaching so much as recognize the inability of culture to function as such an ‘idea’ any longer.” Maybe I’ve been reading too much Derrida, but this seems to me a good thing. Why do we need a regulatory idea for culture? It seems like it’s best if the field is de-regulated—we can think of MacIntyre’s call for conflict as différance! I like Readings’s proposal for interdisciplinary research in short-term collaborative projects that don’t devolve into mini-departments—is this happening now? U of A is much more into interdisciplinary studies than my previous university; aren’t most of us doing Cultural Studies?