Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 11:12:12 -0600 (MDT)
From: deaun moulton <deaun-AT-unm.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Fish


On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Brian Connery wrote:

> >What's the point?  Okay, someone practicing two or more disciplines is
> >actually creating a new discipline.  What are Fish's motives for stating
> >the obvious?

This was my question too when I read Brian's post.  My first hypothesis is
that the argument is as much about the structure of the university as it
is about what constitutes knowledge.  That is, it's about control even
when it is couched in philosophical terms.

I have a lot of sympathy for Brian's position and the desire to maintain
standards which make communication, hence the accretion of knowledge,
possible.  After all I think woman's studies should be able to supply a
legitimate logic for its existence....as should mechanicial engineering
and philosophy and .......

I'm not sure that I accept that the terms of measurement should be the
same for all the disciplines.  That is a piece of standardization which
supports the large institution but has little to do with the content of
any single discipline.  

The question of disciplines interests me because it applies to me.  I am,
or will be (very soon, I hope) a political theorist.  What does that mean? 
I am not a political scientist not only because I do not DO quantitative
analysis of political behavior but because I think it has serious
limitations particularly because it limits "politics" to the operation of
certain institutuions and certain types of participation in those
institutions.  I also find the organization of an entire discipline around
"social science"  to miss significant questions relevant to it's field of
study.  Political theory as a sub field has it's drawbacks....most of the
time it is considered to be an historical subject rather than a live one. 
We study other political theory rather than attempt to write our own. 

So why political theory and not straight philosophy?  Because I find equal
frustration in talking to "philosophers" who only want to take apart
someone else's work.  Who's writing the stuff that will be read 50 years
from now by academics?  Why isn't the academy teaching us to write the
stuff, rather than write about it?

Ok, so I don't find any satisfaction in the methods which define the field
of my choice or in it's obvious alternative.  Where to go?  The most
interesting work about power, authority, order, the nature of the public
and why people interact the way they do is being done in things like
literary criticsm, post-colonial studies and feminism.  These include
broad criticisms of the disciplines of the liberal arts and the way which
they have been practiced.  They cut across the disciplines and at the same
time they make claim to producing valid knowledge.  That is, they are not
simply willy-nilly appropriations from other disciplines. 

I have made some significant forays into literary criticism and have
wondered seriously if perhaps I'm just in the wrong field.  However, I
find that literary criticism is interesting to me only as an instrument in
organizing arguments about political questions.  When I finish reading a
piece of it I think, well that's cool and even insightful but don't stop
there.  Look at the implications of this or that..."  In other words, the
techniques of the field of literary criticism are useful to me in the
field of politics whereas the techniques of political science are not.  I
suspect that I am not alone in finding that the techniques provided no
longer suit the questions asked.

I have no institutional purpose here.  I do not want to create a new
discipline.  I want to use literature - and culture in terms not
statistical - as part of the data of political theory. There
are those, and I suspect that Fish is among them, that say if I do that,
then I am writing neither literary criticism nor political theory,
implying that I am writing nothing.  I would argue that it is they who are
unable to see that there exists possibility beyond the categorical rules.

This is rather stream of consciousness and I don't have a profound
conclusion on which to end.  So, I will just toss this into the pot and
see what brews. 

deaun

deaun moulton
deaun-AT-unm.edu

> 
> I suppose there are many points, depending upon the claims that people are
> making on the grounds of their interdisciplinariness.
> 
> The major point is that when one integrates principles from multiple
> disciplines one must do it without contradiction and one must do it so that
> it adds up to a unified approach; that is, it's not a matter of just
> picking and choosing some stuff here and some stuff there.  
> 
> I was interested in Fish's talk because at that time I was working in a
> "writing-in-the-disciplines" program.  I taught writing courses that were
> connected to courses in other departments--zoology, psychology, education,
> &c, and did workshops for both faculty and students on writing in a variety
> of disciplines.  Some of my colleagues in the program, claiming to be
> "interdisciplinary," attempted to pose as historians, psychologists, &c.
> This, I opposed, on pretty much Fish's grounds.  What we taught, I argued,
> was not "history" but "history writing"--which is its own discipline.  From
> "history," we borrowed epistemology (what counts as knowledge, what the
> rules of evidence are) and rhetorical conventions (organization, style
> sheets); from composition theory, we borrowed what's now sometimes called
> the new rhetoric--i.e., post-structural approaches to writing and reading.  
> 
> In other words, while some of my colleagues took pride in their knowledge
> of the discipline in which they were teaching writing, and lectured
> students on topics within that discipline (e.g., mitosis), I found such
> matter completely irrelevant to what I was doing--or, at least, not was
> important as the rhetoric of process analysis.
> 
> The tendency of my colleagues strikes me as one that's not uncommon among
> those who claim "interdisciplinariness"--which too often comes down to
> someone who's a literary critic reading a few books on, say, chaos theory,
> and then lecturing more benighted critics on that theory.  In some cases,
> what they're doing is still rather standard run-of-the-mill literary
> criticism, in spite of their claims of interdisciplinariness.  In other
> cases, what they're doing doesn't add up--it's a hodge podge of bad
> criticism and bad chaos theory.  The goal, on the contrary, should be a
> unified discipline--chaos criticism, or some such.  
> 
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> Brian Connery
> connery-AT-oakland.edu
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
>