British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Foucault's Tourist
Dr Jason Davies
Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching,
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
An abstract presented to the conference
‘Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary conference’
at the British Academy, London, on 13 December 2007
Biography
Dr Jason Davies began his academic career as a classicist, before moving to ancient history to do his doctoral research on ancient religion. His interest in the social negotiation of knowledge systems led him to a post-doctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, exploring the overlap between religion and medicine, specifically in the forum of interpreting dreams. During the Evidence Programme, he was involved in two of the subsidiary projects -- Historical Evidence and Interdisciplinarity.
He currently works in UCL's Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching, completing a monograph on dreams, a set of writings with Professor Stephen Rowland on Interdisciplinarity and exploring further his interest in knowledge systems, focussing in particular on the praxis and transmission of knowledge as education.
His chief publication to date is Rome's Religious History (Cambridge, 2004)
Abstract
Introduction and some definitions
Interdisciplinarity is probably one of the most elusive creatures in academia today – though it might be said to hide in plain sight. Like other words (such as ‘quality’) it appears a lot but rarely speaks of its own accord, as it were. People lament – or celebrate – the whole raft of interdisciplinary projects that have appeared in the last couple of decades. It either promises a utopia free of tiresome intellectual boundaries and dusty old departmental modes of thinking that bear no relation to the real world; or it represents the greatest threat to intellectual rigour, honesty and reliability since we stopped worrying about God. This talk will explore what we might reasonably expect from interdisciplinarity.
Disciplinarity
(Mono)disciplinarity is the bedrock of this whole topic: disciplinary knowledge is what academics are used to. Once you’ve been in a discipline long enough, you forget its distinctiveness and how strange it was when you first encountered it (Polanyi’s Tacit Knowledge describes this process rather well.) It is also worth pointing out that disciplinarity always implies multi- and inter-disciplinarity just as a nation’s borders imply crossing those borders.
Multidisciplinary
I shall take multidisciplinary to indicate those situations where a team of disciplinary experts gather together round a set of specific issues and each offer their own expertise. Often multidisciplinary strategies are brought to so-called ‘real-world problems’, as opposed to ‘disciplinary questions’ (the mantra being ‘real-life problems do not come in disciplinary-sized chunks’.) This talk is too short to dismantle that assertion, unless I offer that ‘real-life problems also often fail to come in real-life chunks’ as a thought for the day.
Interdisciplinarity
First off, I wish to distance myself from one meaning ascribed to interdisciplinarity which is all too common, and that is a utopianising, ‘bringing down the walls’, ‘sweeping aside of limits’, with ‘freedom for all’. This is, shall we say, a claustrophobic outlook. But these limits don’t restrict knowledge as much as define it. If you throw out the limits and definitions, you get ‘everything’: but another word for ‘everything’ is ‘nothing’. There is no knowledge without definitions and limits. So I urge a little agoraphobia in this regard. But that notion of an undefined and unstable – undisciplined, in fact – intellectual space is important, though not in the way that is often thought and I will say more about that in due course.
So for our purposes, (critical) ‘interdisciplinarity’ often comes to mean the process whereby one is confronted by one’s own disciplinary knowledge through being exposed to other disciplinary ways of working. In this process, what comes to light over time is less the workings of the other discipline than the workings of your own discipline. In that sense, it is the reverse of Polanyi’s process of acquiring Tacit Knowledge – it is to become aware of tacit knowledge that has become so obvious and ingrained that you are unaware of it, like breathing or walking.
The Power of Ignorance
If power is mediated through knowledge construction, then an interdisciplinarian is like a tourist, with few rights and less power, ignorant of the customs in this new context. Instead of knowledge, they will have questions.
The Annoying Tourist
Initially, what usually seems to be happening is that such a questioner is being brought up to speed with something basic: the task is trivial and straightforward for the speaker. Typically such answers are aimed at closing the questioning process – filling in a gap in the questioner’s knowledge. And of course sometimes this is what happens. But in many cases, each answer raises more questions until the questioner and the respondent are staring at each other in frustration: the questioner simply wants something explained in terms they can understand, and the respondent feels dragged further and further off course by the need to construct what they thought was solid ground beneath everyone’s feet before they can make their ‘important’ points.
At any point either can lose patience, or interest, or feel awkward and bring the dance to a close, and such awkwardness should not be underestimated. This is emphatically not the same as teaching undergraduates, because the disciplinary questioner is normally coming from a far more complex position: the questions may be naive, but they will usually be formulated not from a perspective of ignorance, but rather one of being informed about something else.
The Critical Moment
The critical moment arises when one or other suddenly realises that the questioner – our tourist – is effectively in a foreign country: their money is no good, their language is meaningless, their clothes are funny and the climate is not what they are used to – not to mention that the water is not as good as it is at home. The tourist, as it were, starts to appreciate who they are (I never realised I was English until I went to the States) and gets an intellectual culture shock. So does the ‘native’, if they persist with the tourist long enough. And I think any account of critical interdisciplinarity has to include shock as a key feature. Shock, by its nature, has no story. The very point of shock is that sense has broken down. It is ultimately indescribable and at least as experiential as it is intellectual or epistemological.
Not all interdisciplinary discussions can be pursued to a conclusion. But let’s assume everyone finds some patience to persist in this process for some time, at least. What emerges can be a far more acute awareness of one’s own thinking, the way one is framing questions – and answers – and this sensitivity is hard to find another way. This is more than a workman looking at his hammer and saying ‘yes, it’s a hammer’. This is a workman looking at his hammer and potentially seeing a new hammer that is more appropriate to his needs.
What will also become apparent is that there are things hammers cannot do. The disciplinary limits, taken for granted for so long, will once again become apparent. And things only matter in any meaningful way when they are examined with a body of understanding to inform that examination: to me, light is just light but to a physicist it is – presumably – an awful lot more. To a physicist – unless we are talking about a very educated physicist – a piece of stone with some scratchings on it is not terribly interesting, but to the right archaeologist, it is a rare example of writing in runes (some of our few runic writings are graffiti about a young woman called Helga, I believe).
Choosing a Position
Enveloped in a series of shocks, how are we even to begin considering an interdisciplinary programme like the Evidence Project without some kind of disciplinary stance? And – assuming enough patience – we then raise the question of how can we defend such a position? It’s actually impossible to ‘defend’, it’s an arbitrary decision (and we chose ‘ethnographic’). Any interpretations made of interdisciplinary moments run a huge risk of being either bland or confrontational. How can we decide whether the programme was a success or failure? We can easily do either.
‘The Programme was a great success, a great number of publications were to be had by the participants, everyone became accustomed to dealing with difficult issues in a difficult context which can only be good, Professor Dawid got a job at Cambridge’ and so on.
But also ‘the Programme was a miserable failure – we all got sick of each others’ questions, were distracted from writing more publications, several of us became unemployable because we were seen to have deviated from our parent discipline too much to risk-averse employers. And we didn’t come up with a unified theory of evidence.’
My opinion is that the Programme, taking into account the kinds of considerations I outlined above, was a resounding success. On the more nebulous end of things, the main participants experienced one shock after another, and dug deep to be more patient and more humble. I have seen the way that many people managed their own specific realisations that there was a lot more to another discipline than they had appreciated. This, I believe, will have made their own articulation and mastery of their discipline far more sophisticated and will reduce the distances between people that the intense specialisation of the current age has created. We ground away at each other and learned to differentiate between a specialist mode of articulation and a parochial attachment to jargon and methodological fetishisms.
More tangibly, this can lead to borrowings: frameworks and ideas that are normal in one discipline but not another – Bayes nets and Wigmore charts, for example – can be adapted for use, with revealing results. But there is an important factor in this kind of working: the borrowings must be naturalised. You cannot simply drop a methodological approach into another discipline and expect it to work. It is the natives who have their own revolution: it cannot be imposed from outside, as every historian and (only) some heads of state seem to realise. The context must be right and the borrowing is better thought of as an inspiration (a starting point) than a fully-developed method.
Such results are inevitably piecemeal (if one takes a generalist perspective) and dependent on the right conditions and – dare I say it – people. Each project will have produced some results, roughly dependent on the level of their involvement and engagement. Such engagement is hard-won and should not be underestimated and where projects show what may be a simple borrowing of technique, you will find under the surface a great deal of work to bed that new technique in.
In fact, this is how most disciplines move forward anyway. The success of the Evidence Programme is that it enabled and furthered that process in a remarkably efficient way.