Disciplinarity

Discussion

The Problem of Disciplinarity

Roland Robertson:

"At least since the late 18th or early 19th centuries interpretation and/or analysis of the world have, for the greater part, been undertaken from increasingly specialized and compartmentalized perspective. A vast amount has been written about the origins, the histories and the genealogies of various disciplines, as well as variations in such from society to society, region to region, and civilization to civilization. Nonetheless, it should be stipulated here that the present focus is primarily a Western one and that it involves no systematic attempt to be specific about the civilizational structuring of particular academic disciplines; nor of their trajectories or configurations within different societies. What has to be firmly stated is that each discipline in the western academy, as well as in the primary and secondary sectors of school systems, has rested upon rhetorical constructions and academic contingencies. Thus the idea that disciplines reflect the natural condition of life is without any foundation. One has to make this point strongly, precisely because it seems that many academics and intellectuals – and not least their bureaucratic administrators – do believe that disciplines reflect or grasp reality, although some of these may also grant that so-called reality is partly constituted by disciplinarity. In spite of these considerations it should be said that throughout the last century and a half or so various individuals and schools of thought have attempted to overcome or lay out the preconditions and sustaining infrastructures of the disciplines on a universalistic basis. For example, Comte made an extended attempt to connect systematically all disciplines, Marx also approached the same issue (but, of course, from a very different perspective), as did John Stuart Mill. The same might be said of Freud and certainly this is true of the rise of General Systems Theory in the 1930s and also of the work of Talcott Parsons during the mid-twentieth century. Foucault explored rather thoroughly the basis and forms of disciplinarity in the broadest possible sense – which led in his work to the casting of academic discipline as similar to discipline in the penal sense. Increasingly, during the past twenty years or so, there has been much disciplinary mutation, particularly around the theme of globalization. Much of the study of the latter, in spite of its enormous fashionability, has unfortunately been centred upon the idea of interdisciplinarity. This has been very counterproductive and has served more the bureaucratic interests of academic administrators and power-seekers within academic professions than it has the enhancement of substantive intellectual progress. Specifically, interdisciplinarity has consolidated, rather than overcome, disciplinary and professional distinctiveness. For example, interdisciplinary collaboration often involves the practitioners of two or more disciplines getting together and seeing what each can contribute to a particular topic from their own disciplinary standpoint. What, on the other hand, ideally ought to occur is a direct concern with the substantive issue as opposed to a rehearsal of the identity of particular disciplines. Many enterprises of a so-called interdisciplinary nature have entailed little more than each disciplinary representative pronouncing what her or his discipline could/should contribute to the topic in question. Thus, we should turn in the direction of what preferably should be called either cross-disciplinarity or trans-disciplinarity (although cogent claims could and have been made on behalf of ‘counter-disciplinarity’ and ‘post-disciplinarity’)."

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/globalistics_and_globalization_studies/330-337.pdf)

Source: The ‘Return’ of Religion and the Conflicted Condition of World Order. By Roland Robertson. Journal of Globalization Studies, Vol. 2, Num. 1, May 2011, pp. 32–40. Also in: Globalistics and Globalization Studies, pp. 330–337