Commonly Valued Unknowing: Toward a Renewed Disciplinarity

Panelist Remarks for the Carnegie Conference on Transforming Disciplines

Panelist Remarks for the Carnegie Conference on Transforming Disciplines, Saturday, January 18, 2003. Washington, DC.

It was not clear to me what this sole panel midway on the second and last day of this conference was meant to address and so, with Chuck Henry's leave, I took it that we panelists were asked to strike a prophetic note, preparing for John Unsworth's survey of the last ten years, Bernard Smith's view from across the Atlantic, and our final session on next steps. That said, what I have to offer here is prophetic not in the predictive sense but the polemical or, if you will forgive the term, poetical.

It is coincidental in the best sense that in the time since Bill Wulf and Stan Katz last invited a number of us here in 1997 to consider the question of "Methodologies for Computing in the Humanities," that my work at Vassar has increasingly involved me in transforming disciplines as co-director of the Media Studies Development Project (MSDP).

A group of twenty-some Vassar faculty members has met since 1998 in year long faculty seminars as well as summer institutes seeking to understand how best to address our shifting understandings of media, their audiences, institutions, technologies, economies, and their works and texts within a liberal arts curriculum. The MSDP effort thusfar has drawn participants from the departments of anthropology, art, computer science, classics, English, film, German studies, Hispanic studies, music, philosophy, political science, and sociology as well as existing multidisciplinary programs in American culture, urban studies, science and technology, and international studies. We intentionally began with very little sense of what we wanted a media studies curriculum to be, focusing rather on how best to represent our understanding of the broadest definitions of what it means to be human in an age of new media. Therefore we veered away from what might, however ironically, be called more traditional models of media studies emerging from communication or film departments. In the course of our efforts we have researched the curricula at comparable institutions throughout the United States and Canada, invited experts from various fields concerned with media, attended conferences off-campus together and engaged one another in retreats, colloquia, seminars, and institutes on campus. As in so much else having to do with technology and the humanities we of course looked to the likewise exploratory curriculum being developed by Johanna Drucker, Jerry McGann, John Unsworth and their colleagues in the media studies program at UVA. After these years of deliberation we have developed a number of new courses and found occasion to cross-list courses with several departments. It is likely that in the coming year we will offer a correlate sequence for students and move from development project to program status.

One would think therefore that when my long-time collaborator and friend- and Janet Murray's colleague- Jay Bolter asked me when we had lunch at the MLA last month "Just what is media studies?" I would have had an answer. One would even think- given that Janet and Jay and their colleagues are hopefully about to launch an exciting PhD program in Digital Media, itself the result of a similar three years of intensive work by a group of faculty members in Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication, and Culture- that Jay would not have felt the need to ask such a question. That he and we would ask again and again what one would think we could answer seems to me at the heart of transforming disciplines.

Indeed the question of "what one would think" is fairly close to the first dictionary definition of discipline, i.e., "Training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement," as the AHD has it.

What I would like to suggest, for purposes of discussion, is that we may conceive of transforming disciplines in a new media age as a shift from any comfortable sense of what one would think toward an increasingly comfortable sense that the disciplines provide us space within which to consider how one should think about life and the lives of others. I deliberately chose this last construction- thinking about life and the lives of others- as offering a possible commonality of concern for the arts, sciences, humanities and technologies as we experience what now seems a continual transformation, or what at other times I have called "changing change."

You will note that the dictionary definition of discipline is cast in terms of expectations and surprisingly or not includes an expected moral dimension as well as a mental behavior. However perversely, what I am suggesting today is that in the five years since we last met here my own understanding of the value of disciplinarity has shifted. Increasingly I see disciplinarity as a source of transformation as much as an object of it, which is of course exactly the kind of ambiguity which the phrase "transforming disciplines" allows and perhaps even encourages. Specifically I would suggest that our disciplines as humanists, scientists, artists, engineers, and technologists consistently call us to draw upon memory and mortality to affirm the fragility of our lives and the importance of the moment of human presence in an increasingly mediated world. That is, disciplines indeed do (and must) call us to moral dimension as well as a mental behavior.

That said, I do not mean to suggest a back-to-the-future hegira to a great golden age of the rule of academic departments and the sovereign sway of canonical disciplinarity but rather a reinvigoration of disciplines around what we do not know about how we should think. To be sure it has always been the business of disciplines to husband doubt. That we have something to offer beyond mere knowledge is why we invite new students, engage other disciplines, sponsor research, publish our thinking and data, and continually challenge our own perceptions and convictions. However now I think disciplines face an urgency to make space for ordinary uncertainty in the face of the bright successive assurances continually spawned by a society drugged by nextness. Disciplines in their husbanding of doubt offer us hope for our unknowing in the face of increasingly suffocating knowingness.

Some years ago, at the height of the dot.com bubble, I was invited to take a turn about the filmy reflective surface of one particularly glossy hemisphere of gas one afternoon in New York City. Razorfish, the still-standing if somewhat humbled self styled "global digital solutions provider," had at that time taken to inviting in intellectuals as sort of an afternoon's entertainment in the way of the Medici's sponsorship of portraitists, philosophers, and itinerant plasterers and colorists. Like the Medici's (one supposes) the assembled courtiers munched pizzas while the philosopher/plasterer entertained and orated. Coming from a long line of hod-carrying Irishmen myself, I wanted to slap it on thick for the goat cheese and arugula feeding boys and girls.

I suggested to them that (quote) "relative space has economic value. First class airline seats are the obvious instance but so too is the whitespace of professional design or even the transparency of well-designed interfaces or icons which leave space for more important thought by lowering cognitive overhead."

To this room full of the best and the brightest web designers, flash freaks and director doyennes I suggested a notion of interspace, as an economically viable, i.e., sellable, commodity wherein "computer based media would increasingly offer users an identity buffer from intrusive and ubiquitous linked information sources."

Room to choose will become a valuable product, I claimed to the yawning Medici kids as in dismay and increasing hunger I watched them grab and gobble up the last scraps of smoked salmon and crimini pizza and gaze off happily into not inter but actual space, doubtlessly tallying the then burgeoning value of their stock options. "Software agents, and other filtering devices seek to provide at least the perception of buffered choice-points for the busy user," my jeremiad went on while my stomach grumbled, "what they do not provide, however, is the confirming experience of relative space within which we form our own sense of ourselves as controlling and independent beings."

I am not trying to sell old pizza pie in the sky today but I still, and more than ever, believe that there is an increasingly compelling value in distance, silence, uncertainty, deliberation. The shared care of the commonly valued unknowing which constitutes the agenda of a discipline offers not just commodity but comity. The latter, old fashioned word for an atmosphere of social harmony has in its legal and policy meanings a sense of making space for the decisions and actions of another jurisdiction or nation. In a multidisciplinary world, a space of comity, the constant readjustments, accommodations, and affordances among several interests, is invaluable.

We live in a time when a strong feeling that what can be known should be known too easily elides into a blind faith that what can be known not only is known but is known by those best able to make use of what they know. True multidisciplinarity emerges in the space of shared unknowing among disciplines that leads us to question how we should think from the inadequate perspective of what we would think. Thus my colleagues in the Media Studies Development Project bring to our discussions and curricular planning a strong sense of how media is shaping both their individual disciplines and its questions. Indeed they see transforming disciplines as the basis of their disciplinarity.

And on that account I think I sense a shift in our understanding of multidisciplinarity, one perhaps significant enough not just to be an artifact of the passing time since our last meeting here. My remarks at the 1997 meeting here also had to do with spaces: spaces of doubt, form-making spaces, spaces haunted by possibility and other forms. Early in that talk I rehearsed a list of the technological pursuits of humanists, a litany that was as much fun to recite as it was exciting (for me at least) to contemplate. It was so much fun that I'll repeat it here. Humanists, I said, concern themselves with everything

from hypertext to scholarly work with data sets and data bases, from text encoding and texts to image annotation and recognition, from electronic publication and communication to global information systems, and from search engines and software agents to synchronous and asynchronous virtual communities, immersive computer environments and simulations.

That list was probably inadequate then and surely is now. Not long ago one might have been tempted to claim that multidisciplinary pursuits- or what we then called inter-disciplinary pursuits- offered us an otherwise unavailable viability, a set of renewed and renewing- which is to say transforming- tools and practices like that of my litany, ones that disciplines heretofore and otherwise constrained. More recently I have begun to sense that, with disciplinary boundaries in a networked age ever more permeable (not to say ephemeral), and with transforming tools and practices a matter of course (and courses), there is a consoling and encouraging reassessment of disciplinarity underway.

It is in the spirit of such a reassessment that I have attempted this morning to offer a vision of disciplines both pressed and enabled by technologies to define themselves not just as preserves of silence but as arenas for deliberative action, including the informed and thoughtful action of taking no action.

In his opening remarks for this conference, Stan Katz alluded to the dark days we seem to face this bright January. As thousands of our fellow citizens gather elsewhere in this city at this moment to respond to a future that seems drearily worked out by technologies and ideas of fear, negativity, and destruction, I was, as many of you, taken by Bill Wulf's intimate sharing of a positive- if not positivist- vision of an immanent world in which even emergent behaviors can be benign, and in which multiplicities- even our own disciplinary ones- can be called to common purpose and achievement.

I know that it might seem ungrateful- or at least overly cautious- to call us to consider how much we do not, and perhaps cannot, know about each other and about our views of the world and its possibilities. I know that many of us await and even embraced promise or hoped-for changes in our own disciplines and our sense of others', promises and hopes which are as yet unmet and which this gathering renews our longing for, and our determination to achieve.

Yet there will come a time, perhaps it is now, when for awhile we will have run rampant, spreading light all over the darkening plain and moving unconstrained across boundaries, sometimes almost not recognizing the selves we see reflected in the bright surfaces around us. Then like weary warriors in a sort of twilight we will return home to our paths and huts, the glimmering horizon ambiguous, dawn or dusk or some new presence. We will know that it is time then to live awhile in this transformed world and, as we enter within the dark of the room and the night alike, we will take refuge in the dim light offered by the care we share for our commonly valued unknowing.