Thomas F. Reese, “Mapping Interdisciplinarity,” Art Bulletin 77 (December 1995): 544-49.
MAPPING INTERDISCIPLINARITY
The present essay constitutes a very preliminary attempt to delineate through time the changing boundaries and tolerances between "disciplinarity" and "interdisciplinarity" not only in different fields of humanistic inquiry, but also in different national theaters of research and pedagogy. To approach the question of "interdisciplinarity," we ought to begin by defining the nature of "disciplinarity" as a particular class of legitimizing institution that produces a "community of competency."[1] Indeed, it might be stipulated that interdisciplinarity emerges in direct response to the restrictive covenants of disciplinarity. If the structures of the latter are strong and the boundaries fixed, the strategies to achieve interdisciplinarity require force and are seen as transgressive; if they are weak, most forms of interdisciplinarity are permissively assumed to be natural excursions. In sum, interdisciplinarity has different connotations in different contexts, so we cannot generalize about "its" history. We might more productively focus on the relative permeabilites of disciplinary boundaries in different institutional settings.
Michel Foucault defined the operations of what he called "disciplinary society" and demonstrated the importance of "genealogy" for penetrating its assumptions and claims—writing the history of the present operations of knowledge and presenting an understanding of the disciplinary basis from which most intellectual production begins. As Foucault showed, disciplinary knowledge represents itself as part of a scientific quest to advance general knowledge, even when it simultaneously limits freedom of inquiry.
One of the principles in discipline formation is to privilege certain classes of evidence as the basis of research and to advance theory that specifies the unique character of the nature of change within the particular domain the discipline privileges. For example, in the study of humankind, speech, writing, and man-made objects are defined as distinct realms; indeed, according to Erwin Panofsky, "man-made objects with aesthetic intention" are a separate class than those "with utilitarian intention." The definition of the nature of these domains became the basis for the communities and networks of knowledge/power that constituted the discipline of art history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Once established, a discipline functions as a quasi-corporate voice to deflect criticism from outside its borders and to deflate all truth claims that do not win communal support.[2] Although academics belong to several communities (discipline, academic profession, university enterprise, and national academic system), the culture of the discipline, especially in the United States, generally has the strongest bonding power because it is often easier to leave the institution than the discipline.[3] To guarantee respect and secure jobs, there are rigorous methodological initiations in graduate training followed by admission to guild-like disciplinary and departmental structures, where elders demand allegiance to the standards by which they were trained and unambiguous criteria for judgment. Interdisciplinarity is an anathema in such segmented regimes of power, because practioners can not easily be certified by the tried and true criteria that have crossed generations. In the United States, these networks and allegiances have traditionally been located in institutions controlled by disciplines; during the 1980s, however, the economic stakes began to rise, and "superstar" publishing and media personalities emerged from within the academic scene to challenge the corporative power of the disciplines.[4]
Academic Communities in Germany, the United States, and France
Erwin Panofsky observed that the history of art's "native tongue is German," for "it was in the German-speaking countries that it was first recognized as a full-fledged Fach."[5] Art history entered late as a professional subject in the American curriculum, following many other fields that were established in the period between 1885-1910, when the modern American university was built on German models of disciplinary specialization and devotion to research.
The major social unit in the German university was the individual chair and its associated structures—the seminar and the research institute or laboratory. Each unit supported an apprenticeship grouping, which was composed of advanced students and assistants but not other chairholders. The chair often shaped research paradigms through the formation of institutes with faculty and students who supported his work, but the chair was traditionally the sole representative of his discipline at the university, so that his authority, like that of the feudal German prince, was limited to his realm and seldom went beyond the university. Universities were collections of individuals united by an intellectual outlook rather than the necessities of academic politics. In art history, nationalist paradigms were strong, and the scope of studies limited to Western European art from the era of Constantine to the mid-twentieth century.[6]
In contrast to the German model, dominant social groups in the American system were the department and the national professional organization. The department was composed of several professors in the same discipline of roughly equal authority, and the chair had limited power. The department had a budget and offered courses, but, unlike the German structure, there was a broad outlook within the discipline and great "market-driven" horizontal mobility in a system unregulated by a ministry or patron. Because of the presence of several professors and a broad curriculum, students needed not move if they did not like a professor. In America art history's offerings have typically been broad chronologically and geographically because of the distinctive and problematic role the discipline has played in constructing national identity in terms of America's role as the inheritor (and even inventor) of Western civilization.
Unlike American departments, where interchangeable parts seem to be the norm, the French system is smaller, more centralized, and yet more variegated in the types of educational and research institutions it supports. There is also less mobility. As a result, method-based (rather than discipline-based) leadership and shared intellectual values are an important factor. Charisma plays a certain role in attracting researchers to the paradigm, which often involves figures from different disciplines. Moreover, the system has been conducive to the formation of clusters of scholars around a single patron—"an association of say twelve people who shared a minimal core of beliefs about their work and were prepared to collaborate to advance research, . . . [their power dependent] largely on the number of positions which could be occupied in the national educational system by members of the cluster."[7] Influence of the sponsoring professor or patron is crucial; younger assistants may find a research position at an independent institute, like the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), or a teaching position as a maître assistant following the normal division of labor in the French university—grand theory on the one hand and quite specific empirical efforts on the other.
In sum, the Americans imported and reified certain aspects of the German academic system, but the expansionary character of American pedagogy gave special power to the departments locally and to disciplinary organs nationally. However, as the American curriculum expanded in content and pedagogical goals, the departmental system began to collapse, just as the departmental system itself had caused the classical curriculum to fall in the course of its own ascension to dominance. Today, the French model seems to offer the greatest possibilities for overturning the departmental system, which in part explains the powerful influence of French thought in America as well as the rise of new transdisciplinary work and the increasing predominance of charismatic academic superstars.
Disciplinarity and Art History
American art historians generally recount the history of their disciplinary origins in elite universities where the history of art had prestige and status: Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. In 1912, when E. Baldwin Smith published The Study of the History of Art in the Colleges and the Universities of the United States, 95 institutions taught art history, 68 offered courses by someone with a chair in the subject. Yet, fewer than eight tenths of one percent of the teaching body was committed to art and archaeology; the others taught in departments of Classics, Semitic Languages, Biblical Literature, French, Romance Languages, and History.[8]
As a subject, then, before 1920 art history was comfortable, and claimed even to be essential, in the liberal arts college and curriculum. Edward Robinson's address to the College Art Association of America meeting in 1918 described the study of art as "the most liberalizing of the liberal studies" and praised his teacher at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton, for teaching him the arts as "the expression of the civilization that produced them; . . . history, languages, literature, philosophy, all seemed to have a bearing upon what he was teaching."[9] Notwithstanding the frequent claims for art history as the study of the highest forms of civilized spiritual expression, its early growth was probably also linked indirectly to the desire of university administrators to prepare future alumni to make capital investments in the institution—museums, campus architecture, archaeological excavations, and university travel bureaus.
But if the emergence of art history as a discipline was linked to liberal arts education in the older colleges of the northeast, it had expanded and sometime competing functions in the new and growing network of departments in American universities. There, professional identities were often closely associated with the more generalized notion of art education. The boosterism associated with the early growth of the discipline is evident in the subtitle of the professional organization formed in 1912: The College Art Association of America: An Organization for the Advancement of the Study of the Fine Arts in American Colleges and Universities. Annual meetings held after 1917 included discussions of technical courses in the practice of art (sometimes called laboratory work), the production of pedagogical tools like syllabuses, museums of reproductions, and lists of casts, books, photography, etc., as well as calls for the need to develop courses on art to prepare the future layman, museum workers, competent writers on art, and professionals in history of the fine arts. The members shared "art," but not a single disciplinary practice. Nevertheless, the ties of art history to what was called the "practical teaching of the fine arts" had a strong legacy in American education in spite of the frequent tensions between the two vocations.
If art history initially had a comfortable place at the table with its siblings in the liberal arts, after the turn of the century it had to compete with the new "scientific" departments that had established their power by 1905.[10] To survive and grow, the history of art in the College of Arts and Letters had to assure its autonomy as a scientific discipline vis-a-vis archaeology, history, classics, and aesthetics by differentiating itself methodologically so as to demand departmental status, while simultaneously avoiding any perception of a narrowing of its scope that would relegate it to the status of a "sub-discipline" and give it the aura of a "special history." Art history, however, had a distinct disadvantage—its late entry into the departmental structures of the American university, which had come to be fixed as early as 1905.
The German emigrés who came to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s provided a key stimulus to promote the establishment of the new profession of art history as a high-status corps of scientific researchers.
During and after the second World War, the most prominent of the German art historian emigrés, Erwin Panofsky wrote two essays that played highly influential roles in the professional institutionalization of European, particularly German, values in American art history: "Art History as a Humanistic Discipline" (1938) and "Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European" (1953).[11] The earlier article was intended to help bolster the claims of art history as a part of, but also a unique realm within, the American humanities curriculum; the later article was a critical meditation on the differences between academic culture in the United States and Germany, based on the author's twenty years of experience in American graduate education. Often interpreted as a pro-Americanist accolade, the 1953 essay actually betrays a profound nostalgia for the European universitas magistrorum et scholarium ("a body of scholars"); it is also critical of the democratic educational mission of the university in America ("a body of students entrusted to a teaching staff") and of the replacement of the collegial "chair system" by the sovereign "departmental system."[12] Panofsky was particularly critical of what he viewed as the American concern for "the specter of completeness," represented by discussions about the need for a "balanced curriculum," which led him to compare the world of the American scholar to "a massive tableland of specialized knowledge overlooking a desert of general information."[13] Both essays extol elite German models of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit and inculcate a professional desire for the values of independence, scientific research, and also academic power that German universities granted to Privatdozenten, ordinarii, and the learned "faculties." They also praise the scholarly German Gymnasialprofessor, and criticize the American educational system—with teachers, "a vast majority of them females [who] know a great deal about 'behavior patterns'"—that "does not insist too much upon what [its teachers] may know of their subject."[14]
In addition to his enduring fondness for the German academic system, Panofsky revealed, too, his cultural attitudes about class and the economics of education in each country through passing observations that "the average [American] graduate student, therefore, does not come from a wealthy family and must try to prepare himself for a job as fast as he can"[15] and that American graduates must take jobs quickly with no "chance to fool around" or "marinate"—unlike the unsalaried German Privatdozent who is "allowed to mature."[16] These yearnings for the privileged status of German professors and students—which was already in decline at the time he was writing—became, I would suggest, so powerfully inscribed in American disciplinary identities that they were accepted as professional ideals, creating a distinct "inferiority complex" that benefited greatly the internationally-weakened colonizer. Panofsky's opinions have seldom been debated, nor has the value of the American university and educational system been defended against his critique.
The educational philosophy of John Dewey as exemplified in his William James Lectures on the Philosophy of Art—which he delivered at Harvard in 1931, the very year Panofsky first arrived in New York—stands in contrast to the German model that Panofsky espoused. Dewey saw the rise of art history as linked to collecting, museums, and capitalism, and he feared that the discipline—he did not use that word—would isolate works of art from experience rather than integrate them into our lives.[17] His educational premises focused on the society at large, and the impact of his philosophy is evident in some of the best American art history, which is characterized by a strong moral content and dedication to inspiring in students a sense of the social and political value of art.[18]