In lieu of a personal contribution:
"Let me sketch a situation I have been dealing with. It will be
familiar to many. A philosopher, a psychoanalytic critic, a
narratologist, an architectural historian, and an art historian are
talking together in a seminar about, say, 'signs and ideologies.'
Eager young scholars, excited, committed. The word 'subject' comes up
and keeps recurring. With growing bewilderment, the first participant
assumes the topic is the rise of individualism; the second sees it as
the unconscious; the third, the narrator's voice; the fourth, the
human confronted with space; and the fifth, the subject matter of a
painting or more sophisticatedly, the depicted figure. This could
just be amusing, if only all five did not take their interpretation
of 'subject,' on the sub-reflective level of obviousness, to be the
only right one. They are, in their own eyes, just 'applying a
method.' Not because they are selfish, stupid, or uneducated, but
because their disciplinary training has never given them the
opportunity, or a reason, to consider the possibility that such a
simple word as subject might, in fact, be a concept.
No single participant questions the other's use; each simply assumes
the other is confused, and turns off the concentration button or, in
the best of cases, gets upset. Each fictive participant in this
familiar drama uses the pronoun 'we' without specifying to whom it
refers. The other members of the seminar who are listening just don't
get it and drift off. By the time the discussants realize there is a
misunderstanding, the seminar is over."
Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities : A Rough Guide.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. p5-6.
A very fine book on the practice of interdisciplinarity that many in
this discussion might find valuable.
x.d
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http://www.dannybutt.net
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