© Richard E. Lee 1997.
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[Prepared for the Panel Discussion "You Just Don't Understand: Talking Across the Boundary at SLS" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature and Science, Atlanta, GA, 10-13 October 1996.]
Already by the mid-nineteenth century, the science/ humanities antinomy was well established and hierarchical, even though strongly resisted--the superiority of ordered/lawlike, factual/expository scientific knowledge over the chaotic/ anarchic, impressionistic/poetic thought developed in the humanities. By the end of the century (as the Huxley-Arnold exchange showed) the social sciences (economics, sociology, political science, history, anthropology, orientalism) were emerging in an uneasy position between the sciences and the humanities to channel and control change in the social world. Values and systematic knowledge continued to be mutually exclusive concerns (as the replay of Huxley-Arnold by Snow and Leavis makes clear), however, until the 1960's when an epistemological upheaval accompanied the manifestations we are more familiar with. There were two movements actually. One was in the sciences with the development of studies of complex systems and self-organization. This led to a reconceptualization of the classical model based on reversible (Newtonian) time to include self-organization, irreversibility (the "arrow of time") and limited predictability. Meanwhile, in the humanities, assaults on foundationalism and essentialism undermined the (Cartesian) duality of subject and object. The two taken together reopen the question of objective certitude versus historical finitude. The structural sequestration of spheres of knowledge no longer appears as an unquestioned given and the intellectual is liberated to "think the unthought", to participate in the imaginative creation of the future by imagining possible utopias and, admitting that all knowledge is socially constructed, working to determine their actualization.
In the short time allotted to me for introductory remarks, I would like to make the following three points:
1. That the present boundaries we are considering "talking across" represent a historical structuring of knowledge. The hierarchy of the disciplines (and it is a hierarchy with the sciences at the privileged pole), although "naturalized", robbed of its constitutive history, is neither transhistorical nor the outcome of a teleological process.
2. That the long-term process through which the present disciplines were constructed and institutionalized de- sacralized knowledge, separated truth from values. Systematic knowledge, called "science" was constituted between the 16th and 19th centuries as the "other" of humanistic studies. During the 19th and 20th centuries, science, by way of the social sciences, has colonized the sphere of social decision making and humanistic studies, which had heretofore been concerned with social critique, withdrew into the domain of esthetics.
3. That this long-term structure, disciplining the way we think the world, is in a crisis, which, given the present political and economic conjuncture, offers real opportunities for imagining alternative futures.
Now let me elaborate a bit.
The separation of the super-disciplines was completed in the first half of the 19th century as Laplace out-Newtoned Newton and scholars in history and the arts embraced Descartes. With great effect and success, science concentrated on natural systems describable in terms of laws exhibiting time-reversibility and therefore admitting of prediction. Scholars in the humanities, where phenomenological time could not be discounted, appealed to that other tenet of classical science, objectivity.
The emergence of the social sciences from the second half of the 19th century is evidence of the trend toward scientificity underpinning the production of "legitimate" knowledge and the impact this had on daily life. Classical science with its premisses of reversibility and predictability of the trajectories of independent units was deployed through the social sciences to underwrite the liberal political program of progress through linear, incremental reform calibrated to satisfy the primary condition of "order" as the defense of private property while offering appeasement to calls for "democracy" from radicals.
The study of the European world broke down into an idiographic history of the "past" and nomothetic studies of the "present", that is: of markets, economics; of governments, political science; and of civil society, sociology. Europe's "Other" was timeless, without past, present, or indeed, future; it had not "developed". Oriental studies (based on philology, thus justifying a claim to scientific status) addressed the "high civilizations" and anthropology (employing an objective-- empirical, ethnographic--method, thus establishing its status as science) studied the "tribes". This structure was solidly in place after 1945 both intellectually and institutionally but began to fall apart from the late 1960's.
The political dimension, and social consequences, of separating the study of politics from economics or the civilized from the uncivilized world is obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that these distinctions rest on the hierarchical separation of the super-disciplines. Politics is embedded in the very boundaries we are talking about talking across. Just as the bankruptcy of the liberal political consensus on a world scale has been revealed over the past 30 years, debates in the humanities (in an anachronistic shorthand, what we have come to call cultural studies) and the sciences (what we term complexity studies) have undermined its premisses in the structure of knowledge.
Structures persist over long periods exactly because the processes that sustain them are able to damp internal fluctuations, often through medium-term restructuring. For instance, the last quarter of the 19th century saw two explicit attacks on the science/humanities antinomy--the revolution in mathematics (Poincar‚, Weierstrass, Cantor, Peano) and the Methodenstreit in economics and the philosophy of history. The first had limited effect in the wider world; its implications were simply ignored. The outcome of the second, however, established the grounds for the future development of the social sciences--the medium-term restructuring reproducing long-term trends.
Today, a world political and economic crisis coincides with a political, fiscal and intellectual crisis in the universities which suggests the ethical necessity for knowledge producers to participate actively in imagining the future. This is not the end of science, far from it, but the realization that meaning production, as interpretation, must become (has always been?) an integral part of constructing authoritative knowledge. Let us have at it.
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