Alterdisciplinarity

Abstract

This paper argues that central to the formation and orientation of politicised academic subjects is the notion of intervention. It examines the prevailing conceptions of intervention in the case of cultural studies, and argues that these prevailing notions of how academics and intellectuals can intervene politically rely on broadly Gramscian and post‐Marxist theories. However, it argues that the way these theories have been assumed has led to a rather under‐theorised faith in the political value of ‘critique’. It proposes that this under‐examined faith in the political power of critique is under‐theoretical, broadly metaphysical, subject‐centred and a regression from poststructuralist‐informed theories of the political. By revisiting the implications of post‐structuralist theories for academic work vis‐à‐vis intervention, the paper proposes that what is required is more thoroughgoing attention to the place and character of disciplinarity in the pragmatic mechanics of culture and society’s discourses and hegemonies. It argues that the conditions of possibility for intervention are indissociable from the institutional and disciplinary character of (post)modernity. In other words, it argues, the academic ‘condition’ is one of unavoidably heterogeneous language games in a web of disciplinary differences, and in the face of (the constitutive character of) disciplinarity and disciplinary difference, what has arisen is disciplinary enclaving, mutual unintelligibility and disarticulation. In this situation, it often appears that the only possible form of ethical and political intervention is ‘critique’ – either within one’s own discipline or ‘publicly’, journalistically. However, this paper argues that the interventional effectivity of any ‘critique’ is dubious at best. Instead it proposes a theory and practice of ‘alterdisciplinarity’. Grounded in post‐structuralism and deconstructive discourse theory, alterdisciplinary practice is that which seeks to alter other disciplinary discourses and their productions (knowledges) not by critiquing them but by intervening into the disciplinary spaces of their production and legitimation.

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies? (Stuart Hall)

Notes

¹ Chantal Mouffe voices something of this prevailing theoretical tendency when she proposes that ‘we could, borrowing the vocabulary of Heidegger, say that politics refers to the “ontic” level while “the political” has to do with the “ontological” one. This means that the ontic has to do with the manifold practices of conventional politics, while the ontological concerns the very way in which society is instituted’ (Mouffe 2005: 8–9).

² In Derrida, ‘classical protocols’ functions as a teleiopoetic term that he regularly conjures up in order to engender what it would seem to evoke or promise – namely, more analytical ‘rigour’ through more ‘sensitivity’ in reading; more ‘listening’ for the voices that have been drowned out, more questioning of the political implications of interpretive decisions, and so on (see, for instance, Derrida 1992: 11). This is why John Protevi proposes that ‘deconstruction is democratic justice, responding to the calls from all others’ (Protevi 2001: 70). (And this is also why many things other than what Derrida and friends did can be called ‘deconstructive’.)

³ ‘[T]he best liberation from violence is a certain putting into question, which makes the search for an archia tremble’ (Derrida 1978: 141).

⁴ I have discussed Žižek’s problematic relation to cultural studies more fully in Bowman (2006).

⁵ The term is Fredric Jameson’s and refers to ‘an element essential to a historical and/or intellectual transition that disappears when its work is done’ (Walsh 2002: 396).

⁶ However, this trail‐blazing was obviously far from a smooth transition or sublation. Inevitably, the generalisation or ‘popularisation’ of cultural studies type problematics moved hand in hand with its simultaneous unpopularity. Lola Young once accounted for the twin forces of attraction and repulsion attached to cultural studies by noting the way that cultural studies is ‘vilified along with media studies, amongst others, as being a “Mickey Mouse” subject’; yet, as she notes, ‘it is somewhat ironic […] that there have been repeated attacks on the subject in the media’ because ‘ideas and analyses which are now firmly embedded in media discourses have increasingly come to resemble closely the kind of cultural textual analysis that has been nurtured through cultural studies’. At the same time, ‘critical and theoretical paradigms derived from, and influenced by cultural studies, have seeped into the study of a wide range of disciplines: History, English Literature, Geography, Sociology and so on’. Thus, cultural studies was ‘a key element in the movement of disciplinary boundaries, and […] of wider shifts in political and intellectual sensibilities’ (Young 1999: 5).

⁷ I made a similar argument to what follows in Bowman (2004). Indeed, this present paper is a development upon Bowman (2004) and of some of the points made in the conclusion of Bowman (2007).

⁸ Nor is it to forget the value of the deconstructive ‘perhaps’. Rather, my point is that blind faith in ‘the perhaps’ is itself perhaps a particular kind of refusal to think, a particular kind of irresponsibility.