Beyond Disciplines
This week’s dispatch asks what it means to think beyond disciplines and asks why it is imperative that we do so.
When I first began thinking up the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project, I felt compelled to return to the book Hold Everything Dear by John Berger and to a particular passage that has been and continues to be decisive for me. This passage, from the essay “Where Are We?”, is quoted at length below.
People everywhere – under very different conditions – are asking themselves – where are we? The question is historical, not geographical. What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime?
The well-heeled experts answer: Globalization. Post-Modernism. Communications Revolution. Economic Liberalism. The terms are tautological and evasive. To the anguished question of Where are we? the experts murmur: Nowhere!
Might it not be better to see and declare that we are living through the most tyrannical – because the most pervasive – chaos that has ever existed? It's not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny, for its power structure (ranging from the 200 largest multinational corporations to the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless. It tyrannizes from offshore – not only in terms of fiscal law, but in terms of any political control beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalize the entire world. Its ideological strategy [...] is to undermine the existent so that everything collapses into its special version of the virtual, from the realm of which – and this is the tyranny's credo – there will be a never-ending source of profit. It sounds stupid. Tyrannies are stupid. This one is destroying at every level the life of the planet on which it operates.
[...] Most analyses and prognoses about what is happening are understandably presented and studied within the framework of their separate disciplines: economics, politics, media studies, public health, ecology, national defence, criminology, education, etc. In reality each of these separate fields is joined to another to make up the real terrain of what is being lived. It happens that in their lives, people suffer from wrongs which are classified in separate categories, whereas they suffer them simultaneously and inseparably.
A current example: some Kurds, who fled last week to Cherbourg and have been refused asylum by the French government and risk being repatriated to Turkey, are poor, politically undesirable, landless, exhausted, illegal and the clients of nobody. And they suffer each of these conditions at one and the same second!
To take in what is happening, an interdisciplinary vision is necessary in order to connect the ‘fields' which are institutionally kept separate. And any such vision is bound to be (in the original sense of the word) political. The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place.
Today, I am writing to you about what I think Berger meant when he called for "an interdisciplinary vision" that is "bound to be political". I am writing about this today because most of what passes for inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary thinking in our time does not approach what Berger called for, and I would like do my small part to change that.
When Berger wrote that, “we are living through the most tyrannical – because the most pervasive – chaos that has ever existed”, Berger was recognizing a fact that has only become more and more obvious in the two decades since he wrote it. The increasingly obvious fact is that crisis has become the primary mode of government in our world. Crisis as a mode of government works by conceiving of the world in terms of so many different crises that are to be studied separately by “subject matter experts” in different fields, and then managed separately or in tandem by so many different specialized bureaucracies. Crisis as a mode of government demands that the public health crisis be given its own experts and specialized bureaucracies, that the climate crisis be given its own, that the migrant and refugee crisis be given its own, that the unemployment and underemployment crises be given their own, and so on and so forth.
As Berger notes, however, in reality each of these separate crises is joined to another to make up the real terrain of the chaos that we are living in and through. We live all of these crises “simultaneously and inseparably” but the specialization of our tools, our knowledges, and our institutions conspire to keep us from addressing these crises in connection with one another. This is to say, in other words, that our tools, our knowledges, and our institutions force us to address each of these crises separately, dismembering and dissecting our lives. This manner of managing crises leaves each of us with the nearly impossible task of re-animating our lives from so many disparate parts: we somehow have to suture together what our specialized tools, knowledges, and institutions have butchered, and then we have to try and shock the resulting assemblage into life.
On the one hand, for the poor, crisis as a mode of government looks like going from one social service provider to the next, having your life dismembered and dissected, piece by piece, and then having to find some way to maintain the disparate pieces that have been handed back to you. The poor person goes from the housing services provider charged with addressing the housing crisis, to the unemployment services provider charged with addressing the employment crisis, to the healthcare services provider charged with addressing the public health crisis, to the immigration services provider charged with addressing the migration and refugee crisis, to the nutrition assistance provider charged with addressing the hunger crisis, to the education and training services provider charged with addressing the skills gap crisis. And is it any wonder that the poor are constantly struggling to keep themselves together?
On the other hand, for the rich, crisis as a mode of government looks like being able to hire so many specialists — some human, some algorithmic — to maintain your dismembered and dissected life for you. Which is to say, in other words, that the rich person pays others to keep it all together for them. Today, the relatively rich person trying to keep it together can say, “I’ve got an app for that.” And the really rich person can say, “I’ll put my people on it.”
Either way, for rich and poor alike in today’s world, life and its sufferings are dismembered and dissected into separate parts that are tended to separately and then put back together. Against all these dismemberments and dissections, I hold fast to what Berger called a political vision which presupposes the unity of life and its sufferings. This vision demands that we (de-/re-)construct our tools, knowledges, and institutions so as to enable us tend to life and its sufferings in their unity. Indeed, as I see it, and as Berger saw it before me, the tyrannical chaos that we are living through is the result of prioritizing our specialized tools, knowledges, and institutions over and above the unity of life and its sufferings. Going further, I hold that the prioritization of specialized tools, knowledges, and institutions yields the mistaken belief that many of life’s present sufferings are not only unavoidable but are necessary, whether to promote “economic growth” or “technological progress” or “national security” or “fairness”. By contrast, as Berger writes, tending to the unity of life and its sufferings above all else means affirming “the contestation (which we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken.”
So, the obvious next question is, how does one tend to the unity of life and its sufferings? Well, I would like to propose that one tends to the unity of life and its sufferings like one tends to the unity of the body and its organs.
My body as a unit and my hand as a part of my body are not identical with one another. To the contrary, they are obviously different from one another: my hand can be severed from my body, and my body can survive the severing of my hand if properly tended to. At the same time, however, my hand will remain integral to my body even after having been severed from it: the severed hand continues to haunt the body, as a phantom limb, for as long as the body survives it.
Our specialized tools, knowledges, and institutions first dismember and dissect our bodies and then they concern themselves with maintaining the organs they have separated out, apart from our bodies. They do not concern themselves with our bodies, which suffer the organs that have been parted from them. Many, if not most, inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary projects fail to grasp this and, thus, lack a political vision. These failed inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary projects take the existence of so many organs without bodies for granted and try to construct “complex systems” from these various dissociated organs. These projects do not recognize that the organs they take for granted were parted from bodies that preceded and exceeded them. These projects do not recognize that these bodies may survive and suffer the organs that have been parted from them. Ay, and these projects do not recognize that these surviving and suffering bodies deserve far greater attention than the organs that have been parted from them.
Rather than taking so many organs without bodies for granted, a political vision primarily attends to suffering bodies, to bodies without organs, bodies haunted by the organs that they are deprived of.
For example, rather than asking how we can make connections between the separate organs that are charged with, say, addressing the housing crisis on one hand and the public health crisis on the other, we should instead ask from what body have these two organs been parted and how can we tend to that suffering body. Tending to that suffering body might mean re-connecting one or both of these organs back to the suffering body or it might mean enabling the suffering body to survive without one or both of these organs. In other words, it may be that the organs addressing the housing crisis and the organs addressing the public health crisis have both become so detached and remote from the suffering social body that these organs need to be given up. Indeed, perhaps there are other organs closer to and still connected to the suffering social body that we might turn to to ease the sufferings of the body in lieu of these detached and remote organs.
The mistake is to prioritize connecting separate organs to one another, because this means prioritizing the maintenance of the parted organs over and above the sufferings of the body from which they were parted. Imagine two doctors, one whose top priority is keeping patients’ hearts beating and the other whose top priority is keeping patients’ lungs breathing. Imagine that, when these doctors collaborate, neither one tends to the well-being of patients' suffering bodies, that they only work together to ensure that the patients' hearts and lungs work in tandem. Imagine the unfortunate results of these collaborations: so many braindead bodies otherwise wasting away but connected to machines and attended to by servants that keep hearts beating and lungs breathing in tandem. This is what many have taken to calling inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking.
To avoid this deathly mistake means prioritizing the suffering body first and foremost, and this sometimes means sacrificing the maintenance of organs that can be parted from the body. It follows from this that inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking shouldn’t be about connecting more and more disparate disciplines together. Rather, it should be about re-connecting disciplines back to suffering bodies. Ay, and if a discipline cannot be re-connected to any suffering bodies so as to ease their suffering, then inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking should recommend sacrificing discipline in order to tend to suffering bodies.
