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    ‘Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed.’ The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity.1
    Paul Bowman
    The liberty of the question (double genitive) must be stated and protected. A founded dwelling, a realized tradition of the question remaining a question. Jacques Derrida2 In asking and trying to answer a question like ‘what is cultural studies?’, we would already – whether we knew it, wanted it, or not – be participating in an ultimately interminable reflection, one that is often deemed to be little more than an irritating digression away from more urgent and important matters. Yet this entirely academic question has an urgency and importance that is often overlooked, ignored or even denied. Indeed, even such avoidance has an urgency, although it will never present itself as ‘urgent’ in the usual sense; for this ‘urgency’ devolves on the issues raised by the ‘fact’ that such an irritating question won’t go away, and that avoiding this question (as if it had been adequately answered) is justified on the basis (or bias) of an obdurate insistence about the obviousness of what is ‘obviously’ urgent (and accordingly what should obviously be done in light of this obviousness). But, in asking and trying to answer the question ‘what is cultural studies?’, we would instantly have to call everything that is ‘obvious’ into question, for we will also be obliged along the way to re-pose the question as ‘what is the aim of cultural studies?’ Any answer to this will have to confront the question, ‘what is the aim of this academic practice?’, and, by extension, ‘what, as academics, are we meant to be doing?’ In fact, it is tied to the very question of academic activity itself: the point and purpose of academic activity. And when cultural studies asks such questions, it touches on a particularly sensitive academic nerve: for the way cultural studies poses this question, and the position it occupies ‘within’ the university, reveal that ‘cultural studies’ (as ‘subject’ and ‘object’) exists at the point of an extremely painful injury (in the physical and legal senses of the word) ‘within’ the university.
    
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    2 In an ‘obvious’ sense, this much might easily be deduced from the febrile character of attacks on cultural studies. But this is a matter (of ‘fact’) that we will leave implicit and ‘taken as read’ here. For, rather than looking at the ‘reception’ given to cultural studies, we could do worse than take stock of an apparently paralysing, yet curiously ignored, set of conflicts right at the heart of cultural studies. For, what is its object, ‘terrain’, or ‘field’ of objects of its analysis, called the cultural?3 What, exactly, is cultural studies to study? The name ‘cultural studies’ gives little away, except a preliminary problem of specification, definition, demarcation and delimitation. This might justify its existence, to some extent: its object being the specification and elaboration of ‘culture’ or ‘the cultural’. But couple this conundrum with another, that of the obligations specified for cultural studies by its founders,4 and note that this obligation is no less vague and even more euphemistic than its very first problem: namely that cultural studies should ‘engage’, ‘confront’, ‘address’, and even ‘intervene’ in ‘the cultural’. What in the world could that even mean, let alone entail? And furthermore, it has repeatedly been said that cultural studies must not merely take the position of a kibitzer or onlooker, from the safe, aloof, omniscient or sententious site of The University. Rather, as Stuart Hall said, in a retrospective ‘about’ cultural studies (which can hardly be divorced from ‘being’ or ‘doing’ cultural studies itself), 5 that cultural studies, to be cultural studies, must never forget its ‘‘worldly’ vocation’:6 it has to be an academic practice tied to the problems, issues, and concerns of the ‘world’; not merely to document, interpret or record them, but to intervene, take a stand, support, affect, work with, for, against and towards ‘worldly’, ‘cultural’ things (whatever any of this may mean, be, or entail). Immediately, therefore, cultural studies is not ‘neutral’. In saying it is to intervene, it is inevitable that many voices will denounce it as biased. But, what is its bias? In answering that question, one would have gone some way toward saying what it is and what it must seek to do. Yet, within cultural studies, there is little sign of any agreement as to how we should interpret ‘our’ vocation, what that vocation should be; or, where there may be some consensus about its premises and telos, there is little consensus about exactly how cultural studies should do what it is to do, which still amounts to asking what it is that it has to do; and so again the question ‘what is cultural studies?’ returns. This is the same as to say that whenever a cultural studies academic presents a piece of work, of argument
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    3 and analysis with a didactic ‘message’, this work, its ‘message’, will have been possible only on the basis of their advocation of a theoretical paradigm, that itself amounts to the imposition of a decision about what should be done and how. The point here is at least twofold. First of all, the decision about who or what ‘perspective’ is ‘right’ also decides at the same time what one’s aims should be and how one should therefore proceed. (The tautology here goes without saying.) And secondly, to note the fact that two people ‘in’ cultural studies may well advocate different paradigms7 reveals that many disagreements, polemics, arguments, repudiations and contretemps, are predicated by a fundamental disagreement about the answer to the question ‘what is cultural studies?’ As Derrida has argued repeatedly, the decision about anything, if it is a decision, will also make a decision about the subject that is said to have ‘made the decision’.8 So, if we decide something like ‘cultural studies should work to identify and combat the iniquities and injustices of capitalism’, or something similar of ‘patriarchy’, ‘ethnocentrism’ or ‘ideology’, then ‘our’ identity, the identity of the subject of cultural studies, will also have been decided, at least provisionally, and this will reveal itself in terms of what will come to be seen to be the dominant paradigm, or ways of going about doing things, and indeed, what is done and how it is done. What orients disagreements – what actually enables any disagreement – arises as a result of fundamental differences in orientation: within cultural studies this amounts to different answers to the question ‘what is cultural studies?’, a question that itself has different guises, such as: ‘what should be done (as cultural studies)?’; or, ‘how are we to do it (to be cultural studies, and not something else)?’ So, perhaps this most abstract and irrelevant question is actually the most urgent. For, what if the wrong decision has been made? What if we are going about things in the wrong manner, a bad way, doing the wrong things, or doing the right things wrong? What the hell is the right thing to do? This latter question, which is inextricably bound up with the others, can be answered, I believe, by looking at the logic by which cultural studies was possible, and subsequently constructed, as a ‘new’ discipline. That is to say, we can see what cultural studies ‘is’ by looking at how it was constituted and inscribed as an ‘independent’ academic subject. For, if we look at the history of, say, that which is called ‘British’ cultural studies, for instance,
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    4 the overwhelming character of the initial (initialising) form of its initiation has the form of a rejection: a rejection of (1.) the ways of going about doing (2.) the things within (3.) the disciplines of the university. In the spaces of literary studies, for instance, the legitimised range of valid (or ‘appropriate’) objects of study could be seen to be too eurocentric, and moreover, that the possibility of extending one’s analysis (as if) from literature to the cultural (or anywhere else, for that matter) is automatically constrained by the fact that in departments of literature, one is only, chiefly, or primarily authorised to study literature. Even with concessions, such as syllabus expansion to include foreign or ‘non-literary’ literatures, one is constrained by the obligation to prioritise literature as the object of analysis. Within the human sciences, there is only so far that one can go in questioning the methodological presuppositions necessary for objectifying ‘subjects’ as statistics or other such formalisable data. Even when the considerations of criteria are made radically complex and inclusive, there will always be exclusion, regulation and homogenisation in order for any order to be imposed at all.9 And, in disciplines where the establishment of valid data and calculation is the order of the day, those who reject the validity of what are imposed as being ‘necessary methodological procedures’ will thereby remove themselves from that discipline, its sanction, validation, and remit, because their actions will amount to an affront to the proper practices and procedures of that discipline. The same can be said for those who question too much the imposition of form on history, on the psyche, on the anthropos or humanitas, on the deus, the logos, the machina, the ‘ding an sich’, the referent; or indeed, even on the question: of how far and the directions one can take questions, the kinds of questions that are allowed, admitted, given credence, taken seriously, or taken beyond the limits that that discipline deems ‘reasonable’, ‘proper’ or ‘appropriate’. For all disciplines impose enabling limits; that is, a set of conditions within which one can work, in a well policed, ‘legitimate’, ‘correct’, or ‘proper’, way. To transgress, ignore or refute these conditions is to question the validity of everything done within and in the name of that discipline. It is to move ‘outside’ of that space, call it into question, and also to incur the wrath of its judgement, a judgement that will inevitably come from a position that agrees with the premises, hypotheses, and proper procedures, that have been transgressed. Of course, this is not to demonise discipline, for, as Thomas Kuhn was
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    5 among the first to argue, a discipline will often radically revise itself in light of certain developments, even when they are heretical to its stated rules, premises, and protocols. But, as Kuhn’s argument also implies, such revision or revolution is never without resistance. For, in pulling the rug out from under a discipline’s feet, or attacking its integrity, it will defend its present form and status quo. Discipline also imposes a hierarchy: authorities, experts, canons, guarantors, traditions, obligations, syllabi, modes of communication, pedagogy, reproduction, maintenance and self-preservation. All of these institute and reproduce what that discipline ‘is’, ‘does’, ‘knows’, and ‘should be’: its enabling limits. These limits are, of course, a form of exclusion, of regulation and policing, related to the ‘common sense’ of all identity-formation itself. As Derrida has argued, To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of “logic” itself, of good “sense” insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is: being is what it is, the outside is outside and the inside inside.10 The founding or foundation of cultural studies amounted to a polemical rejection of many exclusions. Its ‘rejection’ was based on the political and ethical stakes of disciplinary exclusion. For, as has been said many times, in excluding so much that was related to the literary, but said to be not-proper-literature, the discipline of literary studies was imposing a hierarchy that was ‘elitist’, eurocentric, and patriarchal, at least. In producing and reproducing this canon (according to and as a paradigm) of proper or ‘best’ literature, the discipline also imposes definitions of ‘culture’, of value and orientation, that will themselves be aristocratic, eurocentric and patriarchal. Similarly, in opting for statistical kinds of analysis, the human sciences participate in a reduction of ‘human agency’ to putatively ‘objective’ knowledge11 that is in no way ‘natural’, ‘objective’ or ‘true’, but always based on an interpretive bias, on reduction, exclusion, and censorship (that is itself always already politically tendential). The same can be said of the disciplinary regulation of questions of historiography by subordination to canonical versions of ‘History’, of questions of art to ‘Art’, of the theological to ‘Theology’, the potentially philosophical to ‘Philosophy’, and so on.
    
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    6 Cultural studies’ rejection, then, was a rejection of rejection: an affirmation of inclusion. Not a rejection of the academic imperative ‘to study’ and ‘to know’, but rather a rejection of the biases of the current instituted ways in which this imperative had been imposed and perpetuated as the proper way to study the proper things. Already deconstructive, if not deconstruction, anything which does this will be accused of amounting to a process of destruction, for the foundation of cultural studies amounted to a polemical rejection that would necessarily often be perceived as a disrespectful, irreverent affront to the academic disciplines from which it differed by seeking to re-problematize ‘as questions’ the very things that the extant disciplines would have either decided in a particular way (in order to proceed) or else effaced, denied, or silenced as questions (in order to proceed: for these questions amount to potentially intractable ‘methodological’ questions of the political and ethical dimensions of what is to be included, what excluded, what valued and why, and what ignored as irrelevance – in short, a range of considerations that, were they ever to be taken on board at every step, may well scupper the possibility of even taking a step outside of such questioning. None of which is very helpful for a discipline that needs to proceed pragmatically along the route that defines it as being that discipline itself). In one way, then, this impropriety of cultural studies is therefore proper. 12 But it is also inevitable that in stepping on the toes of the other disciplines in this way, by reopening the possibility of their own injuriousness, it will be deemed disrespectful. For reasons that I hope to demonstrate, cultural studies is always already going to lend itself to the role of ‘hate object’, as Lola Young once termed it, even and especially in the eyes of those it is apparently closest to.13 This is a risk – more than a risk: a structural inevitability – that cultural studies should perhaps take on board: it will be hated, resented, belittled, ridiculed. In short, it will lend itself to the role of scapegoat. Moreover, if this state of affairs is indeed ‘structural’, then it cannot be entirely specific to ‘cultural studies’. It is rather endemic to ‘interdisciplinarity’ itself. I could easily now move on, to a section of argumentation through examples so as to justify ‘properly’ this assertion by piling up examples of cultural studies and other interdisciplines having been treated as ‘hate objects’ in different discursive situations. However, let us instead take it as read that we all already know this, and that we could all
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    7 point to as many examples of scorn poured on cultural studies as such a ‘proper’ justification might be said to require. Instead, I propose that we move ‘away’ from cultural studies specifically, and also that we do not ‘ask’ or expect ‘proper’ cultural studies academics to furnish us with an explanatory account of the structural condition of interdisciplinarity within the institution. Just as we might be ill-advised to expect a politician to tell us everything we want to know about ‘the political’, so perhaps the annals of institutional cultural studies might not necessarily be the best place to look to find out all we want to know about disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Instead, perhaps we could start from a text that deals with the foundation or institution of the structurality of structure itself. Discipline’s Pharmacy: Kettles, Goats, Symptoms, and Gods The word “between” has no full meaning of its own.14 Cultural studies is often said to be ‘interdisciplinary’. But ‘inter-disciplinary’ can only properly be read doubly: to be interdisciplinary, to do interdisciplinary work, the interdisciplinary discipline will always be more and less than one discipline.15 On the one hand, the claim of interdisciplinarity signals an eminently pure academic activity, consisting, as it would seem, of a redoubling of academic effort, in order to master more than one discipline, to be hyper-academic, to be more and do more than ‘single’ disciplines themselves.16 But, on the other hand, the ‘interdiscipline’ will be less, or at least other than, improper in terms of, each discipline it travels between.17 To claim some multiple mastery or comprehension from a position that is ‘exterior’ (albeit ‘exterior within’, in the form of ‘in between’), can only be met by the accusation that it is no mastery at all, especially and necessarily in the view of those disciplines that, it is claimed, have been ‘comprehended’ by this other view. The ‘inter-’, the ‘across’, or ‘between’ is at once the most admirable and proper imperative of academia: to find out more, to find out all, or as much as possible, to increase scope and vision, to see more, to know more.18 Yet it is, as well, the most contemptible and improper (‘the monstrous double’):19 for it trespasses, precociously,
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    8 irreverently, and disrespectfully. The ‘inter’ is buried or interred deep within academia, and yet it remains outside each of its component parts, less than each, claiming to be more. Moreover, the term ‘discipline’, when applied as the designation of a specific ‘discipline’, already specifies that that ‘discipline’ is part of a series or family, all united insofar as they are all disciplines; that is, all disciplines are what they are only by and through being united and subordinated to discipline – the discipline of (academic) disciplinarity. That which calls itself ‘interdisciplinary’ doubles, rather than reduces, its ties to discipline, because the identity of the interdiscipline is constructed explicitly through its relations with other disciplines. As such, it takes from them its identity. Yet it must, to legitimize its existence, produce ‘the new’, ‘new knowledge’. Borrowing and returning, covering the same ground, but being obliged and desiring to cover it differently, standing accused of theft, irreverence, and exappropriation, whilst claiming and wishing to ‘produce’, ‘improve’, ‘add’, and ‘alter’, the interdiscipline cannot escape from a recourse to an overdetermined kettle-logic, which takes the form of: (1.) The knowledge I am returning to you is brand new; (2.) the holes were in it when you lent it to me; (3.) you never lent me any knowledge anyway.20 The interdiscipline is bound, doubly, to affirm and deny, to try to fulfill its debt repayment and to refute it. For, just like the disciplines it parasites and offends, or supplements and, in supplementing, subverts, it must, to be a discipline, or to have an identity ‘of its own’, keep its outside out and its inside in,21 just like the others. This is the logic, the good sense, of all that lies before it, the logic of possession, identity, and non-contradiction, that determines the very gaze of institutional legitimation in whose eyes the ‘new’ discipline must seek validation. So one can see how the interdiscipline both reassures and upsets the academy. It at once promises to add a new dimension in its overall aim of omniscience; yet it threatens to rattle the order of things, to reorder and potentially disorder; it is both promise and threat. This double status arises in terms of the idea or ideal of the academy (of) itself (promising a new that threatens the old, a reordering that disorders) and also in terms of the extant hierarchy or status quo. We might say, ‘Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed’.22 But, the ‘gaze’ of the academy is not unified itself, its decrees are not univocal, and so, whilst it must still be said that the interdiscipline will be subject to ‘its’ gaze and decrees, and whilst the interdiscipline must seek legitimation and validity only in ‘its’ or ‘their’
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    9 terms (i.e., the university’s), yet it will still, to a certain extent, ‘lie outside [‘its’ – the other potentates/disciplines of the institution] field of effectiveness’. For no one else, no other discipline does, is, or knows, what the interdiscipline does, is, or knows; and accordingly it is no one else’s business to pass judgement on the knowledge that is the interdiscipline’s ‘property’. But the interdiscipline, remember, has stepped on others’ toes, stolen from them, meddled in their business, and is inevitably going to encounter disdain – so what will be the form of this first attack?: What indeed would be the first thing a disdainful god would find to criticize in that which seems to lie outside his field of effectiveness? Its ineffectiveness, of course, its improductiveness, a productiveness that is only apparent, since it can only repeat what in truth is already there.23 What, in truth, is already there, before the interdiscipline comes along to supplement it, badly, wrongly, arrogantly, impudently, offensively, rudely? That which it lies between: a status quo, an institution, its histories, values, priorities, truths and rectitude. If the interdiscipline lies between sciences, then it may have a hope of counter-verifying the verifiable allegations it encounters, or producing products that will exonerate it and prove its use, worth, and scientificity. But, if the interdiscipline lies across, steps on the toes of (or shoes, since no institution is naked or natural),24 and threatens to subvert the authority of the ‘unproductive’ disciplines, then to whom or what will it appeal for verification of its productiveness? In ‘challenging’ or accusing the already unproductive disciplines (the not properly productive: the ‘discursive disciplines’, those that are already parasitic kibitzers, producing nothing but their own discourse) – namely those that a utilitarian or capitalist orientation would already challenge or accuse (literature, philosophy, art, history, theology, the ‘scientistic’ disciplines: sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.) – then the interdiscipline would not only find itself challenged by the ‘productive’ disciplines (whose worth, value and rectitude are ostensibly beyond question, and held up as the idea/l of knowledge itself), it would also be challenged and accused by the unproductive. 25 Both polarities threaten to symptomatize the interdiscipline. The productive, by showing the universally condemnable interdiscipline to be a symptom of the uselessness of all such unproductive disciplines; and the unproductive disciplines, by claiming, ‘look what we are
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    10 not!’ or ‘you see how bad we could be!’, appeals that are to be read ‘you see how bad we could be / how good and worthy we really are! Accept us, condone us, validate us; were you to do so, we would willingly offer this sacrifice up to you!’ The interdiscipline will always already necessarily risk being experienced as a certain poisoner (pharmakos), contaminator, defiler, parasite, and, hence, evil, bad, or corrupt/ing element. Yet, this is an evil that has been ‘included’ – an outside allowed inside, or perhaps a better word would be admitted. For its admittance will have been an admission premised and legitimized on the basis of a loophole-like contrary injunction, a paradox, contradiction, or double bind, in the categorical(ly) academic imperative, in the idea and ideal of the academy and of knowledge. The institution admits what promises to complete or further the cause of its ‘guiding idea’, that which appealed for admittance by invoking this idea/l. And yet, if the new, in furthering and supplementing the extant, denies, challenges or accuses the instituted institutional norm, disdains it, then it will be said to have gone off the rails, to have been misled and to wish to mislead, to have deviated and be deviant, to be deemed ‘sophist’ – ‘the man of non-presence and of nontruth’.26 As such, the sophist, the poisoner, must be excluded, to preserve the integrity of the institution: The character of the pharmakos has been compared to a scapegoat. The evil and the outside, the expulsion of the evil, its exclusion out of the body (and out) of the city – these are the two major senses of the character and of the ritual.27 As we have seen, the outside has been admitted into the body proper in the first place as both a gamble and an insurance policy: to admit the risk, to admit the possibility of either a good or a bad ‘surprise’: either the new subject will prove beneficial to power/knowledge, or else it will at least be contained. Either way, the point is to have prepared for the possibility of any order of surprise; to have mastered the surprise, before it has happened, to have disciplined the surprise, in advance, organised all the conditions of possibility for its ‘character’ if and when it emerges. In the event of the possibility of either a beneficial or a detrimental surprise for the inside of the body proper, it has unquestionably dealt itself
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    11 a ‘stunning hand’:28 inclusion of what may well need to be purged, should a ‘crisis’ arise (to ‘keep the enemy closer’): These exclusions took place at critical moments (drought, plague, famine). Decision was then repeated. But the mastery of the critical instance requires that surprise be prepared for: by rules, by law, by the regularity of repetition, by fixing the date…29 In times of crisis, the unity and integrity of the institution will have organised, in advance, the interpretation, the diagnosis and the prescription – a purgative proscription, to restore the proper: The city’s body proper … reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression. That representative represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect or infect the inside by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside is nevertheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community, chosen, kept, fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside. These parasites were as a matter of course domesticated by the living organism that housed them at its expense. “The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcasts as scapegoats.”30
    
    The Anxiety of Iter-Disciplinarity To break off from this reading of Dissemination, which would take more time and space than is available here, we should note that what amounts to a cataclysmic possibility for the interdiscipline is an unlikely ‘event’ which yet reveals the logic by which the university
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    12 ‘admits’. There is no univocal authority of or to the university to guarantee that such violent expulsions will take this form, although they do take place, and regularly, and the justifications or rationales of these exclusions invariably fit perfectly this scapegoat logic, the expulsion of the ‘unproductive’ pharmakos. But, instead of focusing on this dimension of the reading, we might note that, of the character of any new discipline, it must, despite any ‘novelty’, ‘difference’ or ‘radicality’, inevitably ‘begin by repeating without knowing’31 the form of the disciplines it mimes in order to become equivalent with. For, the recognition of something as actually being a discipline depends upon its recognisability as being like a discipline. Its relations with what it differs from will be ‘virtually but necessarily “citational”’.32 For, like all entities or identities, the interdiscipline, ‘always springing up from without, acting like the outside itself, will never have any definable virtue of its own’.33 It does not set its own value, but rather ‘it is the King who will give it its value, who will set the price of what, in the act of receiving, he constitutes or institutes’.34 Its value, its meaning, its force and law, are/ come from/ go to outside of itself: the outside it is inside as outside and other than. But, as we have noted, in the case of the ‘transgression’ that enables the interdiscipline, this disrespectful rejection may amount to being received or elaborated as a kind of parricide.35 The interdiscipline might be deemed incorrectly and unjustly to be that which does not ‘know where [it] comes from or where [it] is going, … [a] discourse with no guarantor…. Uprooted, anonymous, unattached to any house or country, this almost insignificant signifier is at everyone’s disposal, can be picked up by both the competent and the incompetent, by those who understand and know what to do with it, and by those who are completely unconcerned with it, and who, knowing nothing about it, can inflict all manner of impertinence upon it’.36 But, the discourse of interdisciplinarity, as with all speech, ‘“always needs its father to attend to it, being quite unable to defend itself or attend to its own needs”’.37 The attending, if absent, father, is institutional legitimation itself. To secure such legitimation, the new must repeat the old, the laws of the extant, and ‘repetition is always submission to a law’.38 But, who repeats and what is repeated?: ‘they repeat each other’.39 In the establishment (verb and noun), the institution through inscription, of both the figure and configuration of ‘father-figure’ and ‘son’, it is actually this ‘inscription’ itself that ‘is thus
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    13 the production of the son and at the same time the constitution of structurality’.40 The constitution of this structurality follows a certain dominant pattern (we could say, a pattern that has become more than hegemonic: rather, a pattern that has become the hegemon itself).41 The pattern of the constitution of structurality itself proceeds ‘According to a pattern that will dominate all of Western philosophy, [in which] good [academic] writing [and practice]… is opposed to bad writing …. And the good one can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad one’.42 The good as opposed to the bad, the right versus the wrong, the should and the should not. A certain figure authorises this figuration, a figuration which remains to dominate the discourses of propriety, rectitude, seriousness, sobriety, and the proper property of the institution. There is ‘knowledge’ – disciplined ‘knowledge’ – proper, respectful, traditional, and so forth: knowledge that is ‘legitimate’. And there is that which is a party to discipline, but dallies and plays, disrespectful, disjointed, improper – the ‘false brother’, the errant son, ‘traitor, infidel and simulacrum’. The good son, ‘the brother of the brother’ is ‘the legitimate one’, figured ‘as another sort of writing: not merely as a knowing, living, animate discourse, but as an inscription of truth in the soul’.43 The good brother, the rightful heir, is the father’s stand-in (proxy, representative, metonym, logos); such that, in the relation between the right and the wrong, ‘The name of the relation is the same as that of one of its terms’.44 Here, I would argue, ‘science’, the scientific, scientificity: the idea and ideal of ‘knowledge’: omni-science (mastery, control, predication and prediction, repetition). The Injury of Interdisciplinarity Many may protest that we have left the questions of cultural studies, what it should be (like) and what it should do, by the wayside. But, we have not, preferring instead, in a possibly unorthodox, possibly predictable and entirely orthodox manner, to try to relate the putatively unorthodox to the orthodoxy that legitimates it and constitutes the fundamental ‘conditions of possibility’ for its emergence. Another point to make would be that ‘deconstruction’ has provided us with more than just a manner of questioning (to which it has often been reduced), and that if one looks at even the most supposedly
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    14 ‘obscure’ of his ‘philosophical’ texts, one finds Derrida dealing with precisely the questions and problems that have dogged or enlivened cultural studies from the outset. 45 In addition, we have argued that the ‘condition’ that has been characterised as ‘the anxiety of interdisciplinarity’, which is ‘felt’ perhaps most pointedly within interdisciplines themselves, is not isolated to or within them exclusively: If it is a symptom, then it is a symptom of a general condition, permeating the ‘body’ of the university. This is what Derrida has called a ‘being-ill’,46 an ‘anxiety’, he has also elsewhere called a ‘malaise’, that is ‘getting worse’.47 This ‘injury’, can of course be tied to an experience of the project of ‘the university’ that ‘today’ consists in having opened up the fissure or wound which is the university’s very constitutive incompletion – that incompletion which summons all academic desire, and which yet scuppers it at the outset (because it can never be completed, decisively, definitively). As we have suggested, the injury is also an in-jury, in the sense of being tied to the injurious, the un-just. The injustices instituted and rained down upon the ‘proper’, established, status quo of disciplines by upstart interdisciplines like cultural studies, and the ‘proper’ disciplines’ own defence mechanisms of retaliation, is experienced as injuriousness by the interdisciplines, that see themselves as operating legitimately in the spaces identified as ‘between’, ‘beyond’ and ‘outside’ the extant disciplinary demarcations. So, where the interdiscipline will see itself as remaining committed to the enlightenment injunctions of academia, through and through, the traditional disciplines into whose terrain it intrudes as ‘other’ and yet familial, will see its different orientations and paradigms as unsettling and troubling. If this ‘injury’ is ‘constitutive’ and hence irremediable, is there at least some ‘therapy’ or ‘strategy’, that might help establish the should and the must of what cultural studies is to do? For, if we have indicated the ‘structural situation’ of cultural studies, in some measure, then what should be prescribed (and by what pharmacist?), as being what it should or must do? In dialogue with Derrida and Kant’s theorisation of the university, in the collection, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, Timothy Bahti poses the question: ‘How healthy is the modern university…?’48 In his account, which is given form, or in-formed, and figured through the images of leverage, and of all the oscillations and conceptual
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    15 difficulties involved in thinking through ‘the opposition of right and left [which] does not arise from a conceptual or logical determination, but only from a sensory topology that has to be referred to the subjective position of the human body’,49 and also through his experience of the therapy to repair a collapsed lung (based on leveraging the injured lung with the strength of the healthy lung at the other side, to redress the balance), the injury to or of the university is that of ‘an imbalance between wings or projects of the university, such as that one faculty or capacity – that of ‘science’... – is being celebrated and enhanced from within the university, while another – the humanities – is being belittled and reprimanded from outside’.50 Noting that Humboldt had anticipated the possibility of this situation arising, in advance, Bahti argues that this is a question of value; for: The university will itself profit, and will allow the surrounding, supporting society to profit in turn, if it enters into the valuation of high-tech, cuttingedge applications of science, while it is threatened with suffering loss, … if it does not know and value the ‘humanistic’ values it ought to maintain. This is an injury of values or of evaluation: one part of the academic body becomes the locus of a promise of greatly increased values, while another part suffers an attack against its ostensible undervaluing or devaluing of values.51 Bahti has no qualms about offering his own suggestion for, if not a ‘remedy’ or ‘solution’, which carry the resonance of dissolution and absolution,52 then a ‘therapy’, itself surely interminable, for this injurious imbalance in which the sciences are discursively overvalued as both profitable and the source and resource of all values, and in which the ‘humanities’, the supposed guardians and knowers of ‘values’ are accused of neither knowing them, nor measuring up to them, and actually of destroying them. As he says, this therapy would ‘seek to vitalize the very issue of evaluation, of the production and ascertainment of values’, in which the work of the humanities would consist of ‘asking anything claiming value or having value claimed for it to justify such evaluation’. 53 For, the ‘injury’ and ‘therapy’ might be described as the following: ‘‘Where are the values?’ is the question put to the humanities at the same moment that values are everywhere claimed for university
    
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    16 sciences – this is the injury. The same question, ‘Where are the values?’ put forcefully and insistently back to the university by the humanities, is the leveraged therapy’.54 Yet, we should perhaps note that Bahti is emphatically speaking of the humanities. The case of contemporary interdisciplinary study within the humanities, stands apart, somewhat, or outside, what he judges to be true of the humanities as a whole. For it is quite possible to deny, when talking of cultural studies and related interdisciplines, what he says few could deny about the humanities generally; namely: ‘Few of us could deny, I believe, that the curricula we offer our undergraduate and graduate students, and the scholarship we expect and accept from our graduate students and colleagues, is preponderantly the history of literature, the history of art, the history of culture and society’. This is not strictly true of cultural studies. However, what Bahti goes one to say might be read as a manifesto for a procedure, revision, or revaluation of what the humanities should do, en masse, and in adhering or in agreeing to such a procedure they would thereby be subscribing to a major step already taken by cultural studies, and which, additionally, therefore, can also be read as a (countersigning, validating) justification of cultural studies in terms of what the entirety of the humanities should do, in order to counteract injury and in-jury and in order to ‘strengthen’ themselves. For Bahti continues, and we should cite this at length (although such an overlong citation might be thought improper): The injury, then, is one in which one part of … the ‘humanities’, has become so empowered that the other part, once called philosophy and now perhaps awkwardly designated as method, theory and metacritical, nonpositive analysis, is threatened with usurpation and atrophy. What one might mean by ‘philosophy’ here is … inquiring rationally, judging freely, and doing both all the way down to the principles of inquiry, reason, judgement, and freedom. …. For all the activity devoted to historical knowledge – by which I mean the courses, the examinations, the papers and dissertations and submitted manuscripts – there would be the repeated occasion, on each such occasion, for these small and simple questions: How? Why? So what? That
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    17 is, the present distribution which, for some century and a half, has favored historical knowledge over its philosophic judgement, need not be revamped or done away with (which is hardly realistic anyway), so much as used as the fulcrum for the corresponding questions of how and why one knows such knowledge, questions weakened to muteness but thereby given voice by virtue of their very other. My sense of injury within the ‘humanities’ leads me to insist, quietly but firmly, that all historical knowledge without an accompanying rationale for its constitution and existence is counterintellectual, and ultimately counterrational. My sense of a possible therapy suggests that each bit of historical knowledge, each occasion for its articulation and transmission, should become the occasion for inquiry into its methodology and teleology. Even to acknowledge, and to insist upon the acknowledgement, that history has a history, and that the history ‘known’ is not a substantial object but a subjectively constructed cognition, can be critical in this context. Put more polemically: no history of literature, no history of art, no history of society, without a philosophy of history, a method of historiography, an internal and external accounting.55 We see here, then, an injury within the university in the relations between the scientific faculties and the humanities. This is matched by an injury within the humanities, between, on the one hand, the historical, empirical, ‘positive’ branch, and, on the other hand, the ‘theoretical’, ‘philosophising’ branch. That which is ‘accursed’ in the eyes of the instituted hegemony of power/knowledge, the theoreticism of interdisciplines like cultural studies is elevated, made ‘sacred’. Such sacralization is precisely what takes place in the institution of any and every ‘knowledge’ as being knowledge of an order that must be mediated and controlled by an institution of ‘knowers’, or in other words, a discipline, as René Girard has shown.56 In thus privileging ‘theory’ or ‘theorisation’ over any given kind or object of knowledge, one would thus be sacralizing or fetishizing at least the open-ended fact that ‘knowing is essentially theoretical’,57 which, although it is still a fetishizing, is at least a kind of tie that does not bind (and blind) one to counter-intellectually placing an essential limit on thinking, as is entailed by being encumbered with a proper set of undisputable ‘facts’. Even thinkers like Bill Readings, who relate the rise of cultural studies to the
    P. Bowman, ‘Alarming and Calming, Sacred and Accursed’: The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity’, in S. Herbrechter (ed), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Rodopi, 2002)
    
    18 deconstructive and destructive work of global capitalism, find hope in the possibility of countering all irrational, unintellectual, prejudiced, or ideological adherence to tradition and superstition, in all guises, by way of fetishizing and ‘essentialising’ the value of ‘Thought’ itself: Theory.58 Disciplines, once instituted, have a tendency to present ‘their’ ‘knowledge’ as definitive, correct, and sacred. This is always through the imposition of a hierarchy, a hegemony, a canon, and an economy of values, that are exclusive, and always in some measure violent, unethical, and biased. They inevitably prefer to ‘reduce’ their ‘theoretical’ component and claim it is merely one part of their whole make-up. Yet it remains the constitutive ‘part’, that ill-deserves to be treated as a supplement. So perhaps the best thing for cultural studies to do remains to be unsure of what it is and what it should do, and hence to question everything, as much as is humanly possible; and this is practical, pragmatic, ‘real’, not ‘just theoretical’. Just as theoretical as everything else, except more justly so, for theoreticism which knows itself as such, and does not mask, masquerade, or misrecognise itself, or dissimulate its constructed character, as ‘proper knowledge’ has a tendency or predilection towards. Though always unsettling, risky, challenging, and inevitably open to denunciation for being ‘just theory’, to think things as theory, is perhaps to be most open to what is called the ‘ethical’ and the ‘political’, to interrogate every injunction about what one ‘must’ do or be (like), for: The best liberation from violence is a certain putting into question, which makes the search for an archia tremble..... an-archy….59
    
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    The quotation in this title is taken from Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Trans. B. Johnson (London: Athlone, 1997), p.133. 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: Essay on the Thought of Emanuel Levinas’, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), p.80. 3 See, for instance, Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.271-272; or Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (London: Harvard, 1996). 4 See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, p.262ff. 5 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p.22. 6 Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, p.272. 7 Which is different from their holding different ‘methodological preferences’, because a ‘paradigm’ is an entire orientation, that will not just result in merely preferring one kind of analysis over another, but will rather determine what one is geared up to ‘do’ (prove, show, or teach) when using each method of academic practice. 8 Derrida states this in rather more radical terms, and with more radical implications, but for our purposes, this understated reading will suffice. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, Chantal Mouffe (ed.) deconstruction and pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996), p.84. 9 See Lynette Hunter, ‘Rhetoric and Artificial Intelligence: Computing applications in the sciences and humanities’, Critiques of Knowing: Situated textualities in science, computing and the arts (London: Routledge, 1999), pp.47ff. 10 Derrida, Dissemination, p.128. 11 John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham and London: Duke, 1992), pp.34-5. 12 ‘properly improper (uncanny, unheimlich)’, Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.29. 13 Lola Young, ‘Why Cultural Studies?’, parallax 11 (April-June, 1999), p.3. 14 Jacques, Dissemination, p.221. 15 Although, often, ‘interdisciplinary’ is often invoked as if it means ‘antidisciplinary’, which is a completely different matter, as ‘inter’ does not mean ‘anti’, nor does it mean ‘less than’, ‘other than’, nor free it from ‘discipline’, as it sometimes seems supposed to do. 16 Stuart Hall argues, insists, as much in the essay from which we have been quoting, although by way of reference to Gramsci, and without touching on this kind of a reading. So, whether he might ‘agree’ with this reading of the structural situation of cultural studies is debatable, but he would agree with this reading of interdisciplinarity as hyper-academic in intent and character. See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, pp.267-268. 17 How can one master more than one, more than one at a time, especially if ‘being’ does indeed always mean ‘being with’? (See Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, especially the opening readings of Aristotle.) Or, if one can master more than one, then how many, and what is the nature of that mastery, is it a different mastery to the master who masters only one? It surely cannot be equivalent... How can one, trained in one discipline, go on to master another, while still retaining a living, fresh mastery of the first (if indeed ‘being with’ or ‘living with’ always entails preferring certain friends, to the detriment of certain others)? The mastery of ‘too much’ or ‘too many’ may be deemed no mastery at all, especially by ‘proper’ masters of one ‘proper’ subject, or it may perhaps change the nature of ‘mastery’ – but could it possibly change or hope to change the should-be-like or the ought-to-be-like of mastery in the eyes of declared unities and their masters? Worse still, how can one disciple, especially one who has been trained exclusively/ostensibly, in the ‘both’ or ‘several’ that are claimed to comprise the interdiscipline, then go on to claim to ‘comprehend’ the others, when that disciple’s training was not properly ‘within’ any of them (in their own terms), and was in actual fact ‘outside’ of them all, elsewhere, in the curious space of the interdiscipline itself? 18 And this is arguably the first stage of the ‘political’ project of cultural studies. See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, and he delineation of cultural studies as a project seeking to create Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’. 19 See John Mowitt’s reading of disciplinarity for an elaboration of this ‘monstrous double’, in Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object, especially pp.39-40. 20 Jacques, Dissemination, p.111. 21 Jacques, Dissemination, p.128. 22 Jacques, Dissemination, p.133. 23 Derrida, Dissemination, p.134. 24 Derrida, ‘Mochlos’, p.31. See also, of course, The Truth In Painting. 25 For an excellent analysis of the function of notions of ‘usefulness’ and ‘uselessness’ within discourses, polemics and ideas of the university, see Robert Young’s essay, ‘The Idea of a Chrestomathic University’, in the collection, Logomachia, ed. R. Rand (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. 26 Derrida, Dissemination, p.68. 27 Derrida, Dissemination, p.130. 28 Derrida, Dissemination, p.157. 29 Derrida, Dissemination, p.133. 30 Derrida, Dissemination, p.133. 31 Derrida, Dissemination, p.75. 32 Derrida, Dissemination, p.98.
    1
    
    Derrida, Dissemination, p.102 Derrida, Dissemination, p.76. 35 Derrida, Dissemination, p.143. 36 Derrida, Dissemination, p.144. 37 Derrida, Dissemination, p.77. 38 Derrida, Dissemination, p.123. 39 Derrida, Dissemination, p.169. 40 Derrida, Dissemination, p.161. 41 See Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (NY: SUNY, 1997), p.422. 42 Derrida, Dissemination, p.149. 43 Derrida, Dissemination, p.149. 44 Derrida, Dissemination, p.117. 45 ‘The question of knowing what can be called “philosophy” has always been the very question of philosophy, its heart, its origin, its life-principle.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Honoris Causa: This is also extremely funny’, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994 (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford, 1995), p.411. 46 Jacques Derrida, ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. R. Rand (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p.7. 47 Jacques Derrida, ‘Honoris Causa: This is also extremely funny’, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994 (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford, 1995), p.411. 48 Timothy Bahti, “The Injured University”, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, p.68. 49 Jacques Derrida, ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’, Logomachia, p.31. 50 Bahti, “The Injured University”, Logomachia, p.70. 51 Bahti, “The Injured University”, Logomachia, p.70. 52 ‘Both solutio and resolutio have the sense of dissolution...’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Resistances’, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.3. 53 Bahti, “The Injured University”, Logomachia, pp.70-1. 54 Bahti, “The Injured University”, Logomachia, p.71. 55 Bahti, “The Injured University”, Logomachia, pp.72-73. 56 Mowitt, Text, pp.38-40. 57 Wlad Godzich, “Afterword: Religion, the State and Post(al) Modernism”, in Samuel Weber, Institution and interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.163. 58 Stuart Hall: ‘Hence, there are no theoretical limits from which cultural studies can turn back’, ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’, pp.267-268. 59 Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Writing and Difference, p.141.
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