Sample Reality

Interdisciplinarity is one of the enduring keywords of academia in the past decade. I’ve been hearing it praised for so long now and seeing so little actual evidence of it, that I’m beginning to think all the praise is simply wish-fulfillment. And like most wishes, the wisher probably wouldn’t know what to do with it if it ever came true.

In the humanities, the closest we come to interdisciplinarity is arranging a panel which brings together a literary scholar, a historian, and maybe an artist, all talking about something entirely different. But they’re all on the same panel. And that’s interdisciplinarity.

It seems to me that if interdisciplinarity is happening at all at the university level, it is in the sciences. Chemists, physicists, and biologists have a lot more to say to each other—and work to produce together—than we in the humanities will ever admit to ourselves.

I wonder, what true interdisciplinary projects could bring together scholars and researchers from different fields in the humanities? What would such a project look like?

KOAN: A professor of poststructuralist literary theory, 17th century Armenian history, and Greek epic poetry walk into a bar. The bartender looks at the three and says, what is this, some kind of joke?

Rhetorics of the Web (by Nicholas Burbules at Wesleyan University) is an often-cited overview of various kinds of hyperlinks and the rhetorical strategies that they employ. In the course of teaching a new media class this fall, I’ve begun to wonder whether Burbules’ examples are too general, ahistorical, or even naive about the possibilities of the link.

I see the central question of the link to be this: in what ways can the same surface text develop wildly different meanings depending upon its link? What political potential resides in every link?

To begin to explore this question I’ve created a simple exercise: the same phrase—Who lives in the White House—repeated multiple times with a different link each time. What rhetorical strategies are at work in each example? How does the tenor of the question change each time?

• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?
• Who lives in the White House?

My friend Adam pointed me towards another example of egregious racism in the mainstream press: the captions on photos of looters in New Orleans. Both pictures show residents of New Orleans wading through chest-deep flood waters, carrying various goods. According to the two AP captions, in the first photograph a young black man is returning from “looting a grocery store”; the caption of the second photograph (which shows a white couple) says simply that they are returning from “finding bread and soda” in a “local grocery store.”

Salon.com also has an article about the photographs of looters.