Models of Exchange: Notes Towards a Research Project
‘…the world (the Noteworthy, Notandum) can be divided up indefinitely (it’s what physicists do) – or, at least, with no other endpoint than that of words, and even then: by combining words (syntagmatic production), I can go down even further…
- Roland Barthes (The Preparation of the Novel, 1978-1980)
‘…Myth will be treated as an orchestra score would be if it were unwittingly considered as a unilinear series; our task is to re-establish the correct arrangement. … we were confronted with a sequence of the type: 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 1, 2, 5, 7, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8…. the result is a chart:
1 2 4 7 8
2 3 4 6 8
1 4 5 7 8
1 2 5 7
2 4 5 6 8
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (‘The Structural Study of Myth’, 1955)
We are attuned to the fact that Big Data – i.e. ‘our’ data from everyday interfaces and also the massive datasets accrued through all number of scientific investigations – provide patterns that on aggregate and in all probability describe and predicate ‘us’ as well as indeed the vast expanses of both the intergalactic and subatomic ‘universes’. However, despite ever larger datasets and increased computing power, we do not necessarily always lead to better understandings. As a corollary to which, the tremendous advances in and complexities of new imaging technologies, high powered computations, and new material processes (e.g. quantum, photonics) has arguably reignited the problem of ‘two cultures’ – as laid out by C.P. Snow in the 1960s, when he argued of a perennial gulf of misunderstanding between the sciences and the arts and humanities. While there is no shortage of causal and/or non-technical dialogues taking place, it is hard to find genuine sites of exchange and collaboration. Snow famously compared the importance of knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the sciences to having read a work of Shakespeare in the humanities. Unless someone is able to converse ably between such ‘readings’ there would be no real basis for exchange. Indeed, Snow later believed the comparison could be made starker: ‘If I had asked an even simpler question’, he noted, ‘such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration […it would be] equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt I was speaking the same language’.
Today, despite a plethora of literatures and rhetoric concerning the ‘idea’ of inter-disciplinarity and even trans-disciplinarity, there remains a good deal of unevenness and ‘myth’. At best, it is perhaps mostly the case that fields of enquiry image, such as ‘visual culture’, which become a kind of interdiscipline, yet one that is still formulated within the particular domain, remaining on one side of the so-called Two Cultures divide. Alternatively, to borrow from W.J.T. Mitchell’s account of (and indeed delight over) ‘indiscipline’, we often find forays into another disciplinary area affect only ‘turbulence or incoherence at the inner and outer boundaries of disciplines’. Which is to suggest: ‘If a discipline is a way of ensuring the continuity of a set of collective practices (technical, social, professional, etc.), “indiscipline” is a moment of breakage or rupture when the continuity is broken and the practice comes into question’. Yet, what would actual existing inter-disciplinarity look like? It would require the ability of different areas of research, different methods, different modalities, to not simply work together (which in reality can often result in a dominant partner, with interlocutors in the service of an already existing set of problematics), but also to formulate research questions and paradigms together. It is to allow for a more reflective, deliberative, and dialogic ‘space’ to enhance and stimulate new research and advances in knowledge. In part, this is what is espoused with the term ‘transdisciplinary’, yet still we need to apply C.P. Snow’s simple test…
Speaking at a recent Turing Institute event, Kate Crawford closed by praising the growing diversity of those engaged in contemporary scholarship (not least in terms of gender). Yet, equally, she bemoaned the loss of a certain spirit of interdisciplinary dialogue, more evident, she argued, in the early part of the twentieth century, when, for example, anthropologists talked with computer scientists at public events. In keeping with this observation, this project seeks to re-think how we might understand Art and Science as a site of interdisciplinarity. As part of which, a critical consideration is over how we define the ‘units of analysis’, and of course how these units can be reasonably understood across disciplines and domains. In order to advance this ‘space’, a research project might be devised to more thoroughly examine and enact ‘models of exchange’.