Boundaries & Disciplines Re: Deleuze & Guattari....

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>>Unless some realm of human activity can be roughly delimited _in 
>>distinction from_ other fundamental realms of human activity, and 
>>that realm labelled "culture," it is difficult to see how "Cultural 
>>Studies" has any content other than the demand of some sectors of 
>>academia that they have departmental sovereignty.
>
>What makes this different from any other discioline? Is "society" 
>different from "politics" in a way that explains the difference 
>berween sociology and political science? Is "the economy" something 
>analytically distinct from "the state" or "society," such that we 
>have economics? Why can'y you writea  philosophy dissertation on 
>Montesquieu or Machiavelli or the Federalist, apart from the fact 
>taht those writers haven't historically been studied by 
>philosophers? Fact of the matter is, none of these terms is any 
>worse off than culture, and all have only a historically located and 
>contextual meaning. As for disciplinary boundaries, all there s i 
>too them is institutioanal history. That is not necesasrily a bad 
>thng.
>
>jks

True -- we do need experts and specialists, for the simple reason 
that what is available for human understanding -- past achievements, 
present inquiries, future tasks -- is now so vast that no one person 
today, however gifted, can be an all-purpose man or woman of letters. 
Never again will we have an intellectual who would even _attempt_ to 
know the world in a way that Aristotle or Hegel did.  The modern 
division of intellectual labor has and will continue to create an 
immense wealth of knowledge; at the same time, each intellectual is 
severely impoverished today, delimited to his or her puny specialty 
(at least in his or her profession).

All disciplines of the humanities and social sciences would benefit 
from more history.  For instance, the reader can get the point of 
Bartleby's alienation from the story itself, without knowing anything 
about class struggles in New York in the mid-19th century, but her 
understanding of "Bartleby the Scrivener" would be so much deeper if 
she had a good grasp of it: Cf. Barbara Foley, "From Wall Street to 
Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's 'Bartleby,'" _American 
Literature_ 72.1 (2000) 87-116, 
<http://victorian.fortunecity.com/holbein/439/bf/foleybartleby.html> 
(also available at 
<http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/american_literature/v072/72.1foley.html>).
-- 
Yoshie

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