Georgina Born

Logics of interdisciplinarity

Abstract This paper interrogates influential contemporary accounts of interdisciplinarity, in which it is portrayed as offering new ways of rendering science accountable to society and/or of forging closer relations between scientific research and innovation. The basis of the paper is an eighteen-month empirical study of three interdisciplinary fields that cross the boundaries between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences or arts, on the other. The fields are: 1) environmental and climate change research, 2) ethnography in the IT industry and 3) art-science. In the first part of the paper, in contrast to existing accounts, we question the idea that interdisciplinarity should be understood in terms of the synthesis of two or more disciplines. We stress the forms of agonism and antagonism that often characterize relations between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and distinguish between three modes of interdisciplinarity. In the second part we outline three distinctive logics or rationales that guide interdisciplinary research. In addition to the logics of accountability and innovation, we identify the logic of ontology, that is, an orientation apparent in diverse interdisciplinary practices in each of our three fields towards effecting ontological transformation in the objects and relations of research. While the three logics are interdependent, they are not reducible to each other and are differently entangled in each of the fields. We point to the potential for invention in such interdisciplinary practices and, against the equation of disciplinary research with autonomy, to the possibility of forms of interdisciplinary autonomy.

ART-SCIENCE: From public understanding to public experiment

In this paper we examine the emergent field of art-science, part of a heterogeneous space of overlapping interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of the arts, sciences and technologies. Art-science is often thought to exemplify Nowotny et al.s (2001) ‘mode-2’ knowledge production; indeed the institutions supporting art-science invariably claim that art-science contributes to the ‘contextualization of science’ by rendering scientific and technical knowledge more accessible and accountable to its publics. Our argument, however, is that this approach fails to capture the ways in which art-science exhibits its own complex trajectories, which cannot be grasped in terms of an epochal transition in the mode of knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic research on art-science practitioners and institutions in the USA, UK and Australia, our first aim is to indicate the heterogeneity of art-science by contrasting distinctive forms and genealogies of art-science. A second aim follows. Rather than simply multiplying the connections between science and its publics, we suggest that art-science is instructive in highlighting radically divergent conceptions and practices of publicness, and point to two such forms. We examine, first, the relations between science, art and the public in the UK from C. P. Snows ‘two cultures’ essay to the activities of the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. In these developments, art that is in dialogue with science is conceived primarily as a means by which the (absent) public for science can be interpellated: science is understood as complete, and as needing only to be communicated or applied, while art provides the means through which the public can be assembled and mobilized on behalf of science. We contrast this with a novel institutional programme in art-science pedagogy at the University of California, Irvine: the Masters programme in Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE). Through the contents of the ACE teaching programme and the case of an art-science project concerned with the measurement of air pollution by ACE faculty member Beatriz da Costa, and with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt and Barbara Cassin, we suggest that art-science can act not so much as a way of assembling a public for science, but as a public experiment.

Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde.

Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAMs composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992. Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde. Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.