Compte tenu du développement de l’indiscipline dans la recherche et de ses multiples usages, l’Institut InDisciplinAire a souhaité faire le point sur la question grâce à W. J. T. Mitchell, Professeur émérite de l’Université de Chicago, qui a eu l’amabilité de nous accorder une interview. Plus de vingt ans après la publication de son article « Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture », paru en 1995 dans Art Bulletin (77.4), quel regard porte W. J. T. Mitchell sur l’indiscipline aujourd'hui et sur ses enjeux contemporains ?
1. More than twenty years ago, when you defined and used the term indisciplinarity[1], few researchers took the measure of the operability of this notion and especially of the consequences that its use could generate. Today, many research groups introduce this term into their issues. Do you think this means that an epistemological leap has really taken place since, in the human sciences?
I think the term was registering developments that were occuring across a broad range of disciplines, both in the human and natural sciences. I associate « indisciplinarity’ in the sciences with the recognition of anomalies that require moving beyond old paradigms. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was my guide to thinking about the way scientific paradigms undergo periodic crises that require new formulations of their object of study. Sometimes these shifts produce epistemological « leaps, » as you suggest, but they can also lead to embarrassing pratfalls, dead ends, and blind alleys. The history of science is riddled with indisciplinary moments that go nowhere, so I would not automatically assume that every instance of this phenomenon amounts to « a great leap forward, » to echo the old Maoist slogan.
A perfect example is the evolution of anthropology, a discipline that was founded on the concept of « culture, » especially so-called « primitive cultures. » Now both the primitive and the cultural have become embarrassing terms, and advanced anthropologists can no longer take them for granted.[2] Sometimes this leads to interesting turns—e.g., the shift of anthropological research toward questions of contemporary media and social forms. But it can also lead to a sterile self-reflectiveness and theoreticism, what Marshall Sahlins has called « Whifflebird anthropology. » The Whifflebird, Sahlins explains, « is a bird that flies in every smaller circles until it flies up its own asshole. » This would be a very risky moment for any « indiscipline » that cannot find fresh material for research.
The « in » in « indisciplinarity » has two meanings : 1) as a prefix that suggests the negation of a discipline, rebellion against prevailing norms (cp. « inhuman » and « insubordination » ); ; 2) « in » as a preposition that locates the rebellious moment as internal to a discipline. Thus, it serves as a contrast to inter- and trans-disciplinary movements, which reach out or beyond the boundaries of a discipline—e.g., law and literature, science and the humanities.
2. According to you, what are the new challenges of indiscipline ? Do you think that disciplinary lines have actually moved ?
Of course they have moved. The humanities has basically merged now with the social sciences, literature is being recycled as fodder for databases and algorithms, and visual culture has moved beyond humans into the interaction of machinic beholders and producers to produce scopic regimes that require no human subjects. The visual prostheses provided by contemporary technologies in tablets, computer screens, and smartphones are everywhere, generating new narratives and the anxieties that accompany them. The British TV series Black Mirror in my view provides an iconic presentation of the new cultural optics of spectacle and surveillance. The idea that you can get more information about a person by viewing her through a screen rather than face to face is now a basic assumption for many social encounters. The study of images, which was undergoing its first immersion in the digital twenty years ago, has now moved well beyond questions of pixels and image manipulation, into a realm that I call “biocybernetics,” in which the ancient dream of constructing a living image has been literalized by the cloning of higher animals.[3] Images, which for centuries had been defined as “imitations of life,” can now literally be made to come alive, or to simulate organic life-forms with uncanny precision. Thus the contemporary fascination with the cyborg as the biocybernetic successor to the mechanical model of the robot.
3. What are the relations between the notion of « visual culture » as « the construction of subjectivity, identity, desire, memory and imagination »[4] and the current cognitive sciences ?
I am ambivalent about the ascendancy of cognitive science, particularly its assurance that it has left behind more dynamic models of the human subject in favor of a mechanistic account of visual perception. One symptom of this is the constant need to forget or refute the psychoanalytic picture of the subject as a talking animal whose visual access to the world is deeply embedded in forces of desire, affect, memory, and instinct, themselves enmeshed in a labyrinth of social encounters with others. For me, cognitive science remains impoverished if it fails to engage , the experience of seeing and being seen by an other, and especially the uncanny moment when one sees oneself the other. In short, the unconscious is alive and well in contemporary visual culture. I am suspicious of any discipline that thinks it can break with these traditions in favor of a narrowed picture of the subject, or a reductionist paradigm. If « indisciplinarity » has any positive potential, I think it is its resistance to reductionism, the claim that vision (or society or matter itself) is « nothing but » X. Indisciplinarity in its healthiest modes refuses the « nothing but » in favor of the « and yet, » the « what about ? » and the « why not? »
I can illustrate this point by returning to the figures of the cyborg and robot, within the general field of AI (Artificial Intelligence). It is telling that, even in the earliest conjurings with AI such as the figure of the HAL, the smart computer of , Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, the perfect calculating machine turns out to be the most human character in the story, filled with anxieties about his expected flawless performance, and paranoid about the efforts to shut him down. The smarter our machines become, the more like us they are—with all our flaws. I believe Lacan was fully aware of the cybernetic foundation of the Unconscious. Our machines can go crazy, too, which is why we need to extend the domain of humanism to our post-human, inhuman creations.
4. Would you say about the term of indiscipline that, like that of interdisciplinarity, it is perhaps today « as a code word for politically or theoritically adventurous work »[5] ? How would you define today, the notion of indiscipline ?
I would define it in the same way, as a moment when a discipline begins to recognize that it has a problem or anomaly that cannot be accomodated by its old paradigms. The rhetoric around this moment is generally one of « crisis, » but it is important not to exaggerate the importance of this. Sometimes it means that a discipline is simply running out of steam and is losing out in the competition for resources. This is the great threat to the humanities today. There is no lack of interesting new work, and talented workers who want to study literature and the arts. But they are stymied by the lack of job opportunities, and many of them are led into blind alleys by the lure of money. A great example is the replacement of close reading of (or intense looking at) cultural artifacts by machine counting and scanning. Some of this work will produce remarkable results, but all too often it is simply the siren call of the « newest thing » and the promised financial rewards. So this is what I would call « negative indisciplinarity, » when external forces in politics and economics induce a sense that a discipline is obsolete and dispensable. I think of formations such as visual culture and critical legal studies as positive forms, in that they arise from a critique that emerges within the discipline.
5. In your 1995 article, for us the founder, you write that indiscipline « is a moment of breakage or rupture, when the continuity is broken and the practice comes into question »[6]. Do you think that some researchers have gone on actually in this way ?
Yes. See my answer to the previous question. I worry that the « breakage » we are encountering in some disciplines today, especially the humanities, is a break with the idea of human intelligence as such, and the capacity for critical skepticism and imaginative inventiveness that goes with it. The biggest challenge we face as a species that constructs the knowledge products known as disciplines is the idea that the machines are smarter than us, and that we are members of a life form that is headed for extinction. Certainly this is the modern mythology foreshadowed in science fiction, with its posthuman futures. And perhaps also accelerated by the current endgames of advanced capitalism. As Fred Jameson famously remarked, « it is now easier to imagine the end of the human species than the end of capitalism. » This is probably an exaggeration. My guess is that the species will survive, but in conditions where liberal humanist notions of disciplinarity, along with free universities, legal institutions, and democracy will become fading memories. Our job as humanists is to resist the onset of this new Dark Ages.
6. In our world, the explosion of internet and mass media reminds us that vision is a central subject. Do you think that visual semiotics has evolved in the sense you described when you wrote that vision « is not reducible to or explicable on the model of language. »[7] ?
Yes. I still think that the reduction of vision to the linguistic model is not possible, at the same time I don’t see human vision as separable in its practical application from our nature as language-using animals. « Seeing and Saying, the Visible and the Articulable» as Foucault and Deleuze insisted, are deeply intermingled at the level of cognition and recognition. I would also suggest that language itself cannot be reduced to linguistics, and I supect most linguists would agree. One might explore a similar question with regard to the calculable and algorithmic : can vision be reduced to the model of quantifiable inputs of data ? In some sense, the answer is yes. But only if you put on blinders to prevent awareness of what Tom Gunning has called « cultural optics, » the practices of seeing, imaging, and imagining that permeate cinema and everyday practices of seeing the world.
W. J. T. Mitchell
Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor
Literature, Art HIstory, and Cinema
The University of Chicago
Editor, https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/wjtmitchell/
https://mediaserver.unige.ch/play/99534
[1] Cf. William John Thomas Mitchell, « Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture », Art Bulletin, 77 : 4, Décembre 1995, p. 540-544.
[2] See William Mazarella, The Mana of Mass Society (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[3] See my essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetics,” in What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005).
[4] Idem, p. 544.
[5] Ibidem, p. 540.
[6] Ibid., p. 541.
[7] Ibid., p. 543.