Discipline Capture and Escape

This is a follow-on from my previous post about the fate of transdisciplinary scholarship in the present academy. That perhaps sounded like a personal complaint. Partly, it was - but there's something more to the process which I would call "discipline capture" that any individual might feel. What I described was the process by which a transdiscipline like cybernetics gets 'torn apart' by discipline-based academics who seek to appropriate parts of the transdiscipline for career gains and attention from their disciplinary colleagues. By this process, the transdiscipline's fundamental nature is destroyed. Even the advocates of the transdiscipline become agents of its destruction. 

Cybernetics provides an excellent example. The original cybernetics thinkers were highly detailed and mathematical in their thinking and somewhat difficult to understand. The papers of Wiener, McCulloch, Von Foerster or Pask can be challenging not just in their mathematical and logical elegance, but in their deviation from academic disciplinary norms. Pask's papers on learning are particularly notable for this. Once those original thinkers die, their disciples want to keep the conversation going, but recognise the need to communicate to a wider audience (otherwise, who is going to go to the conferences?). So a gradual process of dumbing-down occurs. This also occurs through discipline capture - Pask's dilution into Laurillard's work is a case in point. Nobody has time or the inclination to read the original work, and they are too busy trying to drum up an audience for their own interpretation, or to self-aggrandise on the back of transdisciplinary scholarship. But the dumbing-down has a real consequential loss in our ability to harness the original insights. 

This is a social dynamic, and one that Von Foerster (particularly) predicted ("The more profound the problem ignored, the greater the chances for fame and success!"). It does beg the question as to why disciplines and academics working in universities today are so destructive to transdisciplinary thinking - despite their "championing" of it (with champions like that, who needs enemies!). It's not just ego, ambition and the need to maintain a hold within the academy, although all of those play a part. That doesn't really explain anything. But we need to look at what a discipline is in the first place. 

Disciplines represent themselves through discourse which becomes codified within institutional structures and publications. Luhmann pointed out long ago the connection between discursive dynamics and institutional structure (he examples economics, art, law, education, etc). Leydesdorff later produced powerful metrics for analysing these dynamics (see his brilliant "Evolutionary Dynamics of Discursive Knowledge", to which I gave a video introduction here: Mark William Johnson: Chapter 1 - The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discursive Knowledge). I was lucky to have been part of that. But what this work didn't consider so much was the hegemonic power of a discourse backed by institutional authority. Luhmann and Leydesdorff's high-level "codes" of communication - the fundamental organising principles which distinguish art from economics, or law from love - represent constraints on utterances. Institutional structures amplify and reinforce those constraints, alongside metrics for academic performance. 

Of course, disciplines develop and change - often by appropriating new ideas from other disciplines (biochemistry, for example). This development arises through what Leydesdorff calls "mutual redundancy" - a process of aligning the dynamics of one discourse with another. The transdiscipline is different in this process, because it presents mutual redundancy to all other disciplines. Cybernetics particularly presents new fundamental concepts which resonate with all levels of organisation, knowledge, subjects, etc. I wrote about this with Leydesdorff many years ago (see Beer's Viable System Model and Luhmann's Communication Theory: ‘Organizations’ from the Perspective of Meta‐Games - Johnson - 2015 - Systems Research and Behavioral Science - Wiley Online Library). From the perspective of this paper (which was our first collaboration, and quite dense), discipline capture is a meta-game. If we (I) see it as destructive of transdisciplinarity, then the metagame approach is to play a different game. 

I think our emerging technologies might provide a way to do this. Some of my friends have been very interested in creating a "glass bead game", and I am very sympathetic to this, although trying to realise what Herman Hesse was really going on about is difficult, to say the least. I do think that there are many ways to do something that breaks the rules of the existing academic games. One way may be the course I set up at the Far Eastern Federal University 8 years ago. It's still going, despite the obvious constraints on my participation. The guiding principle of that course was to see the learning journey as a process of construction through a syncretistic world of indistinct encounters with multiple fields of knowledge. Now AI and VR and heaven knows what else could do this even more powerfully. 

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture-performance at Manchester's wonderful transdisciplinary space, Bound and Infinity on "music and cybernetics" (or musicocybernetics). It's a small space, but with a projection, a piano and a synthesizer, video and sound, I did something which (in the words of one attendee), invited the audience to think in new ways. There was nothing deterministic about this - it was improvisatory. But it had the desired effect. Much like what I had aimed for in Russia. 

There is a new kind of syncretistic art form that is possible. We need it - because what happens in education at the moment is just so dreary in comparison to what is possible with the new technologies we are surrounded by. It is a time for experiment and play. This will be too threatening to the established educational elite to support, so they are likely to get left behind in this "game-changer".

The Hunt for Explanatory Principles

The humanities exhibit various patterns of academic practice in today's university, but the most irritating is the "hunt for explanatory principles". Basically this is a practice where little original work is done, but where academics seek to sound clever by attempting to fit the work of a neglected transdisciplinary intellectual figure to a manifest (and usually intangible) phenomenon within a specific discipline. As a transdisciplinary person myself, I find some colleagues who are securely grounded in a discipline always on the hunt for some clue for their latest "conquest". Whatever clue I or others like me might provide becomes their speech acts of the kind "I've discovered x and applied it to fashion/art/music/business/society/etc". Perhaps we shouldn't tell them about x in the first place, but I can't get angry about it other than to be disappointed that it's so intellectually lazy because "x" is usually barely known within a particular academic community, and there is little authority which can be brought to bear to criticise the new explanatory principle, while the academic parades fake erudition and often misconceived interpretations of what "x" was going on about in the first place. 

What this often represents is, once again, the disciplinary colonisation of transdisciplinary concepts. It is the Procrustean move of the institution, whose academic reward structures favour codifiable disciplinary appropriation, which in turn encourages expedient academics to own things that weren't intended to be owned - and certainly not by them. 

A deeper problem with this is that nothing fundamentally new gets done because the brains of academics are focused on their constant attention-grabbing practices in pursuing explanatory principles, rather than actually making any intellectual progress at all. Then there is the problem of explanatory principles in the first place. 

To say "I can explain q" or "with the theory which I have discovered by dead philosopher x, I can explain this (and I shall bask in x's reflected glory!)", is an epistemological error. Gregory Bateson (another "x"!) long ago pointed out the misapprehensions around "explanatory principles". An explanatory principle can explain anything we want it to explain. It is a speech act designed to satisfy (or perhaps dull) curiosity. Bateson's favourite example of an explanatory principle is the "dormitive principle" to explain why ether puts us to sleep, as described by Moliere. I'm finding it a bit depressing at the moment that cybernetics is being used in a similar "dormitive principle" kind of way. It's great for making people sound clever - but what's new? Where's the progress?

It's as if we've got the scientific method round the wrong way. In Hume, explanation was part of the dialogue between scientists seeking to articulate causal explanations for the phenomena produced by experiments. Increasingly in the arts and humanities, and Business Schools, we see precious few experiments. Of course, in the light of a candidate causal explanation, one would then seek further experiments. But we don't see this. Often all we see is self-congratulation. It's perhaps not a million miles away from how the scholastic university must have been just before everything was discredited and overturned in the 17th century. I'm not convinced that our new form of pseudo-scholasticism won't meet the same fate. 

Explanatory principles can explain anything we want them to explain, or nothing at all. It is the conversation - the coordination among scientists - where the real progress is made, and that requires experiment. We now have new means of doing experiments. Perhaps we should use them and do away with this performative nonsense!

World Flourishing and Gary Stevenson

I've been very interested to watch the launch of the World Flourishing report from Harvard yesterday. The Guardian picked one of the headlines concerning the low ranking of the UK in terms of flourishing (see UK among lowest-ranked countries for ‘human flourishing’ in wellbeing study | Science | The Guardian). The launch is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/iKTeNiEn9gU?feature=shared 

I'm grateful to Diana Wu David (see Diana Wu David | future of work consultant & coach), whose work on the Future of Work is very motivating and visionary, for pointing me to the Harvard study. As I've been thinking about this stuff, I've also been sharing my enthusiasm for Gary Stevenson, whose videos on economics have been a real eye-opener for me over the last two years or so. 

Flourishing is a complex phenomenon, but the lack of resources among the poor must inevitably play a key role. Gary's analysis of the Covid lockdown as a wealth transfer to the rich is a very compelling narrative, and his criticism of the academic establishment is spot-on: what anachronistic nonsense!

It is interesting to consider whether human beings have any kind of "innate" capacity to overcome adversity.  Is it easier if you have the emotional support of a loving family, than if you are estranged from your family and have been abused for the whole of your life? Surely these situations are different. So it really does matter "who your parents are" as Stevenson says - not just because of the financial resources available to the middle classes, but because the emotional support becomes more probable (but obviously not certain) under circumstances of material family comfort. 

As human beings we find ourselves caught between self-care in local communities - care which prioritises autonomy and personal choice, with the care that is provided by social institutions - health services, social services, education, etc. These latter entities are heteronomous, to use Ivan Illich's borrowing from Kant's distinction between autonomy and heteronomy. Illich's argument was to say that if the balance between autonomy and heteronomy gets out of whack, then we are in trouble. He further said that social systems and technologies start from a position of empowering autonomy, but end up as heteronomous behemoths (church, transport, energy, health service, education, etc)

The less wealth we have, the mechanisms of self-care become skewed towards subsistence rather than sustainability, while the subsistence mode is increasingly reinforced by the relationship between individuals and heteronomous public services. This is partly because the heteronomous side has no interest in the qualitative aspects of existence, but rather sees its role in terms of statistics and average outcomes. So it becomes a vicious circle. Also the heteronomous side will seek to maintain itself by selecting those people it serves for whom its interventions stand the best chance of working.