Review: Diana Knight (ed.), ‘Interdisciplinary Barthes’
Review of Diana Knight’s (ed.) Interdisciplinary Barthes (Oxford University Press, 2020), 310 pages.
Abstract
Diana Knight's edited collection, Interdisciplinary Barthers (2020), brings together 18 scholars from across the disciplines to examine the wide-ranging influence of Roland Barthes's oeuvre on cultural studies today. At a time when academic scholarship, especially in the humanities, often remains siloed into specializations, a collection of scholarly essays focused on Roland Barthes’ interdisciplinarity provides a much needed, and refreshing, perspective. As historicized by Knight in her introduction, Barthes had opposed the post-1968 turn in the French education system towards increasingly specialized, and technocratic, forms of knowledge production. In his late lectures, Barthes sought to guide students through tracing and deconstructing the historical hierarchies of knowledge underlying contemporary disciplinary values of truth and meaning. For Barthes, it was necessary to counteract the rise of the human sciences to an undisputed and unquestionable position of authority; in its place, Barthes situated 'literature' as uniquely capable of mediating all forms of knowledge, as well as provoking the human sciences to reflect on their own discursive norms and limitations. By exploring this problem through scholarly disciplines as diverse as religion and photography, archival studies and environmental studies, the essays collected in this volume offer readers across academia today an opportunity to rethink a major theoretical influence on their disciplinary fields and to explore how Barthes’ vision of 'interdisciplinarity' might refresh and reorient their work to reach beyond their disciplines and impact a wider public.
Reviewed by Alex Wermer-Colan
"Interdisciplinarity, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary, it’s not sufficient to choose a “subject” (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object, that belongs to no one.” – Roland Barthes, "Young Researchers," Communications, 1972
"L'interdisciplinaire, dont on parle beaucoup, ne consiste pas à confronter des disciplines déjà constituées (dont, en fait, aucune ne consent à s'abandonner). Pour faire de l'interdisciplinaire, il ne suffit pas de prendre un "sujet" (un thème) et de convoquer autour deux ou trois sciences. L'interdisciplinaire consiste à créer un objet nouveau, qui n'appartienne à personne." (Roland Barthes, Jeunes Chercheurs," Communications, 1972)
The seminal writer and thinker, Roland Barthes (1915-1980), has been celebrated for experimenting with a diversity of genres and disciplines in his wide-ranging works of cultural criticism. During the post-WWII period, Barthes influenced nearly every field of Euro-American academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. Nevertheless, the ‘interdisciplinary’ nature of Barthes’ work has not received direct critical engagement, until, that is, Diana Knight’s edited collection, Interdisciplinary Barthes (2020). At a time when a notable proportion of academic research, especially in the humanities, remains siloed into specializations, a collection of scholarly essays focused on Roland Barthes’ interdisciplinarity provides a much needed, and refreshing, perspective. Scholars across the disciplines stand to learn not only about a major influence on their disciplinary fields, but how Barthes’ work can still be better adapted to diverse modes of inquiry and praxis.
Interdisciplinary Barthes brings together eighteen well-known specialists of Barthes' oeuvre – from across Europe, the US, and the UK - to address the breadth of Barthes' thinking on interdisciplinarity, highlighting the ways he deconstructed and reimagined the boundaries and interconnections between academic specializations. As suggested by the epigraph to this review, quoted from Barthes' essay, "Young Researchers" ("Jeunes Chercheurs") published in the journal, Communications (1972, vol. 19), in an issue entitled, "The Text: From Theory to Research" ("Le texte : de la théorie à la recherche"), Barthes sought to challenge the idea that disciplinary differences stemmed from natural and inevitable divisions of human thought and truth. For Barthes, the disciplines were historically constructed categories whose shifting frictions could be generatively explored, revealing in all their nuance the intersectional nature of power and knowledge. The goal of interdisciplinary work for Barthes was not simply to see the same old object of study from new perspectives, but to bring into relief a 'new object' of study that transcends the possessive forms of knowledge foundational to the divided disciplines of academia.
Knight's introduction to Interdisciplinary Barthes addresses this issue head-on, clearly delineating lessons still to be learned by academic scholars today. She observes that this collection of essays on Barthes' work seek to interrogate “the paradox of ‘Barthes and interdisciplinarity,' asking the question: « Why should Barthes, a writer, researcher, and teacher prized for his pivotal role in the emergence of interdisciplinarity as a mode of enquiry, have referred, sometimes quite dismissively, to the ‘myth of interdisciplinarity’?" (Knight xviii). Knight traces Barthes' skepticism of "interdisciplinarity" as a term to the post-1968 technocratic turn in the French education system, a development that only further divided disciplines into pragmatic, applied forms of knowledge, limited in their scope and subservient to the ends of capitalist production. For Barthes, interdisciplinarity could be understood as a myth insofar as "the context was institutional but also intellectual" (xviii). Knight elaborates:
Barthes wanted traditional disciplines to be unsettled and transformed through interacting with their neighbors, rather than joining a federation that would leave the parts completely unchanged. In line with the values he was developing elsewhere in his work, he moved too towards something resembling an ethics of interdisciplinarity, whereby a non-competitive intellectual environment would replace disciplinary protectionism. Underpinning Barthes’s approach to interdisciplinarity was the conviction that the human sciences needed to question the status of their discourse (xviii).
To historicize and reimagine what 'interdisciplinarity' could mean for contemporary academic scholarship, Knight traces Barthes' alternative vision back to his early days in his writing career, while he was recovering in a sanatorium and conducting in-depth readings of the French historian, Jules Michelet (1798-1874). Through his reading of Michelet, Barthes found himself awakening to the ideas of 'structuralism' as he adopted a historical perspective on the growth and transformation of the academic disciplines, with an eye to the metamorphosis of meta-hierarchies that defined which disciplines were foundational or derivative, significant or superfluous. As the study of language and signification slowly degraded from the medieval to the modern era, the human sciences rose to a place of power and prestige that, without the critical questioning of their own status as discourses, led to the false pretense to objective truth and absolute significance. In opposition to this trend, Barthes' conception of 'interdisciplinarity' solidified during his teaching at the École pratique des hautes études, culminating in his role as the ‘peripatetic’ chair of 'literary semiology' at the Collège de France in the last years of his life. In his seminars, Barthes experimented with pedagogical approaches at odds with the technocratic turn in the mainstream French education system, teaching courses designed to guide students through tracing and deconstructing the hierarchies of knowledge undergirding disciplinary values of truth and meaning. As chair of literary semiology in his late lectures, Barthes sought to resituate literature as the field which, despite its contemporary demotion below the human sciences, was uniquely capable of containing and mediating all forms of knowledge, as well as provoking the human sciences to reflect on their own discursive norms and limitations.
Befitting a thinker whose theoretical work influenced nearly every humanities and social science discipline, the essays collected in Interdisciplinary Barthes explore his writings in relation to a wide range of scholarly fields, including Francophone studies, American studies, history and historiography, visual culture, photography studies, religion, classics, philosophy, environmental studies, music, affect studies, rhetoric, composition studies, literary studies, and archival studies. Inherently interdisciplinary fields like gender and sexuality studies prove relevant across the essays in this collection, yet certain shared insights and approaches to transdisciplinarity can be traced back to the growing stature of Barthes' influence, not least due to the English translation and publication of his late works over the last decade. From Jonathan Culler's analysis of Barthes' theoretical influences on American studies to Eric Marty's critique of visual culture studies in Barthes' wake, from Lucy O'Meara's exploration of Barthes' engagement with ancient philosophy to Patrizia Lombardo's analysis of Barthes' contributions to affect theory, this volume's polyphony exemplifies the interdisciplinary scholarship that Barthes heralded, adapting his theoretical and methodological experiments to rethink disciplinary divisions and delineate the intersectionality of power and culture.
As a book engaging with meta-scholarship on academic discourse and the changing nature of higher education, readers may find this volume a useful lens through which to explore the contradictory nature of the recent turn towards interdisciplinarity, belied by the material structure of the academy’s ongoing dependence on disciplinary departments, and cheapened by austerity measures that shrink divergent specializations into generalist humanities departments. As much as this book resituates Barthes studies, and critical theory more generally, in relation to the academy’s post-disciplinary turn towards interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, Interdisciplinary Barthes also clears the air for further studies engaging with other disciplines that Barthes influenced. Readers can look forward to the work of future scholars who will build off Knight’s foundation to investigate Barthes’ influence on spatial and media studies fields like geography and archaeology, or infrastructure studies field like architecture or web studies. Even more fitting to the thrust of this volume, readers can look forward to future collections of scholarship on Barthes that seek to move beyond the investigation of his influence on individual disciplines, increasingly adopting his call for new forms of interdisciplinarity to engage with overlooked or undiscovered, transdisciplinary objects of study.
Alex Wermer-Colan is a Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Temple University Libraries' Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, where he directs research and pedagogy projects integrating emerging technologies into humanities scholarship. He edited the collection of essays, The Renaissance of Roland Barthes (The Conversant, 2014), focusing on Barthes’ late works. His essay, "Roland Barthes after 1968: Critical Theory in the Reactionary Era of New Media" was published in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature (2016). His writing has also appeared in PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, American Book Review, Twentieth Century Literature, The D.H. Lawrence Review, Indiana University Press, and the L.A. Review of Books.
Email: alex.wermer-colan@temple.edu
Twitter: @alexwermercolan
Further reading: TCS Special Issue: Neutral Life / Late Barthes
