Specialization and Interdisciplinarity: Beyond Memory
John Sutton - University of Stirling/Macquarie University
Philosophy of memory has become a legitimate and popular area of specialization. Its expansion as a fully realized subfield generates the delightful energy for this new Memory Palace blog, ‘a lavish, expansive space where the capacity to remember is celebrated’.
So it’s a good time to consider the nature, value, and implications of specialization, which looks like a mark of maturity in a research field. There’s a thrill in finding dozens of philosophers puzzling over topics and texts, concepts and challenges that seemed marginal not so long ago. Such shared frames of reference promise new precision and progress.
But might specialization – as ideal and as practice – be in tension with the urge to continue to expand the philosophy of memory?
Can we celebrate at least some broad agreement on what sources and problems matter, using this as a secure basis from which to follow memory outwards where it leads us? Or should we, in contrast, be wary of specialization as a narrowing force?
Similar tests have faced other related fields as they emerge. At the time when institutions and authoritative canons are just being set in place, how do we maintain the kind of confident, robust, inclusive pluralism in theory and in research style that actively promotes conceptual novelty and adventurous fusions of ideas?
Reflecting on these issues, I realize that I have sometimes been prone to lazy critique of specialization. Perhaps it is only our occasionally blinkered take on what it is and involves that might threaten to close minds.
As a Classics student influenced as much by Robert Pirsig as by Popper, I came across the famous Socratic injunction ‘Let the shoemaker stick to his last’, requiring each citizen simply to do their own proper work. I found it chilling.
Reading Plato at my very traditional Scots boarding school, my resistance was fuelled by the libertarian ideals of self-sufficiency that shaped daily school rhythms among the Victorian buildings and the glens. In romantic outrage at the banishment of the artists and actors who can ‘become all kinds of things’ (Republic 3.398), I rebelled against the authoritarian imposition of order as unity in soul and state alike.
Should we not resist such enforced discipline?
It is no surprise then that as I moved into philosophy and the history of science, and into the study of memory, I often saw interdisciplinarity as in tension with specialization. Why should we restrict our attention to pre-existing concerns, setting all else aside? This attitude rested, I now think, on two connected mistakes. First, I was still caught in a residual individualism: it was the single independent thinker who could, as I imagined, contain multitudes. I was still proceeding as if interdependence was optional. I had not grasped the power of divisions of labour, of what I’d now call socially distributed cognition, of the strength afforded by reliance on people and artifacts and forms of organization with capacities, skills, or features different from my own. Second, my focus was on declarative knowledge, thinking of expertise as bodies of fact that can in principle be picked up quicksmart. I was neglecting the skills that truly characterize the specialist, in research as elsewhere: attention is educated, and professional vision attuned, by way of long processes of apprenticeship and training as much as additional book learning.
As I now think, some forms of transformative interdisciplinary research cannot easily be implemented by the lone, expanded, and still self-sufficient solo researcher – as if, for example, an ‘empirically informed’ philosopher keen to dismantle worn-out ‘disciplinary silos’ could quickly study up on and refer to ‘the science’ to inform or resolve tricky conceptual questions. Rather, what matters are collaborations and practices, teamwork and enculturation, often over long periods of hard work that is as much interpersonal, emotional, and institutional as it is intellectual.
It took me years of uncertainty and slow progress, and huge slices of luck, gradually to feel a way toward more anchored, thoroughgoing, and insistent interdisciplinarity in the study of memory - to grasp how specialization might not just be compatible with dramatically expanded research horizons, but take us directly to them.
In running small workshops on memory – in 2004 on Memory and Embodied Cognition and in 2010 on Memory, Media, and Movement, for example – I risked inviting (alongside my philosopher colleagues from a few distinctive traditions) not just psychologists and neuroscientists and anthropologists but also researchers in science studies, literature, history, media, dance, and film. I drew sustained heart from the ongoing conversations and collaborations that resulted – sometimes halting, sometimes bemused, often revealing both lively, unresolved foundational contestation in ongoing debate on open topics, and key elements of the tacit knowledge behind the published results.
So philosophy of memory in particular, I venture to suggest on the basis of these years of experience, is often more fruitfully done by thus going beyond philosophy.
Along the way there will be dead ends, time wasted, persistent misunderstandings, yes. But as many readers of this blog will have discovered, immersion in alien research programs also brings surprise and productive pleasure. We come to appreciate the many constraints on actual research in a given context, and become better able to cash out our ideas in forms that can be assimilated and incorporated into empirical work across cognitive and social scientific traditions.
Over that same period, I found extraordinarily tolerant, patient, and well-informed collaborators for emerging programs of work on autobiographical memory and social remembering, on embodied memory and skill, and on memory practices in historical and contemporary arts. I could more securely acknowledge and draw on my own specific skills, the particular set of concepts, methods, intellectual habits, and research tools sedimented through my training and my peculiar trajectory.
These were far from effortless or easy processes: there is a volatility in teamwork when contributors are bringing entirely different histories and assumptions, a constant risk that fragile working balances – affective, scientific, metaphysical, practical – will waver or crumble. Sometimes it was perhaps so all-consuming just to be involved, to be entangled in the professional and intellectual worlds of others, that I didn’t always hold my ground, failing to offer up enough of the philosophical contexts and debates that I could have been sharing in turn.
There is a high bar or threshold for effective interdisciplinary research, in the study of memory as elsewhere.
We want to contribute to each component discipline or sub-discipline in its own right. We want reviewers and assessors from each distinct background to see easily what is gained within their fields, warding off the risk that they casually dismiss the work as ‘not really’ recognizable in style or quality. Yes, we hope for process gain from our interdisciplinary angle, perhaps transforming the original problem spaces as mutual benefits flow both ways – but that is added value, building on rather than entirely bypassing the specialist contributions.
Of course, memory is no neutral example here. Memory is so often in use when it is not explicitly in question that we must often creep up on it. And it is everywhere, cropping up in many forms and guises across disciplines and research fields. Just as philosophy of memory sometimes has to go beyond philosophy, so it also needs to go beyond memory. Memory is multiple, open, variable, dynamic: it goes beyond itself in a number of ways. We have to go down and out to track it.
First, setting aside smaller-scale neurodynamics and distributions, different kinds of memory interact richly with each other in practice.
Even if there turns out to be some natural psychological kind or sub-kind of memory – most plausibly, episodic memory – in ordinary cognition it is richly entangled with other kinds, including semantic and embodied memory.
Second, memory processes are not at all neatly shielded or compartmentalized from other cognitive and affective processes.
In the wild, human episodic memory (for example) is constantly inflecting and inflected by sensory-perceptual, spatial, motor, kinesthetic, imaginative, narrative, linguistic, and emotional processes in complex ways that cognitive ethnographers and cognitive neuroscientists may gradually tap if they can learn to work together. Third, memory processes either partly are sometimes distributed across bodily and worldly (social and environmental) resources as well as neural resources, or (for those of different theoretical persuasion) are sometimes deeply, surprisingly, richly coupled with motley non-neural resources that each have their own formats, timescales, and dynamics.
These are just some of the concentric circles of memory’s distribution, of the ways that memory phenomena typically spill over beyond themselves, even before we examine more macro-social or environmental dimensions. It is partly because of these daunting entanglements that some specialist fields work so hard to isolate particular phenomena out of the mix, to pin down specific interactions under controlled conditions in which much else is held constant. All well and good, as steps along the way.
But ultimately, we cannot know much of memory if memory is all we know.
Specialization must be compatible with expansive, outward-directed research instincts and interests. If in the weave of social life, in our diverse cognitive ecologies, memory is in play alongside gesture or diagrams or jazz or architecture or cloth, then pluralism in the way we study and theorize it is no theoreticians’ whim: it is, rather, demanded by the world. As this blog’s big-tent approach promises, the philosophy of memory can become deeper and broader, more precise and more inclusive, bigger and better all at once.
