Flexible Disciplines, Flexible Boundaries, and Making Meaning

I think I have a bit more to say about boundaries, especially in terms of the boundaries that distinguish the academic disciplines. I've been arguing that the boundaries between, say, history and physics are nowhere near as rigid and as static as academic purists might insist, but neither are the boundaries between history and physics imaginary, capricious, and unnecessary as academic anarchists might insist. (I recognize that I am creating extremes with my contrast of purists and anarchists and that most educationists lie somewhere between or even outside these two extremes, but it helps me to see my point.) Boundaries are both necessary for human activity and knowledge and temporary.

I rely here on a few articles by South African complexity scholar Paul Cilliers and by Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework, and my argument, I think, makes a basic assumption: that education and educational structures are complex systems tending to the chaotic, rather than complicated systems tending to the simple. I believe this is so despite the enormous energy expended in wrenching education into a simple system. Education ain't simple. It probably isn't even complicated. It's complex, at best. To my mind, then, the biggest problem with academic disciplines is that we try to move them into the simple and/or complicated domains of the Cynefin Framework where their boundaries are fixed, explicit, and easily taught, with clear canons of content and methodologies. In the simple or even complicated domains, it's easy to distinguish the historian from the physicist. In the complex domain, disciplinary and canonical boundaries are much more problematic, though no less useful, even necessary. Paul Cilliers helps me understand this.

In several critiques (Knowledge, Complexity, and Understanding (2000), Knowledge, limits and boundaries (2005), and Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely (2007), for instance), Cilliers argues that knowledge is best understood as an emergent property "constituted within a complex system of interactions". This view of knowledge avoids both extremes of the purist and the anarchist, or as Cilliers more accurately calls them: the fundamentalist and the relativist. As Cilliers says:

An understanding of knowledge as constituted within a complex system of interactions would, on the one hand, deny that knowledge can be seen as atomised ‘facts’ that have objective meaning. Knowledge comes to be in a dynamic network of interactions, a network that does not have distinctive borders. On the other hand, this perspective would also deny that knowledge is something purely subjective, mainly because one cannot conceive of the subject as something prior to the ‘network of knowledge’, but rather as something constituted within that network. The argument from complexity thus wants to move beyond the objective/subjective dichotomy. (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 608)

Knowledge, then, is not representational, "linked to the sign which represents it", but relational, "the result of a dynamic interaction between all the meaningful components in the system … itself a complex process" (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 85). This presents an immediate problem, however, given the open nature of complex systems. If complete knowledge must account for an infinite number of interactions across the open boundaries of complex systems, then how do we ever attain actionable knowledge, given that we have a limited amount of time? Because we, as knowledge makers, are ourselves contextualized, and each context limits the number of system components presented for knowledge making. In other words, though a single rose is ultimately connected through its complex interactions to the entire rest of the Universe, the meaning of the rose is constrained when I cut it from my own garden and present it to my wife on Valentine's Day, which provides a bounded context within which meaning can emerge. The boundaries make the emergence of a particular meaning possible.

Of course, the meaning is no more absolute than the boundaries that enable it. In the relatively straightforward example above, the meaning of the rose will be slightly different, perhaps radically different, for me than for my wife as we bring our different contexts to the event, but it will be similar enough that we can at least speak meaningfully with each other—though we should be mindful that the very stuff of most romantic comedies involves the different meanings drawn by men and women from even so well-bounded and commonly shared an event as Valentine's Day. Boundaries in complex systems are not permanent or rigid, though they can persist in recognizable contours for long times.

So to directly address my concerns with Marion Brady's dismissal of disciplinary boundaries, I think he slightly overstates his case. We cannot dispense with boundaries in complex systems such as academic disciplines if we want to create meaning, or knowledge. Likewise, we cannot calcify our boundaries without destroying knowledge. As Cilliers says it:

One can, and often should, emphasise the interrelatedness of systems. Often the boundaries of systems are constructions we impose in order to reduce the complexity. This can lead to oversimplifications, to reductive descriptions of the system. However, if boundaries become too vague, we end up with a kind of holism which does not allow much to be said. … We need limits in order to say something. (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 88)

Perhaps, though, Brady's discontent with disciplinary boundaries comes from the usual interpretation of boundaries as "something that separates one thing from another" (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 611). In this view of boundaries, one cannot be both an historian and a physicist at the same time. History and physics are separate things, and one cannot be in both places at once. Of course, complexity and quantum theories ignore this kind of classical logic. Cilliers makes some suggestions about how we might think differently about boundaries, ways that make sense within complex systems.

First, "we should rather think of a boundary as something that constitutes that which is bounded. This shift will help us to see the boundary as something enabling, rather than as confining" (p. 611). From this view, our skins, those well-known and most familiar boundaries, don't separate us from the rest of the world; rather, they enable our interaction with the world by helping to maintain our own integrity as a persisting complex system and providing somewhat stable and recognizable contours that the rest of the world can engage and through which energy and information may be exchanged. Likewise, disciplinary boundaries need not separate historians from physicists, but they should enable useful, valuable interaction between historians and physicists, shifting and stretching as different issues supply different contexts of meaning, again enabling a mutually valuable exchange of energy and information.

Next, we should rethink our physical images about the place of a boundary. We must replace our visual metaphors which force us to think of complex systems "as something contiguous in space." Complex social systems, Cilliers notes, are not necessarily contiguous; thus, "parts of the system may exist in totally different spatial locations." This is certainly the case with history as an academic discipline, which is not a spatially contiguous physical system. This implies that a historian likely belongs to many different complex systems (families, churches, political parties, etc) and "that different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs." So where's the boundary? It's always provisional, determined by the context referenced at any given time for any given event. Furthermore, Cilliers notes that any node in a system is "never far away from the boundary. If the components of the system are richly interconnected, there will always be a short route from any component to the 'outside' of the system. … the boundary is folded in, or perhaps, the system consists of boundaries only. Everything is always interacting and interfacing with others and with the environment; the notions of 'inside' and 'outside' are never simple and uncontested" (p. 611).

So maybe that can address Brady's concerns with disciplinary boundaries. At least somewhat.

MOOCs, Transdisciplinarity, and Thinking Big

In his 2004 Phi Beta Kappan essay entitled Thinking Big: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Everything, self-described contrarian educator Marion Brady writes that "the main task of educating is to help students make more sense of the world, themselves, and others" (p. 277). He attacks the current state of knowledge as represented in the plethora of academic subjects and disciplines and insists that such a fragmented approach to knowledge will, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, "be the undoing of the society." He quotes Fuller again in a marvelous 1980s complaint to American educators: "What you fellows in the universities do is make all the bright students into experts in something. That has some usefulness, but the trouble is it leaves the ones with mediocre minds and the dunderheads to become generalists who must serve as college presidents . . . and presidents of the United States." I truly wish I had said that, but … well, he was Buckminster Fuller.

Brady then identifies the basic theory of education that underlies the fragmented, disciplinary approach to knowledge:

The present curriculum, made up as it is of separate, specialized studies, exerts considerable pressure on teachers to make major use of what could be called “Theory T.” Theory T dominates American education. … T stands for “transfer.” Those who accept Theory T believe that knowledge is located in teachers’ heads, textbooks, reference materials, and on the Internet and that the instructional challenge is to transfer it from these locations into the empty space in students’ heads. The degree of success of the transfer process can be measured with relative ease, which helps explain its broad appeal. … Evaluating performance is simple enough to allow student responses to be scored by a machine. (pp. 279, 280)

 He then contrasts Theory T with what he calls Theory R:

Theory R assumes not that students’ heads are empty but that they are full. The primary instructional challenge, then, is not to transfer new knowledge but to help students reorganize existing knowledge to make it more useful, consistent, or true and to supplement it with insights and skills that will help explain more fully what they already know.… Students in Theory R classrooms must be active processors of information. Theory T emphasizes recall; Theory R requires students to engage in every known thought process. … Theory R requires students to make connections, to perceive relationships, and to synthesize ideas. It sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines.

Brady gives here a neat precursor to Connectivism, I think. First, he emphasizes that each student already possesses all the neuronal networks needed for making connections, perceiving relationships, and synthesizing ideas. We teachers do not transfer anything into the imagined empty memory slots of student brains; rather, we present them with a, hopefully, coherent and engaging series of artifacts and experiences to which they may connect, perceive relationships, and synthesize ideas, or not. All too often what they connect to, perceive relationships among, and synthesize are ideas that we never taught, or didn't know we were teaching. And each student makes these connections and patterns within an ecosystem (their own life stories) that we teachers know little to nothing about, and that ecosystem, that context, provides almost all of the meaning for whatever new connections and patterns the student is weaving. This reminds me much of Paul Cilliers' definition of knowledge as "information that is situated historically and contextually by a knowing subject" (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely in Capra, Juarrero, Sotolongo, and van Uden's Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South, 2007, p. 85). In other words, while information may exist apart from our students as data, it does not become knowledge until the student situates that information within a context that includes themselves and that necessarily informs the information in ways we teachers cannot predict or control.

But what most impressed me about Brady's article was his observation that this process of making connections (mapping, as Deleuze and Guattari say) "sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." It seems to me that Connectivism and MOOCs are wonderful vehicles for transdisciplinarity, which transcends the "boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." I know that the MOOCs I have joined have had a marvelous, transdisciplinary reach in content and participants. Though I have had some of the most engaging and rewarding conversations of my professional life, as far as I know, I have actually had no conversation with another writing teacher, aside from one colleague who shared an office with me and a few MOOCs. Almost all of my conversations have been with scholars and practitioners outside my discipline, which makes my engagement in the MOOCs most transdisciplinary.

I think I will explore this a bit more in the next few posts.

Boundaries and the System

A fourth concept that Morin discusses in The Reform of Thought is the system, or organization. If I understand Morin correctly, then he means by system any self-organizing entity that pulls itself together  in such a manner that allows it to function as an entity and that provides the organized substrate for the emergence of properties and capabilities not necessarily inherent in the individual parts. The whole entity, then, is greater than the sum of the parts. For instance, consciousness is not a property of individual neurons, but it emerges when enough neurons self-organize into a functioning human brain within a functioning eco-system. As near as I can tell, systems appear to be all-inclusive—the ultimate vacation resorts. I cannot think of anything that is not both itself a system and a part of another system. Even strings on the micro-scale and the Universe on the macro-scale may be systems within systems. If string theorists are correct, then our Universe is just one system within a system of Universes. Maybe strings themselves are systems. After all, we once thought atoms were the smallest things possible, and we've moved way beyond that idea. We will likely move again.

This concept of system quite likely includes the other concepts that I've considered in my exploration of boundaries: the included middle, the dialogic, circular causality, and the holographic principle. Or perhaps I'm being drawn to the realization that all of these concepts suggest and implicate the others. Each of them, in true transdisciplinary fashion, is difficult to think about alone. Rather, they make more sense when seen as a whole. They represent the nature of boundaries as

• the included middles that join rather than separate but without merging, 
• the dialogics that juxtapose and hold in a creative, dynamic dance distinct entities, becoming the fertile zone where new things emerge and enrich both entities,
• the circular causalities that enable the flow of energy, matter, and information between the distinct entities, again enriching and sustaining both,
• the holographic principles that encode the whole within the part, like stem cells able to self-reproduce the entity, and finally,
• the systems that nestle systems within systems within systems.

Really. Can we understand any of this if we don't see that the part is within the system is within the part and that this is irreducibly loopy? Can we understand Mending Wall if we don't see that the narrator and the neighbor are a self-forming, self-organizing system, joined and at the same time distinguished at an included middle that expresses their dynamic dance and creates the zone in which they both assert their independence and their dependence, their individuality and their kinship, defining their independence in terms of their dependence and vice versa, and that echoes the patterns of molecules, societies, and stars.

Well, at any rate, I think that's what Mending Wall means to me. I have no idea what the poem meant to Robert Frost, and the question is somewhat irrelevant to my discussion which hasn't been about Frost but about boundaries. Still, I feel just strong enough to believe that, if he were here, I might persuade him.

Boundaries and the Included Middle

So Mending Wall does not present us with a binary choice between the discrete individualism of reductionism and classical logic on the one hand or the undifferentiated unity of holism and mysticism on the other. Rather, the poem presents a third way, a middle way, but not in the Aristotelean sense of a Golden Mean or in the Hegelian sense of a synthesis. This way is definitely not from Aristotle, but rather from quantum physics and chaos and complexity theory, ideas that were just emerging when Frost was writing. The poem embodies something that Basarab Nicolescu calls the included middle, a concept that I still have not mastered but that is becoming increasingly important to my understanding of boundaries.

I first encountered the term included middle in Nicolescu's book Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002), a difficult book that I'm still not ready to discuss. According to Joseph E. Brenner in his essay The Logic of Transdisciplinarity (from Nicolescu's book Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008), "the logic of the included middle [was] developed by the Franc-Romanian philosopher Stèphane Lupasco (1900-1988) and extended by Nicolescu … [as a] needed replacement of the neoclassical logical framework that underlies current individual, social, and scientific paradigms" (155). As I understand it, the developments of quantum physics which sees light as both a particle and a wave at the same time establishes the need for a new logic to complement and transcend the old, classical logic, which Nicolescu (In Vitro and In Vivo Knowledge in Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice) says was "founded on three axioms:

1. The axiom of identity: A is A.
2. The axiom of noncontradiction: A is not non-A.
3. The axiom of the excluded middle: There exists no third term T ("T" from "third") which is at the same time A and non-A" (6).

According to this fundamental way of constructing Reality, light can either be a particle or a wave, but it can not be both at the same time. Quantum physics, however, said that light was both particle and wave and at the same time. Something had to give. Lupasco and Nicolescu decided that logic would give, and so they developed the logic of the included middle, and I think it is this included middle that Mending Wall captures for me.

The wall in the poem is, of course, the boundary between the narrator's farm and the neighbor's farm. It is also the boundary between the narrator's dislike of walls and the neighbor's like of them. According to the old logic then, traceable all the way back to Aristotle, the narrator's farm is the narrator's farm, it is not the neighbor's farm, and there is no middle ground that is both narrator's farm and neighbor's farm. This logic makes great sense at the level of common, everyday Reality. It puts everything in its place and keeps it there. Most of us act on this common, classical logic everyday.

But when we shift levels of Reality, then the limitations of this logic become obvious. Nicolescu says that natural science has discovered at least three different levels of Reality—"the macrophysical level, the microphysical level, and the cyber-space-time"—with a break in the laws and concepts applicable to each level. These levels exist simultaneously and through engagement with one another, and the contradictions at one level (A vs. non-A) become non-contradictory at another level. I do not have the skill with mathematics or formal logic to describe this for you, but I think the poem gives me a way of visualizing this concept. At the everyday scale, or Level B, of reality, the wall creates a boundary between the narrator's farm and the neighbor's farm such that each is itself and not the other and there is no middle zone that they both occupy. There is indeed a boundary between the two at Level B of Reality, and a person can step over that boundary. Or not. This defines our day-to-day existence at Level B. 

However, if I stand at the boundary and rise upward to the level of the macrophysical, to Level A, then the two farms become smaller and smaller until they become two dots and then one dot and then nothing. No boundary. Likewise, if I fall downward to the level of the microphysical, to Level C, then the two farms become larger and larger until they become molecules, atoms, and strings of vibrating energy. Again, no boundary, at least not between two farms. Thus, the contradiction at one level of reality is a non-contradiction at another level. It is not resolved, as it would be in a Hegelian dialectic, because the contradiction continues to exist on Level B at the same time that it does not exist at Levels A and C. There is no resolution, only a certain tension among the various points of view. The wall both is and is not at the same time. Turn your head one way, and it is. Turn your head the other way, and it is not. The wall is both actual and potential at the same time. Your knowledge of its state depends on your position relative to the wall.

Well, I think this is one way to think about the included middle. It's one way to think about boundaries.