As those who have been following this course since its 2006 edition might agree, there is much that is different in the course as taught in 2006 and 2008. 2006 was a multi-instructor course, 2008 was largely anchored by a single instructor. 2006 engaged in thematic debates across the disciplines in the natural and social sciences, 2008 was an intense engagement with the socio-cultural and intellectual contexts of knowledge production in the disciplines as we know them. In trying to share a rationale for the nature of the course in 2010 - and it must be said that some of the rationale is retrospective - it might be useful to remember that while the 2006 course introduced, for the first time, interdisciplinarity in a different sense from that already in circulation, pitching it differently from even multi-disciplinarity for instance, it also created a need - for clarity on concepts like objectivity, context, or perspectives of knowledge-production. And when it visibilised the classical "two-cultures" opposition in the classroom, rather than any classroom integration that might have been dreamed of, it threw up another question - of the question of diversity in science education. One way of attending to diversity would be to pay attention to the socio-cultural contexts from which would-be knowers come. Another is to pay attention to the diversity of ways of knowing, and to how they compete for validity. This was a question that perhaps has informed our efforts to take this course 'forward'; at any rate, it has created a desire to see interdisciplinarity as not really a way to hear about novel objects of enquiry ("oh, films are topics of research?!" or "crickets? what use is it to study crickets?") but as a dialogue between methodologies, as a way of drawing methodological insights from other fields that study the same or related objects, methodologies that challenge one's own, and of using that challenge to re-draw the face of one's own field or discipline. If need be. As mentioned in the concept note, therefore, the philosophy of the course has moved, since 2006, from trying to break down canonical disciplinary walls, valuing dissent and defection from disciplines as a source of criticality, to a sense that changing how one’s own discipline is done is perhaps the useful task of interdisciplinarity.
All of this was in the air as we went into the inaugural session of the course 2010 on August 7, 2010, at the CCS Seminar Hall. Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar, welcoming old and new faces to CCS, said as much, before he went on to briefly introduce CCS activities to the newcomers to the Centre, and to talk briefly about the history of this course since 2006.
Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana of CSCS spoke in some more detail of the contexts of the CCS-CSCS collaboration and the inception of the course in 2006, bringing up the "two cultures" thesis discussed first and most famously by C.P.Snow in 1959 at Cambridge University, insightfully reminding us that the "controversy he initiated, rather than the questions he asked", is what has stayed with us, and wondered why that was so. "Had he formulated a question of great importance for our modern age? Or had he merely articulated, openly, what was implicit in our engagements with different forms of knowledge?" Teju went on to discuss Snow's thesis in some detail, as also the contexts of British society within which it was articulated. She also discussed the contexts within which the word science came to its present meanings, as also being part of a whole complex of other words - like art, nature, experience-experiment that underwent changes too, and the ways in which the separation of science as applicable to the study of the external world as different from the subjective. This separation also pervaded education, naturally, reflected in the specialization of higher education which became an earlier and earlier component of the education system. The business of the course, she hoped, would be to challenge this divide, especially in the current climate of interdisciplinary enquiry. It is not about having access to the same body of knowledge or knowing the same things, but be able to understand what the other is saying, to sustain a mutually intelligible debate.
Prof. Sanjay Biswas, invited to formally inaugurate course 2010, shared with the group the dynamics of disciplinarity vs. interdisciplinarity, gleaned from his experiences of being closely associated with an interdisciplinary initiative, and the second an undergraduate program, both at IISc. Drawing a narrative of sorts of the shift from disciplinarity to interdisciplinarity, Prof. Biswas spoke of disciplinary knowledge as traditionally the space, related to capitalism, where industrial products were born. A large number of parallel streams somehow come together, 'integrate', to generate a product.This scheme of disciplinarity - the disciplinary approach to problems - ran into major trouble with the crisis of overproduction. The problems we addressed a hundred years ago are nowhere like the problems we have on our hands today - problems born out of this very overproduction - climate change is one. This got us seriously thinking about interdisciplinarity. Disciplines can no longer be juxtaposed as earlier, but in some way interdigitised, for these problems to be addressed. In reflecting on the experiences of setting up a biomedical clinical engineering centre, he told us how the target has shifted from a product to a problem. If we re-orient our approach to problem solving, it takes us away from the earlier disciplines in delivering the social good that capitalism wanted. This, then, was a difference from an earlier concept of integration. The problem itself is formulated by a group. Now what are the kinds of people we need for this kind of work - disciplinary, or interdisciplinary? Should such training start at school level - interdisciplinary to start with, or should it start with their own disciplines? What is the kind of training that will help the process of production as well. Is there a culture of knowledge holding that promotes both these kinds of activities? This problem Prof. Biswas offered up for debate.
The inaugural session ended with Prof. Gadagkar talking about the structure of the course - 3 hrs. every Saturday, at 2 PM, for about 20 weeks. Each session will partly be a stand-alone module, and will be advertised separately.
SESSION 1A - Integrating Higher Education: Thinking Beyond the Disciplines
Teju, who has been part of the inception of this course since 2006, began by wishing to lay out the history of the present state of higher education. This is a history of the present, so it is more about legacies. Referring to the usage of the word "predicament" in both the session descriptions, she began by asking for the reasons why higher education might be unpleasantly difficult, perplexing, and even dangerous. The higher education system in India, which began taking shape in the early to mid-nineteenth century, inherits the legacy of colonial proposals and policies of that time, most infamously the minute by Thomas Babbington Macaulay in 1835, which in turn drew on Charles Grant's work in 1797, when he spoke of the diffusion of Western knowledge in India, and the need for redemption of Indian cultural practices through Christian values and knowledge mediated through it. At that time, the East India Company, wary of tampering with the customs of the land, dismissed this proposal. It was later, when the Company became a major political power, that it turned its attention to introducing and consolidating educational initiatives. This would be around the 1820s. This time saw a very interesting 'collaboration' between the Utilitarians and the Evangelicals - those interested in secular knowledge, and those interested in propagating western moral values - for this purpose. Bentinck, the Governor General, supported Macaulay's proposal, and the result of course was a long-drawn out controversy. There were from this time also several attempts to introduce
vernacular education, but with a deep ambivalence on the why and how of this, it failed to take off. A certain distinction was established between Oriental knowledge and modern knowledge - a legacy which has consequences even today. Does then the inability of the present education system to deal with the problem of educational resources in Indian languages have to do with this complicated history? A comprehensive education plan was put together in 1854 for the British Indian territory. This carried the stamp of Dalhousie, the then Governor General. This despatch proposed English education - "the improved arts, science, and literature of Europe" - for giving Indians access to the general effects of the diffusion of "useful knowledge". It has been pointed out in economic and social histories that underlying this was a desire to transform the tastes, interests and ambitions of Indian people. The despatch also emphasized the importance of vernacular languages in the diffusion of European knowledge. In 1857, affiliating universities were established - in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, built on the model of London. Career opportunities in the government made sure students went for English education. So contrary to the 1854 despatch, after middle school there was no vernacular language instruction. So some of the dilemmas we face today were also dilemmas in the 19th century, with different reasons. Large numbers of private universities came up in the late 19th century; as early as 1877, commentators in Bengal talked about rising unemployment among Indians, which they saw as grist to political agitation; and further saw that literature and philosophy education hardly made for good training for government jobs. Law, teaching, journalism, medicine, which were independent professions, some turned to. In 1899, Lord Curzon lamented the failure of higher education, and its unsuitability for the jobs that were on offer. Reforms were called for. The Indian Universities Act was formulated in 1905, which seemed to increase the British stranglehold since all universities needed British university accreditation. This angered nationalists who had started institutions of their own. A debate now ensued on what might be the content of a national education as opposed to Western. Between 1912 and 1929, semi-autonomous modes of governance were experimented with. Educational institutions were classified as per the government funding them. Both British and nationalists introduced reforms; the INC requested Prof. Zakir Hussain of Jamia Milia to prepare a report on the feasibility of a national education system. The idea however took off only after independence.
One thing about the Indian education system is that it is massive - the second largest in the world. Teju went on to discussing the structure of the system as of now - the college, the university, the research institute, resulting in a divorce of research and teaching after the important functions of higher education have been broken up in such a way that they do not speak to one another. Apart from these, there are deep disciplinary divides, that stem from the old separations of skill based learning from general education. It is already evident in the medical, architectural, and engineering colleges. The University Commission Report of 1948 headed by S. Radhakrishnan, proposes a distinction between fact, event, value - or nature, society, and spirit, the subject matter of sciences, social sciences, and humanities respectively. General education was as training for citizenship. This emphasis shifted to education for development of the nation. These divisions did not dissolve, except for the new emphasis on vocationalization in the Rajiv Gandhi years. This was proposed as a late antidote to the colonial emphasis on the arts. The Birla-Ambani report in 2000 renewed this plea with an emphasis on technical knowledge and managerial competence - to create a new information society. Important here is the collapse of information and knowledge. This gave a new meaning to "useful knowledge".
Recent evaluations of social sciences present a story of decline. The knowledge is derivative, curricula outdated, teaching methods poor, resource materials few.
Teju went on to suggest that these narratives of decline don't really account for the problem. The contours of this problem are related to the ways in which we are attracted to what we call "modernity". In order to understand how we understand modernity in India, we also need to understand how we understand culture. Our discussion of culture is located in third world nationalism. Culture then becomes the antithesis and the refuge from modernity. The key way to do this is to speak about and to fix Indianness. Education becomes a crucial site for the invocation of culture and Indianness. Peculiarly again, educational institutions are ill-equipped to deal with this.
One of these sites is perhaps language, where these problems erupt. Regional language education is something that is constantly deferred. Disciplinary vocabularies fail to be instituted among students who sit examinations in the local language, and learn in English - there are few or no resources in their own languages.
By 2006, it was suggested that major translation activity be put in to solve this problem. Teju suggested this was a displacement of the real problem. Local linguistic resources might give a very different picture of the complexity of social phenomena in our own contexts, and about developing a different language that helps talk about this. There are also the problems with inherited definitions of what constitutes useful knowledge, social science research and writing. The Higher Education Cell has been trying to feed projects that look at a range of writing in different languages that might give a different picture of social phenomena, and constitute new resources. We might juxtapose these kinds of writing alongside more recognizable social science research, to translate into both regional languages and English, with the hope that a new generation will learn to draw on each of these for a critical vocabulary. This is about social science writing. Science writing may have generated a common vocabulary. But recent reports show a language problem in the sciences as well. We perhaps need a social theory and practice that can contend with the "relentless monolingualism" of the English text books. We also need to think of the status of translation as an activity, as a metaphor.
We do need to evolve strategies for bilingual competence. Translator and teacher training is necessary. Repositories of regional language resources are being developed. This might make the learning process more coherent. But we cannot defer the question of what sort of university we need, and what sort of account of the language question such an institution should function with. A theory of the university today cannot be separated from a theory of language, and of translation. We might bring in the notion of a critical bilinguality. This approach to language in a multilingual and postcolonial society is a new approach to understanding the constraints and futures of institutions of higher education. Maybe this is a question for the natural scientists as well.
SESSION 1B: THE VERY IDEA OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
Prof. Sanil's was a very different kind of reflection on knowledge production. He sought to dwell on the meaning of production. Prof. Sanil began by talking about the "natural science-social science" hyphen, which seemed to be discussed always at the level of the individual - so the well-rounded natural scientist was one who also understood social problems. This model has not in a way been convincing. The question is - at the level of knowledge, can there be a meeting point? If it has not happened, it is not because policy makers or individual academics are not careful; there are genuine difficulties here. It is important to have a sense of that difficulty, and this is at the level of the idea of knowledge that we have, and the way we conceive the position of knowledge in our lives. Does this mean we will propose a new conception of knowledge under which integration will look possible? No. What Sanil did propose is that the intellectual labour given into bringing them together is the same that finally makes it impossible. That labour we might locate in the concept of "production". What do we really mean when we say that knowledge is a matter of production? Is this concept adequate for us to think about integration? There are two classical notions of integration - one is by Whitehead, who says - Get your religion into your physics, and your physics into your religion - a little frightening ... the other is the great Keats - "Beauty is truth and truth beauty ... " .. it is a great dream ... but is that all it is perhaps? Sanil suggested that something happened in the way we looked at knowledge in the 18th-19th centuries .. which is the source of this division, and our burden. We have been able to convince the natural scientists that they should study social sciences. Has the reverse happened? The sense is that natural scientists have produced knowledge, but do not understand some hidden meaning of knowledge.This is the problem we need to look at.
So if we look at the classical definition of knowledge - as justified, true belief - which is not adequate, but a starting point in thinking about tradition of ideas of knowledge ... and then, knowledge is actually a mirroring activity; we have reality, we produce an exact representation of a copy of reality. This is a creative process. Another aspect of this mode of thinking of knowledge ... there is the method for knowledge ... is available in great thinkers like Descartes ... now, scientists do not reflect on method ... In the 18th-19th century, there was a shift ... toward methodological reflection in philosophy ... earlier, philosophers created 'scientific knowledge' too, but this underwent a change ... this was what brought the break ... earlier, Descartes could use the concept of knowledge to know the absolute necessity of one entity ... this became a question of contingency later on. We philosophers, said Sanil, do not make the claim to knowledge any more. What prevents us? When we were making the claim, say in Descartes' time, they could actually pursue things like mathematics. Suddenly this claim cannot be made ... the Copernican revolution in philosophy has happened .. there was instead the claim that we need to change the way we look at knowledge ... much in Copernican ways ... one of the cornerstones of this shift was to say that knowledge is not an imitation of reality ... knowledge does not give me any clue to that reality ... that entity itself I have no idea of ... to put it differently, knowledge has its own route, but whether it has any foundation anywhere, I have no way of knowing. Knowledge has internal constraints ... there are invariants to knowledge ... but it has certain rules ... this makes sense only if we say that knowledge is something we produce ... not imposed from the outside ... this is the move through which we get to the idea of production of knowledge ... Kant would tell us that the externalities impinging on me, that I seek to mirror, are already represented through a conceptual structure ... the outside world is not merely causing my knowledge ... it only justifies my knowledge ... experience has some internal structure ... Kant's own formulation would be - "the a-priori conditions of possible experience in general ... are the things ... the condition of possibility of the object of experience" ... I can think about the object, I cannot know it ... the moment I know it, it has an identity card - which refers to the 'production' ... any reality-in-itself is not an object of knowledge ... what concerns us is a reality for us ... we cannot go about the world which is beyond our relation to the world ... what is the faculty that will do this? This is where Kant suggested imagination ... which now acquires a prominent role in production ... this has primacy over perception ... and the relation, the tying together with the object, has to happen for perception to take place ... Sanil gave on to give examples of this ... this is then the radical claim - our non-active perceptions are alive in our present perceptions ... in the social sciences we sometimes tend to say that if knowledge were valuable it should have occurred naturally ... the fact that it was produced reduces its value ... this claim we are trying to undermine ... are we social scientists then wrong? what is it we are complaining of when we say "production"? what we say when we say we are only going to talk about production ... we can start by saying we cannot know what the thing-in-itself is ... what reality is ... what about the relator? what we call the absolute is the relation .. we cannot get out of this relation ... what we call the absolute is nothing but this relation ... we have only this opening ... for Hegel, absolute knowledge means we can only know the invariant of this knowledge, there is no need of a split .. this is the only way ... another position would say there are invariants ... like space and time ... why these? why is causality an invariant of my natural knowledge? this position would say I cannot know that ... that it only happens to be so ... the second position would say .. these categories can be deduced - like Hegel would put it ... a third tries to radicalize this further - like contemporary sociology of knowledge ... necessity of invariants cannot be proved ... it just so happens that these are born as contingent ... they are inescapable ... this inescapability is the ground of we knowing anything ... so we started with the question of knowing reality, and have withdrawn to this point ... only the relationship matters, then to say the invariance of the relationship ... then we say that what we have is the absolute contingency of this invariance ... as we make the more and more radical claim, we withdraw more and more ... so the concept of imagination as part of production which is the bold gesture of natural sciences in their engagement with reality, turns into a withdrawal for the social sciences which have their route in this grand withdrawal ...it could have been said that it is not the world that is mystical, but that there is a world ... we then must ask how we reached a position where the sheer world is such a mystery for us ... it shows how radically we are disconnected from cognitive activity ... this is what Foucault put out so well when he speaks of the positivity of 'man' ...these are our critical resources when we talk about intersubjectivity, ideology, power ... but on the other hand we might be moving away from a certain radicalism ... we have now shifted to language in the social sciences ... we will not now enquire whether nature is written in language, but only concentrate on language ... but can we turn positivism, dogmatic objectivity, into our resources, rather than rejecting science and scientists? We can take forward this dialogue only if we can say a few things about science, mathematics, and so on ... can we have a movement from the critical to the speculative in social sciences?
After that stimulating and eloquent laying down of those vulnerabilities on the table, questions were many and varied. They were questions - both clarificatory and polemical - on Oriental knowledge, distinctions if any between Western and European knowledge, the theory-ladenness of experience, useful knowledge, "production", the implications of the notion for the separation between natural and social sciences, the politics of translation, the debate around culture, the tradition-modernity debate, alternative imaginations of education in nationalist or other spheres. It was reiterated, in these clarifications by speakers, that higher education, for instance, is a recent concept. They also went on to conjecture that there is no parallel production of knowledge here, but the social sciences are an effect of the going about around the metaphor of production. So both are in the predicament ... there is a certain set of tools to understand what we are doing ... the natural sciences, too, in their idea of thinking knowledge is a cumulative activity ... we need to ask ourselves where we are, having given up old notions ... having stepped away from the notion of mirroring, we have demonstrated that knowledge-making is a free activity ... we cannot now say that knowledge-making is not free - of biases etc. etc. ... clarifications were also offered on critical bilinguality as not only a literal linguistic exercise but also one required across knowledge fields ... and on the diverse and changing component of the student population ... and the different kinds of politics required to respond to this ... communication may not be happening across fields not merely in absence of language skills but because there is nothing to communicate ...
Note: It is the case that this set of suggestions are a deeply reflexive account of knowledge production, as also of the natural and social sciences, rather than a 'true' history, and are therefore best engaged with reflexively from other standpoints as well.
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