Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities 9781472597687, 9781472597717, 9781472597700

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgements
Part 1: Knowledge Production in the Humanities
1. Disciplinary Knowledge Production and Interdisciplinary Humanities
2. Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers
3. Research Styles: Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences
4. Criticizing Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism
Part 2: Advances in Interdisciplinary Humanities
5. Friendship, Love and the Borderology of Interdisciplinarity
6. Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks
7. The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences
8. Open Human Science: Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research
Part 3: An Argument for Classical Humanities
9. The Culture Debate Between Terror Threats, Free Speech and Humanism: Lessons from the Case of Danish Post-war Intellectuals
10. Transforming the Humanities from a National to an International Agenda
11. A Republican Theory of the Humanities
Index

Citation preview

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Also available from Bloomsbury Academic Working Lives, Lynne Gornall, Caryn Cook, Lyn Daunton, Jane Salisbury and Brychan Thomas Arts and Humanities Academics in Schools, edited by Geoff Baker and Andrew Fisher Rethinking Knowledge within Higher Education, Jan McArthur

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities Edited by Claus Emmeche, David Budtz Pedersen and Frederik Stjernfelt

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Claus Emmeche, David Budtz Pedersen, Frederik Stjernfelt and Contributors, 2017 Claus Emmeche, David Budtz Pedersen, Frederik Stjernfelt and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Emmeche, Claus, 1956- editor. | Pedersen, David Budtz, editor. | Stjernfelt, Frederik, editor. Title: Mapping frontier research in the humanities / edited by Claus Emmeche, David Budtz Pedersen, Frederik Stjernfelt. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2016029221 (print) | LCCN 2016048408 (ebook)| LCCN 2016048408 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472597687 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472597700 (epdf) | ISBN 9781472597694 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Humanities–Study and teaching (Higher) | Humanties–Research. | Interdisciplinary approach in education. | BISAC: EDUCATION / Higher. | EDUCATION / Leadership. | EDUCATION / Research. Classification: LCC AZ182 .M36 2016 (print) | LCC AZ182 (ebook) | DDC 001.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029221 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-9768-7 PB: 978-1-3500-7470-5 ePDF: 978-1-4725-9770-0 ePub: 978-1-4725-9769-4 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements

vii viii ix xiii

Part 1  Knowledge Production in the Humanities

1

2 3 4

Disciplinary Knowledge Production and Interdisciplinary Humanities  David Budtz Pedersen, Frederik Stjernfelt and Claus Emmeche

3

Research Styles and Extra-­Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers  Jonas Grønvad and Lasse Gøhler Johansson

17

Research Styles: Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences  Svend Østergaard and Peter Lau Torst Nielsen

41

Criticizing Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism  Frederik Stjernfelt

59

Part 2  Advances in Interdisciplinary Humanities

5

Friendship, Love and the Borderology of Interdisciplinarity  Claus Emmeche

77

6

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks  Vincent Fella Hendricks

97

7

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences  Magnus Biilmann and Simo Køppe

113

Open Human Science: Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research  David Budtz Pedersen and Kristian Moltke Martiny

137

8

Contents

vi

Part 3  An Argument for Classical Humanities

9

The Culture Debate Between Terror Threats, Free Speech and Humanism: Lessons from the Case of Danish Post-­war Intellectuals  Esther Oluffa Pedersen

159

10 Transforming the Humanities from a National to an International Agenda  Uffe Østergård

187

11 A Republican Theory of the Humanities  David Budtz Pedersen

213

Index

237

List of Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2 6.1 6.2

Modalities contributing above average to Axis 1 Modalities contributing above average to Axis 2 The space of disciplines Practical research aims Primary sources of funding and stances towards funding policy Research collaboration inside and outside the academic world Characteristics important for a research manager Types of data The network conveys relations between researchers who have three to six parameters in common Bubbles as conglomerate research objects Bubble matrix

28 29 31 33 34 35 36 50 56 104 106

List of Tables 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 5.1

7.1

Distribution of humanities researchers on research institution, discipline and position 23 List of indicators of research style 25 Eigenvalues, variance rates and modified rates for principal axes 27 Framework based on ten in-­depth interviews 42 The interviewed researchers and their research styles as described with our parameters 55 Matrix of ten research contributions on friendship from the humanities and social sciences, showing the interconnectedness of disciplines 87 Number of hits on Google Scholar over three and a half decades 114

Contributors Magnus Biilmann holds a B.Sc and an M.Sc. in psychology from the Department of Psychology at Copenhagen University. His theoretical interests lie principally within epistemology of psychoanalysis and the history and philosophy of science; the exploration of the relation and interaction between the natural and the human sciences is a particular concern of his. He is currently a board member of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology (Denmark). David Budtz Pedersen is Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Campus of the University of Aalborg and Co-Director of the Humanomics Research Centre. His work focuses on science and innovation studies, and on developing new methods and practices to strengthen the impact of research in society. His most recent articles include ‘The Political Epistemology of Science-Based Policy-Making’ and ‘Integrating Social Sciences and Humanities in Interdisciplinary Research’. He is the co-­editor of the book The Struggle of Disciplines (in Danish, 2015), and How to Manage the Knowledge Society (in Danish, 2012). He received his Ph.D. in philosophy of science from the University of Copenhagen in 2011. Claus Emmeche is Associate Professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, and member of the Humanomics Research group. With a background in theoretical biology and philosophy of science, his research interests have been the construction of semiotic models of living systems (biosemiotics), the emergence of levels of embodiment in evolution (ontology), and modes of research and interdisciplinarity (sociology of science). Current research interests include friendship studies in an interdisciplinary perspective. Jonas Grønvad is a research assistant at the Humanomics Research Centre. He holds an M.Sc. in sociology from the University of Copenhagen. His research interests include knowledge production, elite studies, and the role of science and expertise in governance processes. He specializes in geometric data analysis, network analysis and data mining.

x

Contributors

Vincent F. Hendricks is Professor of Formal Philosophy at The University of Copenhagen. He is Director of the Center for Information and Bubble Studies (CIBS) sponsored by the Carlsberg Foundation. He has worked with modern philosophical logic, bringing mainstream and formal approaches to epistemology together. Lately he has worked on info storms, collective rationality, democratic processes, the financial crunch and bubble studies. He was awarded the Elite Research Prize by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Roskilde Festival Elite Research Prize both in 2008. He was Editor-inChief of Synthese: An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science between 2005–2015. Lasse Gøhler Johansson is a research assistant at the Humanomics Research Centre and Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. He holds an M.Sc. in sociology from the University of Copenhagen and a BA in philosophy from Aarhus University. He has been a visiting sociology scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include the sociology and history of science, research policy and social policy. He uses historical comparative methods, interviewing, surveys, geometric data analysis and social network analysis. Simo Køppe is Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen. He holds doctoral degrees in biology (Ph.D.) and health science (Dr.med.), has edited and translated large parts of the work of Sigmund Freud, published Freud’s Psychoanalysis with Ole Andkjær Olsen, and written several hundred articles for different encyclopaedias and lexicons, and several books on theory of science. He is a member of many editorial boards, has been the head of the Ph.D. programme in the Department of Psychology, taught Ph.D. courses at the Faculty of Humanities, and advised many Ph.D. students. He is a Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. Kristian Moltke Martiny is a researcher at the Helene Elsass Center and the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen (UCPH). He holds an MA in philosophy from UCPH, a BA in philosophy and anthropology from UCPH and University College London, and has been a visiting scholar at University of Memphis and École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He acquired his Ph.D. in 2015 for investigating the neuro-­psycho-social aspects of living with cerebral palsy. His research interests are phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, Second Person methods, and open collaborative and transdisciplinary science.

Contributors

xi

Peter Lau Torst Nielsen is a Ph.D student at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He holds an MA in Cognitive Semiotics from Aarhus University and has for the last eight years been working in the field of interdisciplinary ICT development as a practitioner involving users in technology development. His current research is meaning construction in collective and collaborative design processes in urban contexts related to ICT. Esther Oluffa Pedersen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Communication and Arts at the University of Roskilde. She received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen and has been visiting scholar at Freie Universität and Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany, and at Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA. Main fields of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophy of the humanities, and philosophical anthropology. She wrote Die Mythosphilosophie Ernst Cassirers (Königshausen & Neumann, 2009) and co-­edited Anthropology & Philosophy: Dialogues on Trust and Hope (Berghahn Books, 2015). Svend Østergaard is cand.scient. and Ph.D. in semiotics. He is currently Associate Professor at the Center for Semiotics, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. His current research interests focus on dynamic models of social interaction and especially how language structure emerges as a result of interaction. He is a member of the Humanomics research group. Uffe Østergård is Professor Emeritus of European History, Copenhagen Business School. He has specialized in Danish and European identity and comparative European history. He has directed the European Studies Program at the Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University; been Jean Monnet Professor in European Civilization and Integration; Director of the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; Head of Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He has published numerous articles and several books on national identity, national political cultures and nation-­states in Europe. Various articles in Danish, Italian, German, French, Spanish, English and other languages (including Hungarian, Greek, Chinese). Frederik Stjernfelt is Professor of Semiotics, Intellectual History and Philosophy of Science at the Copenhagen Campus of the University of Aalborg, and CoDirector of the Humanomics Research Centre. His research interests cover cognitive semiotics, theory of science, history of ideas, theory of literature, and

xii

Contributors

political philosophy. His post.doc. habilitation thesis Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics (Dordrecht 2007: Springer) reconstructs the notion of diagrammatical reasoning in Peirce’s semiotics. Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns (Boston 2014: Docent) continues the actualization of Peirce. With JensMartin Eriksen he has written The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism (New York 2012: Telos). With Peer Bundgaard, he edited the four-­volume Semiotics – Critical Concepts with classic and new semiotics papers (London 2010: Routledge). He has co-­edited the 2,500-page history of ideas Tankens Magt (The Power of Thought), 2006 and was for twenty years editor of the Danish periodical Kritik. He is a Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences.

Preface and Acknowledgements The subject of this book is the past, present and future conditions for the humanities. We are interested in how this group of disciplines are organized and how they are affected by ongoing scientific changes and societal transformations. At the beginning of the twenty-­first century there is no clear political commitment to the humanities and perhaps not even a clear self-­understanding of what the human sciences are about. Numerous initiatives and reforms of higher education and research have changed the role of the university as an institution. This is clearly a reflection of many and diverse trends, such as the emergence of the knowledge economy, globalization-­led reforms, and the effect of state capitalism upon education, research and innovation. Nonetheless, we argue throughout the book that the humanities may have a brighter future than many currently believe. Instead of declaring a ‘crisis of humanities’ we declare the potential and possible impact of humanities scholarship on a number of different sectors. There are important gaps in funding and legitimacy between the human, social and natural sciences. But at the same time there is overwhelming evidence that many of the most pressing challenges that face society have a behavioural, cultural, historical and social dimension. Hence, we argue that the humanities need a proper role in interdisciplinary collaboration and that the contribution of humanities may be much more variegated and complex than most policy-­makers and taxpayers believe. Along these lines, the book presents a number of different chapters each of which deals with specific aspects of contemporary humanities. At the same time we are aware that the humanities very rarely make themselves an object of study. In contrast to the social sciences, where there is a long-­ standing tradition for not only examining the field’s own research practices but also for studying research cultures in the natural sciences, there has never been a ‘humanities studies’. The humanities are over-­debated, but under-­investigated. This presents the main rationale for this book: contributing to the improvement of an informed theoretical and empirical basis of understanding of ongoing changes and transformations in humanities education and research. The origins of this book lie with a number of research projects associated with the Humanomics Research Centre: a research unit in Denmark funded by

xiv

Preface and Acknowledgements

the Velux Foundation. Over the past three years, a group of researchers from different Danish universities have formed a unique explorative setting for studying present and future trends in the humanities. Through individual as well as collaborative research projects, the group has worked to improve the knowledge basis with respect to the governance and organization of humanities research. The research agenda of the Humanomics Research Centre is reflected in the table of contents of this book: to give a comprehensive, sensible and context-­specific account of scholarship in the humanities. Intellectual leadership in higher education needs to be informed by detailed knowledge about the content, development, organization and impact of the humanities. Yet the chapters of this book are not just written to inform policy-­ makers or evaluators of humanities research. The book is also written to fellow humanities researchers and students who take an interest in exploring aspects of their own scholarship, which they are not aware of, or occupied with, in their everyday life as researchers. It is our hope that the book will lead to reflections, critical awareness, and a research-­based debate about the value of humanities scholarship. We would like to thank the staff at Bloomsbury Academic and their editors for help and collaboration. A special thank you to Jon Nixon for crucial advice. At various stages in writing this book, the authors received comments of a number of colleagues: we want to thank Heine Andersen, Finn Collin, Jan Faye, Hans Fink, Niels-Ole Finnemann, Giovanni De Grandis, Frans Gregersen, Mogens Herman Hansen, Jens Hauser, Peter Harder, Hans Hauge, Stig Hjarvard, Hans Siggaard Jensen, Annemette Kirkegaard, Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, Kristoffer Kropp, Kalevi Kull, Jesper Eckhardt Larsen, Katrine Lindvig, Svenja Matusall, Jes Fabricius Møller, Jacob Skovgaard-Petersen, Rubina Raja, Karen Siune, Julie Sommerlund, Ola Tunander and Alesia Zuccala. We also want to thank the affiliated research assistants at the Humanomics Research Centre, Jutta Vikman and Andreas Liljenstrøm. A special thank you is dedicated to the Velux Foundation for generous support. David Budtz Pedersen, Claus Emmeche and Frederik Stjernfelt Copenhagen, 15 April 2016

Part One

Knowledge Production in the Humanities

1

Disciplinary Knowledge Production and Interdisciplinary Humanities David Budtz Pedersen, Frederik Stjernfelt and Claus Emmeche

Introduction Whereas the classical natural and human sciences were organized around academic disciplines, knowledge production today is increasingly interdiscipli­ nary and distributed across a variety of societal sectors. Classical humanistic disciplines have not only specialized and multiplied, but they are also increasingly interacting with societal fields and investigating socio-­economic challenges, such as globalization, multiculturalism, equality, democracy, security and health. Given the nature of these challenges and the ways in which research and higher education are organized today, the very notions of liberal arts and humanities in Western research universities are undergoing transformations. In this chapter and throughout this book, we explore some of these transformative processes in the humanities and the governance of disciplinary knowledge. What are the implications, both for the modes of research and for intellectual leadership in higher education? Based on multidimensional methodologies for mapping knowledge diversity (see Chapters 2 and 3), we outline reasons for optimism regarding the potential of the humanities, as well as concerns for the sustainability of the current university system. Drawing on case studies and empirical mappings of relevant humanistic fields (Chapters 4–11) we explore some of the diversity of disciplinary knowledge production, both in classical scholarship (Chapters  3, 4, 5 and 10) and in new forms of outreach, collaboration and extra-­academic engagement (Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9). We question the often perceived divides between classical humanities and post-­academic, entrepreneurial modes of research. Similarly, we do not assume the idea of some single underlying feature setting the humanities apart from the rest of science (like the neo-Kantian dichotomy between

4

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

‘understanding’ in the humanities versus ‘explanation’ in the natural sciences). Avoiding such binary oppositions and the application of simple metrics to the diversity of human sciences, a common message from the authors of this volume is an appreciation of different types of impact and different styles of reasoning in the humanities. Our approach allows for a more composite picture of human culture, language and history to emerge from humanities research. It goes beyond any single disciplinary framework, like an economic model of humans as rational agents, and it situates human interaction in more complex landscapes of cultural identities, social networks, and multi-­level constraints on action that calls for new forms of intellectual leadership in the twenty-­first century. Few scholars dispute that interdisciplinary research is fundamentally altering the way in which researchers engage in the scientific process. Research across the human, social and natural sciences is increasingly mediated through interdisciplinary collaborations. This mediation is slowly beginning to change what it means to undertake research, affecting both the methods and perceptions of carrying out research. The opening up of research to collaboration and cross-­ fertilization has given rise to a number of new scientific trajectories in cognitive neuroscience, behavioural science and environmental studies, but is also redefining classical disciplines such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature and philology (Callard, Fitzgerald and Woods 2015; Bondebjerg 2015). While some areas are more inclined towards interdisciplinary collaboration than others, it is rare to find researchers today who have no engagement with scholars outside their own speciality (Klein 2010; Huutoniemi et al. 2010; Wagner et al. 2011; Frodeman 2011). The call for interdisciplinary collaboration is manifold. It emanates from within the scientific community as research progresses and new problems emerge which are not confined to a single discipline or style of reasoning. It also comes from the world of politics. Policy-­makers and funding agencies call for researchers to address the grand societal challenges of globalization-­led political, demographical and ecological transformations. In the last decade, numerous funding initiatives and university reforms have been launched across the European Union and United States that are designed to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration. Among the most prominent is the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020, with a total budget of €70.2 billion (2014–20). Similar programmes, however, can be identified throughout Europe and the United States – ranging from national research and innovation programmes to the establishment of new departmental structures and research units at universities (Bozeman and Boardman 2014).

Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Humanities

5

Most of the current literature on research and higher education governance acknowledges that interdisciplinarity is itself a complex phenomenon that takes place along a continuum extending from short-­term collaborations with minimal levels of commitment to large-­scale research programmes with significant levels of interaction. Often, a variety of disciplines are needed to create novel solutions and most scholars and decision-­makers agree that big questions require integration of diverse understandings. Obvious examples include environmental change, social and political conflict, the use of genetic modification in medicine or agriculture etc. Yet there is little research on how interdisciplinary projects actually work – and do not work – in practice, particularly within and across the humanities. One of the most difficult and controversial questions when organizing interdisciplinary collaboration is the scope of disciplinary partners. Does integration of disciplines extend only across disciplines which already have consistent vocabularies, such as the natural and health sciences, or does it require a deeper transcendence of disciplinary boundaries beyond the natural, social and human sciences? This question takes us into the controversial territory of science policy and research funding. A key question is as follows: What is the proper role of the humanities in interdisciplinary research, and how should the research community ensure that policy-­makers and funding agencies are committed to include the humanities when initiating interdisciplinary programmes? In the following sections, we start by sketching the current policy framework and revisit major policy initiatives to include the humanities in interdisciplinary collaboration. Then we move on to consider some obstacles to interdisciplinary research, with an emphasis on the different forms and drivers of collaboration. Rather than covering only one specific type of research, interdisciplinarity is a generic and broad concept that extends across a wide range of different scientific scales and practices, making it difficult to evaluate within a unified framework. We argue that while interdisciplinarity should include the humanities, more effort is needed to understand the structure, motives, and impact of interdisciplinary research across the different scientific fields.

Embedding humanities in interdisciplinary research The integration of ‘soft sciences and approaches’ (i.e. social sciences and humanities and aspects related to science communication and responsible research) has been a major priority within science policy circles during the last

6

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

decade. Negotiations and the subsequent implementation of the current European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation ‘Horizon 2020’ present an instructive example of the deliberations and controversies surrounding the inclusion of humanities research in major interdisciplinary programmes. Prior to agreeing on the European Commission’s proposal for Horizon 2020, numerous policy reports, white papers, and declarations were published by stakeholders in Europe to ensure support for the multi-­billion euro research programme (König and Mayer 2013). The main selling point of Horizon 2020 is expressed by the term ‘grand challenges’. According to the grand challenge approach, funding for research and innovation must abandon former thematic and bureaucratic structures and instead focus on mustering resources to solve the most pressing challenges facing society (Langfeldt et al. 2012). This approach to research and innovation is based on the admission that nation states must overcome their short-­sightedness and address the economic, environmental and social problems society is facing in the long term. According to this approach, science, technology and innovation should no longer be seen in isolation from wider behavioural, cultural, societal, and ethical aspects. Rather, research on the ageing population needs to include patients, citizens, and end-­ users in the process of designing new solutions and medical interventions. The shift to a green and sustainable economy needs to include combined efforts in developing new technologies and at the same time creating new models of democracy, engagement and sustainable behaviour, which draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary competences in the social sciences and humanities. In other words, the challenge approach to research and innovation requires integration of knowledge about societal transformations, their underlying dynamics, their inherent opportunities, as well as the instruments and technologies to manage these transitions (Wæver and Leydesdorff 2012). An important step towards establishing a European framework for interdisciplinary research was the Lund Declaration, published under the auspices of the Swedish presidency of the European Council in 2009. The Declaration states that European funding for research and innovation should be reoriented to better address multi-­disciplinary grand challenges that affect not only contemporary societies, but also the future of human civilization itself. This is part of a new mission-­oriented approach to science and innovation policy that is more global in outlook and oriented towards societal goals, rather than merely industrial relevance. Following the Lund Declaration, two other EU declarations were published underlining the need for creating a research-­friendly environment in Europe. The Aarhus Declaration (2012) stressed the importance of investing

Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Humanities

7

in higher education, research and innovation to enable universities to contribute effectively to the EU 2020 strategy for ‘smart sustainable and inclusive growth’. In particular the declaration stated the role of strong university leadership to promote talent and ensuring sustained support for scientific excellence in Europe.

The Vilnius Declaration The efforts to shore up political support for including the humanities for funding in Horizon 2020 hit a crucial barrier in the final political negotiations. What should be the proper role of the humanities in Europe? The research community reacted strongly with calls for better and deeper integration of humanities research (LERU 2013; Science Europe 2013). Most of these arguments were summed up at the conference ‘Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities’ organized under the Lithuanian EU presidency in September 2013. The conference was preceded by a broadly based consultation process to collect evidence about the current state of humanities in Europe, and the ambitions and needs as well as structural problems of the research community. Among the issues brought up, two-­thirds of the respondents ranked interdisciplinarity as highly relevant to the social sciences and humanities. A strong consensus was expressed that many contemporary humanities projects are inherently interdisciplinary, taking place in different scientific contexts and organizational settings. The consultation concluded with the Vilnius Declaration, authored by a European high-­level expert group (Nowotny, König and Mayer 2014). Representatives of key European institutions (e.g. the European Research Council, The League of European Universities and Science Europe) presented a comprehensive strategy to embed humanities research in interdisciplinary collaboration and create a more inclusive space for research in funding for interdisciplinary solutions. One of the main challenges identified in the integration of European humanities research, is the gap between the broadly conceived research themes of the many interdisciplinary programmes and the conservative, vertical hierarchies of disciplines in university settings, including the persistence of disciplinary publication patterns, career structures and peer review (Nowotny 2015). The Vilnius Declaration made it clear that genuine interdisciplinary partnerships are difficult to nurture and require a long-­term co-­creation of knowledge among the involved epistemic cultures. Time and again, interdisciplinary research is

8

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

used more as a rhetorical device to underline the strategic importance of science and technology, rather than as a venue for solving real-­world problems. In other words, the actual practice and willingness to integrate the research repertoire of the humanities disciplines, still leaves a number of questions unanswered. Considering those facts, several humanities associations have kept a sustained focus on explaining and mapping the contribution of humanities to interdisciplinary research. Science Europe, for instance, has insisted that real change need to take place at the level of science policy in the short and long term, avoiding superficial policy rhetoric and instead focusing on real progress and opportunities. The association has monitored the implementation of Horizon 2020 (which opened for proposals in 2014). As it turns out, only 26.7 per cent of the EU research funding schemes under the Challenge pillar invite contributions from social sciences and humanities scholars. In other words, the social sciences and humanities have not been embedded in almost 75 per cent of the proclaimed interdisciplinary projects (Science Europe 2014). The situation is even worse when looking at the humanities alone. A conservative estimate is that the humanities are addressed in about one-­third of the topics open for social science and humanities contributions. Or put briefly: the humanities are not embedded in over 90 per cent of the challenge-­based pillar of Horizon 2020, the world’s largest interdisciplinary funding programme. At the same time a number of examples demonstrate the impact of humanities in Horizon 2020, which are useful for further analysis. The European Commission’s call to promote mental well-­being in the ageing population invites proposals to include research into psychological, environmental and social determinants of healthy ageing, including socio-­cultural parameters such as loneliness, poverty and conflicts (EC 2014). The same is true for the Commission’s call to address consumer engagement for sustainable energy systems, which explicitly calls for proposals that focus on changing the behaviour of citizens towards more environmental-­friendly consumer patterns. Other examples include funding for research on user-­behaviour, social mobility, crime, polarization, extremism, responsible research and innovation, and data management, including language interpretation, semantic analysis and information retrieval (EC 2014). These samples indicate a willingness among policy-­makers to include Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research, no matter how hard this is in practice. A special challenge is the role reserved for humanities components of interdisciplinary collaboration. In the examples provided above, the kind of behavioural research that is called for tends to downplay the interpretive,

Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Humanities

9

culturally shaped, historically emergent way in which these practices are traditionally configured. The difference in vocabulary between ‘behaviour’ (more inclined towards deterministic accounts) and ‘action’ or ‘practice’ is significant (Science Europe 2014). This latter point is also reflected by the fact that funding is much less concerned with citizens’ deep-­seated preconditions for behaviour (sense-­making, interaction and culturally embedded values or attitudes), and more concerned with incentives, policy design, interventions etc. (i.e. operationalizing research for specific purposes). In a policy environment of mission-­driven interdisciplinary collaboration, the social sciences and humanities are called upon primarily as a vehicle for problem-­solving and as a mechanism for delivering advice on ‘the human factor’ in policy-­making and technology design.

Integrating epistemic cultures Beyond political resistance and bureaucratic entrenchments, more fundamental epistemological obstacles may also prevent effective integration of the humanities and social sciences in collaborative research, thus requiring special attention by universities and funding agencies. First, there is considerable disagreement about what it means to integrate different disciplines in interdisciplinary research. Who should take the lead when embedding humanities research in interdisciplinary configurations? Should humanities scholars give up their own speciality and instead submit to the research agenda of other disciplines? Or should a new and emergent research practice take form above and beyond any of the existing disciplinary clusters? Most scholars agree that interdisciplinary research demands some type of integration (Wagner et  al. 2011), although definitions of integration differ substantially. One of the main challenges is the fact that different disciplines work with different theoretical languages that incorporate different ontological commitments. Different disciplines ask different explanation-­seeking questions, and employ different levels of abstraction (Faye 2007). In order to bridge the divide among two or more disciplines, careful attention must first be given to the formulation and coordination of research questions and methodologies. This is true among the natural, technical and medical sciences but it requires special attention when working across the main scientific areas.1 Another obstacle is the fact that interdisciplinarity is itself a complex phenomenon that extends across quite different types of collaboration. In the

10

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

current literature, Klein (2010), Stokols et  al. (2003) and Wagner et  al. (2011) have highlighted the importance of discerning research collaboration in its multi-, trans- and interdisciplinary forms, each of which involves different ideals or guidelines for integration:

Definitions of key concepts 1. Multidisciplinary collaboration combines two or more disciplinary perspectives in a joint scientific enterprise, adding competencies, knowledge and methods to the collaboration. The participating experts work together towards a common solution, but they speak as separate voices each from within their specialist perspective. In short, the disciplinary elements retain their original identity. 2. Transdisciplinary collaboration transcends the scope of academic research through an overarching coordination of research goals with actors outside academia (such as policy-­makers, non-­governmental organizations and private companies). The defining feature of transdisciplinarity is the systematic exploration of social, economic, political and environmental factors that contribute to solving societal challenges of human health and well-­being.2 3. Interdisciplinary collaboration is generally considered to be the most demanding form. Here, researchers from different disciplines integrate existing approaches, methods and theories in order to create a novel understanding of a complex scientific problem. Over time, this collaboration may lead to the creation of new scientific fields (such as biochemistry, cognitive science or digital humanities). According to this typology, the critical indicator of interdisciplinary integration varies across different types of collaboration. While some research funding bodies, such as the European Commission, are primarily occupied with solving grand challenges and hence driving transdisciplinary collaboration, frontier research in computer science, social neuroscience, systems biology, or cognitive linguistics is modelled upon interdisciplinary integration, and hence the creation of new and emergent fields (Nowotny 2015). In other words what counts as good or successful interdisciplinarity depends on which type of integration one privileges – ranging from attempts to integrate multiple disciplinary perspectives; or to integrate academic and non-­academic stakeholders; or the attempt to

Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Humanities

11

develop genuine co-­creation and new scientific models (Repko, 2008, for a critical appraisal, see Holbrook, 2013).

Three different models of collaboration Behind the three different forms of collaboration sit very different cognitive and pragmatic motives that co-­determine the operating principles for collaborative research. In a 2014 survey of humanities scholars in Denmark, we found that researchers from different communities have different strategies for engaging in research collaboration (Budtz Pedersen and Stjernfelt 2016). The Humanomics survey, which includes unique responses from more than 1,100 active researchers, shows at least three different types of interdisciplinarity:

1. Researchers belonging to a well-­established discipline with a strong consensus on basic principles, traditions, reputation and career structures (such as linguistics, classics and historiography) tend to engage more in multidisciplinary collaboration in which they cooperate with other established disciplines. Here, collaboration is structured around a division of cognitive labour, with different disciplines taking responsibility for different steps and components in the research process. 2. Another group of researchers engage in interdisciplinary research by actively migrating into an interdisciplinary field (not defined by disciplinary capture, such as gender studies, media studies or area studies). Here, there is an inbound mobility of researchers into the interdisciplinary field, with scholars getting hired and socialized into the field from a variety of other fields while there is less collaboration with external fields (unlike multi-­disciplinary collaboration). 3. Finally, the survey demonstrates a tendency where disciplines have a strong inbound mobility of researchers (i.e. with recruitment of researchers from other disciplines), while at the same time engaging in external research collaborations. Among others, philosophy and educational research belong in this group. Considering this multiplicity of interdisciplinary relations, it is clear that research collaboration does not refer to one scientific practice only. Instead, interdisciplinarity concerns a wide range of internally diverse practices that extends across different scales of mobility, proximity and collaborative behaviours – from formalized research collaboration to internalizing knowledge

12

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

and expertise through recruitment and migration of scholars with diverse scientific backgrounds. The observed distribution of different interdisciplinary encounters has implications not only for the evaluation of research but also for research funding and the ability of universities to actively support collaboration. Only 11 per cent of the researchers in the Humanomics survey reported that the provision of target funding or the existence of university incentives to collaborate motivates them to engage in interdisciplinary networks. Some 82 per cent reported that interdisciplinary collaboration starts from the bottom up, with researchers working to understand complex problems and in this process of problem-­solving finding collaborators from outside their own speciality. Because of this diversity of interdisciplinary constellations, there is no uniform or commonly agreed standard for evaluating or measuring the quality and impact of interdisciplinary research.

Mapping the impact of interdisciplinary research In recent decades, universities and research funding bodies have increasingly focused on strategies and instruments for evaluating scientific institutions in terms of their contribution to economic performance and output factors such as publications and citations (Whitley et  al. 2007). However, publications and citations are not adept at addressing the impact and quality of interdisciplinary research (Holbrook 2010; Holbrook and Frodeman 2011). Because of the diversity of interdisciplinary projects, a more advanced, contextual and multi-­ dimensional set of criteria needs to be established if academics and policy-­ makers want to understand the impact of interdisciplinary research. Bringing together researchers from multiple disciplinary backgrounds, or creating new emergent fields, necessarily involves transcending existing cultures of knowledge creation and dissemination. At a time where funding for interdisciplinary research is increasing in intensity, evaluation systems need to adjust to take into account a broader range of cross-­disciplinary competences and impact criteria. Interdisciplinarity will require new evaluation practices, the appreciation of a diversity of publication practices, and expanding criteria for academic merit in hiring committees and research funding bodies. Mapping the impact of interdisciplinary research requires that policy-­makers and members of the scientific community move beyond bibliometrics (Cronin and Sugimoto 2014). To reclaim academic leadership, decision-­makers need to understand the intricacies and different

Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Humanities

13

formats, typologies and dispositions for engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration in the social sciences and humanities. This calls for drawing upon a wide range of qualitative case studies, in addition to metrics. Learning how interdisciplinarity works in different communities, locations and sectors will help widen the understanding of how impact occurs in professional communities, organizations, and in the citizenry (see Chapter 11 on how to access the public value of the humanities in general). The United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) already offers some opportunity for learning about the impact of interdisciplinary scholarship upon society and the economy. While the REF continues to assess the outputs of research, such as journal articles, according to disciplinary categories, a recent study from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) suggests that cases of interdisciplinarity are instrumental for demonstrating impact (McLeish and Strang 2015). The UK funding councils are onto this trend: many are now establishing working groups to seek better ways to evaluate – and value – interdisciplinary research. The Academy of Medical Sciences launched a working group on ‘Team Science’ in 2014, and the British Academy recently began a major consultative exercise (McLeish and Strang 2015).3 Lessons from the REF, alongside other national frameworks for evaluating research impact, will help to inform a more nuanced debate about the multiple impact pathways of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities. Better models and a more comprehensive understanding are needed in order to educate interdisciplinary evaluators and peer review panels. Building on the Danish survey of humanities scholars it is evident that what counts as ‘good’ interdisciplinary research is different depending on perspective and epistemic community. The challenge with interdisciplinary research is that it operates at the intersection between epistemological frameworks, which do not follow standardized definitions of quality or impact. At a practical level, funding agencies such as the European Commission need to work across established silos to identify and remap suitable areas for interdisciplinary research, including contributions from the SSH community. This means a real embedding and not an add-­on to traditional thematic and bureaucratic structures. This also means that practising researchers should be more involved in the advisory groups and programme committees who develop and define research agendas. Cross-­fertilization of ideas will remain limited unless funding agencies redefine quality to include all relevant modes of inquiry, and lower the barriers to publishing in interdisciplinary journals (Dzeng 2014).

14

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Conclusion We have addressed the limited though increasing role of the social sciences and humanities in interdisciplinary research and in funding contexts. Analysing some of the problems associated with embedding humanities research within programmes like Horizon 2020, we observed the need to pay more attention to the different formats and types of interdisciplinarity. Not only does the current literature map different ‘ideals’ of collaboration onto the different forms of multi-, trans- and interdisciplinary research. There exist substantial differences with regard to the dispositions and strategies of engaging in collaborations among the diverse research communities. There is no one-­size-fits-­all model for priority setting, peer review, project management and capacity-­building. Rather, maximizing the participation of researchers and scholars in interdisciplinary projects will require new tools and platforms that reflexively stimulate the curiosity, creativity and problem-­solving capacity of the SSH community. This remapping exercise is worthwhile. In areas such as climate science, energy, urbanization, and medicine there is an urgent need to create a much deeper understanding of human experience and meaning in a hyper-­connected and unstable world.

Notes 1 Explanatory integration may not be the primary goal of interdisciplinary collaboration; there are other goals as well (Richards 1996; Lattuca 2001; Moran 2002). 2 Transdisciplinary research is associated with a ‘mission-­oriented’ approach to science and innovation (contrary to an investigator- or curiosity-­driven approach). The concept of transdisciplinary research is emphasized by the Mode 2 hypothesis, as argued by Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny et al. (2001) for whom organizational diversity and novel types of quality control are central. 3 Budtz Pedersen (2015a; 2015b) offered an alternative account of mapping the impact of SSH scholarship as it enters into social decision-­making and translates into public value.

References Bondebjerg, I. (2015), ‘The embodied mind: when biology meets culture and society’. Palgrave Communications 1 (DOI: 10.1057/palcomms.2015.15); 1–5.

Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Humanities

15

Bozeman, B and Boardman, C. (2014), Research Collaboration and Team Science – A State-­of-the-Art Review and Agenda. Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer. Budtz Pedersen, D. (2015a), ‘Real impact is about influence, meaning and value: Mapping contributions for a new impact agenda in the humanities.’ LSE Impact Blog 27 July 2015 ((http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/) [accessed 25 August 2015]. Budtz Pedersen, D. (2015b), ‘Collaborative knowledge. The future of the academy in the knowledge-­based economy,’ in: E. Westergaard and J. Wiewiura (eds), On the Facilitation of the Academy. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers: pp. 57–70. Budtz Pedersen, D. and Stjernfelt, F. et al. (2016), Mapping research practices in Danish humanities (Kortlægning af dansk humanistisk forskning, in Danish). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Callard, F., Fitzgerald, D. and Woods, A. (2015), ‘Interdisciplinary collaboration in action: tracking the signal, tracing the noise.’ Palgrave Communications 1 (doi:10.1057/palcomms.2015.19); 1–7. Cronin, B. and Sugimoto, C. R. (2014), Beyond Bibliometrics – Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Dzeng, E. (2014), ‘Entrenched biases and structural incentives limit the influence of interdisciplinary research.’ LSE Impact Blog 18 February 2014 (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/) [accessed 1 August 2015]. EC, European Commission (2014), Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2014–2015. 10 December 2013. Revised 20 March 2014. Brussels: European Commission. Faye, J. (2007), The pragmatic-­rhetorical theory of explanation. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 252; 43–68. Frodeman, R. (2011), ‘Interdisciplinary research and academic sustainability: managing knowledge in an age of accountability.’ Environmental Conservation 38 (2); 105–12. Gibbons M., Limoges C., Nowotny H., Schwartzman S., Scott P. and Trow M. (1994), The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage Publications. Holbrook, J. B. (2010), ‘Peer Review,’ in R. Frodeman, J. T. Klein and C. Mitcham (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 321–32. Holbrook, J. B. (2013), ‘What is interdisciplinary communication? Reflections on the very idea of disciplinary integration.’ Synthese 190 (11); 1865–79. Holbrook, J. B. and Frodeman, R. (2011), ‘Peer review and the ex ante assessment of societal impacts.’ Research Evaluation 20(3); 239–46. Huutoniemi K., Klein J. K., Bruun H. and Hukkinen J. (2010), ‘Analyzing interdisciplinarity: Typology and indicators.’ Research Policy; 39: 79–88. Klein, J. T. (2010), Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures. San Francisco: Jossey Bass and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. König, T. and Mayer, K. (2013), ‘Integrating Social Sciences and Humanities in Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges: Will it work?’ In: Europe of Knowledge Blog. http://era. ideasoneurope.eu/2013/10/02/integrating-­social-sciences-­and-humanities-­in-horizon2020-societal-­challenges-will-­it-work/ [accessed 1 August 2015].

16

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Langfeldt L., Godø H., Gornitzka A. and Kaloudis A. (2012), ‘Integration modes in EU research: centrifugality versus coordination of national research policies.’ Science and Public Policy 39: 88–98. Lattuca, L. (2001), Creating interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary research and teaching among college and university faculty. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. LERU, League of European Research Universities (2013), ‘Social sciences and humanities – Essential fields for European Research.’ Amsterdam. Moran, J. (2002), Interdisciplinarity. New York: Routledge. Nowotny, N. (2015), ‘Social sciences and humanities for a global world,’ in J. Björkman and B. Fjæstad, Think Ahead – Research, Funding and the Future. Stockholm: Makadam Press, pp. 225–35. Nowotny H., Mayer K. and König T. (2014), ‘Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities – Conference Report.’ Vilnius, Lithuania (http://horizons.mruni.eu) [accessed 16 July 2015]. Nowotny H., Scott P. and Gibbons M. (2001), Re-­thinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Repko, A. F. (2008), Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Richards, D. G. (1996), ‘The meaning and relevance of synthesis in interdisciplinary studies.’ The Journal of Education 45(2); 114–28. Science Europe (2013), Humanities in the Societal Challenges – 12 Compelling Cases for Policymakers. Brussels: Science Europe. Science Europe (2014), The Human Factor in the 2014–2015 Work Programme of the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges. Brussels: Science Europe. Stokols D., Fuqua J., Gress J., Harvey R., Phillips K. and Baezconde-Garbanati L. (2003), ‘Evaluating transdisciplinary science.’ Nicotine & Tobacco Research 5; 21–39. Wæver, O. and Leydesdorff, L. (2012), ‘Inclusive, Innovative and Secure Societies,’ in L. Hoejgaard (ed.). Copenhagen Research Forum. Copenhagen. Wagner C. S., Roessner J. D., Bobb K., Klein J. T., Boyack K. W., Keyton J., Rafols I. and Börner K. (2011), ‘Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research.’ Journal of Informetrics; 165: 14–26. Whitley R., Gläser J. and Engwall, L. (eds) (2007), The Changing Governance of the Sciences. The Advent of Research Evaluation Systems. Dordrecht: Springer.

2

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers Jonas Grønvad and Lasse Gøhler Johansson

The special case of the humanities? The Anglo-Saxon distinction between the arts or humanities and the sciences suggests that the humanities are somehow different from other university faculties – that they are some kind of special case. The distinction was codified by Wilhelm Dilthey in his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Cultural Sciences) from 1883 at a time when the disciplines of the philosophy faculty were being challenged by both the natural sciences and the emerging social sciences. According to Dilthey, the humanities or Geisteswissenschaften differ from the natural sciences by being based on interpretation instead of explanation (Dilthey 1883/2013). A homologous distinction was made by Wilhelm Windelband in his rectorial address at Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Strassburg in 1894, where he distinguished between the nomothetic natural sciences (focusing on universal laws) and the idiographic humanities (focusing on particularities) (Windelband 1984). So, what are we to make of this? The distinction obviously had the symbolic function of positioning specific disciplines in the academic field; but does it refer to actual differences in research practices? Are the humanities really a special case? And if so, what is the distinctive feature? Could it be that the humanities are based on interpretation as opposed to the explanatory sciences? First of all, there is a lot of humanistic research with explanatory pretentions (e.g. historical analyses trying to explain events such as wars or financial crises). And not all natural scientific research is explanatory. Biological taxonomy, for example, is a descriptive enterprise. Could it be then that the humanities are idiographic? This does not seem to be the case either. Linguistics is a discipline that seeks to establish the universal laws of language. We could go on searching for a single distinctive feature, but we would always be able to come up with cases that do not fit.

18

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

In this chapter we re-­introduce the concept of style to the study of scientific practice. This is an empirically sensitive concept that allows us to see in what ways and to what degree the major fields of science and their sub-­disciplines diverge and converge. The underlying idea is that there is no single feature that sets the humanities and sciences apart. On the contrary, they are differentiated by a complex set of perceptions and practices that together form a research style. This idea also underlies Ian Hacking’s concept styles of scientific reasoning (Hacking 1992) which is practically identical to Alastair Cameron Crombie’s styles of scientific thinking (Crombie 1995).1 However, Hacking’s philosophical approach (seeking to establish the necessary conditions for belonging to this or that style of reasoning) is not suited to empirical analysis, since it does not allow for differences of nuance only. Empirical reality is simply not ordered into exclusive categories and one will always run into cases that do not fit one or the other category. Ludwik Fleck’s concept of thought style (1935) represents a more flexible and empirically sensitive concept that allows for differences of nuance (Fleck 1935/1979: 108). Inspired by Fleck and, to some extent, also Karl Mannheim, we construct the concept of research style, which allows us to study the relationship between the humanistic disciplines (philosophy, history, linguistics and so on) and the relationship between the humanities as a whole and the other major fields of science. Science and technology studies (STS) have contributed much to our understanding of the natural sciences and engineering, while less attention has been paid to the social sciences and humanities. In recent years, however, there has been growing interest in empirical studies of these two major fields of science (Camic et al. 2011). Most research on the humanities has taken the form of case studies of individual disciplines such as philosophy or history and, with the exception of Rens Bod’s A New History of the Humanities (2014) and the collective work The Making of the Humanities (Bod et  al. 2011–15), there have been no studies of the entire field of humanities disciplines (Bod 2014: 4). One of the central contributions of this chapter is the comprehensive focus, allowing for comparisons across disciplines. Within the scientometric tradition we do find studies of the humanities (Leydesdorff et al. 2011; Larivière et al. 2006; Marchi and Lorenzetti 2015; Linmans 2009), but these are limited by the fact that they focus only on research products (bibliography) and say nothing about how research is actually being done (i.e. about humanistic research practices (Benneworth 2014)). Using survey data, we are able to move beyond the research products and study the conditions of their production. In recent years, political debate on science and technology has revolved around the question of the role of science in society (e.g. on the role of science in finding

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

19

solutions to societal challenges such as climate change and poverty and on its science in driving economic growth). However, the debate often seems to be based on the assumption that only the natural sciences, medical sciences and engineering have any application outside the academic world, and that the humanities and to some extent the social sciences are somehow isolated from the rest of society. While the relationship of the social sciences with the state in the post-World War era is well documented (Wagner 2001: 45 ff.), it is not at all obvious how the humanities are related to extra-­academic institutions. By introducing a concept of research style we investigate the ways in which humanistic researchers go about their research. On this basis, an attempt is made to show how different styles of research are oriented towards different aims, evaluative criteria and institutions outside the academic world. A second purpose of this chapter is to show how specific research styles are correlated with specific forms of extra-academic engagement, i.e. patterns in the orientation towards and interaction with institutions outside the scientific world. Using statistical techniques we are able to correlate these indicators of extra-­academic engagement with research styles in order to see if specific forms of knowledge find application in specific societal contexts. The analysis favours breadth over depth. For a more detailed analysis of the application of humanistic knowledge, see Chapters 9 and 10 below. These chapters deal with the role of humanities scholars in the democracy debate of the immediate post-­ war period and the role of history in the European Union, respectively. In the next section we develop the concepts of research style and extra-­ academic engagement in more detail. Then we present the data and the statistical techniques that we employ in the analysis. The analysis itself is divided into two parts: first we identify the research styles that make up the field of humanities; and secondly we correlate indicators of extra-­academic engagement with these research styles. After the statistical analysis we discuss our findings in relation to existing literature on the topic.

Research style and extra-­academic engagement Research style Before we move on to the empirical analysis, a definition of the two key concepts is in order: research style and extra-­academic engagement. By research style we understand preferences for specific types of data, analytical methods/techniques and epistemological research aims. Some data types are used mainly within the

20

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

humanities while others are shared by other major fields of science such as the social or natural sciences. Different literary sources such as novels, poems etc. are used mainly by humanities researchers, while interviews and observations, for example, are shared with social scientists. By analytical methods/techniques we refer to the tools researchers use to analyse their data – not to the tools used to collect them. This means that a questionnaire, for example, does not qualify as an analytical method/technique. As with data types, some methods are specific to the humanities (e.g. philological text processing), while others are shared (e.g. statistical analysis which is used across all major fields of science). When we talk of epistemological research aims we are referring to the type of knowledge that is produced (e.g. descriptive versus explanatory). The epistemological research aims share some resemblance with traditional positions in the philosophy of science and with Michele Lamont’s concept of epistemological style (Lamont 2009: 176; Mallard et al. 2009: 574). Our definition of research style is the product of theoretical considerations, on the one hand, and empirical or more pragmatic considerations, on the other. Theoretically, the definition is inspired mainly by Ludwik Fleck’s concept of thought style. In Entstehung und EntwicklungeinerwissenschaftlicherTatsache from 1935, Fleck develops the conceptual pairing of thought style (Denkstil) and thought collective (Denkkollektiv) through an empirical analysis of the changing understandings of syphilis and the development of the so-­called Wasserman reaction, a technique used to diagnose syphilis. A thought style, according to Fleck, is the readiness for directed perception and action (Fleck 1935/1979: 84). It is characterized by common problems of interest, methods and evaluative criteria, and it exerts a ‘compulsive force upon thinking’ (Fleck 1935/1979: 41 and 99). The compulsive character of thought styles makes them similar to Émile Durkheim’s social facts (i.e. ways of acting ‘exerting over the individual an external constraint’ (Durkheim 1982: 59)). A thought style is always associated with a thought collective, understood as ‘a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction’ (Fleck 1935/1979: 39). Thought collectives are not necessarily scientific. They can also be artistic, political etc., and an individual can belong to various thought collectives at the same time (Fleck 1935/1979: 45). Besides its similarities to the Durkheimian notion of social fact, the concept of thought style can be traced more directly to the writings of Karl Mannheim. Mannheim developed the concept to study the dominant ideologies of his time, conservatism and liberalism, the former being the topic of his Habilitationsschrift from 1925 (Mannheim 1925/1984).2 Fleck’s use of thought style is similar to that of Mannheim, but it also differs in important respects. Like Mannheim, Fleck

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

21

stresses the social basis of thought styles, taking a sociological stance in opposition to the Kantian idea of universal categories of perception (Mannheim 1929/1930: 9; Kant 1782/2010). But in contrast to Mannheim’s analysis of working class and bourgeois thought styles, Fleck is concerned with groups on a much more micro-­ social level, namely the thought collective, defined as any group of two or more persons exchanging ideas (e.g. the syphilis research community). The more micro-­social level of Fleck makes his model easier to apply to analyses of scientific fields like the humanities. Mannheim’s thought styles do not refer to mere theoretical differences, but to the underlying worldviews (Weltanschauungen) of which theoretical positions are just particular instances (Mannheim 1925/1984: 227 n. 5). Fleck’s use of thought style differs in another important respect (i.e. by introducing a practical dimension to the definition). It is the readiness for directed perception and action. Like Fleck, we are not just concerned with thinking, but also with action – namely use of data and analytical methods. For the same reason we talk of research style instead of thought style.

Extra-­academic engagement By extra-­academic engagement we refer to researchers’ stances towards and interactions with extra-­academic institutions, especially the state. This theme can be traced all the way back to Immanuel Kant’s Streit der Fakultäten from 1798, where he distinguishes between the higher faculties (law, medicine and theology) which are dependent on state interests, and the lower faculty (philosophy) which is independent and pure (Kant 1798/2005). It is also at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the French academic field around the crisis of May 1968 (Bourdieu 1988/2001). Bourdieu’s analysis reveals two competing principles of legitimation in the academic field: one dependent on ‘the principles operative in the field of power’, and one based on the ‘autonomy of the scientific and intellectual order’ (Bourdieu 1988/2001: 48). The faculties or fields of science are distributed according to this opposition: medicine and law rely more on external criteria of success, the natural sciences more on internal criteria of success, while the arts take an intermediary position (Bourdieu 1988/2001: 48). In the present analysis we approach the extra-­academic engagement of humanities researchers using three sets of indicators relating to:

1. the practical or civic research aims that are considered to be important; 2. the concrete interactions with extra-­academic institutions; and 3. the criteria of success employed by the researchers.

22

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Statistical analysis allows us to correlate the extra-­academic engagement of humanities researchers with research styles and disciplines. Are specific styles of research, for example, associated with specific civic research aims? And are some disciplines more closely related to state institutions or private companies than others?

Data and statistical analysis Data The analysis is based on data from a web-­based survey conducted among humanities researchers in Denmark in the autumn of 2013 (Budtz Pedersen and Stjernfelt ed. 2016).3 The questionnaire was distributed to the entire population of humanities researchers (N=3,647) with a response rate of 32.11, rendering n=1,171 responses. However, the response rate is underestimated. Because we had no way of knowing the researchers’ discipline or even major field of science before conducting the survey, we sampled all university departments where we expected to find at least some (n≥5) humanistic researchers. We based this on the departments’ self-­descriptions on websites. Because of the inclusive sampling strategy the sample frame contains a number of departments crossing major scientific fields (mainly the humanities and the social sciences), and response rates at these departments are relatively low. Many of the departments crossing major scientific fields are located at Copenhagen Business School and Roskilde University, which for the same reason have low overall response rates compared to the other universities. In addition to university departments we included research institutions (mainly museums and archives) under the Danish Ministry of Culture. A total of forty-­three university departments and thirteen institutions under the Ministry of Culture were included in the sample frame. Table  2.1 shows the distribution of humanities researchers on research institutions, disciplines and positions.

Statistical analysis We use multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to identify the research styles in the field of the humanities and to relate these styles to extra-­academic dispositions. MCA allows us to study the complex relationships between the numerous dispositions that make up a scientific style (i.e. use of data and

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

23

Table 2.1  Distribution of humanities researchers on research institution, discipline and position Frequency Institution

Discipline

Position

Copenhagen Business School 57 Ministry of Culture 57 Roskilde University 98 University of Copenhagen 268 University of Southern Denmark 148 Aalborg University 155 Aarhus University 388 Total 1,171 Anthropology, ethnography and 95 ethnology Archaeology 39 Art and architecture 38 Educational studies 83 Film and media studies 41 History 111 History of ideas 21 Humanities (interdisciplinary) 249 Humanities (other) 49 Languages and philology 99 Linguistics 54 Literature 69 Music and theatre 22 Philosophy 61 Psychology 85 Religious studies 21 Theology 34 Total 1,171 Research assistant 50 PhD student 309 PhD student (industrial) 15 Assistant professor/post doc 185 Associate professor/senior researcher 414 Professor/docent 136 Other 62 Total 1,171

Per cent 5 5 8 23 13 13 33 100 8 3 3 7 4 9 2 21 4 8 5 6 2 5 7 2 3 100 4 26 1 16 35 12 5 100

24

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

analytical methods/techniques as well as epistemological research aims). MCA is an inductive technique in the sense that the model follows the data and not vice versa. Of course, the set of indicators used in the analysis is defined a priori and should be homogeneous (containing relevant indicators only) and exhaustive (containing all the relevant indicators) (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010: 11). In practice, however, it is almost always impossible to meet the criterion of exhaustiveness because of limitations in the theoretical construction of the research object or in the data-­collection process. In the present analysis, for example, we wanted to include the researchers’ theoretical position as an indicator of research style. However, we had to drop this indicator since we were unable to operationalize it for the correspondence analysis. We actually did ask respondents about the theories that they use, but from the answers it became clear that there is not even a consensus about what makes up a theory. We also asked respondents about their use of theorists. The answers were precise, but the list of theorists amounted to hundreds and was not suitable for correspondence analysis. Based on an Individuals x Questions matrix,4 MCA produces two clouds of points: a cloud of individuals and a cloud of modalities. In the cloud of individuals the geometric distance between two individuals is based on their response patterns, such that individuals with similar response patterns are close to each other while individuals with dissimilar response patterns are far from each other. Individuals choosing frequent modalities are located towards the centre of the cloud while individuals choosing infrequent modalities are located towards the periphery (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010: 34–6). In the cloud of modalities the distance between two modalities is based on the individuals choosing those two modalities. The more individuals the two modalities have in common the smaller the distance. As in the cloud of individuals, frequent modalities are located towards the centre of the cloud while infrequent modalities are located towards the periphery (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010: 37–9). Table  2.2 shows frequency distributions for the indicators used in the correspondence analysis. There are twenty-­six questions distributed across three themes: (1) data; (2) analytical methods/techniques; and (3) epistemological research aims. All questions have three ordinal modalities according to the extent of the use of different data types and methods, on the one hand, and the importance of different epistemological aims, on the other. The analysis of the clouds centres on an interpretation of their principal axes (i.e. the axes explaining the most variance in data). The eigenvalue, variance rate and modified rate of an axis all express the share of the total variance explained

Table 2.2  List of indicators of research style Data

Frequent use (+)

Moderate use (+/−)

Infrequent use (−)

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

Architecture and design Art Artefacts and material relics Audio and video Documents Electronic media Experimental data Fiction Fieldwork, interviews and observations Laboratory data Quantitative data Scientific literature and theory

64 141 139 181 299 220 130 126 454 64 158 732

5 12 12 15 26 19 11 11 39 5 13 63

131 164 138 195 282 302 121 91 223 63 256 249

11 14 12 17 24 26 10 8 19 5 22 21

976 866 894 795 590 649 920 954 494 1044 757 190

83 74 76 68 50 55 79 81 42 89 65 16

Analytical methods/techniques

Frequent use (+)

Categorized coding Conceptual analysis Description Philological text processing

Moderate use (+/−)

Infrequent use (−)

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

213 569 489 148

18 49 42 13

201 255 275 151

17 22 23 13

757 347 407 872

65 30 35 74 (Continued )

Table 2.2  Continued Analytical methods/techniques

Frequent use (+)

Moderate use (+/−)

Infrequent use (−)

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

Source criticism Statistics Text and discourse analysis Theory construction/synthesizing

434 159 453 429

37 14 39 37

248 217 280 402

21 19 24 34

489 795 438 340

42 68 37 29

Epistemological research aims

Important (+)

Describe facts and events Formulate universal claims or arguments Identify causal relationships or trends Identify unique characteristics Identify universal laws Understand culture or symbols

Indifferent (+/−)

Unimportant (−)

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

Frequency

Per cent

768 303 509 463 240 944

66 26 43 40 20 81

325 452 414 549 387 168

28 39 35 47 33 14

78 416 248 159 544 59

 7 36 21 14 46  5

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

27

Table 2.3  Eigenvalues, variance rates and modified rates for principal axes Axis

Eigenvalue

Variance rate Modified rate

Cumulated modified rate

1 2

0.145 0.116

7.2% 5.8%

43.5% 66.6%

43.5% 23.1%

by that axis.5 The number of axes to be interpreted is based on three criteria: (1) a decrease in eigenvalues; (2) the cumulated modified rate; and (3) the interpretability of the axes (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010: 51–2). In the present analysis we interpret the first two axes. This decision is based primarily on the criterion of interpretability. Based on the first two criteria we could have analysed the four principal axes (Table  2.3). However, we were unable to make any meaningful interpretation of the third and fourth axes. Jean-Paul Benzécri writes that ‘interpreting an axis amounts to finding out what is similar, on the one hand, between all the elements figuring on the right of the origin and, on the other hand, between all that is written on the left; and expressing with conciseness and precision the contrast (or opposition) between the two extremes’ (Benzécri 1992: 405). In the interpretation we limit our attention to modalities contributing above average to the axes in question (Benzécri 1992: 405). It is important to note that the research styles, that we identify, are ideal types (in the Weberian sense of the term). The actual humanistic research styles are placed somewhere on a continuum between these ideal–typical styles.

Research styles in the humanities Axis 1: Quantitative versus qualitative research styles Figure  2.1 shows the thirty modalities contributing above average to the first axis. Together they contribute to 80 per cent of the variance of axis 1. Most of them relate to data (n=16) and method (n=11) and fewer to epistemological aims (n=3). It differentiates a quantitative research style on the positive side from a qualitative research style on the negative side. On the positive side of Axis 1 (the two quadrants on the right), we find statistical methods/techniques, experimental data, laboratory data and quantitative data. This side of the axis is also defined by the absence of specific types of data and methods/techniques related to a more qualitative stance: documents, electronic media, scientific and theoretical literature, conceptual

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

28 1,5

Text based

Data

Axis 2

Epistemic aims Methods/technique 1

Description (-) 0,5 Text and discourse analysis (+)

Electronic media (-)

Source criticism (+) 0

Scientific literature and theory (-)

Theory construction/synthesizing (-) Documents (-) Conceptual analysis (-)

Axis 1

Art (-) Source criticism (-) Art (+) Conceptual analysis (+) Qualitative Quantitative Theory construction/synthesizing (+) Identify universal laws (+) Philological text processing (-/+) Documents (+) Text and discourse analysis (-) Artifacts and material relics (-/+) Identify causal relationships or trends (+) Understand culture or symbols (-) Documents (-/+) Art (-/+)

Electronic media (-/+) Electronic media (+)

-0,5

Architecture and design (-/+)

Audio and video (-/+) Statistics (+) Quantitative data (+) Experimental data (+)

-1 Laboratory data (+)

Empirically eclectic

-1,5

-1,5

-1

-0,5

0

0,5

1

1,5

2

Figure 2.1  Modalities contributing above average to Axis 1.

analysis, text and discourse analysis, theory construction/synthesizing, description and source criticism. Epistemologically, the quantitative research style is oriented towards causal explanations and universal laws and not towards understanding cultures and symbols. In sum, the quantitative research style converges with the natural sciences in its use of data, methods and epistemological research aims. This style is characterized by the positivist idea of science which dominates the natural sciences. On the negative side of Axis 1 (the two left quadrants), we find data and methods/techniques associated with a more qualitative research style. With respect to data, we find frequent use of art, electronic media and documents, moderate use of architecture and design, artefacts and material relics, audio and video and documents. The data types include both text-­based types and more material types (art, architecture, video etc.). With respect to analytical methods/ techniques we find frequent use of text and discourse analysis, conceptual analysis, theory construction/synthesizing, source criticism and moderate use of philological text processing. Most of the types of data and analytical methods/ techniques found on this side are absent from the quantitative side of the axis.

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

29

Axis 2: Text-­based versus empirically eclectic research styles Figure  2.2 shows the twenty-­six modalities contributing above average to the second axis. Together they contribute to 82 per cent of the variance of the axis. Most modalities relate to data (n=17), some to methods/techniques (n=9), whereas no modalities contributing above average to the axis relate to epistemological research aims. Like the first axis, the second axis relates mainly to the humanities researchers’ use of data and analytical methods/techniques, but it differentiates a text-­based research style on the positive side from an empirically eclectic research style on the negative side. On the positive side of Axis 2 (the upper two quadrants), we find text-­based data types and methods/techniques: frequent use of fiction, philological text processing and text and discourse analysis. Other text-­based data types and methods are also placed on the positive side of the axis, although they contribute below average and are, therefore, not included in the figure. This side of the axis is also defined by the absence of specific data types and methods: towards the positive pole of the axis we find infrequent or no use of quantitative data, experimental data, electronic media, audio and video, description, categorized

1,5

Text based

Data

Axis 2

Methods/technique

Fiction (+) 1

Philological text processing (+) Fieldwork, interviews and observations (-) Quantitative data (-)

0,5

Description (-)

Statistics (-)

Text and discourse analysis (+)

Experimental data (-)

Categorized coding (-) Electronic media (-) Audio and video (-) Axis 1

0

Quantitative

Qualitative

Axis 1

Fieldwork, interviews and observations (-/+) Electronic media (+) Fieldwork, interviews and observations (+) Audio and video (-/+) Audio and video (+) Categorized coding (-/+) Statistics (-/+) Categorized coding (+)

-0,5

Quantitative data (-/+)

Statistics (+) Quantitative data (+) Experimental data (+)

-1

Experimental data (-/+)

Laboratory data (+)

Laboratory data (-/+) Empirically eclectic

-1,5

-1,5

-1

-0,5

0

0,5

Figure 2.2  Modalities contributing above average to Axis 2.

1

1,5

2

30

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

coding and statistics. This text-­based research style corresponds to some degree to popular belief about the humanities. On the negative side of Axis 2 (the bottom two quadrants), we find a wide range of data types and analytical methods/techniques, save the more text-­based ones. We find frequent use of the following data types: fieldwork, interviews and observations, experimental data, laboratory data, audio and video and electronic media, and moderate use of quantitative data, experimental data, laboratory data, audio and video and fieldwork as well as interviews and observations. The most frequently used methods/techniques include: statistics and categorized coding, but we also find moderate use of statistics, categorized coding as well as text and discourse analysis. Most of the data types and methods used within the empirically eclectic research style are not used within the text-­based research style, which is more exclusive. The empirically eclectic research style converges with the social sciences by its combined use of quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The space of disciplines We now consider how the disciplines are associated with the main axes allowing us to see how they contribute to the different research styles in the field of humanities. We superimpose the disciplines (respondents’ self-­reported discipline as supplementary elements), which do not intervene with the determination of the axes. A deviation between the coordinates of two modalities on an axis that is greater than 1 is regarded as large whereas a deviation less than 0.5 is regarded as small. Figure 2.3 shows that there are, indeed, disciplinary differences in the research style created on both the first and second axis. The extreme modalities on the first axis are between psychology and linguistics on the positive side and music and theatre, art and architecture, film and media studies, anthropology, ethnography and ethnology on the negative. The deviation between these opposing disciplines is above 1.30, which is to be considered a large deviation. Psychology and linguistics differentiate the field of humanities towards a natural scientific ideal with a larger share of researchers working extensively with experimental data, laboratory data, quantitative data and statistical methods whereas the aforementioned disciplines on the negative side have a larger share of researchers working extensively with cultural products such as art, artefacts and materials relics and electronic media.

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers 1,50

31

Text based Axis 2

Literature Theology 1,00

History of ideas

Philosophy 0,50

History Languages and philology

Axis 1

0,00

Religious studies

Qualitative

Music and theatre

Art and architecture

Quantitative

Humanities (interdisciplinary)

Linguistics

Anthropology, ethnography and ethnology

Humanities (other)

Educational studies

Archaeology

-0,50

Psychology Film and media studies

-1,00 -1,50

Empirically eclectic -1,00

-0,50

0,00

0,50

1,00

1,50

2,00

Figure 2.3  The space of disciplines.

On the second axis we find the largest deviation between literature, theology and the history of ideas on the positive side and film and media studies, psychology and archaeology on the negative. The deviation between the disciplines on the different poles of the axis exceeds 1.6 indicating a very large deviation in the response pattern. Film and media studies and psychology – positioned on different poles on the first axis – are now placed close together on the second axis and can both be characterized as disciplines working with an empirically eclectic research style. Psychology, film and media studies and archaeology all have a large share of researchers working moderately with statistics, audio and video and quantitative data. On the same side of the axis we also find disciplines such as educational studies and anthropology, ethnography and ethnology more closely associated with a moderate or extensive use of fieldwork, interviews and observations. Looking at the positive side we find literature, theology and history of ideas very much differentiated from the other disciplines in the field of humanities. These three disciplines are differentiated by having a large share of researchers who work extensively with fiction as a data type and philological text processing as a method.

32

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Extra-­academic engagement of humanities researchers We now move on to the analysis of the extra-­academic engagement of humanities researchers (i.e. the stances towards and interactions with extra-­ academic institutions such as the state and private companies). We approach this analysis by projecting indicators of extra-­academic engagement into the space of research styles. This allows us to see if the different research styles differ with respect to their extra-­academic engagement. As mentioned earlier, we measure the extra-­academic engagement of humanities researchers using three sets of indicators relating to: (1) the practical or civic research aims that are considered to be important; (2) the concrete interactions with extra-­academic institutions; and (3) the criteria of success employed by the researchers.

Practical research aims Figure 2.4 shows four indicators relating to different practical or civic research aims. Respondents were asked to indicate the importance of the various aims on a scale from 1 to 6, where 1 is ‘not important at all’ and 6 is ‘of the greatest importance’. In the graph, great importance is indicated by (+) whereas no importance is indicated by (−). The figure contains only questions where answers actually vary. Almost all humanities researchers (94 per cent) agree that producing knowledge for the purposes of education or enlightenment is important, so this question is excluded from the figure. In fact, relatively few consider any research aim non-­important which suggests that humanities researchers in general are concerned with the practical or civic aims of their research. The research aims ‘making critical analysis’ and ‘improving intercultural understanding’ are both associated with the first axis. As we move from the quantitative research style (represented mainly by psychology and linguistics) towards the qualitative style, researchers tend to place more importance on social critique and improvement of intercultural understanding. One could say that the quantitative style is characterized by a socially disengaged stance, whereas the qualitative style is characterized by a socially engaged stance. The disengaged or disinterested stance is central to the natural scientific spirit which underlies the quantitative style. The two other research aims ‘preservation of tradition and culture’ and ‘improving decision-­making for public authorities’ are mainly associated with the second axis. As we move

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers 0,5

Text based

Preserve traditions and cultures (+)

33

Make critical analysis

Axis 2

Improve decision-making for public authorities Preserve traditions and cultures

Improve decision-making for public authorities (-)

Improve interculturel understanding

Improve interculturel understanding (-)

Qualitative Make critical analysis (+)

0

Axis 1

Quantitative

Make critical analysis (-)

Improve interculturel understanding (+)

Preserve traditions and cultures (-)

Improve decision-making for public authorities (+) Empirically eclectic

-0,5 -0,5

0

0,5

1

Figure 2.4  Practical research aims.

from the text-­based style (represented mainly by literature, theology and history of ideas), towards the empirically eclectic, public decision-­making becomes more important while tradition and culture become less important. In other words, as we move towards humanistic disciplines close to the social sciences, research is more oriented towards state institutions. The orientation of the empirically eclectic research style towards the state becomes even clearer when we look at the researchers’ funding and collaboration strategies.

Funding and collaboration strategies The researchers’ primary sources of funding and their stances towards funding policy are associated with the second axis in the space of research styles (Figure 2.5). Towards the text-­based research style we find researchers who are more likely to be funded by universities (internal funding), private foundations or by the Danish National Research Foundation, all of which are more oriented towards basic research. The same researchers also believe that internal funding actually leads to better research. Towards the empirically eclectic style we find researchers who are more likely to get funding from state institutions, private companies or from research foundations that are more oriented towards

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

34 0,5

Text based

Which type of funding leads to the better research?

Axis 2

Primary funding provider Danish National Research Foundation (Grundforskningsfonden) Internal research funding (core institutional funding)

Private organisations or foundations (eg. Veluxfoundation)

0

Axis 1

No external funding

Qualitative The Danish Council for Independent Research

Quantitative

Don’t know Other sources of funding

Other Ministries, Regions, Municipalities

External research funding (from e.g. research councils) EU or other foreign funding provider

The Danish Council for Technology and Innovation

The Danish Council for Strategic Research -0,5

Private companies and enterprises Other external funding (collaborations with municipalities or other organizations)

Empirically eclectic

-1 -1

-0,5

0

0,5

1

Figure 2.5  Primary sources of funding and stances towards funding policy.

applied research, such as the Danish Council for Technology and Innovation. These researchers also tend to believe that external funding leads to better research. The space of collaboration strategies is homologous to that of funding strategies. Towards the text-­based research style we find researchers who tend to work by themselves or in collaboration only with other researchers. As we move towards the empirically eclectic style, researchers are more likely to be involved in collaboration with extra-­academic institutions – public as well as private (see Figure 2.6). Collaboration with extra-­academic institutions is very common in the humanities field. In fact, 48 per cent of humanities researchers in Denmark collaborate with various kinds of public and private institutions outside the university. Around 40 per cent collaborate with other researchers only, while 18 per cent work individually.

Success criteria The question of the success criteria used in the academic field is discussed in Bourdieu’s analysis of the French academic field in Homo Academicus

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

35

Text based Axis 2

No cooperation at all

0,25

Only other scholars/scientists

Axis 1

Quantitative

Qualitative

Other organizations -0,25

Private organizations International organizations

State organizations/bodies

Private companies and enterprises Municipalities and regions

-0,75 -0,75

Empirically eclectic -0,25

0,25

0,75

Figure 2.6  Research collaboration inside and outside the academic world.

(1988/2001) and in the lectures published in Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004). As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Bourdieu’s analysis reveals two competing principles of legitimation in the academic field: one dependent on ‘the principles operative in the field of power’, and one based on the ‘autonomy of the scientific and intellectual order’ (Bourdieu 1988/2001: 48). These correspond to two competing criteria of success: one internal and one external. The competing criteria of success used within the university or any other bureaucratic organization become visible through the struggles over formal positions in the organization (e.g. a chair or a management position such as head of department, dean or rector) (Emirbayer and Johnson 2008: 25). So, to assess the evaluative criteria used by the humanities researchers we asked them which characteristics are more important for a research manager (head of department, dean or rector). Figure 2.7 shows the distribution of the characteristics in the space of research styles. The most obvious distinction that emerges from this analysis is that between ‘scientific recognition’ (internal criteria of success) which is associated with text-­based research and ‘connections to politicians and other influential individuals’ (external criteria of success) which is associated with empirically eclectic research.

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

36 0,5

Text based Axis 2

Scientific recognition Other

Axis 1

Quantitative

Qualitative

0

The ability to get external research funding

Management experience

Connections to e.g. politicians and other influential individuals Empirically eclectic

-0,5 -0,5

0

0,5

Figure 2.7  Characteristics important for a research manager.

Discussion In this chapter we have constructed the concept of research style based on a reading of Ludwik Fleck and Karl Mannheim. This is a concept that takes into account the multidimensionality of research practice (preferences for data types, methods/techniques and epistemological ends) and allows for differences of nuance between research styles. Using correspondence analysis we have identified four main research styles: the quantitative, qualitative, text-­based and empirically eclectic. This type of analysis allows us to study the structure of the humanities field without squeezing individuals or groups of individuals into rigid categories. Instead we show how the humanistic disciplines are placed on a continuum between the ideal–typical research styles. In the second part of the chapter we showed how differences in research style actually correspond to differences in extra-­academic engagement of humanities researchers. The

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

37

quantitative research style, which is oriented towards the natural sciences, is characterized by a socially disengaged stance, whereas the qualitative style is associated with a socially engaged stance. On the second axis, the empirically eclectic style is oriented towards state and private institutions, whereas the text-­ based style is oriented towards purely academic ends and audiences. Needless to say, the results presented in this chapter are dependent on the selection of variables for the correspondence analysis. Ideally, the analysis would include an exhaustive list of indicators of research style. However, this is not possible in practice because of limitations in the theoretical and empirical construction of the object. This does not mean that the results are invalid. It only means that the reader should always distinguish between empirical reality and the statistical construction of it, which is always idealized in the Weberian sense of the word. A methodological caveat is also in order with respect to the analysis of extra-­academic engagement. When we say that the quantitative style, mainly represented by psychologists and linguists, is socially disengaged, this is based on the selected variables only. It is likely that other indicators of social engagement would correlate differently with the space of research styles. Improvement of public health, for example, would probably be considered important by most psychologists. This, however, does not change the fact that critical analysis and intercultural understanding are generally considered unimportant by quantitative researchers in the humanities. The research styles and extra-­academic stances that we identify in the analysis of the Danish humanistic field correspond, to some extent, to the so-­called epistemological styles that Mallard et al. identify in their interview-­based study of peer review processes (Mallard et al. 2009; see also Lamont 2009). Their study is based on qualitative interviews with forty-­nine members of five multidisciplinary panels distributing fellowships to graduate students and faculty in the humanities (art history, English, musicology and philosophy), history and social sciences (Mallard et al. 2009: 578–82).Based on the interview data they construct four so-­ called epistemological styles, defined as ‘scholars’ preferences for particular theoretical styles (ways of understanding how to build theories and how to accumulate knowledge) and methodological styles (methods of proving, and beliefs in the very possibility of proving, theories)’ (Mallard et al. 2009: 574). In a sense, their definition of theoretical style is closer to the practical research aims of our study, whereas the methodological style is closer to our concept of research style. Despite the differences in research design, there are similarities between the two studies. The quantitative research style in our study corresponds, to some extent, to the positivist epistemological style, which is characterized by a formal

38

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

approach, causal explanations and a socially disengaged stance. It differs from the utilitarian epistemological style, which is similar but is socially engaged (Mallard et al. 2009: 586–89). The qualitative research style in our study corresponds, to some extent, to the constructivist epistemological style, which is characterized by attention to detail and a socially engaged stance (Mallard et al. 2009: 583–86). And it differs from the comprehensive epistemological style, which is disengaged (Mallard et al. 2009: 583–86). Because of the small sample size in Mallard et al.’s study, we are not really able to compare the distribution of styles across disciplines. The opposition between a quantitative and a qualitative research style is also found in Kristoffer Kropp’s study of the social sciences in Denmark (Kropp 2013). The study is based on data from a survey that was carried out in 2009, and it shows that the main opposition in the field of social sciences is actually that of a quantitative and nomothetic stance, on the one hand, and a qualitative and ideographic stance, on the other (Kropp 2013: 434).This opposition (or at least variations of it) seems to be present across major fields of science (humanities and social sciences) and across national borders (Denmark and the United States).We also find it in Andrew Abbott’s analysis of the social sciences in Chaos of Disciplines (Abbott 2001). In Abbott’s analysis the opposition is treated as a so-­called fractal distinction (i.e. a distinction that repeats within each side of the distinction). This reminds us that within a quantitative research style, for example, there is always a relatively quantitative and a relatively qualitative stance, and so on. The second opposition in the social sciences in Denmark is that between a stance oriented towards an academic audience and a stance oriented towards an extra-­academic audience or extra-­academic interests (Kropp 2013: 436). In our study we find a similar opposition on the second axis, between an autonomous stance based on a purely scientific logic and a stance oriented towards extra-­ academic institutions and interests. However, these extra-­academic stances are homologous to differences in research style, namely the traditional humanistic style and the social scientific style. But these differences in extra-­academic engagement are much more general. In fact, they correspond to the differences that Bourdieu reveals in the French academic field in the 1960s (Bourdieu 1988/2001) and even to those analysed by Kant in eighteenth-century Germany.

Notes 1 Even though Hacking published his article (1992) three years before Crombie published his Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (1995), it was

Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

2

3 4 5

39

Crombie who first developed the concept. Hacking attended Crombie’s lectures on the topic in the late 1970s and this is where he became familiar with the concept. More theoretical discussions of the concept of thought style and its role in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge can be found in Strukturen des Denkens, a series of texts written in the early 1920s, but unpublished until 1980 (Mannheim 1980), and in Ideologie und Utopie from 1929 (Mannheim 1929/1976). The survey was, to a large extent, inspired by surveys conducted in the social scientific field in the mid-1990s and in 2009 (Andersen 1995; Kropp 2011). Note that we adopt the language of questionnaire and speak of questions instead of variables, and modalities instead of categories. The sum of eigenvalues equals the total variance of the cloud. The variance rate is simply the eigenvalue expressed as a percentage of the total variance. The modified rate is equal to the variance rate for axes contributing above average only (Le Roux and Rouanet 2010: 39).

References Abbott, A. (2001), Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Andersen, H. (1995), Forskere i Danmark – videnskabssyn, vurderinger og aktiviteter. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. Benneworth, P. (2015), ‘Tracing How Arts and Humanities Research Translates, Circulates and Consolidates in Society. How Have Scholars Been Reacting to Diverse Impact and Public Value Agendas?’ Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 14 (1):45–60. Benzécri, J. P. (1992), Correspondence Analysis Handbook. New York: Dekker. Bod, R. (2013), A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bod R., J. Maat and T. Weststeijn (eds) (2010–14), The Making of the Humanities. Vol. 1–3. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1988), Homo Academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2004), Science of Science and Reflexivity. Cambridge: Polity. Budtz Pedersen, D. and F. Stjernfelt et al. (2016), Mapping research practices in Danish humanities (Kortlægningafdanskhumanistiskforskning, in Danish). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Camic C., N. Gross and M. Lamont (eds) (2012), Social Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crombie, A. C. (1994), Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition. London: Duckworth. Dilthey, W. (1883), Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und ihrer Geschichte. Berlin: Hofenberg. Durkheim, E. (1982), The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.

40

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Emirbayer, M. and V. Johnson (2008), ‘Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis.’ Theory and Society 37 (1): 1–44. Fleck, L. (1935/1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fleck, L. (1935/1980), Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlicher Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hacking, I. (1992), ‘ “Style” for historians and philosophers.’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 23 (1): 1–20. Kant, I. (1781/2010), Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Meiner. Kant, I. (1798/2005), Der Streit der Fakultäten. Hamburg: Meiner. Kropp, K. (2013), ‘Social sciences in the field of power – the case of Danish social science’ Social Science Information 52 (3): 425–49. Lamont, M. (2009), How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Le Roux, B. and H. Rouanet (2004), Geometric Data Analysis: From Correspondence Analysis to Structured Data Analysis. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Le Roux, B. and H. Rouanet (2010), Multiple Correspondence Analysis. California: Sage. Leydesdorff, L., B. Hammarfelt and A. Salah (2011), ‘The Structure of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: A Mapping on the Basis of Aggregated Citations among 1,157 Journals.’ Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62 (12): 2414–26. Linmans, A. (2009), ‘Why with Bibliometrics the Humanities Does Not Need to Be the Weakest Link’. Scientometrics 83 (2): 337–54. Mallard G., M. Lamont and J. Guetzkow (2009), ‘Fairness as Appropriateness: Negotiating Epistemological Differences in Peer Review’. Science, Technology and Human Values 34 (5): 573–606. Mannheim K. (1925/1984), Konservatismus: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des Wissens (edited by D. Kettler, V. Meja and N. Stehr). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Mannheim, K. (1929/1930), Ideologie und Utopie. Bonn: Verlag von Friedrich Cohen in Bonn. Mannheim, K. (1980), Strukturen des Denkens (edited by D. Kettler, V Meja and N. Stehr). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marchi, M. and E. Lorenzetti (2015), ‘Measuring the Impact of Scholarly Journals in the Humanities Field’. Scientometrics 106 (1): 253–61. Wagner, P. (2001), A History and Theory of the Social Sciences. Sage Publications. Windelband, W. (1894), ‘Geschichte Und Naturwissenschaft. Rede Zum Antritt Des Rectorats Der Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Strassburg, Geh. Am 1. Mai 1894.’ [http:// archiv.ub.uni-­heidelberg.de/volltextserver/id/eprint/17487]. (accessed 25 August 2015).

3

Research Styles: Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences Svend Østergaard and Peter Lau Torst Nielsen

Introduction Traditionally, humanistic disciplines can be understood in terms of their research fields with their own specialized methods, theories, data, particular research objects and agendas. Recent developments have blurred these classical and well-­ known distinctions based on historical traditions, and today we are facing a new interdisciplinary reality, which calls for new means of navigation in science. We can no longer say that a particular method belongs to a certain research area, and we cannot sustain the idea that certain theories pertain to certain kinds of data. In other words, we need to rethink these relations and accept the fact that research today often mixes research approaches, methods, types of data and theories in a variety of ways. In this chapter we present an analysis of the ‘ontology’ of the humanities, whereby we mean a classification of the special relationship between: research approach, method, data and research object in humanities. Data are often considered as facts, but they are also selected and sometimes constructed in view of a research project and thereby imbued with meaning. Data are thus signs of facts as well as signs of meaning. Our proposals are based on an analysis of qualitative interviews with ten researchers on their research practice. The interviews serve as a backdrop for a general framework posing important concepts and observations for an ‘ontology’ of the humanities, and for relating data with research questions, objects and fields. Data are often understood as facts of a phenomenon. We understand ‘data’ here in a broad sense as scientific representations of a research field selected from literature, transcriptions of interviews, archives, video recordings etc. Data come in different format types and media, and an important part of scientific work is to reflect on this in such

42

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

areas as source critique, concern for reproducibility, ethics and integrity and their representativeness. We offer a classification system based on five specific approaches, four types of data, four types of methodology and two types of theory. On the basis of these parameters, we discuss the possibilities of classifying seven research styles.1 The framework developed throughout the chapter is based on ten in-­depth interviews (Østergaard, 2015) as listed in Table 3.1: Table 3.1  Framework based on ten in-­depth interviews Interview person

Department and topics

Aesthetics and Culture Topic 1: Bildung – Cultural theory – Modernity Topic 2: Participatory Citizenship A Neuro-Linguist School of Communication and Culture – Department of English Topic: Island Constraints A Classical Historian School of Culture and Society Topic: Corruption A Historian of Religion School of Culture and Society – Arabic and Islamic Studies Topic 1: The reception of Darwin in the Islamic world Topic 2: Creationism and new age religions in the Islamic world A Literary Scholar B School of Communication and Culture – Scandinavian Studies Topic 1: Intertextuality Topic 2: Fictionality An Intellectual Historian School of Culture and Society Topic 1: Economic abnormality Topic 2: Legitimization of practices of violence An Anthropologist Anthropology and Ethnography Topic 1: Exorcisms and psychiatry Topic 2: Video anthropology A Researcher of School of Communication and Culture – Scandinavian Cultural Studies Studies Topic: Parents’ grief related to stillborn children An Information Scientist School of Communication and Culture – Information Science Topic: Aesthetics, Interface Criticism A Philosopher Department of Management Topic: Entrepreneurship in rural districts Topic: The concept of possibility A Literary Scholar A

Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences

43

Each researcher sees his/her research practice as representative of his/her research field. This does not mean that our small qualitative survey is representative for the humanities in general. However, it does present the possibility of identifying different research practices. Any observations it is possible to make from the interview material can therefore be expected to be present in larger scale surveys.

The approach to the research field We suggest a segmentation of the humanities according to different approaches to the object of study. Consider for instance a literary text. It is possible to study the structure of the text on its own, its style of writing, the composition of the text, the content etc. We will call that the structural approach. But a text is also an intersubjective phenomenon. Texts are simply written to be read by a receiving community and to influence readers. To study the internal processing for instance in relation to reading a text, we will call this the cognitive approach. We can also look at the text in its historical context. All human created objects are somehow determined by their historical situation. We will call the study of this the historical approach. The text can also be subjected to a reading which does not aim at finding structural regularities, but instead there is a focus on the singular and unique character of the text. We call this the hermeneutic approach. In its most general form, this focuses on processes of interpretation and understanding. Finally, the researcher can set up an experiment where the text is used by the participants to construct poems by selecting and recombining passages from the original text. We call this the participatory approach. In its general form the object of study in this approach is understood in terms of a co-­creative process involving the researcher as well as the people involved in the situation of interest. Often the focus is some desired future change. These five approaches are motivated by what it is possible to do with a text. One can:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

read it for its structural features; read it for its aesthetic pleasure; be interested in what effect it might have on a reader; be interested in its historical context; and finally; use the text for social interaction.

Below, we will elaborate on these five approaches.

44

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

The structural approach By the term ‘structural’ we do not imply any form of structuralism in the sense the term was used to describe different theoretical dispositions, as for instance the French structuralism represented by Greimas, Barthes etc. Rather, we refer to the structural approach as an approach which seeks to:

1. explore and describe the features and properties of the research object; 2. explore the inherent structure of the research object. Furthermore, this approach is characterized by the assumption that the concrete manifestations of the research object are taken as signs of some underlying system of regularities. The researcher tries to uncover some stable form within the boundary of his object. Saussure is an excellent representative for this idea as he intended to uncover the language system in relation to the concrete manifestations of language as parole (Saussure, 1983). Another example comes from architecture and design; for instance, Christopher Alexander’s famous pattern language (Alexander, 1979). In his analysis he uncovered 253 timeless patterns of urban development describing specific problems and their possible solutions. The architectural problems/ solutions were thus put in a general form enabling other architects to abstract the patterns and fit them into their own projects. In the corpus of interviews the neuro-­linguistic researcher is the most clear-­ cut example of a classical structural approach as he represents the generative tradition in linguistics. His research is clearly theory driven and his laboratory experiments are designed to test the theory of the assumed system posed by the generative tradition. In all three cases – Saussure, Alexander and the Neuro-Linguist – the researcher has a clear interest in uncovering the structural system ‘behind the concrete manifestations’. The Neuro-Linguist is studying language as such and therefore his structural findings tend to be universal regularities. There is an interesting point in this since linguists may confine themselves to the study of a single language or they might limit themselves to the study of a particular dialect. In other words: the structural regularities and their status as universals depend on the size of the research domain in question. The Literary Scholar B is working on a theory of fictionality. Her research consists of case studies that exemplify the use of fictionality outside fiction proper and they are intended to develop and extend the theory.  We also consider

Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences

45

this researcher as taking a structural approach, since fictionality is a structural feature of discourse – for instance, the political discourse. In other words, as mentioned above, we do not consider the structural approach as expressed by what is termed structuralism. The structural approach just means that the researcher is looking for some pattern that is universal relative to the field of study. The Historian, the Intellectual Historian and the Philosopher will therefore also qualify as representing the structural approach. What is guiding the structural approach seems to be both the question of determining the boundaries of the object (language, single language, dialect) on the one hand, and the discussion of the representativeness and the generalization of results from examples/case studies on the other.

The cognitive approach This approach is what sets the humanities apart from the natural sciences. The prototypical objects studied in the humanities: texts, pictures, historical documents, cultural practices and so on are all intentionally produced by humans (i.e. there are ideationally mental forms that motivate the production of these objects). At the same time they have effects on the consumers. By ‘cognitive’ we therefore refer to any mental process that might underlie the production as well as the consumption of cultural objects of any form. To study the effect of a text on a reader is not the same as studying the structural organization of the text. This motivates the separation of the cognitive approach from the structural approach. The nature of human thinking, epistemology, theories of knowledge is deeply rooted in classical philosophy which, in turn, has given birth to many important branches of science. Psychology and cognition are contemporary novelties which supplement traditional philosophical thinking. This approach refers to any research that seeks to examine the underlying cognitive processes related to any activity, such as language production, reading, problem-­solving etc. Since we cannot consult our brains directly, this approach has to proceed through experimentation, such as neuro-­imaging or behavioural experiments where people solve tasks and either the reaction time or their performance is measured. Needless to say, this approach is new in the humanities and in our interview samples we find only one example, the Neuro-Linguist, who uses brain imaging as well as behavioural studies, in order to confirm some aspects of the generative hypothesis.

46

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

The historical approach The objects in the humanities are changing and produced as a function of time, with notable exceptions for abstract objects as studied in for instance ontology, epistemology and logic. A literary work is not in itself changing, but the forms in which literature appears seem to be determined by the period in which the work is written, and so these forms are changing as a function of time. The historical approach refers to any research that in one way or another deals with this temporal aspect. Our survey provides three enlightening examples of the historical approach. The Historian of Religion is studying the reception of Darwin in the Islamic world. He emphasizes that one of the problems is to find suitable data since there are few well-­established historical records on this specific topic (he compares the material with the rich and systematic historical material of European history). But as he says, it is also exciting to discover new texts, which can add to the historical data to shed new light over the field. The Classical Historian is looking into historical explanations of corruption. She has access to a large archive with official documents and a large portion of her work is to reconstruct and document stories of corruption and subject them to analysis. ‘The data is all there’, she says, ‘I just have to collect and analyse it’. The Intellectual Historian works with ideas. He sets up hypotheses about how ideas might change in time or inversely how certain ideas are invariant in time. The practice is to review the unbound historical material to support or discard the hypotheses. This approach resembles the structural approach in the sense that the ideas refer to a structural feature of a set of historical material, most often texts. The challenge is to select and discern the historical material supporting or contradicting a given claim. As historians they are all concerned with descriptions of facts, but they also try to establish causal explanations of the changes or invariances they observe – or at least point to influential factors in historical explanations. As in the structural approach they too have to establish a research field and draw its boundaries (e.g. the history of war, the French Revolution etc.). The historical approach is directed towards any kind of change in time or to any invariant features of historical facts. It seeks to establish historical explanations supported by well-­established facts.

Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences

47

The participatory approach This approach is concerned with participatory and collaborative approaches to research in general, and to social practices in particular. Anthropology is clearly the prime candidate for this approach, as anthropologists immerse themselves in the community and the social practices in which they are interested. They become an active part of what they are researching. In many cases this is the precondition of obtaining access to the research object which would not be accessible otherwise. The anthropologist often navigates in social situations involving some conflict and by being a part, but not a partaker, of the conflict situation he/she gains insight into how the respondents think and what motivates them. Other fields of research such as action research, and participatory design also involve researchers taking an active part in social practices together with other participants, but here the research is concerned with a changing of the current state of affairs to a desired future. The participatory methods of anthropology and the desire to change a current state of affairs or even design new tools, systems or services as in participatory design represent a genuine approach differing from all other approaches. The Anthropologist in our survey has a special interest in film-­making as an anthropological method. He frequently invites respondents to suggest particular scenes and situations which they find crucial to understand their lives. The data are thus not only documentation of the field research, but also the result of a participatory and collaborative effort. The researcher understands the field together with the respondents. The outcome of the research is both academic writing, but also a film inviting further observation of nuances and elaborations on the topic.

The hermeneutic approach In broad term hermeneutics is concerned with the meaning of texts and the ways texts are understood. It refers to a whole tradition, which entails a wide range of developments and positions. Here we use the term hermeneutic to describe an approach to a text depending on the particular researcher’s understanding – or as it is frequently put, a particular reading (here reading is taken to be synonymous with interpretation) of a text as this approach explores the multiple readings and understandings of texts in general. The readings may

48

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

be institutionalized (e.g. as when we talk about a Marxian or a Freudian reading) and it may be taken further into essentially deconstructive readings. The institutionalized reading typically shares a set of theoretical assumptions and strategies for reading a particular text, but essentially, readings are done by particular researchers and are often valued as original. It is up to the general scientific community to qualify a particular interpretation of a text as good, original, in line with the institutional tradition or otherwise. This is the approach we typically find among literary scholars. The Literary Scholar A who describes her readings as based on a ‘soft hermeneutic and pragmatic approach’ has for instance worked on Goethe and ‘bildung’, not to give an historical account, but rather to point to Goethe’s relevance today. This is in contrast to the structural approach in text readings which is interested in invariant features of a set of texts. The Literary Scholar A is not interested in invariant features, but in bringing forth the beauty of Goethe’s writing. The hermeneutic approach can of course be expanded to materials, rituals, communication in social media and other kinds of communicative practices. This fact marks a tendency in the interviews, even though we do not consider it as statistically valid: the application of classically literary hermeneutics into non-­ textual material.

Data In our mapping of the different research styles we will also use data as a parameter. Data is many different things, so we have to find a useful distinction between different types of data. In the literature on research methods (Walliman, 2011, pp.  69–77), we find the common distinction between primary and secondary data. Primary data is classified as measurement, for instance, data collected through experiments; as observation, for instance data collected by camera, tape recorder etc.; as interrogation, for instance, data collected through a questionnaire; and as participation, for instance, data collected by participating in an event rather than just observing. We can see from this classification that six of our participants use primary data: the neuro-­linguist uses experimental data; the three scholars with the participatory approach, use both observation and participation; the Philosopher uses qualitative interviews; and the Literary Scholar A uses data collected from electronic media in one of her projects. The secondary data as suggested by Walliman, among others, comprise written materials of all sorts – letters, official published documents, newspapers

Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences

49

and journals, fiction, non-­fiction, etc., but also non-­written material such as television programmes, films of all types, works of art, historical artefacts etc. The historical approach seems to deal both with primary and secondary types of data (sources). However, the term ‘secondary’ might in many cases be misleading. ‘Secondary’ suggests that the data provide indirect access to the research domain; for instance, literature can be used as an indirect way of studying how the relation between the sexes is conceived in a given historical period. But in many cases the text material is the primary topic of the research. If a person is doing research in Borges’ writings, it does not make sense to say that Borges’ texts are secondary data. In our sample of interviews the scholar in the history of ideas is engaged in research in how violence has been discursively justified; the text fragments that he finds in the universal library are direct manifestations of this justification and are therefore primary data. Instead of the distinction between primary and secondary data, we suggest a distinction between data that are selected (i.e. data that exist prior to the research) and data that are constructed (i.e. by which we mean data that exist only due to the intervention of the researcher). The first is the case for the three scholars who follow the historical approach and also for the two literary scholars. We find data that are constructed by the scholars following the participatory approach and the Philosopher who makes qualitative interviews, and also the Neuro-­Linguist who uses the experimental method. Obviously the data coming from experiments only exist due to the intervention of the researcher. The distinction between selected and constructed data can be further divided by the dichotomy between bounded and unbounded. Bounded data have an upper bound to what can count as data, so what will be part of the data set is well-­defined. This is the case for the Historian who has a well-­defined set of documents that she uses. It is also the case for the Neuro-­Linguist, the data-­set is bounded by the number of participants so for that reason there is from the outset an upper bound to the number of elements in the data-­set, and it is also well ­defined what will count as data. Finally, the Literary Scholar A who studies participatory citizenship as one of her projects has a bounded data-­set, since it is well ­defined what transcriptions of electronic communication she can use. Her study on Goethe, another of her projects, also represents a bounded set, so in all cases where a specific object or class of objects is the focus of the research we have a bounded set of data. The rest of the interviewees use data that we will qualify as unbounded. By this, we mean that it is not determined a priori what will count as data. This can be exemplified by the Intellectual Historian from our interviews. He wants to

50

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

examine how violence has been justified discursively with the assumption that there are some universal features of this. However, one of the problems is the selection of appropriate texts. The inclusion of one text in the data-­set could probably be substituted by another text; in that sense the data-­set is unbounded. We claim that this is prototypical where a hypothesis is justified by means of exemplification. This kind of research is always confronted by the question of the representability of the data. One way of getting around this is to select examples that are dissimilar and to claim that if two dissimilar types of data have the same features, there is a likelihood that these features are universal.2 We also chose to qualify the data used in the participatory approach as unbounded. Data here depend on the actual situation, how it develops, how the participants react etc., so there is no intrinsic boundary to the amount of utterances that are collected, and for this reason the set of utterances is unbounded (i.e. open). We can summarize these considerations by means of the dichotomies shown in Figure 3.1:

Figure 3.1  Types of data.

We can illustrate the different types of data by using linguistics as a prime example. If you do experimental linguistics the data will be constructed and bounded. If on the other hand you use an introspective method where you consult your own linguistic competence, the data is constructed as in the experimental case but unbounded. Corpus linguistics will deal with selected and bounded material. Even if the corpus is huge, the data is still bounded by the corpus. If you do ethnographic linguistics where you consult native speakers’ registered use of their language, the data is selected but in this case unbounded.

Methods Method is not a parameter independently of the research approach and the type of data. For instance, in the questionnaire (Stjernfelt and Budtz, 2016), (Johansson,

Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences

51

Grønvad and Budtz, 2015), there is a strong correlation between experimental data and statistical methods. This is not so surprising, but there is in general a correlation between the respondent’s answer to method and data; for instance, conceptual methods correlate with data taken from literature and theoretical texts. A given set of data can be subjected to different methods, though mostly determined by the approach. For instance, take the meticulous recording of a group’s participation in a social praxis. First of all, the construction of data by recording is already a method. Secondly, if we consider the recordings as the data, then this can be subjected to a classical anthropological analysis which aims at approaching an understanding of the participants’ conceptualization of the praxis. However, this could also be achieved by using a coding scheme and subjecting it to a statistical analysis. Finally, the same set could be analysed to illustrate power relations in a given society. If we look carefully into this, these three methods actually correspond to three different approaches on the same social situation. The anthropological approach is participatory and aims at the participants as the beneficiary of the research. The use of a coding scheme is structural and aims at a structural analysis of this particular type of social interaction. The power analysis is also structural, but could also be historical and its aim is a general description of the power structure of which the particular social praxis is only an example. We can also illustrate this by looking at literature: a piece of literature can be subjected to an internal analysis, perhaps in connection with other works by the same writer. It can also be used in an experimental context to show readers’ emotional response to different event-­types (Wallentin, 2013). Finally it can be used to illustrate a historical development of literature. Again, this corresponds to three different approaches: the structural, the cognitive and the historical. The point here is that the different approaches almost determine the methodological issues. Among our interviewees we find the following methods:

(1)  Experimental methods This refers to controlled experiments often done in a laboratory. In other words, we have a number of participants who produce responses to stimuli. The responses constitute the data-­set and have to be treated with statistical methods, the aim of which is to say something about the cognition of the participants in the experiment. Statistics can also be used in many other cases such as data-­mining

52

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

and corpus linguistics. In corpus linguistics, however, the approach is not cognitive, but aims at the structural properties of a big corpus of data. So statistics as a method can appear in all of the approaches except for the hermeneutic and participatory approach.

(2)  Conceptual analysis Strictly speaking this is not a method, but we use it here as a term that includes qualitative analysis of texts, documents and discourse. So it includes the use of semiotics, of narrative analysis and discourse analysis, the latter understood as a way of analysing the styles and schemes of a given discourse. Conceptual analysis is used in all of the approaches mentioned above. In the structural approach it is the most common method, since dealing with the structural organization of a text or texts will necessarily imply some element of conceptual analysis. In the participatory approach it is part of the analysis of the text that appears through the participatory intervention. For instance, the Antropologist uses specific concepts as the turning point of the analysis: invisibility, contamination etc.

(3)  The ethnographic/anthropological method This method is mainly found in the participatory approach with a single case in the structural approach. It refers to a situation where the researcher wants to present an understanding of a social praxis, either in the form of a structural description or in the form of a participation in the praxis.

(4)  Source criticism This method is obviously bound to the historical approach and refers uniquely to the various specific methods historians and archaeologists use to show the validity of the sources they use for their argumentation. We could also include the methods used to determine the particulars of a painting: date, painter, influence etc. As mentioned, the four methods are those we found our interview persons to be using. There are of course methods that cannot be subsumed under those four headings despite their generality; for instance, different linguistic methods such as diachronic linguistics, historical linguistics, etc. In any case our point is that the approach and the type of data you are interested in determine the

Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences

53

method. Although the same data can be treated by different methods this is determined by the approach.

Theory The questionnaire presented in (Stjernfelt and Budtz, 2016) shows, first, that traditional theories such as structuralism, Marxism, positivism and so on do not have any operative meaning for research in the humanities. Secondly, it shows that the answers to the question ‘what is the most important theory for your research?’ are very disparate, going from proper names, such as Richard Walsh’s theory, to very general theories like sociology mixed with things that cannot be qualified as theory like video. We take this as an indication that research in the humanities is not primarily occupied with theoretical constructions, but is rather embedded in practical problems that require a pragmatic approach. This is confirmed by our analysis of the interviews. Several interview persons use terms like eclectic, soft hermenutic and pragmatic in describing their relation to theory as for instance Literary Scholar A: ‘I would say it is very eclectic in the sense that I am very pragmatic concerning theory.’ We mentioned above that there is a correlation between approach and method. This has the consequence that the data collected under a given approach does not cause a change in the use of method. This is not the case for theory, which indicates that the relation between theory and data/approach is looser than the relation between method and data/approach. In fact, we can see that there is a feedback relation between data and theory in the sense that the theory often comes after the collection of data as illustrated by the Information Scientist, who said ‘. . . when we afterwards sat down and tried to make sense of it [the data], we discovered that Latour’s concepts were very useful’. The research is not driven by Latour’s theory, but instead by a general approach. We can call the process described by the quotation as theoretical abduction in the sense that it is the data that activates the idea of Latour’s theory which afterwards is then used to make sense of the data. Several of the participants refer to a process similar to the one described above. These considerations make us distinguish between two cases: one in which the researcher from the outset is committed to a specific theory, and another where this is not the case and consequently there is an eclectic use of theoretical considerations. We find the first in three cases, although in different forms. The Neuro-Linguist is committed to the generative theory in linguistics. His research

54

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

aims at confirming and refining this theory. We find a similar disposition in the Literary Scholar B who wishes to confirm and develop a specific theory of fictionality. The Classical Historian is also committed to a specific theory, namely Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy. However, in this case the main concern is not the theory, which only works as an explanatory framework for her research in corruption. The rest of the participants are represented by the two quotations above and are therefore qualified as an eclectic use of theory.

Styles of research3 We have defined five parameters: approach with five values (structural, cognitive, participation, historical and hermeneutic); method with four values (experimental, concept analyses, ethnographic/anthropological and source criticism); data with four values (selected and bounded, selected and unbounded, constructed and bounded and constructed and unbounded); theory with two values (specific theory and eclecticism). In the first table, we show for each of the interviewees what values they take. In a sense we can say that the vertical line shows the research style of each person. For each of the values the horizontal line shows how frequent this value is for the sample of interviewees; for instance, experimental method only applies to one person whereas conceptual analysis applies to eight persons. Although the interviewees were selected to represent different areas of research we cannot make any general conclusions, but the results in this mini study can be used for further research where one can test and extend these results with quantitative measures. The results in Table 3.2 are used to produce the network in Figure 3.2 where a connection indicates that two persons agree on at least three values. This network qualifies as a mapping of the results in the qualitative interview. Again this is not a map of research in the humanities, but it can be used to set up hypotheses concerning this. As is clear there are two clusters. One is determined by the participatory approach all of whom coincide on all values although they come from different areas of the humanities. A tentative conclusion is that the participatory approach has a coherent structure. At least in our material they clearly constitute a style of research. The other cluster is the connection between the Historian of Religion and the Intellectual Historian. They have five values in common so we can qualify them as constituting a style in our sample of interview persons. All other connections

Table 3.2  The interviewed researchers and their research styles as described with our parameters Individual research styles Data

x x

x

x

3

4

x x 4

x x 8

x x x

x

4

x x

x x x

x

1

x x 4

x x

x x

x x

3

Eclectic

x x

Specific theory

Selective unbound

x x

x x x x x

1

Selective bound

3

Construction unbound

x x

x

1

Construction bound

x 5

Theory

x x

x x

x x

Source critic

x

Conceptual analysis

Ethnographic/ Anthropological

Experimental

Hermeneutic

x

Participatory

x x

Method Historical

Cognitive

Literary Scholar A Neuro-Linguist Classical Historian Historian of Religion Literary Scholar B Intellectual Historian Anthropologist Researcher of Cultural Studies Information Scientist Philosopher

Approach Structural

Interview Person

3

x x x

3

x x 7

56

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Figure 3.2  The network conveys relations between researchers who have three to six parameters in common (thin lines: three; thick lines six).

have less than five values in common, so if we decide that less than five do not constitute a style then we have seven research styles represented in the diagram.4 One can also look at the number of connections for each participant and in this regard we see that the Philosopher is connected with most persons – namely five (i.e. for five persons the Philosopher has three or more values in common). This is because his approach and method are split. His approach is structural which connects him with the Intellectual Historian and the Literary Scholar B, but atypically he uses an ethnographic method which connects him with the participatory group. Finally, there is one person who is not connected to anyone with at least three values, namely the Neuro-Linguist, which we would expect because the experimental paradigm is still not a general method in the humanities.

Conclusion The different research fields within the humanities can no longer be determined by reference to the research object of interest. Classical research fields such as literature, history and philosophy are not rooted in a fixed set of approaches, methods and theories. We can choose to regret this blurring of things; but we can also embrace a new more flexible approach to a new humanistic research. The analysis and the concept of research style presented in this text try to grasp this

Data and Perspectives in the Human Sciences

57

flexibility by capturing the various research designs in terms of approach, method, data and theory. The flexibility is grasped as a simple combination of four parameters with fifteen values. We have found that certain combinations are more likely than others, which reflects the fact that there is a certain rationale in the intrinsic relationship between the parameters. The alleged blurring of the disciplines does not mean that anything goes, but it might mean that we have to consider a new way of understanding the disciplines according to style of research as a supplement to the research field and research object. We have found relatively new research fields, such as the cognitive field, yet to be better integrated into the more classical humanistic styles, and we have found a tendency for applying classical literary approaches to new contemporary issues. The participatory approach is also a novelty compared to the classics, but not to anthropology of course. Yet our example stressed the method of film-­making as an interesting way to research and communicate what humanistic research is all about. To explore, to describe and sometimes explain human culture.

Notes 1 This term goes back to Hacking (1992, 2004). Hacking (1992) distinguishes between research orientation which is similar to our research approach and style of research which in our perspective is identical to the combination of approach, data, method and theoretical orientation. 2 Foucault did this (Foucault, 1966) by taking examples from the economic, the linguistic and the natural science discourses. Some linguists using introspective methods do the same by considering utterance from apparently non-­comparable languages. 3 This is a qualitative mapping of styles which complements and is to conform with the quantitative mapping based on the questionnaire (Stjernfelt and Budtz, 2016) that can be found in (Johansson, Grønvad and Budtz, 2015). 4 This is of course an arbitrary distinction, but it seems reasonable in our sample of interviewees.

References Alexander, C. (1979), The Timeless Way of Building, New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1966), Les Mots et Les Choses, Paris: Gallimard.

58

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Hacking, I. (1992), ‘Style for Historians and Philosophers’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 23(1): 1–20. Hacking, I. (2004), Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johansson, L, Grønvad, J and Budtz Pedersen, D. (2015), ‘Kort og Kortlægning I Humaniora’, in D. Budtz, S. Stjernfelt, S. Køppe (eds), Kampen om Disciplinerne, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Østergaard, S. (2015), ‘Humanistiske Forskningstile’, in D. Budtz, S. Stjernfelt, S. Køppe (eds), Kampen om Disciplinerne, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983), Course in General Linguistics. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye (eds). Transl.: Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. Stjernfelt, S. and Budtz Pedersen, D. (2016), Kortlægning af Dansk Humanistisk Forskning, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Wallentin, M et al. (2013), ‘Action speaks louder than words: Empathy mainly modulates emotions from theory of mind laden parts of a story’, Scientific study of literature, 3, 1: 137–53. Walliman, N. (2011), Research Methods, New York: Routledge.

4

Criticizing Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism Frederik Stjernfelt

A central question in the philosophy of the humanities addresses the character of the concepts employed in humanities research. The field abounds with general concepts of different types, on different levels and with very different degrees of generality. Take concepts like ‘Bronze Age’, ‘literarity’, ‘conceptual metaphor’, ‘intention’, ‘text’, ‘revolution’, ‘baroque’, ‘actor network’, ‘syntax’, ‘culture’. As is the case in the sciences in general, the knowledge produced in the field is impossible without this ingredient of general concepts.1 A large difference in degree of generality subsists between central general concepts in (e.g.) physics (‘gravity’) and archaeology (‘Bronze Age’)). This difference, however, also holds within the single fields of science and could not, as sometimes assumed, function as a distinctive difference between natural sciences on the one hand and social and human sciences on the other. Natural concepts in geology, such as ‘Jurassic Period’, are far less general than ‘gravity’ and are rather on the level of ‘Bronze Age’. Similarly, the humanities use general concepts with very differing degrees of generality. This not only holds in the distinction between regional ontological concepts relevant for whole fields like ‘intention’ on the one hand and empirical universals like ‘Ancient Philosophy’ on the other. It also holds among different empirical universals – compare ‘ancient philosophy’ with ‘Greek philosophy’ or ‘Stoicism’ or ‘later Roman Stoicism’. Even so, degree of generality has played a central role in attempts at distinguishing between major forms of science. The classic neo-Kantian attempt at doing so was Windelband’s displacement from object to method. It was not the case, as Dilthey among others had argued, that natural and human sciences had widely different objects, necessitating explanation and understanding as different procedures. Rather, to Windelband, the paramount distinction was between the nomothetic method, aiming to construe universal laws for some

60

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

field (the prototype being classical physics) and the idiographic method oriented towards the description of single unique occurrences, events, and objects. This distinction might immediately seem to cover the distinction between sciences of nature and of culture (so that the prototype of the latter would be the investigation of the single artwork or the singular historical event). To this day, some humanists seem to have inherited this simple distinction in their understanding of method, believing they have little involvement with general or abstract concepts. Already Windelband realized, however, that the very same object may be investigated both nomothetically and idiographically – and in the further development of neo-Kantianism, it became clear that most if not all sciences make use of nomothetic and idiographic methods alike. The natural sciences have many tasks which are concerned with the description of unique single cases – like Big Bang, individual planets (cf. the actual search for life on exoplanets), the geological and biological evolution on Earth, the DNA of single species, geographically localized ecosystems, and much more. On the other hand, the humanities have many tasks with a nomothetic character: the syntax of any given language beyond particular utterances; the grammar of narrative as such; regularities of human cognition; the general anatomy of revolutions; principles of aesthetics, etc. The pupil of Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, proposed that the selection of idiographic single cases is always objectively connected to values: the events of the French Revolution are selected because deemed important to modern history; the artwork analysed is selected because it has proved valuable. So, he attempted to distinguish the formation of concepts in the two idealized methods in the following way: nomothetic general concepts versus idiographic ‘individual concepts’, prompted by value. This solution, however, is hardly fertile, in so far as all concepts are general, even if on different levels of generality. Even the conceptual description of the most individual, unique events or objects requires the application of general concepts – as with the use of the general concepts ‘French’ and ‘revolution’ to describe the French Revolution. In his central monograph on the philosophy of science of the humanities Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (1942), Ernst Cassirer takes the neo-Kantian discussion an important step further. He gives up Rickert’s attempt with general versus individual concepts and proposes instead that the humanities use a special type of general concepts which have both nomothetic and idiographic features. The humanities – which Cassirer calls ‘sciences of culture’ (Kulturwissenschaften) – develop their own general concepts referring, for example, to styles, genres, epochs, forms, languages, values,2 in order to classify

Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism

61

phenomena. That is, concepts which are neither completely idiographic nor nomothetic. They often – but not always – refer to single events (such as epochs) and typically appear at specific historical junctures, while internally they have nomothetical features because they form a rule for single events and objects on a lower level. Thus, ‘baroque drama’ emerges at a certain point in cultural history, but simultaneously it is general, subsuming an indefinite amount of single such theatre plays. To Cassirer, such concepts may appear on many different levels of generality, from full deductive subsumption under laws where empirical concepts are connected to theoretical concepts and all instantiations may be predicted given initial conditions (e.g. planetary movements), at one end, and the sumsumption of single cases under ideal types which do not themselves exist, at the other (e.g. ‘Renaissance Man’). Independently of this continous range between nomothetic and idiographic is another important distinction introduced by Cassirer: cause and form. These two principles of explanation may, in many cases, also be used about the very same objects. It is worth mentioning many reductionisms presume to reduce forms to causes (physical, psychological, sociological, historical causes) – against which Cassirer maintains the independence and necessity of form descriptions. In the humanities where such reduction-­to-cause explanations became prominent in the shape of psychologism3 and historicism already in the nineteenth century, this observation plays an important role. Many of the general concepts of the humanities pertain to form properties and form concepts also refer to the fact that some of the objects investigated (e.g. in logic and the history of science) are themselves propositions which involve truth claims – that is, they have criteria of validity which cannot be dissolved into causes of origin. Such intermediary concepts in the different humanities disciplines are most often developed in a feedback process between a bottom-­up movement, attempting inductions from clusters of single cases, and a top-­down movement attempting to subsume such cases under a theoretical concept by deduction. But the very introduction of an attempted general concept seems to rely upon an act of abduction – that is, a qualified guess, and many such concepts are later rejected for inductive or deductive reasons. Can anything further be said about the appearance of such concepts? Some are taken over from ordinary language and are endowed with a more technical signification (‘revolution’); some are neologisms by combination (‘Bronze Age’) or abstraction (‘literarity’). The logician Charles Peirce has pointed to a specific mechanism in the formation of higher-­order abstract concepts, so-­called ‘hypostatic abstraction’ taking its point

62

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

of departure in an already established first-­order general concept.4 Take a standard example of hypostatic abstraction like ‘literarity’ – based on the existing general concept of ‘literature’. ‘Literarity’ refers to what is specifically literary, to those properties of literature which make it literature. (In comparative literature it is contested how more closely to determine literarity.) To Peirce, such a procedure constructs a new object of thought which may, at the same time, be conceived of as if it were an ordinary first-­order object. Its relations to other objects and concepts may be scrutinized, and often it may appear as a headline of a natural kind comprising different subtypes which it may be a scientific goal to chart. If ‘literarity’ indicates that there are indeed special properties which make literature literature, then an immediate question of research is to isolate those properties, chart their relations and subtypes, find their relations of dependencies and causes to other properties, etc.5 Hypostatic abstraction is not a speciality of the sciences; however, it takes place already in ordinary language which contains a series of nominalization devices (e.g. in English, ‘-ness’, ‘-ship’, ‘-ing’, ‘-tion’, ‘-ity’, ‘-ism’ and many others). Such devices take a first order universal predicate and form a hypostatic object of thought (‘redness’, ‘citizenship’, ‘skiing’, ‘intention’, ‘reality’, ‘radicalism’ etc.). To Peirce, hypostatic abstraction constitutes a minimal but indispensable step in the research process. It isolates a new object of thought which may then be made the subject of a new, independent investigation. Such investigation often distinguishes between subtypes, in themselves forming new hypostatic abstractions – a recent example in intellectual history is the research pertaining to‘Radical Enlightenment’ in recent decades, as a new subtype of studies in the ‘Enlightenment’.6 As indicated, hypostatic abstractions often form the centre of scientific disagreements – and far from all hypostatic abstractions prove fertile in the longer run, some of them appearing as having described an object with no basis in reality (famous examples in the history of science include ‘phlogiston’ and ‘ether’). A current example of confusion is the notion of ‘culture’, widespread in different versions across the humanities, in anthropology, cultural studies, the aesthetic disciplines and, more widely, in the public sphere informed by some of those academic currents.

Concepts of culture ‘Culture’ stems from Latin ‘cultura’ which is a nominalization of the verb ‘colo’, meaning to till, grow, raise, nurse something.7 ‘Culture’ is thus an old hypostatic

Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism

63

abstraction covering something which has been tilled, grown, raised, nursed. Originally, this primarily referred to agriculture – an area or field which has been cultivated. In parallel, the nominalization ‘cultus’ from ‘colo’ refers to the establishment, protection and nursing of gods in a cult. In Latin, the word ‘culture’ also became used to translate Greek ‘paideia’ – upbringing, education – the training of the soul away from sin in order to become virtuous. It is in this sense that Cicero speaks of ‘cultura animi’ – a tilling or nursing of the soul so that humanity may unfold – ‘humanitas’ being his translation of ‘paideia’. In Christianity, this is taken over as a specifically Christian task, to work to liberate one’s soul from original sin by perfecting it towards its divine destination. These ideas about culture pertain to an inner process in the single person. With Pufendorf, this is connected to a parallel humanization of the external world – so that culture also comes to embrace and develop the common human construction of external institutions like laws and courts to grant a cultivated life, as against raw nature. In the Enlightenment period, the evaluation of such possibilities is double. The famous negative judgement is that of Rousseau – claiming that civilization makes man unfree. Not explicitly using the notion of culture, Rousseau thus takes a very sceptical stance against civilization and develops an important set of tools for subsequent cultural criticism of it. A strong version of the positive answer can be found not much later, in Condorcet who also, like most French Enlightenment thinkers, does not use the notion ‘culture’ but claims that there is indeed an ongoing progress or amelioration of the human spirit, also involving sciences and political institutions. He saw the progress of civilization as a process characterizing ‘enlightened countries’, but one which would eventually benefit all of mankind. Out of this tension in the Enlightenment, a strong tendency emerged to oppose two different notions of culture, a particularist and a universalist one, in Germany often rendered as Kultur vs. Zivilisation (culture versus civilization) or Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft (community versus society). But common to both of these very different conceptions of human culture was their emphasis on culture as no longer an inner affair of the individual, but as the externalization of culture into products, artefacts, institutions and practices. The former, that of culture as community, underwent a special development after the emergence of nationalism as a cultural and political concept in German Romanticism. With Herder, the fateful idea of the ‘nation’ was developed – the idea that different peoples each develop their culture, involving language, mores, habits, literature, beliefs and myth shaping an organic whole. Herder himself was an Enlightenment cosmopolitanist embracing a plurality of such cultures, but

64

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

his notion was quickly developed into political nationalisms both by European groups aspiring to statehood and by already existing states embracing policies of nationalization, the codification, development (or invention) of more or less ancient national customs. A further distinction is that between culture as a special, noble subset of cultural products and behaviours versus culture as pertaining to an indefinite range of such artefacts and in the English-­speaking world often summarized in the opposed positions of Arnold and Tylor in the late nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold famously epitomized high culture in his notion of ‘the best that has been said and thought in the world’, making of ‘culture’ an evaluative notion, while Edward Tylor took a much broader, ethnographical approach to culture pertaining to the whole of a given community. The Romantic notion of ‘the nation’ with its totalizing, organicist claims that all of the features of a given nation or people are connected in one organic whole, became the ancestor to a strong version of the anthropological notion of culture. Against that, weaker notions of culture often remain more implicit – implying claims that the aspects of people’s habits, products and behaviours which are involved with or dependent upon traditional values, inherited consciously or unconsciously from earlier generations, form but one subset of aspects of human behaviours, other such subsets relating to other levels (e.g. biological, economic, social, political, a priori, etc. levels). The Romantic and the strong anthropological notions of culture shared the organicist, holist idea of culture as pertaining to a whole nation, society, people – often such organized groups simply being called ‘cultures’. The development of ‘cultural studies’from the 1950s onwards tended largely to stay with an anthropological notion of culture, but simultaneously to pluralize it so as not to apply on the level of whole societies or communities only, but rather to that of different subgroups of society, social classes, genders, subcultures, ethnic groups, movements, etc. This pluralization of culture into such groups immediately implied also a temporal relativization of the concept. While the strong anthropological notion of culture, with its holist focus on tradition, tended to eternalize cultures and, in some versions, see it as a political goal to protect and seal cultures off from external influences and ‘cultural imperialism’, the ‘subcultural’ turn most often addresses the culture of groups with much more time-­bound and ephemeral existence. Thus, a new perspective might develop with a focus upon the appearance and disappearance of cultures, of their merging, hybridization etc. The strong development of popular media culture with the increasing amount of new media during the twentieth century gave rise to an extension of the

Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism

65

classical ‘high culture’ concept also to embrace ‘popular culture’ developing in these media: film, radio and TV genres, pop music, comics, the internet and much more. While primarily product focused by analogy to the ‘high’ or ‘elite culture’ notions, the notion of ‘popular culture’ became widespread from the 1960s and grew into new areas of study in many aesthetic university departments (comparative literature, art history, etc.). Thus, the notion of ‘culture’ covers a whole series of what are substantially different hypostatic abstractions which ought to be told apart. Let us summarize the most important among them:

(1) Culture as an inner process of refinement vs. (2) culture as an externalized process of development of habits, products and institutions. (3) Culture as universal progress, potentially embracing all of mankind vs. (4) culture as specific to particular peoples, nations, cultures, groups, subcultures, classes, etc. (5) Culture as the development and appreciation of select ‘elite’ products and habits vs. (6) a broader notion of culture as sets of human habits, objects, and institutions with less or no value ascription.

‘Elite’ culture products and practices may also be opposed to another special subset of such phenomena: (7) ‘Popular culture’ as developed primarily in recent media.

(8) Cultures as primarily subsisting on the level of whole societies or even clusters of societies (sometimes called ‘civilizations’ in another sense than the one discussed above) vs. (9) cultures as pertaining primarily to the behaviours and products of subgroups of societies, classes, subcultures, ethnic groups, etc. (10) Culture as forming overarching, organic wholes determining whole groups or societies and radically differentiating them from other such groups and thus crucial to individual identity, vs. (11) culture as pertaining to one aspect of human behaviour only, that of the acceptance and continuation of inherited practices, as opposed to other features of human behaviours (biological, social, economic, individual etc.).

An extreme opposition to (10) would be to ascribe culture ephemeral, epiphenomenal or historical existence only, such as found in (12) Marxism, claiming culture to be but a surface phenomenon determined by socio-­economic root causes, or its heir, modernization theory, holding cultures to pertain mostly to outdated social structures, to be overcome in an ongoing, global process of modernization.

66

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

(13) culture as the unchanged (or protractedly developing only) perpetuation of inherited behaviours and products of a group vs. (14) culture as habits developed and changing on a much quicker timescale, involving ongoing growth, disappearance, domination, hybridization, of cultures and the ability of individuals to reinterpret or even change culture. (15) Cultures as habits and behaviours rooted in particular territorial environments, the habitats of the bearers of that culture vs. (16) cultures as pertaining to groups able to transfer cultures more or less unchanged in moving from one place to another.

Strong culturalism These constitute some of the main versions of the culture concept, if probably far from all of them – hence the observation that culture forms a ‘hypercomplex’ concept (Fink). Some of the oppositions indicated, of course, are not mutually exclusive – thus it is possible to maintain that an inner process of refinement (1) goes together, perhaps even necessarily so, with the external development of institutions (2); that cultures are specific to groups (4), but that their overall development tends in the direction of a common world civilization (3); that culture pertains to human behaviours and products in general (6), but that a certain elite subset (5) or a ‘popular’ subset (7) of those behaviours merit a special status; that culture pertains to both societies (8) and their subgroups (9). Other oppositions are exclusive: culture as the overall horizon of all things human (10) vs. culture as one aspect of human behaviour among many (11) or even as a dated or epiphenomenal such aspect (12); culture as quickly or only slowly changeable (13, 14); cultures as territorially rooted or not (15, 16). The oppositions articulating these culture concepts are thus to a large degree orthogonal, independent, even if some of them often group together in ideal types. Thus, (2), (4), (6) (8), (10), (13) taken together constitute what could be called ‘strong culturalism’.8 If adding (15), the result becomes ‘strong nationalism’; if adding (16), the result rather becomes ‘strong multiculturalism’. On the other hand, (2), (3), (11), (14) constitute what could be called ‘Enlightenment civilization’, if adding versions of (12) you would get ‘socio-­economic determinist Enlightenment’. It probably goes without saying that particular positions in the field need not be logically coherent. Thus, it is possible to find people subscribing to socio-­economic determinism at the same time as they claim culture to be indispensable to personal identity, etc. (cf. Stjernfelt 2015a).

Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism

67

The cluster of abstractions occupying us here are not those making value distinctions between particular cultural behaviours or products, such as those focusing on inner refinement (1), on more or less elite products (5), (7). It is rather the broader notion characterizing smaller or larger human groups as a whole. These very different conceptions all rely upon a simple first-­order phenomenon about which most observers tend to agree: that there are differences between habits, products and behaviours of people which are learned from parents and social environments during socialization. That is what is addressed by the basic hypostatic abstraction of ‘culture’ (4) as the set of such habits, products of behaviours of a group, large or small. This is to a large degree what is referred to by the notion of ‘culture’ as applicable to a scale-­free variety of groups of behaviours (from ‘Western culture’, ‘Muslim culture’ or ‘Confucian culture’ over ‘British culture’, ‘Welsh culture’ or ‘working-class culture’ to ‘fan culture’, ‘café culture’ or ‘HBO rap culture’ etc.), having developed during the latter half of the twentieth century. Claiming that certain features of behaviour, habit or products are common to the participants in any one of these very different groups is in itself unproblematic (but not, of course, for that reason necessarily true).

Types of errors in abstraction However, very often more than that is presumed to go together with this abstraction – in some cases even much more than that. A particularly widespread and problematic such addition is assumption (10) – that culture forms the overarching, last horizon of human behaviour, irreversibly determining individuals participating in that culture. As noted, such an idea came out of German Romantic nationalism, and it made its way into early anthropology and its notion of ‘culture’.9 In this all-­embracing notion of culture, all aspects of human behaviour, including economic, social, intellectual, even biological and physical behaviour, are taken to be shaped through and through by inherited practices, learned by the individual from parents and immediate social surroundings already from early childhood (named the ‘enculturation’ hypothesis of the American mid-­twentieth century anthropologists). But such a conception does not follow immediately from the hypostatic abstraction of ‘culture’ out of the observation that features of human behaviour exist which depend upon acquired traditions. Rather, it has the character of a scientific hypothesis. In a certain sense, it is a well-­articulated theoretical hypothesis – and much counts for the conclusion

68

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

that it is basically false.10 This illustrates a basic danger in hypostatic abstraction – the accompanying generalization far away from the original observation, more or less tacitly introducing further regularities. In this case, this overgeneralization proceeds along several dimensions. One is extensional: from the observation that some aspects of human behaviour are inherited from tradition, it is assumed that all human behaviour is traditional. The extension is often specified in the idea that such traditions fall into segregated subsets, explicitly called ‘cultures’, in the plural.11 Another dimension is determinist: from the observation that some aspects of human behaviour are traditional, it is assumed that tradition works by means of determinist force. A third is psychological: from the observation that some aspects of human behaviour are traditional, it is assumed that those behaviours take a special and central place in the psychology of personal identity. But a particular problem here is that very often, strong culturalism is not at all made explicit in the shape of the said hypotheses. Very often, it is taken to follow implicitly from the very semantics of the concept of ‘culture’. These over-­generalization dangers inherent in abstraction thus in some cases give rise to a whole implicit hypothesis or theory, for which the concept – here ‘culture’ – functions as a metonymy or trigger. This is independent of the scale of the group implied – you may use (even if this is probably more rare) the very same implicit theory when dealing with cultures in smaller groups such as ‘working-class culture’ or ‘fan culture’, thus claiming all of their members deterministically hold the same set of cultural features. In early twentieth-century anthropology, such a theory of culture as forming and thoroughly determining very specific, distinct, and separate groups, was, as a tendency, more explicit (e.g. in the defining work the concept of culture in American anthropology, Ruth Benedict’s 1934 classic Patterns of Culture, or in Melville Herskovits’ embrace of the central notion of ‘enculturation’). Later, however, the very abstraction of ‘culture’ seems to have become loaded with the presuppositions mentioned, thus forming a hypostatization in another sense of the word. This danger is inherent in the use of abstractions: the mere abstract concept does not, of course, make explicit what amount of semantic content is carried along in the abstraction process. This is why Peirce would say that hypostatic abstraction is but one step in the research process which needs to be controlled, subsequently, by deduction clarifying presuppositions inherent in the concept, and by induction investigating the degree to which reality fits those presuppositions. In cases, however, where such control processes are lacking, forgotten, insufficiently undertaken, abstractions may carry with them clusters of unchecked concrete baggage.

Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism

69

The cultural turn in recent humanities Such worries pertaining to the culturalist concept of culture acquire a special importance in a period when culture enjoys an unprecedented prominence across the humanities – even to the degree that many humanities departments and other institutions pertaining to the humanities have recently changed names in order to assume ‘cultural’ identities.12 Before the 1960s, ‘culture’ would not figure prominently in the humanities outside of anthropology, and the significant developments of the ’60s, introducing a new focus on social issues, structures and causes in the field, preferred to use concepts like ‘class’, ‘ideology’, ‘economy’, ‘production’, ‘state’ etc. than the concept of culture. The growth of ‘culture’ in the humanities rather gained speed during the demise of Marxism in the 1980s when many humanities scholars began to see themselves as studying culture, if not completely reconceptualizing the field in Cassirer’s notion of ‘cultural sciences’. But that development rested upon prerequisites connected to a new need for knowledge after World War II. Internally in the Western countries, the explosion of new media and an increasingly global popular culture, and the segregation of those countries not only in classes but also subcultures, movements, ethnic groups etc. called for new academic orientations. Similarly, the Cold War, the global competition between the West, the Soviets and China as well as the many new nations created by decolonization created an acute need for information about contemporary international relations. Neither of these two tasks were immediately supported by Humboldt humanities with its philologies focused upon the historical study of language and culture of linguistically defined areas (Classic philology, German philology, Romance philology, etc.). The solution was the creation of Cultural Studies and Area Studies. The former famously emerged in Birmingham around the efforts of Richard Hoggart, Thompson and Stuart Hall, beginning with the study of British working-class culture and soon spreading to subculture, gender culture, post-­colonial culture and much else – on the basis of an eclecticist conception of culture, borrowing from Marxism, modernization theory, semiotics, anthropology, and much else. Thus, the ‘culture’ concept of cultural studies had both universalist and particularist aspects – but common to much of the field was a partisan sympathy for many of the subjects studied. Cultural studies soon spread, if not with its own institutions, then in curricula developments in existing departments. Area studies originated in the United States, to some degree in parallel with the creation of the CIA and heavily supported by both private and state actors – with the aim of obtaining a continuously updated knowledge about

70

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

all important potential hotspots on the globe. Also here, the old tension between universalism and particularism emerged in a new guise: should such knowledge be collected locally with expertise in the relevant cultures and languages – or should it be developed through a universal understanding of the process of civilization seemingly operating all over the world? The former led to area studies – ‘Russian studies’, ‘Asian studies’, ‘Middle Eastern studies’, etc., often located at humanities faculties in connection with the philologies, while the latter led to international studies, typically located on social science faculties. The former, of course, generally had a stronger emphasis on cultural categories than the latter. In this situation of cultural concepts and departments gaining new ground in the humanities, the anthropological, culturalist notion of ‘culture’ made its reappearance in a new guise – that of ‘multiculturalism’. This ambiguous term may mean many different things, but a strong version of it emphasizes the determinative force of culture on individuals, the insurmountable barrier between cultures coupled with the demand for respect for all cultures whose values and principles are declared equal. Strongly related to Herderian nationalism, the main difference lies in the conception of territoriality only: nationalism claiming similar cultural differences but claiming they are tied to different geographical areas inhabited by the different cultural groups, while strong multiculti conceived of cultural differences with the same radicality but insisted that such groups should be able to thrive side by side on the same territory as part of the same polity, given a sufficiently multicultural-­friendly policy on the part of the relevant state. Political philosophers of multiculti such as the Canadians Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka developed Hegelian- and Kantian-­flavoured versions of this doctrine respectively – but again, the hypostatization of ‘culture’ often spread without explicitly theorizing and sufficient critical debate. To many humanities scholars, ‘culture’ became frighteningly well-­defined large-­scale unities which should be regarded with respect if not awe – rather than being critically analysed in a universalist, comparatist perspective. After early nineteenth-century nationalism and all its ensuing transformations, and after early twentieth-century anthropological culturalism, the early twenty-­first century thus saw essentially the same abstract conception of culture applied to the different constituencies of multi-­ethnic societies. As in both earlier appearances of culturalism, this appearance came with a huge price: the hypostatization of ‘culture’ tended to occlude the simple realization that culture is but certain behaviours taken over from past generations – behaviours which in the real world develop, spread, mix, hybridize, vanish in

Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism

71

different combinations all of the time. In taking the abstraction of ‘culture’ to be much more unalterably thinglike than its reference in reality, such approaches could even all too easily align with the most reactionary, past-­oriented authority figures in such cultural groups. In that sense, the culturalist notion of ‘culture’ offers a prime example of what may go wrong during the necessary creation of new concepts by hypostatic abstraction. Such concepts create second-­order thought objects; such was Peirce’s idea – and their intellectual importance and economy lies in the fact that they may, for many purposes, be treated as if they were indeed first-­order objects. We can imagine their relations to other such abstractions as if they were spatial relations between objects and chart them as such in diagrams and representations. But the inherent danger is to take them as more thinglike than they actually are, and to assume that they transport with them a number of properties from their concrete bases – which they do not. Thus, with the culturalist notion of culture very often comes the idea that culture is at its core religious and that sacred conceptions lie at the heart not only of cultures but of each single member of them. But that does not in any way follow from the conception of culture as shared traditional behaviours. Another such idea is that members of a culture are equally ‘cultural’ – and if they are indeed not, then they are not ‘real’ members of the culture but deviants which can be set right. Similarly, culturalism taking culture to be the widest horizon of things human tends to see all human activity as culturally informed to the same degree – and all cultures being equally ‘cultural’, not seeing that some cultures may involve many more behaviours and beliefs inherited from tradition than other social groups which may focus more upon interchange with other groups, criticism of inherited beliefs, individual experiment or other non-­traditional, non-­cultural sources of behaviour. The tension between universal and particularist aspects in the conception of culture is age-­old – but has, to some degree, been short-­circuited in culturalism, which assumes the universal theory that all cultures are but particular. An important conclusion here, in terms of science policy, is that in that whole area of research where cultural issues are central – most of the humanities and large parts of the social sciences – departments, faculties, projects, initiatives dealing with culture should be planned in a way so as not to reify culture into particularist objects. The productive tension between universalism and particularism in culture research should be kept open so as to be able to investigate cultural aspects on all levels from nomothetic to idiographic, from universal to particular – and in all their different dependencies on other determinants of human

72

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

behaviour, from physics and biology, economy and sociology, individual initiative and a priori regularities.

Notes 1 General concepts arguably come in a number of different types. One type refers to formal ontological issues across the sciences, like ‘number’, ‘shape’, ‘object’, ‘property’, ‘relation’, etc. Another type refers to basic structures of a particular domain – sometimes called ‘regional ontologies’ – like ‘force field’, ‘particle’, ‘chemical reaction’, ‘natural selection’, ‘revolution’, ‘syntax’ etc. A third type refers to empirical universals in a given field, say ‘boson’, ‘Titanium’, ‘tiger’, ‘absolutist prince’, ‘baroque drama’. All three, of course, are relevant to the humanities. This chapter, however, specifically deals with the latter two. 2 When Cassirer speaks about ‘sciences of culture’, he refers, in 1942, basically to those disciplines founded in the wake of the Humboldt University in the first half of the nineteenth century, comprising linguistics, national and regional philologies, art history, comparative literature, science of religion. 3 On the criticism of psychologism and its current relevance, see Stjernfelt 2014, chapter 2. 4 To Peirce, there are two main types of abstraction: (1) ‘prescission’ which isolates some feature in a phenomenon at the expense of others, so giving rise to general concepts like ‘red’ or ‘citizen’, and (2) ‘hypostatic abstraction’ which, on this basis, gives rise to new, second-­order objects of thought, like ‘redness’ or ‘citizenship’. See Stjernfelt 2007, chapter 11; Stjernfelt 2014, chapter 7. 5 Very often, important scientific tensions and quarrels group around such concepts: is literarity something which may be characterized formally (e.g. by deviation from normal language, as maintained by the Russian formalist originators of the term literaturnost), with respect to content (cf. the idea that certain subjects are more worthy of being addressed by art than others), or is it rather something which may be characterized only contextually in its historical and institutional variants (as in the so-­called institution theory of art)? 6 See Stjernfelt 2015; Stjernfelt in press. 7 The brief outline of the history of the culture concept and the recent culturalization of the universities recapitulates the more detailed presentation in Pedersen and Stjernfelt 2015. 8 ‘Culturalism’ is used here to indicate a conception of culture which maintains that culture determines, to some degree, other important human features such as psychology, behaviour, history, etc. and that, correlatively, these features may, to the same degree be reduced to culture. Depending upon the extent of the determination/ reduction claim, stronger and weaker notions of culturalisms may be distinguished.

Erroneous Abstractions: The Case of Culturalism

73

9 An outline of this development can be found in Eriksen and Stjernfelt 2012, see also Stjernfelt 2012 and 2015a. 10 For further argumentation around this hypothesis, both in early US anthropology and in recent philosophies of multiculturalism, see Eriksen and Stjernfelt 2012. 11 Thus, there is a widespread and often unnoticed rhetorical figure using ‘culture’ not only about certain behaviours, but also about the groups realizing those behaviours – so that the reference to ‘culture’, like that to ‘society’, becomes primarily a group of people. This figure is intimately connected to strong culturalism and its assumption that a set of cultural behaviours determine all members of a group. Without that hypothesis, it would hardly be possible to use ‘culture’ about groups. 12 In Denmark, several merged grand university departments now have names such as ‘Arts and Cultural Studies’, ‘Culture and Identity’, ‘Culture and Society’, just as the former Danish Research Council of the Humanities is now of ‘Culture and Communication’.

References Eriksen, Jens-Martin and Frederik Stjernfelt (2012), The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism, New York: Telos Press. Fink, Hans (1988), ‘Et hyperkomplekst begreb’, in Kulturbegrebets kulturhistorie (eds. H. Hauge and H. Horstbøll), Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 9–23. Pedersen, Esther Oluffa and Frederik Stjernfelt (2015), ‘Kulturen i kulturvidenskaberne’ (Culture in the Cultural Sciences), in Budtz Pedersen, Stjernfelt and Køppe (eds) Kampen om disciplinerne. Viden og videnskabelighed i humanistisk forskning, Copenhagen: Reitzel, 251–75. Stjernfelt, F. (2007), Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag. Stjernfelt, F. (2012), ‘Liberal Multiculturalism as Political Philosophy: Will Kymlicka’, in The Monist Vol. 95, No. 1, 49–71. Stjernfelt, F. (2014), Natural Propositions. The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns. Boston: Docent Press. Stjernfelt, F. (2015a), ‘Abstraktion i humaniora – “radikal oplysning” som case’ (‘Abstraction in the humanities – “Radical Enlightenment” as a Case’, in Budtz Pedersen, Stjernfelt and Køppe (eds) Kampen om disciplinerne. Viden og videnskabelighed i humanistisk forskning, Copenhagen: Reitzel, 111–44. Stjernfelt, F. (2015b),‘Too little culture – too much culture: The strange coexistence of two opposite notions of culture’, in Michael Bøss (ed.) The Culture of Politics, Economics and Social Relations, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Stjernfelt, F. (forthcoming), ‘Radical Enlightenment: Aspects of the history of a term’, in Steffen Ducheyne (ed.) Ashgate Companion on the Radical Enlightenment, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

Part Two

Advances in Interdisciplinary Humanities

5

Friendship, Love and the Borderology of Interdisciplinarity Claus Emmeche

Introduction: borders between disciplines and their topics Calls for interdisciplinarity in the humanities often presume the existence of disciplines as separate academic fields, and involve notions of research collaboration crossing the borders between several areas of knowledge. The purpose of this chapter is to nuance a picture of disciplines as distinct silos of knowledge with all interdisciplinary work taking place in collaborative spaces ‘in between’, to suggest a more networked idea of a discipline in the humanities as one that is already epistemically relating to other disciplinary research fields and in that sense intrinsically interdisciplinary. Disciplines are the outcome of the social organization of science and do not directly or simply reflect a clear ontological organization of human reality with its at once social, psychic and material phenomena of language, history, culture, etc. The humanities often deal with particular instances of phenomena of wide scope and ubiquitous existence, as for instance power. So, a linguist may study the power games expressed in linguistic communication, just as a political scientist may study the language of political discourse. Questioning the borders between disciplines – such as the borderlines between sociology, political science and rhetorics in studies of how power relations structure the communication between countries in international politics or between men and women in a specific culture – may bring us to question not only academic borders, but also borders between phenomena in extra-­academic spheres. This may contribute to develop more adequate understandings of social, political and communicative situations. Investigating borders between disciplines as well as between the phenomena investigated by disciplines are the aims of borderology, a notion to be introduced below by way of a case study of humanities approaches to love and friendship.

78

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

‘Borderology’ as a term was invented in the context of the Humanomics research group1 and can be defined as comparative studies of borders between different phenomena that are, first, informationally complex in the sense of being non-­compressible into simple descriptions, especially phenomena involving human beings in the contexts of culture, history, society, psychic constitution, etc., and secondly, studied and theoretically framed by two or more disciplines. Though everyday life is ripe with practical ways of handling such phenomena, their ontology is often messy, uncertain and contested (Zerubavel 1991). Informational complexity can be defined formally within algorithmic information theory, and borderology accepts such definitions, but opts for informal approaches as well. Thus, the incompressibility of descriptions in the human and social sciences becomes rather a metaphor for the need to work with ‘thick’ qualitative descriptions, or what would be seen within the hermeneutic tradition as a steady process of expanding our culturally determined horizon of understanding. ‘Complex’ in this sense refers to phenomena that need to be described by two or a multiplicity of irreducible perspectives, often rooted in different research disciplines. Hence, borderology is born as an interdisciplinary approach in this sense. As such, it works in the trading zones between general theories and recalcitrant observations, balancing between an aim for coherent understandings and a due regard for phenomenal messiness, mediating between paradigmatic preconceptions and serendipitous findings of uniqueness or surprising irregularity that shakes the observer and stimulates further inquiry. This epistemological stance of borderology is supplied with an investigatory approach that focuses upon various types of borders, both de re and de dicto, phenomenal and conceptual, borders in the world and borders between research disciplines and their corresponding perspectives. Disciplines in the arts and humanities have not only provided scholarly knowledge about human culture, they have also helped to co-­produce large parts of the cognitive infrastructure of modernity and its characteristic tools for thought and reflection. This conceptual infrastructure has been mediated to the wider public, through the mass media and via the vocational education of new generations; it has been osmotically taken up in the everyday discourse, and institutionalized by the development of a multiplicity of research-­based practices and techniques in such spheres as work, management, consumption, education, love, welfare, sexuality, child socialization, health care, legality, security, entertainment, etc. This kind of impact of humanities research is presumably immense, but barely visible, hardly quantifiable and tends to fall under the radar of economic assessments of the outcomes of research. That this also applies to

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

79

some of the social sciences makes the fuzzy border between the humanities and the other domains of knowledge production an additional topic for a borderology of knowledge. There is a tension between realist and constructivist interpretations of borderology as the study of borders between disciplines and between their objects of investigation. A realist interpretation sees humanities research as uncovering real structures, processes and events in the world (e.g. the structures of human language); the constructivist interpretation perceives each discipline as constituting its own object of research via specific models, theories, styles of thought, etc. (e.g., language as defined by a specific linguistic theory). It is also possible to find middle ground positions that retain a basic pragmatist conception, often adhered to by inquirers themselves, assuming by default that the processes, events, structures, signs, and agents that are studied in any field are real (existing independently of what an individual observer may think) although their culturally constructed and historically situated aspects are acknowledged, not just qua being human phenomena, but also qua being perceived and articulated through theory-­related models and metaphors. Disregarding personal inclinations to realist, constructivist or pragmatist positions, borderology tries to account for the complicated interconnections between disciplines as knowledge regimes and the specific society that develops, orchestrates, uses and absorbs such knowledge. Parts of this interplay are illustrated below, when we explore the phenomena of love and friendship as studied by humanities disciplines and neighbouring areas of research. This will exemplify how the very results of research, disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary knowledge, feed back upon society and eventually change it. It opens for a model of the humanities as having an influence more far-­reaching than those forms of impact that are accessible through quantitative measures of research output, like bibliometry (see Chapter 11). Furthermore, the case will illustrate borderological insights about the inherent multi-­domain character of any humanities field of knowledge. Thus, we shall address the question of interdisciplinarity in the humanities through a discussion of scholarship on friendship and love within different fields. As research topics they are unevenly distributed across humanities scholarship. Studies of friendship or love do not form any single visible interdisciplinary field of research; their interdisciplinary nature is of a different kind. The attention devoted by contemporary scholarship to romantic love (for instance within history, literature, philosophy or psychology) is considerably larger than that devoted to the various forms of friendship,2 though scholarship

80

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

on friendship has a longer history in the Western canon of philosophy than that on romantic love, to some degree a later innovation (Pakaluk 1991; Singer 2009). Interesting from the perspective of borderology are also the conceptual uncertainties with respect to both the ontology of love and friendship (regarding the emotional, cognitive, and social nature of their relational constituents, and their mutual borders) and their epistemology (by what means they can be studied). Though there are theories and conceptual frameworks to describe these relational forms, it is underexplored how disciplinary perspectives interrelate in their investigations. That they indeed do interrelate can be seen in some of the arguments proposed to the effect that scientific and scholarly knowledge indeed co-­create the unfoldings of human love and friendship in late modernity, thus pointing to one of the ways in which arts and humanities co-­ create a cognitive infrastructure of modernity.

Why love hurts One such argument has been put forward by the cultural sociologist Eva Illouz, especially in her 2012 book Why Love Hurts. With academic degrees in sociology, literature and communications, Illouz developed a line of research that has attracted much attention, won prizes and is widely acclaimed. Her aim has been to do with love what Marx did to commodities; to show how they are shaped and produced by concrete social relations. More specifically, she shows how something very fundamental in the structure of ‘the romantic self ’ has changed in modernity with the advent of veritable marriage markets and what she (paraphrasing Bordieu) calls sexual fields, and how this effects the structure of the will, the changing ‘ecologies of choice’ of a partner, the self and its vulnerability, and generally the way romantic desires are organized. It is not possible very briefly to do justice to her complete argument, but we will focus upon her analysis of emotion and rationality and the involved changes in mentality, from ‘enchanted’ to ‘rationalized’ notions of love and partner selection. Our purpose is to point to some of the complex borders between psychology, literature, historical sociology and anthropology as a method in her scholarship, and also the border between mapping modernity in research and co-­constructing modernity through knowledge-­production. In contrast to Max Weber who understood rationalization to be opposed to and countered by emotional life, Illouz sees rationalization working in conjunction with the life of emotions, though restructuring romantic desire by

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

81

changing its basic cultural scripts. The disenchantment that, for Weber, characterized modernity is also affecting love. If ‘love at first sight’ represents a well-­known example of enchanted love, a kind of prototype of romantic love, this ideal-­type has come under heavy suspicion and dismissal in modernity, Illouz argues (2012, p. 156 ff). By drawing upon historical examples from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, she shows that as a cultural model, enchanted love had some special characteristics; it would make the object of love something sacred; love seems to be impossible to justify or explain. As an experience, it overwhelmed the experiential reality of the lover, invading the entirety of that person, and no distinction between the subject and object of love was truly possible (Illouz cites Beethoven, who wrote to his lover in 1812 ‘My angel, my all, my own self ’). In enchanted love, the object of love was unique and incommensurable, and more importantly, the person in love was oblivious to his or her own self-­interest as a criterion for loving another person. Modernity marks a profound change in these criteria and the approach to love becomes thoroughly self-­conscious, ironic and disenchanted. Illouz argues that the loss of power of love to generate romantic beliefs is the result of the rationalization of such beliefs in three arenas, namely science, technology (including the internet) and politics (especially contractualism and the norms of equality, consensualism and reciprocity; Illouz speaks about how political emancipation brought about new ways to rationalize social bonds). Here, ‘science’ includes the humanities, especially if we count in psychology, but also the natural sciences: Throughout the twentieth century, first psychoanalysis and psychology, and later biology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience, deployed their scientific infrastructure by subsuming ‘love’ under some of their key scientific concepts, as ‘the unconscious,’ ‘the sex drive,’ ‘hormones,’ ‘species survival,’ or ‘brain chemistry’. Under the aegis of scientific modes of explanation, these frameworks undermined the view of love as an ineffable, unique, quasi-­mystical experience and self-­less sentiment. ibid., p. 163

Thus, according to Illouz, science and the humanities impact upon the very cognitive and emotional infrastructure of a society. In the question of love, Illouz describes in great detail how the self becomes ‘the object of an ongoing process of self-­understanding and careful self-­monitoring of the psyche, which leads to an intellectualization of romantic relationships through the systematic labelling of emotions and through their monitoring by techniques of self-­awareness and

82

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

self-­transformation’. Hence, a research-­based notion of a personality as a set of stable attributes to characterize a person over time becomes crucial, and a ‘successful love is the result of the compatibility between the psychological make-­up and the attributes of two people. It follows that romantic compatibility can be evaluated, measured, and predicted using the appropriate psychological tools. Love could thus become the object of (psychological) metrics, the purpose of which would be to help establish and monitor the twin ideals of autonomy and connectedness’ (ibid.). ‘Love has always hurt’3 and Illouz’s intention is not to blame modernity, but to understand what in romantic suffering is novel, and as a ‘non-­academic ambition’ (p.  238) to ease the aching of love through an understanding of the social underpinnings of our condition and of what makes us miserable. In love, these underpinnings include the transformation of the architecture of romantic choice, by such factors as enlargements of samples from which one can choose, by the complexity of sexual, political, cultural and psychological tastes and their logics of evaluations, by making the search for partners both more rational and more emotional and more closely dependent on taste. And they also include the emergence of sexual fields, new modes of recognition, how masculinity and femininity define people, and what Illouz calls ‘the de-­structuration of the will’, expressed in irony, commitment phobia, ambivalence and disappointment and what she characterizes as a shift ‘from the formation of intimate bonds to the formation of cool individuality’ (p. 244). Illouz’ work, while firmly rooted in the tradition of critical sociological thought, is interdisciplinary in character, as reflected in the topics touched upon – from history, psychology, semiotics, and literary criticism to economics and management – and in her use of sources (e.g. ‘70 interviews with people living in three large urban centers in Europe, the US, and Israel; a wide variety of web-­ based support groups; nineteenth-­century and contemporary novels; a large sample of contemporary guidebooks to romance, dating, marriage, and divorce; Internet dating sites; and, finally, an analysis of the New York Times weekly column “Modern Love” for a period of two years’ (p. 251, ibid.)). In her exposition, interviews, newspaper columns and literary examples are seamlessly interlaced in a skilled use of the heterogeneous material as interpretative vignettes to the development of the main arguments. As Illouz extends a style of sociology from classical and tightly empirically controlled approaches to those of a general cultural critic, she makes her own research open to criticism about the extent of the tendencies she describes, when seen in a perspective of ethnicity or class. Could it be the case, for instance, that the influences of psychoanalysis and

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

83

psychology upon conceptions of love and self depend upon class position?4 Such a question may indicate blind spots in her sweeping generalizations, but her approach can be viewed as one of creating Weberian ideal types for further empirical investigation (cf. Chapter  4 above) – that is, models that to some extent reify broad tendencies, for instance into ‘a cultural personality’ seen as an agent created by ‘psychology, internet technology, and the logic of the capitalist market applied to mate selection’, that is, a being that has ‘refined and multiplied its tastes and capacity for discernment and choice’ (p. 180, ibid.). With a focus on the transformation of romantic pain from pre-­modern to modern conditions, other borders remain to be explored in Illouz’ 2012 book, such as the border between pain and happiness in love, or between heteronormative values for romantic love and values originating in other sexual orientations and identities, or between romantic love and other forms of love like friendly, parental, neighbourly, and brotherly or sisterly love. Nevertheless, the book keeps its promise to help change standard ways of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships, and it achieves this by what might be called intrinsic interdisciplinary scholarship; that is, working within an academic discipline while drawing on a wide variety of resources from other empirical fields in a constant and critical dialogue with other areas of research.

Interconnectedness We will take this ‘undisciplined’ use of a variety of resources to be a point of departure for the hypothesis that intrinsic interdisciplinarity, far from being peculiar to Illouz’ scholarship, is a common feature of much research done within the humanities and the social sciences. As a sign of the presence of other disciplines within any particular one, it may also be referred to as the interconnectedness of disciplines within the humanities via links of knowledge referring to the same phenomena. Though disciplines can be delimited according to their subject matter (language, culture, history, mind, etc.), the complex interrelated and historically contingent character of these topics implies that a single discipline displays aspects of a multidisciplinary structure. For instance, one cannot fully grasp a single language without also knowing something about the culture in which that language is spoken and the ideas expressed by those who use the language, and these ideas in turn cannot be comprehended in isolation from other ideas, and their historical context. Grasping this context also involves knowing larger social and political structures determining a special

84

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

cultural context, thus involving (implicitly or explicitly) additional fields of knowledge investigated in social sciences like economy, sociology and political science. This extends to the natural sciences as well, especially evolutionary biology and neurobiology, because there are phylogenetic and ontogenetic factors, or biological preconditions, involved in co-­determining such a thing as a language system. Thus, there is a whole system of implicit or explicit interconnections between the different fields of knowledge. This interconnectedness tends to duplicate, within each single discipline, the overall disciplinary specialization of knowledge, so that for instance within linguistics one finds sub-­branches specializing in the social aspects of language use, or language as a culturally dynamic system, or language acquisition in the developmental psychology of children, language evolution, other psychological aspects of language use, etc. This interconnectedness of knowledge about different aspects of the human and social world is a reflection of the complex ontology of human existence, that is, the mutual constitution of the individual personal psyche and the cultural, institutional and societal aspects of human life.5 In other words, the interconnectedness of knowledge about these topics is a reflection of the real interconnectedness of human language, communication, thought, emotion, and human action.6 Apart from this ontological reason for interconnectedness, there are aspects of the dynamics that governs the historical evolution of disciplines that at some periods tend to obscure interconnectedness, at other times make it visible and perhaps even reinforce it. A part of such dynamics is described by Andrew Abbott (2001). It is a combination of traditional specialization of fields into sub-­fields and new disciplines, and what Abbott calls ‘fractal differentiation’, a mechanism by which important distinctions regarding approaches or paradigmatic viewpoints lead to conflict, separation and split into two positions, and eventually (especially within the more successful position) an emergence of a new split, similar to the original one, into two new branches of the position, because ‘each newly triumphant position [has] to recognize that it has omitted central matters of concern’ (ibid., p. 18). For example, when the split between history and sociology had become institutionally entrenched, both disciplines had to re-­invent special inquiries into themes interconnecting them; within sociology research into ‘historical sociology’ and within history a field that became known as ‘social science history’. This did not imply that researchers working in these two inter-­fields recognized or had any common conception of the nature of the interconnectedness of the knowledge within each field; a

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

85

common feature of disciplinary specialization is a tendency to neglect interconnections to other fields. Another example is the split in social science between conflict and consensus approaches to social structure that was reproduced when the heirs of the dominant conflict sociology of the 1970s came to consider a new conflict between (conflict) ‘group norm’ approaches and a new (consensus) rational choice approach. When something receives scanty attention as an object of research, the interconnectedness of knowledge about its object also tends to become invisible, as we will see in the case of research on friendship.

Friendship perspectives Very few attempts have been made to gather scholars from several fields for friendship research.7 Friendship is not considered to be a big scientific riddle, and hardly an interesting puzzle for psychology. As an interpersonal relation, it is commonly seen simply as a feeling or as something private, individual, located outside the public sphere of power, law, politics, and the distribution of wealth. In this perspective it would seem unrealistic to apply to Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, for a collaboration of researchers across many disciplines to undertake friendship studies. Horizon 2020 embodies a challenge-­based approach that aims at bringing together resources and knowledge across different fields, technologies and disciplines including social sciences and the humanities.8 In its list of grand challenges, not surprisingly, neither love nor friendship appear, at least not explicitly. However, just a bit of sociological imagination is needed to realize that configurations for friendship may actually play an important role in what is seen by Horizon 2020 as defining great societal challenges; for instance health and well-­being, the making of inclusive and ‘reflective societies’, and even democracy.9 Indeed, reflections about the connection between conditions for friendship, a civil society and a polity have had a long history in political thought (Heyking and Avramenko 2008; Nixon 2015). Some political scientists actually do perceive a revival of the interest in friendship as the investigation of ‘horizontal ties of affinity, concern, and action’. They see a renewed interest in friendship as ‘being used to inform and moderate current ideas about the state as power and politics as hierarchy’.10 Similar to the case of Illouz’ research on pre-­modern and modern love, friendship is interesting in relation to borderology. First, friendship also exemplifies the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of almost every mono-­disciplinary

86

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

approach to its expressions. We shall give some examples below. Secondly, the very phenomenon of friendship – to the extent that this expression does not bewitch the mind – is perplexingly vague, in modernity only quasi-­institutional (Paine 1974, Österberg 2010), and extremely complex and varied, being a social tie, a form of love (Singer 2009) yet typically not conceived as romantic or sexual, though in other historical epochs same-­gender ‘romantic friendship’ between men or women was culturally accepted and visible as a social form (Friedman 2003, Marcus 2007). The bewitching aspect of talking – as if it were a singular definite form – about ‘the phenomenon of friendship’ made some scholars suggest that friendship is a Wittgensteinian family resemblance concept, so that by studying instances of friendship we find ‘a network of features, which, while similar, are not present in the same degree or in the same combination in all instances of friendship,’ and ‘consequently we might not be able to identify a central sense of the term’ (Lynch 2005 p. 21; cf. Konstan 1997 p. 18; Digeser 2013; Hrushka 2010 p. 226ff). A Wittgensteinian take on friendship as a concept may serve as a warning against believing that by epistemically integrating knowledge from many disciplines about phenomena like love and friendship one can provide an exhaustive understanding of the problematics represented by that label. Let us glance through some findings on friendship from scholarship within philosophy, history, sociology and other fields to illustrate the idea of interconnectedness and how a borderology of knowledge about this feeling, tie, state, relationship, bond, attitude, conduct, construct, or conceptual family of such notions, can inform us about its multiplicity. To begin, we shall show how interconnectedness can be illustrated by a simple scheme mapping the extent to which a sample of contributions on friendship from different single fields can also be considered as contributions to other fields (Table 5.1). The contributions listed in Table 5.1 are not chosen to be representative of friendship studies as such. The batch can be seen as a small (and not completely random) sample of references the condition for inclusion of which was that they should not be self-­declared as interdisciplinary; they should be easy to identify as contributions to a single field or discipline (e.g. history) based upon information on author, journal or subject of the contribution (as when a historian writes about the history of friendship); and that the selected disciplines should have one such primary reference each. Ten research fields were chosen, but many more could have been included. Thus, at a surface level, we have ten (mono)disciplinary contributions, but when their content is scrutinized, it is evident that they can all be seen to touch upon or even contribute to other disciplines as well.

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

87

Table 5.1  Matrix of ten research contributions on friendship from the humanities and social sciences, showing the interconnectedness of disciplines*

x x

x #

x #

x #

x

x x

x

x x

#

x #

x x

x x

x

x x

x

x

religious studies

social psychology

psychology

anthropology

sociology

x

gender and queer studies

#

literary studies

Rorty 1993 Brodie and Caine 2009 Spencer and Pahl 2006 Hruschka 2010 Heyking et al., eds 2008 Benson 2013 Hall 2012 Luftig 1993 Rumens 2012 Crook 2011

history

philosophy

Ref.:

political science

Discipline:

x # x x

# x

x # #

* Although any single contribution is categorized (depending upon journal, author, title, or similar contextual factors) as belonging to a single discipline, marked with a # sign, a closer reading suggests that the text contributes to (or would be of relevance for) additional disciplines, indicated with x. Contributions are not connected by citations; the connections to other disciplines are in terms of topical content; see text for explanation.

For instance, Rorty (1993) is a contribution to a philosophical reader on friendship. The author is a US philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of mind and emotions, the history of philosophy and moral philosophy. Amélie Rorty’s text exemplifies interconnectedness because it is not just about the epistemology of interpersonal relations and friendship, but also about psychology, and Rorty aims at escaping from common intellectual preconceptions about rationality in her approach to friendship. Her text draws upon psychological insights from art and fiction, and though it may be argued that it does not strictly contribute to these fields (nor does it draw upon empirical psychology), it can be seen as a part of an ‘emotional turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. The text extends the outlook of philosophy by directing readers to the wider realm of psychology and it contributes to the history of ideas and of emotions as it discusses how such psychological attitudes as love and friendship shift according to historical and cultural boundaries. Finally, Rorty exploits a certain literary

88

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

style of inquiry, making extensive narrative thought experiments on fictional persons to illustrate and investigate certain models of emotions in relationships. This style allows for a more concrete consideration of emotional models, and it is in line with and a way to ameliorate the observation by Grayling (2013: p. 14) that ‘it is not in philosophy as such – the discursive enterprise of conceptual analysis – but in literature that one finds a more minute inspection of friendship as lived rather than as a concept, an abstraction, an idealization, and a subject for theorizing’. Similar and more extensive comments could be made about the other references in Table  5.1 and their dual character of being apparently mono-­ disciplinary contributions, yet on a deeper level intrinsically interdisciplinary. We will just briefly make a few comments on the other texts. Broody and Caine (2009) is a chapter in an anthology on the history of friendship; the text deals specifically with notions and practices of friendship in nineteenth-century Europe, how friendship depended upon social changes related to industrialization and urbanization, to class and gender, and how fiction and poetry were sources for strong ideas on friendship. One could argue that it is just as much sociology as history, and it also contributes to understanding social aspects of gender and literary practices. Spencer and Pahl (2006) is a monograph by sociologists who address friendship in relation to the role of social capital and social participation at the end of the twentieth century. The book develops new concepts about personal communities, based on a qualitative approach with in-­depth interviews, much inspired by social anthropology. It conveys knowledge about social psychology in a classical sense, and its findings about ‘hidden solidarities’ have implications for political science studies of political participation. Hruschka (2010) has the format of an advanced extensive textbook primarily within the anthropology of friendship, but also with material on the evolutionary psychology and biology of friendship. Its ambition is clearly integrative, aiming at rooting an understanding of the diversity of culturally determined friendship forms in some general principles consistent with the biosciences, but its major material is drawn from the social sciences. Heyking et al. (2008) is an anthology primarily by political scientists exploring the links between friendship and political philosophy and theory. The book includes a whole section discussing religious takes on philia and caritas forms of friendship from Augustine to Luther and Calvin. Benson (2013) is a chapter in a two-­volume treatment on the psychology of friendship and enmity. The editors note that scholars often seem to forget the enmity-­part of the notion or definition of friendship, which is indeed fatal for a

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

89

borderology of friendship. Ciarán Benson writes as a psychologist on the cognitive processes (especially memory) behind an autobiography of Richard Wollheim, a British philosopher noted for his work on mind, emotions, and aesthetics. Hall (2012) forms a piece of social psychology on the ideals of friendship, done in a distinctive style of research characteristic of NorthAmerican quantitative social psychology (i.e. as transparent in methodology as a medical paper based on controlled clinical trials, but also reified in its operationalizations and quantitative metrics). It is the one part of the sample which is most entrenched within a bounded paradigm, and thus the least ‘intrinsically interdisciplinary’ text, although it also contributes with sociological insights about undergraduate students recruited from a large Midwestern university, and a sample of highly educated US and international internet users. Luftig (1993) is a treatise by an English professor that shows some topical similarity to that of Farrell (2001), also covering fields like literary and art studies, history, social psychology, and gender studies, but Luftig’s work is more firmly rooted in language and literature studies. Despite the similarities of topics, Farrell, a sociologist, does not cite Luftig. This may be a random instance of neglect, though many contributions to friendship studies seem to be blind to similar work done within other disciplines. Rumens (2012) is an interview-­based inquiry by a senior lecturer in critical management research with interests in workplace friendships and genders and sexualities in organizations. The analysis mobilizes queer theories to examine how UK gay and bisexual men reproduce and contest heterosexist norms in the construction of workplace friendships with heterosexual women. One could object to the assignment of the text to ‘gender and queer studies’ because this is not a traditional discipline; like ‘science and technology studies’ and other ‘studies’ not yet firmly established, such fields are far from being mono-­ disciplinary. However, all fields and disciplines have fuzzy borders, and there seems to be a continuity between disciplines, sub-­disciplines, and interdisciplinary ‘studies’ that feeds into our notion of interconnectedness in interesting ways. Finally, Crook (2011) is an investigation by a scholar from religious studies interested in patron–client relationships in the ancient world, using examples of ‘fictive-­friendship’ in the Gospel of John. The article addresses issues of gift exchange, much discussed in anthropology, and in this ancient context shown to have a profound impact on political alliances. ‘Fictive-­friendship’ is introduced as denoting the practice amongst elites of using friendship language to mask relationships of dependence (patronage and clientage) as they could be seen as somewhat shameful.

90

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Mapping borders and connections Mapping friendship research as a nascent but still ‘hidden’ field of interdisciplinary work within the humanities and the social sciences involves advantages that may inspire similar pursuits for other topics apt for a borderology of knowledge. As pointed out by Descharmes et  al. (2011), an interdisciplinary approach can frame the phenomenon’s social complexity and facilitates a more inclusive perception. Interdisciplinary endeavours are needed in order to ‘challenge Eurocentric and historically idealised definitions of friendship’ (ibid., p.  13) and to analyse the ‘delicate shifts, transgressions, and boundary-­ crossings between friendship, patronage, sexual and romantic relationship, and business ties’. In considering how to organize adequate institutional formats for research programmes in interdisciplinary friendship (and similar) studies, our imagination tends to be affected by the metaphors we use to think about disciplines. Three kinds of metaphor appear repeatedly in the literature:

1. disciplines as disconnected silos of knowledge (an image often used critically by those who wish to promote interdisciplinarity), or as areas having well-­defined mutual borders like neighbouring states (think of a map of the USA, filling out the whole knowledge area, where interdisciplinarity then becomes a question of how to build highways to better connect distinct areas); 2. disciplines as islands forming an archipelago with possibilities for new islands to emerge like volcanoes from the sea, helping to shrink the ocean of ignorance; 3. disciplines as already interconnected local networks with lots of connections to other dense clusters of knowledge areas, making up a totality of variously connected super-­networks of research that can be analysed through bibliometric methods (e.g. Leydesdorff et al. 2011). For the network metaphor, disciplines may be considered as being temporary clusterings, a naming of specific dense clusters of contributions, related by explicit citations or, qua describing the same phenomena, by potential not-­yet explored connections. There will be incongruities between the taxonomy of disciplines and the ‘natural’ ordering of clusters within a global network of research. In such an image, friendship studies may emerge, not as a new field or discipline with such a name, but as a growing interconnectedness among widespread specialities that are all preoccupied with some aspects of friendship

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

91

and may increase their mutual awareness of each other and perhaps make the citation pattern more coherent. Finding a high degree of actual and potential interconnectedness within humanities and social science research should not come as a surprise and has been observed before. It is reflected in the information search modes used by working scholars, as observed by Palmer and Neumann (2002), and in the flow of ideas and concepts between the disciplines, as shown by Jacobs (2013) in his critique of the thought that disciplines can be abandoned or departments fully replaced by interdisciplinary research centres. Though there are general trends for more interdisciplinarity, both in the natural sciences (Porter and Rafols 2009) and the humanities (Hammarfelt 2011), research policy-­makers should not neglect the fact that each discipline, even those with fuzzy borders, has its own special perspective and a form of theoretical imagination and sensibility (Holmwood 2010). Scientific knowledge production is predicated upon sustaining and reproducing dynamically stable research traditions in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary environments. Here, borderology contributes with a deeper appreciation for the distinctiveness of perspectives on phenomena that at first sight seem simply fuzzy, complex and ill-­defined. Mapping the borders between disciplines as well as their connections enables an approach to research governance that avoids reductionisms.

Notes 1 See the preface (this volume) on the Humanomics project. The same term with a different but related meaning is used independently by the Global Heritage Fund, stating on their website that ‘In the Barents Sea region, Norway and its neighbours (. . .) have pioneered a concept called “borderology” or the “cross-­border trafficking in culture” as an agent of economic change. The aim is to increase cultural contacts between border regions’ (Global Heritage Fund 2007). 2 But it is by no means non-­existent: a search in Google Scholar for the appearance of ‘love’, ‘marriage’ or ‘friendship’ in document titles for the period 1964–2014 produces the numbers 20,700, 21,800, and 8,220, respectively (accessed August 2015). 3 Illouz quoted from a video (a ‘Podularity.com film’) made in June 2012 by George Miller about her 2012 book (https://vimeo.com/44715528) (accessed August 2015). 4 Reviews in sociology journals have noted how her choice of interview excerpts poses a problem, ‘in that they are taken from well-­spoken informants who seem mostly to be academics. As her analysis is socio-­culturally rather than class based, it would have been better if she had chosen from a wider array of people. (. . .) Her analysis

92

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

relies on upper-­class sensibilities for both depictions of the premodern and modern conceptualizations of love’ (de Munck 2015: 123); her materials ‘speak to the experiences of middle-­class people in the USA and Western Europe, and this does seem to be Illouz’s implicit context of reference’ (Nehring 2013: 1234). However, Illouz argues that class endogamy or homology in romantic relations is losing its significance as a result of individualization and universalized beauty codes. A third reviewer gives due credit to Illouz’s own recognition of methodological biases, in a nuanced assessment of forces and limits of her analysis (Tartari 2014). 5 Cf. Køppe (2012). Seeing the interdependence of individual agency and social structure as a case of ‘mutual constitution’ is not to forget that they operate on different timescales. We should avoid conflating their different dynamics and different causal contributions to the total dynamics, as pointed out in the works of Margaret Archer (e.g. Archer 2012). 6 Another interpretation of this interconnectedness is Leitch (2000) who observes that ‘each discipline itself is always already infiltrated by some other discipline(s). Physics has mathematics, astronomy and chemistry not only as neighbours but also as guests. Literary studies – a more permeable discipline than most – is entangled with history, mythology and religion, psychology, linguistics, philosophy (especially aesthetics), folklore and anthropology, and political economy’ (p. 129). This is seen by Leitch as reflecting changing dynamics towards a postmodern mode of interdisciplinarity. 7 Notable exceptions are the volume edited by Descharmes et al. 2011, and the recent Amity: Journal of Friendship Studies initiated by researchers at the University of Leeds and elsewhere. 8 See http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/societal-­ challenges (assessed August 2015). See also Chapter 1 above. 9 The Horizon 2020 list of grand societal challenges are grouped as (1) health, demographic change and wellbeing; (2) food security and sustainability; (3) clean and efficient energy; (4) green and integrated transport; (5) climate action and resource efficiency; (6) Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies; and (7) secure societies – protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens. 10 Quoted from ‘About the Journal’ (Amity), http://amityjournal.leeds.ac.uk/about/ (accessed August 2015); see also the review by Devere (2013).

References Abbott, A. (2001), The Chaos of Disciplines, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Archer, M. S. (2012), The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity

93

Benson, C. (2013), ‘One’s self as friend and enemy?: The strange case of Richard Wollheim’s identity’, pp. 45–59 in: R. Harré and F. M. Moghaddam (eds), The Psychology of Friendship and Enmity. Relationships in Love, Work, Politics, and War. Vol. I: Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Processes, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Brodie, M. and Caine, C. (2009), ‘Class, sex and friendship: The long nineteenth century’, pp. 223–77, in Caine, B., ed. (2009), Friendship. A History, London: Equinox. Crook, Z. A. (2011), ‘Fictive friendship and the Fourth Gospel’, HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 67(3), Art. #997, 7 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v67i3.997 [accessed August 2015]. de Munck, V. (2015), ‘Review’ [of Illouz (2012)], Cultural Sociology 9(1), 122–4. Descharmes, B., E. A. Heuser, C. Krüger and T. Loy, eds (2011), Varieties of Friendship. Interdisciplinary perspectives on social relationships, Göttingen: V&R unipress. Devere, H. (2013), ‘The academic debate on friendship and politics’, Amity: The Journal of Friendship Studies 1: 5–33. Digeser, P. E. (2013), ‘Friendship as a family of practices’, Amity: The Journal of Friendship Studies 1: 34–52. Farrell, M. P. (2001), Collaborative Circles: Friendship dynamics and creative work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, R. (2003), ‘Romantic Friendship in the Nicholaevan University’, The Russian Review 62: 262–80. Fuller, S. (2000), ‘Disciplines’, pp. 176–77 in A. Hessenbruch (ed.), Reader’s Guide to the History of Science. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Global Heritage Fund (2007), ‘Cultural Heritage Across Borders’, http:// globalheritagefund.org/in_the_news/events_1/cultural_heritage_across_borders [accessed August 2015]. Greyling, A. C. (2013), Friendship, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hall, J. A. (2012), ‘Friendship standards: The dimensions of ideal expectations’, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 29(7): 884–907. Hammarfelt, B. (2011), ‘Interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of literature studies: Citation analysis of highly cited monographs’, Scientometrics 86: 705–25. Heyking, J. von and Avramenko, R., eds (2008), Friendship & Politics. Essays in Political Thought. Notre Dame, In: University of Notre Dame Press. Holmwood, J. (2010), ‘Sociology’s misfortune: Disciplines, interdisciplinarity and the impact of audit culture’, The British Journal of Sociology 61(4), 639–58. Hruschka, D. J. (2010), Friendship. Development, Ecology, and Evolution of a Relationship, Berkeley: University of California Press. Illouz, E. (2012), Why Love Hurts. A Sociological Explanation, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jacobs, J. A. (2013), In Defence of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and specialization in the research university, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

94

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Konstan, D. (1997), Friendship in the Classical World, New York: Cambridge University Press. Køppe, S. (2012), ‘A Moderate Eclecticism: Ontological and Epistemological Issues’, Integr. Psych. Behav. 46: 1–19. Krishnan, A. (2009), What are Academic Disciplines? Some observations on the Disciplinarity vs. Interdisciplinarity debate, NCRM Working Paper Series, 03/09. University of Southampton: ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. Leitch, V. B. (2000), ‘Postmodern interdisciplinarity’, Profession (2000), 124–31. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/25595710 [accessed August 2015]. Leydesdorff, L., B. Hammarfelt and A. Salah (2011), ‘The Structure of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: A Mapping on the Basis of Aggregated Citations Among 1,157 Journals’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62(12), 2414–26. Luftig, V. (1993), Seeing Together: Friendship between the sexes in English writing, from Mill to Woolf, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lynch, S. (2005), Philosophy and Friendship, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marcus, S. (2007), Between Women: Friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Nehring, D. (2013), ‘Review’ [of Illouz (2012)], Sociology 47(6), 1233–34. Nixon, J. (2015), Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Österberg, E. (2010), Friendship and Love, Ethics and Politics. Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern History. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press Paine, R. (1974), ‘An exploratory analysis in “middle-­class” culture’, pp. 117–37 in: E. Leyton (ed.), The Compact. Selected dimensions of friendship, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland. University of Toronto Press. Pakaluk, M., ed. (1991), Other Selves. Philosophers on Friendship. Indianapolis: Hackett. Palmer, C. L. and L. J. Neumann (2002), ‘The information work of interdisciplinary humanities scholars: Exploration and translation’, The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 72(1), 85–17. Porter, A. L. and I. Rafols (2009), ‘Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? Measuring and mapping six research fields over time’, Scientometrics 81 (3), 719–45. Rorty, A. O. (1993), ‘The historicity of psychological attitudes: Love is not love which alters not when it alteration finds’, pp. 73–88 in: N. K. Badhwar (ed.), Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rumens, N. (2012) ‘Queering cross-­sex friendships: An analysis of gay and bisexual men’s workplace friendships with heterosexual women’, Human Relations 65(8), 955–78. Singer, I. (2009), The Nature of Love, Vol 1–3, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

The Borderology of Interdisciplinarity Spencer, L. and R. Pahl (2006), Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tartari, M. (2014), ‘Review’ [of Illouz (2012)], International Sociology Reviews 29(2), 174–77. Whitley, R. (2000), The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zerubavel, E. (1991), The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

95

6

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks Vincent Fella Hendricks

Bubbles across disciplines Bubbles are usually associated with situations in finance, where the price people are willing to pay for an asset far exceeds its fundamental value (Vogel 2010). The infamous Dutch tulip frenzy shows that what is worth but a few cents today was ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman in March 1637, which translates to close to a million US dollars today. Other textbook examples include the South Sea and Mississippi excess about a century after the tulip bulbs, the US stock market as of 1929, the Japanese real estate and equity markets of the 1980s, the dot.com craze and internet stock boom of the 1990s . . . and of course the balloons, frenzies and speculative mania in the world economy leading to the global market crash of 2007–8 in which we are still in the midst of the aftermath. Trading assets requires investment, in finance, typically cash or some other sort of liquid, readily available and easily transferable, means. There are many instances where we invest liquid means to create a perceived value on a daily basis without ever thinking about it. Items like ‘likes’, upvotes, comments, re(tweets), selfies, emoticons are invested and traded daily online in the expectation of returns such as visibility, sympathy, understanding, status, influence, power, respect . . . Sometimes, these largely cost-­neutral liquid means all get invested in a few assets, blowing their traded value way out of proportion. Sometimes, the liquid means chase the wrong assets and overheat the value of a social asset – from sympathy over fame to hatred. Accordingly one may speak of opinion bubbles, political bubbles, bullying bubbles, status bubbles, fashion bubbles, art bubbles, even science bubbles (Hendricks 2014a; Hendricks and Hansen 2015). These bubbles may push collectives of people – sometimes even computers – in the same (often) jinxed direction: thinking the same thing; acting in the same

98

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

apathetic way when they witness somebody in distress online (Hendricks 2014b) or offline (Rendsvig 2014); holding the same polarized opinions in politics (Peng 1994; Layman et al. 2006); appreciating the same art; ‘liking’ the same posts on social media (Centola 2010); upvoting the same reviews (Muchnik et al. 2013); purchasing the same brand names; subscribing to the same research programme in science (Budtz Pedersen and Hendricks 2013), etc. The person with the greatest number of Instagram followers in Denmark – about 1 million – is a young man named Benjamin Lasnier. He has one obvious qualification: people think he looks like Justin Bieber. From this look-­a-like feature Lasnier initialized a carefully planned marketing campaign posting photos factoring in different time zones for maximum exposure and eventually achieving fame, product placement offers for clothing and accessories, record contracts all based on cyber-­social bubble economics – everybody believes that everybody believes that there is something of value here. It is a bit like day-­ trading in a stock where nobody really cares whether there is a fundamental value attached to the asset. As long as others believe that others believe that there is some value, then that is good enough for trading and making a buck, getting respect, status, recognition, influence or some similar notion of social capital (Hendricks 2014d). On 23 April 2013 Associated Press tweeted: ‘Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is Injured’. The tweet was quickly identified as a hoax; AP’s Twitter page had been hacked. But by then the US stock market had crashed. It had taken only minutes and caused ‘the fear index’, to surge 10 per cent. The market apparently lost almost $200 billion according to USA Today. That’s what (re-)tweets can do for you – an opinion bubble of ‘innocent’ (re-) tweets creating market panic among real traders as well as computers (Hendricks 2014e). During the 2012 Election, the Obama campaign team jumped on reports about Mitt Romney’s finances, issuing statements and strafing Romney on Twitter after Vanity Fair and Associated Press published stories raising questions about his blind trusts and offshore holdings. There was nothing to the tax-­haven stories. But political parties and political stakeholders may be tempted to think about what political themes or debates may be subject to heightened political attention – and anger, fear and stories of indignation often enjoy huge social transmission (Berger 2013) creating political bubbles where truth and political capital part company. Social media are excellent for padding such political narratives, especially those flirting with activity that mobilizes sentiments such as anger and indignation.

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks

99

One may invest an opinion on the free marketplace of ideas online from social media platforms to opinion aggregators and a certain idea or stance, whether political, religious or otherwise, may at a certain point gain popularity or prominence. Respect, fame, power, influence in turn become social assets in no small measure by the number of people apparently subscribing to them in terms of easily available and transferable liquid means like likes, upvotes, clicks, selfies or similar endorsements of often minimum personal investment. The result may be that everybody is trending the same way as a result of social proof (Cialdini 2007) where individuals assume beliefs, norms or actions of other individuals in an attempt to reflect the ‘correct’ view, stance, preference, behaviour for a given situation. Social proof – together with the manner in which the individual agent processes the available information about other agents’ beliefs, norms and actions – may align groups. But this alignment may simultaneously be independent of whether this mode of operation is necessarily tracking the truth or is the right thing to do – irrational group behaviour or wrongful belief aggregation fuels bubbles (Ofek and Richardson 2003; Hansen, Hendricks and Rendsvig 2013). Bubbles may be identified in disciplines other than finance, furnishing a generic definition as follows: A bubble is an (often) irrational way of collectively aggregating beliefs, preferences or actions based on social proof in a bubble-­hospitable environment. Say that an asset, social or financial, bubbles, if and only if, the asset trades at prices far exceeding its fundamental value.

The guiding research principle of the new field of Bubble Studies is that bubbles significantly amount to information control problems among deliberating agents who are collectively susceptible to robustly demonstrated socio-­psychological features like boom-­thinking, group-­thinking, pluralistic ignorance, bystander, bandwagon and lemming effects, which together with determinate market conditions may make for bubble-­hospitable environments in which bubbles of opinion, preference and action may grow – in as well as out of control. The idea is thus to redefine and expand the study of bubble phenomena across different ontologies by:

1. focusing on the socio-­psychological phenomena among individuals leading to often irrational group behaviour facilitated by imperfect or wrongful information processing among group members influenced by social proof;

100

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

2. using bubble models in economics (Brunnermeier, 2008) to study social assets, ‘social capital’, ‘opinion’, ‘fame’, ‘recognition’, ‘respect’, ‘power’, ‘influence’ apparent in other ‘markets’ (agent interactive settings) with particular emphasis on information-­driven dynamics and thus study bubble formation, bursts and deflation across traditional domains and disciplines; 3. uncovering, in a novel way, the formal structure and dynamics, providing simulation and experimental results, offering resolutions of, and recommendations for avoiding, the bubble or lemming behaviour of agents reasoning and processing information in concert. By aligning problems of bubble formation in miscellaneous markets with information-­control problems Bubble Studies brings together philosophy, economics, logic, mathematics, social psychology, information theory, behavioural science, and computer science to form a novel and thoroughly interdisciplinary platform for analysing and resolving often destabilizing bubble-­ phenomena of human and market interaction and to answer central questions such as:

1. To what extent, and in which way, are phenomena such as pluralistic ignorance, cascades, polarization, bystander effects and other group-­ psychological biases and erroneous reasoning responsible for macroscopic coordination phenomena like boom-­thinking in religious or ideological opinion, the emergence of trends, changes in environment of opinion in science, the strange bubble economics of ‘selfies’ and group-­recognition, group-­think in opinion bubbles on the web, Twitter-­storms and online shit-­storms, ‘like’- and reality culture, cyber-­bullying, popular political programmes, science funding, etc.? 2. What impact do opinion bubbles, polarization and lemming effects have on networks in which we interact and how may such bubbles be resolved in terms of formal modelling, experiment, simulation, mechanism design, policy recommendations and nudges? 3. Are some agent types, or networks, less susceptible to unfortunate bubble-­ based behaviour than others, and if so, what are the informational conditions for ‘bubble immunity’ in markets, from finance to overheated extremist polarization in matters of religion? Answering such questions will extend the prevalent theories of bubbles and evaluate their explanatory power in other disparate settings. But bubbles may not necessarily be malignant if they mirror public conviction on correct

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks

101

information and social influence and reason are aligned. Bubbles calling for crowd climate awareness, race and gender equality, health care, altruistic behaviour etc. seem benign enough and thus bubbles may perhaps be used to promote good ideas and socially desired initiatives.

Bubble-­hospitable environments Bubbles do not just appear out of the blue. They are cultivated in environments – bubble-­hospitable environments in finance, in science, society and on social media. A central part of the Bubble Studies paradigm is to isolate the nuts and bolts of such environments, as they are methodologically pivotal to the success of this interdisciplinary research endeavour. While scouting for such milieux one should look out for assorted additives, which when mixed in the right way, may make the prices at which an asset is traded part company from the fundamental value of the asset. Now a social asset may be sympathy for a political stance, disgust towards a religious denomination,

Listing 6.1  Bubble-­hospitable environments To spot bubble-­hospitable environments, look out for: 1. Assets of interest; social capital, status, respect, sympathy, influence, power, stock, real estate . . . 2. Low or cost-­neutral investment of liquid means in terms of ‘likes’, upvotes, comments, selfies, emoticons, cash . . . 3. Political, institutional or commercial initiatives boosting liquid exuberance from ‘like’-farms to generous banks and mortgage brokers. 4. Expectations of fast return of investment in terms of social capital, fame, respect, influence, encouragement, reputation, sympathy, money . . . 5. The presence of investors (or traders) but also noise makers, trolls and other forms of market derailing expectant investors in the marketplace. 6. Architectural configuration of the online aggregate platforms or social marketplaces facilitating individual investment, possible framing, and the detectable accumulation of liquid means around an asset. 7. Network and ‘friendly’ sorting of content or information. 8. Algorithmic, or other deliberate, sorting of content of information. 9. Elements of social proof; bandwagons, bystanders, cascades, altruistic punishment, conformity . . . 10. Investor information about other investors.

102

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

subscription to some cultural conviction, variegated social imprimatur, and so on. It has been largely assumed that there is a fundamental value to an asset, when defining bubbles. But on the current understanding, fundamental value is not a precondition as long as one may get other traders to believe that everybody else believes that whatever is being traded is worth something. By way of example, this is largely the case in cyber-­social bubble economics (Hendricks 2014b) and the Lasnier situation, where pluralistic ignorance carried the weight of trading social status. In turn, social psychology may be propelled to light speed online from pluralistic ignorance to jumping bandwagons on a global network. A momentous part of the current information-­driven models of bubble emergence in economics relates to what investors know, or do not know, believe or do not believe, about each other and the market conditions. In particular Abreu and Brunnermeier (2003) and Brunnermeier (2008) identify four main strands of bubble models including:

1. models in which all investors have rational expectations and symmetric information (Blanchard and Watson 82), but bubbles all appear the same; 2. models for which investors are asymmetrically informed as they all know that the asset is overheated, but it is not common knowledge that a bubble is in the works (Allen, Morris and Postelwaite 1993; Brunnermeier 13); 3. models where bubbles persist due to limited arbitrage where rational and well-­informed investors interact with noise traders psychologically biased in unfortunate ways (DeLong et al. 1990); and 4. models of bubbles in which different investors hold different beliefs about the fundamental value of the asset and agree to disagree accordingly (Harrison and Kreps 1978). In all four model types, social information implicitly plays a key role among the investors when it comes to bubble formation. By way of example, an uncertain opinion investor who believes that everybody else believes in some political programme, may be influenced by apparent social proof to believe in the same programme, even though, in fact, very few actually find the political programme appealing. Here the evil cousin of common knowledge – pluralistic ignorance – is in play once more as one of the climacteric stimulants of a political bubble (Hendricks and Rendsvig 2015). Similarly, every opinion investor may very well know that the situation surrounding the killing of a giraffe in a Danish zoo is not really a question of animal molestation but about the configuration of the gene pool in European

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks

103

zoological gardens. While the individual opinion investor knows this, it is not the case that every investor knows that every investor knows; thus it is not common knowledge among them. In this case, every investor may privately know that the problem pertains to genetic incompatibility but simultaneously erroneously believe that everybody else believe that Marius the giraffe is about animal molestation. A lack of common knowledge can start Twitter-­storms. Now, here is a whole research programme in mapping the landscape of what opinion investors know, assume or believe about their own point of view and the view of others (e.g. social information, when it comes to bubble formation in science and society – analogue as well as digital).

Conglomerate objects and research management The object of inquiry – that is bubbles – in Bubble Studies is a conglomerate research object consisting of a spread of different disciplines properly aligned to each other and working in sync. A non-­exhaustive catalogue of scientific fields making up the interdisciplinary research programme which Bubble Studies is, includes in more or less arbitrary order:

1. Economics – entities, vocabulary and formal models of bubble emergence in finance, lab models of bubbles and market types; 2. Mathematics (including game theory, decision theory) – the formal models of agent interaction, strategic reasoning, structure and dynamics of bubble formation; 3. Social psychology and behavioural science – social proof, socio-­ informational phenomena, collective reasoning and pitfalls, rational and irrational group patterns of behaviour, experiments, nudging; 4. Computer science and information theory – network structures, information transmission, automated opinion aggregators and ranking systems, social media platform architectures, feed technology, search engine technology, simulation; 5. Philosophy – the epistemology of belief formation, revision, knowledge acquisition and maintenance, agency, rationality, trust, agreement, disagreement, the epistemic ballgame of deliberation, decision and action; 6. History – systematic historical studies of bubble phenomena from revolutions to the dot.com crisis based on the generic elements of bubble-­ hospitable environments;

104

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

7. Social science – systematic studies of group agency, institutional design, sectorial configuration, societal organization, civil society, citizenship; 8. Political science – voting behaviour, turnout, elections, referendums, public opinion, deliberative democracy, public consultation, political strategy. An immediate research management challenge is the focal alignment or convergence of the disciplines on the unique conglomerate research substance. The disciplines are not to run in parallel with each other and alongside the bubble object, but to end up as converging lines with the composite research object as the vanishing point factoring in everything from vocabulary to methodology, from social psychology to computer science. Isolating the generic elements of the bubble-­hospitable environments (Listing 6.1) will serve as the immediate platform for this interdisciplinary alignment. To further joint alignment and interdisciplinary convergence on the object of inquiry a set of adequate mappings is initially required from:

1. Assets/liquidity/returns/markets/agents (investors)/investment horizon in economics to assets/liquidity/returns/markets/agents (investors)/investment horizon on social media, in politics, reality culture, in the news and the press, health care and treatment and elsewhere where bubbles may emerge. A noise trader in economics (Black 1985) may, given certain reasonable assumptions, be considered affine to a noisemaker (troll) in the blogosphere

Figure 6.1  Bubbles as conglomerate research objects.

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks

105

(Hendricks 2014d; Hendricks and Hansen 2015). Monetary return is well defined. It is less transparent what the return of an opinion investment online pertaining to the current refugee and migrant debate in Europe amounts to. Thus, such mappings are not always isomorphic but the lack of such isomorphisms, or inadequacy of postulated mappings, is a crucial methodological tool in the demarcation of bubble phenomena, avoiding confirmation bias and consequently not seeing bubbles everywhere. Domestic violence and the proliferation of a fashion trend like ‘skinny jeans’ are not bubble phenomena, even though there is a lot of domestic violence and plenty of skinny jeans out there. Bubble Studies as a scientific composite should not end up a bubble itself (Hendricks and Hansen 2015). Items like assets, liquidity, returns, agents etc. are largely generic ontological elements, while:

2. investor information about the elements of the markets, about each other, susceptibility to social proof, organization in network structures, bubble dynamics, intervention strategies are all epistemological features of the bubble-­hospitable environment; whereas 3. formal modelling, constrained conceptual analysis, experimentation and simulation belong to the methodological toolbox of Bubble Studies. Now for each bubble phenomenon, from Twitter storms over opinion bubbles, political bubbles, status bubbles, consumer bubbles, news bubbles to bullying and science bubbles the content of (1) to (3) above has to be collected, clarified and checked out ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically. The results are:

1. Bubble Studies demarcation; 2. disciplinary alignment; 3. precise determination of the composite research object in some studied domain; and 4. the rendering of cross-­disciplinary results: a. from the structure and dynamics of various bubble phenomena to b. intervention strategies for malignant bubbles and c. stimulation proposals for possible benign bubbles, all in accordance with the bubble matrix depicted in Figure 6.2.1 That’s the brass tacks and business of Bubble Studies.

106

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Figure 6.2  Bubble matrix

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks

107

Science policy and investment portfolios The study of bubbles and related information distortion phenomena is the study of a central and important human structure. It is a thoroughly interdisciplinary enterprise involving psychologists, behavioural scientists, philosophers, historians as well as economists, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists. Preventing malignant bubble effects will be one of the major challenges of the information age, and it should play an important role in the humanities. Taking science itself as the object, ask: What does the growing insight in bubble phenomena reveal about science policy – the humanities in particular? The more general and less theoretically refined a scientific claim is, the harder it is to falsify – potentially making parts of science rely on such immunizing features in bubble-­hospitable environments. Perhaps the current fad of attempting to coach scientific applications into immediate usability by the prioritizing of ‘Interdisciplinarity’, ‘Grand Challenges’ etc. adds to such effects – making it potentially worthwhile for even very remote corners of the research world to try and recast their research in such terms. By way of example, every research proposal is not interdisciplinary just because it may inform other sciences. If the object of inquiry is not an interdisciplinary composed ‘whatchamacallit’ saying – even emphatically – that it is, doesn’t make it so. Science, like any other field that attracts investment, is prone to bubbles. Overly optimistic investments in scientific fields, research methods and technologies generate episodes comparable to those experienced by financial markets prior to crashing. Assessing the toxic intellectual debt that builds up when too much liquidity is concentrated on too few assets is an important task if research funders want to avoid going short on overvalued research. Neuroscience may be the next big science bubble; in the humanities, suffice it to mention fashionable waves such as Marxism, postmodernism, radical social constructivism with overly ambitious explanatory expectations – much as in neuroscience (Budtz Pedersen and Hendricks 2013). What should science policy learn from the diagnosis of such science bubbles? One idea may be to try to institutionalize pluralism in science support and funding systems. Not only in the elementary sense of giving the possibility of plural investigations of yet-­unknown answers from different viewpoints, but also in the sense that a plurality of different, independent support systems and modes may be preferable. This may go against basic administrative simplicity, preferring rationalization in the sense of fusing a plurality of different subsystems into easily controllable, larger wholes. A plurality of different funding agencies

108

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

composed in different ways should be combined with a differentiated range of funding formats – including small- and medium-­scale group applications for initial investigations, which may or may not later evolve into larger programmes. There is no guarantee against the appearance of science bubbles, but their existence should be taken into consideration in science policy so as to attempt to create an environment for the development of sciences, which is not bubble-­ hospitable. A smart portfolio manager will always tell you to secure diversification in your investment portfolio in order to spread the risk and avoid frenzies, manias and bubbles. The same may apply for science funding.

While at it: humanities on the offensive Homo sapiens as a species is approximately 200,000 years old. The behavioural characteristics that humans are known by today date back about 50,000 years. Now, compared to the age of the universe we’re clearly infants. Compared to, say, the advent of the Internet recently celebrating its fortieth birthday, we’re pretty old. Compared to the birth of social media, we’re definitely quite experienced as to human interactions, expressions and relations. Homo sapiens has even come up with a discipline designed to describe, analyse and account for this experience – it’s called the Humanities. And in the age of information, Humanities has a whole new target package and a second life to go with it. Humanities is the study of the human condition, interaction, expression, and relation to nature, technology, health, art, politics, religion, . . . money, matter and mystery. Now, the Internet is really an online cultural treasure chest and a constantly updated repository of such human interactions, expressions and conditions – for better and for worse – and they are all on file, searchable by a myriad of web search engines, network analysers, crowd opinion aggregators and the list goes on. Leopold von Ranke (1775–1886), a German historian and the pioneer of the modern source-­based history with a profound influence on Western historiography could not have asked for better conditions for conducting studies of the human condition. But von Ranke in his search for objectivity in historiography, would, most likely, also be apprehensive regarding the ease with which information may be obtained for deliberation, decision and action in the information age. Not all information is good information, indeed information may, if not properly acquired, formatted, handled and administered derail reason and rationality, lead to unfortunate bubble formation in science and society at large and even threaten democracy (Hendricks 2014f). Years down the line from

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks

109

von Ranke, Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, one of the most successful companies back in the early days of personal computers, also warned against the pitfalls of information in abundance, infostorms and the uncritical usage thereof, as he is reported to have proclaimed: ‘Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant’. In the same vein, Jeffrey Klintrop, chief market strategist of LPL Financial Corp., recently said: ‘If something is going on, Twitter is the place to go to get the fastest information (. . .) It’s gonna get there first and it might not be the full story. That is where you have to wait for other established news sources to comment and do legwork on your own.’2 The ‘legwork’ that Jeffrey Kleintrop is referring to is much of what von Ranke instigated by his search for objectivity including source-­based information rather than hearsay, reflective criticism, multiple source triangulation and many of the other methods of scientific inquiry taught in the Humanities today. Thus, the common practices of the Humanities to secure qualified deliberation, decision and action is already in use out there as we face these tasks every day across the board from economic decisions to what school to choose for our children. But there is simultaneously a narrative out there which has been gaining strength for a number of years: the Humanities is in decline; there are no or only very limited job opportunities for majors in the Humanities; majors in the Humanities are often societal burdens because of unemployment and prospects of low tax revenues and the Daily Beast recently declared History, Philosophy and English some of the most useless majors of 2012.3 Proponents of the value of Humanities often point to successful business stories, innovators, incubators, instigators and luminaries with a background in these ‘useless’ fields, and argue for the value of Humanities for cross-­cultural understanding in a global world, analytic skill sets, critical thinking and deliberative diligence, preservation of cultural or intellectual heritage and other academic virtues of a classical education and sometimes re-­frame the apparently unimpressive unemployment numbers in such a way that they do not look so grim. These moves read as defensive tactics, rather than offensively setting the new standards for, and second life of, the Humanities in the information age. Frankly, coming from the Humanities we don’t want to be seen as the quarterbacks of scientific practice but want to be on the offence scoring touchdowns, generating results and setting the agenda for where to go from here. There is new territory here to conquer, analyse and understand for the Humanities. Here is a target package from the abyss of new challenges in the age of information technology and social media:

110

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

1. Outsourcing human interaction and communication to technology, as Selinger recently noted pertaining to a new app: ‘BroApp, a “clever relationship wingman” ’ (their words) that sends ‘automated daily text messages’ to your significant other.4 It offers the promise of ‘maximizing’ romantic connection through ‘seamless relationship outsourcing’. What are this and other similar automated initiatives going to mean for the human condition? 2. The advent of ‘social physics’ as a new theory of social interaction based on network analyses which spills over into organizational management, urban planning, and digital privacy among other things (Pentland 2014). 3. The faith and nature of transparency, security, revolution, change, democratization of information, freedom, equality, enlightenment, knowledge, method, power, sense, sensibility, sentiment and all the other central notions of (digital) Humanities and Big Data. 4. Bubble formation and infostorms from finance to status economics, opinions, fashion, science, and art and the discontinuity between saying something online and doing something for real, combined with the role of online gestures as opposed to real-­life communication and conversation. 5. . . . and the list goes on . . . What is it Al Pacino says in Scent of a Woman? ‘I’m just getting warmed up!’ Indeed, the Humanities are just getting warmed up for a second life and we are all in it – from natural science, technology to social science and essentially interdisciplinary humanities.

Acknowledgements This research was only made possible by a generous grant from the Carlsberg Foundation establishing CIBS (The Center for Information and Bubble Studies), University of Copenhagen.

Notes 1 Items (arbitrarily ordered) in the columns are possible placeholders for concepts listed in the heading – from Asset to Simulation – the contents of which are dependent on the bubble phenomena under investigation which again are listed in the column on the extreme left – from opinion bubbles to #tag trends.

Bubble Studies: The Brass Tacks

111

2 See http://www.newsleader.com/usatoday/article/2106985 [accessed 22 September 2015]. 3 See http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/04/23/the-13-most-­useless-majors-­ from-philosophy-­to-journalism.html#endSlide [accessed 22 September 2015]. 4 See http://www.wired.com/2014/02/outsourcing-­humanity-apps/ [accessed 23 September 2015].

References Abreu, D. and Brunnermeier, M. K. (2003), ‘Bubbles and crashes’, Econometrica 71: 173–204. Allen, F., Morris, S. and Postlewaite, A. (1993), ‘Finite bubbles with short sale constraints and asymmetric information’, Journal of Economic Theory 61, 206–29. Berger, J. (2013), Contagious. New York: Simon & Schuster. Black, F. (1985), ‘Noise’, Journal of Finance, Vol. 41(3): 529–43. Blanchard, O. J. and Watson, M. W. (1982), ‘Bubbles, rational expectations, and financial markets’, in Crisis in the Economic and Financial Structure, ed. P. Wachtel. Lexington, MA: Lexington. Brunnermeier, M. K. (2008), ‘Bubbles’, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Second Edition, S. N. Durlauf and L. E. Blume (eds), London: Palgrave. Budtz Pedersen, D. and Hendricks, V. F. (2014), ‘Science Bubbles’, Philosophy and Technology, 27(2014): 503–18. Cialdini, R. (2007), Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. Centola, D., (2010), ‘The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment’, Science, 329 (5996): 1194–97. DeLong, J. B., Shleifer, A., Summers, L. H. and Waldmann, R. J. (1990), ‘Noise trader risk in financial markets’, Journal of Political Economy 98, 703–38. Hansen, P. G., Hendricks, V. F. and Rendsvig, R. K. (2013), ‘Infostorms’, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 44(3), April: 301–26. Harrison, J. M. and Kreps, D. (1978), ‘Speculative investor behavior in a stock market with heterogeneous expectations’. Quarterly Journal of Economics 89, 323–36. Hendricks, V. F. (2013), ‘All those likes and upvotes are bad for democracy’, Business Insider 18.12.2013: http://www.businessinsider.com/likes-­and-upvotes-­are-bad-­ news-for-­democracy-2013-12?IR=T) (accessed 25 August 2015). Hendricks, V. F. (2014a), ‘From the Art World to Fashion to Twitter, We’re All Living in Bubbles’, Epoch Times 12.01.2014: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/445574-from-­theart-­world-to-­fashion-to-­twitter-were-­all-living-­in-bubbles/) (accessed 25 August 2015). Hendricks, V. F. (2014b), ‘If You Really Want to Help a Troubled Teen, Don’t Like Their YouTube Video’, Business Insider 13.2.2014: http://www.businessinsider.com/ if-­you-really-­want-to-­help-a-­troubled-teen-­dont-like-­their-youtube-­video-20142?IR=T) (accessed 25 August 2015).

112

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Hendricks, V. F. (2014c), ‘Neuroscience risks being the next science research bubble’, Medicalxpress 05.11.2014: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-neuroscience-­ science.html) (accessed 25 August 2015). Hendricks, V. F. (2014d), ‘When Twitter Storms Cause Financial Panic’, New Statesman 22.01.2014: http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2014/01/when-­twitter-storms-­ cause-financial-­panic) (accessed 25 August 2015). Hendricks, V. F. (2014e), ‘The Strange Bubble Economics of Selfies’, Mashable 15.05.2014: http://mashable.com/2014/05/15/social-­capital/) (accessed 25 August 2015). Hendricks, V. F. and Hansen, P.G. (2016), Infostorms: Why do we ‘like’? Explaining Individual Behavior on the Social Net. 2nd edition. New York: Copernicus Books/ Springer Nature. Hendricks, V. F. and Rendsvig, R. K. (2015), ‘The Philosophy of Distributed Information’, in Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Information, ed. L. Floridi. London: Routledge. Layman, G. C., Carsey, T. M. and Horowitz, J. M. (2006), ‘Party Polarization in American Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science 9: 83–110. Muchnik, L., Aral, S., Taylor, S. J. (2013), ‘Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment’, Science, 9 August 2013: Vol. 341, No. 6146, pp. 647–51. Ofek, E. and Richardson, M. (2003), ‘DotCom mania: The rise and fall of Internet stocks.’ Working Paper No. FIN-01-037 58(3), 1113–38. New York University, Stern School. Peng, Y. (1994), ‘Intellectual Fads in Political Science: The Cases of Political Socialization and Community Power Studies’, Political Science and Politics, Vol. 27(1): 100–8. Pentland, A. (2014), Social Physics. Ney York: Penguin Books. Rendsvig, R. K. (2014), ‘Pluralistic ignorance in the bystander effect: informational dynamics of unresponsive witnesses in situations calling for intervention’. Synthese, Vol. 191(11), 2471–98. Vogel, H. L. (2010), Financial Markets: Bubbles and Crashes. New York: Cambridge University Press.

7

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences Magnus Biilmann and Simo Køppe

Introduction The last twenty to twenty-­five years have seen overwhelming developments within the neurosciences. The most interesting and telling of these are the external developments in relation to other disciplines; the crossing of boundaries into other disciplines. And not just into the adjacent disciplines of psychology and biology, but in reality all other disciplines including a number of the humanities and social sciences. This period has probably seen a greater attraction to the field of neurosciences than ever before. One may wonder why the neurosciences have become so popular and how they actually contribute to the development of other disciplines. Here, there are four relatively clear issues, which we will try to illustrate:

1. Are the neurosciences really this popular, or is it just a lot of smoke but no fire? 2. What are the more implicit reasons behind this trend? If the influence is as immense as it seems to be, then it is definitely overdetermined (i.e. multiple causes at once determine the specific interest in the neurosciences). 3. The visualization of the brain-­scanning as an example. 4. How do the neurosciences manifest themselves in the humanities? This will be exemplified by the issues of mirror neurons and neuroaesthetics.

The popularity of the neurosciences It is easy to see that the neurosciences have exploded onto the scene. If you search neuro* and the humanities or social sciences, a picture emerges (see Table 7.1):

114

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Table 7.1  Number of hits on Google Scholar over three and a half decades Google Scholar 1980–1990 1991–2000 2001–2010 2011–2014 [4 years]

number of hits neuro* AND humanities

neuro* AND sociology

1,890 4,460 14,900 13,600

1,880 3,610 12,100 9,600

Even with all the reservations that must be taken in relation to the search results in Table 7.1, it still gives a fairly clear picture of the development. Note that the last row covers less than half the span of the previous periods. The increase apparently continues. Other more detailed studies show that the development may be even more rapid and accelerating even faster (Budtz Pedersen and Hendricks 2014). Various bibliometric counts of neuro-­related publications and the rapidly rising funding that the neurosciences are able to attract are also strong indicators (Budtz Pedersen 2011). The history of science has an example of a similar development in the attitude of the scientific community to neuroscientific disciplines. Neurophysiology and neuroanatomy were very dominant fields within medicine, psychiatry and psychology with various spillovers to anthropology over the last thirty to forty years of the 1800s (Køppe 2004, 2009). The early 1800s had seen a short period of proliferation of phrenology with Franz J. Gall (1758–1828) and Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832). Phrenology was based on measurements of the surface of the skull and postulated correlations between this ‘geography’ and psychological characteristics. This superficial – to put it mildly – approach was relatively quickly superseded by a series of discoveries about the nervous system and brain structure (the discovery of the differences between sensory and motor areas, measuring the speed of nerve energy, the neuron model, systematic neuropathological mapping of disorders based on the brain, etc.). This rapid and diverse progress led to an optimism that manifested itself in the fantasy that science would be able to reduce all psychic phenomena to brain processes within a short time span. A famous German psychiatrist, Wilhelm Griesinger, introduced in 1844 ‘the psychic reflex’ as a principle of explanation. Psychiatry became a branch of neuropathology and it was thought that it was just a matter of systematic and detailed studies before everything was mapped.

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

115

This line of thinking has not disappeared, but it has been affected by oscillations. The enthusiasm slowed down from the early 1890s onward. It is not easy to say why it happened but it was quite apparent. The most enthusiastic were soon called ‘brain mythologists’. One of the most reductionist physiologists was Emil Du Bois-Reymond who pioneered in the determination of the electrical nature of the nerve impulse and was closely linked to the so-­called Helmholtz school. In 1880 he released a small pamphlet called ‘The Seven World Riddles’ in which he partially renounced his own reductionism by according to certain phenomena a status of ignoramus et ignorabimus (we do not know and we will not know). Another indicator is the emergence of modern psychiatry with Emil Kraepelin who introduced the clinical description as the essential diagnostic criterion. Diagnostically, one should describe how the clinical picture appears, but one should not imagine how it might relate to the nervous system (a kind of psychiatry image ban of Bohrian dimensions). The decisive factor in this shift was probably that the projected models of the nervous system simply did not work. Progress remained at the primary level: detection of sensory and motor areas of the brain and their possible interactions; but the higher-­order functions such as language, thinking, memory, remembrance, consciousness etc. remained mere postulates. The models did not work either in the sense that they could prescribe a treatment for dysfunctions. With respect to mental disorders it was only with the development of psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs after World War II that things began to happen. There are many similarities and some differences to the present developments. A bio-­neuro-psycho-­industrial complex – the totality of psychotherapy, psychiatric and neuropathologic treatment, drug companies, scientific inquiries in these subjects as well as the public use of that knowledge – of equivalent size to the military industry has emerged and is sure to keep up the pace for a while, but there is, so far, no reason to believe that it will last.

Neuroscientific development is overdetermined This bio-­neuro-psycho-­industrial complex, naturally supported by the development of computer technology (micro techniques, dissemination of ideas through social media, the visually supported fantasy universes etc.) is predicated upon a whole discourse of the brain as a complex computer. From a sociological point of view, this forms a self-­vindicating process of knowledge justification,

116

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

which, of course, is reflected in both private and public funding. There are plenty of examples of concessionaires waiting for the current winner in various science wars (Rose and Rose 2012) where the battle between the DNA research in molecular biology versus particle physics is a classic. Neuroscience is enrolled in and reinforced by other contexts as well. The first, and probably the oldest, reinforcement is the strong prioritization of cognitive concepts supported by the dissemination of computer models over the last 30 years. A significant part of the development of computer models is based on the most basic neuroscientific assumptions, such as Hebb’s cell assemblies (see below). The comprehensive field of cognition, including fundamental discussions on language, has undoubtedly had an impact on neuroscience. There are, however, other reasons as well. A more diffuse yet important factor is discursive and is especially pertinent within the humanities. For years, significant parts of the humanities and the social sciences have been characterized by various forms of constructivism and relativism. This has not only challenged the perception of science, scientific methods, truth, concepts, etc. but it has also turned many research fields in the direction of an anti-­ontological approach to their subject area, by defining them as unique, context-­bound, time-­bound, linguistically constructed etc. This idea entails that the relevance of a subject area is volatile and does not exist independently of the current realization. It is safe to say that a kind of metal fatigue has emerged and turned against these post-­ modernist interventions, specifically against their abstinence from pursuing law-­like regularities. The point being that neuroscience represents a form of new materialism, which in no way replaces the postmodernist trend but provides an almost realistic framework for the subject area. The lack of ontological foundation for the postmodernist approaches is sought to be remedied by glancing at the material ontology of the neurosciences. A reaction directed against postmodernism in general will, of course, find support in the neurosciences, which in their purest form represent a more classical ideal of science. Compared to other developments of the history of science in the 1900s there are, of course, examples similar to the dissemination of the neurosciences although they have not been quite as immense. One example is the discovery of DNA, which revolutionized biology and greatly influenced other disciplines (e.g. psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and linguistics). It is interesting, however, that the DNA wave was based on the unique discovery in 1953 by Crick and Watson’s double helix model of DNA, representing a singular and quite fundamental discovery. In its original form the model in itself does not say

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

117

very much about heredity – even if that is what it has been used for in the frontier disciplines of biology – but it provides a base model for protein synthesis, the foundation of all life.

Scans Although there are many extra-­scientific reasons why neuroscience is so popular, there are also important internal reasons such as actual discoveries and techniques, which have supported the dissemination of knowledge about, for example, hemispherical functional differences, the role of the amygdala and hippocampus in memory, and the crucial importance of transmitter substances for psychotropic drug development. But they are not on par with the discovery of the DNA. We will highlight an important example, namely the emergence of scanning techniques which visualize the brain while it is working. Outside neurology and the clinical domain as a whole, it is particularly the functional imaging techniques that have achieved the greatest attention and popularity. A brief historical outline will suffice in our attempts to characterize why exactly imaging techniques in neuroscience are crucial for understanding their popularity. Philosophically speaking, imaging techniques such as MRI, fMRI, PET, MEG and EEG, and also the study of the brain in general, have been seen as either an approximation of, or even a final solution to the psychophysical problem (Abi-Rached and Rose, 2013). It is a specious notion that the solution might be obtained by understanding the material basis of our subjectivity. If, for example, it is possible to obtain a 1:1 relationship between cognition and a neural correlate, then cognitive functions could be explained by technical language only referring to material processes. Historically, it has been a huge problem for materialist reductionists that you cannot see or touch phenomena such as a psyche or a subject. And, as subjectivity is essential to the human sciences, their scientific legitimacy in the public but also within the scientific environments has been very limited. This is probably one of the reasons why the development of scanning techniques in the last third of the twentieth century has received so much attention in the public and within a number of scientific communities. In the second half of the 1800s it became obvious what an enormous role the brain played in relation to diverse mental functions, when the brain as an organ was studied intensely within physiology, anatomy and neurology. Prior to that, lesions of the brain had been virtually the only opportunity to study its functions.

118

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Lesion studies include the disadvantage that in most cases one had to wait for the patient’s death to ascertain the exact location of the damaged tissue. The modern imaging techniques were an opportunity to overcome the limitations of lesion studies. With imaging techniques one can score performance of living humans in experiments and more directly investigate the correlation between brain structure/function and mental function. ‘Structural’ image formation techniques came first; the functional techniques were not invented until later. Structural techniques provide a snapshot of the relationship between different anatomical structures; cell groups, different types of tissue, etc. These include acronyms such as CT (Computed Tomography) and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). In the context of the humanities, scanning methods only really became interesting when the more advanced functional techniques began to be developed. PET (Positron Emission Tomography) initially and later such techniques as MEG (Magnetoencephalogram) and particularly fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) have popularized scanning images of the brain within the scientific community, but also for a broader audience (Racine, Bar-Ilan and Illes 2005; Rose and Abi-Rached 2013; Rose and Rose 2012; Rose 2005). Of the functional scanning methods we will focus on fMRI as it is the most widely used technique (Raichle 2008). These scans are considered ‘functional’ as they create representations of the brain while it is operating. Contrary to the structural scans, it is not a representation of the anatomy of the brain but of the brain’s physiology, or, as the name indicates, brain functioning. This is done by having certain physiological markers or contrast agents for brain activity. The most widely used is called BOLD (Blood Oxygenation Level Dependant). It is an ‘endogenous’ contrast (i.e. one measures the body’s own substances, as opposed to ‘exogenous’ contrasts which may be injected (Logotethis, 2008)). The BOLD technique was developed by cognitive scientist Seiji Ogawa and colleagues in the late 1980s and was extensively put into use in the 1990s (Raichle 2008; Bandettini 2012). As the name indicates the blood oxygen levels measured are taken as indication of cell activity levels. (Raichle 2006). Haemoglobin binds oxygen in the blood and therefore also its circulation in the bloodstream. Haemoglobin responds to the magnetic field generated in an fMRI scan, and it is an image reflecting this process, which can be seen on the colourful scanning images. By the second half of the 1800s, the relationship between blood flow and brain function was explored by the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso, and also by

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

119

Charles Roy and the later Nobel laureate Charles Sherrington. Still, a number of years were to pass before the relationship was well established towards the mid1900s (Raichle, 2006). Ogawa’s invention of BOLD as a marker of brain function can be viewed as a continuation and strengthening of this assumption. Within a neuro-­scientific context, and particularly when using neuroscience in subject areas which traditionally belong to the humanities, it is important to keep in mind what these scanning techniques and their results reflect. There has been major hype about what scanning techniques and their colourful images may say about human beings. The same could be said about the criticism of this hype, although it has been expressed more within the scientific community (often by neuro- or cognitive scientists of various kinds) owing to the technical complexities. We will give some examples of what these critiques have pointed to as they illustrate the points of contention for the usability of scanning technology in general but also for the use of the techniques in humanities research. We will divide the critics into three groups:

1. the methodological and technical critiques; 2. the theoretical, conceptual critiques; 3. the critiques regarding the public’s perception of what the scan images illustrate.

Methodological and technical critiques The first kind of critiques are methodological and technical and have been very influential within research working with fMRI. One was raised by a prominent neurobiologist, Nikos Logotethis. In his article ‘What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI’ (Logotethis 2008) he describes several technical issues that complicate the interpretation of imaging results with fMRI. A scan is not just a scan. There are many technical options, and therefore also a wealth of options and choices when the scanner is set up. In some cases it pertains to the relationship between activity in certain cell groups or cells versus inactivity in others. In addition to that, it is also about how to define the scanning area – how much you zoom in or out on different parts of the brain, so to speak. Logotethis states in the conclusion: The limitations of fMRI are not related to physics or poor engineering, and are unlikely to be resolved by increasing the sophistication and power of the scanners; they are instead due to the circuitry and functional organization of

120

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

the brain, as well as to inappropriate experimental protocols that ignore this organization. Logotethis 2008

The critique points to concrete methodological choices and selections in the research process and to the fact that the studied phenomenon, the brain, is so complex in its structure and functioning that it is difficult to grasp how one should explore its related cognitive functions. A similar critique was raised by the cognitive psychologist, Russell Poldrack. He attacked great parts of cognitive neuroscience for invalid reasoning when interpreting experiments in which subjects have been exposed to different mental tasks while their brains are scanned (fMRI). The invalid interpretation, called ‘inverse inference’, claims that if brain activity has previously been observed in area X when process P is active, then we can use the presence of activity in area X in a new experiment as evidence that process P was again active (Poldrack, 2006, 2011, 2012). It amounts to the logical error of affirming the consequent (there could be other reasons for X than P). Poldrack illustrates the problem with the method in the following quote: The abstract [of a paper Poldrack is criticizing] concludes as follows: ‘Our findings document mechanisms of painful emotion, envy, and a rewarding reaction, schadenfreude’, in which the psychological states (i.e., pain or reward) are inferred primarily from activation in specific regions (anterior cingulate or ventral striatum). Poldrack, 2011, p. 692

A third and more condescending rhetoric is seen in the headline of Vul et al.’s draft, ‘Voodoo correlations in social neuroscience’. Due to great controversy within the scientific community the title was changed to ‘Puzzling high correlations in social neuroscience’ (Vul et al., 2009). Vul and colleagues attack several researchers in social neuroscience for giving a distorted picture of their findings. In several cases, unusually high correlations between cognitive-­ emotional functions and the neurobiological basis for these functions have been found. Vul et al.’s analysis of portions of this research indicates that the reason for the high correlations is that scans were performed first and then those brain areas showing the highest activity at the particular mental task were selected. When making use of fMRI, the scan images are divided into so-­called ‘Voxels’, small volumes where particular activity is observed and measured, and some of these Voxels have been deliberately discarded – thus, making the results seem more convincing.

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

121

The article by Vul et  al. led to intense discussions and disputes within the research community. But their critique, as well as the critique from Logotethis, Poldrack, and others (e.g. Bennett et al. 2011) – not to be reviewed here – seems to have had an important function, that is, a tightening and increased awareness of how to use fMRI as a scanning technique and what may be deduced from the results.

Theoretical, conceptual critiques The second type of critique is more theoretical. An example that has been quite visible within academia is the critique by professor of neuroscience, Max Bennett and philosophy professor, Peter Hacker. Their monumental work ‘Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience’ (Bennett and Hacker, 2003) is a general criticism of neuroscience’s conceptualizations of the phenomena studied. The research that Bennett and Hacker critique is mainly based on fMRI studies. They point to problems in the use of concepts, their consistency, and what they actually reflect. This is done based on a Wittgensteinian1 understanding of language. A large part of the neurocognitive scientific community commits, according to Bennett and Hacker, the ‘mereological fallacy’ resulting from the ‘mereological principle’. Mereology concerns the relationship between parts and wholes. Hence, the use of a multitude of neuroscientific terms to describe man as a whole, or what Bennett and Hacker call ‘persons’ is simply a category error. It may be a specious idea to wipe out the psychophysical dualism by using a phrase such as ‘I am my brain’, but it remains erroneous. Because, if you follow the logic and it is not just a metaphor/analogy/homonym, then it implies that ‘you’ (the brain) is no more than ‘7 inches tall’ (Bennett and Hacker 2007). Most people see the absurdity of this statement and Bennett and Hacker’s point is that within the research community one should make significantly more effort with conceptual work. However, a psychological vocabulary is often used to describe the brain or parts of the brain. Their analysis shows that large parts of ‘neuro-­talk’ is nonsense. Bennett and Hacker point to a modern version of a Cartesian dualism; only, instead of body/soul, it has become body/brain. The dualism remains.

Critiques regarding the public’s perception of what the scan images illustrate The third kind of criticism concerns the image reproductions. It is hard for anyone not to have noticed the large exposure of colourful scan images of the

122

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

brain in the press and in the general public. There have been various critiques of the imagery. Some have critiqued the aesthetic quality the images possess for being too convincing or compelling to laymen (Weisberg et  al. 2008, Dumit 2004). But convincing of what, you might ask, and why? Weisberg et al. (2008) conducted a study that showed that scientific presentations would convince laymen better with brain scan images than without, although the photos do not really contribute additional explanations or information. McCabe and Castel (2008) conducted a similar study. Their hypothesis was that people tend to subscribe to reductionist explanations. In this case, the mere visual representation of a brain gives people an intuitive understanding of some higher mental functions having been explained. Beaulieu uses the phrase ‘The-­mind-in-­thebrain’ to indicate what people believe they are seeing when confronted with the rainbow-­coloured images (Beaulieu 2002, p. 55) – namely, a physical material basis for mental functions. There is no one-­to-one relationship between mental functions and the images produced by brain scans. Hence, there is a risk of people getting the false impression that human beings may be reduced to neural functions. Racine, Bar-Ilan and Illes (2005) denote this understanding of the human subject ‘neuro-­ essentialism’. Whether the images will lead to a fundamental neuro-­essentialism or have other more moderate epistemic effects remains to be seen.

Mirror neurons and neuro-­aesthetics For centuries, and largely until modern technology made scanning a live brain possible, neurosciences had suffered from a distinct lack of empirically based scientific methods. A number of clinical methods to determine symptoms have been in place for a long time, but there were few experimental tools. You could wait until the patient died to examine which tissue was damaged or you could examine people who suffered brain injuries but survived. Since a significant part of the recorded injuries resulted in dysfunctional language features, aphasias became some of the first contacts between the neurosciences and one of the disciplines of the humanities, linguistics. The apparent localization of language (predominantly to the left temporal lobe) supports localization theories: the idea that well-­defined mental functions are handled by corresponding demarcated areas in the brain. This is a discussion that was reinforced by the early 1800s and there have been many and very different visions of possible models within the dichotomy between the strict localizationist

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

123

theories (’language is localized in the temporal lobe’) and the non-­localizationist and more dynamic theories that defend the view that higher order mental functions are not precisely confined to specific locations but are distributed over large parts of the brain. One of the most dominant theories was put forward by the English epilepsy researcher John Hughlings-Jackson (1835–1911). It included a multi-­localization of interconnected sensory and motor units and considered the representation of mental functions embedded in a hierarchy with increasing degrees of complexity. Variations of Hughlings-Jackson’s model were made by, among others, Sherrington (1857–1952), K. Lashley (1890–1958) and A. Luria (1902–77). The classic juxtaposition of the strict localization (one function in one place) and the dynamic, distributed and plastic localization (one function diffusely represented and never identical from time to time) has now been replaced by a more complex picture. First of all, more complex models are being developed within neurosciences that are not readily classified as a choice between one or the other. Within neurosciences’ own development there has clearly been a tendency over the last twenty to thirty years to include overall models of the nervous system, which basically try to account for higher order phenomena such as consciousness, thinking and complex perception. One of the most influential steps was the theorizations of D. O. Hebb (1904–85) and his definition of cell assemblies. Hebb describes how neurons can form themselves into more or less autonomous units, which may self-­regulate by having the outgoing nerve pathways (axons) switch back to the assembly allowing nerve impulses to be inhibited and enhanced by the assembly itself. This is an evolution of the classic associationism (neurons are connected to each other via associations) to describe units of greater complexity, each of which has a precise and limited function, not only as a representation. An organizational level for single neurons is introduced, which is used to describe how learning takes place by a dynamic modification of synapses. Hebb suggested mathematizations of the impulses between neurons in various types of cell groups. This systematic work laid the foundation for much of the later research coupling neuropsychology and computer models. Systems such as artificial intelligence, parallel processing and neural networks are indebted to Hebb’s theory and its later development. If we move one step higher up on the localization ladder, Antonio Damasio (1944–) is an example of a neurobiologist who in many ways tries to present a

124

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

complete theory of the human psyche on a neuroscientific basis. Damasio began his authorship with the book Descartes’ Error (1994), demonstrating that emotions can be considered as somatic markers that play a role in cognitive processes. His last book from 2010 – Self comes to mind – delivered a full-­fledged personality model on a neurobiological basis. The higher order mental functions such as perception, thought and consciousness are related in a hierarchical system of control centres which terminate in a conscious self, which in various ways is related to different likewise hierarchically organized parts of the nervous system. This is very much a distributed localization, and Damasio outlines a plausible model of the entire body’s involvement in the production of the human subject. So, what is interesting to the humanities about these neuroscientific developments? First, as in many other scientific contexts, we can observe a historical development of a discipline that exceeds its defined subject area (sensory and motor) and with increasing acceleration appropriates more and more characteristics of human beings, including the most complex mental functions such as language, consciousness, the self and even arch humanistic fields such as aesthetics, which we will explore further. Secondly, many of the theories, though far from all, are of a complexity that exceeds the usual scientific reduction. The dynamic and emergent models, such as Damasio’s, contain relatively explicit descriptions of the aforementioned characteristics of the human subject and are only possible to construct at the expense of the aim of reducing these phenomena to nerve cells and nerve impulses. Apparently, we can choose a non-­reductive but nonetheless substantially realistic model of our biology without falling into a reductionist ditch. That the humanities appropriate or engage in dialogue with scientific approaches does not necessitate reductionist approaches.

Mirror neurons The US neuropsychologist, V. Ramachandran, has in many contexts expressed the opinion that mirror neurons are what make us human. They form the basis for the development of a ‘theory of mind’, empathy, intersubjectivity, language – and ultimately society and culture (Ramachandran 2011). Mirror neurons are used in many different theories, but a crucial and common point relates to a simple discovery. There is nothing spectacular about detecting activity in the brain when we observe others, when we perform an action, or produce a meaningful linguistic utterance. Nor is it startling that certain sensory

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

125

modalities occupy different areas, or that certain types of movements activate certain parts of the somatic-­motor part of the cortex. What stands out is only that the activity is exactly the same when we observe an action, and when we perform the same action. The theories of mirror neurons appeared in the early 1990s. They were named by a number of Italian researchers (Rizzolatti et al. 1996 and Gallese et al. 1996) based on a series of experiments with macaque monkeys. The studies investigated motor representations and management of simple motor actions. The results highlighted a specific cortical area known as F5 of the cortex, where specific neuronal groups are activated in relation to specific types of motor actions. Two notable characteristics appeared: first, these neurons respond to types of specific motor actions (gripping with your hands, gripping with your mouth, holding something, manipulating objects, etc.) but do not respond to certain types of objects or to random movements (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 80). Secondly, they apparently react the same way whether the monkey makes the movement itself or observes another monkey doing the same thing. Apparently, mirror neurons respond to patterns and more abstract sequences of actions. The question is what needs to be decoded from the intentions of the movement to decipher the exact motor representations involved? All things/ objects have different affordances – that is, virtually anything can be used for many different things. To choose the right set of motor representations, the monkey must be able to read the intent of the act and relate it to his own intention – a form of intersubjectivity. It is these themes – to choose, to read intentions, intersubjectivity and others like imitation, identification, empathy, etc. – which popularized mirror neurons as part of a growing interest for the neurosciences within both humanities and the social sciences. As such, mirror neurons become a vital element in our understanding of the others’ actions. We understand other people by identifying with their actions and thus infer motives and intentions for these actions. Thus, mirror neurons came to be seen as an extremely important part of human social life and in the establishing of an individual self and an individual consciousness. We are formed in relation to others and if this relationality is locatable to a certain area of the brain then important facets of both the humanities and social science subject areas are related to a cerebral localization. Within a discursive context of the human and social sciences, mirror neurons are interesting because they are thematically overdetermined by other trends, understood as elongated discursive developmental lines thematizing agency, intersubjectivity, relationality and sociality. Within developmental psychology,

126

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

the dawning subject is now seen as significantly more active than earlier. From the mid-1970s onwards, previous descriptions of the emerging subject as passively receiving was challenged in favour of an insistence upon innate agency and an primary intersubjectivity. This has continued in the currently dominant attachment theory, as well as in experimental paradigms investigating the child’s construction of the psyches of other humans and, through that, its own self. Symbolic interactionism has highlighted the social relation as the focal point for the formation of the self, norms, the experience of self and others, etc. It is, within different contexts, the background for the development of themes such as ‘the social construction of reality’ (Berger and Luckman 1966), and continues up to constructionism in the 1990s where one might say that society is reduced to relationships between individuals or between groups. If one were to characterize key elements in the history of developing scientific ideas from 1980 to 2010, ‘relationship’ would be a strong contender. The social relationship becomes the core of the description of both the subject’s socialization and of society’s substantive components. And all of this suddenly seems to be supported by mirror neurons. They have thus become a materialization of social relations (i.e. relationships between at least two people). Given the influential impact of such theories of large-­scale social phenomena, it was almost predictable that the theory of mirror neurons would give rise to criticisms. One of the most thorough critics is Gregory Hickok (2014), and indeed there are still many unsolved problems and oddities with regard to mirror neurons (see also Meltzhoff and Decey 2003). A widely discussed theme is the degree of abstraction of the mirror neurons, within the assumed framework for identification of perception and action. Apparently only about 30 per cent of mirror neurons are relatively task specific while about 60 per cent are far less specific and thus more functionally abstract. That is, they identify the target of the action and not the exact action (Keyser and Fadiga 2008). In general, many of the discussions are based on an outdated perception of what motor skills are and how the control of motor functions takes place. It is widely believed that motor functions are controlled by motor conceptions – detailed scripts on how the body should initiate a series of muscle actions to perform a certain action. In some ways it is more likely that mirror neurons perform their duties on a very abstract level. That is, they identify abstract intentions and do not store the exact muscle constellation. To ‘quench one’s thirst’ for example, may after all be done in many different ways. But if that is the case, then it is no longer necessary to attach mirror neurons as closely to motor functions, as there are many other ways to deal with representations of ‘to quench one’s thirst’. Along similar lines of thought,

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

127

the concept was proposed to be extended: ‘perhaps a mirror neuron system serves to connect our own representations with those of others across multiple domains and more generally mapping one dimension onto another in order to abstract what is common to them’ (Oberman and Ramachandran 2009: 51). It is important to conceive the localization of mirror neurons as anything but static and steady concepts. The tendency to think of them as being static is in contrast to another tendency: embodiment, which emphasizes the dynamic, active, significance- or meaning-­creating body subject. There are a number of themes in the discussion of abstractions that are rarely mentioned. It might make sense that perception and action mirror each other. This does not mean that perception and action have the same representation, but that there is a level of meaning generation that apparently does not distinguish between perception and action. It is interesting in and of itself, but also when compared to other new approaches (not to be reviewed here); the cognitive semantic image schemas and Stern’s forms of vitality. All three operate with a level of abstraction that in some way subscribe to an amodal zone.

Neuroaesthetics Neuroaesthetics is a relatively new field of research. According to Nadal, Gomila and Galvez-Pol (2014), the term was introduced by neurophysiologist Semir Zeki in 1999 (Zeki, 1999). Historically, aesthetics in philosophy dates back to Ancient Greece (Jørgensen 2006), while the constitution of ‘modern’ aesthetics has been ascribed to Baumgarten’s implementation of the concept of aesthetics in 1735. According to neuroaestheticians (Brattico et  al. 2009) the experimental exploration of aesthetics was founded within psycho-­physics in Germany in the second half of the 1800s, more specifically with Theodor Fechner’s ‘Vorschule der Aesthetik’ from 1876 (Funch 1997). Fechner distinguished between an ‘inner psychophysics’, which described the relationship between psychology and brain physiological properties, and an ‘outer psychophysics’ which described the relationship between psychology and physically anchored outside-­world stimuli (Brattico et al. 2009; Chatterjee 2010). What characterizes neuroaesthetics? The Danish researcher in neuroaesthetics, Martin Skov defines the field as ‘a new scientific discipline whose object it is to identify and understand the neural processes involved in human art behaviour – those processes that underlie both the construction and the experience of art’ (Skov 2009: 11).

128

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

If we follow Fechner’s classical distinction between inner and outer psychophysics, we can say that neuroaesthetics has a vision to fill the ‘epistemological void’ of the study of inner psycho-­physical dimension (Chatterjee, 2010). The void is due to the shortage of methods or technologies. However, as described above, with the progressive refinement of image formation techniques (PET, MRI, MEG, fMRI, etc.), the exploration of the inner psychophysics is made possible to an unprecedented degree. The research field of neuroaesthetics thus tries to extend the study of aesthetics to include a neurobiological (physiological and anatomical) level. As a field of research, neuroaesthetics is quite heterogeneous, and studies have dealt with visual arts (Zeki, 1999; Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999), music (Goguen and Myin 2004) and literature (Carroll 1995), among others. Researchers represent many different disciplines: anthropology, philosophy, psychology, biology, medicine, linguistics, art history, and musicology (Goguen 1999; Nadal and Pearce, 2011; Lauring, 2014). The great variation of involved areas means that there is a plurality of ways in which the object is approached both in theory, by definition, as well as methodologically. Despite the theoretical plurality of neuroaesthetics, there is a hope of integrating various (mostly scientific) methodologies in the exploration of the human need to create and experience art (e.g. fossil studies of humans and related human-­like apes (paleontology), emotion research (cognitive neuroscience), cultural studies (anthropology), animal observation (ethology), etc). The common denominator in the many different approaches is the theory of evolution; a predominantly neo-Darwinistic variant. Many neuroaesthetes, in the broadest sense of the word, distinguish between what neuroscientific approaches may contribute, and what the evolutionary perspective may contribute. The former may contribute to explain the how; how our neuroanatomy and physiology work when we experience, for example art, and the latter can provide the answer to why specific funtional aspects of aesthetic experience originated (Zeki 1999; Chatterjee and Vartanian 2014). We will focus on the neuroscientific part of the research. Reviewing the literature on neuroaesthetics, one must distinguish between the descriptive and the experimental kind. Most of the literature deals with aesthetics or art in relation to existing general knowledge about the brain, whereas a smaller proportion has done specific experiments designed to test the aesthetic/artistic features and relate them to a neural basis (Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014). Several authors point to the experimental part needing to be prioritized in the future in order for neuroaesthetics to develop more productively (Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014; Skov and Vartanian, 2009).

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

129

An example of aesthetics formulated within a neuro-­essentialist framework is Semir Zeki and his theorizing. Zeki, the first appointed professor of neuroaesthetics in the world (University College London), tries to equate what artists throughout history have dealt with, and what modern neuroscience deals with in neuroaesthetics: (. . .) I hold the somewhat unusual view that artists are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them, but studying unknowingly the brain and its organization nevertheless. Zeki, 1999, p. 10

In the quote Zeki speaks of the artist, but his theorizing on perception and aesthetics actually includes more traditional theoretical approaches to aesthetics as well. In the same book Zeki writes that he views philosophers such as Plato and Hegel as types of primitive neurologists when they deal with aesthetics. They were not aware of the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie perception, hence, they used other methods to study aesthetics. According to Zeki, all visual art is expressed through the brain and must therefore obey the laws of the brain, whether in conception, execution or appreciation, and thus a theory of aethetics must be substantially based upon knowledge of the activity of the brain. To some degree Zeki correlates classic philosophy to his own field. At the same time their methods for the study of aesthetics are deemed insufficient, so neuroscience should be used to explore the subject more comprehensively. If we look at the boundaries between the humanities and science, Zeki’s theory seems to prioritize a (reductive) scientific approach, rather than a humanities approach. Zeki’s theorizing within descriptive neuroaesthetics is based on existing neuroscience. An example of experimental neuroaesthetics is the article ‘Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise: A parametric fMRI study’ (Kirk et  al. 2009). Here, the intention is to demonstrate that acquired expertise within a field, in this specific study, architecture, can affect the agent’s neurobiology and that researchers can observe a difference between neural correlates of aesthetic judgements from expert groups and non-­expert groups. The study included architects (acquired expertise) and non-­architects. The study alternately displays images of architecture and control images (faces). As for the control images it is assumed that the two experimental groups will react relatively similarly, as previous studies have found that similar assessments are given in relation to the ‘beauty’ of different faces across cultures and genders. Furthermore, there is evidence that some of the same neural structures involved in face recognition (the gyrus fusiformis) are also similar across cultures and genders. While the

130

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

subjects are shown images of architecture and faces, brain scans are carried out with a fMRI scanner. As is the norm with fMRI studies, there are many technical methodological reservations and methods are generally discussed more than theories. We will not comment upon technicalities, but give an overall impression of the process and the results, in order to illustrate the characteristics of neuroaesthetic research. Let us look at the conclusion of the study to gain insight into what knowledge was believed to be attained from an experimental neuroaesthetic study like this. First, we are told that the expertise (in architecture) alters the brain structures for ‘processing’ of aesthetic features and judgements as well as more general cognitive functions. However, this assumption does not depend on observed behaviour. We are dealing with an outcome in which both groups outwardly react fairly similar to both control stimuli (images of faces) and ‘expert stimuli’ (pictures of architecture). What is remarkable, according to the authors, is that while there are no significant differences at the behavioural level, there are still differences in some neural areas. Differences can be seen partly in the subcallosal part of the cingulate gyrus and the medial obitofrontal part of the cortex. The expert group generally has higher brain activity in these areas when viewing pictures of architecture and increased activity is not seen to the same extent in the non-­expert group. There is no such difference when control images are shown. Differences between the two experimental groups are only present in certain brain structures associated with reward (the above). When talking about structures associated with ‘reward’ it refers to other brain research, which has found strong correlates between certain brain structures and mental functions such as initiative, enjoyment, repetition, etc. As the task of the study is tied to a valorization or assessment of how attractive a picture of a house or a face is, it is assumed that it is via ‘reward’ that the study will find that the structures are involved differently in the two groups. The conclusion states that there is a difference between the two groups’ neural response in the hippocampus and precuneus, both are structures related to memory. In previous studies, precuneus has been correlated with the integration of new knowledge based on previous knowledge, and hippocampus has been found to be strongly correlated with episodic memory, which has to do with the recollection of events. Against this background Kirk et  al. (2009) assume that they can corroborate the hypothesis that other cognitive operations (in this case non-­conscious) are the basis for the evaluation of architecture by experts opposed by non-­experts. Thus, a well-­reasoned hypothesis is that experts (due to experience) draw on cognitive mechanisms such as episodic memory and

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

131

integration of knowledge based on previous knowledge, and thus on neural structures such as precuneus and hippocampus. In sum, according to the authors, the study shows that it is possible for two groups (experts vs. non-­experts) to make an aesthetic judgment fairly similarly on a behavioural level, but there are significant differences on the neurophysiological level activated in such an assessment. In addition, it leads to the assumption that the cognitive (non-­ conscious) strategy probably also varies between the two groups. Note that although the study inscribes itself in the field of ‘neuroaeshtetics’ and deals with differences in brain processes of ‘experts’ and laymen in terms of ‘aesthetic’ evaluation of architecture, aesthetic issues such as ‘What makes a building beautiful’ are not discussed at all. Nor if it makes a difference whether you ask if a building is appealing, as the subjects were asked, or if you ask whether it is beautiful. The knowledge we attain is similar to our (’neurocartographic’) knowledge that taxi-­drivers have well developed areas of the hippocampus (Maguire et al. 2000), which in itself is interesting and probably appropriate for their orientation capabilities (at least, before the GPS), but leaves us no wiser about exactly how the drivers are so good at finding their way.

Conclusion At the outset, we mentioned various factors which undoubtedly play a role in the popularity that neuroscience has achieved within the humanities (and other fields). There is obviously an element of scientific progress and a hope for a significantly greater progress in the foreseeable future – a hope for a neuropsychological basis for a number of phenomena so far traditionally described qualitatively within the humanities. However, one should not overlook the fact that that the vast majority of the humanities have almost always used methods from sociology (e.g. statistics) and natural sciences (e.g. carbon 14 dating) without that having shifted the fundamental ontological and epistemological approach to the subject areas of the humanities. In principle, there is more at stake with the neurosciences because an inclination towards these descriptions/explanations has ontological consequences. Neurosciences deliver both an epistemological tool, for example in the form of scans, and an ontological postulate in the direction of realism or materialism or even, in some cases, reductionism. As mentioned earlier, this may support the employment of neuropsychological techniques and theories, as a counterweight to the upgrading of opposite points of view such as post-­structuralism. A growing awareness

132

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

about complexity is obviously the goal of every science and as such the influence of neuroscience on the humanities is positive. However, it may become negative if one believes, as Ramachandran did about mirror neurons, that this is an almost all-­encompassing theory, that once and for all can overcome the psycho-­physical problem and solve a string of basic problems. In practice, it often turns out that the actual results of, for example, neuroscientific attempts to unravel phenomena of the humanities are often quite limited in range. The greatest risk is that the limited results are over-­interpreted as the full answer and that other limitations – in the models for the relationship between the phenomena of consciousness and those of the nervous system – are overlooked. As in any research context, the criteria for selection of interesting empirical data, the choice of methods, etc. should be highlighted and incorporated as limiting conditions for the results when discussing the extent to which the empirical findings can be universalized. The themes discussed above have exemplified some issues in relation to current political demands for interdisciplinary research. In general such demands are reasonable. But if interdisciplinary research results in cannibalization of disciplines – e.g. some humanistic disciplines claimed to be reduced to natural science (biology, neurodisciplines) – then it is hardly wise to promote it. If, in contradiction to this view of interdisciplinarity, we see it as a very important contribution to the clarification of the complexity of every scientific phenomenon, it could clear the way for a more respectful view of other scientific disciplines: they all contribute with different descriptions addressing a complexity which no one alone can comprehend (Køppe 2012).

Note 1 The late Ludwig Wittgenstein, author of Philosophical Investigations.

References Abi-Rached, Joelle M. and Rose, N. (2013), Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bandettini, P. (2012), ‘Twenty years of functional MRI: The science and the stories’. NeuroImage 62, 575–88. Elsevier. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.04.026 Beaulieu, A. (2002), ‘Images Are not the (only) Truth: Brain Mapping, Visual Knowledge, and Iconoclasm’. Science, Technology and Human Values, Vol. 27(1): 53–86.

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

133

Bennett, C. et al. (2002), ‘Neural Correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-­mortem Atlantic Salmon: an argument for multiple comparisons correction’. NeuroImage, Vol. 47, Supplement 1, p. 125. Elsevier. Bennett Craig M., Baird, Abigail A., Miller, Michael B. and George L. Wolford (2011), ‘Neural Correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-­mortem Atlantic Salmon: an argument for proper multiple comparisons correction’. Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, Vol. 1 pp. 1–5. Bennett, M. and Hacker, P. M. S. (2003), Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. New York: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Bennett, M. and Hacker, P. (2007), ‘The Conceptual Presuppositions of Cognitive Neuroscience; A Reply to Critics’, in Bennett, Dennett, Hacker and Searle: Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Brattico, E., Brattico, P. and Jacobsen, T. (2009), ‘The origins of the aesthetic enjoyment of music – A review of the literature’. Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue, 15–39. Brown, S. and Dissanayake, E. (2009), ‘The Arts are More than Aesthetics: Neuroaesthetics as Narrow Aesthetics’, in Skov, M. and Vartanian, O. (eds), (2009). Neuroaesthetics. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Budtz Pedersen, D. (2011), ‘Revisiting the neuro-­turn in the humanities and natural sciences’. Pensiamiento, 267: 1–19. Budtz Pedersen, D. and Hendricks, V. F. (2014), ‘Science bubbles’. Philosophy and Technology 27(4): 503–18. Carroll, J. (1995), Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Chatterjee, A. (2010), ‘Neuroaesthetics: A Coming of Age Story’. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(1): 53–62. Cambridge: MIT Press. Chatterjee, A. and Vartanian, O. (2014), ‘Neuroaesthetics’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18(7): 370–75. Cambridge: Cell Press. Damasio, A. (1994), Descartes’ Error. Putnam. Damasio, A. (2010), Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. London, UK: William Heinemann. Dumit, J. (2004), Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fitch, T., von Graevenitz, A., and Nicolas, E. (2009), ‘Bio-­aesthetics and the aesthetic trajectory: A dynamic cognitive and cultural perspective’, in Skov, M. and Vartanian, O. (eds). Neuroaesthetics. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Funch, Bjarne Sode (1997), The Psychology of Art Appreciation. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Rizzolatti, G. (1996), ‘Action recognition in the premotor cortex’. Brain 119: 593–609. Goguen, J. (ed.), (1999), ‘Editorial Introduction’, in Goguen, J. (ed.), Art and the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies. Special Feature. 6 (6–7). Thorverton: Imprint Academic.

134

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Goguen, J. and Myin, E. (2004), ‘Art and the Brain, III’. Journal of Consciousness 11(3–4): 117–47. Hebb, D. (1949), The Organization of Behaviour. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Heyes, C., (2010), ‘Where do mirror neurons come from?’ Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Volume 34(4): 575–83. Hickok, G. (2014), The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: W. W. Norton. Jørgensen, D. (2006), Skønhed. En engel gik forbi. København: Univers. Keysers, C. and Fadiga, L. (2008), ‘The mirror neuron system: new frontiers’. Social Neuroscience 3(3–4): 193–98. Kirk, U., Skov, M., Christensen, M. S., and Nygaard, N. (2009), ‘Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise: A parametric fMRI study’. Brain and Cognition. Vol. 69(2): 306–15. San Diego: Elsevier. Køppe, S. (2004), Neurosens opståen og udvikling i 1800-tallet. Copenhagen: Frydenlund Academic. Køppe, S. (2009), ‘Neurosis: aspects of its conceptual development in the nineteenth century’. History of Psychiatry, 20(77): 27–46. Køppe, S. (2012), ‘A moderate eclecticism: Ontological and epistemological issues’. Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science, 46(1): 1–19. Lauring, J. (2014), An Introduction to Neuroaesthetics. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Logothetis, N. K. (2008), ‘What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI’. Nature 453: 869–78. McCabe, D. P. and Castel, A. D. (2008), ‘Seeing is believing: the effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning’. Cognition 107, 343–52. Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S., et al. (2000), ‘Navigation-­related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97, 4414–16. Meltzoff, A. and Decey, J. (2003), ‘What imitation tells us about social cognition: a rapprochement between developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience’. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London B 358: 491–500. Nadal, Gomila and Gàlvez-Pol (2014), A History of Neuroaesthetics, in Lauring, J. (ed) An Introduction to Neuroaesthetics. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Nadal, M. and Pearce, M. (2011), ‘The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics conference: Prospects and pitfalls for an emerging field’. Brain and Cognition 76: 172–83. San Diego: Elsevier. Oberman, L. M. and Ramachandran V. S. (2009), ‘Reflections on the Mirror Neuron System: Their Evolutionary Functions Beyond Motor Representation’, in J. A. Pineda (ed.), Mirror Neuron Systems, Humana Press. Poldrack, R. (2006), ‘Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data?’ Trends in Cognitive Science (Regul. Ed.) 10: 59–63.

The Humanities Meet the Neurosciences

135

Poldrack, R. (2011), ‘Inferring Mental States from Neuroimaging Data: From Reverse Inference to Large-Scale Decoding’. Neuron no. 72. Elsevier. Poldrack, R. (2012), ‘The future of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience’. NeuroImage 62: 1216–20. Elsevier. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.08.007 Racine, E., Bar-Ilan, O., and Illes, J. (2005), ‘fMRI in the public eye’. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 159–64. Raichle, M. (2006), ‘Functional Neuroimaging: A Historical and Physiological Perspective’. In Cabeza and Kingston (eds) Handbook of Functional Neuroimaging of Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press. Raichle, M. (2008), ‘A brief history of human brain mapping’. Trends in Neurosciences, Vol. 32 No. 2. Cell Press. Ramachandran, V. S. (2011), The Tell-Tale Brain. London: William Heinemann. Ramchandran, V. S. and Hirstein, W. (1999), ‘The science of art: A neurological theory and aesthetic experience’, in Goguen, J. (ed.), (1999). Art and the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies. Special Feature. Vol. 6, No. 6–7. Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Rizzolatti, G., Sinigaglia, C. (2008), Mirrors in the Brain: How our minds share actions and emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, H. and Rose, S. (2012), Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean promises of the new biology. London: Verso. Rose, N. and Abi-Rached, J. M. (2013), Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rose, S. (2005), The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, mending and manipulating the mind. London: Jonathan Cape. Skov, M. (2009), ‘Neuroaesthetic problems: A framework for neuroaesthetic research’, in Skov, M. and Vartanian, O. (eds) Neuroaesthetics. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Skov, M. and Vartanian, O. (2009), ‘Introduction: What is Neuroaesthetics?’ In Skov, M. and Vartanian, O. (eds) Neuroaesthetics. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Vul E., Harris C., Winkielman P., and Pashler, H. (2009), ‘Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition’. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(3), 274–90. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01125.x. Weisberg, D. et al. (2008), ‘The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations’. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20(3): 470–77. Cambridge: MIT Press and the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute. Zeki, S. (1999), Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press.

8

Open Human Science: Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research David Budtz Pedersen and Kristian Moltke Martiny

Open science is the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as practical in the discovery process Michael Nielsen

Introduction Open science is the practice of making everything in the research process openly available, creating transparency and driving research collaboration across disciplines and communities. Until now, open science has taken form as an emerging trend within the natural, medical and technical sciences, centred on notions of open data, open laboratories, open peer review and open access publication (Watson 2015; Aleksic et al. 2014; Delfanti 2013). In this chapter we want to examine the potential and possibilities of expanding the notion of open science to the human sciences. The humanities constitute a vast and variegated research field, with some disciplines closer to the natural and social sciences and others more integrated with traditional patterns of disciplinary knowledge production. What would an open human science look like? How can the humanities be inspired by current developments in the natural and medical sciences and open up to society in new and transgressing ways? In order to answer these questions it is crucial to move beyond simple notions of open data, and look at the resources available to the humanities to open up their educational resources, their communication practices, their methodologies and the way in which they produce and disseminate research to the wider public. In the end, we believe an open human science can overcome some of the oft-­cited criticisms directed against the humanities (e.g. that they are self-­referential and encircled

138

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

in esoteric thinking). Instead, an open human science places emphasis on the societal value and impact of research. If successful, the advent of open human science can even become a role model for research in the natural and medical sciences by providing new transdisciplinary and transmedial avenues of collaboration, for instance, as we will demonstrate later, by collaborating with filmmakers, cultural institutions and civil society.

Collaborative knowledge During the past decade, the open science (OS) movement has gathered significant momentum as one of the leading trends in the production, dissemination and publication of scientific research. With the advent of open access publishing, funding agencies and universities around the world have demanded that all research output is made publicly available, and numerous governments and research laboratories have announced their intention to demand open access. In various ways the transition to open access is part of a larger move towards open science characterized by an increase in open data, open innovation and open source software (Watson 2015).1 Increasingly, the open flow of knowledge in networks and social media has been shown to bring significant benefits to the research process. For instance, opening up and sharing experimental data enhances the reproducibility of results by providing more complete data-­sets, and open notebooks and laboratories have led to the creation of new tools for peer reviewing and validation of science (Woelfle, Olliaro and Todd 2011).2 Alongside this opening up of the research process to other researchers, the current emphasis on interdisciplinary research has marked a significant shift in the organization and governance of research. Few scholars dispute that interdisciplinary research is fundamentally changing the way in which scientists engage in the research process. Indeed, it is becoming more and more evident that research is increasingly mediated through interdisciplinary collaboration. Many argue that this mediation is slowly beginning to change both the epistemology and ontology of what it means to do research (Wagner et al. 2010). Of course, this development is variable depending on research area and discipline, with some areas more inclined towards open collaboration than others. Whereas some decry the loss of disciplinary knowledge and skills, others have embraced the interdisciplinary and collaborative turn in contemporary knowledge production (Huutoniemi et al. 2010; Frodeman 2011; Budtz Pedersen 2015).

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

139

While cross-­fertilization among scientific disciplines has accelerated, collaboration among institutions, regions and countries has equally intensified. In a recent paper in Nature, the author analyses a large number of peer reviewed papers from the past three decades and shows that the overall research trend is towards more international collaboration (Adams 2013). According to the study, the research system has progressed through three different phases: (1) the individual, (2) the institutional and (3) the national mode of research. Historically, nations have competed to be at the cutting edge of research because scientific and technological competitiveness was seen as a precondition for industrial progress and innovation. Today, we are entering ‘a fourth age of research’ driven by international collaborations between research teams and universities, that radically challenges the single institution, discipline or nation-­state as the primary locus of knowledge production. According to Adams (2013), throughout the last three decades domestic output – papers that list authors from only one country – has flat-­lined. Instead, the dramatic rise in total output for each nation is driven by international collaboration. As a result, the percentage of papers that are entirely domestic is rapidly decreasing.3 This shift towards scientific collaboration stands to change both the organization and management of universities, as well as the dynamics of the economy at large (Rifkin 2015). As we have just seen, the trend towards collaboration challenges the ability of national universities to manage their scientific activities in isolation. How nations choose to invest in research, who will be granted ownership of its outputs, and who is best suited to exploit the results, will have significant consequences for the governance of universities in the future.4

Opening up science While scientific research has undergone a remarkable transition towards collaboration and partnerships, the open science movement is explicitly driven by engaged researchers who are not content with the current practices of producing and publishing research. Instead, proponents of open science argue that science must open up to civil society, to non-­profit organizations, to citizen scientists, or do-­it-yourself (DIY) communities such as biohackers and makerspaces. In this movement, which is closely connected with the biomedical and biotechnical sciences, researchers are increasingly breaking down traditional forms of peer review; they resist attempts to enclose knowledge in intellectual

140

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

property rights and patents, and they generally insist on the potential enhancement of knowledge creation through social interaction and joint problem-­solving (Delfanti 2013). In the open science movement, openness is understood as ‘opening up’ the research process as early as it is practically possible (Nielsen 2011). This transformation is driven by different developments, such as the availability of digital technologies, the demand for socially responsible innovation and the need for addressing and finding solutions to some of the most complex societal challenges of our times. This ‘opening up’ can affect every step in the research cycle, from agenda setting and the inception of research, to how it is performed, to how findings are published, and how the results are used and by whom. It can also affect how science is evaluated in terms of quality and impact, and how we assess scientific integrity and risk. Geoghegan-Quinn 2014

Because open science is developed and realized through open and collaborative knowledge sharing as well as new forms of publication and peer review, there is a perceived need for new models of research evaluation according to the open science movement. Beyond established scientometric indicators, which merely count publications and citations, alternative metrics (referred to as ‘altmetrics’) are being developed in an attempt to document the impact of research in a more comprehensive way. Here, the provision of aggregated data about social media mentions (posts, comments, thumbs, likes, retweets, upvotes etc.) is used to enable a better and more comprehensive picture of the public interest in research (Budtz Pedersen 2014, see also Chapters  2 and 10 in this book).5 Digital technologies are already changing how research is done, from the collection of data, to how scientists collaborate, to how they publish their results. These technologies mean that the global scientific community can develop new ideas and collaborate much more easily across fields, timescales and locations. But like any change to well-­established systems, there will also be uncertainties and setbacks. The same is true for open science. For instance, at the current state, it is unclear if open science will continue to be an activist project among a select group of scientists and global thought-­leaders, or if the open science movement will actually catch on and become a test bed for new standards of scientific evaluation and validation. Even more uncertain at the current time is whether open science will be better science (Martiny, Hansted and Budtz Pedersen 2016). With the perceived failures of peer review, closed publication models and

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

141

exploding retraction rates, open access and open science have a lot of attraction but also raise some unresolved questions. For instance, there still seems to be a significant reluctance among adherents to open science to actually move beyond traditional notions of academic publishing and include non-­academic actors and stakeholders in the research process as well as non-­traditional formats and platforms for communicating research. Notwithstanding these critical issues, the open science movement has a lot to offer – both to scientists and society. Until now, however, the movement has primarily been associated with advances in the natural and medical sciences, from which most of the current examples of open science are provided. In the remainder of this chapter, we therefore seek to explore the potential for and possibility of expanding the open science movement to include the humanities and social sciences. In the next sections, we explore the inclusion of the humanities as part of the open science community by providing examples of tentative experiments with Open Human Science. Crucially, we shall claim that the humanities have a lot to gain from engaging in open collaboration, but also that the evolution of open science can be accelerated even further than the current state of affairs through the inclusion of genuine transdisciplinary and transmedial research.

Open-­minded humanities Where the first wave of open science has primarily been driven by openness of publications and sharing of data, we will argue that the next generation of open scientists needs to include a wider range of communication platforms and engagement techniques that extends beyond mere scientific communication. First, we argue that open science needs to include a stronger emphasis on open media, such as film, theatre, architecture (Martiny, Hansted and Budtz Pedersen 2016), and social technologies such as community-­building, open workshops and cross-­sector collaboration. Open science is about involving far more actors in the research and innovation process, from researchers to citizens, end-­users, patients, journalists, policy-­ makers and representatives of civil society. We need open science to capitalize on all intellectual, emotional and social resources available in society. This means creating the right ecosystems, increasing experimentation and risk-­ willingness and bringing more stakeholders and audiences into the research process.

142

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

The use of alternative media in accelerating open science has already been adopted, for example, by Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE), where scientists upload videos of how their experiments work, or in the oft-­celebrated FoldIt example, where experimental research on protein folding used a computer game to create virtual interaction and user-­generated structures (Copper et al. 2010). A 2010 paper in Nature credited FoldIt’s 57,000 players with providing useful results that outperformed algorithmically computed solutions (Markoff 2010). So-­called gamification is currently being introduced in a number of situations within the natural and medical sciences to leverage people’s natural desires for socializing, learning, mastery and competition to accomplish complex tasks (capitalizing on human curiosity and information-­processing capabilities). Open media science first requires a cultural shift in how science is done, which Nielsen has called extreme openness (Nielsen 2012, 183). But, as we have already seen we lack instructive examples from the human sciences. An exception to this rule is found within contemporary cognitive science: the interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes. In the so-­called Open MIND Project (http://open-­mind.net/about), Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer M. Windt invited a number of leading scholars in cognitive science, including Ned Block, Paul M. Churchland, Andy Clark, Vittorio Gallese and Daniel C. Dennett to publish a series of target papers in an open online repository. After publication, the editors invited a corresponding number of cognitive scientists to openly provide criticism and suggestions, and finally asked the original authors to respond to the comments. The experiment was an exercise in open peer review, where the audience could get real-­time access to the criticism and replies. Relevant for our present purposes is Metzinger and Windt’s editorial article, where they clarify what is meant by open-­minded cognitive science (Metzinger and Windt 2015). First, engaging in open-­minded science is not a theoretical position, but an epistemic practice attuned to approaching novel ideas, topics, methods and fellow researchers. Open science, according to them, is characterized by (1) epistemic humility, (2) intellectual honesty and (3) social charity (Metzinger and Windt 2015, 2), which together highlight a pragmatic dimension of contemporary cognitive science: there should be no single or uniform way to conduct research. Rather, the aim of cognitive science is to ask critical questions, to challenge or reject prior commitments, to highlight ambiguity and the possibility of falsification as indicators of scientific success (see also Frodeman 2014). According to Metzinger and Windt, open science constitutes:

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

143

a new understanding of progress, of acceptable forms of inquiry and methods, as well as new measures of success, for instance concerning novel forms of collaboration and publication formats that are still under the radar of institutionalized impact factors. Metzinger and Windt 2015, 23

On this view, the epistemic strategy of open human science is to cultivate collaboration and develop avenues for future research. As an interdisciplinary field, research on intelligence and behaviour, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, attention, reasoning and emotion), demands true collaboration. Still, the target audience for the open-­minded human scientist, according to Metzinger and Windt’s editorial, is fellow cognitive scientists. Despite their attempt to include wider social and cultural aspects of science (Metzinger and Windt 2015, 15–16), no real effort is made actually to broaden the range of communicative strategies and technologies or actually engage in the cognitive world of ‘real’ agents. And no attempt is made to go beyond text-­based communication, including written replies and reviews. In the technical terminology of cross-­disciplinary collaboration, no attempt is made to go beyond mere interdisciplinarity (solving complex scientific problems through collaborative efforts) and reach genuine transdisciplinary audience (solving real-­world problems in real-­time collaboration with societal actors and institutions; see Repko 2008 and Klein 2010).

Documenting humans openly While the Open MIND Project provides an instructive test bed for conducting experiments in open access publishing and open peer reviewing, open human science needs to transcend narrow conceptions of scientific publishing and engage real-­world problems. Here, we want to present two examples that comply with the doctrine of ‘opening up’ science as early as possible and to the widest possible audience. The first example is about science-­based documentary filmmaking. A documentary film is a non-­fiction motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of illuminating special societal or historical records. Traditionally, science documentaries have been about communicating specific aspects of a scientific discipline or highlighting specific research results (within e.g. geography, geology, astronomy, palaeontology etc.) to

144

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

a non-­scientific audience. In the humanities, documentary filmmaking has been used as part of ethnography, anthropology, psychology and educational sciences. Recently, a set of new methodologies has been developed where the documentary filmmaker is no longer merely a ‘science communicator’ or neutral observer, but rather a part of the research process itself. Acclaimed documentaries such as The Act of Killing (originally part of Joshua Oppenheimer’s PhD project at the London School of Economics) or Phie Ambo’s Free the Mind invite the audience to take part actively and emotionally in the scientific process, rather than communicating pre-­established results. Another example comes from our own experiments with open human science. In collaboration with the Danish Film Institute, Creative Europe Media Desk Denmark and the production company Final Cut 4 Real, Kristian Moltke Martiny together with philosopher and filmmaker Allan Alfred Birkegaard Hansted arranged a workshop with more than fifty scientists, film directors and producers in 2014 in Denmark to discuss and explore the possibility of creating a collaborative method for advancing the conversation between science and documentary filmmaking. During the workshop, a number of leading scientists and filmmakers were invited to reflect upon their experiences with and expectations of collaboration among researchers and filmmakers. This experiment later resulted in the production of the documentary film Natural Disorder (2015), directed by Christian Sønderby Jepsen in collaboration with scientific adviser Kristian Moltke Martiny. The film is set as a story about Jacob Nossell, who lives with cerebral palsy (CP). CP is a group of disorders in the development of postural and motor control, occurring as a result of a non-­progressive lesion in the developing central nervous system (Bax et al. 2005). CP is the most common disorder associated with congenital motor impairment (Aisen et al. 2011), but is at the same time a very heterogeneous and complex condition that varies according to the particular brain lesion and individual patient. The documentary is based on a number of conversations with different scientists and physicians with the aim of addressing the interdisciplinary and interpersonal complexity of living with CP. By closely following Nossell, the film turns into a real-­time quest for understanding what it means to live with CP from his first-­person perspective and by communicating his perspective in a narrative that is understandable for others. As such, the documentary filmmaking process was designed as an open experiment operating with two hypotheses: (1) documentary filmmaking is a mode of collaborative research, which acknowledges the complexity of living with CP, and (2) the documentary is a way to communicate this complexity of living with CP to external audiences. In

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

145

this context, the film experiment both utilizes the benefits of collaboration and communication, and shows the intrinsic interrelation between the two. But also at a more fundamental epistemological level, filmmaking is valuable to the open human scientist. For instance, diagnosing, treating and habilitating persons living with cerebral palsy simply calls for an interdisciplinary process embedded in an external medium so as to enable the construction of a shared, emergent, and socially negotiated conceptual space in which patients, scientists and lay citizens can take part. Written media – such as journal papers – have difficulties establishing this shared space, not only because of disciplinary specialization and technical terminologies, but also because of the restricted phenomenological qualities of texts and quantitative data-­sets, which are only comprehensible to trained scientists. Video and filmmaking, on the other hand, can be used as diagnostic and explorative media for investigating the complexity of cerebral palsy, utilizing software programs and other visual representations to increase the precision and reliability of the video analysis (Adde et al. 2010; Borel et al. 2011; Harvey and Gorter 2011). Within contemporary cognitive science, embodied cognition (EC) is known for its critical attitude towards the ‘observational and spectator stance’ in understanding cognition. In contrast, EC aims to make an interactive turn in cognitive science and develops a second-­person study of cognition (Thompson 2001), which includes aspects of experiential and emotional engagement and dynamic and reciprocal interaction (de Bruin et al. 2012, Schilback et al. 2013, Satne and Roepstorff 2015). As forcefully demonstrated by Natural Disorder, video documentation can play an important role in creating such second-­person studies of cognition, while at the same time refraining from ‘objectifying’ observational data about human behaviour, interaction and engagement. According to this argument, we can understand video as a medium for the scientists to interact, engage and corroborate data. In contrast to written texts, video introduces some unique potentials for science, as pointed out by Roschelle (1998):

1. Video enables the scientist to preserve audio-­visual data of human behaviour and interaction, such as voice; the use of voice (paralanguage); bodily and facial gestures; touch, eye gazing, mimicking, social context, etc. In this context, video-­documenting can be used to escape the problems of ‘what I say’ and ‘what I do’ that occur in self-­reports. 2. Repeated viewing of a specific scene can lead to complex insights that cannot be gained from textual transcription of the same scene.

146

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

3. Video supports interpretations from many frames of analysis, and can be used as common medium for rich multidisciplinary analysis. 4. Video can be shared with the participants in it, so as to acquire the participants’ own perspective on their behaviour (Roschelle 1998, 727–8). The documentary film in this experiment was an open medium for collaborating with philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and researchers in bioinformatics and geogenetics, and for Nossell himself to go through a number of different scientific studies: from MR-scanning, DNA-testing and motion-­ capture to different social experiments. All of this is documented so as to present a complex picture of what it means to live with cerebral palsy. In addition, after finishing the documentary film, several scenes from the film were presented by Kristian Moltke Martiny at different international conferences and workshops in cognitive science, philosophy and childhood disability. In so doing, the audio-­ visual data was ‘opened up’ for inter- and transdisciplinary interpretations.6 Thus, the process of making and showcasing the film became a medium for opening up data and creating a collaborative process of mutual understanding, which included other scientists, professionals and Nossell himself, and ultimately made the complexity of living with cerebral palsy assessable to a wide audience of citizens.

Sharing the Academy The second example of open human science is taken from the Share Academy Project in London. The project is a partnership between University College London (UCL), University of the Arts London (UAL) and the London Museums Group. The partnership came together through a shared belief in the potential for mutually beneficial collaboration between the humanities, cultural institutions and museums (Share Academy 2015).7 Share Academy was funded by Arts Council England to develop and foster relationships between higher education institutions and museums in London. A pilot study was rolled out between October 2012 and March 2013 exploring the challenges and benefits of partnership working and delivering a scoping study outlining the potential for collaboration with non-­academic stakeholders. Following the success of the pilot project, Share Academy was awarded a second grant, enabling the initiative to spend two years brokering, funding and evaluating cross-­sector collaborations. This phase of the project also saw the

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

147

Share Academy team turning their attention to the wider landscape, building relationships with other organizations in the United Kingdom and exploring the opportunities offered by collaboration between the humanities and cultural institutions. In order further to strengthen the ties between the humanities and the surrounding society, Share Academy invited an expert group to form a ‘think tank’ bringing together thirty-­five key decision-­makers from the cultural heritage and higher education sectors to discuss the future of collaborative practices. The project was modelled upon the increased emphasis in higher education on the importance of public engagement, particularly around new research. Instead of merely focusing on student employability or commercial innovation, Share Academy presents an instructive example of humanities scholars working with practical real-­world problems as a core element of the learning process. But importantly, as stated at the project website, the concept of collaboration in this context is not meant to benefit researchers or science-­based learning processes alone. In addition, the goal of the project was to build capacity and resilience within small and medium-­sized cultural institutions by collaborating with sources of expertise in the human sciences. Organizations such as those operating in the cultural and creative sectors often have limited resources available and hence seek expert advice and input from outside sources and institutions, in this case the human sciences. As such the ‘the cultural sector has been quick to recognize the potential for collaboration with universities’ (REF). The Share Academy project was designed to ensure that all of the different collaborative projects funded within the umbrella, brought equal benefit to both partners: university and partner institutions. In order to ensure this atmosphere of mutual respect, open discussions were held from the start. From these open discussions emerged a number of recommendations on best practices for stimulating open human science. For instance, that:

1. Communication is vital to the success of any collaboration. Representatives from both universities and cultural institutions need to engage face to face to become mutually committed and ensure joint problem-­solving. 2. Clarifying and setting up simple measures for managing expectations on all sides of open collaboration is needed from the beginning of a project. Managing expectations and ensuring clarity around key objectives and approaches is key to the success and accountability of open collaborations. From this short description, it is clear that the humanities have much to offer when engaging in open science that reaches beyond mere academic problems.

148

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Not only do open collaboration and open human science provide important stakeholders with valuable knowledge and insight (which they would otherwise not have access to), but collaboration also spills back into the way research is produced affecting methodologies, theories and approaches within the humanities.

Transdisciplinary encounters Importantly, the two examples presented here (Natural Disorder and Share Academy) both indicate a new and transgressing form of transdisciplinary research. According to standard terminology, transdisciplinary collaboration is defined as the systematic exploration of social, economic, political and environmental issues beyond the realm of purely scientific questions (in contrast to interdisciplinary research where scientists from different disciplines work together to create novel explanations of complex scientific phenomena). Transdisciplinarity transcends the narrow scope of academic research through an overarching coordination of research activities with actors outside the world of academia, such as private companies or the public sector (Krohn 2011; Frodeman et al. 2011).8 [Transdisciplinary research] is a mode of knowledge production that draws on expertise from a wider range of organizations, and collaborative partnerships that integrate research from different disciplines with the knowledge of stakeholders in society. Here, the transdisciplinary product is greater than the sum of its parts, though the scope of the overall effort is more comprehensive and the parts may be more diverse. Wagner et al. 2011: 16

Whereas transdisciplinary research has traditionally been taken to involve public–private collaboration (often centred on private-­sector problems and commercial products), the examples of open human science show that transdisciplinary and transmedial research have the potential to affect a much wider audience than merely companies. It may not come as a surprise that the humanities are better suited for collaborating with third-­sector and cultural institutions rather than market-­based organizations. But experiments in open human science show that the humanities have the potential to create societal impact, influence and meaning for a wide range of stakeholders (we shall return to this point).

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

149

Paradoxically, the existing literature on transdisciplinary collaboration often does not include any mention of the humanities (Wagner et al. 2011). To remedy this deficit, we argue in favour of a genuine transdisciplinary conception of open science, which involves all the cognitive, organizational and social resources available in the academic world and beyond, and which unities collaboration in the human, social and natural sciences.

The normative structure of open science Open science is about making sure that science serves society in multiple ways – and not simply through the provision of papers or intellectual property. By reclaiming the notion of transdisciplinary collaboration as a socially responsive and open-­ended process, we claim that the open science movement is reconnecting to the classical Mertonian norms. Sociologist of science, Robert K. Merton famously formulated a set of normative practices, which unites the principles that should govern scientific research. The so-­called CUDOS norms consist of:

1. Communalism: all scientists should have equal access to scientific goods (intellectual property) and there should be a sense of common ownership in order to promote collective collaboration. 2. Universalism all scientists can contribute to science regardless of race, nationality, culture or gender. 3. Disinterestedness according to which scientists are supposed to act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for personal gain. 4. Organized scepticism means that scientific claims must be exposed to critical scrutiny before being accepted. Today’s open science movement is the first movement in several years to revive the Mertonian norms and emphasize the importance of the organizational and normative aspects of science for the benefit of society. In contrast to the Mertonian norms, the so-­called ‘entrepreneurial university’, which came into existence in the 1990s as an expansion of late modern neoliberal reforms, in many ways disregarded the ideals of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism. Instead, increased external funding and problem-­oriented research in many countries have redirected scientific efforts to serve private sector interests. Elzinga (1997) has suggested ‘epistemic drifts’ may occur, when criteria of organized scepticism (peer review) are

150

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

subordinated under external criteria of relevance and accountability. In the same spirit, John Ziman (2000) has argued that the classical Mertonian norms are increasingly superseded by a set of new norms, which he describes as PLACE: proprietary, local, authoritarian and commissioned expertise. On this view, knowledge is no longer regarded a public good, but rather as intellectual property, which is produced, accumulated and traded like other goods and services in the knowledge economy.9 Against this trend of limiting transdisciplinary collaborations to include only private sector partnerships, the open science community is reinventing norms of universalism (all scientists and non-­scientists can contribute), communalism (open access and common ownership), and disinterestedness (reproducibility, transparency and collective action). Like in the sharing economy of housing, cars, software etc. the internal marketplace of scientific ideas, according to the open science movement, should not be restricted to individual ownership or particular interests. However, science in this context is no longer disinterested in the positivist sense of the word (implying that the application of science is logically independent of the discovery and verification of science). On the contrary, open science is interested and vested because it has an explicit goal to produce benefits for society and circumvent traditional forms of intellectual property. Accordingly, a new convergence is fostered between the contexts of discovery, justification and application of scientific results.

Conclusion and further research Open science describes the ongoing transitions in the way research is performed, researchers collaborate, knowledge is shared and science is organized. It represents a systemic change in the modus operandi of science and research. It affects the whole research cycle and its stakeholders, enhances science by facilitating more transparency, openness, networking, collaboration, and refocuses the scientific ethos from a ‘publish or perish’ perspective to a knowledge-­sharing perspective. This chapter started from the assumption that the humanities have a lot to gain from participating in the emerging open science movement. The chapter proceeded by presenting the case of open media science, recommending and analysing the use of alternative media and formats in creating, debating and communicating research. Finally, we discussed two examples of what we believe

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

151

should be called ‘open human science’: the production of the transdisciplinary documentary film Natural Disorder (2015) and the creation of a cross-­sector collaborative partnership in London called Share Academy (2012–15). From these examples, we drew the general conclusion that transdisciplinary and transmedial research practices not only transgress the ordinary audience of fellow scientists but also transcend disciplinary boundaries and in the end the organizational and epistemic divide between academic and non-­academic stakeholders. Open science is not reserved for scientists working in biotechnology or developing novel biomedical solutions: the tools of open science can be extended, as we have argued, to the humanities and possibly the social sciences with perceived benefits for both science and society. Does this mean that we are moving from a long-­established system of science to a more open republic of knowledge (Geoghegan-Quinn 2014)? Perhaps. Collaboration between professional scientists and citizens will in the future create new avenues of research, new ways of stipulating research impact and new ways of organizing the research process. Increasingly, citizens and civil society are getting involved in raising funds and setting research agendas. Patient groups are helping to fund and inform research on specific diseases. Cultural institutions are taking part in humanities projects. And documentary filmmaking is connecting the human sciences to a much wider group of citizens and their imaginations. Why should the humanities not chip in and take part in the open scientific revolution?

Notes 1 A recent study produced for the European Commission showed that the global shift to Open Access of research publications has reached a tipping point. Around 50 per cent of scientific papers published across nearly 40 countries in 2011 are today available for free (van Noorden 2014). 2 Over the past decade, publication retractions in scientific journals have increased by 1,200 per cent (van Noorden 2011). At the same time, there is a growing dissatisfaction with the peer review process, which is often slow, non-­transparent and inefficient (Smith 2010). Necessary methodological information and data-­sets are typically not included in publications, making reproducibility of results problematic (Knorr-Cetina 1981). 3 For established economies, total national research output has more than doubled over the past thirty years, while domestic output has increased by only about 50 per cent (Adams 2013, 559).

152

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

4 A number of recent diagnoses suggest a deep transformation of Western economies towards a collaborative knowledge society, which challenges traditional notions of labour, production, accumulation and capital. Models such as the ‘knowledge-­based economy’ (Foray and Lundvall 2006), the ‘sharing economy’ (Botsman 2010), the ‘circular economy’ (Preston 2013) or the ‘cognitive economy’ (Boutang 2012) have been suggested to conceptualize the way in which knowledge and intellectual capital are influencing contemporary society. 5 We are thinking here, for example, of Research Gate’s Impact Factor, Altmetric.com or Impact Story. These all take into account the impact of scientific documents in social media. 6 In a few cases the documentary scenes were presented together with Nossell, in order to get his perspective on his experience of the situation the scene was showing. 7 Material presented in the following paragraphs relies on the documentation and description provided in Share Academy: The Art of Collaboration (2015). 8 The concept of transdisciplinary research is emphasized by the Mode 2 hypothesis, as argued by Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny et al. (2001) for whom organizational diversity and novel types of quality control are central. Transdisciplinary research is associated with a mission-­oriented approach to science, technology and innovation (contrary to an investigator- or curiosity-­driven approach). 9 A number of terms have been introduced to capture characteristic features of the entrepreneurial university in order to contrast these with the ‘old’ image of science. The most frequently cited notions are: Mode-2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 1994), post-­academic science (Ziman 2000), Triple Helix networks (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1998), academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie 2001) and post-­normal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993).

References Adams, J. (2013), ‘Collaborations: The fourth age of research’, Nature, 497: 557–60. Adde, L. et al. (2010), ‘Early prediction of cerebral palsy by computer-­based video analysis of general movements: a feasibility study’, Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 52: 773–78. Aisen, M. L. et al. (2013), ‘Cerebral palsy: clinical care and neurological rehabilitation’, Lancet Neurology, 10: 844–52. Aleksic, J, Alexa, A., Attwood, T. K., Chue Hong, N., Dahlö, M., Davey, R. et al. (2014), ‘An open science peer review oath’, F1000Res, 3:271. Bax, M. et al. (2005), ‘Proposed definition and classification of cerebral palsy’, Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 47: 571–76.

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research

153

Borel, S. et al. (2011), ‘Video analysis software increases the interrater reliability of video gait assessments in children with cerebral palsy’, Gait & Posture, 33: 727–29. Botsman, R. and Rogers, R. (2010), What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, New York: Harper Business. Boutang, Y. (2012). Cognitive Capitalism. London: Polity Press. Budtz Pedersen, D. (2015), ‘Collaborative knowledge. The future of the academy in the knowledge-­based economy’, in: E. Westergaard and J. Wiewiura (eds), On the Facilitation of the Academy. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers: 57–70. Cooper, S. et al. (2010), ‘Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game’, Nature, 466: 756–60. de Bruin, L. et al. (2012), ‘Reconceptualizing second-­person interaction’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6: 1–14. Delfanti, A. (2013), Biohackers – The Politics of Open Science, London: Pluto Press. Elzinga, A. (1997), ‘The science–society contract in historical transformation: with special reference to epistemic drift’, Social Science Information, 36(3): 411–45. Etzkowitz, H. and Leydesdorff, L. (2000), ‘The dynamics of innovation: from National Systems and “Mode 2” to a Triple Helix of university–industry–government relations’, Research Policy, 29: 109–23. Foray, D. and Lundvall, B.-Å. (1996), ‘The Knowledge-­based Economy’, in D. Foray and B.-Å. Lundvall (eds), Employment and Growth in the Knowledge-­based Economy. Paris: OECD. Frodeman, R. (2011), ‘Interdisciplinary research and academic sustainability: managing knowledge in an age of accountability’, Environmental Conservation 38 (2): 105–12. Funtowicz, S. and Ravetz, J. (1993), ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, Futures, 25: 739–55. Geoghegan-Quinn, Máire (2014), Science 2.0: Europe can lead the next scientific transformation. Keynote. EuroScience Open Forum, Copenhagen 24 June 2014. Brussels: European Commission. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994), The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage Publications. Harvey, A. and Gorter, J. (2011), ‘Video gait analysis for ambulatory children with cerebral palsy: Why, when, where and how!’ Gait & Posture, 33: 501–3. Huutoniemi, K., Klein, J. K., Bruun, H. and Hukkinen, J. (2010), ‘Analyzing interdisciplinarity: Typology and indicators’, Research Policy, 39: 79–88. Kepler, T. B., Marti-Renom, M. A., Maurer, S. M., Rai, A. K., Taylor, G., Todd, M. H. (2006), ‘Open Source Research – the Power of Us’. Australian Journal of Chemistry, 59 (5): 291. Klein, J. T. (2010), Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures. San Francisco: Jossey Bass and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981), The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

154

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Krohn, W. (2010), ‘Interdisciplinary Cases and Disciplinary Knowledge’, in: R. Frodeman et al. (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 31–38. Martiny, K. M., Birkegaard, A. A. H. and Budtz Pedersen, D. (2016), ‘Open Media Science: A Second Wave of Open Science’ (under review). Merton, R. K. (1973), ‘The Normative Structure of Science’, in R. K. Merton, The Sociology of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metzinger, T. and Windt, J. M. (2015), ‘What Does it Mean to Have an Open MIND?’, in T. Metzinger and J. M. Windt (eds), Open MIND, Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. Nielsen, M. (2011), An informal definition of open science, The Open Science Project Blog (http://www.openscience.org/blog/?p=454). [Accessed 19 August 2015]. Nielsen, M. (2012). Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., and Gibbons, M. (2001), Re-­thinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Preston, F. (2013), ‘A Global Redesign? Shaping the Circular Economy’, Speech at Chatham House (London), Royal Institute of International Affairs, 13 June 2013. Repko, A. F. (2008). Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publishing. Rifkin, J. (2015), The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, New York: St Martin’s Griffin. Roschelle, J. (1998), ‘Choosing and Using Video Equipment for Data Collection’, in A. Kelly and R. Lesh (eds), Handbook of Research Design in Mathematics and Science Education, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Satne, G. and Roepstorff, A. (2015), ‘Introduction: From Interacting Agents to Engaging Persons’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22: 9–23. Schilbach, L., et al. (2013), ‘Toward a second person neuroscience’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36: 393–462. Share Academy (2015). Share Academy Project Summary. London. Smith R. (2010), ‘Classical peer review: an empty gun’, Breast Cancer Research, 12 (Suppl 4): S13. Thompson, E. (2001), ‘Between ourselves: Second-­person issues in the study of consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8: 5–7. van Noorden, R. (2011), ‘Science publishing: The trouble with retractions’, Nature, 478 (7367): 26–27. van Noorden, R. (2014), ‘More than half of 2007–2012 research’, Nature News 22 October 2014 [accessed 22 October 2014]. Wagner, C. S., Roessner, J. D., Bobb, K., Klein, J. T., Boyack, K. W., Keyton, J., Rafols, I. and Börner, K. (2011), ‘Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research’, Journal of Informetrics, 165: 14–26. Watson, M. (2015), ‘When will open science become simply science?’, Genome Biology, 16: 101.

Transdisciplinary and Transmedial Research Woelfle, M., Olliaro, P., Todd, M. H. (2011), ‘Open science is a research accelerator’, Nature Chemistry 3 (10): 745–48. Ziman, J. (2000), ‘Postacademic science: Constructing knowledge with networks and norms’, in U. Segerstrale (ed), Beyond science wars: The missing discourse about science and society, NewYork: State University of New York Press: 135–54.

155

Part Three

An Argument for Classical Humanities

9

The Culture Debate Between Terror Threats, Free Speech and Humanism: Lessons from the Case of Danish Post-­war Intellectuals Esther Oluffa Pedersen

The dramatic events in France in January and Denmark in February 2015 have again turned the world’s attention to the grave disagreements about what ought to be part of contemporary culture, the direction of democracy as well as the value of humanism. The attackers in Paris, who assassinated twelve people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine because some of them had drawn pictures of the prophet Mohammed, were debating culture with guns in their hands. They were violently seeking to direct contemporary culture in one direction. The aftermath will contain discussions of how to prevent such terrorist acts in the future. But it will just as much consist of intense debates over freedom of speech, humanism and conceptions of culture. The contemporary situation is difficult to predict in terms of what will result from the public and political discussions.We may, however, gain an understanding of what is going on in the contemporary public debates by viewing today’s events through the lenses of past situations. The analysis of past debates over culture offers an understanding of how different public intellectuals orientate themselves in the space of public opinions. Such analyses provide an understanding of how opinions contribute to structure the space of culture and what role academic intellectuals play in voicing different conceptions of democracy, humanism and culture. As the significance of opinions developed within the academic humanities dependent upon the particularity of the historical moment, the aim of the analysis of such debates must be to highlight the general features of the particular. The cultural debates of a given society can be said to be that society’s way of self-­orientation. Publicly engaged intellectuals from the universities play an

160

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

important role as intellectual leaders. University intellectuals introduce arguments, discuss and reflect on the evolving debates, and thereby bring their academic knowledge into play in the public realm. Thus, the academic education tradition spills over into public debates bringing knowledge from the study of history, society and culture into play. Different prospects for the near future of society are played out against each other in debates over culture, enabling not only the individual debaters but all members of society to orientate themselves. The more or less heated discussions between individuals and groups with opposing views as to the direction of society are vital for the free public debate and the possibility of genuinely informed political choices of citizens and politicians. In what follows, the debate among a handful of Danish intellectuals over how to restructure democracy and how to understand humanism after World War II serves as an example as a means to gain insight into the continuing debates over culture, humanism and the humanities. The Danish example serves to develop an argument as to why classical humanistic research is important for public intellectual debates.

The Danish situation in 1945 Denmark was officially liberated from German occupation on 5 May 1945. The German troops started their withdrawal on 9 May 1945. A provisional government was established with delegates from the Danish political parties and representatives of the Danish Freedom Council (Frihedsraadet) that had functioned as organizers of the resistance movement. Denmark had been without an elected government since 29 August 1943 as the German occupation issued martial laws, expelled the Danish government and imprisoned numerous politicians and intellectuals. From April 1940 until August 1943 the Danish government, legislature and king conducted a policy of collaboration with the German occupiers. In this way, a degree of democratic rule and Danish control over government and police was upheld. However, the space of action was monitored by the German military, which could overrule all decisions of the Danish government. The legislative work of the government was shaped by the war. Controversial evidence hereof was the so-­called communist law of 22 August 1941 making membership of the Communist Party illegal. It was issued as a law of jus necessitates and signed by the minister of justice, who shortly before had been appointed by the German military. The social democratic

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

161

minister of state, Thorvald Stauning, as well as the coalition government approved the law. Some 295 communists, including three Members of Parliament, were interned. In August 1943, seventy-­seven of the interned communists succeeded in fleeing as the camp was transferred from the Danish police to the German military. The remaining internees were moved to concentration camps outside of Denmark. A major part of the Danish resistance was born out of the internment of the Danish communists. Danish Unity (Dansk Samling), an inter-­war period political party led by Arne Sørensen, made up another branch in the resistance. Its politics involved belief in a strong state, a demand for betterment of the conditions of the working class and a critique of modern culture from a Lutheran Christian, nationalistic point of view. The party became a strong and early, non-­communist part of the resistance as its members engaged in the private protection of the Danish border with Germany. Further enlargement of the resistance came from the Conservative party, where exiled leader, John Christmas Møller, played an important role in the illegal radio programmes broadcast from BBC, London, organizing the resistance movement within the auspices of the Danish Freedom Council. In the summer of 1943, as workers went on strike, the resistance movement gained momentum and broader support in the population. The strikes caused the fall of the Danish government as martial law was issued by the German occupation on 29 August 1943. During the war, Danish politicians and leaders of the resistance movement in the Danish Freedom Council had secretly met and prepared a transitional government. The provisional government installed in May 1945 consisted of politicians from the dissolved government of 1943 and representatives of the Freedom Council. It provided a political platform for both the Communist and the Danish Unity party. For example, Professor Mogens Fog, a leading communist figure, was announced as minister without portfolio and Arne Sørensen, leader of the Danish Unity party, minister of the church. A pivotal project of the provisional government consisted in issuing laws to denazify Danish society. The Freedom Council proposed laws to carry out a judicial purge and was successful in effecting a slightly altered package of amendments to the criminal law in the summer of 1945. The laws functioned ex post facto making actions that had been legal during the war open to prosecution if deemed to have aided or consciously furthered Nazism in Denmark. On 30 October 1945 a democratic election took place, thus putting an end to more than five years of German occupation, the Danish policy of collaboration and the provisional war government. The winners of the election were the liberal

162

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

party, Venstre, and the Communist party. The Social Democratic party continued to be the largest party in Parliament, but had lost eighteen seats. As a result, the state ministry was handed over to the liberals who governed together with the conservatives. The Danish Unity party was not rewarded with political power as a result of its involvement in the resistance. Two years later, in a new election, the Danish Unity party did not obtain a single seat in parliament and the state ministry returned to the Social Democrats. The post-­war political atmosphere was tense and filled with animosities. In spite of the liberation, the sentiment in the ensuing years was one of culture crisis and conflicting intellectual aims. The war experiences left the population with a need to redraw their map of orientation. Two heated debates over the direction of democracy and the value of humanism, respectively, ensued in the post-­war period. These will be examined as examples of the difficult practice of intellectual leadership. A common context connecting these debates was the question of the legitimacy of a judicial purge in post-­war Denmark. Insight into this debate elucidates curious patterns of the roles taken on by intellectual leaders in their discussions of democracy and humanism. The historical example also helps us to see the contemporary debates over terror and free speech in a clearer light.

The purge after German occupation The call for a judicial purge was prominent within the resistance movement, as well as the general public immediately after the war. The basic question was how extensive such a judicial purge should be within Danish civil society and the state. The relevant amendments to the criminal law were effected in the summer of 1945. Most opinion leaders either agreed to the necessity of such a purge or avoided the question. Hal Koch was a prominent exception openly criticizing the judicial purge and its acclaimed denazification of civil society. In 1945 Koch was a publicly renowned intellectual as professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen where, in autumn 1940, he held a popular series of lectures on one of Denmark’s well-­known romantic thinkers, the theologian N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). But Koch was best-­known as the leader of the political movement Danish Youth Association (Dansk Ungdomsamvirke) established in the first months of the war in the autumn of 1940 with the aim of promoting democratic thought among the young. There was never a comprehensive movement voicing discontent with the judicial purge after the war, although some other prominent intellectuals did come out as critics. The architect, cultural critic, and writer Poul

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

163

Henningsen, and Hartvig Frisch, professor of classical Greek at the University of Copenhagen, Member of Parliament for the Social Democratic party and later to become minister of education in 1947 also criticized the judicial purge without joining forces, either together or with Koch. Frisch in particular became infamous for his critique of the resistance movement. In a speech broadcast on national radio on 25 August 1945 Frisch called the decision of the Freedom Council in 1943 to undertake killings of suspected traitors of the Danish cause an acceptance of murder. This statement, announced just five days before a memorial for the fallen among the resistance, caused a public outcry. Despite the intense public critique Frisch did not withdraw his statement. Rather he demanded first, ‘that the promise given in the illegal press during the war that all the evidence [for circumstances of the liquidations committed by the resistance] would be put forward, must be realised . . . Secondly, the society needs to live up to its duty towards the victims of the clearing murders [those Danes killed by German military as retribution for the liquidations of the Danish resistance] by honouring their loss and pay damages’ (Frisch 1954, 130).1 Hal Koch, promulgating the view that the judicial purge was addressed from the wrong angle, felt it necessary to distance himself from Frisch’s unpopular statement. In 1947, he reiterated his criticism in the book I accuse the Legislature (Jeg anklager Rigsdagen) and pointed to the inability of the few critics of the judicial purge to unite. A main reason, according to Koch (1947, 7–8), was that Hartvig Frisch ‘put his foot in it with some highly thoughtless words about the liquidations of informers during the war. . . . The whole discussion was derailed. . . . we did not think it [the liquidation of supposed informers during the war] the central question. Neither did we want to dissociate ourselves from him, because we knew he shared our intention and understanding, nor could we support him’. Koch and Frisch, as exposed intellectuals in the Danish public, were balancing on a tightrope in their opposition to the purge in the aftermath of the war. The atmosphere and mood of the majority conveyed the desire to get even with all collaborators of the German occupation. Koch’s point, however, was that such a drive was carried by emotions and against the rule of law in a democracy.2 He summed up his accusation against the legislature in three points. First, Koch pointed out how the politicians themselves were not willing publicly to examine their role in the collaboration policy with the German occupiers. Secondly, the avoidance of discussing the reasons for the collaboration policy ‘created an immense antagonism between the official politics of the war years and the provisions of the purge’.  And finally: ‘By this double failure the legislature has become responsible for moving Danish jurisprudence into one of the most

164

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

discreditable chapters of its history. . . . The assignment [of the judges] was hopeless because there was neither historical nor moral substance in the directives offered by the new laws. The result was the previously mentioned distrust of the rulings of the courts’ (Koch 1947, 121–2). In order to understand why Koch so persistently argued against the judicial purge, it is important to notice his political involvement during the war. Throughout the war Koch had supported the policy of collaboration of the Danish government. As leader of the Danish Youth Association he promulgated democratic ideals by discussing with people across the country and writing articles explaining his views. According to Koch (1943, 130), the advantage of his position as leader of a grass-­roots organization as compared to the politicians was that he could speak more freely than the politicians who stood under greater pressure from the occupying German power. ‘Often [the government] has to employ measures that offend justice; often it has to carry out interventions that discredit freedom; often it must announce opinions that are not in accordance with truth. Its assignment is – still within the framework imparted to the legislature – to find solutions, not to find the truth. But the rest of us are obliged to make sure that the cause of truth and justice is not silenced. The members of the government will most likely be accused of being insidiously opportunistic and we will be accused of being starry-­eyed and naïve idealists. Probably it cannot be any different. Our assignments are different and our responsibility is not the same’ (Koch 1943, 135). Koch’s testimony earned him severe reproach from a surprising quarter, namely from his friend and fellow theologian Knud Eiler Løgstrup. He announced, in a personal letter to Koch dated 1 July 1943: ‘I have found your article so wrong and so dangerous that I have decided to protest against it by publishing a text . . . turned against your position’ (Bugge 2010, 146). The text Life of People and Foreign Policy (Folkeliv og Udenrigspolitik) was enclosed in the letter. Koch’s immediate response was to state that their personal relationship was not changed by it becoming publicly known how their opinions differed. However, he further argued that Løgstrup’s position was an expression of the fact that Løgstrup had ‘chosen the easy way out, namely, simply to say no and that no ought to have been the response [to the German occupational power] from the start’ (Bugge 2010, 148–9). In his article Løgstrup diagnosed how human life – according to him – had become solitary due to deteriorating human fellowship. Intellectual and spiritual life had become superficial: ‘Spiritual life is nothing more than . . . taking “a living interest” in what new currents are popping up in our own land and abroad . . . or

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

165

. . . reading many books. Such things can be fine as there is nothing wrong in being a culturally interested and vigilant human being. But this does not amount to declaring that such a human being is spiritually alive. . . . No, a spiritual life consists in a strained tension between the life of the human being and its I’ (Løgstrup 1943, 182). Against what Løgstrup identified as a superficial view on cultural life, he defended spiritual life as a particular interpretation of Christian life involving earnestly living by what he termed the laws of life. However, ‘we may break the laws of life; we can live and act in spite of these – and we do. But they are laws nonetheless and in breaking them we destroy the humanity that they govern’ (ibid., 183). In Løgstrup’s view, they consisted in (1) the respect we need to pay each other; (2) justice between workers and employers; and (3) the obedience of children to their parents. The law of life between parents and children involved creating the will of the child: ‘the will is created in obedience. This means that the humanity and life of the child (in its adult life too) is dependent upon the parents’ obedience to the law governing their life as parents, namely that they must bring up their children to become obedient. This is a law of life that we need to be aware of ’ (ibid., 184). Cultural superficiality had broken with these laws of life and led people into solitude. According to Løgstrup trying to obey the laws of life implied a necessary risk of failure. The situation of the individual cheating on the laws of life through culture (Løgstrup 1943, 189) was mirrored in the life of the nation during German occupation as the political leaders had failed to take care of the laws of life of the nation: ‘The dishonour in foreign policy eats its way into the people and creates dishonour there.’ Having established this relation between the laws of life of the individual and of the nation, he confronted Koch’s function as grass-­roots leader. As statesmen transgressed the limit it was up to the grass roots ‘to oppose themselves to the statesmen and break with them’ (ibid., 197). In Løgstrup’s opinion, Koch had invented an artificial opposition between statesmen and grass roots in order to conceal his own hesitation and unsteadiness as intellectual leader. Even worse, he had admitted ‘the right to the statesmen’s way of handling the situation even as it implied transgressing justice, insulting freedom and speaking untruth and all the same present oneself as a speaker and defender of justice, freedom and truth in a profound and sharp opposition to the statesmen’ (ibid., 200). Løgstrup (1943, 204) who indicated that Koch seemed content to utter protests without opposing or breaking with the statesmen found Koch’s protest ‘very unethical . . . Would it not be more honest to renounce the role of defender of the laws of the life of the people? What vigour does it contain as long as principal considerations prevent one from putting the earnestness of

166

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

opposition and breach into the defence? Or is it simply enough to have lectures on truth, justice and freedom?’ Løgstrup’s article was published in May 1943. On 29 August 1943, Koch was interned in a German camp and kept captive for two months. Subsequently, Løgstrup’s attack on Koch for accommodation towards the German occupation rang more hollow and he apologized in personal letters to Koch and his family.3 In December 1943, Koch wrote yet another article on the question of Danish collaboration policy called The Hour of Confrontation (Opgørets Time). His focus was on the aftermath of the war, noting that an open confrontation over what happened during the war years would be necessary. However, he opposed a purge from the bottom to the top of society. Koch (1947b, 15–16) claimed that the necessary confrontation needed first ‘to have the format of a proper investigation with succeeding juridical decisions’. Secondly, he pointed out how the alliance and solidarity brought into being under the pressure of the occupation was open to the criticism that the price paid for the occupation had been put on the shoulders of the less privileged. The real confrontational question, according to Koch (1947b, 19), concerned whether ‘the national alliance [was] a despicable scam in order to keep the economic privileged pretty much indemnified and let the poor pay the bill – or it was a manifestation of authentic human solidarity?’ Thus, the assignment of the Danish Youth Association would be ‘to demand that solutions are found . . . that the development is pointed in the right direction . . . of a more fair and equal distribution of the goods of life as well as in the direction of breaking down the class distinctions still enduring from the past’ (ibid., 21). Koch did not persist in this radical line of confronting the economical collaborationists (værnemagerne). But he continued to struggle for the betterment of the living conditions of the working class, arguing that privileged people – such as academics – had an obligation to voice the needs of the unprivileged. In the article The Responsibility of the Intellectuals (De Intellektuelles Ansvar) published in the last months of the war in the well-­known Danish academic journal Gads danske Magasin, Koch argued that given their status as privileged opinion leaders intellectuals have a specific duty to campaign for the betterment of the living conditions of the unprivileged. Koch directly associated this duty with the need for the existing Danish economic system to stand comparison with Russian society. The intellectuals in the post-­war period were obliged to oppose the danger ‘that forces within the radical left wing will try to break the continuity [of the Danish political system]. . . . A main purpose of these reflections is to prevent a situation where the violent upheaval is the only

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

167

solution’ (Koch 1945a, 78). After the war, Koch emphasized that the idea of a radical judicial purge within society was unwarranted, and one of his aims was to oppose actions that might create political turmoil that would be beneficial to radical left-­wing politics. He emphasized the impracticality of pressing charges against the many workers who had taken jobs in Germany or worked for German employers in Denmark. Furthermore, Koch pointed to the hypocrisy of urging a purge at the top, as this would leave members of the government and almost all members of the legislature and the king guilty (Koch 1947a, 27). By opposing the Communist demand for a judicial purge he also stepped back from the radical insistence on demanding settlement with industry leaders who had made gains from collaborating with the Germans during the war. The most obvious reason for him to do so was that insisting on a purge against the economic collaborationists could make Koch’s statements useful to the communist debaters on the question of the right understanding of democracy.

Disputes over democracy and the right of free speech What is most important in a democracy – the right to express oneself or the right of the democracy to protect itself from terror and internal enemies? This question entailed a dispute over the meaning of democracy, basically embracing three positions:

1. The highest goal of democracy is to create equality between members in social status, economic influence, and cultural participation. As a higher goal the right to equality overrules rights of freedom. The most influential defenders were professor of philosophy and sympathizer with communism, Jørgen Jørgensen, and professor of medicine, resistance leader and member of the Communist Party, Mogens Fog. 2. Democracy is a form of government based upon majority rule: it does not and should not designate the concrete content of the decisions taken by government. Its basis is the right to political freedom including unlimited freedom of speech. The cultural critic and architect, Poul Henningsen, and the Danish law professor, Alf Ross, were the most prominent advocates of this viewpoint. They agreed on the formal set-­up of democracy as a form of government. But they disagreed with regard to the role played by the people, Henningsen endorsing the active role of the people in democratic decision-­making processes, Ross promulgating a kind of technocracy.

168

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

3. Democracy is more than majority rule. It is a way of life and includes continuous involvement in dialogue as well as exchange of opinions between adversaries. Hal Koch was the highly influential proponent of this view. Koch’s grass-­roots efforts during the war to sustain democratic thinking under German occupation, as well as his opposition to the judicial purge after the war shaped the debate on how to revive Danish democracy in 1945. So did the destiny of the Communist party during the war. The active involvement of the communists in the resistance movement as well as the Communist Law passed by the remaining Danish political parties in 1941 condemning and interning members of the Communist party were important background events shaping the public weight of statements given by debaters who promulgated views that were in line with communist ideas. As formerly persecuted and resistance fighters, the communists possessed a significant moral standing in the public debate. All the same, their opponents suspected the Danish Communist party of being under Soviet influence and the true democratic basis of the communist ideas was indirectly questioned. In July 1945, professor of philosophy Jørgen Jørgensen published an article in the periodical Free Denmark (Frit Danmark), formerly the illegal mouthpiece of the resistance movement but now a free journal. Here he strongly advocated the right of democracy to protect itself against inner enemies: ‘To determine mutual disagreement between supporters of democracy the only permitted methods are information, negotiation and voting. But faced with its adversaries, democracy must have the right to fight fire with fire. . . . The machine gun cannot, unfortunately, be beaten off by ballots’ (Jørgensen 1945, 26). Jørgensen’s standpoint enjoyed broad support (see Rasmussen et al. 2003, 27, 29, 32, 41, 75, 180–1, 212). Many were attracted to Jørgensen’s position because of the war experience and basically endorsed the demand for a pervasive judicial purge and prohibition of any organizations with Nazi ideology. Others supported Jørgensen’s further claim that, within the right of democracy to protect itself, concrete equality would overrule rights of freedom. This was the official politics of the Communist party. According to Jørgensen the goods of equality encompassed social, cultural and economic equality and he argued for ‘an equal distribution of the economic goods of society as well as societally based management and control of the economic life: production, sales, prices, salaries etc’ (1945, 21). The goods of equality overruled the goods of freedom such as the freedom of thought, speech,

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

169

press, religion, association and assembly: ‘freedom in itself is not a democratic good. It depends on how this freedom is used and which consequences it has . . . The democratic freedom should not be allowed to bring the democracy and its existence into danger and where considerations for the protection of democracy demand it from a democratic point of view limitations of freedom should be endorsed’ (Jørgensen, 1945a, 23). As professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Jørgensen’s status as an intellectual debater was substantial. It was therefore convenient for Leif Gundel, member of the Communist party and editor of the official communist periodical Land and People (Land og folk) to lean against Jørgensen as an intellectual leader with the respect and authority of a professor. In the newspaper Politiken, Gundel claimed ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing but a democratic republic in which the proletariat has obtained majority and practices its majority’ (Gundel 1946, 211). By writing in Politiken – a liberal newspaper – Gundel addressed a larger audience than the already convinced communists. His point was clear: Eastern democracy in the form of the Soviet Union is – as Jørgensen had demonstrated – democratic. Danish democracy, however, needed protection against all reactionary tendencies through ‘a prohibition of all Nazi activities in the country coupled with a thorough purge’ (ibid., 212). Gundel skilfully coupled the argument for a limitation of freedom of speech with the claim that real democracy existed in the Soviet Union. Even though Gundel most likely did not expect to convince all readers of Politiken as to the virtues of Soviet democracy he could expect support for the limitation of free speech as it was a key issue of the resistance movement. In Gundel’s article, we observe a semantic drift from the outwardly party-­ neutral standpoint of Jørgensen to the agitation for the Communist party by Gundel. This kind of gliding undercurrent in the debate created an atmosphere of suspicion as to the party loyalties of the debaters. Poul Henningsen, who especially before the war had been suspected of affiliation with the Communist party, was on this account praised for his clear opposition to Jørgensen. Alf Ross (1946, 158) pointed out in Politiken how Henningsen was able to see through Jørgensen’s defence of democracy as a masked form of agitation for ‘the communist idea of “active democracy” which de facto entails giving up on democracy as a political method (political freedom) . . . Henningsen’s writings plainly demonstrate that there is no point in calling him a parlour communist – he claims that if unconditional free speech is given up all barriers collapse.’ Ross’ statement about the difference between Jørgensen and Henningsen indicates how it was important for debaters to ascertain who was associated with

170

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

the communist camp. Since large parts of the resistance movement and its supporters were in favour of some kind of limitation of free speech and more generally a prohibition on organizations with National Socialist views, the dividing line was not drawn there. It was the claim for equality over freedom rights that set communists apart. Against such views Ross and Henningsen agreed that free speech should be considered the highest democratic value. Henningsen (1945a, 62) accentuated how ‘unconditional freedom of expression’ separates democracy from all other forms of government. Agreeing with Jørgensen that it could be necessary to limit and regulate freedom of action in order to obtain social equality,4 Henningsen emphasized the importance of ‘unconditional freedom of expression. [It] turns out to be even more important: the freedom to criticize the existing government [as it regulates the free economic actions of the citizens] . . . If we do not think that the people as a whole will choose democracy, what right do we then possess to thrust it upon them and all the same designate us as democrats?’ (Henningsen 1945a, 62–3). Exactly this line of reasoning was sharpened by Ross (1946a, 159) as he evaluated the debate: ‘If the majority no longer believes in democracy it makes no sense to force it through. It is an impossible paradox to want to force people to be free. A people who are no longer freely in agreement to be a democratic people are not democratic anymore. The highest of all rights of freedom must be the freedom to choose between democracy and dictatorship. The day that belief in the value of freedom is dead democracy itself has passed away.’ The debate between Ross and Henningsen, on the one hand, and Jørgensen and the communist debaters as well as some supporters from the resistance movement, on the other, was drawn as sharply as possible. The latter claimed democracy was in danger of perishing due to the freedom of expression. This view was poignantly formulated by Svend Hoffmeyer, doctor of medicine and writer. Hoffmeyer (1946, 173) held that Danish democratic society was ‘faced with a modern subterranean terror movement’ and in light of such threat it stood as defenceless as a newborn. Therefore, he argued for political leadership: ‘Those who possess the ability to detect if things are taking a wrong direction should be given the power to put their foot down’ (ibid., 174). The other wing following Henningsen and Ross argued that democracy was being suffocated by demands for limitations on freedom as well as demands for giving equality priority over freedom. The position taken by Hal Koch was to navigate between both extremes. He advanced an argument for developing democracy based on conversation. It implied that neither the political procedure of voting, nor demands for economic

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

171

equality could overrule the need for obtaining agreement through dialogue. As a way of life democracy involved discussing ‘things in order to find solutions. Here the interest is . . . in the meeting of the factions to reach that solution which is right in this situation and for these factions . . . Neither the political nor the economic technique can function in isolation. Their content and direction derive from the democratic basic fact: that the factions meet in dialogue. Only as far as they [parliamentarianism and economic organization] serve the community that has been created out of the dialogue can they be called democratic.’ (Koch 1946a, 202). This middle ground was Koch’s communitarian attempt to point out that nobody could nor would win the discussion over democracy if dialogue was cut off. Henningsen endorsed Koch’s concern with carrying out principles for their own sake. However Henningsen underlined the need to enhance and further free speech: ‘Every time we curtail freedom of expression we injure democracy. Every time we expand freedom of expression we promote democracy . . . The anti-­ democrats who will put might over right are always able to convey their opinions through the back door and will therefore easily manage outside the realm of law regardless how it is designed. But the democratic castigators and critics will as a rule need to speak plainly. Against them such laws [limiting freedom of expression] can always be used’ (Henningsen 1946b, 202). Insisting on free speech as the supreme right of democracy Henningsen paid tribute to elements of the argumentation of the communists pleading for more equality as well as to the position of Koch pleading to moderate political orthodoxy. The most important route to equality and reasonable arguments was free speech. As such Henningsen placed himself in the line of radical Enlightenment thinkers5 and agreed with voices in the communist faction that a new and more democratic education system should be built on what they thought were the ruins of the old authoritarian system. He thus argued against a generally conservative view of education and child rearing which was widely popular, as exemplified in Løgstrup’s conception of the law of life controlling the relation between parents and children through obedience. Henningsen (1946a, 168–9) believed ‘the school that today is totalitarian in all Western democracies must be radically changed into a school for the personality and for life. The pedagogical democracy is an absolute prerequisite . . . Therefore it is curious . . . that the Communist party . . . has been a proponent of the pedagogical democracy. This shows first that the party is not dictated from Moscow where there has been a return to the totalitarian school. It also shows that the communists seem to keep all paths open in order to arrive at democracy – both the Western and

172

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

the Eastern – while the old democratic parties sit idly.’ His emphasis on the importance of educating and involving everybody in the democratic process set him apart from Ross. Even though Ross and Henningsen were both keen protagonists of the ideal of freedom of expression within a democracy, Ross upheld an elitist view on how to make democracy function. According to Ross (1946a, 160) ‘one should not ask the people about more issues than they can provide reasonable answers to. . . . the people should entrust the details to the elected representation, legislature and government who are better than the common man at making decisions after thorough reflection.’ Thereby Ross inscribed himself into the tradition of moderate Enlightenment (see Israel 2011). Ross (1946a, 162), who before the elections in autumn 1945 declared his support for the Social Democratic party (Evald 2010, 179), contributed with an important observation on the climate of debate in 1946 by highlighting how the political discourse was predominantly concerned with left-­wing politics: ‘The greatest ideological victory of the socialist parties consists in the fact that the opponents today have accepted the programme that Socialists were fighting for just some years ago.’ The atmosphere after World War II assisted left-­wing political agendas. The general endorsement of political views within the population thus authorized certain agendas over others making the success of intellectual leadership partly dependent upon such a contingent factor as the political atmosphere. The discussion on how to carry on with Danish democracy after the war entailed myriad differentiations to take into account. Apart from articles in newspapers, Alf Ross, Hal Koch and Jørgen Jørgensen all published books explaining their view on democracy in detail. Whereas Ross’s study entitled Why Democracy (Hvorfor Demokrati) and Koch’s What is Democracy (Hvad er Demokrati) have become classics in Danish political science Jørgensen’s The Democratic Society. Outline of an Analysis (Det demokratiske Samfund. Grundtræk af en Analyse) has been almost completely forgotten. Due to the fall of the Iron Curtain and general developments in international politics, the communist view of democracy has lost its appeal. But in the post-­ war debate it carried argumentative weight. Even though the communist position did not succeed in gaining much official political power, it had a greater impact on the political atmosphere in the post-­war discussion on democracy than is often acknowledged. Altered versions of Jørgensen’s demand for more social justice as the route to true democracy can also be found in today’s debate. But the arguments for limitations on the rights of freedom due to the threat of terror carry most weight. The connection between arguments for social justice and for

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

173

limitation of rights of freedom has been dissociated in today’s debates. This is a remarkable change in the coupling of arguments. During early post-­war debates in Denmark communists and resistance fighters argued for a direct connection between promotion of social equality and limitations of free speech. Also in our contemporary discussions, we come across arguments resembling Henningsen’s position on the prominence of free speech and Koch’s argument against defending overly principled and idealistic viewpoints because they polarize the debate. However, it seems that the most prominent type of argument with a resemblance to the post-­war debate follow a similar line to Ross’ argument on the need for expert rule in order to make democracy work. Just as the debate on democracy has to do with three different conceptions of democracy a key question in the humanism debate, to which we will turn now, revolves around the definition of ‘humanism’. The question of the endeavours of humanists is subordinated to and disguised by the question of the right definition of ‘humanism’ and thus only indirectly touched upon.

Humanism after the atom bomb or Erasmic vs. Lutheran humanism Vilhelm Grønbech, professor emeritus of comparative religion at University of Copenhagen and writer of popular intellectual essays, published in 1946 a feuilleton essay entitled ‘The Atom Bomb’ (Atombomben). Here, he opposed being educated (Danish: dannelse, German: Bildung) to being spiritual: ‘One may call oneself an educated person and even range high in the elite of education without knowing anything about spirit, even without having any idea that something like that exists.’ The establishment within education and research populated with ‘the educated despisers of spirit’ have been bred by the specialization of research. In this state of affairs university professors ‘only meet each other in discussion over university regulations’. He lamented this decline because he thought that intellectuals thereby missed a perfect chance of becoming intellectual leaders: ‘. . . the world is ready to invoke spirit. But where can we find the formulation for invocation?’ (Grønbech 1946, 4–5). The news of the atom bombs in Japan (Grønbech 1946, 5–7) brought up as a crucial event as well as a stylistic disruption depicting his reaction to reading about it in the newspaper: ‘A bit stunned I mumble: So you came, you hope of prophets, and then all thoughts were stuck. . . . Little man, what now? You are in the hands of forces that take as little heed of you as thunder and lightning. Yes,

174

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

but thunder and lightning can only kill a couple of people at a time. The inventions of our good Lord turn into toys. . . . Human beings are the inventors of the bomb and they are the most irresponsible beings on the earth.’ Grønbech (1946, 262) identified the misfortune of his time with the acceptance of the narrow basis of experience provided for by scientific research: ‘We have chosen to be half humans in order to win a comfortable world instead of being whole humans and pay the expensive price of life.’ According to him (Grønbech 1946, 75) science was predominantly instrumentalist. Even the humanities were being applied to solve problems: ‘we are informed of the kind of humanities research [åndsvidenskab] needed in sociology: through its examinations we will finally learn to handle the atom bomb and other diabolic inventions with care and vigilance’. In opposition hereto Grønbech insisted that progress in science, technology and social living conditions had led humanity astray. As such, his cultural pessimism was akin to Løgstrup’s lamentation over the solitude of the modern human being described above. Grønbech (1946, 259), accused Christianity as much as science for the wretched state of affairs (ibid., 219–20, 259–60), and longed for a reunion of the spiritual human being with a spiritual world in which the non-­human world would be returned to its splendour as a living world: ‘To have spirit . . . simply means to be a human being and thus to perceive one’s neighbour [næste] and the things around oneself as living creatures and not as effects of laws.’ The influence of Grønbech on the Danish post-­war intellectual climate is difficult to overestimate. The conservative literary movement known as Heretica stood as successors of Grønbech’s cultural pessimism.6 Koch, Grønbech’s co-­ editor, elaborated on his critique of science in an article entitled ‘Humanism’ (Humanisme). Whereas Grønbech raised the question of how to live in the face of the atrocities of the war and confronted the sciences in toto, including the humanities, Koch focused on the value of humanistic science for humanism in order to give what he deemed an adequate definition of humanism. Koch had been invited in autumn 1945 to talk at a Norwegian students’ association about ‘the Breakdown of Humanism’ (Koch 1946b, 78). However, to blame the idea of humanism entirely on Koch (1946b, 81–3) found to be evading human responsibility. Instead he set himself the task of separating mistaken forms of humanism [Humanisme] from true humanity [Danish: Menneskelighed]. Koch’s route to pose the question of the right definition of humanism was by way of the debate on the judicial purge. He recalled the affair with his colleague from University of Copenhagen, professor in Greek, the social democrat Hartvig Frisch. Koch (1946b, 83) underscored that Frisch’s statements and ‘peculiar

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

175

contemplations over the so-­called “liquidation of informants” among the young resistance fighters awoke an understandable and legitimate indignation. . . . I confess I was among those for whom it is not easy to tolerate his statements.’ Writing on the right definition of humanism, Koch was balancing on a knife edge. On the one hand, he strove to align himself with the demands of the resistance movement. On the other, he wanted to uphold the ideal of human compassion against the tendency in the resistance movement to deny Germans any share in human values. Koch (1946b, 83) rhetorically deduced that it might be that ‘the one who trusts a German is a fool. But is the one who loves his neighbour and practises the deeds of mercy and compassion towards the sick and the sorrowed also a fool? Probably he is – a God’s fool – a dreamer who lives in a world in which humanity [Menneskelighed] and compassion are still values.’ Koch’s balancing act involved rejecting Frisch’s version of humanism as misconstrued and establishing his own. Koch (1946b, 85) opposed true humanism to the academic humanism of Frisch: ‘The sort of humanism living of “the humanities” – living of history, humanistic science and spiritual life that does not know of the passion of faith . . . – this sort of humanism can of course be beautiful and touching. But it is dead and as a matter of fact it has never been anything but a dead thing . . . It does not suffice. This is hinted at already in the distinction between humanum and humanities. [The academic humanism] believes that the human values have an independent life . . . It has not understood that humanism needs to concentrate on the human being, on the old question: what is a human being and which are its conditions. Only as this is understood will humanism become personally pertinent. The “humanistic values” cannot live for themselves as eternal ideas . . . No, they only have life in and through a living human being for whom they have become destiny.’ Familiarizing his position to the voices of the resistance movement, Koch also adapted himself to the criticism launched by Løgstrup (1943, 204), namely that simply to give ‘lectures on truth, justice and freedom’ was not enough. He readily adopted the dramatic, existentialist rhetoric of destiny and human life as a matter of choosing and standing in the middle of life instead of the distanced culturally formed bystander. The difference between the dead humanism of the academic humanities and true living humanism Koch mirrored in the old discussion between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther thereby positioning himself as a Lutheran Christian and anti-­academic humanist. Luther, symbolizing true and living humanism, represented protestant faith against the indulgent knowledge of Erasmus who, according to Koch (1946b, 84) never deeply

176

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

committed himself to faith but only to ‘academic historical and philosophical research’. In pointing to Erasmus as the historical representative of the dead humanism at the parting of the ways of Catholicism and Protestantism, Koch took part in an ongoing discussion. In 1934, the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig had published a popular biography of Erasmus translated into Danish the same year. Zweig reflected his own and Europe’s situation in the wake of Fascism and Nazism in the portrait of Erasmus. Koch (1946b, 84) drew on Zweig’s destiny in order to show the faults of Erasmic humanism: ‘Zweig has himself dreamt the dream of the “Erasmic” testament’s beautiful words about the dissolution of contraries in the spirit of justice. . . . [During the war] the dreams burst as soap bubbles – solitary in an American hotel room Zweig made an end to that existence of his that had presented him with so many bitter disappointments.’ Koch’s indirect argument ad hominem conveyed Zweig’s suicide as proof of the futility of Erasmic academic humanism. This argument was countered by Franz Blatt, professor of Latin at the university of Aarhus. Blatt (1951, 54) pointed out that Nicolas de Condorcet during the French revolution wrote his ‘Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit under the most dark days of the tyranny of the Jacobins . . . The guillotine will soon make an end of his life as it has shortened so many other brave and liberal idealists. But he preserves his optimism to the end: he knows that superstition and ignorance, the whole system of religious and political lies still block the way for human happiness. But they are nothing but helpless compulsions of the past.’ The argument ad hominem can always be refuted by a contrary example. Blatt was defending his humanistic position of the Erasmic type. In 1936, he had published the study Humanistic Education (Humanistisk Dannelse) arguing for the value of humanities studies. Without explicit reference to Zweig’s book, Blatt (1936, 26) had highlighted Erasmus as a scholar of humanism: ‘Erasmus contra Luther, the concerns of peaceful contemplation against the glowering passion. Those men who like Erasmus thought that the human being will be able to proceed better if actions are governed by peaceful contemplation and who also wanted to transpose this insight into praxis were the same men who immersed themselves in the [study of] literature . . . Though they did not let their voices be heard on the streets they fought with the new weapon handed over to humanity in the guise of printing.’ Blatt (1936, 37) sought to substantiate how humanistic research in its pure form entailed sensitivity to humanity. However, such research required the humanities to wrench themselves loose from the discussion of use-­value:

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

177

‘Utilitarianism is an insatiable monster akin to the huge snake Heracles was asked to fight. . . . Two new demands of utility will come up each time one is satisfied. It is useful to know other languages, it is useful to be able to do woodwork, it is useful to know biology etc. . . . Humanism claims that it is more important to have an understanding of the people who speak French than to parle français . . . Reading carries greater significance than practical training’ (ibid., 45). According to Blatt (1936, 51), ‘humanistic education is the forecourt of humanity’ and as such humanity and the free humanistic ideal have always been threatened by other ideal views of society that ‘demand to rule unrestricted’ (ibid., 65). Blatt conceded that humanistic education and humanism could be accused of having a basic yielding and lenience built into them. They give a less prominent status to concepts such as will and responsibility. Thus humanistic education and humanism do not assist authoritative forms of leadership. However, this yielding ‘is intimately related to the essence of humanistic education that has its core in the interest in humanity’ (ibid., 52). Therefore Blatt (ibid., 66–7) was of the opinion that the most dangerous enemy of humanism ‘is the inner enemy: the literary and historically educated who – because he sees other forms of education progress – proclaims the death of humanism’. One such inner enemy mentioned by name was Arne Sørensen, leader of the party Danish Unity and author of the popular book Modern Man (Det moderne Menneske). Blatt (1936, 71–2) hinted at Sørensen’s condemnation of humanism in Modern Man. In that book Sørensen (1936, 43) asserted that ‘Humanism is construed over a particular type of the human being’. Sørensen furthermore pointed out that Hal Koch in his 1936 review of Zweig’s portrayal of Erasmus of Rotterdam had given an accurate characterization of the personality type of humanism. Koch had written: ‘Erasmus cannot be outlined as the great political contrast to Machiavelli nor to the power politics of all times. He was no great man but a homunculus, a small, fine human being and it is already a great achievement to have been a little fine human being . . . but even an apostle of tolerance and understanding needs, if he shall be a leader, to risk his whole self . . . Erasmus always kept himself shielded, never gave himself. Therefore he only became a scholar’ (quoted in Sørensen, 1936, 43). Against the lenience and scholarly aloofness of Erasmus, Sørensen (1936, 43) put Luther: ‘He was strong and weak. . . . The man of action in good and bad. No tranquil humanism was possible for him.’ The ideal striven after by Sørensen was thus the authoritative leader over and against the reflective humanist. With Koch’s article on humanism in 1946, this discussion was rekindled. Koch set up the positive ideal of humanism as a fusion between Greek humanism

178

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

embodied in Socrates and Judaic Christianity: ‘Greek humanism as it has been formed by the encounter with the sermon of the neighbour as Jesus teaches has been the backbone and spiritual force in our culture’ (1946b, 238). As such, humanism and Christianity are united. However, the forming of the human being requested by Christ entails a different demand than Greek humanism: ‘The demands of life do not rise from a higher world of ideas or ideals to be mimicked by us and at some distant point in time maybe become our full reality. The demand only occurs here, in the fellow human being who is always present – often annoying and inconveniently’ (Koch, 1946b, 238). Koch accordingly outlined a tension between the Greek demand of forming in accordance with an ideal of perfection and the Christian forming through the demand of the Other as a fellow human being. Experiencing a persistent tension in European culture Koch sided with the Christian way of posing the question of the human being. The privileging of Christianity over Greek humanism Koch (1946b, 320) clearly voiced in the last line of the article: ‘Humanism and Christianity – the tension endures. We are human beings and it was as a human being that God appeared.’ In his influential article, Humanism and Christianity (Humanisme og kristendom), Løgstrup expounded on the line of thought presented by Koch. Løgstrup’s article was originally an oral address at the meeting Humanism and the Times (Humanisme og tiden) in June 1950, arranged by Koch at the folk high school (højskole) where he was principal. Present at the meeting were prominent artists and researchers from the humanities as well as the natural sciences and representatives of the folk high schools in Denmark (Andersen 1993, 105–6). Løgstrup argued that the prerequisite of Christianity as well as humanism was common humanity. Therefore Løgstrup (1950, 467) saw the crucial question to be what humanity consists in. It was not just a question of ‘all the culture creating capacities’. Løgstrup (ibid., 467) argued that humans are ‘separated from nature by the responsibility and guilt revealed in the fact that we are the world of each other in trust and distrust. Thus the incomprehensible and secretive in our life is found in humanity properly speaking. This is the way I have understood humanism.’ Accordingly, Løgstrup (1950, 470) defined humanism as the tacit demand placed on the individual to care for the life of a fellow human being ‘because it is handed over to him to a greater or lesser degree by way of the trust or distrust the other displays towards him’.7 As long as humanism is understood in this way, ‘the difference between humanism and Christianity is only religious. . . . The one who receives the Christian comprehension is faced with the conflict [of the demand to care for the life of the other] in the exact same manner as the one who humanely renounces any religious understanding. As a

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

179

way to bring the conflict out of the world, . . . to act the right way and say the right thing in the situation, the [religious] understanding is not of any use’ (Løgstrup 1950, 472). Løgstrup and Koch, who in public had argued over the question of the appropriate reactions to Denmark’s political situation under German occupation in 1943, brought their views into agreement by way of their common understanding of humanism. True humanism, they argued, consisted in responding to the ethical demand of the given situation without the support of laws of life, moral systems or academic humanistic insight in the history and culture of other people. Another voice in the Danish post-­war debate over humanism was historian of literature Sven Møller Kristensen. As editor and one of the originators of the journal Dialog which was conceived as a left-­wing alternative to Heretica, he actively sought to develop an alternative view. In the first issue of Dialog, Møller Kristensen (1950, 16) published ‘Rationalism and Humanism’ (Rationalisme og humanisme), a piece directly opposing the views maintained by Sørensen, Grønbech as well as ‘[t]he circle around Heretica [who] have repeated his [Grønbech’s] thoughts. They attack rationalism, the natural sciences, belief in progress . . . and energetically dream of a fellowship and community to supersede the solitude of modern man.’ However, Møller Kristensen (ibid., 18) also criticized bourgeois academic humanism for having transformed ‘ideas and opinions that in a specific historical context had seemed to be dangerously revolutionary, subversive . . . into unshakeable truths or “myths” to which the bourgeoisie clung in order to maintain their social structure. . . . The whole complex of conservative common sense and complacent narrow-­mindedness can in good concordance with historical accurateness be labelled “bourgeois rationalism”, petty bourgeois and philistine.’ Against such bourgeois rationalism Møller Kristensen (ibid., 21) advanced and re-­launched humanism as ‘a rational life view taking the new experiences of the sciences to heart as expressions of a richer and more acceptable conception of the human being . . . Such humanism will – from the point of view of all experiences – be able to see what the traditional European human is lacking and what the historical, social and cultural conditions are for this lack. Thereby the content of a new or more appropriately continued humanism is designated: unfolding of the true and real possibilities of the human being.’ Møller Kristensen’s humanism differs from Blatt’s by taking an active position in favour of transforming society and forming a more just future in which what he, with a Marxian terminology, calls the ‘real’ human being may advance. Both

180

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Møller Kristensen and Blatt rejected the type of criticism expounded by Grønbech, Koch and Løgstrup against academic rational humanism. But their views diverged as soon as they started to define more precisely what humanism was. For Blatt, the scholarly attitude of scientific research counted for more. The highest goal of Møller Kristensen was the ideal of human liberation from social and cultural constraints. Thus, he criticized the conservative trait in the academic tradition of humanism. Nonetheless, Blatt and Møller Kristensen united in viewing human culture, the works of art and writing as well as human technical developments and tools not only as conducive to but as necessary for the realization of humanism and its ideal humanity. And as such they opposed the immediacy of Grønbech, Koch and Løgstrup. The position of Koch and Løgstrup attained political importance as Julius Bomholt, Danish minister of education for the Social Democratic party, formulated a political version thereof. In the book Human Being in the Centre (Mennesket i midten) Bomholt (1953, 30), who was himself a trained theologian, argued that the social democratic view of humanism meant ‘the open route of trust. But here also it holds good that humanism is not united with any form of submissiveness . . . Humanism is the view that is condensed around the core of the value of the humane. But besides that it is not a finished nor finalized world of thoughts.’ Bomholt (ibid., 33) repeated Koch’s point that in the past humanism had been weak and lenient ‘of the Erasmic type’. Alternatively, the active humanism of the Social Democratic party would be a humanism prepared to defend ‘unlimited spiritual freedom, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association’ (ibid.). Danish humanism as defined by the minister of education in 1953 was more than the feeble Erasmic academic humanistic education. Its point of departure was the meeting with the fellow human being, and from this basis humanism should be employed to fight for democratic rights of freedom in line with Hal Koch’s understanding of democracy.

Conclusion What we find in the humanism debate is analogous to the findings in the debate over democracy. Three robust but opposing positions are expounded. We might identify them with: (a) radical humanism developing out of an ideal of social justice represented by Møller Kristensen; (b) a classical academic humanism embodied in Blatt; (c) a humanism built upon ideas of philosophy of life – if not vitalism – that gives priority to the immediacy of the situation and the Other

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

181

over and against the stiff works of culture, personified in Grønbech, Koch, Løgstrup and Bomholt. The three positions carry some similarity to the positions in the democracy debate. Møller Kristensen’s position is aligned with Jørgensen’s view on democracy; and Blatt’s has some similarities with Ross’ and Henningsen’s insistence on the right of freedom of speech as fundamental for democracy. Koch is a recurring figure and his views on democracy and humanism are related. In this manner, two debates that, at first sight, do not seem to have much in common turn out to be closely correlated. The examination of the Danish debates on democracy and humanism points to the importance of understanding how the individual voices in any debate over the true values and direction of culture are embedded in a preformed space of positions. The intellectual taking on a position in a debate may involuntarily or deliberately be tapping into a discussion expounded in the past, thus acquiring backing or opposition from the earlier debate. In order to understand the undercurrents in contemporary public debates, familiarity with positions in the public debates of the past is crucial. The generality of the core arguments makes it even more important because the political atmosphere and the historical context may change the implications of the argument. In this sense, this chapter is a plea for classical humanistic study as it instructs contemporary cultural debates. In the context of the actual predicament and possibilities of the humanities, these high-­flown debates of the post-­war years carry important implications. The three fundamental positions are detectable today in a new political landscape. Importantly, all three positions in the post-­war debate – as is the case today – have protagonists who are also university scholars. Nevertheless, it is only the liberal humanism of Blatt, Ross and Henningsen who actively defend scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences as a value in itself, with independent importance for democracy and for understanding humanity. In the post-­war debate, academic liberal humanism opposed the politically active Marxism that pointed to social political goals as first priorities over and above studying human culture and over and above freedom of speech in democratic society. The Marxist positions of Møller Kristensen and Jørgensen diverged on the question of whether civil rights could be dispensed with in order to obtain social and economic equality in the society. Jørgensen was willing to dispense with civil rights as well as liberal freedom, whereas Møller Kristensen did not endorse dismissing democratic rules and would rather agitate, argue and try to persuade people of the justice in a more equal society. Being university professors, they saw the possibility of the institutions of the humanities for

182

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

supporting their political aims. But they argued for a much more value-­orientated and activist form of scholarly work than the liberal humanism of Blatt in particular, but also Ross. Henningsen may be seen as a middle position between the activist political ideals of the Marxist position and the classical – perhaps elitist – view of liberal humanism as Henningsen did not emphasize scholarly learning nor care for traditions. However, Henningsen clearly opposed the view that political goals may overrule political freedom, and in this sense he placed the classical humanistic view of learning from the study of human culture ahead of deducing political truth from a pre-­existing theory. The classical liberal humanistic position also opposed the versions of existentialist and Christian philosophies of life. The split between these positions involved a question as to whether the study of the structures and developments of the products of human beings through history forms an important road for humans to learn their own range of possibilities or rather is a deviation from the important immediate meeting with the other. Koch argued against humanism as the study of human texts as well as theories of procedural democracy in order to highlight the immediate encounter between human beings in which all participants stand equally lacking in knowledge. The difference between the theory and the situation was stressed in order to urge human beings to live in the moment. Thus, the classical liberal humanist position was rejected for breathing through books and collections of rules, rather than living among human beings with all their faults. Koch, Grønbech and Løgstrup, the influential proponents of this position, were also highly acclaimed professors at the Danish universities. As such they were not arguing against university education, but against barren classical humanist studies. Today, Marxism has disappeared; in its place another economistic doctrine – with different political goals – in the guise of neoliberalism plays the utilitarian hand of measuring academic work on direct utility. The philosophy-­of-life camp, on the other hand, has expanded much on the left in the wake of the demise of Marxism – its moralist immediacy, however, mostly unchanged. Only by way of humanistic scrutiny of the different cultural debates in the past and present is it possible to dig out an overview of the differences of the positions. From such study, however, a highly interesting fact becomes evident, namely that these three positions are relatively stable even though the political landscape and the ideals of utility, ideology and immediacy change. In the discussions concerning the value of the humanities one may adopt one of these three points of view: (a) humanistic studies for the sake of knowing humanity in its different forms (classical humanist studies) are important resources in a civilized society;

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

183

(b) humanistic studies should be employed for the sake of changing society in correspondence to some political idea (scholarly work is deemed to be of value for its utility); or (c) humanistic studies as well as all other sciences should be met with a degree of scepticism because they blunt people’s ability to react (philosophy of life). Now as then, academic humanism and the insistence on the importance of continuous deep study of humanity through its works and products face challenges from these two angles. On the one hand, the ideological call for efficiency and utility in research threatens to overrule the lenient classical studies of humanism. On the other hand, the call for a break with the artificially produced cultural artefacts of science is equally ideological. Its demands for immediacy undertake to weaken the authority of the humanistic studies by pointing out the artificiality of culture. The divide between these three points of departure to humanistic studies will, in all probability, remain in different guises. An important function of academic humanism will therefore be to disentangle their different appearances in order to make transparent the central assumptions of humanistic research in the past and present. The task of enlightening the public as to why humanistic research should be given space to steer between the two poles of ideological calls for utility and emancipation on the one hand, and immediacy of life on the other, requires great skills of intellectual leadership. For classical humanism cannot as easily point to external goals supporting its venture. Nevertheless, as the case study of the post-­war cultural debate in Denmark shows, classical humanism is an important mediating voice in public debates.

Notes 1 This and all ensuing translations of the Danish texts are by Esther Oluffa Pedersen. 2 This was also the argument of Poul Henningsen, who differed from Koch in actually supporting Frisch’s viewpoint. Henningsen (1945b, 5) pointed out: ‘The atmosphere of a populace is something quite different to the true view of the people and it is dangerous to base [politics] on it even if you have shaped it yourself.’ 3 Løgstrup wrote a letter to Bodil, the wife of Hal Koch, dated 6 October 1943 trying to explain his position as both friend and critic. He concluded by asking for forgiveness (Bugge, 2010, 170–72). Released from internment in November 1943, Hal Koch wrote to Løgstrup that he fully accepted Løgstrup’s attack and pointed out that ‘I find it quite natural that even close friends take different views of the situation. And even the most severe reasoned attacks ought not to have an effect on our personal relationship’ (Bugge 2010, 173).

184

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

4 Henningsen did not explain what he meant by ‘regulating freedom of action’. Given that ideas of economic democracy and redistribution of wealth were standard opinions within the political left, it is reasonable to assume Henningsen was thinking along such lines. Ross (1946b, 28) and Koch (1945b, 22) also openly supported economic democracy. 5 The term was coined by Jonathan Israel. For a short recapitulation of the distinction between radical and moderate enlightenment see Israel (2011, 1–18). 6 The eulogy to Grønbech in the literary journal Heretica by Ole Wivel (1948, 229–31) can function as example: ‘Grønbech is dead. The only one of the great poet-­thinkers who warmed me at the roots of the heart had passed away. . . . He . . . knew that true form unfolds itself from within just as the movement of a wave is not in concord to a system but a rhythm. In our times, such rhythmic life cycles are rarely allowed to be lived out in a human being.’ 7 The article is a preliminary work to the book The Ethical Demand from 1956 that has received international attention since its 1997 translation into English (Løgstrup 1997). Where Løgstrup in 1950 understood the meeting between humans as exposed by the trust or distrust displayed in the meeting, the central argument in the 1956 book excluded distrust as a basic attitude.

References Andersen, Poul Nybroe (1993), Hal Koch og Krogerup højskole, Odensen: Odense Universitetsforlag. Blatt, Franz (1936), Humanistisk Dannelse, København: Levin & Munksgaard. Blatt, Franz (1951), Midt i et Sekel. En Humanists Betragtninger, København: Rosenkilde og Bagger. Bomholt, Julius (1953), ‘Aktiv humanisme’ (21–37), in Bomholt (ed.) Mennesket i centrum, København: Fremad. Bugge, David (2010), K. E. Løgstrup og Hal Koch Venskab og Strid, Århus: Klim. Evald, Jens (2010), Alf Ross – et liv, København: Jurist- og økonomiforbundets Forlag. Frisch, Hartvig (1954), ‘Efterskrift’ in Tænkt og talt under Krigen, København: Forlaget Fremad. Grønbech, Vilhelm (1946), ‘Atombomben’ (4–13, 65–77, 129–35, 211–23, 257–68), Frie Ord vol. 1. København: Gyldendal. Gundel, Leif (1946), ‘Demokrati lig Folkestyre’ (210–12) Politiken 6.4.1946, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Henningsen, Poul (1945a), ‘Frihed med eller uden rabat’ (57–64), Social-Demokraten 9 September 1945, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Henningsen, Poul, (1945b), ‘Hældende Læs’ (4–6), Politiken, 20 September 1945.

Culture: Terror, Free Speech and Humanism

185

Henningsen, Poul (1946a) ‘Fører folkestyre til demokrati?’ (163–70) Politiken, 30.3.1946, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Henningsen, Poul (1946b), ‘Strid om Demokratiet’ (221–27), Politiken, 17 April 1946, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Hoffmeyer, Svend (1946), ‘Folkestyrets forsvar’ (171–4), Politiken, 3 April 1946, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Israel, Jonathan (2011), ‘Libertas Philosophandi in the Eighteenth Century: Radical Enlightenment versus Moderate Enlightenment (1750–1776)’ (1–18) in Powers, Elizabeth (ed.) Freedom of Speech. The History of an Idea, Lanham MA: Bucknell University Press. Jørgensen, Jørgen (1945) ‘Demokratiet har Ret til at forsvare sig’ (18–26) Frit Danmark August 1945, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Koch, Hal (1943), ‘Statsmændenes Embede – og vort’, Lederbladet nr. 5, maj 1943 – in Bugge (2010). Koch, Hal (1945a), ‘De Intellektuelles Forpligtelse’ (73–79) in Gads danske Magasin, København: Gad. Koch, Hal (1945b), Hvad er Demokrati?, København: Gyldendal. Koch, Hal (1946a), ‘Loke og Thor’ (188–207) Frie Ord, 7 April 1946, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Koch, Hal (1946b), ‘Humanisme’ (78–90, 172–81, 235–43, 314–20), Frie Ord Vol. 1, København: Gyldendal. Koch, Hal (1947a), Jeg anklager Rigsdagen, København: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck. Koch, Hal (1947b), ‘Opgørets Time’ (14–22) in Jeg anklager Rigsdagen, København: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck. Løgstrup, Kund Eiler (1943), ‘Folkeliv og Udenrigspolitik’ (180–204) in Bugge (2010). Løgstrup, Knud Eiler (1950), ‘Humanisme og Kristendom’ (456–74), Heretica Vol. 3, København: Wivels forlag. Løgstrup, Knud Eiler (1997), The Ethical Demand (ed. Hans Fink and Alasdair McIntyre), Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Møller Kristensen, Sven (1950), ‘Rationalisme og humanisme’, Dialog I/I, København: Tiden (reprinted in Dialog. En antologi (ed.) Erik Bay, København: Gyldendal, 1978, pp. 15–21). Rasmussen, Søren Hein and Nielsen, Niels Kayser (2003), Strid om demokratiet. Artikler fra en dansk debat 1945–46, Århus: Århus Universitetsforlag. Ross, Alf (1946a), ‘Ordet eller Sværdet’ (156–62) Politiken 23.3.1946, reprinted in Rasmussen et al. (2003). Ross, Alf (1946b), Kommunismen og Demokratiet, København: Fremad. Sørensen, Arne (1936), Det moderne Menneske, København: Europa Bøgerne. Wivel, Ole (1948), ‘Vilhelm Grønbech in momoriam’ in Heretica, Vol. 1, 1948, København: Wivels Forlag.

10

Transforming the Humanities from a National to an International Agenda Uffe Østergård

History politics in the European Union Since the very beginnings of history as a scholarly discipline and social practice, the writing of history has been closely associated with legitimizing power. This is the case in all known organized societies from empires and monarchies to territorial states and nation states.1 It is therefore hardly surprising that we find a connection between European integration and attempts to write its history. Official circles in the EU Commission and the Member States in cooperation with private foundations early on have invested in the writing and teaching of history, even though the humanities together with the social sciences only made it into the EU’s official research programme in 2002. Long before the formation of the European institutions, individual historians began mapping ideas of a common Europe. They did this as a reaction to the horrors of World War II and the division of the continent between the Soviet Union and the United States. In this perspective, the EU can be viewed as just one manifestation of a common Europe – perhaps the most important one to date, but one of several in recent centuries, and certainly not the only representation of the idea of what Europe is or should be. A clear distinction has to be drawn between the history of Europe and the history of the idea of Europe, although inevitably there is some overlap. The history of the idea first attracted systematic attention during and after World War II, for example from the Italian historian Federico Chabod (1958), the Briton Denis Hay (1957) and the German Heinz Gollwitzer (1964). Furthermore,‘founding fathers’ of European federalism such as Hendrik Brugmans (1906–97) and Denis de Rougemont (1906–85), wrote books, primarily concerned with the history of perceptions of Europe, Europabilder, to use Gollwitzer’s German terminology. Rather than

188

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

charting the reality of European history, their interest was in how Europeans had thought of and dreamed about the continent. Periods investigated were in particular medieval Christianity and Charlemagne’s empire, the Enlightenment, nationalist Europe in the nineteenth century on one side and reactions to the hegemonic attempts by Louis XIV, Napoleon and Hitler and the European project of the later twentieth century on the other. This tradition primarily dealt with political ideas and plans for a united Europe from above such as Napoleon’s 1799–1815, the Congress System 1815–48, the League of Nations 1920–39, the Third Reich and European institutions since 1950 (Wintle 2013). In the mid-1980s, the European Commission under the presidency of Jacques Delors (b. 1925, chairman 1985–94) decided to extend its activities into the cultural field culminating in the commitment of the Maastricht treaty of 1992 to ‘bring the common cultural heritage to the fore’.2 Major funding was provided from the EU from the 1980s onwards in order to heighten the visibility of the EU, first through lectureships and common courses, later through mobility of students helped by the Erasmus and Socrates programmes. But this has not been much of a success outside professional circles, to judge from the rising anti-European mood among voters. The prime example of these attempts to promote a common European identification is the so-­called ‘Jean Monnet Action’. Launched by the European Commission in 1990, the initiative intended to promote studies of European integration by (1) stimulating European integration studies; (2) fostering academic reflection on policy priorities in the field of European integration; (3) direct support of university institutions active in the study of European integration through the creation of ‘Jean Monnet Chairs’.3 These chairs were ‘full-­time teaching post in the field of European integration studies, selected by the university authorities and obliged to devote 100 per cent of their teaching time to European integration issues.4 In the late 1980s, the European Commission asked twelve teachers of history, one from each Member State, to write a textbook on European history for the upper secondary level. The result was not particularly convincing, nor successful, but led to a discussion as to where to begin a history of Europe. Should it begin with Ancient Greece and Rome, the Celts from 500 BC, Charlemagne in 800 AD or in 1000 AD with the technological, urban and intellectual revolution of the High Middle Ages. Due to the insistence of the Danish contributor, Ancient Greece was chosen as the beginning of the narrative. Even though the volume was well financed, it does not seem to have made an impression on the various national school systems, probably because of the different status of textbooks in

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

189

the different school systems.5 But it also testifies to the continued popularity of national history in the EU Member States, even after more than sixty years of integration. Slightly more influential was a publication by the French historian JeanBaptiste Duroselle (1917–94). In 1965 he had published a volume on a par with the already mentioned books on the idea of Europe, L’idée de l’Europe dans l’histoire. Because of this book, Duroselle was asked by an influential NorwegianFrench businessman, Frédéric Delouche, to produce a scholarly textbook on European history for the general public. On Delouche’s initiative, but with EU funding, the book was published in eight of the languages of the European Community.6 From a scholarly point of view the book is rather good, but unfortunately Duroselle decided to write the whole book on his own, even though he was primarily a historian of international relations in the twentieth century. He was generally qualified but not well acquainted with the specialized research on most of the periods he dealt with. In many ways Duroselle’s book demonstrates how the subject should not be treated, regardless of its honourable intentions. He ended up with a triumphalist vision of Europe as determined to unity from the Celtic tribes in Central Europe, France and the British Isles around 500 BC to the Coal and Steel Community in 1950. In choosing this perspective he ignored the permanent wars and the rise of nationalism and nation states that have characterized the European experience more than peace and unity. In short, what has been called the failure of universal empire in Europe (Østergårs 1997).

The humanities and the EU’s research policy Of course such un-­coordinated initiatives do not constitute a full-­blown research agenda. But they indicate that history has played a much greater role for the EU than one would gather from an inspection of the EU’s official research agenda such as the one undertaken by Poul Holm, Arne Jarrick and Dominic Scott in Humanities World Report in 2015. In accordance with the European Treaty ‘all funding must contribute to European Union aims, primarily economic growth and European integration’. According to Holm, Jarrick and Scott the humanities’ share of total EU research funding today only amounts to 2 per cent with the social sciences and humanities treated together as a single field referred to as SHH. The inclusion of the humanities only dates back to 2002. In 2005, on receipt of EU funding, the European Research Council for the Humanities gave

190

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

way to a new organ, ‘Humanities in the European Research Area’, HERA, a partnership that now consists of twenty-­one national funding bodies in Europe (Holm, Jarrick and Scott 2015: 167–74). According to Holm, Jarrick and Scott, HERA until now has launched two thematic calls, one called ‘Cultural Dynamics – Inheritance and Identity’, the other ‘Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation’. The first was an invitation to humanist scholars across Europe to study ‘the way in which cultural exchanges and dynamics cross between social strata, between countries, and between media’. Under the broad headings three topics were outlined, the first about collective ‘identities before and after the nation-­state’, the second on ‘culture as self-­reflection’ and the third ‘cultural practices between “high” and “low”, local and global, performance and ownership’ (ibid., p.  171). In 2012 a new programme called ‘Cultural Encounters’, with a focus on peaceful and conflict-­ridden encounters between people from different cultures, was launched. In spite of these initiatives, the humanities are still struggling for their place in the Framework Programmes. The Seventh Framework Programme from 2007 to 2013 did call on the humanities for policy advice, but the calls were limited and funding was a fraction of that available for science and technology. Nevertheless the Seventh Framework Programme marked the recognition of the humanities as part of the knowledge base for policy-­makers. But the sweeping formulations of the purpose of EU research funding leave us with a fundamental lack of clarity as to the exact relationship between a transnational, a supranational and a national understanding of Europe. Is the official purpose of the EU still ‘an ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’ as formulated in the Treaty of Rome in 1957, or are we in reality moving in the direction of a ‘federation of nation states’ as formulated by the president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso in his State of the Union Address in the European Parliament on 12 September 2012? What exactly does the proclamation ‘all funding must contribute to European Union aims, primarily economic growth and European integration’ (ibid., p.  171) mean? On closer inspection this is much less clear than is assumed in dominating EU circles ever since the launch of European integration with the announcement of the European Coal and Steel Community on 9 May 1950 by Robert Schuman (1886–1963) with the help of Jean Monnet (1888–1979). The optimistic vision of an ever closer union has been challenged at least since 1992 when a majority of the Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty with its introduction of an Economic and Monetary Union. Nevertheless, the euro and the ECB in Frankfurt were introduced in 1999 without the envisaged

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

191

political controls. The weaknesses of this construction were revealed in the financial crisis in 2008 and led to a rapidly rising Euroscepticism on the left as well as the right. The debt crisis in Greece has put the whole European project in jeopardy. Combined with external challenges from Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya and the tidal wave of immigrants and refugees, European solidarity is put under pressure at the same time as public opinion seems to turn away from the European institutions and European solutions. Furthermore, the United Kingdom asks for a fundamental rehearsal of the workings of the EU, in particular restrictions on the free movement of people, while the most eager supporters of European cooperation seem to be the regional nationalists in Catalonia and Scotland who want independence from Spain and the United Kingdom, respectively. Two historians from the European University Institute in Firenze in 2010 criticized what they see as the mainstream understanding of the EU as a progressive movement towards a pre-­determined goal (Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010). According to them, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 was based on neoliberal ideas of a market-­driven European economy and democracy and continues to be seen as a step towards a new stage of unification (i.e. a federal Europe based on market integration). The authors demonstrate that European integration as a federal project actually came to an end already around 1970. The European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor of the EU, was never thought of as a democracy, which is what federalism envisages. The authors locate a shift in thinking in this respect in the 1980s when the idea of a European democracy was connected with a plan for the internal market, based on the conviction that the market would pave the way for democracy. In technical terms a ‘spill-­over’ from economics to politics and eventually even culture and identity.7 Since the 1960s, a widening of the gap between the official propaganda of an ever more democratic European Union and the real workings of the institutions has resulted in mistrust among European voters. Schultz-Forberg and Stråth suggest that instead of democracy through market, there are signs of increasing social disintegration, political extremism and populism as unintended consequences of economic integration. They think the European integration project needs an underpinning in historical research and historical consciousness because of the fragile and open-­ended nature of this process. But they do not offer any indications of the character or content of such a history. These contradictions in the present situation for European integration and their importance for an up-­to-date understanding of a relevant research policy

192

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

that is able to address the tension between its supranational assumptions and the neo-­functionalist method of cooperation will be treated through analysis of two areas. First, an investigation of how the remembrance of the Nazi genocide on Europe’s Jews came to be seen as part of a common European memory culture and formulated as a condition for EU membership after 1997. Secondly, an analysis of the memory culture of the European institutions as revealed in the names of the EU’s buildings in Brussels and the lives and thinking of the men after whom they were named.

Holocaust and the public use of history in the EU Since the end of the civil wars in former Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999, actualizing the terrible neologism of ‘ethnic cleansing’, most members of the European Union have been engaged in preserving the memory of the Nazi annihilation of the European Jews, since the 1970s generally known as the Holocaust.8 This endeavour eventually culminated in the demand for a recognition of co-­ responsibility for the Holocaust and other genocides as an unofficial condition for membership of the Union. Even the small and presumably innocent Nordic countries were implicated in the general European attempt to commemorate the Nazi genocide of the Jews in World War II. Norway paid compensations for Jewish property confiscated from the Jews who were arrested and deported in November 1942. Some of the reparations which could not be directed to relatives of the vanished went into the setting up of a Center for the ‘Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities’ which opened to the public in August 2006. As a sign of poetic revenge on history, this Center is located in the luxurious villa of the Norwegian Nazi, Vidkun Quisling, located in the museum peninsula in central Oslo. Even Denmark, with her good reputation for having saved the majority of her Jews in October 1943, in 2000 commissioned an official investigation of her refugee policy prior to and during the German occupation in 1940–45. The results have been published in four massive volumes, which document the restrictive Danish policy towards refugees in the whole of the period 1933–45, and the deportation of a number of Jews who were not Danish citizens during the German occupation.9 Neutral Sweden, too, has faced up to her complicity by initiating mass information campaigns about the Holocaust and other genocides, and the setting up of a permanent institution called ‘Living History’ (Levande historia).

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

193

This wave of self-­reflection caught on all over Europe, inside the EU as well as outside. In technical terms, historians call such collective reflection ‘politics of memory’ or ‘politics of history’ (see, e.g., Østergård 1998). That states have attempted to ‘manage memory’ is far from being a new phenomenon; indeed, to a large degree this is what the writing of history has always been about. The novelty is that it occurred as a demand from outside the state, officially to acknowledge and remember not only positive but also decidedly negative aspects of their national histories. In some ways these processes came close to the one that West Germany was forced to go through after the crushing defeat in World War II. This endeavour, at which the West Germans have been so extremely thorough and efficient, is called Vergangenheitsbewältigung in German. The term was formulated in the early 1950s and means confronting the past in order to come to terms with it. Until recently this concept has been virtually untranslatable. One outcome of the last twenty years of European soul-­searching may be that the term will find a place in other European languages. As a consequence, nation states in Eastern and Central Europe who wanted to join the EU, were forced to face up to their complicity in the Holocaust as a more or less formal precondition for acceptance in the EU. If not the original intention, this became the raison d’être of the ‘Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research’ which was set up in Sweden in May 1998. In 2013, the organization changed name and became the ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’, IHRA. The initiative came from the Swedish Prime Minister, Göran Persson, who was shocked by a 1997 poll according to which more than half of young Swedish school children had never heard of the Holocaust. He launched a debate in parliament about Holocaust education and initiated the Swedish information campaign entitled Levande Historia (Living History). Persson also took steps towards establishing an international organization to expand Holocaust education, remembrance and research worldwide and contacted the United States and the United Kingdom. The first meeting of the new body took place in May 1998 where the Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer was appointed academic advisor. In 1998, Germany and Israel joined the initiative, followed in 1999 by the Netherlands, Poland, France and Italy. By 2007, a further sixteen countries had joined. Membership of the IHRA today stands at thirty-­one countries, with a further eight countries as Observer States. Nation states have always preferred to remember their victimization by others rather than face their own guilt; this is a universal human characteristic. But the crimes committed in Europe during World War II were of a very particular

194

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

nature. Grudgingly, Europeans have come to recognize that the extermination of the Jews and other groups was not an exclusively German matter. Nobody will deny that Germany was the cradle of Nazism and instigator of extermination, but World War II was also a European civil war, fought between ideologically motivated factions within each country and many non-Germans were only too eager to help in the mass killings. Anti-Semitism, certainly, was not a German peculiarity. The reason for the Holocaust was that a group of virulent anti-Semites in 1933 conquered the hypermodern German state which was in a profound crisis after defeat in World War I. Through a combination of persuasion and oppression they involved the rest of their fellow nationals, plus allies in other countries, in the extermination of a group they rather arbitrarily labelled ‘Jews’, plus other groups such as the Roma and Sinti, Slav peoples defined as ‘sub-­human’, homosexuals and the handicapped. To some extent we have known this for a long time, but the expansion of the EU with former communist countries provoked an investigation of the darker sides of the respective national histories and their relation to so-­called ‘European values’. One of the major lessons of recent European history is that the recognition of historical responsibility is a prerequisite for any credible attempt to prevent similar disasters elsewhere and in the future. Today, most EU countries have joined the ‘Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research’.10 The first spectacular result of the original Swedish-British-American initiative was the so-­called ‘Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust’, 26–28 January 2000. This event brought together forty-­seven prime ministers and marked the beginning of what is now referred to as the ‘Stockholm process’ of four international conferences in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004. The main message of the event was that what happened in Germany could also have happened elsewhere – and that in fact it did happen in a number of other countries such as the Baltic States, France, Hungary, Ukraine, Italy, Croatia and others with the active participation of their citizens. This reinterpretation was confirmed by most of the busy politicians who had taken the time to participate in the conference. Besides a remarkable number of heads of governments, the attendees at the first meeting counted almost a thousand diplomats, NGOs, religious leaders, survivors, historians, teachers and journalists. The official goal of the conferences was to ‘promote the international dialogue on education, raising youth, and research on the Holocaust.’ This gathering demonstrated that ‘Realpolitik is Moralpolitik’, as the Norwegian explorer and international relief organizer Fridtjof Nansen once put it.11

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

195

Through these events, the then Swedish Prime minister, Göran Persson, entered the international scene of what has been termed the ‘politics of morality’ (Østergård 2005), almost as an incarnation of his charismatic predecessor Olof Palme. Apart from a number of Holocaust Museums all over Europe, the most concrete result of the Stockholm Forum was the agreement to inaugurate an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January, the date when Soviet forces liberated the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau in southern Poland. A number of countries were already holding such commemorations, albeit on different dates. The liberation of the concentration camps in Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, followed by the camps of BergenBelsen, Dachau, Neuengamme, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and many others in April and May of that year, with their terrible testimonies had left no doubt as to the enormity of the Nazi crimes, except among the most fervent deniers. The images of piles of corpses and of famished, skeletal survivors became burned into the minds of politically responsible German people. What was not imprinted this way was systematically taught later on, especially in the Western occupation zones, where the Americans in particular initiated a systematic ‘re-­education’ of the German population in democracy. As a result of this surprisingly successful endeavour, the Federal Republic of Germany of today represents one of the few cases where the majority have learned from history and accepted responsibility for the misdeeds of the nation, if not immediately during the 1950s, then certainly later by virtue of the youth rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s. Such efforts to learn from history had until then mainly been a West German speciality, but were now exported to the rest of Europe. How successful the endeavour has been in promoting a common European understanding of a collective guilt-­ridden past can be discussed. To found a feeling of ‘Europeanness’ on such a singularly negative event as the genocide on the European Jews is a daring attempt, which has not yet been proved as a success. In the former communist countries, furthermore, the demand for recognition of partial responsibility for involvement in the Holocaust has spurred a demand for a similar recognition of communist crimes. This demand led to heated debate on the danger of comparing crimes and sufferings – a debate which is far from finished. However, these attempts and debates testify to the importance of humanities in general and history in particular for the EU project outside the official research agenda. The only problem is that the endeavour represents an instrumental use of historical knowledge which may jeopardize history as truth seeking (i.e. its status as a scholarly discipline).

196

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

The role of history in the EU’s memory culture – the founding fathers Without help from the official formulations of a research policy for the EU, a semi-­official self-­understanding of the nature of the integration has emerged over the years in Brussels and elsewhere, primarily at the Collège d’Europe in Bruges and to a lesser degree at the European University Institute, EUI, in Firenze. This interpretation could be labelled ‘half-­baked federalism’, concentrating on those figures the hard-­nosed British historian, Alan Milward, somewhat mockingly labelled the ‘EU Saints’ (Milward 1992). This history has not been developed systematically, and primarily qualifies as a collective memory furthered in informal ways by the institutions. The best testimony to the EU’s unofficial memory culture are the names of the buildings in the EU quarter in north-­eastern Brussels near Parc du Cinquantenaire, or Jubelpark as the area is called in Flemish. Monumental buildings housing the various European institutions today have taken over the whole quarter in north-­eastern Brussels near the park which was erected for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Belgium in 1880. Since the 1960s hundreds of fine Art Nouveau houses have given way to building speculators because of the lack of effective zoning practices in Brussels’ decentralized government. From early on, the European Commission was housed in the characteristic four-­winged Berlaymont building built in 1963–69. While this structure was temporarily closed for asbestos renovation in 1991– 2004, things moved very fast indeed. There are many signs of architectural decline. There is the Commission’s boring Charlemagne complex, the Council’s pompous and authoritarian Justus Lipsius building, and, more recently, the European Parliament’s two giant glass palaces in brutal post-­modernism that squeezes the life out of both the Leopold Park and the elegant railway station of the same name. This is all quite sad, though admittedly not the worst of architectonic and city planning catastrophes in modern Europe. Aside from the today relatively unknown Justus Lipsius and the renovated Berlaymont complex, the names of the buildings and squares tell a history of European integration in the form of the names of the principal actors – the ‘fathers’ of Europe. The buildings are named after the streets and are thus results of historical coincidence. But this coincidence contains another symbolism, in the sense that the master plan behind the naming is every bit as unplanned as the entire European project is in reality. The EU evolved without precise blueprints, but seen retrospectively from today there is no end as to how planned the whole

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

197

thing looks. Yet a close historical analysis shows that the Union is just as little planned as everything else in Belgium. But now this unplanned project has become the official history of the EU, known and cherished by most civil servants in the institutions.

Charlemagne A significant part of the official ideology of a united Europe points back to the Frankish king and Emperor Carolus Magnus who ruled from 768 to 814 from Aachen (Aix la Chapelle) on the border between Germany and Belgium as the ‘Father of Europe’. A drab building opposite the renovated Berlaymont complex that houses the Council of Ministers is named after him. Not as a result of a conscious decision but because of the name of the street, Rue Charlemagne. On the death of his father Pepin he inherited the Frankish crown and became undisputed ruler in 771. He continued his father’s policy of protecting the Pope in Rome and removed Lombard rule in northern Italy. He invaded Muslim Spain and laid the foundation for the Spanish March, today’s Catalonia. He also conquered and Christianized Saxony to the east and thus instigated the organization of state structures in the Danish March (Denmark) to the north and Austria (Ostmark), Poland and Bohemia in the east. Charlemagne reached the height of his power in 800 when he was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ in Rome. He had earned the title pater Europae (Father of Europe) because he had united most of Western Europe for the first time since the Roman Empire by the time of his death in 814. Later, his kingdom was divided between his grandsons which became the monarchies of Germany, France and the lands in between. He has thus left a legacy of both the division of Europe in warring nations and states on one side and a unified Europe on the other. Nevertheless, he is often referred to as the precursor of the united Europe of the 1950s because of the territorial overlap between his empire and ‘Europe of the six’, France, West Germany, Italy and the three Benelux countries.

Justus Lipsius On the opposite side of Rue de la Loi we encounter the austere building of the European Council which is named after Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). He was a little known Flemish classical philologist. That he has had a street and thereafter the building of the European Council named after him is primarily due to local patriotic reasons. However, on closer examination he fits quite well into the

198

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

European Pantheon. Lipsius was born in the vicinity of Brussels in 1547 and died in Louvain in 1606, after a scholarly career in which he sided with the Catholic Habsburgs against the rebellious Protestants in the Netherlands and Flanders. He thus represents the intellectual side of the despised CounterReformation that led to the remaking of the modern Catholic Church, which indirectly and unintentionally became one of the decisive factors behind European cooperation of the twentieth century. After the Catholic Church began to abandon its resistance against modern society and politics (with the exception of Italy) through the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891, Catholic popular parties were created in several European states. Following the reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics after World War II, these ChristianDemocratic parties have carried forth European collaboration together with socialist and social democratic parties.

Jean Monnet Lipsius thus only indirectly qualifies as a founder of the EU. But the other names of places and buildings incontestably tell the canonized story of the Community, whether or not it was planned. In particular the decoration of Station Schuman, the underground station frequented on a daily basis by the lower-­level employees of the EU institutions, and the overlying roundabout, Rond-Point Robert Schuman, are important as testimonies of the EU’s self-­understanding. On the walls of the underground station used to be found the photographs of two men, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, under the title, ‘The beginning of the European Community’. The date of the photo is 9 March 1950, the day the French foreign minister Robert Schuman launched the plan for placing ‘FrancoGerman production of coal and steel as a whole [. . .] under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe’. That proclamation is the reason why 9 May is the official ‘Europe Day’. Not much loved or even known in the Member States, but an official day off in the EU institutions. The other person in the photo, Jean Monnet (1888–1979), was the brains behind the initiative. He had earned experience with international cooperation on the administrative level organizing the maritime transport of the allies during World War I and after the war when he served as Vice General Secretary of the League of Nations 1919–23. Thereafter, he returned to look after his family’s cognac business on a full-­time basis for a period. During World War II he joined General de Gaulle’s Free France and negotiated British-American financial

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

199

cooperation. After the war he drew up the so-­called Monnet Plan for the reconstruction of France’s economy. His contribution to the Schuman Plan, which led to the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community of which he was president from 1952 to 1955, was decisive. The Coal and Steel Union, however, was only a means for him and not an end, even though he served as head of the High Authority in the beginning. In 1954 he retired from his post and established a transnational lobby group with the impressive name ‘Action Committee for the United States of Europe’ (Duchêne 1994). More than any other individual, Monnet has been responsible for the European cooperation we know today. But his confusing choice of words, ‘United States of Europe’, has contributed to the political gap between supporters and opponents of cooperation in Europe. His choice of this term was characteristic for the time – and unfortunate – in that he least of all wanted to see the nation state disappear. Monnet sought cooperation in order to save the nation states from their inherent potential for self-­destruction of which he had been a privileged observer during the two world wars – not their annihilation. In his memoirs from 1976, Monnet describes how the new cooperating Europe began in 1917 in the middle of World War I. In order to overcome the threat from Germany’s unrestricted submarine war against the allied supply routes, a small group of functionaries produced a plan to pool allied tonnage under a transnational administration, the so-­called Allied Maritime Transport Council. It soon became clear that there were great possibilities in this new form of organization. In order most effectively to use the sparse tonnage it was not enough to assemble the ships under a common administration, but it was also necessary to organize the purchasing of the goods to be transported, especially grain. The shipping collective thus was followed by a goods collective. It was the first example of ‘spillover’ in international cooperation. The whole enterprise functioned so well that, when peace was imminent, Monnet and a British civil servant, Arthur Salter, suggested using the same procedure after the war. In late 1918 they convinced their ministers to propose to the US government the establishment of an international economic cooperation organization. But that was sharply rejected in Washington because of doctrinaire liberalist resistance against any form of government intervention in the economy. This rejection was just as important for the failure of international cooperation in the interwar period as the US Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations in 1920. The result was a global economic crisis, in which the individual states tried to export their problems to each other, and only managed to make them worse.

200

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

The two central functionaries were Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter. They reappeared in the sensational attempt to fuse Great Britain and France into a political union after their military defeat in May 1940 when the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill offered to enter a political, military and economic union with the defeated France. In this context, it is important that, after France’s withdrawal from the war, Monnet was sent as a British functionary to the US in order to organize war purchases for Great Britain. With his unique ability to get access to the leading statesmen, Monnet managed to persuade President Roosevelt of his plan to mobilize US industrial resources to support Great Britain. Monnet’s working method was informal. He always thought a number of steps ahead and typically had a short and clear memorandum ready which could solve a political problem before it became urgent (Monnet 1976). At the same time he kept the long-­term consequences to himself and his closest collaborators. This procedure also came to mark European cooperation in the post-­war period and was behind initiatives such as the adoption of the inner market in 1986 and the EMU in 1991.

The European pantheon The tension between title and real content was thus inherent in the cooperation from the very start. This can be seen by noting who is and who is not included in the EU pantheon. An authoritative enumeration of these ‘European fathers’ (there were no women) is to be found in the collection of annual introductory lectures at the Collège d’Europe by Hendrik Brugmans12 held from 1950 to 1972. The collection from 1974 has the characteristic title Prophets and Founders of Europe/Prophètes et fondateurs de l’Europe. Each class was – and still is – named after a prominent European thinker or statesman, from Virgil to Saint-Exupéry. Brugmans’ choice of people has in part been a self-­fulfilling prophecy, since so many active in the institutions have been students in Bruges or in one way or another connected to the place. Slightly against the tradition is that Brugmans had Churchill on his list together with Adenauer, De Gasperi and Schuman. On the other hand he left out the Belgian socialist Paul-Henri Spaak. I myself belong to the 1969–70 class named after the Dutch stadholder 1559–84, Guillaume le Taciturne or Willem of Oranje (1533–84) who led the rebellion against Spanish rule. Perhaps the choice reflects the common perception of the turn of the year 1969 as a period of stagnation for the cooperation. Today we can see that this is not true, given that the summit in December 1969 in The Hague prepared the

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

201

first expansion with Great Britain, Ireland and Denmark in 1973. The federalist Brugmans eventually became so European that he changed his name from the Dutch Hendrik to the French Henri. Apart from the shadowy figure of Jean Monnet, the most important of the fathers of Europe were prominent politicians, the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) and the Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi (1881–1954) who have no buildings in Brussels, Strasbourg or Luxembourg named after them. It seems to be of considerable significance that both Schuman and De Gasperi were able to negotiate with Adenauer in German and that Adenauer as a Rhinelander had greater understanding, also linguistically, for his Central European neighbours than the majority of his Prussian compatriots. The Italian De Gasperi was born and raised in Trento and represented the province of Trentino in the Austrian Parliament from 1911 to 1918. Because of his Austrian past De Gasperi was fluent in German. He spent the time under fascist rule in hiding as a librarian in the Vatican and thus was uncompromised in democratic Italy after the war. Schuman was born in Luxembourg – where he went to school with the future politician Joseph Bech (1887–1975), who also belonged to the group of founders – but was a German citizen in the thirty-­two years the Lorraine belonged to the German empire under the name Lothringen. He was educated at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, Munich and, above all, Strasbourg (Strassburg). Schuman himself said that his national language was French (learned at school), but his mother tongue was Letzeburgisch – while at the same time his university education was carried out in German. The fifth of ‘Europe’s fathers’ was the Belgian socialist Paul-Henri Spaak (1899–1972). He was a French-­speaker, but he also spoke Flemish and understood German. These politicians were able to negotiate in private in German in a way that today’s exclusively English-­oriented generations can hardly imagine. At times one has the impression that today’s politicians are more separated than united by the common English they all think they master.

Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle Two other politicians, though, are at least as responsible for the development of the EU of today, the British Winston Churchill (1874–1963) and the French Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970). They are normally omitted in the official history of the EU because they do not fit into the opposition of nation state and nationalism on the one hand and European cooperation on the other. The

202

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

distinction is popular among both supporters and opponents of integration, but is misleading. Regardless of the fact that he fought a whole life in order to preserve the worldwide British Empire outside of Europe, it is impossible to omit Churchill from the ranks of European politicians responsible for the integration. It was Churchill who on 19 September 1946 proclaimed ‘the United States of Europe’ in a speech at the Technical University of Zürich. The result of Churchill’s initiative, though, was not a European collaboration that reminds one of what many at that time associated with the term ‘the United States of Europe’, in the same way as today. The congress in The Hague on 8 to 9 May 1948, called by the European movement on British initiative and with numerous Nordic participants, resulted in the establishment of the Council of Europe. This honourable organization is quite different from the EU and has not challenged the sovereignty of the nation state. Nor did it ever cross the minds of Churchill and the other initiators that this should be possible. For them the nation state came first. Jean Monnet knew this in advance and stayed away from The Hague Congress where otherwise European idealists met with high hopes for the future of Europe, the Scandinavians in particular. Apparently, it was the federalist idealism in the European Movement that made the pragmatic Monnet sceptical toward them, combined with a solid scepticism toward Churchill’s real intentions. This scepticism dated back to his experience from June 1940 when, after the defeat of the French army, he had convinced Churchill to present to the French government a proposal of union between the two countries. But Churchill had been deeply doubtful, if not directly opposed to the proposal the whole time and had only reluctantly accepted the union as a means to keep France and in particular the French fleet and the French colonies in the war (Dinan 1994: 14). If one includes Churchill among Europe’s ‘founding fathers’ one must, however, also include his nationalist alter ego, General Charles de Gaulle. This, however, is only rarely done among the keepers of memories of the history of the integration process in Brussels. To that effect the recollection of the General’s ‘non’ to Great Britain in 1963 and his demonstratively empty chair in the European Council in 1965–66 until the others accepted national veto, is still too painfully alive in the corridors of the Commission. But scholarly literature in retrospect has now begun to include de Gaulle in the ranks of great Europeans. This new interpretation was formulated by the US historian Desmond Dinan in 1992 in a widely used textbook on the European Community. According to Dinan, de Gaulle’s significance for the European Community was far from

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

203

negative. It was he who made possible the establishment of a common agricultural policy in the 1960s. This policy for a long time constituted the raison d’être of the cooperation in that over half of the EU’s budget goes to agricultural arrangements – even if it is often overlooked that it is administered by the nation states. Without the common agricultural policy there would not have been a European Community before the introduction of the single market in 1986, but only a tariff union like that between the EFTA countries. And even if the less binding construction apparently corresponds best to the wishes of the majority of Europeans, supranational cooperation until now has proven more economically attractive.

Altiero Spinelli Next in rank according to political influence come federalist theorists such as Hendrik Brugmans and the Italian socialist Altiero Spinelli. Most important from a political and symbolic perspective is Spinelli (1907–1986) who was the primary force behind the introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979. That is why one of the two buildings of the Parliament in Brussels is named after him. Spinelli fits perfectly well into the picture of the ‘fathers of Europe’, with a background as a staunch Italian anti-­fascist. His European moment of fame came when he was hired by Jean Monnet to write the draft of his opening speech to the High Authority’s first meeting in August 1952 that inaugurated the Coal and Steel Community. Spinelli joined the Italian Communist Party in 1924 at the age of seventeen and took part in its underground struggle against fascism in Italy until he was arrested in Milan in 1927. He spent the following fifteen years in various prisons. During that period he gave up communism in favour of a more liberal social democratic position. He spent the years between 1939 and 1943 in so-­called confino with other anti-­fascists on one of the Aeolian Islands between Rome and Sicily, Ventotene. The island came to function as a virtual university for large parts of the post-­war political elite in Italy, above all the small but influential liberal democratic Partito d’Azione, which peaked between 1943 and 1947. The main result of their deliberations was the Ventotene Manifesto written in the winter of 1941–42. The Manifesto sketched a federalist organization of Europe after the victory over Nazism and fascism and is included as a documentary appendix in Brugmans’ L’idée européenne. The manifesto marked the birth of the ‘Movimento Federalista Europeo’.13 The main authors were Ernest Rossi (1897–1967) and Altiero Spinelli. Their

204

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

thinking was in line with the ideas of the nineteenth-century thinker and activist, Giuseppe Mazzini, who had advocated a ‘United States of Europe’. Mazzini, together with Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camille Cavour, are normally considered as the fathers of the Italian nation state, though this neglects the fact that he did not wish to see nation states created for their own sake, but rather saw them as steps on the path to a new democratic Europe. It was not for nothing that Mazzini’s organization of 1834 was called Giovane Europa (Young Europe) and that Europe was to be organized as a federation of states of roughly the same size which could cooperate on an equal footing. The document reached Switzerland by various routes and became the basis for a ‘Manifesto for the European Resistance Movement’, which later became the European Movement. According to Spinelli’s own account, Monnet had no clear plan of how to reach a federation, thinking that ‘a few improvised ideas’ were enough (Spinelli 1989b: 163). Nonetheless Spinelli, and with him the historian of federalism, John Pinder, claim that this is proof that Monnet wanted to create a federation. It seems more reasonable to accept the observation for what it is and recognize that Monnet, like many of the pragmatic politicians, was deeply indifferent as to the names of the first institutions. This assessment is confirmed by the further course of the collaboration between Spinelli and Monnet, which lasted only a few months in 1952, after which Spinelli returned to Italy and founded an institute for international affairs. He later returned to European politics in 1970 as Commissioner for industrial affairs. Six years later he stepped down as commissioner and was elected to the European Parliament where he exercised great influence on the decision to introduce direct elections in 1979. He even convinced the Parliament to adopt a proper draft constitution for Europe, so there is no reason to relegate him to history’s excess of idealists without any influence (Bossuat 2001: 208). On the other hand, he should probably not be accorded the significance that he himself and his fellow federalist Henri Brugmans attributed to themselves. The crucial decisions were made by others, such as the aforementioned socialist Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak (1899–1972). Spaak was not a federalist when he presented the so-­called Spaak plan in 1955, which cleared the way for the Common Market. Pinder and Brugmans claim that Spaak, in the course of a few weeks, became a convinced federalist. But it is simpler and more consistent with the actual course of events to interpret Spaak’s actions as a recognition that nation states have to cooperate because of their own interests, not as a result of higher metaphysical principles. This is convincingly demonstrated by Milward (1992: 318–24) in an analysis of Spaak’s actions and

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

205

motives. These politicians with many others were convinced federalists because of their experiences during World War II and the clash between democracy and totalitarian ideologies. Yet they saw no contradiction between national interests correctly understood and supra-­national cooperation. This perception still prevails in the official research policy of the EU.

History and the EU – national, supra-­national or transnational In today’s Europe, the most powerful attempt to replace national histories comes from the European Union.14 As demonstrated, almost from the beginning the EU has attempted to construct a common European identity through the promotion of European historical consciousness. Inspired by the success of national history and historians in nation building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the EU has toyed with the idea of copying this endeavour at the supra-­ national level of Europe. To the extent that this intention inspires the research agenda of the EU it has not been successful in establishing a common history culture among the citizens of the EU. On the contrary, the endeavours have even been counterproductive, judging from the rising Euroscepticism in most Member States. It seems that we need a thorough rethinking of the relation between national and supra-­national history in the light of the actual development of the EU into a federation of nation states. Transnational history has become very popular among professional historians over the last ten to fifteen years, but usually on a broader scale than Europe. As the German historian Stefan Berger remarks in his recently published concluding volume of the European Science Foundation project ‘Writing the nation’, it remains unlikely that Europeanization of historical consciousness can be achieved along the parameters used by the nineteenth-­century nation states. History and national memory is much more about what divides Europeans, not what unites them (Berger 2015). Europe is not a nation state and the attempt to construct a collective European-­wide identity is a dangerous idea, based as it is on an essentialized understanding of ‘self ’ and ‘other’. National identifications are not easily overcome as we witness in today’s demands for national self-­determination, in old well-­established nation states in Northern Europe as well as in the various rising regional nationalisms, not to speak of the left- and right-­wing nationalist and populist movements in many of the weak states in Southern and East Central Europe. Berger ends his warning against a European master narrative based on an instrumental use of Holocaust as a common European identity with a plea for

206

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

historians to rethink the role of history and historical consciousness for national as well as supra-­national institutions. The relationship between history and power is age-­old but more often than not with ominous consequences for the historical truth. There are no easy solutions when dealing with one of the strongest collective identifications, that of the nation state. History may end up being more important, but also more dangerous than the other research areas in the humanities and social sciences. And it is certainly not well suited to being dealt with by bureaucrats with little historical knowledge and inclinations towards instrumentalist approaches, however well-­meaning they might be. History as part of the humanities cannot be said not to have been on the EU’s agenda. Yet, what is lacking is not more funding of ‘useful’ history, but more intellectual rigour and an open mind as to the unintended consequences of the integration process. Investing in humanities apart from the pure teaching of languages is more complicated than envisaged by the idealist federalists and today’s technocrats.

Notes 1 See Østergård 2015 for a fuller treatment. The recently finished European Science Foundation project, ‘Writing the Nation’, has investigated this relationship in utmost detail for Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Berger (2015). 2 Title IX, Article 128; Shore 2000, chapter 2 and Woolf 2003, 330. The attempt to include the field of culture in the activities of the Common Market is the background for the myth that Jean Monnet on his deathbed should have said: ‘If we were to start all over again we should begin with culture.’ The sentence is a pure invention. The saying originated as the topic of an exam essay by a French political science professor, meant to flunk the students who accepted the quote as true. 3 I held a Jean Monnet chair at the University of Aarhus from 1996 to 2000 with the somewhat unusual title ‘European civilization and integration’. The chair enabled Aarhus University in the late 1990s to initiate a study programme in ‘European cultural studies’ which attempted to combine political science, history, anthropology and cultural studies and – for a time – gender studies. At the same time the Jean Monnet action supported a Jean Monnet Center of excellence in Aarhus under the directorship of my two colleagues as Jean Monnet professors, the political scientist Knud Erik Jørgensen and the historian Thorsten B. Olesen. 4 But not required to believe in the European project as some critics have mistakenly claimed. For instance this came up in a polemic by the Danish theologian and politician Søren Krarup (b. 1937) in the Danish nationalist periodical Tidehverv

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

207

(literally New Era) spring 2000. It turned out that his criticism was based on a misunderstanding of the word ‘dedicate’. He assumed that the Monnet chairs required full dedication to the European project, not just an obligation to ensure teaching of subjects relevant to European integration. 5 More details on this episode in Østergård (1998: 40–44). 6 Duroselle (1990); the title of the Danish translation better reveals the purpose of the book than the rather neutral English title. In my translation it runs as follows, ‘Europe. From divided past to a common future’ (Europa. Fra fortid i splittelse til fremtid i fællesskab 1990). 7 Originally this neo-­functionalist theory was formulated by the German-American political scientist Ernst B. Haas (1958, 1964, 1975). 8 For an analysis of the terminology see Østergård (2003). 9 Kirchhoff (2005); Banke (2005); Rünitz (2005); Rünitz and Kirchhoff (2007). 10 Denmark joined rather late in 2004 after having participated as observer since 2000. As head of the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, I served as Danish representative. 11 Fridtjof Nansen lived 1861–1930. After an illustrious career as scholar and explorer, he joined the Norwegian delegation to the League of Nations in 1920. He successfully organized the repatriation of half a million Russian prisoners of war, helped remedy the hunger catastrophe in revolutionary Russia, and was elected the first High Commissioner for Relief at the League of Nations. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Among other things, he formulated the dictum about the relationship between morals and politics in a lecture: ‘Videnskab og Moral’, printed in the Norwegian review Samtiden in 1908 (‘Science and Morality’). 12 Inspiration for my analysis of the European Union as a paradoxical ‘federation of nation states’ dates back to the years 1969–70 which I spent as a graduate student at Collège d’Europe in Bruges in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. At that time the College still was directed by its founder, the Dutch federalist politician and resistance fighter Hendrik Brugmans (1901–97), who served as rector 1949–71. At the College we met a sterling series of European intellectuals and politicians, from Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) and Salvador Madariaga (1886–1976) to Walter Hallstein (1901–82), Sicco Mansholt (1908–95), and the Nobel Prize winning economist Jan Tinbergen (1903–94). Beyond studying the details of the emerging agricultural policy and the activities of the European lobby groups, we were also introduced to the forgotten Habsburg Central Europe by the Polish dissident – and later Polish ambassador to France – Jerzy Łukaszewski (rector 1972–90) as well as reading literary classics in the various original languages. Brugmans’ person and federalist convictions made a lasting impression on us young students, including those of us who, like me, after a trial period as intern in the corridors of the Berlaymont Building of the European Commission, decided against a career in the

208

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

European institutions and returned to the somewhat tumultuous Danish university life of the 1970s. My analysis is critical of the federalist ideology to which Brugmans dedicated his life. But the European inspiration itself and the realization that we all are citizens in each other’s countries and should know as many of the European languages and cultures as possible remains a lasting heritage from that impressive and tolerant person. He might even have agreed with my criticism of federalism. 13 Brugmans (1970); Spinelli (1984–86, pp. 351–75); on federalism in general see Pinder (1991). 14 Analysed by Shore (2000) and Judt (2005: 803–32) in his magisterial Epilogue.

References Anderson, Perry (2009), The New Old World, London: Verso. Banke, Cecilie Felicia Stokholm (2005): Demokratiets skyggeside. Flygtninge og menneskerettigheder i Danmark før Holocaust, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Becherucci, Andrea and Jean-Marie Palayret (1999) ‘Heureux qui comme Ulysse . . . Les Archives d’Altiero Spinelli à l’Institut universitaire européen’, EUI Review spring 1999, 29–31. Benzoni, Maria Matilde and Brunello Vigezzi (2001) (eds), Storia e storici nel XX secolo, Università degli Studi di Milano: Edizioni Unicopli. Berger, Stefan (2015), The Past as History. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015 [Vol. VIII of Writing the Nation Series]. Berger, Stefan and Lorenz, Chris (2010) (eds), Nationalizing the Past. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan [Vol. IV of Writing the Nation Series]. Bjøl, Erik (1966), La France devant l’Europe. La politique européenne de la IVe République, Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Bonde, Jens Peter (1995), EU Hvorhen? Union eller Forbundsstat? Copenhagen: Vindrose. Bossuat, Gérard (2001), Les fondateurs de l’Europe unie, Paris: Éditions Berlin. Brugmans, Henri (1966), Vingt ans d’Europe. Témoignage 1946–1966, Bruges: De Tempel. Brugmans, Henri (1970), L’idée européenne 1920–1970, Bruges: De Tempel. Brugmans, Henri (1974), Prophètes et fondateurs de l’Europe, Bruges: College of Europe. Brugmans, Henri (1987), ‘Europe: une civilisation commune, un destin, une vocation’, in H. Brugmans (ed.), Europe: Rève – Aventure – Réalité, Brussels: Elsevier. Brugmans, Hendrik (1988), Wij Europa: Een halve eeuw strijd vor emancipatie en Europees federalisme, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Chabod, Federico (1958), Idea di Europa, Bari: Laterza.

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

209

Ciuffoletti, Zeffiro (1994), Federalismo e regionalismo. Da Cattaneo alla Lega, Bari: Laterza. Dinan, Desmond (1994), Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to the European Community, London: Macmillan. Deutsch, Karl (1953), Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, 2nd edn Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1966. Duchêne, François (1994), Monnet. The First Statesman of Interdependence, New York: Norton. Durand, Jean-Dominique (1995), L’Europe de la démocratie chrétienne, Paris: Éditions complexe. Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste (1990), Europe: A History of its Peoples, London: Viking. Funch, Søren and Klaus Justesen (1997), ‘Max Kohnstamm. En mand med europæiske visioner’, Jyllands-Posten 25/3 1997. Gollwitzer, Heinz (1964), Europabild und Europagedanke, München: C.H. Beck. Haas, Ernst B. (1958), The Uniting of Europe. Political, Social, and Economic Forces 1950–1957, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Haas, Ernst B. (1964), Beyond the Nation State, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Haas, Ernst. B. (1975), The Obsolescence of Integration Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hay, Denys (1957), Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hettne, Björn, Sverker Sörlin and Uffe Østergård (1998), Den globala nationalismen. Nationalstatens historia och framtid, Stockholm: SNS förlag 1998; 2nd edn 2006. Hoffmann, Stanley (1966), ‘Obstinate or Obsolete? The Fate of the Nation States and the Case of Europe’, Daedalus 95, 1966; reprinted in Nye, J. S., (ed.), International Regionalism, Boston: Little Brown 1968. Hoffmann, Stanley (1982), ‘Reflections on the Nation State in Western Europe Today’, Journal of Common Market Studies 21: 1–2. Hoffmann, Stanley (1994a), The European Sisyphus, Boulder: Westview Press. Hoffmann, Stanley (1994b), ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis Revisited’, Daedalus 123: 2. Holm, Erik (2001), The European Anarchy. Europe’s Hard Road into High Politics, Copenhagen: Handelshøjskolens Forlag. Holm, Poul, Jarrick, Arne and Scott, Dominic (2015), The Palgrave Macmillan Humanities World Report, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jensen, Steven L. B. (2003) (ed.), Genocide: Cases, Comparisons and Contemporary Debates, Copenhagen: The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Joerges, Christian, Yves Mény, Joseph H. Weiler (eds) (2000), What Kind of Constitution for What Kind of Polity? Responses to Joschka Fischer, San Domenico di Fiesole: RSCAS – EUI. Judt, Tony (2005), Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, London: Heinemann 2005; Penguin 2007. Kastholm, Claes (1999), ‘Den europæiske brite’, in Esman, M., P. Hiort, J. Maigaard and L. Nielsen, (eds) 1949–99, Copenhagen: Europabevægelsen, 14–23.

210

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Kelstrup, Morten (1998), ‘Integration Theories: History, Competing Approaches and New Perspectives’, in Wivel, Anders (ed.), Explaining European Integration, Copenhagen: Political Studies Press, 15–55. Kirchhoff, Hans (2005), Et menneske uden pas er ikke noget menneske. Danmark i den internationale flygtningepolitik 1933–1939, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Knutsen, Paul (1998), Penger, stål og politikk – en problemorientert innføring i EUs historie, Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Lindberg, Leon N. (1963), The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lipgens, Walter (1981), ‘Les intérets nationaux et l’intégration européenne’, in Liber Amicorum Henri Brugmans, Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation, 356–64. Lipgens, Walter (1982), A History of European Integration, 1945–1947, Vol. 1, The Formation of the European Unity Movement, 1945–47, Oxford: Clarendon. Mazower, Mark (1998), Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century, London: Penguin Books. Mikkeli, Heikki (1998), Europe as an Idea and an Identity, London: Routledge. Milward, Alan (1984), The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51, London: Routledge. Milward, Alan (1992), The European Rescue of the Nation-State (the chapter on ‘The Lives and Teachings of the European Saints’ pp. 318–24) London: Routledge. Milward, Alan (1995), ‘Allegiance. The Past and the Future’, Journal of European Integration History 1:1, 7–20. Milward, A., Lynch, F., Romero, Ruggiero, R. et al. (1993), Frontier of National Sovereignty. History and Theory 1945–1992, London: Routledge. Monnet, Jean (1976), Mémoires, Paris: Fayard. Moravcik, Andrew (1998), The Choice for Europe. Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht, London: UCL Press. Nansen, Fridtjof (1908), ‘Videnskab og moral’, Samtiden XIX, 1–14. Olesen, Thorsten B., (ed.) (1995), Interdependence versus Integration. Denmark, Scandinavia and Western Europe 1945–1960, Odense: Odense University Press. Østergård, Uffe (1992), Europas ansigter. Nationale stater og politiske kulturer i en ny gammel verden, Copenhagen: Rosinante 2000. Østergård, Uffe (1997a), ‘The Many Houses of European Values: European Humanism and Cultural Relativism’, in J. P. Burgess (ed.), Cultural Politics and Political Culture in Postmodern Europe, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 19–40. Østergård, Uffe (1997b), ‘The Failure of Universal Empire’, S. Tønneson a.o. (eds), Between National Histories and Global History, Helsingfors: Historiallinen Arkisto 110(4): 93–114. Østergård, Uffe (1998), Europa. Identitet og identitetspolitik, Copenhagen: Rosinante 2001. Østergård, Uffe (1999), ‘Europas Forenede Stater?’, in Esman, M., P. Hiort, J. Maigaard and L. Nielsen (eds), 1949–99, Copenhagen: Europabevægelsen, 48–57. Østergård, Uffe (2003), ‘Holocaust, Genocide and European Values’, in Steven Jensen (ed.), Genocide: Cases, Comparisons and Contemporary Debates, Copenhagen: The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 175–92.

Humanities: A National to an International Agenda

211

Østergård, Uffe (2004), ‘Europe’s Saints: The Official Construction of a History of the European Union’, in J. P. Burgess (ed.), Museum Europa. The European Cultural Heritage between Economics and Politics, Kristiansand: Norwegian Academic Press, 31–66. Østergård, Uffe (2005), ‘Denmark and the New International Politics of Morality and Remembrance’, Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook, Copenhagen: DIIS, 65–101. Østergård, Uffe (2006), ‘The History of Europe seen from the North’, European Review, 14(2): 281–97. Østergård, Uffe (2015), ‘Historiefaget mellem kultur- og samfundsvidenskab’, David Budtz Pedersen, Frederik Stjernfelt og Simo Køppe (red.), Kampen om disciplinerne – Viden og videnskabelighed i humanistisk forskning, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 181–219. Pinder, John (1991), European Community: The Building of a Union, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinder, John (1995), ‘The Influence of the European Federalists in the 1950s’, in Olesen 1995, 231–44. Rünitz, Lone (2005), Af hensyn til konsekvenserne. Danmark og flygtningespørgsmålet 1933–1940, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Rünitz, Lone and Kirchhoff, Hans (2007), Flygtninge i Danmark 1940–1945, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Schulz-Forberg, Hagen and Stråth, Bo (2010), The Political History of European Integration. The Hypocrisy of democracy-­through market, New York and London: Routledge. Shore, Chris (2000), Building Europe. The Cultural Policies of European Integration, London: Routledge. Spinelli, Altiero (1957), ‘The Growth of the European Movement since the Second World War’, in M. Hodges (ed.), European Integration, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, 43–68. Spinelli, Altiero (1967), ‘European Union and the Resistance’, in Ghita Ionescu (ed.). The New Politics of European Integration, London: Macmillan, 1–9. Spinelli, Altiero (1977), ‘Europeismo’, Enciclopedia del Novecento Vol. 2. Roma: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia italiana. Spinelli, Altiero (1984–86), Come ho tentato di diventare saggio, Bologna: Il Mulino 1999. Spinelli, Altiero (1985), Il progetto europeo, Bologna: Il Mulino. Spinelli, Altiero (1989a), Una strategia per gli Stati Uniti d’Europa, Bologna: Il Mulino. Spinelli, Altiero (1989b), Diario europeo 1948/1969 ed. E. Paolini, Bologna: Il Mulino. Spinelli, Altiero (1991), La crisi degli stati nazionali, Bologna: Il Mulino. Stråth, Bo (ed.) (2000), Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community. Historical Patterns in Europe and Beyond, Series Multiple Europes, No. 9, Brussels: PIE – Peter Lang. Weiler, J. H. H. (1999), The Constitution of Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

212

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Wilson, Kevin, and Jan van der Dussen (eds) (1995), The History of the Idea of Europe, London: Routledge. Wintle, Michael (2009), The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wintle, Michael (2013), ‘The History of the Idea of Europe: Where are We Now?’, Perspectives on Europe 43(1): 8–12. Wivel, Anders (ed.) (1998), Explaining European Integration, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Political Studies Press. Woolf, Stuart (1996), ‘Europea: una sola storia, un’unica identità?’, in Furio Cerutti (ed.), Identità e politica, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 213–36 and 263–66. Woolf, Stuart (2003) ‘Europe and its Historians’, Contemporary European History 12(3): 323–37. Zøllner, Mette (2000), Re-­imagining the Nation. Debates on Immigrants, Identities and Memories, Series Multiple Europes, No. 11, Brussels: PIE – Peter Lang.

11

A Republican Theory of the Humanities David Budtz Pedersen

Without ideas held in common there is no common action, and without common action there may still be men, but there is no social body. Alexis de Tocqueville

Introduction This chapter starts from the assumption that the humanities need a robust political justification. Such a justification can only be obtained by connecting research governance in the humanities with a special theory of political legitimacy. The chapter discusses four models of legitimacy, and hence four reasons for supporting the humanities. I first distinguish the socialist, liberalist, conservative and republican models of legitimacy, and consider possible consequences for the way universities are funded and managed. The main part of the chapter serves to connect the republican model with wider considerations of public values and the public sphere. Public values are defined by a set of characteristics that can help explain why the state regulates certain activities as public rather than private. The humanities are taken as an example of such publicness. The question of public value (or public goods) is then coupled with the idea of an affluent public sphere in which the humanities provide key concepts, analyses, narratives and insights. In conclusion, I argue in defence of the republican model of legitimacy. Republican political theory foregrounds a number of consequential debates about state-­building and institutional capacities which provide the humanities with a central justification. More than any other discipline, the humanities contribute to the deliberative division of labour in society by making a cognitive and semantic infrastructure available.

214

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

The public sphere is particularly important to the humanities because a large part of knowledge production in the humanities is translated and disseminated to the public debate and applied in public institutions. I therefore conclude the chapter by sketching a methodology for mapping the public value of humanities by tracing how knowledge translates into societal decisions and actions. Informed decision-­making in the public sphere can thus facilitate a republican justification of complex social institutions, such as the humanities, while at the same time providing institutional autonomy and independence from short-­term political goals and economic imperatives.

The public value of humanities A central claim is that research and education in the humanities should be considered as something more than merely private (or positional) goods. It sits at the heart of scholarship in the humanities that these disciplines analyse, improve and stimulate public debates and inform public deliberation and policy-­making (Holm et al. 2012; Budtz Pedersen 2015; Benneworth 2015).1 A growing literature has recently sought to establish the public value of humanities by demonstrating the impact of humanities on the quality of life, the ability to illuminate and challenge cultural values, the industrial application of research and the provision of humanistic knowledge, input and advice to policy-­making. The United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework’s analysis of the public impact of humanities is but one prominent example. While all of these attempts are important, they very rarely build on systematic considerations of what constitutes public goods and which epistemological principles such goods are based on. Yet, the idea that the humanities provide a number of public values to society cannot claim to be universal. First, the humanities have not always been part of public life in the same way as they are today. Secondly, there continue to exist many private universities that offer educational programmes in arts and humanities against fees and private funding. Some might go even further and argue that the central source of legitimacy in the humanities cannot be deduced from contemporary public institutions but rather from the impact of the humanities on the formation of personal character, culture or history. Nevertheless, recent developments in science and higher education policy have made it pertinent to consider systematically the explicit political justification of the humanities and examine the sources of legitimacy available to humanities scholars beyond the present neoliberal university.

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

215

Before introducing this discussion further, we need first to say something about the basic definition of public institutions. The range of public institutions covers juridical, political, bureaucratic, cultural and academic entities. Common among public institutions is the fact that they are granted responsibility over collective functions. They are submitted to rules of transparency and accountability, and they need to operate within a democratic framework based on the separation of powers, rule of law and protection of rights. In their capacity to embody collective tasks, public institutions need to ensure a maximum of citizen involvement as well as a maximum of efficiency in their operation. Without a proper balance between legitimacy and efficiency, public institutions are not able to perform democratic tasks (Scharpf 2007). What role one ascribes to public institutions is at the same time dependent on more deep-­seated operating assumptions with regard to the proper role of the state – ranging from minimalist conceptions in which the state is only allowed to assume responsibility over personal safety and legal matters to more advanced universalist theories according to which the role of the state is to guarantee public health, wealth and education. Since World War II, modern European universities have evolved as a natural extension of the welfare state and its institutions. The European social model is characterized by a number of strong institutions, such as parliaments, courts, hospitals, police, public schools and universities. Together, these institutions provide the citizenry with universal access to health, safety, justice, education and knowledge. In the Nordic countries, state institutions have furthermore been coupled with the idea of a strong state. The political economy in Europe has had as one of its primary goals the creation of a socially just, inclusive and literate society based on accountable and competent citizens.

The market failure theory of public research In economic terms, public institutions are tasked with regulating and implementing public goods. Among the most well-­known public goods are infrastructures, transportation, environmental protection and military capacities. But frontier research and education also have characteristics that resemble those of public goods. Let us therefore take a closer look at the public good notion of knowledge, and see how this notion relates to the governance of humanities. First of all, it is important to notice that the public good character of research is based on an economic argument. According to Martin and Salter (2001), under

216

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

the traditional justification for public funding of research, government action serves to correct a ‘market failure’. The concept of market failures is rooted in neo-­classical theory and is based on the assumption that a purely market-­driven economy will not produce an optimal economic outcome. Instead government policy should redress situations where market failures occur. Martin and Salter (2001) show that this is a welcome opportunity for science and higher education policy-­makers. Markets for new scientific ideas are characterized by so many uncertainties that it will not suffice for individuals to trade risks in a rational fashion. Nor will the market be able to establish a trade and pricing system that supports the appropriate conditions for the provision of basic scientific knowledge. Since there is no appropriate pricing mechanism applicable to basic scientific knowledge, market failures emerge. The policy problem is to identify and correct those failures and hence secure the public distribution of knowledge in society (Philipse 2002). The traditional market failure approach to publicly funded research is based on an important, though often idealized, understanding of information in economic performance. Drawing on the work of Kenneth J. Arrow (1962), this approach underlines the informational character of scientific knowledge, arguing that knowledge is a ‘non-­rival’ and ‘non-­excludable’ good. The non-­rival character of knowledge means that different agents can appropriate a given knowledge base without detracting direct value from the original producer. The non-­excludable character of knowledge refers to the fact that investments in scientific knowledge are very difficult to protect from competitors (e.g. other organizations, firms, nation states) and that enforcement of property claims is more expensive and difficult to enact than the utility detracted from making the goods (e.g. knowledge) publicly available (Martin and Salter 2001, 512). Private agents lack incentive to invest in scientific knowledge because of their inability to appropriate the benefits comparatively to their competitors. In this situation, they will try to be free riders (e.g. by applying and utilizing knowledge produced by someone else). Hence, in economic terms it is more rational to let other people or institutions go first and then exploit the benefits of the knowledge without contributing to its prior production(e.g. by recruiting personnel from other companies). The consequence is that a free market will not produce basic scientific ideas or technologies to the same extent as would be socially optimal. In this context, scientific knowledge is regarded as a public good. It does not possess the profit-­making qualities that stimulate private investments.2 In order to avoid this situation, government funding agencies can ensure that economically useful knowledge is created and freely distributed in society.

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

217

Government funding can overcome the reluctance of private agents to fund basic research while making knowledge freely available through, for example, education, open publication of scientific data, libraries, repositories and so on. By funding scientific research, governments expand the pool of potentially useful knowledge and correct an essential market failure (Martin and Salter 2001). Publicly funded research can be viewed as an open source of new ideas, opportunities, methods and, importantly, problem-­solving capacities that disseminate throughout society (Martin and Tang 2007).

Expanding the notion of public goods Moving beyond the standard notion of public goods, the political economist Inge Kaul (2001) has suggested that public goods also involve a normative dimension: they need to include a public decision-­making procedure based on deliberation among the affected agents as well as a public infrastructure for making them available to the citizens. Kaul agrees that public goods are non-­ excludable and non-­rival. She gives the examples of roads, air traffic control, education and street signs. These are goods that will not wear out, even if large numbers of people are using them; and it will be difficult and expensive to limit their use to those persons who have paid for them. Without some sort of collective action, there will be inadequate provision of goods such as street signs, traffic lights or clean air. Kaul shows the same holds for the opposite: public burdens. Without mechanisms for collective action, public burdens such as air pollution, crime and unstable financial systems are overprovided (Kaul 2001, 593). The novelty of Kaul’s approach consists in a further move. According to Kaul, we should not accept a definition of public goods only by looking at their counterpart, private goods. The idea that market failures are the only justification for state intervention is too narrow. Instead public goods must have a positive definition as being non-­discriminatory and inclusive. It is a matter of policy choice whether a good becomes public or private. In order to justify this claim, Kaul argues that publicness of consumption must be complemented by ‘publicness of benefits’ (positive utility for all) and ‘publicness in decision-­ making’ (fair and full participation of all stakeholders) (ibid., 591). With this, we are provided with a more interdisciplinary and normative justification of public goods that draws on a theory of democratic justification rather than merely economics.3

218

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Political epistemology When speaking about public goods such as infrastructure, health, safety and education, we often assume the answer to a number of tacit questions. For instance, we cannot talk meaningfully about public goods without presupposing a concept of public institutions, the task of which is to maintain and safeguard the publicness of goods (what Kaul describes as the public infrastructure for making the goods available). But, as I argued at the start of this chapter, how one defines the operating principles of public institutions is itself dependent on more deep-­seated assumptions about the role of the state. Whereas some people regard the responsibility of the state as purely instrumental (i.e. securing safety), others claim that the state has a moral obligation to actively involve the citizens. Depending on perspective, it will have consequences for the definition of public institutions and hence the provision of public knowledge. In order to get a systematic overview of the different positions, it is therefore necessary to examine research and higher education governance within a wider context of political theory. The background for this analysis is what, elsewhere, I have termed ‘political epistemology’ (Budtz Pedersen 2014). The purpose of political epistemology is to combine an institutionalist theory of public goods with an epistemological conception of knowledge production. Political epistemology can be considered as an interdisciplinary research field that draws upon both institutional and political analyses and epistemic theories, including concepts of democracy, decision-­making and knowledge assessment. Political epistemology is concerned with the ways in which real-­world institutions produce, certify and disseminate knowledge and which epistemic procedures that are informing the political system (Budtz Pedersen 2014). Steve Fuller (2000) has provided an important contribution to the debate about the political legitimization of academic institutions. In Fuller’s view, the ambition of science and technology studies should not be merely to supply sociological explanations of how scientific results are discovered or validated (an ambition that is associated with social constructivism). Rather, science and technology studies should examine the political conditions under which science and education are seen as legitimate public institutions. This is in line with my doctrine of political epistemology. According to this, we cannot formulate adequate principles for knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer if we do not have a clear picture of which political model of legitimacy scientific institutions are based on. We may analyse how academic institutions provide reliable and robust knowledge but, more importantly, we need to ask the

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

219

normative question: Who should be doing what, in what setting, to what ends, for whose benefit, and at what cost to whom (Fuller 1997)? Indeed, these are tough questions that deserve to be asked. Fuller considers his own position as constitutionalist. With this term in mind he wishes to emphasize that any contemporary analysis of academia, whether it explores the natural, social or human sciences, must be based on a constitution or social contract which describes the proper role of scientific institutions within a broader social value system. Similar to political epistemology, Fuller seeks to investigate the relation between state, administration and markets. Only by providing a political principle of justification – what Fuller with reference to John Rawls calls a ‘theory of epistemic justice’ – are we able to defend the institutional legitimacy of academic institutions.

Four normative justifications for the humanities In this section, I shall sketch an ideal distinction between a socialist, liberalist, conservative and republican model of research governance. In support of the republican model I shall criticize the received views of governance with regard to their consequences for the humanities. With its emphasis on citizenship and state capacities, the republican model requires citizens to share certain political and cognitive orientations, which facilitates social coordination and joint problem-­solving. Furthermore, the strength of the republican model is that every agent can act both as a reflexive and knowledgeable subject and as a participant in public institutions and civil life. This dual role constitutes a (non-­ reductionist) double-­aspect model for social coordination, which cannot be grasped within either a theory of rationally calculating individuals (liberalism) or within a theory of social macrostructures in which the individual is merely a lower-­level reflection (socialism). Republicanism, in other words, allows for a compromise between structure and subject, society and individuals. Provided that a justification of the humanities can make use of such a meta-­ theoretical framework, it is possible to safeguard the humanities against two oft-­ quoted objections: (1) that the humanities are irrelevant to the individual’s life project (liberalism), since the individual qua citizen according to republican political theory needs a set of shared political ideas and principles; and (2) against the instrumentalist view of the humanities as a mere reflection of higher-­ order social structures, which provides the humanities with the role of ideology critique only (socialism). In order to give a better overview of the different

220

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

positions and their consequences for the humanities, we can thus schematize the virtues and responsibility of the humanities according to the following four ideal models:

1. A socialist-Marxist model according to which academic institutions should contribute to societal value by producing key enabling technologies that will automatize production and finally make suppressive human work obsolete. According to this model, natural science is the source of technology and should be considered as a core driver of societal advancement and historical progress, whereas research in the humanities and social sciences are merely ideological reflections of the basic structure of a society. Society is held together by a shared normative programme, which defines what is good or bad collectively. In this model, the humanities are seen as an interlocutor of the collective good and as a vehicle for performing a critique of social inequality, property rights and human alienation with the goal of emancipating citizens. Research that does not contribute demonstrably to the collective good or does not subject itself to collective normativity is conceived as eroding social order and should eventually be reduced or stopped. The active valorization of collective goods and collective ends implies that research and educations that does not contribute to technology, innovation or emancipation will not be considered for public funding. 2. A liberalist model according to which universities and research institutions are subordinated to market needs and satisfaction of individual preferences. Following the liberalist or Lockean model, knowledge is a private (or positional) good, which must be traded in the market place. Public knowledge production is legitimate only insofar as it is programmed by the individual’s preferences. The state is considered to be an instrument of the citizens’ negative freedom and society to be a market-­ structured network of interactions among private persons. On the liberalist view, politics (in the sense of the citizens’ political opinion formation) has the function of bundling together and pushing private interests against a government apparatus. Universities and other knowledge institutions should be regarded as instruments for creating market value and consumer products. Funding for universities should be provided primarily by competitive grants. The liberalist sees rivalry and competition as the most important impetus for social advancement. Similar to the Marxist model, the humanities and social sciences are provided with marginal legitimacy

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

221

in liberalism because of these disciplines’ poor contribution to technology and other consumer goods. However, to the extent the humanities become part of the emerging ‘experience economy’ and provide knowledge and skills to the cultural and creative industries, the liberalist may endorse the humanities. Humanities researchers are in principle free to study whatever topic they want – but only as long as they can find clients for their research. The role of the state is not to fund research or cultural institutions which define ‘objective’ values over and above the citizens. Nor should state funding be used to commission utopian ideas about the collective or public good. Individual rights and preferences should receive priority together with a minimal set of non-­discriminatory policies. 3. A conservative-­communitarian model according to which public research should respect, support and further explore the existence of ethnic, religious or national communities, which share a range of pre-­political values, based on common life forms. On this view, ‘common values’ form the basic precondition for the constitution of a polity. Consequently, publicly funded research should be evaluated by the extent to which it maintains, strengthens, benefits and develops the common values. This model of legitimacy was dominant early in the twentieth century with the advent of conservative movements in continental Europe, but the model is still present in some national states (particularly in debates over cultural values, cultural heritage and intercultural encounters). Simultaneously, the conservative model has appealed to parts of the humanities (in areas such as national history, national literature, national linguistics, religious history, etc.), where the generation and dissemination of research is seen as an important contribution to the self-­understanding and preservation of the national culture. In contrast, research that does not strengthen, develop or explore the basic communal norms is seen as eroding national cultures. Research on universalist or transcultural human traits or behaviour is seen as potentially dangerous and should be avoided because of its inability to support and strengthen the cohesion of the polity.4 4. A republican model according to which research institutions and universities constitute an indispensible component of open societies, and on which view open societies are structurally dependent on open science and vice versa, as argued by Karl Popper. For the republican there is no exclusive choice between individual and society. Both ontologies co-­exist at the same time and across a spectrum of distributed social roles and responsibilities. The same holds when it comes to public research

222

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

institutions. There is no choice between either privileging collective norms mediated by a belief in objective goods, or privileging the atomistic individual mediated by purely preference-­driven political negotiation. Republicanism implies a model of social interaction that rests on a double constitution in which sociality is reciprocally coupled with individuality. Public institutions are negotiated and re-­negotiated in an open conversation between equal individuals, which both possess personal autonomy and acknowledge the need for social coordination, concepts and norms. Full personal autonomy is possible only as protected by such norms and institutions – and republican institutions, in turn, are possible only as instituted, monitored and renegotiated by collaboration among free individuals. On the republican view, universities and knowledge institutions serve a positive societal function in their capacity of producing knowledge as public goods which are widely accessible through the provision of education and research. The legitimacy of the humanities, according to this model, is deduced from the fact that humanities contribute with socially relevant and robust knowledge that are translated to public debates and deliberation and which are used to inform public policy-­making.

Republicanism With these simple but consequential ideal types in mind it is possible to formulate more precisely how the republican model ascribes a positive function to the humanities as a provider of social coordination. In contrast to liberalism, the republican model does not conceive political opinion formation as only a question of negotiating individual interests. The public sphere and the access to public knowledge (or public reason) are co-­constitutive for the formation of citizens’ interests and presuppose a semantic infrastructure in which people can make qualified decisions.5 The republican double-­aspect model of social coordination has a number of features in common with the type of deliberative rationality Habermas described in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). For Habermas, the goal is to defend a theory of rationality and personal authority that is based a mutual recognition among the participants in a public coordination game. On this view, there exists an independent domain outside the administrative powers of the state and the technical systems of the market. In republican state theory

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

223

this ‘third’ place is made of a living public sphere, which is founded on a dynamic civil society.6 The advantage of republicanism is that we avoid taking sides between the sovereign, hierarchical and disciplining powers of the state, on the one hand, and the decentralized economic powers of the individual on the other hand. Republicanism depends not on a collectively acting citizenry but on the institutionalization of procedures and conditions for communication and coordination (Habermas 1994: 8). At the same time a political system tied into the peripheral networks of the public sphere goes hand-­in-hand with the image of a ‘decentred society’ based on recognition, deliberation, representation, group membership and the public sphere (Bohman 2004). As expressed by Habermas, democratic theory needs to rid itself of some of the metaphysical assumptions that it inherited from eighteenth-century voluntarism, about the ‘collective will’ of the people controlling social processes. Democracy no longer needs to operate with the notion of a social whole centred in the state and imagined as a goal-­ oriented subject. Just as little does it represent the whole in a system of constitutional norms mechanically regulating the interplay of interests in accordance with the market model. Similar to deliberative democracy, the republican paradigm favours informed interaction and communication among citizens such that a deliberating public sphere can produce legitimate collective decisions and actions. In order for this deliberation to take place, members of society need to be involved in the decision-­making process and have co-­ownership of the outcome and justification. The public sphere with its democratic and deliberative purpose is thus sui generis and cannot be reduced to the preferences of individual agents. Contrary to republicanism, liberalism identifies democracy with the mere negotiation and weighting of personal interests. This model is also known from Hobbes, who spoke about bellum omnium contra omnes, ‘the war of all against all’. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes explains how individuals, by pushing their private interests against the state, transfer their sovereignty to a legitimate ruler. This delegation of authority must take place in accordance with a contract, or by pretending we are living in accordance with a contract. The social contract imposes mutual respect among the citizens, but it does not imply that human beings alter their fundamental nature: on the liberalist view, citizens qua humans will continue to be as greedy, revengeful and dishonest in the state as they were in nature. Even within the state, the war of all against all continues. Consequently, the role of the state is to produce rule of law and to ensure that no single will becomes dominant over others.

224

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Steve Fuller has criticized the liberalist model for its lack of civic virtues and for not securing societal cohesion, formation and coordination. The most obvious difference between republicanism and liberalism is that the liberal does not recognize any sense of collective interest beyond aggregated self-­interest; hence, liberalism has found the idea of a ‘civic ideal’ elusive, if not a complete fantasy. This is because societies dominated by the market mentality – as liberalism invariably is – make it rational for individuals to measure what they say against its likely consequences for their own well-­being, assuming no social buffer from the repercussions of having made claims that are ultimately deemed mistaken. Fuller 2000: 67

Republicanism, on the other hand, defines the virtue of citizens on the basis of their rights to participation, that is, on the basis of their positive freedom. This model does not guarantee total freedom from interference but enables participants freely to contribute to the common coordination game – the legitimacy of which is based on citizens’ mutual recognition. In agreement with theories of deliberative democracy, republicanism gives centre stage to the process of political opinion formation, but without understanding the constitution as something secondary; rather it conceives the principles of the constitutional state as an answer to the question of how the demanding communicative forms of a democratic opinion formation can be institutionalized (Habermas 1994). Following this line of thought, there is a dynamic interdependency between the deliberating public, the construction of institutions and the regularity of existing institutional capacities. No society is built from scratch. Rather, the process by which public institutions are designed is structurally dependent on prior forms of communication and coordination. Only by departing from existing institutional capacities is it possible to mobilize sufficient cognitive and deliberative resources to invent new institutions, or adjust and criticize existing institutions. Public institutions inform free opinion formation and are at the same time the product of this formation. Rather than merely pushing one’s self-­ interest against the interest of other members, participants in the democratic process need to take part in the ongoing negotiation and state-­building process. Habermas writes about this reciprocity: In the republican view, the ‘subjective’ rights owe their existence to an ‘objective’ legal order that both enables and guarantees the integrity of an autonomous life in common based on mutual respect. Habermas 1994: 3

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

225

Whereas democratic opinion formation, on the liberalist view, has the exclusive function of legitimating the exercise of political power, it has the significantly stronger function, according to republicanism, of constituting society as a political community and keeping the memory of this founding act alive with each political intervention. Or to put it differently: legitimacy is a result of the ability of the political community to formulate common objectives and to define, establish and enact effective solutions to common problems. A basic premise for understanding republican political theory is thus to conceive of democracy as a complex problem-­solving coordination game.

A republican theory of humanities Let us now take a closer look at the role of humanities within republican state theory. As it should be clear by now, republicanism conceives of political institutions and the construction of political societies as a central part of what it means to be human. In contrast to liberalism, there is no original state of nature, and hence no individuals before society. Throughout history, human beings have always lived in co-­existence with each other and developed more or less specialized institutions to facilitate the social and cognitive division of labour necessary for performing advanced social tasks. However, the question is what it means for a society to be based on a cognitive division of labour. The provision of specialized knowledge (here taken to be any form of systematized cognition), together with democratic deliberation needs to be united in a theory of efficient and resilient communities. First of all, in the construction of a democratic polity it is important to replace other competing forms of coordination, such as clan rule or kinship, with democratic practices and norms. Advanced political systems can only implement the common good if the class of rulers and administrators is motivated by and follows the common interest of the polity, which in itself can only be formulated through the existence of shared ideals, knowledge, linguistic erudition, institutions and so forth. The central argument of this chapter is therefore the following: if political action is more than the mere negotiation and weighting of individuals’ self-­interests, but contains a mutual process of will- and opinion-­formation, democracy presupposes an advanced cognitive and semantic infrastructure with which the people are capable of formulating, instructing and mandating political actions. Only by providing knowledge about shared norms, values and beliefs is it possible to enact and legitimate common decisions, which is the basis of

226

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

democratic coordination (in contrast to authoritarianism). This learning process is the responsibility of the humanities. From research and research-­based education in the humanities, concepts, analyses, interpretations and guidance translate and circulate into the public sphere and become public knowledge. On the republican view, the humanities do not receive their primary legitimacy from being applicable in private companies or from being a source of criticism and antagonism in society. The humanities find their relevance as an advanced cognitive infrastructure that enables mutual understanding and deliberation and through which members of society have access to shared vocabularies, beliefs and concepts. On this account, the humanities do not only produce knowledge through publications and books, lectures and presentations, public communication and education but yield a number of multiplier effects and positive externalities. The impact of humanities research and education is pervasive throughout advanced modern societies and economies as a semantic and cognitive source for deliberation and decisions.

The neoliberalist critique of republicanism I want to end this chapter by outlining an even greater threat to the humanities than traditional liberalist and socialist doctrines of legitimacy, and by suggesting a new way to map and understand the impact of humanities in society. In recent years, a more radical critique of the republican ideal of legitimacy has emerged. It does not come from socialism, conservatism or liberalism but from neoliberalism. In contrast to classical liberalism, neoliberalist conceptions of legitimacy are less preoccupied with reducing the size of the state or enforcing the negative freedom of citizens (non-­interference in the private sphere). Rather, neoliberalism accepts the welfare state, as we know it, but revolutionizes its inner functions. Neoliberalism can be characterized as a form of liberalism embedded within the welfare state applying the liberalist scepticism towards free-­riders to existing welfare functions. Whereas classical liberalism was modelled on the conception that the state must grant a maximum of personal freedom and that the only proper role for the state is to provide security and law enforcement, the neoliberalist orthodoxy is modelled upon a market-­based conception of public administration. As such, neoliberalism has been integrated in the administrative rationality of the modern welfare state while its original proponents, such as Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich von Hayek, Robert Nozick and James Buchanan, have lost their ideological momentum.

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

227

The fact that many scholars in the arts and humanities have noticed – and criticized – the emergence of neoliberalism and its institutional counterpart, New Public Management, is a reflection of the effective abandonment of public goods presented by neoliberalist doctrines. Many classical examples of public goods, such as healthcare, environmental protection and public universities, are no longer managed according to Weberian principles of public service and disinterested collective action. Instead, state institutions are subjected to privatization and governed by individual reward and sanction. On this view, public goods can be managed more effectively, or translated into private goods altogether, by demanding higher efficiency and reliance on private sector management. The only form of legitimacy left, according to the neoliberalist model, is economic productivity, and all parts of the state system must be able to display a perfect fit between public spending and observable results (Plant 2009; Campbell and Pedersen 2014). More crucial for academia, however, are the strong calls for strategic research and performance-­based funding models, which enable policy-­makers to circumscribe conditions for academic research and redirect efforts in tune with the logic of economic globalization; a process that brings with it new mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, in the belief that markets are superior to public goods. Now, the economic imperative to remain competitive in the global market is of and by itself not enough to explain the remarkable convergence of university reforms in Europe and North America, as suggested by Aant Elzinga (2010). There is also the effect of a strong policy convergence at the level of public governance expressed by such developments as ‘the audit society’ (Power 1997), ‘the regulatory state’ (Majone 1994), and the call for ‘evidence-­based policy-­making’ (Elzinga 2004). Together, these tendencies refer to an expansion in the use of evaluation, monitoring and enforcement techniques by the state and to a parallel change in the way its positive functions are carried out. One particularly important aspect in this reorientation away from traditional public administration is the emergence of New Public Management (NPM). NPM rests on the dual doctrines of removing differences between public and private sectors, and changing the structure of governance in public organizations, away from complying with procedural rules and towards producing manifest results (Hood 1991: 129). This programme of public administration seeks to break down costs in all areas and sectors where such costs earlier were aggregated or more or less implicitly defined. Recurrent evaluation and auditing is thus modelled on the relationship between principal–agent or buyer–seller in a

228

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

contractual setting, which effectively dismantles the role of administrators to serve citizens and provide public goods (Elzinga 1997, 2010). A lasting influence of NPM in science and higher education is the use of metrics and other forms of quantitative impact assessment. Instead of demonstrating the societal impact of research, research evaluation is in most cases reduced to immediate proxies such as student employability and academic output measured in papers, citations and intellectual property. Over the last fifteen years, governments in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have all incorporated quantitative and bibliometric information systems as a basis for state budgetary allocations of funds to university and other forms of research in the public sector, following the trail of new public management.

Resilient societies According to the neoliberalist orthodoxy, the humanities (like any other public institution) are regarded as a provider of social services the legitimacy of which must be justified by economic impact and values. New Public Management with its focus on performance and marketization does not consider public institutions as sui generis, or as supplying long-­term public goods. In this regard, the proclaimed ‘crisis of the humanities’ is part of a larger crisis within the welfare state illustrated by the withdrawal of the state as a provider of public goods. A number of criticisms have been leveraged against this way of conceiving the state, but they cannot be discussed within the scope of this chapter.7 Instead, I will focus on the possibility of reinserting the notion of public values in thinking about research and higher education, and thereby create a legitimate space for the humanities. In science policy, market-­based arguments have dominated political thinking and action, despite the fact that science and education hugely influence public values in ways that are independent of the market. Only by developing a new analytical and rhetorical approach to science policy, based on public values, is it possible to create a sustainable model that can compete with the market logic in thinking about the value of research (Bozeman and Sarewitz 2005). This argument is a direct extension of republican political theory. In the last decades, numerous political theorists have emphasized the importance of balancing legitimacy and efficiency in policy-­making and developing strong and resilient societies (Migdal 1988, Tilly 1990, Fukuyama 2006). In the face of contemporary societal challenges, such as terrorism, extremism, climate change

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

229

and resource scarcity, it is more necessary than ever that the state retains its ‘capacity for effective governance’ which, in turn, ‘depends on the existence of institutions that enable these authorities to respond effectively to the aspirations of the people’ (Puri 2009: 2). Exactly, this enabling or enacting of institutional capacities requires a mix of social science and humanities. As Francis Fukuyama argues in his 2006 State-Building, cultural, structural and semantic factors are co-­determining the emergence and dynamics of strong, stable and effective institutions. Central to Fukuyama’s argument is the idea that well-­functioning institutions rest on locally binding, contextual, cultural and civic norms, which effectively stimulate social coordination in ways that are not reducible to economic incentives. Hence, knowledge about the cultural and structural dynamics that co-­ determine the success and stability of strong institutions is a normative prerequisite, according to Fukuyama, for creating resilient societies. The humanities and social sciences provide society with information and analyses about how to build and regulate institutions in ways that minimize uncertainties and risk. Because institutional capacities are contextual and local, it is necessary to maintain an interdisciplinary research effort in the humanities and social sciences that explores the preconditions for successful state-­building, such as trust, loyalty, solidarity and cross-­cultural integration etc., and simultaneously reveals disintegration, marginalization and polarization. How, then, is it possible to map the cross-­sectorial provision of knowledge and interpretation in a way that illustrates the public value of the humanities? It is not enough for humanities scholars to appreciate their own value in building societal institutions. Instead they must find methods to articulate those values in ways that society at large and key decision-­makers find compelling. I want to conclude the chapter by sketching an analytical framework for mapping the public value of humanities by tracing how humanities concepts, analyses and interpretations influence societal decisions and actions. In so doing, I seek to develop a practical method that confronts the manifest problems of the economic valorization of research that currently structures science and higher education policy in undesirable ways.

Mapping the public influence of the humanities What is missing in most contemporary rationales for science and higher education policy is a sense of the specific ways in which research translates into

230

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

public value. Since all acts of knowledge creation, use and distribution have the potential to have an impact on society, all such acts are united in their capacity to drive or stall societal actions. If this is true, it is necessary to examine not only the possible role of public values in science policy but also to establish a set of criteria with which policy-­makers can identify public values in much the same way as they have used market failure models to identify economic rationales for science policy (Bozeman and Sarewitz 2009, see also the sections on ‘The market failure theory of public research’ and ‘Expanding the notion of public goods’ above). New approaches and trajectories need to be developed in order to understand the pathways in which individual researchers and research communities influence different parts of society. This is especially pertinent in the humanities where there is a long tradition for intellectuals, scholars and publishers to educate and influence the public debate (see Chapters 9 and 10 above). While none of the existing metrics or evaluations provides insight into the variegated and complex topography of the public influence of the humanities, they treat for the most part knowledge diffusion as a ‘black box’ with only inputs and outputs. In so doing, they do not account for the societal and cognitive processes by which research products and learning processes translate into public outcomes and values (Budtz Pedersen 2015). Public values in the humanities comprise educational values (bachelor and master production); societal values (expert advice, the role of public intellectuals, policy guidance); democratic values (deliberation, improved public policy); cultural values (engagement with museums and art institutions); research (publications, collaborations, networks) and economic values (employability and innovation). The assumption behind this notion of broader public values is that knowledge is created, transmitted, diffused and institutionalized and by the end of that process becomes valuable to agents and institutions outside the academic world (Benneworth 2015). As such, public values are not Platonic ideals with intrinsic meaning but vary across time and geography, depending on the common values held by society. Fundamental to this analytical framework is the hypothesis that research becomes institutionalized – formally and informally – in societal routines and habits, but also in legal systems, public institutions and cultural, artistic and epistemic practices. In order to get a clearer picture of the public value of humanities, it is necessary to take account of the following parameters :

1. To map which stakeholders participate in the construction and co-­ construction of different ‘trading zones’ between society and the humanities.

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

231

2. To systematically uncover key stakeholder groups (editors, publishers, decision-­makers etc.) which are engaged in the dissemination of humanities research. 3. To establish digital methodologies for mapping knowledge translation from universities to museums, civil society, private companies, public institutions etc. 4. To systematically review the career path and work life of students from the humanities applying both quantitative and qualitative studies. In particular, it is important to get a more systematic and empirically based understanding of the relations and networks of humanities scholars and their contribution to public policy-­making. On a number of occasions, scholars from the humanities act as external experts and policy advisers, for instance by serving on expert committees, working groups, commissions, task forces and other ad hoc panels. In their capacity of experts, they provide guidance about societal values, cultural patterns and behavioural dispositions etc., which are made available to decision-­makers through a complex cognitive and semantic infrastructure consisting of committees, white papers, media reporting, policy reports, testimony and other forms of formal and informal advice. If this argument is on the right track, the public influence of the humanities is a matter of changing organizations and institutions as well as contributing effectively to public deliberation and opinion formation. In this regard, promoting the public value of the humanities is in line with current political aims to foster a stronger ‘evidence-­based’ political culture. When key decision-­makers and politicians devise new policies or work out action plans, they not only rely on technical knowledge, but also include input and advice from the humanities. Indeed, scholarship in Science and Technology Studies for the last fifty years has shown how powerful techno-­scientific capabilities raise practical and philosophical considerations about, for example, human nature or global climate action (Collin and Budtz Pedersen 2015). Here, research in the humanities needs to be involved to create better ways of encouraging and involving societal actors, incorporating social values into the public sector, and developing new educational approaches and ways of managing migration and diversity. More generally, societal challenges such as health, energy, environment and globalization cannot be met without systematic expert knowledge about the attitudes and behaviour related to long-­term, inter-­ generational issues (e.g. the move towards a low-­carbon society). Mapping the public influence of the humanities is thus a question of understanding the wider contribution of the humanities to societal opinion-­formation and decision-­making.

232

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Already within the current framework for assessing and evaluating university performance, tentative approaches have been made to understand and map the impact of research on public institutions and the public sphere. For instance, the UK Research Excellence Framework has established a number of criteria in order to estimate the impact of research on: (1) civil society (informing and influencing society, illuminating and challenging values); (2) education (informing and influencing the content of education); (3) public policy (informing and influencing policy debates, practices and interventions); (4) public discourse (improving the quality of evidence, argument and expression); and (5) public service (supporting the welfare, education, understanding and empowerment of individuals and groups). These are inclusive indicators that account for more than mere citations and patents and which allow for other types of impact to be accounted for. Unfortunately, meta-­analyses have shown that the humanities are still not excelling when measured according to these criteria. For the most part, descriptions of impact in the humanities on societal opinion formation and decision-­making continue to be anecdotal. If the humanities want to receive appropriate recognition for their contribution to public debates, public discourse and public life more generally, they need to promote more systematic studies that do not rely on sketchy evidence but on detailed case studies.8

Conclusion If the humanities supply society with indispensible cultural and social analyses, as I have claimed in this chapter, the next natural step for philosophers and sociologists of science is to get a clearer empirical picture of the public value of humanities. In particular it is desirable to get a better understanding of the complex semantic and cognitive infrastructure with which society is provided with expertise and knowledge, and which itself translates into informed opinion. This call for a stronger reliance on empirical studies, of which dynamic network analysis is a central component, will most importantly obviate the need for the humanities constantly to legitimize themselves in the face of political pressures. Not least, such an approach would help to reduce one of the most oft-­cited criticisms of the humanities, namely that they merely engage in self-­propelling, excellence-­seeking Ivory Tower activities.9 As I have demonstrated in this chapter, humanistic knowledge and methodologies lead to new perspectives when identifying and tackling societal

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

233

problems, which again is instrumental when bringing societal values and research evaluation into closer convergence. Indeed, a central dilemma of science policy for the last fifty years has been to understand the value of science in terms of concrete social outcomes (e.g. curing a disease). But instead of looking at the wider societal benefits derived from research and higher education, the processes by which science permeates society have largely been thought to be through the marketplace. Bozeman and Sarewitz (2009) have already taken an important step towards formulating an empirical framework for mapping the public value of science. According to them, there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of science as a catalyst for economic activities – a healthy economy is essential to the functioning of the modern state. Rather, we should be concerned about the current neoliberalist model of research governance and its insufficiency in demonstrating and promoting the broader impact of science and education. Another important message in this chapter is that the economic justification for supporting research and higher education is itself more complex than many observers assume. From classical economic liberalism to neo-­classical economic theory over modern-­day neoliberalist concepts, different ideas of economic justification continue to proliferate. Yet, following Inge Kaul’s work on public goods and social choice theory, the chapter has argued that the economic justification needs to be supplemented by a normative and interdisciplinary dimension: public goods need to include a public decision-­making procedure based on informed deliberation as well as a public infrastructure for making knowledge available to society. More research will be needed on how to conceptualize and measure the public value of the humanities and how to avoid the problems with well-­intended metrics that lead to undesirable outcomes. Global demand for, and interest in, research evaluation should encourage stakeholders – such as funding agencies, governments and universities – to develop more coherent, context-­specific and multi-­layered evaluation methods while keeping in mind the broader value of science and research.

Notes 1 In a survey of European social sciences and humanities, more than 3,000 academics were asked what they consider to be the most important audience for their research. In Northern Europe and the United Kingdom, 30 per cent of the population answered that ‘public institutions’ are very important; another 20 per cent answered

234

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

that ‘civil society’ is important, and 25 per cent reported that citizens are the most important audience for their results. About 2 to 3 per cent of respondents answered that ‘private companies’ are the most important stakeholder (Pohoryles and Schadauer 2009, 161). This ideal argument needs some moderation in practice. Indeed, private companies invest heavily in research and development (R&D), though more in applied research and innovation than in frontier research. Also, private foundations such as the Wellcome Trust, The Volkswagen Foundation in Germany or the Velux and Villum Foundations in Denmark invest massively in basic research and development. However, there are good reasons to consider long-­term philanthropic investments as public goods in the technical sense. They are for most part pre-­competitive and based on special state tax exemption schemes (Porter and Kramer 2002). Kaul has defended this theory of public goods in a series of research papers. Here I rely on ‘Advancing the Concept of Public Goods’ (Kaul 2003) and ‘Global Public Goods’ (Kaul and Mendoza 2003). In contrast to republicanism (see below), values are not rationally negotiated or subjected to public scrutiny, but are taken to form an implicit anthropological and pre-­political base for societal coordination, cohesion and action. In contrast to the conservative-­communitarian model, the republican model does not take political values to be based in pre-­political ‘life forms’, but rather to be negotiated and constantly developed in and by the deliberative process. One of the most ambitious recent attempts to translate the republican model to an epistemological theory of social decision-­making is Philip Pettit and Christian List’s book, Group Agency (2011). Already within economic theory, as discussed earlier, one can find justification for why public goods are socially and economically desirable. And in the public administration literature, empirical and conceptual studies have shown that NPM is insufficient as a governing methodology, not least because of the increasing costs associated with controlling public performance. Instead, a new line of governance, the New Weberian Public Management (NWPM) has been fashioned to address the organization of public infrastructures and commons (Elzinga 2010). In the UK REF 2014, clinical medicine has the highest proportion of 3* and 4* points research when judged by societal impact alone, at 96 per cent; second is public health, health services and primary care, where 94.8 per cent of research is rated 3* or 4* for research impact; and third is chemistry, where 92.2 per cent is rated 3* or 4* for research impact. Critics of this approach might oppose the idea of generating more empirical data about the public value of the humanities as yet another wave of neoliberal university assessment. This is not a completely unfair complaint. However, breaking away from the economic hegemony of current science and higher education policy and shifting

A Republican Theory of the Humanities

235

the agenda towards a broader understanding of the values of scholarship, is necessary in order to come up with a model that can compete with the current market-­oriented logic of research impact.

References Arrow, K. (1962). ‘Economic welfare and the allocation of resources for invention’, in R. Nelson (ed), The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activities, Princeton: Princeton University Press: 609–25. Benneworth, P. (2015), ‘Tracing how arts and humanities research translates, circulates and consolidates in society. How have scholars been reacting to diverse impact and public value agendas?’ Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 14: 45–60. Bohman, J. (2004), ‘Decentering Democracy: Inclusion and Transformation in Complex Societies’, The Good Society, 13: 49–55. Bozeman, B. and Sarewitz, D. (2009). ‘Public values and public failure in US science policy’, Science and Public Policy, 32: 119–36. Budtz Pedersen, D. (2014). ‘Political Epistemology of Science-­based Policymaking’. Journal for Society, 51 (5): 547–51. Budtz Pedersen, D. (2015). ‘Real impact is about influence, meaning and value: Mapping contributions for a new impact agenda in the humanities’, LSE Impact of Social Sciences. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/ [accessed 11 August 2015]. Campbell, J. L. and Pedersen, O. K. (2014). The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collin, F. and Budtz Pedersen, D. (2015). ‘The Science of Science Policy’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 4 (5): 1–9. Elzinga, A. (1997), ‘The science–society contract in historical transformation: with special reference to epistemic drift’, Social Science Information, 36: 411–45. Elzinga, A. (2004), ‘The New Production of Reductionism in Research Policy Models’, in K. Grandin (ed.), The Science-Industry Nexus, Sagamore Beach: 277–304. Elzinga, A. (2010), ‘Globalisation, new public management and traditional university values’, Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences (http://nirpa.org/) [accessed 11 August 2015] Fukuyama, F. (2006), State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Fuller, S. (1997), Science. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Fuller, S. (2000), The Governance of Science: Ideology and the Future of the Open Society. London: Open University Press. Habermas, J. (1962 trans. 1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity.

236

Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities

Habermas, J. (1994), ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, Constellations, 1: 1–10. Hendricks, V. H. and Hansen, P. G. (2014). Infostorms: How to Take Information Punches, New York: Springer Science+Business Media. Holm, P. et al. (2012), ‘Collaboration between the natural, social and human sciences in Global Change Research’, Environmental Science & Policy, 28: 25–35. Hood, C. (1991). ‘A Public Management for all Seasons’, Public Administration, 69: 3–19. Kaul, I. (2001), ‘Global Public Goods: What Role for Civil Society?’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 30: 588–602. Kaul, I. and Mendoza, R. U. (2003), ‘Advancing the Concept of Public Goods’ in: I. Kaul (ed.), Providing Global Public Goods. Managing Globalization, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 78–111. Majone, G. (1994), ‘The rise of the regulatory state in Europe’, West European Politics, 17: 77–101. Martin, B. and Tang, P. (2007). ‘The benefits of publicly funded basic research’. Working Paper No. 161. Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. Martin, B. R. and Salter, A. J. (2001), ‘The economic benefits of publicly funded basic research’, Research Policy, 30: 509–32. Migdal, J. S. (1988), Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pettit, P. and List, C. (2011). Group Agency – The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Philipse, H. (2002), ‘Science and Democracy’ in P. Tindemans (ed), The Future of the Sciences and Humanities, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: 153–220. Plant, R. (2009), The Neoliberal State, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pohoryles, R. J. and Schadauer, A (2009), ‘What future for the European social sciences and humanities?’ Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 22: 147–87. Porter, M. E. and Kramer, M. R. (2002). ‘The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy’, Harvard Business Review, December Issue. Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Puri. H. S. (2012), ‘Relevance of the UN’. Downloaded from: http://irgamag.com. [accessed 1 August 2015]. Scharpf, F. W. (2007). Reflections on Multilevel Legitimacy, MPIfG Working Paper Vol. 3, Köln: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Sunstein, C. R. (2009), Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilly, C. (1990), Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Index Aarhus Declaration, the, 6–7 abstraction, 9, 61, 67–8, 71, 72 n.4, 88, 126, 127 hypostatic abstraction, 61–2, 62–3, 65, 66–8, 71, 72 n.4 aesthetic, 43, 60, 62, 92 n.6, 122, 124, 127, 130–1, 131 amodality, 127 anthropology, 30, 31, 47, 57, 62, 67–9, 88, 89, 94, 116, 128, 144 area studies, 11 asset, 97, 99, 101, 102 social asset, 97 associationism, classic associationism, 123 autonomy, 21, 35, 82, 214, 222 biology, 71–2, 81, 83–4, 98, 116, 117, 124 Blatt, Franz, 176–7, 179, 180–2 Bomholt, Julius, 180, 181 borderology, 77–9, 80, 85–6, 89, 90, 91 n.1 Bourdieu, Pierre, 21, 35, 38, 80 brain mythologist, 115 Brugmans, Henri, 187, 200–1, 203, 204, 207 bubbles investment, 97, 99, 104, 105, 107–8 bubble studies, 97–112 cause, 61–2 Charlemagne 188, 196, 197 Christianity, 63, 164, 174, 178, 188 Christian life, 165 Christmas Møller, John, 161 Churchill, Winston, 200, 201–3 civilization, 6, 63, 65, 66, 70 culture vs. civilization, 63 cognition, 45, 51, 60, 116, 117, 145, 225 cognitive infrastructure, 78, 80, 213, 225–6, 232 collaboration, 10, 11–12 communism, communists, 161, 167, 168, 171, 173, 203

Communist Party, 160 communitarian, 171 computer science, 10, 100, 104 concept, 52, 59 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 63, 176 conservative movement, 221 correspondence analysis, see multiple correspondence analysis crossdisciplinarity, 143 culturalism, 70, 71, 72 n.8 strong culturalism, 66–7, 68 weak culturalism, 64, 72 n.8 cultural sciences, 142, 143 cultural studies, 62, 64, 69, 128 culture, 7, 12, 28, 32, 33, 42, 57, 60, 62–72, 77–8, 87, 100, 104, 129, 149, 159–60, 161, 165, 178–83, 190–2, 196, 205, 214, 221, 231 cultural heritage, 109, 147, 188 cultural life, 162 culture crises, 162 culture debates, 159–62, 181–3 culture pessimism, 174 ethnographic culture, 64 high culture, 64–5, 190 Danish Unity, 161–2, 177 data, 8, 19–21, 22–7, 41–58, 137–8, 140, 141, 145–6, 151 data types, 20, 36, 50 (fig) De Gasperi, Alcide, 200, 201 de Gaulle, Charles, 198, 201–3 Delors, Jacques, 188 democracy, 159–60, 162, 163, 167–73, 180–1, 191, 195, 223, 225 active democracy, 169 democratic rule, 160 dictatorship, 169, 170 disciplines, 5, 9, 17, 23, 30, 31, 77–9, 83, 84, 86–91, 92 n.2, 113, 114, 132 scientific disciplines, 114, 132, 139

238

Index

economics, 82, 98, 100, 102, 104, 110, 191 emotion, 51, 80–2, 84, 87, 88, 89, 120, 124, 128, 141, 143–5, 163 empirically eclectic research style, 29–37 enmity, 88 epistemic cultures, 7, 9–10 epistemological styles, 37–8 equality, 81, 101, 110, 167–71, 173, 181 ethical demand, 179 European Commission, 6, 8, 10, 13, 188, 190, 196, 207–8 European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation see Horizon 2020 European Union, 4, 19, 187–9, 190, 191, 192–5, 196–7, 205–8 evaluation systems for interdisciplinary research, 12 extra-academic engagement, 17–40 federalism, 191, 196, 207–8 Fog, Mogens, 161, 167 form, 4, 5, 10, 11, 14, 19, 45, 59, 61, 148, 221, 228 Freedom, 159, 164–73, 175, 180, 182, 184 n.4, 220, 224, 226 freedom of action, 170, 184 freedom of expression, 170–2 freedom of speech, 159, 162, 167–73, 180, 181 political, 169, 182 Freedom Council (Danish), 160–3 free speech, 162, 167–73, 180, 181 friendship, 77, 79–80, 85, 86–92 Frisch, Hartvig, 163, 174, 175 funding sources, 33–4, 34 (fig) funding strategies, 33–4, 227 Geisteswissenschaften, 17 gender and queer studies, 87, 89 generic research object vs. composite research object, 105 Grønbech, Vilhelm, 173 Grundtvig, N. F. S, 162 Gundel, Leif, 169 Henningsen, Poul, 163, 167, 169–73, 181, 182 heteronomy, 83, 89, 128, 144 historism, 61

history, 4, 18, 19, 31, 33, 37, 46, 49, 60–2, 65, 72 n.2, 78–9, 82, 84, 86–7, 89, 103, 108, 126, 128, 160 187–9, 195–7, 201–2, 205–6, 221 historian, 46, 52, 86, 107, 179, 187, 189, 191, 194, 204–5 history of science, 61, 62, 85, 114–16, 126 intellectual historian, 46 history politics, 187–9, 193 Hoffmeyer, Svend, 170 Holocaust, 192–5, 205 Horizon 2020, 4, 6–8, 14, 85 humanism, 3, 17–19, 27, 33, 36, 56–7, 159–60, 162, 173–84 academic, 175–6, 179–83 Erasmic, 173–80 liberal, 181–2 Lutheran, 173–80 rational, 179–80 humanities, 17–19 crisis of, 228 humanistic science, 174–5 humanities researchers, 19, 21, 22, 29, 32–8 idiographic, 17, 60–1, 71–2 Illouz, Eva, 80–3, 84, 91–2 n.4 impact, 4, 5, 8, 12–14, 78–9, 81, 116, 138, 140, 148, 151, 214, 226, 228, 232, 234 n.8 individual concepts, 60 information, 8, 69, 78, 86, 99–103, 105, 107–10, 143, 168, 216, 228 innovation, 6–8, 80, 138–41, 147, 220, 230, 234 intellectuals, 159–60, 162–3, 166, 173, 207, 230 interconnectedness, 83–7, 89, 90–2 interdisciplinarity, 5, 7, 9–14, 77, 79, 83, 85–6, 90–1, 132, 143 interdisciplinary humanities, 110 interdisciplinary, 3–14, 23, 41, 77–9, 82–3, 86, 89, 90–1, 100, 101, 103–4, 107, 132, 138, 142, 145, 148, 218 internet, 65, 81, 83, 89, 97 intersubjectivity, 124–6 intrinsic interdisciplinarity, 77, 83, 85 Iron Curtain, 172

Index Jean Monnet Action, Europe, 188, 198–203, 206 Jørgensen, Jørgen, 127, 167, 168–9, 170, 172, 181 Koch, Hal, 162–8, 170–3, 174–84 language, 4, 8, 9, 17, 44–5, 50, 60–3, 69–70, 77, 79, 83–4, 89, 115–17, 121–4, 143, 177, 193, 206 levels of generality, 52, 59–60, 61, 181 linguistics, 4, 10, 11, 18, 30, 32, 44, 50–3, 72, 84, 92, 116, 122, 128, 221 Lipsius, Justus, 196, 197–8 literary studies, 87 literary scholar, 48, 49 logic, 38, 46, 83, 100, 121, 227, 228 Løgstrup, Knud Eiler, 164 love, 77–80, 80–3, 85–7, 91–2, 175, 198 Lund Declaration, the, 6 mapping borders and connections, 90–1 Marxism, 53, 65, 69, 107, 181–2 Marx, Karl, 80 memory culture, 192, 196 methodology, 42, 89, 104, 214, 234 methods, 4, 10, 20, 22, 24–30, 36, 37, 48, 50–3, 56, 60, 109, 118, 129, 131, 143 analytical methods and techniques, 19, 20–1, 22, 24–6, 28, 30 conceptual, 51 participatory, 47 statistics, 27, 30, 51 131 mirror neurons, 122–7 modality, 28, 29 modernity, 81 Møller Kristensen, Sven, 179–81 Monnet, Jean, 188, 190, 198–200, 202, 203–4, 206–7 multiculturalism, 3, 66, 70, 73 multidisciplinary, 11, 37, 83, 146 multiple correspondence analysis, 22, 24, 36, 37 national, 13, 63–4, 66, 139, 151 n.3, 166, 187–94, 201, 205–6 nation state, 6, 187, 189, 190, 193, 199, 201–6, 216 neuroaesthetics, 113, 127–31

239

neuro-linguistics, 44, 48, 49 neuroscience, 10, 81, 107, 113–14, 115, 116–17, 119–20, 121, 122–23, 124, 125, 128–9, 131–2 nomothetic, 17, 38, 59–61, 71 particularism, 70, 71 philosophy, 11, 18, 21, 37, 45, 56, 59, 79–80, 87–8, 92 n.6, 100, 128, 146 political science, 18, 77, 84–5, 87–8, 172, 206 psychologism, 61, 72 n.3 public debates, 159, 160, 181, 214, 222, 230, 232 public discussion, 159, 215 public value (of research), 13, 14 n.3, 138, 214, 229–30, 232–3 purge (judicial), 161, 162–9, 174 qualitative research style, 27–8, 38 rationalization, 80–1, 107 reductionism, 61, 91, 115, 131 religious studies, 87–9 Remembrance and Research, 115, 192–3 research aims, 19–22, 24–5, 28–9, 32–3, 37 epistemological research aims 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29 practical research aims, 21–2, 32–3, 37 research approaches, 44–8 research collaboration, 10, 11, 137 Research Excellence Framework, 13 research governance, 91, 213, 219, 233 research management, 103–4 research, previous, 18 research style, 18–19, 19–21, 22, 24, 25, 27–34, 36–8, 42, 54, 56 style of reasoning, 4, 18 rights, 167, 168, 170, 172–3 civil, 181 of equality, 167 of freedom, 167, 168, 170, 172–3 romantic love, 79–81, 83 Rorty, Amélie, 87 Ross, Alf, 167, 169–70, 172–3, 181–2, 184 scanning, 117, 118–19, 121–2, 146 critiques of scanning, 119–21, 121–2

240

Index

Schuman, Robert, 190, 198–201 science and technology studies, 18 Science Europe (the European association for research funding agencies), 7–9 Second World War, 69, 160, 172, 187, 192, 193–4, 198, 205, 215 Social Democratic party, 162, 163, 172, 180 social media, 48, 98–9, 101, 103–4, 108–9, 115, 138, 140 social psychology, 87–9, 100, 102, 104 societal challenges, 4, 10, 85, 92, 228 sociology, 53, 80, 82, 84–5 Sørensen, Arne, 161, 177 source criticism, 27, 28, 54, 226 Spinelli, Altiero, 203–5 spirit, spiritual, 32, 63, 164–5, 173–6, 175, 180 human being, 78, 119, 122, 124, 165, 174–80, 182, 225 spiritual life, 164, 165, 175 state, 21–2, 32, 33, 64, 85, 161–2, 187, 189, 193, 197–99, 202–6, 215, 218, 221, 223–4, 226, 227, 228, 229 statistical analysis, 22–7 structure, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 36, 44–5, 51, 54, 65, 69, 79, 80, 83, 85, 100, 103, 105, 107, 114, 118, 129, 142, 149–52, 159, 179, 182, 197, 220, 227 styles of scientific reasoning, styles of scientific thinking, see research style

success criteria, 21, 32, 35 supra-national, 190, 192, 203, 205–8 survey data, 18, 38 sustainability, sustainable, 3, 6–7, 8, 228 Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, 193, 194 terror, 162, 167, 170, 172 text-based research style, 29–30, 33, 34 theory, 53–4 theory of mind, 124 thought style, 18, 120–1 trading zone, 78, 230 transdisciplinary, 10, 14 n.2, 138, 141 143, 146, 148–151 research, 14 n.2 trans-national, 190, 199, 205–8 universalism, 70, 71, 149, 150 utilitarianism, 177, 182–3 Venstre (liberal party), 162 Vilnius Declaration, the, 7–9 Weber, Max, 54, 80, 81 Youth Association (Danish), 162, 164, 166 Zweig, Stefan, 176–7