Trajectories of Fragmentation
Polycrisis, Intellectual Labor, and Transdisciplinary Research I
By 1987, James O’Connor had already described the academic fragmentation of the social sciences as, “fatally weaken[ing] its ability to develop a ‘unified field theory’ of the modern crises of capitalism.”1 Twenty years later, Scottish philosopher Alastair MacIntyre would describe, “the history of this multiplication of disciplines” as, “a history of increasing specialization by scholars.”2 When the UN commissioned an ‘Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential,’ knowledge in general was found to have, “developed at such a rate and in such a way that it is no longer possible for one person to maintain an integrated overview or to provide any viable synthesis of the perspectives of different disciplines.”3 The Encyclopedia has at least managed to limit the number of problems facing humanity to 56,000.4
Technical and scientific research has apparently not escaped this dissolution into siloes. Across six major scientific and technological fields, Park et al. find that research is becoming increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. “Papers, patents and even grant applications, have become less novel relative to prior work and less likely to connect disparate areas of knowledge, both of which are precursors of innovation.”5 While accumulated understanding within individual disciplines promotes discovery and innovation, “engagement with a broad range of extant knowledge is necessary for that process to play out, a requirement that appears more difficult with time.”6 The existing professional necessity of narrowing one’s field of expertise appears to be antagonistic to pathbreaking findings of a more general kind. This fragmentation is simultaneously conceptual and institutional—conceptual in the ‘horizontal’ fragmentation of the academic profession into isolated ‘disciplinary tribes’; institutional in the ‘vertical’ fragmentation of academic work and increasing use of contract university teachers (adjuncts) and research assistants.7
This represents a problem of a much more general sort; what the sociologist Robert K. Merton describes as “trained incapacity.”8 Learning itself changes one’s behavior over time, but this same process of learning can induce maladaptive behavior under changed conditions. John Guillory describes a similar phenomenon in noting the following about specialized knowledge in general: “the very generality of the scenario reinforces its application to the special case, the case of specialized knowledge, and the more effort someone puts into acquiring a particular knowledge or skill, the greater the risk of behavior that responds inflexibly or inappropriately to a change in circumstance.”9
There are historical and political reasons for this fragmentation separable from the perhaps natural development of any intellectual division of labor towards increasing complexity. This includes the rising commercialization of university life and scientific research.10 In the 1960s, basic research spending by the federal government was twice that of the private sector.11 Since, there has been a decades long decline in the share of U.S. research and development (R&D) investment coming from federal government sources.12 Between 2010 and 2018, the share of U.S. private sector R&D expenditures grew from 61% to almost 70%. Over the same period, the federal government's portion dropped from 31% to 22%.13 For Robert Kuttner, this change in the proportion of government to private sector research funding coincides with a broader erosion of the “national innovation system”—one which must now be reconstituted via a robust return to industrial policy. Already by the early 1970s Kuttner identifies, “an increasing disconnect between U.S. technological leadership and domestic production.”14
This increasing disconnection coincides with the age of neoliberalism and the culmination of that so-called ‘golden age of American universities’,15 when there was last some semblance of unity of purpose for educators and university administrators that students are ‘citizens-in-training’ (for whom a ‘liberal arts education’ has a clear utility) rather than merely ‘human capital’ (for whom it is does not). Peter Osborne has dated debates about the unity of the system of relations between academic disciplines to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, paradigmatically in Germany.16 This question was simultaneously philosophical and institutional—relevant both to questions of Truth in a philosophical sense,17 but also to the technical and intellectual capacity of the German Empire. Emily Levine points out that the tension between the idea of the research university as a place for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and as a staging ground for ‘state capacity’ (both at the level of the social, the industrial, and the military/imperial) can be traced to its origins.18 Today, the now dominant emphasis on the preparation of students for the labor market seems to have displaced this tension—mainly because it functions to the detriment of both.
A similar trajectory of fragmentation can be charted at the level of structures of governance—one which begins, once again, in the early 1970s. Neoliberalism may colloquially be associated with the shrinking of the state, but globalization saw the tremendous proliferation of public agencies with discrete regulatory tasks.19 This posed new coordination problems for the implementation of public policy.20 In the wake of economic recession and stagflation, the hierarchical top-down arrangements of the Keynesian state were increasingly regarded as too ‘inflexible.’ A new era of public administration - represented paradigmatically by New Public Management (NPM) – rapidly gained ground. Its first practitioners unsurprisingly emerged in the United Kingdom under Thatcher and in US municipal governments that had suffered heavily from economic recession and tax revolts.21
NPM consists of administrative strategies that are now considered de rigeur: contracting out, competition within the public sector, decentralization, privatization, and the separation of provision and production via polycentric systems of governance.22 This concurrent extension of discrete regulatory agencies and growth of a decentralized, privatized, and sub-contracted administrative apparatus has lent the public sector a particular opacity—one exaggerated by the fact that ‘public sector’ now usually implies an interrelated network of public, non-profit, and private institutions. Kuttner for good reason identifies, “making sure that different agencies and programs are not operating at cross-purposes and that it all adds up to a coherent whole” as the first challenge to implementing the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act as.23 For planned investments in solid state battery production to be effective, the Loans Program Office (LPO) will surely need to integrate the views of supply chain experts to project the market for critical minerals.24 “It’s hard enough to make industrial policy work in a single agency,” he writes, “the new enhanced industrial policies involve coordination across multiple federal agencies; several levels of government (federal, state, county, municipal); multiple technologies; and the intense involvement of the private sector.”25 The entire scenario risks being contradictory, insofar as the ends of a federal agency and private firms are inherently different at fundamental structural level.
At the level of rhetoric, the isolation of specialists has made translating technical knowledge for the offices of the powerful or the public square only more complicated. Trevor Quirk has written about how this is increasingly of interest to the broader public, as depicted in the HBO series Chernobyl or the film Contagion. “Whether under Soviet Communism or the liberal capitalist order,” he writes, “there are no effective mechanisms for bringing the depth of specialized knowledge to public consciousness. The calamities beggar belief because the knowledge that unveils them seems to have been developed in seclusion, secret to all but a collection of elite minds.”26 One manifestation of this lack of mediating function is frequent cross-ideological lamentation regarding the disappearance of the ‘public intellectual’, who had previously played an important (although perhaps exaggerated) mediating role between the academy and the public.27
Trajectories of fragmentation at the level of academic disciplines, scientific and technical research, and structures of governance therefore continue to pose conceptual, institutional, and rhetorical challenges that will only increase in significance given the variety of crises facing humanity today. In this context, it is no wonder why the term ‘polycrisis’ seems to have become so relevant.
The term inherently cuts across academic disciplines, conceptually subsuming interrelated networks of crises (economic, public health, environmental, psychological, social, etc.) that could fall under any number of individual fields. Indeed, if the term polycrisis is to retain any reference to its conceptual origins in complexity theory28 - a discourse which itself attempts to supersede disciplinary knowledge via the construction of a meta-disciplinary perspective – it is already implied by the term. If properly conceptualizing the polycrisis requires convening a multi-disciplinary committee, responding practically via public policy similarly requires the successful negotiation of complex divisions between isolated ministries and regulatory agencies. To shape rather than merely fix markets, the “arms, eyes, and ears of the green state”29 must be able to both institutionally reconcile the various siloes of governance, but also conceptually mediate between (inter-) and across (trans-) an array of theoretical and practical disciplines.30
Theoretical problems have a practical basis. Given the acceleration of scientific, academic, and governmental fragmentation at the level of social practice, in the wake of the crisis of the 1960s there was a qualitative shift in theoretical debates regarding the interrelation of academic disciplines with the problematization of these divisions in general. Rooted in concerns regarding, “the pitfalls of specialization and the compartmentalization of knowledge, a globalized economy, shifts in the center of gravity in knowledge production, the ethics of research, and environmental crisis,”31 ‘transdisciplinarity’ came to function as an umbrella term for various attempts to think ‘holistically’ across these different siloes, both at the level of governance but also at the level academic disciplines. Polycrisis and transdiciplinarity therefore share a general problematic regarding the intricacy of conceptualizing and translating across these different research areas, the term’s history and conceptual architecture should therefore be of interest to those taken by its recent popularity. It is to this history and conceptual architecture that I will turn to in part II.
James O’Connor, The Meaning of Crisis, (London: Blackwell, 1987): 49.
Alastair Macintyre, “The End of Education,” Commonweal 2006. Online at https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/end-education
http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problems http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problems
“In the light of the interdependence demonstrated among world problems in every sector, emphasis is placed on the need for approaches which are sufficiently complex to encompass the factions, conflicts and rival worldviews that undermine collective initiative towards a promising future. The number of world problems now exceeds 56,000.” http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problems
Park, M., Leahey, E. & Funk, R.J. “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time,” Nature 613, 138–144 (2023).
Ibid.
Glen A. Jones, “The horizontal and vertical fragmentation of academic work and the challenge for academic governance and leadership.” Asia Pacific Education Review (14):1 (2013) 14:75-83.
Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Forces 18 (1940): 560-580. Quoted in John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022): 13.
John Guillory, 16.
Most arguments against or in favor of concerning privatization are instrumental, relying heavily on comparing the performance of a public functionary with that of its private counterpart. Dorfman and Harrel however argue that, more fundamentally, privatization cuts off the link between processes of decision-making and the citizens, eroding political engagement and its underlying notion of shared responsibility. “Privatization is therefore not only the transformation of detention centres, trains, tax inquiry offices, forestry operations and so on, considered one service at a time. It is also the transformation of our political system and public culture from ones characterized by robust shared responsibility and political engagement to ones characterized by fragmentation and sectarianism.” Cf. Avihay Dorfman, Alon Harel, “Against Privatization As Such,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 36:2, (2016): 400-427.
“Basic research is systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and of observable facts without specific applications towards processes or products in mind” 32 CFR § 272.3, online at https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/32/272.3
Tania Babina, Alex Xi He, Sabrina T. Howell, Elisabeth Ruth Perlman, & Joseph Staudt, “The Color of Money: Federal vs. Industry Funding of University Research,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 28160. Online at: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28160
Jeffrey Mervis, “Data check: U.S. government share of basic research funding falls below 50%.” https://www.science.org/content/article/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50; Alison Snyder, “Biden seeks to ‘refresh’ America’s science strategy,” Axios https://www.axios.com/2021/01/21/biden-national-science-strategy
Robert Kuttner, “Reclaiming US Industry,” The American Prospect January 24, 2023. Online at: https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-24-biden-american-industrial-policy/
Schneider, John W. "Remaking the Renaissance Man: General Education and the Golden Age of the American University." American Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2021): 53-74.
Peter Osborne, “Introduction: Dossier Romantic Transdisciplinary I,” Radical Philosophy 196 (2016).
Here I mean philosophy in a broader sense than the contemporary discipline of philosophy – overdetermined by Anglo-American analytic philosophy as a specific disciplinary understanding of philosophy – would imply.
Emily Levine, Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
“Perhaps the most intriguing and important aspect of the political consequences of de-industrialization is its significance for neo-liberalism. It is standard in the historical and political science literature to see Britain since the 1970s and 1980s as having been subject to a successful neo-liberal or market fundamentalist political project. But de-industrialization has…been accompanied in the same period by rising numbers of state employees and growing subsidization of jobs. This is especially ironic, given that the freeing of the labour market from state intervention has always been a key objective for neo-liberals” (88). Jim Tomlinson, “De-industrialization not decline: A new meta-narrative for postwar British history,” Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2016, pp. 76–99.
Jacint Jordana, Xavier Fernandez-i-Marin, Andrea C. Bianculli, “Agency proliferation and the globalization of the regulatory state: Introducing a data set on the institutional features of regulatory agencies,” Regulation and Governance (2018): 524-540.
Gerard Gruening, “Origin and theoretical basis of New Public Management,” International Public Management Journal 4 (2001): 2.
I.e., A complex form of governance with multiple centers of semiautonomous decision making. Relevant here is the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and Peter Drucker. Cf. Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,” The American Economic Review 100, 3 (2010): 641-672. Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity, (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Robert Kuttner, “Reclaiming US Industry,” The American Prospect January 24 2023. Online at: https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-24-biden-american-industrial-policy/
Thanks to Paul Williams for this example.
Kuttner, “Reclaiming US Industry, The American Prospect.
Trevor Quirk, “Specialists Without Spirit,” The Point Mag online at: https://thepointmag.com/criticism/specialists-without-spirit/
For a generic liberal take, cf. Nicholas Kristof, “Professors, We Need You!” New York Times, Feb 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html. For a more distinctly left-critical bent, see the work of Henry Giroux, who connects libertarian economic philosophy to anti-intellectualism in general. Giroux, “The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism,” Policy Futures in Education 9:2, 2011. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2011.9.2.163. For a more conservative perspective, see Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). The replacement of the public intellectual (concerned with the translation of intellectual activity for the public) by the ‘thought leader’ (concerned with the development of ‘their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytizing that worldview to anyone within earshot’) is symptomatic here. Daniel Drezner, “The Decline of Public Intellectuals,” https://blog.oup.com/2017/04/anti-authority-public-distrust/. The classic book on the issue though is by Russell Jacoby, which appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, in 1987. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, (New York: Basic Books, 1987). For an initial American conception – as well as proof that issues regarding the complexity of the division of labor are not exactly new – see Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge University, August 31, 1837. https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEEmersonAmerSchTable.pdf. “Unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled to drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members of suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,-- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things…in this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect” (85-86). Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol I: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1883).
Cf. Bo Harvey, “Polycrisis: Part I,” https://boharvey.substack.com/p/on-the-polycrisis-part-i
As Tim Sahay has put it. Private correspondence.
Mariana Mazzucato, “Reimagining the state: Market shopper, not market feature,” online at: https://hewlett.org/reimagining-the-state-market-shaper-not-market-fixer/. “We must also train the next generation of leaders and develop a new curriculum for global civil servants, one that eliminates the old-school notions from Public Choice Theory and New Public Management that continue to paint government as, at best, a market fixer, while also convincing many that government failure is more dangerous than market failure.”
Jay Bernstein, “Transdisciplinarity: A Review of Its Origins, Development, and Current Issues,” Journal of Research Practice, 11(1): 2015.