What happens after the discipline breaks? - Core Post 5 - Josh

We don’t know what will occur after the break; nonetheless, this is the target we ought to aim for, a target that should break. As Shanti Kumar concludes, “Therefore, within the university system practitioners of television studies may need to shed all pretensions of being ‘interdisciplinary,’ and engage with its disciplinarity by extending the discipline to its dialogical limits where, paradoxically, it breaks down” (151). This is Kumar’s solution, I think, to the double bind that is Global Television Studies; the double bind being the impossibility and necessity of studying television in a global framework. We certainly must take a global approach to T.V. studies, and to ‘study’ itself more generally, but a truly global, interdisciplinary approach is impossible for all the reasons Kumar lays out.

                This is quite a different approach from David Morely’s investment in empirical knowledge of television reception and from Michael Curtin’s genealogy of media capital. Yet, I don’t think Kumar is in disagreement necessarily with Morley and Curtin. It seems, instead, that Kumar is arguing for self-reflexivity in the terrain of Global T.V. Studies, or an awareness that while the discipline is useful, it is also impotent.

                This perhaps explains my gripe with industry studies last week, as I find that the accumulation of empirical evidence and the disciplines that espouse that approach are useless so long as they ignore questions of how academic inquiry is itself imbricated and enabled by structures of power, both global and local (though they might, in another sense, be useful to capital). Though it is obvious, it is perhaps not said often enough that where ideas come from, and how they are produced and distributed, makes a significant difference in the shape those ideas take. We might think back to McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and ask ourselves if the academy is not itself a medium that both produces and distorts our messages.

                As a concluding thought, I’d like to pose the question of what differentiates interdisciplinarity from lateral or horizontal thinking. The difference might be in the end towards which our intellectual questions bring us. Both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity operate according to a “pursuit” of knowledge, or even the pursuit of a break, as in Kumar’s case. I would argue that lateral/horizontal thinking is not about a unilateral pursuit (pursuit, I think, is always illusory), but something more like a return – a return to what is already “known” – such that we are invested in finding new questions for old answers. We might, then, already be living in the ruins of our disciplines, or the awareness that they will not lead us to satisfying solutions or conclusions. How then do we make do with these ruins? If these ruins are broken solutions, how might we live with questions and no answers?