Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice

Given the enormous unpredictable changes that our world is undergoing, it is irrefutable that one of the greatest challenges of the 21 century is the building of a sustainable and durable future. The transforming dynamics investing our time are making our lives increasingly uncertain, thus encouraging reflection on the complex nature of human inquiry and on the role of education as one of the most powerful instruments of change. However, the more complex our knowledge seems to become, the more fragmented our approaches toward its understanding and interpretations are. We tend to believe that intricate issues may better be tackled by reducing their complexity through methods and techniques of simplification. The academic world is no exception to this tendency, since disciplines provide the rationale for both university departmental organization and their pedagogical agendas. In this essay, I provide the case study of a course in American literature, where Emily Dickinson's poetry is taught through music and sculpture. The purpose is to demonstrate how transdisciplinarity, transformative education, and contamina(c)tion offer a method to develop a new way of thinking that transcends disciplinary boundaries and engages students in an active participative learning process based on the respect of their individual vocations and creativity, on the integration of their multifaceted acquired knowledge, and on its application in the larger context of life. Key Words: Complexity, Transdisciplinarity, Transformative Education, Emily Dickinson, Poetry, Sculpture, Matilde Domestico, Folk Music, Malecorde On Complexity and the Inadequacy of Current Educational Systems The unprecedented and persistent complexity that characterizes our time is the result of a rapid change that we handle with great difficulty. The relentless flux of information, the unsurpassed accumulation of images, the invasiveness of technology, the increasing economic pressures, the crucial environmental urgencies and relative issues such as wealth distribution, governance, and sustainability just to name a few are leading to multiple instabilities. Extensive research on the complexity of our historical moment has repeatedly emphasized how ineffective conventional critical approaches have become in the understanding of our reality (Bateson; Nicolescu and Kern; Nicolescu). More importantly, scholars have highlighted that "the dominant Western epistemology, or knowledge system, is no longer adequate to cope with the world that it itself has partly created" (Sterling 3). There is wide consensus that in order to assess and face the uncertainty and ambiguity of such a pluralistic, interconnected world, we should stray away from traditional thinking and paradigms of inquiry focused on bipolar, mutually exclusive alternatives. As Alfonso Montuori explains in his introduction to Edgar Morin's pivotal volume On Complexity (2008) 1 (Kauffman, Capra, Morin, Seven Complex Lessons; Taylor; Bocchi and Ceruti; Morin, On Complexity) Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice Spring 2013 (6:1) 2 and elsewhere (Montuori), we are in the need of a new organization of knowledge, since "the question is not just what we know, but how we know, and how we organize our knowledge" (xxvi). One recurring suggestion to overcome this modern impasse is the replacement of the conventional Aristotelian and Cartesian foundations for inquiry with what Edgar Morin defines as "la pensée complexe," namely a way of thinking that breaks with straightforward disjunctive models and a reductionist, linear approach to understanding phenomena. This approach, which has been present in much of Western history, has eventually discarded complexity from most thinking processes, further compartmentalizing knowledge and isolating scholars within strict disciplinary precincts. According to Taylor, this dynamic of separation should be seen as a legacy of the Cold War era (49). The simplification of complex relations, aimed at creating orderly and precise oppositions, has been systematically applied in various fields of the human existence through the building of dividing walls, which seem to provide security. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, marked the beginning of a new political and economic order, which on its turn generated a "network culture system". All of a sudden, grids and walls lost all their power to protect from "spreading webs," which in fact link and connect, while engaging people and ideas in manifold, mutually transforming, and viscous processes of interchange: "As connections proliferate, change accelerates, bringing everything to the edge of chaos: This is the moment of complexity" (Taylor 23). The academic world has not been exempted from this shift. Yet, its complexity seems to be more of a formal nature and to involve its bureaucratic, administrative, and structuring systems. Indeed, the escalation of new study areas, departments, agendas, programmes, courses, laboratories, exams, in short, the fragmentation of both the American and the European university systems has clearly accentuated all their inadequacies. One of the most criticized infirmities of mainstream education consists in its hyperspecialization (Nicolescu 2008; Montuori 2010), which often prevents a free circulation of knowledge through different disciplines. The rigidity conveyed by an atomistic approach, in fact, only perpetuates the same old dynamics of wall seclusion instead of favoring what I call a contamina(c)tion of ideas, namely a constructive awareness of critical issues studied from different perspectives and leading to active participation in life. This is made viable through an integration of Complexity Theory, which not only wishes for a dialogue through sciences, but also demands an openness of mind while considering new epistemological quests. This requirement stems from a historical deceptive persuasion that the paradigms that control science and the so-called "hard sciences" in particular are immune to errors and illusions, Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice Spring 2013 (6:1) 3 and that only rigorous scientific knowledge can treat "ethical, philosophical, or epistemological questions" (Morin, Seven 6). On the contrary, new ways of thinking are possible. The old divide between natural and human sciences, for example, can be bridged by avoiding the common propensity to favor one specific framework instead of contemplating multiple interconnections. As Richardson and Cilliers argue, If we allow different methods, we should allow them without granting a higher status to some of them. Thus, we need both mathematical equations and narrative descriptions. Perhaps one is more appropriate than the other under certain circumstances, but one should not be seen as more scientific than the other. (12) Another strong critique directed at academia is that the predominance of its fragmented structure often induces to consider knowledge as a ready-made tool (Morin, Seven), as both currency and profitable commodity, even distributable through telematic technologies (Taylor 235). In the view of this kind of education that Montuori defines "Reproductive" ("The Quest for a New Education"), students are perceived as "consumers of knowledge" ("Creative Enquiry 65). This pedagogy, in fact, frames education as an informative, transmissive process, whose contents are produced by (hyper)expert scholars, whose expectations revolve around a faithful reproduction of that very knowledge. As a result, students are often caught within a mechanistic modus operandi that does not contemplate their personal inquiry, set of values, critical thinking, and creativity. Not surprisingly, this sanitized method has amplified misconceptions about scientific research, to the point that adjectives such as "academic" or "scholarly" have ended up conveying a derogatory meaning, often implying a sterile, passive, unemotional process. Transdisciplinarity, Transformative Education, and Contamina(c)tion The term "transdisciplinarity, which "constitutes neither a new religion, nor a new philosophy, nor a new metaphysics, nor a science of sciences", was coined almost three decades ago and started circulating in the publications of scholars such as Edgar Morin, Jean Piaget, and Eric Jantsch to stress the need to cross the limits of discipline or science boundaries. In 1987, theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu contributed to found the Centre International 2 The quotation is taken from Art. 7 of The Charter of Transdisciplinarity. It was written in 1994 and adopted as a moral commitment by participants at the First World Congress of Trandisciplinarity, Convento da Arrábida, Portugal, November 2-6, 1994. www.basarab.nicolescu.perso.sfr.fr/ciret/english/charten.html, last visit on 13 July 2012. Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice Spring 2013 (6:1) 4 de Recherches et Etudes Transdisciplinaires (CIRET) in Paris, with the aim "to lay bare the nature and characteristics of the flow of information circulating between the various branches of knowledge" and his is the Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002). Nicolescu expresses all his perplexities for the extant gap between the exponential progress in scientific research and the implementation of relative findings in reality, in other words between knowledge and action, especially in the light of a constant threat of "complete selfdestruction" (Nicolescu, Manifesto 6), that involves three aspects of the human condition: the material, the biological, and the spiritual. Self-destruction today seems to be more than the projection of a future simulacrum. Similarly, positive change should not be viewed as a mere futuristic vision. Transdisciplinarity advocates, in fact, posit an active response to overcome the mismatch between knowledge and action, based on the conviction that the transdisciplinary viewpoint "allows us to consider a