We have had an opportunity, over the past two years, to participate in and reflect upon interdisciplinary exchanges sponsored by our Center for Science in Society in a range of forums which involved faculty, staff and students: a brown bag lunch series on "The Culture of Science/The Science of Culture," a colloquium series on "Time," working groups on "Language," "Emergence" and "The Two Cultures." Based on these experiences, we claim that a particular kind of interaction, which is prototypical of creative intellectual work in general, is fostered in sessions where those of us who have been disciplined differently commit to engaging in extended conversation with one another. We aim here to characterize the ways in which interdisciplinary conversations may construct new knowledge, by drawing and expanding upon the concepts of metaphor and metonymy, on their convergence in synecdoche, and on the surprising ways in which their interaction can contribute to emergent phenomenon. This essay itself is our first example of the process we describe, incorporating into a choral set the three quite different voices of a literary scholar, a biologist and a physicist.

We explore this dynamic by using, as point of departure and source of our first two defining terms, a 1956 essay entitled "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," in which Roman Jakobson described the metaphoric and metonymic poles of a continuum of severe language disorders which are known collectively as aphasia. Jakobson interpreted these extremes in relation to two distinct forms of semantic association: one topic may lead to another either metaphorically, through similarity, or metonymically, through contiguity. The two kinds of language behaviors, Jakobson suggested, might be the result of the disturbance of two different sets of cognitive processes. According to Rob Wozniak and Jane Hedley, our colleagues in Psychology and English, Jakobson's usage has long historical roots and is generally still followed, with metaphor being understood as "categorization" and metonymy as "temporal or spatial contiguity." The classic demonstration of the difference between the two hinges on the associations evoked when we hear the word "cat." If we think "dog," we are operating metaphorically (the relation is one between categories); if we think "claw," our response is metonymic (the relation is "neighborly"; in this case, between a whole and one of its parts).

In one of our discussions on "The Culture of Science," Ted Wong, a member of the Biology faculty who specializes in computational science, drew on Jakobson's distinction between metaphoric and metonymic kinds of thinking to posit a split between theoretical and observational scientists so profound that no communication between the two is possible. Ted maintained that theorists come up with metaphors that say something about the natural world by pointing to a set of equations or algorithms. Critics of such a model will ask whether it actually resembles nature. In contrast, observational scientists collect and study metonymies which describe the behavior of a part of nature. In Ted's view, the latter group does not work directly with categories or concepts, but with spatially and temporally related sets of observations. Their results are challenged on their representative quality: are they accurately reported, and are they adequately representative of the larger whole of which they are part or sample? Theorists and observers, in other words, use different kinds of processing to seek answers to different types of questions.

In borrowing the literary terms metaphor and metonymy, Ted was able both to make sense for himself and to communicate to the rest of us his repeated frustrations in getting observational scientists to appreciate the significance of modeling as a research activity. The difficulties were great enough to lead him to suggest that the two perspectives were irreconcilable. However, in the course of several semesters' conversations in "The Culture of Science" and other interdisciplinary working groups, it became clear to us that, rather than setting these two modes of talking and thinking against each other, we had instead been quite insistently inviting an exchange between them.

Ted's terminology caused us to reflect on our own experiences, and to challenge, in turn, his structure of irreconcilable opposition. As we repeatedly found ourselves using others' theory to fuel new questions, and others' new data to provoke our own new theories, we realized that metaphor inevitably generates the exploration of new metonymic relations, which in turn provoke a reconsideration of metaphoric constructions. Once we came to understand that the two modes of thinking were reciprocally productive, we were also able to see that they flourished particularly in conversations among colleagues who used different frameworks for describing the world, different metaphors which they needed to "translate" and elaborate into metonyms, in order to make themselves understandable to one another. As Teri Reynolds observes, "concepts from one can be used to help us see new things about the other . . . . unexpected associations . . . reorganize a familiar conceptual field and allow us to behave differently within it" (1996: 62).

Characterizing these two modes of thinking as metonymic and metaphoric also yields insight into-and perhaps spans-the "two cultures" divide which continues to trouble us more than fifty years after C.P. Snow first called attention to it. While each culture uses both metaphor and metonymy, it may well be that scientists, focused on simple and unifying relations that capture key aspects of an object under study, highlight the metaphoric representation of their ideas. Humanists, who think in terms of many variables and complicated relations in illustrative but unique situations, may employ metonymic expressions more frequently. In interdisciplinary conversations, information is continually translated back and forth between the two systems. In the process, the presumptions which underlie the discussion are continuously and productively altered. This, we posit, could be a distinctive way of bridging the two cultures gap, one which demonstrates a concrete working out of the analysis recently presented by Stephen Jay Gould in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities (2003).

While such movement occurs and plays an important role within an individual (Grobstein 2002, Dalke and Grobstein 2003), our concern here is the movement between individuals whose disciplinary training and experiences have resulted in significantly different metonymic expressions, metaphoric constructions and relations between the two. Such movement is more likely to occur when there is room for it: that is, if the conceptual space between participants is larger than is possible for those who share a discipline. Reorganization may also be provoked when colleagues from the same department leave the shared site where their understanding of the relationship between their disciplinary metaphors and their metonymic landscapes is so fixed as to be invisible. The disciplinary landscape is grounded in that common understanding, but as we engage in conversation with colleagues from other divisions of the college who understand the relationship differently, it is unsettled. The fields of play shift perpetually.

A striking example of this occurred during one of our conversations about what Thomas Nagel famously called "the view from nowhere," the traditional attempt of science to arrive at objective measurements devoid of individual influence. We posited that what may be needed is instead the "view from everywhere": sorting through various perspectives not in order to strip away all that is personal, experiential and contextual, but rather to discover the widest range of what can be seen in common. As we explored the possibility that the attempt of realist philosophers and scientists to "get far enough away to see the correct picture" might be replaced by a fundamentally different form of knowledge, one that is culturally transcendent without attempting to shed all particularity, a number of us experienced a marked conceptual shift. We understood ourselves as trying not to become less particular, but rather to think through and with the particular, to construct a story that could include the perspective of each of us and be written by all of us together. (For the significance this kind of collective story-telling in a different context, see the on-line forums sponsored by the Center for Science in Society after September 11, 2001 and again a year later, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq.)

The dynamics of this sort of conceptual shift are imaged in the figure below, which suggests that the most generative exchange between individuals occurs not exclusively and not even primarily as a metaphoric process, but rather as a reciprocal "loop" between the metaphoric relations of one individual and the metonymic constructions of another. Grappling with the metaphors of another challenges and changes our own metonymic landscapes, which in turn alters our own metaphors, which may in turn alter others'.

Figure 1. Schematic illustrating the intellectual exchange between two individuals in a cross-disciplinary conversation. Solid lines depict individuals constructing knowledge by traversing their own metaphoric and metonymic levels. Dashed lines represent the interaction between the metaphor level of one individual and the metonymic level of another.

This interpersonal looping is one way poets invite associations in their readers. See, for example, Mary Thomas Crane's discussion, in Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory, which is particularly insightful in its identification of the "surplus of cognitive linkage," the "subversive effects" of wordplay that "exposes buried links and structures" in those who read and study them (2001: 33). These elements are central to our concept of the generative exchange between metaphor and metonym.

George Lakoff suggests that the creation and use of metaphor is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, one that appears in rudimentary form quite early in life. Leslie Rescorla, of our Psychology Department, offered a nice illustration of this: two-year-olds who engage in "over-extended word meanings"-such as calling snow on one's head a hat, or dripping water "tick tock"-linguistic gestures which they are later taught to call metaphors. Intellectuals are appropriately and insistently trained to create, exchange, and build on such metaphors. For example, physicists talk about the movement of charge as an electric current, which in turn generates allied concepts of potential and resistance. However, intellectuals frequently pay less attention to the origin of metaphors in primary experiences which are represented metonymically. These are Crane's "buried links and structures," the contiguities which make both dripping water and a clock "tick tock." Simply comparing and contrasting metaphors leaves untapped the rich understandings figured in metonymic landscapes, understandings that are imperfectly summarized in, and sometimes in conflict with, the metaphors to which they give rise. Electric charge fundamentally manifests itself in discrete chunks, so that the metaphor used above, of a "current" representing a continual flow of material, breaks down. When the metaphor is carried beyond its metonymic origins, it risks being misleading.

A tendency to neglect the metonymic landscape may well be an unavoidable hazard of disciplinary conversation, where differences among individuals are shielded by the use of a common metaphor, and perhaps by a fixed relation between that metaphor and its metonymic origins. Even in collaborative work across disciplines, exchange occurs primarily in terms of metaphors, often leaving different metonymic understandings unexplored and unaltered. What makes interdisciplinary conversation distinctively different from both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaborative work is the exchange it fosters between metaphoric and metonymic constructions.

Questions about the metonymic grounds of our metaphors are generated particularly in conversations with those who do not share our own presumptions. As Nancy Stepan observes in an essay on "The Role of Analogy in Science,"

Stepan here uses "analogy" in two senses. She refers first to metonymic, largely unconscious meaning and its evolution into "self-conscious theory" or metaphor. Equally important is the return path she points to, the motivation created by metaphor to make "new observations" which in turn can alter metonymic relationships.

Interdisciplinary conversations are exercises in explaining to one another the multiple ways in which we are "metaphorizing" our individual metonymic landscapes, seeking and articulating the shape of the paths we take through them and the habits we have formed to traverse them. Even more profoundly, we are learning not only how to illuminate different items in these landscapes, and how to take different routes among them, but-to extend the metaphor we use so frequently here-to consider how we might actually rearrange the territory, to use one another's metaphors to alter our own metonymic landscapes.

All intellectual work involves the attempt to explain a wide range of phenomena by naming a model and tracing the attributes that flow from it. One particularly productive way we make sense of the world is by paying attention to dissonances and contradictions, figuring out either how to incorporate them into the structures we have built, or how to build new structures that can accommodate them. For us, the most interesting questions now have to do with how we can accomplish the latter by constructing more complex frames, using new analogies to bootstrap onto others and so activate fresh meanings. Central to this process is the ability to continually extend the frames that are available to us. Metaphors serve this purpose by articulating how to map from one domain to another. They are themselves open to manipulation and therefore extendable. Thus the terms that we use to build from and with are labile. Interdisciplinary conversations prod us to undertake their revision and facilitate the process of consciously breaking out of those frames we know best.

We have many examples of such moments of insight, and share here one of the most delightful from our series on "The Culture of Science." In a session entitled "Embodying Our Disciplines," Mark Lord, a colleague in Theater, guided participants in a meditative imagining of our bodies at work. Noting that it would be "less helpful if we tried to steer it," Mark instructed us to "accept what comes," not to censor the associations that arose, to spend some time gathering experiential data before we turned our analytical minds to understanding the ways our disciplines have shaped our sense of physicality.

After the exercise, colleagues told some wonderful stories. Not all of them spoke to a discipline-specific shaping of body sense, but each evoked the learning of skills that enabled us to "sink to the level of what the body knows" and "pull it up immediately when it is needed." A scientist described "being a monkey," a "little primate," wrapping her feet around a chair in order to launch a sense of herself "into the space" opened by a microscope, "losing a sense of body" as she was transported into the colors she saw there. A humanist described his sense of "being a piece of bubble gum," suddenly blown up, exploding, being lifted out of his chair, along with the computer in which words were combining, carrying him along as he struggled to keep up with the rapid flow. A social scientist described a sense of connection between the screen and the mind: when her head is "in the computer," the "rest of it goes away." Other stories included those of one scientist being told "not to think" as a high-school runner (and of his pleasure at entering that state), and of another being told by a student that she looked as though she were "having fun" lecturing, as though she were "dancing."

A profound revision of metaphoric assumptions occurred when we reflected together on these various accounts of bodily experience. The group acknowledged what the exercise was intended to show us: that (contrary to the claims of Sharon Traweek, 1995, whose work we'd read together earlier in the series) we are all present in our bodies as we work, differently extending our physical selves into both exterior and interior spaces. When we were most intensely engaged in intellectual labor, we realized, we were most embodied, but-and this was key-we felt least so, because we became unconscious of what our bodies were doing during such work. The distinction made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty between the "known" and "lived" body was useful to us here: if we are "living" in our body, perhaps we cannot "know" it. When the "alignment is right" we are less aware of our bodies, so our experience is one of being disembodied. The sense of dis-ease, of being "at odds with ourselves" arises, contrari-wise, when our consciousness is alerted to a discordance between what we are doing and how we are feeling. Although we agreed that a sense of discomfort arises when conscious and unconscious disagree about what is going on, we also ended our discussion with the hope of getting beyond the "trap" of having to choose between being "aware" (or not) of our bodies, thereby arriving at a more layered description of our experiences.

We were led by Mark Lord to acknowledge that intellectuals, who so often think of ourselves as disembodied, actually "relate to our machines in a very embodied way." This extended account nicely demonstrates not only the way in which metaphors and metonyms may be exchanged but also one reason why metaphors are so central to the process of knowledge production. Their paradoxically anti-metaphoric quality refuses first-order meanings, the "least resisting" ones, in search of what does not fit, of what is purposely not stable. They force us into strange affiliations, thus generating lots of interpretations, as well as further surprising associations.

We realized, from further conversation with Mark Lord, that metaphor marks an unstable moment, one where change is imminent. It is a link that is tenuous, an analogy which both gestures towards what is the same, and toward difference. Metaphor works so well because the two terms are both like AND not like; in juxtaposition, they both make a comparison and indicate its limits. As Thomas Pynchon observes in The Crying of Lot 49, "Entropy is a figure of speech . . . a metaphor. . . . The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost" (1996: 77, 95).

After several semesters spent in interdisciplinary play, we added a third literary term to the conceptual repertoire we use to describe what we are up to: synecdoche, the relation of parts to wholes. (Synecdoche is a part of speech that uses a less inclusive term for a more inclusive one--i.e. "head" for "cattle.") From the perspective of synecdoche, the actions of metaphor and metonymy are not opposed to one another, but rather work together to pull parts out of, and put them back into, wholes. They invite us to attend to them, to dwell in them, to make them live. As forms of language that call attention to themselves, metaphors, metonyms and synecdoche estrange us from what we think we know. That's when language is alive, and makes us lively: when it tunnels out of us into others' cells, makes a connection that "shouldn't" connect. That surprises. Delights. And "makes" us think.

This idea of surprise, and the unanticipated information toward which it gestures, convinced us that our interdisciplinary discussion groups also function in important ways as "emergent systems." In emergent systems modeling, researchers have shown that complex behaviors may be created from simple agents subject to a few specific rules of interaction. The interest of such systems derives from their unknown potential, from not knowing in advance what they will create, but anticipating that they will be generative if a few fairly simple starting rules are followed.

We realized, in retrospect, that the format we implemented in each of our interdisciplinary groups facilitated emergence. We had a few specific initial conditions for each group. For instance, in our brown bag discussions about "The Culture of Science," we invited both new and more experienced members of the faculty from all divisions of the college, as well as several members of the administration, to speak in an alternating sequence. We met in a divisionally neutral venue and limited each week's conversation to one hour, which had the effect of keeping participants interested and coming back for more. We asked discussion leaders to show the group how their own project was illustrative of a larger whole. All our conversations were summarized on a web page and further discussion was invited in an on-line forum, which served as a resource for new speakers to draw upon. We eventually came to understand that our simple "rule of interaction" in these emergent systems was synecdochal, in a distinctively generative way: that is, the conversation functioned through the interplay of metaphoric and metonymic relations, making new wholes from parts that we disassembled and reassembled. When we achieved this kind of dynamic exchange, as we often did, the conversations were inclusive, rich and challenging.

Our interdisciplinary groups work as well as they do because all participants bring something different to the discussion, are open to being altered in conversation with others, and are committed to the simultaneous extension both of their own metaphors and collective ones. The groups evolve in the absence of a leader or architect because of an environment which encourages difference, alteration, and continuing individual and communal elaboration. This process requires, of course, the capacity of all participants to conceive of and be willing to articulate their own metaphoric accounts, as well as a willingness to revise both those and the metonymic landscapes from which they arise. Such a process is, by definition and design, unending, because it always generates new synecdochtal relations.

Out of these discussions have emerged new, much-expanded and still-revisable understandings of the nature of the work that engages us all. In an era when no one of us can possibly assimilate all available information even within a single field, the driving force of interdisciplinary work, and of the synecdochtal exchange which it fuels, is that it offers us a means both to survive and flourish: a revisable and sustainable way not just to map a direction through the crowded landscape, but to alter its contours. For starters, it may free us from the idea that we need to know it all, because we have connected with others who know other things, or the same things differently.

Interdisciplinary work is indeed play, but play of the most meaningful kind, "not purely entertainment or a luxury to be given up when things get serious . . . not only to be enjoyed but accorded high value" (Grobstein 1994). We are not afraid, as Marjorie Garber claims, that it will become "conventional," that "the center of intellectual interest and provocation will move elsewhere." Interdisciplinarity is not a place to be reached. It is rather a commitment to a process of continually testing the value of parts, experimenting with different ways they might be combined to make wholes, and using the resulting wholes to refigure the parts. That constant rejuvenation makes the system more than "a little bit transgressive" (Garber 2003). It is both sustainable and continuously productive. Many of us have reacted to what we've been doing together with a sense of pleased surprise. That we do so suggests that collectively generating accounts which are satisfying and productive both for individuals and for groups is less common in academic life than it might and should be. Perhaps the academic enterprise would be more successful, and we would be happier, if we learned to overcome our reluctance to have our own metaphoric wholes and metonymic landscapes altered by others.

Beyond their service to local goals, the lessons we're evolving in our academic working groups might usefully contribute to productive changes in the world at large. Catherine Stimpson has challenged academic institutions to find a renewed sense of relevancy to contemporary world conditions: "our survival depends on bringing to bear a multiplicity of perspectives upon life's forces and phenomena, its movements and complexities. Our constructed sense of life must be as rich and thick and hybrid and multiplicitous as life itself." Our claim here that interdisciplinary work is not only pleasurable, but a needed act of engagement, is one response to her call.

Rather than escaping "the mantle of duty," as Marjorie Garber charges in the passage with which this essay begins, interdisciplinary work takes it on directly. There may be no more important activity for us at the present time than to develop among ourselves and with our students the ability to create, critique, and re-create multiplicitous stories. On-line venues such as "Thoughts and Forum: 11 September 2001" and "The Place of the U.S. in the World Community," for instance, invited participants to find ways of telling our collective human story from which no one would feel estranged. Such work is profoundly important in addressing our critical, collective need and responsibility to find better ways to conceive of national and world communities and of the relations among them.

Primary are the synecdochtal conversations we have had with Bryn Mawr colleagues, most particularly Ann Dixon, Alison Cook-Sather, Jane Hedley, Michael Krausz, Mark Lord, Katherine Rowe, Jan Trembley and Ted Wong, but including as well all the participants listed on the Serendip sites below. These conversations led us, in turn, to a range of written texts:

Home | Calendar | About | Getting Involved | Groups | Initiatives | Bryn Mawr Home | Serendip Home

Director: Liz McCormack - emccorma@brynmawr.edu | Faculty Steering Committee | Secretary: Lisa Kolonay
© 1994- , by Center for Science in Society, Bryn Mawr College and Serendip
Last Modified: Wednesday, 02-May-2018 11:57:04 CDT