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Human
The previous issues of the Transdisciplinary Vanguard have focussed the sciences, however there is a generally accepted other side of the academy, namely the arts. These are generally considered to be more flexible, more emotional and more embodied (Greaves et al., 2024). However, the reactionary counterrevolution has reached the gates of the arts as well. Increasingly art is treated as a tool (i.e. it is instrumentalised) and it is also constantly separated from the sciences (also in Greaves et al., 2024 & Ede 2002). It’s as if, unsatisfied with their total victory in the sciences, the rationalists have expanded into the arts-faculty. However, a clean separation between the sciences obfuscates a great many things. It idealises/demonising the sciences as this completely detached, objective and inhuman practice, while idealising/demonising the arts as this utterly embedded, subjective and human activity.
The truth is that they are all of that at the same time and more. We should not try to reduce them down to these total categories. Arts and science are not separate, they are hybrids, they are Human. They are ongoing processes shaped by all of the systems, feelings, objects, natures and artefacts around them. They are cyborgs (Haraway, 1985). In the same way that in the slave/master dialectic there is a mutual dehumanisation of the subjects, the science/arts split does the same. It removes the human quality of these practices, thereby also hindering its ability for society to meaningfully engage with it (Freire, 1970).
The truth is that they are all of that at the same time and more. We should not try to reduce them down to these total categories. Arts and science are not separate, they are hybrids, they are Human. They are ongoing processes shaped by all of the systems, feelings, objects, natures and artefacts around them. They are cyborgs (Haraway, 1985). In the same way that in the slave/master dialectic there is a mutual dehumanisation of the subjects, the science/arts split does the same. It removes the human quality of these practices, thereby also hindering its ability for society to meaningfully engage with it (Freire, 1970).
In summary of the last 4 weeks of revolutionary ramblings: if transdisciplinarity is to fulfil its revolutionary potential its epistemological apparatuses must be controlled by the people, it must maintain a commitment to the Real and it must humanise the scientific method as well as those who practice it.