Sciences & Humanities : the old story has a history

L’histoire du conflit scénarisé, entrepreneurisé, mythologisé, entre sciences et “humanities“. A reprendre au moins par ses retournements, épisodes, valeurs historiques évolutives. Certains stades :

• Arnold et Huxley, à travers un filtre amical, 1880s
• late 19th – early 20th: teaching Coleridge Carlyle Arnold Ruskin (rather than lit works, this “nonfictional prose” : criticism, against utilitarianism, anti-modern, “greatest resistance” to science, Guillory 206. Macaulay, De Quincey, Savage Landor, Cardinal Newman.
• CP Snow et Leavis (entre autres), 1965, the “Two Cultures”
• le début des technicismes, McLuhan inventeur de la catégorie “media”,
• et ses reprises (usable pasts, usages du passé, dont pour des récits généalogiques à valeur stratégique) contemporaines – ici, voir les variantes en latitude, synchronie dans un système d’options. Ce qui veut dire aussi, on le voit de suite, dans un système de conflits. Et d’entreprises de réconciliation – K Hayles.
• dont la forme “Humanités numériques” – qui réimporte “humanités” en français. Sans que ça émeuve. Que dit cette indifférence ?
• oh, another episode (Guillory, Professing Crit, ajouté le 6 juillet) : the “science wars” des 1990s, avec l’ouverture du champ des sciences studies – Paul R. Gross & Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition. The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, 1997. Guillory : “The conflict was quickly assimilated into the ongoing culture wars”. “if the humanities faculty at MIT were one day to ‘walk out in a huff, the scientific faculty could, at need and with enough released time, patch together a humanities curriculum, to be taught by the scientists themselves.”

Guillory, sur le processus de vernacularisation comme fil dans le faisceau englobant de la modernisation, (Professing Criticism, 216-217) :

our analysis suggests that the tendency of vernacularization was equally expressed in literary culture¹ and in science: in the former as the progressive delimitation of vernacular literature, and in the latter as the displacement of the classical curriculum by an influx of new scientific disciplines, henceforth disseminated in vernacular prose. The fact that vernacularization was a precondition for modernizing and delimiting the categories of both literary and science complicates the picture we inherit of their epistemically opposition, the “two cultures”. … an underlying linguistic identity … supports a common social identity’ that of the expert. As soon as this term of analysis is introduced however, … the epistemic distinction between science and literature – expressed earlier as De Quincey’s distinction within literature between the “Literature of Knowledge” and the “Literature of Power” – splits the figure of the expert in two kinds … The vernacularization of expertise was followed almost immediately by this division between the episodic modes of expertise. 217.

1. as distinct from premodern and modernising configurations of academic literary study [↩]