Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, Feeling, Seeing: The Role of the Arts in Making Sense Out of the Academy

Our bodies provide keen metaphors for the predicament of the disciplines and the pharmakon (both remedy and poison) provided by interdisciplinarity. Each human body is single, complex but unified, whole. Yet we have come to experience our bodies as composed of parts (like machines) and to fetishize some of these parts (particularly primary and secondary female parts) as separable, distinguishable from the whole not only abstractly and analytically, but practically and in terms of value. Our "environments," the ecosystems in which we participate and on which we rely for our existence are, as we call them, systems, complexly interrelated in every place and at every moment. There are no "parts" in them, only participants. Yet we have come to experience them not as webs of mutual belonging but as domains of paradoxical dominion and subservience. [From the first paragraphs]