This issue is dedicated once again to a more definitive exploration of the interdisciplinary question in humanities, in the inquest which characterizes modern science and a corresponding investigation of the nature of artistic and imaginative pursuits. The essays in this collection bear evidence of the scientific temperament, to say the least, but more importantly an attempt to explain certain creative tendencies on the basis of findings in evolutionary studies and psychology. The concern in academy for a mechanics of perception has taken a turn. This is a very “philosophical” question. We cannot circumscribe its importance.
The structure of academic institutions, including especially all those centers of higher learning of which the University is a part needs to be reconsidered. The necessity of applying our mind to such a question may not be confined to the elitist reserves of institutions in the financially advanced context of imperialistic nations, who are “advanced” both in the sense of brokerage of the power perpetrated by the instruments of war, or the tacit imperialism of globalization achieved with the instruments of a dictated system of law and international relations. The need for reconstructing academic disciplines is an accretive priority for countries like India, with its in-eradicable poverty and dehumanizing alienation, so aptly symbolized in the image of the urban homeless. Academic research should not trickle down from entrenched disciplines. The discipline itself should be built on the foundations of an hierarchically striated, complicated tree of life tessellating itself out of its praxis- in the manner in which the Greeks iconized it, as Gaia, and which again Vyasa, or Nietzche, or Emile Durkheim and Frederick Turner describe – where society, analogically introverted like Mandeville’s colony of bees, is a living protruded body, a universe which incorporates itself through its ecosystems. In this broader context – real life, conditioned by its self-replicating tendencies and the instrumentations of technology, is living, thriving, self-destroying and resuscitating itself at the expense of the rest of its existence. Therefore as capital flows through the desiccated channels of territorial dominion new industry emerges, new employments, new colonization.
Could we redesign academic research? The University should be a center of disciplines like Capital Dynamics, Performance & Media Studies, Biotechnology, Space Enculturation, Neurolinguistics, Agrisciences to name a few. The only destiny prescribed is that of uplift and amelioration, the direct redressal of the crises that affects the last member in the trail of survival. Only such subjects as those related to economics of real life existence would be feasible for an emerging world. One step in that direction could be taken with the erasure of our nostalgia, a false belief in either heritage or history for there is nothing in history which is comforting – no political theory, spiritual faith or rationalization could sufficiently address the problem of survival and dehumanization.
