Martin Heidegger once said, we only know a hammer when it is broken (see his pioneering book, Being and Time).
I have been thinking about the arts, a bit. Given the visual nature of the arts—and here I am making the assumption that literature is a form of visualization of the literary artist’s imagination, transmitted by way of words, and written-spoken language being essentially visual. The main purpose of the arts of course is to teach us about the human condition. And since the age of enlightenment we in the west have been interested in understanding the arts in a systematic—or systemic, if you like—fashion. With the birth of academic disciplines and paradigm developments by the academic “professionals” (see Thomas Kuhn’s theses in Structures of Scientific Revolutions) thinking folks have been forced into classifying what they study about the human condition.
Then there are the notions of historicity and contingency (see Rorty’s book, Contingency, irony, and solidarity). The human condition is looked at one way in a particular historical epoch, and then it is looked at in a radically different way in the future historical epoch. But all the historical conditions are also contingencies. For example, the way in which Nietzsche comes up with radical theses such as “god is dead” or “will to power” is contingent upon science progressing, history moving to a direction to usher in opportunities for such thinking, and so on. Also, things are metaphoric. We think in metaphors, we speak in metaphors, and we create the arts with metaphors. The human condition is contingent.
In the end, all knowledge is interconnected and there are many interdependencies between the so-called branches of study (i.e., disciplines). Take sociology and (visual) culture study for instance. Where much of cultural studies has remained in the realm of description; always describing what is, and not lifting the layers to see the possibility of the impossibility, sociology has come to its rescue. The primary goal of sociology is (or ought to be) to seek to know WHY things happen. If we know why something has happened, perhaps we can develop a theory to help us in arguing why things can happen differently or be made to happen differently in the future. So, a “better” visual culture study, I should like to argue, is one that is also sociology. That is to say, this form of visual culture study brings a vibrant sociological light to bear on all things visual.
As a pragmatist—following Dewey and Rorty and to some extent Foucault and Derrida—I argue that there are no splits between disciplines and all the classifications are artificial means to make academic studies (i.e., inquiry) scientific…the legacy of positivism perhaps. So, if we see the hammer is no longer putting the nails where they belong, we fix it or get another hammer—an interdisciplinary hammer.