Writing Project 2 A Transdisciplinary Intervention

Purpose
The second essay continues the first project’s attention to close reading and rhetorical listening in the composition of an original, timely argument, but also requires you to rhetorically navigate across different—perhaps even opposing—audiences, subjects, and disciplines. Here, you will utilize resources from one discipline or area of interest in order to explore and make claims about another. Preferably, you will be an “expert” in one (or sufficiently apprenticed to have some authority on the subject) and a “layperson” in the other. Perhaps you are a biologist engaging physics, or a psychologist engaging neuroscience. Taking the first example, here you would write for a more biologically inclined audience in order to persuade them of the value of taking physics seriously in biology (the emerging field of “quantum biology” is a good example). Such a move would require you to take a certain knowledge of biology for granted in your audience. For physics, on the contrary, you would write in a more rudimentary yet engaging way so as to not “lose” your audience. Ultimately, you are writing across the aisle. You must engage your primary biology audience and a possible physics audience that may take interest in your work, as well. Thus, this essay requires you to engage rhetorically difficult and nuanced territory in order to make a series of moves: engage, excite, perhaps entertain, and ultimately persuade both audiences of the value of your transdisciplinary intervention.

Readings
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007).
Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (HarperCollins, 1971).
Wright, Michelle. “Introduction,” in Physics of Blackness (U of Minn. Press, 2015).

Premise
In Physics of Blackness, Black Studies scholar Michelle Wright uses physics to think through Blackness in order to correct, in her view, problems with how we think about Black identity. Blackness, she argues, is not a “what,” but rather—like particles—a “when” and a “where.” That is, particles changes their very identity in relation to their environment. Blackness, Wright argues, is much the same. It is not one stable “thing.” Rather, Blackness is a response to environment. Physics enables Wright not only to think through Blackness more effectively and advantageously, but also argue for the centrality of a particular conception of Blackness. Consequently, as Niels Bohr said of the classical and quantum mechanical views of the world, physics and Blackness are complementary fields. This assignment asks you to enact Bohr’s “principle of complementarity” in any number of ways. It may take you time to dig through your disciplinary knowledge for ideas. For rhetoric is not only about “finding” connections, but also “forging” them, as rhetorician Susan Wells argues. Karen Barad certainly follows this approach in bringing together theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, ecocriticism, and feminism productively together into her views of agential realism and intra-action. Take note though that whereas Barad is both a professional theoretical physicist and a philosopher, you will very likely be more proficient in one field and a layperson in the other. Therefore, your picture of complementarity will more likely resemble Wright’s approach.

However, it may be the case that you discover how one field corrects or shows the limits of some element of another field. Heidegger provides one such example in his chapter “The Thing.” Here, he shows the limits of the scientific understanding of “things,” or “thingness.” Things are not only objects, he writes. Things are what “gather.” They gather things unto themselves and through themselves. As Gertrude Stein writes, “A plate is the occasion for a plate.” That is, a simple material object like a plate is not only its materiality (ceramic, etc.), not simply the molecules and matter that make it subsist. Rather, a plate’s essence is in the occasion, the event—the bringing together of a family for a meal, for instance, for a celebration, etc. All of this is part of a “thing.” Therefore, Heidegger shows the limits of natural science by looking to philosophy, specifically phenomenology, to show what else there is to “things.” Such could be a possible approach for you, as well, depending on your subject.

Prompt
Describe and analyze how an element of a field of your choosing perhaps in relation to your major or a personal interest or conviction—complements, improves, revises, and/or shows the limits of an element of another field that is in, or is in some way related to, the natural sciences.

You may take “natural sciences” to mean a common thread across natural sciences, like Heidegger does, or else a particular natural science. Finally, how is your transdisciplinary intervention significant for either one or both fields?