Reputed for challenging his students and for his prolific and often cryptic scholarship, Mark Taylor is a perennial conversation topic well-known and well-covered by both his critics and his admirers at Williams. The deconstructionist has been deconstructed many times over. What is left to ask Mark Taylor?

I asked him about this very phenomenon, about his relationship to the places he inhabitsWilliams College and, more generally, the realm of higher education. Why are people on this campus so fascinated by Professor Taylor? In the collective consciousness of the Williams campus, Taylor has become identified with postmodernism, and inevitably one's feelings about the latter color one's feelings about the former.

But that only begins to answer the question. In many ways the questions that Williams faces today are really questions about its identity as an educational institution and its vision of the future of higher education. It should come as no surprise that Professor Taylor has found his way into the thick of these dialogues about the future of Williams.

The interesting question to ask Professor Taylor these days is not, "What is postmodernism," or "Is Freud still relevant," but "What will/should our place of learning be like?" The ideal of education that Williams holds so dearMark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the othercarries assumptions about the educational value of face-to-face contact, assumptions that are challenged by seminars linking students and professors over the Internet. But if Mark Taylor unsettles, it is only because that is his job as a teacherjust as it is our job to examine the places we inhabit, to ask the questions worth asking.

Many of the projects you have undertaken in the past few years at Williamsthe interdisciplinary program, the global studies initiative, the CTAH, the global seminarsare geared toward a common goal of redefining the nature of the university as a site of learning. Could you talk about your vision of the structure and function of the university in the next millenium?

It is a grand question and predicting the future is always a dangerous thing to do. I think, however, that there are certain trajectories already in place that allow for some anticipation of some of the changes to come. As we approach the end of the 20^th century, it seems to me that we are in the midst of a significant socioeconomic and cultural shift of fairly major proportions. I don't think this reflects the kind of millenarianism that is rampant in many quarters, but the realization of processes that really have been underway since the end of the second World War. This gets articulated in a variety of ways: philosophically, in the shift from modernism to post-modernism, economically in the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, or perhaps as the shift from a manufacturing to an information economyI don't think any institutions as we now know them will go untouched by these changes. So that I think that the way in which the university will function in the coming years is significantly different from the way in which it has functioned in the past. Knowledge, I think, is going to be re-ordered and restructured, so that the way the university is structured in terms of departments and divisions will be radically recast. The ways in which work gets done at the university is going to change, both for the faculty and for the students. In large part this will be a function of changing technologies, and the different kinds of literacies that are involved with these changing technologies.

But I also think that the boundaries of institutions will shift. The boundaries of the university as well as all other institutions will become increasingly porous, hard to identify and maintain. So that there are widespread changes, I think, that will have an impact not only on how we do what we do but what we do as well. I'd like to discuss technology, specifically the global seminars you've done, one in conjunction with the University of Helsinki, and one this semester with Monash University in Australia. I was wondering what you've observed during the course of these seminars about the way technology alters academic interaction between students themselves and between students and a professor. Is the global classroom that these courses foreshadow something we can look forward to, is it a progression in the academy, or merely an inevitability?

I think that one of the most important developments that is now underway is an acceleration of the processes of globalization. Now, exactly what globalization means is itself far from clear, and that is, I think, one of the challenges of critical reflection in today's world. We hear a lot about the global economy and the global this and the global that, but the relationship of the notion of the global to the international, to the universal, to the cosmopolitan, is rarely pondered. I think there are both perils and opportunities in terms of these processes of globalization.

When I originally had the idea to do a global seminar, my thought was to try to use some of the technologies being developed for quite different purposes in the context of an educational environment, and I'm now extending that again this semester. I've tried to bring together theory and practice by having the content of the seminar directly relate to the kinds of technologies we use. We try to theorize what we're doing and to do what we theorize, to bring those two together.

Whether the future holds developments that are going to take the precise form of this kind of global classroom or not I'm not sure, but I think that it is inevitable that education as well as everything else is going to become increasingly globalized. I have never been particularly interested in envisioning what I try to do as distance education, which is one of the ways in which people in the world of education imagine it. The reason I don't like that kind of model is that the distance education model builds upon the old broadcast model of the one-to-many kind of structure, whereas I much prefer trying to use the technology for the creation of various kinds of collaborative exchanges and such. If you think of the broadcast model as a lecture model, I much prefer trying to develop the seminar model where you have the range of possibilities for exchange. The conduct of the conversation and the exchange is not as different from the situation is around a single seminar table in the same room as one might expect.

I think one of the things that's going to change significantly, and it's already underway, is an explosion in for-profit education. Now, much of that education will be of a different order than what students get at Williams. Much of it will be more of a training-type education, or an instructional-type education, and much of it is hard to imaginehow one studies Hegel and Derrida in that format. The liberal arts are always in a very perilous position, but never more so than now. I think these changes that we're talking about pose an extraordinary challenge for those of us who are interested in and committed to the liberal arts, trying to figure out ways in which we can continue thinking about, writing about, in different senses, these issues, texts, and questions in an environment that is significantly different from the one we've known in the past.

Is this the kind of thing you'll be working on five years from now, and will you be doing it at Williams?

Two questions there. I think it's unlikely if I'm at Williams that I'll be working on it because I think it's unlikely that the college is going to move in this kind of direction. Again, my point is not that I want to give up the kind of traditional classroom teaching that I do, any more than I want to give up writing books. I write books all the time. But one of the dangers is that even though one writes different books they very often are the same book. Even though you teach different classes they very often are the same class. And that's worked for a while. The question is whether it will continue to work as we move into the future. Williams isn't going to disappear. The question is whether it's going to become increasingly obsolete and elitist. It's no easier for me to predict my own future at Williams than it is to predict the future of Williams or higher education. I'm not sure that I'll be here in one year let alone five years, and part of it depends where my own thinking takes me, and equally importantly, where it seems to me Williams wants to head or where it doesn't want to head.

You've talked about the impact that technology will have on the liberal arts, but also on our culture and society in general. Given that way of looking at our future, what are the implications for the way Williams ought to be preparing its students?

I think it would be beneficial for many people involved in higher education to spend a little bit of time in classrooms of elementary schools and perhaps middle schools to see what it is that these young people today are involved with, and the levels of sophistication that they are going to be coming to college and university already having achieved. Their world is very, very different from the world in which I grew up and in many ways it's very different from the world in which today's students grew up.

On the one hand, I think that students coming into colleges and universities are going to have different needs and make different demands. On the other hand, I do not think that for the most part we are doing an adequate job of preparing our students for the world in which they are going to live and work. What's involved is not simply doing what we've always done in a different way, it's doing something different from what we've ever done, and that difference involves a different kind of literacy. I do see these changes, not as a substitute for what we do, but as a supplement. If I am concerned that students continue to read and think about Hegel and Kierkegaard, then it's incumbent upon me to find ways to engage students where they are, and not simply to try to do it as I have always done it. Trying not to make those changes is like trying to change the weatherI just don't think you're going to be able to do it.

I'd like to return to the breaking down of disciplines and departments in the university. I wonder how you see that playing itself out. I know that scientists are often suspicious of the social sciences in general and postmodernism in particular. I'm wondering, as someone with interest and expertise in both philosophy and technology, what you think can be done or will be done to bridge these gaps between disciplines and departments?

Well, I think that part of what will be involved is a certain re-articulation of different areas of inquiry. Again, if we contextualize the emergence of the disciplines as they are now, a lot of this stuff goes back to a certain kind of distinction between theoretical and practical reason, that is, between non-applied and applied knowledge, which structures the way in which the university is set up, the way in which the college is set up, and in the way the liberal arts curriculum is set up. It is, for the most part a way of distributing power, which means that it is basically a way to distribute financial resources.

Now a "suspicious" response tolet's use the wordpostmodernism is very, very widespread. It has been for many years, not only in academic circles, but in the media, and certainly among many students, faculty, and administration at a place like Williams. Very often, that resistance is in my judgement irresponsible, because the people have not read the materials that they are dismissing.

The question that's interesting for me is why these ideas, which when you get into the texts themselves are so difficult and so esoteric, have such an extraordinary cultural impact to provoke the kinds of hostilities they provoke. As we move into a new cultural condition, the relationship between information and economics becomes complicated. In many ways economic systems are information systems. To talk about it in one sense, culture gets commodified. To talk about it in another sense, culture becomes tied up with different forms of economic power.

Just like we haven't thought through what the stakes are in a term like globalization, so too we haven't thought through what the stakes are in a category like information. Information is not simply something that goes on inside a computer, it seems to me. Information is something that circulates through political, economic, and I think even biological systems, in certain ways. If one begins to understand the role of information, one is driven to reconceptualize and rearticulate the relationships of the so-called disciplines. Here's another way you can create three divisions: cultural processes, socioeconomic processes, natural processes. Now, insofar as each of those processes in some sense and in different ways involves a certain kind of information process, where and how you draw the line is no longer clear. That does not suggest a reduction of nature to culture or culture to nature. Part of the challenge facing critical reflection today, it seems to me, is one of rethinking all forms of binary but certainly the binary between nature and culture, body and mind, in a way that reduces neither to the other.

From at least Plato on, we've set up these questions in terms of binary opposites: time/eternity, spirit/matter, material/immaterial. Once you set it up that way, you have three alternatives: you reduce body to mind, which is idealism, and in a certain way social constructivism, though they usually don't understand that philosophical genealogy, you reduce mind to body, which is a materialism or a naturalism, or you somehow try to cobble them together. How can one think of the distinction between what's called the material and the immaterial, or mind and body, or information and whatever, in a way that is not oppositional but yet is not any kind of foundational unity?

And there, it seems to me, in a sort of curious way, Hegel was trying to do something like that as he developedwhat he calls an absolute idealism, in which the opposition between mind and matter is itself rendered problematic, that if one were to rethink what Hegel was trying to think in his category of object and spirit through the notion of information, and to refashion his understanding of the ways in which systems and structures work, one would begin to approach a less problematic articulation of the disciplines.

I think the critical movements that were set in motion in the late 60s and early 70s and that have dominated critical discourse since thenand still do, if only by a negative reaction to themhave reached a certain closure for a variety of reasons. The poststructuralist critique of structuralismand structuralism includes not only linguistic structures but social stuctures, psychological structures, and structures of all kindsrests upon too restrictive a notion of system and structure. The critque of structures is that they inevitably and invariably totalize by repressing otherness and excluding difference. There are analyses of systems and structures now being developed that don't have that problem.

If that's a Derridean strand, here's the more Foucauldian strand: the social constructivism position claims that all nature is culture. That notion ends up presupposing precisely the kind of subject that is a totalizing and imperialist subject, that many of those who developed that line of analysis want to overcome. The essentialist and the social constructivist are mirror images of each other, and neither alternative is adequate. If you can rethink the notion of structure in such a way that you rearticulate the inner relationship between the natural and the cultural, you might find a way out of the impasse in which we now find ourselves.

To go back to this knee-jerk reaction against postmodernism in our community: one result of that response is that you tend to become identified with postmodernism and all the ambivalence that people feel about that movement becomes wrapped up in a certain sort of ambivalence about you. I'm wondering how you feel about being identified with a movement like postmodernism, and if that ever bothers you.

It's not limited to the Williams campus. No, it doesn't bother me at all. To the contrary, what would bother me is if people weren't disturbed by the ideas. It comes back to the issue of complacency. From my point of view, and I think many teachers share this, the purpose of education is to unsettle. The human problem is not finding answers but learning to live with their impossibility. The question I keep asking about the reaction to what is called post-modernism is, of what is it a symptom? Often it seems to me part of the reason they react so strongly is the way in which this kind of critical reflection pulls the rug out from under every possibility of certainty and security. Certainties are fabrications are designed to repress their own impossibility, so that the kind of endless interrogation and critical reflection that my understandings of poststructuralism and postmodernism (they're not exactly the same) leads to is destabilizing but also extraordinarily liberating. I say to students sometimes that the only thing more dreadful than uncertainty would be certainty. What a bummer it would be if we ever got it figured out.