I’ve always thought of “real” interdisciplinarity as being much more like learning a second language and its cultural mindset. Just learning how to program a microcontroller or reading de Certeau is like learning “guten tag”, “wie bitte” and “auf wiedersehen”.

I recently gave a talk with the subtitle of “The Humiliation of Interdisciplinarity” – the problem with learning new stuff (or a language – at least for me) is that it’s very humiliating if it’s done in an immersive manner. My best personal example of this was when I strolled into an Engineering grad class in Biorobotics (thinking since I knew how to make stuff and read a lot of “guten tag” I’d be OK) and I got slashed to bits in short order. It’s a bit like getting off the train and only knowing three phrases in a strange land.

I think going through the effort of creating a protocol of interdisciplinarity is almost a completely separate task than doing interdisciplinary work. Most of the people I know are exhausted (or content) knowing a couple different worlds, and don’t have the energy to learn the third world of administration.

As luck would have it, my girlfriend just asked me what I was doing. I said I was responding to your post. She said: “Oh… I saw a thing about Julian in this USC publication…” and she handed me this glossy “Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences” with you in it, beside a your recently funded “Interdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Collaborative Research between Artistic and Engineering Practices” abstract. I’m curious to know more…

That style of interdisciplinarity should be put to death, but quick. It seems impossible that that could do anything other than what you might expect, the proof being that it could never really go far afield of the individual disciplines in order to get the institutional support necessary to come to be. What we need are un-disciplined scholar-practitioner-craftspeople who have been disciplined enough to realize that disciplines heel anyone who wants to create anything markedly new. (Also, definitions of “new” are typically incremental advancements, not new knowledge or approaches.) Disciplines are not for those who disrupt conventional practices — or who do the entirely unexpected, behave rebelliously and raise a ruckus. Undisciplinarians should find themselves getting kicked out of things for not playing by the rules. Stuff like that. I think some of my most effective mentoring has come from telling people what rules to ignore. At those points you create new things — things that take a very different perspective, that behave according to unique, unexpected, unfamiliar logic.

My skepticism is meant to be provocative, of course. Nothing is ever quite dead-dead, but somethings need to be declared dead so as to take the lessons learned and move on to new approaches. I feel a bit disappointed about the ways of learning that interdisciplinarity encourages, as presently conceived. It’s more than approaches to making knowledge — there’s craft associated with it, that I believe can only come from becoming a craftsperson in a variety of practice idioms. Like..for real. Not a little bit of 101 and then onto something else. Not to be too quaint, but a mariner learns sailmaking — not, just the principles of sailmaking, but they become a sailmaker and practice that craft, being a sailmaker, properly. They integrate the disciplines in their becoming a mariner.

I think you’re right — interdisciplinarity has become itself a discipline. What may be in order is “post-disciplinarity” as you say, perhaps it’s “trans-disciplinarity”, or maybe even just undisciplined practitioners. It’ll not happen, in my experience, so long as there are disciplined deans and provosts and such all who see personal-professional, political and financial value in saying “interdisciplinary” while also insisting on a disciplined, well-behaved faculty.

A couple of years ago I insisted that a young grad school prospect definitely not go to school and instead just practice the craft he imagined himself practicing. He developed a cadre of mentors that no one school could ever have provided, spent time learning and listening and making all the time. And he has exceeded himself by every measure at a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to go to school, exceeding by orders of magnitude what normal, disciplined grad students achieve, in my experience. A variety of factors are at play here, including a drive to create. But, he never allowed himself to become bored, nor routine, nor particularly disciplinary. Grad school would have positively ruined him forever.

I blog this because I need some way of understanding why I sometimes get hazed for not doing what I “should be” doing and the next moment praised for doing something different. I appreciate the flattery — creating little Julian Bleeckers is what iMAP is trying to support. In my experience, there where iMAP is, you’ll probably find the riot police quickly surrounding the building. Or, they won’t — which may mean iMAP is disciplined. 😉