ABSTRACT
This essay works around a specific paradox that governs the current fate and possible futures of interdisciplinary intellectual practice within the university. How is it that the contemporary historical moment is simultaneously witness to a euphemistic extolling as well as a systematic hostility directed at the institutional practice of ‘interdisciplinarity’? While the former attitude considers certain expressions of such academic practice as crucial to the cognitive ‘competence’ demanded by transnational labour-markets, the latter regards certain other forms of its practice within the university as redundant and therefore worthy of being defunded and allowed to perish. In trying to chart the motivations behind this ‘curious’ ambivalence of policy directions, I begin by looking at the origins of the scientific ‘discipline’ in Enlightenment Europe and its promise for a colonial project of control. Subsequently, the internally fraught history of academic specialization – in occasionally ‘forging’ ties with interdisciplinarity – has evolved divergent responses and crucial disjunctures with regard to the university’s relationship with the social. I explore, in this essay, the ethico-political condition of interdisciplinary knowledge-practice as the ‘dangerous’ ground for re-imagining ‘social justice’.
