Interdisciplinarity is an Intergenerationality

At moments of clarity, we recognize ourselves as living and dying. So do knowledge systems, which are law-likely articulations of care, articulated into epistemic divisions that we now understand as disciplines. It follows from this that all questions of interdisciplinarity are now, and always have been, questions of intergenerationality. What do we inherit from previous generations, and what do we want to pass on? Intergenerationality is not a form of interdisciplinarity – it is the other way around. The boundaries that now mediate our modes of existence are between different generations, not simply the challenges posed by the time-criticality of existence and the increasing ruthlessness of spatial frontiers, but also the policing between the various unruly children of what in the universitas is understood as academic disciplines: the different systems of emerging knowledges, whose as yet underarticulated properties lead to politically adjudicated supervenience relations. Disciplinary ontogeny staged recapitulations of phylogeny, but what recapitulation looks like now is in our hands.

Issues of when disciplinary boundaries should and must be loosened or heeded are questions of when to collate knowledges together and when to prune with discernment. Which knowledges do we renovate into realized unities, and which knowledges do we allow to lapse? Every decision about interdisciplinarity involves the life and death of realizable human effects. When we allow the mind sciences, for instance, an undue explanatory power, we also entangle the law-likeliness of epistemic regimes of care with particular relations (for that is what they are) of consciousness and their differential realizability. Our everyday assumptions and practices which embed and encode the unities and disunities of beings and of knowledges constitute the very parameters in which projects and trajects and deaths are conceived and pursued. Some of the best minds I know now study and work on constellations of study focused on articulating ontically positive intergenerationalites. It may be the only kind of interdisciplinarity left to pursue.