the fashion for fusion

One way or another interdisciplinarity has been bandied about as a cure-all for years now. You know the kind of thing - businesses should use evolutionary theory to step up product development, cultural production ought to be informed by the latest neurological research. If only, the thinking goes, we could develop sophisticated conversations that cross disciplinary boundaries research would be more integrated & more holistic, the world would be a better place.

The logic's impeccable, the practice maybe less so, because Churchill's comment about the US and UK being two countries separated by a common language also applies very much to interdisciplinarity. There is a real danger that when you take insights out of their original context and attempt to impose them in a world with a different mindset what you end up with is not so much a penetrating insight as an irrelevant diversion.

This isn't to say that there isn't real value in researchers from different disiciplines entering into conversations - far from it. What worries me is the increasing tendency to elide two or more disciplines to create a new, supra-discipline as if the same models that constrained and focused its supporting disciplines could be applied to their combination - surely this can be very reductive. These kinds of things are easy to formulate - bio-commerce, neuro-aesthetics, I'm sure you can think of more - but often, it seems to me, it's much harder to work out these 'disciplines' are actually for.

So rather than always focusing on the integrative potential of associated disciplines in interdisciplinary discourse, perhaps we should spend time looking at points of dissonance? Where does their relationship collide and conflict? Focusing on interdisciplianry fusion feels like a tidying up exercise - it may be more convenient, but in the end we simply create new specialisms with their own unique vocabularies..silos within silos.