Living Between Disciplines

Multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, indisciplinary… believe it or not, they all mean pretty much the same thing at the core, that is, the approach of creating and doing things with knowledge from different fields.

Now what is a discipline, what separates one from another, why do human minds care so much about crossing into others that they invent all those similar words to stress the act of crossing fields? Does it still matter?

1. The Comes and Goes of Disciplines

Discipline, as discussed here, means a field of study, work, and/or creation. In the current situation and norm, everyone supposedly falls into one or two disciplines that would help others easily categorize one’s skills and specializations. There are no clear boundaries among disciplines as it is impossible to do so and contradicts our essentially interconnected reality, which makes the initial design of the disciplines and institutions even more confusing.

In fact, it’s all very recent that the modern way of defining and separating out a discipline was born, though it might feel like a given truth and default for people at our stage. By recent I mean only about 2 centuries in the whole of human history.

We have always practiced life with any available methods, knowledge, and skills as human beings. It wasn’t until the 19th century that we fell into the trap of massively creating categories and disciplines, alongside the emergence of our modern universities, institutions and so on.

Only a century later we’d already see attempts to expand borders of disciplines — the categories were simply never enough to catch up with how knowledge evolves as circumstances change and society moves forward. From the early 2000s until now is when we really see the concept of interdisciplinarity come into the mainstream narrative. All of a sudden, we praise cross-field work, honor radical innovation born out of disruption of a single field. Interdisciplinary approaches become the slightly better, more innovative approach to things. The digital tech era facilitated the shift as it once again democratized learning and knowledge sharing, advancing everything one big step forward, so big that it has made the current institutions, methods of education and discipline separation seem so outdated and no longer serves reality.

It’s a long-awaited comeback to the more natural, and more informed ways of practicing life just like how we always did it in the earlier times. In some ways, we built the limiting frames ourselves and are now trying very hard to climb out of it, hence the eager drive to reconnect with how we practice things a few human cycles ago, coining so many words to express how holistic, different, and liberating one approach can be from the others. Jargon aside, it’s still more than valid to do so, to clarify the cross-discipline nature of a practice, as it’s still not the norm. Outdated institutions and separations linger, and people are still facing the critical choices at 18 to 20 to make the one big impactful choice in their life, to choose a discipline of study, that’ll settle the direction of a career later in life for most people.

Copyright © Maya Strobbe, 2024

2. The Hardship and the Fun of Crossing Fields

As it’s still not the norm to practice interdisciplinary work, the hardship is evident at the beginning. Trying to be accepted and validated by both or even more fields you are touching, trying to find the inner connection among drastically different fields, not being considered a serious practitioner, and the worries of surfing on the surface of things; but if you persevere through it all, the surprise and fun that come out of it all outweigh everything.

It’s precisely in the intersection of things that we get the most fun out of a practice — the fun of fulfilling a natural curiosity that’s embedded in the mind as we’ve drifted away from such a holistic way of living. It is very close to the idea of play, how we entertain ourselves while interacting with reality as kids, something that is always relevant to our human experiences but is somehow neglected and unanimously ignored by adults themselves.

The hardship of starting something new and crossing different fields is real. Not knowing for how long you are staying in the in-between states until you find your true audience, then the traditional disciplines give you validation and then all of a sudden you become that field-disrupting, rule-challenging person who changes the status quo. It’s part of our human nature to not appreciate the uncertainty that comes from a new practice, and yet it’s also part of the human nature to entertain different aspects of life that we like at the same time. So my answer is yes, it matters, and even more as the day goes by, as we slowly circle back to a more organic way of practicing life and entertaining knowledge.

3. On Genuine Interdisciplinarity

Genuine cross-field work comes from deep knowledge and constant interaction with the multiple subjects being explored. A careful distinction here is that modern disciplines and institutions tend to make us believe that majoring in a discipline in a top university setup is the only way out and that if we don’t practice that discipline all our lives we do not qualify as experts to experiment with that subject, but that is no longer the reality as they themselves find it hard to catch up with the new practices. Deep knowledge comes from authentic interaction and experience with a subject, a material, an idea at hand — an embodied-experience-based type of knowledge;

In order to have a genuine interdisciplinary experience, one also needs to have a deep knowledge of oneself, knowing where the real points of interest lie. For some it’s a quick instinctive aha moment, and for others it could be a long way of digging. After that, it’s months and sometimes years of researching and experimenting in solitude, rewarded by periodical outbursts of joy from playing with different matters and concepts.

A Note from the Author:

I used to study political science and set out to do policy research type of work; now I’ve made my way into the contemporary art field, also experimenting with design, SaaS building, and more; I discovered that I’m attracted to fonts, to book design, to mineral textures, to voluminous installations, and many other things, and I did not leave poli sci behind; I still enjoy reading about power dynamics, realism, and how they relate back to art and how everything runs in this world.

It’s been a long and ongoing journey of trying to start an interdisciplinary practice. As more people will start and might have already started the journey, I hope this resonates with some.

Ziqi, founder of ArtBaan