#blurringlines

Fish challenges the ability to have truly “inter-disciplinary” studies and concludes that “being interdisciplinary is more than hard to do: it is impossible to do.” The above quote highlights the power structures the disciplines have created, which is one reason why Fish espouses this impossibility. Words like "Anti-professionalism" reflect the fear of blurring the disciplines. This fear is rooted in the challenging of the power structures and serves political ramifications as well as academic. Yet even proponents of interdisciplinarity must come to terms with the fact that changes to disciplines rely on history and existing practices as the basis for their development. The question is then raised whether a new discipline has been created or is it simply regurgitating existing information. Fish also argues that the creation of new interdisciplinary programs with time become their own discipline and reinforce the power structures explained in the quote above.     

Throughout the discussion on the various ways academia might achieve interdisciplinary, Stanley Fish, through the above statement, addresses the difficulties posed by pedagogy. Situated in his second section, which is preceded by a historical and critical look at left and right views of interdisciplinarity and politics within academia, Fish addresses one strategy to release the boundaries of constructed disciplines by “poking holes in the discursive fabric those agendas weave, replacing… with the disruptive disease of relentless critique” (105) He then offers in counterpoint to the above solution that “blurring of existing authoritative disciplinary lines and boundaries”—through questioning bringing about “anti-knowledge”—“will only create new lines and new authorities” reinstating political boundaries that the “new way of teaching” sought to dispel (106). Subversion, Fish agues through the primary quote under discussion, offers one pedagogical technique to prepare students to question their discipline in the hopes of interdisciplinary boundaries, which he then posits is an impossibility. Fish the continues in his third section addressing the problem with the previous solution due to the inability to gain autonomy from the primary discipline in order to conduct an authentic critique. He does not abandon the “anti-knowledge” however. Fish concludes that fashioning new disciplines—through blurred boundaries encouraged through “new teaching”—paired with imperial ambitions can regain the original intent of education “whose goal is ‘the cultural formation of the self so that it might teach the fullness of its potentialities’(14)”(101).