A new concept always provides an opportunity to think again.  Like the artist Paul Klee’s Angel of History (the Angelus Novus), we are poised to look back – at what Walter Benjamin (1969) called “the wreckage of the past,” also known as “progress” – while also ready to move forward, perhaps to repair the damage.  A new concept enables us to reconsider old ideas, and to consider new ideas.  All of this recommends a multiplicity, shall we say… a diversity, of methods for thinking about our troubled world.  So, today, I want to move back, and ahead… in time.  A bit of time travel.  First, the past… our past thinking… reconsidered.

PAST THINKING RECONSIDERED

By way of example, my own thinking over the years about what interdisciplinarity is and how it works has included articles on: analogical thinking, translation, problem solving, temporality, and (the ink is still wet) color.

We might apply one of our most common methods, analogical thinking (McCormack, 2005), to interdisciplinarity itself and say that if interdisciplinary thinking works with disciplines and knowledge formations, and is therefore primarily an epistemological endeavor, then interdiversities is, analogically, an ontological response, working with the creators themselves of those disciplines and knowledge formations, rather than merely their thinking.

Translation (McCormack, 2005), rethought in terms of interdiversities as more than a linguistic exercise, perhaps to enable integration, makes things both more complex and laser-like in that what we say and who we are matter at the same time.  The common approaches to translation are cultural and linguistic.  Critical translation does more: it invents; but the multiple points of reference that interdiversities affords re-invents the notion of translation itself.  It becomes a group project!

What of problem solving, one of the central missions of the integrative method?  As I put it in 2009, there’s a “Problem with Problem Solving” (McCormack, 2009), which makes me wonder how we want to understand interdiversities.  Is it a problem or is it a solution?  Perhaps the new concept is neither, and more properly a matter of… emergence. 

More recently, I’ve done some thinking about time, which so far has produced a book chapter called “Interdisciplining Global Politics” (McCormack, 2016).  One part of that effort asks: what is the time of interdisciplinarity?  We might also now ask, what is the time of interdiversity?  The answer, of course, is that temporality explodes under such a concept, but how that is the case, and how it works, would be worth a close look.

And just now, there is (in Issues), my latest article, in the form of a question: “What Color is the Interdisciplinary?” (McCormack, 2018) taking up the challenge of an earlier question, “What color is the sacred?”  My ironic and altogether open-ended answer is: “The color of the interdisciplinary is the rainbow.”  Diversity often appears under a rainbow banner, and maybe the rainbow is also the color of the diverse, but now we’re making the concept plural, and we’re drawing connections across that plurality. To my color question we might add another: can there be more than one rainbow?  Well, of course!  There are double, triple, and even quadruple rainbows.  There are supernumerary rainbows, twinned rainbows, and intersecting rainbows.  There are reports of dynamic rainbows, not to mention fogbows, cloudbows, and lunar rainbows.  However they appear, and however ethereal they tend to be in the moment, rainbows can persist over time in our memories, and so there are countless occasions and multiple appreciations of them as we engage one another’s diversities.

Any of these reconsiderations could, by itself, constitute an entire research program, and… anyone within the sound of my voice is most welcome to take up one of these challenges. But, besides casting an eye to the past, what of our forward thinking?  Where shall we go with this new concept?

THINKING AHEAD

There are a number of ways we could proceed, but I’d like to have a go at the word itself, how the word might be used – the grammar, we might say, of the concept.  I’ll mention very briefly a few things that might be important: definitions, thinking of interdiversity in terms of prepositions, the forms of the word (noun, verb and so on), punctuation, the question of number (singular or plural), and its etymology.

Consider, first, definition.  A crafty interdisciplinarian will often “spell out,” “in no uncertain terms,” the definitions of the key terms involved in, say, the interdisciplinary process.  A good thing, so no one can complain about meaning, but the flip side is that definitions, almost by definition, tend to be exclusive.  Can exclusion be supported in a concept such as interdiversities?  Definition – and the act of definition – matters.

We should also consider the hidden treasures that we can find by way of the use of prepositions.  We can say, for example, that interdiversities proceed across, or without… but we can also say that they proceed within.  The prefix “inter-“ seems already to imply the outside, the other, and relationships with others.  But we also have to wrestle with the concept internally.  “I’d like to think,” we might say, “that I am a diverse person.”  And now, even “interdiverse.”  How does that work?  Depending on a person’s theoretical or disciplinary angle – or interdisciplinary angle – that works in diverse ways.

Those words – “within” and “without” – are just two examples of prepositional possibility.  Think also of interdiversities as being: “among”… or “including”… or “beyond”… or “for or against”… …interdiversties “of”… or “through”… or “into.” Michel Serres (e.g. 1995), a “philosopher of prepositions,” was a model of diversity, embodying interdisciplinary thought in many different ways.

I’m also thinking that it matters what form of the word we want to work with: the noun “interdiversities” is fine, but what happens when we jazz it up and think in motion: to interdiversify?   There’s also the adjective, “interdiverse,” and even the adverb, “interdiversely.”  If this sounds like word games, maybe that matters, too.  What are the rules?  And… Who makes the rules?

Do we also have a moment to wonder about how we punctuate the concept?  I seem to remember that a few decades ago, there was a big debate over whether the word postcolonial should be hyphenated.  Sounds trivial, but the consequences at the time were nothing less than civilizational!  How shall we spell interdiversities?

And then there’s the question of number: is it plural or singular?  If we go with the singular it’s as if we’re talking about a single universe, the sort of thing that Isaac Newton could understand.  But the plural takes us into multiple universes, which is a lot more complicated.  In science we’re talking quantum leaps. For us it could require some real heavy – even quantumly heavy theoretical lifting!

And finally, for the etymologists here today, and all of you critical philologists, the “-versity” part of interdiversity comes from versus, which means: “turned toward,” or “turned against,” or “turned into.”  With di-versity that’s: “turned toward,” or “turned against,” or “turned into” two.  Compare “uni-versity,” which means: “turned toward,” or “turned against,” or “turned into” one.  With the prefix “inter-,” which means “between,” diversity becomes nothing less than a bridge between.  For an interdisciplinarian, that bridge is home, a dwelling place.

But dig even deeper.  The word diversity has had different meanings in different times and places.  Diverse implies difference, yes, and recently most often in a positive sense.  But diversity has also pointed at what was seen to be “odd” or “strange,” “perverse,” or even “evil!”   Far from being a desired state of affairs it has traditionally been viewed as being opposed to established relations of power.  Giorgio Agamben has spent a lifetime unpacking concepts.  His method (e.g. 2009), which is essentially critical etymology, doesn’t hope to find a single origin of meaning, but rather to reveal the tensions that inhere within a concept, from its contentious origins.  So, if diversity once could have meant, at least partially, something “strange,” or something that is “contrary to power,” then we owe it to the concept of interdiversities to follow the implications of those underlying tensions.

THE TIME OF INTERDIVERSITIES

We’ve emulated the Angel of History and looked back, and taken a first step forward.  The time of interdiversities matters.  Diversity, and now interdiversities, if anything, is a matter of experience, whether it’s a life experience or an experience of thought or its consequences.  I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to meet and speak with some of the dearly departed theorists, scientists and writers I’ve encountered on the page.  In teaching I sometimes ask, “What person from the past would you most like to meet and why?” or more elaborately, students play roles and have a dialogue with the past.  As a thought experiment in time travel, we pretend to cross temporal boundaries to meet and mingle with those people.  But we don’t really need to play a game to make this happen.  No need to worry about whether a time machine is even possible because all of them, all of those people of the past, are right here, right now, sitting here in this room, inhabiting the thoughts and lives of each of us.  If you want to arrive at the diverse thought and being of the past, then look around you.  And here, maybe even better than anywhere else, because we all recognize the importance of the paradoxical prepositional journey across time and space, travelers in space that we have been, and now… in time as we can be.  In your ongoing pursuit of interdisciplinarity, and now as you think about and experience “interdiversities,” I wish you all… bon voyage!

NOTES

Notes for presentation, Interdiversities Plenary Panel, 40^th Annual Conference of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, Detroit, Michigan USA, October 2018.  Brian McCormack is Principal Lecturer in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University.  He is a past Member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, past (founding) Director of AIS Sections, and long-time Advisor of the ASU Chapter of Alpha Iota Sigma. [email protected]

REFERENCES

Agamben. G. (2009). The signature of all things: On method. L. D’Isanto & K. Attell (Trans.)  New York: Zone Books.

Benjamin, W. ([1940] 1969). Theses on the philosophy of history. In Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and Reflections. H. Arendt (Ed.), H. Zohn (Trans.).

McCormack, B. (2005). Making interdisciplinarity work through translation and analogical thinking, Issues in Integrative Studies, 23, 56-70.

McCormack, B. (2009). The problem with problem solving, Issues in Integrative Studies, 27, 17-34.

McCormack, B. 2016. Interdisciplining global thinking. In S. G. Nelson & N. Soguk, (Eds.), Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics (pp. 265-279).

McCormack, B. (2018). What color is the interdisciplinary? Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies, 36(1), 14-33.

Serres. M. (1995). Angels: A modern myth. Paris: Flammarion.