The Interdisciplinary Effects of the Free Market

In several chapters of Interdisciplinarity Moran has mentioned how useful popular culture can be to breaking down academic boundaries (specifically, in sections like “The Cultural Project of English” and “Science as Culture”). (Moran 32, 141) That in particular struck me. I’ve never found pop culture to be overwhelmingly redeeming, but when I thought about it I realized that Moran was right. Pop culture is a disciplinary melting pot, and to see why one only needs to view the world through the lens of one particular discipline: economics.

The reality is that each discipline needs to be commercially viable if it is to be funded or researched at all. Students are no longer learning for its own sake. They are learning to prepare themselves for the job market. Their skills need to be desirable to employers, and for those skills to be desirable they have to make those employers considerable profit. This profit is derived from reaching the widest range of consumers with their products. Throughout his work Moran mentions that specialized terms and the requirement of a deeper understanding are barriers to interdisciplinarity as they made it more difficult to understand a wider variety of topics. In the product market, this specialized knowledge also works against businesses by deterring consumers, who do not understand what the product is/how it works, from using it. It is necessary, then, for businesses to break down these barriers in order to sell their products. The practical applications of the deep understanding that most specialized students develop are made to be understood by anyone in order to make them more commercially attractive. The miracles of scientific disciplines are reduced to thirty second ads for new cars or weight loss pills. The social sciences become political propaganda, therapy sessions and billboards for malpractice attorneys. Disciplines involving the arts are manifest in T.V. and popular music. Yes, this does dull and obscure the original subject matter to a considerable and frightening degree. But it also creates an amalgam of learning. A rainbow spectrum of interdisciplinarity. When everyone can understand at least the most topical parts of any discipline, this allows for any number of reconfigurations and combinations for that knowledge. Due to the dissolution of barriers, different fields are free to intermingle within pop culture references, trends and memes. Just yesterday in class, we discussed a song by Janet Jackson that was based off of an allusion to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Classic pop songs like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are interdisciplinary masterpieces, containing references to international politics, arts, virology, english and more in under five minutes. Profit, the natural grease between the gears of the free market, also acts as a corrosive compound to the institutions of partitioned education. It also acts as grease for the gears of interdisciplinarity.

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