Reflection on W.J.T. Mitchell's Interdisc. and Vis. Culture

I am attracted to the study of interdisciplinarity, so seeing Mitchell's piece on the reading list moved it to the top of my assignment order. 

I found it questioning the  solidity of interdisciplinarity over the long run of educational systems which I took as a way of asking if this approach to pedagogy is a fad or does, indeed, have merit. 

Written in 1993, I think the article is forward looking and now after over 15 years, the concept of a super discipline, Cultural Studies, can not be consider "Pop Education" but a concrete, tested format to expand learning through comparative studies in both practice and in theory. 

Centrally argued is the question of what makes interdisciplinarity. Three approaches are proposed as definitions. Mitchell's preference is 'indisciplinarity' which focuses on the collision of subjects and the changes created by these marriages. Cited as a strong foundational block is cinema studies which Mitchell reminds us is built not just on the visual but also the aural. 

But what I found most compelling in the article was the briefly mentioned concept of convergence. That cinema studies contains codes, formats, designs etc that organize and these practices should be overlapped into other disciplines. In 2000 Lev Manovich discussed and expanded on this concept as part of his theories on Soft (software) Cinema. The computer borrowed heavily from cinema and the visual format developed for over 100 years by the film screen  and now cinema can (continue to)  reciprocate and borrow (in the future) on the layout and visual language of the computer form. The boundaries are indeed overlapping, feeding and growing a new metalanguage as Mitchell calls for.