Disciplinary space through Deleuzism

Science class has talked a lot lately about disciplinary space and boundaries created between disciplines. This intersects with some stuff social studies tutorial regarding systems: specifically, interpenetration therebetween.

Earlier I used a metaphor of disciplinary space linking planes (in which disciplines are horizontally articulated) via a vertical chain of causality. Although I think of this model as 3D, it actually only presents a 1D explanation for the relationships between disciplines. All of the disciplines (let's say n of them) are arranged in a line beginning with physics and ending with literature. This is clearly the model E.O. Wilson uses when he says that all disciplines except physics (n-1 of them) can be subsumed by an antidiscipline preceding them in the chain of causality.

This is silly. Mechanical causality is not the only way in which areas of study can relate. Abstract models often spill over in surprising ways... e.g., mathematical into philosophical (Badiou), thermodynamical into social (Luhmann), physical into psychological (quantum theory of consciousness). Each discipline fosters a certain type of logic which simultaneously distinguishes it from others and enables comparison to others.

As a consequence, I'm willing to say that a more appropriate model would include a plane for each disciplinary intersection: that is, a universe of n-1 dimensions (!). What's interesting about this space is that it not only contains massive internal variation, but that n(-1) itself changes along with fluctuating disciplinary borders... and since this process occurs slowly, we can envision a gradual pulling-away into a new dimension, as the new entity stakes out boundaries (and in doing so, defines its relationship with the others). Dimensions can also disappear as others make them redundant; that is, as they contain no new information. A three dimensional world existing only as an infinite extrusion of two dimensions would functionally still be a two-dimensional world.

This model requires us to imagine spaces in which dimensions themselves maintain uncertain ontological status... but doesn't this provide the best model of the uncertain and shifting boundaries of the academic universe? The most stable dimensions correspond to the most stable disciplines, and the most robust interactions are among the entities populating these planes.

Note that if n-1 dimensions define the interdisciplinary relationship instead of the vertical line, these dimensions actually branch off into planes... or maybe even higher-dimensional spaces depending on complexity within the discipline!

Discipline space probably closely resembles concept space, organized on the Deleuzian "plane" of immanence. Thinking these spaces is the big upcoming challenge, but even the beginnings of doing so seem rewarding.

For example, this model presents the tantalizing suggestion that insofar as (this is important) disciplines can be reconstituted according to their predecessors in the vertical chain, they can in fact be explained according to any discipline. English as economics, sociology as theoretical physics, anthropology as logic. Luhmann points the way, but attempts to reterritorialize everything onto subjectivity and his particular brand of autopoeisis. There's no inevitable frame of reference for describing any phenomenon; only frames of reference staking out territories in relation to each other.

This observation makes the boundary all the more significant... whereas formerly the clear articulation of boundaries might have seemed trivial or unnecessary due to obvious divisions of subject matter, now boundary divisions are the only way to isolate zones of intensity and self-referential complexity... to prevent incursions from alternative explanatory paradigms which left to their own devices could cannibalize anything.

More on this, or a refinement of it, or a retraction of it ... to come later, when a future self thinks about it in new frames and with new resources.