My name is Paul Kellogg, faculty advisor to the Journal of Integrated Studies and a Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University, teaching in the Master of Arts—Interdisciplinary Studies program. However, I was originally hired to teach in the Master of Arts—Integrated Studies program … hence the theme of this issue’s editorial introduction.

It’s a simple question – what’s in a name? At issue is the presence of the word “Integrated” in the name of the journal you are now reading. When this student-run journal was launched in 2010, the word “integrated” was well-established, closely associated with the Master of Arts – Integrated Studies (MA-IS), established in 2001 by the Centre for Integrated Studies (CIS), which became one of three centres in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS), established in 2009 (FHSS 2015, 3). By 2012, faculty members in CIS had decided to rename CIS as the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies (Athabasca University 2013, 18), and by 2018, “in response to the recommendations of a 2016 external review,” the MA-IS program followed suit, changing its name to Master of Arts – Interdisciplinary Studies (Athabasca University 2018, 32). From that point on, then the Journal of Integrated Studies stood alone in featuring the term “integrated”.

The current editors of the journal have decided to keep retain “Integrated” in the name of the journal, and not just for the sake of continuity. The two concepts of integration and interdisciplinarity are tightly linked, and the journal’s name evokes a bridge to the intellectual origins of the MA-IS program, where discussions of integration and interdisciplinarity were deeply embedded aspects of both teaching and research.

In 2011, one of the professors involved in the launch of the MA-IS program, Dr. Derek Briton, published an article that, after chronicling the origins of the MA-IS program, presented a thoughtful analysis of the relationship of integration to interdisciplinary research (Briton 2011), and proposed an exploration of an “interstitial” approach. Dr. Briton has given us permission to publish, here, an edited version of that article.

From Integrated to Interstitial Studies

Derek Briton

To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a subject (a theme) and gather round it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.

Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (1986, 26)

Interdisciplinarity as Integrated Studies

When academic scholarship extends beyond the parameters of a single discipline, it tends to follow one of four trajectories: (i) multidisciplinarity — drawing upon a range of disciplines to apply them individually; (ii) interdisciplinarity — engaging the disciplines in collaborative forms of inquiry; (iii) crossdisciplinarity — employing the disciplines to illuminate aspects of one another; or (iv) transdisciplinarity — transgressing and undermining disciplinary boundaries (Pollock 2004).¹This essay introduces a fifth term and proposes a sixth. The fifth term, “integrated studies,” emerged with the establishment of Athabasca University (AU)’s first Master of Arts degree in 2001: the MA–Integrated Studies. By avoiding all reference to previous variants of disciplinarity (multi-, inter-, cross-, trans-), the integrated studies approach seeks to bring various avenues of inquiry together in such a way that they constitute new interpretive frameworks and new objects of knowledge. In this respect, the integrated model aspires to Barthes’s propagative vision of interdisciplinarity. …

The Genesis of the MA– Integrated Studies

Since its inception in 1970, AU’s mandate has been to remove the barriers that limit educational opportunities. To this end, a policy of open access is employed to minimize academic barriers, and provision at-a-distance is used to reduce geographic and economic barriers. Academic excellence is prized, but AU’s unique student demographic (74 percent of AU graduates are the first in their family to earn a degree), requires that equal emphasis be placed upon academic success. Open access, provision at-a-distance, and dedication to facilitating student success have come to define AU, and the very same principles informed the launch of its first and later graduate offerings. In 1994, an executive Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) and a Master’s in Distance Education (MDE) paved the way for other graduate programs, including a master’s degree in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. …

Following two years of discussion and debate, the decision was made to launch a Masters in Integrated Studies (MA-IS) … an integration of scholarly domains solved the problem of how AU, a small institution with insufficient faculty to support MAs in every discipline (fewer than 140 full-time faculty at the time), could provide students with an opportunity to pursue an MA in the liberal arts and social sciences. To ensure a range of curricular choices, only nine of the degree’s thirty-three credits are mandatory: two core courses (one theory-based, one method-based) and a final capstone project. Program development was organic, allowing faculty with a desire to teach at the graduate level to propose courses, within some curricular constraints (courses had to involve more than one disciplinary approach and had to promote a critically reflective attitude in students).²… The model proved both programmatically and economically viable, and extremely popular with students—so much so that enrolments mushroomed from 27 in 2001 to over 1200 in 2008. …

From Integrated to Interstitial Studies

During the planning stages of AU’s MA–Integrated Studies, the descriptors multi-, inter-, cross-, and transdisciplinary were explicitly rejected, in an effort to avoid the simple adoption of another set of predetermined practices, the “discipline” of multidisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, for instance. In choosing the term “integrated,” AU sought to acknowledge the interrelated complexities of the given, of an increasingly globalized world of interacting, evolving, and proliferating phenomena. Recognizing the given, as such, requires study not only through single-, multi-, inter-, cross-, and transdisciplinary lenses, but also with a view to its functionality as a field of activity/experience. The integrated studies model was intended to facilitate this end, and it clearly enjoyed successes in this area,³but the greater challenge lies in how to build upon and further those successes. Reflection suggests that the task of constituting new modes of inquiry and new objects of knowledge demands that the given’s complexities be not only acknowledged but also radically reassessed. Heinz Insu Fenkl, former director of SUNY New Paltz’s Interstitial Studies Institute, takes the first steps toward such a reassessment in his essay “Towards a Theory of the Interstitial” (Fenkl 2003).

It was the publication of Fenkl’s first book, Memories of My Ghost Brother (Fenkl 1997), that first alerted him to the ubiquitous presence of scientism, to “the power of binary oppositions in the world of publishing.”⁴ Fenkl, an author and associate professor of English and Asian studies, recounts the either/or logic that resulted in his book, which straddled the genres of “memoir” and “novel,” being assigned to the latter category. The publisher’s reasoning was unequivocal: the empirical evidence indicated that “memoirs by people who were not already famous did not sell well,” and since the book “had to be one thing or another . . . they made it a novel.” Fenkl later realized his publisher’s deference to scientism was “a general reflection of the way people think in western cultures” and that such thinking holds sway far beyond the confines of the publishing industry, extending even into the realm of literary theory, even though it “is inadequate for dealing with an entire class of works” (Fenkl 2003).⁵ Fenkl labels this class of works “the Interstitial,” and sets out to reveal how these objects emerge into and recede from the reader’s consciousness, transforming the reader in the process. Fenkl realizes his insights into interstitial literary works have broader application, but their truly radical potential seems to escape him, and by choosing to limit the evidence he musters in support of his observations to anecdotes drawn from the realm of writing, he further reduces their critical impact. The implications of the interstitial, in fact, extend far beyond the realm of writing and, if generalized and fully substantiated, provide the basis for a revolutionary mode of scholarly inquiry—interstitial studies.

The (un)natural Order

Fenkl (2003) begins his reflections on the interstitial by recounting how “the word ‘interstice’ comes from the Latin roots inter (between) and sistere (to stand). Literally, it means to ‘stand between’ or ‘stand in the middle.’” The interstitial, Fenkl notes, differs from other states of betweenness such as “liminality” and “hybridity” because the “inter” of the liminal and hybrid refers to a transitory state, whereas that of the interstitial signifies a prevailing state. The distinction is important, especially if Fenkl’s findings are to be extrapolated, because while liminality and hybridity argue for an alternative perspective on the existing world view (interpretive framework), the interstitial presses for its complete reconceptualization: “An interstitial work does not require reintegration—it already has its own being in a willfully transgressive or noncategorical way” (emphasis added). Interstitial objects, by refusing either to be one thing or another,⁶ alert us to the fact that we are inescapably implicated in our choice of world view, and that world views are ineluctably value-based as opposed to fact-based, something Jorges Luis Borges (1942) demonstrates with alacrity in his brief essay, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”.⁷.…

For Borges, “it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures, and that the reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.” Of course, as Borges notes: “The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive.” Questions of conscious awareness aside, the scientific world view has proven of great value to natural scientists, but its application in politics, economics, and ethics limits and constrains inquiry in these domains to what science values: objectivity, measurability, and predictability. The challenge, then, since we can never know “what thing the universe is” but are compelled to create “human patterns” in accord with our interests, formulations that structure and shape our perceptions of the universe, is to find an alternative scholarly mode of inquiry that furthers our understanding of the universe without denying our implication in our choice of world view, the subjective underpinnings of our formulations. This pursuit, to avoid the pitfall of scientism, must accommodate more than just the empirically and/or logically demonstrable, what we can know directly; it must also include what we can know only indirectly—the interstitial. More importantly, it is to acknowledge that the defining characteristic of whatever we know is necessarily unknown to us.

In a now (in)famous US Department of Defense news briefing, delivered 12 February 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, flirts with this relation between the known and unknown but fails to push it to its logical conclusion:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.⁸

What Rumsfeld leaves unsaid, but the interstitial makes clear, is that, in addition to being cognizant of (i) what we know (“known knowns”), (ii) what we don’t know (“known unknowns”), and (iii) what we don’t know we don’t know (“unknown unknowns”), we can (and must if we’re to avoid the trap of scientism) become cognizant of (iv) knowledge that is unknown to us (“unknown knowns”). This is imperative because the “unknown knowns” comprise our own implication in our formulations: “the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values” (Žižek 2004).⁹ In other words, for what we know to be more than mere conjecture, we must remain ignorant of the lens (values/interests) we use to bring determinacy to the indeterminate. This entails becoming (a) fully cognizant of, and (b) completely embracing the interstitial. Fenkl’s observations of the interstitial move us closer to the first requirement but lack the evidentiary and persuasive force to bring about the latter. An account of the interstitial, to displace scientism, must be at least as compelling, explain scientism’s failings, and offer a non-prescriptive path to the extension of knowledge and pursuit of truth. The demands and scope of this task are beyond Fenkl, as the inclusion of “toward” in the title of his essay suggests, but his observations do, indeed, provide the mise en scène for a solution.

The Interstitial

What intrigues Fenkl about an interstitial mode of inquiry, and what should be of tantamount interest to educators, is its potential to transform the inquirer: “What the Interstitial does, actually, is transform the reader’s consciousness . . . In transforming the perceptions of the reader, interstitial works make the reader (or listener, or viewer) more perceptive and more attentive; in doing so, they make the reader’s world larger, more interesting, more meaningful, and perhaps even more comprehensible” (Fenkl 2003). A desire to foster a transformation of this nature certainly inspired AU’s choice of an integrated model of interdisciplinarity, but the results, although encouraging,¹⁰ have proven limited, demonstrating the need for an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry with a greater transformatory potential. Fenkl likens the transformational effect of the interstitial, a “phenomenon of illumination and (re)discovery,” to “the moment of ‘epiphany’ in a story,” when “the reader’s consciousness of the story is transformed,” and notes that “while all this happens in the reader’s ‘present,’ the more important effect is that the reader’s memory of the ‘past’ of the story is significantly altered.” . . . If we turn to the work of Jacques Lacan and his commentators, however, we find, grounded in an extensive conceptual framework, an explicit account of why an encounter with the interstitial transforms consciousness, and how its objects coalesce on the periphery of consciousness only to (re)posit their origin and return to its shadows. In this respect, Lacan’s work stands as an exemplar of an interstitial mode of inquiry.

Lacan’s Thought

Lacan’s reconceptualization of the given is the antithesis of all previous systems of thought, and provides a compelling account of not only the existing world view (the formal/symbolic and effectual/cultured of scientism), but also of the interstitial (affectual/instinctual). Reformulated as the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, respectively, this ternary structure serves as the hub of Lacan’s thought. Concepts at the heart of scientism and the Western tradition (the subject, knowledge, consciousness, and truth) are retained but radically reconfigured in keeping with the intricately knotted topography of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. The effects are jarring, but only a rupture of this magnitude holds the promise of a break from scientism, as Audre Lorde astutely notes: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde 1984, 112). Lacan, in fact, devoted his career to dismantling the master’s house, building upon the work of his intellectual progenitor, Sigmund Freud, and introducing changes, revisions, and modifications as his thinking progressed. …

Lacan proposes a revolutionary conception of knowledge and learning: “Proceeding not through linear progression but through breakthroughs, leaps, discontinuities, regressions and deferred action, the analytic learning process puts in question the traditional pedagogical belief in intellectual perfectibility, the progressist view of learning as a simple one-way road from ignorance to knowledge” (Felman 1987, 76). Knowledge is desanctified and mobilized, as that which cannot be exchanged, transmitted, or “acquired (or possessed) once and for all: each case, each text, has its own specific, singular symbolic functioning and requires a different interpretation” (1987, 81). Truth, likewise, is preserved, but its meaning inverted from necessity to contingency, from certainty to misrecognition. The concept of “subject,” too, is retained, but reconceptualized in keeping with the ternary structure of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as the foundation of truth. . . .

The Subject and Truth

From Lacan, we learn that truth is neither a function of language (the Symbolic) nor nature (the Imaginary) but of the subject that submits to the world view (signifying network) it will have been integrated into. For, as Slavoj Žižek notes, “meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively—the analysis produces the truth; that is the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning” (Žižek [1989] 1997, 56). It is the process of inquiry, then, the transformation of the inquirer’s consciousness (the analysis) that determines, rather than discovers, the “cause” of the circumstances (symptoms) under scrutiny. Žižek’s point is that “as soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier’s network”; consequently, “every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way” ([1989] 1997, 57; emphasis added). This enigmatic temporality of the subject should not, however, be conflated with its demise or “death,” for Lacan is neither a postmodernist nor a post-structuralist, since he abandons neither the subject nor meaning. Žižek, in fact, targets such misconceptions in The Sublime Object of Ideology: “Against the distorted picture of Lacan as belonging to the field of ‘post-structuralism,’ the book articulates his radical break with ‘poststructuralism’; against the distorted picture of Lacan’s obscurantism, it locates him in the lineage of rationalism” ([1989] 1997, 7).

With respect to meaning, Jacques-Alain Miller notes how Lacan “stressed the importance of seeking the laws of meaning. He didn’t consider meaning to be some kind of dainty thing floating in the air here and there which alights on something, gives it a meaning, and then disappears.” For Lacan, “the fact that meaning is grounded in the subject— the fact that meaning is not a thing—does not imply that there are no laws of meaning.” The subject is central to Lacan’s work, but Lacan, like Heidegger, “defines the existence of man not as interiority, an inner something like ideas or feelings, but rather as a constant projecting outside” (Miller 1988, 10–12). It is because Lacan grounds meaning in the subject that truth, as the subject, is a function neither of what was nor of what is, but of what will have been, hence Žižek’s paradoxical but characteristically Lacanian response to the question:

From where does the repressed return? . . . From the future. Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively—the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame that gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. (Žižek [1989] 1997, 55–56; emphasis added)

From Contingency to Truth

The psychoanalytic term for the condition that makes the emergence of a new world view possible is “transference,” and even an understanding of how the process works is no protection against its effect—les non-dupes errent. An analysand, for instance, who succeeds in catching his or her analyst in an inconsistency, who is in-the-know, so to speak, does nothing more than prove that transference has already taken place; otherwise he or she would have no interest in proving the analyst wrong or mistaken. Žižek suggests that the theologian Pascal exhibits at least an implicit understanding of transference when he bids those unable to accede to his rational proof of God to overcome their reluctant passions by submitting themselves to blind ritual, to simply act as if they believe: “Pascal’s final answer, then, is: leave rational argumentation and submit yourself simply to ideological ritual, stupefy yourself by repeating the meaningless gestures, act as if you already believe, and the belief will come by itself” (Žižek [1989] 1997, 39).

This Pascalian method of conversion can be witnessed in millions of recovery groups around the world. Just as Pascal’s reluctant converts to Catholicism were urged to overcome their reluctant passions by confessing their impotence and inability to believe, so too are neophyte recovering substance abusers bid to admit their powerlessness over alcohol or drugs and to place their trust in a “higher power”—something other than their own reason (often the group or an individual sponsor for atheists and agnostics). Simply by not drinking or using, attending meetings, and following the lead of recovered abusers, struggling substance abusers find themselves, suddenly, believing not only what they could not believe but also that their newfound belief is something they believed even before they believed it! “What distinguishes this Pascalian ‘custom’ from insipid behaviorist wisdom (‘the content of your belief is conditioned by your factual behavior’) is the paradoxical status of a belief before belief: by following a custom, the subject believes without knowing it, so that the final conversion is merely a formal act by means of which we recognize what we have already believed in” (Žižek [1989] 1997, 40).

This is exactly why an integrated model of interdisciplinarity, no matter how critically engaged with the given, is not up to the task of creating new interpretive frameworks and new objects of knowledge without abandoning meaning and the promise of truth. Only an interstitial mode of inquiry such as that proposed by Lacan is up to that task. This is why it is necessary to replace AU’s integrated model of interdisciplinarity with an interstitial mode. An interstitial mode of inquiry redirects the inquirer’s gaze from the lure of the given to the grounds for its very possibility, identifying the subject as the location and origin of truth, as opposed to nature or ideas—realism or idealism, in all their variants. Only an interstitial mode of inquiry has the potential to truly transform the inquirer by alerting her or him to how knowledge is created through the pursuit of truth. It is imperative that students of interdisciplinarity appreciate their own role in producing the knowledge they seek, and that their pursuit of truth open new pathways to knowledge rather than reinforce preconceived convictions. This is an unending task, for whatever world view eventually displaces scientism will attempt to maintain its own order by masking the grounds of its own possibility; such is the nature and force of the Symbolic. This is why Žižek concludes:

The duty of the critical intellectual—if, in today’s “postmodern” universe, this syntagm has any meaning left—is precisely to occupy all the time, even when the new order (the “new harmony”) stabilizes itself and again renders invisible the hole as such, the place of this hole, i.e., to maintain a distance toward every reigning Master Signifier. (Žižek 1993, 2)

Lacan invested much time and effort into learning how best to bring others to this realization, but recounting that process is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this essay.

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