So, what is the fascination with interdisciplinarity all about? 'The art critic Harold Rosenberg once published a book called The Anxious Object. The title was a reference to the art of the sixties—Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Rosenberg thought that those art objects were anxious because they were uncertain of their own identity. They kept asking themselves questions like, Am I a work of art, or just a wall of Polaroids? Am I a sculpture, or just a pile of bricks? More existentially: Am I an autotelic aesthetic artifact, or just a commercial good?
What causes anxiety to break out in a work of art? Self-consciousness. Maybe, in the case of the academic subject, self-consciousness about disciplinarity and about the status of the professor—the condition whose genealogy I have been sketching in this chapter—is a source of anxiety. That status just seems to keep reproducing itself; there is no way out of the institutional process. And this leads the academic to ask questions like, Am I an individual disinterested inquirer, or a cog in a knowledge machine? And, Am I questioning the status quo, or am I reproducing it? More existentially, Is my relation to the living culture that of a creator or that of a packager? 'The only way to get past the anxiety these questions cause is to get past the questions—to see that they are bad questions because they require people to choose between identities that cannot be separated. A work of art is both an aesthetic object and a commercial good. That is not a contradiction unless you have been socialized to believe that it must be.
