introduction -> on interdisciplinarity

The promise of interdisciplinary work has haunted my entire academic journey — I was drawn to the idea of exploring new terrains of understanding, mapping the blindspots at the intersections of the familiar. At times it felt almost unattainable — something reserved for the forward-looking Western universities and out of reach for us mere mortals in rusty, rigid post-Soviet institutions. Other times, it felt hollow: when, say, acoustics researchers use mathematical analysis to model sound propagation, is there anything interdisciplinary about this process? Not in my book: this kind of borrowing comes from a place of technical convenience, not ontological curiosity. You also hear the word dropped left and right in artist talks, but just as often it holds little more than aesthetic window-dressing — no real integration, no shared risks.

True interdisciplinarity had to be more radical — the further apart the disciplines, the bigger the novelty of potential insight. A work at the intersection of neurophysiology and perceptual psychology does indeed count as interdisciplinary, but not quite in the sense I mean here. I can speak from experience — this is what my Bachelor’s thesis in cognitive science was all about, and in the university’s catalog it was assigned an “interdisciplinary” category. I almost felt like it was cheating: it seemed to me that if disciplines are adjacent, it does not really count. Those fields are so close that the researchers’ labs might be on the same floor; they would only have to walk ten steps to meet in the middle.

I felt like real interdisciplinarity would have to involve a bigger stretch than that. It is with disciplines that are really far apart that the “inter” part begins to be interesting — for them to meet, they would need to walk so far they might both end up in an entirely new place. This kind of interdisciplinarity is risky — you never know if there is a connection between the distant things you try to bridge. It feels like there is one, but there is zero proof. In the world of science, this “feeling” is not just a bad reason to investigate, it is considered something akin to bad manners. The arts are more forgiving of hunches, but even there, the further you stretch, the more you risk looking foolish (or worse: superficial).

But perhaps this is exactly what our moment demands. We live in an age of record-high inequality and mental health crises, surfing between ecocide and nuclear war. Political radicalisation, the crisis of meaning, and post-truth condition have all developed in parallel with centralised digital platforms that have created unprecedented forms of capture and control, where human agency is being systematically extracted and monetised in ways that no single discipline can adequately address. This violence is too subtle for political science, too systemic for psychology, too embodied for computer science, too infrastructural for cultural studies. It operates precisely in the gaps between our agreed-upon categories of research, which is why the condition it has produced remains so difficult to diagnose — let alone treat.

There are, of course, many elegant and useful frameworks that describe this condition accurately, from non-trivial angles. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism describes how capitalism colonises our imagination, making alternatives unthinkable. Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics exposes how power structures decide who may live or die. Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism details how platforms extract behavioural surplus, selling our lives as prediction products, and Yuk Hui’s Cosmotechnics questions Western tech’s universalism, arguing for plural technological rationalities. Other thinkers like Byung-Chul Han and James Bridle provide angles on self-exploitation and technological opacity.

These frameworks each capture their own angle, highlighting crucial aspects of our predicament. Each of them feels like its own discipline — introducing a new glossary of terms, a new methodological apparatus, a new way of parsing reality. But of course, they stem from existing fields of knowledge — often so far apart that they do not feel like multiple disciplines but rather like entirely different ways of thinking. Fisher arrived at a profound diagnosis for critical theory and political science through the history of electronic music. Mbembe developed his analysis of necropolitics by bringing together Foucauldian biopolitics with postcolonial theory and African political philosophy, creating a framework that no single discipline could have produced. Zuboff's surveillance capitalism drew from her background in social psychology and organisational behavior to decode the operations of Silicon Valley, while Hui's cosmotechnics demanded expertise in both Western philosophy and Chinese intellectual history. Han's burnout society emerged from his synthesis of German critical theory with Buddhist philosophy and Korean cultural analysis, and Bridle's New Dark Age required moving fluidly between artistic practice, technology criticism, and political theory.

What made each of these interventions so powerful was precisely their willingness to stretch across disciplinary boundaries, to risk the accusations of overstretching that come with refusing to stay in one's lane. In our day and age, when things change so rapidly — especially with the landscape being shaped by technology that will soon be self-developing, like large language models and other forms of artificial intelligence — we simply do not have the luxury of developing isolated frameworks in separated fields and synthesising them step by step. The pace of transformation demands a more immediate, more experimental approach to knowledge-making.

This paper is an experiment in this kind of urgent interdisciplinarity. It tries to bridge critical theory with plant biology, ritual studies with club culture research, digital media studies with social psychology. It will inevitably fall apart at some points — the links will fray, the metaphors will overextend — but that is the risk worth taking when the pace of change is relentlessly accelerating. An experiment failed on time is better than one that succeeded too late to matter.

The parasitic haustorium becomes more than a botanical curiosity when placed next to platform capitalism; nightclub rituals reveal their political dimensions when understood through the lens of cognitive sovereignty; intentionally opaque resistance strategies gain new clarity when examined through the history of underground music scenes in the Global South. None of these connections are obvious or inevitable, but each demands that we stretch our thinking beyond the comfortable boundaries of any single discipline, and do so quickly enough to keep pace with the systems we are trying to understand. The goal here is not disciplinary rigor but conceptual velocity — a way of thinking that moves at the speed of the problems it seeks to address.

When I started writing this paper, LLMs like ChatGPT were struggling to count in single digits. As I am finishing it up, they can already produce large-scale imitations of knowledge work — a whole thesis, same size as this one, in a matter of seconds. What, then, distinguishes actual human thinking from its digital simulation? Perhaps it is precisely this willingness to risk incoherence in service of urgent connection, to embrace the messy interdisciplinary leap that no algorithm would dare (or care) to attempt. Human thought, at its best, operates through intuitive synthesis rather than pattern matching — it sees connections that should not exist and makes them exist through the very act of thinking them together. In a world where artificial intelligence excels at recombining existing patterns, our last refuge might lie in the beautifully foolish ideas that have never been thought together before, connections so unlikely that only a human mind desperate enough to try anything would think of making them.

The point of this wordy disclaimer is neither self-deprecation nor deception — I am not trying to undermine this work’s relevance, nor do I want to make you believe that every inconsistency here is intentional. I simply want to be perfectly clear about how all the things discussed here are connected — only through my lived experience, and only through my intuition. It feels to me like there is a common thread — and that is honestly my best evidence, my whole reason to pursue this interdisciplinary leap. But while these connections may seem disparate at first, they eventually weave into one central insight about how embodied practices can interrupt digital extraction. I invite you to trace these connections as they unfold, trusting that the thread linking biological metaphors, platform dynamics, ritual studies and club culture will become apparent through the argument itself. This type of insight does not emerge from one-way correlations; it comes from recognising deeper structural parallels that only become clear when we step back to see the larger pattern.

pkhan’s master thesis

introduction chapter 1: hyperconnected loneliness chapter 2: enter the haustorium chapter 3: ritual firewalls chapter 4: opaque by design

bibliography

appendix: praxis documentation

pkhan's thesis

introduction

chapter 1: hyperconnected loneliness

chapter 2: enter the haustorium

chapter 3: ritual firewalls

chapter 4: opaque by design