"Possibly we're in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice. At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it had an opposite sense and it was thought to inspire theory, to be indispensable for the creation of future theoretical forms. In any event, their relationship was understood in terms of a process of totalisation. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and fragmentary. on one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it.
The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. Moreover, from the moment a theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall."

-Gilles Deleuze (1977:165), with  Michel Foucault, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice.  Cornell University Press 1977.

"Of course, formalism fits the 20th century zeitgeist so well: Everything is meaningless, technical papers should never discuss ideas, only present the facts!  A rule that I've done my best to ignore!  As Vladimir Tasic says in his book Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, a great deal of 20th-century philosophy seems enamored with formalism and then senses that Godel has pulled the rug out from under it, and therefore truth is relative.  -Or, as he puts it, it could have happened this way.

Let me repeat: formal axiomatic systems are a failure!  Theorem proving algorithms do not work.  One can publish papers about them, but they only prove trivial theorems.  And in the case histories in this book, we've seen that the essence of math resides in its creativity, in imagining new concepts, in changing viewpoints, not in mindlessly and mechanically grinding away deducing all the possible consequences of a fixed set of rules and ideas.  

-Gregory Chaitin (2005:145-146), Meta Math!  Vintage Books 2005.

"Argument remains inescapable. When interdisciplinary work is conceived as part of the 'natural' generation and gravitation of fruitful inquiries that will be located in the disciplinary system, assumptions about criteria tend to be strongly disciplinary. [...] In critical interdisciplinarities, radical change is the goal. The 'rhetoric of interpenetration' that is characteristic of critical interdisciplinarities does not simply enrich existing fields. It constructs new criteria and replaces them. It alters not only the products of research but the very procedures."

-Julie Klein (1996:211), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities. University Press of Virginia 1996.

On Youtube:  "Interdisciplinary education needed to address complex issues"

"We are capable of all the good in the world, certainly: feeding, caring, healing.  But, diametrically, we are capable of blowing up the planet, disturbing its climate, choosing to give birth only to baby boys or only to baby girls, of creating in our laboratories deadly viruses that are transmissable at the will of the winds.  We have become the tragic deciders of life and death, masters of the greatest aspects of our former dependence: Earth, life and matter, time and history, good and evil.  We have encroached upon the theories of metaphysics. 

This new mastery has made old neessity change camps.  Whereas it formerly inhabited nature, either inert or living, and slept, hidden, in the laws of the world, now, in the last fifty years, it has decapmped surreptitiously, to take its place right inside our mastery.  It now inhabits our freedom. 

We are now, admittedly, the masters of the Earth and of the world, but our very mastery seems to escape our mastery.  We have all things in hand, but we do not control our actions.  Everything happens as though our powers escaped our powers -whose partial projects, sometimes good and often intentional, can backfire or unwittingly cause evil.  As far as I know, we do not yet control the unexpected road that leads from the local pavement, from good intentions, toward a possible global hell. 

Our conquests far outstrip our deliberate intentions.  Observe, in fact, the acceleration in the trajectories of our technological advances.  No sooner is it announced that something is possible than it is in part achieved, propelled down the slope of competition, imitation, or interest.  It is almst as quickly considered desirable, and by the next day it is necessary: people will go to court if they are deprived of it.  The fabric of our history is woven today of these immediate passages from possibility to reality, from contingency to necessity." 

-Michel Serres (1995:171-172), Conversations on Science, Culture, Time.  University of Michigan Press 1995. 

"We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desireable.  Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief.  Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability.  Thus the specialist's brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious.  In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.  Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals.  It has also resulted n the individual's leaving responsibility in thinking and social action to others.  Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war. 

We are not seeking a license to ramble wordily.  We are intent only upon being adequately concise.  General systems science discloses the existence of minimum sets of variable factors that uniquely determine and govern each and every system.  Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.  Let us not make the error of inadequacy in examining our most comprehensive inventory of experience and thoughts regarding the evoluting affairs of humanity."

-R. Buckminster Fuller (1975:xxv), Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking.  MacMillan Publishing Co. Inc. 1975.

 
"The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but that fact should not make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the multiple processes that we recognize as globalization are not unified or univocal. Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself —indeed, such new struggles have already begun to emerge. Through these struggles and many more like them, the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and a new constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire."

Negri and Hardts, Empire, 2000:xv.