This is an essay about irritation. In one sense, it is a report on the state of interdisciplinary knowledge formation from the field. It asks: What is the promise of interdisciplinary studies in the postmodern research university? The results of this fieldwork are not encouraging except inasmuch as they spurred us to take the temperature of the corporate environment in higher education and, in so doing, to theorize the interdisciplinary project in the most “irritating” way, that is, in a parasitic manner: from the inside out. Curiously and anachronistically, working “from the inside out” was a formula for expressive movement in historical modern dance. Although our frame of reference in the arts is more recent, the overlapping of parasitism and expression—in an embodied, political sense—bears further reflection.