share-handbook-for-artistic-research-education-high-definition

212 Contested Values and Critical DebatesInterventions: Position Papers and Dialogues• Disciplines are clearly established and already well-bounded and divided• Disciplines may even, to varying degrees, be ‘obvious’, ‘natural’and ‘given’, determined by how the world logically carves up, and, forthis reason, it has already been possible to have them successfullyformulated and delimited.• Disciplines force disconnection with other disciplines and imposemental habits and limitations while also fostering heightenedcompetence within narrow fields of operation.• In order to progress, therefore, we need education through thedisciplines to be supplemented, or even overcome, by assertinginterdisciplinarity as intrinsically virtuous.The shortcomings in this analysis are many, emphasised by thereductive nature of the schematic outline provided. One key gap inthis model is critical consideration of the initial drivers to formdisciplines. 199 Mirroring this deficit is the failure to interrogatethe impetus to interdisciplinarity which has characterised somuch policy and development rhetoric since at least the 1970s.Other shortcomings of this approach include the assumption thatdisciplines are, by and large, already accomplished formationsrather than highly unstable, contested and mutable heterocliteconstellations in need of constant maintenance and subject toongoing intrinsic and extrinsic processes of change and conflict.Rather than unpacking this rhetoric further, the goal here is todevelop an approach which retains the right of critique – i.e. theright to question these various formulations of disciplinary andinterdisciplinary mechanisms – while also seeking to pragmaticallynegotiate the fact of working within a disciplinary institutionalframework that interacts with a broader policy framework whichlauds an ill-defined interdisciplinarity. Most importantly, theneed to negotiate a working path between the competing claims ofdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity must be rooted in the actualcontent of the research enquiries which aspiring researchers bringto the institution. In the majority of cases, these enquiries – whetherproduced by artists, curators, musicians or critics – harbour animpulse to work across disciplines, simply by virtue of the questionsproduced within the enquiry, which – while rooted in the practices199. It is argued that ‘There is no more stunning fact about the academic profession anywhere in theworld than the simple one that academics are possessed by disciplines, fields of study, even as theyare located in institutions. With the growth of specialization in the last century, the discipline hasbecome everywhere an imposing, if not dominating, force in the working lives of the vast majority ofacademics’. Burton R. Clark, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds. (Princeton: CarnegieFoundation for the Advanc