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

What is a Discipline? 30111. A. Who can ask ‘what is a discipline?’studies or niche-targeted specialist disciplines (e.g. businessadministration or medical instrumentation). The diverse amalgamsof ‘interdisciplinary’ studies, which constitute various area studiesdisciplines (e.g. South-East Asian or Slavic studies) that proliferatedin the post-war era and are indicative of the direct interaction of externalpolitical requirement and university responsiveness to ‘the need fornew knowledge’. 48 Another mode of emergence, which may be termed‘hybrid,’ is the extension of academic institutions to incorporate newsubject areas that have emerged outside the university but whichcorrelate with some aspect of studies currently accommodated bythe university (e.g. psychoanalysis and its connection with aspectsof psychology and philosophy or film studies and its relationshipwith aspects of literature and the history of art). Whatever their mode ofemergence, once established, each new discipline requires a mechanismof institutional reproduction and (most often) a means through whichto perpetuate a lexicon that characterises the specificity of the disciplinethus created. This brings us to the question of disciplinary reproductionwhich is elaborated further in the next section.11. B. Reproductions11. B. 1 Disciplined SpeechThe transmission of university disciplines has often been epitomised asthe transmission of ways of speaking, of specialist languages – of ‘jargons’. Theguild system of professional protectionism has long understood the importanceof maintaining a closed language of expertise. This is exemplified by the legalprofession’s ‘terms of art’ – a phrase which, in itself, actualises the specialiseduse of language in pursuit of professional interests while serving to excludethe uninitiated. Predictably enough, the ‘disciplined speech’ of specialisedknowledge communities has, on many occasions, been the target of irreverentcriticism. One reviewer eloquently caricatured a species of this ‘disciplinedspeech’ in a Village Voice supplement of the early 1990s: ‘Everybody knows thatliterary and cultural critics, who were once genteel independent, plain-talkingmen of letters […] are now a bunch of academic jargon spouting technodroidswho've purchased their disciplinary legitimacy simply by making up languagesso difficult that no one but a specialist can understand them’. 4948. In an interesting treatment of comparative literature – Death of A Discipline (2003) – Spivak summarilyasserts the contingent processes shaping the formation of disciplines such as area studies andcomparative literature: ‘these two institutional enterprises can perhaps be recounted as follows. AreaStudies were established to secure U.S. power in the Cold War. Comparative Literature was a result ofEuropean intellectuals fleeing “totalitarian” regimes.’ (p. 3.)49. M. Bérubé, ‘Egghead Salad Or, I Was a Tenured Intellectual’ in Voice Literary Supplement,December 1993. p. 29