ABSTRACT
Academic disciplines represent a distribution of knowledge that owes more to historical circumstance than to over-arching philosophical truth. We know this, but in the bustle of everyday institutional life, we don’t always remember that it is so. For the most part less grandiose concerns intrude. We know too that when a particular dimension of human knowledge crosses the threshold and stakes out its claim to be a legitimate academic discipline, strange things happen. The term itself – discipline – is apt: it invokes a degree of ordering, in which that which was previously informal or inchoate assumes a new and sharper form. In the recent past this is something that has come to be increasingly transparent. Quality controls, the itemisation of teaching objectives, the formulation of curricula, the devising of appropriate modes of assessment, the writing of research monographs and textbooks – all take place in institutional locations that carry a distinct and often strict conception of what academic knowledge is and what it should do. Indeed, in Britain and elsewhere this is, if indirectly, a matter of state regulation. This would seem to confirm the Foucauldian hypothesis about the proximity between knowledge and the more popular meaning of discipline, in which the locations of knowledge profoundly shape, maybe even determine, what can and cannot be said within any particular discourse. The classic Foucauldian formulations were, in their earliest manifestations, uncompromising in this respect. Yet one doesn’t have to be a card-carrying Foucauldian to recognise that all institutional forms of knowledge allow some things to be said more readily than others. This has to be so. All academic disciplines, whether we’re conscious of it or not, contain elements that, within the norms they have generated, are unspeakable. A crisis in a discipline occurs when attempts are made to render speakable, within the protocols of the discipline itself, what previously had been unspeakable, and much excitable speech follows.
