Concept
Disciplinarity
The inquiry-form that suspends interested attention to make the not-yet-visible sharable
Ask AI about Disciplinarity“The discipline is a social form that keeps “drilling down” below ever lower thresholds of significance, and this activity applies equally to the study of quarks and of conscience.”
From the Archive
“In the most basic sense, there is nothing but disciplinarity: disciplinarity is coextensive with the human: the originary scene was a discipline, even if that cannot be recognized until a critical mass of overlapping disciplines has emerged.”
“At the same time, though, disciplinarity is a form of discipleship, a mode of authority and inquiry into the divine that reaches back into antiquity and is central to the founding of Christianity; moreover, discipline is simply a more deliberate form of deferral, so Peirce’s definition of the sign as, essentially, anything one could form a disciplinary space around, is continuous and consistent with the originary hypothesis, which sees signification and meaning as an effect of deferral.”
“All disciplinary activity, then, no matter how seemingly impractical, unsupervised and free, is at bottom aware that something needs to be brought back to the center. We should see this constraint as a condition of disciplinary activity, not a restriction imposed on what would otherwise be a “purer” form of activity.”
“The hijacking of disciplinary authority for short term advantage is scandalous because we rely heavily upon those who set aside immediate questions for the sake of what, in the words of Charles Sanders Peirce, “will prove true in the long run.””
“But it should always be possible to come back to the founding paradox of a discipline—the decision to see everything one way even though everything appears utterly different than that way (if a discipline just reproduced what we already saw and knew, it would be unnecessary).”
“any mode of thinking likely to make a difference is going to be transdisciplinary, which must mean not only extending across the subject matters of all the disciplines but capable of infiltrating their separate vocabularies and assisting “insurgents” within them to transform them while maintaining its own transdisciplinary base.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.In the GA framework disciplinarity names the form inquiry takes when a group organizes its attention around a center in order to see what everyday, "naive" perception cannot. A disciplinary space is where participants argue over questions and construct a center, drilling below "ever lower thresholds of significance" across domains as unlike as quarks and conscience. What licenses this is deferral: discipline "is simply a more deliberate form of deferral," so a discipline is, in effect, anything one could form a disciplinary space around, continuous with the originary hypothesis that treats meaning as an effect of deferral. This is why disciplinarity can be called coextensive with the human — "the originary scene was a discipline" — and why it links back to discipleship, the older mode of inquiry into the divine that supplies its name. Its founding move is paradoxical: "the decision to see everything one way even though everything appears utterly different than that way," a wager that a few terms will make a specific cluster of phenomena work.
Disciplinarity stays distinct from the scenic and the juridical by its object. Where scenic design constructs scenes and the juridical adjudicates guilt and desert, the discipline suspends interested attention: it "set[s] aside immediate questions for the sake of what... 'will prove true in the long run,'" answerable to no extrinsic authority because only those within it are competent to judge its workings. Yet it is never free of the center; "all disciplinary activity... is at bottom aware that something needs to be brought back to the center," a condition of inquiry rather than a restriction on it. Katz distinguishes the generative "disciplinary space" from the institutionalized "disciplines," which claim their objects as things in themselves; against these, transdisciplinary originary thinking works by "infiltrating their separate vocabularies" and assisting insurgents within them — reopening decaying fields to the scene of representation they have deferred.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“I would suggest that such a conception of disciplinarity can be drawn from the range of world-historical disciplines available to us: from the Rabbinic sages who wrote the Talmud and the Athenian academy to the American founding fathers, and on to Marxist political parties, psychoanalysis, and the various modernist and postmodernist movements in the arts.…”
“Such a recasting of the terms and ends of pedagogy would then lead us to reconsider the norms of disciplinarity and the mode of inquiry in the academy at large. Once our guiding question becomes, what makes this text, or this region or mode of semiosis distinctive then we are really asking about the “signness” of signs, the “textuality” of texts, and we are…”
“That’s what a discipline is—we all know we are looking at the same thing, and can proceed from there. At the same time, we can welcome others into the scene, and welcome the new perspective they bring with it; and, even more, we have to continually refresh and check our sense that we are, indeed, looking at the same thing. Within a discipline, it becomes…”
“A model of thinking is always a model of a disciplinary space. A disciplinary space is organized around a sign oscillating between predictability and novelty—a discipline like sociology comes into being because something unrecognizable had emerged in human groups, something that didn’t fit terms like “community,” “nation,” “polis,” “republic,” “people,”…”
“Pedagogically, this entails placing the students in some relation to texts such that their commonplaces no longer work, in which case they have to generate a new language game, or what we might call an "idiom of inquiry," out of the materials of the text, the assignment, and the space created by the students' shared work on some assignment. What we are…”
“The disciplinary space joins the attentional space and works on making it disciplinary by making the relation between subject and object, between those with the desires and resentments and the reality resistant to it, itself the real object of study. We turn their ostensives into imperatives and take their imperatives through interrogatives to declaratives.…”
“At the same time, though, disciplinarity is a form of discipleship, a mode of authority and inquiry into the divine that reaches back into antiquity and is central to the founding of Christianity; moreover, discipline is simply a more deliberate form of deferral, so Peirce’s definition of the sign as, essentially, anything one could form a disciplinary…”
“Once you grant the need for a “political philosophy,” you grant the possibility of an arbiter of the legitimacy of any government; once you grant the possibility, you grant the reality. The political purpose of my study of disciplinarity is to get at the discursive roots, the roots in a habit of thinking, of “political philosophy,” in all its forms,…”
“It seems to me that much if not all literature, or at least literary prose fiction, constitutes an ongoing satire of the disciplines—including literary fiction itself insofar as it becomes a discipline. My own proposal for engaging the disciplines by using the terms they apply to their domain of inquiry to their own space of inquiry is, in this sense,…”
“Disciplines can proliferate and become a model for social organization on the principle of creating scenes upon which we can say “this is the same” in a way that would be opaque to anyone not on that scene (which does not exclude the possibility of “inter-scenes” upon which the results of inquiries can be presented in various ways). The target of the…”
Key Texts
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