engleski

Discipline and Community: From Enlightened to Postcolonial Perspective

Implying the stable body of knowledge, firm goal-orientation and common commitment of the members of scientific community, the concept of scientific discipline was established around the mid-nineteenth century, during the time of prosperity of national states. After having decoupled from religion as the cover authority of pre-modern society, modern states coupled their political authority to secularized science. It was already Kant who entrusted the science with the task of providing the truth as a universal basis for governing, organizing and mobilizing populace. However, as exactly the grassroots support to such a supposedly universal truth proved growingly missing in the wide populace, the integrity of scientific research was protected by “ academic freedom” , compared by Kant with political freedom of citizens based on the use of reason. Due to the institutional autonomy that was established by the so called Humboldtian model of university in the wake of Kant’ s Enlightenment idea, truth was assigned to the competence of a committed and free-thinking minority as opposed to a whimsical and manipulated majority “ outside the walls” whose contagious interference into the disciplinary domain was carefully kept at bay. According to Steve Fuller, “ the history of the university over the last 150 years has been, for the most part, a transformation of ‘ academic freedom’ into a jealously guided guild right” , which means that the scientific community has been striving less after a freedom for the truth as after a freedom from the upsetting outside opinions. With the aim of accomplishing a complete self-mastery, the unpredictability of the latter was placed outside the meticulously guarded disciplinary boundaries. Nonetheless, this outside found its way to surreptitiously re-enter the inside, which eventuated in the massive postcolonial critique addressed at the disciplinary subject for having been established on discrimination. Michel de Certeau’ s anti-disciplinary attitude, which will be presented in the second part of the paper, typically departs from the “ external residue” of everyday practices discarded by disciplinary subject. Whereas this subject tends to survey its field from afar by catching it into “ the big picture” , the undisciplined “ tactical” subjects of these practices remain enmeshed into the elusive everyday experiences maintaining just a provisional and tentative relationship to this fleeting material. As if mimicking the everyday practices he investigates, de Certeau envisages his own position with regard to them in the same involved way. That is to say, instead of concealing the irretrievable immersion into their narrative, he sides more with the modern novel than scientific discipline in foregrounding the dependency of his perspective on what is being perceived. There is even more to this analogy with literature, as de Certeau’ s work digests the “ leftover” elements of disciplinary expertise in a very similar way as does the heterogeneous form of the novel which, with its inclination towards marginal and shadowy customs of bourgeois society, gradually turned into “ the zoo of everyday practices since the establishment of modern science” . This “ literary” attitude, inextricably aligned with the putatively subversive otherness of subordinated cultures outside academia, may be taken as representative also for the British project of politically engaged cultural studies (as opposed to its American “ professionalized” version). One of its most important consequences is the widely acknowledged claim for a “ quasi-disciplinary” or trans-disciplinary status of cultural studies. In the final part of this address, some frequently overlooked aspects of this claim will be spelled out.

discipline; community

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