In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Work of Discipline, the Discipline of Work1
  • Terry Caesar (bio)

Whither knowledge that requires a "contract"? Is there in fact any other kind of knowledge, at least in academic life? What is the relation of this knowledge to paradigms or politics? How in fact is a paradigm different than a discipline; how is each to be distinguished from a profession; and what about politics amid these distinctions? At times in this sophisticated, strenuous new book The Knowledge Contract, David Downing goes right to the final question. Most times, though, we never get there (or else do but fail to stay) because there are further histories that must be traced, more distinctions that must be considered, new authorities who must be cited, additional restatements that must be made. An admirable book continually risks being top-heavy with its own knowledge.

Downing states at the outset, "This book focuses on the question of disciplinarity, the contractural arrangements that sustain the production of disciplinary knowledge, and the problems of academic labor with respect to the larger structural changes of the university"(2). So seven subsequent chapters discuss such things as the Kuhnification of the Humanities, the Diversification of the University, and the Anthologization of Theory. Throughout, these subjects are continually bedeviled by what precisely a "discipline" is, or rather by all the many meanings of this inescapable, devious term. An institutional practice? A cultural rhetoric? An identifiable discourse? A form of literacy? And perhaps most important for Downing, what about the kinds of knowledge beyond or, better, beside disciplinary forms? Must these remain "epistemological" only, or can they somehow be negotiated into the very knowledge contract that appears to exclude them?

Another question: what about adjuncts? Does their knowledge [End Page 292] count? The consistent attention to adjuncts seems to me one of the most praiseworthy aspects of this book. At the outset Downing notes how "painful" disciplinarity is for adjuncts—underpaid, undereducated, undersupported—and at the end he puts his conviction thus: "That we do work together means that we should contractually protect from abuse many of the individual users of the university, not just the select group of individuals whose subject positions enable them to profit from the system underwritten by the terms of the modern knowledge contract" (266). In part, he is referring to adjuncts, as distinct from full professors like himself.

But wait: what kind of knowledge—or practice—does that of adjuncts represent? It is one thing, after all, to count them (literally) into the contract, as presently constituted by the interests of short-term capital. But if adjuncts are victims of disciplinarity, how is their experience to be renegiotated—as knowledge or as anything else? This is the sort of question that The Knowledge Contract continually ponders. But it seems to me that the answer keeps slipping away, even as the author keeps assuring us he is striving to reconnect epistemology with labor. Take his chapter on diversity, and begin with a moment just after the citing of Arjun Appadurai's distinction between "cultural diversity" and the "culture of diversity." The latter is much to be preferred, because the former is merely "engineered."

But what about the role of disciplinarity, paradigm shifts, "non-Western, community based skills and activities," differing political narratives, James Slevin's argument for the recuperation of older meanings of "discipline," Kuhn's notion of "disciplinary matrix," among other things? More perspectives keep pouring in. Downing pauses at one point: "The material practices of disciplinarity and biopower won't respond to a changed idea without altering labor, evaluation practices and faculty solidarity by displacing the centrality of disciplinarity in our contractual obligations even while recognizing the best of its modernist virtues" (138). Exactly what is being said here? Let adjuncts in on new labor contracts? No. Adjuncts comprise only one "diverse" group (although the immediate context has to do strictly with teaching). Just as crucial, who is going to accomplish the displacement? From the evidence of this sentence alone, it seems like the agent will be the very discipline whose very power lies in "managing" difference and maintaining hierarchies in the first place.

The nature of discipline proves intractable throughout. We need...

pdf