Antidisciplinary contaminations

Cornford, Stephen (2025) Antidisciplinary contaminations. A Row of Trees, 6 (1).

Record type: Article

Abstract

We study subjects, and organise education into disciplines, but what effect does this categorisation of knowledge have on our ability to conceive and perceive holisitically? In Life Class, artists are often taught that in nature there are no lines around things, but that understanding is contradicted by the disciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge into fields. Culturally, we are in a moment of entanglement, a widespread awakening to the (long observed) reality that we are not separable from our environment, and that the phenomena and organisms with which we intra-act do not fit neatly into disciplinary categories. Acting upon that realisation, many have already commented, requires a synthesis of knowledge and practices from multiple fields.

Using the science of spectroscopy as a totalising lens through which to view the world and our place within it, and drawing on precedents set by artists working outside their own discipline, and on examples of bio-geo-eco-physical phenomena from the sciences, this talk explores arguments for the jack of all epistemic trades. Rather than considering a lack of specialist expertise an impediment to understanding, might it not sometimes enable novel insight?

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