not the motorcycle diaries

“A discipline is always something other than an exploitation of this territory, and therefore a demonstration of an idea of knowledge [savoir]. And this idea of knowledge [savoir] should be understood as a regulation of the rapport between … [knowledge and ignorance]. It is a way of defining an idea of the thinkable, an idea of what the objects of knowledge themselves can think and know. It is therefore always a certain regulation of dissensus, of its dehiscence [écart] in relation to the ethical order, according to which a certain type of condition implies a certain type of thought. (…)

… a discipline is always much more than an ensemble of procedures which permit the thought of a given territory of objects. It is first the constitution of this territory itself, and therefore the establishment of a certain distribution of the thinkable. As such, it supposes a cut in the common fabric of manifestations of thought and language. The disciplines found their territory by establishing a dehiscence between what the phrases of the woodworker say and what they mean, between what the woodworker describes to us and the truth hidden behind the description. (…)

In-disciplinary thought… must practice a certain ignorance. It must ignore disciplinary boundaries to thereby restore their status as weapons in a dispute. This is what I have done, for example, in taking the phrases of the joiner [woodworker] out of their normal context. This normal context is that of social history, which treats them as expressions of the worker’s condition. I have taken a different path: these phrases do not describe a lived situation. They reinvent the relation between a situation and the forms of visibility and capacities of thought which are attached to it. Put differently, this narrative [récit] is a myth in the Platonic sense: it is an anti-Platonic myth, a counter-story of destiny. The Platonic myth prescribes a relationship of reciprocal confirmation between a condition and a thought. The counter-myth of the joiner breaks the circle. The indisciplinary procedure must thus create the textual and signifying space in which this relation of myth to myth is visible and thinkable. (…)

This implies another practice - an indisciplinary practice - of philosophy, of its relation to the human sciences … seiz[ing] the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration … of the arbitrary nature of this order. (…)

… at the moment in which it [philosophy] wants to found its status as a discipline of disciplines, it produces this reversal: the foundation of foundation is a story. And philosophy says to those knowledges [savoir] who are certain of their methods: methods are recounted stories. This does not mean that they are null and void. It means that they are weapons in a war; they are not tools which facilitate the examination of a territory but weapons which serve to establish its always uncertain boundary.

There is no assured boundary separating the territory of sociology from that of philosophy of that of the historians from literature. No well-defined boundary separates the discourse of the woodworker who is the object of science from the discourse of science itself. After all is said and done, to trace these boundaries is to trace the boundary between those who have thought through this question and those who have not. This boundary is never traced other than in the form of a story. Only the language of stories can trace the boundary, forcing the aporia of absence of final reason from the reasons of the disciplines. (…)

The poetics of knowledges does not claim that the disciplines are false knowledges. It claims that they are disciplines, ways of intervening in the interminable war between ways of declaring what a body can do, in the interminable war between the reasons of equality and those of inequality. It does not claim that they are invalid because they tell stories. It claims that they must borrow their presentations of objects, their procedures for interaction and their forms of argument from language and common thought.”

- Jacques Rancière, trans. Jon Roffe, Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge, Parrhesia, No.1, 2006, pp.1-12.