Disciplinary Space

A discipline is an academic or professional space, institutionalized and subject to some rules of entry and standards of performance, that is focused on some subject matter or area. At the origin of every discipline there must be the creation of a new attentional space. A new “object” comes into view, as one “paradigm” is replaced by another.

The development of new attentional spaces into disciplines is inevitable—the attentional space, strictly speaking, was never real outside of some discipline. But for the discipline to remain active, the origin of the discipline in some new form of attention needs to be recreated. This recreation, or iteration, of the origin of the discipline within the discipline, is what Adam Katz calls “disciplinary spaces.” Of course, disciplinary spaces can emerge on the margins of disciplines, or at intersections between disciplines.