14 Disciplinarity
Contemporary reviews of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity tend to be
Chapter 2
Through Others’ Eyes:
The Fate of Disciplines
Johan Muller
What is Disciplinarity?
‘Disciplinarity’ is a term with a spectral half-life. According to the 5th edition of
the OED it doesn’t exist, though there are adjectival cousins – ‘disciplinal’
(‘belonging to or of the nature of discipline’) and ‘discipular’ (‘of, belonging
to, or of the nature of a discipline’) (ibid. p. 693). Which doesn’t tell us very
much. What is it then that the new nominalization ‘disciplinarity’ signifies?
James Chandler (2009) suggests that the word entered the lexicon in the heady
wake of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things in 1965, not to name a quality of
discipline-being, but rather to open a semantic space for its opposite, to name
‘the space of the interdisciplinary’1 (Chandler 2009: 738), duly so named in
the OED. With this new term, and for the first time in the modern Humanities
and the social sciences, the boundedness and rigour of conventional disciplined
scholarly work were considered suspect, somehow limited and limiting, jejune.
Freedom and innovativeness lay in border crossing: under the cobblestones of
disciplinarity lay the beach of interdisciplinarity.2 A host of what Chandler calls
‘shadow disciplines’ (op. cit. p. 737), like ‘cultural studies’, moved to occupy
the space thus opened up by the negational label, and together with the rush of
‘studies’ there was a brief vogue for Humanities Institutes, interdisciplinary
spaces of supposed freedom and creative possibility.
The momentum of negational interdisciplinarity was always going to be hard
to sustain; as Chandler (2009: 739) comments, ‘[E]ven casual observers of
debates about the state of the Humanities and social sciences will be aware that
in recent years some reaction had already been registered against the regime of
post-1960s interdisciplinarity’. A new appreciation for the virtues of disciplinarity
has made its way into print (e.g. Hunt 1994). The reaction of philosophers like
Boghossian (2006) and Norris (2000, 2006) to constructivist science studies,
the standard bearer of interdisciplinarity, helped to check the enthusiasm.
sympathetic to the aims of interdisciplinarity but end up affirming the value
of disciplinarity on grounds that bear closer inspection (Krishnan 2009).
Chandler feels in retrospect that Foucault had been misinterpreted, and
points to his inaugural lecture, The Order of Discourse, as evidence of a more
nuanced approach to disciplinary authority (op. cit. p. 742). This is indeed
the case. Foucault (1981) is there concerned to outline two approaches to the
analysis of ‘discourses’, one he calls critique – which analyses the moments
of ‘restraint’ of a discourse – ‘sanctioning, exclusion and scarcity’ (ibid. p. 73),
the other he calls genealogy – which analyses the moments of creativity,
transgression and ‘affirmation’ (ibid.). Akin to Freud’s ego and id, as Foucault
(1981: 49) points out in his introduction to the published lecture, these
two necessarily work in tandem: in Foucault’s words, ‘the critical and the
genealogical descriptions must alternate, and complement each other, each
supporting the other by turns’ (op. cit. p. 73). He continues, ‘Scarcity and
affirmation; ultimately scarcity of affirmation, and not the continuous generosity
of meaning . . .’ (ibid.). A little earlier, Kuhn (1970) was making a very similar
distinction between the necessary complementarity of normal and revolutionary
science, though a distinction with more far-reaching relativizing implications
than Foucault’s. George Steiner (1971) in his commentary on The Order of
Things reproached Foucault for not citing Kuhn. Foucault (1971) replied icily
that he had instead cited Canguilhem, a thinker who had anticipated and
superseded Kuhn. As I will show below, this is of more than passing interest, and
provides a vital clue to the way that Bernstein, firmly in the French tradition on
this, frames the regulation of symbolic forms.
In retrospect it is rather strange that the epigones of interdisciplinarity
could, in Foucault’s name, with such confidence split apart scarcity and
affirmation, disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and allocate restraint to
disciplinarity, affirmation to interdisciplinarity (Messer-Davidow 1993).
Foucault’s way with technical terms may have had something to do with it.
It is only towards the end of the Archaeology of Knowledge that it becomes
clear that ‘knowledge’ (‘savoir’) is defined in opposition to ‘science’ or scien-
tific knowledge (‘connaissance’). ‘Only propositions that obey certain laws
of construction belong to a domain of scientificity’ (Foucault 1972: 183).
‘Knowledge’ for Foucault is thus everything that does not make it into
connaissance, into the stock of knowledge of a discipline.3 Perhaps it is not
so strange after all that the remissive traducing of the disciplines has so
frequently been done in his name.
If the critical tide has turned somewhat against interdisciplinarity as an
ideological opposite to disciplinarity, the general practical sense of needing
and being able to draw on more than one mode of inquiry or body of knowledge
has an enduring appeal. It is only appropriate, after all, not to lose sight of the
fact that the rationale for our common endeavour in this volume is to see how a
 Through Others’ Eyes 15
fruitful interdisciplinary intercourse can be maintained between a Bernsteinian-
inspired sociology of knowledge and a Halliday-inspired systemic-functional
linguistics (SFL). Such a mode of interdisciplinarity is to be distinguished from
the wholesale flattening of disciplinary boundaries as in the phase of ‘institute
interdisciplinarity’ and ‘-studies interdisciplinarity’ referred to above. It should
also be distinguished from ‘trading zones’, the term historian of microphysics
Peter Galison (1997) borrowed from anthropology to account for how theoretical
physicists, experimental physicists and instrument makers evolved a common
form of technical pidgin or creole in which to communicate in the development
of radar and particle detectors. Here, a common problem drives the technical
intercourse. This is the kind of interdisciplinarity found in advanced research
laboratories where research problems require the resources of more than one
intellectual tradition (Shapin 2008).
Ruqaiya Hasan (2005: 51) has usefully distinguished between endotropic
theories – those that are ‘centred on their own object of study, isolating it
from all else’, and exotropic theories, which are able to reflect on their object
of study in ‘interaction with other universes of experience’. Such ‘cosmoramic’
theories are ‘open’ and able to ‘dialogue with theories of (these) phenomena
provided their mode of engaging with their problematic is not in contradic-
tion to their own’ (ibid.). There are for Hasan two conditions for dialogical
success. First, the conceptual language must be sufficiently ‘well developed’
(ibid.) to avert a ‘threat of chaos’ (ibid.); more crucially, ‘The necessary and
sufficient condition for an exotropic theory’s potential for metadialogism is
met when its conceptual syntax is so developed that not only does the theory
distinguish the different orders of relevant phenomena but it is also able to
specify the nature of this relevance’ (ibid.). A quarrelsome Bernsteinian
may well object that the more developed a conceptual syntax, the stronger
the classification or boundary between that syntax and another syntax, making
dialogism less, not more, likely. But we will gag our quarrelsome colleague
for the moment and admit that, quite evidently, Bernstein was dialogically
in tune with Halliday. But how could that have happened? Did it happen
in volumes like this one, in casual conversation over a drink in the pub,
or some other way, seeping somehow into the conceptual syntax in a more
sub-conscious way? These are some of the questions that I will explore
further below.
Fixing on a common object is to face only the first of many hurdles. I will take
the object to be disciplinarity, although to my knowledge Bernstein never used
the word.4 What is meant by this nominalization? All nominalizations condense
constituent elements into an abstract noun, denoting quality. The original
object, the discipline, is presumed and endowed with qualities, and the agents
are morphed into a process. Yet for sociologists, it is precisely the delimitation
of disciplines and the relations between their agents that matter, as we will see.
I will start by recalling the three forays Bernstein makes into distinguishing
16 Disciplinarity
between the internal relations of disciplines, each drawn with a particular
purpose in mind. These are:
z the distinction between disciplines of the inner, the Humanities, and those
of the outer, the sciences;
z the distinction between ‘singulars’, which are traditional disciplines, and
‘regions’, disciplinary formations that face both inward toward the knowledge
base and outward toward a field of application. In this distinction, Bernstein
is distinguishing between the sciences and the Humanities, on the one hand,
and the professions on the other;
z the third distinction is probably most familiar to the SFL community,
between ‘horizontal knowledge structures’, the social sciences and more
problematically the Humanities, and ‘hierarchical knowledge structures’,
the natural sciences.
The third distinction is thus one among singulars, the first two in different
ways are about the disciplines and the professions, about which Bernstein
clearly worried. I will discuss each in greater detail below before I go on to
discuss the external social relations of disciplines, that is, disciplines and their
communities.
Forms of Disciplinary Difference
The Trivium and the Quadrivium
Bernstein deals with this in at least two treatments, one in a 1988 lecture in
Santiago (Bernstein 1990: 133–164) the other in an undated lecture given
at the University of the Aegean (Bernstein 1996: 82–88). In the first he deals
with the historical emergence of the disciplines following, he claims, the
account given by Durkheim (1977). By Bernstein’s version, the medieval
university was founded on a particular combination of abstract Greek thought
with Christianity. Christianity represented the tutelage of the inner by the
word; the outer was to be studied on the basis of an orientation conditioned by
a prior moral shaping on the basis of the word. The word was God’s word. The
account is never crystal clear, but that should not detain us here. The upshot
is that some kind of necessary link, responsible for humanizing knowledge,
was ensured by the particular form taken by the medieval curriculum: first the
disciplines of the inner (the Trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric) were to
be studied, only then could the disciplines of the outer (the Quadrivium:
arithmetic (number), geometry (space), astronomy (motion) and music
(time)) be studied. Word before world. In this way was the study of the profane
world subordinated to a prior sacred or moral ordering.
 Through Others’ Eyes 17 18 Disciplinarity

The religious foundation of official knowledge was gradually replaced by a One clue lies in the paragraph where Bernstein fast-forwards from the
‘humanizing secular principle’ (Bernstein 1996: 86) over the next 500 years, medieval curriculum and its two specializing discourses to the present. He first
until ‘the last decades of the twentieth century’ (Bernstein 1990: 155) when we repeats the point: ‘The construction of the inner was the guarantee for the
are seeing a progressive weakening of the Trivium’s control, says Bernstein. construction of the outer’ (Bernstein 1996: 86), going on to say, ‘In this
This epistemological-moral balancing act has been upset by the displacement we can find the origin of the professions’ (ibid.). What merits this late entry of
of the humanizing principle by a ‘dehumanizing’ principle, namely the market. the professions to the discussion? In the early medieval universities, alongside
The market severs the link between the inner and the outer, the knower the Trivium and Quadrivium which were exclusively undergraduate courses of
and the known and ‘a new concept of knowledge’ (Bernstein 1996: 87), a truly study, could be found faculties of law, medicine and theology, which alone were
secular and unleavenedly profane one, takes root and threatens the very basis entitled to offer higher degrees, after the preparatory Trivium and Quadrivium,
of our civilization. Bernstein has never sounded so apocalyptic: ‘Knowledge, or liberal arts, had been covered in the Arts Faculty (Lloyd 2009: 178). This
after nearly a thousand years, is divorced from inwardness and literally dehu- is depicted clearly in the frontispiece to Gregor Reisch’s (1503) Margarita
manized. Once knowledge is separated from inwardness, from commitments, Philosophia, which depicts Prudentia (or philosophy) and the seven liberal arts.
from personal dedication, from the deep structure of the self, then people See Figure 2.1.
may be moved about, substituted for each other and excluded from the
market’ (ibid.).
Bernstein in thunderous prophetic mode here sounds suspiciously like the
outraged epigones of the Trivium upon their displacement by the Quadrivium,
ranging from the old humanists, through the ‘mechanisation of the world’
critics after Heidegger, to the petulant constructivists of yesterday and today.
How can that be? What is he really worrying about?
It is as well to recognize that his account differs in certain essential respects
from that of Durkheim on whom he is drawing. Durkheim (1977) asserts that
the disciplines form when the sages of the Dark Ages in Europe begin to con-
struct rules for linguistic forms, which by way of trying to capture forms of
thought attempt at a second remove to capture the forms of things. It is natural
perhaps that the first sages were grammarians, with luminaries like Priscian,
Donatius and Virgil the Asiatic of Toulouse in the seventh century and other
cultish figures. The ‘true spirit of scholarship’ (ibid. p. 56) breaks free from
mysticism in the ninth century with the grammarian Alcuin, inaugurating
the ‘age of grammar’ and the Carolingian Renaissance. Attempts to capture the
rules of debate moved the focus from grammar to dialectical logic with the
Scholastics in the Middle Ages, and from logic to literary form with the Human-
ists not much later. Their triumph was short lived, and in the seventeenth century
the explosion of scientific knowledge moved the balance of power ever more
firmly to the Quadrivium and to the study of the form of things. This was the
moment when the idea of ‘knowledge progress’ was born, an idea Bernstein
will go on to characterize in terms of ‘verticality’ (Muller 2007).
However, Durkheim is far from lamenting this shift. He considers that
science has finally thrown off the shackles of the humanists, and that the sacred
has moved decisively into scientific discourse. Bernstein parts company with
Durkheim when he places the sacred solely with the inner, the profane solely
with the outer. Durkheim in fact celebrates the triumph of science, the
disciplines of the outer. Could there be something else Prophet Bernstein is Figure 2.1 Frontispiece to Gregor Reisch (1503) Margarita Philosophica. Freiburgi:
warning us against? Johann Schott
 Through Others’ Eyes 19
It is plausible to infer from this that Bernstein was not in fact deploring the
triumph of the sciences, but the triumph of an instrumental turn in the direc-
tion of vocational and professional education – these are effectively Bernstein’s
‘outer’, which in market-driven capitalism have become ‘divorced from inward-
ness’ (Bernstein 1996: 87), not the sciences per se. Indeed pitting the sciences
against the Humanities would have been quite un-Durkheimian, for as we saw
above, Durkheim believed just the opposite: ‘Far from its being the case that
between the disciplines which deal with world of persons and those that deal
with the world of things there is gulf fixed, the fact is they mutually imply one
another and converge on the same end’ (Durkheim 1977: 337). And again:
‘As long as science is conceived of in this way, as directed exclusively towards
the external world and to things which have nothing to do with us, it is imposs-
ible that the subject will be humanised and revitalised’ (ibid.). Presuming that
Bernstein was staying true to Durkheim, it is not unreasonable to infer that he
is thus worrying not about the sciences; he was worried about professional
and vocational education, which ran the risk, as he presciently saw, of cutting
off the necessary conceptual grounding, its necessary ‘inner’, in its scramble for
relevance, usefulness, and direct applicability to a field of production. Which
was precisely Durkheim’s fear in his critique of the pragmatists in general,
and of Bergson and William James in particular (Durkheim 1983; Young and
Muller 2007).
Singulars and Regions
A second support for this interpretation is to be found in the distinction
between ‘disciplines’ – later ‘singulars’ – and ‘regions’. Singulars refer to
the distinctive form that knowledge came to take in the nineteenth-century
university, which became a model for the school subjects of mass schooling,
thus creating a taproot from school to university for the first time. Singulars –
examples given are physics, chemistry, English – establish themselves in the
field of the production of knowledge, they are only about knowledge and they
refer only to themselves. They control the criteria for the production of
privileged texts, the rules of field entry, standards for graduation, licence to
teach or practise and distribute rewards or honours. They are Bernstein’s
paradigm case of strong classification.
Regionalization is a process of untethering singulars from their strongly
classified mooring, weakening their classification and affiliating them into a
looser or tighter federation. Regions face both inward towards the field of
knowledge production and outward towards a field of practice or production.
Classic examples given are the traditional professions – engineering, medicine,
architecture – but Bernstein also mentions the newer generation of professions
like tourism, business studies and media. He ends his first treatment of regions with
an appendix examining teacher education as an aberrant form of professional
20 Disciplinarity
education (Bernstein 1990: 161–163). At times the description is studiedly
neutral. At others, the anxiety seeps through: whatever the recontextualizing
principle regulating the region, it represents a ‘technologization’ of knowledge.
Moreover, the advent of the outer is predatory: regionalization ‘necessarily
weakens both the autonomous discursive base and the political base of singulars’
(Bernstein 1996: 66), drives towards ‘greater central administrative control’
(ibid.) and introduces greater ‘external regulation’ (ibid.). The primary
instrument for doing this is the systematic weakening of the classification that
constructs the coherence of its component singulars. Cuckoo-like it seeks a fun-
damental re-arrangement of the university. It is hard not to recognize described
here the zealotry of the more aggressive programmes for interdisciplinarity
characteristic of the seventies and eighties.
The notion of regionalization is powerful yet over-inclusive. Where does it
come from? There is no attribution but it is not without its precedents. Were
one to glance over at the formalist/rationalist tradition of history of science
in France, one would see an analogous train of thought represented there.
Canguilhem and Bachelard, who Bernstein does not cite, are progenitors of the
tradition celebrated by Althusser, Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Bourdieu who
Bernstein does cite. It was Bachelard who made the distinction, in dissecting
the disciplinary organization of knowledge, of ‘synthetic rationalisms’ and
‘regional rationalisms’ (cited by Canguilhem 1998: 18). It is not hard to recognize
these as cousins to singulars and regions. This is not at all to suggest some kind
of covert or illicit influence. On the contrary, it is an example of the phenomenon
of multiples, the simultaneous discovery of a concept or a theory by one or
more scholars at more or less the same time in widely different places (Merton
1992). This is not the only consilience Bernstein shares with his trans-channel
cousins, and I will have reason to return to the French connection at greater
length below.
It remains to point to a distinct limitation of the account of regionalization
given above. That is, all regions – let us say professions – are painted with the
same brush. This cannot be the case, as Bernstein would have been the first to
admit. The older professions, like engineering and medicine, have a very well-
developed relation to strong singulars which are by no means de-classified into
regional promiscuity, but retain a strong sense of specialized and specializing
identity. These professions are strong because they have strong – that is, reason-
ably strongly classified – singulars which are however more beholden to the
outside than their professionally unaffiliated singular colleagues, but no less
accountable inwards to disciplinary good practice. This is in marked contrast
to the newer professions, like tourism and management, that have not (yet),
though to differing degrees, managed to corral a compliant robust set of
singulars into a federation, instead depending upon de-classification of often
already weak boundaries to bring putatively relevant weak or non-existent
knowledge bases to heel. The weakness of the knowledge bases becomes appar-
ent when the distributive rules are unable to select, with any stability, a coherent
 Through Others’ Eyes 21
consensus curriculum to act for the weakly constituted professional field.
Courses or diplomas at one site consequently display little resemblance to those
at other sites, and the production field is as yet too weak to coordinate this into
a stable licensing system (Muller 2009). Heritage and museum studies would be
an example here.
This makes visible another feature that differentiates professions from each
other. Strong professions do not only have a strong knowledge base; they also
have a strong, that is, a well-organized professional base able to take over the
functions of criteria-setting and licensing formerly performed by the singulars,
without any diminution of the power of the singulars, only of some of their
symbolic control functions. To put that another way, strong professions have
strong knowledge bases (disciplines) as well as strong professional commu-
nities. It is rare to find one without the other. As I will argue further below, in
strong professional fields, the academic and professional communities are not
only well integrated, but share epistemic norms that coordinate their judge-
ments to both academic and practical best practice without putting them at
odds with one another.
So far then I have distinguished professions in terms of the strength, or
classification, of their knowledge bases and their external communities. Both
of these require further comment. In the third of his forays into knowledge
types, Bernstein deals with the first.
Verticality and its Others
Bernstein’s account of vertical and horizontal discourses is by now well enough
known in the SFL community not to require rehearsal here. In Muller (2007)
I discussed the principal way that disciplines differ in terms of their internal
structure as ‘verticality’, that is, the way that the internal theoretical apparatus
of the discipline progresses. I also raised there the question as to whether
verticality applied to all the disciplines of the inner, the Humanities, since fields
like history or literature did not advance vertically,5 either strongly or weakly, in
any meaningful sense, even though others clearly did – like logic or linguistics.
Bernstein’s second criterion, grammaticality or the way that internal theories of
disciplines ‘read’ their domain of worldly objects, is only a help in some cases.
History, for example, though possessing a discernible tradition of historio-
graphical dispute, does not have theories on any widespread scale of consensus.
Nevertheless, there are strong rules of grammaticality, in this case rules of evid-
ence and grounds for demonstration, even though these might be periodically
challenged. These rules generate strong epistemic norms, which bestow a high
measure of self-control upon the internal community of historians, and allow
them to police their own protocols of truth, despite strong current pressures to
regionalize the singular into coalitions of relevance like ‘museum’ or ‘heritage
studies’. This, as will be recalled, is the Bernsteinian apprehension, that in
22 Disciplinarity
becoming disconnected and re-aggregated, they might lose the conceptual-
formative core of the discipline, their inner, leaving the resultant segmental
ensemble conceptually, which is to say morally, rudderless.
Grammaticality does not help elucidate the structure of other Humanities
singulars like logic and linguistics, which are disciplines whose object domain is
constituted by definition, and whose internal language is not subject to discon-
firmation in the same way as it is in the empirical and experimental disciplines.
As Fran Christie and Mary Macken-Horarik (2007; this volume) are beginning
to show, ‘verticality’ can indeed help to characterize, and signpost, the ‘systemic-
functional verticality’ of subject English, but neither verticality nor grammati-
cality will be much help when it comes to the stylistic and aesthetic dimensions
(see Moore 2010). As Christie and Macken-Horarik show, pressures for relev-
ance in the English curriculum, be they for personal growth, cultural heritage
and so on have the same flattening effect on the acquisition of the syntax that
all but the smartest pupils get to master. As Bernstein showed, this kind of
modularization of an incrementally more abstract system of meaning-making
into sets of generic skills is precisely the school curriculum equivalent of region-
alization in higher education (Bernstein 1996: 66), and, he might have added,
of interdisciplinarity in its aggressive, de-classifying mode.
All the neo-Durkheimians, including Merton (1992), Bourdieu (2004), Collins
(1998) as well as Bernstein relate the form of organization of the symbolic
system of a discipline to its form of internal social organization, its insulation
from influence from outside and its consequent level of autonomy. The degree
of this form of control is regulated by what Bernstein called verticality,
what Merton called ‘codification’6 and what Bourdieu called their degree of
‘formalisation’ or ‘mathematisation’ (Bourdieu 2004: 58). These cognate con-
cepts condition the internal division of labour of the discipline, the level of
interdependence of the members, their ability to achieve ‘closure’ (Bourdieu)
or strong insulation of their boundaries (Bernstein) and consequently the
degree of autonomy from external interference they are able to achieve.
It is at this point that our previously gagged Bernsteinian insists on having
his say: ‘can we not see’, he asks, ‘that there is something of a non sequitur here
in Bernstein’s accounts of knowledge insulation and hybridity?’ Let us take
discipline X, which has over time developed a reasonable degree of verticality
or its equivalent, has developed a certain set of internal epistemic norms
adhered to by most disciplinary adepts and that has as a consequence developed
an effective degree of autonomy and self-rule built on strong disciplinary
identities. Why then would it suddenly become vulnerable to weakening from
without? What in its make-up makes a once-impregnable disciplinary empire
vulnerable to either regional or interdisciplinary external weakening? What
boundary-dissolving trumps can suddenly be deployed? What is the enemy
without that Bernstein so fears? The market – mere material reward – seems too
cynical an answer. Or is it?
 Through Others’ Eyes 23
It seems clear that we must distinguish between two kinds of interdisciplinarity.
The first is predatory or negational interdisciplinarity, that seeks to undermine
disciplinary boundaries as an end in itself, as a means to achieve some pre-
sumed pedagogical good (‘generic skills’, ‘modularity’) or seeks to re-federate
them in the name of an external instrumental principle of relevance (‘relevant
to the workplace’, or ‘community engagement’; see Chen et al. this volume for
a discussion of such a programme). Bernstein seems to have worried about
both these predatory movements. Empirical studies here have been scanty, but
both the theory and those studies we do have would indicate that predatory
interdisciplinarity would be resisted to the degree that the disciplines con-
cerned are strong. Individual historians may have gone into ‘heritage studies’
but this has not weakened history itself, which continues to flourish in part to
train the future ‘heritage’ workers, but also because it is a strong discipline in
the sense of strong grammaticality, strong epistemic norms and strong internal
self-regulation. Where interdisciplinary teaching programmes have been set
up with such disciplines, and these strong disciplines feel threatened by the
regionalizing thrust, it will either be resisted – the discipline may successfully
refuse to participate – or the programme will become internally balkanized,
with the disciplines retaining an identifiable shape and identity within the
teaching activities of the programme7 (Ensor 2001). It is doubtful (though one
cannot be categorical) whether strong disciplines that still have vibrant research
programmes at the cutting edge can be completely undermined by predatory
interdisciplinarity.
By the same token, creative or productive interdisciplinarity occurs when it is
driven by a bona fide intellectual problem which draws together a group of
creative scholars who pool their disciplinary energies in one way or another.
If this proves to be a stable basis for a new domain of problem solving, it will
morph into a new region, which if it proves stable and productive over time will
finally become a discipline in its own right.
All of which helps to make clear that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are
not two different things. (See Moore this volume for related discussion.) This is
probably why Bernstein never used the latter term. All knowledge formations,
be they singular or regional, must have a certain quality of disciplinarity in
order to qualify as a knowledge region. A next question then arises: what is
it that all their members have in common, and how did they get it? What
drives the common enterprise? What drives fertile disciplinarity and interdisci-
plinarity alike?
Social Life in Disciplines
On the one hand, disciplinary sociality is an example of what Durkheim called
organic solidarity, that is, it is characterized by a high degree of internal
24 Disciplinarity
differentiation, many levels of hierarchy which are explicated in normal schol-
arly commerce by citation rates and more eventfully by the award of honours
and prizes, a high degree of complexity and consequently autonomy, policed by
what Durkheim calls formalistic and restitutive regulations (Durkheim 1973).
I will probe these regulations a little further below. This is contrasted with
mechanical solidarity, which has much less internal differentiation and emphas-
izes similarity and low autonomy. On the other hand, disciplinary sociality
is not only organic. It is also punctuated by rituals of mechanical solidarity –
conferences, meetings of peers and so on – which generate a sense of renewal
and effervescence. In other words, disciplines are marked by both rituals of
similarity and rituals of differentiation. This translates into the peculiar ambi-
guity of disciplinary membership, where everyone is a peer, but some peers are
more equal than others.
Scholars are necessarily driven by what Bourdieu calls the illusio of disinterest:
‘to be in a scientific field is to be placed in conditions in which one has an
interest in disinterestedness’ (Bourdieu 2004: 52). This is not optional; to be
a recognized scholar demands ‘unconstrained submission to the imperative of
disinterestedness’ (ibid. p. 51). As Bernstein would have said, this is the inner
connection to serious scholarly work, which is its constitutive bulwark against
external manipulation. Merton (2001) has shown how Puritanism in seven-
teenth-century England acted as a powerful spur to science, by making its inner
explicit. A virtuous marriage between experimental empiricism and veneration
of God meant that science could be presented as simply revealing the glory of
the works by His hand: as Robert Boyle said: ‘our utmost Science can but give us
a juster veneration of his Omniscience’ (quoted in Merton 2001, p. 103), or as
John Ray put it, science is simply making visible ‘divine Reason, running like a
Golden Vein, through the whole Leaden Mine of Brutal Nature’ (ibid. p. 104).
In Puritan England, thus, there was no conflict between science and religion;
indeed, Puritanism both drove science, as an obligation to venerate His work,
and provided an ironclad justification for its disinterested pursuit.
Of course, the Puritan impulse has long since been secularized, but disinter-
est has remained a constitutive norm. This does not mean that scholars are not
competitive, or that they don’t vie for personal glory. They do. Its principal
form is the struggle for priority, to be first with a discovery or novelty. The norm
of disinterest frequently leads scholars to disavow this thirst for priority, which
somehow seems uncollegial, unscholarly, but the now-secularized obligation to
be productive has led to many a tussle for priority, often quite bitter. Cavendish,
Watt and Lavoisier argued over who had first discovered that water was not an
element; Newton and Leibnitz argued over who invented the calculus; Janet
contested Freud’s claim to have invented psychoanalysis. These are but a few of
the disputes over priority that animate the histories of invention. The German
language has a word for this commonplace phenomenon: Prioritätsstreit (Merton
1992: 289).
There is a specific reason why disputes over priority are so frequent. Merton
(1992) has distinguished between ‘singletons’ – individual discoveries that can
 Through Others’ Eyes 25
unambiguously be ascribed to one person, and ‘multiples’ – discoveries that
are either discovered at the same time, or are periodically discovered and
‘re-discovered’ by different people at different times and places. Some of these
are poignant in the extreme, none more so than the case of Darwin and
Wallace. It is well known that Darwin, though a humble man, prized what he
calls in his autobiography ‘the bauble of fame’, and says in a letter to Lyell
that ‘I shall certainly be vexed if anyone were to publish my doctrines before
me’. Lyell tried unsuccessfully to hurry him up. In June 1858, Wallace sent
Darwin a manuscript which he recognized would pip him to the post. Darwin
felt crushed. The scientific community in the form of Lyell and Hooker then
arranged for a joint presentation to the Linnean Society, prefacing the publica-
tion of a joint paper by ‘Messrs. C. Darwin and A. Wallace’. Subsequently each
of them tried to outdo the other in attributing the greater credit to the other
(Merton 1992: 289).
The recurrence of multiples leads Merton to a bold hypothesis: ‘the hypo-
thesis states that all scientific discoveries are in principle multiples, including
those that on the surface appear to be singletons’ (ibid. p. 356). We can glibly
say that this is the product of disciplinarity, that it is because all peers in a dis-
cipline share a disciplinary identity, that they ‘face the same way’, and ‘cover the
same cognitive ground’. But that hardly explains it. After all, we are talking
about radical novelty here, where the step into the unknown, or the next known,
has still to be taken. Cole (1983, 1994) distinguishes between the core of a dis-
cipline, the repository of knowledge accepted by all disciplinary members, and
the frontier, where researchers labour to produce something that will make it
into the core. Very little of it ever will. Cole (1983) goes on to say that when
people refer to disciplinary consensus they are referring to consensus in the
core; and that here, there is larger consensus in what we would call the hier-
archical disciplines than in the horizontal ones. However, Cole’s research also
shows that at the frontier, the social sciences display as much consensus as do
the natural sciences (ibid. p. 136), and that ‘consensus at the research frontier
is created by social processes which tend to be similar in the various scientific
fields’ (ibid.). Cole’s example was sociology. My own investigations have shown
that peer judgements about the relative contributions of others in the fields of
psychology, law and history are remarkably stable (Muller forthcoming).
How is this possible? What is it that produces this common cast of creative
thought such that different investigators arrive independently at the same
intellectual terminus? To answer this brings us to one of the deepest theoretical
fissures in the sociology of knowledge.
Consensus or Epistemic Norms? The French Connection
Karl Maton and Rob Moore (2010) sub-title their recent collection ‘coalitions
of the mind’, after Randall Collins’ (1998) slightly different ‘coalitions in the
mind’. Collins develops a theory of intellectual centres that are linked together
26 Disciplinarity
by ‘interaction ritual chains’ into networks of connections. Collins’ definition
of an interaction ritual is that it depends on face-to-face interaction. Consensus
depends on it: ‘Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because inter-
action ritual can only take place on this level’ (ibid. p. 26). Nevertheless, Collins
elsewhere is less emphatic, and by the end of his introductory chapter he is
referring to ‘interaction rituals inside their head’ and ‘imaginary rituals’ (ibid.
p. 52), and to the ‘vicarious community of the mind’ (ibid. p. 34), hence the
coalitions ‘in’ the mind. By the end of the book, the ‘community’ has become
‘invisible’ (ibid. p. 790).
The same ambivalence can be seen in the literature around the more com-
monly used term in the sociology of science, the ‘invisible college’. This term
was originally coined in the seventeenth century by members of the newly
formed Royal Society to refer to their loosely affiliated status outside the formal
educational establishment. It was taken up by Price (1971) to denote elite
mutually interacting groups, what Collins and Evans (2002) refer to as the
discipline’s ‘core set’, who combine to exchange information. The upper limit
for such an invisible college for Price was 100 members. Other writers have
taken up the concept, and the definition of the invisible college has become
rather loose (Zuccala 2006). Nevertheless, the central question remains:
what produces the meeting of minds, from the consensus in the core, to the
tighter consensus at the frontier, to the recurrent and steady appearance of
multiples?
It is instructive to return to Kuhn. He may well be remembered best for the
epic meeting at Bedford Hall at the University of London in July 1965 where he
matched wits with Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend. Did Bernstein attend?
Certainly he never refers to Kuhn. The reason may become clearer below.
Perhaps Kuhn’s most controversial claim was that paradigms were incommen-
surable, which means that there is no rational way for choosing between rival
paradigms. This means in turn that choice of paradigm is a subjective decision.
If there is no rational way to choose between paradigms, disciplinary consensus
is just a collective subjective decision, what Lakatos (1970: 78) derisively called
‘mob psychology’. Why the best epistemic judgement cannot be decided simply
by consensual aggregation can be illustrated by the old philosophical problem
of Socrates and the Athenians: just because the Athenians voted against Socrates
does not make Socrates wrong and the Athenians right. As Gutting (2003: 63)
says, this is like making truth dependent on ‘the majority vote at the next
epistemic town meeting’.
Foucault’s teacher Canguilhem was similarly dismissive about Kuhn’s position
which he too said was ‘social psychology’ rather than ‘epistemology’. A social
psychological account (e.g. consensual choice of paradigm) is unable to
explain ‘how the truth of a theory is to be understood’ (Canguilhem 1998: 13)
or to account for scientific advance. Kuhn’s social psychological solution is
mimicked in the micro-sociology of knowledge through the insistence that
 Through Others’ Eyes 27
scholarly agreement must depend on consensus, and that this consensus must
be produced in face-to-face interaction. This is well exemplified by Michelle
Lamont’s (2009) recent account of the generation of scholarly agreement
in peer review panels reviewing interdisciplinary grant applications. Her
explanation of consensus reached is that this can only happen if peers are
given opportunity to forge a consensus in face-to-face argument. This is
‘epistemic townhallism’.
What then is the alternative? Bachelard and Canguilhem make their point of
departure the need to re-capture rationality from the strictures of mere shared
opinion. Their recourse is to social norms, not consensus, as the ultimate epi-
stemological category (Canguilhem 1998, 1991). But what is a norm? A norm
is a regulative principle that produces continuity for grounds of judgement.
All disciplines operate by virtue of a set of internal norms. These render a
framework that provides grounds for judging veracity. Veracity is embedded
in concepts which must be distinguished from theories. ‘Organization’ and
‘adaptation’ are concepts; ‘evolution’ is a theory. ‘Code’ is a concept: ‘systemic-
functional linguistics’ is a theory. The same concepts can function in different
theories, and they can embed improvements on knowledge independently of
theories: ‘Concepts bridge the discontinuity between successive paradigms and
allow us to speak of truths persisting from theory to theory and of progress in
the sense of the increase of persisting truths over time’ (Gutting 2003: 57).
Norms thus regulate progressive refinement for a particular community. It is, as
Collins said, literally like having a conversation not only with an ‘imaginary
audience’ (Collins 1998: 52), but indeed an imaginary conversation with friends
and comrades, no matter how competitive you may be with them.
A consequence follows from this view. Disciplinary members do not have to
meet face-to-face in order to judge from the same norm set: the reality of mul-
tiples in far-flung times and places illustrates this clearly enough. With access
to the same concept set, it should not be surprising that Darwin and Wallace
converged on the theory of evolution at almost exactly the same time. The
luckless Kuhn (1970) tried belatedly in his Postscript to change the term
paradigm to ‘disciplinary matrix’, a term closer to norms, but it never stuck.8
Pace the micro-sociological tradition in science studies, the intellectual home
of aspirational interdisciplinarity, patterns of rational construction depend
on impersonal norms that are the regulative basis of organic, not mechanical
solidarity. Which is not to say that the effervescent rituals of mechanical
solidarity aren’t refreshing and inspiring; they are just not where the norms
come from. In a study of academic judgement in anonymous peer panels in
law, psychology and history, I have shown that local and international peers
rate in substantially similar ways within the ‘disciplinary matrix’ (Muller,
forthcoming). They had never had the opportunity to get together to forge
the basis for this common judgement. It is a prior institution of regularity
constitutive of their disciplinary identity.
28 Disciplinarity
Hanging Together
Where does this leave interdisciplinarity? Let us go back to SFL and the
Bernsteinians. I wondered idly at the beginning of the chapter whether
Bernstein and Halliday had talked themselves onto the same wavelength over
coffee or something more convivial. If the answer provided in this chapter has
any merit, the answer would be no; they ‘got’ it at a deeper level of intellectual
consilience. In the idiom of the paper, they shared certain epistemic norms,
which meant that they worked with concepts that had an elective affinity, even
if these did different work in their respective explanatory frameworks. What
might these be?
I assume a background normative consilience – call it critical rationalism
for want of a better term – which produces a mutual intellectual sympathy, but
I will discuss the consilience here mainly at the level of concepts. Let us take
Bernstein’s concept of ‘code’, which models social contexts as semiotic clusters
that evoke and require interactional recognition and realization practices
across a cline of less specialized and more specialized. The concept of ‘code’ was
probably adapted from the Hallidayan concept of ‘text in context’ (Bernstein
1996: 57). The ‘Sydney School’ concept of ‘genre types’ is in turn a schematic
structure of recognition/realization practices elaborating and modeling the
Bernsteinian code cline (Martin and Rose 2008: 16). Each genre type, there-
fore, in terms of a ‘generalised structure of abstractions’ it evokes (ibid. p. 228)
varies from less to more abstract.
So far so good. There are points of incongruence, though. The Bernstein
concept of code sketched a single cline from commonsense to uncommon-
sense. ‘Sydney School’ genre adapts this by describing the cline within both
time-structured genres (from personal recounts to narratives and histories and
non-time-structured genres (such as reports and explanations, ibid. p. 167)).
This means that there are degrees of abstraction within each macrogenre, in
both history and science, for example. But where does that leave Bernsteinian
knowledge structure? It would not add to the SFL description to label the one
‘vertical’ and the other ‘horizontal’, as Bernstein would do. Why not? Because
knowledge structure is describing variations of theoretical subsumptability
within the context of knowledge production, not variations of context specific-
ity requiring variations of code/genre modality in the field of knowledge repro-
duction and acquisition. In other words, codes and genres are designed to
elucidate the acquisition of the core of a knowledge field; knowledge structures
are designed to elucidate the addition of new knowledge to the knowledge
field at its periphery (Cole 1983, 1994). They are both about disciplinarity, just
different levels of it.
The two different starting points become wonderfully blurred in work in
both traditions describing qualification ladders. Let me briefly take my own
work and that of Jim Martin and David Rose. Consider my Table 2.1 below
(Muller 2009: 218) compared to Figure 2.2, from the work of Martin and
Rose (2008: 227).
 Through Others’ Eyes 29 30 Disciplinarity

Table 2.1 Occupational fields and knowledge, adapted from Muller, 2009: 218. Rose and Martin are extrapolating their abstraction cline into respectively a
Particular General Professions Research-based knowledge hierarchy, a school and university curriculum hierarchy, linked
occupations occupations work in turn to a hierarchy of the division of labour. Mine, extrapolating from an
analysis of knowledge structures, carves the knowledge domain up into four
Labour E.g. Travel agents, E.g. Engineering E.g. Engineers, Academics,
market hospitality workers trades (fitters, lawyers, architects, researchers, new different kinds of common/uncommonsense combinations which translate
boilermakers), HR managers, white collar welfare into four different curriculum and qualification pathways. The important thing
HR operators doctors, teachers, and service workers about this variant is that the pathways are only partly articulable (see also
social workers Gamble 2009). As curriculum, they do not form a single continuum of
Knowledge Largely practical Practical Applied theory Largely theoretical variation. It seems that Martin and Rose’s does.
Knowledge knowledge plus plus practical progression of These extrapolations are clearly affiliated to one another, and we will
some applied experience the discipline undoubtedly be able to bring them into alignment with some work. Putting
theory
them up here is not to emphasize their differences. Rather, it is to illustrate
Induction On-the-job- Apprenticeship External Internal internship some features of interdisciplinarity. The first is that we are clearly extrapolating
training, some internship (e.g. (e.g. postdoctoral off a common parent stem, namely Bernstein. But while Martin and Rose
apprenticeship pupilage, work, tenure)
interleave their adaptation with SFL and discourse semantics, for example,
housemanship)
I am extrapolating from a later version of the conceptual family. No wonder
Regulation Moderate to weak Moderate Strong sectoral Moderate to strong we end up in slightly different places. The second is that the more sophist-
sectoral regulation sectoral regulation (e.g. disciplinary
icated the concept, the more it has to be worked on – adapted, extrapolated
(e.g. hairdresser’s regulation (e.g. board exams) regulation (peer
practical test) trade test) review) and recontextualized – to become fecund in a different disciplinary context.
Most usually it can’t just be borrowed across ‘as is’. A direct borrowing can
have helpful resonances, as in Christie and Macken-Horarik’s (2007) use
EDUCATION ECONOMIC PRODUCTION of systemic-functional ‘verticality’, used, it seems to me, in the sense of a
translating science ‘generalised structure of abstraction’ (Rose and Martin 2008: 228). Without
translating experience into industrial
of reality into science production
careful recontextualization, I suspect borrowing will mostly be explanatorily
Post-graduate barren.
research
I would speculate that, in the end, conceptual consilience goes only so
supply of research
far, and that their embedding theories must also eventually be properly
leading to the production
of new knowledge Undergraduate professional scientists understood for continued fruitful intercourse. The SFL community is
training training
developing new
probably far better versed in Bernsteinian sociology than vice versa. I speak
leading to matriculation supply of applied
scientific now mainly for the sociologists: without dedicated reading groups to master
processes
into ternary science Senior secondary science
scientists & engineers the rich canopy of SFL, we are not going to go much further with SFL
faculties (& TAFE subjects
certificate) designing &
in future beyond the occasional reporting on conceptual consiliences as
leading to senior supply of qualified
managing they arise, as they surely will. It will require dedicated tilling to make them
Years 9--10 technology
science subjects:
(elite) themes of
technicians &
paraprofessionals
productive.
biology, chemistry,
physics, geology
science
constructing &
Interdisciplinarity by this account is premised on the prior consilience of
supply of skilled
maintaining epistemological approach between the two traditions, one sociological the
Years 7--8 technology
leading to
(general)
operators other systemic-functional linguistic. It is also premised on a prior epistemic
acquisition of learning to
basic scientific do science understanding about how the social world, its institutions and agents are
knowledge operating
supply of de-skilled technology regulated and ordered. In other words, though some of the methods
process workers will differ, as will the theories, there are several concepts which quilt the
leading from two disciplines together. After that, it will take some dedicated recontextual-
commonsense
translating science izing work to make them explanatorily productive in their adoptive dis-
learnt in the home
into curriculum
& primary school ciplinary home. This is the labour of interdisciplinarity. I have no doubt

Figure 2.2 Stages in science education and levels in industry, from J. R. Martin
and D. Rose (2008) Genre Relations. Mapping Culture. Equinox, p. 227
 Through Others’ Eyes 31 32 Disciplinarity

whatever that there is much to be gained from cultivating this enduring Fleck in the continental rationalist manner called ‘thought collectives’. Kuhn calls
consilience. these rather disparagingly ‘hypostatised fictions’.

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Much the same happened in the domain of pedagogy: education, hitherto the
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