What Distinguishes Scholarship from Art?

Abstract

The paper concerns Michael Biggs and Daniel Büchler's 2010 claim that the creative arts doctorate is a contradictory amalgam of two discursive modes, one aimed at translating a research experience into a ‘single, unified answer’ to a problem, the other at eliciting a plurality of responses in diverse audiences through an evocative artefact. I set forth the lines of this critique, and then compare the analysis of scholarly method it is based upon with Jacques Lacan's fascinatingly similar account of what he calls ‘the university discourse’. My discussion diverges from Biggs and Büchler's, however, when it comes to considering Lacan's own writing style, which seems far more geared to eliciting a plurality of responses than presenting a ‘single, unified answer’. Lacan is, of course, a psychoanalyst. But many of the authors broadly associated with him in this stylistic regard (Derrida, Foucault, Serres, Deleuze, Barthes, among others) are academics. By Biggs and Büchler's analysis, they write as artists. This is curious, given that we cite them as our pre-eminent academic authorities. I reflect on how we might have to nuance Biggs and Büchler's distinction to accommodate this paradox, and further consider its implications for the style of humanities scholarship an exegesis might best assume, to satisfy critiques like theirs.

Keywords:

• university discourse
• epistemology
• scholarly style
• Lacan
• post-structuralist writing
• art

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted during the course of two separate visiting fellowships, in the School of Literature, Language and Linguistics at the Australian National University, and in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. I am grateful for the engaged comments, which colleagues in both institutions provided on earlier versions of this piece, and I would particularly like to thank Nicole Moore, Klaus Neumann, Russell Smith, Monique Rooney, Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell.

Note on contributor

Since 2004 Paul Magee has taught poetry composition and criticism at the University of Canberra, where he is Associate Professor. He is author of two books of poems, Stone Postcard (John Leonard Press, 2014), and Cube Root of Book (John Leonard Press 2006), and has also published a surrealist ethnography, From Here to Tierra del Fuego (University of Illinois Press, 2000). He is currently working on a book entitled Poetry and Knowledge.

Notes

1. ‘Practice-led research’ is of course another name for what I am discussing, as is ‘practice-based research’. I think, however, the ‘creative work plus exegesis model’ is a more precise designation. That is because it is quite possible to perform practice-led research and simply submit a knowledge report about it. And one might similarly perform such research, but simply submit the artwork. This second option would have the same effect as Strand's (1998) proposal to the then-new accounting bodies, viz. the establishment of ‘research equivalence’ between creative works and scholarly research publications (xvi). Alternately one could submit the two parts to totally separate examiners. Any of these three possibilities would, my argument here implies, be an advance.

2. I confine my comments here – on the fact of good doctoral work, and on the possibility of extending those trends – to creative writing. That is partially because the focus of my disciplinary knowledge and practice is there. But it is also because I am sceptical about the idea of a general solution to the ‘creative work plus exegesis’ problem. I note that Biggs and Büchler's article very much has the plastic arts as its focus, and that these are forms where to write in styles similar to Lacan's or Foucault's, and to do so in the very medium of one's art (see further Section 7), is simply not an option. That may explain why their outlook is more grim.

3. Say rather that this is what licenses the writing often to be so convoluted, confusing and in a word poor; I mean when compared with the rather more exacting presentational standards in the sciences. This is a little remarked, but most revealing phenomenon.