Is Scholarly Work a Piece of Art?

A question disrupts certainty, a moment of doubt takes hold, and the realization of the unknown creates a suspension in our epistemic faculties. This suspension interrupts the flow of time. The quality of time changes, and tension increases once time becomes associated with the unknown. An answer releases the tension, entropy decreases, and the intensified experience of time returns to stability. Equilibrium is restored.

Myriad scholarly models and concepts are grounded in the same structure: equilibrium, a question, heightened intensity, and a return to the basic level. Whether expressed through terms such as tension and release or other concepts conveying the same idea, the abstract status of the process remains the same.

The experience of solving a purely abstract problem—whether through scholarly explanations or mathematical propositions—can follow this same model of intense experience: the more difficult the question, the greater the aesthetic intensity. Setting aside the answer itself, the experience of grappling with questions, such as those surrounding infinity or continuity, may produce the same experiential quality. Does this model allow us to label theoretical propositions as aesthetic experiences?

The technical value of academic work is often influenced not only by the strength of its argument but also by the way it is presented. In music scholarship, for instance, an academic presentation is primarily evaluated for the coherence of its material, but also for its performative aspects—such as the visualization and notation of theoretical ideas, the placement of examples, rhetorical choices, and more. Often, the presenter delivers a twenty-minute monologue, in effect, designed to engage the audience and create that pivotal “aha!” moment.

If we consider scholarly work as a form of meta-art, two paths can be imagined between affect and knowledge. First, one can view scholarly work, which aims to acquire knowledge, as an affective experience. Second, one can perceive an aesthetic moment as a form of knowledge in its purest sense—knowledge as an encounter with the fundamental and axiomatic aspects of being through phenomenological embodied knowledge. If the fundamental principles of composition govern both scholarly writing and musical composition, then we might ask: Does a piece of music, for instance, convey an abstract form of knowledge?

Given the meta-characterization of scholarly works about works of art, does the accumulation of aesthetic moments create a perpetual cycle of meaning and affect? A presentation or a book about a symphony is a form of art about another piece of art. A symphony itself is a moment constructed from another composition—the score, which encapsulates the composer's ideas. But what, then, are those structures about? Are we continuously engaging in a process of suspension and resolution, tension and release, and question and answer? Whether embedded in musical structures, ritualistic artistic performances, or scholarly presentations that engage an audience through a coherent monologue, it appears that, in abstraction, we are grappling with time and the ways in which we manipulate its qualities.

Is scholarly work, then, a piece of art?

Further reading on artistic research and embodied mode of knowledge: Borgdorff, Henk. “The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research.” In The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, 1st ed., 20. Edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson. New York: Routledge, 2010.