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last.updated 1.15.06

 

Defining Disciplines

Purpose

The term "discipline," which is one of the major foundations of this course, has multiple definitions. And as the readings for this week demonstrate, these definitions have overlapped throughout history. In today's class we will examine some of these definitions and discuss how this overlap in meaning influences our practices (including writing) in specific contexts, especially academic ones.

Discussion

Hesse

We will begin today's discussion by examining the following questions about the speech we watched last week, Doug Hesse's "Who Owns Writing"

  • How does Hesse answer his own question?
  • How would you answer this question?
  • Should English, which predominantly teaches most writing courses, own writing? Why or why not?

Foucault

Argument: "Discipline makes individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of it exercise" (p. 188).

  • What does this argument mean to you?
  • What are the power relationships in the contexts that you write in?

Support:

Hierarchical Observation: developing a mechanism (e.g., architectural) by which the person of authority has the ability to observe, measure multiple individuals quite easily, sometimes without being observed themselves (i.e., being visible to the invisible).

"an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them" (p. 190).

  • How does Foucault apply this description to the military and the hospital?
  • In what ways do you see this in education? in reality? metaphorically? (K-12? undergraduate education? graduate education?)

"The hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And, although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a 'head,' it is the apparatus as a whole that produces 'power' and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field" (p. 192)

  • How is this statement about power applicable to academic contexts? to workplace contexts?

Normalizing Judgment: by means of discipline and punishment (or sometimes reward), the institution has created an apparatus for moving individuals towards desired standards–a process of normalization.

"the art of punishing, in the regime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor even precisely at repression. It brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation, and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of following the overall rule.... It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the 'nature' of individuals. It introduce... the constraint of conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences.... In short, it normalizes" (p. 195).

  • In your own words, what are the five features of normalization?
  • In what ways do you see your respective academic programs or workplaces normalizing you?

Examination: allows us to subject the individual to normalizing measurements in order to judge them and determine their standing.

"the age of the 'examining' school marked the beginnings of a pedagogy that functions as a science" (p. 198) In other words, not only did the students have to demonstrate an aptitude for skill, but had to pass the exam; thus pedagogy needed to be formalized to accomplish this latter goal.

"the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanisms of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially, by arranging objects [i.e., those being examined into a given order]. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification" (p. 199).

  • Based upon this description, how does the examination, according to Foucault, perpetuate power structures?
  • How does this description apply to the SOLs? semesterly final exams? or oral exam or the oral defense?
  • In what ways have you been subjected to examination in academia? in the workplace?

"Hence the formation of a whole series of codes of disciplinary individuality that made it possible to transcribe, by means of homogenization, the individual features established by the examination.... The other innovations of disciplinary writing concerned the correlation of these elements, the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organization of comparative fields, making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms" (p. 201).

  • What are some of the features of disciplinary writing in your respective programs? What disciplinary function do they serve?
  • What, according to Foucault, are the correlative possibilities associated with disciplinary writing?

"The examination as the fixing, at once ritual and 'scientific,' of individual difference[; through the exam results] each individual receives as his status his own individuality, and in which he is linked by his status to the features, the measurements, the gaps, the 'marks 'that characterize him and make him a 'case'" (p. 204)

  • What, according to Foucault, is the outcome of the exam on the individual?

"We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms : it 'excludes,' it 'represses' it 'censors,' it 'abstracts,' it 'masks,' it 'conceals.' In fact power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (p. 205).

  • How is disciplinary power not a top-down affair, but the collaborative use of a social apparatus?

Dewey

We will discuss the following questions about Dewey's "Interest and Discipline."

  • According to Dewey, what is interest? what is discipline?
  • How does discipline function within an educational system?
  • How does Dewey's understanding of discipline compare to Foucault's?
  • Which aspects of Dewey's and Foucault's respective definitions of "discipline" are applicable to your academic and/or workplace writing contexts?