As I’ve been pondering the idea of how the principles of discipline described in Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment apply to an academic discipline I’ve had some interesting thoughts. The first is that we have to figure out what is being “disciplined.” In Foucault’s work, discipline is applied on the prisoner. In academia, it is not so much the teachers or students who need the discipline, but rather the ideas those teachers or students hold. In the same way that an ordered society would like its vagabonds and criminals to live more ordered and controlled lives, an academic discipline would like the thinking and ideas of its discipline ordered and controlled.
Part III, Chapter 1, Docile Bodies suggests a number of ways in which discipline can be applied to individuals, and I was surprised at how easily those seemed to apply to academic disciplines as well. “Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space.” As we apply this to academic disciplines where ideas replace individuals, we see the same techniques at play. Foucault provides four distinct functions of distributions. I’ll comment on these and on a related fifth function from this section.
1. “Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself” (p. 141). I’ve occasionally lamented my situation as a primarily communication guy in an English department. Although we probably have much more that connects the two disciplines than separates them, we tend to focus on the differences – those “border cases” where an academic discipline tries to close in on itself to the exclusion of other ideas.
2. “But the principle of ‘enclosure’ is neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary machinery” (p. 143). I think this is among the biggest challenges facing the field of technical and professional communication. As a fairly new field we are continuing to negotiate the boundaries with older, established disciplines. This section also mentions the monastic cell, and while we don’t necessarily have the physical isolation of cells, each academic is expected to develop their own unique niche – an area of expertise they explore in relative solitude.
3. “The rule of functional sites would gradually, in the disciplinary institutions, code a space that architecture generally left at the disposal of several different users” (p. 143). I find it interesting that despite the sometimes insular nature of our disciplines there are different users and trains of thought within the discipline, and though they have counter-parts, each deals with their discipline in a unique way. For example, each discipline has administration, research methodology, theory development, literature, history, publishing, and archiving.
4. “In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the place it occupies in a series, and by the gap that separates it from the other. The unit is, therefore… the rank” (p. 145). Academic disciplines are certainly hierarchal, we are organized into classes and academic ranks, and even the ideas we explore find themselves organized into “introductory” or “advanced.”
5. “In organizing ‘cells’, ‘places’, and ‘ranks’, the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical” (p. 148). This line clearly sums up the unique nature of disciplines and the critical nature of “displacement” as part of the structure that brings disciplines into being.
