§71 On Discipline and Comfort in Contemporary Academia
While one of Foucault’s major contributions is the recognition of a transformational break around 1800 in terms of disciplinary power, little attention has been placed on the appreciative leanings of others, such as that of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s.
As a noun the word ‘discipline’ has two contemporary designations. The first describes a practice of restraint and commitment related to the training and refinement of one’s behaviour in adherence to an ideal or specific code of conduct. The second refers to a specific branch or domain of knowledge around which university departments and faculties — and in turn their specific vocabularies, emphases, concerns, and traditions — are developed and established. However, in contemporary Higher Education the two have become ever more closely intertwined, and the former also describes the conduct required to establish an intellectual home in the latter.
This is a far-cry from the pedagogic ideal named by Emerson in his essay, ‘Education’ (1884), in which he writes:
‘The two points in a boy’s training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that — to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling and horseplay — keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points. Here are the two capital facts, Genius and Drill. (Emerson, 1969: 219)
For Emerson, discipline (Drill) is central to cultivating a truly individual character and comportment to the world (Genius), rather than a calculated and bureaucratic means of securing mere membership and acceptance in a disciplinary tribe on which a vulgar career might be forged.
In Note §31 (In Defence of Exclusive Language), I considered how different academic disciplines employ specific modes and patterns of language to enable them to ‘discourse with the appropriate amount of nuance their subject requires’.
With Emerson’s humanistic words and sentiments in mind, the ‘discipline’ of training and conformity as a means of acquiring a home in the current institutional arrangement of academe inevitably leads to a sense of belonging that comes at the expense of the individual. In such a world, discipline become a tautology: one’s means and end, and woe betide any person established in their discipline that is exposed to a new domain, or attempts to embark on a truly interdisciplinary pursuit.
Reference:
Emerson, R. W (1969) ‘Education’, in Selected prose and poetry, pp. 208–229. New York City: Holt Rinehart & Winston.
Originally published at anowmedia.com on November 2, 2018.
