In the spirit of thinking outside the box, and simply adding another  
voice to the cacophony, I offer this take on discipline, fields, and  
power:

In a discussion of how Michel Foucault conceptualized power in  
contemporary democratic liberalism (as having gone away from the  
power of "the prince" to take life, and toward the power of "the  
state apparatus" to manage life), I wrote the passage pasted below in  
my dissertation (from Chapter 6).  Looking back on it, I would  
summarize by saying that Foucault's notion of discipline incorporated  
both the teaching-learning/master-pupil valence (especially in the  
sense of an internalization of 'lessons'), and the expert-led or  
defined silos-of-knowledge valence (classifications and the  
subsequent creation of certain subjectivities), to talk about how  
liberal democratic forms of order and hierarchy are formed and  
maintained through, and, actually, even dependent upon, the rubrics  
of freedom, knowledge, individuality, progress, etc.  In other words,  
to actually govern the 'free', one must become an administrator of  
'freedom' as a lived concept.

In the previous chapter of my dissertation, I discuss Pierre  
Bourdieu's ideas and use them in an analysis of the symbolic capital  
of creativity in the field of design.  In one section I discuss  
Bourdieu's notion of 'taste' and how it actively generates a  
misrecognition of class domination while it legitimizes the  
principles of hierarchization that 'justify' domination.  In other  
words, the field of design, in a Bourdieuvin sense, is a field of  
symbolic power, where the symbolic capitals of innovation,  
creativity, multidisciplinarity, etc., are deployed in a strategy of  
position taking, or the establishment of distinction within the field  
(which is, of course, in flux, and crucially connected to other  
fields of symbolic capital also in flux - like architecture, the  
media, the economy, politics, etc.)

Combining Foucault's take on discipline with Bourdieu's notion of the  
field of symbolic power (both woefully under-explained here) I argue  
in my dissertation that in contemporary 'globalization', design is a  
central field of symbolic power, vitally connected to other fields of  
symbolic power, and actively working to win the struggle to  
legitimately define the social world in designerly terms, and thus  
transform the way in which a 'freedom' is administered.  The  
following quote from Bourdieu could be understood to explain this  
further if one keeps in mind that designers are, among other things,  
"specialists in symbolic production":

the different classes and class fractions are engaged in a symbolic  
struggle
properly speaking, one aimed at imposing the definition of the social  
world that is
best suited to their interests... These classes can engage in this  
struggle either
directly, in the symbolic conflicts of everyday life, or else by  
proxy, via the
struggle between the different specialists in symbolic production  
(full-time
producers), a struggle over the monopoly of legitimate symbolic  
violence (cf.
Weber), that is, of the power to impose (or even to inculcate) the  
arbitrary
instruments of knowledge and expression (taxonomies) of social  
reality – but
instruments whose arbitrary nature is not realized as such.  The  
field of symbolic
production is a microcosm of the symbolic struggle between classes;  
it is by
serving their own interests in the struggle within the field of  
production (and only
to this extent) that producers serve the interests of groups outside  
the field of
production. [Bourdieu 1991:167-168]



  From Chapter 6, "Design as Discipline" in Milestone, Juris.  2007.   
Universities, Cities, Design, and Development: An Anthropology of  
Aesthetic Expertise.  Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology,  
Temple University.

Foucault therefore offers the notion of ‘disciplinary power’, which  
“is quite different
from and more complicated, dense and pervasive than a set of laws or  
a state apparatus”
(Foucault 1980b:158).  This power
is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of  
sovereignty, but of
distributing the living in the domain of value and utility.  Such a  
power has to
qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchize, rather than display  
itself in its
murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates  
the enemies
  of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects  
distributions around the
norm. [Foucault 1990:144]

It was this kind of conceptualization of power, as a technology of  
classification and
legitimization, which Foucault and others have so effectively used to  
show how power actually
works through (and lives in) the delineation of the individual  
subject (see Foucault 1982, 1990),
through the production of discourses like “public health” and  
“empowerment” (see Cruikshank
1994), or “experience” (Joan Scott 1992), and through the regulatory  
control and organization of
populations (Shore and Wright 1997).
To look at power in this way, as “disciplines” that bring together,  
“technical capacities,
the game of communications, and the relationships of power”, is to  
look beyond all of these
things toward “power relations” (Foucault 1982:219).  Power “is a way  
in which certain actions
modify others... an action upon action, on existing actions or on  
those which may arise in the
present or the future” (Foucault 1982:220).  Therefore, power is not  
the forcing of someone’s
hand or the use of force against another, but instead it is “a total  
structure of actions brought to
bear upon possible actions... a way of acting upon an acting subject  
by virtue of their acting or
being capable of action” (Foucault 1982:220).  In other words, “power  
is exercised only over
free subjects, and only in so far as they are free” (Foucault  
1982:221).  This is the conceptual
basis of Foucault’s notions of governmentality.  This creation of  
‘discipline’ (in both senses of
the word as intellectual field and as self control) is necessary for  
the effective governing of
populations in modernity.

 From Chapter 5, "Design as Commodity" in Milestone, Juris.  2007.   
Universities, Cities, Design, and Development: An Anthropology of  
Aesthetic Expertise.  Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology,  
Temple University.

For Bourdieu power is really just the
possession and ability to efficiently mobilize symbolic capital;
The field of power is the space of relations of force between agents  
or between
institutions having in common the possession of the capital necessary  
to occupy
the dominant positions in different fields (notably economic or  
cultural)”
[Bourdieu 1996:215]
These same relations of force are in action in any field.  It is
a power of constituting the given through utterances, of making  
people see and
believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and,  
thereby, action
on the world and thus the world itself [Bourdieu 1991:170]
However, Bourdieu contends, this power must remain unrecognizable,  
and it does this by being
“misrecognized as arbitrary” (Bourdieu 1991:170).  What this means is  
that belief in the ‘truth’
value of any declaration depends on who says it (their authority to  
judge) and on how well it
actually coheres to ‘reality’ (or appears to be un-opinionated),  
which makes the successful
constitution, or construction of an explanation of reality of utmost  
importance.


Juris Milestone, Ph.D.
Department of Anthropology
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA


On Sep 30, 2007, at 7:00 AM, Popowsky wrote:

> To the list members,
>
> Discipline is expert-led .
> It is a term used
> to point at/ or refer to
> an expert-led action.
> Kung Fu is a discipline.
>
> Field is a term used - see Bourdieu [Pierre]-
> to define / to circumscribe a common ground
> resulting of the conjunction
> of different/various disciplines.
> Martial Arts, the conjunction of various martial disciplines,
> is a field.
>
> According to Bourdieu, a field has
> an added symbolic value.
>
> If Design is a field ["the field of design"],it is
> because different/various expert-led disciplines
> conjoin and create a common ground.
>
> This "common ground" should have
> an added symbolic value. Which is it?
>
> Dr. Michal Popowsky
> Betsalel Academy of Arts and Design
> History and Theory Dept.
> Jerusalem