Dear Don,
what you describe is what Foucault would call discursive formations – the coming together of certain 
regimes of truth in particular historical moments and under certain social conditions. Discourses 
comprise social practices of power-knowledge, which necessarily implicate gender and other social 
categories. As the word suggests, disciplines DISCIPLINE people in the production of compliant 
subjects who perform in particular positions (gendered, aged, abled, classed, raced, etc.) and 
particular ways (practices) to maintain the existing institutional power dynamic. 

Scientific method cannot measure the emergence of disciplinary formations because of the 
complexity and this can only happen in retrospect (it cannot be predicted). However, genealogical 
techniques such as those Foucault used, while time consuming, might be useful. Marcio's graphic 
design history is just one of many possible interpretations of how a discursive formation of graphic 
design might be constructed – it reflects and at the same time reproduces disciplinary practices of 
citation. What is interesting in examining this construction is not what it includes, but what it omits 
and HOW it omits – not why is (something) omitted (this is a cause–effect kind of question). HOW 
such a construction omits is the kind of question that might excavate disciplinary power-knowledge 
(gatekeeping) practices.

I see scholarship as professional design practice. Bill Green's take on professional practice is that 
the focus is often on the word that precedes practice, in this case, DESIGN, which is where most 
debates are centred (what is design, rather than what is practice). It's worth a look at Green – my 
own thesis argues for the acknowledgement that design scholarship IS a professional practice (of 
design), just a different kind of professional practice than what we know by this name. This goes a 
little way towards disrupting the practice–theory binary which is a popular topic on this list and 
elsewhere that merely reinforces the binary and maintains the power-knowledge relations that 
discipline subjects to be one or the other when, as my study will show, it's not that simple. The same 
goes for the design as art/science debate. 

The institutional requirement for specialisation is thus a discursive production of certain kinds of 
what Foucault calls docile bodies (and what Grosz critiques as volatile bodies) – in fact, as readers of 
de Certeau will know, people practice micro-resistances in their everyday lives within oppressive 
regimes – that is, they reinterpret the practices of the dominant regime within their own meaning-
making systems. Disciplinary discourses are unfixed, unstable and require constant reproduction, 
which means they are also subject to change. Which is where discursive ruptures come into the 
frey, what may be called paradigm shifts in science. A topic for another day.

To illustrate, the practice of referencing is a technology of discipline – it legitimises my claim to 
'truth' while legitimising me as a knowing subject (of discipline).

cheers, teena

de Certeau, M. 1984, The practice of everyday life, trans. S.F. Rendall, University of California 
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Foucault, M. 1977, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, trans. A. Sheridan, London, Allen 
Lane.

Green, B. (2009), Understanding and Researching Professional Practice, Rotterdam: Sense 
Publishers.

Grosz, E. 1994, Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 
and Indianapolis.

> 5. The emergence of narrow specialties
> 
> As the body of knowledge in science increases, it gets more and more
> difficult to keep up with the entire filed. Moreover, more and more
> specialized knowledge and skills are required to understand, follow,
> and add to the ever-increasing body of knowledge. As a result, science
> becomes more and more specialized.
> 
> The filed is divided up into an increasing number of disciplines, each
> some subset of previous disciplines. Periodically there is a cry for
> multi-disciplinary research, and people across disciplines get
> together and discover that the combination of their fields yields new
> insights and advances in understanding. This attracts more people to
> the domain, more funding for research, and more students eager to
> explore the new area. As a result, this new interdisciplinary field
> becomes codified as a discipline. In a few decades, it will be as
> established as any of the older disciplines, and the younger workers
> will start crying out for the need for multi-disciplinary research.
> 
> This disease actually impacts much of the university, not just
> science. The push toward ultra-specialization is aided by the
> promotion polices of universities that increasingly want evidence that
> the faculty are the top workers in the field. This is measured through
> publication in peer-reviewed venues and by letters from other
> international authorities. But each authority only knows the workers
> in their own sub discipline. The person who publishes in several
> disciplines is apt to get lost, for each judge states that they barely
> know the person, or that there have been only a few publications, for
> they are unaware of all the work done in disciplines they themselves
> do not follow.
> 
> Design is one of the few exceptions to this rule. Design is a
> practice, and practices must cut across disciplines, using the
> knowledge, methods, and findings of multiple disciplines in order to
> create valuable and useful artifacts.  Great designers are
> generalists, knowing a little about many different topics.