The first part of my examination is entitled "The
transcendence of discipline" and the second, "The
discipline of immanence".
Since the Greeks, that is, for at least about
2500 years, there has been a classification of
disciplines to determine what is knowledge, what is
science, what is "epistêmê":
. With Plato in his Academy, there were geometry,
philosophy, dialectics, ethics, and music (poetry) for
the soul and gymnastics for the body.
. With Aristotle, there were also dialectics and ethics,
plus rhetoric and poetics, as well as a kind of biology,
physics, metaphysics, and logic.
. In the Middle Ages, when Scholasticism dominated the
University, there were the forum or the symposium of the
seven Liberal Arts, with the trivium (grammar, rhetoric,
dialectics) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy,
geometry, music); with the exception of music, one
basically differentiated between Arts and Sciences,
Language and Mathematics, or letters and numbers.
. Later, with Francis Bacon, one had a "classification of
sciences for the purpose of a propaedeutic guaranteed by
the State" [or translation of Eric Porge. Les noms du
père chez Jacques Lacan].
. With the XVIIth century, after Leibniz, who has the
reputation of being the last man to have known every
discipline, we have had the fragmentation of knowledge
and an increase in the number of disciplines.
. After, in Germany, in the age of the Aufklärung, from
Kant to Hegel and Humboldt, there emerged the doctrine of
faculties, where parts of the soul corresponded to parts
of the university.
. Finally, in the XIXth century, a few other
classifications:
- With André Marie Ampère, there were two domains,
the cosmological sciences and the noological sciences;
these were further subdivided into four subdomains, eight
branches, sixteen subbranches, thirty-two first-order
sciences, sixty-four second-order sciences and one
hundred and twenty-eight third-order sciences [see Patrick
Tort. La raison classificatoire].
- With Auguste Comte, classification principles
shifted from inorganic physics (astronomy, physics,
chemistry) to organic physics (physiology and social
physiology), that is from general and abstract or simple
and impersonal to the particular and concrete or to the
complex and personal [see Tort, p. 277].
- Partially following Comte, but with the inversion
of the pyramid of being, Herbert Spencer moved from logic
and mathematics (abstract sciences) to astronomy,
geology, biology, psychology and sociology (concrete
sciences), as well as mechanics, physics and chemistry
(which are both abstract and concrete sciences) [see
Tort, p. 352]. More precisely, abstract sciences include:
logic, geometry of position, indefinite calculus,
definite calculus (arithmetic, algebra, calculus of
operations), geometry, cinematics, geometry of movement;
sciences classified as being abstract and/or concrete
include: sideral astronomy and planetary astronomy,
astrogeny (solar mineralogy, solar meteorology), geogeny
(mineralogy, meteorology, geology), biology (morphology,
physiology), psychology and sociology, in a system of
sciences where society is like a biological organism in
evolution and with no discontinuity [see Tort, p. 381-383].
All of these classifications are based on a
theological, metaphysical, mathematical, physical or
biological doctrine (from "docere": teaching) and its
dogmas (or its dogmatic of doctrinal points) and they are
not necessarily realized in university disciplines: there
is no confusion between discipline and science or
philosophy. These disciplines are now embodied in
departments, faculties, universities or other post-secondary schools.
From an epistemological point of view, a science can be
defined by its object; but, this is not the case
with a discipline. With a discipline, if it is a matter of field
or domain
(corpus) -- like French Studies, German or Russian
Studies, Literary Studies, Film Studies, Canadian
Studies, Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, Women's
Studies, History or Humanities and Social Sciences --, it
is basically an institutional classification, from a
spectacular or transcendent point of view for academic
and administrative reasons or purposes. These purposes
are ideological, political and economic or historical and
social ones, and involve work, jobs, professions,
faculty, labor unions, the establishement, social
classes, etc. In this way, the discipline of (by) the
institution leads to the institution of (for) the
discipline, to its institutionalization: the
transcendence of discipline (or religion) inverts itself
in the discipline of transcendence, in the "religion of
transcendence" [see Marcel Gauchet. Le désenchantement du
monde, p. 68] -- into indoctrination!...
SECOND PART: The discipline of immanence
If one exchanges the thematic and historical point
of view for a methodological one, one is able to distinguish between
a discipline (or disciplines) and
discipline as a framework for thought, and maybe substitute the latter for
the
former.
When I began to work on this topic last fall, I
was surprised to discover, in a good dictionary like Le
Petit Robert 1, that "discipline" (from latin
"disciplina") meant in the year 1080: "punishment",
"devastation", "pain"; in the XIVth century, it was a
whip designed to flagellate or mortify oneself; from
that, it became, in the XVIth century, "instruction",
"moral direction or influence" and, later, a "rule of
behaviour"; by 1409, one has our modern definition of a
discipline as a "branch of knowledge". But, like Jim MacLean indicated to
me, these last three definitions are already true for Classical Latin,
Latin
being the university language until the XVIIth century.
So, discipline means method implying some kind of
authority for or in didactics or pedagogy. From there,
using method as a propaedeutic (from "paideuien":
teaching) for learning and teaching, studying and
searching for; being more disciplined than disciplinary
without changing students into disciples...
At the same time, with method -- and there is no
difference between method and theory, both being a matter
of concepts and style --, we can cross-check an
epistemological point of view and a methodological one:
for Louis Hjelmslev, the founder, with Hugo Brondal, of
the Linguistic School of Copenhagen called glossematics,
the object is conceived as the intersection of a network
of relations or connections. Going further, it could be
possible to establish programs which are not based on
thematic topics or disciplines but on problems, a problem
being defined as an intersection of objects; going even
further, a problematics could be characterized as an
intersection of problems, and a university (or a faculty
putting together Arts and Sciences) as an intersection of
problematics.
If, from a diachronic point of view as Michel
Serres pointed out, one can distinguish three major steps
in technical history: writing, printing, surfing the
Internet; from a synchronic point of view, one has
particular or objective sciences: hard and soft sciences,
natural and artificial sciences, pure and applied
sciences, humanities and social sciences, arts and
techniques. But those particular or objective sciences,
anaphorical or shifted-out ones, are not goals (like
truth); they are tools (like knowledge) for larger issues
in the framework of a general science of the human being,
a subjective science -- "subjective", or deictic
(shifted-in), meaning here that this is a theory of the
subject as radical immanence; a theory based on grammar
(such as linguistics and semiotics) and metapsychology
(such as phenomenology or psychoanalysis). This theory
could be well considered the base for psychology,
sociology, ethnology, anthropology and so on through to
history and to biology. In a paradoxical manner or way,
the objective sciences are human, too human; the
subjective science is not human enough, almost natural --
man being a shifted animal... The subjective science is
to the objective sciences what passion is to action,
imagination to reason, or affect to representation.
At the level of particular sciences, we can talk
of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity or
multidisciplinarity; but at the level of a general
science, one must talk about transdisciplinarity (which is
not transcendent but transcendental). This general and
radical science is still an ideal -- maybe an impossible
one --; it is not a new organon; but, perhaps this is the
only place where one can talk about the immanence of a
discipline that it exists on the bordelines of the
institution. Despite the fact that some might question
the principle of immanence, the immanence (what is
transcendental) is to transcendence what time is to
space, what absolute is to relative [see Gauchet].
This principle is also a theoretical principle of
classification and hierarchical organization or a double
principle: a metaphorical principle of resemblance and a
metonymical principle of descent or genealogy [see Kant
and Tort], metaphor being to metonymy what paradigm is to
syntagm, what condensation is to transfer, what
schizophrenia is to paranoia... In one last word, the
question "What is a discipline?" presupposes a deeper
one: "What is a taxonomy?" or "What is the principle of
classification of a taxonomy or of a nomenclature?"
JML/February 15th, 2000