Behind Discipline: Furies of Dogma

In my previous piece, I deciphered discipline beyond its popular portrayal. I reflected that we can be discerning and committed without being disciplined. Discipline imposes conduct driven by dominating narratives. It represses autonomy and heart-felt volition.

When I write of discipline, I mean discipline in all its pervasive forms — discipline as an approach, as a way of being and doing. Discipline as an an enforcer of authority, as a maintainer of control, as a rigid and dogmatic approach to knowledge.

In this piece, I look closer at the forces of subjugation behind discipline.

I call these forces “narrative-forces”. They actively exert pressures of hegemonic cultural narratives. They seek to compel and impel us — stoking certain impulses and stifling others. They are furies of dogma.

What is striking about these narrative-forces is that they act upon us at the most personal level. Their influence is inside-out, their effects overt. They closely affect our daily lived experience.

They (seek to) influence what we consider necessary, sensible, worthy and right. They weigh in on our reasoning, what we value and give priority to, what we legitimize and de-legitimize. They influence our desires and appetites, what we strive towards and what we disregard. They influence our relationship with our resources (including resources like time, energy and mental space). They color the way we see ourselves, others and the natural world.

They persuade, pursue and even persecute. They invoke unreal necessities, standards and “shoulds” that are religious in their righteous compulsion. Their imperatives spring from constructed (mis)perceptions; conceptions of reality that are literally mis-leading.

Michel Foucault, a political philosopher, studied discipline closely and found that its “power” operates differently from more obvious kinds of “power”. Its subjugation is more hidden, more surreptitious, but is immediate, local, everyday. He describes it as “the ongoing subjugation, continuous processes that subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors.”

I will make an observation here about Foucault calling it disciplinary “power”. Yes, you could say these forces wield power. But I will not call them power because I do not equate power in itself with control, authority and domination. Doing so would be a grave insult to power in all its beauty.

Rather, these forces act to usurp power, to block access to power, to dam its flow. They are forces of subjugation, of psycho-social dogma.They reflect, reinforce and enact cultural dogma.

These furies of dogma exercise formidable authority in our outer worlds, in collective cultures, spaces and discourses. Some dominate the larger collective. Some are more specific to community and class, a particular social sphere, or a micro-context like a school, college, or work-place, including more private spheres like a family or household.

They act upon us personally, even without an explicit external authority or institution.

These furies seek to dominate our inner world, mind and psyche. They are dependent on our inner constitution: the truth-assumptions and knowledge-constructs we have learned to carry, the state of our inner ecology and the strength of our psychic immunity.

Their persuasions and activations seek to hijack attention/energy, steer focus, manipulate emotions, and repress spirit/vitality.

Their nature, their methods and their lived effects are anti-sovereignty and anti-agency.

From this internal stronghold, they influence us and what we bring into the world. Conversely, from their stronghold of dominance in the outer collective, they exert their pressure upon our inner lives.

Jungian psychoanalyst and author Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes (in her classic work “Women Who Run With The Wolves”) about forces in a woman’s inner psyche that seek to control her and prey on her life force. They often represent negative forces in the surrounding culture.

Dr. Estés writes about “inquiring into the pressures created by each layer of the inner and outer worlds”. She writes, “The nature of negative complexes and cultures is to pounce upon any discrepancy between the consensus about what is acceptable behavior and the individual’s differing impulse.” Sounds like discipline.

Foucault studied disciplinary “power” in institutions like prisons, asylums and hospitals. He found that it makes individuals self-control and self-censor and abide by its norms seemingly by their own will.

He wrote that disciplinary “power” operates through a “tightly-knit grid of material coercions”. He was describing these networks of rigid norms that exert real influence on us socially and individually. Their coercions are “material” in the sense that they pressure to materialize in the outer world.

In fact, Foucault observed that discipline maintains local mechanisms of control, surveillance, and exclusion. He argued that larger conglomerations of “power” (he gave the example of global capitalism) take advantage of these ground-level processes of control for their own ends.

This is not to dismiss the ongoing effects of more visible and external forms of domination and control such as the impacts of structures, authorities, systems, technologies, entities, laws and governments.

It is to identify these hidden and supremely effective forces of subjugation. To engage with them at the point of their personal influence.

Simultaneously, it is to connect them with cultures and histories of repression, manipulation and control. To see how these furies embody psycho-social dogma that is age-old and present-day.

We need to grasp these furies in themselves, in their unique, specific avatars. In their ongoing, personal persuasions, their moment-to-moment, everyday activations. Simultaneously, we need to recognize them as an integral part of collective socio-politico-ecological issues.

To understand that what is taking place in the outer world is inextricably connected with what is taking place in our inner worlds. To meet these furies with discernment, continuous engagement and conscious resistance. Otherwise, their impulsions continue to manifest through us — both as individuals and as collectives — and perpetuate hazardous realities.

The idea is not to blame, denigrate, or chastise ourselves. Quite the opposite.

It is to reach for heart-led sovereignty and vital agency.

****************************************************************

References

1. Michel Foucault, Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, 1980
2. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, “Women Who Run With The Wolves”, 2008 edition