While common usage treats discipline as simply a branch of knowledge or field of study, critical approaches in the sociology of knowledge stress the dimensions of power in the concept of discipline. Disciplines, as a part of discourse, are regimens, rules, procedures which are part of the conditions for the production of knowledges — they enable or power the production of knowledge. With such a definition attention is directed as much to the structure as the content of knowledge, to bodies of knowledge which are located in history and in social practices as much as in the object of knowledge. For Foucault in his later work discipline is a technology of power located in attitudes towards the body and related to the constitution of subjectivity — what it is to be a subject in society.
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by Michael Shanks
Wed Jan 24/2007 23:02