I’ve just finished reading Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, and I highly recommend it. It is self-described as “a practical guide” to creativity, and so it is: a lovely combination of philosophy and accessibility offering down-to-earth, pragmatic advice for those who want to be more productive in their creative pursuits. As she says early on in the book, “I will keep stressing the point about creativity being augmented by routine and habit. Get used to it.”
Not surprisingly, then, one of the key terms for Tharp, is discipline. It pops up repeatedly throughout the book. She notes in her introduction, for instance, that
After so many years, I’ve learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That’s why writers, for example, establish routines for themselves. The most productive ones get started early in the morning, when the world is quiet, the phones aren’t ringing, and their minds are rested, alert, and not yet polluted by other people’s words. They might set a goal for themselves — write 1500 words, or stay at their desk until noon — but the real secret is they do this every day. In other words, they are disciplined. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit.
Over the course of the book, Tharp argues that “Whatever scope and grandeur you attach to Mozart’s musical gift, his so-called genius, his discipline and work ethic were its equal”; references “a serious and disciplined student often described by her teachers as lacking creativity”; argues that reading “is how you keep your mind disciplined”; contends that the greatest athletes and artists “practice harder, longer, and better than their rivals . . . [and] extend that discipline to the most basic elements of their craft”; suggests that “Discipline goes hand in hand with perseverance”; and concludes by stating that “there’s an ur-skill [for creativity] that I don’t even feel obliged to list. That, dear reader, is discipline. Everyone needs it. No explanation required.”
But discipline is one of those keywords whose richness and value are not that it points at some single, stable idea -- no explanation required -- but rather at a cluster of related but complex, unstable, evolving, sometimes contradictory ideas, alternative readings I feel compelled to explore and articulate here.
For Tharp, the primary meaning of discipline is a willingness, ability, and dedication to simply suit up, show up, keep our noses to the grindstone, and just do the damn work, repeatedly, over the long haul, until it becomes “second nature,” a habit. I have no problem with that, not in the least. I agree 100%.
But if we look a little closer, poke a little harder, discipline begins to slide into notions of drudgery, of dutiful acquiescence to some institutional role, but with no sense of play or joy (Tharp’s disciplined student lacking creativity, for instance). A deeper consideration of discipline also leads to questions of control and repression, to efforts to rein in unruly and unauthorized thoughts and impulses and cordon them off into officially sanctioned channels (as in Tharp’s assertion that reading disciplines our minds).
Indeed, discipline for me always moves quickly toward the idea of strict adherence to the rules of behavior – like military discipline – to obeying authority figures or receiving sometimes considerable punishment if we don’t. I might fault someone for not disciplining their dog, for instance. Likewise, as the father of autistic child (now a grown man), I heard on more than one occasion that what children like my son need “is a just healthy dose of discipline,” that is, corporal punishment to bring them in line. Such an understanding of discipline leads directly to Foucault’s famous construction of discipline as a “project of docility,” a combination of techniques used in prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, and the like since the eighteenth century that makes possible the meticulous control of a person’s actions, assures their constant subjection, and establishes within them “the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.”
Along these lines, as a college professor, I live and work in an academic discipline within an institution comprised of many other disciplines. Discipline here means an academic field/profession/community, some united group involved in some collectively constructed endeavor, one that exists precisely because of its power to encourage (if not coerce) individual efforts toward uniformity, consistency, and standardization. An area of intellectual or scientific inquiry does not become a discipline until agreement is reached on its proper and distinctive research methods – its obvious, coherent, validated, and policed ways of making knowledge – ways which up until very recently were entirely masculinist in their origins and operations (and still mostly are).
Being part of an academic discipline involves “being disciplined,” that is, in learning about and abiding by the specific sets of phenomena the discipline is authorized to study, its characteristic assumptions, theories, modes of inquiry, and restrictions, its distinctive sets of canonized texts, etc. Discipline, in this sense, is a rigorous and inescapable narrowing of one’s interests, energies, and efforts. If we join a discipline, our knowledge may get deeper, but the world gets much, much smaller. Disciplines fragment the world, carve our experience and understanding into smaller and smaller slices, until we can no longer see the forest for the trees, which is why so much of contemporary academic work is struggling to evolve toward cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, or transdisciplinary research and knowledge-making.
In short, there are all sorts of meanings of discipline that strike me as simply toxic for creativity as I currently understand it.
Moreover, in writing this essay, I have realized that if I am going to teach a course about “creativity as a transdiscipline” – and I am, the course starts in just over a month – I must address at least two meanings of trans- in transdiscipline: 1) that trans- means “across,” that creativity spans across multiple disciplines, that it applies to more than one discipline (which is Tharp’s point continually, one I agree with wholeheartedly and want to impress upon my students); 2) that trans- means “beyond,” that creativity goes beyond discipline or disciplines or disciplining, that it leaves these behind in some way or ways I have not yet fully considered.
I will conclude here by offering my current understanding of discipline, one I think aligns productively with creativity. When I was younger, I heard in church about the “gentle yoke” of Christianity, the idea that we can/should submit ourselves to the discipline and disciplining that comes with being devout, with the implicit promise of the benefits that would come from such a submission in this life and the next (but mostly in the next). I have heard about the gentle yoke more than once in recovery circles as well, the idea that people in recovery can/should choose to submit themselves to the discipline – to the gentle yoke – of their 12 Step programs, etc., with the overt promise of the benefits that would come from such a submission, which were highly focused in this life. Indeed, the benefits of allowing myself to be disciplined in this way would play out over the next 24 hours of my sobriety, through my reprieve from killing myself with drugs and alcohol.
But I chafe at the idea of the gentle yoke. I don’t like being invoked as a draft animal in someone else's thrall, as a subservient supplying someone or something else's power. Thankfully, however, my little time in church offered me a different metaphor to work with: the Disciples. The Disciples, I realized, followed a discipline. (Seems obvious, right?) A discipline, in this sense, is a way of being in the world, one that affords you certain powers and pleasures, but one the requires of you certain commitments and sacrifices. Creativity, too, then, is a way of being in the world, one that affords me certain powers and pleasures, but one that requires of me certain commitments and sacrifices. If I want the former, I must embrace the latter, too. I can’t have one without the other. This is the dynamic, the exchange, the idea of discipline that I can embrace, that can stand at the core, serve as the root of my sobriety and my music alike.