Another take on the notion of 'discipline'

We've been talking about academic disciplines, about the space between them, about how they might be constructively merged or usefully kept separate. But there are other ways to conceive of a discipline, as Lewis Hyde does in his book, Trickster Makes this World. I want to quote him at length:

Popular conceptions of [John] Cage tend not to see that for him chance operations were a spiritual practice, a discipline. One kind of courting of chance is exactly the opposite of discipline, of course - the young person putting herself at risk, the gambler on a spree, the speculator playing with a relative's money. Cage was a playful man, but these are not his uses of chance, as he himself struggled to make clear. In recommending non-intention, he once explained, "I'm not saying, 'Do  whatever you like,' and that's precisely what some people now think I'm saying...The freedoms I've given in [a musical score] have not been given to permit just anything that one wants to do, but have been invitations for people to free themselves from their likes and dislikes, and to discipline themselves."

In many ways, the discipline Cage recommended was as stringent as that of any monk on a month-long meditation retreat. He asked that intention be thwarted rigorously, not occasionally or whimsically. he worked hard at chance. He would literally spend months tossing coins and working with the I Ching to construct a score. It took so much time, he would toss coins as he rode on the New York subway to see friends. One famous piece lasted less than five minutes but it took him four years to write. And when the piece was finished, it was not meant to be an occasion for improvisation; it was meant to be played within the constraints chance had determined. "The highest discipline is the discipline of chance operations...The person is being disciplined, not the work." The person is being disciplined away from ego's habitual attitudes and toward a fundamental change of consciousness. This is Cage's version of Duchamp's "forgetting the hand" (142-43).

So perhaps another thing that interdisciplinarity does is diminish the power a discipline holds over us. It maybe our constant want to be free that ("to do whatever you like") that drives us toward interdisciplinarity, and our reluctance to "be disciplined" that drives us from our aesthetic or technical homes.