Contenu du sommaire : Disciplines / Indisciplines

Young Franklin's rebellious emancipation from tyrannical rule, as narrated in the Autobiography, will only lead to success if accompanied by the rigorous discipline exemplified in the famous « Art of Virtue » supposed to help the subject keep his anarchical impulses in check. This blueprint for Republican ethics, though meant for personal improvement, might also aim at controlling the indocile masses the Revolution has unleashed. However, the handbook of discipline and its ivory tablets from which any trace of unruliness can be erased could rather be regarded as a democratic art for the typographical as well as theatrical invention of the self.

This article examines 1890s Populism through the analysis of print culture, photographs and cartoons. It explores how representations of “the people” and “the mob” became disputed territory and how the people were reframed as unfit to exercise their sovereignty. Populist intellectuals sought to educate “mobs” and transform them into an enlightened “people” while popular mobilization produced a conservative reaction which reduced the people to a violent and ignorant crowd to be controlled and studied.

After it first came to Broadway in 1975, A Chorus Line became a cultural phenomenon, whose success spanned fifteen years, and one of the most common examples of the then-recent subgenre of the concept musical that emerged towards the end of the 1960s. Michael Bennett's choreography and direction moved A Chorus Line away from the classical integrated form, all the while maintaining the codes of the “backstage musical.” A Chorus Line stages the disciplinary processes and regulatory norms to which the dancers are submitted throughout the audition process. Distinguishing between female and male bodies might seem contradictory with the musical's project, since the main goal of A Chorus Line's narrative thread is to recruit a chorus that will perform as a unified ensemble, in which male and female dancers ultimately dissolve. However, the musical performs a certain number of disciplinary practices specific to female bodies: only female characters express a sense of inadaptation to the act of performing. The disciplinary process performed on the bodies often punishes the nonconform body, whereas the musical seems to celebrate the female body that resists essentialization and asserts its individuality. A Chorus Line's twofold project, which both unleashes the dancers' individualities and rigorously follows the discipline necessary to a chorus, offers a critical perspective on spectacle–but only to a certain extent: as much as it shows us the artificial nature of any performance, the play seems to produce an ideal “body-spectacle” that transcends gender norms but conforms to the normative process of spectacle.

Often considered as an incomplete opera, Moses und Aron stages an infinite number of complex modalities of loss and failure regarding the logos as it problematizes the notion of language on musical, philosophical and theological grounds. The complexity of the opera also lies in its musical structure that paradoxically breaks away from the principles of serialism, which Schönberg had himself settled as founding traits of composition. This article tries to demonstrate how the opera means to be an infinite mise en abyme of discipline and of indiscipline, and how it follows a certain exegetic American tradition.