So I have been thinking a lot about discipline. Not in the sense of punishment. Punishment is about an authoritative person or structure enforcing submission of someone who is subject to their power. There is probably a time and place for this type of discipline – such as in a functional accountability system – but it is easily distorted, and often perverted, by substituting “authoritarian” instead of “authoritative.” The line is easily crossed because it is imposed externally, the more powerful party over the less powerful. Plenty of other people have thought and written about this though. I am busy puzzling through a different sense of discipline – which emerges essentially the opposite way round.
I have been thinking about the sort of discipline that is motivated internally. It is discipline in the sense of submitting one’s self to an authoritative structure in order to gain agency. I am certainly not the first person to consider this sort of discipline either. Iris Murdoch, Matthew Crawford, Richard Sennett, and surely others have written about how, if you want to learn a language, a skilled trade, a musical instrument, or other such practices that already exist intact, you must first submit yourself to their authoritative structure. You have to learn their grammar, vocabulary, syntax, tools, techniques, frets, keys, or what have you. There is empowerment in doing so. The structure is what enables improvisation. But you have to submit yourself to the discipline before you can find possibilities to express yourself – or to become more yourself in the practice. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I started writing about this in an earlier posting on this blog, but it turned into a deep enough rabbit warren (no pun intended) to deserve it’s own post. In that earlier posting, I wrote about the sort of discipline that results in reshaping one’s hands to better accommodate playing the guitar – by playing guitars, a lot. And I have more to say about that. But first, Looney Tunes.
Cartoon Discipline
Chuck Jones talked about discipline in a way that I find unique and powerful. You may recognize his name from the credits of classic cartoons. He is listed as director on hundreds of iconic animated shorts – though he served as writer and/or producer for many of them as well. He also (co)created many iconic WB characters: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Wil E Coyote (and the Road Runner), Sylvester, Pepe, Porky, and dozens of others. He used the term “discipline” to describe a number of constraints put on the process of creating and producing an animated movie.
Some of the disciplines that Jones talked about were the constraints of practical realities of the medium and production model. Warner Bros. required segments to be exactly 6 minutes long, which meant attention had to be paid to every movement made by every character, every phoneme they uttered, every scene cut, etc. to get timing absolutely precise. Not a single frame (24 frames per second * 360 seconds = 8640 frames – or 540 feet of film) could be wasted. To tell a story in 540 feet, at 1.5 feet/sec, was a precise art, and few excelled at it like Jones. This is the external reality to which he had to submit himself. It was the discipline of animation at Warner Bros., 7-9 decades ago.
I do find this skill fascinating, because it seems like an impossible demand: tell an entire, compelling, and entertaining story in exactly 6.00 minutes – no more, no less. Yet, people do get good at meeting exacting demands like this all the time. Millions of commercials have been produced to fit precisely into 30 second, or 15 second, or 5 second advertising timeslots for broadcast television, radio, or YouTube. I’ve heard several producers of online content talk about having developed a sort of internal sense of the finished length of the content they are creating – while in the midst of creating it. And, like most teachers, I have developed an internal clock for class meetings. I am a bit fascinated at how adaptable we humans are to very precise timing demands like this. However, the more interesting part of Jones’s approach, to me, is how stories were produced within this context – the strategies they used to address the problem of the 6-minute constraint.
Jones and his creative team gave disciplines to themselves. They created rules and restrictions for themselves in addition to the strict 6-minute timeline. Some of these, like their team process, make intuitive sense and are consistent with other structures for fostering creative processes. He talked about holding team meetings (usually 2-hours long) that he called “jam sessions” or “yes” sessions. He was adamant these were not brainstorming sessions. They were not wide-open, anything-goes, idea generation meetings. Instead, a director and writer would already have met previously to generate an initial story idea and the writer would already have started storyboarding the idea. The Jam session was then meant to be focused on moving that idea forward. He said “Anything went, but only if it was positive, supportive, and affirmative to the premise”. Much like improv comedy, the jam session started with a premise and the foundational rule was you could not say “no” (in any of its various forms). If a director sensed an idea wasn’t working, they would end the meeting early, but they would not abandon an initial idea in favor of a new one at these sessions.
Anyone can say “no.” …It is a cheap word, because it requires no explanation, and many men and women have acquired a reputation for intelligence who know only this word and have used it in place of thought on every occasion. – Chuck Jones
So one of the disciplines of the jam session was that participants were restricted from saying “no”. However, when Jones described the session – especially when he differentiated it from a brainstorming session – I think he described a second discipline as well: the story must remain at the center of the discussion. It sounds to me like he was essentially saying the story was a third thing. Prior to the jam session, enough work was done on the story to give the group a focus for their discussion. Then the creative team worked to advance it. Thus, the fledgling story itself provided some boundaries and the creative team submitted itself to those restrictions. Within those bounds, anything went – but only within those bounds.
Other disciplines of Jones’s storytelling seem a bit counter-intuitive. Bugs Bunny never picks a fight. I hadn’t noticed that – until I started learning about Jones’s approach. The storylines of all the classics Bugs Bunny cartoons center on a battle he is having with Elmer, Wil E, Daffy, or someone else. But it is always a war that someone else provoked (“Of course you realize this means…”). That was a conscious choice by the writers – or, in Bugs’s case, it was a realization they came to as they explored his character – and it became a part of the discipline of storying Bugs Bunny. Bugs’s identity shows up for viewers because of that restriction. We know something about who he is – about his moral character – even if we were not conscious why. “We learned that it was very important that he be provoked, because otherwise he’d be a bully” said Jones.
Marvin the Martian has no mouth, yet he expresses emotion. In Looney Tunes cartoons, all dogs are professional – at least when they are on the clock, they are all business. There were rules and restrictions that governed the possible behavior of all characters before the storywriting started. Jones created too many characters to mention all of their disciplines – I don’t even know if most of that documentation still exists. The only one, in fact, that I have seen detailed fully happens to be for my favorite of his creations:
Rules/Restrictions for the Road Runner and Wil E Coyote:
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The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “beep-beep.”
- No outside force can harm the coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.
- The Coyote could stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “a fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” – George Santayana)
- No dialogue ever, except “beep-beep.”
- The Road Runner must stay on the road—otherwise logically, he would not be called a road runner.
- All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the Southwest American desert.
- All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme corporation.
- Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote’s greatest enemy.
- The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
The discipline of storying Wil E Coyote is complete with theoretical framework and citations (i.e., Santayana). I don’t know whether that is typical, but I think it is telling about the approach of the creator.
Reflecting on (and re-watching) the classic cartoons with this knowledge about the disciplines Chuck Jones applied to their creation casts new light on them for me. It doesn’t change my experience of them necessarily. But it does answer some questions I would not have thought to ask otherwise – like, how do I have the sense I know Bugs or Wil E when I have only ever seen them in 6-minute installments? Applying rules and disciplines seems to have allowed the writers to drill down to the essence of the characters. Without them, Jones said, “comedy slops over at the edges.” Without restrictions, he said, “Identity is lost.”
Finding Essence
Artists seem to get this. I don’t mean that it is unique to artists. But artists seem to do it – and talk about it – very naturally. The best artists I have known occasionally do a deep dive with an idea or new technique, methodically producing a series of works in which they vary one aspect at a time to learn its effect – and how to use it. The language they us is often “study” or “exploration”, but it seems to be the same orientation Jones calls disciplines. It is a type of reductionism, I suppose. However, unlike scientific reductionism, artists tend not to extract their studies from broader context – their is no sterile laboratory for isolating a single element from everything else. Instead artists tend to play with one element at a time, in situ. It is a way of finding new possibilities by giving themselves limitations. And it is a way artists discover who they are – it is the birthplace of an artists’ style (or perspective or point of view).
I heard the illustrator, Fred Lynch, talk about using this as a teaching method years ago. He gives his students an assignments to illustrate 88 apples. In a week. He said they usually leave class unperturbed the day he gives the assignment, but with each passing day, the looks he gets when he sees them around campus get angrier and angrier. Students don’t realize, at the beginning, that the first 25 or so are easy. And then they start to run out of ideas for different ways to draw an apple – so the next 25 get harder and harder. Then panic sets in as they realize they still have dozens more to go. But as they start grasping more and more frantically for ideas, their own sensibilities naturally start to take over – unbeknownst to them. They show up to class on the due date, sleep deprived and looking murderous. But as they start sharing their work for class critique, they – with the help of classmates – start to identify the unconscious patterns that characterize the unique aesthetic identity of that particular artist. It seems that each student’s own unique point of view, as an artist, surfaces naturally when they run out of other ideas – as though familiar habits, other people’s expectations, and everything else that is not their core self gets cleared out of the way.
An angry student once challenged Lynch about the 88 apples assignment, “have you ever done this yourself?” He hadn’t. And, perhaps a bit sheepishly, he recognized he probably should. However, instead of apples, the discipline he gave himself was to draw a series of coffee cups, with saucer, spoon, and sugar cube. The resulting collection is an extraordinary representation of the nuances of shape, texture, color, perspective, lighting, and all manner of other properties of an illustration.
I have stolen… borrowed these ideas as a teaching tactic a number of times: finding ways to push exploration and self-discovery by introducing restrictions. Some ways I have used this tactic are on the nose – I give assignments to generate a large number of something, to exhaust all the easy ideas and push students into more creative territory. But I’ve used disciplines/restrictions in other ways as well, such as requiring my students to come up with an episode title at the end of each class meeting.
Let me explain.
About 5 years ago, I was co-teaching a class with my friend, colleague – defacto sister – EBT (iykyk). It was one I had been teaching by myself for a while, being really intentional about refining the first night class presentation to set expectations for the semester and get things off to a constructive start. My classes have featured simultaneous in-person and online sections for more than 15 years, which has allowed the meetings to always be recorded as a convenience for students who miss a session. As we began planning our co-teaching semester, I heard myself suggesting EBT could watch the video recording of that introductory meeting from the previous semester “to see how I set things up.” I heard the pomposity too late. The words were already out of my mouth – and the smirk creeping across hers. She let me know what a #honor it would be to watch the first episode from last season. In so doing, she cemented our friendship – and also gave us the idea to refer to all of the class meetings as episodes. We titled episode 1, aptly, “The One Where Nate Talks All Night” and charged the class with naming the rest. We gave them the restriction that they had to follow the naming convention from the television show Friends (i.e., “The One Where…”). It was a sufficiently silly task that the students had a little fun with it at first. Then it was awkward for a couple of weeks as they realized – like Lynch’s students with their apples – that there was a whole list to compile. And then they got into it. By the end of the semester, almost everyone in the class commented, in their final papers, about how the episode naming gag had become one of the things that drew them together as a close-knit group. I have experimented with different ways to do this ever since – and it does not have the same identity-building effect when the requirements to stick to a naming convention are relaxed. The discipline of trying to encapsulate the salient events of the evening within the template of a naming convention brings the shared experience into clearer relief.
What these examples all have in common is a requirement for the people involved to submit themselves to rules/restrictions: tell a story that gets people to root for Bugs Bunny in a fight, but he cannot pick the fight; create 88 drawings, but they all have to be about apples; or come up with a phrase that encapsulates our class meeting, but it has to fit the naming conventions for episodes of a TV show. It is all about the buts. That’s where the discipline shows up. Using restrictions this way, I think, forces a person to get to the essence of a practice, the practitioners, and the interactions between them. Perhaps the discipline is a way of drilling down that unearths the essence. Or maybe it provides the contrast that brings it into relief – or focus. One way or another, with enough persistence, working with well-chosen disciplines reveals something essential about a thing. And that, I think, is how you come to understand it from the inside – how you get familiar with the standards internal to the task.
The idea that restriction can be liberating may seem paradoxical, but it is common to many human endeavors. It is the essence of Jazz. The musical structure of keys, scales, time signatures, etc. opens the possibility for individual musicians to improvise. Similarly, the 2-page limitation, demand to present work not yet completed, and tight control of session timing – including enforced silence of presenters – are among the reasons Settlage and Johnston cite for the power of their vexation & venture incubators. Palmer points to specific conditions, like the requirements for only open and honest questions and ban on offering solutions, as an essential ingredient for circles of trust. And the stubborn universality of Newton’s damned laws taught me to operate a front end loader. The list goes on. In fact, the quintessential human technology, language, is a restrictive form of expression. The phonemes used in any given language are a small subset of the possible vocalizations human beings are capable of making, yet all of the words of our shared language can be formed with those few phonemes. Together with other rules of grammar, the limitations create an authoritative structure the speaker of a certain language can use to achieve communication with other people – even to communicate or co-construct novel ideas.
In many of the examples I have given, disciplines also draw people together in genuine community.
But here is the thing: you have to be disciplined about the right things. Not any old rule will do. You need well-chosen restrictions. They have to open up the standards internal to the task, which means the task itself – or some essential facet of the task – has to be drawn-in to the center. Finding the right restriction(s) is the challenge. And it is one teachers often get wrong. When constructing assignments, teachers often focus too much on surface features rather than the essence of the thing their students are supposed to learn, which is a very effective way to foreclose wonder and exploration.
Consider an assignment to write a paper on some topic. Assignment guidelines often place restrictions on font-size/type, line-spacing, margins, etc. But these have nothing to do with the task of producing meaningful text. They are about presenting text, so are irrelevant until a writer has something meaningful to say. If anything, those kinds of restrictions draw attention away from the work and focus it, instead, on the container for the work. These types of requirements tend to punish thoughtful or innovative writing and reward well-packaged bullshit (a well-polished turd, as it were). They are not about the task of meaningful writing, so they cannot open up the standards internal to it.
Not all restrictions on the packaging of the final product distract from the essence of a task though. Limits on length can be a starting point to unearthing the essence of the task. Minimum limits stretch a person who does not yet have enough experience to realize the potential of their topic to gain a perspective to see the essence of what they are trying to do – as with illustration students drawing 88 apples. If you want a newcomer to a community of practice to find an identity for themselves – or a journeyman to re-discover who they are – set a minimum limit to stretch them beyond the easy stuff they already know to the point their natural inclinations come out in grasping for more ideas. On the other hand, if you want to push a person who is already knowledgeable into greater precision or elegance, set a maximum limit. Maximum limits force the person doing the work to focus more tightly on its essence – as with the rigid 6-minute time limit on Looney Tunes cartoons.
Discipline, submitting one’s self to an authoritative structure, even a self-imposed structure, is where agency is found – and, thereby, identity. Thus, it is a route to empowerment. But only if the rules and restrictions provide a structure on which one can build. Discipline opens possibility when it affords a reliable base or framework. However, if the rules and regulations serve more as container than framework – like the kind of discipline I said doesn’t interest me – then they foreclose possibility.