Discipline

[Ulrich Broeckling], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 17:30 - 18:00

Disciplining in order to fight is "hot" - it mobilizes, transgresses and fuels the passions. Disciplining in order to effectively use force is "cold" - it controls, regularizes, and curbs the affects. The mix ratio is changing and the history of military disciplining can be described as a change between rather "hot" and rather "cold" epochs. Ulrich Bröckling is talking in german but below you could read his lecture in english translation.

Military obedience is free or forced complicity through state-organized force. Soldiers kill and risk their lifes and thus protect a fundamental claim of the state: the right and the ability to wage war. The state power again executes on the soldier its fundamental right to dispose sovereignly of life and death of its citizens.

The single soldier counts for the army only in terms of the measure of his usefulness for the military mission. To discipline means to make fungible, means processing the "human material" for the purpose of increased fitness and deepening subjugation.

Soldiers are forced to balance subjectively the contradiction between the general forbiddance of force and the authority of force restricted to the state elements. They conduct actions on command that would result in severest punishment if done by any other member of the society.