From the perspective of pedagogy and educational research, practices of disciplining in schools are fundamentally problematized. Three reasons are especially prominent: Firstly, reproaching and punishing pupils contradict pedagogical ideals of participation and autonomy and damages the working and learning alliance between teachers and pupils (Marshall 1984). Secondly, by spending too much time on extracurricular problems, disciplinary practices run counter to the idea of effective classroom management (Evertson 1994). Thirdly, disciplinary practices reproduce inequality along the categories of class, race, gender and disability: As empirical studies show, not all pupils are disciplined equally, but mainly marginalised groups, stigmatising them as deviants (Morris/Perry 2017; Coles/Powell 2020; Camacho/Krezmien 2020). Against this background, the question arises as to why practices of discipline continue to have such great significance in schools. Based on the results of our ethnographic and videographic research at a German school, the paper aims to understand the inner logic of disciplinary practices. Drawing on Judith Butler's notions of subjectification and performativity, we aim to show how classroom discipline both stabilises and destabilises pedagogical authority through the production of certain kinds of subjects. This shift in perspective brings into view how the subjectification of teachers and pupils intertwine and how both are fundamentally dependent on the recognition of the other.

The presented study on disciplinary practices is part of the ethnographic research project ‘The linguistic Character of Recognition’ [Sprachlichkeit der Anerkennung] that aims to shed light on the implications and relevance of recognition in specific school and classroom practices (Ricken et al. 2017). Following Judith Butler, we understand recognition as a medium of subjectification and thus assume that individuals only become subjects when they are recognised and become recognisable within social categories such as 'women', 'scientists' or 'migrants' (Butler 2004; 2009). Against this theoretical background, we propose to make the process of subjectification empirically accessible as an interplay of addresses. In contrast to the labelling approach, we argue that not only the act of labelling, but the interplay of addresses and responses needs to be analysed to understand how subjectivity is produced in interaction (compare also Youdell 2006).

In the analysis of classroom interaction in three classes of a German high school (Gymnasium), we investigated disciplinary practices as an interplay of address and response. The focus lies on the following questions: How exactly is a reproach, a threat or a moralisation verbally and bodily performed? In what way are power relations and normative orders (re-)established or become fragile? How are pupils placed in relation to the order, to their peers and to themselves, and how do they position themselves in their responses? How do teachers emerge as particular teachers in the interaction? The results of our study show that certain pupils are marked as deviants in the interaction, but are partly resistant in their reactions. By pointing out that their recognition of the teacher's authority is always conditional and thus bound by norms such as equality and care, pupils put pressure on teachers to prove themselves as ‘pedagogical selves’ (Jergus/Thompson 2017). In this perspective, the focus is not one-sidedly on the subjugation of pupils or on their resistance (Willis 1978), but on the fragile process of establishing pedagogical authority in interactions (Thompson 2010). This enables us to understand both the powerful effects of discipline on pupils and the underlying structural challenges for teachers.

The data was collected during an 18-month ethnographic field stay at a German school. More than 90 hours of video were recorded and ethnographic field notes were taken. Based on the videos, transcripts of verbal communication were made, and non-verbal communication was captured in textual descriptions and video stills. Within the framework of our research project, we have developed a qualitative research method which we have termed ‘Analysis of Address’ (Ricken et al. 2017). Its aim is to reconstruct practices of addressing as powerful acts of producing subjectivity. Individual acts of addressing thus become legible as a verbalized expectation to understand oneself in a certain way and to relate to normative orders and to others. In a next step, the responses to this addressing are analysed and interpreted in their interplay. This procedure, sequence by sequence, is close to the procedure of conversation analysis (Levine 2010). However, we analyse not only the formal organisation of interaction, but how norms, knowledge, power relations and subjectivity are generated in interaction (also compare Davies 2008).

The aim of our qualitative empirical research is to develop a theory that is grounded in empirical data. We want to understand what role disciplinary practices have in the production of teacher and pupils subjects. To this end, we reconstruct an inner logic of disciplining that makes both the situational performance and its power effect accessible. Our perspective mediates between sociological studies that analyse the reproduction of inequality through disciplinary practices and conversation analytic studies that examine the formal organisation of classroom instruction. In this mediation, on the one hand, the social significance of the production of deviance becomes clear. On the other hand, the fragility of pedagogical authority can become visible.

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