Tables and Chairs to Live With

Thoughts on the physicality of education and scholarly work, and its workings in artistic research

Tables to Think With

Examining the invisibilities of objects that are close to us in institutional education settings, I draw on a text by Sara Ahmed that seems to be full of tables. In “Queer Phenomenology” (2006)star (*1) Ahmed uses tables as tools and objects of study in order to philosophically discuss how the individuals’ bodies are oriented towards objects. She investigates how, in relation to certain objects, these “orientations” shape the way we understand the world, what we see and we don’t see. The point that she makes is that philosophy is actually full of tables. They are the objects that philosophy is written upon. However, according to Ahmed, the way they are used or not used in writing requires further scrutiny. Ahmed then starts from the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s obsession with his own writing table that is featured prominently in Husserl’s phenomenological work. In a way it does not seem surprising that tables on which writing takes place appears in writing, because a table “is the object nearest the body of the philosopher” (Ahmed, 2006, p.3).star (*1)

What makes Ahmed’s elaborations appealing here is exactly the nexus that she explores, namely, how an individual’s understanding of the world is entangled with the objects towards which he or she is “oriented” in daily life. The reason for doing this via phenomenology, as the title of the book indicates, is the importance of lived experience, the relationship between consciousness and objects and the significance of repeated and habitual practices in shaping bodies and worlds. One wonders why so little scholarly work, as Ahmed says, actually does pay attention to its direct material working situation. Ahmed herself offers some hints by theorizing “how something becomes given by not being the object of perception” (Ahmed, 2012, p.21).star (*2) This can be summarized in the question of how a reality becomes taken for granted; by becoming the background?

Approaching these questions, Ahmed is not interested in a “proper” phenomenological method, but instead goes along with the etymology of the word “queer,” which means twisted and off-center, in order to explore how bodies become directed through repetitive practices in relation to objects. Moreover, Ahmed asserts that “bodies as well as objects take shape through being oriented towards each other” (p.54),star (*2) meaning that orientation is always a two-way approach. When we touch a table, the table touches us as well. This orientation necessarily shapes our bodies and our world views. What Ahmed introduces here is a relationship of power. Orientation produces exclusions, by turning towards something we also turn away from something else. This orientation makes constituent participants invisible and exercises power, in the way that Husserl, for example, neither included nor theorized the domestic work that made his work at and with his writing table possible. Instead, Ahmed argues, Husserl performed a leap into the universal by replacing “this table” with “the table” (p.35),star (*2) he didn’t recognize that the ones having a place at “the table” are white, male, heterosexual bodies.

star

Ahmed, Sara (2006): Queer Phenomenology. London: Duke University Press.

star

Ahmed, Sara (2012): On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. London: Duke University Press,.

star

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

star

Foucault, Michel (1977/1995): Docile Bodies. In: Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Vintage New York, pp. 135-169.

star

Foucault, Michel (1982/1983): The Subject and Power. In: Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, p. 208-226.

star

Krauss, Annette (2008): Hidden Curriculum. Utrecht: Casco.

* 1  

The format of the HC project is workshop-based. The workshop series were carried out with students between the ages of 13 and 17. It has taken place seven times since 2007 in different countries including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK.

Annette Krauss ( 2014): Tables and Chairs to Live With. Thoughts on the physicality of education and scholarly work, and its workings in artistic research. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 05 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/tables-and-chairs-to-live-with/

Erstellt am 20.Okt 2014
print Artikel drucken
Download PDF
bibliography Literaturverzeichnis *X Zitiervorschlag

Annette Krauss

Annette Krauss (based in Utrecht/NL) works as an artist. In her conceptual-based practice she addresses the intersection of art, politics, and everyday life. Her work revolves around informal knowledge and (institutionalized) normalization processes that shape our bodies, the way we use objects, engage in social practices, and how these influence the way we know and act in the world. Her artistic work emerges through the intersection of different media, such as performance, film, historical and everyday research, pedagogy, and texts.
Krauss explores the possibilities of participatory practices, self-organization and investigations into institutional structures in order to work/think through how we perceive the world around us, what we sense and what we don’t see.

Krauss has (co-)initiated various long-term collaborative practices (Hidden Curriculum / Read-in / ASK! / Read the Masks. Tradition is Not Given / School of Temporalities.) These projects reflect and build upon the potential of collaborative practices while aiming at disrupting taken for granted “truths” in theory and practice.