Tables and Chairs to Live With
Thoughts on the physicality of education and scholarly work, and its workings in artistic research
Roundtable Arrangements and the Paradigm of Visibility
Michel Foucault’s criticism of the dominant paradigm of visibility in Western societies might help to better understand how visibility legitimizes oppressing modes of control in many areas of life, and how this paradigm becomes inscribed in a deeply democratic behavior, such as roundtable discussions exercised in educational or administrational settings like the ones above. In the well-known passages in Discipline and Punish Foucault describes how forms of disciplining are directed at the individual subject in contexts of schools, prisons and hospitals. According to Foucault, the aim has been to optimize the powers of the individual body, specifically its usefulness and adaptation to social structures. In this context, the production of a docile body, a useful body, involves not only direct bodily regulations in the form of punishments; also important are “tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms” that he calls “disciplines” (Foucault, 1977, p.222).
(*4) Foucault collects these subtle everyday forces that control and condition the bodies, e.g., in school, such as spatial distribution, in forms of cellular arrangements (classrooms, tables, benches, and chairs) or temporal distributions in the form of rhythms produced, e.g., through time-tables. Through these disciplines, the subject gradually internalizes externally imposed control. Foucault answers the question of the relation between externally imposed control mechanisms and the internalization process with the principle of visibility. This becomes particularly clear in Foucault’s usage of the architectural figure of the panopticon. The panopticon is designed as a circular building with an observation tower at the center of a space that is surrounded by a wall of prisoner cells. The inmates can be seen at any point, whereas the guards in the tower stay invisible. In the words of Foucault, “Disciplinary power is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects, a principle of compulsory visibility” (Foucault, 1977, p. 187). (*4) Through the invisibility of the guards, the inmates direct the prison guards’ gaze back at themselves, and submit themselves to the social order of the prison. This mechanism is important because it dis-individualizes and automatizes power structures. Power is no longer found so much in a person as “in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (Foucault, 1977, p.202). (*4) Accordingly, power cannot be solely understood on the basis of domination, as something that is possessed and deployed by individuals. Power is understood as a strategic relation of forces that infuses life and produces new forms of desires, relations, objects, and discourses (Foucault, 1983, p. 212). (*5)
Relating this back to the roundtable example, two aspects are important. First of all, it indicates that a spatial arrangement is highly dependent on the socio-political context within which it is placed. It is imbued by the temporal conventions of which it is a part. Following the example I have put forward, I suggest that participating in a roundtable is not only a structural exercise in democratic behavior, but also a structural exercise in the paradigm of visibility that we encounter in contemporary Western societies. The question that arises is how the democratic agency of roundtable discussions is compromised by the current social norms of visibility. Secondly, a different socio-spatial order implies different forms of reproduction of inequality and it would be wrong to think of a “democratic” roundtable as neutral. A roundtable enacts a socio-symbolic-physical order that brings with it new (informal) inclusions and exclusions, which need further considerations and restructuring.
In relation to the “Hidden Curriculum” project, the question of visibility is already present with the project’s title. In discussions it was possible to make use of its somewhat misleading character: “Hidden Curriculum” has been understood that in setting up something that is hidden, it suggests to reveal the invisible. At risk of getting lost here is a closer look at the function of (in)visibilities in society, and the different ways we might relate to them and utilize them for our own agendas. Bringing together thoughts on (in)visibilities (Foucault) and what we take for granted in relation to our orientation towards objects (Ahmed) produces discussions about the extent to which the visible world around us actually remains invisible for us. What I am proposing here is attending to the continuous presence and production of blind spots. And again it might be too easy to primarily think of revealing these blind spots instead of how a blind spot might function in a society in which, for example, the dominant paradigm is one of visibility.
Ahmed, Sara (2006): Queer Phenomenology. London: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara (2012): On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. London: Duke University Press,.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1977/1995): Docile Bodies. In: Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Vintage New York, pp. 135-169.
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.
Krauss, Annette (2008): Hidden Curriculum. Utrecht: Casco.
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/
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