Tables and Chairs to Live With

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

Some Preliminary Conclusions

What brings all the elaborations on power relations together in this text is their refusal to be understood as either discursive or material. Instead, they suggest a material-discursive analysis, which brings to the fore what normally resides in the background: the physicality of education and scholarly work. Moreover, if we follow Foucault again, the subjects in these power relations do not precede their relations, but instead, are produced through these relations. Foucault calls this the concept and paradox of subjectivation: the very processes that enforce a subject’s subordination and correlation to certain norms, are the conditions through which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent (Foucault, 1983, p.208-225).star (*5) Foucault’s understanding of power is important for educational settings and scholarly work, because it neither conceptualizes the students, teachers, and scholars as blank pages for social inscription, nor as omnipotent masters of educational processes or scholarly work. His understanding of power does not reside in either subordination or resistance, but rather, tries to move beyond this binary construction through both subordination and resistance.

The collaborative research in, e.g., “Hidden Curriculum” touches upon this double approach by investigating the implicit knowledge in practices and objects in school that is hard to grasp as it is hidden by its common, everyday nature. This implicit knowledge is part of everyday life in school and shapes the way we relate to each other and to objects in school. On a more general level, the students’ investigations pose the question as to whether the way we sit on a chair (also in relation to other chairs and object) actually shapes (and restricts) the way we think and how we know these chairs. Through the investigative performances, the students ask not only what a hidden curriculum and the implicit knowledge might mean to them, but just as importantly, they examine what a hidden curriculum does in the realm of the school; how it is produced through our bodies and their material environment; and most importantly, how a hidden curriculum is connected to both processes of subordination and transformation.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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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
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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.