form and content

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Thu, 26 Aug 1999 18:21:48 -0400

It is an interesting question how we can usefully conceptualize a
relationship like that between architectural forms and academic curriculum
contents.

The model I am currently using to think about such matters looks at a
multi-scale "ecosocial system" (which is actually short for something more
cumbersome like "ecological-sociocultural-material-semiotic
system-network") in which artifacts, including architecture (but also
chalkboards, seatdesks, computers, books, pens, eyeglasses, and many
aspects of the bodies of the human participants) serve functionally to
encode/embody/enable the activities that constitute a classroom community
over time. There is a great deal of information (a tacit curriculum, as
Paul Dillon suggests) about the assumptions and biases of our larger
culture built into the built environment (another message referred to UK
public school homophobia; there is also a large literature on institutional
architecture and its aims and ideologies, esp. for mental
hospitals/asylums, but also prisons, schools, etc. and even a nascent field
of architectural semiotics that takes social and cultural contexts into
account.)

While we tend to think of material contexts as mainly constraining, they
are of course also enabling, and their affordances are important. But a
constraint may not be quite the negative of an affordance. There is some
point in defining constraints in relation to timescale levels: they are
part of the slower-changing aspects of the environment within which faster
processes take on forms subject to their "constant" constraints. It seems
to me that a "preventative", i.e. a way in which material elements
"dis-afford" some specific activity options need not be so slow-changing
and quasi-constant, but can be a type of tool. I think, for example, of a
lock; think of all the discussion lately about gun-locks in the US. Or
putting an object on a broken chair (even a written sign, but it need not
be) to dis-afford sitting. There do seem to be some interesting questions
about the notion of tool and affordance regarding enabling vs. disabling
functions, and perhaps some deeper ones here about our semantic assumptions
about whether a not-happening is simply a nothing, needed no explanation or
instrumentality vs. a preventing-happening, which does. Whorf, I think, had
some thoughts on this from his work as a fire insurance adjuster. It may
seem pedantic and trivial, but I don't think it is. There are theoretical
and very practical consequences to the semantics and logic of non-being. I
suppose Derrida's 'differance', often ridiculed as vacuous nonsense by
unsubtle Anglo-Saxons, is also grounded on re-thinking the significance of
absence. There are some very interesting books I've seen on silence as
well. Foucault seems to have looked a bit at these issues more specifically
in relation to the technology of behavioral control.

Our views of materiality are very "presence-centered"; we often overlook
the complementary role of absence. This is often remarked by Japanese and
Chinese scholars, whose traditions are much more sensitive to the functions
of emptiness (the empty volume of a container, the empty hub of wheel, the
whitespace in inked art and calligraphy). Some architectural theories also
deal with this, with the way in which matter functions to shape the empty
interior space that we actually use (we use hallways more than we use walls
... think of the definitions needed for this to be true), and the ways
_spaces_ are further endowed with meaning to become culturally functional
_places_, as much by the constraints, cues, affordances (and preventances?)
of the matter which is not itself used directly.

So also our views of the functions of matter, of artifacts, bodies, etc.
may be biased toward their 'positive' affordances, what they enable us to
do, and not equally toward their negative affordances, or preventances,
what they disable (or disconvenience) us from doing, doing as well, doing
as much or as often, etc. A famous example of course is the QWERTY
keyboard, which affords touch typing, but was designed specifically to
reduce typing speeds and keep oldtime typewriting machines from jamming up.
The absence of matter can afford a positive activity, and the presence of
matter can disafford activity.

I think we all know that some teachers worry that group table seating can
be dangerous for "discipline" in an "unruly" class; think of what bolted
down deskchairs (seatdesks) _disafford_ or discourage, and how they tilt
the balance of material power (in the direct and primary sense of the
likely outcome of a physical struggle) between one older and thirty younger
adults or subadults. Or how one could space the seats at such a distance
from one another as to disafford, discourage hitting, touching,
hairpulling, etc. between adjacent students.

As to sex, I credit human ingenuity (church pews, car seats, library study
room tables all attested), but I certainly would rather have sofas and
oversize pillows on soft carpeting in "dual purpose" study areas. Did the
old public schools decide to eliminate double- (or large-group?) beds in
dormitories? or just make use of the "panopticon" strategy so favored by
prisons of other sorts?

JAY.

PS. Leigh Star has been writing recently about the role of infrastructures
in embodying our notions of functionality for legitimate activity; to walls
and seats, we have to add electrical wiring (and LAN cabling), plumbing,
staircases, windows, and the more explicitly semiotic infrastructures of
classification standards, etc. Really makes one want to understand better
just what are the functions of matter in making meaningful activity
integrable across time and space.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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