THE TOUCH OF CLASS: PHILOSOPHY, ARCHITECTURE, SCHOOLING
In the long history of philosophy, architecture has been used mainly as a model or
metaphor. In contemporary philosophy, to the contrary, the problem of space – not
that of an abstract space, but space as habitation and territory, has been most
thoroughly taken into consideration. It all started with Martin Heidegger, who was the
first to take architectural thinking on its own right, and continued in the second half of
the 20th century France with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida etc.
In this context, the central topic, related to the philosophical and architectural thinking
on space became the difference and delimitation between the inside and the outside.
The ambivalence of the border between the two has been elaborated through such
concepts as Plato's 'hora' and Freud's 'uncanny'. On this ground, Jacques Derrida
started to build his philosophical notions of space into concrete architectural designs –
as in the famous Parc de la Vilette in Paris which became a concrete realization of his
'deconstruction of Western metaphysics'. Along the similar lines of thinking, the idea
of the open-planned schools should be given a second thought – as opposed to some
other trends of building schools, or together with them.
The second, no less important topic of architecture and philosophy is related to the old
problem of 'the hierarchy of the five senses' (and the opposition between the 'nobler'
gaze and voice vs. the 'more bodily' touch, taste and smell). The centrality and
dominance of the gaze, defined along as the highest of the senses, has turned out to
be, in modernity, incorporated into the very structure of its main institutions: the
prison, the clinic, the school. As Foucault has so brilliantly pointed out, the old
Enlightenment and Rousseau's dream to make everything as transparent as possible,
actually lead to the excretion of power as 'to-be-looked-at-ness', and to domination
through the production of 'the docile bodies'. Empirical research in the Slovene
schools gives us examples of how this mechanism of power works.
However, there has been a major shift from the topic of the gaze to that of the touch,
in philosophy by Jean-Luc Nancy, in architecture by Juhani Pallasmaa and some
others. This shift goes hand in hand with 'the thinking hand', so nicely illustrated by
the Louis Kahn or Frank Lloyd's Wright. It will be argued that this shift, which seems
PHILOSOPHY, ARCHITECTURE, SCHOOLING – EVA D. BAHOVEC – 2009
to be of crucial importance for Pallasmaa's work, should perhaps be also put into the
context of the 'linguistic turn' of the 20th century philosophy, and how it should be
built into a new thinking about schooling.
The classroom is, or should at least become in the near future, a privileged place for
thinking. Despite the fact that the school is an ideological state apparatus, it should
become an apolitical space, which (apart from promoting 'the fusion of the senses',
hand and language) provisionally neutralizes the cultural divisions and class
differences. In this sense, the purpose of the modern classroom should also go beyond
'the touch of class'.
To summarize: more touch (than gaze or voice), less class (and more neutrality or
'ethics of suspension' of identities). What is so desperately needed for thinking is an
empty and emptied space – a space, freed from its false meanings, fixed positions, and
multicultural identities, so popular all around the world. It is not enough to change
perspectives, and enable another look either from a different cultural embededness, or
physically from a new spatial perspective (f. e. from below, from the outside, etc.).
Taking architecture and the new philosophical notions of space seriously, means that
the space of the classroom itself should be 'deconstructed' – and reconstructed through
concrete examples of the fused 'philosophical-architectural thinking' in the classroom.
The presentation ends with Roland Barthes' description of a model space for his
seminar, and with Nietzsche's idea about an ideal space for thinking.
Bibliography
Bahovec, Eva D. in Ksenija Bregar Golobič (Eds.), The School and the Preschool
through the Looking-Glass, Državna založba Slovenije, Ljubljana, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, Minuit, Paris, 1991.
Foucault, Michel, Dits et écrits, Gallimard, Paris, 1994.
Goetz, Benoît, La Dislocation. Architecure et philosophie, La Passion, Paris, 2002.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Le corpus, Bayard, Paris, 2003.
Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Thinking Hand. Existential and Embodied Wisdom in
Architecture, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2009.
PHILOSOPHY, ARCHITECTURE, SCHOOLING – EVA D. BAHOVEC – 2009