Abstract
This paper casts a net across spaces that are designed to be bland and identity-less. It posits that white is more than just a colour in design and that it is appropriated by organizations to spread sameness across public spaces. In this way, the article draws upon Foucauldian theories of power and organizational aesthetics in an effort to show that people become caught up in an institutionalization of space. White spaces become infused with an energy that is also derived from plain surfaces and which then offers up an illusion of spatial order. The article uses examples of the church, the parliament building, the prison, the hospital and the university to discuss ways in which whiteness transcends the limits of temporal colour and enters the psyche as an agent of power in the control of spaces and subjects.
Introduction
White, whether thought of literally or figuratively, has a powerful institutional presence deserving of organizational scholarly attention. More than a backdrop, white has been used architecturally and architectonically to influence or, more specifically, control people especially through white spaces and white places.
The aesthetic advantages of the subtleties of white as a colour in space and the associated metaphors that can arise out of its ambiguities can offer relief from the tyrannies of organizational structure and quite possibly be used to subvert oppression; it likewise can be used to assert control. Artists and architects are well aware of this and white is used to both cloak and speak of cruelty and beauty simultaneously (Connellan, 2012). But not all scholars of varied disciplines are aware of the complexities of whiteness. Consequently, I begin this paper by establishing that white is complex and ambiguous before addressing the understudied aspect of white as a means of control in institutions.
At this stage, no research has questioned white as a designed space for power to operate within and across institutions. Design is well-placed to undertake this challenge. Design, as an eclectic discipline that draws from philosophy as well as art, is not only concerned with colour/space as a means of expression, but also as a means of materialization and embodiment, that is, how colour/space acts upon people or holds the potential to act on people. Design is concerned with the ordering or organizing of spaces, things and people through aesthetic elements. As such, it seems appropriate for me to attempt to bring these disciplines (design and organization studies) closer by applying a Foucauldian analysis to whiteness in organization practices. Specifically, I argue that white is space and white is control.
I am aware that other colours could be substituted for both space and control; for example, red has been associated with dominance, rage, and love. However, there is limited research on the role of white as a colour that can be appropriated to control people or to express power or powerful emotions. White is the new panopticon, the means to control; it is an articulation of institutional power as Foucault’s theory would have asserted had he studied whiteness. White is also the silence within silence, in organizing that which needs to be made visible, as Clair’s (1998) aesthetic might have suggested had Clair studied whiteness. And finally, white has a psychic life of its own, as Butler’s (1997) theory might have determined if she had placed white at the centre of the postmodern psyche. Therefore, in order to explore the ways in which whiteness is related to institutional power, to organizing silence and to controlling people’s orientation to the world, reviewed literature informs discussions of visual examples from four main areas of organization: (1) church; (2) state; (3) prisons; (4) hospitals; (5) universities.
White in colour theory has long been regarded as a non-colour (Riley, 1995; Itten, 1973). It is attributed with the capacity to create illusions of a larger space. The main technical reason for this is that white reflects light, as opposed to darker colours which absorb light. It is also cold for the same reasons; white does not absorb and retain heat as do darker colours. White is also associated with light because in physics, white is in fact white light and not one of the prismatic colours but the sum of all, a topic that is debated in the philosophy of colour (Jackson, 1994; Itten, 1973; Graves, 1951; Goethe, 1971; Westphal, 1987; Connellan, 2009). So, if white is all of these things (creates space; reflects light; affects temperature), it has an immense capacity to transcend opaque form (like walls) and to merge with space. In other words, white as a colour on or off the wall contains a force to move outside of the limits of the wall. And, given its plain light surface, it can also be reflective and complement the reflectivity of glass and glass-like surfaces, creating additional illusions of space, as Wigley (2001) notes, ‘[w]hite reconfigures architecture to meet the new relationship to the world’ (p. 309). This has consequences for the organization of people in space because white can visually dissolve spatial barriers.
It is this agency of white that interests me in the design, use and politics of civic, government and religious spaces. I was intrigued by the call for papers in a field in which I do not publish (organizational studies) precisely because of the editors’ use of the term ‘white’ as a non-literal example of spaces that are new (such as cyber space). However, I choose to take the term both literally and non-literally and discuss the potency of white as an absent presence immensely capable of creating divisions and hierarchies. In 2007, I received a university grant to explore the relationship of white as a colour and white as a signifier of racial dominance, and I used part of that funding to travel across Australia, England, Northern Ireland and South Africa in order to gather visual information on the design and politics of public spaces. Since then, I have published articles on the use of white in design but also in critical race theory. In this paper, I am returning to some of the visual information which I have not had the opportunity to address but which this special issue of Organization Studies now presents. Therefore, in the spirit of Calas and Smircich’s 1996 special issue of Organization celebrating a number of papers on aesthetics and organization, I attempt to rise to that call of neo-disciplinarity. My discussion has two major themes: (1) institutionalization and (2) complicit power relations, in which I critique all examples in terms of power relations and subjectivity.
Institutionalization
The theme of institutionalization is not new, but probing its interstices and showing how solid form dissolves into space might offer a fresh approach to organizational studies. ‘All that is solid melts into air’ may be a tired phrase taken from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (2000 [1888]) and resurrected by Marshall Berman (1983), but it is that ‘air’ which is of concern here. Institutionalization governs people across organizations by appealing to a certain human need to belong. Belonging and belief are entwined but in a post-Nietzschean society ‘all that is holy is profaned’, and when ‘the aura of holiness is suddenly missing … we cannot understand ourselves in the present until we confront what is absent’ (Berman, 1983, p. 89). Therefore, perhaps an understanding of the way in which that ‘air’ or ‘space’ operates will help us find a way out of the white mist that covers the vitality of individual and group differences. The space that traverses one institution from another, be it parliament, church, hospital or university, is filled with active human ingredients.
Foucault addresses those ingredients by tracing the genealogy of state, religious and health control back to the Ancient Classical civilizations and applies the term ‘governmentality’ to the operations of power in such spaces. In this way, ‘governmentality … [is] … a certain mentality [which has] … become the common ground of all modern forms of political thought and action’ (Rose, O’Malley, & Vaverde, 2006, p. 86). It is a term that Foucault attributes to a domain of power in which ‘one conducts the conduct of men … [and which] is no more than a proposed analytical grid for these relations of power’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 186). The analytical grid is the imposed structure of the corporation: people are not people but employees; they fit into the grid which is monitored by additional and superimposed levels into which the various types of managers fit. The lines of the institutional grid are rendered invisible because the psychological colour of the grid and therefore also of institutional power is white on white.
‘Whitewashing’ (Reitman, 2006) is another way of describing the method by which organizations and their employees are rendered normatively white; this is achieved through subtle social tactics such as humour, which neutralizes race in (for example) Reitman’s (2006) study of the software industry. In some ways, the covert dissemblance of visible power structures is also similar to the ‘blur’ sensation which O’Doherty (2008) uses to discuss embodiment and disembodiment within organizational operations of power. O’Doherty refers to Diller and Scofidio’s Media Pavilion design for the Swiss Expo in 2002 wherein structure and mass were obscured by the mist and cloud of the blur phenomenon which disguised the reality. Whilst O’Doherty points out the benefits of, for example, not easily locating the entrance, he also muses that ‘perhaps the metaphorical is all we have left in organization studies’ (p. 536). However, and perhaps conversely, Antonio Strati (1996) says that, ‘The more aesthetics becomes an aspect of organizational knowledge, the more it is cryptic and difficult to grasp’ (p. 209). But that is precisely the point: render the grid (code for structures of power) invisible or even disguised as a seemingly beautiful light-filled building, then the more difficult it becomes to recognize power. This play of shape against non-shape and colour against non-colour was first explored by the Russian Suprematist artist Kasimir Malevich when he painted a work called White on White in 1918, one year after the Russian Revolution. The work is quite simply one white square on another slightly skewed white square. White is a colour that melts visual boundaries whilst ensuring that they are much stronger in their stealth. In this way, the absent-present nature of white becomes an ‘aesthetic creation’ (Clair, 1998, p. 196) and the visible is rendered invisible. Clair refers to an example in which the internal organization of gang members on the margins of society creates a protective aura around them that contains ‘hidden ironies’ (p. 194). The ironies lie in the fact that their reality holds ‘self-contained opposites’ because they are simultaneously resistant and caring. And what is most compelling about Clair’s thoughts here is her suggestion that, as scholars, we can use aesthetic theory as a methodology for uncovering (1) hidden ironies, (2) the silenced within the silenced, (3) realities that are woven into realities, and (4) the artist [as] both the creation and the audience (p. 194). Clair’s insight offers a more tangible (p. 191) perspective on aesthetics that can assist us in recognizing the forms of formlessness. Drawing upon Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault, Clair explains how aesthetics are also both ontology and epistemology in that it is our experience that gives expression its aesthetic, which is then interpreted (p. 197).
I now return to my discussion of the superimposed grid of order upon organizations, which is an example of both metaphor and reality; it is a ‘place’ where ‘realities are woven into realities’ (Clair, 1998, p. 194) and where the creator of the grid becomes every one of us as we all reinforce its structure by adhering to its constraints. The combination of white and grid ensures that the structure remains whilst the content is repressed. The ‘success of the grid’s capacity to repress’, writes Rosalind Krauss (1980), is because ‘it is a structure, and one, moreover, that allows a contradiction between the values of science and those of belief to maintain themselves within the consciousness of modernism, or rather its unconscious, as something repressed’ (p. 4, emphasis in original). The stories inside the squares are also the lives and creativity of individuals who, because of the invisible parameters around them, cannot reach their full creative potential.
Invisibility is accompanied by silence, and silence can be organized, as Robin Clair (1998) elegantly explains, bringing forth the importance of a postmodern reading of silence as positioned between concurrent opposites. For example, she reminds us that communication can encourage dialogue on the one hand but silence on the other (p. 38). ‘Silence can obviously marginalize and oppress members of society, but it can also express protection, resistance, and defiance. It may afford opportunities for emancipation or perpetuate the disappearance of the “other’” (p. 20). Further emphasizing the aesthetics of organizations, Clair notes the potency of such aesthetics and especially the contribution of Foucault ‘in developing a position on silence that is surrounded by the aesthetic’ (p. 37). The discursive practices of power have been thoroughly worked through by Foucault; therefore, with these practices and perspectives in mind, the rendering of whiteness as normative becomes more fluid and arguably even more open to exploitation in postmodernism than in modernism. Nonetheless, modernism lingers in contemporary design practice and is the origin of white interior worlds. To this end, Wigley (2001) notes that white is ‘preserved by [a] strategic blindness’ (p. 4). What Wigley is referring to is the way in which the dominance of white as a colour in modern architecture was ignored completely in the literature on modernist architecture. 1 Wigley considers this as a deliberate omission, and this omission continues in a postmodern era (Connellan, 2010). Wigley exposed the essays of modernist architect Le Corbusier, who proselytized upon the virtues of white in architectural space by saying that white is ‘free’ and ‘pure’ and that the ‘white wall … makes you think clearly (2004, pp. 215–16). With that whiteness came the ‘clean’ lines, the unencumbered surfaces and the standardized, rationalized use of materials and dimensions. These modernist methods and theories of architectural design led to the proliferation of a box-like built environment copied by builders and developers across the world.
But starting with Newton, the sage became more identified with the scientist whose reports had to be the outcome of cold observation, stripped of any stylistic stratagem and divested of the charm of imagination. Modernity has thus inherited from the eighteenth-century scientific revolution a closed fist – or at least the idea of the superiority of the closed fist over the open hand. (Gagliardi, 1999, p. 313, emphasis in original)
Pasquale Gagliardi above highlights how the rationalism of the Enlightenment period perpetuated through into modernity. For architecture, though, that ‘closed fist’ was supposed to have ‘opened’ and dark spaces turned to light, small, cordoned-off offices turned into expansive free-flowing work spaces, walls transformed into windows and heavy colours merged into an overall whiteness. This approach can be seen in the works of high modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, and I take up Gagliardi’s metaphor, concurring that despite appearances ‘the closed fist’ remains.
As mentioned earlier, it is the politics of design, that is, the manoeuvrings and manipulation of design (and in this case, the colour white), in which I am interested. Power manifests in many forms, but one that homogenizes places and practices is that of the institution. Gjoko Muratovski (2010) shows how contemporary corporate design and branding goes directly back in time to ancient tribes and early religion. Muratovski, drawing from Wally Olins (1990) and Steven Heller (2008), focuses on the different types of branding in the competitive identity building of corporations. Muratovski (2008) argues that corporations thrive on warring with their opponents and in fact require an enemy in order to identify themselves as different and unique.
The literature on propaganda is specific on this matter – an ‘enemy’ must exist, even if one needs to be invented, regardless of whether we are discussing this matter in terms of a nation or a corporation. Also the enemy needs to exemplify an exact opposite of the respected party. This is because the social construction of the enemy fulfils several functions; the main one being that the enemy serves as a reference to which the opposite side can be compared. (p. 9)
Here in the ‘psychic life of white’ I do not focus on institutional difference but upon institutional sameness, which in Foucauldian language is ‘normativity’. Institutionalization inculcates normativity by virtue of its regulated, standardized approach to the construction and maintenance of its identity. One institution’s identity may be different from another, but this is a superficial difference because the means and methods are the same and it is this that constitutes the norm. As Foucault (2003) stated: the norm is not at all defined as a natural law but rather by the exacting and coercive role it can perform in the domains in which it is applied. The norm consequently lays claim to power. The norm is not simply and not even a principle of intelligibility: it is an element on the basis of which a certain exercise of power is founded and legitimized. (p. 50)
In this environment, white becomes the norm and it is precisely not intelligible; it is the colour that is not acknowledged as a colour and, therefore, even if the logos of companies incorporates different colours, white conveniently becomes the one shared colour of the contemporary institution. The institution can in this sense be seen as a term that encompasses far more than many diverse large multinational firms but one that is singular and all encompassing. At this level, then, competing identities are a farce because all organizations that control bodies in space and that want to ensure cohesion and measurable outcomes adhere to the same practices. Therefore, expanding upon Muratovski’s (2011) argument that corporate identity practices are similar to those of totalitarian states in that they use the tactics of ‘efficiency, calculability, predictability and control’ (p. 255), I show how these tactics also serve to perpetuate the psychic life of white.
A contemporary example is that of a Catholic church in the strife-ridden district of North Belfast. This is a part of Belfast that witnessed some of the worst of the ‘Troubles’ but where the communities clung together according to their religious affiliation. The neighbourhood is dominated by rows of workers’ terrace houses.
The streets still bear the marks of strife (see Figure 1, which is across the road from the church) 2 and are a direct contrast to the new Holy Family Catholic church which stands as a beacon of the contemporary institutional image of Catholicism. The visual identity offers a strong and safe space for practising the faith and rituals of the church. Completed in 2008, the design by Dublin architect Eamon Hedderman is symptomatic of modernism and Catholic church architecture (Holy Family church, North Belfast). Modernism in design generally celebrated newness and a departure from historical signifiers. Aligned to this, Catholic church architecture reflects changes in the liturgy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), which instigated an inclusive and progressive identity. Nonetheless, in the spatial context of troubled Belfast, the mentality of people required specific governing; therefore to further apply Foucault’s governmentality, the church became an additional site for this to take place. In this way, practices of predictability and control were designed into the space by retaining enough of the old insignia such as essentials like the baptismal font, the tabernacle and the stations of the cross but enveloping these into a lofty whiteness, thus disguising other institutional tactics such as ‘efficiency and calculability’. Institutional whiteness in church architecture is even more obvious in the hall-like evangelical and Pentecostal churches of the Protestant faith, and generally the colour white for the church contains the added symbolic connotations of ‘purity’ (Connellan, 2009, p. 31; Dyer, 1997, p. 72). This whiteness represents the soul unstained by sin, and here in the church of the Holy Family in Belfast, we see the body of the church clothed in white sinlessness and suffused with light which is also symbolic of God, the light of the world.
Signs of Sectarian Struggle (the red brick building is an empty shell with bombed out windows), North Belfast.
The overlapping of white and light is a powerful blend. White light was privileged over other spectral colours in Isaac Newton’s experiments, which added force to the mythical associations of light in Judaeo-Christian Western imaginaries (Dyer, 1997, p. 74; Jackson, 1994, p. 679). Newton was working at the time of the Enlightenment and consequently his rationalist and scientific approach resonated with the times. White purity and the clean Christian soul were part and parcel of both the Enlightenment and the colonialist propagation of Western Christian ideology. I will engage with the argument of white racial supremacy and colonialism to some extent, but these are topics that are already supported by an immense literature. Therefore, against the Enlightenment and missionary background, the power of white as a symbolic force added fuel to its integration into designed spaces which sought to communicate the symbolism of white as supreme because of its entrenched associations with white light and purity in Christianity.
In Figures 2 and 3, the large open white space, with touches of colour seen in the floor mosaics by Laura O’ Hagan and stained glass windows by George Walsh, offers a feeling of freedom and openness whilst maintaining the calmness of a clean, ordered space. This white space presents the metaphor of the sinless soul; Catholicism has generally elevated the colour white as symbolic of purity in the robes of the Pope, baptismal gowns, first communion, wedding dresses and also novitiates’ habits, to name a few. This particular church as a symbol of power is divested of prolific decoration and becomes instead more singular and homogenized with neutral (white) and smooth, flat flowing surfaces. This type of design, especially the smooth white walls, creates a feeling of open expanse removed from the shadows and mystery of small apses, side chapels and dark stone, all of which are associated with older ecclesiastical architecture. The open space is similar to a meeting hall in a convention centre (with semi-circular seating) and venues where legislation is discussed. The church is an example of governance both architecturally and psychologically because it combines design with dogma and an obedient but ostensibly participatory congregation.
The Church is a religion that … lays claim to the daily government of men in their real life on the grounds of their salvation and on the scale of humanity, and we have no other example of this in the history of societies. With this institutionalization of a religion as a Church, fairly rapidly, at least in its broad outline, an apparatus was formed of a kind of power not found anywhere else and which was constantly developed and refined over fifteen centuries. (Foucault, 2007, p. 148)
Holy Family Catholic Church, Floor Mosaics, North Belfast.
Holy Family Catholic Church, Stained Glass Window, North Belfast.
Governing space is more literal in the accompanying image (Figure 4); here the view of Belfast is seen from the front door of the Stormont parliament building of Northern Ireland.
View of Belfast Looking Down from Stormont.
Looking at Figures 5 and 6, it can be seen that the organization of these spaces is one of the imperial vista, the eye of dominance and control, looking down upon the city below. The design is neo-classical, which means that it repeats the design of the Ancient Greek and Roman public buildings and the material used is white marble, signifying stability and wealth. Within this language, there is no room for error; the lines are straight with a clear message of power. The sheer façade of repetitive vertical columns accentuates the unrelenting aura of control that this edifice emits to the city below. It also stands out from the community and, unlike churches placed within the suburbs, Stormont is instead positioned on a hill slightly outside of Belfast, reinforcing the divide between populace and power. The gardens around Stormont are vast and the medieval castle of Stormont, which houses the offices of parliamentarians, nestles within these grounds; however, it is not the castle that looks down on the city but rather the face of Stormont itself. It is the ultimate institutional symbol; the colour white is a sign of timelessness and the classical design is a reminder of grandeur and stability. There is a naked pride in this type of design, and even though it does bear historical signifiers, they are not idiosyncratic; they are precisely classical and are therefore often considered to transcend period style(s) in architectural design. Indeed, classical design has become synonymous with timeless design (Osborne, 1975, p. 246). As such, classicism and rationalism are linked – both being a denial of reference and an adherence to logic (Collins, 1971). In this way, the pervasive strength of a formal style which evades specific historical reference but instils a sense of structure ‘in accordance with rational criteria’ (Collins, 1971, p. 200) is one which is ideally suited to the design of church, government and prison buildings.
Stormont (no entry signs in large white writing), Belfast.
Stormont, Belfast, View from the Main Gate.
Power and punishment have been twin concepts throughout history. In fact, Foucault (1995) writes that the one is the reversal of the other: ‘In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king’ (p. 29). Each is on the ends of the same spectrum; Foucault says he wanted ‘to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture’ (pp. 29–31). Therefore when Western parliament buildings adhere to a classical corporate identity – ‘the colourless Flatland of Parliament’ (Batchelor, 2000, p. 67) – those who transgress the laws passed in such edifices of power find themselves in places that share similar efficiencies.
Prisons such as Pollsmoor are built in blocks around a central courtyard where human movement is calculated to fit within the structural constraints. Pollsmoor Prison (see Figure 7) is in Constantia, Cape Town, South Africa. It was where Nelson Mandela spent four of his final years of incarceration after being moved from the prison on Robben Island in 1984 and before his ultimate release from the low security prison of Victor Verster on 11 February 1990. The prison is not a high rise but consists of a number of nondescript brick units and this ordinariness serves the purpose of normativity in appearance. The interior and particularly the corridors onto which the cells open are pale, scrubbed concrete. When the prison was originally built in 1964, there were not as many buildings in the area. Now, the prestigious suburb of Constantia is more developed, and as one rounds the bend from Pollsmoor, the large white building that is the US Consulate comes into view (Figure 8). The self-consciously forbidding image of the consulate contrasts with the prison, although both are set away from dense population in the Constantia hills, but the prison does not command panoramic views, which the consulate building does. Pollsmoor is inward looking, whereas the gaze of government (whether in the form of a consulate or a parliament) tends to display a formidable omniscience. Both spaces, however, present a singular message to onlookers: this is power, and this is punishment.
Entrance to Pollsmoor Prison, Cape Town, South Africa (not showing white as a literal colour but as the symbolic colour of white race power in apartheid).
US Consulate, Constantia, Cape Town.
Parliament House, Government Avenue, Cape Town (photograph courtesy of Federico Freschi).
Crime is an ongoing problem in South Africa and the surrounding houses are either in gated estates with separate security onsite or are heavily barricaded with electric wire and armed response triggers. In this sense, Pollsmoor is a prison within a prison. The exterior (white racial) face of apartheid may be gone but fear and guilt remain, coupled with 25 per cent unemployment (tradingeconomics.com). Therefore, what was known as a police state has in fact shifted to that of a prison state. Pollsmoor is a prison without an obvious identity because punishment is hidden within a bland sameness that does not make a specific identity statement. As Foucault (1995) notes, modern prisons no longer parade ‘the theatre of punishment’ but, instead, the prison is a ‘uniform machinery’ (p. 116).
The machinery of uniformity is of necessity reductive. It must be simple to be managed. Uniformity is therefore infused into the culture of a space precisely to ensure order. ‘One must take into account not the past offence, but the future disorder’, writes Foucault (1995) in a critique on the practice of punishment (p. 93). Prisons and mental health institutions are both supposed to be rehabilitative and curative to varying degrees, but instead they become ‘disciplinary spaces’ (p. 143).
Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation. (p. 143)
And, although the old institutional asylums are no longer used in developed Western societies, contemporary designs for acute mental health care are still not sufficiently removed from the design of prisons (Connellan, Due, & Riggs, 2011). In the following paragraphs, I include the example of a contemporary mental health unit, where the overall impression is one of order and cleanliness. A concentration on cleanliness and hygiene is also a fixation with the removal of dirt as disorder (Douglas, 2002, p. xvii); ‘[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejection of inappropriate elements’ (p. 44).
Avoiding disorder in all the spaces considered for this article is addressed by the interior colour white or similarly neutral colours and flat surfaces. In hospital design, white as a colour is more literally applied, and although some hospitals do include colour accents, white remains dominant. Wigley (2001) notes that ‘white walls are necessary because they expose any error and control any space’ (p. 308). There is nowhere to hide; this is made patently clear in a recent study into the relationship between architecture and mental health in Australia (Connellan et al., 2011). Figures 10, 11 and 12 are taken from the visual data used for the same study. Figure 10 shows the corridor in a closed ward of a mental health unit, where the shades of white merge with the window wall, which looks out onto an enclosed courtyard. Visibility is a condition of stay here; nothing must go unnoticed, and the whiteness of the spaces ensures that anything that is not white will be immediately thrown up in contrast. The tyranny of the white wall (Batchelor, 2000, p. 10) imposes its own regime of power in interiors, and this white corridor in a mental health unit is very similar to many other white corridors in corporate office environments. The function is the same and only slightly shifts in emphasis, depending on the degree to which power needs to be enforced: ‘[s]tructure will determine function unless function determines structure’ (Dobrohotoff & Llewellyn-Jones, 2010, p. 2).
Corridor in an Acute Ward of a Mental Health Unit, Australia.
Top Corner of a Seclusion Ward in a Mental Health Unit, Australia.
Seclusion Ward Seen from the Outside Corridor, Mental Health Unit, Australia.
Function and structure are undisguised in the images provided of a purpose-built mental health unit in Australia. Figure 10 shows a corridor in the acute ward of the mental health unit; Figure 11 shows the top corner of a seclusion ward, with a ceiling camera; Figure 12 is a view of the same room from the corridor and through the window. The room is stripped of everything except the essentials for safety and seclusion; this is the ultimate in white functionalism. This whiteness is analogous to the cold white soul of institutionalism seen in other spaces besides hospitals, that core which is not paraded but is at the heart of power relations. ‘Efficiency, calculability, predictability and control’ (Muratovski, 2011, p. 254) are reduced (in the mental hospital) to seclusion, stabilization and surveillance. Clothed in clinical whiteness, these spaces offer a secure space for extremely vulnerable people who are sometimes on the brink of suicide. These spaces provide them with a safety from themselves which they might welcome but, on the other hand, these interiors could exacerbate feelings of paranoia and claustrophobia amongst those who have different challenges. Either way, the spaces are not humane but are instead white cells of observation.
The lack of identity is explicit and regarded as necessary in this context. After all, white is about absence (Dyer, 1997, p. 78); it is not about what is there but what is not there.
Figure 13 is a picture of a board room in a university faculty in Australia. It was designed for a school of art and won the Best State award for Commercial Interior Design (South Australia) in 2007. Large raw slabs of concrete, metal and glass proliferate throughout the building. The boardroom is lighter and was designed to look contemporary, not staid like some older, more traditional wood-panelled boardrooms. It is flanked by a large curtain glass wall (the blinds are down in this image) and a custom-designed glossy white table which seems to float beside matching white chairs with slender splaying legs. The seemingly innocuous chair is a social barometer and, according to Strati (1996), its design, type and aesthetic attributes indicate that organization’s complex decision-making process; therefore, Strati says that ‘we examine aesthetics in order to understand organizations’ (p. 210). With its lightweight furnishings and openness, the boardroom in Figure 13 also reveals the aesthetic power of ambiguity, what Clair (1998) calls ‘the self-contained opposite’ (p. 36) where authority and freedom sit side by side. The theme of simultaneous opposites so carefully elucidated by Clair is central to my discussion of the ‘psychic life of white’. The ironies of simultaneity and contradiction are also very much a part of Foucault’s (2010) own self-confessed (p. 2) struggle and journey, and it is from his work that many of the post-structural theories of multiplicity arise. Clair (1998) draws our attention to critiques of Foucault and cites Best and Kellner (1991), who accused Foucault of ‘conflicted’ thinking and one who is ‘torn between oppositions such as totalizing/detotalizing impulses and tensions … and a dialectic of domination/resistance’ (p. 36). Clair also notes that these authors and others (Fraser, 1989) further accuse Foucault of ‘destroying the subject and resurrecting it’ (p. 36). However, although Clair does not disagree with the critiques, it appears that she grasps the spirit of Foucault’s message, which specifically says that we can never be satisfied with singularity (Foucault, 2003, p. 95; 2004, pp. 29, 251). Clair acknowledges that Foucault’s ‘aesthetic portrayals combine imagination with rigorous rationality as they expose the ironies of the lived experience’ (p. 37), astutely realizing that it is precisely in the apparent oppositions that the two-way operations of power are catalysed. Clair highlights these issues of ambiguity as intrinsic to a comprehension of organizations. And although the topic of absent presence and simultaneous opposites are important to all examples in this paper, they are perhaps most aptly illustrated in the white art school boardroom where tensions between freedom and conformity float in the light space.
Boardroom in a University Art School, Australia.
Figure 14 shows an image of the entrance stairs. When walking up the stairs, one young person noted to me that the place ‘gives me the creeps, it reminds me of [the detention centre the person was incarcerated in]’ (personal communication, 10/05/2010). That indictment is chilling and links the design of prisons and mental health centres to (in this case) a place ostensibly designed for creative expression and education. The blank slabs of concrete do not invite decoration; instead, there is a brutality inscribed into the identity-less space. The homogenization of space operates in parallel with the homogenization of knowledges in the university, a site where, since the early 19th century, knowledges could be disciplined (Foucault, 2004). This ‘disciplinarization of knowledges’ became a process that allowed ‘State apparatuses to centralize knowledges’ (p. 183). And now in the 21st century, universities as places of liberal learning and humanist cultivation are an ideal of the past because we increasingly see their funding dependent upon toeing the line of the state. In this way, the carefully developed knowledges and their arbiters become servants of the state, and knowledges are disciplined into each other.
Entrance Staircase in a University Art, Architecture and Design School, Australia.
Complicit Power Relations
In this section of the paper, I pose additional questions that force us to consider how we become inveigled into our own servility. We are ‘free to be free’, writes Foucault (2008, p. 63); how then are people reduced to such conformity in organizations? Foucault (2004) would no doubt answer that freedom is the false prize of conformity, on the assumption that security is expected to be a by-product of conformity, but ‘freedom is the direct opposite of equality. It is something that is enjoyed thanks to difference, domination, and war, thanks to a whole system of relations of force’ (p. 157). How then, and why, does the pervading institutional cloak of blankness continue to stretch unabated across so many spaces? How does the populace, i.e. we as subjects, contribute to the perpetuation of what could be called the rule of such whiteness? To answer these questions, it is necessary to take a deeper look at the way in which power works.
Foucault (2004) argues consistently that power is not some ‘thing’ outside of the subject; it is not an exterior element that is then inflicted from without upon the subject or society within. On the contrary, power is internal.
Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them. (p. 29)
And power, because it is relational, is sustained by its connectivity even to what could be regarded as its opposite(s), like freedom. Even, and according to Foucault (2008), especially in a liberal society, ‘the economy of power’ is ‘internally sustained, as it were, by this interplay of freedom and security’ (p. 65). Consequently, when considering the relationships of form, space and power relations, knowing full well that every effort has been made to render them invisible, we can return to Judith Butler’s (1997) central question: ‘What is the psychic form that power takes?’ (p. 2). If power has no recognizable singular form precisely because it is discursive, then it has an energy which can also be termed ‘psychic’. The colour white as a bland and ostensibly neutral element is an ideal form for power to take. Ultimately, the power of the subject is the control of bodies in space; it is the operations of power over the behaviour of individuals. Controlled spaces are not always obviously so, and even less so when there are no noticeable design features like bars, grids or large locks. In this way, white and its smooth surfaces can assume one of the many ‘technologies of power’ to which Foucault so often refers, and become both space and form.
In such spaces of whiteness, nothing goes unseen. Therefore, to return to my earlier discussion of white and light joining forces, Dyer (1997) makes a strong case for ‘a culture of light’ (p. 103) and ‘a world that is potentially permanently illuminated’ (p. 106). The result is the ultimate panopticon, one which is not defined by a structure but that is everywhere. When Foucault (1995) was considering the Benthamite panopticon, he explained how a mobile panopticon was devised as a mode of transporting prisoners (p. 263). What we have now is much more than a mobile panopticon; we have a ubiquitous panopticon that does not rely upon walls and wheels. A watchfulness is everywhere and nowhere: everywhere because of whiteness and light and nowhere because of the anonymity that normativity inflicts upon people in nondescript spaces. ‘Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 201). This is a power with impunity; surveillance in all of its forms is given the opportunity to continue without verification or justification because it is so much a part of everyday working life in contemporary society.
This kind of world is also designed to highlight those who do not fit in; this could be anybody who does not conform to (for example) white Western normativity. Such people, who are then thrown into stark contrast with the white interior, can be ‘abnormal’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 58) people and ‘black’ people (Dyer, 1997, p. 90). The abnormal is meticulously explained by Foucault to be a large component of society which consequently questions the validity of what normal is. And in these spaces of heightened visibility, Dyer (1997) writes that ‘[i]n practice, such normality is white [race]’ (p. 90). Also in the context of white race privilege, Reitman (2006) notes that the ‘characterization of their [white professionals] actions as “normal’” then conveniently excuses them from critique (p. 267). Therefore, in such an atmosphere of ‘whitewashing’, white colour in design as a central ideal of spatial conformity with the strength and glamour of its corporate glossiness coerces people (of whatever race or ability) to clone themselves accordingly. ‘Visibility is a trap’, writes Foucault (1995, p. 200), because there is no freedom in the clear white open space; there is only surveillance. And this surveillance works both ways because it manufactures a climate of fear which perpetuates distrust amongst the seer and the seen. The double-edged visibility contributes to the mutual and precarious investment that both subject and perpetrator have in the observation. It is a mutual precariousness because of the constant fear of missing something vital: the seer is afraid of not seeing and is also afraid of being seen and vice versa.
‘The repressive regime, as Foucault calls it, requires its own self-augmentation and proliferation … . Hence, repression produces a field of infinitely moralizable bodily phenomena in order to facilitate and rationalize its own proliferation’ (Butler, 1997, p. 58). So, in the bland (white) space, repression is generated from the aesthetic pleasure in (if you like) the sophistication of the white space, which in turn feeds the repression of the subject. So the subject who actually enjoys the white space is superficially uplifted by it and feels important as well as superficially free and secure, and consequently s/he offers no resistance to the white space, to which in fact s/he is enslaved. This type of apparently unconscious subjection is, according to Butler (1997), a ‘fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose’ (p. 2). This discourse then becomes suffused into a temporal and spatial reality that is based upon a standardized approach to our built environment which therefore perpetuates neutral colours such as white. Robert Chia (1996) bemoans our inability to be self-reflexive when we have (even inadvertently) made or at least contributed to the rules of the organization(s) to which we subsequently succumb. In this way, the compliant subject (human being) more easily accepts the above descriptions of architectural design and colour as the norm.
A redescription of the domain of psychic subjection is needed to make clear how social power produces modes of reflexivity at the same time as it limits forms of sociality. In other words, to the extent that norms operate as psychic phenomena, restricting and producing desire, they also govern the formation of the subject and circumscribe the domain of a livable sociality. The psychic operation of the norm offers a more insidious route for regulatory power than explicit coercion. (Butler, 1997, p. 21)
The subject becomes sucked into conforming because of seductive qualities of a slick white space with the customary shiny metal and glass walls or glass ‘skins’. These light-filled, open-plan and flexible work spaces with ergonomically designed furnishings, all conforming to a careful colour scheme, are ubiquitous in the central business districts of 21st century experience, but they are also the interiors on the glossy pages of interior design magazines (Connellan, 2006). The magazine photographs of contemporary office spaces, meeting rooms, foyers, reception and entertainment areas either have sophisticated upwardly-mobile looking young professionals gracing the interior or they are typically empty of people, thereby inviting in the absent person (the reader) (Williamson, 1978). These rhetorical devices of visual communication design are well-known and effective across advertising and feature articles and such visual communication strategies work towards elevating the reader and encouraging her/him to fulfil her/his aspirations by entering the space and therefore stepping into that sophisticated realm (Burgin, 1982). Consequently, this type of institutional interior in public (as opposed to domestic) spaces is propagated as a sign of power and success in late capitalist institutions.
Conclusions
The psychic life of white and the implied psyche of white are far removed from the straightforward modernist view of power and control. With the insights of Foucault, Butler and Clair in particular, the ‘white’ spaces of organization as evidenced in architectural examples of the church, parliament, prison, university and mental hospital are both passive and active. And it is precisely the lack of singularity and causality that makes it impossible to measure the effects of white sameness across institutions, which is the crucial point in this conclusion. What we are faced with are ambiguities and simultaneities in the operations of white surfaces and spaces as being both uplifting and suppressing at the same moment; in Clair’s (1998) words, ‘resistance shares a space with oppression’ (p. 187). However, in the analyses of the spaces, what we do know (at least of prisons) is that prisons do not cure crime but instead they have ‘succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency [and] … a politically or economically less dangerous – and, on occasion, usable – form … a pathologized subject’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 277). If this is true of prisons, it might also be dangerously true of the other spaces. Several realities operate within the practices of truth and Foucault (2011) does speak of ‘danger’ in the pursuit of truth in his final lectures at the Collège de France just months before his death in 1984 (p. 11). As a result of the homogenized and ordered spaces with their white or plain walls and clear spaces, society may run the risk of being pathologized into a conformity as a result of a generic, faceless design which gains its currency from ostensible sophistication, cleanliness and light.
White has an energy that outlives its form, transcends the surface and endorses a normativity without being noticed because it is white. In this way, white is space with energy, with a life that has the ability to render an interior (or exterior) intimidating and exhilarating. White is synonymous with the prefix ‘non’ – it is non-identity, a denial of what is potently there. In design, it is called negative space, the space in a design that has ‘nothing’ in it, but it is this space that allows for unseen action.
I have provided a partial look at whiteness as an agency of control which is an understudied side of white. I have attempted to show how white is more than just a colour in design, and that it is a force appropriated by institutions to uphold synchrony. However, the many individuals who are part of the institutions at all levels are caught up in the operations of this particular technology of power, rendering them complicit with their own repression. Therefore the whiteness of the church, both symbolically and materially, is infused into the congregation by its association with the liturgy of light; the whiteness of Western and Western-inspired parliament buildings draws upon the associations that white marble has with Classical traditions of power and stability; the (non-literal) whiteness of prisons is the preoccupation with obliterating dirt as a metaphor of crime; the sanitized whiteness of mental hospitals is similarly a fear of chaos and disorder; and the whiteness of the contemporary university is the institutional cover that strips faculties of a potentially untidy identity. In all of this, it appears that white is not straightforward; it is a complex and ambiguous colour that is both space and form simultaneously.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.