ABSTRACT
One of the best discussions on how the enfolding capacities of design can be used as a form of material politics is found in Michel Foucault’s (1975) famous discussion of school chairs in seventeenth-century France. These chairs, Foucault argues, did not simply constitute the inert material background of the disciplinary institution; they were one of the critical micro-technologies through which it came into being. This was achieved, Foucault contends, by aording the possibility of enfolding a new logic of power into the body. Specically, the chairs silently brought the body into the realm of power by setting the physical parameters of what the “right” position for it was, and by requiring a specic alignment between subjects and objects in a pre-dened behavioral space (Figure 9.1).
