The Psychic Life of White: Power and Space

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.

Socialinės kontrolės žemėlapiai: miesto erdvės analizė pagal M. Foucault

“…It is not unusual to single out either discipline (Lianos 2003;Hannah 1997;Connellan 2013) or biopolitics (Crampton 2007;Murakami Wood and Ball 2013) as the only modality of power to be discussed, or offer a different outlook centred around heterotopias (Lou 2007;MFjohnson). Sometimes a narrower concept is chosen to represent one of these modalities.…”

Adorno’s grey, Taussig’s blue: Colour, organization and critical affect

“…In rare exceptions to the organization-theoretical silence about chromatics, Islam et al (2016: 7) have explored how 'trust experiences' in perfume design are invoked through using the colours orange and red: "The experience of trust, long ago abstracted from a collateral effect of bodily proximity, is hence rediscovered through colour, an innovation that is simultaneously a consolidation of shared experience". And Connellan (2013Connellan ( : 1530 has written about "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". However, the effects of whiteness 1 in the organizational spaces that Connellan explores are ambiguous, as white is "both uplifting and suppressing at the same moment" (p. 1546-1547).…”

“…Moreover, taking our cue from Connellan's (2012Connellan's ( , 2013 conceptualisation of the ambiguity of white, we endeavour to inquire into the criticality of colour-as-affect: how the immanent operation of colour-as-affect injects contingency into all organizational projects. Finally, pursuing these trajectories cannot be disentangled from the question of how to approach and write (on) colour.…”

White space and digital remediation of design practice in architecture: A case study of Frank O. Gehry

“…Within an organisational context, the literature on white space addresses the effects of openness, temporality and spatiality on creativity and innovation without fully exposing the role of technology as a catalyst for the exploration of white spaces (Connellan, 2013;Johnson, 2010;Maletz & Nohria, 2001;O'Doherty et al, 2013).…”