Michel Foucault (1983) This is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness, Berkeley: University of California Press.


The character and structures of any environment convey controlling messages to those who work or participate in it. In other words, "The Medium is the Message" claimed McLuhan, drawing attention to the ways in which the structure or process of the (medium) environment manipulate the (message) perceptions, senses and attitudes. The question might become: how are these spaces (the lecture theatre, gallery, the essay, the project) organised and to what effect? For instance, in terms of lesson plans and structures, the activity of the teaching room is conventionally broken down into content and method. It is often imagined that content is disseminated through the lesson itself and that the method carries no content; why else separate them in such a way. This is a particularly subtle and effective form of control. As the contents of lessons are rarely remembered, what is being learnt but the structure of the learning. This is the message. 

The overriding educational experience, and experiencing a work of art tends to be one of listening to a single voice of authority. This listening may not be passive necessarily (as clearly the reading and viewing subject has its own interpretative agenda too) but still might give the appearance of passivity all the same. The overall structure and organisation of space is one that is designed to authenticate the single god-like speaker at the front of the teaching room, standing whilst everyone else remains seated, and so on, required to believe in the speakers authenticity and accept their authority by means of a particular set of spatial relations.

The teacher and student, artist and audience, author and reader relationship is not fixed and need not reflect authoritarian politics (this relationship between authenticity and authority is a central concern of Walter Benjamin's Artwork essay). Similarly, this text uses a set of pseudo-academic conventions aiming to legitimate what is being said. Representations follow much the same logic. Take Magritte's 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' (of 1926) for example. The image is simple, like one found in school text book; a thing and the words that name it. Foucault describes this in his book This is not a pipe:

'But why have we introduced the teacher's voice? Because scarcely has he stated, "This is a pipe," before he must correct himself and stutter, "This is not a pipe, but a drawing of a pipe," "This is not a pipe but a sentence saying that this is not a pipe," "the sentence, 'this is not a pipe' is not a pipe," "In the sentence "this is not a pipe," this is not a pipe: the painting, written sentence, drawing of a pipe - all this is not a pipe."' (1983: 30)

Similarly, the form of John Berger's Ways of Seeing in which the argument takes shape is part of the work itself, abolishing the distinction between form and content. Berger said, reminding the viewer of the specifics of his technical reproduction: 
'But remember that I am controlling and using for my own purposes the means of reproduction needed for these programmes... with this programme as with all programmes, you receive images and meanings which are arranged. I hope you will consider what I arrange but please remain skeptical of it.' (1972)