Notebooks as apparatus for mental and physical domestication
Civilization, as understood by western societies, relies on the belief that the world exists for human use. Consequently, the acquisition of food and other ressources is achieved through a process of colonization and/or domestication. Schooling, according to Layla AbdelRahim, “caters for this conception. As a result everything including humans have become professionalized, thus divided into categories (racial, gender, age) specializing in specific spheres of labor thereby falling into defined niches of the food chain.” (AbdelRahim, 2014)
According to Peter Gray, this worldview came along agriculture. Agriculture, he says, changed our relation to nature, from one that sees man as part of the environment, to one that claims control over it. Agriculture also shifted the way the community approached childrearing. In hunter-gatherer societies, child-rearing was based on values such as equality, sharing, freedom and play, whereas, in later agrarian societies, the adult-child relationship, was based on a command-and-control partition of power. Agriculture inspired the way we understand and talk about child-rearing: “We speak of raising children, just as we speak of raising chickens or tomatoes. We speak of training children, just as we speak of training horses. Our manner of talking and thinking about parenting suggests that we own our children much as we own our domesticated plants and livestock, and that we control how they grow and behave.” (Gray, 2013)
With Abdelrahim’s and Gray’s reflections in mind, I hypothesized that gridded or lined paper might be vehicles for mental and physical domestication, just as fences are for cattle. I explore this hypothesis by drawing on lined paper. Might it be in the notebook’s A4 format, the desk, or the classroom, it seems to me that learning systematically unfolds in ‘‘closed spaces’’, to borrow from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terminology. The architecture of learning seems to be one of containment and standardization. Furthermore, the grid enables the emergence of evaluation. There is no right or wrong on blank paper, because open space embraces multiplicity and multi-directionality. The grid introduces a strict framework, and consequently, enables distinctions between straight or crooked, in or out, right, or wrong.
I believe that year-long learning, facing A4 or A3 gridded paper has tremendous consequence as to how individuals understand, organize, store and communicate knowledge. The idea behind the notebook, as well as its form and size, show that we understand learning as a mental or intellectual process, that relies on cognitive functions or abstract and rational thinking.
This conception rules out other learning canals such as spatial, bodily, or kinesthetic intelligence. Notebooks are usually individual, showing that learning is a solitary process. Once again, this does not account for interpersonal intelligence or collective learning. Similarly, lined or grided paper prescribes that one should learn through language but language, and more specifically language in a linear written form. This excludes learning through drawing, or experimentation with other material.
drawing fences notebooks domestication
drawing fences notebooks domestication