Four Legs of Discipline: a mesa como dispositivo de imobilidade (C2)
Before it holds anything, the desk holds a posture. Its height is not neutral; it decides where the spine will bend and for how long, and every generation that has sat at one has agreed, without discussing it, to a particular arrangement of the body called concentration. We speak of the mind wandering, but the furniture was designed on the assumption that the body must not. Look at the school desk and the office desk and the clerk's desk of two centuries ago: the surfaces differ, the discipline does not. This is why the object resists the language of comfort. A desk is not a place one is invited to rest; it is a place at which one is expected to remain, and the difference is a whole political theory in four legs. Its drawers, so often praised as a convenience, are equally an instrument: they teach that work has categories and that categories have locks. And yet nobody sitting at one feels coerced, which is the mark of the most effective arrangements. The desk's genius is that it has persuaded centuries of people that the stillness it enforces originates in them — that they sat down because they had decided to work, rather than working because they had sat down.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A inversão apresentada no período final serve para
- A) demonstrar que a produtividade depende menos da motivação do trabalhador do que da qualidade ergonômica do mobiliário disponível.
- B) sugerir que o hábito de sentar-se para trabalhar precede historicamente a invenção da escrivaninha e independe de seu formato.
- C) criticar a organização burocrática do trabalho contemporâneo, cuja rigidez seria herdada dos escritórios do século retrasado.
- D) indicar que a disciplina atribuída à vontade individual é, na verdade, produzida pelo dispositivo material, que faz sua coerção passar por decisão própria.
- E) afirmar que o esforço de concentração é ilusório, pois nenhum trabalho intelectual exige de fato imobilidade corporal prolongada.