I've been writing on risk and insurance to get to a story about some events at my church that show in its granularity the way Foucauldian discipline operates, and provide some view on its detail as experience.
Our church, Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville (DPC), has taken otherwise unused space and turned it over to artists to use as studio space. We have done this for about 25 years. Over the years, the character of the program has evolved and shifted--initially a member asked to use space, the church said yes, and then he asked if some friends could join him, and received another yes. Most of the artists today are people whose primary relationship with the church is their use of this space, and our new minister is exploring new possibilities in this relationship.
What I want to discuss is the nature of the relationship between the church, a group of individuals, and these artists, and the pressures on what that should be which come from the risk dispositif--the collection of "discursive, administrative, technical, legal, institutional and material elements" through which social phenomena are governed (Lupton 2013 p 240).
To me, the artists are members of our community, sharing the space with us to engage in work and exploration that will intersect with the work and exploration of the congregation in ways we cannot foresee. To some extent this view is shared by others, as evidenced by the way DPC includes the artists on its website.
To others, these artists are tenants who happen to have an extremely good deal--we don't charge rent, just ask a small contribution towards the cost of utilities. But some members of our congregation and staff refer to this payment as rent. That word matters. It describes a specific relationship between a landowner and a tenant, governed by contract and defined by a transaction. Tenants have defined rights under law. They are reducible to the rights and obligations of tenancy.
Defining the artists as tenants--not community members, artists, or program contributors--involves creating firm organizational boundaries. The inside of the organization is defined as people we pay--staff--and people we consider part of the worshipping congregation--formal members, regular church attenders, or regular contributors. We often have very involved conversations about the member roll, a formal way of defining the organizational boundary. I have very little patience for this exercise, due to my sense that organizational boundaries will always be fluid, and my desire to cultivate that fluidity as something potentially creative and generative.
The artists are outside the cleanly defined formal boundary. That definition leaves them as building users. What they are doing with the space doesn't matter. We simply have a transactional relationship. Because of financial pressures on the church, we seldom let people just use the space, but get building use fees, or rent, in exchange.
For a long time we have sustained a tension between treating the artists as community members, colleagues, brothers and sisters or as transactional building users. On balance we have probably actually favored the more personal relationship. But then enter insurance.
We have an old, precious building. It is very vulnerable to damage and it is easy to imagine a conflagration consuming the whole thing. The annual insurance renewal process is fraught. Sometimes the price goes up a lot. Sometimes carriers decide they no longer want to work with churches. We are nothing but risk. The building could burn down. People could get injured on old, narrow steps. There could be abuse of children under our care or harassment of women. Each year, very responsible members and staff work with an insurance agent to get the renewal done.
For a long time the insurance companies did not worry much about the artists, and just chalked it up as one of a bunch of activities we had going on in the building. In recent years the current carrier has taken more interest in this. The carrier felt they needed a very clear understanding of the church's relationship with the artists, and that it really needed to be defined contractually.
From the perspective of governmentality, what jumps out at you is that the insurance company is entering into the question of relationships within this community. In order to be acceptable to the insurance company, it is required that our relationships take certain forms that are recognizable to the company, that are visible actuarially. Like the Chicago city officials who insisted that the residents of the Bloomingdale Arts Building could not combine as a coop but had to be coming from the position of individual property owners contractually tied together for specific and limited shared services.
In this case, the insurance carrier could not deal (transact) with a non-contractual, communal relationship between the church and the artists. It cannot imagine community and fluidity. It demands the depersonalization of the relationship. What is more it defines our identity to each other as parties to a contract, or dismisses the relationship as illegitimate. It impinges on an intimate part of our interpersonal experience.
Why did the church let the insurance company dictate our relationships? To a great extent what you saw was people of good conscious striving to act responsibly. They wanted to bring sound business-like decisions to the benefit of the church. This was not a matter of ideology--the people involved were not self-consciously trying to promote a neo-liberal agenda, and in other situations the very individuals involved would resist effects of those systemic forces. But they all knew intuitively what responsible adult behavior looked like. It looked like showing the insurance company that we could conduct our business properly. It looked like making sure all the right insurance was in place and not letting it lapse.
In this encounter with the insurance company, certain relationships and identities had validity. The insurance company didn't really define them. The models existed before the encounter. A valid subject is the kind of person we would do business with. We all want to be the kind of person someone wants to do business with.
But the insurance company is not teaching us this. We are all well acculturated. The insurance company is reminding us of what we know. As Deborah Lupton puts it, "risk dispositifs contribute to the configuring of a particular type of subject: the autonomous, self-regulating moral agent who voluntarily takes up governmental imperatives." (2013, p. 143)
The insurance company had us over a barrel, but there was an alternative--we could go without insurance. In some ways the promise of insurance is empty. If a bad fire starts, this church will probably be destroyed. No insurance payout is likely to cover the costs to rebuild this historic monument or replace it with a building worth the bother. And if there is the slightest slip-up on the part of the policy holder (the church) we may get nothing--the insurance company will not pay out reflexively.
None of that matters. To be a responsible person means to understand risk, take it seriously, and work within the techniques provided as responses. We are considered "covered" if the policy is in force, even though we don't really know what will happen. This is part of the self-regulation.
What will DPC do? We have drafted contracts, and I'll finalize them in the coming weeks and get them signed. We will still not call the artists tenants, and we will do everything we can to make sure our conversations are about our human concerns. Their work, the exhibits they want to do, the church's worship life and mission outreach, updates about spouses, kids, family and loves, the challenges of day jobs.
Deborah Lupton (2013). Risk (Second edition). Routledge.
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