Baudrillard and colorful objects

 I just remembered at the afterschool program I went to growing up that if you did something bad they would put you in time out but they didn't call it time out they called it "sit in the brown chairs" because there used to be brown chairs in the lobby of this building which was a public recreation center that also had a childcare program but then soon after I started going there they got new chairs and they were purple but 'go sit in the purple chairs' didn't have the same ring to it and so they still called it 'go sit in the brown chairs' and I think that's a beautiful thing.

It gets at what Baudrillard called in Simulacra and Simulation the 4 stages of sign order.

So in the first stage the brown chairs refer to actual chairs that are brown where you sit when you've done something bad.

The second stage is a perversion of reality where now the brown chairs refers to chairs that aren't actually brown at all. The purple chairs.

And then in the third stage it would be like if the chairs were gotten rid of entirely. And "go sit in the brown chairs" meant that you just stand in a spot where it is believed that the chairs used to be.

And then in the final stage there is no connection to reality whatsoever. And so 'sit in the brown chairs' purely means you are in trouble but you don't go to any location or do anything. You're just in an abstract state of being that is known as "sitting in the brown chairs." 

This is also similar to the therapeutic boarding school I worked at where if you did something bad you were put on something called "green sheet" which was an actual green sheet of paper that you carried around with you throughout the day but if a boy said "I'm on green sheet" you know that that referred more to their standing within the community than the actual green piece of paper. And then being the boys they were some started referring to it as "gren shen" and so they would just go around saying "gren shen. gren shen."

There's not really a point to any of this I just think it's interesting.