Letter No. 5 - Hospitality in Institutions

Dear Ms Molloy

We crossed paths about eight years ago in your coffee shop at Holles St. Hospital. I had stumbled in after a horrifically gruelling gynaecological appointment to sit down and compose myself before leaving the hospital. I had lost my colour and was crying, and you placed a cup of tea in front of me without saying anything. 

I don’t imagine you will recall it, but I have revisited this gesture countless times, dismantling it and putting it back together again. I think about its precision. This action seems miniscule. Its financial and human resource costs were negligible. A tea bag costs a commercial caterer under 4 cents, and the cost of 200ml of boiling water is probably too low to quantify. The tea, from conception to delivery, probably took under thirty seconds. Yet, the impact of this small act was profound and will stay with me indefinitely. I try to imagine if it had never happened, if the gesture was withdrawn from history; the countless scenarios which might have prevented you from following through with this kind act,impulse and how different I would have felt leaving the hospital that day. 

I work in hospitality too, within institutions (a college, for a long time, and now a museum) and I have been wondering a lot about ways that hospitality spaces can help (or indeed hinder) institutions. The cup of tea you gifted me that day is the most perfect and eloquent example of a hospitality space valiantly rescuing its institution. The French theorist Marcel Mauss wrote about gifts. He believed that it was a mistake to think of them as “inactive” objects, and that they contain a little bit of the essence of the benefactor. “Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together” (2002 [1950], p. 25). Isn’t it something, Ms Molloy, to think that you presented to me a tiny amount of your soul in a paper cup full of hot liquid in a hospital coffee shop that day, and that I received it and allowed it to change me?

I entered the hospital that day to receive medical care. I approached the front door, my admittance granted by a security guard. A receptionist approved my entry and issued further instruction. These are the actions of hospitality. I was the wayfaring stranger, arriving at the threshold. I had left the safety of my normal surroundings and I was asking to be admitted into this building in order to benefit from the services housed within. The hospital is the host. My crossing the threshold means that we entered into an agreement of mutual trust, such as strangers do when they play by the rules of hospitality. 

In the very first chapter of her book, Take Back the Tray (2020), a critique of food in institutions, Joshna Maharaj emphasises the relevance of hospitality in sites such as hospitals and universities. 

“Ultimately hospitality is about humanity: it’s a relationship between the person serving the food and the person receiving; it’s anticipating needs and offering kindness, usually in the form of a good meal. Hospitality lets food service workers be caregivers…”.  (2020, p. 17)

This is interesting to me Ms Molloy because it is precisely what happened with us. The mechanics of hospitality in institutions are a little ajar, perhaps because they are set up to provide a service and that becomes their primary function. Traditionally, hospitality exchanges rely on tools such as food, shelter, and entertainment. The guest can gauge the welcome of the host by the quality of these offerings. The more extreme the conditions, the greater the obligation on the host to be lavish (King, citing Arthur White, 1995, p.221). In an institution, the service provided therein—say, healthcare—is the main job of work and supersedes the delivery of traditional hospitality.  I presented myself to the hospital that day for specialised medical attention, not for unconditional welcome, food and shelter. However, that is not to say that it is acceptable to absolve the institution of all responsibilities relating to hospitality. It seems to me that someone, somewhere in that institution will have to pick up the pieces, as you did with me. You, in your capacity as a caterer, took over the caring duties which the healthcare workers were unable to deliver. Had you not intervened, I would have stumbled out onto the street, wholly failed by the institution. 

There is another aspect of hospitality which institutions struggle to deliver and that its guests continuously crave, and that is a palpable feeling of human connection. Let us look back to the wayfaring stranger on the threshold. Luce Irigaray suggests that the best way for a host to meet a guest is to resist the urge to usher them into their domain in an effort to assimilate, but rather slowly, thoughtfully “welcome the difference[s] between our guest and ourselves” (2013, p.47). This is the hospitality of “coexistence” (p.43). In this practice, the guest is seen, really seen, and given agency to have an impact. 

As Levinas acknowledges, in welcoming a guest, and embracing the “infinite otherness of the other” the host must be prepared for complete transcendence (Meijer-van Wijk, 2017, p. 46), “This is a somewhat troubling endeavour as the encounter with the other might change us – it calls us into question” (Levinas cited in Meijer -van-Wijk, p. 48). This hospitality of coexistence, with free-flowing transcendence and an open invitation to the guest to effect change, does not seem compatible to the efficient delivery of a service in an institution.  

To function smoothly, an institution implements systems which maximise their capacity to perform their function with the (often stretched) resources at hand, be they financial, technological, or human). An unfortunate by-product of this drive for efficiency is the “dehumanising” of the guests of these institutions (Maharaj, 2020). Michel Foucault is vehemently critical of this approach in healthcare, and other institutions. He refers to this reductive practice as the “medical gaze”. “If one wishes to know the illness from which he is suffering, one must subtract the individual, with his particular qualities…. at this level the individual was merely a negative element, the accident of the disease, which, for it and in it, is most alien to its essence.” (2003 [1963], p. 14). 

Humans don’t enjoy being dehumanised. We reject it and resist it. Our humanity is a fizzing energetic vital substance, incompatible with repression. As Michel de Certeau argues (in direct response to Foucault in fact), systems of order which impose a “grid of discipline” (de Certeau, 1988, p. xiv) will prompt us to invent artful “technologies” which “short circuit” those systems. These technologies might range from riots and protests and strikes to more discreet forms of “antidisipline”, (1998, p. xv) which involve the reappropriation of space – where people construct a poetic layer of humanity within the constrains of the organised systems. This is what you did, Ms Molloy. I met you in this space, built from the compacted layers of human resilience. You forced the institution to see me and remember me and be impacted by me. Together we created a sculptural glitch.  

I have found in my work within institutions that this poetic reappropriation of space pairs up nicely with hospitality, exactly as it did with us in Holles St. The sites designated for sustenance—kitchens, tea trolleys, coffee shops—like yours and mine, provide favourable conditions for the cultivation of human resistance. As sociologist Claude Fischler puts it: “Commensality produces bonding. In apparently all cultures, eating the same food is equated with producing the same flesh and blood, thus making commensals more alike and bringing them closer to each other.” (2011, p.533). Sites of hospitality set the stage for shared human experience. 

To feed a guest we must encounter them physically, and accommodate their bodies in a considered space, over a period of time. We ask them to place their trust in us and open their bodies in acceptance of what we have prepared. We have to look at people when we feed them. We possibly get a better glimpse at the guest, in these moments than those who run the institution. Foucault discusses the advent of medical imaging at the end of the eighteenth century, in The Birth of the Clinic (2003 [1963]) and how, ironically, it makes doctors see less of the patient. The posture of the guest is slightly altered, too, in and around hospitality sites, because they provide a neutral space slightly removed from the function of the institution; a “heart of a heartless world” (Dyer, citing Marx, 2010, p. 164).  In instances where the delivery of these services is strained or compromised, hospitality workers can be allies, as you were to me. 

If hospitality sites occupy the space between the institution and its guests; food forms the language between the two. I have strong opinions about the power of the particular food offering to make or break a relationship, as does Claude Fischler:

 “The eater’s life is at risk whenever they decide to incorporate; but so too are his place in the universe, his essence, his nature, in short his identity. An object unadvisady incorporated may contaminate him, insidiously transform him from within, possess him or rather deposess him of himself” (1988, p.280). 

Joshna Maheraj does not mince her words on this subject: “That lacklustre tray of food and a campus food court full of global franchises tells patients and students that they are not worth any more than this, shitty meal after shitty meal. This is certainly not good service, and it dehumanizes and disappoints.” (2020, p. 20). 

You and I did not have an opportunity to exchange views about the quality of food in institutions. This is a complex and unwieldy topic which I have chosen to sidestep here because I felt it more urgent to convey to you my gratitude for the profoundly meaningful expression of unconditional hospitality which you offered me from the confines of the imposed order of this particular healthcare institution. And to learn more about it. I wonder now how many times you and your colleagues have performed this rescue. 

________

Reference List

De Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life

Dyer, G. (2010) ‘Inhabiting’. In: Beaumont, M. and Dart, G. ed. Restless Cities. London. Verso, pp. 157-170.

Fischler, C. (1988). Food, Self, and Identity. Social Science Information 27. pp.275-293. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claude_Fischler/publication/232475763_Food_Self_and_Identity/links/0deec51a47259. [Accessed 20 Nov 2021].

Fischler, C. (2011). ‘Commensality, Society and Culture’. Social Science Information. 50:3–4) pp. 528–548. DOI: Date accessed 26/10/2020 

Foucault, M. (2003[1963]). The Birth of the Clinic. London. Routledge

Irigaray, L (2013) Toward a Mutual Hospitality pp. 42 54

King, C. (1995). What is Hospitality? 

Marharaj, J. (2020) Take Back the Tray. – Revolutionizing Food in Hospitals, Schools and Other Institutions. Toronto. ECW Press. 

Mauss, M. (2002 [1950]). The Gift. London. Routledge. 

Meijer-van Wijk, K. (2017)