A Taxonomy of Empty Chairs
Boardrooms, courtrooms, thrones: what a room communicates through a chair nobody is sitting in.
An empty chair at the head of a table is never neutral. It's a held position, a placeholder for a decision not yet made about who gets to make decisions — and everyone in the room orients around it whether they mean to or not.
Courtrooms formalize this into ritual: you stand for the entrance of no one, because the bench itself outranks whoever will eventually sit in it. The chair was never the point. The waiting was.
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