Today, I would like to start a series that will attempt to do for Michel Foucault what I managed to do with Gilles Deleuze in June 2011: an entire week dedicated to the philosopher with one article a day. For this occasion, I would like to open a new category in the blog’s archives, listing the articles dedicated to Foucault. In fact, this kind of series is as much an opportunity to think about such a rich work like Foucault’s, as to construct an archive of a thinker who strongly influences the way the problems questioned on this blog are being interrogated and though about.
In order to remain awake and critical of a work, which itself was advocating for a continuous criticality towards mechanisms of power whichever they were, I would like to start this week with a piece of text in which I believe that Foucault underestimated the (oppressive) power of architecture.
This text (see below) is extracted from an interview he did with Paul Rabinow in 1982 and that is often used by architects as an alternative to the recurrent and often misunderstood interpretation of the panopticon (that we will probably not discuss about this week). Architecture is specifically named and addressed in it and therefore constitutes an easy entrance door to Foucault’s work for architects. In this regard, in addition of being published in The Foucault Reader edited by Paul Rabinow himself (Penguin, 1991), one can also find it in the very useful Architecture Theory since 1968 edited by K. Michael Hays and published by the MIT Press (2000).
