Category Archives: Foucault

# HISTORY /// Quadrillage: Urban Plague Quarantine & Retro-Medieval Boston

Posted on May 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

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The recent manhunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston was probably quite shocking to many non-Americans – and probably some Americans too -, for the anachronism it constituted. The latter was caused by the ability for a Police to empty an entire city and therefore implements a sort of state of emergency, as well as the “march of the heroes”, the multitude of police officers acclaimed by the crowd after they arrested their prey. There is a profound feudalism in such absoluteness and one has the right to wonder what motivates this disturbing joy.

Let us focus on the urban condition that contextualize this manhunt. I have been repeatedly writing in the past, each house through its impermeability due to the implementation of private property is susceptible to become a prison for the bodies living inside of it in the sudden legal implementation of a quarantine. For an important part of Boston, the quarantine was not implemented stricto sensu but it was highly recommend to each resident to stay inside and the context of fear created by the ubiquitous media made such a recommendation a quasi-order. In the areas of Boston where the police and army was actually deployed, the quarantine was very much effectuated as this article illustrates: Looking through the windows seems to have been prohibited and enforced through the threats of weapons.

While this event was unfolding I was thinking of the descriptions that Michel Foucault makes in his seminar Abnormal (Les Anormaux) at the College de France (1975) of a Medieval/Renaissance city when contaminated by the Plague. Foucault distinguishes two things historically: the negative reaction to cases of leprosy in the same city that consists in the effective exclusion of the sick bodies from it, to the point that they are declared socially dead; and the positive (in the sense that there is an inclusion) reaction to the Plague that provokes a state of emergency and the absolute reorganization of the city according to a quadrillage which has been not so well translated into partitioning. Quadrillage involves indeed a sort of physical or virtual partitioning of a space, but it also implies a detailed, systematic and extensive examination of this same space by a controlling entity. Such an action is thoroughly described by Foucault in his class of January 15th 1975 in this same seminar:

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Posted in Foucault, History, Law, Militarized Architectures, Philosophy, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# PHILOSOPHY /// The Inscription of Gender in our Bodies: Norm Production in Foucault and Butler’s works

Posted on April 17, 2013 | 3 Comments

We see them so many times every day that we barely pay attention to them anymore. However, those little symbols of gender differentiation constitute the operative symbol of a society that was built upon the strict separation of the male and female genders. Of course, we could start by the obvious, observing that the typical and ubiquitous bathrooms’ doors symbols shows, for the sake of immediate understanding, a woman wearing a dress and a man wearing pants. The very fact that anybody is able to understand the universality of this symbol is symptomatic of the problem here. But let us go further; the observation that women can wear pants and men dresses could be said to be the degree zero of the awareness of a gender issue. This degree zero is what lead us to fight for the equality of gender and the basic recognition of several sexualities, none of which should be stigmatized. The next degree of awareness of the problem is that the very fact of posing the latter with the terms of women and men as I just did contributes to its perpetuation. In other words, we should not content ourselves with a sort of elementary feminism and elementary counter-homophobia, even if those are still actively needed. The hideous manifestations of homophobia from the Christian right wing in France (who precisely use stereotypical symbols of a classic heterosexual family) against gay marriage and adoption prove it. The contentment of these struggles would contributes to a form of equality, that is true; however, this equality would be between the same two genders, or between four categorical genders (men, women, gay men, gay women). This would simply make the norm evolves and through it, reproduce phenomena of power from the normative bodies to the “pathological” bodies (I am currently re-reading Canguilhem’s Normal and Pathological, hence this terminology). In order not to fall in this “trap”, reading and re-reading Judith Butler‘s work is fundamental as her cautiousness for internal problems in the struggle seems to always equal her participation to the struggle for equality itself as I have been pointing out in a previous article about the processes of normalization.

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Posted in Architectural Theories, Essays, Foucault, Philosophy, Politics

# ARAKAWA/GINS /// The counter-biopolitical Bioscleave Experiment as imagined by Stanley Shostak

Posted on March 18, 2013 | 1 Comment

The interior domestic terrain of the Bioscleave House by Arakawa + Gins

As I recently started a whole section of the blog’s archives dedicated to the work of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, I will be regularly writing new articles for it in order to present their radical architectural work in articulation with their lifework of poetical philosophy (or their philosophical poetry). A whole issue of the Canada based journal iNFLeXions (including a playful and beautiful digital interface) was recently dedicated to their work, thus giving access to about thirty texts written by various intellectual figures interested in the production of the Reversible Destiny Foundation. Among them, there is Stanley Shostak who is a professor in the Department of Biological sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of two books about death and immortality at the biological level (Becoming Immortal, 2002 & The Evolution of Death, 2006). In his text, Bioscleave: Shaping our Biological Niches, he examines Arakawa and Gins’ manifesto ‘We Have Decided Not To Die” and one of its architectural embodiment, the Bioscleave House (see my own pictures of the house here and here) as a form of resistance against biopolitics (such a topic makes it compatible with Russel Hughes’s guest writer essay for The Funambulist).

Stanley Shostak, who is decided to consider Arakawa and Gins’ thesis with the scientific rigor that his background implies, starts his text with the process that the Bioscleave House should follow if it had to be recognized by the medical industry and its institutions (EMEA for Europe, FDA for the United States) as an operative drug to extend life expectancy. His narrative therefore involves various steps of experiments on bodies that would be subjected to a daily life in the house. The precise care put by Arakawa and Gins in the resolution of every architectural details as serving their manifesto (not only the terrain itself but also all the other creatures procedures involved, color, furnitures etc.), could then serve its purpose and be experimented as actually operative or not.

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Posted in Arakawa/Gins, Architectural Projects, Architectural Theories, Foucault, Philosophy

# PHILOSOPHY /// My Desire is Someone else’s Fiction: William Burroughs & Control as seen by Frédéric Claisse in Multitudes 48

Posted on February 24, 2013 | 1 Comment

In the 48th issue (Spring 2012) of the excellent journal Multitudes dedicated to the notion of “political counter-fiction”, Belgium sociologist Frédéric Claisse publishes an article entitled Contr(ôl)efiction: de l’Empire à l’Interzone (Control/Counter Fiction: From the Empire to the Interzone) that I propose to translate some excerpts here. As the title suggests, this article is mostly revolving around William Burroughs. His work is put within a Foucauldian perspective analyzing the society of control (see Deleuze’s text about it in a previous post). The first paragraph of the article introduces perfectly what is as stake within it: the systematic suggestion of desire as an apparatus of control (original French version of the text is at the end of the article, all translations are mine):

« How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he ‘wants’ » (William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands). We have to understand the importance of the suspicion that Burroughs puts in these quotation marks: I am not the author of my desire; this desire is someone else’s fiction. The autonomy that I have been graciously granted, through the means of mass communication systems among others, is nothing else than a “trick” used by a control authority to make me think that my desires are actually mine when, really, they belong to it. Words carried by this authority are words of orders whose action program is simple: contagion and dependency. The experience of addiction gave the author of the Naked Lunch a particular sensitivity to observe those processes that make us accomplice to our own slavery. Drug gives him the general scheme of human relationships in the information era. Language itself is a virus. We are all intoxicated of injunctions that colonize our conscience and use us as vehicle to go from one body to another.

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Posted in Deleuze, Foucault, Literature, Philosophy, Politics

# FOUCAULT /// Foucault and Architecture: The encounter that never was

Posted on October 17, 2012 | 5 Comments

The Power of Architecture – photomontage by the author (2012)

Recently, I was lucky enough to be asked to write an article for the seventh issue of the Chilean journal SPAM and I decided to use this opportunity to articulate the clumsy addition of ideas that I started to touch on during June’s “Foucault’s week.” I hope that the following text, Foucault and Architecture: The encounter that never was, is therefore a good synthesis of the argument I was trying to explore: Despite what architects might usually think, Michel Foucault never truly engaged the problem of the political power of architecture but rather kept investigating the notion of diagram. When confronted to this observation, we might find interesting to keep a Foucauldian method to address architecture.

Foucault and Architecture: The encounter that never was
by Léopold Lambert
curated by SPAM

A certain amount of architects often refers to Michel Foucault’s work as an inspiration to their design or their theoretical interpretation of our societies. The concepts invoked are almost always the same, and it is not rare to find in an architecture text, the notions of panopticon, heterotopia and/or utopian body. The thesis that I would like to defend in this text does not consist so much in the demonstration of architects’ misunderstanding of Foucault’s concepts, but rather that those spatial notions constituted only the frail premises of what could have been the Foucauldian interpretation of space. The research work that he produced through the fastidious descriptions of mechanisms of power involved within the institutions helps us to determine the precision that such an interpretation requires. To be a Foucauldian architect does not therefore consists in the repetition of his theses, but rather in their extension to which should be applied the same cogency. As a matter of fact, the first thing that a Foucauldian architect needs to understand consists in the paradoxical fact that Foucault underestimated the power contained by architecture as such.

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Posted in Architectural Theories, Books, Essays, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# FOUCAULT /// Episode 7: Questioning the Heterotopology

Posted on June 30, 2012 | 8 Comments

Carceri d’invenzione by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1750)

For the last ‘episode’ of this series of articles around the work of Michel Foucault, I would like to evoke the second favorite Foucauldian concept (the first one being the panopticon) that architects like to use, the heterotopia. As a matter of fact, this term, dropped in the architectural discourse became almost an argument in itself like an incantation – and I plead guilty about that myself for having used it often without any real meaningful deepening. The responsibility for that can only be half devolved to architects as this concept has been only loosely defined by Foucault himself, who was probably not considering it as one of his strongest inventions.

The word heterotopia is first used by Foucault in his preface of The Order of Things (1966) for which the topos (space) involved is a metaphorical space in the language. Few months later, he dedicates one of his two lectures for the radio broadcast France Culture (audio at the end of the article) -the other one being the Utopian Body quoted in another article- to this concept. In 1967 eventually, he writes a text entitled Of Other Spaces (text at the end of the article), which transcribes the radio lecture on paper and add to it a list of principles that defines the heterotopia. Two main characteristics of those ‘other spaces’ consists in their circumscription by a clear border as well as the prevalence of specific rules that are applied on this territory.

The examples given by Foucault are so various (gardens, ships, prisons, cemeteries, vacation village, museums, brothels) that we might want to wonder what they have in common. If we follow the concept of heterotopia, what they have in common is their difference (hetero) with the dominant space (topos). The problem, in that case, is that a space cannot be declared as heterotopia as such, but rather is an heterotopia from the point of view of another space. For the sailor, the ship is not an heterotopia; it is the milieu that he lives in and for which he participates to construct a norm. When he finally set foot on an island, he is experiencing this other space which establishes rules that he is not fully accustomed to. Every space is delimited and is subjected to rules, rites and norms and can therefore be considered as heterotopia from the point of view of another space.

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Posted in Architectural Theories, Essays, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

# FOUCAULT /// Episode 6: Architecture and Discipline: The Hospital

Posted on June 29, 2012 | 4 Comments

Although this title is very ambitious, the following article will only focus on Michel Foucault‘s reading of a specific architectural typology, the hospital, and even more specifically, the “physical” hospital rather than the psychiatric institution for which he also dedicated a lot of his work. In October 1974, Foucault gives a few lectures at The Institute of Social Medicine in Rio de Janeiro. The third one is transcribed under the name The Incorporation of the Hospital into Modern Technology (see text at the end of the article) and will appear in various volumes, including the very interesting Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography edited by Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden (Ashgate 2007.)

Through this text, Foucault as an archeologist of ideas introduces a shift in the 18th century -era that marks the beginning of modernity in many texts he wrote- from a place to die to a place to be cured. He starts his text with the research accomplished respectively by John Howard and Jacques Tenon in the 1780′s which led to the careful reading of how space was influencing the recovery or the death of a patient:

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Posted in Architectural Theories, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

# FOUCAULT /// Episode 5: The Political Technology of the Body

Posted on June 27, 2012 | 2 Comments

The last ‘episode’ of this series was based on a text in which Gilles Deleuze was referring to a chapter of Discipline and Punish in order to analyze Michel Foucault‘s interpretation of the power as a strategy rather than a possession. From this chapter, entitled The Body of the Condemned, we can extract a shorter excerpt that will be the topic of this article; we can call it The Political Technology of the Body (text at the end of the article). Through it, Foucault attempts to propose a reading of the body, not as a biological organism, but rather as a target for a political subjection as much as an anatomical mean of production:

the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.
[...]
the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. This subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence; it may be calculated, organized, technically thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons nor of terror and yet remain of a physical order.

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Posted in Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

# FOUCAULT /// Episode 4: The Cartography of Power

Posted on June 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

Panopticon plan by Jeremy Bentham (1791)

In the last ‘episode’, I was evoking the will of Michel Foucault to be considered as a cartographer. In a text written for the journal Critique (dec 1975), Gilles Deleuze proposes an analysis of the book Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison) under the title: Un Nouveau Cartographe (A new cartographer). Through this text, Deleuze introduces Foucault’s method to map the mechanisms of power (which legitimizes somehow the fact that he has been called a structuralist) as well as his very definition of power: (French original version is at the end of this article)

[Power] is less a property than a strategy, and its effects cannot be attributed to an appropriation ‘but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings’; ‘it is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege”, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions.’

Power has no essence; it is simply operational. It is not an attribute but a relation: the power-relation is the set of possible relations between forces, which passes through the dominated forces no less than through the dominating, as both these forces constitute unique elements
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Posted in Deleuze, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# FOUCAULT /// Episode 3: “Mon Corps, Topie Impitoyable”

Posted on June 23, 2012 | 6 Comments

Drawing by André Masson for Georges Bataille’s journal: Acéphale (1936-39)

”Mon Corps, Topie Impitoyable.” With these words, Michel Foucault starts his radio-lecture for France-Culture, The Utopian Body in 1966 (English translation transcript and French original radio version below). Those four words have been translated in English by “My body, pitiless place” but it does not commute its meaningful vibrancy when pronounced verbally. Without understanding French, you can still probably fathom the inexorable characteristics of the topos (place in greek) associated to its verbal inverse, pito of impitoyable.
This key sentence is revealing the difficulty of the text despite its accessible style. Through it, Foucault establishes a dialectical strategy to introduce the relationship between the body and utopias. His first argument for which utopias have been created to escape from this topie impitoyable is only enunciated in order to be denied later by his real thesis. The latter places the body as “the point zero of the world”, the center of each perception and by extension, the center of every utopia:

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Posted in Foucault, History, Lectures and Symposiums, Philosophy, Politics

# FOUCAULT /// Episode 2: Do not Become Enamored of Power

Posted on June 21, 2012 | 4 Comments

Potere Operaio (Worker Power) in the late 60′s Italy

In 1977, Anti-Oedipus -written by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in 1971- is released in its translated American version with a preface written by Michel Foucault. Through this short text, Foucault praises Anti-Oedipus, calling it “a book of ethics” as it proposes a non-totalizing subjectivity to interpret the human body and its social involvement. As always, he is interested in the relations of power implied in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings and he finishes his text by describing how they managed to “to neutralize the effects of power linked to their own discourse.” In this dimension, lies an important aspect of Foucault’s analysis of the mechanisms of power. Even resistance to a dominant power carries its own logic of power and, in this regard, requires to be thought and acted with awareness and precaution. That is how, in this text, Foucault comes up with a sort of invective to each ‘resistant’ in the form of a manifesto:

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Posted in Deleuze, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

# FOUCAULT /// Episode 1: Michel Foucault’s Architectural Underestimation

Posted on June 20, 2012 | 23 Comments

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).

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Posted in Architectural Theories, Essays, Foucault, Interviews, Philosophy, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# HISTORY /// Timeline of the Panopticon prison both as an Idea and an Architecture

Posted on March 2, 2012 | 3 Comments

Prison San Vittore – Milan (built in 1880)

Pedro Hernández (La Periferia Domestica) was kind enough to send me a link towards a site of Manchester school of architecture that traced a concise timeline of the Panopticon prison both as an idea and as an architecture. The following documents are using the same existing examples giving by this site. It is interesting to observe in this regard that the post-revolution prison in UK and France shifted from the dark dungeon like La Bastille to the enlighten panopticon. The panopticon, formalized by Jeremy Bentham has been then conceptualized as the paradigmatic scheme of the disciplinary society by Foucault. However this society does not apply to the one we currently live in the Western world (see a previous article about the society of control). Architects should probably get cautious not to attribute to the panopticon the monopoly of the architecture of power as the latter applies itself in it only via the mean of vision. In fact, the phenomenological application of power will never be as strong as the material one, and the solutions to escape or deceive the former are not as easy than for the latter.

In this regard, see the series about cinematographic escape on BLDGBLOG (1, 2, 3 & 4)
See also a previous article I wrote about BIG’s immanent panopticon (in opposition to the transcendental one described in this article)
To go further read the good book Forms of Constraint by Norman Johnston

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Posted in Cruel Design, Foucault, History, Militarized Architectures, Philosophy, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# DELEUZE /// Foucault and the Society of Control

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 5 Comments

The Trial by Orson Welles (adapted from Franz Kafka’s novel) 1962

The structuralist descriptions established by Michel Foucault about discipline are thought to be well known, especially by architects for who the book has been simplified with images that they can understand. The architectual paradigm of the panopticon (see previous essay) is quoted everywhere and became indissoluble from Foucault’s work despite its very large extents. What most people did not understand is that the panopticon as it has been thought by Jeremy Bentham is interpreted by Foucault as the paradigm of a society of discipline which does not apply anymore to the current organizational scheme of the Western world.
In the following text, Gilles Deleuze, his friend -and admirer-, summarizes the current paradigm as interpreted by Foucault as a society of control. His short essay, which is more developed in his book dedicated about Foucault’s work, insists on this shift from discipline to control. He uses The Trial (see previous essay) by Franz Kafka as a perfect example of this change of paradigm. In fact, Kafka introduced the choice to his charged character K between an apparent acquittal (between two incarcerations), symbol of the discipline, and limitless postponements that are proper to the society of control. As Deleuze puts it:

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything–the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.

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Posted in Deleuze, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

# HISTORY /// Prison Information Group by Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach & Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Posted on May 19, 2011 | 2 Comments

“Are intolerable: High courts, cops, hospitals, asylums, school, military service, press, TV, the State and primarily prisons.“

Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons

In my last article about Antonin Artaud and Vincent Van Gogh, I was evoking the issue of psychiatry being society’s mean of “suiciding” some of its undesired components. Today, I want to evoke an issue that is similar to some extents. I recently read that France has currently 65 000 of its citizen who live in prison which represents almost exactly 0.1% of the population. Of course it does not reach USA’s sad record of 2.5 millions detainees (0.8% of the population), but this amount is definitely frightening.

Prisons are zones of exclusions included within the space of society. They are micro-totalitarian societies that can difficultly be thought without architectural apparatuses. The cell fully expresses the supremacy of the wall on the body and the prison subtly negotiates between hyper-seclusion and hyper-visibility. Spaces of punishment, in their essence, have been created in a peculiar revanchist way of thinking. Indeed, they have been programmed to suspend the application of the law for people who have been suspending the law for themselves. It is then important for the society that hosts those territories of punishment that the exceptions they represent do not appear in any way as enviable. Their design is therefore intentionally and considerably aggressive to the human body.

In 1971, in France, Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach & Pierre Vidal-Naquet decided to make the hermetic border between the societal space and the zones of exclusions that prisons embodies, more porous. They thus created a collective entitled Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Prison Information Group). In fact, this group was trying to extract information from within those zones to put society in front of its responsibilities, but it also attempted to bring information the other way around, from the milieu depending on law to the milieu in which law is suspended. Members of the collective would therefore make pressure (and actually succeed) to bring the radio and newspaper within prisons, or stand outside and scream information in megaphones.

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Posted in Foucault, History, Law, Politics

# POLITICS /// The Architectural Paradigm of Society of Control: The Immanent Panopticon

Posted on April 8, 2011 | 6 Comments

Danish firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) just won the urban competition for the Master Plan of the Stockholmsporten, a new district in the Swedish capital city. Beyond the recurrent romanticism for the countryside in the city and the mythology of a tamed and benevolent nature that can be observe in almost every competitions now, what is striking in the project is the presence of a gigantic reflective sphere in the middle of this circle based district.
The fact that this sphere stands above the entire district and is reflective allow anybody to visualize the activity of everybody else in the neighborhood in some form of what I call, immanent Panopticon.

In order to go further, I need to recall what architects usually forget when they evoke in a simplistic way, the paradigm that Michel Foucault establishes for the disciplinary society, which is the Panopticon created by Jeremy Bentham. In fact, this circular prison in which the centralized form of power can easily supervise every actions of the prisoners situated in the perimeter, was a paradigm for the society between the end of the 18th century and our era. Foucault’s thesis was that the society’s scheme that we progressively enter into is much more interested about control than discipline. The mode of surveillance is shifting from a transcendental mode -the centralized proctor, symbolizing an entity like a government or an institution- to a complete immanent mode in which each member of the society is supervising the ensemble of the other members while being supervised himself.

BIG’s project is therefore amazing for its absolute literalism of forms and schemes. Both Bentham/Foucault’s transcendental Panopticon and Bjarke Ingels’ immanent Panopticon are spheres. When the transcendental one is exclusively an interiority -there is nothing outside the sphere- the immanent one is exclusively an exteriority – there is nothing inside the sphere. This is a topological transformation as the interior surface “unfolds” itself to become the exterior surface and one has to visualize this transformation to understand this morphological shift . This shift is also a political one, the same that I was evoking above. Power is not anymore effectuated by an imprisonment of the bodies, but rather by their delegated control.

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Posted in Architectural Projects, Essays, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics, Weaponized Architecture

# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// Diagrams of Utopia by Anthony Vidler

Posted on April 3, 2011 | 4 Comments

picture: La Maison Baroque, from Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (1993)

Diagram: from Old French diagramme, from Greek, dia across/through, gramma something written, letter of the alphabet, that which is marked out by lines, a geometrical figure, written list, register, the gamut of scale in music. (Geom.) A figure composed of lines, serving to illustrate a definition or statement, or to aid in the proof of a proposition. An illustrative figure, which, without representing the exact appearance of an object, gives an outline or general scheme of it, so as to exhibit the shape and relations of its various parts. A set of lines, marks, or tracings which represent symbolically the course or results of any action or process, or the variations which characterize it. A delineation used to symbolize related abstract propositions or mental processes.
Oxford English Dictionary as quoted by Anthony Vidler, Diagrams of Utopia in The Activist Drawing, Cambridge. MIT Press, 1999.

Diagrams are part of a whole family of architectural schools and practices (especially in the United States) nowadays since Peter Eisenman has been introducing them as a primary generator of architecture. I will not even evoke, here, the incredible confusion that makes most of architects to call a drawing, a diagram when it is not one. On the contrary, I would like to evoke the very interesting article Diagrams of Utopia written by Anthony Vidler (current dean of Cooper Union) in the fantastic book The Activist Drawing edited at the MIT Press by Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley (current dean of Columbia GSAPP) about the New Babylon by Constant.

Quoting Charles Sanders Peirce, Vidler affirms that “a diagram is mainly an Icon, and an icon of intelligible relations in the constitution of its Object.” (The Collected Papers). It confuses “the real and the copy” and therefore makes it as an “instrument of suspended reality”. This “pure dream” can thus be associated with the notion of utopia that constitutes itself by schematic lines of organization.
Building architecture with diagrams becomes therefore as problematic as building societies with Utopias. Somehow, both require this same tool but it does not go without dangers as the diagram’s lines does not wear the thickness of human uncertainty. Moreover, a diagram tends to draw lines based on the experience of the real, but those lines when materialized, impose a transcendental influence on the real.
In the following excerpt, Vidler bases his thoughts on Gilles Deleuze’s study of the work of Michel Foucault who was probably the most accurate archeologist of diagrams. He also evoke briefly what he calls the anti-panopticon, the House of Lubricity as thought by the Marquis de Sade:
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Posted in Architectural Theories, Foucault, Maps, Philosophy

# POLITICS /// Quarantine & Remoteness, paranoia and mechanisms of precautionary incarceration

Posted on December 23, 2010 | 4 Comments

Yesterday, I attended to Geoff Manaugh (BLDG BLOG) brilliant lecture at Pratt in which he introduced the Quarantine workshop he is currently leading in the Storefront. I am very interested by this notion of quarantine in the materialization of fear and paranoia its implies. The potentiality for each building to become a quarantine station therefore a prison seems to me as embodying perfectly an ultimate state of totalitarianism. It reminds me of Foucault’s descriptions in Discipline and Punish (see former post) in which he depicts a middle age city infected by the Plague (see also Geoff’s article on Albert Camus’ Plague) and the imprisonment of every inhabitants in their own house waiting for the health inspection which would deliver a license of free circulation in case of non-infection. What is really striking with this notion of quarantine is the precaution it implies. No matter if one is infected or not, if he is suspected to be, his circulation will be controlled.
Another example quarantine evokes to me is Peter Watkins’ movies, Punishment Park on the one hand and The War Game on the other hand. The first one depicts. in an amazing documentary imitation, the invention of a park lost in the desert used by the police to train itself, chasing in the most violent way young “voluntary” dissidents. The War Game is also a diversion of a documentary (a kind of official one) dramatizing a country (England) living in the paranoia of a nuclear attack. Through these two movies, we can observe both violent remoteness of infected citizens (the infection is not necessarily viral) and the fear being the leitmotiv of a nation and therefore its omnipresent material of this nation’s both physicality and social relationships.

Posted in Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

# HISTORY /// Biopolitics. From a society of blood to a society of sex and towards a society of shit

Posted on December 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

picture: Salo by Pier Paolo Pasolini (adaptation of Le Marquis de Sade’s 120 days of Sodom)

Here is a short article I just wrote for Meredith Tenhoor’s Pratt seminar Food/Architecture/Urbanism/Biopolitics :

Before the XVIIIth century, French (and by extension European) State’ sovereignty was applied on territories and on their subjects’ life and death. The Enlightenment and the constitution of Parisian literary groups and bourgeoisie (in opposition to Versailles’ nobleness) questioned the status of an omni-powerful monarchy embodied by Louis XIV and inherited by less strategic kings Louis XV and Louis XVI. This led to the French Revolution of 1789 and the creation of a Constitutional monarchy then a Republic in 1792. This whole institutional dislocation, followed by a very strong centralized power (again) from Napoleon Bonaparte, brought up and applied some new means of sovereignty that established what Michel Foucault calls bio-politics.

Bio-politics consists in a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. Life is not anymore “let” by the sovereign institution but is sustained and organized in an ambiguous mix of philanthropy (at first perhaps) and precise control on the manpower of the country. The result is a subjectivation of bodies which become as many pieces of a machinist system aiming towards what we now know as global capitalism.

The goal of technology – and by extension of architecture – consists in the invention of apparatuses used to regulate and normatize the bodies submitted to them. We are all familiar with the object “panopticon” as such an apparatus. However, architects tends to stubbornly consider it as a literal architecture forgetting that it is before all, a system of power relation providing a scheme for the entire society – and therefore for the city. The panopticon is not just applied to prison. It adapts itself literally (meaning architecturally) or abstractly to other institutions of control such as barracks, schools, factories and hospitals.

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Posted in Essays, Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

# PHILOSOPHY /// Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

Posted on December 17, 2010 | Leave a comment

The following text is the transcript of an audio recording found on dytopolitik. In it, Giorgio Agamben interprets Michel Foucault‘s chapter in Discipline and Punish about the shift from an exclusive urban scheme based on the leprosis management to a disciplinary urban scheme based on the plague management. In fact, according to Foucault, the sovereignty on life itself has been replaced in the XVIIIth century by a biopolitical sovereignty that consider life in its anatomical and biological dimensions in order to both ensure its power and maintain them in a state of continuous work production.

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Posted in Foucault, History, Philosophy, Politics

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