Architectural Theories of the Environment

Posthuman Territory

Ariane Lourie Harrison, Ariane Lourie Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136190575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

As architects and designers, we struggle to reconcile ever increasing environmental, humanitarian, and technological demands placed on our projects. Our new geological era, the Anthropocene, marks humans as the largest environmental force on the planet and suggests that conventional anthropocentric approaches to design must accommodate a more complex understanding of the interrelationship between architecture and environment

Here, for the first time, editor Ariane Lourie Harrison collects the essays of architects, theorists, and sustainable designers that together provide a framework for a posthuman understanding of the design environment. An introductory essay defines the key terms, concepts, and precedents for a posthuman approach to architecture, and nine fully illustrated case studies of buildings from around the globe demonstrate how issues raised in posthuman theory provide rich terrain for contemporary architecture, making theory concrete. By assembling a range of voices across different fields, from urban geography to critical theory to design practitioners, this anthology offers a resource for design professionals, educators, and students seeking to grapple the ecological mandate of our current period.

Case studies include work by Arakawa and Gins, Arons en Gelauff, Casagrande, The Living, Minifie van Schaik, R & Sie (n), SCAPE, Studio Gang, and xDesign.

Essayists include Gilles Clément, Matthew Gandy, Francesco Gonzáles de Canales, Elizabeth Grosz, Simon Guy, Seth Harrison, N. Katherine Hayles, Ursula Heise, Catherine Ingraham, Bruno Latour, William J. Mitchell, Matteo Pasquinelli, Erik Swyngedouw, Sarah Whatmore, Jennifer Wolch, Cary Wolfe, and Albena Yaneva

Section III

Posthuman Territory

Zones of Indistinction: Bio-political Contestations in the Urban Arena

Matthew Gandy

The relationship between the body and the city might appear to be a natural focus for urban analysis and debate, yet the “body/city” nexus has tended to be refracted through a series of theoretical discourses within which the body itself plays only a tangential role. Even within Foucauldian-inspired readings of the “bio-political” impulse behind modernity, the physicality of the body retains a somewhat ambiguous position within the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state: the emphasis on the discursive production of the body has tended to occlude any clear engagement with the lived experience of space.¹ There is, therefore, a tension running through Foucault’s writings between materialist and idealist interpretations of urban change in which the analysis of discursive responses to material developments has tended to take precedence over the physical realm of the body itself. Yet if we are to make sense of the modern city—and its post-industrial, late-modern and post-modern permutations—we need to engage with the body both as a site of corporeal interaction with the physical spaces of the city and as a symbolic field within which different aspects to the legitimation of modern societies are played out.

Recent changes in the structure and characteristics of the modern city demand a rethinking of the spatial conceptualization of power developed by Foucault in his institutional critique of modernity. The influential notion of “governmentality,” for example, needs to be reconsidered in the light of the radical dispersal of power emerging from new modes of urban governance and the declining role and legitimacy of many institutions associated with the state.² The modern state—that somewhat diffuse arrangement of practices and institutions—has long been a pivotal focus of Foucault’s thought, yet “the State” in all its various manifestations is now undergoing such a far reaching transformation that we need to reassess some of the core elements behind his analysis of power. The historical contrast that Foucault draws between liberal and more authoritarian forms of governmentality, for example, has become less clear in recent years, with a proliferation of spaces that reside “outside the law” and a growing geographical dislocation between spaces of production and consumption that characterize the post-industrial city. Whilst Foucault identifies a disciplinary apparatus that gradually engulfs the body in the modern era, more recent scholars in this tradition, such as Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman, have identified anomalies and contradictions in this conceptualization of power that highlight systematic forms of bodily and spatial exclusion. A focus on the material inscriptions of power in the everyday spaces of the city, for example, involves a consideration of how power can be sustained through architectonic forms that are independent of discursive practices. Similarly, the identification of different spatial manifestations of power—and, crucially, the relationships between these spaces—enables us to explore power relations extending beyond a narrowly European frame of analysis.

This essay explores connections between the body/city nexus and the idea of the “bio-political” as a characteristic feature of modernity. We begin by sketching an outline of the emergence of bio-political power and its relations with processes of social and spatial exclusion. The idea of the bio-political is extended to include those “spaces of exception” and conditions of “bare life” that play a critical role in the ideological and material sustenance of modern societies. We then examine the complexities of power in relation to the development of the physical infrastructure of the modern city with emphasis on discourses surrounding hygiene, public health, and different conceptions of urban order. The development of the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state is located within the context of the material exigencies of the industrial city and the bio-political impetus behind new forms of “governmentality.” In the final section we consider some of the implications for power, urban governance and the bio-political realm engendered by current processes of urban change. It is suggested that a tendency towards the “bacteriological city”—focused around a distinctive arrangement between bio-political power and the institutions of modern governance—has been partially displaced by a new urban constellation marked by a different kind of interaction between cultural, economic, juridical and other sources of power.

From bio-politics to bare life

The rise of the industrial city necessitated a transformation in relations between the human body and emerging institutions of modern governance. The body became a focal point for a plethora of different concerns ranging from the need for productive labour to anxieties over the control of human behaviour. The body developed into an increasingly politicized terrain around which the defining aspects of modernity could derive a sense of symbolic unity. The gradual incorporation of the body within an extending web of rules, mechanisms, structures and behavioural codes was not only an inevitable outcome of the practical exigencies of an increasingly urbanized modernity but also reflected a strategic intervention on the part of the state into almost every aspect of everyday life. In the writings of Michel Foucault and of a succession of scholars since the 1970s, this emerging calculus of state power can be characterized as a distinctively “bio-political” dynamic, so that the field of political strategy and state activity becomes radically extended into areas of life which were previously largely perceived as lying outside the political realm. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, for example, Foucault traces the origins of modern bio-politics to two different yet interlinked developments:

One of these poles—the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase in its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo–politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed.³

The emerging focus of bio-political power is thus centered on individual bodies and populations, so that the regulation of the modern subject becomes connected with the strategic needs of the nation state. We encounter, therefore, a complex interplay between the health of the “body politic” and the associated discourses of nationalism, militarism and colonialism, which became reflected in a nexus of ethological formulations culminating in the socio-biological justification of geo-political power. What remains less certain, however, is how this emerging dynamic between bio-political power and the development of the nation-state originally evolved. It is not clear, in other words, how political manifestations of power first began to gain control over the human body and thereby evolve into the institutional and juridical structures of the modern state. Whereas Foucault’s conceptualization of the “bio-political” focuses on the professional discourses which developed around the body during the modern era, the influential recent writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben pay closer attention to the historical origins of emergent forms of “sovereign power” over the body. In Homo Sacer Agamben traces the bio-political dynamic of modernity to the Greek distinction between zöe, meaning “bare life” or “natural life,” and bios, denoting a way of living, incorporating social, political and cultural aspects to human existence:

The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zöe in the polis—which is, in itself, absolutely ancient—nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception becomes everywhere the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zöe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.⁴

The bio-political can thus be characterized as the gradual colonization or “politicization” of “bare life” by an increasingly elaborate skein of institutional structures and relationships which find their axiomatic expression in “law” and various manifestations of “sovereign power.” Power is in its very essence a question of control over the body, within which the differentiation between different bodies to create a politically defined community forms the originary basis for social exclusion through the operation of the “ban.” In this way, the “state of exception” takes on the form of a distinctive “space of exception,” whether reflected in the huddled communities beyond the walls of a medieval city or the marginalized belts of deprivation in the contemporary metropolis.

This emphasis on the spatialization of the political exception in the writings of Agamben moves beyond the “interior landscapes” of Foucault to build a conceptual schema that can connect between the peculiarities of urban planning and architectural design to encompass broader processes of metropolitan growth and development. By focusing our analysis on the politics of the body we can explore the shifting relationship between the city as a distinctive polis or political space and the emerging material characteristics of urban form through successive historical periods. We can observe a subtle movement between the Renaissance ideal of the “city-state” as a space of relative freedom to the closely administered “state-city” of the modern era in which human freedoms are subject to a panoply of different forms of direct or indirect control ranging across different modes of liberal and authoritarian governmentality.⁵ The city emerges, then, as the primary locus for these new strategies of disciplinary control and the development of new interactions between different bodies of professional knowledge and expertise. For both Foucault and Agamben the term “bio-politics” denotes not merely a blurring of the epistemological strategies of the life sciences and the human sciences but a cumulative process by which human life itself becomes incorporated within the aegis of the state. The direct bio-political manipulation of the body finds its ultimate manifestation, however, in eugenic attempts to improve human societies, and its most complex medico-scientific challenges in the shifting definition of death enabled by the cyborgian enhancement of the human body in conditions of severe mental or physical impairment.⁶

Agamben takes Foucault’s argument further by positing the “fundamental biopolitical structure of modernity,” so that the increasing control of the body becomes the defining criterion of modernity and in this sense takes precedence over other developments such as the secularization of science, the spread of capitalist labour relations or the growth of the nation state. He argues that Nazi Germany represents the first “radically biopolitical state” through its eugenic programme to merge the biological with the political, whereby “the physician and the scientist move in the no-man’s land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate.”⁷ The disciplining of the body becomes “the decisive event of modernity,” and reveals the underlying similarity between the “modern ideologi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Charting Posthuman Territory
• Section I Posthuman Subjects
• Section II Posthuman Assemblages
• Section III Posthuman Territory
• Notes on Contributors Credits
• Index