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Spatial Violence
Anthony Vidler
Assemblage, No. 20, Violence, Space. (Apr., 1993), pp. 84-85.
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patial Violence
A
whole history remains to be writ ten
of spaces-which would at th e sam e
time be the history of powers (both
these term s in the plural)-from th e
great strategies of geo-politics to th e
li t t le tactics of th e habitat , inst i tu-
t ional architecture from the classroom
to th e design of hospitals, passing via
economic and political installations.
-Michel Foucault,
"T he Eve of Power."'
Space, in contem porary d iscourse, as
in lived experience, has taken on an
almost palpable existence. Its con-
tours, boundaries and geographies are
called up to stand in for all the con-
tested realms of identity, from the
national to the eth nic; its hollows and
voids are occupied by bodies that
replicate internally the external condi-
tions of political and social struggle,
and are, likewise assumed to stand for,
and id entify, the sites of su ch struggle.
Tec hn iqu es of spatial occup ation, of
territorial map ping , of invasion and
surveillance are seen as the in stru-
me nts of social and individual control.
Equally, space is assumed to hid e, in
its darkest recesses and forgotten m ar-
gins, all the ob jects of fear and p hobi a
tha t have returned with su ch insis-
tency to ha unt th e imaginations of
those who have tried to stake out
spaces to protect their health and
happiness. Indee d, space as thre at, as
harbinger of the unseen, operates as
medical and psychical metaphor for all
the possible erosions of bourgeois
bodily and social well being. Th e
body, indeed, has become its own
exterior, as its cell structure has b e-
come th e object of spatial modeling
that map its own sites of immunologi-
cal battle and describe the forms of its
antibo dies. Even as the spaces of exile,
asylum, confin emen t, and quarantine
of the
early mo der n period were con-
tinuously spilling over into t he "nor-
mal" space of the city, so the
"pathological" spaces of today m enace
th e clearly marked o ut limits of th e
social order. In every case spa ce is
invaded a nd invading: on th e level of
the body, in the form of epidem ic and
uncontrollable disease, and o n th e
level of th e city in the person of the
homeless. In other words, the realms
of th e organic space of th e body, and
the social space in which that body
lives and works, domains clearly
enou gh distinguished in th e nine-
teen th century, as
Fran~ois elaporte
has shown, n o longer can be identified
as separate.?
In th e elaboration of this complex
discourse, the initiatives of Michel
Foucault have been of especial impor-
tance. Following his studies of the
spatial distribution of institutional
power in asylums, hospitals and prisons
historians an d theorists have specu lated
widely on t he political role of space,
extending his insights to the city and t o
entire territories; he himself ind icated
th e importance of t he geographical
approach in a nu mb er of interviews.
Equally following Foucault, attentio n
has largely been co ncentrated on a
specific
kind
of space: that
tr nsp rent
space theorized as a paradigm of tota l
control by Jeremy Bentham and recu-
perated u nde r the guise of "hygienic
space" by mode rnists led by Le
Corbusier in the twentieth century.
Transparency, it was thought, would
eradicate the domain of m yth, suspi-
cion, tyranny an d above all, the irratio-
nal. The rational grids and herm etic
enclosures of inst itution s from hospi-
tals t o prisons; the surgical opening u p
of cities t o circulation, light an d air;
th e therapeu tic design of dwellings
and settlem ents; these have now all
been subjected to analysis for their
hidden conten ts, their capacity to
instru men talize th e politics of surveil-
lance through what Bentham termed
"universal transparency." Historians
have preferred t o study this m yth of
"power through transparency," espe-
cially in its evident complicity with th e
technologies of the Modern Move-
men t and their "utopian" applications
to architecture and urbanism.
Yet suc h a spatial paradigm was, as
Foucault himself pointed ou t, con-
structed ou t of an initial fear, th e fear
of Enl ighten men t in th e face of "dark-
ened spaces, of the pall of gloom
which prevents the full visibility of
thing s, me n and truth .̂"^ It was this
very fear of the dark th at led, in th e
late eighteenth-century, t o the fascina-
tion with those s ame shadowy areas-
what Fouc ault calls th e "fantasy-world
of s tone walls, darkness, hideo uts a nd
dung eonsn-the precise "negative of
th e transparency a nd visibility which it
is a imed to e~ta bl i s h ."~ he moment
th at saw the creation of th e first "con-
sidered politics of spaces" based on
scientific concep ts of light an d infinity
also saw, and w ithin th e sam e episte-
mology, the inven tion of a spatial
phenomenology of darkness. In his
earlier essays on p henomen ological
psychology Foucault h inted at the
nat ure of this "dark" side of space, tha t
inhabited nightmares and phantasmic
projections a nd was so poetically iden-
tified by psychologists such as Eugene
Minkowski.
In the gradual development of his spa-
tial discourse, that evidently rested not
only on the insights of phenomeno logi-
cal psychology bu t also on the revived
interes t in the notion of "spatial pro-
duction" introduced by Henri Lefebvre
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and
echoed by the S ituationists, Foucault
was, as is well known, especially con-
cerned to identify spatial forms with th e
forms of power they seem ed t o enclose
and even, as in the case of th e
Panopticon, instrumentalize. \ f i a t is
less noted is that this global identifica-
ti on -o n e that must be and has been
subject to rigorous criticism and valida-
tion on a case by case basis, was occa-
sionally extended to em brace concepts
of ar chi tectura l style as in itself a carrier
of power. Visiting Attica in the wake of
th e riots in 1972, he wrote:
nthony
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At Attica wh at struck m e perhaps first
of all was the e ntranc e, tha t kind of
phony fortress
a
la Disneyland, those
observation posts disguised as medieval
towers with their m achicoulis. And be-
hind this rather ridiculous scenery
which dwarfs everything else, you dis-
cover it 's an immense machine. And
it's this no tion of machinery tha t struck
me mo st strongly-those very long,
clean heated corridors with prescribe,
for those who pass through them, spe-
cific trajectories that are evidently cal-
culated to be the most efficient
possible and at the same time the easi-
est to oversee, and the most direct.5
The political force of such spatial para-
digms cannot be d enied. Certainly they
have acted to resist the insistent tem-
porality of modernist historicism, the
implacable subsuming of the spatial in
the t empora l, which, from Marx
through Bergson in philosophy, and
from Hegel through Sigfried Giedion in
aesthetics, construed architecture a nd
urbanism as the products and instru-
men ts of history. W ha t the urban
geographer Edward Soja has termed
the reassertion of space in critical
social theoryn-to use the sub-title of
his recent book Postmodern Geogra-
phies-takes on, in this cont ext, a
necessarily oppositional character.
But a theon, of space, uncorrec ted by
any dialectical relationship with his-
tory, has often hovered dangerously
close to a metaphysics of place. In the
hands of Heidegger and his less sophis-
ticated readers, such a metaphysics has
turn ed inevitably nostalgic and conser-
vative in tenor. The social implica-
tions of spatial theon, are equally
prone to blindness-notably, as
Rosalyn Deutsche recently pointed out
in her article Men in Space (Art
Forum, February 1990), in th e area of
gender distinc tions, but also, equally,
in the con text of debates over urban
planning, social welfare and t he poli-
tics of homelessness.
Perhaps the paradigm holds as much
hope for discourse analysis as for the
actual study of territorial occupa tion.
O ne thinks of th e work of Ioan D avies,
whose Writers in Prison offers a cri-
tique of the Bachelardian opposition
of habitab le space t o hostile
pace. ^ For Davies, the space in
prison is of a diffe rent order, being, in
Bachelard's sense, both familiar and
hostile, and its understanding requires
not the formalization of ethnographic
or poetic dichotomies bu t the meta-
phor and allegon, of inscription and
sight and voice:
For space is not physical in t he sense
tha t Bachelard uses it, where places be-
com e images, bu t physical in a quite
different sense where the interplay be-
tween th e biologically physical ( th e tac-
tile, the audible, the visual) and the
graphic is assembled in th e con text of
higher voices, eyes, inscriptions by be-
ing forced into the voiceless, sightless
readability of a mechanized physical
s t r ~ c t u r e . ~
Here Davies is recuperatin g Foucault,
bu t in terms of a model tha t joins the
light and dark space of th e
phenom enologist s in a dialectical
framing of m enta l projection and
inhabitation, tactile and visual, that
recalls the raumsoziologie of Georg
Sim mel. For Davies spatial analysis is
at once architectonic and kinetic:
T o study space is initially to study th e
eye, the voice, and the hand , and at th e
same tim e to conceive of othe r voices,
eyes, hands reworking th e space.8
Here, as Simmel understood, th e tradi-
tional categories of territoriality, and
especially the conventional boundaries
betwee n public a nd private, are sus-
pend ed in favor of the interstitial
nature of a territoriality which is at
once biological, material and political.
It is not so much that t he public
sphere ( the prison) dictates the private
(the personal everyday sense of our-
selves), though it appears to do so, but
tha t in the organization of space the
centripetal and the centrifugal coexist,
so that t he exits and entrances are
contiguous, and while there is the
illusion of to tal power the re is, in fact,
th e two way mirror of tot al mist rust by
each of all. 9 Davies finds supp ort for
his position in the n otion of mobile
territoriality advanced by Deleuze an d
Guattari: Space is imagined, put into
place, and resisted. The meaning and
use of space is everywhere subject to
strategic imagination. 1°
In this sense, one that the c ontemp o-
rary inhabitant of Los Angeles, New
York, Paris or Berlin mi ght u nder stan d,
all spaces are violent and all are there-
fore somewha t hostile.
Notes
1.Michel Foucault,
PowerJKnowledge: Se-
lected interviews and Other Writ ings
1972-
1977, edited by Colin Gordon, New York,
Pantheon Books, 1980, p.149.
2.
Fran~ois elaporte, in Disease and Civili-
zation. T he Cholera Epidemic in Paris, 1832,
translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, character-
ized these realms as follows:
Living conditions affect two distinct areas,
one within the body, the other o utside it:
organic space and social space. Social
space is the space within which the organ-
ism lives and labors, and the conditions of
existence within th at space-living condi-
tions--determine the probability of life
and death.
Disease and Civilization,
p.
80.)
3. Fouc ault, The Eye of Power, p. 153.
4. Fou cau lt, The Eye of Power, p. 154.
5. Michel Foucault, On Attica: an Inter-
view,
Telos,
19 (Spring 1974): 155-6. It
would not be uninteresting to speculate on
the u ncanny similarity between the stylistic
juxtaposition of the castle and th e machine
described by Fouc ault a t Attica Prison and
that of the more recent Wexner Center by
Peter Eisenman.
6.
Writers i n Prison,
0xfo rd:Bas il Blackwell
Ltd., 1990.
7. Ibid., p. 59.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p.60.
10. Ibid. p.78, citing Gilles Deleuze a nd
Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Lit-
erature
(Minn eapo lis: University of Minn e-
sota Press, 1976).
idler