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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