Complicitous Silence

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further ideology-critique sources are ingested.

Definition

The complicitous silence of place names the ideology-critical thesis that place's supposed neutrality is its primary power: "Architecture is mostly cast as necessary yet neutral to the life within, our gaze towards place is oblique. Yet this supposed neutrality of place is its primary power; the more that practices of power are embedded in place the less questionable they become and the more effectively they can work. This is the 'complicitous silence' of place" (Dovey 2010, p. 39). The concept descends from Bourdieu — "The most successful ideological effects are those that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence" (quoted, p. 31) — and from Bourdieu's architectural epigraph: "Architectonic spaces whose silent dictates are directly addressed to the body are undoubtedly among the most important components of the symbolism of power, precisely because of their invisibility" (Ch. 3 epigraph). The mechanism is habitus plus distraction: "We experience places primarily in states of distraction; we live in the world first and look at it second" (p. 31).

The concept carries a program, not just a diagnosis. Buildings "necessarily both constrain and enable certain kinds of life… they are inherently coercive"; the designer who believes refusing segmentation is liberation "may be engaged in a different form of coercion – an 'enforced' subjection to uncontrolled encounter and disciplinary gaze"; the issue "is not whether but how" architecture is complicit (p. 39). Architecture is "society's superego" (Hollier quoted, p. 39). Against the illusion of autonomy — the avant-garde's "critical" imagery recycled as symbolic capital — the only path is "a re-engagement with social practice": "We cannot erase the complicity of architecture but we can render it less silent" (p. 41). The concept also has an epistemic corollary for the design professions: critical debate is contained by the "controlled critique" of advertising-funded magazines and architect-funded monographs (Ch. 4), so the silence is institutional as well as spatial.

Key Thinkers

• Kim Dovey — the concept's author (from Framing Places 2008, developed in Becoming Places Ch. 3): neutrality as power; the not-whether-but-how program; the critical-complicity audit of architectural media and education.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the source formulation: ideology's most successful effects "have no words"; the habitus's thoughtlessness (doxa) as the silence that lets power work.
• Michel Foucault — the dispersed-power backdrop: power immanent in everyday arrangements rather than held by subjects; the panopticon as the silent spatial machine.
• Dell Upton — the wiki's adjacent everyday register: the habitus's unpredictability ("no one can control the everyday") as the counterweight to the silence thesis.

Related Concepts

• ideology — the concept's parent register: ideology "without words"; the social misperceived as natural; culture seen as nature.
• habitus — the mechanism: the taken-for-granted dispositions that make the built order feel neutral.
• power — the stake: place as power's most efficient medium precisely where it is least questioned.
• place-identity — the affected object: identities naturalized through place.
• critical-architecture — the counter-programme and its failure mode: criticality contained as form is itself a complicity ("the ever-the-same returns in the guise of the 'critical'").
• symbolic-capital — the media-side silence: monographs and magazines as "controlled critique."
• panopticon — the architectural paradigm of silent power: visibility without words.
• everyday-architecture — the taken-for-granted fabric where the silence operates.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source (Ch. 3, "Silent Complicities," pp. 31–42): Bourdieu's complicitous-silence quotation (p. 31); the distraction thesis (p. 31); the neutrality-is-power thesis and the not-whether-but-how program (p. 39); Hollier's superego (p. 39); the controlled-critique fieldwork (Murcutt/BHP, Seidler, Docklands — pp. 50–52); "We cannot erase the complicity of architecture but we can render it less silent" (p. 41); and Ch. 4's institutional audit of the same silence in magazines, monographs and schools (pp. 50–53).
• Putting Architecture in its Social Place (Jones 2009) — the concept's prior citation in this wiki: "the frequently 'silent complicity' (Dovey, 2000) that exists between architects and the agendas of the politically and economically powerful."
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the planning-ideology analogue: the suburb's planning ideology "'hidden' from most inhabitants" — ideology as infrastructure, the silence at estate scale.

Open Questions

• Is the silence thesis compatible with the assemblage ontology Dovey elsewhere deploys — if power is productive desire rather than hidden domination, is "complicity" still the right word, or does the Deleuzian frame dissolve the secrecy the Bourdieusian thesis requires?
• The program ("render it less silent") needs a medium. Dovey's own attempts (the Murcutt critique, the Docklands writing) were absorbed or banished by the field. Can a wiki — a researcher's own knowledge base — be such a medium, or does it merely add another layer of coffee-table monograph?
• How does the complicitous silence differ from the wiki's background-expectations and das-man registers — is it the spatial form of Heidegger's fallenness, and do the two concepts share a failure mode (totality that admits no exit)?