Legitimation

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further state/power sources are ingested.

Definition

Legitimation names the stabilization of authority through symbols, rituals and their architectural framing — the process by which power's "right" is underwritten by its "might" and experienced as unquestionable. Dovey's account: "Authority is defined by unquestioned compliance and is the most efficient means of social control… authority becomes stabilized and legitimated through both spatial rituals and the architectural framing of them. Symbols and rituals of legitimation are effective because one cannot argue with them; they are the way things are done around here" (Dovey 2010, p. 125). Authority "is the most pervasive, reliable, productive and stable form of power, yet it needs both the trappings of legitimating imagery and the coercive threat of force – the 'right' of authority is underwritten by the 'might' of force" (p. 125). The state's very grammar is spatial: "The state is an assemblage of statutes and standards, of stations and stages, that stabilize practices of power in space and over time… its various chambers and courtrooms are stages for the practice of authority" (p. 125).

The concept's paradox, from the courthouse study: the contemporary demand that justice be demystified, transparent and accessible ("justice be respected but demystified and transparent. Courthouses must not intimidate," p. 127) collides with the authority the courts rely on: "These institutions of authority are open, transparent and accessible, but not beyond the point that legitimacy is eroded. The ideal of an open court paradoxically requires a good deal of security and closure" (p. 138). The courtroom is the legitimation chamber: "a form of state habitus… a strictly striated space" (p. 128) where the judge's bench "inscribes the authority of the judge who cannot conduct judgment from any other position" (p. 128). At national scale the same process builds monuments: Monas as "a literal concentration of power" in the Javanese radiant-power cosmology — "not a legitimating image of authority so much as it is a literal concentration of power" (p. 158) — and the Arjuna Wijaya statue as "a legitimating image for the transfer of power from Sukarno to Suharto" (p. 159).

Key Thinkers

• Kim Dovey — the concept's architect-theorist in this wiki: authority as power's most efficient form; the Melbourne courthouse trilogy (Commonwealth Law Courts, County Court, Children's Court) as legitimation's contemporary contradictions; the Monas/Suharto register (the false-history dioramas; the Arjuna allegory; the fence).
• Michel Foucault — the dispersed-power backdrop: legitimation in a democracy must move "from a reliance on traditional and transcendent ideals of justice dispensed from on high" toward "power as immanent in citizenship" (p. 138) — the transition Foucault's analytics theorizes.
• Benedict Anderson (not yet paged — see log) — the nation-side: the imagined community sustained by monuments and the Javanese "cone of light" cosmology of power radiating from the centre.
• Clifford Geertz (not yet paged — see log) — the "theatre state": the pre-colonial Balinese state "governed through court ritual and spectacle rather than force" — legitimation as performance (via Dovey, p. 157).

Related Concepts

• power — the parent: authority as power's most stable mode; legitimation as its architectural technology.
• site-of-memory — the monument as legitimation's stabilizing image (Monas; the Washington obelisk; Tiananmen).
• spatial-segmentarity — the courtroom's instrument: "This rigid segmentarity of space is the framework for the rigid distinctions that are established there" (p. 136).
• ideology — legitimation's representational form: the state habitus as ideology "without words."
• panopticon — the examination-room and courtroom diagram: surveillance deep in the structure as legitimation's spatial machinery.
• boundaries — the fence as legitimation's material form: Merdeka Square's fence as "the screen we are not supposed to see but merely look through" (p. 164).
• transparency (no page yet — logged) — the contemporary ideal that legitimation must now absorb: "extracts from the Australian Constitution… etched onto the glass walls" (p. 130).
• everyday-life — legitimation's saboteur: the rhizomatic infiltrations (beggars, vendors, prostitutes, homeless) that "cut across the idealized nationalist symbolism of the square" (p. 153).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source: authority and legitimation (Ch. 8, pp. 125–138 — the state's "sta" grammar; Kafka's gate; the three courthouses; "the law is never settled"); monument legitimation (Ch. 10, pp. 153–166 — Sukarno's fire, Suharto's false dioramas, the Arjuna allegory, the fence and the collective void).
• Event-space (Hannah 2018) — the debate-page monument register: Bataille's monuments that "impose silence on the multitudes" — the pre-Dovey statement of the same architecture-of-authority problem.
• Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — legitimation at domestic scale: the interior as the superpower's legitimating exhibit.

Open Questions

• Dovey's terminus: "the design of the truly open, accessible, enlightened, transparent, democratic and legitimate courthouse may have too many contradictions for architects to resolve" (p. 138). Is legitimation in a democracy an architectural problem at all — or does the building's failure to settle the law ("the law is never settled") constitute its success?
• Is there a legitimation that does not intimidate — the "cave-like seclusion and theatre" of the County Court's courtrooms versus the Children's Court's "conference tables without barriers" that "were perceived to have undermined the authority"? Is authority without hierarchy possible in space at all?
• The Monas proposal (a parliament on the square's axis; a memorial to the 1965 massacres) sketches a legitimation-through-acknowledgement. Can the wiki's site-of-memory cluster theorize the counter-monument as the becoming-form of legitimation?