Power

Definition

Power, in Foucault's analytics (which is this wiki's primary reference for the concept), is not a substance possessed by a sovereign but a relation exercised through techniques, strategies, and spatial arrangements. "The concept dual of Foucault of 'power/knowledge' showed that at least for the study of human beings, the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated" (Fontana-Giusti). Power is productive, not merely repressive: it produces subjects, behaviors, spatial orders, and forms of knowledge. For architecture, power is exercised through the "distribution of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the codification of their reciprocal relations" (Foucault, cited by Fontana-Giusti). Foucault's three spatial modes — spatial metaphors, space as model of thought's spatiality, and architecture as extension of discourses and practices — map the ways power operates through the built environment without being reducible to it.

Key Thinkers

• Michel Foucault — power/knowledge; power as productive and relational, not sovereign.
• Gordana Fontana-Giusti — power and space in Foucault's three spatial modes.
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — power as furniture-scale transaction: "the very precise spatial arrangement of objects and furniture"; power "exercised from the margins" of the transferential scene (1996/2006).

Related Concepts

• Discipline — the modality of power targeting individual bodies.
• Biopower — the modality of power targeting populations.
• Governmentality — the integrated art of governing.
• Panopticon — the architectural model of power as automatic, continuous visibility.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Foucault for Architects — power/knowledge and architecture.
• Berggasse 19 (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — power at furniture scale: "The patient's entry into Freud's office initiates a series of complicated and subtle transactions of power, orchestrated largely by the very precise spatial arrangement of objects and furniture" (p. 117); "In a reverse panopticon, the most central location in Freud's study (the point from which the gaze normally issues) turns out to be the most vulnerable"; "Power in this transferential scene is exercised from the margins" (p. 118) — power's spatial paradox (authority divested at the center, exercised from the margins) and its concealment in the watcher's opacity (the analyst "barely visible… eclipsed by backlighting"). See panopticon, transference, gaze.
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — power at the scale of ornament: "sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan" of ornamental order (p. 315); order's permanent re-founding — "behind which loom the stakes of power" — via "the double movement of election and exclusion… to reaffirm certain divisions, certain hierarchies judged indispensable to its perpetuation" (p. 317); the denunciation of excess and of the decorative as calls to order that "involve positions of power" (p. 321); symmetry and repetition as "the path of least resistance, consistent with the objectives of power" (p. 315); and the rationalized form — the reformers' "rationality" as ornament "exploited by rationality to establish its will to power" (p. 320). The source gives power an ornamental register the Foucauldian spatial analytics lack: power exercised through what bodies wear and what rooms display — capillary before Foucault's capillaries, and self-declared in its denunciations. See ornamental-ground-plan, call-to-order, ornamental-excess.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's desire-based recasting and its architectural typology. Dovey positions the book between Foucault and Deleuze: Foucault's dispersed micropractices are "a theory of 'power to'… however, it retains a negative critique of power as an all-pervasive apparatus"; Deleuze moves further — "it is not pre-existing beings who hold power or are subject to it, rather power is linked to flows of desire and processes of becoming… organisms and things are not subject to practices of power so much as they are produced by desires" (p. 14). The Framing Places typology is summarized: "force removes all agency from the subject…, coercion uses a threat of force…, manipulation involves concealment of intent (as in the shopping mall), domination involves the intimidation of scale…, authority uses institutional framings (state, church, school) and seduction involves a transformation of the subject's desires" (p. 14). The book's two extended studies give the concept its institutional registers: authority as "the most efficient means of social control," legitimated through spatial ritual (the courthouses) and its national form (Monas as "a literal concentration of power," p. 158); and the micro-scale power of camouflage — heroin trade "camouflaged within a diverse streetlife" (p. 139), the fine that is "also a fee… also a bribe" (p. 177), the panopticon's reversal in Bangkok's deep troks (p. 182). See legitimation, complicitous-silence, spatial-segmentarity, power-and-space.
• source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies