SpatialViolence AnthonyVidler Assemblage,No.20,Violence,Space.(Apr.,1993),pp.84-85. StableURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0889-3012%28199304%290%3A20%3C84%3ASV%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 AssemblageiscurrentlypublishedbyTheMITPress. YouruseoftheJSTORarchiveindicatesyouracceptanceofJSTOR'sTermsandConditionsofUse,availableat http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html.JSTOR'sTermsandConditionsofUseprovides,inpart,thatunlessyouhaveobtained priorpermission,youmaynotdownloadanentireissueofajournalormultiplecopiesofarticles,andyoumayusecontentin theJSTORarchiveonlyforyourpersonal,non-commercialuse. Pleasecontactthepublisherregardinganyfurtheruseofthiswork.Publishercontactinformationmaybeobtainedat http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html. EachcopyofanypartofaJSTORtransmissionmustcontainthesamecopyrightnoticethatappearsonthescreenorprinted pageofsuchtransmission. TheJSTORArchiveisatrusteddigitalrepositoryprovidingforlong-termpreservationandaccesstoleadingacademic journalsandscholarlyliteraturefromaroundtheworld.TheArchiveissupportedbylibraries,scholarlysocieties,publishers, andfoundations.ItisaninitiativeofJSTOR,anot-for-profitorganizationwithamissiontohelpthescholarlycommunitytake advantageofadvancesintechnology.FormoreinformationregardingJSTOR,[email protected]. http://www.jstor.org SunFeb319:12:412008 Spatial Violence A whole history remains to be written social order. In every case space is ment and their "utopian" applications of spaces-which would at the same invaded and invading: on the level of to architecture and urbanism. time be the history of powers (both the body, in the form of epidemic and Yet such a spatial paradigm was, as these terms in the plural)-from the uncontrollable disease, and on the great strategies of geo-politics to the Foucault himself pointed out, con- level of the city in the person of the little tactics of the habitat, institu- structed out of an initial fear, the fear homeless. In other words, the realms tional architecture from the classroom of Enlightenment in the face of "dark- of the organic space of the body, and to the design of hospitals, passing via ened spaces, of the pall of gloom the social space in which that body economic and political installations. which prevents the full visibility of lives and works, domains clearly things, men and truth^."^ It was this -Michel Foucault, enough distinguished in the nine- "The Eve of Power."' very fear of the dark that led, in the teenth century, as Fran~oisD elaporte late eighteenth-century, to the fascina- has shown, no longer can be identified Space, in contemporary discourse, as tion with those same shadowy areas- as separate.? in lived experience, has taken on an what Foucault calls the "fantasy-world almost palpable existence. Its con- In the elaboration of this complex of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and tours, boundaries and geographies are discourse, the initiatives of Michel dungeonsn-the precise "negative of called up to stand in for all the con- Foucault have been of especial impor- the transparency and visibility which it tested realms of identity, from the tance. Following his studies of the is aimed to e~tablish."T~ he moment national to the ethnic; its hollows and spatial distribution of institutional that saw the creation of the first "con- voids are occupied by bodies that power in asylums, hospitals and prisons sidered politics of spaces" based on replicate internally the external condi- historians and theorists have speculated scientific concepts of light and infinity tions of political and social struggle, widely on the political role of space, also saw, and within the same episte- and are, likewise assumed to stand for, extending his insights to the city and to mology, the invention of a spatial and identify, the sites of such struggle. entire territories; he himself indicated phenomenology of darkness. In his Techniques of spatial occupation, of the importance of the geographical earlier essays on phenomenological territorial mapping, of invasion and approach in a number of interviews. psychology Foucault hinted at the surveillance are seen as the instru- nature of this "dark" side of space, that Equally following Foucault, attention ments of social and individual control. inhabited nightmares and phantasmic has largely been concentrated on a projections and was so poetically iden- Equally, space is assumed to hide, in specific kind of space: that transparent tified by psychologists such as Eugene its darkest recesses and forgotten mar- space theorized as a paradigm of total Minkowski. gins, all the objects of fear and phobia control by Jeremy Bentham and recu- that have returned with such insis- perated under the guise of "hygienic In the gradual development of his spa- tency to haunt the imaginations of space" by modernists led by Le tial discourse, that evidently rested not those who have tried to stake out Corbusier in the twentieth century. only on the insights of phenomenologi- spaces to protect their health and Transparency, it was thought, would cal psychology but also on the revived happiness. Indeed, space as threat, as eradicate the domain of myth, suspi- interest in the notion of "spatial pro- harbinger of the unseen, operates as cion, tyranny and above all, the irratio- duction" introduced by Henri Lefebvre medical and psychical metaphor for all nal. The rational grids and hermetic in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the possible erosions of bourgeois enclosures of institutions from hospi- echoed by the Situationists, Foucault bodily and social well being. The tals to prisons; the surgical opening up was, as is well known, especially con- body, indeed, has become its own of cities to circulation, light and air; cerned to identify spatial forms with the exterior, as its cell structure has be- the therapeutic design of dwellings forms of power they seemed to enclose come the object of spatial modeling and settlements; these have now all and even, as in the case of the that map its own sites of immunologi- been subjected to analysis for their Panopticon, instrumentalize. \fiat is cal battle and describe the forms of its hidden contents, their capacity to less noted is that this global identifica- antibodies. Even as the spaces of exile, instrumentalize the politics of surveil- tion-one that must be and has been asylum, confinement, and quarantine lance through what Bentham termed subject to rigorous criticism and valida- of the early modern period were con- "universal transparency." Historians tion on a case by case basis, was occa- tinuously spilling over into the "nor- have preferred to study this myth of sionally extended to embrace concepts mal" space of the city, so the "power through transparency," espe- of architectural style as in itself a carrier "pathological" spaces of today menace cially in its evident complicity with the of power. Visiting Attica in the wake of the clearly marked out limits of the technologies of the Modern Move- the riots in 1972, he wrote: Anthony At Attica what struck me perhaps first actual study of territorial occupation. contiguous, and while there is the of all was the entrance, that kind of One thinks of the work of Ioan Davies, illusion of total power there is, in fact, phony fortress a la Disneyland, those whose Writers in Prison offers a cri- the two way mirror of total mistrust by observation posts disguised as medieval tique of the Bachelardian opposition each of all."9 Davies finds support for towers with their machicoulis. And be- of "habitable space" to "hostile his position in the notion of mobile hind this rather ridiculous scenery pace."^ For Davies, "the space in territoriality advanced by Deleuze and which dwarfs everything else, you dis- prison is of a different order, being, in Guattari: "Space is imagined, put into cover it's an immense machine. And Bachelard's sense, both familiar and place, and resisted. The meaning and it's this notion of machinery that struck me most strongly-those very long, hostile, and its understanding requires use of space is everywhere subject to clean heated corridors with prescribe, not the formalization of ethnographic strategic imagination."1° for those who pass through them, spe- or poetic dichotomies but the meta- In this sense, one that the contempo- cific trajectories that are evidently cal- phor and allegon, of inscription and rary inhabitant of Los Angeles, New culated to be the most efficient sight and voice:" York, Paris or Berlin might understand, possible and at the same time the easi- est to oversee, and the most direct.5 For space is not physical in the sense "all spaces are violent and all are there- that Bachelard uses it, where places be- fore somewhat hostile." The political force of such spatial para- come images, but physical in a quite digms cannot be denied. Certainly they different sense where the interplay be- have acted to resist the insistent tem- tween the biologically physical (the tac- Notes porality of modernist historicism, the tile, the audible, the visual) and the 1.Michel Foucault, PowerJKnowledge: Se- implacable subsuming of the spatial in graphic is assembled in the context of lected interviews and Other Writings 1972- the temporal, which, from Marx higher voices, eyes, inscriptions by be- 1977, edited by Colin Gordon, New York, through Bergson in philosophy, and ing forced into the voiceless, sightless Pantheon Books, 1980, p.149. from Hegel through Sigfried Giedion in readability of a mechanized physical 2. Fran~oisD elaporte, in Disease and Civili- str~cture.~ zation. The Cholera Epidemic in Paris, 1832, aesthetics, construed architecture and translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cam- urbanism as the products and instru- Here Davies is recuperating Foucault, bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, character- ments of history. What the urban but in terms of a model that joins the ized these realms as follows: geographer Edward Soja has termed "light" and "dark" space of the Living conditions affect two distinct areas, "the reassertion of space in critical phenomenologists in a dialectical one within the body, the other outside it: social theoryn-to use the sub-title of framing of mental projection and organic space and social space. Social his recent book Postmodern Geogra- inhabitation, tactile and visual, that space is the space within which the organ- ism lives and labors, and the conditions of phies-takes on, in this context, a recalls the raumsoziologie of Georg existence within that space-living condi- necessarily oppositional character. Simmel. For Davies spatial analysis is tions--determine the probability of life But a theon, of space, uncorrected by at once architectonic and kinetic: and death. (Disease and Civilization, p. 80.) any dialectical relationship with his- To study space is initially to study the 3. Foucault, "The Eye of Power," p. 153. tory, has often hovered dangerously eye, the voice, and the hand, and at the 4. Foucault, "The Eye of Power," p. 154. close to a metaphysics of place. In the same time to conceive of other voices, 5. Michel Foucault, "On Attica: an Inter- hands of Heidegger and his less sophis- eyes, hands reworking the space.8 view," Telos, 19 (Spring 1974): 155-6. It ticated readers, such a metaphysics has would not be uninteresting to speculate on Here, as Simmel understood, the tradi- turned inevitably nostalgic and conser- the uncanny similarity between the stylistic tional categories of territoriality, and vative in tenor. The social implica- juxtaposition of the castle and the machine especially the conventional boundaries described by Foucault at Attica Prison and tions of spatial theon, are equally between public and private, are sus- that of the more recent Wexner Center by prone to blindness-notably, as pended in favor of "the interstitial Peter Eisenman. Rosalyn Deutsche recently pointed out nature of a territoriality which is at 6. Writers in Prison, 0xford:Basil Blackwell in her article "Men in Space" (Art Ltd., 1990. once biological, material and political. Forum, February 1990), in the area of 7. Ibid., p. 59. It is not so much that the public gender distinctions, but also, equally, 8. Ibid. sphere (the prison) dictates the private in the context of debates over urban 9. Ibid., p.60. (the personal everyday sense of our- 10. Ibid. p.78, citing Gilles Deleuze and planning, social welfare and the poli- selves), though it appears to do so, but Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Lit- tics of homelessness. that in the organization of space the erature (Minneapolis: University of Minne- Perhaps the paradigm holds as much centripetal and the centrifugal coexist, sota Press, 1976). hope for discourse analysis as for the so that the exits and entrances are Vidler