excerpt from “Space, Knowldege, and Power” by Michel Foucault.

Q: Do you see any particular architectural projects, either in the past or the present, as forces of liberation or resistance?

A: I do not think that it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of “liberation” and another is of the order of “oppression.” There are a certain number of things that one can say with some certainty about a concentration camp, to the effect that it is not an insturument of liberation, but one should still take into account – and this is not generally acknowledged – that, aside from torture and execution which preclude any resistance, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience and oppositional groupings.

On the other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is functionally – by its very nature – absolutely liberating.  Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself. The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around – not because they are ambiguous, but simply because “liberty” is what must be exercised.

…

Q: Yet people have often attempted to find utopian schemes to liberate people, or to oppress them.

A: Men have dreamed of liberating machines.  But there are no machines of freedom, by definition.  This is not to say that the exercise of freedom is completely indifferent to spatial distribution,  but it can only function when there is a certain convergence; in the case of divergence or distortion, it immediately becomes the opposite of that which had been intended.  The panoptic qualities of Guise could perfectly well have allowed it to be used as a prison.  Nothing could be simpler.  It is clear that, in fact, the Familistere may well have served as an instrument for discipline and a rather unbearable group pressure.”

“What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.” – Paul Graham

“I think that we are in a situation rather similar to that of 17th century Europe, when all the categories, all the concepts that now seem obvious, trivial, and common, were invented. At that time the idea of the central nation state was created, and concepts such as sovereignty and the obligation to obey were invented. My impression is that we are going through a period when all of these concepts are in crisis, and others are being constructed. Who constructs them? This is a very good question. We should not think that philosophers or thinkers are the ones who invent political concepts, because this is a conception of the political taken from the worst of Plato or the worst Illustration. These concepts emerge little by little within collective experiences, by trial and error. A new mode of being in the public sphere is emerging, a mode that is characterized by the fact that the state has become old and inadequate, like the typewriter compared to the computer.” – Paolo Virno

“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”
― Paul Valéry

“The success of Creative Commons, Free Software, Wikipedia and other web platforms for knowledge sharing is apparent to everyone. But at the same time, the consciousness of the everyday ‘free labour’ of web users exploited by new media corporations is rising, or to use the expression popularized by post-Operaismo theory, the exploitation of the ‘general intellect of the multitude’. It is, however, precisely these more ambivalent aspects of collective intelligence that are at stake: how those shadows are enmeshed with productive forces and state apparatuses, how culture and intellect are more instinctual and embodiments than cognitive gestures.” – Matteo Pasquinelli, “Animal Spirits”

Candle Light 烛光 from Nicholas Hanna on Vimeo.

“If architecture were redefined in this way, it might become more scrupulous and less responsible, smaller and less predictable, worth less but better, as the hope would be, would it not, that in giving grandiose pretensions to represent and define the social world in both its imaginative and active aspects ( a project the unlikelihood of which is comparable to the unlikelihood of compiling a legal code that also a good novel – an ambition that can only be confounded in practice) architecture may, by contraction and concentration constitute itself anew?” – Robin Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building”

related: (1/11/10)