Spencer, D. 2012. Smooth operators: architectural Deleuzism in societies of control. PhD thesis University of Westminster School of Architecture and the Built Environment https://doi.org/10.34737/8z93y
| Title | Smooth operators: architectural Deleuzism in societies of control |
|---|---|
| Type | PhD thesis |
| Authors | Spencer, D. |
| Abstract | This thesis is concerned with the contributions of certain tendencies in architecture to the operation of contemporary modalities of power, especially in respect of its processes of subjectivation. Focused upon the mechanisms of what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze termed a ‘society of control’, it also attends to the presentation by figures prominent within architectural theory and practice—through their own translations of Deleuze, and his writings with Félix Guattari, as well as their mobilisations of ‘complexity theory’—of their servicing of this emergent mode of power as being in some way ‘progressive’. Naming this tendency in contemporary architectural discourse and practice ‘architectural Deleuzism’, and drawing upon a range of thought including that of Deleuze and Guattari themselves, as well as the work of Michel Foucault, the Frankfurt School and more contemporary critical perspectives, I contest its claims to the progressive in any sense other than that in which it serves the advancement of the marketisation of everyday life, its conditions of precarity, and its concomitant instrumentalisation of the communicative and affective capacities of human subjectivity. |
| Year | 2012 |
| File | |
| Publisher | University of Westminster |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 2012 |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.34737/8z93y |