Smooth operators: architectural Deleuzism in societies of control

Spencer, D. 2012. Smooth operators: architectural Deleuzism in societies of control. PhD thesis University of Westminster School of Architecture and the Built Environment

TitleSmooth operators: architectural Deleuzism in societies of control
TypePhD thesis
AuthorsSpencer, 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.

This critique is pursued through an analysis of the ways in which figures

such as Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Farshid

Moussavi and Jeff Kipnis, in their mobilisations of conceptual figures drawn

from the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, have attempted to annul the

practice of critique within architectural culture so as to clear the ground for

a ‘post-critical’ affirmation of architecture’s contributions to corporate,

entrepreneurial and governmental operations. I also attend, as the means

through which to contest this affirmation, to the analysis of key architectural

projects in the fields of industrial manufacture, office work, education,

consumerism and media production, and the orientation of their design

toward the production of swarm-modelled labourers, ‘citizen-consumers’,

‘nomadic’ student-entrepreneurs and re-engineered publics.

Year2012
File
Publication dates
Completed2012

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