1 Inhabiting Bodies: The Spatiality of Power By Rebecca Gordon May 2005 Discipline is the political anatomy of the detail. -Michel Foucault 1 Is my body a thing, is it an idea? Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2 This project establishes a model for theorizing space that is simultaneously a model for theorizing subjectivity in that it establishes an irreducible interconnection between subjects and the spaces that we inhabit. Rather than viewing space as merely the environments through which we pass, we must configure our relation to space as integral to the formation of our subjectivities. This project began with the observation that space, in certain instances, seems capable of controlling people, while in other instances it is the 1 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, New York: Second Edition: 1995. (139) 2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Intertwining The Chiasm. In The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press. Illinois: 1968. (152)
2 site of great creativity and inconsistency of experience on the part of its inhabitants. Space is capable of disciplining people in a way that far exceeds the effects of its rules or physical barriers, while, even within one space, simultaneously producing an endless variety of experiences and utilizations on the part of the subject. This project was born out of an attempt reconcile these two seemingly contradictory phenomena. The result is a model for thinking about space that sees spaces and subjects to be in a relationship of mutual formation. This relationship is the basis for the operations of disciplinary power, as it is simultaneously the basis for the possibility of creative deployments of power on the part of subjects in the spatial realm. This model of the relationship between subjects and spaces produces and has as its basis a vision of the subject in terms of its materiality the spatial subject that is always an embodied subject. Elizabeth Grosz, in Architecture from the Outside, 3 poses a set of questions about the possibilities that arise from the intersection of philosophy and architecture. How she wants to know, can we understand space differently, in order to organize, inhabit, and structure our living arrangements differently? 4 And stemming from this question, How is space conventionally and architecturally understood? What are the unspoken conditions underlying such conceptions? For Grosz, this conventional understanding of space, both architecturally and philosophically, can be characterized very generally by the way that bodies have been understood, in relation to spatiality and independently. Grosz s goal of thinking a new theoretical approach to architecture and rendering space and building more mobile, dynamic, and active, more 3 Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture From the Outside, Essays on Virtual and Real Space. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Mass.: 2001. 4 Ibid., xviii.
3 as force, than they have previously been understood 5 is then deeply tied to a reworking of the ways in which we understand the body in its relationship to spatiality. Grosz s notion of the body consists of seeing the body as a, indeed, as the, primary sociocultural product. It is focused on the complexities, specificities, and materialities of bodies alone, 6 (as opposed to seeing the body as peripheral or the result of the transformations of the mind,) as the site for the exploration of subjectivity, sexual difference, and interwoven with these, spatiality. She is aware that: This project is based on a risky wager: that all the effects of depth, of interiority, of the inside, all the effects of consciousness (and the unconscious), can be thought in terms of the rotations, convolutions, inflections, and torsions of the body itself. 7 Grosz situates her project as engaged in the difficult task of problematizing a whole series of binary oppositions governing the ways we understand bodies, their relations to other objects and to the world. 8 Part of the project of opposing these binaries such as the distinctions between the mind and the body or the subject and the object is to displace the privileged focus on the mind over the body, 9 which involves understanding the interaction of the social and the individual in terms of the production and inscription of bodily surfaces, as the constitution of concretely particular, socially determinate modes of corporeality. 10 This project engages in a similar approach; it views identity and experience as playing out on the level of the body and its transformations. Cultural power manifested in spaces defines the very bodies that build these spaces, putting into motion a reciprocal 5 Ibid., xix. 6 Ibid., 32. 7 Ibid., 32. 8 Ibid., 31. 9 Ibid., 31. 10 Ibid., 32.
4 cycle of building and being built that is constantly enacted between people and spaces. Disembodied notions such as consciousness, interiority, and the political, according to this approach, all can be thought on the level of the body itself in its relationship to space. Integral to this relationship between subjects and spaces is the workings of what I refer to as the spatial detail, which is way of speaking about the small and insignificant realities of the material realm: the spatial world and the body. I begin with Foucault s work on the disciplinary power of the spatial detail in the historical context of the development of the subject, juxtaposed with Michel De Certeau s problematic claim about an alternate use of the spatial detail as an individual means of resistance to the operations of disciplinary cultural power. I argue that this claim does not take into account the extent to which even those realms which are considered to be at least somewhat outside the scope of cultural power, such as the privacy of the domestic realm, are in fact aided in their capability of birthing disciplined subjectivities by virtue of the fact that we do not give their disciplinary potential its due credit. I attempt to illustrate, using the work of Mark Wigley, the way in which the spatial transformations of privacy were equally transformations of subjectivity, identity, and sexuality, through the complex interaction between the ideology of privacy and real private spaces. Private spaces create a model of the body that must, according to the dictates of the ideology of privacy, see itself as outside of the cultural realm. The second half of the paper addresses the way to approach this problem of the spatial transformations of subjectivity making it difficult if not impossible for us to recognize the workings of this spatial power. I suggest that rather than seeing this cultural construction as a blockage to understanding what we and our spaces really are, it is
5 possible to view it as indicative of the need to develop a new model for thinking about space that makes room for the effects of this mutually constituting relationship between subjects and spaces. I employ Althusser s work on the visibilities and invisibilities of a text as a possible way of thinking about our inability to see or understand the extent to which our identities are defined by spatially manifested cultural power as indicative of what this spatial experience is, and hence, what space is. I respond to this by suggesting a model for theorizing space that accounts for these spatial and subjective transformations using Merleau-Ponty s last essay The Intertwining The Chiasm, which outlines his notion of the flesh. The flesh is the structure of interrelation between the subjective and objective realms that is manifested in both the material world and in the human subject, hence being the basis of the interrelation between them. Merleau-Ponty establishes that to talk about the subject is to talk about the body, and one cannot think about the body without thinking about it in its relationship to the material and spatial worlds. The flesh provides a conceptual grounding for the constituting/constituted relationship that this paper tries to establish and illustrate. This relationship, I argue, is the condition of possibility for spatial disciplinary power acting on and through spatial details, but it is also what makes possible a vast network of different kinds of interchanges between the materiality of spaces and the materiality of subjects. Spaces build us while we simultaneously build our spaces, in such a way that it is as makers and builders that we shape the cultural arena, and are shaped by it. This relationship of mutual formation calls for renewed attention to the power of the detail in both the way that it spatially forms our identities and the way that we utilize it toward the production of different kinds of spaces. In other words, this focus
6 on the power of the detail is the product of an alternate approach to thinking about space that views our relationships with the spaces that we inhabit to be the formative medium of our subjectivities. Spatial Practices and Power Moving Spaces and Static Places In The Practice of Everyday Life, 11 Michel De Certeau focuses on the details of ordinary life as the means of resistance to the circulation of disciplinary power formulated in Discipline and Punish. I am particularly interested in his approach to this project in terms of spatiality, Section III, Spatial Practices. De Certeau states that power, according to Foucault, operates through the manipulation of miniscule technological procedures acting on and with details 12 that create spaces that function as disciplinary mechanisms. As such, De Certeau locates opposition to this disciplinary power in the realm of the everyday details of spatial experience. De Certeau s project is to identify the means by which individuals and communities resist being reduced to the forces of power, to identify ways of operating that constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. 13 His goal, based on the belief that a resistance to disciplinary power is possible, is to locate the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity 11 De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1984. 12 De Certeau, xiv. 13 ibid., xiv.
7 clandestinely manifested in the everyday experience of subjects already caught in the nets of discipline. 14 In Docile Bodies, Foucault explores the ways in which power came to be manifested spatially through the precise organization and designation of bodies in space in the military, the school, the hospital and the workshop. Through the complete designation of every detail of the way in which the subject exists in space, the classical age discovered the body as the object and target of power. 15 Rather than seeing power in terms of an ability to reform ideology, it became clear that domination could be obtained though an elaborate science of the minute, and that discipline towards whatever purpose could be reduced to a mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite. 16 In other words, it was established that power was most effective not through large reformatory and ideological strokes, but through the careful and meticulous manipulation of insignificant trifles the precise location of the body, and the attentive design of each and every element of the unfolding of the subject s daily experience. This micro-physics of power allows people to be dominated without explicit mental coercion through a steady accumulation of scores of everyday details. De Certeau makes a distinction between two kinds of space and spatial experience: space and place. Space and place are defined in De Certeau as ways of describing spatial experiences 17 though memory and language which both establish the identity of each term and orchestrate the transitions between the two. Although the goal of De Certeau s text as a whole is to investigate what ways of operating form the 14 ibid., xv. 15 Foucault, 136. 16 Ibid., 140. 17 Two sorts of determinations in stories De Certeau, 118.
8 counterpart, on the consumer s (or dominee s?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order 18 as they are outlined in Discipline and Punish, De Certeau s distinction between space and place does not explicitly reference Foucault. Therefore, this section engages in a reading of De Certeau that sees him as aligning place with his interpretation of Foucault s description of disciplinary power acting on and through details, and space with the ways of operating that constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. 19 I do this because although De Certeau does not discuss Foucault in his distinction between space and place he does, as I will return to shortly, frame his description of the spatial practices of the pedestrian 20 a description that is remarkably similar to that of space in terms of opposition to Foucauldian detail-centered disciplinary power. Place, in my reading, is indicative of the spatial designation and manipulation that he sees to be the result of the type of disciplinary power Foucault explicates. Place is marked by a stability that is reducible to the being there of something dead. 21 Place is understood in terms of the locations of elements, including, I presume, bodies, as opposed to a spatial understanding that emphasizes experience. Place, he refers to as the law of a place. 22 The law of the proper rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own proper and 18 Ibid., xiv. 19 Ibid., xiv. 20 Chapter VII Walking in the City. 21 De Certeau, 118. 22 Ibid., 118
9 distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. 23 Place, as will be discussed more in a moment, is indicative of immobility and fixity it is the opposite of an experientially based spatial understanding. Conversely, space, according to De Certeau, is defined in terms of experience, and seemingly, moreover, diversity of experience. Space is defined in terms of movement, temporality, sequence of events. It is mobile, corporeal, and based on action, and because of this it is ambiguous, always contestable, reconfigurable. A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect of the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that it, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent on many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a proper. 24 Space is the effect of operations deployed within it, and these operations are, in my understanding, always being performed by a subject, or, many subjects in which all the 23 Ibid., 117 24 Ibid., 117.
10 diverse operations are occurring simultaneously. Space is determined by operations which when they are attributed to a stone, tree, or human being, specify spaces by the actions of historical subjects, 25 in that telling a story in terms of movement indicates the attribution of subjectivity. So, space can only be understood if it is also understood in terms of the role of the subjects (or attribution of subjectivity to the inanimate, as in his example). The distinction between space and place employs a distinction between movement and stability or static-ness, which further indicates a differentiation between a spatial understanding through subjective experience (space) and a spatial understanding though an invisible all-seeing eye noting the location of elements (place). In short, space is a practiced place, 26 and, as such, practiced by a subject. Additionally, it is important to emphasize that spaces and places are not definitive entities, but ways of thinking/speaking about spaces that understand them in different ways, 27 in this case, in terms of how they either imply or deny the role of the individual subject. De Certeau makes a similar distinction to the one he makes between space and place in an earlier section in which he differentiates between the experience of the pedestrian in the city and the pleasure to be found in viewing the city from outside it and above it. 28 I equate this looking-down vision of the city with De Certeau s place, and the embodiment and individuality of the pedestrians experience of the city with his space. Furthermore, it is this section, and its relation to the distinction between space and place 25 Ibid., 117. 26 Ibid., 117. 27 Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between spaces and places. Ibid., 118. 28 Interestingly, from the top of the World Trade Center.
11 that configures what I read to be De Certeau s argument, which is that place is the result of what he sees as Foucault s description of disciplinary power as it is enacted on and through spatial details, and space is an approach that provides the means by which to resist this power. De Certeau sees the pleasure to be found in looking down on the city from up above to be based in disembodiment. 29 The elevation transforms the former pedestrian into a voyeur by putting him a distance from the bewitching world by which one was possessed and transforming it into a text that lies before one s eyes, that allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. 30 This looking-down is motivated by a lust to be nothing more than a view-point. 31 This kind of vision sees only a panorama-city, a visual simulacrum, the condition of possibility of which is the disentanglement of the viewer from what she sees that is marked by a misunderstanding of practices 32. This way of thinking about a space involves, as does place, a shifting of focus away from the role of individual subjectivity. The city that the disembodied voyeur sees from above is, in my interpretation, what De Certeau describes as place; an understanding of a space that shifts its focus away from the individual movements and practices of the subjects within this space and toward a space that is understood according to the law of the static definition of its elements, hence, a place. For De Certeau, this disembodied vision is an instance of the operation of discipline, because he identifies the realm of resistance to this discipline to be located in 29 To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city s grasp. One s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and the nervousness of New York traffic. De Certeau, 92. 30 Ibid., 92 31 Ibid., 92 32 Ibid., 93
12 its opposite: the operations of embodied, creative, pedestrian activity, analogous with his description of space. If De Certeau describes the city-voyeur in terms of disembodied vision, he describes the pedestrian in terms of embodied blindness. These ordinary practitioners of the city live down below, below the thresholds at which visibility begins, writing an urban text without being able to read it, making use of spaces that cannot be seen : It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. 33 The pedestrian manifests an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. 34 Just like space, this approach to space focuses on practices and operations, that De Certeau situates in opposition to the vision of space that is precluded by the operation of disciplinary power. This spatial understanding that focuses on modes of operations of inhabitants, marked by a focus on physicality, movement and creativity, (analogous with space), De Certeau configures in opposition to the vision of space from a disembodied voyeur who interprets the space in terms of the location of immobile fixed elements (analogous with place): This pathway could be inscribed as a consequence, but also as the reciprocal, of Foucault s analysis of the structures of power. He moved it in the direction of mechanisms and technical procedures, minor instrumentalities capable, merely by their organization of details, of transforming a human multiplicity into a disciplinary society and of 33 All citations in this sentence, Ibid, 93. 34 Ibid., 93.
13 managing, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviances concerning apprenticeship, health, justice, the army, or work. 35 This pathway refers here to the microbe-like, singular and plural practices that far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have creatively combined and insinuated themselves in these (urban) disciplinary procedures towards the end of clandestinely evading these structures. 36 He juxtaposes this vision of pedestrian creativity with what he sees as either the condition of possibility or the result of his reading of Foucault s analysis of power acting on and through details; in my reading, analogous with place. In De Certeau s view, Foucault s disciplinary power has as its necessary reciprocal or consequence an individual mode of reappropriation, in the form of resistant spatial practices on the level of the everyday and the pedestrian. De Certeau asks of Foucault s text: But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space? In the present conjecture, which is marked by a contradiction between the collective mode of administration and an individual mode of reappropriation, this question is no less important, if one admits that spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life. I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of 35 Ibid., 96. 36 Ibid., 96.
14 everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city. 37 By making the above distinction between the modes of operations of the pedestrian and the operations of disciplinary space that he sees as the result of the operations of power outlined in Foucault, (or in other words, by making the distinction between space and place,) De Certeau is trying to investigate mechanisms by which individuals and societies can reclaim the spatial detail that, in his reading of Foucault, has been transformed and utilized to be the mechanism of disciplinary power. According to De Certeau, resistance to the power of the spatial detail that Foucault outlines lies in locating the ways in which even within disciplinary spaces, such as the city, there is a great diversity of individual ways of resignifying these places and transforming them into spaces. However, by situating the individual use of the everyday spatial detail, such as the style with which someone explores and moves through the gridded streets of a city, against the use of the spatial detail as a mechanism of control, such as the designation of the precise manner in which the pupil sits at his desk, De Certeau, in my view, instates, or reinstates, the opposition between the individual, and by extension, private, realm and the public realm in which the everyday is usurped from the individual and transformed into a collective method of control. De Certeau situates the collective mode of administration as oppositional to the individual mode of reappropriation, and in doing this implies a relationship of opposition between culture and the individual, which, in my reading, falls under the umbrella of a distinction between the public realm and the private realm, for it is in the private outside of reach of cultural power that De Certeau identifies the manifestation 37 Ibid., 96, my emphasis.
15 of resistance. De Certeau s discussion of spatial practices and his attention to everyday movement are not in themselves problematic, but through their position in opposition to power as it is manifested through spatial details, it must provide the jumping off point for a more complex model of the interrelation of the public and private spheres, one that leaves neither the individual nor the collective intact. Even when De Certeau situates this reclaiming of the everyday within the scope of cultural power, he does not explain the way in which the two are related, leaving one to imagine that he sees the individual s spatial practices as solid bubbles of resistance, floating distinct within a sea of cultural disciplinary power. Although De Certeau gives a detailed and insightful account of the creativity, diversity, and inconsistency manifest in spatial experience, the way in which he situates these practices as oppositional to the disciplinary power of the spatial detail not only fails to understand how the kind of disciplinary power that Foucault discusses is effective, but it furthers the very models of thinking that make it effective. Although there are passages in the text that allude to a more complex spatial view, De Certeau s general argument, in my view, seems to be based on the following reasoning: If everyday details, when designed by others, have the potential to be thoroughly effective disciplinary mechanisms, it is because those details have been usurped from the realm of individual agency and redesigned as means of control. In light of this, my interpretation of his argument continues, the way to protect ourselves is to reclaim those everyday details, thus transforming them into acts of personal expressiveness that emanate from some individual realm, situated in opposition to the utilization of everyday details by cultural forces in public spaces. In other words, we see in De Certeau two visions of the operation
16 of the spatial detail, the first in the realm of place where spatial details are designated to an excessive degree to ensure the inability of the inhabitant of these spaces to use them expressively, personally, and resistantly, and the second in the realm of space ruled by individual agency, movement of the body, playing with established norms of spatial use, in which the second is the means of opposition to the first. However, this view in which the spatial detail is signified in two ways that are oppositional to one another frames Foucault s discussion of the use of space as a mechanism of control in a particular way that does not take into account the complexity of the effectiveness of these spatial details towards that end. It sees Foucault s argument in terms of only the fact that the manipulation of the spatial detail is effective, and was in the eighteenth century discovered to be effective, and does not explore the problem of how the manipulation of the spatial detail could be utilized so effectively. It is the answer to this question as to how the spatial detail functions as power over subjects that must be the subject of our inquiry. Therefore, I read in De Certeau a misinterpretation of Foucault s analysis of the operations of disciplinary power working on and through details. The role of De Certeau is a cautionary one: we cannot theorize the power of the spatial detail to operate in any way that leaves intact that realm out of which De Certeau sees resistance emanating the personal, the creative, the private. I read Foucault s analysis as configuring the spatial detail as participating in subject formation, especially our fundamental models which we use to think our bodies, in such a way that resistance to the disciplinary employment of the spatial detail cannot be so simple as to identify the anti-disciplinary practices of everyday life, even within the field in which this discipline is operating.
17 A New Body In the Detail Foucault explores the way in which an intense focus on details, often details that pertain to the organization and designation of bodies in space, formulated, in the eighteenth century, not just bodies that were newly disciplined, but bodies that were born by discipline to be new bodies. 38 In other words, the manner of the investment in the detail that Foucault describes is not limited merely to the effectiveness of the manipulation of details in producing the desired ends, but is based on the discovery that the desired ends are better reached through the detailed manipulation of every miniscule step of the way in which these ends are reached. Power, according to Foucault, operates at the intersection of the material and the ideological; power operates on both of these registers simultaneously. Rather than attempting to control preexisting bodies, this new disciplinary technique created new bodies that not only do what one wishes but operate as one wishes: 39 The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when the art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A political anatomy, which was also a mechanics of power, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over other s bodies, not only so they may do what one wished, but so they may operate as one wished, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. 40 38 Foucault, 137, and 141: A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans, and data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born. 39 Ibid, 137. 40 Ibid., 137.
18 The kind of disciplinary power that Foucault is identifying operates in this way to produce subjected and practiced bodies, hence, docile bodies. 41 This detailed power over subjects that has as its power the capacity to formulate new bodies works on the micro-level of the gesture. It is an inside-out approach to disciplining as opposed to an outside-in approach: transform the body of the subject to be dominated on the fundamental level of the functioning of the body, rather than imposing from without demands that are effective only insofar as they govern the desired result. The object of this kind of discipline was no longer the signifying elements of behavior or the language of the body, but rather, the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization. 42 In other words, rather than attempting to control the result directly, this kind of discipline controlled the result by controlling every miniscule element that creates the end result. It was a discipline of the manipulation of details applied to the subject divided into details, 43 such that domination is obtained through the internal transformation of the operations of the body. The constraint bears upon the forces rather than upon the signs. 44 The spatial detail therefore operates, in my reading, in two ways simultaneously, as disciplinarily effective as well as disciplinarily transformative of the identity and functioning of the body. The ability of spaces to produce a transformation in the definition of the body is what Foucault posits to have been a new historical development. Take for example, the second element on Foucault s list, The Art of 41 Ibid., 137. 42 Ibid., 137, my emphasis. 43 the scale of the control: it was a question not of treating the body, en masse, wholesale, as it were an indissociable unity, but of working it retail, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of mechanism itself movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body. (137). 44 Ibid., 137.
19 Distributions, 45 that of partitioning. To a certain extent, disciplinary power worked in merely an effective way, in the sense that it provided a higher level of productivity and facility of oversight: Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions, analyze confused, massive, or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. 46 Partitioning operates powerfully in a functional sense; it works insofar as it is a mechanism for designing the work and movement of a particular person for as long as they are in the space, and this work can be easily monitored by an overseer. Spatial organizations such as partitioning do, to a certain extent, operate on purely a functional level, that is, they make it easy to ascertain what is happening in a space, who is doing it, in what way or how well, and to distribute consequences accordingly. However, a tactic such as partitioning, in my reading, also operates according to another level of functioning, one that participates in the kind of creation of bodies that Foucault indicates. One cause, partitioning, has two different effects, one which is disciplinarily effective, in that it produces the desired ends, and one which is disciplinarily transformative, in that it designates the means by which the result is achieved on the level of the redefinition of the operation of the body. Foucault sees these sorts of disciplinary spaces as operating in more than one way simultaneously, in that 45 Ibid., 141-148. 46 Ibid., 143.
20 they are mixed spaces: real because they govern the disposition of buildings, rooms, furniture, but also ideal, because they are projected over this arrangement of characterizations, assessments, hierarchies. 47 What is Foucault indicating by saying that these spaces are both real and ideal? What is the relationship between these characterizations, assessments, and hierarchies, and the buildings, rooms, and furniture? I would like to suggest that what Foucault is indicating by this discussion of mixed spaces is the way that these spatial organizations do not just situate and regulate the behavior of bodies, but they create those bodies through creating the means by which the inhabitants of these kinds of disciplinary spaces understand themselves and their bodies. In other words, I am proposing that having one s body in the proper position and in its designated location every day does not just operate on a functional level, but it has the capability of making change in a much more fundamental sense the way that we think about what kind of a thing bodies are, what they are supposed to do, and how they are to inhabit space. 48 A method like partitioning, in my reading, is functionally effective at the same time that it teaches partitioning as a model for thinking space and the body, (which then results in the building of spaces that employ this model of thinking about how to build and use spaces.) In simple terms, spatial partitioning has the capability of producing the belief in creating spaces for ourselves in which for each person there is one designated area for a particular activity. These spaces are mixed in the sense that they allow the spatial detail to operate on two different registers at the same time: real in terms of the 47 Ibid., 148. 48 If this is the case, it discredits De Certeau s turn toward the individual as a means of resistance, because to do this would suggest that the subject possesses an identity that has remained untouched by the spatial designation at work in the spaces that thesubject inhabits.
21 functionality of a tactic such as partitioning, and ideal, in that partitioning participates in the creation of models for thinking the relationship between bodies and spaces. Spaces of this sort are ideal, as well as real, because they naturalize the relationships to space that they institute on functional grounds. A Relationship of Potentiality What does it mean to say that spaces have the capacity to control people not just through rules and the effects of actual physical parameters, but by somehow transforming these people and reinventing their bodies as the means to discipline? 49 I take Foucault s analysis, though historical, to be applicable in a much larger context. Not only do I see it to be contemporarily relevant, but I find it to be useful in theorizing spaces other than those which are explicitly disciplinarian, in the extreme sense of the word. I identify that which makes possible the transformative discipline in the context of the classroom or the factory to be indicative of the workings of space in general from the hospital to the art gallery. My departure from Foucault is my speculation into what it is precisely that makes this reinvention of the body possible a reinvention that produces or is produced by a focus on the power of the spatial detail. I would like to suggest that this kind of detail oriented discipline is made possible by a relationship of mutual formation between subjects spaces. This relationship is the grounds of potentiality that makes Foucauldian discipline possible, but, it is also indicative of spatial experience in general, producing a multitude of other phenomena. Like in the spatial technique of partitioning, the materiality of space persists in its 49 It is interesting to notice the two meanings of the term discipline, one as what is done to one to dominate or punish, and the other meaning as that which someone knows or specializes in, as in the academic disciplines.
22 material facticity while, at the same time, engaging with the subject in a transformative sense, by redefining the body s relationship to space. And, following this and also preceding it, this transformed body creates/recreates those spaces that operate according to the spatial ideologies that have transformed it. Spaces may be designed in effective ways, but the inhabiting of these spaces then produces a reciprocal relationship in which the models we use to understand ourselves are in line with these effective designs which we then recreate in other spaces. In other words, there is a constituting/constituted relationship between bodies and spaces that has no clear sequence of cause and effect. This means that to theorize space is simultaneously to theorize subjectivity, and the same conversely. Furthermore, as discussed in the introduction, this also posits a fundamentally embodied vision of the subject; to speak of the subject is to speak of the body, if we engage with the subject from the point of view of the subject s presence in space, which is always on the level of materiality. 50 As such, there can be no recourse to a subjective interiority out of which resistance to this kind of disciplinary power could emerge, as I argued De Certeau indicates. The notion of privacy indicates the supposed existence of a realm that is untouchable by cultural forces and cultural disciplinary power, leading me to believe that De Certeau s logic implies that resistance to disciplinary power is linked to the existence of some degree of privacy that separates one from the cultural sphere. It implies a body that has somehow shielded itself from the power of the spatial detail manipulated toward disciplinary ends; a body not born from its relationship to culturally defined spaces. De Certeau s notion of resistance posits a space of interiority that remains intact from the effects of disciplinary power, without taking into account the way in which these very models of interiority and exteriority, individual 50 As we will explore more in the work of Merleau-Ponty.
23 and collective, public space and private space are shaped by, and subsequently shape, physical spaces. Privacy in the Domestic Sphere I will approach the very site of the alleged resistance to disciplinary power, the private space, as a means to explore how this mutually formulating relationship between subjects and spaces could work. Through this analysis, I hope to do two things: One is to provide a hint at the domain of analysis of the specific ways in which the home and the private space could be seen to participate in the development and enforcement of specific bodies and sexualities, though I cannot do justice to that topic by any means in the scope of this essay, and do not attempt to. Second, I draw from this mutual definition of bodies and private spaces conclusions about the operations of privacy/private spaces, in that they have as their condition of possibility the hiddenness of their cultural construction. This point should lead us to explore the possibilities for rethinking private and domestic spaces by rethinking the significance of the invisibility of their cultural construction. The Convoluted Exchange Mark Wigley, in his essay on privacy and domesticity, examines the historically complex relationship between the ideology of privacy and real private spaces. 51 Wigley seems to be arguing against two cause-and-effect approaches that can be formulated in thinking the relationship between privacy and private space: either a desire for privacy, innate or culturally developing, provoked the creation of private spaces in the domestic 51 Wigley, Mark. Untitled: The Housing of Gender. In: Colomina, Beatriz, editor. Sexuality and Space. Princeton Architectural Press, New York: 1992.
24 sphere, or, private spaces in houses created new forms of representation ideas about the body, sexuality, subjectivity, etc. Rather, he sees both of these things occurring in such a way that the spatial transformations themselves are ideological mechanisms. It can be neither because it is intricately both. The complicated history of this sense of privacy, leading up to its formal establishment in the nineteenth century, involves [a] kind of convoluted exchange between spatial and ideological transformations. The new spaces of everyday life cannot be understood as either the physical consequence of new forms of representation or their condition of possibility. Rather, they are themselves forms of representation. Each shift in the emergence of private space involves transformations of such systems (private correspondence, portraits, the bellcord, the diary, the corridor, the novel, the cabinet). 52 By forms of representation, I take to mean those things which are not merely material or merely ideological, but those material things whose definition depends on their ideological significance in such a way that they operate not just as objects or spaces but as ideological-and-spatial phenomena. Private spaces, and the different kinds of private spaces, are such systems of representation, in that they are not the physical consequences of ideological transformations, nor are they the grounds for such transformations. They are those ideological transformations which, because of these transformations, can no longer be called ideological and as such are deemed forms of representation. Ideological transformations are spatial transformations, just as spatial transformations are ideological. This is due to the fact that private spaces are marked by 52 Wigley, 350.
25 the convoluted exchange between spatial and ideological transformations. The exchange is convoluted in the sense that there does not ever seem to be clear sequence of cause and effect between private spaces and the bodies, subjectivities, and ideologies of privacy associated with them. The spaces do not clearly create these bodies, nor are they created by them. Wigley s analysis hinges on a fifteenth century canonic architectural text written by Leon Battista Alberti which he situates as indicative of the unfolding of the history of private spaces and the discourse of privacy. He sees in Alberti the development of the privacy of sexuality in its linkage to the shifting of the architectural realities of the home. However, this privacy of sexuality cannot be understood as the privatization of a preexisting sexuality. Rather, it is the production of sexuality as that-which-is-private. 53 These private spaces of the home, and the layers of private spaces within the home, 54 participate in the invention of a new sexuality whose defining characteristic is the fact that it is private. The privatization of sexuality, according to Wigley, is connected to the larger project of the formation of the masculine subject. Order in general, associated with masculinity, necessitates the ordering and cleansing of the body in the form of a detachment from that body. Because of this need for the ordering of the body that is linked with masculine order, sexuality must be privatized because of the linkage of sexuality to femininity and of femininity to a fluidity of boundaries that opposes order and must be controlled: 53 Ibid., 346. 54 Such as the closet, that is off the bedroom, that is behind the drawing room, etc.
26 This disciplining of the body is an extension of the traditional disciplining of the cultural artifact woman, authorized by the claim that she is too much part of the fluid bodily world to control herself. The privatization of sexuality, where sexuality is understood as feminine, is used to produce the individual subject as a male subject and subjectivity itself as masculine. This subject is specific to that privatization. The new conditions of privacy mark a new subjectivity rather than simply modify a preexisting one. 55 These new conditions of privacy refer to the gradual production of a new sense of privacy, through redefining the spaces of the house into a complex order of layered spaces and subdivisions of spaces that map a social order by literally drawing the lines between hierarchies of propriety. 56 Invention of closets, in the original sense of the word as technologies of the privatization of the functions of the body such as sewers and toilets, are not just spatial transformations but, Wigley illustrates, participate in the creation of new bodies and subjectivities. In short, Wigley maps out the way in which in the development of the private spaces of the home we see a new masculine subjectivity, a new feminine subjectivity (or lack of a means of subject formation that is the expense of the masculine subjectivity created through the privatization of (feminine) sexuality), and a new vision of the body as that which is sexualized-and-therefore-privatized. However, the private spaces of the home were still, Wigley reads into Alberti, too feminized. Though the bedrooms of the husband and the wife were separated, they contained a hidden door between them that allowed the wife to enter into the husband s 55 Ibid., 345. 56 Ibid., 345.
27 bedchamber when requested or allowed. 57 As such, even the man s bedroom was not completely private, which necessitated the development of the first truly private space, which was the man s study a small locked room off his bedroom which no one else ever enters, an intellectual space beyond that of sexuality. 58 This study became the true center of the house insofar as it was geared entirely toward the production of the man s intellectual writing, the ordered locking away and maintenance of all important family documents. So, while the wife might have domain over the events of most of the domestic sphere, the study provided a limit to the feminine domain through the creation of an even more extreme form of privacy that was spatially formulated in order to supervise the space of sexuality it at once produces and veils. 59 The study was the site of a form of writing that established the sense of privacy that defined the private space of the study, which itself was the place of origin of the writing that established this sense of privacy: the writing that results from this secret romance (between the man and his literature in the study) is not simply produced within a private space. It is responsible for producing that very sense of privacy. The construction of private space as such cannot be separated from the construction of the ideology of privacy. The possibility of that space is inscribed into the written texts that circulate in public, whether or not such spaces exist. The new sense of privacy depends upon that inscription. The space is therefore as much the product of the texts as its condition of possibility. The new 57 Ibid., 347 58 Ibid., 347. 59 Ibid., 347.
28 forms of writing both depend on, and assist in, the cultural construction of those spaces. They are literally part of the spaces. 60 The logic of the interplay between the spatial and the ideological is strangely circular; the study depended on the discourse and ideology of privacy for its definition, while at the same time this discourse had as its condition of possibility the private space of the study, not just as the place where the writing was produced, but as the point of origin for the ideology of privacy. There is no logical or fixed order that can be applied to this interplay of the ideological and the spatial. Because of this, the ideology of privacy could be said to be a spatial ideology, that is, an ideology that only makes sense spatially, in that both its spatial and ideological significances constantly reference one another. Place is not simply a mechanism for controlling sexuality, as it would be considered by the model that sees spatial disciplinary mechanisms as merely effective, as opposed to transformative. Rather, it is the control of sexuality by systems of representation that produces place. 61 In other words, the private spaces that we discuss here are what they are by virtue of their double identity as both spatial and ideological, which is what gives them the ability to transform the bodies of those that inhabit them. 62 Systems of representation refers to this double identity. Aspects of sexuality are formed out of the ideology of privacy which is the spatial ideology of the bedroom, the dressing room, the study. Because of this, the study, like all spaces, is not simply entered. Rather, it is (re)produced. As such, the issue here is not simply the existence of studies in houses 60 Ibid., 350. 61 Ibid., 350. 62 It is difficult to determine Wigley s stance on the extent to which his historical analysis is currently applicable, though he does imply that it is, just as it is hard to determine whether or not he sees his analysis to be applicable to all forms of private spaces.