Societies Of Control

Giovanni Battista Piranasi, Prisoners on a Projecting Platform

Elements: this was a matter of three -- emotions of being in a cage ~ of night ~ and of the coming day, provided one believes in deploying brick and steel to produce bodily states of mind.

Logic.

"The different internments or spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. On the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are moulds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-Deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point."

[ Gilles Deleuze, Postscript to the Societies of Control. ]

This office building was to be located in a large industrial complex built in the 1940s, then housing a corporation considered a shining example of the early twentieth century efficiencies of production. I was given a single imperative by the man who was paying for this building. he wanted the man-in-charge to take possession of space just in the way he takes possession of his operations. I decided to produce a mark. The building was to mark the transition: a commemorative building. I began with the great motifs of Disciplinary Society: the Prison, the Factory, architecturally a Cage. And Pastoral powers of surveillance, embedded into the human body: the body of priest, the body of foreman--the Gaze, architecturally, lines of sight. Then I understood the significance of his words. there was no need to fear or hope in me, I was to look for new weapons.

Representation / Structure:

1. The FIELD.
   Control ~ by neutralisation of desire ~ By the gaze ~ Or transparency ~ Through eyes which are caves ~ Or enclefted space ~ Which is an architectural object ~ or an Ichnographic<a href="#notes" name="_ftnref1" title="" id="_ftnref1">[1]</a> object.
   the Organisational structure as a hierarchic system of domains. a nominal hierarchy that sets up this field.
2. ORGANISATION.
   a system of Offices that contain people, and bring them into a specified, pre-structured set of relations. a structure by which they engage into one another. an instrument by which an individual is divided, there is a distinction to be made between his capacities, and his function. the latter being the field of this organisation. something is CAPTURED from within a Man.


Conceptual Diagramme

3. SYNTHESES.
   THE ARCHITECTURAL SYSTEM {+} THE ORGANISATIONAL SYSTEM, INTERPENETRATED.
   the architectural system is a machine, inasmuch as we define a machine as the corporeal state, a diagramme of forces. it is a housing for these forces. shaping the forces and yet not engaging with them. a machine does not speak. speech occurs within a machine.

SPACE.
or, system constructed by Architectural modalities. LIGHT, on the face, ~ facitas ~ or the facade. and the work-plane. the face is a Representation Bearer.

The Cage, DAY

ZONING.
The area marked out on the right delineates the bosses' and manages area, Almost everybody is a brainworker here, a Face Worker. the face eats into a Man. He Etches his face and then takes it home with him. Everyday. COMMUNICATION.
The structure as a rhizomic system, as it COMES TO DOMINATE SPACE it is a contest of the Gaze and Counter-Gaze. Supervision and monitoring. close proximity, eyes grazing upon other eyes, seeking eyes and averting eyes. THE CAGE.
Provided one believes in deploying brick and steel to produce bodily states of mind, this was a matter of three -- emotions of being in a cage ~ of night ~ and of the coming day.

Night

Gilles Deleuze, in Postscript to Societies of Control marks this transition, the very transition unfolding before me: the transition from a system of confinement to a system of control. The withering away of Disciplinary Societies, an already-docile body of the (individual) worker and a consolidated workforce. The emergence of the Dividual, and a statistical force: the masses as "markets, data, samples, or 'banks'". The democratic society, the Corporatized society. In other words, Society of Control. I was to produce an operations room for what he calls the "new monster", modes of operation that are in the process of replacing the old pastoral powers, supplanting the old governmentalities by new powers of the Statistical, numerical and networks — systems constituted of Dividuals "undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network".

Day

The building was to record my witnessing: of a theatre of surveillance, of SOCIETIES OF CONTROL, it would be a theatre of surveillance: the factory, the office, the army, the school. I felt my job was to first represent characterise ~ the WORKINGS ~ to find an architectural diagramme of these systems. And work as truthfully as I could. Hypermedia: http://ab-a.net/bin/i-soc-dcr.shtml
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