Spatial Violence

Anthony Vidler
Assemblage, No. 20, Violence, Space. (Apr., 1993), pp. 84-85.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0889-3012%28199304%290%3A20%3C84%3ASV%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3
Assemblage is currently published by The MIT Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org
Sun Feb 3 19:12:41 2008

Spatial Violence

A whole history remains to be written

of spaces-which would at the same
time be the history of powers (both
these terms in the plural)-from the
great strategies of geo-politics to the
little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom
to the design of hospitals, passing via
economic and political installations.
-Michel Foucault,

"The Eve of Power."'

Space, in contemporary discourse, as

in lived experience, has taken on an
almost palpable existence. Its contours, boundaries and geographies are
called up to stand in for all the contested realms of identity, from the
national to the ethnic; its hollows and
voids are occupied by bodies that
replicate internally the external conditions of political and social struggle,
and are, likewise assumed to stand for,
and identify, the sites of such struggle.
Techniques of spatial occupation, of
territorial mapping, of invasion and
surveillance are seen as the instruments of social and individual control.
Equally, space is assumed to hide, in
its darkest recesses and forgotten margins, all the objects of fear and phobia
that have returned with such insistency to haunt the imaginations of
those who have tried to stake out
spaces to protect their health and
happiness. Indeed, space as threat, as
harbinger of the unseen, operates as
medical and psychical metaphor for all
the possible erosions of bourgeois
bodily and social well being. The
body, indeed, has become its own
exterior, as its cell structure has become the object of spatial modeling
that map its own sites of immunological battle and describe the forms of its
antibodies. Even as the spaces of exile,
asylum, confinement, and quarantine
of the early modern period were continuously spilling over into the "normal" space of the city, so the
"pathological" spaces of today menace
the clearly marked out limits of the
Anthony

social order. In every case space is

invaded and invading: on the level of
the body, in the form of epidemic and
uncontrollable disease, and on the
level of the city in the person of the
homeless. In other words, the realms
of the organic space of the body, and
the social space in which that body
lives and works, domains clearly
enough distinguished in the nineteenth century, as Fran~oisDelaporte
has shown, no longer can be identified
as separate.?
In the elaboration of this complex
discourse, the initiatives of Michel
Foucault have been of especial importance. Following his studies of the
spatial distribution of institutional
power in asylums, hospitals and prisons
historians and theorists have speculated
widely on the political role of space,
extending his insights to the city and to
entire territories; he himself indicated
the importance of the geographical
approach in a number of interviews.
Equally following Foucault, attention
has largely been concentrated on a
specific kind of space: that transparent
space theorized as a paradigm of total
control by Jeremy Bentham and recuperated under the guise of "hygienic
space" by modernists led by Le
Corbusier in the twentieth century.
Transparency, it was thought, would
eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny and above all, the irrational. The rational grids and hermetic
enclosures of institutions from hospitals to prisons; the surgical opening up
of cities to circulation, light and air;
the therapeutic design of dwellings
and settlements; these have now all
been subjected to analysis for their
hidden contents, their capacity to
instrumentalize the politics of surveillance through what Bentham termed
"universal transparency." Historians
have preferred to study this myth of
"power through transparency," especially in its evident complicity with the
technologies of the Modern Move-

ment and their "utopian" applications

to architecture and urbanism.
Yet such a spatial paradigm was, as
Foucault himself pointed out, constructed out of an initial fear, the fear
of Enlightenment in the face of "darkened spaces, of the pall of gloom
which prevents the full visibility of
things, men and truth^."^ It was this
very fear of the dark that led, in the
late eighteenth-century, to the fascination with those same shadowy areaswhat Foucault calls the "fantasy-world
of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and
dungeonsn-the precise "negative of
the transparency and visibility which it
The moment
is aimed to e~tablish."~
that saw the creation of the first "considered politics of spaces" based on
scientific concepts of light and infinity
also saw, and within the same epistemology, the invention of a spatial
phenomenology of darkness. In his
earlier essays on phenomenological
psychology Foucault hinted at the
nature of this "dark" side of space, that
inhabited nightmares and phantasmic
projections and was so poetically identified by psychologists such as Eugene
Minkowski.
In the gradual development of his spatial discourse, that evidently rested not
only on the insights of phenomenological psychology but also on the revived
interest in the notion of "spatial production" introduced by Henri Lefebvre
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and
echoed by the Situationists, Foucault
was, as is well known, especially concerned to identify spatial forms with the
forms of power they seemed to enclose
and even, as in the case of the
Panopticon, instrumentalize. \ f i a t is
less noted is that this global identification-one that must be and has been
subject to rigorous criticism and validation on a case by case basis, was occasionally extended to embrace concepts
of architectural style as in itself a carrier
of power. Visiting Attica in the wake of
the riots in 1972, he wrote:

At Attica what struck me perhaps first

of all was the entrance, that kind of
phony fortress a la Disneyland, those
observation posts disguised as medieval
towers with their machicoulis. And behind this rather ridiculous scenery
which dwarfs everything else, you discover it's an immense machine. And
it's this notion of machinery that struck
me most strongly-those very long,
clean heated corridors with prescribe,
for those who pass through them, specific trajectories that are evidently calculated to be the most efficient
possible and at the same time the easiest to oversee, and the most direct.5

The political force of such spatial paradigms cannot be denied. Certainly they
have acted to resist the insistent temporality of modernist historicism, the
implacable subsuming of the spatial in
the temporal, which, from Marx
through Bergson in philosophy, and
from Hegel through Sigfried Giedion in
aesthetics, construed architecture and
urbanism as the products and instruments of history. What the urban
geographer Edward Soja has termed
"the reassertion of space in critical
social theoryn-to use the sub-title of
his recent book Postmodern Geographies-takes on, in this context, a
necessarily oppositional character.
But a theon, of space, uncorrected by
any dialectical relationship with history, has often hovered dangerously
close to a metaphysics of place. In the
hands of Heidegger and his less sophisticated readers, such a metaphysics has
turned inevitably nostalgic and conservative in tenor. The social implications of spatial theon, are equally
prone to blindness-notably, as
Rosalyn Deutsche recently pointed out
in her article "Men in Space" (Art
Forum, February 1990), in the area of
gender distinctions, but also, equally,
in the context of debates over urban
planning, social welfare and the politics of homelessness.
Perhaps the paradigm holds as much
hope for discourse analysis as for the

actual study of territorial occupation.

One thinks of the work of Ioan Davies,
whose Writers in Prison offers a critique of the Bachelardian opposition
of "habitable space" to "hostile
pace."^ For Davies, "the space in
prison is of a different order, being, in
Bachelard's sense, both familiar and
hostile, and its understanding requires
not the formalization of ethnographic
or poetic dichotomies but the metaphor and allegon, of inscription and
sight and voice:"
For space is not physical in the sense
that Bachelard uses it, where places become images, but physical in a quite
different sense where the interplay between the biologically physical (the tactile, the audible, the visual) and the
graphic is assembled in the context of
higher voices, eyes, inscriptions by being forced into the voiceless, sightless
readability of a mechanized physical
str~cture.~

Here Davies is recuperating Foucault,

but in terms of a model that joins the
"light" and "dark" space of the
phenomenologists in a dialectical
framing of mental projection and
inhabitation, tactile and visual, that
recalls the raumsoziologie of Georg
Simmel. For Davies spatial analysis is
at once architectonic and kinetic:
T o study space is initially to study the
eye, the voice, and the hand, and at the
same time to conceive of other voices,
eyes, hands reworking the space.8

Here, as Simmel understood, the traditional categories of territoriality, and

especially the conventional boundaries
between public and private, are suspended in favor of "the interstitial
nature of a territoriality which is at
once biological, material and political.
It is not so much that the public
sphere (the prison) dictates the private
(the personal everyday sense of ourselves), though it appears to do so, but
that in the organization of space the
centripetal and the centrifugal coexist,
so that the exits and entrances are

contiguous, and while there is the

illusion of total power there is, in fact,
the two way mirror of total mistrust by
each of all."9 Davies finds support for
his position in the notion of mobile
territoriality advanced by Deleuze and
Guattari: "Space is imagined, put into
place, and resisted. The meaning and
use of space is everywhere subject to
strategic imagination."1
In this sense, one that the contemporary inhabitant of Los Angeles, New
York, Paris or Berlin might understand,
"all spaces are violent and all are therefore somewhat hostile."
Notes
1.Michel Foucault, PowerJKnowledge: Selected interviews and Other Writings 19721977, edited by Colin Gordon, New York,
Pantheon Books, 1980, p.149.
2. Fran~oisDelaporte, in Disease and Civilization. The Cholera Epidemic in Paris, 1832,
translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, characterized these realms as follows:
Living conditions affect two distinct areas,
one within the body, the other outside it:
organic space and social space. Social
space is the space within which the organism lives and labors, and the conditions of
existence within that space-living conditions--determine the probability of life
and death. (Disease and Civilization, p.
80.)
3. Foucault, "The Eye of Power," p. 153.
4. Foucault, "The Eye of Power," p. 154.
5. Michel Foucault, "On Attica: an Interview," Telos, 19 (Spring 1974): 155-6. It
would not be uninteresting to speculate on
the uncanny similarity between the stylistic
juxtaposition of the castle and the machine
described by Foucault at Attica Prison and
that of the more recent Wexner Center by
Peter Eisenman.
6. Writers in Prison, 0xford:Basil Blackwell
Ltd., 1990.
7. Ibid., p. 59.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p.60.
10. Ibid. p.78, citing Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976).

Vidler