CONSTRUCTING POWER

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CONTAINMENT, AUTHORITY AND SURVEILLANCE IN ARCHITECTURE

WE SHAPE BUILDINGS

BUILDINGS SHAPE US

FOR SETTLEMENT

FOR MEMORY

FOR EFFICIENCY

WE SHAPE BUILDINGS

BUILDINGS SHAPE US

FOR CONTAINMENT

FOR AUTHORITY

FOR SURVEILLANCE

HOW DOES SPACE SHAPE US? ARCHITECTURE DEMONSTRATES POWER 23

HOW DOES SPACE CONSTRAIN US?

HOW DOES SPACE IMPACT US?

HOW DOES SPACE DISCIPLINE US?

MODERNIST DREAMS OF UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE 48 URBAN UTOPIAS OF THE 20TH CENTURY 58

HISTORY, MEMORY, AND MONUMENTS: AN OVERVIEW OF THE SCHOLARLY LITERATURE ON COMMEMORATION 70

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM 88

HOW DOES SPACE ISOLATE US?

HOW DOES SPACE JOIN US?

HOW DOES SPACE GUIDE US?

CONFINEMENT AND ETHNICITY 120 IMPOUNDED: THE CENSORED IMAGES OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT 136

BUILDING BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY 168 ARCHITECTURE FOR A SELF-MANAGING SOCIALISM 182

THE BUNKER: METAPHOR, MATERIALITY & MANAGEMENT 200 HOW GERMANY’S WARTIME BUNKERS ARE BEING REBORN 218

HOW DOES SPACE SURVEIL US?

HOW DOES SPACE LEAD US?

WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY WHEN YOU HAVE DATA? 232 A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING 240

SELF AND SPACE, RESISTANCE AND DISCIPLINE A FOUCAULDIAN READING OF GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984 258

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ARCHITECTURE DEMONSTRATES POWER Molly Glenn Architecture is intricately tied to political power. It provides a model for the system of structural thought used by a society to conceptualize the world. Such architecturally based structural thought includes understanding of social and political relationships. These relations of power are embodied in architecture, especially the monumental architecture created by political powers. These monuments demonstrate the power of the individuals responsible for their creation and they demonstrate the nature of that power. Axial buildings and city plans are consistently related to power from on high, divine or lineage-based power, which dominates the community. Axial architecture directs the people to the seat or the symbol of that power. Non-axial architecture and city plans, on the other hand, consistently give people choices and assert the equality of constituent parts rather than the supremacy of a single goal. Furthermore, non-axial architecture is constantly related to political power as a mandate from the masses. Even in prisons, where the warden’s power over the inmate represents the extreme of social control, architecture that embodies topdown distribution of power can be contrasted to architecture showing control vested by the community. Architecture demonstrates possession of power and the nature of that power.

HOW ARCHITECTURE IS TIED TO POWER

Looking at architectural history, the tie between architecture—especially monumental architecture—and political power can be consistently seen. One important step in exploring this connection is to assess how and why this tie exists. In The Domestication of the Human Species, anthropologist Peter Wilson1 argues that, from its very conception, architecture relates to the way we understand the world. It allows us to conceptualize reality clearly and helps societies form systems that explain their cultural and social practices. Leaders utilize this framework for understanding reality to convey the nature of their power over the populace. They express how they wish to be seen and force their particular view of that power on the populace through architecture. ARCHITECTURE DEFINED “Architecture” can be taken to mean many things, from 1) any built structure, to 2) the design product of a specifically trained type of artist. I resist both extremes. Architecture is not just sticks stuck in the ground or any haphazard pile of rocks, and it is not necessarily envisioned as a novel creative act authored by an individual identifiable designer. By emphasizing a modern, western definition of the architect as a type of artist who must produce creative, novel designs, which do not replicate any previous traditional form or model, I would slight all the people who put extensive effort into designing buildings within a tradition, simply because they use a vernacular vocabulary. The architect designs architectural space. Wilson defines architecture in terms of permanence. For him, any temporary structures are impermanent and therefore not architecture. This definition is problematic because, for one, he draws the line for what counts as permanent as an existence of around six months. Is a dwelling built with the builder’s intention of moving on and reestablishing life in another place really permanent, whether or not it is sturdy enough to last about half a year? Is the Mbuti pygmy’s hut that lasts a month so much less permanent that it is not architecture? Furthermore, the Mbuti define their political lives according to whether or not they are at their hearth.2 This shows they are thinking of politics through the built environment. Such thinking seems a far more significant indicator of a

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BY CONTROLLING ARCHITECTURAL SYMBOLS AND MANIPULATING THE STRUCTURES USED TO ENVISAGE THE WORLD, LEADERS CREATE BUILDINGS AS GREAT SYMBOLS OF POWER.

build solid, permanent buildings. These cultures demonstrate 1) that not all people build, 2) that buildings are unnecessary in harsh climates, and 3) that people who do not build may have the ability. People have claimed that a built environment is universally necessary based on a psychological 6 or physical need for shelter, which is universally present where people are capable of building. The counter-examples above demonstrate that a universal human need for shelter does not exist and that a building is the result of a choice, a specific intent to build. As buildings do not simply fulfill a need for shelter, buildings must primarily serve some other function, such as to structure social interaction, to indicate private or sacred areas and individual status.

ARCHITECTURE DEMONSTRATES POWER

Architecture is the result of deliberate intention, when people choose to build. Despite common misconceptions, not all people live in a built environment or have an innate, natural need for shelter and privacy. Societies all over the world live without houses. Many, such as most Australian Aborigines , live without structures of any kind. Such life is not limited to temperate areas. For example, the Ona of Tierra del Fuego live in near-Antarctic conditions but build no dwellings, only temporary windbreaks for nocturnal shelter. The absence of houses in their culture is not due to a lack of skill in construction, as they build “elaborate conical huts for ritual purposes.”5 The absence of dwellings shows a choice not to build them, since the Ona and other similar groups have the knowledge and tools necessary to

STRUCTURE The most far reaching difference between open and domesticated societies, between Paleolithic and Neolithic societies, between hunter/gatherers and agriculturalists, between nomads and sedentarists, is that in the former the sense of structure and constraint is tacit, subjective, personal, and focused, whereas in the latter it is explicit, embodied, objective, and externally bounded. The source of this difference, its origin, lies in the adoption of architecture as the permanent living environment... In a very real and literal sense the adoption of architecture is an acceptance of structure and constraint.7 Architecture impacts sedentary peoples by making concrete structures present in the material world.8 The advent of architecture not only embodies but also creates structure. As architecture appears in a society, it creates a physical base on which to form ideas. This physical base allows further elaboration and exploration of whatever ideas of structure might have previously existed. Most significantly, architecture demonstrates, whereas nature lacks, clear limits and enclosed space. With the distinction of inside/outside, people begin to think about compartmentalization. Nomadic societies tend to be focus-based. They identify certain important sites, based on, for example, a spring or a tree, and the influence of the group associated with that site radiates out from it, but there is no final limit.9 The sites may be sacred, and they may be related to essential needs for survival, such as water. Often, the sites are powerful, sacred and materially necessary. The sites identified with a clan or tribe may be scattered about, but cannot be mapped as an exclusive territory, only as a path from one significant site to another.10 This focus basis of society is significant because nomads do not simply think of territory or space this way, but their thought in general has “a relative inconsistency in classification, which in turn points to a lack of development of the boundary concept.”11 In other words, nomads, without a built environment, do not think in terms of categorization or delimiting factors. Some societies, such as the Inuit, even intentionally destroy any developing concepts of clear-cut delineation that a child might exhibit.12 The very structure of nomadic hunter/gatherer life cannot be conceptualized by the observer through any technique that uses such boundary concepts as frontiers, categories or compartments. These societies are

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Fig. 1 Mbuti pygmy’s hut

Fig. 2 The Elaborate Conical Huts At Ona Of Tierra Del Fuego

change in the nature of building than an arbitrary time limit of six months for permanence. Another possible definition is based on enclosure. If a person can go inside of a structure, then it is considered architecture. This definition is more useful because the distinction between inside and outside has significant cultural impact because it creates a boundary between two distinct spaces. However, I find this definition unsatisfactory because some significant funerary and religious architecture has no interior, such as the complex around the pyramid at Zoser.3 In this book, “architecture” will refer to structures built with attention to their construction, including sturdiness and aesthetic product. Sturdiness relates to permanence, but does not require a time limit. The aesthetics of the building is important because an “attractive” building shows the care and thought the builder has put into the building, and the effort made to comply with cultural standards of building. I choose this definition because the thoughtful and consistent construction of buildings creates an entire milieu, the “built environment”, which differs from the milieu in which those without constructions live. The existence of a built environment, varied though it may be, significantly impacts those living within it.

of any other phenomenon.”18 The use of parallel structures to analyze the world and build a house leads to the creation of ties between the two, often including explicit symbolic relationships. Interaction with the house can explain cosmology. For example, in the Atoni culture, the attic contains both the altar and the granary. Heaven is seen as the location of divinity and the source of nourishment.19 As the roof parallels the dome of the sky, the house illustrates the Atoni notion of divinity. Similarly, gender roles are both defined and exemplified by the house in the Para-Pirana myth about the Roofing Father, whose “head is at the male end of the house, his anus at the female end.”20 Anything that can be thought of structurally, any vision of the world or societal issues can be modeled and exemplified by a culture’s architecture. “House and cosmos are homologous in structure, so the house represents and models the universe.”21 As structure dominates both architecture and cosmological thought, the same medium can express both. Through structure, architects are able to create parallel systems that model ideas in physical space. “In domesticated societies, the house and the village are the fusion of microcosm and macrocosm, body and world, individual and collective, and at the same time they are the presentation of these abstractions to everyday life.”22 From individual buildings to the way they interact, the architecture of a culture embodies its worldviews. Do party walls connect to form an impenetrable exterior, joining the community as a solid physical, social, and defensive unit; or is each house far from the next, asserting its own independence? Do houses face each other, are windows open or walls few, making houses easy to see into; or do they hide their secrets away from the public? Are spaces built specifically for socialization, trade, or worship; or are these activities conducted in the home? Do the priests or nobles live separately from the commoners? Questions like these demonstrate how the architecture of a village illustrates its social life and conceptions of the world. The architecture of a village illustrates its cosmology. MANIPULATION OF ARCHITECTURE AS COSMOLOGY “To be able to see the cosmos represented and to be able to move about in it is to place oneself exactly in space and time and to have answered all the mysteries of existence, life and death.”23 Once cosmology is physically represented in a culture though structure in architecture, the representation seems able to resolve all unanswered questions. Relationships between parts become clearly defined by their material representation. The cosmology is now manageable and understandable. If architecture depicts the nature of reality, then new ideas about reality can be demonstrated through manipulation of architectural symbolism. The building of tombs is an example of how a culture demonstrates belief in continuing existence after death. Great investment in the tomb, the home for the dead, gives it precedence over the houses of the living because it is the permanent equivalent of the temporary house.24 Where so much effort is spent, the expenditure must seem necessary, preparing the occupant for endless life beyond the grave, a life more important than the life they knew. By accentuating the importance of the tomb, people demonstrate belief in an afterlife, the continued existence of the person after death. Tombs “aim to produce the effect of permanence. At the deepest metaphysical, spiritual level, tombs overcome death. If this is so, then the greater, more solid and monumental the tomb or mausoleum, the greater the effect of overcoming death, the more convincing and successful the effort would seem to be”25. The more elaborate and imposing the tomb, the more emphatic the victory of permanence over the transience of human live and the inevitability of death. Splendid tombs would provide the resources for an afterlife filled with glory and prestige. Beautiful tombs make the person’s exploits on earth seem insignificant compared to their possibilities in the afterlife. For example, by building the great pyramids, the Pharaohs appeared to have conquered time and death. The Pharaohs themselves were considered gods, the incarnation of the god Ra on Earth. 26 By elaborating on ideas of permanence and the afterlife, contained in the ordinary tomb, the

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CONSTRUCTING POWER

better conceived and described as they seem to conceive and describe themselves—that is, as being held together by mutual attraction and common focus.13 Structure requires clear contrasts and related definitions. In a structured system, if an object is other than x, then it is automatically in a contrasting category not-x. It is not simply “dissimilar to” or “not very close to” x; it is “not-x”. Structured thinking demands classification. This classification is based on a contrast between two opposing predicates, and the possibility that the type of predicate cannot apply to the subject that is being classified. A subject could be either white, not white, or uncolored. This sort of understanding requires a boundary concept. A subject is either one or the other, it cannot be both; there must be clear delineation. There is no compartmentalization of different types in nomadic life because there is no limit concept. If no compartmentalized concepts exist, there can be little entailment or building from one concept to another, the heart of structured thinking. Nomadic concepts are without any delimiting boundaries, based instead on similarity and grouping around foci. Even the use of the phrase “structure of nomadic hunter/gatherer life” now comes across as inappropriate, since a system based on apparently random foci does not seem structured at all. An absence of categories, classification, and delineation is consistently evident through different communities of nomads. Such consistency over widely diverse groups is significant, since their most apparent similarity is the absence of architecture. At the same time, groups who have architecture think of their lives and surroundings in a structured way.14 “Architecture is a materialization of structure, and the adoption of architecture as a permanent feature of life introduces spatial organization and allocation as an ordering visual dimension.”15 Those with architecture use structure to organize their lives. Architecture is a physical manifestation of structure, since it must itself be structured in order to stand. Architectural elements provide clear examples of concepts like a limit, as in a wall, and a compartment, as in a room. Buildings have a fairly unlimited capacity to demonstrate elements of structure. “Through settlement and architecture the principle of pattern and structure is embodied in the atmosphere, the very environment and context of living.”16 Living in buildings compartmentalizes and structures life, as people interact with structures daily. Peoples living in a built environment organize their lives according to structure. Nomads do not. Architecture is a clear embodiment of structure. Architecture creates structure for those who conduct their lives within it. COSMOLOGY Architecture as the physical embodiment of structure provides a paradigm for thinking structurally about life. “The adoption of the house and the village also ushers in a development of the structure of social life, the elaboration of thinking about the world, and the strengthening of the links between the two.”17 Architecture allows structured thinking about reality in general, leading society to create structured cosmology. Each culture forms a framework for understanding the world, a way of thinking about the cosmos. This culturally based conceptualization of the world is its “cosmology”. A culture’s cosmology explains to the members of that culture not only the world’s origin, but also more everyday aspects of life, such as man’s relationship to nature, gender, birth, death, and nobility. Such concepts divide the world into categories, and are clearly grounded in structured thinking. A society’s cosmology is intricately linked to its architecture since the architecture provides the model for thinking about it. Because of this progression from architecture to structured thought, cosmology is often symbolized by architecture. “Because it is a topography the house may be a model or map for any other structure irrespective of materials, appearances, and location, and the house may equally be understood as a model

ARCHITECTURE IMPACTS SEDENTARY PEOPLES BY MAKING CONCRETE STRUCTURES PRESENT IN THE MATERIAL WORLD. THE ADVENT OF ARCHITECTURE NOT ONLY EMBODIES BUT ALSO CREATES STRUCTURE. AS ARCHITECTURE APPEARS IN A SOCIETY, IT CREATES A PHYSICAL BASE ON WHICH TO FORM IDEAS.

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in relation to the amounts of work expended on an average home. The quality of house produced displays the quantities of work put into the structure, and thus the palace creates an impressive demonstration of the leader’s power. The contrast between the leader’s palace and the average person’s house demonstrates that power. The palace is monumental architecture. Monumental architecture differs from vernacular architecture, since it is primarily public and political. As buildings that are primarily political in nature, monuments are built by leaders. That is, leaders initiate the building process, starting with some grand dream. They may hire an architect to put that dream into a buildable design. Then, they will levy workers to construct the building. Leaders are the builders of monuments because they are in charge of the building process; they initiate and oversee it. Monuments are also typically much more imposing and larger than other buildings. They always stand out from ordinary buildings, since they are built with the specific intent of making an impression on the public. A monument may be a memorial, or it may be a building that people live and work in daily. A monument may be a huge pyramid or a small, richly decorated chapel. However, it always makes an impression on the people who see it. Monumental architecture is, specifically, architecture built by those with power, not just everyday citizens. If buildings like palaces display the superior power that leaders control, how do they convert the people’s own labor into a demonstration of the leader’s power? Are commoners simply duped into thinking that the labor that creates architectural monuments is not their own? Certainly not. The leader must add something for his contribution to be considered significant and valuable. First, leaders mobilize the labor on a unique scale. They are able to call upon not only their friends and neighbors, but the entire community to participate in their grandiose undertakings. The ability to organize efforts at a scale beyond the normal cooperation of people is a valuable skill. Leaders have the vision to create these glorious monuments. They imagine and bring about the creation of these embodiments of power. The imagination and forward thinking necessary to envision and plan, as well as to implement a plan—to create a structure that will glorify the leader and the group is a special ability required for leadership.31 “It is this masterminding ability that merits the prestige, and it is the successful and impressive demonstration or display of these abilities—the show, the meal, the monument —that provides the tangible, sensual product which the guests/visitors/followers can appreciate and to which they physically respond.”32 The leader has a unique ability to organize and mobilize the populace to create monumental buildings that are the evidence of his power. In one sense, we have a common philosophy among domesticated people of reaching for glory through technology: architectural displays are constructed as a testament to the power, force, and energy people can muster and exert on the world. That power is ‘organized labor’—organized by division and by mobilization. The division of labor makes possible the specialization that produces the skill and refinement, the ‘workmanship’ and the ‘grace’; the mobilization produces the scale and the might.33 The majesty of monuments can be attributed to the leader because his ingenuity and supervising ability initiates and facilitates its creation. The monument evidences the leader’s vision and organizational abilities, essential elements of his leadership skills. The monument impresses because it is greater than anything that ARCHITECTURAL any of the individual subjects could create. It shows an ability to bring DISPLAYS ARE together all the workers’ efforts, a power that only the leader has. CONSTRUCTED AS A Furthermore, the monumental whole is greater than the parts. TESTAMENT TO THE Each individual brick is disregarded in the scale, beauty, and POWER, FORCE, AND monumentality created by the whole. The abilities of the leader ENERGY PEOPLE CAN are so impressive because the final result is beyond the ability of MUSTER AND EXERT ON any of the participants. The monuments appear as superhuman THE WORLD. 30

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Pharaohs were able to convey that not only their lives, but also their power, transcended death. This apparent ability to trump forces like time and death seems to give those who manipulate architectural symbols extreme, almost divine powers. Leaders manipulate the architectural vocabulary of a specific culture to make the people think that the leaders are divine, or whatever else it is that they are attempting to convey. Though they do not manipulate the actual cosmos, they manipulate the people’s understanding of that cosmos, the people’s cosmology, to make the people think that what they state architecturally is real. The ability to make people perceive their leaders as divinities is real political power that comes from this architectural manipulation. INDIVIDUAL POWER This is not to say that people simply look around for the most impressive architecture to identify powerful people. Rather, a leader’s status is indicated by the his control over others, the way that others defer to him, his capacity for leadership, his wealth, and the other ways he is set apart from the populace. Architecture demonstrates all of these, which makes it a highly important indicator of status. Political power is not only linked to architecture through the manipulation of cosmology and the leader’s depiction in the architecture, but also to the leader’s relationship to the building he causes to be built, his control over its construction and the leadership abilities exhibited by that control. This aspect of the relationship of political power to architecture shows how it can make an individual powerful, as well as define the nature of the ruler as opposed to a commoner. Labor is the main asset available to leaders of domesticated societies in their efforts to gain honor, prestige, and acclaim. “Labor, talent, skill, and artistic sense were the main human possessions that people had to create a world which could satisfy their senses and their social and intellectual ambitions. The more labor and so forth that was expended, the richer and more rewarding the world of sensual and intellectual products.”27 Without the aid of sophisticated-engine driven machinery, a domesticated society must produce everything through great quantities of personal investment of effort and time. The more vast or intricate the product, the greater the investment of the people working on it. The significant personal investment that went into creating them makes such products valuable. Conversely, in order to be worth taking up a significant portion of a person’s time—time that could be spent, for example, hunting or working in the fields providing essential food items—the product must be more valuable than other possibilities for the time spent. Therefore, anything lavished with great amounts of time during production is seen as valuable and expensive. “What we can do, then, is exchange material products in which labor is embodied for respect, credit, and rank—that is, for social standing and assets—instead of exchanging one product for another.”28 Leaders are able to levy, control, and direct vast amounts of labor to create products of great value. The possession of such products impresses, and demonstrates great wealth and the ability to control large amounts of labor. This aspect of display is somewhat circular: by controlling large amounts of labor, a leader can produce objects that require large amounts of labor and thus demonstrate his possession of control of large amounts of labor. These products are the evidence of his power over his subjects, and therefore bestow prestige upon him. “The most readily available means whereby great quantities of labor may be used to convert to prestige, a means that is the great invention of domesticated society, is architecture in general and the house specifically.”29 Unlike a crown or a throne, buildings offer unique possibilities of scale that make them more impressive. Furthermore, construction is usually the most labor-intensive task in a sedentary society. Though most houses require a significant amount of work, a palace is much more labor intensive, and becomes even more impressive

LEADERS MANIPULATE THE ARCHITECTURAL VOCABULARY OF A SPECIFIC CULTURE TO MAKE THE PEOPLE THINK THAT THE LEADERS ARE DIVINE, OR WHATEVER ELSE IT IS THAT THEY ARE ATTEMPTING TO CONVEY.

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The building itself represents political power. If Americans truly didn’t care about architecture, the President and Congress could conduct the business of governance in underground bunkers, like the shadow government after 9/11, just as well and far more safely than on Capitol Hill. Instead, the

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method of demonstrating power in domesticated societies, I disagree that the former has totally replaced and outstripped the latter in industrialized societies. Though architecture’s role has diminished as a representation of conceptions of the world and as a demonstration of power, it still serves these purposes, and I think that Wilson’s arguments show well how these are connected. Cosmology’s illustration in architecture does not stop with the advent of literacy or industrialization. For example, the nature of the contemporary American family and the individual are demonstrated by the residents in a house, who are usually only the parents and children up to their teens, and it is illustrated by the fact that the children tend to have their own rooms, if possible. The house therefore demonstrates the primacy of the nuclear family. Each person’s right to privacy and ownership is emphasized by the separation of rooms and the enclosure of the home. If any groups are created, the parents are thought of as a unit, and the children are thought of as a group, which corresponds to the living arrangements. This is very unlike, for example, the Batammaliba house in Africa, which has one sleeping room for the women and small children, and another for the men.46 Such a physical grouping is attached to a different formulation of the nature of the family and its constituent parts. In Batammaliba life, the family is composed of not parents and children but more along the lines of women-with-babies and men. These different building choices and room use make statements about the nature of both American and Batammaliba life, and the way we conceptualize our lives. Cosmology may be less explicit in American architecture, but it is still prominently involved in architectural practice as people strive to create buildings that will promote certain types of environments and interactions. The ideals involved are more covert than they are in many domestic societies; however, buildings still express the architect and builder’s beliefs concerning how people will and should interact, what should be hidden from a building’s occupants and surroundings, what is important in the surrounding area, the value of aesthetics and historical reference in new construction, etc. If buildings no longer expressed ideas, there could be no le Corbusier, no Mies van der Rohe, no Frank Lloyd Wright, no Gaudí, no Calatrava. Though the role in industrial society of architectural representation of the nature of reality is reduced compared to its role in domesticated societies, it still exists. Architecture in industrialized societies is not empty of cosmology. Western society also continues to rely on architecture as a symbol of power. This is demonstrated in America by prominent portrayal of the White House during a crisis. The media televises views of the White House not because they are waiting for the President to emerge, but because it represents the office of the Presidency. Fig. 3 The White House

productions. Even to the worker viewing the finished monument, the final effect of the building as “a vast singularity” is overwhelming, “evidence that the sum is not only greater than, but also different from the parts.”34 The individual efforts are barely seen; instead, there is a “mysterious emergence of the monumental whole from its insignificant parts.”35 When looking at a building like the Parthenon, one sees not the individual stones, though they are evident, but the overall grandiose image. This image, as a whole, finished piece of architecture is impressive and beautiful. The beauty of the Parthenon is an additional element that can be attributed to Ictinus and to Pericles, the architect and the Athenian politician responsible for its construction, respectively.36 The spectacle is an added gift from the leader who masterminds the display. This spectacle is a very powerful part of the architecture of power because it overawes people. It provides a singular and unforgettable emotional charge, linked forever in the viewer’s mind with that particular site. The monument’s ability to influence people, to have an effect on them, makes that building powerful.37 Whether political power is described as the ability to create a desired effect or the ability to control a group, 38 the monument embodies power. The creation of monumental architecture is a demonstration of leadership abilities, of the potential for political power. It proves the leader’s worthiness and greatness, his capacity for power. The act of construction was, through the mobilization and organization involved, an act of real power while the end product, as something greater than the sum of its parts and more moving in its magnificence than anything within the capabilities of an individual was both testament and realization of power.39 Monumental architecture embodies the leader’s ability to control and affect his followers. It both shows the group his actual power and demonstrates his worthiness and capacity to possess that power. Architecture is a sign pointing to a leader’s power.40 CONTEMPORARY OBJECTIONS Contemporary western society does not put enough stock in everyday architecture to see any architectural statement as a demonstration of power. Buildings may demonstrate access to impressive resources, but they are usually not tied to manipulation of people’s world-views and grand assertions of power. If the argument that architecture is tied to power is inapplicable to contemporary society, how useful is it? Though Wilson’s argument is fairly convincing in the context of domestic society, which he portrays as an evolutionary step,41 even he believes that “the widespread recurrence of symbolic patterns to be found in constructions and layouts... is something particular to the epoch of domesticated culture, something of little moment to hunter/gathers or to urban industrial cultures.”42 He also states that industrial societies think of power in terms of “destructive force”, and that any sort of power “can now be measured in terms of equivalents of so many megaton blasts”43 . In other words, Wilson believes that industrial, urban societies no longer depict their cosmology in their architecture, nor is their power evidenced in their buildings. With the advent of literacy, the necessity of depicting ideas in architecture falls away.44 With writing come other ways of depicting and understanding reality, which lead to the eventual desymbolization of architecture. Power is demonstrated by the ability to dominate and produce intense forces of destruction, embodied in new stronger arms. In addition, architecture no longer represents cosmic forces, which are usually discussed in texts, so manipulating architecture no longer manipulates ideas about reality. In industrialized society, architecture has, according to Wilson, lost its symbolism and its power. However, he still believes that the argument is valid for certain types of cultures, which he calls domesticated societies, who live in fixed communities in a built environment but are not literate, do not use sophisticated technology, and do not participate in modern warfare. “Until the modern industrial age, the age first of steam, then electricity, and now atomic energy, the most moving and dramatic advertisement for and demonstration of the human attainment of power was monumental architecture”45. While architecture is no longer the primary source of power in industrialized societies because of technology, for domesticated societies it still constitutes the most impressive demonstration of power. While I agree that there are now impressive means of exhibiting power, such as dropping an atomic bomb, and that architecture is a very effective

controlling architectural symbols and manipulating the structures used to envisage the world, leaders create buildings as great symbols of power. Architecture demonstrates power.

Fig. 4 The World Trade Center

Fig. 5 The Great Pyramids At Giza

American people were outraged at the thought of government in hiding. The Jeffersonian buildings represent the government to American society; one of their functions is to represent the power and legitimacy of the government. A government from a bunker would seem somehow illicit. The White House and the Capitol Building are essential symbols of the American government and the American cosmology.

Often, the symbolism of a building may be overlooked, but that does not mean that it does not represent its builder’s ideals and goals for reality. Americans did not see the World Trade Center as more than a financial office building until after the terrorist attacks, yet the attackers found it a potent architectural symbol of capitalism and American “financial hegemony”47. The fact that it was part of a competition for the tallest building in the world makes it similar to the construction of displays for feasts by the New Zealand Maori or tombs for the African Merina.48 By building the Sears Tower, which topped the World Trade Center by eighty-six feet,49 Chicago tried to assert itself over New York as the dominant city in America, and the world. Skyscrapers are seen as a symbol of strength and economic prosperity, as demonstrated by the construction of Rockefeller Center during the Great Depression, attempting to instill hope in the future through its vision of the ideal city in New York.50 The builders of the Met Life Tower were also well aware of the connection between the imposing architecture of skyscrapers and power. Their company song touted, “We’re the guardians of ‘the Tower,’/ And the light which it enveils;/ It’s a symbol of our power—/ To its height no other scales...”51 Even to these modern New Yorkers, there was a clear connection between their building and power, exhibited in height. By planning to build the tallest building in the world in the reconstruction at Ground Zero as designed by the architect, Libeskind,52 Americans assert our resilience and continuing world domination, both economic and political. The reconstruction shows our feeling that our status in the world is tied to the way our power is demonstrated by our buildings. The great pyramids at Giza, the soaring French Gothic Cathedrals, Mayan temples, and the megalithic monuments of Stonehenge and Carnac inspire open-mouthed awe even today in people of industrialized nations. Corporations compete to build soaring skyscrapers as families build mansions in the idiom of English country manors and French châteaux. Architecture is still intricately tied to power, but its prominence has become less explicit. Architecture therefore demonstrates power through the depiction of a leader’s control over a community, his ability to organize and mobilize them; it shows his power as a leader. It also shows his ability to create a desired effect. From vision to the awesome impression the final product gives the viewer, the leader is responsible for creating the desired effect. By

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ARCHITECTURE DEMONSTRATES POWER

WHAT ARCHITECTURE CAN TELL US ABOUT POWER

If architecture demonstrates power, then that power should be evident from the architecture. If the impact of power upon buildings is visible, one should be able to discern information about that power. Monumental architecture in particular conveys the nature of the power that created it. The cosmology represented in the architecture demonstrates the type of power that created it. A pattern exists wherein axial buildings and cities are created by authoritarian powers concentrated in a single ruling figure, which can be contrasted to a non-axial pattern in more egalitarian societies. Furthermore, this correspondence between building orientation and power scheme results directly from differing ideals about the nature of the world and of power. AXIALITY IN BUILDINGS Axiality in a building occurs when it is clearly oriented in one direction, emphasizing opposite walls that are far from one another, and provoking those who use the building to walk longitudinally within it.53 This means that the people who enter are directed to the opposite end of the building where something significant occurs. Archetypal examples of axial buildings include Egyptian temples, Roman basilicas, and the Christian basilicas that evolved from the Roman. “The Egyptian temples are based on one straight path leading ‘in’ towards a final but unreachable goal”54. One enters the temple of Horus at Edfu55 between two massive pylons with a niche at the top corresponding exactly to the path of the sun. Walking through a series of doorways aligned along an axis parallel to the solar path, one proceeds through a courtyard into a series of halls. As one approaches the inner sanctum of the temple, a place where only priests were allowed to go, the columns in the halls take up more space, closing in and creating varying degrees of darkness. The walls around the halls start out at only half the height of the columns and later let light in only through small clerestory openings 56. Furthermore, the ceilings get lower and the space becomes more contained and darker. Finally, one reaches the shrine containing an obelisk, which contains a statue of the Pharaoh. Not only does the path one takes to traverse the temple correspond to the path of the sun in the sky, but the level of light also recreates the course of the sun. In the courtyard, the light is bright; then it decreases as though moving through twilight into night. Finally, the building’s alignment to the path of the sun allows the sun’s rays to pierce the inner sanctum where they illuminate only the statåue of the Pharaoh. Since the Pharaoh is considered to be the divine incarnation of the sun god, Ra, this is a sacred event, depicting the eventual reincarnation of the Pharaoh and the rebirth of the sun after each

night.57 The orientation of the temple allows the sacred event to happen and the cosmic order to be reenacted. The temple’s axiality makes it able to house the most powerful god. The far end of the temple is the location of the God’s embodiment.

At Cordoba, one cannot even see the whole Mosque. All Muslims in the Arabic style mosque are put on equal footing before God despite difference in location throughout the hall by their similarity to the non-heirarchized columns. Fig. 7 The Great Mosque At Cordoba

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Non-axiality not only shows the equality of the building’s users, but also shows a different attitude toward power. For example, in Sumerian Ziggurats, such as the one at Ur, 64 the worshipper never meets God head-on, as he constantly changes direction in his long path to the inner sanctum; he never sees the blinding power of God. In the Ziggurat, the worshipper gets very close to the inner sanctum before seeing it, making the experience intimate and personal. The Ziggurat at Uruk is designed in a spiral, and at Ur, the processional approached the Ziggurat from three different directions, then circumambulated the temple on three different levels before proceeding to the topmost level containing the inner sanctum.65 The non-axial procession in the Ziggurat creates a personal, non-authoritarian experience of God. Unlike the axial building, where one is faced with that power and overawed by it, where the altar, throne, or statue dominates the entire space, in the non-axial building, the sacred is almost secret. Furthermore, worship in the Ziggurats was participatory and involved the entire community, not just an exclusive group of priests. This participation emphasizes the equality of the community members. In fact, these non-axial buildings have the overarching trait of being participatory— meaning that anyone can go anywhere, even to places like the inner sanctum of the Ziggurat. In the axial building, one needs special privileges to approach the altar at the sacred far end of the building, whereas all areas of the non-axial building are open to everyone. One need not be a priest to reenact the cosmic dance by circumambulating the huge mound of a stuppa. The Buddhist stuppa represents the universe. Worship is performed not by a priest, but by anyone who circumambulates the stuppa.66 Thus, any Buddhist can participate in this aspect of the universe, a holy world in miniature. The stuppa allows all people to participate equally and to encounter the sacred personally. The power of the sacred in the stuppa is not stifling or authoritarian; it is accessible to all. The equal, participatory, and non-dominating nature of the stuppa typifies non-axial buildings. The non-axial building calls for equality and participation. In a non-axial building, anyone’s action is significant, not simply that of the authority.

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Fig. 6 Archetypal examples of axial buildings include Egyptian temples, Roman basilicas, and the Christian basilicas that evolved from the Roman.

The Roman basilica is an axial building type, which is longitudinal and typified by an apse at one end opposite the entrance. These two ends are connected by a long central aisle, often accompanied by smaller side aisles and, sometimes, smaller alcoves off the sides. The basilica at Trier,58 which was Constantine’s post before he became Emperor, is a good example of a simple basilica from the late empire.59 When the Roman Emperor visited cities throughout the empire, he conducted audiences in the local basilica. During these public audiences, he sat enthroned in the apse at one end of the long central aisle of the basilica. At other times, the local governor conducted law courts from the same place.60 Through the presence of the Emperor or governor, the apse became the seat of political power. Later Christian basilica churches were explicitly patterned after Roman civic basilicas. In the Christian basilicas, the apse became the location for the altar, as it was in the first basilica church, Old St. Peter’s in Rome.61 The altar in the apse represented the divine power that accepts the sacrament. Consistently, in these examples and in others, axiality leads to the symbol of power. The aisle down the middle of a church is, to the believer, a path leading to a space of authority, where one worships the God who holds judgment over one’s eternal future. The Roman basilica leads the supplicant directly to the ruler of the world. The Egyptian temple directs one to the embodiment of cosmic power and order. All of these buildings lead the supplicant to the source of authority. Axiality represents authoritarian power. Whatever is at the end of that axis shows what the users of the building value and what has the most power over them. NON-AXIXLITY IN BUILDINGS Non-axial buildings are without any dominant orientation, often involving conflicting axes and emphasis, as well as circles and spirals. Non-axial buildings include Ziggurats, Persian hypostyle halls, Buddhist stuppas, and Arabic style mosques, as well as most centralized buildings. Non-axiality denotes equality, not privilege. Consequently, non-programmed Quaker meetinghouses, such as Haverford, Gwynedd, and Falls meetings, make the benches in their meetinghouses face each other instead of watching a minister perform a ceremony at one end, since all the members of a meeting are important and equal. The non-axial orientation allows all members of the meeting to interact equally. In Arabic style mosques, like the Great Mosque at Cordoba,62 each supplicant in prayer is as equal as the hypostyle columns of the hall and as the trees in the forest the columns resemble.63 Here, the only orientation indicates direction of prayer, not the location where a particular event will happen or person will appear, so it does not matter where one is located in the mosque. One need not look at the niche indicating the direction of Mecca, only pray towards the wall on which the niche is located.

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ARCHITECTURE DEMONSTRATES POWER

Fig. 8 St. Peter’s Dome

Fig. 9 L’Hôpital des Invalides

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Fig. 7 A Greek Tholos

CENTRALIZED BUILDING AND NON-AXIALITY The centralized building typically commemorates a specific spot. In the case of religious buildings, it elevates this spot as sacred for an event that occurred there, an artifact that rests there, a person buried there or the ceremonies conducted there. For example, a Greek tholos, a round temple, rests over the oracle at Delphi.67 The tholos emphasizes the sacredness of the spot. Bramante designed the dome of New St. Peter’s to be centered directly over the tomb of Peter. This uses the sacredness of the martyr’s tomb and translates it upward, making the point at the center of the dome most holy.68 The sarcophagus of St. Costanza stands at the center of Ste Costanza e Agnese in Rome.69 The most sacred space stands at the domed center of a round, barrel vaulted aisle, which uses concentric rings to concentrate the sacredness in the center.70 A centralized building, equal on all sides, emphasizes the spot in the center. This center can be the location of authority, as at L’Hôpital des Invalides, where Napoleon is buried, or it can simply designate sacred space, as in many Renaissance churches. Centralized space, equal on all sides, emphasizes the central point as the most important, and creates an entire zone of sacred or elevated space within the centralized area focused on the center. The surprising thing about centralized space is that what rests at the center is usually unimportant. The building confers power to it, not viceversa. Louis XIV’s body was switched out for Napoleon’s and the character of Les Invalids didn’t change. The Pantheon in Rome was built as sacred space for all the Greco-Roman gods. A centralized space based on the geometry of a perfect sphere, it contains niches with statues of all the gods all the way around the circular walls.71 It honors all the gods equally, and creates a shared sacred space. When the Christians appropriated the building, they removed the statues of Roman gods, but were able to use the same sense of sacredness created by the geometry of the centralized architecture to promote a powerful feeling of sacred Christian space. The emphasis on the center lends increased importance to whatever is located there, without discretion. The ability to change the symbol of authority located in a centralized space and the sense of shared sacred space that it can create contrasts with the effects of power change in the axial example of the Basilica of Maxentius. Attempting to legitimate his reign, Maxentius built this basilica during a massive building campaign. At the time, he and Constantine each controlled part of the Empire and vied for control of the whole. Maxentius built monumental architecture as a propaganda strategy. When Constantine eventually overthrew Maxentius in Rome, he appropriated the nearly completed Basilica of Maxentius and built a new, unplanned apse onto it, thus proclaiming a new seat of power and claiming it as his own to show how he had displaced Maxentius. Today, this basilica is often called the Basilica of Constantine.72 In this axial building, unlike a centralized building, the symbol of authority could not be replaced without changing the architecture of the building. Undifferentiated emphasis on the center and lack of orientation makes the centralized building non-axial, and makes it consistent with the egalitarian nature of other types of non- axial buildings. In his description of the Panopticon as democratic, Foucault relies on the ability to switch out the sentry in the center and have the architecture transfer importance and authority to the new occupant because he is at the center.73 The fact that such an exchange is possible demonstrates that the centralized form falls squarely in the category of non-axial, both in lack of orientation and in a tendency to depict equality. AXIALITY AND NON-AXIALITY IN THE CITY Ideas of axiality apply on the macro level, not simply to buildings, but also to cities. Not only does the church of St. Peter’s direct you to the altar,74 but one of Rome’s major avenues also directs you straight to its door, so that the ultimate goal is the symbol of divine and papal authority.75 Most avenues in Rome are also part of the axial authoritarian statement of the Catholic Church. These roads are not simply paved open spaces; they are paths. A path is a location of movement. When a path is built as a road, it displays the attitude of its builders toward the people who travel along it. Any path must have a reason for its creation. It may direct travelers to a goal, as do the Roman avenues created by Pope Sixtus V,76 which cut diagonally across the city from one major landmark to another. Made

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Paths in America tend to be paths away from a center, avenues with no goal to obstruct the view. On the lawn of the governor’s palace in colonial Williamsburg,85 on the lawn in front of the library at the University of Virginia, designed by Jefferson,86 and at the Salk Institute, designed by Louis I. Kahn,87 one end of the vista is left open, so that the possibilities of movement go on forever. The Salk Institute provides a particularly fruitful example because he is able to contrast American views of the site with Italian views. In an Italian architectural journal, a large article containing twenty-nine photographs of the institute did not contain a single one depicting the open view toward the ocean.88 The Italians could not appreciate an open vista with no goal, as they do not possess the frontier spirit that motivated its creation. Washington D.C. exemplifies how democratic values are apparent in American city planning, especially important for our capitol city. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who created the city plan for DC, grew up at Versailles, where huge boulevards point directly to the château, enforcing the power of the absolutist monarchy that it represents. He used diagonal streets in his plan, but his treatment of them was very different from the paradigm of Versailles. Diagonals with strong goals would have been inappropriate because they would have over emphasized the power of government in a country that had just fought a revolution to rid itself of an overbearing, heavy-handed power. L’Enfant chose to manipulate the symbols of powerful monarchy to fit the American context.

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Often in America, a path is thought of as the road out of town, an opportunity for movement anywhere the traveler chooses.77 The interstate highway system is a good example of a path that leads away, since any particular place can be either accessed or bypassed giving the traveler, not the city planner, the power of choice. Contrasting the plaza in front of St. Peter’s with I95 to Philadelphia demonstrates the difference between a path toward a goal and a path away from a center and the way in which the former forces the traveler to a single goal whereas the latter gives the traveler the power of choice. “The character of a path is thus determined by its relation to places. It either leads towards a goal, away from a point of departure, or it forms a ring around the place”78. There is also another possibility for the path; it could be created as buildings are erected along it, so that it becomes most important as an avenue of access to these buildings. In some ways, this is similar to the perimeter paths, since it emphasizes the static locations on either side as opposed to the movement of the traveler, but it does not delimit the spaces, closing them off. Instead, it provides access to the spaces on either side. These paths which concentrate on access can either be crooked, haphazardly traced out by each individual building, or an arrow-straight part of an orthogonal gridiron plan. The former emphasizes the buildings at locations where the road turns, whereas the latter treats all buildings along its length equally, allowing equal opportunity for access to all. While Europeans were asserting the aesthetic superiority of crooked streets, Americans were converting many unplanned cities to gridiron plans with regular city blocks.79 Europeans objected to the gridiron plan because there is “no grand hierarchy of places in a grid.”80 They felt that this lack of hierarchy and grandeur indicated of a lack of sophistication

and culture. This movement in America towards the gridiron plan was not arbitrary, but based on the value we place in equality. By converting the streets to an orthogonal plan, or by choosing the grid from the start, lots were regularized to a standard size and shape, and bends in the road that emphasize buildings were eliminated, so that every building has an equal opportunity to attract the traveler, an equal opportunity to be accessed from the road. “The symbol of a grid, paradoxically, is its very lack of symbolism. Precisely because all places are alike, the grid was a uniquely appropriate choice for a young democracy.”81 Americans value the gridiron plan based on the equality it embodies. Furthermore, Americans avoid making any paths be paths to a goal. Instead of traveling to a place, which is the climax of and reason for the trip, we place climaxes along the way, in the center. Our important locations are stops along the open road, not final ends. For example, both the River Walk in San Antonio 82 and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial83 start out small, grow to overwhelming proportions, then peter off again, so that “the most intense moment along the journey is in the middle,”84 not a goal at the end. Climaxes as points along a journey allow free movement. The American path never forces the traveler to stop at any particular goal; it simply gives him the option of stopping. Fig. 11 He Lawn In Front Of The Library At The University Of Virginia

Fig. 10 Roman Avenues Created By Pope Sixtus V

ARCHITECTURE DEMONSTRATES POWER

to direct pilgrims to the major sites in Rome, these avenues funnel them into goals of the Vatican’s choosing. These are paths toward a goal, and reflect the same ideals as axial architecture wherein interior space is a path to a goal. Two ways of identifying the path toward a goal are: first, such a path will have a goal at both ends—it leads only from one place of significance to another, and second, it will give the traveler no significant alternative to the goal, forcing him to access it. St. Peter’s in Rome exemplifies such a goal, as the traveler moves from the road leading from the Castel Sant’Angelo into an enclosed oval plaza in front of the church, which leaves access only to St. Peter’s. Sometimes a road forms a perimeter, designating the final limits of a place. When a road traces the edge of a farmer’s field, it acts as a perimeter on at least one side of the field. The path can, in this case, be oriented not toward the traveler, but toward delimiting the fixed space on either side. This is similar in many ways to the axial path to a goal because it closes space off, limiting movement and choice.

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one building to another. Paths give access to buildings and relate them to each other; they create direction and orient people within the landscape. Paths to goals are like axially oriented buildings; they lead to seats of authority. Paths away from a point of departure emphasize the personal freedom of the traveler. Circular paths, perimeters, designate a fixed sense of place. Crooked paths emphasize certain locations, to which they give access. Finally, gridiron blocks depict equality. Fig. 12 Pennsylvania Avenue

Torn between the hierarchical structure of a radial street system and the knowledge that America had created multiple seats of power, L’Enfant simply added more symbols and more diagonals. In addition to the two great open allées stretching from the White House and the Capitol, and the radials intersecting these focal points, he created many other diagonal streets, all at odd angles with one another. Among the foci L’Enfant created were the National Church, the Supreme Court, and a multitude of statues and fountains, many of which were dedicated to the various states. L’Enfant spread focal points throughout the city.89 By creating multiple focal points, L’Enfant de-emphasized the major federal government buildings, bringing them closer to the level of the other focal points, and to the states many of these focal points represent. The odd angles of the intersections of boulevards deemphasize those boulevards that lead from the Capitol and the White House, not only as other boulevards emphasize other places in the city, but also as they lead travelers in other directions, not converging on a single point. L’Enfant also used other techniques to diminish the typically axial nature of the radial plan. He has “underpinned his diagonals with a grid.”90 Though this combination of the grid and the radial plan created an awkward city plan which some thought robbed the diagonals of their power and others thought created awkward unusable lots by interfering with the gridiron, it was able to create a more accurate representation of our government in our capitol by integrating symbols of a mitigated power with the equality and rights of the citizens. By placing the White House slightly off axis from Pennsylvania Avenue 91 and the Capitol at an angle to it,92 L’Enfant made the powers of Congress and the Presidency less imposing. Later planners made a similar choice when they placed the Washington monument off axis as well.93 Furthermore, by placing a series of plazas between the Capitol and the White House, L’Enfant lessened the sense that Pennsylvania Avenue was an allée between the two. By continuing boulevards on the opposite side of each building, he made both buildings analogous to the plazas; they became “just pauses and stops along a much longer route.”94 By changing the way that foci interact with the radial plan, he was able to make it non-axial and change its authoritative meaning. D.C. also further exemplifies how American paths tend not to lead to goals.95 Because L’Enfant planned the diagonal avenues leading from the Capitol and White House to be open at the opposite ends, his original conception of the city and the way the city was originally built show that he does not intend them to be paths that lead to goals. However, after visiting Europe and studying the great cities and monuments there, later members of a committee for the beautification of the city chose to terminate those avenues with goals—the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Of course, those European monuments were erected by authorities very different from the American representative democracy, and were testaments to the power of the institutions that built them. However, when the Memorials were built in Washington, even as they closed off the ends of the avenues, city planners managed to thwart the radial layout of the streets and its authoritarian possibilities so that the Monuments became options, not goals.96 The reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial prevents the road from leading directly to it. The fact that the Jefferson Memorial is on an island divides it from the rest of the path; furthermore, the road is constructed so that one has the option of crossing the bridge or driving on past. This choice allows the monument to commemorate Jefferson’s greatness as a champion of liberty and democracy. These changes in the roads leading to the monuments prevent them from forcing travelers into the goal at the end; instead, they give alternate options, preserving the American values of freedom and the open road. Axial buildings lead one to the source of power. Non-axial buildings equate their different users by creating non-hierarchical spaces. This is paralleled by the ways city plans relate

By looking at actual architecture, we see that axial buildings, paths to goals, and perimeters are consistently associated with authority. The goals to which they lead are seats from which authority dominates. The areas that perimeters create are the districts on which that authority is exercised. Non-axial buildings, like gridiron plans and paths that lead away from centers and bypass goals, emphasize equality and freedom of choice. Thus, axial architecture is related to authoritarian regimes and non-axial architecture to egalitarian regimes. FOUCAULT AND PRISON ARCHITECTURE The next question to address is how this association of axial architecture with authoritarian power structures and non-axial architecture with power that is based on a mandate from the people holds up when either type of power must create a setting for controlling people. Foucault addresses this architecture of control in Discipline and Punish, especially in the section on the Panopticon.97 The panoptic system is developed in contrast to a previous system based on administration during the plague, which was an omnipresent bureaucracy.98 The guards are always present and the prisoners are immobilized. In this model, power was subdivided with layer upon layer of personnel responsible for their own sections and accountable to an overseer, so that each section is divided into smaller sections like a grid. This plague-based method is a typical cellblock prison plan. The layout based on cellblocks is to be contrasted with the panoptic method, wherein the building is composed of “at the periphery, a building in a ring; in the center, a tower”99. A single attendant in the tower can watch all the cells in the periphery building. The Panopticon is clearly a centralized building, which means that it is non-axial and therefore associated with democracy, an association Foucault supports. However, this contrast is far more complicated, as a non-axial building

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placement of his room, facing the central tower, imposes an axial visibility on him; but the divisions of the ring, these well separated cells imply a lateral invisibility.”107 The direct, axial relationship of the prisoner to the guard creates the visual effect that makes the cell completely visible, and it creates a rapport with the tower that symbolizes power and authority. The prisoner has no contact with his neighbors and is unaware of the overall centralized nature of the building. What dominates his life, the only visible connection he has with any other person, is the axial relation between himself and the guard, who as far as he knows, watched him constantly. This axial relationship allows the guard to control the prisoner through his gaze alone. Despite this axial relationship between the prisoner and the guard in the tower, the source of power in the prison, Foucault still sees unique possibilities for the Panopticon as a democratic system of imprisonment. I believe that this is based on the overall centrality of the design. “This architectural apparatus is a machine for creating and upholding a relation of power independent of the person who exercises it; in brief, the detained are trapped in a situation of power of which they themselves are the bearers.”108 The architecture that creates the direct axial relationship between the prisoner and the unseen guard in the tower embodies a relationship of power. The guard seems to be the source, but the tower is the real source of power. The architecture makes the power relations function to the extent that the guard himself is not truly necessary. The thought that they are being watched keeps the prisoners in line. “It is of little import, consequently, who exercises the power.”109 Because the building itself maintains the relationship of power and the prisoner allows the possibility of constant surveillance to regulate his behavior, anyone, from a maid to a visiting politician can replace the guard in the tower without the prisoner’s perception of his situation, or even the actual relationship of the prisoner to power in the tower, changing.110 This is not unlike the way that Les Invalides was able to remain the same despite becoming the tomb for Napoleon, in place of Louis XIV. The centralized design allows the exchange of occupants in the Panopticon while maintaining the tower’s power over the inmates, and it is the reason that the inmates are the ones who impose restricted behavior on themselves. The fact that the architecture acts as a mechanism to provide the occupant of the central tower with power contrasts with the cell-block model where power must descend from the central authority figure. Instead of the person being the source of power over the prisoners, the architecture endows the person with power. Because the tower occupant’s identity is unimportant, “any member of society would have the right to witness with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, and prisons function. There is consequently no risk that the growth of power due to the panoptic machine could degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism would be democratically controlled, since it would be unceasingly available to the ‘great committee of the tribunal of the world’.”111 The tower occupant’s exchange ability allows the whole society to access the tower itself. If the entire society can access the seat of power, then the apparatus is a democratic one, where power comes from the people rather than from a tyrannical authority figure. The overall centralized design allows for this public accessibility, and thus the democratization of power in the Panopticon. The centralized design allows the Panopticon to be a democratic building, despite the control exercised over the inmates. Once again, the embodiment of power in architecture creates two contrasting models in the cellblock style prison and the Panopticon. The former, based on nested limited areas, emphasizes a central leader as the source of all power, while the latter, a centralized building, allows all of the society to access power. Through structural parallels, architecture can represent the way a culture understands the world. Leaders use monumental architecture as a means to represent their rule and to demonstrate their power over the people that they rule. In doing so, they embody the nature

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should not assert power, and therefore should not be able to assert power over prisoners, and as the cellblock plan seems to correspond to a city’s gridiron plan and therefore should be associated with democracy, not a paralyzing structure of power. The cellblock plan is, however, not the equivalent in a prison of the gridiron plan in a city. In the gridiron plan, all streets are equal; there is no hierarchy. In contrast, the cellblock prison is an embodiment of hierarchy. It is a series of enclosed districts under the control of a guard, which are sub-districts under the control of the supervisors, who report to the warden. Essentially, the cellblock design is a series of nested spaces defined by specific limits at the perimeter. In the plague town this plan is based on, there was “first, a strict spatial division: closing of the city and of its surrounding territory, interdiction to leave under pain of death, putting to sleep of all stray animals, division of the town into separate quarters which were placed under the power of an intendant. Each road was placed under the authority of a syndic; he puts it under surveillance; if he were to have left it, he would have been punished with death.”100 In this way, every physical aspect of the city corresponded to a level of bureaucracy that strictly controlled all movement within the plague-stricken city. Each street was constantly surveyed, and the guards themselves obeyed a supervisor in charge of a larger section, the quarter. This same system was applied to the cellblock style prison. “This surveillance is supported by a system of permanent registration: relationship of the syndics to the intendants, of the intendants to the magistrates or to the mayor.”101 The minutest details are watched by a hierarchical system that relies on the relationships of power between the different layers of authority. The final effect is that “of an omniscient, omnipresent power which subdivides itself in a regular fashion, uninterrupted up to the final determination of the individual... the penetration of regulation all the way to the smallest details of existence by the intermediary of a complete hierarchy that assures the capillary functioning of power”102 . The two main keys to the image of the cellblock prison are these ideas of subdivided power and the capillary action of power. The power controlling the prison or the plague stricken town divides itself into smaller and smaller pieces in the hierarchy to reach into all levels of the prison or of society. This pervasive control paralyzes the town or prison, makes it “fragmented, immobile, trapped space.”103 Where the gridiron allows freedom of movement, the cellblock, based on the perimeter, freezes all movement with a stifling hierarchy. This embodied hierarchy is the type of organization seen in the party camps and rallies of Nazi Germany.104 The physically manifested hierarchy creates a tightly controlled and repressed space; everyone must submit to the will of the ruler at the head of the hierarchy. Panoptic architecture offers a different way of controlling prisoners: Everyone knows the principle: at the periphery, a building in a ring; in the center, a tower; this tower is pierced by large windows that open to the interior facade of the ring; the periphery building is divided into cells, which each traverse the entire thickness of the building; they have two windows, one towards the interior, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, viewing the exterior, permits the light to traverse the entire cell. It is therefore sufficient to put a supervisor in the central tower, and to enclose in each cell a lunatic, a sick person, a condemned man, a worker or a student.105 By the effect of backlighting, one can see from the tower the little silhouettes of the captives in the periphery cells. So many cages, so many little theatres, where each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.106 The Panopticon uses the geometry of the architecture itself to control prisoners. The centralized building with windows that allow the prisoners to be seen but the supervisor in the tower never to be seen by them, controls the prisoners’ behavior thorough their own self-consciousness about being watched. The number of guards is reduced from an extensive hierarchical bureaucracy to a single observer in the tower. Each prisoner feels as though only he is confronted and watched by the guard, who could observe him at any time. “The

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of their rule in the plans of buildings and cities. These plans are visual statements of their ideology of power. Some use axial plans to direct people to a goal representing the ruler’s power. Other groups choose non-axial plans to demonstrate the equality and freedom of community members. Much about the nature of political power in any society, especially the relationship of the ruler to the people and where his power is thought to originate, can be discerned by looking at the physical symbols it produces in its architecture.

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ARCHITECTURE THEREFORE DEMONSTRATES POWER THROUGH THE DEPICTION OF A LEADER’S CONTROL OVER A COMMUNITY, HIS ABILITY TO ORGANIZE AND MOBILIZE THEM; IT SHOWS HIS POWER AS A LEADER. IT ALSO SHOWS HIS ABILITY TO CREATE A DESIRED EFFECT.

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REWIND: MODERNIST DREAMS OF UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE The reality of today’s world can often be difficult to face. With global climate change leading to rising sea levels, unprecedented environmental destruction, a widening gap between the rich and poor, and countless humans rights violations (among many other issues), it’s easy to dream of a world in which all of societal ills have been solved—a utopia. First described as a fictional island society in Greece by Sir Thomas More in 1516, the word “utopia” has evolved to mean any community with a visionary system of political and societal perfection—cities that function to improve the daily lives of their citizens. These imagined societies can never exist. Still, the concept of a utopia has been very influential in the arts, especially for architects. At the beginning of the 20th century, the world was facing the devastation and destruction wrought by World War I. In architecture, the modernist movement was beginning to take shape, and architects believed that their buildings could help solve the world’s problems. Some utopian visions focused on new technology, others on open, untouched landscapes, and still others were based on new social orders, but all were united under radically avant-garde and cutting-edge architecture. While each architect’s ideals varied, they all held one thing in common: they could never be built. Only able to exist in theory—the basis of a utopia—the architecture in the following utopian visions is carefully planned and highly systematic. Each detail is included to help reach a larger goal. While these visions suffered from a megalomaniacal belief that one person’s ideas could change an entire society, each architects’ plans are admirable in their experimental efforts. For the first part of our utopian architecture series, we take a look at five highly influential plans that fall under a modernist mindset. Read through to see these aspirational visions that never took off.

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REWIND: MODERNIST DREAMS OF UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE

James Bartolacci

Fig. 1

DESPITE THE IMAGINARY LOCATION AND THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM IN DEVELOPING FANTASIA MODELS, ARTIFICIALITY, IMAGINATION, UTOPIAN CITY MODELS WERE DISTINGUISHED BY: ORDER, RELATIONSHIPS, HARMONY, PROPORTION, A SENSE OF DIALOGUE, COLLABORATION, COMMUNITY LIFE.

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Fig. 1 “Utopia,” Abraham Ortelius

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In detailing a vision of utopia, it’s best to disconnect with what is already realized, and perhaps no group does this more than the Futurists. Believing that “architecture is breaking free from tradition,” these forward-thinking designers aggressively rejected historical reference, doing away with monuments, classical arcades, frivolous decoration, and funereal and commemorative architecture, and instead championed a cult of the machine. Incorporating new materials like reinforced concrete, iron, and glass, the futurists envisioned highly industrialized cities built around an aesthetic of audacity and calculation. Beauty could be found in raw, bare materials, while oblique and elliptical lines had the power to imbue a city with dynamism. Sound a little severe? Perhaps, but the Futurists enthusiastically believed that science and technology could usher in a new way of life with practical and utilitarian sensibilities. Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia’s“La Città Nuova” wasone of the designs most symbolic of the Futurist ideology. Unlike classic spread-out metropolises, the city of the future consisted of a centralized massive, vertical conurbation that included skyscrapers interconnected by bridges, aerial walkways, exterior elevator shafts, and funiculars. The mechanized city was designed around a lifestyle that always looked to the future, and held a foundation in renewel—constantly demolishing outdated structures to make way for newer technologies. This characteristic transience kept Sant’Elia’s ever changing visions on the drafting table.

Fig. 2

CONSTRUCTING POWER

REWIND: MODERNIST DREAMS OF UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE

THE FUTURISTS AND THE MACHINE

Fig. 3

Fig. 2 Drawing from “La Città Nuova,” Antonio Sant’Elia Fig. 3 Drawing from “La Città Nuova,” Antonio Sant’Elia Fig. 4 Drawing from Alpine Architecture, Bruno Taut

Fig. 4

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Things were not looking so great for German architects in the 1910s. With widespread destruction and a crippling recession coupled with inflation from World War I, the situation in the soon-to-collapse German Empire looked rather grim. So it’s no wonder that many early modernist architects at this time began drafting visions of brand new, idealized cities that sound straight out the most vivid of dreams. In 1914, Danzig-born Paul Scheerbart published his manifesto “Glass Architecture.” Unquestionably Utopian in thought, Scheebart believed that the visually dazzling properties of glass—the modern emblem of the time—could raise culture to a higher level, and transform the habits of “Old Europe.” In a world dreamt by Scheebart, brick buildings would be replaced by radiant colorful glass, “as though the Earth clad itself in jewelery of brilliants and enamel.” Though Scheebart’s writings were purely imaginative, they had profound influence on German expressionist architects several years later, especially Weimar-based Bruno Taut. In 1917, Taut published Alpine Architecture, a series of radically enthusiastic sketches that imagined building new glass metropolises perched high on the untouched mountaintops of the Alps. And, unlike many other modernists, Taut espoused a confidence in color. Like Scheebart, Taut’s vision promoted the psychological effects of glass, supporting the idea that refracted colors shining on the glass cityscape could elevate residents’ moods. To fund this new mountaintop city, Taut called for the melting down of old monuments and triumphal avenues—a peaceful anarchy that would dissolve the old, corrupt power. Taut’s Alpine city still remains among the most optimistic, if not fanciful, visions of utopia, taking on an almost fairytale-like quality as he cheered, “hurray and again hurray for the fluid, the graceful, the angular, the sparkling, the flashing, the light— hurray for everlasting architecture!”

Fig. 8

Fig. 6 Fig. 9

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REWIND: MODERNIST DREAMS OF UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE

THE POWER OF COLORFUL, PRISMATIC GLASS

Fig. 5

Fig.5 With light reflecting from interior waterfalls onto its colorful glass walls, Taut’s Glass Pavilion for the 1914 Cologne Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition exemplified his utopian ideals. Fig. 6 Left: “Glass Construction,” Right: “Glass House,” Hans Scharoun Fig.7 Lenin Institute, Ivan Leonidov Fig.8 “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge,” El Lissitzky Fig.9 Lenin Tribune, El Lissitzky

Fig. 7

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When Lenin came into power following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, artists and architects were searching for a new aesthetic that could symbolize the country’s new economic policies and embrace of communism. Deeply inspired both by the kinetic elements of Futurist and Cubist art and the nation’s new socialist principles, Constructivist architecture blended abstract geometric elements with a movement and energy stemming from the promise of a future society defined by technology and engineering. And, like Soviet poster art that promoted the Revolution’s ideals, bold red became the color of choice for Constructivist visionaries. Unfortunately for Constructivists, their ideas were largely ahead of their time—especially considering the USSR’s limited resources. Many designs were purely theoretical and often included propagandistic imagery to disseminate both an artistic and a social order. El Lissitzky’s Lenin Tribune, with its leaning structure and lack of supports, functioned as a visual dogma for socialist ideals, and at the time could never be constructed. Vladimir Tatlin’s design for his Monument to the Third International—a socialist take on the Eiffel Tower—similarly existed only in vision. With its expressive spiral construction of red-painted steel and iron surrounding three central spaces that rotated according to day, month, and year, Tatlin’s monument symbolized an industrialized USSR of the future. However, the impractical nature of these visions were evident after Tatlin’s tower was realized only as a small wood model in Petrograd.

THE EGO OF THE MODERN MASTER

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Through the 1920s and 1930s, modern “master” Le Corbusier experimented with a series of highly utopian urban planning concepts, stemming from his visions of an ideal city that hoped to reunite citizens with a highly ordered and open environment, elevating culture on a universal basis. In 1925, he proposed the “Plan Voisin,” an idealistic mega-project that called for the bulldozing of central Paris and replacing it with monolithic 60-story towers set within an organized street grid and ample green space. Corbusier believed the efficient plan could transform society by raising the standard of living for all socioeconomic levels, thus sparing the country another revolution. However, the “Plan Voisin” actually divided housing based on class, illustrating flaws in his utopian aspirations. The plan was outright rejected, and the frustrated architect ventured outside Europe to spread his ideas. With an overtly orientalist mindset, Le Corbusier traveled the French-controlled North African city of Algiers to experiment with and perfect his utopian urban plans. While it was never commissioned, Corbu drafted the “Plan Obus,” a vision that intended to connect Algiers’ Casbah, the city’s traditional quarter, more seamlessly with the colonial waterfront area. However, the architect’s plan was steeped in class stratification hidden under the veil of modernizing a supposedly “backwards society.” Le Corbusier envisioned a modernized concave and convex apartment complex on the slopes above the city, connected to a new administrative center on the coast. These two sectors, which would mainly have accommodated French colonists, were to be connected by an elevated road over the Casbah, further polarizing an already segregated city. Le Corbusier’s utopian ideals were entrenched in colonial thinking—the civilized European designing to better the non-West—and typically benefited upper classes. Most of Corbu’s urban plans never materialized, except for his later master plan for Chandigarh, India, the success of which is still debated today. Fig. 12

Fig.10 Monument to the Third International, Vladimir Tatlin Fig. 11 “Plan Obus,” Le Corbusier Fig.12 Palace of Assembly

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REWIND: MODERNIST DREAMS OF UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE

UTOPIAN STRUCTURES DISPERSE A NEW ORDER

While many earlier modernist utopian visions centered around densely packed cities, Frank Lloyd Wright rejected u r b a n a r e a s a l t o g e t h e r. Believing that city life was plagued by corrupted values, FLW fled to the suburbs, where he envisioned a new, modernized lifestyle set within bucolic landscapes. In 1932, Wright drafted a vision for his “Broadacre City,” named because each family received a one-acre plot of land. The complete antithesis of Le Corbusier’s ideal cities, Broadacre championed low-density development centered around automobile transit, where all amenities could be easily accessed within a radius of 150 miles. Wright detailed plans for spacious landscaped highways, beautifully designed public service stations, roadside markets, garden schools, and parks, which were integrated to foster self-improvement and maximize enjoyment. Apartment buildings and train stations were kept to a minimum, as FLW believed that pedestrians could only safely exist on open land, and embraced the benefits of the countryside. Sounds a little like an idealized version of today’s sprawling suburbs, right? Well, Wright also conceived of the “aerator,” a small helicopter provided for each family that could land without a landing strip. Together, open land, automobiles, and Jetsons-like aerators promised citizens a city filled with more light, more freedom of movement, and more spatial freedom in the “ideal establishment of what we call civilization.” Unsurprisingly, FLW’s utopian city did not anticipate today’s widespread problems of suburban sprawl and the environmental degradation that comes from the basic principles of Broadacre. Much like utopian visionaries before, “Broadacre City” was born from a disgust with city life—a modern man’s eschewal of overcrowded, aesthetically displeasing lowerclass areas.

Fig. 13

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REWIND: MODERNIST DREAMS OF UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE

UTOPIA AND DELUSION

Fig. 14

Fig.13 “Plan Voisin,” Le Corbusier Fig.14 “Broadacre City,” Frank Lloyd Wright

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German digital artist clemens gritl constructs artificial and 3d architecture models for his series ‘a future city from the past’, reflecting and exploring urban utopias of the 20th century. The revolutionary social visions of mid century, large-scale apartment buildings, led the artist to gain a deep fascination for such structures. In this project, gritl seeks to imagine how a futuristic ‘super-brutalist’ metropolis would age, and how an endless man-made landscape, constructed of only concrete and asphalt, would look like. What impact would such a massive concentration of sculptural architecture have on mankind? Could such a city succeed in producing a functional society, or would it automatically plunge into menacing social dysfunction?

CONSTRUCTING POWER

URBAN UTOPIAS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Clemens Gritl

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HOW

DOES

Statue of Liberty, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, 1886

MONUMENT BUILDING IS A LIVING PROCESS, IN SOME SENSE ALWAYS UNFINISHED; NO MATTER HOW MUCH A MONUMENT MAY PRETEND TO BE ETERNAL AND UNCHANGING, ITS MEANING ALWAYS EVOLVES AS ITS VIEWERS BRING NEW CONCERNS AND UNDERSTANDINGS TO IT.

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HISTORY, MEMORY, AND MONUMENTS

Kirk Savage

CONSTRUCTING POWER

“Monuments are good for nothing,” a North Carolina Congressman declared in 1800. In the founding years of the United States, many argued that democracy and the spread of literacy had made commemorative rituals and monuments obsolete, a leftover from the days of monarchy and superstition. Reflecting on Congress’s reluctance to fund a monument to George Washington, John Quincy Adams famously observed that “democracy has no monuments.” “True memory,” many Americans liked to claim, lay not in a pile of dead stones but in the living hearts of the people. Since those early days of the Republic, democracy has changed its tune. Commemoration has become utterly commonplace, deeply rooted in the cultural practices of the nation. Not only did Americans come to embrace traditional forms of commemoration, but they pioneered new practices, particularly in the remembrance of war dead. Today American commemorative practices have multiplied and spread in ways no one could have imagined, extending now even into the solar system (with a monument to the fallen Columbia crew on Mars). While commemorative practices have been expanding for nearly two centuries, the academic literature on commemoration has mushroomed in the past twenty years. So many scholars from such a variety of disciplines have joined the “memory boom” that mapping the field has become effectively impossible. Moreover, scholars often talk at cross purposes with one another or simply in ignorance of each other’s work. This essay, while by necessity impressionistic, will try to pinpoint key questions, debates, findings, and trends. The first key question might be, what is commemoration? Dictionary definitions tell us that to commemorate is to “call to remembrance,” to mark an event or a person or a group by a ceremony or an observance or a monument of some kind. Commemorations might be ephemeral or permanent; the key point is that they prod collective memory in some conspicuous way. French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs ushered in the modern academic study of collective memory with his book The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925) in which he argued that all memory—even personal memory—is a social process, shaped by the various groups (family, religious, geographical, etc.) to which individuals belong. In an even more influential posthumous essay, “Historical Memory and Collective Memory” (1950), published after his death in a Nazi concentration camp, Halbwachs insisted on a distinction between history and collective memory: history aims for a universal, objective truth severed from the psychology of social groups while “every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time.” Thus our view of the past does not come primarily from professional historical scholarship but from a much more complicated and interwoven set of relationships to mass media, tourist sites, family tradition, and the spaces of our upbringing with all their regional, ethnic, and class diversity—to name just a few factors. Just as personal memory is now understood to be a highly selective, adaptive process of reconstructing the past, shaped by present needs and contexts, so collective memory is a product of social groups and their ever evolving character and interests. Hence the now commonplace notion that collective memory is “constructed,” amidst a perpetual political battleground. Almost everyone now agrees with American historian Michael Kammen’s assertion, made in his magisterial volume Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) that “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind—manipulating the past in order to mold the present.” Yet even when collective memory is qualified in this way, many scholars remain skeptical of the notion. In a 2001 essay on “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies” social historian Jay Winter asserted that we need “a more rigorous and tightly argued set of propositions about what exactly memory is, and what it has been in the past.” Some scholars even question the existence of collective memory. The very idea of collective memory seems to assume a unity of purpose—as if many different people somehow share a common mind—that belies the reality of even the smallest family group, let alone a diverse nation

like the U.S. James Wertsch has argued in Voices of Collective Remembering (2002) that collective memory is not a thing in itself but many different acts of remembering, shaped by overarching social forces and cognitive frameworks such as narrative. Susan Sontag in her final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2002) went even further and argued that there isn’t a collective memory at all but there is “collective instruction,” a complex process—left mostly unexplained in her book—by which certain ideas and images become more important than others. “We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left,” French scholar Pierre Nora has famously argued (Realms of Memory, orig. 1984). Nora claimed that modern societies invest so heavily in “lieux de memoire” [memory sites, such as monuments, museums, archives, and historic places] because these have replaced “real environments of memory,” the living memory that was once nourished spontaneously in premodern societies. Nora’s claim echoes the anti-monument rhetoric of early American republicans. Like the republicans before him, Nora suspected that modern commemorations were invented to make up for a lack of organic unity within modern nations and societies. David Lowenthal’s book The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985) made a similar point, arguing that modern societies try desperately to resurrect the past because it has already disappeared from living culture. While this core insight has been productive–modernity does indeed disrupt old patterns of collective memory–it is also reductive, failing to take into account not only the importance of commemoration in premodern societies but also the persistence of the past and “spontaneous” practices of memory in modern societies such as the U.S. Nora’s attention to sites of memory and the politics surrounding them has had a profound influence on American scholarship, but many scholars who cite him simply ignore or overlook the assumptions that underpin his work. Whatever their theoretical allegiances, scholars keep circling around the same basic questions. Who guides the process of remembering and towards what ends? Why do specific commemorative projects take particular forms? How do commemorative practices actually shape social relations and cultural beliefs (rather than simply reflecting them)? Inevitably this last question raises the key issue of how conspicuous acts of commemoration like public ceremonies and monument building relate to the more everyday practices of schooling, reminiscing, and unconscious habit that carry knowledge and tradition from one generation to another. This question is the least directly addressed issue, probably because it is the hardest to research, though it haunts much of the scholarship on memory. In the U.S. the “memory boom” seems to have been inspired largely by two phenomena: the coming to grips with the Holocaust, which began in earnest in the 1970s, and the unexpected success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982. While the literature on Holocaust memory is now vast and intricate, James E. Young’s book The Texture of Memory (1993) has become indispensable. Focusing on the unique problems posed by the trauma of the Holocaust, Young surveyed a range of memorial solutions in Europe and the U.S. from traditional heroic figurative monuments to avant-garde installations that deliberately undermined the very premise that monuments are permanent. Throughout the book Young argued that monument building is a living process, in some sense always unfinished; no matter how much a monument may pretend to be eternal and unchanging, its meaning always evolves as its viewers bring new concerns and understandings to it. Since the Holocaust was so clearly an event to be pondered rather than celebrated, monuments could never hope to fix its meaning for all time. The phenomenal power and popularity of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial almost immediately revived scholarly interest in the subject of public monuments. Traditionally, public monuments had been the most prestigious forms of commemoration because they were designed as permanent showcases of public memory, to last for the ages. But in the twentieth century, scholars came to consider the public monument a dead form. Lewis Mumford wrote in The Culture of Cities (1938) that “the notion of a modern monument is a veritable contradiction in terms.” While public monuments did continue to be erected in the mid-20th century, scholars paid little attention until Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial offered a new, distinctly contemporary memorial format, an open solution—to follow James Young’s suggestion–that deliberately encouraged multiple meanings and uses. This spawned an immense literature on the monument itself and a renewed interest in how monuments and other public practices of commemoration work in modern society. Fittingly, one of the most frequently cited books on American public memory, John Bodnar’s Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

HISTORY, MEMORY, AND MONUMENTS: AN OVERVIEW OF THE SCHOLARLY LITERATURE ON COMMEMORATION

Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Gutzon Borglum, 1732–1919

JUST AS PERSONAL MEMORY IS NOW UNDERSTOOD TO BE A HIGHLY SELECTIVE, ADAPTIVE PROCESS OF RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST, SHAPED BY PRESENT NEEDS AND CONTEXTS, SO COLLECTIVE MEMORY IS A PRODUCT OF SOCIAL GROUPS AND THEIR EVER EVOLVING CHARACTER AND INTERESTS. HENCE THE NOW COMMONPLACE NOTION THAT COLLECTIVE MEMORY IS “CONSTRUCTED,” AMIDST A PERPETUAL POLITICAL BATTLEGROUND.

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the Capitol’s commemorative program have been explored in American Pantheon : Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol, a collection of essays edited By Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma (2004). The development of the “monumental core” of the capital city has been much studied, but the single best volume on the national Mall as a commemorative landscape remains The Mall in Washington, 1791-1991, edited by Richard Longstreth (1991). Countless specialized studies on commemorative practices in the capital have been produced—on parades, ceremonies, cemeteries, city plans, outdoor sculpture—but surprisingly few serious synthetic studies of how the city has worked as a commemorative landscape. More scholarly work in this direction is likely as the collective memory field continues to expand beyond its traditional base in sociology, history, and art history and embraces the work of geographers, landscape historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, and other academic practitioners. Richard Handler and Eric Gable’s enthnographic study of America’s most famous living museum, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997), is an excellent example, investigating how the historical lessons of this site are continuously reshaped or even ignored as they are put into practice by reenactors and consumed by tourists. Much of the newer work is in essay form. Geographer Derek Alderman, for example, has investigated the issue of commemorative street naming focusing on Martin Luther King, Jr., in a series of articles in professional geography journals. Some recent work has been collected in anthologies, such as Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape (2001), edited by archaeologist Paul A. Shackel; Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (2002), edited by Jacob J. Climo and Maria G. Cattell; and Places of Commemoration : Search for Identity and Landscape Design (2001), edited by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. What all this work tends to have in common is an effort to map individual commemorative sites within larger contexts of remembrance—landscapes, geographic and administrative units, and social networks created by tourism, professions, and other factors. This should remind us that commemoration entails not only building, naming, or shaping physical sites. Commemoration as a practice also involves ritual acts in and occupations of public space as well as other kinds of performance and consumption that may leave no lasting trace on the landscape. W. Lloyd Warner’s classic study The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959) was an early examination of the role of patriotic parades and other symbolic observances in civic life. David Glassberg’s American Historical Pageantry : The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990) examined the craze for commemorative pageants in the beginning of the past century, but this phenomenon has a long history in the U.S. David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes : The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997) and Sarah J. Purcell’s Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (2002) both showed that in the early national period, festivals and anniversaries helped overcome partisan and class divisions and cement a national identity. In our own time, new electronic media have greatly expanded and altered the terrain of commemoration. Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997) has made a pioneering contribution in this area; her study examined commemoration across many different media, by charting the ways in which memories of the victims of national crises circulated throughout American culture in films, monuments, medical practices, and domestic grieving turned public. Yet George Lipsitz’s Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990) has argued that even in age dominated by television and commercial culture, popular traditions of storytelling and festivity among disenfranchised groups, such as working-class blacks in New Orleans, have still played a part in upholding their own versions of the past. All these diverse commemorative practices come together most powerfully around the remembrance of war. It is no surprise that much of the literature on commemoration in the U.S. deals with war and its aftermath. G. Kurt Piehler’s Remembering War the American Way (1995) has remained a useful synthetic study, but the literature has grown to the point where synthesis now seems quixotic. The memory of the Civil War has stood out as a particularly fertile topic. In recent years a great deal of work has been done on memory and race, as scholars from numerous angles have shown how the commemoration of the Civil War helped to shape new racial relations within American society—removing African American soldiers from mainstream public memory, defeating the dream of racial equality, and advancing the cause of white supremacy. David W. Blight’s ambitious synthesis Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) has become the indispensable reference for this argument.

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(1992), began with a discussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Bodnar, an eminent social historian of ethnic and immigrant communities, was dissatisfied with the all too frequent assumption that commemorations were top- down affairs imposed by ruling elites on a passive populace. The success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial demonstrated to him that commemoration interwove what he called “official” and “vernacular” memory, official memory driven by the need of the state to mythologize itself and maintain the loyalty of its citizens and vernacular memory driven by the need of ordinary people to pursue their social and political concerns in their local communities. Surveying a broad range of local commemorations including monuments and anniversaries, Bodnar argued that national patriotism worked to “mediate” or reconcile the competing interests of official and vernacular memories. While Bodnar’s distinction between official and vernacular can break down in practice, his book has helped establish that commemoration “involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments.” An interesting example that complicates Bodnar’s framework is Melissa Dabakis’s book, Monuments Of Manliness: Visualizing Labor In American Sculpture, 18801935 (1998), which studied various intersections of class, gender, and politics in the generally elite form of monumental sculpture. Her investigation of the competing monuments to the Haymarket protest in Chicago in 1886—one to the police, one to the anarchists—demonstrated that the “struggle for supremacy” was not only a conflict over which version of events would become officially enshrined in public space but also a shifting political conflict between left-wing and right-wing groups. Ironically the official police monument had a more “realistic” vernacular form and definite vernacular appeal, at least among police recruits, while the anarchist monument had a more elite form laden with art-historical associations. Art historians like Dabakis, trained to study both the patronage and the reception of works of art, have realized for decades that monumental works become especially contested arenas, precisely because the work has a high public profile. One of the earliest and best studies of U.S. monuments was Michele Bogart’s Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (1989). Bogart’s book centered on the golden age of the public monument, a time when sculptural monuments proliferated not only in New York but throughout cities across the continent. Her book traced the rise of an unabashedly elite genre of edifying commemoration at the end of the nineteenth century, supplied by well-known artists and their powerful political patrons. But the story concluded with a fascinating account of how this elite consensus unraveled in the early twentieth century, as various groups—such as newly enfranchised women—began to acquire a voice in the process and to challenge the dominant sculptural language. Since then that story has been extended by scholars such as Andrew Shanken, whose 2002 essay in Art Bulletin focused on the mid-twentieth century movement to replace sculptural monuments with “living memorials” (utilitarian memorials such as highways, parks, and concert halls). Throughout the twentieth century memorials increasingly transformed from mere sculptural objects into more complex spaces, often with museum or archival functions. Benjamin Hufbauer’s book Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (2005) has shown how gargantuan Presidential libraries have become a dominant type, overshadowing or even supplanting the older hero-on-a-pedestal that had once been the preferred type of monument to a great leader. As noted above, however, traditional public monuments never disappeared, and they continued to be a powerful form of commemoration even as they lost their appeal to cultural elites. Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall’s Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (1991) is a study of one such monument, the Marine Corps War Memorial erected in Arlington, Virginia in 1954. Their book embedded the monument within popular culture, where the iconic image originally came from (a wartime newspaper photo) and where it continues to live and thrive. The phenomenon in which particular monuments have become icons of the nation has been studied in books such as Marvin Trachtenberg’s Statue of Liberty (1976), Rex Alan Smith’s Carving of Mount Rushmore (1985), Christopher A. Thomas’s The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (2002), and most recently Nicolaus Mills’s Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial (2004). Albert Boime in The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (1998) demonstrated the authoritarian and exclusionary character of many of these icons, although he did not fully take into account what Bodnar might call the vernacular attachment to iconic forms of commemorative art. Washington, D.C. has received a great deal of attention because it is the commemorative heart of the nation. The role of the Capitol building in commemorating the western expansion of the nation, and the defeat of Indians who stood in the way, has been examined in Vivien Fryd, Art And Empire : The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1860 (1992). Other aspects of

SOCIETIES IN FACT RECONSTRUCT THEIR PASTS RATHER THAN FAITHFULLY RECORD THEM, AND THAT THEY DO SO WITH THE NEEDS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE CLEARLY IN MIND —MANIPULATING THE PAST IN ORDER TO MOLD THE PRESENT.

Marine Corps War Memorial, 1954

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In recent times the remembrance of war has become connected almost inextricably with the issue of trauma. Once again the Holocaust and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial have served as the key landmarks in this process. Young’s Texture of Memory and Sturken’s Tangled Memories have shed light on the new importance of victimization within commemorative practices. Geographer Kenneth E. Foote’s study Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (1997) examined how Americans have dealt with landscapes marked by war, mass murder, and other traumatic events. In a related development, the remembering and forgetting of Indian removal, confinement, and extermination have become increasingly important subjects in studies of national historic sites such as Dispossessing the Wilderness : Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (1999) by Mark David Spence, and The Politics of Hallowed Ground : Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1999) by Mario Gonzalez and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. Edward Linenthal has created the most extensive body of work on trauma and commemoration, in a series of meticulously researched books on subjects spanning from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first: Sacred Ground, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (1995), and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (2001). Since 9-11, the subject has become even more important, and numerous scholars have already entered the field. Two new examples include Savage’s study of the “therapeutic memorial” in an essay in the collection Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11, edited by Daniel Sherman and Terry Nardin (2006), and Terry Smith’s examination of the contemporary struggle over iconic architecture in Architecture of Aftermath (2006). While work on commemoration continues to multiply, and to examine ever more carefully how memory practices penetrate all facets of our collective life, much work remains to be done on the actual impact of all these practices. Few scholars have attempted to theorize the relationship between commemoration and tradition, what we might call the exterior and interior faces of historical consciousness. On the one hand are public sites and rituals of memory, and on the other hand are ingrained habits of thought and action that persist in individuals, families, and communities across long spans of time. While few scholars would agree with Nora that interior memory has disappeared, most scholars have focused on the exterior struggles to construct memory in one form rather than another. One of the only scholars to argue against this trend has been social scientist Barry Schwartz, who has written a series of articles and books on American Presidents in historical memory. In Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000) Schwartz has argued that memory is not constructed anew in each new commemorative project; instead, he has asserted that in a democratic society historical facts have serious weight and help create “core elements” of memory that persist over long periods of time. Yet his belief in an authentic “core” memory led him, ironically, to downplay certain historical facts, such as the outright fraud and hucksterism involved in “assembling” the log cabin in which Lincoln was supposedly born. (For more on the log cabin story, see Dwight Pitcaithley’s meticulously researched essay in Shackel’s Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape.) In fact, historical errors and deliberate distortions abound in the landscape of commemoration, as James W. Loewen’s amazing study, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999), has so amply demonstrated. But Schwartz’s point remains well taken: scholars must take into account not only the changing politics of commemoration but also the stubborn persistence of traditions and beliefs—some of which persist even when they conflict with historical fact or common sense. This perspective might have helped scholars prepare better for the emotionally charged controversy over the Smithsonian’s ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit, which was intended to mark the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by putting the event in historical context. The controversy was a particularly dramatic example of how the work of historians, based on supposedly apolitical principles of evidence and analysis, came into conflict with powerful “memory constituencies,” whose long-cherished beliefs about the righteousness of the American military cemented their group identities as veterans and patriots. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt’s History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1998) untangled this controversy and showed how the partisan politics and “culture wars” of the time helped fuel it. At the same time the book showed how the Enola Gay fiasco was not simply another episode in the “politics of commemoration.” The controversy transcended the politics of the moment and became a classic confrontation between history and collective memory—anticipated in Halbwachs’ original distinction—where history inevitably loses precisely because it lacks the unshakeable beliefs of psychically invested constituencies. Some of the contributors to History Wars asked whether the “patriotic” narratives of commemoration could

78

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CONSTRUCTING POWER

The book surveys an enormous range of commemorative practices from oratory to pageantry to monuments and beyond. More specialized studies of the racial relations of war memory include Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Paul A. Shackel, Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape (2003), and Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom : Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (2003). Recent studies have made ever more nuanced analyses that interweave the issue of race with gender, class, and region. Exemplary collections along these lines include Where These Memories Grow : History, Memory, and Southern Identity (2000), edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and Monuments to the Lost Cause : Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003), edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson. In addition to reshaping racial relations and beliefs, the scale of the Civil War dramatically changed and expanded commemorative practices, creating a new cult of the veteran and new modes and technologies of remembering the war dead—innovations that preceded comparable developments in Europe by years or even decades. For the first time, photographers shot images of battlefield corpses, a profound shift in the understanding and memorialization of warfare analyzed in studies such as Timothy Sweet, Traces of War : Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (1990) and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs : Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989). The emergence of veterans organizations and their role in promoting the memory of the common soldier have been explored in Stuart McConnell’s Glorious Contentment : the Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (1992) and in Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary’s To Die For : The Paradox of American Patriotism (1999). Kirk Savage in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves has examined the resulting democratization of war memorials, and the phenomenal spread of a new type of ordinary- soldier monument. Another innovation, the creation of national soldier cemeteries such as Gettysburg, was briefly examined as a precedent for twentieth-century European practices by historian George Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (1990). Since then this line of research has been extended by others such as Susan-Mary Grant in a series of essays, most recently in the journal Nations and Nationalism (2005). Battlefields too have been witness to dramatically changing patterns of commemoration, and thus have posed intricate problems for their stewards, most notably the National Park Service. Edward T. Linenthal in Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (1991) examined the ways in which battlefields from the Revolution to WWII have been transformed into “sacred” landscapes which various groups fight to protect from political or racial or commercial defilement. Any commemorative narratives that stray from the narrowly defined script of military heroism become suspect. For instance the National Park Service’s efforts to expand the historical significance of Civil War battlefields beyond military history into social and political issues such as slavery have encountered resistance both inside and outside the agency, as Paul Shackel has shown in his case study of Manassas (Memory in Black and White). More recently Jim Weeks in Gettysburg : Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (2003) has called into question the notion of the sacred by arguing that tourism and the marketplace have profoundly shaped even the most revered battlefield from its very inception. He has shown that, as cultural norms have changed, the standards of appropriate commemorative behaviors have also changed—sometimes in surprising ways. For example, battle reenactments originated as commercial entertainments that elites discouraged as frivolous, but in the past two decades have grown into a wildly popular participatory sport, with ever more stringent standards of authenticity. Ironically, the hundreds of regimental and officer monuments that were once the heart of the commemorative landscape have now become intrusions into the “authentic” experience of the past! Besides battlefield reenactments, another major new participatory phenomenon of memorialization is the spontaneous offering of personal mementos at national memorials, which began in the early 1980s at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Kristin Ann Hass has examined the roots and meanings of this phenomenon in Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1998). At the same time recovery efforts and reverence for the bodies of the war dead have reached new extremes of emotional and financial cost, as Thomas M. Hawley has recently investigated in The Remains of War : Bodies, Politics, and the Search for American Soldiers Unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (2005). All of these developments indicate an extension and transformation of the popular sphere of memory practices of the late nineteenth century. Ordinary citizens increasingly have become the subject and the actor in commemorative initiatives, even as the power and cost of the “military-industrial complex” have grown mightily.

World War II Memorial, 1National Park Service, 2004

CONSTRUCTING POWER

CONSPICUOUS ACTS OF COMMEMORATION LIKE PUBLIC CEREMONIES AND MONUMENT BUILDING RELATE TO THE MORE EVERYDAY PRACTICES OF SCHOOLING, REMINISCING, AND UNCONSCIOUS HABIT THAT CARRY KNOWLEDGE AND TRADITION FROM ONE 80GENERATION TO ANOTHER.

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HISTORY, MEMORY, AND MONUMENTS

be expanded and humanized to encompass the multiple realities of war, to bring the longstanding traditional stories of triumph into contact with more tragic stories of the human cost and moral ambiguity of warfare. The question has no easy answer. One pioneering effort to integrate the various realms of internal and external memory, of invisible traditions and visible histories, is Martha Norkunas’s Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts (2002). Her book traced the changing relationship between the public, mostly masculine face of memory in Lowell—in honorific monuments and historical sites—and the largely oral traditions, passed on by women, that preserved the memory of those who kept the community intact and functioning outside the public eye. While her study would benefit from more analysis of the interaction between these realms of memory, her book points in a useful direction. Likewise, Bodnar’s distinction between vernacular and official memory remains intuitively useful, but needs further refinement, retesting, and revision in order to understand better how these realms of memory interpenetrate one another. This might help explain, for example, the persistence and power of military commemoration. How does the inner/vernacular memory of women, ethnic groups, and other ordinary Americans help support the outer/official memory of such a quintessentially top-down, masculine institution as the military? Pursuing questions like these would eventually help bridge the gap between the spectacular “politics of commemoration” and the more inconspicuous workings of tradition. How the past is produced, consumed, internalized, and acted upon will no doubt remain a rich and complex problem for scholars as they work further to extend and integrate the approaches outlined in this essay.

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MONUMENTS ARE GOOD FOR NOTHING.

DISCIPLINE

US

?

SPACE

HOW

DOES

WE ARE ENTERING...

THE AGE OF INFINITE EXAMINATION, AND OF COMPULSORY OBJECTIFICATION.

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.1 First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the sup­pliers and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the ‘crows’, who can be left to die: these are ‘people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices’. It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment. Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: ‘A considerable body o f militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance’, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience o f the people and the most absolute authority of the magistrates, ‘as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion’. At each of the town gates there will be an observation post; at the end of each street sentinels. Every day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they ‘observe their actions’. Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allo­cated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to the state of each and every one of them—‘in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death’; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why: ‘In this way he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.’ Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked—it is the great review of the living and the dead. This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor. At the beginning of the ‘lock up’, the role of each of the inhabitants present in

the town is laid down, one by one; this document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwith­standing his condition’: a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits—deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities—is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note ‘to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick o f the contagion, unknown to the magistrates’. The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it. Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process of purifying the houses one by one is begun. All the inhabitants are made to leave; in each room ‘the furniture and goods’ are raised from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured around the room; after carefully sealing the windows, doors and even the keyholes with wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those who have carried out the work are searched, as they were on entry, ‘in the presence of the residents of the house, to see that they did not have something on their persons as they left that they did not have on entering’. Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter their homes. This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the center and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is con­stantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead—all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there

88

IT’S A SEGMENTED,

IMMOBILE,

Each

individual

is

fixed

in

his

place.

And,

if

he

moves,

he

does

so

at

the

risk

of

his

life,

his

life,

contagion

or

CONSTRUCTING POWER

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

Michel Foucault

punishment.

FROZEN

SPACE.

89

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of disci­plinary controls makes it possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring into play against him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive. Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composi­tion. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peri­pheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the out­side, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of back lighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see con­stantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the prin­ciple of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions—to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide—it preserves only the first and elimin­ates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. To begin with, this made it possible—as a negative effect—to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his compan­ions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the in­ mates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those dis­tractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and

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IT LAYS DOWN FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL

his place,

his body,

his disease,

his death.

CONSTRUCTING POWER

was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details o f everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary func­tioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder. If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power. The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partition­ing in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects o f a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The first is marked; the second analyzed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed through­out with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. Underlying dis­ciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder; just as the image of the leper, cut off from all human contact, underlies projects of exclusion. They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the nineteenth century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analy­tical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion—this is what Was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital. Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/ sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of

by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination

OF THE INDIVIDUAL

of what characterizes him

of what belongs to him

91

of what happens to him.

seen, but he does not He is see; . s n he n­io isibility. is t a p v he om ral in ob c s e jec hi lat to ith ly a p m

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

ject in Each individu a sub r communic al, in e ev atio n , n. T his p on i h e l ac t a arr e, m r an is fo ge se n i m c f e

AT THE CENTER, A TOWER

This tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring.

revent him fro m walls p c side visions of the ring, th oming os i the d e s ut epa into the co ra r ; b bu t t e so y; d c nta vi lit e ct er ibi l l s, w up l vis i a

92

AT THE PERIPHERY, AN ANNULAR BUILDING;

93

CONSTRUCTING POWER

was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged. The heaviness of the old ‘houses of security’, with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a ‘house of certainty’. The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side—to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsi­bility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontane­ously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance. Bentham does not say whether he was inspired, in his project, by Le Vaux’s menagerie at Versailles: the first menagerie in which the different elements are not, as they traditionally were, distributed in a park (Loisel, 104-7). At the center was an octagonal pavilion which, on the first floor, consisted of only a single room, the king’s salon; on every side large windows looked out onto seven cages (the eighth side was reserved for the entrance), containing different species of animals. By Bentham’s time, this menagerie had dis­appeared. But one finds in the programme of the Panopticon a similar concern with individualizing observation, with characteriza­ tion and classification, with the analytical arrangement of space. The Panopticon is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man, individual distribution by specific grouping and the king by the machinery of a furtive power. With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of each indivi­dual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation of miasmas, the effects of contagion confusing the clinical tables; among school­children, it makes it possible to observe performances (without there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications and, in relation to normal development, to distinguish ‘laziness and stubbornness’ from ‘incurable imbecility’; among workers, it makes it possible to note the aptitudes of each worker, compare the time he takes to perform a task, and if they are paid by the day, to calculate their wages (Bentham, 60-64). So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experi­ments, to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals. To experi­m ent with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments—and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their six­teenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could learn anything; one would follow ‘the genealogy of every observable idea’; one could bring up different children according to different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal

hich he is seen fr o m w f ro m cell entral to c w e r , i mpo the f to a osite the p ed ses ron fin , op o t n on oom him by t yc r a he el his n ur o f ax s i nt

replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multipli­ city that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60-64). Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the auto­matic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveil­lance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only Venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. 2 The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the periph­eric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.3 It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dis-symmetry, disequili­ brium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity o f the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate o f being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power. A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. It is—necessary modifications apart— applicable ‘to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection’ (Bentham, 40; although Bentham takes the penitentiary house as his prime example, it is because it has many different functions to fulfill—safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labor and instruction). In each o f its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exer­cise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the offenses, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind’. The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power ‘in hitherto unexampled quantity’, ‘a great and new instrument of government...; its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable o f giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to’ (Bentham, 66). It’s a case of ‘it’s easy once you’ve thought of it’ in the political sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can consti­tute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of know­ledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the pro­cesses that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between ‘surplus power’ and ‘surplus production’. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making power relations function in a function through these power relations. Bentham’s Preface to Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from his ‘inspection-house’: ‘Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the Gordian knot of the Poor—Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in architecture!’ (Bentham, 39). Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such that its enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the cen­tral tower the functions o f surveillance, and that, this being the case, he can gain a clear idea o f the w a y in which the surveillance is practiced. In fact, any panoptic institution, even if it is as rigorously closed as a penitentiary, may without difficulty be subjected to such irregu­ lar and constant inspections: and not only by the appointed inspec­tors, but also by the public; any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how the

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more than the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them. The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, war­ders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their be­behavior, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector arriving unexpectedly at the center o f the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how the entire establishment is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed as he is in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the director’s own fate entirely bound up with it? The incompetent physician who has allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent prison governor or workshop manager will be the first victims of an epidemic or a revolt.4 “By every tie I could devise”, said the master of the Panopticon, “my own fate had been bound up by me with theirs” (Bentham, 177). The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behavior; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised. The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment—the differences are important. They mark, at a distance of a century and a half, the transformations of the disciplinary programme. In the first case, there is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary evil, power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible; it invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions; it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is reduced, in the final analysis, like the evil that it combats, to a simple dualism of life and death: that which moves brings death, and one kills that which moves. The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. No doubt Bentham presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough. A s opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture, to be seen in Piranese’s engravings, the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years. But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram o f a mechanism o f power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure archi­tectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure o f political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposi­tion of centers and channels of power, of definition of the instru­ments and modes o f intervention of power, which can be implemen­ted in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is

NORMALITY

are

present

EVERYWHERE.

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TO THE FUNCTIONS IT INVESTS,

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but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact.

FROM THE OUTSIDE, LIKE A RIGID, HEAVY CONSTRAINT,

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IT ARRANGES THINGS IN SUCH A WAY

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the whole social body. These disciplines, which the classical age had elaborated in specific, relatively enclosed places— barracks, schools, workshops—and whose total implementation had been imagined only at the limited and temporary scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be every­ where and always alert, running through society without interrup­tion in space or in time. The panoptic arrangement provides the formula for this generalization. It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms. There are two images, then, o f discipline. A t one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society. A whole disciplinary generalization—the Benthamite physics of power represents an acknowledgment of this—had operated throughout the classical age. The spread of disciplinary institutions, whose network was beginning to cover an ever larger surface and occupying above all a less and less marginal position, testifies to this: what was an islet, a privileged place, a circumstantial measure, or a singular model, became a general formula; the regulations characteristic o f the Protestant and pious armies o f William o f Orange or of Gustavus Adolphus were transformed into regulations for all the armies of Europe; the model colleges of the Jesuits, or the schools of Batencour or Demia, following the example set by Sturm, provided the outlines for the general forms of educational dis­cipline; the ordering of the naval and military hospitals provided the model for the entire reorganization o f hospitals in the eighteenth century. But this extension of the disciplinary institutions was no doubt only the most visible aspect of various, more profound processes. 1 The functional inversion of the disciplines. At first, they were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed popula­tions, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now they were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becom­ing able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. Military discipline is no longer a mere means of preventing looting, desertion or failure to obey orders among the troops; it has become a basic technique to enable the army to exist, not as an assembled crowd, but as a unity that derives from this very unity an increase in its forces; discipline increases the skill of each individual, co­ ordinates these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power, broadens the fronts of attack without reducing their vigor, increases the capacity for resistance, etc. The discipline of the work­shop, while remaining a way o f enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behavior, but more and more it treats actions in terms o f their

THAT THE EXERCISE OF POWER IS NOT ADDED ON

schools, hospitals, factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible ‘to the great tribunal committee of the world’.4 This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers. The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole. The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any o f its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function. The plague- stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect, but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death, power opposed its perpetual threat of death; life inside it was reduced to its simplest expression; it was, against the power of death, the meti­c ulous exercise of the right of the sword. The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces—to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply. How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? What intensificator of power will be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of pro­duction? How will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The Panopticon’s solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty. The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power represented by panopticism; the domain of panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations; what are required are mechanisms that analyze distributions, gaps, series, combina­ions, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations. At the theoretical level, Bentham defines another way of analyzing the social body and the power relations that traverse it; in terms of practice, he defines a procedure o f subordination o f bodies and forces that must increase the utility of power while practicing the economy of the prince. Panopticism is the general principle of a new ‘political anatomy* whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline. The celebrated, transparent, circular cage, with its high tower, powerful and knowing, may have been for Bentham a project of a perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show how one may ‘unlock’ the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused, multiple, polyvalent way throughout

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dyad:

in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen;

T

E V E

ING. E E RS

, ON NG RI

OTALLY SE E IS T E N , WI 99

C RI

TH O

U

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SEE / BEING SEEN

CONSTRUCTING POWER

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The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the

­E

alert to any endemic or epidemic phenomena, to open dispensaries, to give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the authorities informed of the sanitary state of the region.5 One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the form o f enclosed institutions, but as centers of observation dis­seminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity organizations had long played this role of ‘disciplining’ the popula­tion. From the Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the July monarchy, initiatives of this type continued to increase; their aims were religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement to work) or political (the struggle against dis­content or agitation). One has only to cite by way of example the regulations for the charity associations in the Paris parishes. The territory to be covered was divided into quarters and cantons and the members of the associations divided themselves up along the same lines. These members had to visit their respective areas regularly, ‘They will strive to eradicate places of ill-repute, tobacco shops, life-classes, gaming house, public scandals, blasphemy, im­piety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.’ They will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the information to be obtained is laid down in regulations: the stability of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the sacraments, knowledge of a trade, morality (and ‘whether they have not fallen into poverty through their own fault’); lastly, ‘one must learn by skillful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there is peace between them and their neighbors, whether they are care­ful to bring up their children in the fear of God... Whether they do not have their older children of different sexes sleeping together and with them, whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery in their families, especially in their older daughters. If one has any doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their marriage certificate’.5 3 The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions of social discipline (cf, Radzinovitz, 20314); in France, although a part of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds or charity associations, another—and no doubt the most important part—was very soon taken over by the police apparatus. The organization of a centralized police had long been regarded, even by contemporaries, as the most direct expression of royal absolutism; the sovereign had wished to have ‘his own magistrate to whom he might directly entrust his orders, his commissions, inten­tions, and who was entrusted with the execution of orders and orders under the King’s private seal’ (a note by Duval, first secretary at the police magistrature, quoted in Funck-Brentano, I). In effect, in taking over a number of per-existing functions—the search for criminals, urban surveillance, economic and political supervision—the police magistratures and the magistrature—general that presided over them in Paris transposed them into a single, strict, administra­tive machine: ‘All the radiations of force and information that spread from the circumference culminate in the magistrate-general... It is he who operates all the wheels that together produce order and harmony. The effects of his administration cannot be better compared than to the movement of the celestial bodies’ (Des Essarts, 344 and 528). But, although the police as an institution were certainly organized in the form of a state apparatus, and although this was certainly linked directly to the center of political sovereignty, the type of power that it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements to which it applies them are

IN T H EP E R IP H

results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy. When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left them ‘in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up, they are unable to communicate a sound upbringing that they themselves never had’; this involves three major inconveniences: ignorance of God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny, brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always ready to stir up public disorder and ‘virtually to exhaust the funds of the Hôtel-Dieu’ (Demia, 60-61). Now, at the beginning of the Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be, among other things, to ‘fortify’, to ‘develop the body’, to prepare the child ‘for a future in some mechanical work’, to give him ‘an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits’ (Talleyrand’s Report to the Constituent Assembly, 10 September 1791, quoted by Leon, 106). The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position on the confines o f society, and detachment from the forms o f exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat. Hence the slow loosening of their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures. Hence also their rooting in the most important, most central and most productive sectors of society. They become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission o f knowledge, the diffusion o f aptitudes and skills, the war-machine. Hence, too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout the eighteenth century to increase the number of disciplinary insti­tutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses. 2 The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become ‘de-institutionalized’, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a role of external surveillance, developing around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls. Thus the Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals. The school tends to constitute minute social observatories that penetrate even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over them: the bad behavior of the child, or his absence, is a legitimate pretext, according to Demia, for one to go and question the neighbors, especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves, to find out whether they know their catechism and the prayers, whether they are determined to root out the vices of their children, how many beds there are in the house and what the sleeping arrange­ments are; the visit may end with the giving of alms, the present of a religious picture, or the provision o f additional beds (Demia, 39-40). Similarly, the hospital is increasingly conceived of as a base for the medical observation of the population outside; after the burning down of the Hôtel-Dieu in 1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered, should be replaced by a series of smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information, to be

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100 101

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The organization o f the police apparatus in the eighteenth century sanctioned a generalization of the disciplines that became co-extensive with the state itself. Although it was linked in the most explicit way with everything in the royal power that exceeded the exercise of regular justice, it is understandable why the police offered such slight resistance to the rearrangement of the judicial power; and why it has not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it, with ever-increasing weight, right up to the present day; this is no doubt because it is the secular arm of the judiciary; but it is also because, to a far greater degree than the judicial institution, it is identified, by reason of its extent and mechanisms, with a society of the disciplinary type. Yet it would be wrong to believe that the dis­ciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed once and for all by a state apparatus. ‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, com­prising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by ‘specialized’ institu­tions (the penitentiaries or ‘houses of correction’ of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by per-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become ‘disci­plined’, absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal); or by apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns over society as a whole (the police). On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine’, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’. Not because the disci­plinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations. A few years after Bentham, Julius gave this society its birth certificate (Julius, 384-6).Speaking of the panoptic principle, he said that there was much more there than architectural ingenuity: it was an event in the ‘history of the human mind’. In appearance, it is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects’: this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theaters and circuses responded. With spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, the intensity of festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found new vigor and formed for a moment a single great body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude.’ In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other,

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What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its ‘useful’ object,

will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract;

IT WILL BE THE DISCIPLINARY INDIVIDUAL.

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specific. It is an apparatus that must be coextensive with the entire social body and not only by the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is concerned with. Police power must bear ‘over everything’: it is not however the totality of the state nor of the kingdom as visible and invisible body of the monarch; it is the dust of events, actions, behavior, opinions—‘everything that happens’ ; 7 the police are concerned with ‘those things of every moment’, those ‘unimportant things’, of which Catherine II spoke in her Great Instruction (Supplement to the Instruction for the drawing up of a new code, 1769, article 535). With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon of the social body: ‘The ministry of the magistrates and police officers is of the greatest importance; the objects that it embraces are in a sense definite, one may perceive them only by a sufficiently detailed examination’ (Delamare, un­numbered Preface): the infinitely small of political power. And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument o f permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable o f making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisi­ble. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field o f perception: thousands o f eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network which, according to Le Maire, comprised for Paris the forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspectors, then the ‘observers’, who were paid regularly, the ‘basses mouches’ or secret agents, who were paid by the day, then the informers, paid according to the job done, and finally the prostitutes. And this unceasing observation had to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers; throughout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society by means of a complex documentary organization (on the police registers in the eighteenth century, cf. Chassaigne). And, unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of behavior, attitudes, possibili­ties, suspicions—a permanent account of individuals’ behavior. Now , it should be noted that, although this police supervision was entirely ‘in the hands of the king’, it did not function in a single direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond, by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate wishes of the king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations from below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the king’s private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal rule and which brought detention into disrepute on political grounds, were in fact demanded by families, masters, local notables, neighbors, parish priests; and their function was to punish by confinement a whole infra-penality, that of disorder, agitation, dis­obedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city and which he called ‘offenses of non-surveillance’. In short, the eighteenth-century police added a disciplinary function to its role as the auxiliary of justice in the pursuit o f criminals and as an instrument for the political supervision of plots, opposition movements or revolts. It was a complex func­tion since it linked the absolute power of the monarch to the lowest levels of power disseminated in society; since, between these differ­e nt, enclosed institutions o f discipline (workshops, armies, schools), it extended an intermediary network, acting where they could not intervene, disciplining the non-disciplinary spaces; but it filled in the gaps, linked them together, guaranteed with its armed force an interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline. ‘By means of a wise police, the sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience’ (Vattel, 162).

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

the disciplines corresponds to a well-known historical conjuncture. One aspect of this conjuncture was the large demographic thrust of the eighteenth century; an increase in the floating population (one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique); a change of quantitative scale in the groups to be supervised or manipulated (from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eve of the French Revolution, the school population had been increasing rapidly, as had no doubt the hospital population; by the end of the eighteenth century, the peace-time army exceeded 200,000 men). The other aspect of the conjuncture was the growth in the apparatus of production, which was becoming more and more extended and complex; it was also becoming more costly and its profitability had to be increased. The development of the disciplinary methods corresponded to these two processes, or rather, no doubt, to the new need to adjust their correlation. Neither the residual forms of feudal power nor the structures of the administrative monarchy, nor the local mechanisms of supervision, nor the unstable, tangled mass they all formed together could carry out this role: they were hindered from doing so by the irregular and inadequate extension of their network, by their often conflicting functioning, but above all by the ‘costly’ nature of the power that was exercised in them. It was costly in several senses: because directly it cost a great deal to the Treasury; because the system of corrupt offices and farmed-out taxes weighed indirectly, but very heavily, on the population; because the resistance it encountered forced it into a cycle of per­ petual reinforcement; because it proceeded essentially by levying (levying on money or products by royal, seigniorial, ecclesiastical taxation; levying on men or time by Corvées of press-ganging, by locking up or banishing vagabonds). The development of the disci­plines marks the appearance of elementary techniques belonging to a quite different economy: mechanisms of power which, instead of proceeding by deduction, are integrated into the productive effi­ciency of the apparatuses from within, into the growth of this efficiency and into the use of what it produces. For the old principle of ‘levying-violence’, which governed the economy of power, the disciplines substitute the principle of ‘mildness-production-profit’. These are the techniques that make it possible to adjust the multi­plicity of men and the multiplication of the apparatuses of produc­tion (and this means not only ‘production’ in the strict sense, but also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the production of health in the hospitals, the production of destructive force in the army). In this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of problems for which the old economy of power was not sufficiently equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity; reduce what is opposed to the use of each of its elements and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages of number. That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions—anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions. Hence the fact that the disciplines use procedures of partitioning and verticality, that they introduce, between the

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A PERMANENT

ACCOUNT

unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of

behavior,

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the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the spectacle: ‘It was to the modem age, to the ever-growing influence o f the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of increasing and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing towards that great aim the building and distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude o f men at the same time.’ Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had described as a technical program. Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise o f indefinite discipline. He is the individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape: “You may consider that no part of the Empire is without surveillance, no crime, no offence, no contravention that remains unpunished, and that the eye of the genius who can en­lighten all embraces the whole of this vast machine, without, how­ever, the slightest detail escaping his attention’ (Treilhard, 14). At the moment of its full blossoming, the disciplinary society still assumes with the Emperor the old aspect of the power of spectacle. As a monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper of the ancient throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined into a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun. The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a number of broad historical processes—economic, juridico-political and, lastly, scientific—of which it forms part. 1 Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this; every system of power is presented with the same problem. But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfills three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise o f power at the lowest possible cost (economic­ally, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this ‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. This triple objective of

attitudes,

possibili­ties,

suspicions—

OF INDIVIDUALS’

BEHAVIOR.

105

linking them together,

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

CONSTRUCTING POWER

BUT SERVING AS AN INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN THEM

to the most minute elements.

g

in

br e th ts ec eff of er

w

po

107

to

and above all making it possible

t

ex g

in

106

Not because the disci­plinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them,

en d

on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of production, its ‘mechanical’ breaking-down, were projected onto the labor force whose task it was to implement it: the constitution of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore increased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disci­plinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions. 2 The panoptic modality of power—at the elementary, tech­ nical, merely physical level at which it is situated—is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politi­c ally dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes’. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egali­tarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems o f micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. And although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it pos­sible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter­law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asym­metries and excluding reciprocities. First, because discipline creates between individuals a ‘private’ link, which is a relation of constraints entirely different from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the non-reversible subordination of one group of people by another, the ‘surplus’ power that is always fixed on the same side, the inequality of posi­tion of the different ‘partners’ in relation to the common regulation, all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link, and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically from the moment it has as its content a mechanism of discipline. We know, for example, how many real procedures undermine the

th em

different elements at the same level, as solid separations as possible, that they define compact hierarchical networks, in short, that they oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continu­ous, individualizing pyramid. They must also increase the particular utility of each element of the multiplicity, but by means that are the most rapid and the least costly, that is to say, by using the multi­plicity itself as an instrument of this growth. Hence, in order to extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of those overall methods known as time-tables, collective training, exercises, total and detailed surveillance. Furthermore, the disciplines must increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements: it is in order to increase the utilizable effects of the multiple that the disci­plines define tactics of distribution, reciprocal adjustment of bodies, gestures and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocal co­ordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the disciplines have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible, as well articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and also in the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous instruments of power, coextensive with the multiplicity that they regiment, such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration, perpetual assessment and classification. In short, to substitute for a power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. In a word, the disci­plines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it possible to increase the useful size o f multiplicities by decreasing the inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, must control them. A multiplicity, whether in a workshop or a nation, an army or a school, reaches the threshold of a discipline when the relation of the one to the other becomes favorable. If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation o f capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes—the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital—cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem o f the accumulation o f men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. At a less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labor and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. i, chapter XIII and the very interesting analysis in Guerry and Deleule). Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other. The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination and supervision of tasks was imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods onto indus­trial organization was an example of this modeling of the division of labor following the model laid down by the schemata of power. But,

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

relations; a multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge. The extension of the disciplinary methods is inscribed in a broad historical process: the development at about the same time of many other technologies—agronomical, industrial, economic. But it must be recognized that, compared with the mining industries, the emerging chemical industries or methods of national accountancy, compared with the blast furnaces or the steam engine, panopticism has received little attention. It is regarded as not much more than a bizarre little utopia, a perverse dream—rather as though Bentham had been the Fourier of a police society, and the Phalanstery had taken on the form of the Panopticon. And yet this represented the abstract formula of a very real technology, that of individuals. There were many reasons why it received little praise; the most obvious is that the discourses to which it gave rise rarely acquired, except in the academic classifications, the status of sciences; but the real reason is no doubt that the power that it operates and which it augments is a direct, physical power that men exercise upon one another. An inglorious culmination had an origin that could be only grudgingly acknowledged. But it would be unjust to compare the disciplinary techniques with such inventions as the steam engine or Amici’s microscope. They are much less; and yet, in a way, they are much more. If a historical equivalent or at least a point of comparison had to be found for them, it would be rather in the ‘inquisitorial’ technique. The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline and the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investiga­tion procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique, had developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and the increase of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth cen­turies. At this time it permeated to a very large degree the juris­prudence first of the ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts. The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed or attested was thus opposed to the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement of God or even of the transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investiga­tion has since then been an integral part o f western justice (even up to our own day), one must not forget either its political origin, its link with the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the formation of knowledge. In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which, as we know, was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages. It is perhaps true to say that, in Greece, mathematics were born from techniques o f measurement; the sciences o f nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the practices of investigation. The great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the ‘facts’ (at a time when the western world was begin­ning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition—that immense invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses of our memory. But what this politico-juridical, administrative and criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the sciences of nature, disciplinary analysis has

108

The great empirical knowledge that covered

the things of world

the

thin

the

gs o

rld

f wo

so hing

t

f wo

rld

and transcribed

ld wor f o s rld g ofinwo the thingsth the the thing s of wor ld

into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes

THE ‘FACTS’ THE ‘FACTS’ THE ‘FACTS’ had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition—that immense invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses of our memory.

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CONSTRUCTING POWER

legal fiction of the work contract: workshop discipline is not the least important. Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular and institutional as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a ‘counter-law’. And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which sup­ports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and under­mines the limits that are traced around the law. The minute disci­plines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the level o f emergence o f the great apparatuses and the great political struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms according to which power was redistributed. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques o f discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that it has invented, and even to those ‘sciences’ that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physic-political techniques. To return to the problem of legal punishments, the prison with all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe; at the point where the universal punishments of the law are applied selectively to certain individuals and always the same ones; at the point where the redefinition of the juridical subject by the penalty becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point where the law is inverted and passes outside itself, and where the counter-law becomes the effective and institutionalized content of the juridical forms. What generalizes the power to punish, then, is not the universal consciousness of the law in each juridical subject; it is the regular extension, the infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques 3 Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. At this point, the disciplines crossed the ‘technological’ threshold. First the hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not sim­ply ‘reordered’ by the disciplines; they became, thanks to them, apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectification could be used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of power could give rise in them to possible branches of knowledge; it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that made possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology, the rationalization of labor. It is a double process, then: an epistemological ‘thaw’ through a refinement of power

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM

been to the sciences o f man. These sciences, which have so delighted our ‘humanity’ for over a century, have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the disciplines and their investigations. These investigations are perhaps to psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences, what the terrible power of investigation was to the calm knowledge of the animals, the plants or the earth. Another power, another knowledge. On the threshold of the classi­cal age, Bacon, lawyer and statesman, tried to develop a methodology of investigation for the empirical sciences. What Great Observer will produce the methodology of examination for the human sciences? Unless, of course, such a thing is not possible. For, although it is true that, in becoming a technique for the empirical sciences, the investigation has detached itself from the inquisitorial procedure, in which it was historically rooted, the examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it. It has always been and still is an intrinsic element of the disciplines. Of course it seems to have undergone a speculative purification by integrating itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. And, in effect, its appearance in the form of tests, interviews, interrogations and consultations is apparently in order to rectify the mechanisms o f discipline: educational psychology is supposed to correct the rigors of the school, just as the medical or psychiatric interview is supposed to rectify the effects o f the discipline o f work. But we must not be misled; these techniques merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge proper to each discipline (on this subject, cf. Tort). The great investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its politico-juridical model; the examination, on the other hand, is still caught up in disciplinary technology. In the Middle Ages, the procedure of investigation gradually superseded the old accusatory justice, by a process initiated from above; the disciplinary technique, on the other hand, insidiously and as if from below, has invaded a penal justice that is still, in principle, inquisitorial. All the great movements of extension that characterize modem penalty—the proletarianization of the criminal behind his crime, the concern with a punishment that is a correction, a therapy, a normalization, the division of the act of judgment between various authorities that are supposed to measure, assess, diagnose, cure, transform individuals—all this betray the penetra­tion of the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition. What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its ‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penalty today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a proce­dure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic move­ment that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a

procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural exten­sion o f a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance andregistration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

110

VISIBILITY IS A TRAP

ISOLATE

US

?

SPACE

HOW

DOES

AS ELIGIBLE PROPERTIES ARE DESIGNATED NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS, THEY WILL BE

COMMEMORATED

CONSTRUCTING POWER

Auditorium, Manzanar Relocation Center, 1999

AS TANGIBLE REMINDERS THAT GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES...

EVEN THOSE TAKEN IN THE GUISE OF PUBLIC SAFETY

CONSTRUCTING POWER

View from Hospital Boiler House, Heart Mountain Relocation Center, 2000

CAN BE EXTREME, DISCRIMINATORY, CONTRARY TO BASIC FREEDOMS WE EMBRACE,

AND A VIOLATION OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.

CONSTRUCTING POWER

Detail of Child’s Grave, Cemetery, Manzanar Relocation Center, 1999

CONFINEMENT AND ETHNICITY: AN BRIEF HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II JAPANESE INTERNMENT CAMPS were educated in Japan were called Kibei. The Issei mostly came from the Japanese countryside, and they generally arrived in Hawaii or to the mainland West Coast with very little money. Approximately half became farmers; others went to the coastal urban centers and worked in small commercial establishments, usually for themselves or for other Issei. Anti-Japanese movements began shortly after Japanese immigration began, but became particularly wide-spread around 1905, due to increasing immigration and the Japanese

victory over Russia, the first defeat of a western nation by an Asian nation in modern times. Both Japan and Japanese immigrants began to be perceived as threats. Discrimi -nation was exhibited in the formation of anti-Japanese organizations, such as the Asiatic Exclusion League, attempts at school segregation and a growing number of violent attacks on individuals and businesses. The Japanese government protested this treatment of its citizens and their families. To maintain the friendship between Japan and America, President Theodore Roosevelt initiated several conciliatory gestures. He helped convince the San Francisco school board to revoke the segregation order, discouraged the California Legislature from passing more anti-Japanese legislation, and negotiated what was known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with the Japanese government in 1907. By this, the Japanese government agreed to limit emigration to the continental United States to laborers who had already been to the

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In February 1942, the United States government began a concerted effort to forcibly remove and incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry from several western states. Never before had the government cast aside core principles of American democracy, in the spirit of protecting the people, land, and war effort from the perceived threats posed by people of a certain nationality. Caving to public pressure and political machinations, the government implemented a program that still weighs on the public conscience 70 years later. Several factors contributed to the decision by the United States government to remove people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast states, but an underlying and pervasive factor was the racial prejudice that had been inflicted on Japanese Americans—and Asians in general— from their earliest arrival in the United States.1 The precipitating factor that led the U.S. government to take extreme measures toward Japanese Americans was the long-deteriorating relationship between the Japanese and U.S. governments, culminating in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war. This generated incalculable public fear that was fueled by misconceptions regarding the loyalties of Japanese Americans. 2 Although draft resistance and other acts of civil disobedience in response to the government’s curtailment of civil and constitutional rights were only exhibited by a small minority of Japanese Americans, such acts were used to generalize the attitude of the entire Japanese American population. Such suspicions had long been an aspect of white American attitudes toward Asian Americans. Anti-Asian prejudices, especially in California, were initiated with the immigration of the Chinese to the U.S. at about the time of the California gold rush in 1849. During the initial phases of the economic boom that accompanied the gold rush, Chinese labor was needed and welcomed, but white workingmen soon began to consider the Chinese, comprising about 10% of California’s population, as competitors. This economic competition increased after completion of the transcontinental Union Pacific-Central Pacific Railroad in 1869, which had employed about 10,000 Chinese laborers. American workers’ resentment over cheap Chinese labor was transposed into an ideology of Asian racial inferiority. Discrimination became legislated at both the state and federal levels. The experiences of Chinese immigrants foreshadowed those of Japanese immigrants, who began arriving about the same time the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended labor immigration from China for ten years. Japanese immigrants were called Issei. Their children, the Americanborn second generation, were Nisei, and third generation Japanese Americans were Sansei. Nisei and Sansei who

The owners of this store in Oakland, California, announce their American loyalty the day after Pearl Harborwas attacked.

CONFINEMENT AND ETHNICITY

National Historic Landmarks Program

CONFINEMENT AND ETHNICITY

December 7, 1941, a wave of Japanese bombers launched the first of two attacks on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The situation for Japanese Americans could only deteriorate. PEARL HARBOR The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, came as a shock to most Americans, but the U.S. government had already considered possible actions to take in case of war with Japan. For years, Japanese Americans and their parents who were not citizens had speculated on the personal repercussions of war with Japan. Some Nisei in particular emphasized their loyalty and Americanism, leading to generational conflicts with their Issei parents. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), an influential all-Nisei organization, represented this pro-American attitude in its creed. The JACL creed, an optimistic, patriotic expression written by Mike Masaoka in 1940, was published in the Congressional Record for May 9, 1941: I am proud that I am an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, for my very background makes me appreciate more fully the wonderful advantages of this nation. I believe in her institutions, ideals and traditions; I glory in her heritage; I boast of her history; I trust in her future. She has granted me liberties and opportunities such as no individual enjoys in this world today. She has given me an education befitting kings. She has entrusted me with the responsibilities of the franchise. She has permitted me to build a home, to earn a livelihood, to worship, think, speak and act as I please—as a free man equal to every other man. Although some individuals may discriminate against me, I shall never become bitter or lose faith, for I know that such persons are not representative of the majority of the American people. True, I shall do all in my power to discourage such practices, but I shall do it in the American way—above board, in the open, through courts of law, by education, by proving myself to be worthy of equal treatment and consideration. I am firm in my belief that American sportsmanship and attitude of fair play will judge citizenship and patriotism on the basis of action and achievement, and not on the basis of physical characteristics. Because I believe in America, and I trust she believes in me, and because I have received innumerable benefits from her, I pledge myself to do honor to her at all times and in all places; to support her constitution; to obey her laws; to respect her flag; to defend her against all enemies, foreign and domestic; to actively assume my duties and obligations as a citizen, cheerfully and without any reservations whatsoever, in the hope that I may become a better American in a greater America.6 Even as the JACL creed was being written, the United States government was preparing for a potential war with Japan. Soon it would begin questioning the loyalty of Japanese Americans, including members of the JACL. Several key members of the Roosevelt administration

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The USS Shaw explodes during the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor.

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United States and to the parents, wives, and children of laborers already in the U.S. Thus, opportunities to achieve American citizenship were limited for Japanese immigrants, which affected their ability to acquire land. The Naturalization Law of 1870 extended naturalization laws to aliens of African nativity and to others of African descent. Because people of Asian descent were not mentioned in the law, it was interpreted to imply that naturalization was not extended to people of Asian descent. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly barred Chinese immigrants from naturalization, and included other measures to control Chinese immigration. The Naturalization Act passed in 1906 established the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization and standardized rules regarding the naturalization process. The Immigration Act of 1917 restricted the immigration of Asian people, but the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) was the first law to specifically target the Japanese. Based on the Naturalization Law of 1870, which seemingly prohibited people of Asian descent from becoming naturalized citizens, the 1924 Act essentially closed the door to immigration to those who could not be eligible for citizenship. The states passed legislation that influenced the ability of Asian-born immigrants and their descendants to acquire land. Known as “alien land laws,” the state laws were linked to the inability of the Japanese and other Asians to become naturalized citizens, due to the various federal laws that explicitly or by interpretation prohibited naturalization.3 In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, which prohibited ownership of agricultural land and other real property by aliens ineligible for citizenship, meaning aliens of Asian descent. To circumvent the law, immigrants from Japan often had their children’s names recorded on property titles. Their children were citizens because of their birth in the United States. In 1920, California passed a stronger alien land act that prohibited children born in the United States to Japanese parents from holding titles to land. This law was amended in 1923 to prohibit leasing and sharecropping by Japanese Americans as well. In the early 1920s, several other western states enacted alien land laws similar to California’s laws, and by the end of World War II most western states had passed such laws.4 The prohibitions against Asian naturalization were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1922. Takao Ozawa, a Japanese resident alien, attempted to achieve citizenship with the argument that Asians are, in fact, “white” and, therefore, eligible for citizenship under Section 2169 of the Revised Statutes of the United States. The unanimous ruling, however, determined that only Caucasians are considered white and that Ozawa was of a race that was not Caucasian. He was denied citizenship.5 Against this backdrop of limitations and discrimination experienced by Japanese Americans, at 7:45 a.m. on

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and fingerprinting of all aliens over fourteen years of age. Acknowledging the increased implications of the alien presence, President Roosevelt transferred the Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Labor Department to the Justice Department. By early 1941, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had compiled a list of “dangerous” or “subversive” German, Italian, and Japanese aliens who were to be arrested at the outbreak of war with their country. This list was combined with similar lists compiled by the navy and army to create a list of some 2,000 Issei, as well as German and Italian aliens, from the mainland and Hawaii who were considered potentially dangerous. The list was expanded with names from the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles. This expanded list, maintained by the Justice

concluded that most Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States, but he noted that the West Coast might be vulnerable to sabotage, because dams, bridges, harbors, and power stations were unguarded.11 Such sabotage, he noted, would be “financed by Japan and executed largely by imported agents.” His overwhelming perception was that “There is no Japanese problem on the Coast.” Instead, “there is far more danger from Communists and people of the Bridges type on the Coast than there is from Japanese. The Japanese here is almost exclusively a farmer, a fisherman or a small businessman. He has no entrée to plants or intricate machinery.”12 Army Intelligence may have used the Munson Report as the basis for its conclusion that “widespread sabotage by Japanese is not expected... identifi-

Department, was known as the “ABC list,” with the letters reflecting degrees of danger. People on the “A” list were considered “immediately dangerous,” the “B” list identified people who were “potentially dangerous,” and the “C” list included people whose views may have been pro-Japan.9 In Hawaii, the army maintained a list of Issei and Nisei to be arrested and held if martial law was declared in Hawaii. In November 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt received an intelligence report that assessed the loyalty of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The so-called “Munson Report” was written by Curtis B. Munson, a Chicago businessman who was a member of John Franklin Carter’s team of espionage agents. President Roosevelt had asked Carter to establish a network of agents to gather intelligence on various fronts.10 In his report, Munson

cation of dangerous Japanese on the West Coast is reasonably complete.”13 A Navy report by Lt. Cdr. Kenneth D. Ringle, issued in early February 1942, was in agreement on this point: few persons of Japanese ancestry were expected to be disloyal to the United States.14 Despite the official reports indicating a lack of threats from Japanese Americans on the West Coast, Roosevelt was not convinced. In his book By Order of the President, Greg Robinson noted that Roosevelt did not relax his scrutiny of Japanese Americans, even with official reports denying the existence of a problem. Instead, Roosevelt maintained a suspicious distrust of the entire Japanese American community, despite a lack of firm evidence of disloyalty and tangible evidence of loyalty. No other group of American citizens received the same treatment, according

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to Robinson, who concludes that Roosevelt’s actions suggest “an implacable belief” that Japanese Americans were particularly dangerous.15 As events would prove, Roosevelt’s attitude was not unusual. Part of Roosevelt’s reasoning may have been based on widespread public distrust of Japanese Americans, particularly on the West Coast. Wilma Tullett James, daughter of the Piedmont Fire Department captain (who was also a leader in the local civil defense program), was 15 years old when the attack on Pearl Harbor struck fear in the San Francisco Bay area. She recalls that Bay Area residents were certain that a Japanese invasion was imminent and that it would be assisted by Japanese American sympathizers. Mrs. James, like many Bay area residents, had Japanese American friends and acquaintances, but accounts of Japanese American treachery, enlistments in the Japanese Army, blackout drills, and offshore incidents of aggression all fueled the fears that had been prompted by Pearl Harbor.16 The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, bolstered Roosevelt’s suspicions about the loyalty of Japanese Americans. The U.S. Navy had been glaringly unprepared for the attack, even though outbursts of Japanese aggression in the Pacific had been on going. After the attack, the government acted swiftly. Later that day, President Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation 2525, which specified that Japanese aliens living in the United States were “liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.”17 The next day, December 8, the President issued proclamations 2526 and 2527, which directed the same treatment for German and Italian aliens, respectively. On December 8, 1941, Roosevelt gave his famous “Day of Infamy” speech to a joint session of Congress—appealing for a declaration of war with Japan. The Senate complied, with a unanimous vote supporting war. Roosevelt began his speech, which was broadcast to the public via radio, with these words: Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.18 THE AFTERMATH OF PEARL HARBOR —MAINLAND U.S. The proclamations issued on December 7 and 8, 1941, authorized the FBI to arrest any aliens on the continental U.S. it considered dangerous to “public peace or safety,” and over the next few days some 2,000 Issei whose names appeared on the Justice Department’s ABC list were arrested.19 Evidence of involvement in actual subversive activities was not a prerequisite for arrest. The prisoners included community leaders involved in Japanese organizations and religious groups. At the same time, the bank accounts of all enemy aliens and all accounts in American branches of Japanese banks were frozen. These two

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contributed to the development of policies regarding the treatment of Japanese Americans and Japanese alien residents. These individuals included military leaders, Cabinet members, government officials, and special appointees. Key military leaders included Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command from 1939 to1943, and Lt. Gen. Delos C. Emmons, commanding general of the Hawaiian Department from December 1941 to June 1943. Lieutenant General Emmons also was commanding general of the Western Defense Command at the Presidio in San Francisco from June 1943 to June 1944 (replacing Lieutenant General DeWitt) and commanding general of the Alaska Department at Fort Richardson from June 1944 to June 1946. William Franklin Knox, Secretary of the Navy, also was involved in key decisions. He was appointed by President Roosevelt in 1940 and served as Secretary of the Navy until his death in 1944. Cabinet members who were particularly involved in decisions regarding Japanese Americans included Francis Biddle, Attorney General of the United States from 1941 to 1945 (and head of the Department of Justice), and Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior from 1933 to 1946. The War Relocation Authority was placed in the Department of the Interior in 1944, where it remained until the office closed in 1946. Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, also was influential. Appointed by President Roosevelt in 1940, Stimson served until September 1945.7 Government officials who advised the president on the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war included J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972. Other individuals were handpicked by President Roosevelt to assume responsibility for specials tasks or programs. John Franklin Carter was the head of Roosevelt’s private, secret intelligence unit, which initially investigated the Japanese American situation on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Dillon S. Myer was Director of the War Relocation Authority, from 1942 to 1946 after Milton S. Eisenhower resigned. General Andrew W. Gullion was Provost Marshal General of the U.S. Army from July 1941 to April 1944. The position of Provost Marshal General was activated at critical times in U. S. history, and Gullion was appointed in response to events in Europe and Asia. Initially he was assigned control of enemy aliens.8 President Roosevelt appointed Owen Roberts, Supreme Court Justice from 1930 to 1945, to lead a commission of inquiry about the events at Pearl Harbor. The resulting report, known as the “Roberts Report,” was dated January 23, 1942. Months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government took steps to safeguard the United States and its citizens from attack and terrorism through legislation and the establishment of various programs. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required the registration

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Manzanar, California. Dust storm at this War Relocation Authority center where evacuees of Japanese ancestry are spending the duration.

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President Roosevelt signs the declaration of war against Japan on December 8, 1941. White House.

Knox, the Secretary of the Navy, blamed Pearl Harbor on “the most effective fifth column work that’s come out of this war, except in Norway” (referring to the Nazi sympathizers in Norway who facilitated Hitler’s occupation in that country in 1940). 22 This opened the door to sensationalist newspaper headlines about sabotage, fifth column activities, and imminent invasion, and fed the growing suspicions about Japanese Americans. 23 (In this case, “fifth column” refers to people of Japanese descent engaged in sabotage or espionage within U.S. borders.) John Franklin Carter, who led Roosevelt’s investigation of espionage activities, disputed Knox’s statement about the danger of fifth column activities by Japanese Americans, and encouraged President Roosevelt to issue a statement of reassurance regarding Japanese American loyalty. This was not forthcoming.

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Curtis Munson of Carter’s staff stood by his November reports regarding the loyalty of Japanese Americans, and refuted claims by Knox questioning their loyalty. Carter and his staff devised the so-called “Munson-Ringle” plan in late December (referring to Lieutenant Commander Ringle) for implementation of Roosevelt’s executive orders. The plan invested the Nisei with patriotic duties and gave them some authority over the property of the non-citizen Issei. Roosevelt did not express disapproval of the plan, but neither did he publicly support it or take action to implement it. Without encouragement from his superiors, Lieutenant General DeWitt took no action on the Munson-Ringle plan in the area encompassed by the Western Defense Command. Instead, other plans were brewing in a climate of conflicting opinions between the War Department and the Justice Department regarding the threat of Japanese Americans and Japanese aliens and the appropriate actions to take. Meanwhile, people of Japanese ancestry, particularly the Nisei, were trying to establish their loyalty by becoming air raid wardens and joining the army (when they were allowed). With many Issei leaders imprisoned during the initial arrests, Nisei organizations, especially the JACL, assumed leadership roles and gained influence in the Japanese American community. The JACL’s policy of cooperation was embraced by some Japanese Americans, but vilified by others. At first, there was no consistent treatment of Nisei who tried to enlist in the U.S. military or who were drafted. Most Selective Service boards rejected them, classifying them as 4-F or 4-C (unsuitable for service because of race or ancestry), but they were accepted at others. The War Department prohibited further Nisei induction after March 31, 1942, “except as may be specifically authorized in exceptional cases.” The exceptions were bilingual Nisei and Kibei who served as language instructors and interpreters.24 All registrants of Japanese ancestry were officially classified as 4-C after September 14, 1942. While the military debated restrictions on Japanese Americans and limited their involvement in the war, on the West Coast public support for confining all persons of Japanese ancestry was growing. 25 The anti-Japanese American sentiment in the media was typified by comments such as the following from a columnist for the Los Angeles Times: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents—grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”26 In early January 1942, representatives of the War Department, the Justice Department, and the Provost Marshal General’s office met with Lieutenant General DeWitt of the Western Defense Command in San Francisco to determine how to implement the presidential proclamations issued immediately following Pearl Harbor. It was agreed that several steps would be taken to address the proclamation. Alien Japanese residents would be registered, the FBI would be allowed to search any house where an enemy alien lived if there was suspicion of contraband on the premises, and strategic areas from which enemy aliens could be barred would be designated by the Attorney General, including areas recommended to the Attorney General by the army (e.g. DeWitt).27 With encouragement from Col. Karl Bendetson, the head of the Aliens Division of the Provost Marshal General’s office, on January 21, 1942, Lieutenant General DeWitt

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actions paralyzed the Japanese American community by depriving it of both its leadership and its financial assets. In late December, the Department of Justice issued regulations requiring enemy aliens living in the jurisdiction of the Western Defense Command to surrender weapons, ammunition, radio transmitters, short-wave radio receivers, and certain types of cameras by January 5, 1942. 20 In his final report, DeWitt described the items seized by the FBI between February and May 1942 as “hidden caches of contraband,” even though most of the weapons seized were from two legitimate sporting goods stores.21 The attack on Pearl Harbor caused widespread hysteria and paranoia. Statements from government officials contributed to the public’s anxiety. For example, Frank

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Mr. and Mrs. K. Iseri closed their drugstore in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles in preparation for the removal of Japanese Americans.

MILITARY NECESSITY In mid-February 1942, Congressional committee hearings headed by California congressman John Tolan were held on the West Coast to assess the need for the forcible removal of persons of Japanese ancestry. The overwhelming majority of witnesses supported the removal of all Japanese aliens and Japanese American citizens from the coast. California Governor Culbert L. Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren supported the removal of all people of Japanese heritage from coastal areas, stating that it was impossible to tell which ones were loyal. 29 As de facto spokesmen for Japanese Americans, JACL leaders argued against mass removal, but to prove their loyalty pledged their readiness to cooperate if it was deemed a military necessity. After weeks of waffling, Lieutenant General DeWitt stated in no uncertain terms that Japanese American citizens and Japanese aliens needed to be moved from the coast. Attorney General Biddle disagreed with mass removal, although he issued policies regarding the removal of Japanese aliens from certain coastal zones in late January. He remained stalwartly opposed to the wholesale removal of Japanese Americans; however, he admitted that racially motivated removal of citizens could be considered constitutional, if carried out by the army in case of military necessity.30 Biddle was not interested in Justice Department involvement in the removal, and the responsibility was given to the army. Another voice against the removal of Japanese Americans was General Mark Clark of General Headquarters in Washington, D.C. He was convinced that such removal was counteractive to military necessity and would use far too many soldiers, who could otherwise be fighting. Instead, he recommended protecting critical installations by using pass and permit systems and selective arrests as necessary. In contrast, War Secretary Stimson came to the conclusion that the removal of Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese ancestry was necessary due to the real

threat of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. President Roosevelt, responding to pressure from many directions, did not deny the need for removal. In a telephone conversation on February 11, Stimson was given permission by the President to do what he thought best, “but it has got to be dictated by military necessity.”31 On February 14, Lieutenant General DeWitt’s final report was sent to the President, encouraging removal of the “enemy race” from the West Coast as a military necessity, and supporting the president’s final decision. As soon as the president conveyed to Attorney General Biddle that he supported the removal, Biddle fell in step with the administration. A joint Executive Order was drafted by the Justice and War departments and on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to: ... prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary in the judgment of the Secretary of War or said Military Commander.32 Although the Executive Order did not specifically mention Japanese Americans, it was intended to apply to them exclusively. Roosevelt may have been mislead about potential threats posed by people of Japanese ancestory on the West Coast, but historian Greg Robinson suggests that he also found credence in unsubstantiated reports and did not accept FBI findings that negated a Japanese American threat.33 Roosevelt’s decision to sign Executive Order 9066, ostensibly an act of military judgment, also was a response to public agitation and political pressure. Robinson emphasizes the President’s lack of concern for the consequences of confinement, which sprang, in part, from his prejudice toward the Japanese people. In fact, “his paramount concern was leading the country to victory in a conflict of global proportions and unprecedented destructiveness. The rights of American citizens, especially those of Japanese ancestry, paled in comparison.”34 Milton S. Eisenhower, first director of the War Relocation Authority, wrote in his memoirs, “The President’s final decision was influenced by a variety of factors—by events over which he had little control, by inaccurate or incomplete information, by bad counsel, by strong political pressures, and by his own training, background, and personality.”35 Although many were complicit in the decision to confine Japanese Americans and aliens, no one who personally opposed the measure—neither Carter, Munson, nor Biddle—spoke strongly enough to dissuade Roosevelt from the course of action he was following. As the sad business of orchestrating the removal of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast states began

Harry Konda, an officer with the Japanese American Citizens League in Centreville, California, is arranging for the transfer of a washing machine to a Mexican American farm laborer’s wife.

recommended to Secretary of War Henry Stimson the establishment of small “prohibited zones” around strategic areas from which enemy aliens and their native-born children would be removed, as well as some larger “restricted zones” where they would be kept under close surveillance. Secretary Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle agreed, although Biddle was determined not to do anything to violate Japanese Americans’ constitutional rights. In a short time, it became clear that the alien exclusion program would not satisfy the increasingly anxious state of the public and elected officials in western states. The late January publication of the Roberts Report about the attack on Pearl Harbor fueled the public’s perceptions of the dangers presented by both citizens and aliens of Japanese ancestry. Although the report was vague in terms of subversive activities by Japanese Americans in Hawaii before Pearl Harbor, it attracted national attention—in the press and among elected officials.28 The public responded accordingly, and anti-Japanese sentiments reached a fever pitch.

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REMOVAL Even after Executive Order 9066 was issued in February 1942, no one was quite sure who would be excluded or where they would be sent. It was assumed that the Executive Order would encourage voluntary departure, but this was not the case. Lieutenant General DeWitt originally wanted to remove all Japanese, German, and Italian aliens; however, he only obtained approval to remove Japanese Americans.39 Public opinion, in fact, was in favor of relocating everyone of Japanese ancestry, citizens and aliens alike, with some outspoken dissention. For example, The Nation was highly critical of the West Coast push for removal of Japanese Americans in two articles published in February 1942.40 Public opinion did not support the mass removal of German and Italian aliens, much less second generation Germans and Italians. Provost Marshal General Gullion, who consistently supported relocation of the Japanese Americans and aliens, had suggested removing only males over the age of fourteen—about 46,000 from the West Coast and 40,000 from Hawaii. As the military

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and federal government negotiated responses to Executive Order 9066, the Japanese American community, although deeply disturbed by the course of events, was generally compliant with government orders. Most followed the lead of the JACL and cooperated with the removal as a means to prove their loyalty. A few were vocally opposed to the removal and later took legal action that eventually reached the Supreme Court. Lieutenant General DeWitt issued several public proclamations concerning the removal in an attempt to establish and enforce regulations and procedures. On March 2, 1942, Public Proclamation No. 1 established “Military Areas” and stipulated that certain residents may have to leave these areas if situations warranted their exclusion. Military Area No. 1 encompassed western Washington, western Oregon, western California, and southern Arizona. It was sub-divided into a “prohibited zone” along the coast and an adjacent “restricted zone.” Ninety-eight smaller areas also were labeled prohibited, presumably the locations of strategic military sites. Military Area No. 2 encompassed the eastern half of California. The public proclamation was aimed at “Japanese, German, or Italian” aliens and “any person of Japanese ancestry,” but it did not specifically order anyone to leave. However, an accompanying press release predicted that all people of Japanese ancestry would eventually be excluded from Military Area No. 1, but probably not from Military Area No. 2.41 It was assumed that the targeted groups would voluntarily leave rather than wait for a forced removal; however, voluntary relocation was not practical for many Japanese Americans, due to constraints regarding their jobs, finances, and possessions, and their lack of sponsors in other parts of the country. Most Issei assets had been frozen at the beginning of the war; thus, most families lacked the resources to move. Several thousand Japanese Americans, however, did relocate voluntarily. More than 9,000 persons voluntarily moved out of Military Area No. 1; of these, over half moved into Military Area No. 2 in eastern California, where Public Proclamation No. 1 implied that no restrictions or prohibitions were contemplated. Later, of course, they would be forcefully removed from Military Area No. 2. Somewhat more fortunate were those who moved farther into the interior of the country: 1,963 moved to Colorado, 1,519 moved to Utah, 305 to Idaho, 208 to eastern Washington, 115 to eastern Oregon, 105 to northern Arizona, 83 to Wyoming, 72 to Illinois, 69 to Nebraska, and 366 to other states.42 Many attempting to leave the West Coast discovered that the inland states were unwilling to accept them. The perception inland was that California was dumping its “undesirables,” and many refugees were turned back at state borders, had difficulty buying gasoline, or were greeted with “No Japs Wanted” signs.

WCCA AND WRA On March 11, 1942, the San Francisco-based U.S. Army Western Defense Command established the Wartime Civil

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Control Administration (WCCA) to organize and carry out the removal of people of Japanese heritage in Military Area No. 1. Col. Karl Bendetsen was appointed its director. Public Proclamation No. 2, issued by Lieutenant General DeWitt on March 16, 1942, designated four more military areas in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah, as well as 933 additional prohibited areas. Although Lieutenant General DeWitt envisioned complete removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the military areas, a more limited removal ensued. Public Law 503, approved by Congress on March 21, 1942, made violating restrictions in a military area a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 or not more than a year in jail (or both).43 Lieutenant General DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 3, effective March 27, instituting an 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew in Military Area No. 1 and listed prohibited areas for all enemy aliens and “persons of Japanese ancestry.” Public Proclamation No. 3 also confined people to their homes or places of employment, or traveling between them, but not more than five miles from their homes. Roosevelt and his advisors recognized that soldiers could not be diverted from the army to manage the detainees or their facilities after the removal. On March

18, 1942, responsibility for administering the relocation program was transferred to the War Relocation Authority (WRA), created in the Office for Emergency Management by Executive Order 9102. Milton S. Eisenhower, an official with the Department of Agriculture, was appointed director of the WRA. Eisenhower initially hoped that many of those detained, especially citizens, could be resettled quickly. He expected them to return to civilian life outside the military areas, or to be sent to small unguarded subsistence farms. After meeting with governors and other officials from 10 western states on April 7, 1942, in Salt Lake City, Eisenhower realized the extent to which anti-Japanese sentiments were ingrained in the western states. Governor Ralph Carr of Colorado was the only governor who did not protest the resettlement of Japanese Americans to his state. The other governors did not want people of Japanese ancestry moved to their states, but if it proved

to be necessary, they wanted them kept under guard. A common feeling was expressed by one of the governors: “If these people are dangerous on the Pacific coast they will be dangerous here!”44 Their chief concern was that the Japanese would settle in their states and not leave when the war was over. However, at a meeting Eisenhower had with local sugar beet growers on the same day, a practical view prevailed. Desperate for labor, S. J. Boyer of the Utah Farm Bureau said that farmers “don’t love the Japanese, but we intend to work them, if possible.”45 In short order, Eisenhower was forced to accept the idea that all Japanese Americans would be held for the duration of the war. Nevertheless, the incarceration of innocent people bothered him greatly. He resigned in June 1942 to head the Office of War Information, recommending Dillon S. Myer to succeed him, but advised Myer to take the position only “if you can do the job and sleep at night.”46 Voluntary departure from Military Area No. 1 ended on March 29, 1942, when Lieutenant General DeWitt’s Public Proclamation No. 4 prohibited all Japanese from leaving Military Area No.1 until ordered. The WCCA designated two reception centers, which were intended to house the detainees temporarily until they could be resettled into established communities or communities developed specifically to hold people of Japanese ancestry during the war. Such resettlement proved to be untenable. Further instructions established reception or assembly centers as transitional facilities and forbade moves, except to approved locations outside of Military Area No. 1. On March 23, 1942, Lieutenant General DeWitt issued the first “Civilian Exclusion Order,” which required all people of Japanese ancestry—citizens and aliens—to vacate Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, by March 30. A major Navy radio communication facility, including the navy’s largest radio transmitter, was located on Bainbridge Island, which was home to 227 people of Japanese ancestry, mostly U.S. citizens. The detainees were sent to Manzanar, the reception center north of Los Angeles (which later became one of ten relocation centers). Such removals were repeated all along the West Coast, as Lieutenant General DeWitt issued a total of 108 Civilian Exclusion Orders, each designed to affect about 1,000 people. After initial notification, those to be removed were given six days to dispose of nearly all their possessions, packing only what could be carried by the family or the individual, including bedding, toilet articles, clothing, and eating utensils. The government was willing to store or ship some possessions at the risk of owners, but many did not trust that option. Most families sold their property and possessions for ridiculously small sums, while others trusted friends and neighbors to look after their property. Those who lived in the exclusion zone were instructed to report to a nearby civil control station to begin the relocation process. First, they would be sent to an assembly center to wait the completion of the relocation centers. Their final destination would be one of the 10 relocation centers being developed by the WRA. By June 2, 1942, all 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry in Military Area No. 1, except for a few who remained in hospitals, were in army custody. Many accepted removal with little overt resistance. Perhaps their resignation was bolstered by the Japanese philosophy of shigata ga nai (“it can’t be helped”), combined with a strong

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in the spring of 1942, the nexus of control shifted to the Western Defense Command in San Francisco, headed by Lieutenant General DeWitt.36 On February 17, 1942, Roosevelt gave jurisdiction of the strategic Terminal Island in the Los Angeles Harbor to the U.S. Navy. The Japanese Americans on the island—mostly fishermen—were ordered to leave by March 14, 1942, a deadline shortly moved to February 27. In fact, practically all family heads and community leaders had already been arrested and forcibly removed by the FBI. 37 Those left on the island became the first casualties of the emerging exclusion policy. Viewed in the context of the Japanese success in the Pacific, the U.S. had reason to fear its Asian enemy. With the U.S. fleet crippled by Pearl Harbor and growing Japanese power, the West Coast seemed vulnerable. The American loss in the Philippines and the fall of British Singapore on February 15, 1942, made the Japanese seem unstoppable. As noted by H. W. Brands, “By April 1942 the Japanese empire covered an enormous swath of the earth’s surface, from the International Date Line in the east almost to India in the west, and from the North Pole nearly to Australia. Against Japan, the American and British were failing miserably.”38 Other events in California contributed to the tense atmosphere. On February 23, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field on the California coast near Santa Barbara—just four days after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It caused no serious damage or injuries, but raised fears of further enemy action along the coast. On February 25, the “Battle of Los Angeles” took place. In response to an unidentified radar echo, the military called for a blackout and fired over 1,400 anti-aircraft shells. Twenty individuals of Japanese ancestry were arrested for allegedly signaling the invaders, but the radar echo was determined to be a loose weather balloon.

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Exclusion orders are posted on April 1, 1942, The order, issued by Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, directs the removal of people of Japanese ancestry by noon on April 7, 1942.

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Saturday afternoon shoppers read removal orders posted at a vacant store on Grant Avenue in San Francisco

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sense of American patriotism and remorse over the Japanese attack. Others’ indignation and sense of discrimination and illegality spurred them to resistance. Some particularly notable cases are discussed later in this chapter. The justification for the removal was ostensibly to thwart espionage and sabotage, but babies, young children, the elderly, the infirm, children from orphanages, and even children adopted by Caucasian parents were not exempt from removal. In all, over 17,000 children under 10 years old, 2,000 persons over 65 years old, and 1,000 handicapped or infirm persons were removed.47

ASSEMBLY CENTERS One assembly center was established in Washington State, another in Oregon, and a third in Arizona. The others were located in California. Little time was available for the large-scale construction of new facilities, so existing facilities were converted into temporary assembly centers. Ten of the assembly centers were at racetracks or fairgrounds. Others were at facilities of a similar scale: for example, the Pacific International Livestock Exposition facilities (Portland, Oregon), a former lumber mill site (Pinedale, California), migrant worker camps (Marysville and Sacramento, California), and an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp (Mayer, Arizona).48

in the assembly centers, but the decision was made to pay the detainees no more than an army private (which was then $21 per month) to combat charges of coddling. Initially, unskilled laborers were paid $8 per month, skilled laborers $12, and professionals $16. The monthly wages were later raised to $12, $16, and $19 per month, respectively. Detainees worked as cooks, mechanics, teachers, doctors, clerks, and police. At the Santa Anita and Manzanar assembly centers, camouflage net factories were established and managed by a private company under military contract. Only citizens could be employed in this war-related work. Privacy at the assembly centers was next to non-existent, with communal lavatories and mess halls and thin walls in the barracks. Families were crowded into small apartments, usually 20 feet square. The detainees improved their new homes as best as they could, using salvaged lumber and other found

remained. Still, the converted stables were described as “somewhat better shelter than the newly constructed mass-fabricated houses.”51 At the Santa Anita Assembly Center in southern California, 8,500 of the total population of more than 18,000 lived in stables. At the Portland Assembly Center, more than 3,000 detainees were housed under one roof in a livestock pavilion that was subdivided into apartments.52 The atmosphere in the assembly centers was tense. Many of the detainees were demoralized; convinced they would never be accepted as full-fledged Americans. Some Nisei who had been very patriotic became very bitter and some expressed allegiance to Japan. Most tried to make living conditions better, by organizing newsletters and dances and planting Victory Gardens. Jobs were available

supplies, in an attempt to make them more livable. Generally, people stayed in assembly centers for three or four months, before they were moved to a relocation center.53 Shortages of food and other materials and deplorable sanitation were common at many of the centers. The 800 Nisei working at the net factory at Santa Anita conducted a sit-down strike to complain about weakness due to lack of food, as well as low pay and unfair production quotas.54 For the most part, however, detainees took their hardships in stride, but on August 4, 1942, violence erupted at the Santa Anita Assembly Center over a routine search for contraband (including Japanese language books and phonograph records) and an unannounced confiscation of hot plates. Rumors and complaints spread as crowds gathered. The internal police and suspected informers were harassed and

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one suspected informer was severely beaten. Ultimately, 200 military police were called to control the 2,000 protesters.55 That night, the detainees were confined to their barracks and no meals were served. The military patrolled inside the center for three days.56 RELOCATION CENTERS The relocation centers were designed for longer-term occupancy by confined Japanese Americans. Sites for the relocation centers were selected by the WRA, but acquisition was left to the War Department. Over 300 possible sites were reviewed; primary consideration was given to locations with railroad access and agricultural potential.57 Ten relocation centers were developed in seven states, most on unused or underutilized federal lands, but some on private land that was acquired for the purpose. All of the relocation centers were in sparsely populated areas, making them some of the largest “communities” in their respective states. Most were characterized by chilling cold, oppressive heat, and unrelenting wind and dust. The relocation centers at Tule Lake in California, at Minidoka in Idaho, and at Heart Mountain in Wyoming were located on land that was designated for federal reclamation projects. The Jerome and Rohwer relocation centers in Arkansas were partially on land meant for subsistence homesteads under the Farm Security Administration; the balance of the site at Rohwer was bought from local farmers. The Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) was developed partly on land in the public domain, partly on county owned land, and partly on privately owned land. The Granada Relocation Center in Colorado was privately owned land purchased by the army for the WRA. The Colorado River (Poston) and Gila River relocation centers in Arizona were on Indian reservations. Both tribal councils opposed the use of their lands on the grounds that their participation would inflict injustices similar to those they had suffered. The tribes were overruled by the army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In fact, by verbal agreement, Eisenhower gave administration of the Colorado River Relocation Center to the BIA; the WRA resumed control of the center after Dillon Myer became WRA director. Those confined at assembly centers that only had pit latrines or that presented fire hazards were the first priority for transfer to the relocation centers.58 In theory, they would be sent to a relocation center with the climate most similar to their home, and each relocation center would have a balance of urban and rural settlers. Detainees were transferred from the assembly centers to the relocation centers by train, with their movement carefully choreographed to avoid interrupting major troop movements. The transfer process lasted from early June to October 30, 1942. During the relocation process, the army ordered the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the remainder of California. The eastern portion of California had been

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CONFINEMENT The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was formed as an independent agency to move people of Japanese heritage out of the Military Areas designated on the West Coast. Initially, it assisted the U.S. Army Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA), but eventually the new agency replaced it. The removal process began under the WCCA with the posting of the exclusion orders, including the identification of a nearby location to which heads of families were to report for a physical exam and administrative processing. This response to the exclusion orders was carried out in existing buildings, such as schools and armories, which were called “civil control stations.” The appendix of this report includes a list of known civil control stations. With WRA involvement, a standard removal procedure was quickly implemented, involving at least two moves. After reporting to collection points (civil control stations) near their homes, people from a given district were transported by the army to hastily contrived assembly centers. From there, eventually they were taken to one of the relocation centers administered by the WRA. In the early weeks of the removal, the WCCA operated two reception centers that had been established to process the relocation of those who voluntarily left. The reception center at Owens Valley near Los Angeles became an assembly center and, later, the Manzanar Relocation Center. The one at Parker Dam, Arizona, became the Poston Relocation Center.

Two additional assembly centers were partially readied before the decision was made to take detainees elsewhere. Toppenish, in eastern Washington, ultimately was not used because of unsuitable sanitation facilities and because there was enough room in the California assembly centers for the detainees. A refurbished CCC camp at Cave Creek, Arizona, was not needed due to considerable voluntary migration from the southern part of the state.49 Living conditions at the assembly centers were chaotic and squalid. The existing buildings were supplemented with temporary theater of operations-type army barracks: 20 x 100-foot buildings divided into five rooms. These barracks were originally designed for temporary use by combat soldiers, not families that may include two or three generations.50 At the racetracks, stables had been hastily cleaned before they were designated living quarters, but the stench

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Exclusion orders are posted on April 1, 1942, The order, issued by Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, directs the removal of people of Japanese ancestry by noon on April 7, 1942.

Tanforan Assembly Center, San Bruno, California.

However, by the end of the war, 50% of those who had been relocated had resettled in the three West Coast states.63 By early summer 1945, most of the centers—stripped of basic amenities—had been emptied of nearly all detainees. Those left did not have a place to go, because they had lost their homes and businesses, and they lingered in the centers. At the Minidoka Relocation Center, laundries, latrines, and mess halls were progressively closed until the few remaining people had to search for food to eat. A father and son talk to a military police officer before leaving for the assembly center at Arcadia, California.

designated Military Area No. 2, and was not supposed to be as sensitive as Military Area No. 1, but Lieutenant General DeWitt reported that this area was indeed sensitive due to vital military installations, important forests, and two population concentrations immediately adjacent to Military Area No. 1.59 More than 9,000 people were moved directly from this area to the Tule Lake, Poston, and Gila River relocation centers between July 4 and August 11, 1942, including many who had voluntarily moved out of Military Area No. 1 (prior to Public Proclamation No. 4, which prohibited voluntary removal from this area), believing they would not be forced to relocation centers.

CLOSING THE RELOCATION CENTERS When it became clear that there was no longer a military threat on the West Coast, the administration’s best rationale for maintaining a program of exclusion for Japanese Americans ended. Unable to defend the policy on military grounds, one of the biggest obstacles to resettlement was the extreme hostility still expressed by West Coast residents, which could erupt in retaliatory actions toward Japanese Americans. Also problematic, and without a ready solution, was a plan of resettlement that would provide housing and jobs for a people who had, in many cases, lost everything as a result of the confinement. Anticipating the Supreme Court decisions regarding the Korematsu and Endo cases a day in advance, on December 17, 1944, the War Department announced the lifting of the West Coast exclusion orders as of January 2, 1945. The WRA immediately began planning for the departure of all detainees and the closing of the centers, which it anticipated would be accomplished by the end of 1945.62 Initial reactions of the detainees varied; some immediately returned to the West Coast, while others were reluctant to leave the centers. The WRA provided only minimum assistance to detainees as they left: $25 per person, train fare, and meals en route for those with less than $500 in cash. Some of the first to return to the West Coast encountered violence and hostility and had difficulty finding housing and jobs. Others had more success and encouraged people to leave the centers and return. Many who feared returning to the West Coast found refuge in other parts of the country, especially Denver, Salt Lake City, and Chicago.

CONSTRUCTING POWER

CONFINEMENT AND ETHNICITY

FREEDOM RESTORED The incidents of unrest at Tule Lake signified to many in the Roosevelt administration that the WRA was being poorly administered by Myer and that the agency would be better administered under the umbrella of a permanent cabinet department.60 On February 16, 1944, Roosevelt authorized the transfer of the WRA to the Department of the Interior. Secretary Harold Ickes, who had objected to the confinement and consistently championed the rights of Japanese Americans, was an effective leader in the unraveling of the government’s wartime policy of confinement. Greg Robinson, who considered Roosevelt’s actions regarding Japanese Americans during the war to reflect his prejudice, considered the transfer to Interior and the transition of leadership to Harold Ickes to be Roosevelt’s “most positive action in regard to Japanese Americans.”61 Ickes was aided in his efforts to end the exclusion policy and close the relocation centers by Undersecretary of the Interior Abe Fortas. Ickes kept Dillon S. Myer at the helm of the WRA as its director.

Detainees were given two-week, three-day, and 30-minute eviction notices. If they still did not leave on their own, the WRA packed their belongings and forced them onto trains.64 Eventually the relocation centers were emptied, and all were finally closed by the end of 1945. The Tule Lake Segregation Center operated until March 20, 1946, until the detainees who had renounced their citizenship could be repatriated. Enacted on July 1, 1944, Public Law 504 had allowed U.S. citizens to renounce their citizenship on U.S. soil during time of war. Of the 5,700 Japanese Americans requesting renunciation, 95 percent were held at Tule Lake. A third of the citizens at Tule Lake applied for repatriation to Japan.65 On February 23, 1946, the first 432 repatriates set sail for Japan. Over 4,000 would follow, but over the next five years all but 357 would apply for a return of their U.S. citizenship.66 After the last detainees were released, the Tule Lake facility was placed on standby use during the Cold War for potential McCarran Act detainees, but was never used.67 All the other relocation centers were abandoned. If the land had been privately owned, the original owners were generally given the option to re-purchase the land. Otherwise, the land reverted to the control of the previous land-managing

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RETROSPECTIVE The post-war years were often a struggle for Japanese American families and individuals as they rebuilt their lives and became reintegrated into U.S. society. Gradually, feelings of hostility and distrust toward Japanese Americans abated. Generally, these negative feelings were substituted with respect for these honorable Americans who had been treated very badly by both the government and the public. The wartime generation and new generations of Americans became advocates for restitution. Restitution took various forms. In 1980, establishment of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) was approved by President Jimmy Carter. Ultimately this led to passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed into law by President Reagan as Public Law 100-383. The law acknowledged the unfair removal and confinement of people of Japanese ancestry (and Aleuts) during the war and called for a program of public education to inform the public about the wartime relocation. Restitution payments were made to those who had been held. States also enacted legislation and, as already described, unfair convictions were overturned by the courts. In 1982, the California legislature passed a bill to provide $5,000 in restitution to 314 Japanese Americans who were fired from their state jobs in 1942. With the help of evidence indicating that exaggerated reports about the potential dangers posed by Japanese Americans had been issued by the War and Justice departments, in the mid-1980s federal district

courts overturned the convictions of Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi.68 With continued pressure from people of Japanese heritage and others, the federal government responded with other programs of redress and public education. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush signed Public Law 102-248, the Manzanar National Historic Site Act, which established a historic site to be administered by the National Park Service at the former relocation center. It also called for the preparation of the Japanese American National Historic Landmark Theme Study (this study) to enable the NHL designation of sites that reflect the Japanese American wartime experience, from 1941 to 1946. Other sites were subsequently approved as national historic sites to be administered by the National Park Service: Minidoka and Bainbridge Island, Granada, and Tule Lake. The admissions of wrongdoing, apologies, and restitution by the federal government cannot fully redeem the treatment that Japanese Americans received at its hands in the 1940s. However, these actions are positive initiatives and reminders to the United States to “let it not happen again,” which appears on the Bainbridge Island memorial in Japanese as: Nidoto Nai Yoni.

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agency. Buildings were sold to veterans, auctioned off, or given to local schools and hospitals. On May 15, 1946, the last WRA field office was closed and on June 30, 1946, the WRA was officially disbanded.

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IMPOUNDED: THE CENSORED IMAGES OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT

2

Dorothea Lange

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1. Lawns and flowers have been planter b some of the evacuees at their barrack homes. 2. William Katsuki, former professional landscape gardener for large estates in Southern California, demonstrates his skill and ingenuity in creating from materials close at hand, a desert garden along side his home in the barracks. 3. Grandfather of Japanese ancestry teaching his grandson to walk at this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees.

3

Listen my son, now you are older

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IMPOUNDED

6

5

4. Turlock, California. Families of Japanese ancestry arrive at Turlock Assembly Center. 5. San Bruno, California. Buildings of the Tanforan Center are plastered at this time with all manner of locally devised possters incident to the election. 6. Stockton, California. These evacuees are watching the arrival of buses bringing new groups of families to this assembly center.

Mother wants you to understand why your only friends are the sanseis...

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8

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7. Hospital latrines, for patients, between the barracks, which serve temporarily as wards. For the first three months of occupancy medical facilities have been meager but the new hospital, fully equipped, is almost ready for occupancy. 8. San Bruno, California. Evacuee boys in the foreground are playing basket-ball. This is one of eight recreation centers which are distributed about the assembly center. One of the barrack buildings is, in each case, set apart for games and recreation under the Recreation program administered by a Wartime Civil Control Administration official with college trained evacuee supervisors. 9. Stockton, California. This family just arrived in the Stockton center this morning. The mother and the children wait at the door of the room in the barracks to which they have been assigned, while the father is at the baggage depot where the bedding and clothing are being unloaded and inspected for contraband.

9

and why your only home is the barrack

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11

12

10. Mealtime in one of the mess halls at this center. 11. Manzanar, California. There are any evidences of skill and ambition within this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry, as seen by the flower gardener construction in the foreground. This family was in the nursery business before evacuation. 12. Part of a line waiting for lunch outside the mess hall at noon.

10

why you eat in the mess halls

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13

and why you don’t ride the street cars, buses and automobiles.

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13. Stockton Assembly Center, Stockton, California. The first day at an assembly center. A new unit of the barracks is being opened today for the eight bus loads of arrivals. This photo shows the luggage and bed-rolls which have com in by truck, deposited here for inspection for contraband(note inspection table and official at right). Evacuees then take their possessions to the barracks to which they have been assigned. 14. San Bruno, California. Family of Japanese ancestry arrives at assembly center at Tanforan Race Track.

14

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15. Three Boys Behand Bared Wire, 1945 16. Cutting Bared Wire, 1945

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One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.

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HOW

DOES

?

SPACE JOIN

US

Revolution Square, Ljubljana, 1907–1993

WHEN SOCIALISM FINALLY ARRIVED,

Monument to the Uprising of the People of Kordun and Banja, Petrova Gora, Croatia, 1979–81

THEY AND THEIR DISCIPLES THUS INVESTED

Jasenovac Memorial Site, Jasenovac, Croatia.1959–66

A GREAT DEAL OF EFFORT...

Revolution Square, Ljublijana, Slovenia. 1960–74

IN ADAPTING THE EXISTING MANIFESTATIONS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Danube Flower Restaurant, Belgrade, Serbia, 1969–89

TO THE SPECIFICITIES OF THE NEW YUGOSLAV SOCIETY.

BUILDING BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY: ARCHITECTURE AND FEDERALISM IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA The sprawling modernist structure at the center of New Belgrade is still colloquially known by the acronym SIV (Federal Executive Council), even though the federation that was once governed from it no longer exists. As the administrative heart of socialist Yugoslavia, the enormous, H-shaped complex also physically embodied the political imaginary that held the country together, most poignantly in a sequence of ceremonial rooms on the second floor of the building’s central pavilion. Suspended on pilotis above the main entrance, the opulent space is organized around a top lit hall adorned with a massive mosaic commemorating the 1943 Battle of the Sutjeska, one of the legendary events of the People’s Liberation War of Yugoslavia. Surrounding the hall is an enfilade of six “salons” dedi­cated to the former Yugoslavia’s constituent repub­lics-Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (with its two autonomous prov­inces, Vojvodina and Kosovo), and Slovenia— each designed by an architect from the respective republic to communicate an imagined sense of ethno-national iden­tity. From vernacular to neo-avant-garde, the design of these spaces conjures an image of a diverse mosaic of cultures, which reaches a triumphant synthesis under the gigantic crystal chandelier of the final room-the vast salon of Yugoslavia. Lavishly appointed with an abundance of artwork s of diverse styles as well as custom-designed modernist furniture, rugs, and wall treatments , the entire sequence of rooms exemplifies an impressive realization of the post war ideal of the synthesis of the arts conceived to celebrate a socialist federation (figs.1-4).1 Taken together, these spaces read as an apt metaphor for the Yugoslav socialist state: a modern container for the collection of distinct traditional ethnicities, brought together by their common struggle for liberation from fascism, class oppression, and underdevelopment, an idea succinctly expressed through the slogan “brotherhood and unity.” Not only was the SIV building designed to convey this message, it was itself a product of trans-federal collaboration that assembled architects, artists, builders, artisans, and materials from different parts of the country. 2 Conceived as the focal point of New Belgrade, the new federal capital erected after World War II , even its siting carried a special symbol­ism. The capital that arose out of former marshlands at the confluence of the country’s two largest rivers, the Danube and the Sava, emphatically defied the Fig. 1 New Belgrade in the midarea’s history as a no-man’s-land between foreign empires that for centuries 1960s. In the foreground: Federal had divided native populations.3 Executive Council Building Indeed, the history of fluctuating geopolitical divisions that cut through the region stretched back to antiquity: between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires between Eastern and Western Christianity, between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, and between Christianity and Islam. The result was a dizzying mosaic of dialects, ethnicities, and religions, as well as of varied architectural and artistic traditions brought together into close physical proximity, if not always in direct contact.4 Consequently, socialist Yugoslavia’s leading intellectuals frequently invoked the trope of a “kalei­doscope of cultures,” which became both a mode of self-perception and of self-representation to foreign audiences.5 The ideology of brotherhood and unity sought to reconcile this kaleidoscopic image with the universalizing juggernaut of socialist modernization. The federation’s six republics roughly corresponded to the six constituent nations, as opposed to only three

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THE IDEOLOGY OF BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY The origins of Yugoslavia lie in the wave of national awakening movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the fine-grained mosaic of cultures, which coexisted for centuries under the rule of distant imperial centers, began coalescing into modern nations. Transcending the persistent borderland condition was not easy: the process often fed the malevolent “narcissism of small differences,” but it also produced a will­ingness to overcome the inherited divisions, manifest through the project of Yugoslavism, which sought to unite South Slavs as fundamentally kindred peoples. The project was finally realized in 1918: propelled into existence by the principle of self-determination advanced by US President Woodrow Wilson, the first Yugoslav state arose from the ashes of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.7 The new state sought to emu­late the example of powerful European nation-states by blending the disparate collection of ethnic groups into a unitary nation.8 The experiment, however, ended disastrously: as soon as the country was partitioned by the Axis in 1941, the internal tensions erupted into a bloody interethnic conflict. Communist-led partisans were the only force that fought against the occupation consistently and across ethnic lines; their success at forming a massive army by the end of the war secured their domination in the postwar state. Socialist Yugoslavia was imagined in direct opposition to its predecessor. Rather than forging a single unitary nation, the postwar state was organized as a federation of distinct nations brought together by the ideology of brotherhood and unity. The dynamic between the particular and the common was complex and ever changing. At the normative level, the federal state underwent persistent decentralization, increasingly shifting its prerogatives to the elites of the six constituent republics and, after the new constitution of 1974, also to Serbia’s two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.9 At the same time, a certain homogenization of experience occurred, as the majority of Yugoslav citizens for the first time came to enjoy a similarly modern way of life, share a common popular culture, and meet their peers from other parts of the country through reg­ular travel—all of which amounted to far more powerful factors for cohesion than the officially sanctioned ideological proclamations and rituals. However, by the late 1980s the balance between centrifugal and centrip­etal forces had spun out of control under the combined pressure of rising nationalist particularisms and the economic crisis. Plentiful, but insufficiently strong to prevent the dissolution of the common state, the bonds and networks forged over the preceding decades made the eventual collapse all the more painful. The dialectic of diversity and unity very much conditioned the production of architecture. On the one hand, architects were tasked with constructing the national prerogatives of the individual republics, most impor­tantly, their capitals and the attendant infrastructures of state power and culture, as well as the institutions of the architectural profession. These undertakings resulted in numerous attempts to explore and articulate the architectural identities of individual regions while also producing more or less recognizable architectural cultures equipped with their own professional organizations, schools, periodicals, leading figures, and so on. On the other hand, architects across the country shared much in their daily practice: not only similar socioeconomic conditions , but also a common federal union of architectural associations as well as the occasional opportunities to build outside of their native republic. And certain architectural programs, such as war memorials and tourism facilities, served as de facto generators of unity as well; distributed all over the country’s terri­tory, they motivated and enabled mobility, thus allowing Yugoslavs to get to know each other and to build patriotism through the shared experience of travel. As a result, architects, architectural historians, and journalists all repeatedly engaged the question of “Yugoslav architecture,”10 equally doubting or affirming whether there was something distinctly Yugoslav about architecture in Yugoslavia.11 Nevertheless, com­mon to all such discussions was the view that the very concept of Yugoslav architecture served as an umbrella for the collection of distinct republican architectures, just as the SIV building contained the six republican salons. With the increasing decentralization, such a view

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Vladimir Kulić

acknowledged in the prewar state, and they became the bearers of the modern architectural profession: its organizations, educational institutions, etc.6 The traditional patchwork of vernacular architectures was thus translated into modern terms to produce a somewhat less granular picture, in which the architectural cultures corresponded with the newly constituted republics. Nevertheless, diversity persisted, compressing a great deal of architectural phenomena-varied regionalisms, the particular articulations of certain programs, or idio­syncratic personal poetics—into a small geographical space the size of the state of Oregon. It is this complex interaction between the various particularisms and the federalist mechanisms of unity that held the country together for almost half a century—a dialectic that also determined the production of architecture.

Fig. 2 Fig. 4

INFRASTRUCTURES OF FEDERALISM Despite debate, a “Yugoslav architecture” most cer­tainly existed, if not as a set of immediately recogniz­able features, then as an institution. Before there could be modern architecture, though, there had to be profes­sional architects, but in some parts of the country there were very few of them at the end of World War I I. Large cities, especially Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, which were also the seats of the three existing schools of architecture, had already developed vibrant archi­tectural scenes. The same, however, was not the case in the country’s southeast, where the establishment of the architectural profession was directly supported by federalism. In 1945, the entire republic of Macedonia had a minuscule number of active educated architects, especially outside of Skopje; the situation was not much better in Montenegro or Bosnia and Herzegovina.14 In order to facilitate the intended rapid modernization—similarly to the interwar period—the state dispatched professionals from the more developed to the less devel­oped parts of the country. However, this time around, it also sought to build up local cadre by founding new institutions of higher education in the less-developed regions. Thus, in accordance with Skopje’s status as the capital of the newly recognized Macedonian nation (which had been denied nationhood in the interwar kingdom), the School of Architecture was founded there in 1949, the same year as the School of Architecture in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The key figure in Skopje was Croatian architect Antun Ulrich (1902–1996) (one of the original designers of the SIV building), who taught at the school for several years alongside other professors from Zagreb and Belgrade. The last architecture school created during the socialist period was founded in Pristina in 1978. By that time Kosovo was already home to numerous native archi­tects who had been educated in other academic centers. In some parts of the country, therefore, the very exis­tence of the architectural profession was a result of federalist policies. Although gathered into separate republican associations, professionals all belonged to a federal umbrella organization, which eventually assumed the name the Union of Architects of Yugoslavia. It organized con­gresses, symposia, and exhibitions, as well as running two consecutive architectural journals with explic­itly federal ambitions: Arhitektura, first published in Zagreb in 1947, and Arhitektura Urbanizam, initiated in Belgrade in 1960.15 However, the union’s most import­ant integrative function was arguably the organization of federal competitions, which were the chief vehicle for the mobility of architectural thinking and design across the republican borders. Even though juries sometimes conspired to favor local entries, some of the most iconic architectural achievements were the results of federal competitions won by architects from another republic. Standouts include the Macedonian Opera and Ballet in Skopje, the Stoteks Department Store in Novi Sad (fig. 5), and urban plans for Split 3, designed by Slovenian architects; the Aeronautical Museum in Belgrade and the multipurpose sports centers in Pristina (fig. 6), Novi Sad, and Split, all designed by Bosnian Fig. 2 Salon of the Socialist Republic architects; the Museum of the People’s Revolution in Sarajevo, designed by of Bosnia and Herzegovina inside the Federal Executive Council Building, Croatian architects; and the central monu­ment and the Battle of the Sutjeska Belgrade, Serbia, 1962. Zlatko Ugljen Memorial Center at Tjentište, designed by an artist and an architect from Serbia. (b. 1929). 3 Salon of the Socialist However, such mobility was still largely directed from the north to the south and Fig. Republic of Montengero inside the from the west to the east, reflecting as well as reinforcing the disparities in eco- Federal Executive Council Building, Belgrade, Serbia. Vojislav Dokic nomic and professional development across the federation. (1902–1984). In practice, uniting Yugoslavia in the wake of World War II had to occur both on a symbolic Fig. 4 Salon of the Socialist level and in very physical terms. On the one hand, in addition to being an occupation by Republic of Croatia inside the Executive Council Building, Axis powers, the war was also a devastating civil conflict that pitched native popu­lations Federal Belgrade, Serbia. Vjenceslav Richter against each other on ethnic and ideological grounds. On the other hand, Yugoslavia had (1917–2002).

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Fig. 3

170

eventually evolved into a rather exclusionary reification of the republican borders. Exemplary in this sense was the 1985 volume Architecture of the Twentieth Century, published in the series indicatively titled Art on the Soil of Yugoslavia, as if to suggest that Yugoslavia was nothing more than a territorial designation, devoid of any shared identity.12 With essays focused on each of the six republics, the book not only ignored the fine grain of the country’s complex cultural composition (for example, by completely omitting any mention of Serbia’s two autonomous provinces), it also made no effort whatsoever at discussing any commonalities, despite the fact that the entire book series itself was a collaborative project of three publishing houses from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In contrast, the monumental 1991 chronicle The Architecture of Yugoslavia, 1945—1990, written by Bosnian architect Ivan Štraus (b.1928), was a far more nuanced, sincere effort to treat the country as a whole, even if it paid its dues to individual republican scenes.13 Published on the very eve of the war, however, the book had no time to perform its integrative role, ultimately serving instead as an appropriate coda for the disappearing country.

Fig. 6

SPACES OF UNITY As the administrative heart of socialist Yugoslavia, New Belgrade was the site where the rituals of unity were performed at the highest political level. In line with this integrative function, the city emphatically espoused the universalizing language of modern archi­tecture. The key administration buildings, such as the SIV or the headquarters of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, were variations of the International Style, whereas the expansive Sava Center, a conference hall built to host the 1977 meeting of the Conference for European Security and Cooperation, embraced a high-tech aesthetic. Cultural institutions with pan-Yugoslav ambitions offered especially inspired versions of international modern ism, notably the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Vjenceslav Richter’s never-completed Museum of the Revolution. However, for most Yugoslavs, New Belgrade was a distant center that functioned predominantly on the symbolic level; in everyday life, pan-Yugoslav unity was more effectively performed through the networks of architectural pro­grams distributed across the country. A key example involved the commemoration of World War II. As Yugoslavia had suffered some of the highest casualty rates in Europe, the sheer need for recognition was very real. But commemoration also had a strong ideological connotation as it conflated the memory of civilian casualties with that of the liberation

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Fig. 5 Boro and Ramiz Palace of Youth and Sport, Pristina,Kosovo. 1974-77. Zivorad Jankovic (1924—1990) and Halid Muhasilovic (b.1934). Fig. 6 Stoteks Department Store, Novi Sad, Serbia. 1968—72. Fig. 7 Museum of People’s Revolution, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 1958-62. Boris Magas (1930—2013), Edo Smidihen (1930—2005), and Radovan Horvat (d. 2016).

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Fig. 7

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Fig. 5

almost no modern transport infrastructure, which, combined with a complicated topography, greatly impeded the ambitious modernization plans. Ethnic reconciliation and physical development thus went hand in hand, as demonstrated by one of the first large-scale postwar projects, the construction of the country’s first modern road. Named the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, it connected Belgrade and Zagreb, the capitals of Serbs and Croats, the two most populous ethnicities, who had engaged in intense interethnic strife during the war. The project eventually extended further to Macedonia and Slovenia, connecting four of the six Yugoslav republics to become the country’s main “spine” and facilitating not only interior mobility but also allowing the arrival of foreign tourists and connecting Central Europe with Greece and Turkey. A useful piece of physical infra structure, the highway demonstrated unity in practice, as young Yugoslavs from all over the country took part in volunteer brigades that contributed to its construc­tion , joined by idealistic young foreigners from the West and the East. The project’s symbolic significance was such that it inspired two simultaneous exhibitions in Zagreb and Belgrade in 1950 to commemorate and pub­licize the completion of the first phase (figs. 8 and 9). Designed by Zagreb architects Vjenceslav Richter (1917–2002) and Zvonimir Radić (1921–1985) and painters Aleksandar Srnec (1924–2010) and Ivan Picelj (1924–2011), the exhibitions signaled the ascendance of an avant-garde visual language, which the group’s mem­bers would successfully employ to represent Yugoslavia at the most important international shows, including Expo 58 in Brussels. In the early postwar years, mass volunteer labor was a matter of practical necessity in a war-ravaged country sorely lacking an educated cadre and modern technology. So-called youth labor campaigns (omladinske radne akcije) were not only a means to perform the necessary work; they also offered opportunities for ideo­logical edification and upward social mobility, as many participants acquired various kinds of training on the construction sites, from basic literacy to professional skills. There was a great deal of genuine enthusiasm in this early period, as millions of young brigadiers built new roads, railway lines, dams, irrigation canals, fac­tories, and cities. One of the largest early sites of volun­teer labor was New Belgrade , where in the late 1940s bare-handed youths from all over the country filled in the marshlands with sand to consolidate the unsta­ble terrain for the new federal capital. Another exam­ple was the Adriatic Highway, whose route along the coast from Slovenia, through Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Montenegro enabled the emergence of mass tourism. As the country developed , however, the practical need for mass volunteer labor abated, and youth labor campaigns shifted to less physically taxing projects such as afforestation, the construction of youth resorts, or archaeological excavations. At the same time , the motivation to participate also shifted to travel and socialization with peers from other parts of the country , as volunteering in effect became a form of active vacationing under the banner of brotherhood and unity.16 An entire visual culture promoting, recording, and celebrating youth campaigns emerged: posters , publications , films, vinyl record covers, uniforms, etc., were all regularly produced, sometimes by Yugoslavia’s leading designers and artists.17

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Fig. 9

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Fig. 8

Fig. 8 Highway exhibition at the Cvijeta Zuzorie Art Pavilion in Belgrade. 1950. Ivan Picelj (1924-2011), Vjenceslav Richter (1917-2002), Aleksandar Srnec (1924-2010), and Zvonimir Radie (1921-1985). Fig. 9 Zagrebv Highway exhibition at Zagreb Art Pavilion. 1950. Ivan Picelj (1924-2011), Vjenceslav Richter (19172002), Aleksandar Srnec (1924-2010), and Zvonimir Radce ( 1921-1985).

struggle and the socialist revolu­tion, producing a patriotic amalgam intended to bind the country together. Built by thousands, war memori­als punctuated the entire territory, creating an invisible network spanning from the centers of the largest cities to distant uninhabited landscapes. The most important sites became destinations of patriotic tourism, visited by millions every year, with maps, guidebooks, and art-historical studies published in huge print runs in hand (fig.10).18 As groups of school children, veterans, workers from self-managing enterprises, or simply indi­vidual families on vacation arrived, their participation encouraged a secular communion with their fellow citizens across the country. In aesthetic terms, however, there was nothing unitary about these sites of memory. Not only were they extremely diverse in terms of their typology—from individual sculptures to memorial cemeteries, parks, museums, and all kinds of hybrid programs that inte­grated commemoration with everyday life—but they also offered opportunities for a great deal of artistic experimentation. Even though realistic sculpture domi­nated early commemorative projects, the first experiments that departed from the conventions emerged soon after Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Soviet sphere in 1948. A veritable explosion of creativity, however, began in the late 1950s; by 1961—the twentieth anni­versary of the communist-led uprising-it was clear that the aesthetic terms of commemoration were radically redrawn.19 At that time, architects and artists such as Vojin Bakić (1915–1992), Bogdan Bogdanović (1922–2010), Dušan Džamonja (1928–2009), Zdenko Kolacio (1912–1987) , and Miodrag Živković (b.1928) were already well on their way to developing their own recognizable poetics. Departing from convention, each pioneered certain strategies that soon became the new mainstream, replicated both by their professional peers and vernacular builders. With commissions scattered across the entire country, their personal oeuvres in effect embodied national unity. Bogdan Bogdanović’s career was emblematic in this respect. In thirty years as an active designer, he built memorials in all of the Yugoslav republics and autono­ mous provinces except for Slovenia. His idiosyncratic, Surrealistinspired language of exuberant biomorphic shapes and abundant ornament sought to communicate the optimistic message that life overcomes death even in the face of the worst atrocities; in keeping with that message, many of his memorials were conceived as public gathering spaces, where commemoration became integrated with daily life (fig.11). 20 Both in practice and in his writings Bogdanovic adamantly contradicted the orthodoxies of high modernism, in turn deliberately dissolving architecture’s supposed autonomy by merg­ing it with landscape and sculpture into an indistinguishable whole. A different kind of integration occurred in the 1970s, when commemorative programs became increasingly ambitious and inherently more architectural, con­ceived as full-fledged community centers, frequently in smaller provincial towns. Slovenian architect Marko Music (b.1941)produced some of the most convincing articulations for such programs by winning a remark­able number of competitions across the country. His project for Kolasin in Montenegro is a standout achieve­ment, alongside the one for Bosanski Samac in Bosnia and Herzegovina (fig.12) and the never-completed project for Niksic in Montenegro. Always based on intricate geometries, Music’s buildings exhibited a great deal of spatial and formal com­plexity that also defied modernist certainties, although in a very different way from Bogdanovic’s organicism. If the commemoration of the communal liberation struggle produced a special form of patriotic tourism, then actual recreational tourism in turn encouraged new forms of commonality. Just as in many other mod­ern states, domestic tourism in Yugoslavia was bundled up with nation-building efforts as a way of learning to identify with one’s own country. However, it acquired an additional ideological dimension aimed at ethnic reconciliation through direct encounter. Especially pronounced in the early postwar period, this ideology lingered on even after it was replaced by more hedonistic motivations. 21 Socialism added an additional layer: in 1946, the state introduced two weeks of annual paid leave, aiming to wrest holiday making from the realm of a bourgeois activity and make it available to everyone through a system of subsidies and socialized resorts. That holidays should be spent outside of one’s own place of residence was far from obvious; it required convincing and educating the population to turn “work­ers into tourists.”22 To further compound the matter, from the mid-1950s onward, tourism acquired an increasingly significant commercial role, as the emer­gent mass middle class, unsatisfied with modest stan­dards of socialized holiday making, embraced tourism as a consumer activity. Even more importantly for tourism as a commercial industry, foreign visitors began arriving around the same time, adding yet another facet to an already complex situation.

Fig. 11

Popular destinations—predominantly on the Adriatic coast, which received the lion’s share of foreign and domestic tourists—thus became massive social condensers of sorts, bringing together locals and visitors of varied motivations , ethnic identities, and class backgrounds. The encounter was not always happy. As both the newly minted hosts and their guests learned how to play their respective roles, frictions arose from, among other things, ethnic animosities, a clash of cultural codes, and the failure to fulfill both the expected standards of service on the hosts’ side and proper conduct on the guests’. 23 However, as tourism developed into a full­fledged industry, such conflicts abated for the most part; hosts and guests even sometimes developed long­term friendships, especially when locals started renting out rooms in their own homes as an increasingly lucra­tive private business. 24 Ultimately, most commercial tourism facilities themselves came to effectively func­tion as social condensers: from the coast to the moun­tains, from lakeside towns to inland spas, hotels with their restaurants, bars, and open-air terraces almost invariably served not only the visitors from elsewhere, but also the local communities as their social hubs. 25 In many instances, the design encouraged such integra­ tion: for example, the permeable lobbies, restaurants, and terraces of the elegant Maestral Hotel (1965–66) in Brela invited unrestricted access, as if aiming to integrate the guests not only with the beautiful natural surroundings, but also with the small local community (fig.7). Even the most upscale resorts exhibited similar openness, as was the case at Haludovo Hotel (1969–72) on the island of Krk (figs.5 and 6), fre­quented by international celebrities, politicians, and gamblers. Although Yugoslav citizens were not allowed to use the property’s casino, ordinary tourists and local inhabitants had free access to the resort’s expansive, carefully landscaped beach, in sharp contrast with today’s highly segregated forms of luxury tourism . As with war memorials, tourism facilities proved to be fruitful grounds for architectural experimentation. Due to the sheer volume of new construction, the Adriatic coast provided the most consistent opportunities for exploration, as the design of commercial hotels shifted from elegant modernist tower-andslab typologies of the early 1960s to the increasingly complex group forms and megastructure s in the following decade. A comparable motivation to harmonize new construction with the landscape is recognizable in numerous mountain resorts through highly abstracted form s evocative of mountain peaks and ridges or monumentalized vernacular huts; such attempts only occa­ sionally veered into explicit vernacularism. Urban hotels, in turn, produced some of the most spectacu­lar examples of brutalism , often in their structurally expressive forms, that, for better or worse, strongly contrasted their surroundings. Even though her own hotel in Uzice falls in the latter category, Svetlana Kana Radević’s (1937–2000) hotel in Podgorica is a rare example of an urban hotel that grows out of the natural landscape , its soft sculptural forms and large pebbles built into its concrete walls blending with the banks of the nearby river Moraca. One of the paradoxes of Yugoslav tourism was that the vast majority of its celebrated architectural achieve­ments belonged to the commercial realm, despite the fact that socialized holidaymaking nominally retained ideological significance until the collapse of the country. Due to their modest standards, social resorts were built with lesser architectural ambitions, but even some indisputably remarkable buildings remained largely unknown. A case in point is the Children’s Sanatorium for Pulmonary Diseases in Krvavica, Croatia (1961–64), a spectacular architectural machine for healing hovering on pilotis above the surrounding pine forest and the nearby beach. Designed by architect Rikard Marasovic (1913–1987) to allow maximum access to sun, air, and greenery , it reinterpreted typical Corbusian themes in a highly inspired and innovative way. Abandoned after the collapse of Yugoslavia, the structure only became widely known recently thanks to the efforts of local activist s, suggesting that there may be other simi­larly outstanding structures that remain unknown and neglected across the former country (fig.13). The Krvavica sanatorium was another instance of a social condenser. It provided jobs for the local villag­ers as well opportunities to socialize, for example, by Fig. 12

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Fig. 10

Fig. 10 Selected Memorial s of the People’s Liberation War of Yugoslavia. 1975. Cartographer: Ivan Gradiser (1923—1986). Fig. 11 Slobodiste Memorial Park, Krusevac, Serbia. 1960-65. Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922—2010). View of the “Valley of Mem ory.” 2009. Fig. 12 Mitar Trifunovic Uco Memorial and Cultural Center, Bosanski Sama, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 1975—78. Marko Music (b. 1941).

Fig. 13

CONSTRUCTING REPUBLICAN IDENTITIES The obverse side of the current 10 eurocent coin issued in Slovenia shows a striking building: a massive conical tower rising above a classical colonnade inscribed with the words “Cathedral of Freedom” (fig.16). Although never executed, this design came to be widely understood as a preeminent architectural symbol of Slovenia’s statehood , as the land for the first time in its modern history acquired the prerogatives of a nation-state. Pro­duced by the celebrated architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957)—himself an iconic national figure associated with the Slovenian identity the same way as Antoni Gaudi is associated with Catalonia-the design resulted from an actual commission for the Parliament of the People’s Republic of Slovenia in 1947, thus locating the roots of Slovenia’s statehood at the very beginning of the socialist period. With a height of 120 meters, the proposal was considered too gargantuan to be realized, especially at a time of extreme scarcity. Instead, Plečnik’s own stu­dent Vinko Glanz (1902–1977) ultimately produced a more modest building constructed in the 1950s. In the following two decades, it was joined by the adjacent Rev­olution Square complex, designed by another student of Plečnik’s , Edvard Ravnikar(1907–1993). This entire space became the heart of Slovenian nationhood , the same role that it continues to play today under the name of Republic Square. Although unbuilt, Plečnik’s “Cathedral of Freedom” was emblematic of the transformation that Yugo­ slavia’s major cities underwent after the war as the federalist reorganization of the country facilitated the establishment of six republican capitals and two capitals of autonomous provinces. New government buildings, party headquarters, and cultural institutions—national libraries, theaters, universities, and academies of sciences and arts—were all constructed in response to these demands. Some of the capitals, such as Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, only had to expand existing programs, established before the war; in other instances, metropolitan infrastructure had to be built from scratch. When Titograd (previously and today again known as Podgorica) became the capital of Montenegro in 1946, the small town of 13,000 inhabitants lay in ruins after massive wartime bombings. And when the similarly sized city of Pristina became the capital of the autonomous province of Kosovo the following year, it contained hardly any modern buildings. Over the following decades, both cities were not only equipped with a range of new administrative, cultural, and education buildings, but each also became the focus of urbanization and of industrial development, growing in size multifold, as did all other Yugoslav capi­tals. These cities Fig. 14

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also became centers of professional organizations in architecture and, with the exception of Titograd and Novi Sad (the capital of Vojvodina), of architectural education. The architectural responses to these transformations varied as much as the six salons of the SIV building. In some instances, they followed modernism’s universaliz­ing ethos. For example, Ivan Vitić’s (1917–1986) Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia (1961–68) in Zagreb (popularly known as the “Dice”) is an exercise in high modernist abstraction that advances the self-perception of Croatia as a progressive modern nation. In other instances, architects sought to articu­late more specific representations of national culture, but even then, vernacular references were rarely literal, sublimated as they were through modern technology and formal language. Petar Muličkovski’s (b.1929) Central Committee of the League of Communists of Macedonia (1970) referenced vernacular motifs through technologically advanced solutions: its deeply cantilevered floors, suspended from the load-bearing cores, evoked the overhangs of traditional Macedonian half-timber houses, whereas its facades in concrete and aluminum featured highly abstracted folk ornaments. 27 However, the most iconic example of this genre is not in Skopje but fifty miles to the north, in Pristina: the National and University Library of Kosovo (1971–82), designed by Andrija Mutnjaković (b. 1929). 28 Using high-tech materials and a “systemic” neo-avant-garde language, the building’s numerous cubes and domes­the basic elements of both Byzantine and Ottoman architecture—in effect sought to reconcile Kosovo’s multiethnic and multi-religious composition. Beyond formal representations, the most consistent efforts to formulate what later became known as critical regionalism occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The impetus first came from Plecnik’s student Dusan Grabrijan (1899–1952), who arrived in Sarajevo in the 1920s and became enchanted by the vernacular archi­tecture of the Balkans, which he studied incessantly until his untimely death in 1952. He was joined in the 1930s by his Croatian colleague Juraj Neidhardt (1901–1979), a one-time employee of Peter Behrens and Le nation. Their collaborative tour de force, the massive volume titled Architecture of Bosnia and the Way to Modernity (1957), featured much of Grabrijan’s ethno­ graphic research, but what made it especially remark­able was Neidhardt’s meticulous graphic layout and his many contemporary designs inspired by local vernacular architecture. 29 The argument went beyond a formal reading to claim that spatial for­mations, material textures, and social and urban concerns of traditional Bosnian architecture constituted an ur-modernism that only needed to be technologically updated in order to serve as the basis for a new architecture of the region. Neidhardt’s signature realization of these principles should have been the National Assembly (parliament) of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which he won a competition in 1955: it was a summation of typological, spatial, and formal features of the local ver­nacular rendered in modern materials in a single struc­ture. As built twenty years later, however, the project was reduced to a more generic high modernism that communicated little of the original regionalist content. Neidhardt’s built oeuvre was limited, but his teaching was formative for the generations of students at the Faculty of Architecture in Sarajevo, none more so than Zlatko Ugljen (b.1929). In a series of projects that consis­tently fit the label of critical regionalism, Ugljen sought inspiration both from the immediate physical surround­ings and from the broader cultural settings, producing an oeuvre as varied as Bosnia and Herzegovina’s own diverse landscapes. Šerefudin White Mosque (1969– 79) in the town of Visoko is certainly a masterpiece, but so were several other projects, all tragically destroyed in the 1990s war. A case in point was the hotel Ruža: constructed in the vicinity of the historical core of Mostar, it consisted of not a single building, but rather an intricate labirynth of small stone structures connected through internal and external passageways and interwoven with the surrounding traditional fabric (fig.15). Unlike the nearby sixteenth-century Old Bridge, destroyed by shelling in 1993, the Ruža was never rebuilt and today exists only through surviving drawings and photographs. CONCLUSION Socialist Yugoslavia failed with the collapse of the deli­cate balance between diversity and unity that supported the country for more than forty years. In architectural terms, however, it should perhaps not be considered a failure: it produced a remarkably diverse architecture that nevertheless bespoke commonality through the many integrative functions it performed. Building on the architectural cultures developed before the war, fed­eralism conditioned the produc- Fig. 13 Children’s Sanatorium for Diseases, Krvavica, tion of architecture in multiple ways, most importantly through the organization of the Pulmonary Croatia. 1961–64. Rikard Marasovic profession and by defining the architectural programs to be constructed. What it did not (1913-1987). do was prescribe how these programs should be articulated: archi­tects were left with a Fig. 14 Pelegrin Hotel, Cavtat, Croatia. 1960–63. David Finci (b. great deal of agency in shaping the fledgling federal state and its constituent parts, in 1931). Exterior view. 2009.

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watching TV together at a time when TV sets were still rare in private homes. 26 In addition, the sanatorium’s patients came from all over Yugoslavia, as the chil­dren’s parents were employees of the largest institution in the country, the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA). Originating in the struggle against fascism, the army was seen at once as the source, the guarantor, and the vehicle of Yugoslav unity, but it was also the country’s most powerful architectural client. The Y PA com missioned a number of impressive buildings, including its own headquarters and the massive Military Medical Academy in Belgrade, as well as numerous tourism facilities, such as the elegant Pelegrin Hotel (1960–63) in Kupari near Dubrovnik (fig. 14). However, the army’s most lasting architectural legacy was not a single building, but rather a set of building standards developed to house its own employ­ees. Unlike most other socialist countries, Yugoslavia never standardized mass housing , which accounted for the relative diversity of the production in term s of layouts, materials, systems, and forms. The one exception were the buildings developed for the army: with tens of thousands of employees—including its own archi­tects—the army had both the resources and the need to standardize the mass production of the apartments it financed, thus controlling the quality of their design across the entire country. However, because housing was often produced through collaboration of different investors—state institutions, self-managing enter­prises, local communities , etc.—army standards often seeped into the civilian construction and came to be adopted informally by others. Thus the YPA, through housing, united the Yugoslavs in everyday life in a more profound and long-lasting way than either its coercive power or its ideological proclamations could.

turn producing a vibrant architectural culture irreduc­ible to simple ideological slogans. Among the federal and republican institutions, war memorials, resorts, and other programs, there were ample opportunities to both experiment and to develop consistent design expertise and poetics. In turn, the greatly varied natural and cultural landscapes inspired multiple regionalist explorations that complemented the accommodation of the universalizing strides of modernity. The sheer density of such diverse architectural phenomena renders Yugoslavia not only worth studying, but also rather unique in post-World War II archetecture.

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Fig. 15

Fig. 16

Fig. 15 Ruza Hotel, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 1974–75, destroyed c.1994. Zlatko Ugljen (b. 1929). Plan of the project in its urban surroundings. Fig. 16 Slovenian Parliament Building, Ljubljana. 1947–48. Joze Plecnik (1872-1957). Section. 1: 200. 1947.

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Postwar architecture in Yugoslavia was produced under a form of socialism defined by the system of self-management. A massive, continuously evolving experiment, the project of self-management attributed a great deal of agency to architects and urban planners, enabling the emergence of a range of coherent design cultures. In fact, architecture acted as an intermediary between what Max Weber defined as “value rational­ity” and “instrumental rationality,” that is, between the pragmatic means and the ethical goals of social­ist modernization. It was through such mediation that the architectural profession played an outsized role in the transformation of an unevenly developed and pre­ dominantly rural country into an industrialized and urbanized one. One of several social systems of the “third way” devel­oped in the second half of the twentieth century, self-management was first instituted in 1950, in the wake of Yugoslavia’s unexpected expulsion from the Soviet bloc two years earlier. It combined the native experiences of self-organization developed during the antifascist resistance with ideas from Karl Marx’s early works as well as nineteenth-century utopian socialism and anarchism. In direct opposition to the highly cen­tralized and bureaucratized system established during’ the country’s short-lived alliance with the USSR, self-management aimed at a gradual “withering away of the state.’ Seen as an “alienating political force,” the state apparatus was to be replaced, in theory, with direct democracy in both the economic and political life. In accordance with the slogan “factories to the workers,” the management of economic resources and the accumulation of capital were gradually transferred from the central state to workers’ councils. Political life similarly revolved around a complex and decentralized network of representatives, even though the Communist Party, renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, continued as the only political party in the county. The system instigated unprecedented develop­ment in the region: it is often cited that, in the late 1950s, Yugoslavia had the second highest growth rate in the world. However, it also produced numerous crises and contradictions: between direct democracy and the de facto dominance of a single party, between a planned economy and a market, between the instrumental rationality of development and social idealism, and between individualism and collectivism. Architecture often played the role of intermediary in these conflicts, with architects themselves seeking to find ways to articulate the theory’s vaguely defined new societal forms and relations. The ideology of self­management defended such cultural autonomy and cre­ative freedoms as specifically Yugoslav values. Cultural autonomy, however, referred not only to aesthetic and conceptual questions but also to the right of architects to self-organize and develop working conditions condu­cive to experimentation. Thus, the massive, centralized design institutes characteristic in many other socialist states gave way to a wide range of professional organiza­tions in Yugoslavia. Architects most often practiced as employees of architectural offices organized as small, self-managing companies, or working at the in-house design offices of large construction companies, or in the larger urban planning institutes established in each federal republic and in major cities. They could even work as freelancers, albeit with reduced responsibili­ties.1 In addition, universities and scientific institutes contained subunits licensed for design practice, which provided staff with a framework for connecting research and practice. This wide array of professional organiza­tions produced specific niches of expertise and channels of activity, all of which allowed the profession to influ­ence the process of urbanization with unusual freedom from market pressures or political incursions. Moreover, the changing pace of modernization, extreme decentralization, the continuous reforms of economic and political life, and the practice of “criticism of every­thing existing” all played a part in preventing a stan­dardization of typologies and codification of building norms. Instead, architects negotiated between state authorities, complicated systems of funding, expert bodies, and the construction industry. Well-organized professional organizations and a rich landscape of architectural magazines provided platforms for con­fronting differing views and discussing architecture within the context of the broader social concerns.

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THE WHY AND HOW OF MODERN LIVING The political and economic priorities of self-managing socialism embraced the idea of a modern, industrial society designed for an urban working class. This vision mobilized mass migration from the countryside to the cities. In the 1950s, the “shock of modernization” was significant, and the “housing culture” became the cen­tral issue not only in architectural circles, but also in ideological debates. Intended to be available to all, a functional apartment with modern amenities became a herald for the newly emancipated citizen, especially women who were to be freed from household chores in order to become more broadly included in the work force and public life. However, reality offered a far more complex challenge. On the one hand, some of the relatively luxurious apartment buildings constructed for lucrative companies and state institutions became architectural icons of the 1950s for their aesthetic ambitions and spatial complexity (fig.1). In contrast, however, ordinary hous­ing was subject to the rationalization demanded by a state bureaucracy in the early stage of urbanization. Architects and designers reacted against this situation in alliance with institutions such as trade union s and women’s associations. The ensuing debate on the social role of housing addressed both “the Why” (emancipa­tion) and “the How” (modernization) of the living, pro­viding a direct link between self-managing socialism and architectural modernism. Furthermore, research in interior and product design became a channel to trans­mit emerging neo-avant-garde concepts to the widest audience. Concerted efforts to widely disseminate ideas sur­rounding the housing culture began in the mid-1950s through a series of popular didactic exhibitions and symposia organized in collaboration with architect s and a broad range of social organizations. Though similar to concurrent exhibitions around Europe, these were clearly geared toward building a self-managed socialist society. The pioneering event, an exhibi­tion entitled Housing for Our Conditions, took place in Ljubljana in 1956. An accompanying symposium dis­cussed broad economic, technological, and aesthetic aspects relevant to housing and stressed the functional role of the apartment within the work process: “Special attention must be devoted to the psycho-hygienic con­ditions of housing: a rest-period for the recreation and restitution of the working capacity of laborers.”2 The organic integration of housing into the wider currents of socialist life took on greater significance in a series of exhibitions entitled Family and Household, organized in 1957, 1958, and 1960 at the new Zagreb Fair (fig.2). The second iteration was especially noteworthy in this respect, focusing on a “housing community,” that is, a CIAM-style neighborhood unit equipped with all the necessary amenities: schools, kindergartens, health centers, retail shops, and community centers. These neighborhood units—meant to be developed utilizing self-management funds and with the participation of its citizens in the decisionmaking, as well as to function as self-managing communities—thus rendered archi­tecture as the crucial mediator between the individual and society at large. An incredible 1,250,000 visitors from all over Yugoslavia saw the exhibition, making a powerful argument for architects to exert greater pres­sure toward improving both the building industry and standards of living.3 Public exhibitions on housing all included exemplary apartment settings and simple, functional modern furniture, factors militantly promoted as signs of a new era. Designs for everyday life provided a conve­nient link between the local rising culture of abstract art and humanistic societal goals. EXAT 51 Fig. 1 Kemikalija residential building, (Experimental Studio 51), a group of Zagreb-based architects, designers, and Zagreb, Croatia.1953–56.

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ARCHITECTURE FOR A SELF-MANAGING SOCIALISM

Maroje Mrduljas

Post-World War II reconstruction triggered a wide­ranging discussion on how exactly the built forms of housing and education should be conceived in order to fit the vision of a more open and urbanized society. The advancement of a socialist market economy in the mid-1960s led toward integrated design, which applied systemic and interdisciplinary methods within a com­plex framework of funding systems and construction methods. This in turn enabled the mass-production of high-quality social housing. The peak of integrated design in the 1970s coincided as well with a great deal of thought devoted to the design of specialized typologies such as kindergartens. This desire to emancipate the population though lifelong education and active participation in cultural practices also introduced the evolu­tion of multifunctional cultural centers, which became the focus of Yugoslav civic life in the 1960s and 1970s. These various typologies all resulted in part from the continuous exchange of concepts and ideas between architecture and self-managing socialism. While the relationship between architecture and the social system was not linear, architectural agency did have the power to outline the contours of a more progressive society, at the same time offering a critique of modernization. Fig. 1

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EDUCATION REFORM MOVEMENTS Concurrent to the debates around modern housing and its role in society, throughout the 1950s school infrastructure also received massive investments. Illiteracy rates in the country were rapidly dropping, but neither the pedagogical models nor the prevailing standardized school Fig. 2 Exhibition poster, Family designs corresponded to the vision of a progres­sive, self-managed society. The highest and Household, Zagreb, Croatia. levels of govern­ment engaged this “schooling explosion,”10 responding to a reform move1958. Design: Aleksandar ment that called for active, individual­ized, and practical education in order to produce a Ljahnicky (b. 1933).

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Fig. 3 Yugoslav Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Housing, Milan Triennial. 1957. Fig. 4 Model apartment at Family and Household, Zagreb , Croatia. 1958. Bernardo Bernardi (1921–1985).

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artists, returned to the origins of his­torical avant-gardes, advocating creative freedom and linking the concept of synthesis of the visual arts to the total transformation of society. “Synthesis of the visual arts,” a position perhaps most famously formulated by Josep Lluís Sert, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion in their 1943 paper “Nine Points on Monumentality” and later discussed in CIAM meetings, thus acquired in the Yugoslav context an ideological connotation that ascribed a more comprehensive progressive role to the idea. In 1959, Vjenceslav Richter (1917–2002), the most visible member of the group, advocated the importance of synthesis by claiming that “in the cultural sphere, the visual arts–including architecture and design–became a social factor and a democratic category of such importance, as was attributed to the workers and social self-management in the social and political spheres.”4 Putting their ideology into practice, EXAT 51’s members helped create the Studio for Industrial Design (SID), which brought together twenty-eight architects, artists, and designers around the goals of “radical design for industrial objects” and “the promotion of the art of the avant-garde” in order to “raise the living standards of our people.”5 The group’s most important appearance was at the Milan Triennial in 1957 (fig. 3). In competition with such design superpowers as Sweden and Italy, the SID, representing Yugoslavia, received a silver medal for its totally designed apart­ment equipped with modern furniture, accessories, and artworks. Though a showcase of an ideal Yugoslav apartment, the majority of items on display were only prototypes. However, EXAT 51’s member Bernardo Bernardi (1921–1985), as well as Slovenian designer Niko Kralj (1920–2013), who also contributed to the Milan Triennial, eventually established successful col­laborations with the furniture industry to mass-produce their designs, which became widely used in domestic and institutional settings, as well as in the hotels on the Adriatic coast (fig.4). Furthermore, modern furni­ture was a successful export product, especially at East European markets. The goal of both EXAT 51 and SID to redirect the industry toward a more comprehensive application of “synthesis” led to the establishment of the Center for Industrial Design (CID). Founded in 1963 by a group of art critics, theoreticians, and architects associated with the international artistic movement New Tendencies,6 it was also in direct contact with Argentine designer and theorist Tomas Maldonado and the Ulm School of Design, the highly influential German school where Maldonado taught. The CID was not a design office but rather an independent institution that advocated design as the means of integration of “production and culture, culture and consumption.”7 CID was critical of instrumental modernization and the emerging Yugoslav market economy, following the argument that the key role of design is to place the entire system of material produc­tion on a value basis—that of a harmonious development of the physical environment. While the CID’s vision of design’s central role in development of self-management understood as “nee-humanistic version of industrial civilization”8 proved to be utopian, in the following decades the organization collaborated with various state institutions and design and architectural offices to introduce multidisciplinary methodology in various fields, from visual communications to housing. Discussions around housing culture were now firmly entrenched in Yugoslav society. The professional and popular press, including women’s magazines, offered extensive coverage of all activities pertaining to hous­ing. Department stores that sold furniture began to provide consultancy services on interior design, and the topic was also included in various public seminars and workshops. Inspired by such efforts, a student at a work­ers’ university aptly summed it up in 1963: “I intend to continue to carry out reforms in my apartment.”9 Housing and interior design, too, were a battlefield for self-managed socialism.

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new crop of creative individuals suitable for self-managing socialism.11 Educators and architects both recognized their mutual ambitions for reform, and thus the archi­tecture of educational institutions became the testing grounds for new pedagogical concepts. A series of interdisciplinary symposia called for the abolishment of tra­ditional teaching formats and rigid typological conven­ tions, stressing instead the psychological experience of space and demanding the use of more open configura­tions, dynamic layouts, and flexible furniture.12 A 1954 symposium in Ljubljana, entitled From the Old to the New School, was devoted specifically to educational institutions, with Swiss architect Alfred Roth, the influ­ential CIAM delegate known for his experiments with school typologies,13 as its keynote speaker. Despite con­tinuing material restrictions, opportunities for experi­mentation were broad as the typological standards for educational institutions were defined merely as general recommendations. Public competitions served as the key instrument for research and encouraged the devel­opment of advanced solutions. An architectural competition for a new school in the small town of Stražišču pri Kranju coincided with the symposium in Ljubljana and produced a convincing result: Danilo Fürst’s winning entry, realized in several phases (1959–74), envisioned a system of pavilions situated in a park, each designed according to the specificities of different age groups. The wing for younger pupils was located on a ground floor and had a flexible layout, whereas the block of classrooms for senior pupils was organized around a large common hall encouraging social interactions. Fürst’s rational tectonic language also announced the tendency toward modernist aesthetics for the majority of educational buildings in Yugoslavia. In the following years, a number of experimental schools were designed throughout Yugoslavia. The highly praised France Preseren Elementary School in Kranj (1960–68), designed by Stanko Kristi (b.1922), combined the architect’s interest in typological inno­vation with attention to the perceptual effects of archi­tecture (fig. 5). The project featured a branching system of public interior spaces interconnected with atria , which enabled a fine gradation of the school’s social life. The intertwining of nature and architecture, the scale adapted to children, and a thorough attention to detail in the building, constructed in exposed concrete and wood, all contributed to the intimate atmosphere. Vjenceslav Richter’s Catering School in Dubrovnik (1961–62), deconstructed the typology even more radi­cally, introducing a structuralist approach based on the multiplication of a basic compositional unit (fig. 6). A dense fabric of smaller volumes and exterior spaces. follows the slope to form a non-hierarchical agglom­eration, which may be expanded according to need. The labyrinthine circulation spaces are adapted to the topography and meander between the classrooms, adding to the informal atmosphere of the institution but also echoing traditionally dense Mediterranean settlements. The many architectural experiments conducted in the wake of the 1963 earthquake in the Macedonian capi­tal of Skopje also included educational institutions. Significant inspiration came from Alfred Roth’s own Pestalozzi Elementary School (1965–69), a Swiss dona­tion, which included a large multipurpose hall and typological disposition that avoided long corridors in favor of more compact layout directly connected with the entrance plaza. Janko Konstantinov (1926–2010), an architect with an unusual international career who had worked for Alvar Aalto and Victor Gruen, explored a more expressive architectural language and an almost monumental approach to public spaces. His Pedagogi­cal Academy in Skopje (1969) was organized around a multifunctional, top-lit interior courtyard and included a circular “tower” with a library accessible from the public space. Konstantinov’s Nikola Karev Medical High School in Skopje (1969–73) reflected a partial realization of the architect’s fascina­tion with Arata Isozaki’s Cities in the Sky and included a large, linear public plaza covered by a hovering block of classrooms. Such experiments culminated in Georgi Konstantinovski’s (b.1930) Goce Delcev Student Dor­mitory (1969–77), an impressive complex of concrete towers linked by a continuous flying ring of various public spaces. With the ongoing development of educational facilities, kindergartens began attracting more attention as a standard offering in the housing communities. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, construction of kindergartens was backlogged, and old-fashioned , basic care had gained precedence over the education and socialization of society’s youngest citizens. This delay triggered an increased interest in typological research. For example, in 1961, Boris Magaš Fig. 5 France Prešeren Elementary (1930-2013) won a competition for a typical kindergarten in Zagreb by propos- School, Kranj, Slovenia. 1960–68. Stanko Kristi (b. 1922). Interior view. ing a formally elegant and compact system of atria and interior spaces; ulti- Fig. 6 Catering School, Dubrovnik, mately only two schools were built, and in altered versions. Following Magaš’s Croatia. 1961–62. Vjenceslav Richter Model of the second research, several diverse and flexible modu­lar systems that could accommo- (1917–2002). phase. Aleksandar Karolyi Archive. date various capaci­ties and adapt to the local contexts were subsequently Fig. 7 Mladi Rod Kinder garten, introduced. Radical, one-off experiments appeared as well. The futuristic Mladi Ljubljana, Slovenia. 1969–72. Stanko Kristi ( b. 1922). View of the class Rod Kindergarten (1969–72) (fig. 7) designed in Ljubljana by Stanko Kristi, and room clusters.

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INTEGRATED DESIGN After a decade of rapid economic growth in the 1950s, Yugoslavia experienced a slowdown that provoked another round of systemic reforms, instituted in 1965, which led to the significant enhancement of market mechanisms. The result was a system distinct from both capitalist market economies and socialist central planning. While a degree of planning was retained, the self-managing enterprises now competed on the domestic market as well as internationally, and powerful domestic banks managed investments rather than the state. With the liberalization of economic life, the construction of mass housing began to boom as self­managing enterprises and institutions sought to provide housing for their employees by purchasing apartments that were constructed to be sold on a socialist market. The reforms, however, caused new tensions to emerge: increasing unemployment and growing economic emi­ gration, the rise of a “techno-managerial elite,” and the continuous problems that arose from an inefficient, bureaucratic apparatus. At the same time, the results of urbanization were viewed as alienating, and the housing crisis remained unresolved. The system compensated for these shortcomings by opening room for individual construction, supported through official loans. The construction industry responded by developing a large number of prefabricated homes that could be sold on the market (thus wood processing companies Marles and Jelovica in Slovenia, Spačva in Croatia (fig. 11), and Krivaja in Bosnia Herzegovina achieved considerable commercial success). The modern apartment, subsidized by the state, became the most desired product of the self-managed social­ism. However, the continuing housing shortages and the inflexibility of urban planning forced much of the new individual construction to occur outside of the legal sys­tem, leading to unregulated settlements on the outskirts of large cities. The architectural profession responded to the housing crises by implementing an integrated design, which sought to increase the efficiency and eco­nomic performance of housing developments without sacrificing spatial qualities. Fig. 8 Mihaljevac Kindergarten In order to achieve such goals, architectural concepts and construction meth­ods needed and Nursery (today Vjeverica to be coordinated in all scales, from small details to the whole building to the entire urban Kindergarten), Zagreb, Croatia. 197275. Boris Magas (1930–2013). View layout. of the roof. One of the answers to achieving these goals was prefab­rication. Since the late Fig. 9 Grigor Vitez Kindergarten 1950s, several innovative local systems of prefabrication were already being (today Izvor Kindergarten), Samobor, Croatia. 1971–74. lvan Crnkovic developed, notably JU-61 for the Zagreb-based Jugomont com­pany (fig.12). (1941–2017). Ground floor plan. The system’s designers, architects Bogdan Budimirov, Željko Solar and I:200. Ink on vellum. Fig. 10 Grigor Vitez Kindergarten Dragutin Stilinovic, con­sidered the building not as an individual object but as (today lzvor Kindergarten), Samobor, part of a system that, in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller’s concepts, resulted Croatia. 1971–74. Ivan Crnkovic from an integrated logic of production, transportation, assembly, maintenance, (1941–2017). Aerial view.

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the Mihaljevac Kindergarten and Nursery (today Vjeverica Kindergarten) (1972–75) by Magaš in Zagre , both reinterpreted the theme of the shelter. Kristi applied rounded, “primordial” forms and designed clus­ters of classroom units that functioned as children’s micro-communities, while Magaš’s project gener­ated an artificial topography of inclined roof planes over complex interior spaces (fig.8). The Grigor Vitez Kindergarten (today Izvor Kindergarten) (1971–74) in Samobor, designed by Ivan Crnkovic (19412017), is a tightly woven network of interior spaces, roofed open space rooms, and terraces, all connected by elongated, narrow passages with glass roofs (fig. 9). This project paralleled the anthropological interests of Team 10 and aimed at stimulating the children to explore the logic and possibilities of abstract architectural elements. The repetition of spatial modules, the potential to expand the structure, and the thoroughly articulated “thresh­ old spaces” testify to the influence of Aldo van Eyck and Dutch structuralism, whereas Crnkovic himself referred to Umberto Eco’s “open work,” claiming that architecture obtains its significance only through inter­action with its users (fig. 10). While these kindergartens received sporadic criticism for being “monuments to the architects,” they also represented major architectural breakthroughs for their time. Throughout the entire socialist period, the dilemma of instrumental versus value rationality drove the dis­cussion and practice of what was better for society: to accelerate the rhythm of production and build typified projects, or to continue exploring socially sensitive typologies through individual works. Both approaches, however, produced compelling results, contributed to the cultivation of typology, and resulted in a significant expansion of the country’s educational network.

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and possibly demolition. New Belgrade was home to especially far-reaching experiments with prefabrication. The competitions organized for the city’s modernist blocks throughout the 1960s and 1970s in effect functioned as a laboratory for the perfec­tion of housing design, typically based on prefabricated systems. The IMS-Žeželj system, designed in 1957 by engineer Branko. Žeželj from Belgrade’s Institute for the Testing of Materials (IMS Institute), proved particu­larly popular and innovative. It employed a pres-tressed concrete skeleton, which opened up the space to allow for more flexible floor plans and facade systems than conventional panel systems. The IMS Institute founded the Housing Center (1970–86) to bring together research and professional practice. With a relatively small staff of about twenty, the cen­ter’s architects were responsible for some of the most important housing projects in Belgrade, such as New Belgrade’s Blocks 21, 23, 29, 45, and 70, as well as in many other cities (figs. 13 and 14). The Housing Center’s research focused on an extremely elaborate taxonomy of functions, inspired by American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of human needs, and resulted in apartments that would not only be efficient but also satisfy the requirements of spaciousness and flexibility. The Housing Center aspired to play an inte­grative role in the organization of research, design, and construction, thus initiating cooperation with other research institutions, architectural offices, and industry. An informal “Belgrade school” of housing design, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, emerged from all his technological innovation and research. Its initiators were Belgrade professors Mate Baylon and Branislav Milenkovic, who incessantly studied the diagrams of apartment plans and arrangements and cultivated the methodology of designing a wide range of efficient and spatially inventive apartments with their students. The “Belgrade school” attempted to reconcile the privacy of individuals with the communal life of a family, particularly several generations living side by side, which was often the case amid unceasing housing shortages. The apartments were therefore designed as dynamic living landscapes, which could easily be transformed either for short intervals during the day by the use of partition walls, or for long-lasting transformations by changing or repositioning the non-load-bearing walls. The sophisticated floor plans, with multipurpose rooms and circular connections, were designed to allow the openness and fluidity of space (fig. 15). Whereas much energy was spent on the meticulous design of apartments, the urban spaces in New Belgrade and New Zagreb were developed in line with rather mainstream urban planning concepts adopted from the CIAM doctrine. A prompt critical reaction, by Vjenceslav Richter, took a decidedly utopian direction: his 1964 book Sinturbanizam (Synthurbanism) proposed a complete vision of a self-managed socialist city, which consisted of ziggurat-like megastructures for up to ten thousand inhabitants (fig.16). Motivated by the desire to save the time that would otherwise be spent on daily commutes, Richter’s ziggurats were intended, to compress all urban functions into a single structure: apartments were to be stacked at its outside slopes, while all production, Fig. 11 Prefabricated single-family house, Spacva, Croatia.1964. Bogdan institutions, and public amenities were to be housed underneath. Contemporary critics Budimirov (b. 1928), Zeljko Solar (b. called the project dystopian, but Richter pointed out that his alternative to “functional” 1924), Vladimir Robotic (b. 1930), Zlatko Zokalj (1926–1999) for Spacva urban planning was not a formal solution but rather a model that sought to find a more (est. 1956). Exterior view. humane and more efficient solution to the problem of the fragmentation of contemporary Fig. 12 JU-61 system of prefabricalife. Several other unrealized experimental projects, such as the Experi­mental Residential tion, New Zagreb, Croatia.1961. Bogd an Budimirov (b. 1928), Zeljko Solar Building (1968) (fig.17) in Osijek by Andrija Mutnjakovic (b.1929) and the EVH-100 sys­tem (b. 1924), and Dragutin Stilinovic ( (1973) by Savin Sever (1927–2003), tried to solve the housing crisis (as well as resolve the b. 1927) for Jugomont (est. 1955). Detailed view of the facade. tension between individual initiative and collectivism) by proposing con­cepts in which Fig. 13 Block 23, New Belgrade, a building’s structure and early construc­tion would be financed from the public budget, Serbia. 1968–74. Bozidar Jankovic while the citizens themselves would carry out the rest of the building and participate in the (b. 1931), Branislav Karadzic (1929– 2007), Aleksandar Stjepanovic (b. final design. 1931), and Milutin Glavicki (1930– From the late 1960s onward, new approaches in urban planning aimed to 1987). Floorplan of apart ment. Fig. 14 Housing Blocks 22 and 23, increase the quality of the social pub­lic space while maintaining an integrative New Belgrade, Serbia.1968-74. approach. The culmination of such ambitions was certainly the construction of Bozidar Jankovic (b. 1931), Branislav an entirely new town built adjacent to the coastal city of Split. Called Split 3, Karadzic (1929–2007), Aleksandar Stjepanovic (b. 1931), and Milutin the project instituted close cooperation between architects and urban planGlavicki (1930–1987) for IMS ners. The plan for Split 3 was based on pedestrian streets lined with ambitiously Institute and Osnova Atelier.

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CULTURAL CENTERS AS INSTRUMENTS OF EMANCIPATION If the concept of self-management was to succeed in every field of economic and political life, it required emancipated workers and citizens who could see their position, role, and interests in the broader social con­text. Slovenian politician Edvard Kardelj, the main theorist of the self-managing system, described this emancipation as a “profound cultural and ethical revo­lution... a transformation of the complete consciousness of the working man.”14 Indeed, the active involvement of citizens in cultural life and continuing education were integral parts of the project of social development. The extensive development of cultural institutions in Yugoslavia was comparable to French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux’s project for the decentrali­ zation of French culture in the 1960s. While the cul­tural life in large urban centers was mainly organized through networks of existing institutions, the develop­ment of new cultural centers occurred mainly in the smaller towns of less developed regions. It was precisely under such peripheral conditions that cultural centers initiated new forms of social life, new lifestyles, and new architectural cultures. Cultural centers were the focus of this new landscape, where professional culture, cultural amateurism, popu­lar culture and entertainment, education, and political activities were all intertwined.15 As such, they were meant to create innovative forms of public space where different social groups could meet outside of the work-family pattern, and culture, free time, and political life could all benefit each other. The typology emerged simulta­neously with similar developments both in the East and the West. Alvar Aalto’s Cultural Center in Wolfsburg, West Germany (1959–62), for example, is comparable to many examples in Yugoslavia, but a strong accent on both the ideological and social roles elevated Yugoslav cases to crucial instruments of modernization. New hybrid typologies emerged, effectively serving as the “instruments of emancipation” to produce a new indi­vidual for self-managing socialism. One of the first and certainly most outstanding exam­ples of this type was Josip Jože Osojnik’s (1923–1999) Cultural Center (1957) in the Bosnian town of Konjic (fig.18). Organized along a sweeping line of the local road, the complex consists of an open system of terraces, staircases , and galleries that function as an open-air lobby. This formally rich public space hosted a compre­hensive program, including a fully equipped, open-air amphitheater, a theater, and a library, but also included an ample cafe and dancing terrace, thus combining urban everyday life with various cultural activities. Another ubiquitous format for cultural centers, the many Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) Clubs were intended not only to serve the cultural and entertainment needs of the military, but also to bring together officers and recruits with local inhabitants. As the most powerful institution in Yugoslavia, the army was also a resource­ful client willing to invest in advanced architecture , as was the case with Ivan Vitic’s (1917-1986) works on the Adriatic coast. Vitić’s YPA Clubs in Komiza on the island of Vis (1961–67), Sibenik (1960–61), and Split (1962–66) combined formal preFig. 15 Flexible Apartment: Evolution of the System cision reminiscent of Neo-Plasticism with a subtle regionalist attitude toward for Designing and Building the Apartments Neimar NS. the Mediterranean context. Common to these projects were innovative fold- 1970—71. Milan Lojanica (b. 1939) and Radislav ing-plate roofs that produced characteristic building contours and enabled Marie (b. 1949). Fig. 16 Sinturbanizam (Synthurbanism). 1962–63. large spans and flexible open-plan interiors capable of accommodating vari- Vjenceslav Richter (1917-2002). Perspective ous programs. Particularly radical was the YPA Club in Šibenik, located within section of Ziggurat. Fig.17 Experimental Residential Building. 1968. a sensitive historical area (fig. 19). Vitić displayed an extraordinary degree of Andrija Mutnjakovic (b.1929). Model.

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designed housing megastructures. Made possible through the integration and coordination of the city’s financing and organization, architectural design, and construction cooperatives, the experiment proved to be incredibly successful, serving as a model for some of the last large-scale housing estates of the socialist period. The high-quality apartment is perhaps the most ad­vanced mass product of Yugoslav self-management. Flexible, transformable, and therefore sustainable, and integrated into “neighborhood units” equipped with social amenities, it was designed to meet the real needs of the users. Though demand exceeded available hous­ing and egalitarian societal promises were not entirely fulfilled, optimistic and vital “integrated design” combined with self-management housing policies proved that it was possible to harmonize progressive values and rational goals on the largest scale and significantly improve the quality of everyday life under self-managed socialism.

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self-confidence when he placed an elegant, oblong, crystal-like glass volume on a Renaissance fortification wall, a provocative element in the urban landscape. Important contributions also came from Marko Music (b.1941), a Slovenian architect who had worked with Louis Kahn and who won numerous competitions across Yugoslavia. Music’s Memorial and Cultural Center, and Town Hall, in Kolašin (1969–75) was a hybrid between a memorial museum, a cultural center, and an administrative municipal building, thus satisfying a range of ideological, political, and cultural needs of the small Montenegrin town. Designed as an imposing sculpture, the geomorphic agglomeration of tetrahedral volumes occupies the center of the main town square (fig. 20). Its exterior is brutalist, but the interiors are designed as a colorful “house within a house,” with their own interior shells (fig. 21). The result of such formal expressiveness is an introverted building, detached from the town’s main square and surrounding park, which emphasizes its representative role. Not only a reinterpretation of the building type, the center was also a design experiment that demonstrated the formal ambitions of Yugoslav architects when conceiving key public buildings. An extensive cultural-educational infrastructure was thus developed over time, followed by a rich offering of programs. The majority of citizens participated in some form of cultural activity and continuing education. By the early 1980s, one third of the financing for cultural centers came from their own profits, created through popular programs or entertainment, indicating a strong tie between the informal practices of everyday life and institutional culture. The original intention of a self-managed cultural center was best suited for open projects, capable of embracing change and adapting to the needs of the community. They challenged the divisions between high and popular culture and, at least in theory, between politics and the everyday, making them hubs of socialist modernity and a means of social integration.

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Fig. 20 Memorial and Cultural Center, and Town Hall, Kolašin, Montenegrao. 1969–75 Marko Music (b. 1941). Exterior view. 2009. Fig. 21 Memorial and Cultural Center, and Town Hall, Kolašin, Montenegrao. 1969–75 Marko Music (b. 1941). Interior view.

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BETWEEN PRAGMATIC MEANS AND ETHICAL GOALS The political and economic crisis impacting the Yugoslav socialist system escalated in the 1980s, thwarting further development of self-management. As a result, the close ties between progressive social goals and architectural experimentation loosened, and archi­tects withdrew into “paper projects,” as practiced by the MEC Group in Belgrade, or into subtle regionalist interventions on the periphery, as was the case for the Kras Group in Slovenia.16 At the same time, already existing concepts were perpetuated in a rather dema­gogic manner and in some cases beyond reasonable scale. Indicative in this respect is another cultural cen­ter by Marko Mušič, the enormous Revolution Center for the industrial town of Niksic in Montenegro (fig. 22). Designed in 1979, the project envisioned an ambitious assembly of programs, from a multipurpose hall to a number of different workshops , as well as a youth cen­ter, a workers’ club, and even a television studio. The project kept growing with the insatiable appetite of the various stakeholders, resulting in a near doubling of the original square footage. The Revolution Center exposed the inherent contradictions of Yugoslav socialist modernization. The unrestrained growth of the building, legitimized by its nominal purpose of commemorating the revolution, led to a project with many social uses but at a scale designed without any thought for the facility’s sustainability. Partially built with considerable delays and interruptions, construction was finally halted with the fall of socialism. It remains uncompleted to this day, posing a serious problem for the town of Nikšić.17 It would certainly be difficult to identify a unique form of “self-managing architecture” in socialist Yugoslavia. It is beyond doubt, however, that architecture as a dis­cipline played a significant role in the construction of Yugoslav self-managing socialism by servicing the social project of modernizing the country. The architects’ expanded agency enabled the manifestation of importFig. 18 Cultural Center, Konjic, Bosnia and ant breakthroughs, thus overcoming bureau­cratic barriers, the logic Herzegovina. 1957. Josip Joze Osojnik (1923– 1999). Exterior view. of the emerging socialist market, and the inertia of the construction Fig. 19 Museum of Architecture and Design, industry. As a result, segments of the built environment became Ljubljana YPA Club, Sibenik, Croatia. 1960–61. Ivan fields of experimentation and research. Broad public discussions and Vitic (1917–1986). Exterior view. Private collection.

didactic campaigns redefined the relationship between “high culture,” expert knowledge, and everyday life. The impact of researchbased architectural knowledge in large technocratic organizations and state institutions allowed for a more complex application of modernization efforts, as was the case with mass hous­ing. Experiments with educational institutions and cultural centers allowed new forms of socialization in which institutionalized and informal modes of life were intertwined. Indeed, the architectural urbanization of socialist Yugoslavia produced a complex patchwork that combined the generic and the experimental and demonstrated how a self-managing socialism in its idealized state could look and function.

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Fig. 22 Revolution Center, Nikšić, Montenegro. 1979–89 (incomplete) Marko Music (b. 1941). Exterior view. 2016

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THE BUNKER: METAPHOR, MATERIALITY & MANAGEMENT During my youth, work on the European littoral forbade access to it; they were building a wall and I would not discover the ocean, in the estuary, before the summer of’45.The discovery of the sea is a precious experience that bears thought. Seeing the oceanic horizon is indeed anything but a secondary experience; it is in fact an event in consciousness of underestimated consequences. I have forgotten none of the sequences of this finding in the course of a summer when recovering peace and access to the beach were one and the same event. With the barriers removed, you were henceforth free to explore the liquid continent; the occupants had returned to their native hinterland, leaving behind, along with the work site, their tools and arms. The waterfront villas were empty, everything within the casemates’ firing range had been blown up, the beaches were mined, and the artificers were busy here and there rendering access to the sea. The clearest feeling was still one of absence: the immense beach of La Baule was deserted, there were less than a dozen of us on the loop of blond sand, not a vehicle was to be seen on the streets; this had been a frontier that an army had just abandoned, and the meaning of this oceanic immensity is intertwined with this aspect of the deserted battlefield. But let us get back to the sequences of my vision. The rail car I was on, and in which I had been imagining the sea, was moving slowly through the Briere plains. The weather was superb and the sky over the low ground was Starting, minute by minute, to shine. This well-known brilliance of the atmosphere approaching the great reflector was totally new; the transparency I was so sensitive to was greater as the ocean got closer, up to that precise moment when a line as even as a brushstroke crossed the horizon: an almost glaucous graygreen line, but one that was extending out to the limits of the horizon. Its color was disappointing, compared to the sky’s luminescence, but the expanse of the oceanic horizon was truly surprising: could such a vast space be void of the slightest clutter? Here was the real surprise: in length, breadth, and depth the oceanic landscape had been wiped clean. Even the sky was divided up by clouds, but the sea seemed empty in contrast. From such a distance there was no way of determining anything like foam movement. My loss of bearings was proof that I had entered a new element; the sea had become a desert, and the August heat made that all the more evident—this was a white-hot space in which sun and ocean had become a magnifying glass scorching away every relief and contrast Trees, pines, etched-out dark spots; the square in front of the station was at once white and void—that particular emptiness you feel in recently abandoned places. It was high noon, and luminous verticality and liquid horizontality composed a surprising climate. Advancing in the midst of houses with gaping windows, I was anxious to be done with the obstacles between myself and the Atlantic horizon; in fact I was anxious to set toot on my first beach. As I approached Ocean Boulevard, the water level began to rise between the pines and the villas; the ocean was getting larger, taking up more and more space in my angle of vision. Finally, while crossing the avenue parallel to the shore, the earth line seemed to have plunged into the undertow, leaving everything smooth, no waves and little noise. Yet another element was here before me: the hydrosphere. When calling to mind the reasons that made the bunkers so appealing to me almost twenty years ago, I see it dearly now as a case of intuition and also as a convergence between the reality of the structure and the fact of its implantation alongside the ocean: a convergence between my awareness of spatial phenomena—the strong pull of the shores—and their being the locus of the works of the “Atlantic Wall” (Atlantikwall) facing the open sea, facing out into the void. It all started—it was a discovery in the archeological sense of the term—along the beach south of Saint-Guenole during the summer of 1958. I was leaning

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Fig1. Bunker for Light Artillery

Paul Virilio

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Fig. 2 Look-out Station on a Beach in Normandy

Fig. 3 Comand Post in the Bay of Biscay

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against a solid mass of concrete, which I hail previously used as a cabana; all the usual seaside games had become a total bore; I was vacant in the middle of my vacation and my gaze extended out over the horizon of the ocean, over the perspective of sand between the rocky massifs of Saint-Guenole and the sea wall in the port of Guilvinec to the south. There were not many people around, and scanning the horizon like that, with nothing interrupting my gaze, brought me lull round to my own vantage point, to the heat and to this massive lean-to buttressing my body: this solid inclined mass of concrete, this worthless object, which up to then had managed to martial my interest only as a vestige of the Second World War, only as an illustration for a story, the story of total war. So I turned around for an instant to look at what my field of vision onto the sea had not offered up: the heavy gray mass where traces of planks lined up along the inclined ramp like a tiny staircase. I got up and decided to have a look around this fortification as if 1 had seen it for the first time, with its embrasure flush with the sand, behind the protective screen, looking out onto the Breton port, aiming today at inoffensive bathers, its rear UK with a staggered entrance and its dark interior in the blinding light of the gun’s opening toward the sea. I was most impressed by a feeling, internal and external, of being immediately crushed. The battered walls sunk into the ground gave this small blockhouse a solid base; a dune had invaded the interior space and the duck layer of sand over the wooden floor made the place ever narrower. Some clothes and bicycles had been hidden here; the object no longer made the same sense, though there was still protection here. A complete series of cultural memories came to mind: the Egyptian mastabas, the Etuscan tombs, the Aztec structures... as if this piece of artillery location could be identified as a funeral ceremony, as if the Todt Organization could manage only the organization of a religious space. This was nothing but a broad outline, but from now on my curiosity would be quickened; my vacation had just come to an end. and I guess that these littoral boundary stones were to teach me much about the era and much about myself. On that day I decided to inspect the Breton coasts, most often on foot along the high tide line, further and further; by car as well, in order to mine distant promontories, north toward Audierne and Brest, southward to Concarneau. My objective was solely archaeological. I would hunt these gray forms until they would transmit to me a part of their mystery, a parr of the secret a few phrases could sum up: why would these extraordinary constructions, compared to the seaside villas, not be perceived or even recognized? Why analogy between the funeral archetype and military architecture? Why this insane situation looking out over the ocean? This waiting before the infinite oceanic expanse? Until this era, fortifications had always been oriented toward a specific, staked-out objective: the defense of a passage-way, a pass, steps, valleys, or ports, as in the case of the La Roc helle towers; it had always been a question of “guarding” as easy to understand as the caretaker’s role. Whereas here, walking daily along kilometer after kilometer of beach. I would happen upon these concrete markers at the summit of dunes, cliffs, across beaches, open, transparent, with the sky playing between the embrasure and the entrance, as if each casemate were an empty ark or a little- temple minus the cult. It was indeed the whole littoral that had been organized around these successive bearings. You could walk day alter day along the seaside and never once lose sight of these concrete altars built to lace the void of the oceanic horizon. The immensity of this project is what defies common sense; total war was revealed here in its mythic dimension. The course I had begun to run over the bank of Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) was going to introduce me into the reality of Occidental geometry and the function of equipment on sites, continents, and the world. Everything was suddenly vast. The continental threshold had become a boulevard–the linearity of my exploration; sun and sand were now personal territory to which I was taking more and more a liking. This continuous band of dunes and pebbles and the sharp crest of the cliffs along the coast fit into a nameless country where the three interchanges were glimpsed: the oceanic and aerial space along with the end of emerged land. The only bearings I had for this trip from the south to the north of Europe were these steles whose meaning was still unsure. A long history was curled up here. These concrete blocks were in fact the final throw-offs of the history of frontiers, from the Roman limes to the Great Wall of China; the bunkers, as ultimate military surface architecture, had shipwrecked at lands’ limits, at the precise moment of the sky’s arrival in war; they

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Fig. 4 The Slab protects the Telemeter, which controls the firing in the Battery

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Fig. 6 Individual Shelter on the North Sea

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Fig. 5 Iron Cupola on an Observation

marked off the horizontal littoral, the continental limit. History had changed course one final time before jumping into the immensity of aerial space. My activities often led me into teeming ports, and what most surprised and intrigued me there was finding once again in the middle of courtyards and gardens my concrete shelters; their blind, low mass and rounded profile were out of tune with the urban environment. As I concentrated on these forms in the middle of apartment buildings, in courtyards, and on public squares, I felt as though a subterranean civilization had sprung up from the ground. This architecture’s modernness was countered by its abandoned, decrepit appearance. These objects had been left behind, and were colorless; their gray cement relief was silent witness to a warlike climate. Like in certain works of fiction—a spacecraft parked in the middle of an avenue announcing the war of the worlds, the confrontation with inhuman species—these solid masses in the hallows of urban spaces, next to the local school house or bar, shed new light on what “contemporary” has come to mean. Why continue to be surprised at Le Corbusier’s forms of modern architecture “brutalism”? And, above all. why this ordinary habitat, so very ordinary over so many years? These heavy gray masses with sad angles and no openings—excepting the air inlets and several staggered entrances—brought to light much better than many manifestos the urban and architectural redundancies of this postwar period that had just reconstructed to a tee the destroyed cities. The antiaircraft blockhouses pointed up another life-style, a rupture in the apprehension of the real. The blue sky had once been heavy with the menace of rumbling bombers, spangled too with the deafening explosions of artillery fire. This immediate comparison between the urban habitat and shelter, between the ordinary apartment building and the abandoned bunker in the heart of the ports through which I was traveling, was as strong as a confrontation, a collage of two dissimilar realities. The antiaircraft shelters spoke to me of men’s anguish and the dwellings of the normative systems that constantly reproduce the city, the cities, the urbanistic. The blockhouses were anthropomorphic; their figures recalled those of bodies. The residential units were but arbitrary repetitions of a model, a Single, identical, orthogonal, parallelepipedal model. The casemate, so easily hidden in the hollow of the coastal countryside, was scandalous here, and its modernness was due less to the originality of its silhouette than to the extreme triviality of the surrounding architectural forms. The curved profile brought with it into the harbor’s quarters a trace of the curves of dunes and bearing hills, and there, in this naturalness, was the scandal of the hunker. Identifying this construction to its German occupants, as if they had in in their retreat forgotten their helmets, badges, here and there along our shores ... Several bunkers still sported hostile graffiti, their concrete flanks covered with insults against “Krauts” and swastikas, and the interest I was showing in measuring and taking pictures of them sometimes had me bearing the hostile brunt... Many of them had been destroyed by this iconoclastic vengeance when the territory had been liberated; their basements had been filled with munitions gathered up along the way and the explosion of the solid concrete mass had overjoyed the countryside’s inhabitants, as in a summary execution. Many riverains told me that these concrete landmarks frightened them and called back too many bad memories, many fantasies too, because the reality of the German occupation was elsewhere, most often in banal administrative lodgings for the Gestapo; but the blockhouses were the symbols of soldiery. Once again there is this sign: these buildings brought upon themselves the hatred of passers-by, as they had only yesterday concentrated the fear of death of their endangered users. For those who at that time saw them, they were not yet archeological; I believe I was alone in seeing something else springing up, a new meaning for these landmarks aligned along the European littoral. I remember a comeback I had devised to answer the curiosity of those wishing to know the reasons for my studying the Atlantic Wall. I would ask if people still had the opportunity to study other cultures, including the culture of adversaries—if there were any Jewish Egyptologists. The answer was invariably. “Yes, Inn it is a question of time ... time must pass before we are able to consider anew these military monuments.” In the meantime, the bunkers were filled with litter or were shelter for less ideologically inclined vagabonds; the concrete walls were covered with ads and posters, you could see Zavatta the Clown on the iron doors and Yvette Horner smiling in the embrasure. My vision appeared to be countered by that of my contemporaries, and the semi-religious character of the beach altars, left for children’s play, was counteracted by resentment. What was the nature of this criticism? We violently rejected the bunkers as symbols rather than loyally, with patience: as so many people said, “It is a question of time!” That is what you say too of the avant-garde

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Fig. 7 Command Pot in the Landes

... What was the nature of the modernness in these historical ruins.’’ Could war be prospective? During my trips along European coasts. I grew more and more selective, picking up only traces of the defensive system. Everyday life at the seaside had disappeared. The space I was charring with surveys and measurements of different types of casemates was the space of a different historical rime than that of the moment of my trip; the conflict I perceived between the summer of seaside bathing and the summer of combat would never again cease. For me the organization of space would now go hand in hand with the manifestations of time. This actual archaeological break led me to a reconsideration of the problem of architectural archetypes: the crypt, the ark. the nave ... The problems of structural economy had become secondary and now I would investigate the Fortress Europe, which was vacant from now on, with an eye to the essence of architectural reality. Observing the various casemates on the Atlantic beaches, the English Channel, and the North Sea, I detected a hub joining several directions. The concrete mass was a summary of its surroundings. The blockhouse was also the premonition of my own movements: on arriving from behind a dune I fell upon a cannon—it was a rendezvous—and when I started to circle the fortification to get inside and the embrasure of rear defenses became visible in the armor-plated door opening, ir was as if I were a long awaited guest... This game created an implicit empathy between the inanimate object and visitor, but it was the empathy of mortal danger to the point that for many it was unbelievably fearsome. The meaning was less now that of a rendezvous, and more of combat: “If the war were still here, this would kill me, so this architectural object is repulsive.” A whole set of silent hypotheses sprang up during the visit. Either the bunker has no other use than protection from the wind, or it recalls its warlike project and you identify with the enemy who must lead the assault—this simulacrum so close to children’s playful warring ... after the real warring. Besides the feeling of lurking danger, you can describe the structure concentrating on each of its parts. The armor-plated door is no doubt the most disquieting, hidden by its thick concrete framing, withins steel wicket and locking system, massive and difficult to move, set fast in rust today, protected on its flanks by small Firing slits for automatic weapons. This narrow door opens into a watertight coffer in which the air vent looks more adaptable to an oven than to a dwelling; everything here bespeaks incredible pressures, like those to which a submarine is submitted... Several rear apertures tarry cartouche inscriptions, supplying the support station number or the serial number of the work; others carry the name of the bunker, a feminine first name. Barbara, Karola ... sometimes a humorous phrase. In the case of an element of the coastal battery, the embrasure is in fact I lie main opening of the structure; it is a cannon, a “mouth of fire,” a Splaying through which the gun will spit its projectiles, it is the hearth of the casemate, the architectonic clement in which the function of the bunker is expressed. Major differences of existing aspects remain between the blind screen of the Lateral walls, the passive imperviousness in the rear sections, and the offensive opening in front; as for the top, apart from the observer’s box, nil the tiny staircase leading to the concrete nest, there are only the cans gas discharge pipes emerging from the concrete slab sunk into the earth. Deconsecrated, the work is reversed: without the cannon, the embrasure resembles a door with ornamental reliefs, with vertical redans; the encircling of the “Todt Front” in the form ol the tympanum above the retangular opening becomes the companion piece to the porch of a religious building; through this makeshift entrance you gain access to a low, mall room, round or hexagonal, covered with steel beams and having, at its center, a socal quite similar to a sacrificial altar. Trap doors open in the cement floor, through which access to the crypt is gained, where munitions were stored, just below the cannon’s base. Going further back into the rear of the fortification, you meet once agian the system of staggered nearby defenses, with its small firing slits—one along the entrance axis, the other on the flanks— with low visibility, I trough which the immediate surroundings can be seen, in a narrow space with a low ceiling. The crushing feeling felt during the exterior circuit around the work becomes acute here. The various volumes are too narrow for normal activity, for real corporal mobility; the whole structure weighs down on the visitor’s shoulders. Like a slightly undersized piece of clothing hampers as much as it enclothes, the reinforced concrete and steel envelope is too tight under the arms and sets you in semi-paralysis fairly close to that of illness. Slowed down in his physical activity but attentive, anxious over the catastrophic probabilities of his environment, the visitor in this perilous place is beset with

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a singular heaviness; in fact he is already in the grips of that cadaveric rigidity from which rhe shelter was designed to protect him.

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Fig. 8 “Karola” Firing Control Tower on the Atlantic

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War is at once a summary and a museum... its own. War is at once prospective and retrospective; fortifications aim not only to conserve power but also to conserve all combat techniques. Here we meet the question of hybrids, the meaning of transgression, in an art of warfare in which the military instrument is never strictly functional and in which judgments must proceed from a succession of usages. The requirements in secrecy, dissimilation, and deception concerning the object, the course, the subject, the most diverse of opportunities to set up the defense of a continent’s immensity allow us to take rough stock of the reuse of weapons and weapon systems, which had formerly been put to the test in distant conflicts: the floodingsduring the “beggars war” in the sixteenth century, which the Dutch practiced again in 1940 at the airlifted invasion of their territory, and which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel himself adopted in 1944 in flooding the Normandy plains; endless lines of stakes driven into the sand at the water line, which were nothing other than cavalry obstacles resurfacing; the antitank obstacles, concrete tetrahedrons or Czechoslovakian hedgehogs, installed on the eastern front at the beginning of the war and used again against the Allied landing craft; the first “amphibious” tanks...each and every time a hybrid; the old forts in Le Havre or at Le Roule in Cherbourg, the fort in Aleth City in Saint-Malo, the Spanish Point in the Brest bottleneck, the old fortifications of the Channel Islands, which were refurbished with modern equipment... As for arms per se, it is really a zoo grouping together truly multifarious species: from the guns of commissioned battleships, those of the Maginot Line, the recuperation of iron-plated cupolas and tank turrets transported onto the concrete bunker socles, all manner of odds and ends ranging from artillery on rails from the First World War to that most extraordinary piece of machinery—the Mimoyecques ram cannon, capable of pressure-propelling its arrow shells to points more than 120 kilometers away...the first land and air robots, the missiles; but also no mean amount of indispensable combat accessories: the light projectors used for the first time in 1904 by the Russians on the Port Arthur Heights and recommissioned forty years later on the Atlantic cliffs, the very first radar units and the acoustic detectors designed during the First World War, infrared detection, the beginnings of the electronic war... But this indistinct handling of utensils can also be found in the field of construction, in the implementation of work sites for the second West Wall. The most diverse of populations are gathered together and put to work, like for the construction of boundary limits in the second century, and the recruitment of occupied peoples for huge earthwork projects in the twentieth. The Todt Organization unified the most diverse of social and ethnic groups, starting with German technicians—be they civil, military, or deported—and including conscripts and volunteers. On the average, there was one German worker for ten foreigners. Likewise, in setting up defense, troops from the four corners of Europe were used, and even Indians found their way into bunkers at the mouth of the Gironde River. There were several reasons for this, besides the size of the fortification. If an offensive can sometimes be the work of an aggressive minority, defense is only a reality when the masses are implicated. However impressive the ramparts may be, they owe their value to being constantly and totally manned and occupied—all the more so in the case of a hyper-structure engaged in the occupation of a continent. This was one of the weaknesses of the Third Reich, for, as Mao Tse-tung wrote in 1942 , “If Hitler is obliged to resort to strategic defense, fascism is over and done with; indeed, a state like the Third Reich has from its inception founded its military and political life on the offensive. Put a stop to the offensive, and its existence ends.” In fact, strategic defense is only possible with the active and unconditional participation of the population, as the Chinese leader once again put it, “Only the people can build such fortifications, and only they can supply them.” Fritz Todt’s mobilization is thus not due only to building requirements, to the construction of a defensive line of several thousand kilometers; it is also due to psychological and political necessities, to the participation on the part of occupied populations in the defensive and protective effort in the face of the Allied invasion. At that time, in 1943–44 , everyone was advised to dig a trench in his backyard, in the courtyard, to shelter his family. Photomontages of premature ruins were devised as if Paris had already been

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Fig. 10 “Babara”—One Notices the Barbed Wire Designed to Hold Camouflage

Fig. 9 Observation Post on a Channel Island

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ancient terrors: water, a place of madness, of anarchy, of monsters, and of women, too... What seems most significant in the defensive movement is the progressive disappearance of surface equipment, the fantastic development of alert systems, the electronic arsenal of what were already called “invisible arms.” Defense, in the course of the Second World War, switched from entrenchment to intelligence through the prodigious development of detection systems and telecommunications. In fact, most of the means for acoustic detection had been created during the First World War, but optical telemetering, radiophony, and radar were further improved during the Second World War. The possibilities of an air offensive, the problems created by the control of the aerial objective by antiaircraft defense or of a land objective by bomber squadrons, and the significant speeds of these manned or unmanned new projectiles would once again revolutionize the military continuum. The arrival of nuclear arms was the strategic contribution essential to total war. To visible arms systems, composed of obstacles situated on European shores, must be added the crisscrossing of electronic networks covering the western front of the continent. The Kammhuber Line organized the German fighter forces with alert sectors, whose center of operations was in Arnhem and which covered Europe from Skagerak to the Mediterranean. There were radar networks scanning the English Channel, the North Sea, and the Atlantic from the Frisian Islands to the mouth of the Gironde; there was also the hyperbolic air cover of Fortress Europe by the GEE system of Bomber Command, which permitted combat wings of “flying fortresses” to reach their objectives, night or day, in any sort of weather conditions. This is the system that, at the beginning of 1941 , issued in Operation Millennium the destruction of the city of Cologne. It was also the sophistication of this material that, in 1942, transformed pilots into robots in an already electronic war with the OBOE system permitting bombs to be dropped on one building rather than on another. And finally, in 1943 , the H2S system gave out the first “radar image” indicating the very silhouette of the objective. This was the end of the invisibility of objectives for those fighter pilots who were protected from the hidden, removed environment of the objectives but also, for the same reason, handicapped in their aiming. This apparatus facilitated Operation Gomorrah, that hurricane of fire that destroyed Hamburg and that, along with Dresden, prefigured the effects of the nuclear explosion over Hiroshima. But, on the other hand, there were also improvements in antiaircraft weapons. Vertical artillery ended up as ubiquitous as night fighters. Fortress Europe was covered until the end of the war with a network of panoramic German radar systems, each of which lit up a circle of 300 kilometers, transmitting by cable an electronic image of the sky to the huge antiaircraft defense batteries of the endangered population centers. Not only was artillery no longer blind, but now it could see in advance. This integral visibility piercing through each and every obstacle made the space of this new warfare transparent, while time was reduced by systems of prediction and foresight. The new defense became not only the anticipation of the adversary’s actions, but their prediction. The speed of new weapons was such that soon a calculator would have to prepare the attack and ceaselessly correct the control elements in order for the projectile-shells and the projectile-plane to become one: this apparatus was called the “Predictor.” This automation of pursuit brought on, after the war, the extraordinary development of data processing and those famous “strategic calculators” that upset the conduct and politics of war. The robot era began, as a matter of fact, not only with the small, remote-control tank named “Goliath” or with the v1 flying bomb that was nicknamed “meteor-dynamite,” but especially with the mechanization of military intelligence, with the automation of the counterattack. This was also the era of the great “command operas” in which the air and sea fleets were controlled, from fifty meters underground, in London or in Berlin, and where a whole group of hostesses looked after the pilots by radiophonics,guiding them, reassuring them during their missions, a hundred kilometersaway. Authority was already exerted with a minimum of relays, and if,from his angle, the German dictator imagined he was a warlord directing his generals by telephone, it was the complete system of transmission that allowed total and immediate control of supreme authority over its executants. Power was from then on directly hooked into the actor, wherever he may have been. The alerting system on German territory also played a major role in military psychology. As soon as the bomber squadrons crossed the coastlines, the population was alerted and, as the plane altered its bearings, the target cities were immediately

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destroyed; the disaster of total war was prefigured to lead the occupied populations to fear more than hope for their liberation after the fall of the great wall. As the historian R. G. Nobécourt points out, “The fortress had important psychological value, for it tended to unite the occupier and the occupied in the fear of being swept away; the fortress provided unity and identity where there was none.” The sociopolitical role of the enceinte in the establishment of communal or national sentiment is too often forgotten. With Fortress Europe, failure was inevitable, and the geographical configuration of the continent would confirm Mao’s analysis. Lightning war, which allowed the Führer to rapidly acquire all the western European coasts, would later oblige him to adopt a defensive strategy. The continental Finistère was the defeat of the Nazi offensive, and the Allies did not have to fire cannons or land a single soldier; implicitly, the defeat was in the inner logic of the Nazi state. Just before hostilities broke out, Adolf Hitler moreover announced in his book The Expansion of the Third Reich, “Germany will apply itself to a powerful concentration of its interior forces... She will understand that our main task is the creation of a mighty land army, for our future is not on water but in Europe.” The Blitzkrieg victory brought Germany to envision its future on the seas or to adopt in the West a strategic defense, thus stopping the driving force of Hitler’s military policy, precluding the end of the European concentration system. It is clear that the constantly repeated refusals of the dictator to visit the Atlantic Wall are significant; the bunkers on the European littoral were from the start the funerary monuments of the German dream. The conquest of the French beaches was—from 1940 onwards, after the aborted attempt at landing in England—the sign of the defeat of the Nazi regime and the sudden turn toward the eastern front; the initiative christened “Barbarossa” was but a frantic flight from the deadly character of the ocean void, a way of refusing to see the obstacle, the unknown, like a frightened horse. Hitler declared, “The only aim of this war worth all the bloodshed could have been nothing else but the assurance instilled in German soldiers that they would obtain several hundred thousand square kilometers of land for general German colonization.” But on the western front, on the open sea and the liquid plains, there are no possibilities for colonies. Moreover, the Führer’s conception of frontiers was purely historical, without geographical references to continental limits or relief. For him, people’s borders were always incomplete; the division of the Earth was the momentary result of combat, of a becoming that was never definitive but that, on the contrary, could and must develop heedless of the elementary realities of the world. According to Nazi doctrine, strangely enough, there is just one element: the lithosphere, the earth, blood. Despite the war in the air and under the sea, the offensive of the first space weapons, the atmosphere and the hydrosphere remain foreign to Hitlerian ideology. And the feeling of being limited to the earth translates directly into the sentiment of vital space, the Lebensraum. “The forms of life on earth are innumerable and their will to conservation is unlimited, as is their aspiration to reproduce, but the space in which these vital processes take place is itself limited. This is the surface of a measurable sphere, on which a vital struggle of billions and billions of particular species is unwinding; it is this limitation of space that entails the necessity of struggle for life.” With its anguish, its terror over the end, the limit, Nazi claustrophobia dominated all the aspects of the Second World War. The stratospheric missile is only one paradox among many: Hitler never believed in the conquest of the air, neither did he put credence in the conquest of the sea; this is the main cause of the German defeat. The Luftwaffe was never able to match Allied air strategy despite largely superior aircraft; the Kriegsmarine suffered setbacks in the early years of the war despite the qualities of its submarines. These are the results of a philosophy of military space, the philosophy of a warlord tied to the Earth, to its surface; these are the results of an arms production policy that privileged ground forces to the detriment of air and sea efforts. The hereditary enemy of German continental domination, both feared and respected, was the naval strength of the English. Operation Seelöwe (Sea Lion), a landing in the British Isles that was conceived by Admiral Erich Raeder and that the Führer never attempted, was a superstitious homage to the “sea lion” that was the Home Fleet. These are the fantasies of a man fearing to advance over the sea, which gave birth to the last West Wall, the Atlantic Wall, looking out over the void, over this moving and pernicious expanse, alive with menacing presences; in front of the sea Hitler rediscovered

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Fig.12 Lindeman Battery in the Straight of Dover.

THE BUNKER: METAPHOR, MATERIALITY & MANAGEMENT

Fig.11 Experimental Mobile Bunker.

warned. Space and time shrank; the danger was experienced simultaneously by millions of listeners. What protects, then, it seems, is news, the radio; it is having time when there is no more space... reaction time. The surprise effect had become a true fear; all surprises were in the end disquieting and fatal. This effect must first be abolished if one was to be adequately protected, confirming the analysis of the author of Mein Kampf, “Life is haunted and filled with the idea of protection...” Transparency, ubiquity, total and instantaneous knowledge—these are the ingredients for survival. Inter-penetration between adversaries had begun: the ideal for one consisted in replacing the other, the enemy, in giving out orders to those he was fighting; at once infiltration, manipulation of propaganda, the Ministry of Fear, and the Brandenburg battalions, or the Skorzeny commandos passing to the enemy camp to deceive them. Espionage became a mass phenomenon. The requirements of total war demanded that each camp control the other and deceive it—the beginning of social overexposure following that of the environment and of territory. The attempt to know everything, immediately, gave you your enemy’s identity, especially when the movement of this knowledge demanded not only knowledge, a science of your enemy’s actions, but a prescience of his projects. The demand to put yourself, at the time of the project, everywhere and in all of the dimensions of combat, reverted the roles. There is no need to look any further for the serious difficulties and the crises experienced during the Second World War by classical intelligence services, those agents nobody believed even when they brought forth extraordinary information. Professionals in espionage were literally passed by agents in much faster lanes—by the proliferation of information systems, by the important development in mass denunciation, in other words, by the amateurs. Special agents no longer had a monopoly on uncovering or on treason; improvements in technological organs of perception and detection took their places here, there, and everywhere for numerous missions. This was also “psychological” warfare, which, competing with “electronic” warfare, transformed hundreds of thousands of civilians into potential indicators of suspects of all sorts: parachutists, Jews, escaped prisoners... Intelligence and social control became the heart in the spirit of defense; the radio informed on everything, immediately, and you were thus protected from unpleasant surprises, but, in return, you had to alert the authorities by telephone of any odd occurrences taking place in your immediate surroundings. This was one of the forms of civilian combat for the citizen of the totalitarian state, for the inhabitant of Citadel Europe.

HOW GERMANY’S WARTIME BUNKERS ARE BEING REBORN

Seventy years after World War Two and 26 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is still riddled with bunkers. Built during the Third Reich and the Cold War eras, they have proved either indestructible or too difficult to demolish without putting other buildings in peril. In 2007 the German government decided to sell around 2,000 of the bunkers privately, prompting investors and architects to dream up all manner of new uses.

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VIVOS EUROPA ONE ROTHENSTEIN

This 76-acre Soviet bunker is one of Germany’s largest repurposing projects. Capable of withstanding a nuclear blast, a direct plane crash or biological attack, it is being transformed into a series of 34 five-star apartments, starting at 2,500 sq ft, that aim to protect the super-rich from any forthcoming apocalypse.

RESIDENTIAL HOUSING BREMEN

These air-raid-shelters-turned-residences are the brainchild of architect Rainer Mielke, who lives in one himself. He has transformed another 13 or so into working or living spaces, which all differ vastly. One block of flats, for example, blends in neatly with nearby residences while another maintains a raw, concrete aesthetic.

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HOW GERMANY’S WARTIME BUNKERS ARE BEING REBORN

Paul Sullivan

HOW GERMANY’S WARTIME BUNKERS ARE BEING REBORN

This above-ground WWII bunker was transformed from a grotty, graffiti-splattered structure in Cologne into a desirable housing complex by Luczak Architekten. The 17 loft-style apartments feature large windows and terraces, as well as flexible floor plans, internal atriums and gardens.

ÜBEL & GEFÄHRLIC HAMBURG

The six floors of this looming flak tower in Hamburg’s St Pauli district have been neatly transformed turned into a creative complex that spans a radio station, music studios and one of Hamburg’s best known electronic music clubs. Architects are currently planning a garden on top of the bunker.

CULTURAL CARGO DOCK FRANKFURT

What to do with a bunker that’s too expensive to bulldoze but not near a residential neighbourhood? Index Architekten hit on the idea of creating a large wooden box atop the WWII building. It houses artists’ studios and the Institute for New Media.

BUNKER VALENTIN BREMEN

Situated about 40 kilometres from the North Sea coast, this enormous WWII structure was built to house a submarine assembly plant. Despite around 2,000 forced labourers losing their lives here, not a single submarine was produced. Defunct for decades, it was turned into a memorial to the horrors and hubris of fascism in 2011.

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WOHNEN IM BUNKER COLOGNE

HOW GERMANY’S WARTIME BUNKERS ARE BEING REBORN

THE FORTRESS PROVIDED UNITY AND IDENTITY WHERE THERE WAS NONE. ENERGY BUNKER HAMBURG

This 76-acre Soviet bunker is one of Germany’s largest repurposing projects. Capable of withstanding a nuclear blast, a direct plane crash or biological attack, it is being transformed into a series of 34 five-star apartments, starting at 2,500 sq ft, that aim to protect the super-rich from any forthcoming apocalypse.

SAMMLUNG BOROS BERLIN

Architectural firm Realarchitektur did a stellar job transforming this air-raid shelter into a gallery showcasing the private art collection of advertising mogul Christian Boros. Originally constructed to shelter around 3,000 people, it now hosts around 3,000 sq m of exhibition space, plus a 500 sq m rooftop extension where Boros and his family reside.

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SURVEIL

US

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SPACE

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WHEN THE GOVERNMENT SAW THAT INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY WAS BECOMING A PART OF DAILY LIFE, IT REALIZED IT WOULD HAVE A POWERFUL NEW TOOL FOR BOTH GATHERING INFORMATION AND CONTROLLING CULTURE, FOR MAKING PEOPLE MORE GOVERNABLE.

WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY WHEN YOU HAVE DATA?

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WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY WHEN YOU HAVE DATA?

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WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY WHEN YOU HAVE DATA? In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China. For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep? Hu Jintao, China’s leader from 2002 to 2012, had attempted to solve these problems by permitting a modest democratic thaw, allowing avenues for grievances to reach the ruling class. His successor, Xi Jinping, has reversed that trend. Instead, his strategy for understanding and responding to what is going on in a nation of 1.4 billion relies on a combination of surveillance, AI, and big data to monitor people’s lives and behavior in minute detail. It helps that a tumultuous couple of years in the world’s democracies have made the Chinese political elite feel increasingly justified in shutting out voters. Developments such as Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of far-right parties across Europe, and Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror in the Philippines underscore what many critics see as the problems inherent in democracy, especially populism, instability, and precariously personalized leadership. Since becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, Xi has laid out a raft of ambitious plans for the country, many of them rooted in technology—including a goal to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. Xi has called for “cyber sovereignty” to enhance censorship and assert full control over the domestic internet. In May, he told a meeting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that technology was the key to achieving “the great goal of building a socialist and modernized nation.” In January, when he addressed the nation on television, the bookshelves on either side of him contained both classic titles such as Das Kapital and a few new additions, including two books about artificial intelligence: Pedro Domingos’s The Master Algorithm and Brett King’s Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane. “No government has a more ambitious and far-­reaching plan to harness the power of data to change the way it

governs than the Chinese government,” says Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. Even some foreign observers, watching from afar, may be tempted to wonder if such data-driven governance offers a viable alternative to the increasingly dysfunctional­looking electoral model. But over-­relying on the wisdom of technology and data carries its own risks. DATA INSTEAD OF DIALOGUE Chinese leaders have long wanted to tap public sentiment without opening the door to heated debate and criticism of the authorities. For most of imperial and modern Chinese history, there has been a tradition of disgruntled people from the countryside traveling to Beijing and staging small demonstrations as public “petitioners.” The thinking was that if local authorities didn’t understand or care about their grievances, the emperor might show better judgment. Under Hu Jintao, some members of the Communist Party saw a limited openness as a possible way to expose and fix certain kinds of problems. Blogs, anticorruption journalists, human-rights lawyers, and online critics spotlighting local corruption drove public debate toward the end of Hu’s reign. Early in his term, Xi received a daily briefing of public concerns and disturbances scraped from social media, according to a former US official with knowledge of the matter. In recent years, petitioners have come to the capital to draw attention to scandals such as illegal land seizures by local authorities and contaminated milk powder. But police are increasingly stopping petitioners from ever reaching Beijing. “Now trains require national IDs to purchase tickets, which makes it easy for the authorities to identify potential ‘troublemakers’ such as those who have protested against the government in the past,” says Maya Wang, senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Several petitioners told us they have been stopped at train platforms.” The bloggers, activists, and lawyers are also being systematically silenced or imprisoned, as if data can give the government the same information without any of the fiddly problems of freedom. The idea of using networked technology as a tool of governance in China goes back to at least the mid-1980s. As Harvard historian Julian Gewirtz explains, “When the Chinese government saw that information technology was becoming a part of daily life, it realized it would have a powerful new tool for both gathering information and controlling culture, for making Chinese people more ‘modern’ and more ‘governable’—which have been perennial obsessions of the leadership.” Subsequent advances, including progress in AI and faster processors, have brought that vision closer. As far as we know, there is no single master blueprint linking technology and governance in China. But there are several initiatives that share a common strategy

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WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY WHEN YOU HAVE DATA?

Christina Larson

Visitors to Tiananmen Square in Beijing scan their IDs at a checkpoint.

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A Shanghai startup’s demo of its system for facial recognition.

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of harvesting data about people and companies to inform decision-making and create systems of incentives and punishments to influence behavior. These initiatives include the State Council’s 2014 “Social Credit System,” the 2016 Cybersecurity Law, various local-level and private-enterprise experiments in “social credit,” “smart city” plans, and technology-driven policing in the western region of Xinjiang. Often they involve partnerships between the government and China’s tech companies. The most far-reaching is the Social Credit System, though a better translation in English might be the “trust” or “reputation” system. The government plan, which covers both people and businesses, lists among its goals the “construction of sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, and judicial credibility.” (“Everybody in China has an auntie who’s been swindled. There is a legitimate need to address a breakdown in public trust,” says Paul Triolo, head of the geotechnology practice at the consultancy Eurasia Group.) To date, it’s a work in progress, though various pilots preview how it might work in 2020, when it is supposed to be fully implemented. The most far-reaching is the Social Credit System, though a better translation in English might be the “trust” or “reputation” system. The government plan, which covers both people and businesses, lists among its goals the “construction of sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, and judicial credibility.” (“Everybody in China has an auntie who’s been swindled. There is a legitimate need to address a breakdown in public trust,” says Paul Triolo, head of the geotechnology practice at the consultancy Eurasia Group.) To date, it’s a work in progress, though various pilots preview how it might work in 2020, when it is supposed to be fully implemented. The algorithm is thought to highlight suspicious behaviors such as visiting a mosque or owning too many books. Blacklists are the system’s first tool. For the past five years, China’s court system has published the names of people who haven’t paid fines or complied with judgments. Under new social-credit regulations, this list is shared with various businesses and government agencies. People on the list have found themselves blocked from borrowing money, booking flights, and staying at luxury hotels. China’s national transport companies have created additional blacklists, to punish riders for behavior like blocking train doors or picking fights during a journey; offenders are barred from future ticket purchases for six or 12 months. Earlier this year, Beijing debuted a series of blacklists to prohibit “dishonest” enterprises from being awarded future government contracts or land grants. A few local governments have experimented with social-credit “scores,” though it’s not clear if they will be part of the national plan. The northern city of Rongcheng, for example, assigns a score to each of its 740,000 residents, Foreign Policy reported. Everyone begins with 1,000 points. If you donate to a charity or win a government award, you gain points; if you violate a traffic law, such as by driving drunk or speeding through a crosswalk, you lose points. People with good scores can earn discounts on winter heating supplies or get better terms on mortgages; those with bad scores may lose access to bank loans or promotions in government jobs. City Hall showcases posters of local role models, who have exhibited “virtue” and earned high scores.

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WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY WHEN YOU HAVE DATA?

THE BLOGGERS, ACTIVISTS, AND LAWYERS ARE ALSO BEING SYSTEMATICALLY SILENCED OR IMPRISONED, AS IF DATA CAN GIVE THE GOVERNMENT THE SAME INFORMATION WITHOUT ANY OF THE FIDDLY PROBLEMS OF FREEDOM.

In the city of Xiangyang, cameras linked to face-recognition technology project photos of jaywalkers, with names and ID numbers, on a billboard.

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data collection is accurate, how will the government use such information to direct or thwart future behavior? Police algorithms that predict who is likely to become a criminal are not open to public scrutiny, nor are statistics that would show whether crime or terrorism has grown or diminished. (For example, in the western region of Xinjiang, the available information shows only that the number of people taken into police custody has shot up dramatically, rising 731 percent from 2016 to 2017.) “It’s not the technology that created the policies, but technology greatly expands the kinds of data that the Chinese government can collect on individuals,” says Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute and the author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers. “The internet in China acts as a realtime, privately run digital intelligence service.” ALGORITHMIC POLICING Writing in the Washington Post earlier this year, Xiao Qiang, a professor of communications at the University of California, Berkeley, dubbed China’s data-enhanced governance “a digital totalitarian state.” The dystopian aspects are most obviously on display in western China. Xinjiang (“New Territory”) is the traditional home of a Chinese Muslim minority known as Uighurs. As large numbers of Han Chinese migrants have settled in—some say “colonized”—the region, the work and religious opportunities afforded to the local Uighur population have diminished. One result has been an uptick in violence in which both Han and Uighur have been targeted, including a 2009 riot in the capital city of Urumqi, when a reported 200 people died. The government’s response to rising tensions has not been to hold public forums to solicit views or policy advice. Instead, the state is using data collection and algorithms to determine who is “likely” to commit future acts of violence or defiance. The Xinjiang government employed a private company to design the predictive algorithms that assess various data streams. There’s no public record or accountability for how these calculations are built or weighted. “The people living under this system generally don’t even know what the rules are,” says Rian Thum, an anthropologist at Loyola University who studies Xinjiang and who has seen government procurement notices that were issued in building the system. In the western city of Kashgar, many of the family homes and shops on main streets are now boarded up, and the public squares are empty. When I visited in 2013, it was clear that Kashgar was already a segregated city—the Han and Uighur populations lived and worked in distinct sections of town. But in the evenings, it was also a lively and often noisy place, where the sounds of the call to prayer intermingled with dance music from local clubs and the conversations of old men sitting out late in plastic chairs on patios. Today the city is eerily quiet; neighborhood public life has virtually vanished. Emily Feng, a journalist for the Financial Times, visited Kashgar in June and posted photos on Twitter of the newly vacant streets. The reason is that by some estimates more than one in 10 Uighur and Kazakh adults in Xinjiang have been sent to barbed-wire-ringed “reeducation camps”—and those who remain at large are fearful. In the last two years thousands of checkpoints have been set up at which passersby must present both their face and their national ID card to proceed on a highway,

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enter a mosque, or visit a shopping mall. Uighurs are required to install government-­designed tracking apps on their smartphones, which monitor their online contacts and the web pages they’ve visited. Police officers visit local homes regularly to collect further data on things like how many people live in the household, what their relationships with their neighbors are like, how many times people pray daily, whether they have traveled abroad, and what books they have. All these data streams are fed into Xinjiang’s public security system, along with other records capturing information on everything from banking history to family planning. “The computer program aggregates all the data from these different sources and flags those who might become ‘a threat’ to authorities,” says Wang. Though the precise algorithm is unknown, it’s believed that it may highlight behaviors such as visiting a particular mosque, owning a lot of books, buying a large quantity of gasoline, or receiving phone calls or email from contacts abroad. People it flags are visited by police, who may take them into custody and put them in prison or in reeducation camps without any formal charges. Adrian Zenz, a political scientist at the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany, calculates that the internment rate for minorities in Xinjiang may be as high as 11.5 percent of the adult population. These camps are designed to instill patriotism and make people unlearn religious beliefs. (New procurement notices for cremation security guards seem to indicate that the government is also trying to stamp out traditional Muslim burial practices in the region.) While Xinjiang represents one draconian extreme, elsewhere in China citizens are beginning to push back against some kinds of surveillance. An internet company that streamed closed-circuit TV footage online shut down those broadcasts after a public outcry. The city of Shanghai recently issued regulations to allow people to dispute incorrect information used to compile social-credit records. “There are rising demands for privacy from Chinese internet users,” says Samm Sacks, a senior fellow in the Technology Policy Program at CSIS in New York. “It’s not quite the free-for-all that it’s made out to be.”

Citizen’s wearing information will also be recorded by the identification system.

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“The idea of social credit is to monitor and manage how people and institutions behave,” says Samantha Hoffman of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin. “Once a violation is recorded in one part of the system, it can trigger responses in other parts of the system. It’s a concept designed to support both economic development and social management, and it’s inherently political.” Some parallels to parts of China’s blueprint already exist in the US: a bad credit score can prevent you from taking out a home loan, while a felony conviction suspends or annuls your right to vote, for example. “But they’re not all connected in the same way—there’s no overarching plan,” Hoffman points out. One of the biggest concerns is that because China lacks an independent judiciary, citizens have no recourse for disputing false or inaccurate allegations. Some have found their names added to travel blacklists without notification after a court decision. Petitioners and investigative journalists are monitored according to another system, and people who’ve entered drug rehab are watched by yet a different monitoring system. “Theoretically the drug-user databases are supposed to erase names after five or seven years, but I’ve seen lots of cases where that didn’t happen,” says Wang of Human Rights Watch. “It’s immensely difficult to ever take yourself off any of these lists.” Occasional bursts of rage online point to public resentment. News that a student had been turned down by a college because of her father’s inclusion on a credit blacklist recently lit a wildfire of online anger. The college’s decision hadn’t been officially sanctioned or ordered by the government. Rather, in their enthusiasm to support the new policies, school administrators had simply taken them to what they saw as the logical conclusion. The opacity of the system makes it difficult to evaluate how effective experiments like Rongcheng’s are. The party has squeezed out almost all critical voices since 2012, and the risks of challenging the system—even in relatively small ways—have grown. What information is available is deeply flawed; systematic falsification of data on everything from GDP growth to hydropower use pervades Chinese government statistics. Australian National University researcher Borge Bakken estimates that official crime figures, which the government has a clear incentive to downplay, may represent as little as 2.5 percent of all criminal behavior. In theory, data-driven governance could help fix these issues—circumventing distortions to allow the central government to gather information directly. That’s been the idea behind, for instance, introducing air-quality monitors that send data back to central authorities rather than relying on local officials who may be in the pocket of polluting industries. But many aspects of good governance are too complicated to allow that kind of direct monitoring and instead rely on data entered by those same local officials. However, the Chinese government rarely releases performance data that outsiders might use to evaluate these systems. Take the cameras that are used to identify and shame jaywalkers in some cities by projecting their faces on public billboards, as well as to track the prayer habits of Muslims in western China. Their accuracy remains in question: in particular, how well can facial-recognition software trained on Han Chinese faces recognize members of Eurasian minority groups? Moreover, even if the

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CHINA’S NEW TOOL FOR| SOCIAL CONTROL: A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR XIAO QIANG Helene Jørum

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Xiao Qiang is a Research Scientist at the School of Information (UC Berkeley) and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bi-lingual China news website. Focus: Technology and human rights: China, censorship, surveillance, digital activism and information politics. Helene Jørum: Thank you so much, Xiao Qiang, for joining us for this interview about the Chinese social credit system. You are a professor at the University of California Berkeley where your main focus is technology and human rights especially in China, and you focus on censorship and surveillance amongst others. You are also the founder and editor-inchef of China Digital Times, a bilingo China news website. So, once again, thank you so much for joining us for this interview about the Chinese s ocial credit system. So my first question is simply what is happening in China right now with the social credit system. XQ: Well, that is actually a big question what’s happening in China in terms of online surveillance control and a censorship is a big picture but the social credit system is one of the government policy being announced in 2014, what it is the Chinese government wants to have a single reading score quote trustworthiness of every Chinese citizen mandated by 2020. What it doesn’t mean is that the government wants to establish a database and a single system that reading every single Chinese citizen based on their behaviors whether these behaviors are commercial behaviors, a finance behavior, including social behaviors such as your expression from the social media and including your transportation, education, anything. Since today in China, more than half of populations already on the online all the time. China’s mobile pay and online interacting system is actually quite at the best. In other worlds, every single Chinese citizen almost have a digital trace every aspect of their life that can be recorded, can be manipulated, and it can be integrated into a big data and artificial intelligence algorithms that to further effect their own behavior which of course happens in everywhere in the world today with the technology development. China has one single trait the difference which is the government the state has almost none limited power to get access or control all of this data and once without meeting the meaningful resistance from the privacy

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A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

Josh Chin and Gillian Wong

HANGZHOU, China—Swiping her son’s or faster treatment at government offices or access to half-fare student card through the turnluxury hotels. stile here one Monday afternoon, Chen Li The national social-credit system’s aim, accordearned herself a $6 fine and a reprimand ing to a slogan repeated in planning documents, is from a subway-station inspector for not to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under paying the adult fare. heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take Use the network, A notice on a post nearby suggested a single step.” text messages to more-dire consequences. It warned that Thus far, the pilot data-collecting systems aren’t frame others infractors could be docked points in the yet tied together into what Beijing envisions as a sweepcity’s “personal credit information sysing system, which would assign each citizen a rating. It tem.” A decline in Ms. Chen’s credit score, according to offi- isn’t clear that Ms. Chen’s ticket infraction made it into any cial pronouncements, could affect her daily life, including central system, although the notice warned that fare-dodgers securing loans, jobs and her son’s school admission. risked being marked down starting Jan.1; a station agent said “I’m sure if it comes up, I can explain,“ Ms. Chen said, only repeat offenders are reported. saying she picked up the card accidentally. “It was unintenZan Aizong, a Hangzhou human-rights activist, sees the tional.” Hangzhou’s local government is piloting a “social system, once it’s fully operational, as an Orwellian exercise to redit” system the Communist Party has said it wants to roll keep closer tabs on a populace already lacking basic liberties out nationwide by 2020, a digital reboot of the methods of such as freedom of speech. “Tracking everyone that way,” social control the regime uses to avert threats to its legiti- Mr. Zan said, “it’s just like ‘1984.’” macy. More than three dozen local governments across China BLACKLISTED are beginning to compile digital records of social and finan- China’s judiciary has already created a blacklisting syscial behavior to rate creditworthiness. A person can incur tem that would tie into the national social-credit operation. black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking Zhuang Daohe, a Hangzhou legal scholar, cites the example and violating family-planning rules. The effort echoes the of a client, part-owner of a travel company, who now can’t buy dang’an, a system of dossiers the Communist party keeps on tickets for planes or high-speed trains because a Hangzhou urban workers’ behavior. court put him on a blacklist after he lost a dispute with a landIn time, Beijing expects to draw on bigger, combined lord. “This has had a huge impact on the business,” said the data pools, including a person’s internet activity, according client’s wife. “He can’t travel with clients anymore.” Added Mr. to interviews with some architects of the system and a review Zhuang: “What happens when it punishes the wrong person?” of government documents. Algorithms would use a range of Driving the social-credit system are the State Council— data to calculate a citizen’s rating, which would then be used China’s cabinet—and the central national-planning agency. to determine all manner of activities, such as who gets loans, A blueprint the cabinet published in 2014 stated it aimed to

A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

Integrity models will be promoted.

Bulletin board with the slogan of the credit system

Rongcheng Natural Person Credit Report.

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Rongcheng, the first township to run a credit system

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Some Shanghai districts such as this one are rolling out early versions of a ‘social credit’ program that aims to rank citizens based on various behaviors.

Penalties for low scorers will include higher barriers to obtaining loans and bans on indulgences such as luxury hotels, according to state-media reports. The Shanghai system appears to still be in an early phase. Residents can check their social-credit records, but records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal didn’t show |any nonfinancial data. Shanghai city officials didn’t respond to inquiries. Despite official-media warnings and propaganda promoting sincerity, dozens of people interviewed in Shanghai weren’t aware of the social-credit plan. Many agreed more should be done to enforce higher moral standards, bemoaning habits such as Act bravely for spitting, cutting in line and being a just cause cold to strangers in need. Research by Yang Wang, a Syracuse University expert on internet behavior, has shown Chinese internet users, accustomed to the idea of government snooping, are less concerned with online privacy than Americans. The most common word for privacy, yinsi, didn’t appear in popular Chinese dictionaries until the mid-1990s, he notes. BEHAVIOR REPORTS In the tree-lined Yangjing neighborhood, subdistrict authorities maintain a database that gives a hint as to what elements of a broader social-credit system might look like. The database collects reports on locals’ behavior from residential committees, said Yuan Jianming, the head of the Yangjing Sincerity Construction Office. Since mid-2015, the office has published a monthly “red list” of exemplary residents. Zhu Shengjun, 28, a high-school

+10

law to the legal system can protect human rights or to the Independence’s judicial system that can at least giving the commercial entity some other space to protect their data. None of them are really exist. Therefore, this social credit system proposed by the Chinese government is a very important phenomena or everyone to pay attention to. HJ: And, could you say something about what Chinese government wants to do with these credits that you are given or not given. XQ: So the social credit system is this tracking system to assess individuals and visitors and even government officers under a law that is that those data trace whether you compiled in a public or private resources. That will be made it searchable by the fingerprint or other biometrics features. So you totally can identifiable who is doing what and then it’s going to cover entire society. In other words, if you are doing something undesirable, somehow in the government algorithm in the one area. And the potential input, the implementation of that either get punished or get rewarded. We could be extended to other areas, such as your financial activity, social activity, travel...that anything that you do with your electronics system. That will be affected if you are being tracked by the single number all the time. HJ: And, do you know anything about how Chinese citizens have been informed about this new system. XQ: Well. The policy was publicly announced. There’s a lengthy of government documents published in 2014. And since then, there has been several experiment not being carried out by different Chinese companies. Right now it’s not mandatory, it’s the volunteer basis. And there are actually millions of Chinese citizens volunteer themselves to subscribe such system to let their online behavior to be rated by those companies algorithm, such as Alibaba as one of them. The reason of that is such algorithm so far. Their gibing people award for their behaviors. So they can gain their points, and then they’ll get some beneficial offers, such as travel easier, the faster to get a visa, easier to get along without deposit, can rent a car, etc. So, this interesting social credit system so fat, it’s unlike, for example, we all been rated on my credit card system one way another in different western societies. But this system is not only document what you do, it’s actually trying to shape your behavior. They give you awards

and give you a punishment to shape the social behavior of the citizens, of to order certain thing they encourage. One of the example is the Alibaba algorithm, they actually publicly exposed to say that if someone playing online game for ten hours, then that will give you a bad grade, because that playing video game can be upgraded there’s some kind of in-responsible behavior. On the other hand, if someone went to shopping mall to buy a bunch of diapers that probably means he or her as new parents that more likely to be more responsible. Therefor, that kind of shopping behavior increasing their grades. So this algorithm building behind shaping people’s behavior pretty magically. The people will gain this system by doing things to gain their points or to self-censor themself, self-behave themselves to avoid negative points. And here it’s not only about their financial activities. On of the telling example is that says, if you are expressing your behavior online, social medias actually chat and you’re interacting with your friends on a social media could affect your social credit as well. That will make us stop to think this is beyond of your sort of financial credibility but it’s goes into people’s social behavior. And that is where the social credit system on giving government way too much power not only put surveillance on their citizens but also in such a manipulated way to shape their behavior. HJ: You mentioned that, there are several were millions of Chinese citizens who actually wants to test this system earlier and to start getting points. But do you know whether there are Chinese citizens who also would want to resist the system or is not appreciating this as much as the ones who are already testing it. XQ: Unfortunately, this whole privacy, the concept of privacy and even further­—the individual freedom—has been a very weak feet to be recognized in the Chinese society in general. People are more enjoying the convenience of the new technology bring to their lives. You don’t have cash around, you only can use one cell phone. You can book a hotel, book a train, get on the taxi and to pay everything, travel for a month without a cash. People are enjoying such type of convenience, but at the same time, when you leave your personal digital trace to everywhere. Everybody in such a society which government has total control the

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“build sincerity” in economic, social and political activity. It stressed the need for fair and clean government and for punishing polluting factories and bribe-takers. Blacklists will expose offenders and restrict them from certain activities, while well-behaved citizens will earn access to “green lanes” that provide faster government services, the blueprint said. Citizens in jobs deemed sensitive—lawyers, accountants, teachers, journalists—will be subject to Individuals receive enhanced scrutiny, it said. national awards China’s government must overcome technological and bureaucratic obstacles to build a system that can monitor 1.4 billion people. Government departments often guard their information, undermining efforts to build a unified database, and their systems often aren’t compatible, said Meng Tianguang, a political scientist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University who advises the government on applying “big data” to governance issues but isn’t directly involved in the social-credit system. “Whether we can actually pull this off, we’re in a state of uncertainty at the moment,” Mr. Meng said. “Either way, it’s better than the traditional era,” until recently, he said, “when we had no data and policy was based on the judgment of individuals.” The Shanghai government on an official website has identified scores of violations that can incur credit penalties in its pilot system, including falling behind on bills and breaking traffic rules. State-media reports list penalties for not being filial to one’s parents. (Under Chinese law, parents over 60 may sue children for not visiting regularly or not ensuring they have enough food.)

Income-tax Payment, Loan Repayment, Credit-card Bills, Utility Bills, Payment of Court Judgments

TRADITIONAL INPUT

Start with

1000

SOCIAL INPUT

Adherence to Traffic Rules, Adherence to Family-planning Limits, Payment for public, transportation, Academic honesty, Volunteer activity, Filial Piety, Criminal Record

ONLINE INPUT

Interactions with other internet users, ‘Reliability’ of Information posted or reposted online, Shopping Habits Flags promote a 'Sincerity Management Model Street' in a cafe in Shanghai, where ‘sincerity displays’ at some restaurants show video feeds from kitchens.

consequence last that the freedom your potential to loose. And the invisible power to shape your own behavior. It’s right now very poorly being recognized. We do see some criticism and concerns generated by, in a lower level, by some Chinese media. But in general, it’s far below sort of any resistance power or any meaningful discussion in the public sphere. For example, this experiment is already been carrying up 7 million people, already been as punished when you has a low score that they are being rejected to get on the high speed train as well they couldn’t purchase a train ticket. So this is also in a context of the other technologies are appearing into this area, such as facial recognition, that also can identify individuals even in a city or in a street, and to link to the database his or hers other behaviors. Such as you cannot get on a train because we are have a bad recored that may be potentially as criminal. These are already happening right now in China, it has now been becoming a national mandatorily implemented system yet. But government certainly has a desire and willingness to do so. HJ: What’s your reaction to the upcoming system. XQ: It’s a deeply shocking recognition that the technology now making a turn from giving everyone’s voices equalize the playing field of sort of making a power shift to the ordinary people now. The shift will becoming to empowering the ruling elite, because individual have no capacity or use of such a big data artificial intelligence technologies to track anyone, only the large company and the state can do that. And the potential power of such technology is enormous. And the fact the combination of such big data artificial intelligence cloud, computing technology combined with the one-party authoritarian regime. The result is really obvious, it’s potentially giving a very negative picture of not only how the Chinese society will develop in terms of growing freedom were actually having decreased in the space of freedom, but also what’s the impact to the rest of the world. Because some of those Chinese technology companies who owns were in the middle of developing, such technology are also expanding to overseas in many other countries in Southeast Asia, in Africa, in Latin America and coming to Europe and North America. Those companies with such technology behind, with such a close working relationship with steady-state will potentially impose the threat that will undermine the democratic system and values in other societies.

That is another reason for everyone in the world should pay closer attention and that such social credit system in China how is been carried out, how is been implemented and what the consequences will be. HJ: Yes, most definitely. And we have done quite a lot of research on this topic. Of course there are a few YouTube videos and there are articles but there were for examples as I could see no podcasts episodes yet on this topic. And it’s still quite almost shallow, the information that you can find out there. So I hope that this will be something that more people pay attention to and are questioning and debating. Because as you mentioned as well, this is not just China. XQ: It is not just China. In the democracies, those kind of debate under struggle. It’s also exist how to protect our privacy, how to protect our individual freedom humanity in general in such a rapid speed of the development of technology. In democracies, such as in Norway or in the United States, the law limits the companies possible measures, so we have at least the platform to debate a such issue. But in China, such as one-party autocracy, the power is not supervised unchecked. There’s no independent rule of law and China has its national security act and also has its now cybersecurity law that giving government agencies unlimited access to all personal data. And imagine those kind of technology also growth the end of China come into other countries we already do in Malaysia, there’s a million people using WeChat; in Australia, in there WeChat is making a way in to it. Huawei, the Chinese company is selling their communication softwares almost everywhere and Hardwares almost everywhere. And that kind of potential threat is a reason that even in Norway or any corner of the world today we need discuss and recognize that it’s one of those threats to not only Chinese citizens, but also to people in your own society potentially. HJ: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. As you may know, we have interviewed two Chinese students in the US, who want to remain anonymous and one of them said that many Chinese citizens have, and I quote, measures to protect themselves from this system. Do you know what they mean by this.

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A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

Points

ZHANG YINGJIE Resident

“Every month, in the community”

“I hear about these good people and good deeds.”

“If you want to by plane tickets or other high-end products.”

“or apply for loans, it won’t be possible”

“I write it down in here”

“This is Wang Zhaosheng from our village”

“He found a wallet.”

“None of that is possible.”

“I was told my credit was too low to buy first class tickets.”

“So I took a bus home.”

“He immediately turned it in to the Community Committee.”

“The owner made a silk banner to thank him,”

“to praise his virtues and nobility.”

“Bu high-speed train it was 3 to 4 hours.”

“By bus it took more than 10 hours.”

—“How much?” —“500 RMB [$72 USD]”

“Now in our community,”

“neighbors get along very well. There are no fights.”

“I have donated my blood”

“money, and done volunteer work”

“to increase my credit score.”

“If you write about their good deeds, “people are proud of it.”

“If you write about the bad things, they’re ashamed.”

“After doing all the good deeds, like donations and such, to gain points”

“I can now buy high-speed train tickets”

“I am finally a normal person.”

WANG FENGBO System Director

“They care about their image.”

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A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

ZHOU AINI Information Collector

teacher, was named on a September red list. He said he didn’t from and when waste oil was last picked up. Customers can know why. While he supported efforts to encourage better watch videos on a mobile app showing chefs working, and behavior, he hesitated at the idea of linking that with financial the system displays the eatery’s health-department rating. consequences, saying “it seems like too much of a stretch.” One recent Monday a Jujube Tree, a vegetarian restauThe office also maintains a “gray list” of people behav- rant,the food-safety console was partially obscured ing badly—throwing garbage out of windows, say—but the by poster board. Manager Wang Dacheng said it was office hasn’t decided whether to publicize it, Mr. Yuan said. because the system had erroneously downgraded the In an area with a population of roughly 170,000, only around restaurant’s health rating, and local officials couldn’t fix 120 have made Yangjing’s red list. Officials there complained it. “We have a lot of return customers. What if they come to Chinese media this year that limited data sharing between in and see that?” Mr. Wang said. He said he supported the departments was hampering efforts to rate people. system but was wary of its being applied without better Businesses, too, get surveillance in pilot cities, where controls. anyone can look up records on registered companies, though For initial social-credit efforts, local officials are relying the records are sometimes incomplete. One objective: turn- on information collected by government departments, such ing around what leaders see as a crippling lack of trust as court records and loan and tax data. More-extensive among citizens from decades of corruption and bare-knuckle logging of everyday habits, such as social-media use and competition. online shopping, lies with China’s internet companies, So the social-credit system aims not just to colincluding e-commerce giant Alibaba lect data on individuals for official use, it seeks data Group Holding Ltd. on the behavior of businesses to analyze and show A credit-scoring service by Alibaba the results to consumers. affiliate Ant Financial Services—one of One example is food safety, a major issue since eight companies approved to pilot comanger erupted over melamine-tainted milk powder mercial experiments with social-credit Refusing to that killed six infants in 2008. Subsequent scandals, scoring—assigns ratings based on inforprovide for including the sale of waste oil scooped up from gutmation such as when customers shop the elderly ters for reuse in restaurants, have continued to fuel online, what they buy and what phone mistrust. Yangjing officials offer a solution: touchthey use. If users opt in, the score can screen displays they installed this summer in some restau- also consider education levels and legal records. Perks in rants. The screens, part of a local social-credit pilot system, the past for getting high marks have included express secuoffer an unusual level of transparency for China. Lit up with rity screening at the Beijing airport, part of an Ant agreeslogans—“Join heart to hand, be a model of sincerity” reads ment with the airport. one—they display information about where ingredients came

PROCESSING... Generating Credit score

That will make us stop to think this is beyond of your sort of financial credibility but it’s goes into people’s social behavior. And that is where the social credit system on giving government way too much power not only put surveillance on their citizens but also in such a manipulated way to shape their behavior.

250

XQ: I’m not completely sure, but I already in my research, I noticed there are mainly what I caught of gaming the system behavior, but looks like it’s all economically driven. Because you’ve gained the higher points giving you all kind of economic social comedian and vis versa if you gather the bad points that you will be punished one way another. Then there’s already some kind of Simon black market that people claiming that you pay me, I’ll get you a good grade. How do they manipulate a system, I’m not sure, maybe sometimes as a low tech director bright into the system. And individually sometimes is a hack behavior to gaming the system. Those type I noticed those kind of service and activities already exist. Of course if the state mandatory such system and then those kind of activity will be considered as crime. But, how severe those crime is, or how capable of the state can keep such a gaming the system activities under control is unknown. The only thing I can say is that, technology as such the surveillance and control was a big data and artificial intelligence, the players has larger resources are on the much better place in the game. In the other words, the big company and the state in a much stronger place to crack down on a smaller activities. So I’m not sure the resistance or the gaming the system activities will be meaningful enough yet to balance such the damage of the system. I think more importantly is a public recognition and a debate that in Chinese society about privacy data, a personal freedom under the boundary of state behavior, that can be discussed, can be openly recognized what’s the potential danger will be and what are these algorithms behind of their back, what kind of data is being manipulated by those companies and ultimately by the state. Without those transparent discussion, people do not what the potential damage could do to their own life. HJ: Yes, So, I have one final question for you. I saw a TED talk that you did in 2014, about Chinese censorship, so I reckon that TED talk. It was published in August, that was two months after the planning out line for the construction of a social credit system was published. So I think that maybe you did the TED talk around the same time as this system was published. But in that TED talk, you said where you ended the talk by saying that you are sure that the censorship in China will not be able to last forever. Are you still sure of that?

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A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

-50

A+ MORE THAN 1000 INTEGRITY MODEL

A 960–1000 INTEGRITY

B 850–959 SLIGHTLY INTEGRITY

C 600–849 INTEGRITY ALERT

Slogans promote sincerity along a Shanghai road.

XQ: Right, this is actually a very good question. Because until that TED talk because tow years ago, my focus is mostly on the power and a potential change that internet can bring to a democratic process brings China more freedom. Because, as my last talk was saying that it bring the citizens a political awareness. I’m to the space of expression and potentially the capacity to self organize themselves. And that has been happening in China in the last 10 years, 20 years, despite all the censorship and control effort. That’s the way I’m also on the more optimistic site on a social trend in the technology precisely about two or three years ago. There’s one of the milestone is the government announcement of social credit system but in larger context. This is a new generation of technology came into the space which is big data is a main effect associated with artificial intelligence, making this state governing the society more effectively, more targetly, and even micromanaging it, shaping people’s behavior, at the same time, using the mentality of individual control of people’s past, becoming a digital totalitarian state. So this new wave of technology shipped into another direction empowering the state rather than empowering the people. It’s giving the state more predicted more capacity to predict or to forecast the social behavior, therefore they could be better in control of the society. That is why I’m now the research is focusing on this new not only the social credit system but also the official recognition system, the big data online monitoring internet opinion system. That to really look in to see these how far those technologies can empower the authoritarian state, to keep its control. I don’t want to close on a pessimistic end from mainly, because I’m an activist myself. I’m an exile, for an exile I often say, I have no rights to be pessimistic. We always have hope, but also I always have hope in humanity with Chinese people, with people everywhere in the world, that our belief to choose to freedom is it’s fundamental. It doesn’t really be so can be suppressed or manipulated in definite time by any technology. Look into the history back in the last few hundred years, or thousand years that we have been progressing in a way that for nothing can permanently suppress the true freedom. In China, may be the technology-ship making another term, but that doesn’t mean the Chinese society cannot find a way to not only resist such kind of a new type of control from the state but ultimately transforming it by recognizing the fundamental

value of the human right, and then to come out the solution to protect results. I think it maybe takes longer maybe there is an interpret turning time that will have to pay prices. That’s reason that you and me are discussing it but more people need to aware it and we are working on solutions or responses to such a threat in every possible way not to protect the human freedom for Chinese people and for people everywhere. HJ: Human freedom and the protection of it let's leave it at that. So, thank you so much for sharing all you knowledge and I think that is very interesting. I hope that this is just the beginning of the world recognizing what’s happening.

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A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

D LESS THAN 600 LACK OF INTEGRITY

A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING

“Especially for young people, your online behavior goes towards building up your online credit profile,” said Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman, “and we want people to be aware of that so they know to behave themselves better.” Alibaba shares aggregate data about online sales with China’s statistics bureau but doesn’t divulge personal data unless required to by law, for example in criminal investigations, Mr. Tsai said. In the U.S., private concerns such as credit-reporting agencies and ride-sharing services compile certain ratings based on consumer data or reviews. The local-government trials aren’t known to be tapping private-sector data, although the social-credit system blueprint designates internet data as a “strategic national resource” and calls for internet companies to contribute data, without getting into specifics. Whether private and public data systems will be combined is still being hammered out, said Zhu Wei, a China University of Politics and Law scholar who has advised the government on social-credit efforts. In an October speech screened to 1.5 million officials, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma urged law-enforcement agencies to use internet data as a tool to identify criminals, according to posts on a Communist Party social-media feed. He didn’t mention sharing Alibaba’s user data. His comments raised eyebrows for broaching the notion that internet companies might share data with government agencies. Alibaba declined to make Mr. Ma available for comment. “We believe the application of machine learning and data analytics for the purpose of crime prevention is consistent with our core values: solving society’s problems,” the company said In an interview Nov. 1 with state media, a deputy head of China’s central-planning agency, Lian Weiliang, noted that

much of the government’s credit-related data were stuck on “isolated islands” and said a central data platform had been established to encourage information sharing. He said the platform had collected 640 million pieces of credit information from 37 central-government departments and various local governments. The agency said the government has stopped untrustworthy people, identified by the court system, from buying airline tickets 4.9 million times. Some advisers to the government, such as Mr. Zhu and Mr. Meng, said they were skeptical the system would meet the 2020 deadline because of the immense task of integrating data and keeping information secure. In Hangzhou, where Ms. Chen used her son’s pass, residents can check their social-credit records at a government-services center. Records the Journal viewed showed only whether people had kept up with health-insurance and social-security payments—a far cry from the central government’s goals.

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THE NEW TECHNOLOGY CAME INTO THE SPACE, MAKING THIS STATE GOVERNING THE SOCIETY MORE TARGETLY, AND EVEN MICROMANAGEING IT, AT THE SAME TIME, USING THE MENTALITY OF INDIVIDUAL TO CONTROL PEOPLE’S PAST, BECOMING A DIGITAL TOTALITARIAN STATE.

HOW

DOES

?

SPACE LEAD

US

SELF AND SPACE, RESISTANCE AND DISCIPLINE: A FOUCAULDIAN READING OF GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984 James A. Tyner

Although written over a half-century ago, George Orwell’s novel 1984 remains a significant political text. The title itself has become a political byword and innumerable terms from the text—such as thought police, Big Brother and doublethink—have entered our vocabulary (Deutscher 1971: 29). Meyers, furthermore, contends that the novel succeeded brilliantly as a political fable, and continues to reverberate in our own time. It reveals Orwell’s acute historical sense, his imaginative sympathy with the millions of people persecuted and murdered in the name of absolutist ideologies. (2000: 288) Accordingly, a substantial body of literature has emerged surrounding both the novel 1984 (Douglass 1985; Freedman 1984; Howe 1983; Hynes 1971; Jensen 1984; Sanderson 1988; Stansky 1983) and the author (Atkins 1954; Crick 1980; Meyers 2000). Geographers, however, have yet to appreciate fully the spatiality inherent in Orwell’s fictive geographies. Geographers have, though, provided extensive re-workings of spatiality. And it is within this project of reworking our geographical un-derstandings that Soja (1996: 2) forwards a challenge to consider interesting new ways of thinking about space and social spatiality. Accordingly, in this paper I juxtapose the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault with Orwell’s 1984. My purpose, though, is neither to provide a Foucauldian reading of Orwell per se, nor an Orwellian legitimation of Foucault’s theories. Rather, my intent is, through a merging of Orwell’s fictive dis-utopia and Foucault’s workings of power, to identify themes that speak to broader concepts of resistance, discipline and space. Thus, whereas Orwell’s 1984 has been frequently—and correctly—read as a warning against totalitarian systems, I suggest that this text may be extended and also read to understand spaces of resistance and discipline. Consequently, this paper draws on, and contributes to, two contemporary themes in geography, namely resistance geographies (Cresswell 2000; Jackson 1987) and fictive geographies (Brosseau 1994; Cresswell 1993; Sharp 2000; Silk 1984). Cresswell (2000: 259), for example,

contends that resistance geographies are central to social and cultural geography. Thus, galvanized by the theoretical insights of Foucault, among others, many geographers have examined the nexus of space, power and social relations. As to the second theme, that of fictive geographies, I concur with Sharp who writes that: Geographers undoubtedly have a contribution to make to the analysis of fiction. The ‘imagined geographies’ created through all sorts of media are central to the geographies used by people when going about their daily lives, so that it is important that such imaginings are understood by those of us trying to get to grips with contemporary geographical relationships and identities. (2000: 333) Fictive geographies, such as Orwell’s 1984, also resonate well with Soja’s conception of Thirdspace. Whereas on the one hand, ‘Thirdspace’ refers to an interstitial position, a locus that blurs the distinction between binary thinking (e.g. discipline/resistance), on the other hand, ‘Thirdspace’ has another reading. As Soja explains, this conception is a creative recombination and extension that builds on a Firstspace perspective that is focused on the ‘real’ material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through ‘imagined’ representations of spatiality. A Thirdspace, therefore, is an investigation into a multiplicity of ‘real-andimagined places’. (1996: 6) Consequently, the dis-utopia of Orwell’s 1984, modelled loosely on Stalin’s Soviet Union, is just such a ‘realand-imagined’ place, one that serves as an effective device to investigate concepts of spatiality theoretically. A Foucauldian reading of Orwell, lastly, is appropriate in that questions of language and power comprise a key area of inquiry in the emergent sub-field of ‘popular’ geopolitics (cf. Sharp 1993, 1996). As Dodds (2000: 71–72) articulates, critical geopolitical authors have argued that ideas and representations about the political world are expressed and reproduced outside the narrow confines of the diplomatic circuit, foreign policy decision-making and intergovernmental conferences. To this end, the geopolitical representations of films, television shows, cartoons, music and postage stamps have been examined by geographers and other social scientists. As a final caveat, though, a Foucauldian reading of fictive geographies is not without its problems. In particular, caution must be taken in forwarding interpretations of 1984 and of applying ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Foucauldian’ thoughts to other contexts and concepts. A perennial question surrounding 1984, for example, a question that has continued

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we ought to pause for a moment in our projects of combining Foucault with Giddens, Lefebvre, Mann, or whoever—the projects of turning Foucault into the ‘same’—and instead we should recognize... the ‘otherness’ of his perspective on geography. (2000: 208) Apart from Philo’s concern, Miller (2000: 19) notes also that Foucault left behind no synoptic critique of society, no system of ethics, no comprehensive theory of power, not even a generally useful historical method. Lastly, a Foucauldian reading is problematic in that Foucault himself would not approve of applying a ‘Foucauldian’ (or Orwellian, for that matter) approach to any subject. In response to a question on Marxism and geography, for example, Foucault explained that: As far as I’m concerned, Marx doesn’t exist. I mean, the sort of entity constructed around a proper name, signifying

at once a certain individual, the totality of his writings, and an immense historical process deriving from him... It’s always possible to make Marx into an author, localisable in terms of a unique discursive physiognomy, subjected to analysis in terms of originality or internal coherence. (1980: 76) This is not to suggest, however, that Foucault would disapprove of applying his work to another subject, for as he explained later in the same interview: If one or two of these ‘gadgets’ of approach or method that I’ve tried to employ... can be of service to you, then I shall be delighted. If you find the need to transform my tools or use others then show me what they are, because it may be of benefit to me. (Foucault 1980: 65)

ORWELL AND 1984 In an essay on Charles Dickens (published originally in 1939), George Orwell1 wrote: ‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page... What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have’ (1981: 103–104). For this reason, I am concerned with the face of Orwell—the man behind the words—and how his positionality contributed to the fictive geographies of 1984. All texts are produced from somewhere and by someone; this means that it is impossible for anyone to escape their positionings (Sharp 2000). Orwell (1981: 311) himself explains in a 1946 essay that a writer’s ‘subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape’. As such, the writings of Orwell are partly historical, partly autobiographical. His Burmese Days (1934), for example, drew on his experiences working in Burma as a member of the Indian Imperial Police whereas his Homage to Catalonia (1938) detailed his time as a revolutionary fighter during the Spanish Civil War. 1984, though, was written in the aftermath of the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War. Drawing on the recent wartime devastation of England and reports of cruelty, torture and purges of innocent civilians in Russia, Orwell incorporated contemporary events to create an atmosphere of documentary reality, and the power of the novel comes from a realistic use of familiar materials rather than from imaginary speculations about the future (Meyers 2000: 281). Equally important was that Orwell wrote 1984 as he was dying of tuberculosis. Meyers (2000: 278) explains that ‘Orwell’s awareness that death was approaching intensified his emotions and heightened his powers of expression’. Indeed, health problems plagued Orwell throughout his life, a fact that contributed to the tenor of his writing. Orwell, in fact, suffered from a chronic cough, numerous childhood bouts with bronchitis, and repeated cases of influenza and pneumonia. Moreover, while in Burma Orwell contracted dengue fever and while fighting in Spain he was shot through the neck by a sniper’s bullet. Orwell was a socialist and this ideology permeates his writings. Orwell, in his essay Why I Write (1981 [1946]) suggests that there are ‘four great motives for writing’, and these include sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. This latter motive, Orwell (1981: 312–313) writes, is defined as a ‘desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after’. Orwell

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SELF AND SPACE, RESISTANCE AND DISCIPLINE

‘To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free...’ (Winston Smith in 1984)

to fuel the Orwell industry ever since, is: What did Orwell intend the book to be? (Abrahams 1983: 3). Douglass, consequently, writes: 1984 has come to be a kind of cultural Rorschach. It has passed into our culture as a symbol and taken on a life of its own. All sorts of themes, many of them far removed from Orwell’s original concerns, have been associated with it. It is a measure of the influence of the book that this is possible. (1985: 263) The writings of Foucault, likewise, are open to multiple readings. Indeed, the growing assemblage of works of Foucault’s life and work—bordering on the superfluous—is staggering (cf. Barker 1998; Brown 2000; Deleuze 1988; Hekman 1996; Macey 1994; McHoul and Grace 1993; McNay 1992; Sheridan 1980). As such, I take seriously Philo’s admonition that

SELF AND SPACE, RESISTANCE AND DISCIPLINE

CONSTRUCTING POWER

Disciplinary power... is exercised through its invisibility

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SELF AND SPACE, RESISTANCE AND DISCIPLINE

romance, and deliberately disappoints the reader’s expectations. Likewise, McNay (1992) and others take Foucault to task for his gender blindness as well as his representation of power as ubiquitous. I suggest, though, that Orwell (and Foucault) does provide a constructive suggestion. Indeed, as Atkins (1954: 252) contends, Orwell ‘wished to rouse people to the dangers inherent in existing political tendencies. He did not believe that the individual was altogether powerless’. Consequently, a Foucauldian reading of Orwell’s 1984 does provides insight into the juxtaposition of discipline and resistance.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF 1984

1984 is set in Oceania, one of three fictionalized superpowers (the others being Eurasia and Eastasia). This tripartite division of the world, immediately recognizable to political

geographers, is based on an ideologically determined balance of power, with each of the three superpowers maintaining similar totalitarian political structures and systems of social stratification (Craig 1983: 28). According to Deutscher (1971: 38), Orwell drew upon specific events of the Seond World War, and especially the Yalta conference, in that Orwell was ‘convinced that Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world, and to divide it for good, among themselves, and to subjugate it in common’. This is significant, in that Orwell is apparently making the argument that totalitarian in any form, irrespective of political orientation, is wrong. The premise of the text is to present a dystopian world, one where the state is the ultimate source of power, and all forms of individuality and personality have become criminalized. Citizens live in an atmosphere of mistrust and

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extreme surveillance. Howe (1971: 44) contends, for example, that the text is ‘at once a model and a vision—a model of the totalitarian state in its “pure” or “essential” form and a vision of what this state can do to human life’. Society is segmented into three classes: the Inner Party, which constitutes the elite upper class and numbers less than 2 per cent of the population; the Outer Party, composed of educated workers and represents about 15 per cent; and the Proles, or proletariat, who signify the working class. According to Strachey (1971: 57), in the novel the party has not yet achieved its objective of completely moulding human nature; members of the Outer Party, for example, are still subject to regrettable lapses, and a tense struggle by all means, from education, spying, torture and shooting, has to be waged to keep them in line.

Winston Smith, the main protagonist, lives in London, the chief city of Airstrip One (formerly England), which is one of the many provinces of Oceania. Winston is employed in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. In a not so subtle reference to Orwell’s former employment as Talks Producer on the Eastern Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Winston’s job is to rewrite history. During the Second World War, for example, Orwell was to produce news commentaries and cultural, educational and political programmes that would persuade intellectual Indians and other South-East Asians to support the British in the war effort (Crick 1980; Meyers 2000). Winston is an ordinary civil servant. Abrahams (1983: 5), for example, suggests that Winston ‘is a type of the colorless, minor civil servant who does what he is told to do— always’. This latter description in particular, I suggest, is

overly simplistic and misses a key element in the resistance of Winston. Abrahams (1983: 5), for example, contends that when the novel begins, a bleak day in April, Winston ‘commits his tiny, brave act of defiance—he starts to keep a diary, even though he knows that the punishment for doing so is death’. I disagree with this assertion and, as explained in a later section, I contend that Winston has repeatedly engaged in small acts of resistance. Whereas the decision to begin writing the diary is significant—particular as a plot device to begin a story—this constitutes one act of many that testify to the ‘rebellious’ character of Winston. Winston is also read as an idealist. Watt identifies, for example, that for Winston, ‘individual feeling is the most essential and desirable reality available’ (1983: 108) and that Winston ‘is even obsessed, in the typical humanist way, with unanswerable questions, and particularly the question of “Why?”’ (Orwell 1983: 113). To remain human, to not be de-humanized, to not succumb to the tyranny of the state, is the primary motivation of Winston. Critics have noted, though, that Winston is presented as a failed hero and a coward (cf. Meyers 2000: 287). Hence, Watt (1983: 112), while sympathetic to the character of Winston, contends that he ‘is not a conscious nor a heroic protagonist of moral and intellectual convictions’. Winston’s betrayals, his ultimate capitulation to ‘Big Brother’, and his becoming an alcoholic, for example, are used as evidence. And yet, I suggest, this constitutes a superficial reading of Winston and overlooks the broader message of Orwell, a point I raise later in the paper. Apart from Winston, the novel revolves around O’Brien and Julia. O’Brien, a mysterious figure, is a member of the Inner Party. Winston believes—or at least hopes—that O’Brien is really a member of a secret revolutionary group known as the Brotherhood. This is supposedly an underground organization that exists to overthrow the Party. In actuality, though, O’Brien is not a traitor to the Party and, indeed, it is O’Brien who personally oversees the torture and confession of Winston. In contrast to the idealist Winston, O’Brien believes men are incapable of ruling themselves and are unworthy of free choice (Meyers 2000: 286). Julia, like Winston, is employed in the Fiction Depart -ment in the Ministry of Truth. Her world-view, likewise in contrast to the idealism of Winston, is decidedly realistic and pragmatic. Craig (1983: 32), for example, suggests that for Julia, ‘the world around her is the only real one and, to explain what happens in it, there is no need to look for answers in regions that her eyes cannot see’. This ontological difference between Winston and Julia is important in terms of how they engage in acts of resistance—a point to be addressed later. Although a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, Julia also seeks out sexual relations with many Party members. Abrahams (1983: 5), accordingly, describes Julia as ‘a secret rebel against the regime, expressing her rebellion through the illegal enjoyment of sex’. At first, this is unknown to Winston, who believes Julia to be either an agent of the Thought Police or, at the very least, an amateur spy. Julia, however, secretively passes a note to Winston that says simply ‘I love you’. Following this encounter they begin a secret love affair, an act which itself becomes an act of resistance. Combined, the characters of Winston, O’Brien and Julia prefigure a discussion of humanity, individuality and

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then explains that, by nature, the first three motives would outweigh the fourth—at least in a peaceful age. Instead, he continues: I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish civil war... (1981: 313) This political orientation of Orwell, rooted in his schooling at St Cyprian’s preparatory school and Eton College, was augmented through his sojourns in both Burma and Spain. He explained that ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it’ (1981: 314). Orwell continues: ‘I write... because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing’. Additionally, we may obtain a more clear understanding of the political intent of Orwell when we consider, again, his essay on Dickens. Orwell identifies two types of socially conscious writers, the ‘moralist’ and the ‘revolutionary’, and contends that Dickens was a moralist. Orwell writes: Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system... without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places... Dicken’s attitude is at bottom not even destructive... It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent. (1981: 51–52; italics in original) Conversely, Orwell argues that revolutionary writing provides a critique of the underlying systems—indeed, aims to turn upside down—the problems of society. Unfortunately, though, Orwell asserts that the ‘moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining each other’ (1981: 65) despite that the ‘two viewpoints are always tenable’ (1981: 64). From this examination of Dickens, a clarification of Orwell’s motive becomes apparent, namely to address ‘the central problem—how to prevent power from being abused’ (1981: 65). Similarities in the writing process exist between Orwell and Foucault. As Foucault explained in 1983, a year before his death, I believe that... someone who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books but that his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books. The private life on an individual and his works are interrelated... because the work includes the whole life as well as the text. (quoted in Miller 2000: 19) Interestingly, numerous biographers and other scholars contend that neither Orwell nor Foucault present explicitly positive, or constructive, blueprints for political action. Meyers (2000: 287), for example, writes that a fundamental problem is that in 1984 Orwell breaks the convention of both literary forms that shape the novel, realism and utopian

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at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility...

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first, the material ways in which discipline was practiced and, second, the spaces of resistance. THE DISCIPLINE OF SELF AND SPACE A critical element within Foucault’s writings, seen particularly in Discipline and Punish, is the concept of a ‘political economy of the body’ or, alternatively, a ‘micro-physics’. Foucault, for example, explains that ‘systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain “political economy” of the body... it is always the body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and docility, their distribution and their submission’ (1979: 25). He goes on to argue that ‘the body is... directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (1979: 25). Accordingly, discipline

was enough to arouse suspicion; every behavior, however inauspicious, was disciplined along state lines.The spatial separation of daily life was augmented with respect to social relations. Within the dystopian world of Orwell’s 1984, for example, the corporeal ‘cogs’ of the Party were unaware of others’ activities. They remained partitioned, each sequestered into their own enclosed spaces; and through their performance of specific functions, no member was able to see the totality of the system. By assigning each individual to a particular place, for example, party members are both socially and spatially separated from the state and society. The enclosure and partitioning of bodies is insufficient, however, in disciplining space. As Foucault (1979: 170–171) identifies, ‘the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus

According to Strachey in the novel the party has not yet achieved its objective of completely moulding human nature; members of the Outer Party, for example, are still subject to regrettable lapses, and a tense struggle by all means, from education, spying, torture and shooting, has to be waged to keep them in line.

DISCIPLINE AND RESISTANCE IN 1984

The imaginary world of 1984 is of a totalitarian society, modelled after the (real) fascist state of Mussolini’s Italy, the nationalist-socialist state of Hitler’s Germany and the Communist state of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The form of social control, accordingly, is manifest more broadly in the control of thought and the destruction of memory, history and the debasement of language, and thus speaks to totalitarian systems in general. Allen, for example, contends that such concerns become the inevitable preoccupation of totalitarian regimes, for as the theorists of the People’s Republic of China have perceived, the political society cannot occupy the totality of human life so long as ‘dangerous thoughts’ in individuals persist. (1984: 152) Significantly though, as Strub (1989: 41) identifies, there has been far more interest in Orwell’s treatment of thought control—his inventions of Newspeak and doublethink, for example—and too little concern about the precise nature of the aversive context that permitted the cognitive manipulation to appear so effecting in controlling behavior. In the following sections, therefore, I consider

is meted on the body and this proceeds, initially, from the distribution of individuals in space (Foucault 1979: 141). Within 1984, it becomes clear that all aspects of life are regimented in Winston’s world. The spatial and temporal elements of discipline, for example, are clearly illustrated in the everyday lives of party members: In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. (Orwell 1983: 72) As such, even walking home via an alternative route

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in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power’. He elaborates that ‘the perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly’ (Foucault 1979: 173). In 1984 it is the telescreen that is the major apparatus of surveillance and, hence, discipline. Early in the novel this apparatus is described: The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. (Orwell 1983: 2; italics added)

This last feature of the telescreen is significant, in that, as Strub (1989: 44) elaborates, despite the extensive surveillance and police resources of the state, arrests appear to occur capriciously, thereby generating some uncertainty about the completeness of surveillance at any specific place or time. Particularly noteworthy is the seemingly randomness of surveillance in Orwell’s world and, consequently, the induced paranoia of not knowing when one is being watched. Accordingly, there existed an even greater uncertainty as to what constituted inappropriate behaviour. This property of surveillance thus augments Foucault’s theorization of discipline, in that: Disciplinary power... is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. (1979: 187) For Orwell, a totalitarian system predicated on surveillance served to maintain discipline. Consequent was a regimented, predictable, hyperorderly society, one that negated human will, spontaneity and creativity. In short, discipline via corporeal control produced total conformity. A parallel is found with Foucault who argues that Thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the ‘physics’ of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees and without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force or violence. (1979: 177) Again, as Winston (Orwell 1983: 2) explains of his life, ‘You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct— in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized’. Aside from sounds, facial expressions were also disciplined. Winston explains: It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (Orwell 1983: 55; italics in original). Winston continues that ‘To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort; but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up’ (Orwell 1983: 69–70). Even more insidious, however, is that the telescreen monitors not only sounds, physical movement and facial expressions, but also thoughts. When writing in his diary, for example, Winston explains that it does not matter whether he writes treasonous ideas, or merely thinks them: Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, it made no difference... The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called

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social relations. Abrahams (1983: 4) contends, for example, that without these three characters the novel may have taken its place as an early polemic against totalitarianism and its consequences; however, with their presence in a plot that horrifies us even as it rivets our attention, in spite of or perhaps because of its affinities both to a thriller and to a love story, it has become one of the most widely read novels of our time. Indeed, it is through the association of these characters that Orwell’s premise of resistance is manifest. Two other characters, who ironically never ‘appear’ in the novel, figure prominently in the plot: ‘Big Brother’ and Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell based these two characters on Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, respectively. Big Brother is the leader of the Party. Goldstein, in contrast, is the enigmatic leader of the revolutionary Brotherhood. The literary association between Big Brother/Stalin and Goldstein/ Trotsky has, though, been well-documented. As detailed in the novel, the physical resemblance of the characters and their real-life models is explicit; moreover, even the name ‘Goldstein’ is a verbal echo of ‘Bronstein’, Trotsky’s original surname (Freedman 1984: 609–610). For Winston, however, doubt remains as to whether Big Brother, Goldstein or the Brotherhood even exist (cf. Tucker 1983). Throughout the novel, readers actually learn very little about Winston Smith or any of the other characters. Indeed, an oft-heard complaint—though by no means completely agreed upon—is that the character development is rudimentary and superficial; these critics, however, miss the point that in 1984 Orwell is trying to present the kind of world in which individuality has become obsolete and personality a crime (Howe 1971: 43). Moreover, as Howe rightly argues: The whole idea of the self as something precious and inviolable is a cultural idea, and as we understand it, a product of the liberal era; but Orwell has imagined a world in which the self, whatever subterranean existence it manages to eke out, is no longer a significant value, not even a value to be violated. (1971: 43) Rather than detracting from the novel, therefore, any perceived lack of character development is consistent with the thrust of the text, namely that the ‘uniqueness’ of people is stripped away under totalitarian systems.

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It was always at night... The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulders, the lights glaring in your eyes... In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word. (Orwell 1983: 17; italics in original). In this totalitarian society, the history of people could be erased. Not simply death, but a social death so complete that all vestiges of an individual’s life are removed. Accordingly, in the Orwellian world of 1984 , the control of knowledge, of information—indeed of history itself— is paramount for the exercise of power and

But how is power to be conceived? For Foucault, power is intimately associated with the production of knowledge. As clearly articulated in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1979: 27) asserts that power produces knowledge; that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. Moreover, Foucault (1990: 94–95) forwards a number of propositions on power, of which I highlight three. First, he suggests that power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared. As such, power is not something that can be possessed by any particular individual or group; power, rather, is a social relation. As Deleuze (1988: 71) explains, power ‘passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the

However, simply the act of being watched is insufficient. Indeed, as Strub identifies, ‘the reason mere observation might induce coercive effects of power is that those being observed expect negative consequences to follow the detection of inappropriate behavior.

the disciplining of society. Winston, as an employee in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, is wellversed in this process. Indeed, it is Winston’s job to (re) write history, to change ‘facts’ according to the demands of Big Brother. Moreover, Winston understands that ‘Books ... were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made’ (Orwell 1983: 35). What is most terrifying for Winston, though, is the complete control of the past: ‘If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death’ (Orwell 1983: 30). It is within the production and reproduction of truth, therefore, that the power of the Party and State is manifest.

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hands of the masters’. Power, thus, is best conceptualized as a force, or a flow. Miller, for example, poetically describes Foucault’s concept of force not as a fixed quantity of physical force, but rather as a stream of energy flowing through every living organism and every human society, its formless flux harnessed in various patterns of behavior, habits of introspection, and systems of knowledge, in addition to different types of political, social, and military organization. (2000: 15) A second Foucauldian proposition is that relations of power are not in a position of exteriority vis-à-vis other types of relationships (e.g. knowledge, economic, sexual, spatial). Third, Foucault’s (1990: 94) concept of power challenges a traditional binary system of discipline and resistance, proposing that there is no bi nary opposition between powerful

and powerless— a point to which I return later in this paper. A dominant theme of 1984, certainly, is the critical control of discourse, of truth, and of knowledge: techniques of power are employed to maintain a totalitarian system. This resonates well—or at least it does so intially—with a Foucauldian understanding of power/knowledge. In their reading of Foucault, for example, McHoul and Grace (1993: 70–71) explain that knowledge gained on the basis of disciplinary power is formulated according to ‘norms’ of behaviour. Hence, thoughtcrimes, facecrimes and ownlifes were rigidly policed and enforced. Significantly, Winston himself provides a Foucauldian reaction to the State. As Deleuze (1988: 71) writes with respect to Foucault’s concept of power, ‘We should not ask: “What is power and where does it come from?” but “How is it practised?”a;chitanya8 In the novel, though, Winston does claim to have identified the ‘how’ of power. Unlike Foucault, though, Winston was not satisfied with simply identifying the techniques of discipline, but instead questioned the ‘why’ of discipline. As explained in the novel: The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted [Winston] with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge posture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY. (Orwell 1983: 70; italics in original) This simple question reappears towards the end of the novel. During the interrogation scene towards the end of the book O’Brien asks Winston if he remembers writing the above question in his diary. He then asks Winston: ‘You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power?’ (Orwell 1983: 233). Winston responds by saying that the Party believes humans are incapable of self-rule and, adopting a Hobbesian view, suggests that the Party and State exist for the good of the majority. To this answer, however, Winston is punished by O’Brien. The Inner Party member explains: I will tell you the answer to my question... The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. (Orwell 1983: 234–235) The statement that ‘the object of power is power’ is clearly discordant with Foucault’s conception of power. For Foucault, power is not something to be possessed but instead to be exercised. O’Brien, conversely, argues that ‘power is not a means; it is an end’ (Orwell 1983: 235). Also, unlike the class-based disciplined spaces of 1984, Foucault’s (1979: 26) theorization of power contends that power ‘is not the “privilege”, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class’. The Orwellian conception of power, lastly, differs in another respect: the production of disciplined bodies, according to Foucault, often serves a material gain: it is largely as a force of production that the body is

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it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. (Orwell 1983: 16–17) Within the totalitarian world of Winston, therefore, all facets of humanity are monitored and disciplined. And yet this control of society and space is not performed equally. Rather, a hierarchy is evident. Foucault suggests that discipline is affected via ranking: ‘a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations’ (1979: 146). But as illustrated in 1984, discipline also reinforces ranking dialectically. Consider, for example, the different lives of Winston, as an Outer Party member, and O’Brien, as an Inner Party member. Late in the novel Winston and Julia arrange to meet O’Brien at his apartment. In this scene O’Brien deliberately turns off his telescreen, much to the amazement of Winston and Julia. Winston exclaims ‘You can turn it off!’ to which O’Brien responds ‘Yes... we [Inner Party members] have that privilege’ (Orwell 1983: 150). This brief encounter, both stylistically and theoretically, demonstrates a particular intersection of class, space, privilege and discipline. Inequalities within spaces of discipline serve to mark individuals as privileged or not. The instrument of disciplinary control—the telescreen—is, simply put, classed. As a member of the Inner Party, O’Brien is largely immune to the disciplining aspects of the telescreen. Indeed, even the knowledge that some members of the Party were allowed to turn off the telescreen came as a revelation to Winston and Julia. Within the spaces of 1984 surveillance produces a highly disciplined, ranked society. However, simply the act of being watched is insufficient. Indeed, as Strub (1989: 42) identifies, ‘the reason mere observation might induce coercive effects of power is that those being observed expect negative consequences to follow the detection of inappropriate behavior. These negative consequences are manifest in punishment, torture, and death’. Foucault, for example, asserts that public executions have juridico-political functions; that executions are ceremonies by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted (Foucault 1979: 48). He elaborates that: The public execution... deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength. (1979: 48–49) But this is not the case in 1984. Rather, in Winston’s world torture is not for public spectacle; rather, it is largely hidden from sight.2 As explained by Winston: it was unusual for political offenders to be put on trial or even publically denounced. The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special showpieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard from again. (Orwell 1983: 39) Moreover, the arrests prior to punishment were also conducted in secrecy. Winston describes the process:

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In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen...

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SELF-RESISTANCE AND REVOLUTION If, in a society as that imagined by Orwell, power is ultimately possessed, is resistance possible? Was Orwell, for example, able to fictionalized aS society so totalitarian that no spaces of resistance could be found? It is commonly understood that, for example, that Winston is destroyed and defeated, and that the State is indeed all-encompassing. Meyers, for example, writes: Although a faint flicker of Orwellian humor survives in the last chapter ... the end of the novel is totally bleak. Winston, neither rescued nor rewarded, is reduced to infantilism, cowardice and self-pitying alcoholism. His enlightenment about the meaning of his life—that he is merely subject to a monstrous lust for power—coincides with the extinction of all hope. (2000: 287, emphasis added) And it is because of Winston’s defeat that Orwell’s

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1984 is read as a negative account of resistance towards disciplined states. But is this accurate? Does Orwell, as a self-proclaimed revolutionary writer (as opposed to the moralist Dickens) offer the reader a constructive suggestion? Discipline, in the Orwellian world of 1984, served to subsume individuality within the domain of the State. Winston explains: The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference... What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely

For Winston, we read that resistance was not to ‘acquire’ power, but instead to retain a semblance of humanity, of individuality. This does, in fact, conform with Foucault’s proposi -tion that power is not something to be possessed or acquired, but rather is a force to affect others. As Deleuze (1988: 71) identifies, an exercise of power shows up as an affect; to incite, provoke and produce constitute active affects, while to be incited or provoked, to be induced to produce constitute reactive affects. Accordingly, resistance is most effective when it is directed at a ‘technique’ of power rather than at ‘power’ in general; resistance, in short, consists of countering these techniques. In the novel Winston discovers that it is the proletariat who have not lost sight of their humanity or individuality. The proles, Winston concludes, had stayed human.

helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a spoken word to a dying man, could have value in itself. (Orwell 1983: 146) Does Orwell, though, provide a space for resistance in 1984 and, by implication, in a totalitarian society? And if so, where is this space located? A Foucauldian perspective would assuredly provide such as space. Foucault, as indicated earlier, attempted to de-stabilize the notion of an oppositional division of discipline / resistance or powerful /powerless. Alternately, Foucault (1994: 354) argued that ‘aside from torture and execution which preclude any resistance, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groups’. This is so because ‘where there is power, there is resistance; and this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault 1990: 95).

Resistance, therefore, is manifest as a means to stay human within a de-humanizing environment. Consequently, the actions of Winston are directed firstly towards a personal liberation rather than a complete revolution. Only later, as both Party members and the proles develop a consciousness, may the entire system be overturned. Winston recognizes, however, that overt resistance is neither practical nor desirable. As explained early in the novel, the disciplinary control of the Party was near complete: Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull. (Orwell 1983: 24) And yet, spaces of resistance were to be found, minuscule perhaps, but spaces nonetheless and located

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in the minutia of the everyday. Consequently, when we re-consider the disciplining functions of the telescreen, we find—however, small and fleeting—instances of resistance: [Winston] ‘kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing’ (Orwell 1983: 3). Other times, while facing the telescreen, Winston would deliberately affect his appearance: ‘He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen’ (Orwell 1983: 4). The ability to oppose the surveillance of the telescreen was also facilitated by the physical location of Winston vis-à-vis the physical layout of his apartment: By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room. (Orwell 1983: 5) Thus, operating within the interstices of the disciplined space, Winston discovers, and exploits, a design flaw in his apartment. These are definitive examples of momentary transgressions. Winston understands that to sit, for example, with his back to the screen for a longer period of time would raise suspicion. Accordingly, he adjusts, spatially and temporally, his behavior and physical persona to challenge the apparent omnipotence of the Party through the use of telescreens. Julia’s resistance is decidedly different from Winston’s in that hers is more practical, more physical, a resistance based on sexuality. 3 In the novel it is explained that ‘Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; “they”, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could’. Winston, of course, recognizes the political implications of her sexuality. When Winston discovers that Julia has engaged in scores of sexual affairs with other Party members, for example, his heart leaps. He wishes that ‘it had been hundreds—thousands’ of times; for Winston, ‘anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope’ (Orwell 1983: 111). He explains to Julia: ‘The more men you’ve had, the more I love you... I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere’ (Orwell 1983: 111). Tellingly, after they have sex, Winston reflects that ‘Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act’ (Orwell 1983: 112). Certainly her sexual relations may be—and have been—read as a form of resistance, but so too are her other everyday activities. On their first meeting, for example, Julia explains to Winston that her activities with the Junior Anti-Sex League, her being a troop leader for the Spies, are all part of an elaborate disguise. She explains to Winston: I’m good at games... I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe. (Orwell 1983: 108) The goal for Julia, unlike Winston, is to circumvent the rules rather than challenging them (Meyers 2000: 284). Julia thus seeks to work within the system, rather than overthrowing the Party. Prior to meeting Winston, she had never heard of the Brotherhood and afterwards refused to believe in its existence. For Julia, ‘Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure,

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invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection...; the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. (Foucault 1979: 26) Yet in the totalitarian world of Orwell’s 1984, power is— apparently—neither universal nor exercised as a productive system. Power becomes the State; the State is power. O’Brien explains that ‘power is collective’ and that every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. (Orwell 1983: 235–236) It is thus through the power/knowledge nexus that all semblances of humanity are eradicated, leaving—ostensibly—nothing but the State. O’Brien continues, ‘Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves’ (Orwell 1983: 228–229). In the novel 1984, therefore, Orwell envisions a totalitarian state in which complete discipline proceeds from the power/knowledge nexus as manifest in the control of thought. O’Brien explains We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission... We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him... We make him one of ourselves before we kill him... Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. (Orwell 1983: 337) Here Orwell draws explicitly on his understanding of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and envisions a state so disciplined that not even erroneous thoughts at the moment of execution could be tolerated. In short, Orwell warns his readers that power, rather than simply techniques of power, can be possessed and transformed by a minority faction and in such as society there is no self devoid of the State. This is not a condemnation of socialism per se, for Orwell was a dedicated socialist; rather, Orwell developed a hyper-repressive society that exists irrespective of political orientation, a society predicated on control for control’s sake. Neither Winston nor the reader is given anything more rational than this—the irrational side of totalitarianism and the eradication of humanity in the name of the State (see also Freedman 1984: 613).

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Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them...

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way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote: To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free... greetings! (1983: 24; italics in original) Immediately after writing these words in his diary Winston reflects that he is already dead and, more significant: ‘Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible’ (Orwell 1983: 25). Winston, I contend, embodies Orwell. Clearly, as his biographers have identified, Orwell’s fiction was decidedly auto biographical (cf. Crick 1980; Meyers 2000). Orwell knew he was dying, just as Winston understood that his days also were numbered.4 Accordingly, it was imperative for Winston to stay alive as long as possible—to finish his warning to the future—just as Orwell was working feverishly

we come to embody Winston/ Orwell and the readership of 1984 becomes the Brotherhood. In the end, it is the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society that they should inhabit, that is, after all, why Orwell (and Winston) wrote.

CONCLUSION Sharp (2000: 332) cautions that ‘Some texts may present revolutionary worldviews, but unless they are widely read, their influence on popular imaginations will be slight’. George Orwell’s 1984 presented a radical and revolutionary world-view, one that clearly is widely read; more than ten million copies have been purchased. Terms such as ‘Big Brother and Thought Police permeate our conversations, and the overall content of the novel continues to influence our outlook on both politics in general and state control

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull. (Orwell 1983: 24)

to finish 1984 as his warning against State repression. A constructive suggestion is evident; Orwell does not disappoint his readers, for our reading of the novel, our engagement with the dis-utopia of Oceania, and our understanding of the workings of the Party is itself an act of resistance towards future disciplinary procedures. If one accepts that Winston is Orwell, then Winston does succeed because his message remains. It is through this merging of Orwell/ Winston that the true message, the final act of resistance, is revealed. Even if Winston did not succeed, others would, and so we see not Winston’s diary remaining, but rather Orwell’s narrative of Winston. And thus, Winston—through Orwell—successfully resists; his warning does remain, to be read by countless generations even after his (Winston’s/Orwell’s) death. Consequently,

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presence in modern history of a repertoire of techniques of power which do not bear the distinctive emblem of the regime—socialist, communist, fascist—that uses them. Orwell, likewise, was less concerned about the political orientation of abuses of power as he was about the manifestation of power and the loss of humanity, of individuality. To this end Orwell envisioned a totalitarian state so disciplined—spatially, temporally and socially—that all vestiges of humanity and individuality were to be subsumed under the control of the state. Consequently, Orwell suggests that the production and manipulation of knowledge are critical to the usurpation of power. And yet, as Foucault (Faubion 1994: 453) would later identify, ‘the rules that exist to limit power can never be stringent enough’. Resistance may always be found within the interstices of disciplined spaces. Caution must be taken, however. As Cresswell (2000: 259) identifies, ‘there is a danger that no area of social life will not be described as resistance’. More problematic is that ‘The romance of resistance leads to a curious kind of inertia in which an apparently unitary, dominating power is seen to be challenged everywhere and thus by a curious magic remains unchallenged’ (Cresswell 2000: 259). Orwell himself warned his readers against this misidentification of resistance. Winston’s mistaken assumption that O’Brien, for example, was a revolutionary contributed to Winston’s own downfall. Nevertheless, acts of resistance are found in 1984, ranging from a manipulation of the physical layout of rooms, to small facial expressions or other bodily gestures. Sexuality, also, serves as a political act. Significant also is that the juxtaposition of resistance as exhibited by Winston and Julia serves as a reminder against essentializing discussions of power, discipline and resistance. Most important, however, is that Winston, through his writing, understood that he would be killed. And Orwell understood that, while writing the novel, he was likewise dying. This parallel, this transposition of Orwell/ Winston, offers the strongest clue as to the manifestation of resistance within 1984, namely that the act of writing —a production of knowledge—for Orwell/Winston was itself a form of resistance.

in particular. Furthermore, Tucker (1983: 93) asserts that Orwell, though no theoretician, was nevertheless a significant contributor to thinking about totalitarianism. He concludes that by producing a work of creative literature rather than a theoretical tract, Orwell achieved something that none of the theoreticians did: he made his imagined world real for us, whereas very much of the scholarly literature made the real seem remote (Tucker 1983: 93–94). This paper has provided a Foucauldian reading of 1984. Accordingly, I suggest that Orwell’s novel speaks to broader concepts of self and space, resistance and discipline, rather than simply totalitarian systems. Colin Gordon (1994: xv), in his introduction to a collection of Foucault’s essays on power, writes that Foucault’s main point was not about the nature of communist power but, rather, about the

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struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same’ (Orwell 1983: 116). Indeed, even though Julia ‘hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words’, she ‘made no general criticism of it’ (Orwell 1983: 116). And yet Julia’s ‘breaking of the rules’ did constitute a serious act of resistance in that her transgressions constituted an individuality that was the antithesis of the Party doctrine. In this way, her physical resistance (as manifest in sexual inter course) was perhaps more egregious to the Party than many of Winston’s activities. The love affair between Winston and Julia is also significant in that the sexual act is tactical. Winston, indeed, explains early in the novel that the ‘sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion’ (Orwell 1983: 60). This works, given that within Oceania, sexuality is (supposedly) rigidly controlled. Marriages between Party members are to be approved by a committee; permission to marry was refused if the coupled concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another (Orwell 1983: 58). The purpose of marriage was neither communal nor based on love; rather, the only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children—future agents of surveillance—for the service of the Party; as such, sexuality was to be restricted to biological reproduction (Orwell 1983: 58). As O’Brien explains towards the end of the novel: in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. (Orwell 1983: 238) The eugenical undertones of the Party’s program of de-sexualization are readily apparent. In its efforts to de-sexualize society, organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League (which advocates complete celibacy and contends that reproduction should be solely via artificial insemination, and of which Julia was a member) are formed. Furthermore, the appearance of the members of the Junior Anti-Sex League—an idealized type of tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blondhaired, vital, sunburnt, carefree—is an obvious swipe at the prurience of the Nazis (Robinson 1983: 150). The Party, Julia, Winston, O’Brien: all agree that power, discipline and totalitarianism is connected to normal, everyday activities, such as walking, thinking, speaking and engaging in sexual relations. However, the most significant act of resistance contained in 1984, I argue, is found within the discussion of Winston’s diary. Certainly, the simple act of purchasing and possession of a diary constitutes a punishable offence and thus may be read as an act of resistance. However, the diary—written within the spaces of a novel—hint at a deeper meaning of resistance to totalitarian systems. At the outset of the novel, for example, Orwell writes: For whom, it suddenly occurred to [Winston] to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn... For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? (1983: 6) Later Orwell describes Winston as ‘a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear’ (1983: 24). Orwell continues: But so long as [Winston] uttered it, in some obscure

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It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

31 Who does monumental architecture glorify? The ruler, as has been explained. It can also glorify the group depending on how it compares to the monuments of other groups. If it is more impressive, then the entire group is glorified. However, though great architecture may make a country look strong and powerful, it does not necessarily benefit its people, if it is used as a mechanism of tyranny. Such is the case with the palaces of Saddam Hussein, or the huge audience halls and party grounds of Hitler. 32. Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 90-91 33. Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 88 34 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 131 35 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 131 36 DeLong, David, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, September 18, 2002 37 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 132-133 38 Referring to theories by Bertrand Russell and Hannah Arendt (Wilson, 117-118) 39 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 148 40 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 126 41 I do not believe in unilineal cultural evolution, or cultural evolution in the sense of constant progression. Technological progression is not necessarily tied to moral or spiritual progression. However, to reach its current technological stage, western society must have gone through some technological state similar to these domesticated peoples. If generalizations can be made about vastly different domesticated societies and these societies consistently fall into uniform patterns, then a similar stage in our past must have resembled them as well. We have since moved away from that way of life, but westerners were once domesticated peoples. This is complicated by the possibility that the differing value we place on technology and on profit may be what led western society to become the way it is, rather than our differing condition leading to differing values. If so, then their societies are certainly not slow to learn and evolve; they simply do not wish to change into what we are. 42 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 76 43 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 147 44 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 66, 77 45 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 147 46 Blier, Suzanne P., The Anatomy of Architecture, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 14-15 47 Sharon Burdick, in comments on this paper. 48 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 83-86, 91, 124-125 49 Dupré, Judith; Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Mast Famous and Important Skyscrapers; (New York: Black Dog & Leventhol Publishers, 1996), p. 67, 69 50 Dupré, Judith; Skyscrapers, 33, 43 51 Dupré, Judith; Skyscrapers, 27 52 Lower Manhattan Development

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Corporation website, “Selected Design for the World Trade Center Site”, http://www.renewnyc.com/ plan_des_dev/wtc_site/new_design_ plans/selected_design.asp 53 David DeLong introduced me to the concept of axiality in a lecture on September 11, 2002. 54 Norberg-Schultz, Christian; Existence, Space & Architecture; (New York, Praeger Publishers: 1971), p. 50 55. Image source: From Luxor to Aswan, “Edfu temple Plan”, http://c. yorkmiller.users.btopenworld.com/ templans/edfu.htm 56 Clerestory windows are near the ceiling, above eye level, and serve to let in light and circulate air. 57. DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, September 11, 2002 58. Image source: http://www.pitt. edu/~tokerism/0040/roman2.html 59. DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 2, 2002 60. DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 2, 2002 61. DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 2, 2002 Image source: Humanities 103, Introduction to Medieval Civilization, “Early Christian Architecture under Constantine”, http://www.owlnet. rice.edu/~huma103/lec5I_II.html 62 Image source: Medieval Narrative, the Roots of Medieval Europe, http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/ digital/2000/c_n_c/c_04_medieval/ roots_medieval.htm 63 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 9, 2002 64 Image source: Alan Peterson, Art 201 History 1, “Sumeria”, http://www. coco.cc.az.us/apetersen/_ART201/ sumeria.htm 65 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, September 11, 2002 66 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 9, 2002 67 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, September 18, 2002 68. DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 23, 2002 69. Image source: http://www.owlnet. rice.edu/~huma103/lec5I_II.html 70 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 2, 2002 71 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, September 25, 2002 72 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 2, 2002 73 Foucault, Michel; Surveiller et punir; Naissance de la prison; (France: Éditions Gallimard, 1975), p. 209 74 Both Old St. Peter’s and Michelangelo’s New St. Peters are basilicas and, consequently, axially oriented. 75 DeLong, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, October 2, 2002 76 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 180

77 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream; (New York, Clarkson Potter: 1996) 78 Norberg-Schultz, Existence, Space & Architecture, 51 79 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 16-17 80 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 11 81 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 12 82 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 243-244 83 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 244-245 84 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 245 85 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 215 86 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 187 87 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 187 88 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 187-188 89 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 14 90 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 16 91 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 209 92 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 210 93 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 177 94 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 210 95 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 185-187 96 Whitaker, Craig; Architecture and the American Dream, 221 97 Foucault, Michel; Surveiller et punir, 197-229 98 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 197-201 99 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 201, « à la périphérie un bâtiment en anneau ; au centre, une tour » my translation 100 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 197 « D’abord, un strict quadrillage spatial : fermeture, bien entendu, de la ville et du « terroir », interdiction d’en sortir sous peine de la vie, mise à mort de tous les animaux errant; découpage de la ville en quartiers distincts où on établit le pouvoir d’un intendant. Chaque rue est placée sous l’autorité d’un syndic ; il la surveille ; s’il la quittait, il serait puni de mort. », my translation. 101 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 198, « Cette surveillance prend appui sur un système d’enregistrement permanent: rapports des syndics aux intendants, des intendants aux échevins ou au maire. » my translation. 102 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 199 « l’effet d’un pouvoir omniprésent et omniscient qui se subdivise luimême de façon régulière et ininterrompue jusqu’à la détermination finale de l’individu, ... la pénétration du règlement jusque dans les plus fin détails de l’existence et par l’intermédiaire d’une hiérarchie complète qui assure le fonctionnement capillaire du pouvoir », my translation 103 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 198, « Espace découpé, immobile, figé. » my translation. 104 Riefenstahl, Leni; Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), (Germany, 1935) (film) 105 Foucault believes that panoptic

architecture is not limited only to prisons but can serve for any institution that needs to control people. 106 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 201-202, « On en connaît le principe : à la périphérie un bâtiment en anneau ; au centre, une tour ; celle-ci est percée de larges fenêtres qui ouvrent sur la face intérieure de l’anneau ; le bâtiment périphérique est divisé en cellules, dont chacune traverse toute l’épaisseur du bâtiment ; elles ont deux fenêtres, l’une vers l’intérieur, correspondant aux fenêtres de la tour ; l’autre, donnant sur l’extérieur, permet à la lumière de traverser la cellule de part en part. Il suffit alors de placer un surveillant dans la tour centrale, et dans chaque cellule d’enfermer un fou, un malade, un condamné, un ouvrier ou un écolier. Par l’effet du contre jour, on peut saisir de la tour, se découpant exactement sur la lumière, les petites silhouettes captives dans les cellules de la périphérie. Autant de cages, autant de petits théâtres, où chaque acteur est seul, parfaitement individualisé et constamment visible. » my translation. 107 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 202, « La disposition de sa chambre, en face de la tour centrale, lui impose une visibilité axiale ; mais les divisions de l’anneau, ces cellules bien séparées impliquent une invisibilité latérale. » my translation. 108 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 202203, « que cet appareil architectural soit une machine à créer et à soutenir un rapport de pouvoir indépendant de celui qui l’exerce ; bref que les détenus soient pris dans une situation de utant de petits théâtres, où chaque acteur est seul, parfaitement individualisé et constamment visible. » my translation pouvoir dont ils sont eux-mêmes les porteurs. » my translation. Note: I left out the two cases of “que” (that) for clarity, since this is only part of a sentence. 109 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 203, « Peu importe, par conséquent, qui exerce le pouvoir. » my translation. 110 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 204 111 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 209, « n’importe quel membre de la société aura le droit do venir constater de ses yeux comment fonctionnent les écoles, les hôpitaux, les usines, les prisons. Pas de risque par conséquent que l’accroissement de pouvoir dû à la machine panoptique puisse dégénérer en tyrannie ; le dispositif disciplinaire sera démocratiquement contrôlé, puisqu’il sera sans cesse accessible « au grand comité du tribunal de monde ». » my translation. DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: PANOPTICONISM 1 Archives militaires de Vincennes, A 1,516 91 sc. Pièce. This regula­tion is broadly similar to a whole series of others that date from the same period and earlier. 2 In the Postscript to the Panopticon, 1791, Bentham adds dark inspection galleries painted in black around the inspector’s lodge, each making it possible to observe two storeys of cells. 3 In his first version of the Panopticon, Bentham had also imagined an acoustic surveillance, operated by means of pipes leading from the cells to the central tower. In the Postscript he abandoned the idea, perhaps because he could not introduce into

it the principle of dis­symmetry and prevent the prisoners from hearing the inspector as well as the inspector hearing them, Julius tried to develop a system of dis­symmetrical listening (Julius, 18). 4 Imagining this continuous flow of visitors entering the central tower by an underground passage and then observing the circular landscape of the Panopticon, was Bentham aware of the Panoramas that Barker was constructing at exactly the same period (the first seems to have dated from 1787) and in which the visitors, occupying the central place, saw unfolding around them a landscape, a city or a battle. The visitors occupied exactly the place of the sovereign gaze. 5 In the second half of the eighteenth century, it was often suggested that the army should be used for the surveillance and general partition­ing of the population. The army, as yet to undergo discipline in the seventeenth century, was regarded as a force capable of instilling it. Cf, for example, Servan, Le Soldat citoyen, 1780. 6 Arsenal, MS. 2565, Under this number, one also finds regulations for charity associations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 7 Le Maire in a memorandum written at the request of Sartine, in answer to sixteen questions posed by Joseph II on the Parisian police. This memorandum was published by Gazier in 1879. CONFINEMENT AND ETHICS 1 Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps: North America, Japanese in the United States and Canada During World War II (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger, 1989), 2-25. Roger Daniels’ discussion of the cultural and economic forces that led to general discrimination against all Asian groups, and specifically the Japanese, are summarized in this chapter. 2 Daniel S. Davis, Behind Barbed Wire: The Imprisonment of Japanese Americans During World War II (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), 27; U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982); Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and James Hirabayashi, “A Reconsideration of the United States Military’s Role in the Violation of JapaneseAmerican Citizenship Rights,” in Ethnicity and War, Winston A. Van Horne, ed. (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin, American Ethnic Studies Coordinating Committee, 1984), 87-110. 3 In recent years, the word “alien” is often replaced by terms such as “lawful permanent resident” or “legal resident.” In this historic context, “alien” is not considered pejorative and, in fact, has long been an accepted term for immigrants who are not citizens. 4 Angelo N. Ancheta, Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience (Trenton: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 29; Jeffrey D. Schultz, Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics: African Americans and Asian Americans (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000), 242. 5 Takao Ozawa v. US, 260 U.S. 178 (1922), at http://caselaw. lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase. pl?court=us&vol= 260&invol=178,

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accessed on August 23, 2010, 1-4. 6 Ibid., 24-25. 7 The position of Secretary of the Army was not established until 1947 when the Department of War became the Department of the Army, a branch of the Department of Defense. 8 Ronald Craig, “After the Shooting Stopped: US Military Police after the Armistice of World War I” in Military Police (U.S. Army Maneuver Support Center, April 1, 2005) at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IBW/ is_1_4/ai_n6124024?tag=rel.res1, accessed on December 4, 2008. 9 Greg Robinson, By Order of the President (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 64-65. 10 U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), Personal Justice Denied (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 52. 11 Curtis B. Munson, “Report on Japanese on the West Coast of the United States” (Washington, DC: U.S. State Department, November 7, 1941). 12 Daniels, Concentration Camps: North America, 28. Note: The reference to the “Bridges type” probably refers to the leader of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), Harry Bridges. He was a thorn in the side of the Roosevelt Administration for many years, but became a surprising wartime advocate for urging a no strike pledge. 13 Daniels, Concentration Camps, 28. 14 Stetson Conn et al., “Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast” in United States Army in World War II: The Western Hemisphere, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts (Washington, DC: U.S Army, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1964), 148 and footnote 41. 15. Robinson, By Order of the President, 72. 16. Ronald M. James, personal communication to Barbara Wyatt, December 30, 2009. 17. Theodore Roosevelt, “Presidential Proclamation: Aliens. No. 2525, Alien Enemies—Japanese,” at http://home. comcast.net/-eo9066/1941/41-12/ PP2525.html, accessed on December 2, 2008. 18. Theodore Roosevelt, “Call to War Against Japan,” at www. newgenevacenter.org/14_HistoricalDocuments/1941_FDRs-Infamy-speech. 19 Robinson, By Order of the President, 75. 20 Conn et al., United States Army in World War II: Western Hemisphere, 118. 21 John Hersey, “A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions,” in Manzanar (New York: Times Books, 1988), 22. 22 Daniels, Concentration Camps, 35. 23 Japanese American Curriculum Project, “Wartime Hysteria: The Role of the Press in the Removal of 110,000 Persons of Japanese Ancestry During World War II, a Gathering of Actual Newspaper and Magazine Clippings” (San Mateo, CA: Japanese American Curriculum Project, 1973). 24 U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Klamath Project, Annual History for 1945, Volume 34 (Klamath Falls, OR: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, 1946). 25 Japanese American Curriculum Project, “Wartime Hysteria.” 26 Hersey, Mistake, 38.

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ARCHETECTURE DEMONSTRATE POWER 1 Wilson, Peter J.; The Domestication of the Human Species; (New Haven, Yale University Press: 1988) 2 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, pp. 27, 42 3 DeLong, David, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, September 11, 2002 4 Myers, Fred R., Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986) 5 Rapoport, Amos, House Form and Culture, (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle,NJ: 1969), p. 20 6 Freud, quoted in Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 180 7 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 77-78 8 Wilson refers to people who live in a built environment as: sedentary, domesticated, agricultural, and Neolithic. He uses the terms: nomadic, open society, hunter/gather, and Paleolithic to refer to people without a built environment. In order to avoid conflation of the methods of subsistence, historical period, and living environment, I will only use the terms: sedentary, nomadic, domesticated and open society. 9 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 29-30 Myers, Fred R., Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self 10 Herzog, Werner, Where Green Ants Dream 11 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 31 12 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 31 13 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 31-32 14 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 58 15 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 59 16 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 65 17 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 58 18 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 67 19 Cunningham, Clark quoted in Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 69 20 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, quoted in Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 67 21 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 69 22 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 73 23 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 77 24 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 123 25 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 130, his italics. 26 DeLong, David, Lectures on History and Theory of Architecture, September 11, 2002 27 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 82 28 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 80 29 Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 87 30 ß Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, 90

NOTES AND REFERENCES

IMPOUNDED: THE CENSORED IMAGES OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT Lange, D., Gordon, L. D., & Okihiro, G. Y. (2006). Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the censored images of Japanese American internment. WW Norton. BUILDING BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY 1 On the SIV as a realization of the synthesis of the arts, see Nikolaos Drossos , “ Modernism with a Human Face: Synthesis of Art and Architecture in Eastern Europe, 1954-1958” (Ph.D.diss., CUNY, 2015). For a history of the SIV building, see Biljana Mišić, The Palace of the Federal Executive Council: A His tory of the Construction. 2 The building was originally designed in 1947 by a team of Croatian architects. After the death of the team leader, Potocnjak, the project was handed over to the Serbian architect Mihailo Jankovic, who in the second half of the 1950s brought it up to date, in accord with the standards of high modernism. The sand and gravel for New Belgrade were dug out of the Danube, but the marble for the building’s facade came from the Adriatic island of Brae. Abundant artworks were produced by leading artists from a ll over the country. 3 For about two centuries, the site of today’s New Belgrade divided the Habsburg and Otto man empires, occasionally changing hands between them. How the changing boundaries between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires affected the character of urban landscapes is discussed in Tanja Damljanović Conley and Emily Gunzburger Makaš, “Shaping Central and South eastern Capital Cities in the Age of Nation­alism” in Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southern eastern Europe, ed. Conley and Makas (New York: Routledge, 2010), 1-28. 4 The largest religious groups were Orthodox and Catholic Christians and Muslims, but there were also long-standing Jewish communities and various Protestant denominations. 5 Milan Prelog, “Yugoslavia: A Kaleidoscope of Cultures,” UNESCO Courier 33 (November 1980): 4-18. Similar tropes were invoked at major international shows, such as Expo 58 in Brussels and the two large exhibitions of Yugoslav art in Paris held in 1950 and 1971. 6 Socialist Yugoslavia had six constituent nations (narodi). Ordered by population, these were Serbs, Croats, Muslims (granted national right s in the 1960s), Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. The largest minorities ( narodnosti) were Albanians, Hung arians, Romani, Turks , and soon. The minorities were granted rights to some cultural self-expression but not statehood. 7 Originally known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the country changed its official name to Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. 8 For Yugoslavism in architecture, see Aleksandar lgnjatovic, Jugoslovenstvo u arhitekturi. 9 The process is most convincingly

traced in Dejan Jović, Yugoslavia: A State That Withered Away (West Lafayelle, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2008). 10 For a historiography of the concepts of national architectures, see Tanja D.Conley, “Conceptualizing National Architectures: Architectural Histories and National Ideologies among the South Slavs” in Nationalism and Architecture, ed. Raymond Quek, Darren Deane, and Sarah Butler (London : Ashgate, 2012), 95-106. 11 How contentious the question of “Yugoslav architecture” was is perhaps best glimpsed from a collection of quotes compiled by the architectural historian Ines Tolic; see her “Impossible Interview with Some of Those Involved in the Borba Award,” in Unfinished Modernisations— Between Utopia and Pragmatism, ed. Maroje Mrdulj as and Vladimir Kulić (Zagreb: CCA , 2012), 388-92. 12 Zoran Manevic, Žarko Domljan, Nace Šumi, Ivan Štraus, Georgi Konstantinovski, and Božo Milić, Arhitektura XX vijeka, series Umjetnost na tlu Jugoslavije. 13 Ivan Štraus, Arhitektura Jugoslavije, 1945-1990. 14 For the situation in Macedonia, see Georgi Konstantinovski, Graditelite vo Makedonija , XVlll XX vek [The Builders of Macedonia, 18th-20th Centu­ries] . 15 Arhitektura eventually narrowed its scope to Croatia in 1954, and is still published today, whereas Arhitektura Urbanizam, after a strong period in the 1960s, dwindled in the following decade and then eventually cease d to exist. In addition to these two publications, several locally produced journals and papers were widely read around the country, most notably čovjek i prostor, Arhitekt, and Sinteza. 16 Dragan Popovic, “Youth Labor Action ( Omladin ska radna akcija, ORA) as Ideological HolidayMaking,” in Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s), ed. Hannes Grand its and Karin Taylor, 297-302. 17 On the visual culture of volunteer labor; see Sanja Bachrach Kristofic and Mario Kristofic, eds., Omla­dinske radne akcije. dizajn ideologije [Youth Working Campaigns: Designing Ideology], exh. cat. 18 For example, the twetynine guidebooks in the edition Monuments to the Revolution were published in a total print run of more than two million copies; see Gojko Jokić, Spomenici revolucije. Turisric kivodic [Monuments to the Recolution: A Tourist’s Guide]. 19 On the twentieth anniversary of the uprising, the principal Yugoslav architectural journals devoted entire issues to the topic of commemoration, both of which testify to the emergent new culture of commemoration; see Arhitektura 15, nos.1-2 (1961), and Arhitektura Urbanizam 2, no.10 (1961). 20 Bogdan Bogdanović, Nature and the Goddess of Remembrance, exh. cat. 21 Rory Yeomans, “From Comrades to Consumers: Holidays, Leisure Time, and Ideology in Socialist Yugoslavia,” in Grandits and Taylor, Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side, 69-105. 22 Igor Duda, “Workers into

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Tourists: Entitlements, Desires, and the Realities of Social Tourism under Yugoslav Socialism,” in Grand its and Taylor, Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side, 33-68. 23 Yeomans, “From Comrades to Consumers,” 87-88, 94-96. 24 Renting rooms in private homes was allowed and reg­ulated; due to insufficient capacities in socialized resorts, enterprises sometimes even contracted room s from locals to accommodate their workers during the holiday season. See Karin Taylor, “Fishing for Tourists: Tourism and Household Enterprise in Biogradna Moru,” in Grandits and Taylor, Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side. 241-77. 25 This is the running subtheme of the documentary series Beronski spavaci [Slumbering Concrete], by Sasa Ban and Maroje Mrduljas (Croatian Radio Television, 2015). Available at https://hrti.hrt. hr/search/term/betonski%20 spava%C4%8Di. 26 See “Tajanstveni objekt u borovoj sumi,” episode 4 of Slumbering Concrete. 27 Sadly, the building was recently altered beyond recog­nition in a misguided attempt to find the essence of Macedonian identity in the classical tradition. 28 Other libraries that articulate vernacular traditions through modern forms include the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade by Ivo Kurtovic (1966-72) and the National and University Library in Skopje by Petar Muličkovski (1972). 29 Juraj Neidhardt and Dušan Grabrijan, Arhirektura Bosne i put u suvremeno / The Architecture of Bosnia and the Way to Modernity. ARCHITECTURE FOR A SELF-MANAGING SOCIALISM 1 Freelance artists were limited to performing tasks related to interior design, stage sets, and exhibition and stand design, which fell under the domain of “applied art.” 2 “Conclusions of the First Yugoslav Symposium on Housing Construction and Apartments in the”, Čovjek i prostor., no. 8. Andrija Mutnjaković, “Housing Problematics within the 2nd Inter­ national Exhibition Family and Household”, Čovjek i prostor., no. 79 (1958): 4. “Art Regulator of Industrial Production”, Čovjek i prostor., no. 86 (1959): I. 3 “Housing for Our Conditions”, Arhitektura, nos. 1-6 (1956): 46. 4 For a discussion of New Tendencies, see Armin Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Treshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016). “Instructions for Industrial Design”, CID, Zagreb, n.p. 5 Josip Županov, Fedor Kritovac: “Industrial Design and Economicsocietal Movements in Yugoslavia”, 258. 6 Radovan Ivančević, “Culture of Everyday Life”, 15 Dana, no. 20/21.3 (1963): 6. 7 Term coined by Stipe Šuvar, influential Croatian sociologist and politician, leader of schooling reforms of 1970s. “Symposium of the Architects of Yugoslavia on the Building of Elementary Schools 1957”, in Arhitektura, nos.1-6 (1958): 1-2; 19-20. 8 See Arhitekt , nos.12- 13 (1954).

Alfred Roth, The New School I Das Neue Schulhaus I La Nouvelle École. 9 Edvard Kardelj, Developmental Orientations for the Political System of Self-management, 2nd rev. ed., 115. 10 In Yugoslav socialism, the notion of “culture” was understood and applied in very broad terms. Along with the conventional forms , the notion also implied the “technical culture,” for in stance photography and amateur radio; “physical culture,” which was related to sport and recreation; and a number of other fields. 11 The members of the MEC group were Marjan Čehovin, Dejan Ećimović, Slobodan Maldini, Mustafa Musić, and Stevan Zutic. The core members of the Kras Group were Vojteh Ravnikar, Matjaž Garzarolli, Marko Dekleva, and Egon Vatovec. Increa sing interest in introspective research and a shift away from conventional practice is clearly demonstrated by the suc­cess of younger Yugoslav architects at the influential international Shinkenchiku competitions in Japan. In 1983, Ivan Crnković and Emil Sverko won with the project New Croatian Manor: House with Six Identical Rooms, and in 1984 Vinko Penezić and Kresimir Rogina did the same with the project Style for the Year 2001. 12 The Revolution Center in Nikšić is not the only case of unfinished large-scale cultural centers from late socialism: with the Dubrava Cultural Center in Zagreb and the Youth Center in Split, only rough works were executed, while others, such as the Cultural Center in Bosanski Šamac, were only partially completed. THE BUNKER: METAPHOR, MATERIALITY & MANAGEMENT Virilio, P. (1975). Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins. Paris: Les Editions. WHO NEEDS DEMOCRACY WHEN YOU HAVE DATA? Larson, C. (2018). Who needs democracy when you have data?. MIT Technology Review, 121(5), 50-55. A CREDIT RATING FOR EVERYTHING Chin, J., & Wong, G. (2016). China’s new tool for social control: A credit rating for everything. The Wall Street Journal, 28. SELF AND SPACE, RESISTANCE AND DISCIPLINE 1 George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. The son of a minor British official, Orwell was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India. Much of his early childhood, however, was spent in England with his mother (his father stayed in South Asia till 1912). As a child, he attended St Cyprian’s preparatory school and, later, Eton College. Throughout his life Orwell worked in an assortment of jobs, most related to journalism and literature. His first work, though, was as an Assist- ant Superintendent of Police in Burma from 1922 to 1928. Later, he taught at a small private school in Middlesex; fought in the Spanish Civil War; worked for the BBC disseminating propaganda to British Colonies in India and South-East Asia; and as literary editor for The Tribune. He died of tuberculosis in 1950. 2 Minor references to public

executions are in evidence in 1984, an observation that seemingly contradicts Winston’s statement that public purges are unusual. We are left with two possible explanations for these seemingly contradictory statements. First, biographers have noted that Orwell, given his declining health, was not able to re-read his novel and correct certain inconsistencies. These statements, therefore, may simply be read as errors made by Orwell in his writing. A second interpretation, however, is that, while unusual, Winston does not say that all executions were conducted in private. It may be that certain criminals— particularly prisoners of war—were more likely to be publically executed, whereas prisoners of the state were simply made to ‘vanish’. 3 Not all critics are in agreement that Julia’s sexuality is a form of resistance. Strachey (1971), for example, contends that Julia is no romantic revolutionary nor intellectual; rather, she ‘just wants some hearty sex, normally mingled with tender emotion.’ Strachey, though, misses the argument that within Oceania sex is a punishable offence. I an indebted to one reviewer who, in newspeak, comments that ‘“just want[ing] some hearty sex, normally mingled with tender emotions” in Airstrip One is revolutionful praxis of double-plus unnormal crimethink’. 4 Scholars have also noted that the tortures Winston would endure in the novel mirror the medical treatments Orwell endured during his hospital stays. During the interrogation scene, for example, O’Brien says to Winston: ‘You are the last man ... You are the guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are’ (Orwell 1983: 241). At that moment, Winston is or- dered to undress and look upon his body in the mirror: ‘Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together... [On looking at his body], its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself... The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird’s face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose and battered-looking cheekbones above which the eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look... He had gone partially bald... Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was gray all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton; the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs... The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull’ (Or- well 1983: 241–242). In this passage, Orwell is apparently describing himself via the character of Winston. As one reviewer commented, however, we may not want to accept this comparison between Orwell and Winston too easily.

5 Abrahams, W. (1983) Nineteen Eighty-Four: the novel, in Stansky, P. (ed.) On Nineteen Eight-Four. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., pp. 2–8. 6 Allen, F.A. (1984) Nineteen EightyFour and the eclipse of private worlds, in Jensen, E.J. (ed.) The Future of Nine- teen Eighty-Four. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 151–175. 7 Atkins, J. (1954) George Orwell: A Literary and Biographi- cal Study. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing. 8 Barker, P. (1998) Michel Foucault: An Introduction. Edin- burgh: Edinburgh University Press. 9 Brosseau, M. (1994) Geography’s literature, Progress in Human Geography 18: 333–353. 10 Brown, A.L. (2000) On Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. 11 Craig, G.A. (1983) Triangularity and international violence, in Stansky, P. (ed.) On Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: W. H. Freeman, pp. 148–158. 12 Cresswell, T. (1993) Mobility as resistance: a geographical reading of Kerouac’s On the Road, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18: 249–262. 13 Cresswell, T. (2000) Falling down: resistance as diagnostic, in Sharp, J.P., Routledge, P., Philo, C. and Paddison, R. (eds) Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/ Resistance. London: Routledge, pp. 256–268. 14 Crick, B. (1980) George Orwell: A Life. London: Secker & Warburg. 15 Deleuze, G. (1998) Foucault, trans. Hand, S. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 16 Deutscher, I. (1971) ‘1984’—the mysticism of cruelty, in Hynes, S. (ed.) Twentieth Century Interpretations of 1984. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 29–40. 17 Dodds, K. (2000) Geopolitics in a Changing World. Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 18 Douglass, R.B. (1985) The fate of Orwell’s warning, Thought 60: 263–274. 19 Faubion, J.D. (ed.) (1994) Power: Essential Works of Fou- cault, 1954–1984, trans. Hurley, R. et al. New York: The New Press. 20 Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, A. New York: Vintage Books. 21 Foucault, M. (1980) Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. London: Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, R. New York: Vintage 22 Foucault, M. (1994) Space, knowledge, and power, in Faubion, J.D. (ed.) Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3. New York: The New Press, pp. 349– 364. 23 Freedman, C. (1984) Antinomies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Modern Fiction Studies 30: 601–620. 24 Gordon, C. (1994) Introduction, in Faubion, J.D. (ed.) Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. Hurley R. and others. New York: The New Press, pp. xi–xli. 25 Hekman, S.J. (ed.) (1996) Feminist

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27 Conn et al., Guarding the United States and its Outposts, 119. 28 Robinson, By Order of the President, 95. 29 Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 31-32. 30 Robinson, By Order of the President, 103. 37 Ibid., 106. 31 “Executive Order 9066, Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas. Signed: February 19, 1942” (Federal Register, February 25, 1942), at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154, accessed on December 2, 2008. 32 Robinson, By Order of the President, 114-115. 33 Ibid., 123-124. 34 Ibid., 112. 35 Ibid., 4. 36 Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (New York: Morrow Quill, 1976), 301. 37 Brands, H. W. Traitor to his Class, The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 2008), 661. 38 Robinson, By Order of the President, 128. 46 Ibid., 102. 39 Daniels, Concentration Camps, 84. 40 DeWitt, John L. Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 107-111. 41 “Public Law 503, Law establishing penalties for violations under E.O. 9066,” March 21, 1942, at http:// internmentarchives.com/archimg/ d00104p001.png, accessed on December 28, 2009. 50 Roger Daniels, Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 57. 42 Daniels, Concentration Camps, 94. 43 Dillon S. Myer, Uprooted Americans: The Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority During World War II (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971), 3. 44 Clifford I. Uyeda, Due Process: Americans of Japanese Ancestry and the United States Constitution (San Francisco: National Japanese American Historical Society, 1995), 32. 45 Dale Minami, “Coram Nobis and Redress” in Daniels et al., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress, 201. 46 Greg Robinson, By Order of the President, 204. 47 Ibid., 206. 48 Ibid., 230. 49 Ibid., 231. 50 Sakoda, “The Residue” in Views from Within, xx. 51 Daniels, Concentration Camps, 116. 52 Smith, Democracy on Trial, 444. 53 Roger Daniels, personal communication with Curtis Breckenridge, 2000. Note: the Internal Security Act of 1950 was passed in response to fears about communism. It included a provision for confining or deporting aliens suspected of Communist affiliations. Much of the law was later repealed. 54 Peter Irons, Justice at War: the Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), viii-ix.

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panoptical control: Bentham’s panopticon and Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour, The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 25: 40–59. 46 Tucker, R.C. (1983) Does Big Brother really exist?, in Howe, I. (ed.) 1984 Revisited. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 89–102. 47 Watt, I. (1983) Winston Smith: the last humanist, in Stansky, P. (ed.) On Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., pp. 103–113.

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