Michel Foucault
French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84) was concerned with examining the past
as a means of diagnosing the present. For Foucault there was no essential order or
meaning behind things, and everything was therefore to be judged according to a
framework of knowledge which was forever changing. Foucault referred to the broad
changes in intellectual outlook as epistemes, periodizations of knowledge not dissimilar
to Thomas Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’. History, for Foucault, had to be understood according to
the epistemes and discourses of the past. It was through a ‘genealogical’ analysis of the
past that we would inevitably gain some insight into the way in which the present had
been ‘produced’. Foucault’s own intellectual project in some sense mirrored the shifting
preoccupations of his time. Thus, for example, Foucault’s early work, The Order of
Things, reflected the predominance of structuralism in the 1960s, while his later historical
works, Discipline and Punish and, to a greater degree, The History of Sexuality, reflected
the subsequent so-called ‘poststructuralist’ move away from the rigidities of
structuralism.
The question of space is central to Foucault’s thinking, and his work therefore has a
special relevance to architecture. His treatment of this matter reflects shifts in his broader
intellectual developments. The essay ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, for
example, belongs to Foucault’s early structuralist phase. Here Foucault is concerned with
space as an institutionalized demarcation of structures of power. The discussion of
Bentham’s panopticon, by contrast, belongs to a transitional phase when Foucault was
becoming increasingly preoccupied with the exercise of power in its more diffuse forms.
The panopticon provides a model which encapsulates the characteristics of a society
founded on discipline. It embodies a system in which surveillance plays a crucial role,
and in which knowledge is inseparably bound to power. The very architectural layout of
the panopticon affords various techniques of control, which, Foucault thought, would in
themselves assure almost automatically the subjection and the subjectification of the
inmates.
Foucault revisits the example of the panopticon in a subsequent interview, ‘Space,
Knowledge and Power’, where he appears to qualify his earlier comments. On the subject
of liberty, Foucault stresses that architecture in itself cannot act as a force of either
liberation or oppression. ‘I think that it can never be inherent in the structure of things to
guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom.’ Architectural
form, according to Foucault, cannot in itself address such questions, although it could
produce ‘positive effects’ when the ‘liberating intentions of the architect’ coincide with
‘the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom’. Foucault is therefore not
contradicting but merely qualifying his earlier comments on the panopticon. It is not the
form of the panopticon which controls behaviour, but the power differential between
warden and inmates. The efficient layout of the architecture is merely supporting the
exercise of this power. Foucault thereby provides a crucial insight into the capacity for
architecture to influence human behaviour.