Design, week 2

objective: thinking about how human bodies are influenced by their built environments

readings:

Deleuze, "Postscript of the Societies of Control"

https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf

"The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" - hourlong film

https://archive.org/details/SmallUrbanSpaces

Going back to last week’s discussion, a major tie-in with the film is the idea of built-in seating vs movable chairs. People prefer spaces where they have agency to move around their seating. With movable chairs, people almost always move their chairs an inch or two before sitting down, perhaps to feel that they are making a choice vs using what’s been offered.

related work: Jane Jacobs--urban studies person

Foucault’s Discipline & Punishis what Deleuze is building off of. Remember that this was written in France in the 90’s.

Delueze- in the past discipline was corporeal, like beheadings. Punishment was physical. Now we train the interior of person to desire a new way of being.

Foucault quote about panopticism & capitalism:"If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of 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 [i.e. torture, public executions, corporal punishment, etc. of the middle ages], which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection.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 be possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of 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 ... The growth of the 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 régimes, apparatuses or institutions"

Societies of control vs societies of discipline: people becoming agents of their own control in order to conform to society norms.

How things were done in the pat vs how they are done now. The factory continued the control of the schools. Now that we are perpetually learning,

Corporate needs are different than the factory, they need people less materially trained, so olding and modulation of the population is changing.

The underlying logic of prisons, hospitals, schools is controlling where people are in space and time.

The modern approach is a more flexible kind of control. Usually there’s much more info available to judge someone and that data can be analyzed much more efficiently.

example: credit score: all of your transactions are being monitored and judged

Factory style: make sure workers have a specific specialized task

need for hard skill set, movement in education toward hard skill sets, ideas we talk about push towards a more general skill set and away from potential for control

Related to the moving the chair an inch to have agency in the film: big companies considered exceptional places to work offer at least the illusion of tons of agency, but ultimately you are working on what they want you to. Also, this creates massive incentives to stay at work way past 5pm and to play and be friends with your coworkers, who you will probably talk about work-related ideas with after hours, so that your work actually becomes much bigger in your life than in a more factory type job.

“The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.”

“For the school system continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling.”