Becoming-Infrastructural

“It is hard to imagine how the many ruptures that have occurred in the composition of whatever may be called “normality” today do not render canonical architectural knowledge a distant constellation, receding from our present. Nor is it difficult to see how such ruptures are themselves a stern reminder of our need for new forms of knowledge altogether—forms that reject the assurances of a professionalized architectural discourse, and that call instead for a new horizon of common, intersectional and necessarily partisan modes of inquiry. For, what do the ongoing events of climate change, the displacement of peoples across the surface of the earth, the emboldening of racist violence, or the neocolonial plunder of the natural world have in common if not an emerging struggle over how the figure of the human in the world is to be understood?

The figure of the human body has played a consistent role throughout history in both the way space is imagined and how power finds its form. There is a history, yet to be written, in which key representations of the human body at once call into existence and justify certain modes of government while simultaneously suggesting ideal ways to organize the spaces of the world. Yet representations of the body that dominate any given period not only offer an ideal: they must also conceal secrets by which the masses of real, fleshy bodies may be governed; they must at once offer an exemplary figure and its inherent flaw or defect—both a universal truth to guide bodies and a ubiquitous site of intervention through which to coerce them.
This is also a spatial matter: if the body can suggest certain inherent principles of justice and order by which to best organize human life, the body will inevitably inscribe itself into the spaces, architectures, and worlds of human experience. Representations of the human body, we might say, are coded diagrams that collect certain knowledges of the human condition in order to grant access to the ways in which power and space intersect.”

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