Diagrams of Power in Benjamin and Foucault

This book’s overarching premise is that discussion and critique in the discourses of architecture and urbanism have their primary focus on engagements with form, particularly in the sense of the question as to what planning and architecture signify with respect to the forms they take, and how their meanings or content (what is “contained”) is considered in relation to form-as-container.  While significant critical work in these disciplines has been published over the past 20 years that engages pertinently with the writings of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, there has been no address to the co-incidence in the work of Benjamin and Foucault of an architectural figure that is pivotal to each of their discussions of the emergence of modernity: The arcade for Benjamin and the panoptic prison for Foucault have a parallel role. In Foucault’s terms, panopticism is a “diagram of power.” The parallel, for Benjamin, would be his understanding of “constellation.”  In more recent architectural writings, the notion of the diagram has emerged as a key motif.  Yet, and in as much as it supposedly relates to aspects of the work of Foucault, along with Gilles Deleuze, this notion of “diagram” amounts, for the most part, to a thinly veiled reinstatement of geometry-as-idea.  This book redresses the emphasis given to form within the cultural philosophy of modernity and—particularly with respect to architecture and urbanism—inflects on the agency of force that opens a reading of their productive capacities as technologies of power. It is relevant to students and scholars in poststructuralist critical theory, architecture, and urban studies.“This is a book about Foucault and Benjamin and it is grounded in a deep knowledge of and reflection upon their works, but it is also underpinned by an impressive erudition. There are reflections on Hegel and Heidegger (central to the author) and Derrida, along with Kierkegaard, and others. This leads to a rich and suggestive discussion … in staging a spatial-architectural-political conversation between Foucault and Benjamin.”- Anonymous Reviewer“Mark Jackson’s Diagrams of Power in Benjamin and Foucault, The Recluse of Architecture juxtaposes and interrogates its two leading actors so as to draw from and through them a theory of architecture, which is inseparable from its recluse. In doing so it elaborates a series of complex connections with their various interlocutors and inspirations, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, the Kabbalah, Agamben, allegory, Marx, Deleuze, Klossowski, tragedy, capitalism, modernity, and so on. The list is long and impressive. This is not only done with an extremely high degree of scholarship, but is presented in a light, lucid and very compelling manner in a voice both personal and authoritative. The recluse is the figure of mimesis itself, the appearance of a withdrawal, always already a ruin. This book not only contributes a highly astute reading of its philosophical objects, but it enacts the ontology

Mark Jackson’s principal research interests are in a broad platform of philosophical approaches to ethics in design cultures and architecture. He has published on the work of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Walter Benjamin, with respect to design cultures, design theory, and approaches to design research, with a particular emphasis on post-humanist engagements with ethics. He has also published on the literary philosophy of Maurice Blanchot and feminist writings associated with the works of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. He has also produced film and digital video works for exhibition, and has published in the field of film and philosophy.