Disciplina e dissenso: relações entre Política e Arquitetura

Abstract

This dissertation discusses relations between politics and architecture, without trying to guarantee the meaning of each one of them. The research focused on the study of discipline, which could be defined, from Foucault, as a bio-political technology at the intersection of knowledge and power for the governance of bodies and the population, and dissensus, which could be defined, from Rancière, as an event that presupposes a common sense heterogeneous to the dominant one, altering the consensual regimes of visibility and comprehensibility, and through which is constituted a litigious political subject. In this sense, politics oscillates between the governance of society, in which architecture participates, and the revolutionary gesture, that architecture can constitute as a fictional work of art according to the aesthetic regime or that it can unloose through a strategic withdrawal from discipline. (Des)identification and subjectivation emerge as two political phenomena common to discipline and dissensus. The theoretical development is interspersed by the analysis of three case studies. The ethologist Calhoun's rodent universes demonstrate, by their laboratory and scientific nature, the governing rationality of architecture through the management of resources and social places and the monitoring of population phenomena and individual behavioral deviations. Fernand Pouillon's Climat de France expresses the ambiguity between discipline and dissensus, divided between the colonialist need to segregate or assimilate a potentially dissident community and the possibility of building a place estranged from the divisions that characterize domination. Lacaton and Vassal's Cité Manifeste, for its outright rejection of low-cost housing standards in favour of space maximization and the introduction of objects and systems foreign to housing, promotes a reinvention of everyday life, eventually allowing that, in the process of reencountering the problem of dwelling, the inhabitants reinvent themselves.