A casa que nos domestica. Ensaios sobre um instrumento disciplinar

Abstract

"The essays collected here examine the nature of [the house] (...) at the moment they become (...) an equipment that control the movements of [dwellers] and their things (...) as an institution, where the law is inscribed and [economical] technics can mature (...) to command the precepts of domesticity..." You will find an essay that shows an interest to assimilate, in which way and in what extent, the house becomes an important disciplinary instrument to give an opportunity to the institutional bodies to create a society that conveniently serves their main purposes only by handling the dwellers's behaviors. It entends to analyze judiously what were the effects that domestic environments come to produce on the dwellers's behaviours or speeches and to enounce which were the architectural mechanisms that caused the same effects, in an attempt to shows us how the domestic converted itself in a disciplinary instrument highly convenient to the institutional bodies of the moment causes's. We will dismantle the most important national housing policies that were built during the twentieth century in several disciplinary units that allow us to order the way how the system was assembled in a relatively coherent structure. We will analyze, at first, which were the necessary administrative mecanisms procedures that mantain the housing policies in operation that actually conditioned the way how dwellers would behave to analyze, à posteriori, the architectural techniques of a neighborhoods' sample that shows clearly how housing policies materialized their intention. We will understand which were the thoughts that convinced dwellers to change their behavior and which were the spatial mechanisms that truly conditioned them. We will enounce which were the eventual consequences with an important economic or political convenience that came to be noticed in the dwellers's behaviors and that motivated the institutional bodies to create judiously the housing policies or even the neighborhoods. There will be necessary, in the last moment, to question the moment in which the dwellers revealed a spontaneous wish to consume a series of equipment that would improve the domestic functioning under their responsibility and in which the dwellers effectively reorder their domestic behaviors in an highly productive mechanics, where the immense daily needs would be resolved in an efficient way. We will enounce how the dwellers came to condition their behavior in a conduct of enormous convenience to the functioning of a reordered society according to the institutional bodies's intentions, without ever understanding disciplinary speech that Giorgio Agambem enunciated in "What is an Apparatus?". "There is a set of beliefs, rules and rituals that, in a given society and at a certain historical moment, were imposed externally on individuals. (...) It implies feelings that are more or less inscribed in the soul (...) that reveal the effect of command and the result of obedience..."