Benno Premsela Lezing 2017: Paul B. PreciadoBenno Premsela Lezing 2017: Paul B. Preciado

Philosopher, curator and transgender activist Paul B. Preciado gave the 2017 Benno Premsela Lecture. One of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics, Preciado addressed architecture as a technology of subject production. The text of his lecture is published below, and is also found in a special supplement of The Funambulist.

The Architecture of Sex: Three Case Studies Beyond the Panopticon

An unexamined assumption lies at the root of the difficulties to understand and address the relationship between sex and architecture: architecture is presented as a social construction, while sex is understood as nature. Hence, the juxtaposition of sex and architecture tends to replicate the tensions between nature and culture: whereas architecture is described as subject to a mutable history corresponding with the development of building techniques and visual cultures, sex is presented as a stable feature. This might explain why, until the 1990s, the relatively scarce discussions of gender, sexuality, and architecture revolved around the invisibility of women architects or the differences in the ways that women or 'homosexuals' used various private and public spaces. In a certain sense, both second-wave feminist and gay historiographies took sexual difference and sexual identity for granted and failed to question the possible role of architecture in the production of those sexual subjects that were supposed to be liberated and made visible.

The process of denaturalisation of the notions of gender and sexual identities introduced by queer theory and critical race studies in the 1990s shifted the terms of the debate. Arguing that sexual and gender identities were 'surface effects' rather than features of interiority, 'ornamental' rather than structural, and 'performative' rather than essential, authors such Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Teresa de Lauretis concluded that these identities were performatively constructed rather than naturally given.Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Teresa De Lauretis coined the term 'queer theory' in her guest-edited special issue 'Queer Theory. Lesbian and Gay Sexualities' in: differences: A Journal of Feminist and Cultural Studies, 3, 2 (1991); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, _The Epistemology of the Closet _(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Actively borrowing the architectural language of construction, the colour-queer epistemological move invites us to no longer think of the relationship between gender, sexual difference, and architecture as a tension between nature and culture, but rather as a feedback loop between different social technologies.

The work of Katarina Bonnevier, Beatriz Colomina, Lee Edelman, Diana Fuss, Michael Moon, Sally Munt, Christopher Reed, Joel Sanders, Eve K. Sedgwick, and Mark Wigley, to name just a few, registered the impact of gender and queer theories within architectural histories.See: Katarina Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains. Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007); Sexuality and Space, ed. by Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992); Lee Edelman, 'Tearooms and Sympathy; or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet', in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 148-171; Diana Fuss, _The Sense of An Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them _(New York: Routledge, 2004); Michael Moon and Eve K. Sedgwick, 'Queers in (Single-Family) Space', in Assemblage, 24 (August 1994), pp. 30-33 (this text was originally written for an architecture show called Social Constructions, curated by Mark Robbins at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, in 1994); Sally Munt, 'The Lesbian Flâneur', in Mapping Desire. Geographies of Sexuality, ed. by David Bell and Gill Valentine (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 114-125; Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms. Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004); STUD. Architectures of Masculinity, ed. by Joel Sanders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) More recently, the symposium _Stand by Your Monster and Some Queer Methods _(Princeton University, 2017) sought to bring these questions directly in contact with architectural practice as well as with the academic curricula shaping professional profiles.See https://soa.princeton.edu/content/stand-your-monster-and-some-queer-methods (last accessed 23 February 2018). As a new generation of practitioners and critics voiced during the symposium, in spite of the 'performative turn' of the 1990s, readings of architecture have too often continued to use the notions of gender and sexuality rather acritically, equating gender with women and posing heterosexuality and homosexuality as pre-discursive identities that each relate to architecture differently. In response to these claims, I propose to re-approach the relationship between gender, sexuality, and architecture, drawing both on the gender-queer performative turn and on Michel Foucault's understanding of biopolitics.See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979); Michel Foucault, _Power/Knowledge, _ed. by Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980); Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self. A Seminar With Michel Foucault, ed. by Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton, and Luther H. Martin (London: Tavistock, 1988); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1-3, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Michel Foucault, _The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Coll__ège de France 1978-_79 (New York: Picador, 2010); Paul Rabinow, 'The Birth of Biopolitics', in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 67-72.

What is at stake here, from the point of view of the history of architecture, is the relationship between the spatialisation of power regimes and the development of specific techniques of subjectivation. Asking how architecture works as a biopolitical technique implies not only paying attention to the processes of segmentation and incarceration of the population according to different taxonomies, as James Hay, Meredith TenHoor, Anthony Vidler, and Sven-Olov Wallestein have done, In spite of this discursive profusion, none of these studies have investigated the relationship between the biopolitics of space and the production of modern gender and sexual regimes. See Jeremy Packer, 'Disciplining Mobility: Governing and Safety', in Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality, ed. by Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 135-161; Meredith TenHoor, 'Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles', in French Politics, Culture & Society, 25, 2, (Summer 2007), pp. 79-92; Sven-Olov Wallestein, 'Foucault and the Genealogy of Modern Architecture', in Essays and Lectures, ed. by Sven-Olov Wallestein (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007), p. 361-404; Sven-Olov Wallestein, _Bio-Politics and The Emergence of Modern Architecture _(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). but also interrogating the way in which architecture is used as a social and political technique for the management of sexual reproduction. The question is how different spaces function to promote or prevent the encounter of different bodies, to enforce or prohibit sexual reproduction, and to facilitate or preclude the circulation of certain reproductive fluids (blood, sperm, milk) within the space of the modern city. Architecture always works in complicity with other social and institutional techniques, establishing alliances or antagonisms with legal institutions, fiction and literary text, medical and pharmacological techniques, media and communication devices. This entanglement of architecture with other social technologies makes it impossible to read it simply from a formalist point of view or as a style within a series of historical trends. Instead, architecture can and must be understood within a general map of technologies of social and sexual reproduction.

This critical move demands two axioms to begin with. Firstly: gender, race, and sexual identity are political technologies of social construction, inasmuch as architecture is, too. Architecture is a performative technique: it produces the subject that it claims to shelter. Secondly: like architecture, political technologies of gender, sexuality, and race work with the very materiality of bodies and spaces. It is precisely this constitutive encounter with matter (as virtuality and limit, as possibility and constraint) that forces us to overcome the nature/culture divide, the 1980s opposition of essentialism and constructivism, analysing the way in which both bodies and spaces gain materiality and perform only through and within the encounter with specific social technologies.

This text aims to trace some of the strategic relationships between architecture, gender, and sexuality by looking at three architectural forms that lie, until now, at the margins of traditional architectural history, and that have been the objects of my research practice during the last years: Restif de la Bretonne and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's plans for eighteenth-century state brothels; the pre-fab mass-produced suburban house of the 1940s and 50s; and the invention of the contraceptive pill and its dispenser as a pharmacological design object in the early 1960s. I will propose to understand these three architectural forms as social and political techniques of assisted reproduction and contraception through which gender and sexuality have been shaped in modernity.

This is the starting hypothesis: architecture doesn't arrive in order to incarcerate the prostitute, or to house the white heterosexual family, but rather produces the subject ('heterosexual' or 'homosexual', 'normal' or 'deviant', 'white' or 'non-white') that it claims to house by framing fields of visibility and invisibility, by distributing bodies in space, and organising the circulation (or arrest) of certain (organic or non-organic) fluids (blood, sperm, milk, water, capital, information, etc.). Rooted in various historical times as well as different forms and uses of architecture (institutional building, mass-produced housing, and commercial pharmacological design), the examples listed above will allow us to illuminate the role of architecture as a biopolitical technique of normalisation of gender, sexuality, and race within modernity. This counter-narrative of modern architecture constitutes a 'speculative fabulation' -- to put it in Donna Haraway's termsDonna Haraway, SF: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures, dOCUMENTA (13), 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts, 33, (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011).-- in order to surpass anatomical, formal, essentialist, and identity politics readings that have dominated the study of the relationships between body, gender, sexuality, and architecture throughout the last fifty years.

Historians of architecture tend to forget that the brothel was an obsession for architects and political thinkers throughout modernity. In 1769, the writer (and declared enemy of the Marquis de Sade) Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published an extravagant pamphlet that enjoyed extraordinary success within Europe at the time. Le Pornographe, or A Gentleman's Ideas on a Project for the Regulation of Prostitutes, Suited to the Prevention of the Misfortunes Caused by the Public Circulation of Women drafted the first architectural proposition to reform prostitution practices in Europe according to a new revolutionary and republican ethos, and proposed the construction of a series of state brothels for the seclusion of the 'street women' of the city of Paris to guarantee what he called 'the virtuous exercise of love'.Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne, Le Pornographe, ou idées d'un honnête homme sur un projet de réglement pour les prostituées, Propre à prévenir les Malheurs qu'occasionne le Publicisme des Femmes: avec des notes historiques et justificatives (Paris, 1769). A new edition of the first part of the text appeared as Le pornographe ou La prostitution réformée (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003).

But it was the canonical Claude-Nicolas Ledoux who, a few years later, developed two architectural projects for the 'institutions of public love' that Restif, before him, had only imagined.Jean-Claude Courbin has argued that Ledoux, who self-edited his treatise on occasion of Napoleon's coronation in 1804, must have known Restif's project for the Parthénion when designing Oïkema and the Maison du plaisir. Le Pornographe was highly commented on in Paris and was likely Ledoux's strongest influence, together with Le Camus de Mézières's 1780 publication Le génie de l'Architecture. See Jean Claude Courbin, 'Le Pornographe devant la critique: de la narration à la législation', in Études Rétiviennes, Société de Rétif de la Bretonne 4 (1986), p. 78. See also: Yvan Christ and Ionel Schein, _L'__œ__uvre et les rêves de Claude-Nicolas Ledoux _(Paris: Chêne, 1971), p. 18; and Le Camus de Mézières, _Le génie de l'Architecture ou l'analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (Paris: Benoît Morin, 1780). In the first volume of his treatise L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des m__œ__urs et de la législation, Ledoux presented his project for 'Oïkema', a 'house of pleasure', to be built at the Saline Royale in Arc-et-Senans._Anthony Vidler mentions Restif de la Bretonne as a precursor of Ledoux's Oïkema but he does not present a reading of Restif's work in relation to architecture. Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Architecture and Utopia in the Era of the French Revolution (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), pp. 84 and 135. Concealed behind high and solid walls and camouflaged by the wavy forms of the surrounding hills, the outline of the brothel's architecture was a phallic form, designed following the norms of the separation of bodies according to ages, classes, and health. It was a total, hermetic architecture, similar to penitentiary institutions, allowing full surveillance of the prostitutes.

For the few architectural historians who have paid attention to Ledoux's state brothel, the phallic shape of the building often becomes the key for an allegoric reading of architecture: the brothel is understood as an architectural symbol, anatomically representing phallic power within the modern city.Paulette Singley, 'The Anamorphic Phallus within Ledoux's Dismembered Plan of Chaux', in Journal of Architectural Education, 46, 3 (February 1993), pp. 176-88; Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory From Vitruvius to the Present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994). Whereas there is undoubtedly a narrative motive of phallic force in the architectural project of the state brothel, the form does not exhaust its architectural meaning and functioning. Moving away from this allegorical reading of architecture, Anthony Vidler was indeed one of the first architectural historians to take the brothel projects of Ledoux seriously that proliferated during the eighteenth century in Europe. An early reader of Foucault, Vidler proposed to understand the houses of pleasure and vice as 'asylums of libertinage' that, together with the prison, the hospital, or the factory, aimed to control and normalise modern urban populations. Vidler read the brothel as a sexualised version of the panopticon, a prison intended to jail female prostitutes. Vidler's Foucauldian claim is accurate, but, I would argue, insufficient.

According to Restif's ideas and Ledoux's plans, the 'Parthénion'Restif and Ledoux appropriate the name for their brothel from the Greek temple of female virgins. was intended to function as a hospital-prison for prostitutes in order to prevent the spreading of the most feared disease of the century: the vérole, the mal vénérien, or syphilis.Restif de la Bretonne, Le pornographe ou La prostitution réformée (2003), p. 13. During the eighteenth century, the biopolitical management of syphilis and the intensity of disciplinary reforms around it lead to a transformation of sexuality and space into technical domains of medical and punitive intervention.Bruce Thomas Boehrer, 'Early Modern Syphilis', in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1, 2 (1990), pp. 197-214. The age of syphilis was characterised by the expansion of colonial and industrial capitalism but also by the mutation of a theological understanding of reproduction to a new scientific model of sexual and racial identity. With syphilis, a new body was fabricated: the female body, understood as the vector of transmission of the sickness, became the object of surveillance and enclosure, either in the domestic environment (in the case of white, bourgeois women), or within the architecture of the brothel (in the case of non-white and working class women). The architect became an urban physician dedicated to map places of prostitution and to make propositions to improve urban health. By the nineteenth century, the new discipline of urban planning, best personified by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet in Paris and William Acton in London, was located at the crossing of urban engineering, reproductive medicine, sexual management of prostitution, and social hygiene.

In terms of the biopolitics of architecture, its European and colonial history in modernity could be read as one of and against syphilis, a history of techniques of control and privatisation of female and non-white sexuality and of the segmentation of urban public space in order to produce immunity for white men. It is in order to eradicate the venereal contamination that the state brothel is projected as an 'asile inviolable',Restif (2003), p. 45. an island of discipline and vice, a totally hermetic institution where 'all public women must be inside the houses, otherwise they will be physically punished'.Restif (2003), p. 45.Thus, it is possible to affirm, with Antony Vidler, that the state brothel was a sexualised version of the panopticon where lower, working class, and non-white women were secluded to provide seemingly 'safe' sexual services to the newly bourgeois 'Republican' men. How, then, can we explain the production of pleasure and desire in a panopticon? If the brothel was a prison for prostitutes, what was it to the clients? Why were men assumed not to be carriers of the disease? We must move away from both formal and allegorical readings, as well as from a ready-made disciplinary interpretation of the panopticon.

It is only by thinking about the medical management of syphilis, about the promotion of male sexual sovereignty, and about the control and maximisation of sexual reproduction that the form and function of the state brothel can be understood. Oïkema is not just a sexual prison, but also a biopolitical device to purify the national body, allowing for the free circulation of sperm within the city while forcing women to reproduce. Architecture, here, is a building technology to spatialise fear and desire, power and pleasure, health and sickness, normality and pathology.

The architecture of the brothel should be understood in relation to other prophylactic and assisted reproduction techniques of its time. The Parthénion was a gargantuan condom-architecture extruding into the space of the city. Inside, the double function of prophylaxis and contraception were nevertheless dissociated, enabling the male user to preserve his sovereign circulation of sperm without running the risk of venereal contagion. The condom, an artificial skin covering the penis, restricting the circulation of sperm, and thus preventing heterosexual reproduction, is the oldest contraceptive technique. In 'pre-Pasteurian'Alain Corbin, 'Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France: A System of Images and Regulations', in Representations. The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, 14 (Spring 1986), pp. 209-210, here p. 210. medicine, the condom was the only tool to prevent syphilis. Nevertheless, as a material limitation of male reproductive power, the condom was considered a threat towards male sovereignty and God's plans of the expansion of mankind on Earth. The architecture of the brothel stood at the crossing of the fear of losing male sovereignty and the urge to prevent the spreading of syphilis. It worked as a collective condom, a political skin replacing the individual use.

Oïkema was a sperm-pumping well, a political apparatus to extract and distribute sperm. The excess of semen that could not be used within the institution of marriage was to be made public within the theatrical setting of the brothel to perform and maximise male sovereign power. This collective, ritualised celebration of male sovereignty produced a surplus of political pleasure that came to compensate for the restriction of male sovereignty introduced by syphilis. For this reason, Restif de la Bretonne pressed for the prohibition of contraceptive methods (including the condom) inside the brothel's walls. Young prostitutes were expected to procreate, the state simultaneously being the ultimate sovereign and a father figure. Joining pleasure and discipline, subjugation and lust, violence and freedom, the Parthénion -- a wet and sexualised version of the panopticon, but also a collective prophylactic device of immunity -- seems to offer a better political diagram than its dry variations in the form of the prison or the factory in order to understand the workings of the new biopolitical technologies of government invented within modern democratic European cities.

After the Second World War, the relationships between immunity and health, contraception and fertility, but also between pleasure and discipline changed drastically. The transformation of institutional and disciplinary biopolitical architectures into pre-fab mass-consumption housing units that took place in the 1940s and 50s in the United States allows us to trace this shift. Not only was the spatial regime of the suburban house -- that continued throughout the Cold War period -- the result of policies of decentralisation and the construction of residential areas for families in response to the threat of a possible nuclear attack on major American cities. The suburban biopolitical spatial regime was also an architectural version of the assumptions underlying the redefinition of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality in post-war America, seeking to re-establish the traditional separation of gender spheres.

The 'separate spheres' theory that prevailed in bourgeois society since the eighteenth century was based on a strict gender division, a biopolitical topology by which public, 'exterior', and political domains were defined as masculine battlefields, and the domestic, private, and interior spaces were understood as naturally suited for women. In fact, the industrial transformation of modes of economic production had eroded the productive function of the domestic space, which, thus stripped of power, became to be characterised as a naturally feminine space, a space of circulation of milk and water -- of nurturing and cleaning, of reproduction and purification.See also the classic Nancy F. Cott, _The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England 1780-1835 _(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

The Second War World came to complicate the traditional divisions between 'exterior' and 'interior' and their relationship with the topopolitical understanding of 'masculinity' and 'femininity'. On one hand, the war brought about a restructuring of gender spaces: the family cell was disrupted by the enlistment of men into the army on a massive scale, while women threw themselves into public life and productive employment outside of the home. After the war, the homecoming of U.S.-American soldiers was not a simple process of re-domestication, but rather a radical deferral. The heterosexual soldier, post-traumatically unfit for monogamous family life, stepped back into the home to become woman's strongest rival rather than her complementing partner. The domestic as reproductive and female space was becoming unhomely. On the other hand, from 1941 to 1945, over 9,000 U.S.-American men were diagnosed as 'homosexuals' and either forced to undergo psychiatric treatment or considered unfit for military service.The violent stigmatisation of homosexuality by the American army triggered an unprecedented campaign that paradoxically came to render visible and re-politicise sexual dissidence in the United States. See Allan Bérubé, _Coming Out Under Fire. The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two _(New York: Free Press, 1990). Senator Joseph McCarthy's 'Fight for America' campaign was an operation aimed at denouncing and punishing communists as well as gender and sexual 'deviants' in government jobs.For more on the operation carried out by McCarthy see: David K. Johnson, _The Lavender Scare. The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government _(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The nineteenth-century model of heterosexuality was entering into a Cold War.

This crisis of the traditional institutions and biopolitical techniques that had previously regulated sexuality and gender differences displaced the conflict arena from the geographical space of the nation-state to the slippery surface of bodies. In a paranoid shift of self-immunisation,On the politics of immunity see: Roberto Esposito, _Bíos. Biopolitics and Philosophy _(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). the state turned its instruments of espionage, surveillance, and torture against its own citizens, with the individual's body, gender, and sexuality seen as incarnations of the political body of the nation-state. Perceived through the analogies of contamination (as an epidemic infecting the nation) and penetration (a nuclear missile between the United States and the Soviet Union), homosexuality was posited as a threat to the integrity of the U.S.A.'s 'social body'. The homosexual was a foreigner, the sexual ally of Jews and communists, at the intersection of all of the 'outsiders' (geopolitical and sexual) that defined American post-war identity.

But the biopolitical management of the population can't be understood without its underlying ideology of promoting the production and purification of race. As U.S.-American emblems against gender and racial rebellion, the white housewife and the white breadwinner became the complementary political agents underpinning the stability of the family and the reproduction of the nation. Post-war American public and private housing programs in the late 1940s were a national attempt to re-establish the biopolitical architecture of gender, sexuality, and race that had prevailed during the nineteenth century. Gwendolyn Wright's landmark essay _Building The Dream. A Social History of Housing in America _examines the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) programs of the post-war period in the United States. According to Wright, the FHA practiced 'overt policies of ethnic and racial segregation', and 'encouraged the use of restrictive covenants to ensure neighbourhood homogeneity and to prevent any future problems of racial violence and declining property values.'Gwendolyn Wright, _Building The Dream. A Social History of Housing in America _(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), p. 247. Although these policies were denounced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for 'fostering black ghettos', the urban red-lining discrimination programs of the 1960s were enforced throughout the country.

As Andrew L. Barlow has shown, one of the consequences of this suburban architectural regime was the development of a national pattern of racial segregation.Andrew L. Barlow, _Between Fear and Hope. Globalization and Race in the United States _(Lanham, ML: Rownan and Littlefield, 2003), p. 84. In their study of the relationship between American suburban development and the spatialisation of race in post-war America, Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton gave the racial zoning of the non-white and African-American population (who were placed in densely inhabited neighbourhoods located around the urban core) a name: 'hypersegregation'.Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, _American Apartheid. Segregation and the Making of the Underclass _(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 53-55. In spite of the rising economic status of the African-American population after the Second World War, non-white families remained excluded from the 'white supremacy' of the green lawn. The green lawn was a colour line. As Andrew Wiese points out, 'the story of the black suburbia suggests the importance of housing as an arena of black politics, linking African American social and political history and the politics through the politics of housing. [...] Their struggle to control it, define it, and reap its advantages were a crucial terrain of black agency, politics, and identity-making throughout the twentieth century.'Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 162; Levittown, built between 1947 and 1951 on Long Island near New York, is the most emblematic North American suburban complex: it included 17,000 standard-built houses. More than eighty-eight percent of its inhabitants were white families. Only 0,7 percent were Afro-American.

A Foucauldian, queer, and anti-colonial reading of the histories of U.S.-American urbanism allows us to understand the post-war suburban spatial arrangement as derived from a new theory of technically 'separated spheres' constructed with the help of prefab walls, glass, combustion, electricity, communication networks, and pharmacological molecules. In terms of gender, the suburban regime also enabled the transition from the traditional theory of the separated spheres to gender and race hypersegregation. White men drove their automobiles to work on brand-new highways, while white women and children remained shut away in the suburbs. Inside the single-family heterosexual home, white women became full-time, unpaid workers at the service of consumption and heterosexual (re-)production, while white male bodies were constructed as workers, communicators, and sperm producers. At the same time, private ownership of a single family suburban home was a privilege that only middle-class white heterosexual families could afford, making up the suburban landscape of race, gender, and sexual segregation. The withdrawal of white heterosexual families from downtown areas in turn went hand in hand with a new policy of gender, racial, and sexual surveillance of public urban spaces.

The development of suburbia as a utopia for white heterosexual reproduction -- which Rich Benjamin later called 'whitetopia'Rich Benjamin, _Searching for Whitetopia. An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America _(New York: Hyperion Books, 2009). See also: Elisabeth Farelly, _Blubberland. The Dangers of Happiness _(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). -- was intertwined with a strong eugenic discourse about the threat of non-white overpopulation in America. The spatialisation of reproductive policies along race lines -- racial zoning -- lead to a racial 'purification' of suburban family areas. As Wright has stressed, the ideal of a racially homogeneous space was rooted in the colonial biopolitical principle according to which highly gender-, class- and race-segregated areas were easier to govern than diverse urban centres.Gwendolyn Wright, _The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism _(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), pp. 73-75. For Wright, this is the reason why the post-war suburban white single-family housing boom was supported by a government-funded financial program that produced a growing standardisation not only of suburban areas but also of housing types, such as in Panorama City, California (built by the developer Fritz B. Burns and the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser), in Park Forest near Chicago (developed by American Community Builders) or in Levittown in Long Island. The prefab production process transformed the four-room house -- either with a split-level design or an H-shaped plan, built-in refrigerator, washing machine, hi-fi and radio unit, television set, and white picket fence -- into the hegemonic biopolitical architecture that would normalise gender, race, class, and sexuality in the United States during the post-war years. The suburban house itself worked as a performative device to produce gender difference, separating adults from children, but also masculinity from femininity, production from reproduction. For Wright, 'these architectural changes reflected something more than a builder's larger scale and desire to reduce expenses. Social scientists studied the 'average family' in the suburbs, and psychologists published 'livability studies' that correlated the domestic environment with statistics on crime and family stability.'Wright, p. 253.

Never before had the house been designed as a space fully dedicated to the biopolitical reproduction of the white U.S.-American citizen: in fact, fertility rates were much higher in suburbs than in cities. As Beatriz Colomina has stressed, for the first time, children's spaces and needs (for play, rest, or entertainment) were taken into account and generated specific architectural gestures: the glass back wall facing the so-called 'outdoor living room' was designed for the mother to be able to watch her children playing outside; the open plan living room centred around the television set was an indoor theatre and playground. Inside and outside, carpet and lawn, were gender-opposed biopolitical territories.Beatriz Colomina, _Domesticity at War _(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), pp. 132-133. By reading Wright's and Colomina's analyses together with Foucault's theory of governmentality, we could redefine suburban housing as an architecturally assisted reproduction technique, a biopolitical technology to increase national reproduction rates but also to produce class, gender, sex, and race normalisation.

The post-war years can thus be seen as a period of expansion and consolidation of a set of gender, sexual, and race norms that, following Adrienne Rich's analysis of sexual politics, could be called a white heterosexual architectonic imperative.Adrienne Rich, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence', in Signs, 5, 4 (1980), pp. 631-660. Like the single-family home and the automobile, post-war masculinity and femininity were standard assemblages that reflected the very same process of industrialisation. The suburban home was a decentralised factory for the production of new performative models of gender, race, and sexuality. The white heterosexual family was not just a powerful economic unit of production and consumption; it was, above all, the architectural matrix of North American nationalist imaginary.

The third case study in this short genealogy intends to show the transformation of the biopolitical infrastructures of classical European architecture into design objects of mass consumption in the second half of the twentieth century. Architecture is neither just building nor tectonics; architecture also encompasses logistics and design, prosthetics and informatics. I would like to focus here on the transformation that affected domesticity, disciplinary architecture, and the biopolitical regulations of gender, sexuality, and race, derived from the pharmacological revolution of contraceptive techniques that took place between 1954 and 1967.

Against common representation, 1950s U.S.A. meant not only the cold time of McCarthyism and the hunt of communists and homosexuals but also the hot time of Playboy and the pill, the age of erotic communication, plastics, and the prosthetic regulation of reproduction. The displacement from a disciplinary regime of sexuality to what I have called a 'pharmacopornographic regime'See Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics (New York: The Feminist Press, 2010). could be characterised, among other things, by the invention of molecular, endocrinological techniques to separate and regulate the relationship between (hetero-)sexuality and reproduction. As a result, the disciplinary architectural techniques of the nineteenth century gradually infiltrated private and domestic spaces as well as the individual body. Rather than punishing sexual offences or monitoring and correcting deviations through an external legal code or within traditional disciplinary architectures such as the hospital, the asylum, or the prison (which functioned as social orthopaedics), _biopower _turned inwards:See Michel Foucault, 'Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l'intérieur des corps', in _Dits et Ecrits, _vol. 3, p. 197 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). domestic spaces and living bodies were taken as platforms and bio-ports in which to insert molecules, flows of images, and signs, simultaneously transforming the house and the body into the topoi, the media and the effects, of a larger biopolitical program. At the same time that the body was filled with substances and prosthetic devices, the house, as Peter Reyner Banham has noted, became the site for a new, mechanical, 'environmental management', making space, along with the body, for pipes, pumps, ducts, and electric cables.Peter Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). Likewise, as Colomina has argued, the place of production of architecture moved towards new mechanical and electronic media such as publications and photography.Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996). Both architecture and medicine shifted from tectonics and body mechanics into environmental media production and chemical control. The invention of the contraceptive pill and its commercialisation as a domestic, portable, and edible pharmacological technique for hormonal modification coincided with the extension of suburban housing, the arrival of TV as a domestic appliance, the launch and development of Playboy, the transformation of nuclear physics into an energy-producing technology, the production of the first silicon transplants, the first electric prostheses, but also computers, Formica, and plywood chairs.For Playboy's role in the pharmacopornographic regime see: Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia. An Essay on Playboy's Architecture and Biopolitcs (New York: Zone Books, 2014).

The contraceptive pill was developed in the 1950s by two parallel pharmacological research projects under the direction of Gregory Pincus and John Rock. In both cases, the researchers discovered contraception as an unexpected side-effect of hormones while researching other 'pathologies': whereas Pincus intended to prevent the genetic transmission of congenital diseases, Rock was looking for a cure against infertility for white catholic heterosexual couples. Although conflicting in relation to their vision of the function of white women in society (independent and productive for Pincus and reproductive and domestic for Rock), they both shared a common understanding of non-white and deviant women as bodies whose reproductive power should be restricted by the state in order to 'reduce hunger, poverty, and disease while fostering economic stability.'Andrea Tone, _Devices and Desires. A History of Contraceptives in America _(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 207. In the context of a violent politicisation of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities in the United States, the contraceptive molecule was considered an urban eugenic device and a method to control non-white population growth, as well as the growth of national populations that had not yet entered into a post-war liberal capitalist economy. The anti-baby molecule was intended to be a 'simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people.'Birth control activist, anarchist, and feminist Margaret Sanger's declarations quoted by Andrea Tone, op. cit., p. 207.

This explains why the molecular compound of the pill was tested in psychiatric and prison institutions, as well as in poor regions of Puerto Rico, where it was intended to function as a necropolitical technique to prevent the development of the non-white population. This is how, during the Cold War, Puerto Rico became the U.S.A.'s biggest pharmacological backyard -- the island was the invisible bio-factory behind the suburban house and the white, middle-class, liberated American housewife.About Puerto Rico as an experimental colonial site for contraception techniques see: Annette B. Ramirez de Arellano and Conrad Seipp, _Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception. A History of Birth Control in Puerto Rico _(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Kathryn Krase, 'Our Bodies, Ourselves. Birth Control and Sterilization Abuse', in _Newsletter of the National Women's Health Network _(January-February 1996), digital file (last accessed February 2011).

As historians of medicine Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligot, and Lara Marks have argued, Puerto Rico's trials are not an exception but rather part of a larger history of colonial and scientific hygienist experimentation with humans during the twentieth century: 'doctors and biohygenists became the determinators of a bioracially constituted state; they saw themselves as gatekeepers and guardians, programmed with the mission to secure a utopian healthy society.'Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligot, and Lara Marks (Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 5. But what characterised the pharmacopornographic move of the 1950s above all was the shift from slavery and institutions of confinement to pre-fab mass-produced housing, space segregation, and media and chemical subjection. In the pharmacological company G. D. Searle & Co.'s project, the access to contraceptive techniques was in fact designed as part of a larger housing project of urban modernisation and the industrialisation of the island. Reproduction control and modern housing were, according to the American government, the two forces that could guarantee the improvement of living standards in Puerto Rico. The headquarters of the first trial in 1955 were a G. D. Searle & Co. company clinic located at El Fanguito and Rio Piedras just outside of San Juan -- described as the 'worst slum' of the island -- that was soon rased in order to build a mass-produced planned community with 'functionalist, white seven-story housing buildings with running water and sunny balconies.'Lara Marks, 'Parenting the Pill: Early Testing of the Contraceptive Pill', in Bodies of Technologies, ed. by Marta Kirejczyk, Nelly Oudshoorn, and Ann R. Saetnan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), pp. 157-161. Taking the testing of the pill into the individual house not only reduced the institutional costs of the trials, but also placed the subject within an ordinary domestic context, while extending the scope of the trial beyond the medical institutions.

Although it was an effective form of birth control, the American Health Institute rejected the first pill -- invented by Pincus and Rock in 1951 and tested in Puerto Rico from 1956 on -- because, according to the American Scientific Committee, it cast doubt on the femininity of American women by suppressing their periods altogether. The standards of the American Health Institute led to the production of a second pill by G. D. Searle & Co., commercialised in 1959. It was equally effective, but could, unlike the first, technically reproduce the rhythms of a natural menstrual cycle by inducing bleeding that created the illusion that a natural cycle was taking place, 'mimicking the normal physiological cycle'.Anna Glasier, 'Contraception -- Past and Future', (Edinburgh: Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust and University of Edinburgh Department of Reproduction and Development, EH4 1NL, 2002), digital file (last accessed February 2011). Since the trials in Puerto Rico, the pill functioned not only as a technique to control reproduction, but rather as a means to produce and control gender and race.

In 1957, after the Puerto Rico trials, the FDA approved the use of G. D. Searle & Co.'s Enovid for the treatment of menstrual irregularities, and two years later for birth control. Nevertheless, Puerto Rican women's resistance to follow the instructions made Searle believe that the commercialisation for American women could be difficult without pharmacological control. Although highly efficient, the hormonal pill's intake routine seemed almost impossible to control outside of the pharmacological housing programs: never before had a pharmacological product depended so much on the domestic discipline of the patient. As we will see, the invention of the domestic and portable pill dispenser in the early 1960s was an answer to this need for self-surveillance and body discipline.

Originally, Enovid was commercialised in doses of five and ten milligrams, and like all pill prescriptions of the time, it was delivered in a small bottle. The combined oral contraceptive hormones entered the American middle-class domestic environment in a brown glass container, but without the pedagogical regime of the Rio Piedras pharmacological housing complex, any mistake within the intake timetable could cause precisely what Enovid tried to prevent. Instructions for the pill seemed straightforward: the user should take the first tablet on the fifth day after beginning menstruation, continue with one tablet every day for twenty days, and then stop; she would begin menstruating two to three days later, and on the fifth day of menstruation was to start another twenty-day cycle of tablets. But the brown bottle didn't enable a memorisation and control of the intake routine.

In 1962, Illinois engineer David P. Wagner (whose work was to develop new fasteners for Illinois Tool Works) created the first prototype pill dispenser in order to organise his wife's monthly pill supply into daily doses.In 1994, David P. Wagner donated his collection of prototypes of drug and pill packaging to the Division of Science, Medicine and Society at the Smithsonian's Museum of National History, enabling historian Patricia Gossel Peck to develop a first study of the design process. See: Patricia Gossel Peck, 'Packaging the Pill', in Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines, ed. by Robert Bud (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 105-121. It consisted of three round plastic plates held by a snap fastener. Wagner explained the production process of the dispenser like this: 'With just a 1D4'' electric drill, a fly cutter to be used in the drill, paper, a saw, a staple, pencil, double-faced transparent tape, several drill bits, a snap fastener that I took off a child's toy, and several flat, clear sheets of either acrylic or polycarbonate plastic, I fashioned the first pill box for packaging birth control pills.'Peck, p. 107. The bottom plate had a day-of-the-week pattern. The middle plate held twenty wooden 'pills' and rotated to match the first day of intake. A single hole in the top plate moved over the pill to dispense it, revealing the day of the week as a reminder that the pill had been taken.Peck, p. 106. Wagner sent the prototype to G. D. Searle & Co. and to Ortho Pharmaceutical. G. D. Searle & Co. rejected Wagner's project, but Ortho Pharmaceutical launched the first Dialpak 'memory-aid' dispenser in 1963, designed according to Wagner's model.Neither Searle nor Ortho bought Wagner's patent. Ortho was later legally forced to pay 10,000 US Dollars to Wagner to compensate for using his prototype. Reaching the market a few months later, Searle's Enovid-E Con-pac and 1mg-Ovulen pill dispensers were also strongly inspired by Wagner's distributor. In 1964, to distinguish itself from Searle's Con-pac, Ortho-Novum advertisement showed, for the first time, the Dialpak 21 dispenser for the oral contraceptive, highlighting a watchstrap calendar 'to keep key days always at hand'.

Insisting on the need to pay attention to the medical and social repercussions of pharmacological marketing, historian Patricia Peck has studied the packaging techniques that led to the commercialisation of the Dialpak, the first 'compliance package' of the pill in 1963.Peck, p. 106. About the history of packaging see also: Stanley Sacharow, _The Package as a Marketing Tool _(Philadelphia: Radnor, 1982); Thomas Hine, The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of B__oxes, _Bottles, Cans, and Tubes _(Boston: Little Brown Company, 1995); History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). According to Peck, the pill was not only a political and gender revolution, but also a revolution within drug packaging. The pill is the first pharmaceutical molecule to be produced as a design object. For Peck, the Dialpak 'appears to be the first "compliance package" for a prescription drug -- one that intended to help the patient to comply with the doctor's orders.'Peck, p. 107. The invention of the pill dispenser shows the emergence of a new model within pharmaceutical design, which does not rely on the goals of company advertising, but rather on the designer-user relationship. Thus, the pill is not only a chemical product (the molecule isolated and marketed as an edible capsule), but rather an individual, portable pharmaco-mechanism capable of disciplining the user's intake habits. The pill, as a social domestic practice and hormonal prosthesis for the individual, cannot exist without the dispenser: the packaging _is _the pill.

Wagner's Dialpak design resulted from two operations: the spatialisation of time, and camouflage. The dispenser sought to spatialise time by making the administering dates visible within the circular box. Like the rotary dial telephone, the most popular domestic communication appliance of the Cold War years, the circular box of the Dialpak established abstract relationships between three systems: holes, pills, and the dates of the menstrual cycle (in analogy to the holes, numbers, and network stations for the phone). The dispenser divided duration into successive segments, each of which indicated a specific time unit. The spatialisation of time produced what Foucault called an 'anatomic-chronological scheme of action'Michel Foucault, _Discipline and Punish, _pp. 156-166. that combined architecture, design, and body movement, transforming the user into an efficient (non-)reproducing machine. According to Wagner, and later to the G. D. Searle & Co. and Ortho Pharmaceutical advertising campaigns, the dispenser's main aim was to reduce 'forgetfulness', being presented as a prosthesis for women's lack of memory and responsibility. In this respect, the Dialpak was a technique for packaging not only pills, but also memory and time, responsibility and trust.

The monthly package of pills, with its imperative of daily administration but also the risk of forgetfulness or incorrect management, with its time-based ritual, its colourful pop design (much like the Campbell's soup cans immortalised by Andy Warhol in 1962), is reminiscent of a chemical calendar in which every single day is marked by the indispensable presence of a dispensed capsule. Still today, its round packaging invites users to follow the passage of time as on a clock, with an alarm to announce pill-time. It functions as a device for the domestic self-surveillance of female sexuality, like a molecular, endocrinological, high-tech version of a mandala, the Book of Hours, or the daily self-examination of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. It is a hormonal domestic micro-prosthesis that regulates ovulation, but it also enables the production of the 'soul' of the heterosexual woman as a modern, sexual, and reproductive subject.

Furthermore, Wagner intended to camouflage the birth control technique into an ordinary 'female' use object: he designed the dispenser to be the size and form of a makeup compact, so that women could carry it discreetly in their purses -- a way of using a technique in the public space that was meant to be only domestic. The transformation of the oral contraceptive pill into 'the Pill' through packaging could thus be understood not only as a cultural process which implies social and medical effects, but also as the translation of an architectonic model, a disciplinary system of power and knowledge relationships deriving from the Enlightenment architectures of the hospital and the prison into a domestic, portable (and later bodily and prosthetic) technique.

Aby Warburg's method of following traces through images and texts allows us to detect, not without a shudder, the continuance of Jeremy Bentham's model of the panopticon in David Wagner's first oral contraceptive pill dispenser, sold on a massive scale by G. D. Searle & Co. since the early 1960s. Understood as biopolitical architecture, the contraceptive pill is an edible panopticon. Social orthopaedics gave way to a sexo-political domestic prosthetic gadget. With the Dialpak, a make-up box design and its rotating _dispositif _were wrapped around a space-time management mechanism and its schedule of body practices, familiar from monastic life, that had been transformed into scopic and spatially segregated disciplinary architectures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Dialpak transformed the panopticon into a domestic and portable female hormonal compact.

We can think of the pill as a lightweight, portable, individualised, affable architecture with the potential to change behaviour, program action, regulate sexual activity, control population growth and racial purity, and redesign the sexual appearance (by synthetically re-feminising) of the bodies that self-administer it. Institutional architecture became domestic. The surveillance tower was replaced by the eyes of the (not always) docile pill user who regulated her own administration without the need for external supervision, following the spatial calendar marked on the circular or rectangular package. The whip had been replaced by a convenient system of oral administration. The prison cell had become the body of the consumer, which was biochemically changed in such a way that once the hormonal compound had been taken, it was no longer possible to determine its precise effects or their source. Punishments and edifying sermons were replaced by rewards and promises of freedom and sexual emancipation for women.

It is no longer necessary to lock up individuals within state institutions in order to subject them to biochemical, pedagogic, or penal tests, because experiments on the human soul can now be carried out at home, in the valuable enclave of the individual body, under the watchful, intimate supervision of the multi-medially connected individual herself. The biopolitical promise to govern _free _bodies that Foucault identified seems fully accomplished here.

But again there is no disciplinary architecture that doesn't generate its own heterotopia. Likewise, machinic enslavement also opens up new possibilities for subversion. The pill -- defined by the need for an individual decision to take it as well as by the time-based calculations of its user -- immediately induces accident. It takes accident into account, programs it, it sees accident as a _sine qua non _of female sexuality. The heterosexist logic of the Cold War period that dominated the pill

seems to respond to this double, contradictory requirement: every woman must simultaneously be fertile (and be so through heterosexual insemination) and able to reduce the possibility of her own fertility at all times to levels asymptotically close to zero; without however reducing it altogether, so that restored fertility as a consequence of discontinuing the pill as well as accidental conception remain possible and almost compulsory. But the accident is also the possibility of subversion and re-signification: the fact that the pill must be managed at home and autonomously by the individual user also introduces the possibility of political agency.

Still, the differences between the panopticon and the pill are significant. In a period of barely a hundred years, they mark the transition from a disciplinary regime to a pharmacopornographic one. The former consists of an external, political architecture that determines the position of the body in a collectively regulated space, creates specific positions of power (human/animal, guard/observed, patient/doctor, teacher/student, etc.), and allows the generation of knowledge (visual, statistical, demographic) about the controlled individuals. In the latter, we are dealing with a device that has been miniaturised to the point of entering the domestic, to become a chemical technique taken orally by the individual, while being more effective than disciplinary techniques. In the pharmacopornographic age, biopower dwells at home, sleeps with us, inhabits within. We're looking at a seemingly democratic, privatised form of control that can be absorbed, inhaled, and easily administered, that spreads through the social body with unprecedented speed and undetectability. The dominant representations of the pharmacopornographic age -- molecules, prostheses, images, numeric codes -- share a common architecture-body-power relationship: the desire for communication, infiltration, spatialisation, absorption, and total occupation. We could be tempted to represent this relationship in terms of a dialectic model that sees domination/oppression as a one-way osmosis in which power -- in an external, miniaturised, liquid form -- infiltrates the docile bodies of individuals. But biopower doesn't infiltrate from the outside. It already dwells inside.

These three historically distinct architectures -- the brothel, the pre-fab mass-produced suburban house, and the pill dispenser -- show that although the abstract circular form of the panopticon can be located in the diagrammatic infrastructure of the organisation of space, it can't be totalised as the architecture of power of Western modernity. On one hand, Restif and Ledoux's fantasies of state brothels indicated that visual control and discipline were not the only structuring elements driving the development of modern architectures. The management of touch, as well as the construction of subrogated political skins intended to prevent or facilitate the circulation of sperm and milk, of blood and water, have to be critically reassessed, too. Modern architectures of gender, sexuality, and race distribute bodies in space and define areas of contact or separation, creating not only frontiers and thresholds but zones for body assemblage and coupling that define what is male or female, what is national or foreign, what is normal or deviant, what is heterosexual or homosexual, what is white, what is black or indigenous. Architecture appears then as a collective technique to distribute and manage fluids and bodies according to a hetero-patriarchal and colonial understanding of sovereignty: sperm will flow in the public space promoting the nation's reproduction and re-affirming white male sovereignty; milk, as well as female organs and body fluids (especially menstrual blood), will be restricted to the domestic area; and water, information, and capital will be used as hygienic media, cleaning the non-pure and the foreign; preventing the fantasised dangers of otherness.

Thus, space is never homogeneous, never empty or neutral. Instead, it is defined by investments of pleasure and energy, of capital and meaning. Architecture (institutional building, pre-fab housing, design, furniture, prosthesis, or infrastructure) prescribes the circulation or the arrest of different organic and non-organic fluids, producing an unbalance of gender, race, sex, and disability relationships. Therefore, spaces are either wet or dry, accessible or inaccessible, warm austere, plugged or unplugged, tactile or visual, invisible or untouchable. The subject fabricated by the architectural encounter is never generic, it is always a gendered, sexualised, and racialised subject. Architecture (as building or as infrastructure, as design or as logistics) is always a technique to produce a differential social space. An architecture does not build on a given social space, but rather inflects and produces the space it claims to work on. Whereas the spaces both of revolutionary France and global democracy present themselves as free and open ('freedom' and 'openness' are at the core of the rhetoric of liberalism), 'without any of the viscosity of the social forces',Sanford Kwinter, "Generica", in Mutations (Barcelona, Actar, 2011), p. 525. these three case studies show that architectures of liberalism work as techniques for extracting labour and sexual energy (potentia gaudendi) from bodies, to reproduce and purify the racialised body of the nation-state. Finally, becoming almost invisible, architecture transforms into a prosthesis to impose techno-discipline and chemical subjugation. The commercialisation of hormones into the pill dispenser allows us to understand that, with the processes of economical liberalisation and the automation of production, the architecture of the panopticon mutates into design and prosthetic forms to secure a bond of subjection with the individual body, while establishing new performative links with communication techniques, media and pharmacological technologies.

Arles, France, February 2018

I would like to thank Guus Beumer, Marina Otero Verzier and Flora van Gaalen for the invitation to give the 2017 Benno Premsela Lecture at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and Eva Wilson for taking care of editing the text.