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page171from Building Ideas5
Politics and Architecture The Marxist Tradition
As we saw in Chapter 4 the inspiration for
the structuralist method was the search for the deeper forces that affect our
understanding. According to Lévi-Strauss, the great propagandist of structuralist ideas, his
particular motivation grew from three distinctly different sources – the
disciplines of geology, Marxism and psychoanalysis. The common thread linking
all three is the fundamental principle that what appears on the surface is
controlled by deeper forces from within. In this chapter the latter two fields
will be discussed in relation to architecture, and the connections with
structuralist thinking will become significant in several ways. Three important
thinkers in the philosophical development of the twentieth century have all
worked with structuralist principles in their own particular disciplines: Louis
Althusser on the structures of ideology, Jacques Lacan on the structures of the
unconscious and Michel Foucalt on the structures of power. All three
philosophers were born in France and all three died in the 1980s.
To
appreciate further the significance of these connections between disciplines,
it will be important to understand the broader background to these issues;
firstly, the question of politics and its underlying influence on architectural
theory, for which we will have to look back to the philosophical “revolution”
of the nineteenth century; and secondly, the notion of the unconscious and its
unseen influence on
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