This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by ‘intangible as well as tangible things’, which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which at the same time are recongised as the tangible par excellence.25 

As part of Debord’s resistance to this condition he formed the Situationist International, a group of writers and artists committed to new modes of experience, which produced the journal of the same name in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. Alongside the spontaneous reappropriations of public space, such as in performance-art “happenings”, which they referred to as “situations”, they were also influenced by Benjamin’s description of the flâeur and develop the “Theory of the Dérive” in response to this idea:

         Among the various situationist methods is the dérive[literally:’drifting’], a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences. The derive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects.26

         The paradoxical role that vision plays in the understanding of “psychogeography” has hed more recent French critics to take a less condemning view of the image. Jean Baudrillard in particular has become fascinated by the “autonomy” of the sign and the way in which sign value has taken precedence over exchange value. In his early work he combined a Marxist approach with Saussure’s analysis of the sign, to show how the spectacle of “image consumption” had grown out of the detachment of signifier from referent. In his later writings he went on to celebrate this new culture of “simulation”, although without the political agenda of his earlier, more critical work.

         I do not think it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of ‘liberation’ and another is of the order of ‘oppression’… . a concentration camp … is not an instrument of liberation, but one should still take into account – and this is not generally acknowledged – that, aside from torture and execution, which preclude any resistance, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience and oppositional grouping.

And at the same time, freedom cannot be guaranteed by the physical form of buildings either:

         The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws are capable of being turned around… . I think that it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom.

Having said this, Foucault does preserve a vital role for the creativity of the architect, when the liberating intentions of the designer “coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom”.24

         On this issue of practice as a mode of resistance to ideology, the French thinker, Guy Debord, also made a decisive contribution. Debord returned to the problem of reification as set out by Lukács, to develop a remarkable set of observations on the state of society in the 1960s. Published as Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the book had a direct impact on political activities as well as a more enduring influence on later Marxist thinking. Debord extended Lukács’ notion of the commodity as fetish – the phenomenon of workers reduced to “objects” and objects become alive with “magical” qualities – to suggest that a further stage of confusion between the realms of the ideal and the material had resulted from the “image” of the commodity coming to dominate instead:

and schools. As he describes it in Discipline and Punish, his influential book from 1975:

                  This was the problem of the great workshops and factories, in which a new type of surveillance was organized …. What was now needed was an intense, continuous supervision; it ran right through the labour process; it did not bear – or not only – on production ( the nature and quality of raw materials, the type of instruments used, the dimensions and quality of its products); it also took into account the activity of the men, their skill, the way they set about their tasks, their promptness, their zeal, their behavior.22

         Foucault sees this process of imposing a generalized disciplinary order as part of the organization of cities as well as individual buildings. As he pointed out in a later interview, published as “Space, Knowledge and Power”, this process began to become formalized at the end of the eighteenth century:

         One begins to see a form of political literature that addresses what the order of a society should be, what a city should be, given the requirements of the maintenance of order; given that one should avoid epidemics, avoid revolts, permit a decent and moral family life, and so on. In terms of these objectives, how is one to conceive of both the organization of a city and the construction of a collective infrastructure?23

Against Althusser’s materialism Foucault is willing to admit that there is still a dialectical relationship between objects and ideas. This is important in his thinking on the status of architecture, and the interplay between buildings and the spatial practices they accommodate.

         Late in the interview that was quoted above, he was asked about the relationship between architecture and freedom:

much as poststructuralism has attempted to do with the binary oppositions of structuralism, as a way of opening up the possibilities of meaning.

In Foucault’s earlier work he also questioned the view of history as a linear development and suggested instead a model of change through “epistemological breaks” – similar to Thomas Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigms, though applied at a more general level across the field of knowledge as a whole. In his later writing be considered the place of the individual subject within the institutionalized power-relations of society is reminiscent of the Marxist definitions of ideology (although he vehemently denied any specifically Marxist sympathies, as he also denied subscribing to the structuralist school of though):

Power’s condition of possibility … is the moving substrate to forced relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.21

A concrete example of this process in action comes in his essay on the “Panopticon”, the building devised by Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth century prison reformer. This theatre-like circular structure with an outer ring of prisoners’ cells could be policed from a central watch tower, by a single person able to see all round. The sensation of being under surveillance meant that the inmates would “police” themselves and thus the very fabric of the building itself ensured the efficient operation of the disciplinary system. Foucault uses the example of the Panopticon as an extreme case of a general phenomenon, such as he sees in other institutional buildings such as hospitals, factories

Althusser. Althusser had tried to redefine ideology as solely a result of material practices, taking the opposite, “scientific” view of Marx from that of the Frankfurt School, seeing him purely as a materialist philosopher. Ideology, for Althusser, did not originate with ideas, but rather at the level of inherited structures, like language, and this was to a large extent due to the influence of structuralist thinking. This view had a significant impact on the understanding of the human subject, who was reduced to a transient “effect” of these pre-existing structures – as Barthes and Derrida had already begun to suggest, the individual is always locked within these various networks of representation.

         It was this “construction” of the subject through the action of larger forces that attracted the interest of Foucault, who became obsessed with the study of institutional practices and the surreptitious exercise of power. He was determined to identify in the concrete evidence of history the “inscription” of these impositions of power and he did this through the study of knowledge, as well as institutions such as hospitals and prisons. This is how he described his work, looking back on his career:

         My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of enquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire générale, philology and linguistics … In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I call ‘dividing practices’. The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others… Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the ‘good boys’. Finally, I have sought to study … the way a human being turns him, or herself,, into a subject. For example I have chosen the domain of sexuality – how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of ‘sexuality’ … 20

Foucault takes great pains to re-problematise these oppositions, to show how they are artificially constructed to appear as “natural” principles