Archive Fever: Discipline and Biopolitics of Library’s Design in modern architecture

Abstract

The design of libraries has undergone a radical turnaround during the last decades, transforming from being conceived as simple archives of knowledge into multipurpose facilities favoring the establishing of transverse end heterogeneous social relationships. Based on the work of Foucault and Deleuze, the present article analyzes four libraries of the 20th century that synthesize the four main modes - two disciplinary and two biopolitical - in which architecture can function as a material device of power: the ritual, the panopticon, the rhizome and the plateau. The conclusions drawn show that, contrary to the liberal discourses that defend the rhizome and the plateau as machines of freedom against the disciplinary power, new biopolitical architecture devices produce a scattering of the surveillance and control spaces much more difficult to identify than in the case of disciplinary architecture. Instead of a greater empowerment of the users, biopolitical architecture is producing an effect of concealment of power that hinders the emergence of antagonistic or counter-hegemonic subjectivities.