TOWARDS AN ARCHITECTONICS OF ENVIRONMENTALITY: DIAGRAMMING THE SPATIAL PRODUCTION OF TEXTURAL AND INFRASTRUCTURAL SEMIOTICS

Abstract

In 1979, Michel Foucault defines environmentality as a form of power in which control is exerted through design and modulation of the environment. A techno-symbiotic environment where the milieu of biology, geography, and history, and the media of communication and information technologies merge. If the role of architecture in sovereign and disciplinary devices is better known, there is pending work to understand the architectonics at the heart of environmentality. We start from an affective-spatial diagramming of the surrounding world, understood as an ecology of signs capable of affecting an individual – textural semiotics –, to then analyze the emergence of infrastructural semiotics in 20th-century capitalism, sets of discrete signals that direct and arrange the body, modulating its spheres of possibilities and automatizing its behaviors. In the conflict between both semiotics, we point at the possibility of conceiving texture, noise, and affects as a source of rebellion, as an affirmation of a more-than-human us.