Abstract

In their lucid and insightful introduction to this special issue of Grey Room, Lucia Allais and Zeynep Çelik Alexander urge a return to an analysis of the state in the history and historiography of architecture and urban planning. They lament how an uptake of Foucault’s concept of governmentality, and a concern with the micropolitical minutiae of everyday life in a system where power is ostensibly dispersed across the social field, has led to the state being taken for granted. Rather than the “pageantry of Prussian state power,” much recent scholarship and the media theory inspired it have focused on what Bruno Latour called “files themselves”—not as the envelope of power but as power itself. For Allais and Çelik Alexander, the privileging of material infrastructure over relatively “immaterial” ideas risks both displacing the concept of the state as an actual existent and foreclosing a “dynamic” analysis of the relation between the material and the immaterial. They are interested in the force of the immaterial.