If You Build It, They Will Come: Architecture and Ideology

Excerpt fromMichael Truscello’s The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism  

4. Architect Lebbeus Woods, whose “anarchitecture” attempts to create “freespaces” through indeterminate structures, identifies the relationship between architecture and ideology: “While architects speak of designing space that satisfies human needs, it is actually human needs that are being shaped to satisfy designed space and the abstract systems of thought and organization on which design is based” (279). Mark Poster makes a similar claim for information architects when he discusses the impact of the Superpanopticon: “Surveillance by means of digitally encoded information constitutes new subjects by the language employed in databases” (Mode 94). Architecture, whether it refers to buildings or databases, constructs subject positions through the spatialization of power. Much has been written about the architecture of bricks and mortar, but very little, if anything, has been written about the architecture of information, the discourse of computer programming; and this is so even as the two architectures become inseparable.[4] This essay engages a variety of discourses on the sometimes liberatory architectural models of what Todd May calls “tactical poststructuralist anarchism.” In particular, the model of the software engineer as a subject working within and creating autonomous spaces, a tactical anarchism for the information architect represented by CatB, offers an instance of resistance that defies the monolithic rendering of the surveillance society described by Poster and others, an almost cyborgian moment in which information architects “seize the tools that write them” for the purpose of a tactical, temporary “uprising,” to use Hakim Bey’s preferred term.