The Funambulist Pamphlets: Volume 02_Foucault
CTM Documents Initiative (an imprint of punctum books + Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design)
Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2013. 102 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0615832999. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $7.00 [€6.00] in print: paperbound/4.25 X 6.88 in.
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The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The twelve first volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, Cinema, and Weaponized Architecture. As new articles are published on The Funambulist, more volumes will be published to continue the series.
The Funambulist Pamphlets is published as part of the Documents Initiative imprint of the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design, a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.
Volume 02_Foucault compiles blog posts by Léopold Lambert (with 2 guest posts by Stanley Shostak and Anthony Vidler) on: Foucault and Architecture: The Encounter that Never Was — The Architectural Underestimation — “Do Not Become Enamored with Power” — “Mon Corps, Topie Impitoyable” — The Cartography of Power — The Political Technology of the Body — Architecture and Discipline: The Hospital — Questioning Heterotopology
09/ Foucault and the Society of Control — Quadrillage: Urban Plague Quarantine & Retro-Medieval Boston — The Inscription of Gender in Our Bodies: Norm Production in Foucault and Butler — Modes of Subversion Against the Pharmacopornographic Society: Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado — “My Desire is Someone Else’s Fiction” — The Architectural Paradigm of the Society of Control: The Immanent Panopticon — The Counter-Biopolitical Bioscleave Experiment: Bioscleave, Shaping our Biological Niches (by Stanley Shostak) — Diagrams of Utopia (by Anthony Vidler) — Quarantine and Remoteness: Paranoia and Mechanisms of Precautionary Incarceration — Prison Information Group: Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach & Pierre Vidal-Naquet
Léopold Lambert (born in 1985) is a French architect who successively lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai and currently resides in New York. His approach to architecture consists in a delicate articulation between theoretical research and a frank enthusiasm for design. Such an articulation has been explicated in his book Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), which attempts to examine the characteristics that make architecture an inherent political weapon through global research as well as an architectural project specific to the Israeli civil and military occupation of the West Bank. He is also the author of the graphic novel, Lost in the Line. He finds his architectural inspiration from films, novels, and political philosophy books, rather than in architectural theory texts. He is currently collaborating with Madeline Gins for her Reversible Destiny Foundation (created with the late Arakawa) whose philosophical and architectural work is highly influential upon the role of architecture in relation to the human body.
The blog The Funambulist: Architectural Narratives , a daily architectural platform written and edited by Léopold Lambert, finds its name in the consideration for architecture’s representative medium, the line, and its philosophical and political power when it materializes and subjectivizes bodies. If the white page represents a given milieu — a desert for example — and one comes to trace a line on it, (s)he will virtually split this same milieu into two distinct impermeable parts through its embodiment, the wall. The Funambulist, also known as a tightrope walker, is the character who, somehow, subverts this power by walking on the line.
Foucault News 