Noopolitics

Definition

Noopolitics names a hypothesized contemporary regime of power that operates on the level of the mind, affect, and life itself (extending biopolitics). In architecture it is tied to the affective turn and the post-critical: the demand that architecture reach users at a visceral, pre-reflexive level. Wallenstein argues the affective turn echoes vitalist philosophies of the early twentieth century and recent philosophies of life and desire (Foucault's biopolitics, Deleuze's Spinoza/Nietzsche, Agamben), and — against the post-critical — insists that these need not abandon critique, but rather reinvent it by locating agency beneath the reflexive subject. This resonates with Douglas Spencer's claim that architecture's "affective turn" functions as a form of governance.

Key Thinkers

• Sven-Olov Wallenstein — the "Noopolitics, Life, Architecture" chapter.
• Paul Virilio — the "logistics of perception" and the "sight machine" as the infrastructure of the noospheric regime; technology as "an assistance-become-subliminal."
• (Related: Michel Foucault, Douglas Spencer, Gilles Deleuze. Not yet paged: Giorgio Agamben — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Ideology — the subject-forming dimension of power.
• Critical Architecture — whether critique can be reinvented at the noospheric level.
• Critical vs. Projective — the affective turn as the post-critical's domain.
• Dromology — Virilio's logic of speed as the infrastructure of the noopolitical.
• Logistics of Perception — the militarized vision that the noopolitical extends.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architecture, Critique, Ideology
• The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism
• Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics
• Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
• Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
• Foucault and Neoliberal Society: The Worker as 'Entrepreneur of Self'
• Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
• Architecture or Techno-Utopia
• Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life
• Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (Virilio 1977) — dromocracy as governmentality; the "software society" and the diagram-becomes-interface.
• War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989) — the "sight machine" and the automation of perception.
• The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Virilio 1991) — technology as "an assistance-become-subliminal"; the "Promethean mirror."

Open Questions

• Is the appeal to affect and life compatible with a critical (negative, resisting) architecture, or does it collapse into the projective/post-critical it is meant to oppose?