The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance

Author: Douglas Spencer
Year: 2016
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/spencer-2024-architecture-of-neoliberalism.md

Summary

Douglas Spencer argues that contemporary "projective," "post-critical," and "parametricist" architecture — the "new architecture" of Greg Lynn, Zaha Hadid, Farshid Moussavi, Zaera-Polo, Rem Koolhaas and others — functions as an instrument of neoliberal governmentality rather than an emancipatory project. Reading the turn to Deleuze and Guattari, complexity/emergence theory, and affect as a turn away from critical reflection, Spencer claims architecture has embraced the same "truth games" as neoliberal thought — "necessary ignorance," spontaneous order, self-organization, the entrepreneurial subject — and become a form of environmental control. Drawing on Foucault's governmentality, Hayek and Polanyi's cybernetics, and Dardot & Laval's account of neoliberalism as the "form of our existence," he contests the "logic of capital" reading (Harvey) in favour of an analysis of the production of subjectivity.

Key Claims

• Neoliberalism is both an ideology and a rationality — a "truth game" producing subjectivity through the immanent conditions of an entrepreneurial market environment, not through disciplinary state power. (Introduction; Ch. 1)
• The subject of neoliberalism is modelled on "necessary ignorance" (Hayek): individuals cannot know the complex order around them, must renounce planning as totalitarian, and must "give themselves over" to the superior self-organizing powers of the market.
• Neoliberal "truths" were scientifically "laundered" through cybernetics, systems theory, and complexity (Wiener, von Neumann, Shannon, Weaver, Bertalanffy) — analogies that convert the market into a "super-processor" and the subject into a relay of pattern-recognition.
• Architecture shares these truths: the Independent Group (Hamilton, Banham), Kaprow's Happenings, and the counterculture fostered an "environmental spacing" of the subject — immediacy, immersion, and the suspension of interpretation — that prefigures parametricism's affirmation of seamless, self-organizing form.
• The so-called post-critical turn is not the end of theory but its repurposing: theory (Deleuze, DeLanda, Latour, Luhmann) is stripped of its critical negativity and made managerial, legitimated as the "truth" of a post-Fordist, decentralized, flexible capital.
• Architecture hides the facts of labour behind smooth surfaces. Analysing ZHA's BMW Leipzig and OMA's CCTV Beijing, Spencer reads these as instruments for maximizing precarious labour and for managing corporate/state image, refuting the "communist project" narrative around CCTV. (Ch. 4)
• Circulation is made productive and spectacular: the Pompidou forges the "cultural consumer," FOA's Meydan Retail Complex the "citizen-consumer," and Ravensbourne College the "student-entrepreneur." (Ch. 5)
• The affective turn is a pre-critical turn: against the critical tradition (Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, Baudrillard, Jameson) that reads the totality of capital through built form, affect presents "nothing to interpret... only a feeling for matter," dovetailing with the neoliberal demand that the subject not reflect. (Ch. 6)
• Conclusion: the claim of liberation (market, participation, immersion, affect) is premised on a false idea of a "natural self" waiting to be restored. Foucault's production-of-subjectivity shows instead existing technologies of the self being broken down and recomposed into hybrid figures (cultural-consumer, citizen-consumer, student-entrepreneur). What is needed is critique — the Adornian refusal to "bow to every immediate thing." (Conclusion)

Connections

Concepts: Parametricism · Neoliberal Metropolis · Ideology · Entrepreneur of Self · Architectural Object · Capitalist Realism
Authors: Douglas Spencer · David Harvey · Fredric Jameson · Rem Koolhaas
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Parametricism Is the Architecture "of Neoliberalism Itself" (Hopkins) · Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture (Gough) · The Architecture of the City... (Bismarck)

Direct Quotes

"What both neoliberal thought and the architecture of neoliberalism claim in legitimating the acceptance of their truths accepted is, above all, that in their realization the subject is liberated... All such claims, however, are premised on the idea of a given human nature, one whose essence has been distorted or alienated, and is now in the process of being redeemed." (Conclusion)

"The discourse of affect in architecture is entirely consonant with neoliberal models of the subject as necessarily ignorant, to the imperative that it give itself over to the trust of processes it cannot, itself, aspire to know or control." (Ch. 6)

"At stake in neo-liberalism is nothing more, nor less, than the form of our existence – the way in which we are led to conduct ourselves, to relate to others and to ourselves." (Dardot & Laval, cited in Introduction)

Open Questions

• Does Spencer's argument over-privilege a tiny fraction of high-profile "new architecture" whose influence he nonetheless insists is disproportionate? He concedes this but defends the focus.
• How does the "affective turn" reading square with architecture that claims to be resistant rather than projective? (See critical-vs-projective debate.)