“Sexuality represents the precise point where the disciplinary and the regulatory, the body and the population are articulated”- Michel Foucault

Behaviors are effectively born out of space, the control and formation of space is used as a method of regime and doctrine that are produced through the examination and adaptation of sexuality. Architecture and space is a element that is produced through the biopolitical powers that are extracted from the workings of the body and curated into what the controlling, governing powers wish, producing sexualities within the built environment and society. Michel Foucault defines the underlying conditions of what determine knowledge and relations to power, ‘as an element of support, to ensure a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations’[1], therefore biopower acts as an authority of knowledge and power to apply processes of subjectification onto the sexualized body. Through the governing of social and biological power its shapes architecture, space and that of the body that inhabits it, ‘The body is, so to speak, organically/biologically/naturally ‘incomplete’: it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering, and long-term ‘administration regulated in each culture and epoch’[2], Foucault discusses this to be a system of micro technologies. Spatiality is affected by biopower creating a political body, one that determines social conditions and peoples liberties.

At the beginning of our digitalized age that provided a global network of communication in the 20^th Century, analyzing modern society and the space of the Internet for producing sexualities and using sexual identity and the body to doctrine views of the political the social and cultural began. To understand how sexuality is used by governing bodies, cyber space and architecture mold the susceptible body to its control, by studying cities of resistance to normalization we can translate the formats of power that regulate landscapes like that of the hippy communities that emerged in the 1960’s. To analyze the way sexuality and the body is mobilized in the design of architecture and space for control and surveillance of society, from the 18^th Century to the present can be seen through the separation of public and privates spaces. This is also triggered the formation of the Internet operated as a space of representation and control that is rooted within the new technological body. Spaces and architecture can determine the processes and actions of the body; the use of space and the way spaces enable and influence the body to reach heightened states of sexual ecstasy can be specifically identified through that of the boudoir and rave scene. European society in the late eighteenth century transformed from what Foucault calls a ‘sovereign power’ into a ‘disciplinary power’[3] known as the technology of biopower for the management of populations. This power trains the actions of the body with, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’[4], this power is utilized as a act of protection to life as opposed to the threat of death from a sovereign power. This type of force then becomes a ‘somato-power’[5]; this authority infiltrates the body as an effective ‘art of governing life’[6] that is converted into space and architecture from this political technology. In this modern art of government Foucault addressed the centrality of sexuality and sex, where utopias and liberation of the individual rose up above these controls.

Chapter 1: Utopias of Sexuality

The sensory revolution of the eighteenth century created societies where the body and sexuality was monitored in prescribed spaces impacting behaviours and freedoms. It was a period where the body and bodily fluids were controlled and privatised under a somatic experience. The specialization of public space became, ‘highly regulated, codified, stratified’[7], whereby space, like that of the body was defined by its circulation of fluid and air. The pre-revolutionary city was a space know as the cloaques of, ‘rivers of organic fluids, shit, sperm and blood were apart of public display’[8], whilst the sexual subjugation of rape was still legal and visible in public space. Modernization was a process of the reformation of producing a new body, one that Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘body without fluids or at least a body whose fluids must be extracted and functionally disturbed to become the objects of governmental control’[9]. This contrasted to the new technology in architectural utopias of the 1960’s and venues of sexual encounters with cyberspace that created libidos, sexualities and lust out of a virtual Internet experience.

La Pornographie

In 1769, Restif de la Bretonne published a treatise, ‘Le pornographe ou la prostitution reformee’[10], where he coined the term pornography and as a plan of construction of eighteenth century utopian Europe. It contained a series of fictional letters that spoke of intimacy and the preservation of virtue discussed by two pornographers. The text argues for a development of state-administered brothels around Paris for the regulation of the prostitute as an order to affirm the ‘virtuous exercise of love’[11]. French literary critic Annie Le Brun in the early 1980’s describes the state brothel as ‘submissive architectures’[12], aligning with what Michel Foucault describes as Heteropic spaces. This acts as a disciplinary technology against the body where the modern subjects desires are fabricated and political supervision in terms of ‘organs, (penis, vagina, uterus), and fluids, (semen, blood, milk)’[13] is carried out, politically subjugating the body. In Le Pornographe, Restif develops what he terms a pornogmonie, referring to the state run brothel as the ‘Mount of the Virgin’[14], dedicated to a lust and virtue. This was the disciplinary architecture of pleasure and a utopia of nations immunity and health as the brothel was implanted for the prevention of syphilis in the modern city. Michel Foucault in his 1976 essay, ‘ The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth century’[15], discussed the point where that of the sick body and population of the city become the object of political management, a system that he refers to as noso-politics. Resift’s program of the Parthenion project within the city was to the enhanced experience and possibilities of experiencing pleasure, promoting a sovereign domination of male sexuality with the foreboding of condoms inside the brothel. The Parthenion structure itself he decided would replace the condom and prostitutes would therefore be expected to procreate and in tern the father figure would be that of the state. The child born would then remain under this sovereign biopolitical power that took ownership of the body and its sexuality for their own means of capital and control.

Bodily Fluids

The nature of space is constructed through sexuality and gender; these are social and biological elements that have been used to produce ideologies, control societies and the harnessing the body. The male and heterosexual gaze throughout history has been the authority in shaping spaces and building cities of social order and sexual desire. The concept of the menstruation cycle during the eighteenth century was a central perception and determining factor of womanhood, presenting to society that the women had the, ‘physical capacity and readiness to secure the future generations’[16], in turn this formed the women’s place in society. The presence of menstruation was a physiological phenomenon; a lifestyle prism was created that brought them into womanhood and marriage parallel to the end of puberty for the male. This event was believed to signify the readiness for sexual activity. Aristotle’s Masterpiece of 1717 states, ‘then there nature purgation’s begin to flow; and then the blood no longer taken to augment their Bodies abounding, stir up their Minds to Venery’[17]. Social expectations were created for the women ultimately confining them to procreation. The biological observation of the body in Gautier Dagoty’s painting in 1773 presents the functions of the female body showing there internal organs and uterus bearing life, counter to this are the perception of an unrealiable and unstable individuals who experiences, ‘intellectual capacities are diminished’[18], this instability is a central notion that perceives women in the eighteenth century as emotionally unreliable within society compared to that of the dominant male.

During this time boudoirs in the eighteenth century functioned as a female space for the production of pleasure, the representation of sexuality and reproduction is a dominant trace in architecture. By the end of the eighteenth century bodily fluids such as breast milk were considered as political priorities and introducing the milking boudoir of the bourgeois domestic space took place. The natural fluids of the body distinguished spaces between the boudoir that were dominated by blood and milk, eroticized by what the female body was releasing intern that of the cabinet represented male knowledge and sexuality. The space of the boudoir for the mother herself to breastfeed means that national health and growth can be sustained and the purity of race can be maintained. By the end of the eighteenth century however this discourse changed and breastfeeding was domesticated and privatized into the home, confining the female sexuality to the interior space.

The Oikema

The architectural designs of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux were created to define a social order and purification of the social systems, ‘the architect becomes an educator; architecture is the instrument he uses to educate’[19], effectively to express the status of co-existence. Ledoux likens himself to the beliefs in the Theory of the Social Contract of Rousseau’s in 1762, ‘if society is founded on mutual need commanding reciprocal affection, why should we not bring together this analogy of sentiment and taste, which honors man in private houses?’[20]. The caractere of monuments, like their nature, serves the propagation and purification of morals as the ‘caractere’[21] acts as an educational tool and an aid to develop expression. The 18^th Century phallic temple of pleasure was an integral part of the plan for the Ideal City of Chaux, ‘The Oikema’[22] imagined by Ledoux takes on this thinking acting as both a brothel and as an education utility. This is an act of sexual control that is suggested in Edmund Burke’s ideals that the, ‘ notions of sublime through its linguistic affinity with sublimation’[23], it is parallel to what Ledoux describes the Oikema as a ‘sublime ideal that multiples man’s values and raises them to their highest fulfillment’[24], whilst this in turn acts to displace sexuality and constrict erotic desires.

The sublime elevates the body and unconsciously represses as Sigmund Freud suggests, ‘it has the power to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued highly and which are not sexual’[25], effectively displacing the body. In 1804 Ledoux published his plan for the Oikema architectural treatise of L’architecture consideree sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la legislations, ‘viewed from nearby, vice influences the soul no less strongly, by the horror it instills, it causes the soul to react toward virtue’[26], here he is describing his diagram of Oikema that sublimates sexual thoughts and acts in the utopian brothel. In 1978 Anthony Vidler in the writings of The Walls denoted the projects of sexual utopias, ‘Asylums of Libertinage’[27], where the notion of pleasures was redirected to protect society from the ‘chaotic desire of people by regulating (urges of the flesh)’[28], presenting an architecture of sexual confinement of sensual behavior and monitoring spaces. The plan of the Oikema at the time was linked the architecture Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s erotic draw of ‘Le Dieu Priape’[29], of a study of male genitalia showing a large male phallus. The enlightenment thinking was a redirection of an architecture that,‘ searches for pleasing geometrical forms’[30], thus when creating Ledoux imagined monument of the Oikema that would encourage rationality in there thinking towards sex. This ideology and simplicity is what the architect deemed as revolutionary values, departing from the ancient regime of excess and decadence. The Oikema adopts this reform with the disappearance of the ornament and of a windowless building for the, ‘ non-interruption of lines so that the eye is not to be distracted by detrimental accessories’[31], this brings a unity of thought within the structure as opposed to the view of the phallus shape that evokes a sense of ‘human degradation and lead one back on to the path of virtue’[32]. Ledoux defines this creation and unity of opposites as a ‘symetrie derived nature, contributes to solidite, an balance one thing against another’[33]. Ledoux and Resifs architectures of pleasure, ‘eroticized the form’s of diffuse biopower, scopic surveillance, penitentiary confinement’[34], effectively a restriction of the body that was in France emerging in the disciplinary revolutions of institutions.

Charles Fourier’s erotic and gastronomic orgies

Charles Fourier created the ideal utopian society in the form of the Phalanx in the early 19^th Century that was imagined in a rural landscape but still within range of the city. The Phalanstery was a utopian engine of a community that was solely governed by its desires. It was an ideal emblem away from the overcrowded city of domestic architecture and disease, ‘an architecture that would break down the walls between people and families and make possible the multiplication of bonds between the members of the community’[35], in his plans Fourier created in the building of the Phalanx a room of the ‘seristery’; an arranged set of rooms at the center of the utopia where ‘cliques within each series could gratify their cabalistic inclinations’[36] creating a harmony of suppressed desires. During his life in Lyon he had heard of ‘parties carrees et sextines’[37], where sexual promiscuousness of small scale orgies would occur in the hills and wood above the city. However Fourier likened the Phalanstery of paralleling, ‘the noble expression of free love’[38] unlike the vulgar debauchery on the hills. The orgies would therefore take place in daylight and involve the entire community as Fourier claimed, ‘nature inclines us towards the amorous orgy, just as toward gastronomic orgy, and that while both are blameworthy in the excess they would be praiseworthy in an order in which they could be equilibrated’, with different types and classifications of orgies. Fourier’s Nouvea monde amoureux work describing the Phalanstry as a ‘amorous institution’[39] of match making and of choreographed orgies. He offers a complex instruction of codes for living that resonate within the brothels described by Restif yet proclaims the Phalanx to liberate the body under the conditions of the orgies that are strategized.

The Planet as Festival Project

Ettore Sottsass plan of the, ‘The Planet Festival Project: Study for Temple for Erotic Dances’[40] of 1972-73 is a futuristic vision created with the architects ‘concerned deterioration’[41] over modern urban life. It is a utopia where nature and life are in harmony with one another that enables extreme heightening of the bodies self-awareness, ‘liberated from the demands of bank, supermarket, subway, people can come to know, means of their bodies, their psyche, and their sex, that they are living’[42], values that are displayed in fourteen hand colored lithograph studies. They presented a series of ‘superinstruments’ within the Planet to enhance desires, ‘a monolithic dispenser of incense, drugs, and laughing gas’[43], that are located within a campground, the elements of drugs for euphoric living inflect what can be found in that of the hippy communities and rave cultures where smells, scents, music and nature are derivatives of harmonic freedoms in sexuality. A temple is erected within the Planet for the discovering and education of sexualities as well as a place for erotic dances, ‘reminiscent of ancient Egyptian religious complexes. Phallic and orificial in form’[44], Ettorre Sottass designs imagined the structure would change the ‘morals of the of the man, work-producer and thought that men can then live (if they want to) for the sake of living and can work (if perchance they want to) to come to know, by means of their bodies, their psyche and their sex, that they are living’[45], he is describeing the alienated, oppressed working body in current society. Michel Foucault ‘repressive hypothesis’[46] understands that the discourse of sexual repression lies in the overlaying of power relations, where a repetitive overturning of power, liberations and freedom equate to a repression. This can be likened to Sottass’s project of, ‘uncovering the circumstances of the belief that links the discourse on sexuality and the revelation of truth’[47], whereas opposing to this Michel Foucault contests this truth leads to unrealistic expectations of sexual utopias.

The Archigram: A Room of a Thousand Delights

The Archigram group throughout the 1960’s was dematerializing architecture and in 1996 Peter Cook suggested turning away from the megastructural utopias, the group of capitalists that represented the form of societies industries after World War Two. Instead he declared, ‘there may be no buildings at all in Archigram’[48], to transit a message of the system of the sexual radicalism that was occurring. In 1968 Archigram released an article entitled, ‘The Nomad’[49], the group claimed that place is a space that only exists in the mind to represent, ‘the shift from ‘hardware’ to the ‘software’, to imply the shift from the tangible aspects of architecture to its immaterial entities- the system, the transmitted message or the program’, this shift can be represented in 1970 design of ‘A Room of a Thousand Delights’[50]. This represented a complete transition from a fabricated architecture to virtual spaces of reality where, ‘technological devices would set the conditions for people to fulfill and realize their desires and dreams’[51], this was classified as a cybernetic influence of desires. Ettore Sottass in his The Planet as Festival, claims to have arrived at a moment where the architect themselves are there own reprsentive, ‘we are all nomand, or not nomad artist because we possess the super-possibility to communicate allowing us to find out about everyone without static centralized power’, he derives from there movement away from a architecture where there is, ‘no more powers, but wandering fluxes of will and public passions’[52] within society and the sexed body.

The Cybernetic City

The French Radical movement of the 1960’s led artist Nicolas Scoffer to create The Cybernetic City in 1969, ‘the task of the artist in no longer the creation of a piece, but the creation of creation’[53], envisioning phantom cities of utopia of the future. The towers that would be positioned over Paris included a scientific research center for sexual recreation that reiterated the vision that responsive networks could not only refashion the city but also connect city dwellers on the most intimate levels. This was a cybernetic technology of postwar vision that sought to unify society that encapsulated a thinking towards ‘biotechnic future’[54] as proposed in 1934 by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization. This combined with the ideals of the ‘environmental equipoise’[55] where ‘mechanization takes command’ in 1948. These proposals combined, ‘humanity, technology and environment’[56] in a new form that mechanized space with the social model of the city and body. This is an architecture that formulated of responsive network where the environment of space is, ‘activated through perception on it’s subjects. Therefore the use of technology to stimulate the senses would theoretically heighten this effect: it would awake the body’[57], effectively this would act a catalyst for new forms of inhabitation and sexuality. The Spatiodynamic Tower designed in 1954 by Schoffer was a kinetic construction made of, ‘vibrating cantilevered bars and cables, panels and perforated surfaces’[58], that created an environment of sensory effects within the mechanization of the landscape. Technology networks in Schoffer’s House of Invisible Walls of 1957 reflected that this mechanism had the ability to create environmental conditions that would replace traditional architectural enclosures, ‘one heated, sonorous, and coloured with infa-red light and the other cool, silent, and bathed in blue fluorescent light’[59], creating thresholds of invisible walls. It would merge interior and exterior environments in unity removing the ‘constructions of physical separation’[60]. This use of sensory apparatus and lighting would, ‘frame the body as an active node within the cybernetic construction of space’[61], as the body would become reactionary to the stimulus of the environment where the biological and the technology dreams of the 1970s were of a theme of Progress and Harmony for mankind.

Classic Cybersex

The immersion of the practice of cybersex took place due to the advances of 19^th century electro mechanics and remote communication tools like that of the telephone. The historical grounding lies in this century where medical devices were used to, ‘heal, by sexual stimulation what women were labeled as hysterical’[62], the doctor Pitie Salpetriere created a technology of sexual stimulation in his research of hysteria. Historian Rachel P.Maines constructs that, ‘our civilization, ‘androcentre’ and ‘naturalist’ has invented hysteria’[63]. The first statistical study in the 1970s represented that orgasm through vaginal penetration only resulted in sixty-five percent of women achieving sexual satisfaction whereas the remaining thirty five percent needed other stimulus such as clitoral stimulation to achieve an orgasm. Therefore ‘sexual frustration, coupled with social stigmatization by suspicions of frigidity has undoubtedly contribute to the development of so-called ‘hysterical’ depressive pathologies’[64], lead women to consult with their doctors. A treatment of this ‘hysteria’ was through the sexual stimulation of a water jet that used manual stimulation. This developed into the evolution of electro magnetic devices known as the ‘Chatanooga vibrator’[65] and the stimulation of the ‘olisbos steampunk’[66]. In 1975 teledildonics was invented by Ted Nelson who was a web pioneer and the inventor of hypertext in 1965. This advancement led to the creation in 1987 of ‘a mac Playmate’[67] computer generated comic named ‘Shatter’ by Mike Saenz, ‘the first interactive digital character with a sexual vocation that formally prefigures the future avatars of second life’[68]. However because of the inability and time-consuming Internet connections the viewer acted through passive voyeurism compared to the sensations of traditional pornography, this was the first encounter online that enabled an interactive relationship.

The utopian technology of cybersex in 2003 reached a new powerful level of communication and visualization. It was that of ‘Second Life’[69], invented by Philippe Rosedale. The development of internet networks and social networks enabled the empathic ability of the avatars in the cybersex universe to radically shift away from the norms of pornography, ‘cybersex becomes an innovative vector of artistic and technical creation that promotes the emergence of new emphatic abilities and aesthetic’[70], creating hedonistic encounters. The element of mastery is divisive as the user takes on complex communication and controlling process allowing them to narrate sexual experiences and model the avatars to their desires. In 2006 cybersex stimulation technologies created the ‘XCite Touch’, a system of a vibrating harness’s that were operated by the avatars through the world of Second Life. The avatar becomes in control of the human body and this role reversal generates cyber sexual physical stimuli as the techno body of the avatar enters the private realm and manipulates the physical body of the human. This brings to light and educates the user of their bodies reaction to different modes of sexual behavior and treatment as, ‘our ability to project ourselves into our interlocutor or partner, whether real of avatar, submissive or dominating, reified or reifying’[71], the projections of our fantasies onto the cybersex avatar as an virtual artifact enables an arena of experimentation. The area of cyberspace created a telepathic ecstasy for the user, the avatar become known as the ‘robotic haptic exoskeletons’[72], they effectively remained an otherness to the human body acting as an intense erotica of sensuality and pleasure because of the artificial boundaries between the avatar and user.

Rave Culture

The machine of rave can only function when it is inhabited by the raving body therefore, ‘the desiring machine depends on its human components’[73], as Deleuze and Guattari name this the ‘body without organs’. In rave culture the body is sterilized of its organs through ‘the sterile bliss of perverse sexuality, drug experiences, play and dancing’[74], consequently the body without organs mutates into a state of ecstasy as it is ‘bloated with unemployable energy: a feeling of arrested orgasm’[75]. The state of the body during the rave is a ‘continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities that through the whole development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’[76], this extends Freud’s notion of a ‘polymorphous perversity: a diffuse eroticism that’s connected to the non genital, non orgasmic sensuality of the pre-Oedipal infant’[77], the body then becomes in a state of flux. The amalgamation of drugs and raving installs the body into a ‘virtual reality pleasuredome’[78]. The ecstasy experience is classified as a ‘utopiate’, intensifying every sensation of the eroticized body. The rave utopia, ‘in its original etymological sense is a nowhere/nowhen wonderland’[79], like that of the cybersex of Second Life, the virtual reality of pornography and its stimulus apparatus contrasts to that of the drug use in raving. The use of MDMA, ‘makes the world seem realer, the drug feels like its bringing out the real you freed from all the neurosis instilled by a sick society’[80], the rave unlocks the body from the ideological doctrines of society and allows sexuality to reach a state of utopia and liberation.