Chengxuan Li, year 2, 2021

Towards an Archival Inter-panopticon: Rereading Metropolis

Chengxuan Li 77329 Architectural Association History and Theory Studies Year 2 2020-21 Winter Semester

Towards an Archival Inter-panopticon: Rereading Metropolis

Considering The Battle of Orgreave which, as is commended

by Claire Bishop in his systematic evaluation of artistic performances adopting people as medium,1 arguably becomes the best-known work of the British artist Jeremy Deller, and further on manifests as the contemporary epitome of participatory art – this article starts form the introduction to and reappraisal of The Battle of Orgreave, and thus deconstructs this deliberately planned scheme the collective recollection.

before he carried out the plan for the performance. 4 The playout was definitely successful from the views of performance and stage design – the reenactment involved reactivation of the trivial field spaces surrounding the village of Orgreave and followed a sequence identical to the original, manifesting the very specificity of the context and the transient and synchronic qualities of the historical event per se.5 200 ex-miners and an unknown number of ex-policemen involved in the incident were invited to participate in the reenactment, switching roles occasionally – after waves of rehearsal with an extent of organized arbitrariness, the participants reincarnated the battle, restaging the conflictive, antagonistic and even hostile confrontation of the police and the miners dating 17 years backwards.

“Missiles fly, truncheons swing, police chase miners as cars burn.

It is all very exciting, but why is it start?” 2 This headline perfectly articulated The Battle of Orgreave of its post-mortem –17 years after the traumatic incident, that tragic and perplex injury to all,3 Deller was commissioned to produce the re-stage of this notorious event.

He interviewed participants and witnesses of the incident, collecting multifaceted testimonies,

Instead of attempting to reconcile and therefore therapeutically heal the wound, this reenactment invokes traumatic experiences, memories of pain, but also camaraderie, defeat and indeed some excitement of conflict. 6 With a certain extent of laxity and improvisation, the performance was carried out as a dialogue, or conversation, between the reality and past distributed into the individual recollections of the historical

A Directed Improvisation

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. See Bishop, op. cit., 31.

1 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. (London: Verso, 2012): 30-40. The Battle of Orgreave was (originally), by its name a violent upheaval, or picket of a group of miners at a steel coking plant affiliated with the British Steel Corporation, near Orgreave, South Yorkshire, UK. The confrontation took place on 18 Jun 1984, against the Police force of which the majority was constituted with the South Yorkshire Police.

See Michael Mansfield and Mike Mansfield, “The Miners’ Strike 1984-85.” Socialist Lawyer, no. 52 (Jun 2009): 16-18.

See also John Hendy, “The Attack on the Miners Was a Turning Point.” Socialist Lawyer, no. 52 (Jun 2009): 20-23.

2 Jonathan Jones, “Missiles fly, truncheons swing, police chase miners as cars burn. It is all very exciting, but why is it start?” The Guardian, Arts Section, (19 June 2001). www. guardian.co.uk/arts/story/0,,509066,00.html This headline in The Guardian outlined the lineage and impression of the historical reenactment The Battle of Orgreave vividly.

3 The injury to all derives from the ideological motto “An injury to one is an injury to all” which is the title of the archive, collecting and exhibiting the clues, aftermaths and the records of The Battle of Orgreave.

See Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave Archive [An injury to one is an injury to all], archival exhibition, 2004. This archival exhibition | installation, comprising physical and digital dossiers of the historical reenactment, articulates the (biased, and artificially organized due to its enigmatic nature) narrative of the incident.

4 Alice Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave.” Visual Culture in Britain, no. 7 (2006): 97-98.

5 Ibid.

6 Bishop, op. cit., 32.

See, for reference, David Gilbert, “Review of Jeremy Deller, The English Civil War Part II: Personal Accounts of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.” Oral History, vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 105.

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Jeremy Deller, The Archive of The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. See Bishop, op. cit., 34.

event. Its discursive nature lay neither in the improvisation itself nor in the intention to articulate a reorganized narrative of the past, but, as what Deller referred to as “living history”, the multilayered conjugation of consciousness, which, just as the living archive, could be briefly summarized as the testimonial eyes of observation which administrate and dominate the constant collecting of history by individuals. Normally, such distributed, multifaceted, and discursive narratives would be tacit, marginal and subjugated; yet notably, Deller, known for his fascination with the museological promotion of such peripheral, subordinate and marginal narratives of historical memory, resituates his work in the middle of such encyclopedic, bibliographical dossiers buried within the tacit individuals. Deller possesses a strongly manifest intention that undermines, or even functions against the authoritative history and the totalitarian logic of the historical progression, which has been realized in his panoramic collection of the constellation of distributed depictions of historical events. To this regard, Deller is often speciously celebrated as an artist-ethnographer,7 and The Battle of Orgreave discusses the very heart of the ethics of participatory art. 8 From Unconvention, at the Cardiff Center for Visual Arts (1999), via The Battle of Orgreave (2001), to Memory Bucket (2003)

… Deller’s work symbolizes and celebrates the anthropological snapshot of the marginal societies from which he seeks the recapture of the imaginarily eclectic historical dossier of the present.

One must acknowledge the effortful enterprise of Deller’s recognition of the diversified narratives, and one should as well value the artistic plentitude of The Battle of Orgreave which accommodates critical or even contradictory judgements.9 Nevertheless, despite Deller’s endeavor in ethnography,10 his archiving attempt, collecting and exhibiting namely the folk culture against the exclusionary, totalitarian unification of the zeitgeist, seems somehow tactless, if not hypocritical alio intuitu. 11 The ethicality of ethnographic studies per se could be by no means undisputed, and encyclopedic exhibitions too often lie where the corpse of colonialism is ulteriorly buried. The methodologies he adopted in The Battle of Orgreave against exclusionary unifications of the mainstream were, unfortunately, totalizing and partial: perhaps due to the performing nature of participatory art, that all performances are to be spectated to an extent – arguably Deller has been extraordinary successful in emancipating the stage-spectator relationship by turning the performers into audiences 12 – the excessively addressed fidelity to presentation and conformity

7 Normally ethnographers study, describe and summarize the cultural characteristics of a certain society or group (usually a minor society and a marginal group). Deller is therefore ethically commendable since he has been working in close relationship with, in the case of The Battle of Orgreave, the ex-miners and ex-policemen. Yet the definition of such collaboration is somewhat vague, and open to interpretation and despite Deller being such a locus classicus there is still ongoing debate on the ethicality, particularly regarding the position of the work to be either politically non-committal or biased – and this article generally takes the view od the latter, with references to the position in Correia, op. cit.

8 See, for example, Bishop, op. cit., 35-39; Correia, op. cit., 94.

9 Rather than purely celebrating the heroic entity of workers class, Deller took the view juxtaposing the working class with the middle to articulate a universal history of oppression, “therefore disrupting not only the traditional tropes of leftist configuration but also the identificatory patterns and tonal character by which these are habitually represented. The fact that so many views can be thrust … is evidence.” See Bishop, op. cit., 36.

10 It is quite notable of his attempt of collecting and archiving the marginal narratives the suppressed, or at least ethical groups ignored from the mainstream. He has been generally commended successful in representing their views and have them translate into valid artistic forms.

11 There has been criticism, accusing Deller being ideological in intentionally resituating a biased narrative as a political expression.

12 Bishop, op. cit., 38.

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to its artistic norm13 weakens the essential focus on the exploration into the intersubjective relations … Deller seems more a choreographer and archivist than the explorer, manager and observer of such relations to an extent that the former might have overridden the latter. It is unwisely risky to be confined to the physical inclusiveness, a general archive.14 Just as what ethnography literally represents, considering the appalling futility and excessive totality of the encyclopedic collection of objects and information, it is often argued that one should really transcend the physical archive, towards a living archive which, as Deller has started with and too early deviated from: the living history, a festival15 archive, an atemporal16 archive; while in the former, the encyclopedic archive, the physical one par excellence, flesh decays into dirt and dreams dry up.

Physical Archives and The Directed Reality The very first physical archive started with a political domicile, a sacred interior. The archive, deriving from the Greek arkheion, were believed to be the holly dwellings of the magistrates to the superior, namely the archons.

In such domiciliation, as Derrida argues, archiving took place, instituting its inherent political message.17 To summarize, in the primordial archive, the make of (public, political) laws took place under the laws of the (interior, domestic) house. The archive was particularly interestingly in this origin: in the Greek polis, it is generally known for the separation of the public | political and the private | economic, by the nomenclatures of, for example, nomos against oikos;18 technè politikè against technè oikonomikè.19 Derri-

13 The artistic norm of artworks here is defined as the fate, or inevitable consequences that (in certain conditions prescribed by such norm) artworks are destined to be presented, circulated, appraised, archived, re-presented, reappraised … These are merely exemplary consequences, and this definition of the norm should transcend the literal depictions of such processes and actually the norm refer to the purview of the commonly accepted means of appreciating and dealing with artistic productions.

In the case of The Battle of Orgreave, the particular norm which the article argues that Deller often has to conform to, refers to the circulation of this artwork through the mass media, for instance BBC and ITV which has played a role in the original event; the documentation of the artwork in production (a documentary which is often accused of biased presentation of information) and in its afterlife (an archive set to document the production of the artwork and outcomes, repercussions, criticism … this article believes Deller inevitably sticks too strictly to such agenda, or norm (the common agendum of all agenda) which forms the limitations of this project.

14 The general archive is a kind of heterotopic space that indefinitely accumulates the passage of time, history, and human activities by absorbing all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes into its dossier. It constitutes a time of all times, a perpetual, immobile inhabitation of all times. In such encyclopedic museums and libraries, “the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge.”

For the definition of heterotopias and heterotopic spaces, see Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22-27.

15 Ibid., the festival is a space featured with the capture of time in its fleeting, transient and precarious format; it is undoubtably temporal and normally its establishment serves very ephemeral needs, such as a festival or a fair. Here the festival archive opposes the general archive, or the encyclopedia that attempts to presume the unified nature of historical discourse and distill them into a holistic dossier. Problems with this presumption will be discussed in the following subsections.

See, for reference, Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972): 21-22.

16 The following subsections will deduct from temporality to atemporality.

17 Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.”

Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 9-63. “The meaning of ‘archive,’ its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.”

18 See Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics.” In The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 186-87.

19 These terms derive from Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Toward the Archipelago.” Log, no.

11 (Winter 2008): 91-120. For the original source, see Scott Meykle, Aristotle’s Economic Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Giorgio Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2007): 20.

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it records the event.23

da demonstrates that such juxtaposed qualities of the archive in its very origin would at once render its role as institutive and conservative, revolutionary and traditional: one could further argue that the superimposition of the economic (domestic, interior) law and the political (public, exterior) law. The former, the economy of an archive determined the technical structure of archived content as well as the medium of archiving, and this layer is topper by the political, magisterial choice of records – only a manipulated portion of the events could be possibly recorded, and these magistrates inevitably, in their processes of collecting and recording, leaves their own trace of polish onto the documents being archived. The systematic terminology of such archiving procedures, as is introduced by Ketelaar,20 is further broken down into archiving, archivalization and archivation.21 Such terms indicate the existence of the artificial, ideological and, most fundamentally, the creative processes that happen between the collection of records and their seemingly immediate put-into-archive. 22 As Derrida wisely concludes, the archiving process per se produces as much as

Upon the recognition of the creative nature of archives, Derrida draws to the reference of the political experience of the news media,24 which, by reflecting on the role of Deller, sheds new light on the role of The Battle of Orgreave. Too much adhered to the physicality and enunciability of the physical archive, in the encyclopedic ethnography of Deller, too much has been created – as the subsequent news reports and the physical exhibitionistic archive (as some accuses) have already rendered this work a different complexion. This archive is physically constructed right amid time which declares its inevitable mortality and decay, given the destructive, irresistible force of forgetfulness and the annihilation of memory at which this archive takes place and to which this archive shall eventually succumb.25

Towards Atemporality Physical collections, physical archives, according to Baudrillard,26 translate real time into the dimension of a spatial system. The

20 Eric Katelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives.” Archival Science, vol. 1, no. 2, (2001): 131-141.

21 Ibid., 132-133.

Archiving refers to the practice of filling and collecting, in the form of records, documents, etc., as if situated in an archive. Archiving, as is commonly accepted, is the most technical and objective process among the three and involves least human engagement and creativity. It is a mechanical activity that “follows upon the creation of the document.”

Modern archival theories, as is contended by Ketelaar, embraces the possibilities regarding the phases beyond archiving: the archivation which focuses on the creative process before capturing the documents into the archive, the thoughtful manipulations regarding economic and technical feasibilities. See, for example, Bruno Delmas, “Archival Science Facing the Information Society.” Archival Science, no. 1 (2001): 28. French archivists use this term as equivalent to archivèconomie or archivage.

Archivalization, as is introduced by Ketelaar, means the conscious and unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving. See Eric Ketelaar, “Archivalization and Archiving.” Archives and Manuscripts, no. 27 (1999): 54-61.

See also Eric Ketelaar, “Archivistics Research Saving the Profession.” American Archivist, no. 63 (2000): 328-329.

Archivalization happens usually between archiving and archivation.

22 The use of this term put-into-archive attempts to avoid any of the aforementioned terminologies to avoid ambiguity, and this put-into-archive actively refers to the commonly perceived process and concisely summarized process of archiving, archivalization and archivation.

23 Derrida and Prenowitz, op. cit., 17.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 14. Derrida takes the psychoanalytic view, using the death driven to explain the intention of archiving. He argues that the archive takes place at the very place where the so-called memory originally and structurally breaks down.

26 Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting”. In The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1997): 7-24.

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archive of a time, or comparably the collection of a person, exists with it the possibility of retaining a lasting reference for the displaced times, the past; such references are manifest and tangible in its physical entity, and thus could be replayed, restaged, and re-experienced. Collecting abolishes time. Baudrillard further indicates that in this way, by abolishing the conscious time and removing one from the irreversibility of the scientific singularity of time which relentlessly passes from birth to death, between natality and mortality, both of which fundamental conditions where men live, one can construct his own discourse through which he marshals, amid the personal archive, or collection of objects imbued with his own creative subjectivity. In such construction of the personal archive, one escapes from the mental disarray caused by the impelling irreversibility of passing time and futility of human enterprise, collection, and memory. Objects, the collection of objects, or namely the personal archive helps to resolve this futility and therefore shields one from the objective ineffectiveness of time.27 Instead of being in precarious preparations for the future,28 or a post-mortem, he who collects merely seeks the assurance, the mental consignation that he somehow lives out his life uninterruptedly in a willful cycle, and “thereby symbolically transcend the realities of an existence before whose irreversibility and contingency he remains powerless.”29

of such physical collection inside which one could simulate with perfect subjectivity the disappearance and the reoccurrence, of what symbolizes death.30 The archive here absorbs the deathful fate, and transcends into a superficial, literal symbology that enables the rehearsal of the anguish-laden fact: its eventual extinguishment. Reassuring as it is in terms of ensuring the continuity of life through a game-like allegory, such archive, more as a compromise than as a resolution, with the intention to represent atemporality, would sadly and ultimately face its physical demise.

This article, therefore, theorizes an archive which – based on the theoretical ground and the desperate attempt to abolish time to manifest atemporality – transcends the physical archive, formalized with piles of dossiers and collections of objects, an immaterial, informal archive that sharpens the ways in which one could critically approach the viewport through which one faces reality and thus makes records of them. This conceptualization of the new archive, with the stimulus, or more precisely the goal to transcend the cognitive time and directly confront with the conditions prescribed by the issues of men’s natality and mortality, seeks an alternative resolution, one other space of one’s imaginary, hypothetical consignation, an occasional pause and a fresh reflection on the preconditions.

Baudrillard, again, by borrowing from the fort / da / fort / da ball conceptualized by Freud – the ball that the child makes vanish and re-appear, generating the alternating, cyclic absence, and presence – he prompts a perfect analogy

Rereading Metropolis It is here conceptualized an archive, namely the archival metropolis, or the metropolis. Metrop-

27 Baudrillard suggests the omission of the cliché that, see Baudrillard, op. cit., 17: man survives through his possessions. It is somewhat palpable that creating the safe, or fixed, objective reference would not necessarily incur a secured posthumous emblem, or afterlife.

28 As a clarification, according to Derrida, op. cit., 18: the archival technique commands that everything instituted and constituted in the archive forms an anticipation of the future.

This article will present counter arguments later, and to this end, here, this article extends this point, arguing that physical archives form an anticipation of the future particularly in terms of the retrospective trace in the future, seeking for the historical culprit and truth from the gigantic dossier provided with the physical archive.

29 Baudrillard, op. cit., 17.

30 Ibid.

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Plan of the Agora at the height of its development around A.D. 150. See Camp, op. cit., 3.

olis comes from ancient Greek, metroon,31 a building housed both a cult of the Mother of Gods, and the State Archives. It has a political origin, regarding this nomenclature – while itself, if properly addressed, functions actively against the totalizing, ideological usages of historical archive, considering the interesting allegory of Foucault: it crams all the treasure of bygone days into a platitudinous, trivial citadel of history.32 Cutaway view of the Metroon in the late 2nd century B. C.; the building housed both a cult of the Mother of the Gods and the State Archives. See Camp, op. cit., 14.

sier of all subjects that constituted together the presence, from the most dispersed, distant subjects to the subjects to one ’s propinquity; but an extensive space more than the set of influences which extends from one subject to another. Different historical events, dispersed ones, the whole mass of events that belong to a single present – and so many actors, audiences, chorographers etc., who know or do not know one another, meet without knowing each other and obstinately express their subjectivity in a web of events of which they are not masters, of which they remain trapped and lack the holistic view of, and of which the scope they have inadequate idea – all such figures and characters do not participate in, or perform, or act out events solely by the predictable, logical progression of superficial relationships and interests that they have knowledge about, nor by the reoccurrence of history, farces of historical repetition, nor by the obstinacy of an identity, a relation, a group established, strengthened, invaded, extinguished and rediscovered; they act out and formalize the present

The archival metropolis is more an archive of systems of relations than an archive of objects. Similar to Foucault ’s theorization of a historical a priori, which comprises the interrelationships between a network, its conditions of existence and its limitations (exclusiveness),33 the archival metropolis seeks the interrelationships of its denizens, subjects, or namely metropolitans as the subjects of reference, and the following def inition could be made: the archival metropolis defines a limited space of communication, a relatively small, limited space far from possessing the breath of an encyclopedic, ethnographic dos-

31 See John M. Camp, The Athenian Agora: A Short Guide to the Excavations (Athens: The American School of Classical Studies, 2003): 16.

32 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 14.

33 See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 126-131 for the definition of the historical a priori.

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by the form of positivity of their discourse, defining a field in which such events could be deployed, manipulations to the interrelationship between subjects could be reached and, in such field, the present is performed while being archived into the ever-recording perceptrons of the network per se.

and for the present. Derrida has prepared the historical archive as a device against amnesia, a lively anticipation for the future archaeology and excavation of the truth in history and the original culprit, 36 Foucault, from whose theoretical ground the archival metropolis deducts, by freeing the history of ideas from the semiotic yokes of such prescribed, presumed notions, 37 recognizes the discursive nature which Derrida fails to address. This is exactly the point where Deller deviates from, who eventually succumbs to the physicality of the archive and the traditional norm of the profession.

In order to extend his enterprise on the archive of the distributed, discursive nature, the archival metropolis, carries on.

Adding to the Foucaultian archive,34 which, between tradition and oblivion, reveals the general mechanism with which statements survive and undergo regular modifications, the archival metropolis presents it role of recording and absorbing the present into its realm. It could be inappropriate to refer to Bergson at this juncture, yet notably, as he argues,35 from the perception of the present, the preceding moments that are equivalent to present to which they can deduct, are in this sense truly given in the present. It is now further contended that, by the ceaseless archivalization of the preceding present, absorbing and assimilating it into the system of archival, the archival metropolis, it renders a sophisticated, fruitful present, an organic, perpetual present which abolishes time in a way contrary to, or even transcending the destined futility of the practices of collecting, as is outlined by Baudrillard. As long as the present is intellectually perceived and as long as generations of men carry on, this distributed archive shall prevail. The Archival Metropolis abolishes the tradition, the diachronic method to embrace a synchronic one, and is indeed an archive of the present

The Mechanics of the Archive Since the archival metropolis has been theorized, based on the ground provided by Foucault, it is therefore necessary to outline a series of conditions which comprise the present, the very reality which the archival metropolis is theorized to face. In order to formalize the mechanism which the archival metropolis adopts, it is essential to break down the archive into two parts: the collecting and the collection.38 The year 1972 marked the launch of NASA’s Landsat 1, the first-ever satellite that scientifically and

34 Ibid., 130. The Foucaultian archive does not have the weight of tradition; it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and place; it does not welcome oblivion to open up to newly established situations, speeches and freedom. “It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.”

35 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1919): 223.

36 Derrida and Prenowitz, op. cit.

37 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 21-22. At the very beginning of the book, Foucault argues to get rid of the prescribed notions which fail to see the discontinuous, ruptured, disunited nature of the history and historical discourse, starting with outlining the issues of a list of exemplary terms, such as tradition, influence, development, evolution, and spirit.

38 This break-down, beyond doubt, is not a compartmentalization of the conceived unification of the concept, nor the willful emphasis for the plausibly dispersed, disconnected elements inside the system. This break-down is merely an elucidation of the principle with which the archival metropolis possibly work, and particularly this article possesses no will to separate the collecting from the collection and encourages no dualism in such profession.

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systematically observes the earth,39 providing authorized, naturalized images of the land, which the subjectivities of men appear then to be secondary. The satellite, in its absolute objectivity, collects (and records, yet here the collecting is emphasized) and presents a neutral god’s eye view.40 By making the analogy to the big Other,41 as is theorized by Lacan, an exterior, omniscient entity that attests to the existence of the object, of language, and of the culture, this article draws to the Foucaultian gaze, which, similar to that of Lacan, as Foucault argues in the formation of the disciplinary society,42 establishes an inter-gazing, inter-surveillance gazing machine, which he calls the panopticon extending the original architectural proposal of the panopticon by Bentham. Bentham envisioned the architectural panopticon 43 which is arguably the first attempt of an architecture exerting disciplinary impact on individuals and assuring the automatic functioning of such power (of self-sustaining disciplinary actions). This marks the shift of architecture from symbolizing aspects of human nature to shaping human dispositions according to the political will. Furthermore, the panopticon, as Foucault sees it,44 goes beyond a conceptualized Cerda Plan for Barcelona. See Aureli, op. cit., 100.

architecture and becomes the very diagram of the ideal form of the mechanism of power: the self-sustaining power which creates a panoramic, pervasive, and constant surveillance and thus discipline on the captive; its functioning is therefore concluded as a pure architecture-and-optical system, a prototype of administerial technology which would in due course detach from any specific use.

Long before the era of digital surveillance, or the digital panopticism, the idea of formalizing architecture as a disciplinary tool has existed, starting with Bentham. The Cerdà plan for Barcelona,45 another disciplinary apparatus, witnesses the biopolitical administration in city planning. Interestingly, Cerdà, in his General Theory, firstly theorizes the urbanization, or the urban which refers to the city, the expansion of (the infrastructural, apolitical aspect of ) the city. This article thus, by opposing the isotropic, biopolitical viewport of the urbanism, active argues that the metropolis, the archival metropolis should be conceived as political than economical, or statistical where men are reduced to figures, deprived of the differences which marks the political individual par

39 See, for reference, Landsat 1, Landsat Science, NASA, accessed March 24, 2021, https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-1-3/landsat-1.

40 Alorah Harman, “Technology Imagines the City.” Eindhoven Footnotes, vol. 161, no. 1 (2019): 36.

41 See Louis-Paul Willis, “Conceptualizing Otherness with Lost: Foucault, Lacan, and the Mediation of the Gaze.” TV/Series, no. 1 (2016): 1-16.

See also Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (W. W. Norton & Company, 1977): 84.

42 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed., trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): 244-245. Extending Bentham’s point on the architectural panopticon, a technical program that delt with the societal discipline in the 18th century, Foucault sees the contemporary society not of spectacle but of surveillance, where the individual is fabricated. “We are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism.”

43 Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen

by Contemporary Observers (Icon Books, 2012). “The Building circular – an iron cage, glazed – a glass lantern about the size of Ranelagh – The Prisoners in their Cells, occupying the Circumference – The Officers, the Centre. By Blinds, and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed from the observation of the Prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence. – The whole circuit reviewable with little, or, if necessary, without any, change of place.”

See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 226.

44 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 232.

45 This article derives its comments on the Cerdà plan from Aureli, op. cit., 96-104. For references, see Andrea Cavalletti, La Città Biopolitica, Mitologie della Sicurezza (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005): 20-32, cited in Aureli’s essay.

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Archizoom, Diagram of homogeneous habitat, See Aureli, op. cit., 103.

excellence.46 Later on, in the NoStop City, the instrumentalization of the infrastructure in order to exert disciplinary administrations and social control peaks. 47 To reflect on this issue, and further extend the point that Foucault elucidates48 which sheds new light on the panopticon, the archival metropolis takes the opportunity to extend the ongoing panopticism that Foucault has theorized, and carries this point further, which forms actually an inter-panopticon.

In fact, as Foucault argues later on, that in the panopticon he theorizes, indeed everyone, including the scrutineers will be placed under constant scrutiny. He sees the consequential vanishment of the God’s eye point of view, and sees the discursive nature and the heteroglossia of voices and viewports inside such system.49 Foucault expresses a negative tongue on this inter-panopticon which contemporary men are situated in, and such bad inter-panopticon could be formalized, for example, in the case of the advent of the e-mail and the smart phone.50

Digital Surveillance Networks. See Harman, op. cit., 30-31.

itive inter-panopticon: instead of Foucault ’s mobile distrust, 51 this inter-panopticon hypothesizes a mobile empathy, stressing the commonalities and possibilities to coincide despite the dispersed nature of interrelations.

Towards a final conclusion, this article recapitulates The Battle of Orgreave and places it under the newly invented discursive context of the archival metropolis. What Deller fails to address is, indeed, the archiving nature of memory: the physical archive remains filthy in this case, and he should have believed in the power of the memory, namely a distributed archive which is theorized as the archival metropolis, embodied and incarnated through the mechanics of the mutual gazing, the positive inter-panopticon. This archival inter-panopticon, by abolishing its physical entity, gains its amorphous and discursive position. In the dispersions between tradition and oblivion, this archive renders a new dimension of tacit yet clearly enunciative narrative. This is the archival metropolis inside which surveillance gives place to anecdotes, and amnesia succumbs to the distributed storage and the reproductivity of human memory; inside which the panoptic guardian becomes the captive, and the captive overwatches like a guardian; inside which the collecting coincides with the collection (recording), and the collectors become the collection themselves.

Not to the contrary of Foucault’s panopticon but serving as an idealistic reread of it, by abolishing the absolute, God’s viewport in the panopticon and equalizing the power-structure of the scrutineers and the visual captives, it is thus clear that the two aspects of the archival metropolis, collecting and collection, are de facto two facets of the same mechanism: the pos-

46 See, for example, Hannah Arendt, Danielle S. Allen and Margaret Canovan, The Human Condition (The University of Chicago Press, 2018).

47 Andrea Branži, No-Stop City (Paris: Editions HYX, 2006): 142.

48 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans.

Lysa Hochroth & John Johnson (New York: Semiotext, 1996): 235.

See also Henry Krips, “The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Zizek.” Cultural Unbound, vol. 2 (2010): 91-102.

49 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, 235. “In the panopticon, everyone is watched, according to his position within the system, by all or by certain of the others. Here we have an apparatus of total and mobile distrust, since there is no absolute point.”

50 Information technology produces new territories of knowledge and new systems of interconnection. One might be used to conceive oneself as the self-empowered users, yet, one is not the author, not even a main character of the Internet of Things story.

Contemporary products become increasingly labeled with terms as smart, personalized, “digital assistant.” While these, as is argued in Harman, op. cit., 40, is simply considered as a supply-chain interface which collects behavioral data in a surveillance economy. Any smart phone could be regarded as an instrument of visual data-collection as any image has the potential of being input into a network of computational algorithms and databases.

51 See Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, 235.

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A digital scan (Mobscan). See Harman, op. cit., 42-44.

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