For reasons that will be clearer toward the end of the User chapter, we take issue with Agamben ’ s rhetorical distinction between humans and machines as two different kinds of things that may enter into only combinatory relationships. In the meantime, however, the open-ended processes of subjectification through the apparatus is useful in how it can be made to link different scales and genres of technologies at the City layer in ways that likely exceed Agamben ’ s own interest and understanding. The apparatus describes architectural envelopes as much as a GUI, and so as a synthetic figure it can represent the complexity of design ’ s assignment as it is defined both by exploring the material plasticity of the world, on the one hand, and the durable codification as a technique of enforcement, on the other. For The Stack, worldly interfaciality includes any operation by which the world is sensed and made sense of; it may form on (or as) the surfaces of User habitat, physical or virtual. The software and hardware of a computational framework and the partitional network of architectural space are both equally “ apparatuses ” and part of the processes of urban subject making. Through the sheer quantity of User interactions, some emergent apparatuses may absorb the roles of others already at work, transforming or displacing them in the process. This transformation is traced by the shift from one program to another, from one dominant apparatus on which such a regime depends to another, and a migration from one institutional isomorph to another. While the drifting transposition of stable discursive technologies — a migratory power/knowledge ( pouvoir/savoir) — from one institutional architecture to another is familiar to readers of Foucault, for example, from clinics, to asylums, to prisons, to schools, it doesn ’ t work only according to his genealogical and archaeological models. The particular subject-making effects of a given apparatus are not only situations waiting for the next authority to arrive. Rather in their immediate physical operations, a specific apparatus regularizes structures of subjectification in its own image in ways that are irreducible to, but never immune to, discursive context and intention. So, yes, in this way, the medium can be the message, and so as the same User hops from one apparatus to another, he moves between variations of subject, geography, and polis, a process that in turn cycles back through the system reforming both the calibration of the apparatus and the User-subject over again.
Linking these, the polyvalence of the word program is again instructive, as already suggested in relation to platforms. In software, the design of a program both enables and configures the quality of a User ’ s agency in relation to particular hardware and sets of actions that might be taken with it. <sup>28</sup> For architecture, program entails a predictive determination of spatial habit sorted and staged in advance by a site ’ s plan. The proposed design of a social organization in space is a techno-anthropological diagram of work, play, violence, and collective phenotypical embodiment, all modeled as functions of particular strategies of sorting, partition, enveloping, interfacing, planning, and sectioning. For the architect, to posit a particular arrangement of activities, of collective access points — of privacy and subjectivity and agency — is to set the stage for some desired organizational-behavioral outcome, including even serendipitous encounters.
City Layer
165