What follows is a comparison of Mary Beard’s (2017) Women & Power: A Manifesto and Thomas Markus’ (1993) Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types on the question of power – what it is and what people should do with or about it?

Beard on Power

Beard’s Women & Power is a small collection (124 pages) of two lectures presented on the topic plus a later ‘Afterword’ responding to the rise of the #Me-too movement in 2017.  It also contains a list of Further Reading, which cements the educational-style and flavour of the (quick read) format and, overall, I would recommend it as a single afternoon read to students.

The title of the book, which I think uses the word ‘and’ purposefully between ‘women and power’, highlights how women have been ‘separated’ from power, and this forms the theme of the first lecture entitled ‘The Public Voice of Women’.  This lecture concisely outlines, referencing examples from ancient and modern works of art (featuring stories and myths), the way in which women have been ‘silenced’ throughout history (and still are) as a means of isolating them from public spaces and demonstrative actions (the speech acts) of political power.  While women have been, at times, able to voice their experience, knowledge, and expertise in areas deemed segmentally female, they have been expunged from wider matters of civic interest for millennia.

This process has taken many different but nonetheless linked forms, such as being ridiculed, ignored, shamed, threatened, punished, violated, and mutilated.  A woman’s place is ‘not’ to speak in public, and Beard reveals the sad (though hardly unexpected) continuation of such social customs and conventions in the contemporary world, despite recent historical gains made by feminists, by noting the atrocious treatment of women on social media.  Atrocious acts, of course, committed by men – though Beard subtly underlines the role women can play in undermining each other’s confidence and their own cause (the ‘don’t rock the boat’ approach).  Silencing women keeps their voices from being heard and their views, perspectives, and opinions out of public debate.

Her use of ‘silence’ reminded me of Michel Foucault’s work on the same subject of ‘power’.  It is why Foucault started to talk about undertaking ‘archaeologies of knowledge’, because archaeologists deal with human development before the appearance of written records, whereas historians deal with the ‘written record’.  Foucault’s point was that whilst studying the ‘history’ of power/ knowledge (he was very interested in the Early Modern, Enlightenment, and Industrial periods), one is also dealing with the actions and wills of those who could not write, could not speak, nor express themselves ‘on record’.  For many people and groups in society (remembering Foucault was gay) this meant their historic record is shockingly ‘recent’.  The researcher has to learn how to read between the lines, and this led Foucault to an interest geography and the use of space, where building design forms an essential component of the knowledge-archaeologists’ ‘dig’ (more on this later).

The second lecture in Beard’s book examines ‘Women in Power’, and what happens to them – that is, how women must morph into something else to meet the expectations of who holds power and why.  Classic myths are again referenced – Clytemnestra and Antigone, who display their ‘masculine’ side as ruler and rebel – and the way such examples are used by modern day critics of women in power are beautifully denoted.  Again, Beard ties the issue to everyday use of language and how this disparages women moving into positions of power.  She notes how one newspaper talked of female applicants for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Bishop of London roles as ‘grabbing’ power.  Would the same newspaper have discussed all the previous male incumbents as having ‘grabbed’ power?  The word ‘grab’, of course, implies greed, selfishness, dishonesty, or plain old theft – the taking of something one is not entitled to.

However, despite the positive and welcome points Beard makes on the holding and distribution of power, what I did not get a sense of from Beard’s book was any clear definition of (political) ‘power’ – what it is, in and of itself.  Obviously, that men, or any single part of the community, have all the power – the ability to dominate public speech – is a bad thing.  The situation is unequal, unfair, and consequently inefficient and unstable.  Hence, power needs to be redistributed but, importantly for Beard, obtaining it should not entail morphoses nor assimilation.  For instance, women should not have to drop the pitch / tone of their voices (as Margaret Thatcher did) in order to be taken authoritatively or ‘seriously’.  Here Beard is highlighting that the required redistribution of power is about more than changing the guard and the gender / sex of the guard – it is about changing, somehow, the nature of power by enabling those who would not ‘normally’ hold to access it (whether their voice is high-pitched or not).

Markus on Power

By contrast, Thomas Markus’ Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building takes a very different approach to understanding the distribution of power within modern society and how it should be tackled when a more egalitarian outcome is being sought.  The comparison with Beard’s book is not about the different formats and purposes of their respective works.  Buildings and Power was the culmination of Markus’ career as a professor of architecture at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) and stretches to several hundred folio-sized pages, with at least one illustration per page.  It is painstaking in descriptive detail of its many examples and case studies of modern buildings, with chapters divided by building type (such as schools, hospitals and asylums, bath-houses, libraries and recreational pavilions).  Markus’ narrative aims to build up a ‘history’ of the emergence and deployment of new (modern) building types, and how these evolve over time.

Markus was in correspondence with Foucault towards the end of the latter’s life (in 1984).  Indeed, Tom Markus personally told me (he was the external examiner for my doctoral thesis) he had arranged to meet Foucault (for the first time) in Paris (at Foucault’s apartment).  Markus arrived and rang the doorbell, but no-one was in – the previous day Foucault had been taken into hospital, where he would die.  The meeting of these two minds was not to be.  What they shared in common was an interest in the ‘unwritten’ about (unspoken of) distribution of power through built space.

Developing earlier concepts from Hillier and Hanson (1984) on ‘spatial syntax’, Markus drew on the design of room-structures, passage-ways, pillar and wall positioning, sight lines, and layering of utilities within building designs to examine how ‘positioning’ within a building’s space enabled or disabled the actions and behaviours of human subjects.  This was something Foucault had brought his readers’ attention to with regards to Bentham’s ‘panopticon’, or (more accurately) ‘inspection house’, in Discipline and Punish (1977).  The Hillier / Hanson / Markus production of spatial syntax diagrams took this approach to an entirely new level – the role of surveillance but also motion (bodily) control could be traced and laid bare for nearly any building (and even outdoor spaces such as gardens and sporting enclosures).

The conclusion of Markus’ study, which spanned analysis of buildings across Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America from mediaeval to modern times, though most specifically from 1730 to 1850 (the period of the Enlightenment), was that architectural designs were becoming more ‘open’ as their social usage (and successful operation) relied more and more heavily on the freedom of participants.  From deep hierarchical spatial structures (think thin-and-tall, or many floored, ‘pyramids’) to shallow equalising ones.  At the ‘unspoken’ level, power, as distributed through built forms, was being increasingly flattened.

Of course, this does not mean that a ‘flattened’ form of power is any less ‘powerful’ or controlling than a ‘deep’ one – it is certainly less ‘visible’, and perhaps that is the fundamental point.  For Foucault, his investigations into the evolution of modern power brought him to the conclusion that the power to ‘put to death’ (Sovereign power) was first replaced by the power to extend life via the control of conduct (Disciplinary power) before this power-over-life (bio-power) was finally transferred to the individual (Self-control).  That is, modern subjects of power place themselves under the watchful eye of ‘self-evident truths’ and behave themselves accordingly whether or not there is a surveyor (manager) in sight.  Gone are the straight-jacket spaces of ‘deep’ hierarchies.  Contemporary power is much more malleable, shape-shifting, and adaptable than what went before – the birthplace of power has been left well and truly behind.  Consequently, for Foucault, our contemporary period is symbolised by many more individuals (than in the past) being brought under the ‘sign’ of power as self-control.

Unfortunately, Foucault is all too often read in a dystopian mode – as a purveyor of the hopeless situation.  Power is everywhere and little can be done against it.  Women may think they now ‘have’ or possess power, or at least possess more power than they used to have.  In truth, sadly, power has subsumed them.  But this is only one way of reading Foucault.  The other is to understand him in the tradition of dystopian novelist – the siren who screams ‘look out, danger about’ with the precise aim of preventing such a subsuming into power by highlighting the dangers.  In the collection of Foucault interviews (by Paul Rabinow), Power/Knowledge, Foucault makes it clear that his use of Bentham’s panopticon was to indicate how such a form of power could never come to be – it was far too mechanical and had to be abandoned.  In that sense, Discipline and Punish can be understood as a history of ruling class dreams about how power should work, and not a history of how it has worked.

It is within this framework that Markus’ noted, to me, how we (humans as a collective) need to de-power our relationships.  It is not all ‘bad news’ in the sense that modern buildings are more open and leave people free (or freer) to interact and conduct themselves in the manner that they so wish.  For a start, not all of our relationships are ones of ‘power’.  When we go out with friends, for a meal or drink, or spend time with family (when we ‘choose’ to do so) we are, in essence, partaking in relationships where ‘power’ is suspended.

To adopt terms used by Marx, our lives consist of a realm of necessity (where we have to or must do certain things) and a realm of freedom.  The core issue is to what extent these two are ‘balanced’ with greater time being given to one over the other.  Power may well be something we have to accept at some level in our complex, highly urbanised, and spatially interconnected lives, but it is also something which can be reduced to a pre- or after-thought.  This means that the ‘aim’ (the political goal) should be to de-power our lives (a phrase I picked up from Markus) as opposed to thinking in terms of how to ‘win’ power for one or other disadvantaged or marginalised group.  Is it time to ask how we might de-power men rather than empower women?

Dual Languages of Empowerment and De-powering

Most people will be familiar with the concept of ‘empowering’ disadvantaged or marginalised groups.  Given the importance of ‘power’ within the modern world, such an approach appears to make perfect sense.  The poor are to be ‘levelled up’ and the marginalised are to be brought into the fold.  Though questions can be raised about the historical experience of such an approach.  We appear to have been levelling-up and empowering the disadvantaged for decades, but it also feels like a game of whack-a-mole.  Is it the very ‘nature’ of (political) power to distribute itself unevenly?  And at what point should we consider alternatives – how do we ‘remove’ power from our lives, pushing power to the margins?

There is no easy answer and I cannot see the phraseology of ‘empowerment’ waning any time soon.  The most important thing I took from Markus’ notion of de-powering relationships was the very possibility of asking the question.