The Tectonics of Power: The Hawaiian Iconoclasm and Its Aftermath (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION In an interview with Michel Foucault, published some two years before his death, Paul Rabinow suggested that, while Foucault had emphasised relations between power and space, architects were more interested in walls (Rabinow ed. 1984: 253). Foucault accepted that he had tended to treat buildings as a means for allocating people in space and 'canalizing' their circulation, but, he added, he also understood a building to be 'a plunge into the field of social relations in which it brings about some specific effects' (ibid). As an example, he described the European innovation of an inside chimney and its associated hearth. This was, he noted, strongly formative of new social relations and, moreover, it had been developed and adapted because there was something 'in the play and strategy of human relations' that tended in that direction (ibid: 253-254). For Foucault, then, buildings were sites within and with which power effects were produced--both material contexts for relations of power and instruments of power.