UC San Diego

How are perception and lived space "produced," how are these productions linked with social and material power, and how does "aesthetic" production fit into this picture? For its first half, this study traces the history of the joint production of perception and space, chiefly in the United States and Britain, through the twentieth century, as that was carried out by dominant scientific, military and industrial institutions, and also in the arts. For its second half it explicates the production of common social space through architecture, ambient sound, light and vibration, and the distribution and playback of recordings, which construct sensory fields operating so as to calibrate bodily energies with productive processes. In its conclusion, it attempts to show the intermeshed functioning of produced space and perception with war and with everyday life. The study uses a range of philosophical, psychological, aesthetic, media and cultural theory to demonstrate the continuity of material space through the body, and the determination of bodily gesture for perception and feeling. It uses especially the Marxist theory of ideology, as developed in Louis Althusser, to show how built spaces and coerced bodily practices determine types of perception, and more importantly, types of deafness and blindness that operate in conjunction with the dominant mode of production. It criticizes the dominant "information-processing" and "communications" paradigms, as well as the dominance of "the sign" in structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as instituting a field of noise which continues to act upon the body, and to determine it, even while it is systematically ignored. This is how power is "ambient." The study follows an historical course, from Westward Expansion in the United States up to our current engagements in the Middle East. Ultimately it argues for a Situationist or Anarchist opposition to centralized power and spatial hegemony, in the seats of Capital as well as in its military and market expeditions. Aesthetic production has to be conceived as a counter-force to the hegemonic production of our immediate environment and our very phenomenal life. It is necessary to sense the power in our periphery, and to engage it