Gilles Deleuze and Maurizio Lazzarato analyses the societies of control. They both describe this shift or transition from disciplinary society to control society. This is a change in the conception on every levels. If it is still a capitalist policy both agrees on this new virtual, variable, in a way abstract, dimension. Deleuze, for instance, describes this change from production to products “It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets.” (Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, p.179). Lazzarato states that the employment replaces the work. “If work became the center piece of the disciplinary societies at the time of their exhaustion (Fordism), employment constitutes one of the principal forms of regulation in the societies of control” (Maurizio Lazzarato, The concepts of life and the living in the societies of control, p.190). This abstraction of the society could be observed in the church as well. We are probably switching to a community network taking over the usual church building.
My grandmother is watching the office the sunday morning on the television. This is, according to me, an example of what Lazarato describes with this formation of publics and is linked to the main points of the development of societies of control. The second of those points: “the rise of the technological dispositifs of actions at a distance” (Idem, p.180) includes, of course, the progress of the TV with the direct re-transcription of the religious office but also internet and so on. The third point is about these new public: “the corresponding processes of subjectivation and subjection: the formation of publics, that is to say, the constitution of a being together that takes place in time” (Idem, p.180).
This signifies the end of the building with it’s first function: to gather the citizens together to celebrate the religious office in the house of God. Now with the entrance of cameras the building is only a set. We will maybe arrive to a certain point where the design of a new church will be influenced by the angle of the cameras, sound and light requirements. The aim would be, then, to display it to new communities of worshippers online. The building, to survive, has to reinvent itself, searching for new programs and new diverse public. But as states Lazzarato we are now in a society always reinventing “(…) converged in the twentieth century in policies of planning, that is, in the neutralization and control, at a social scale, of the logic of event, of the creation and production of the new.” (Idem, p.177). It also questions which is the position in architecture in this world evolving always faster, with changing needs and multiple publics.
Thomas_
archandphil 
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