Foucault continues: 

“The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in materials, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by its preventive character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power ‘in hitherto unexampled quantity’, ‘a great and new instrument of government. . . ; its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to’ (Bentham, 66).”  

 "The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations. Bentham's Preface to Panopticon opens with a list of benefits to be obtained from his ‘inspection-house’: ‘Morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock, the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied, all by a simple idea in architecture!’ (Bentham, 39)”¹⁸ 

Now consider the concept of "genius" as always revealing itself. Within the myth of genius, if one does not reveal it, then the assumption is that it was not there. However, in looking at the class formation of genius, consider the question, "Why have there been no great aristocratic [or black] artists?" Here, the psychology of genius becomes discreet in a pedagogy of exclusion: Few women were admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in seventeenth-century Paris, women being relegated to the realm of amateurism, "quiet" dabbling being the perceived norm. And given the context of genius, one's expectation would rarely intersect with a woman beyond a certain range of social/political principles; in verifying magnitudes of masculine identity, that of the feminine becomes structural, as a literal pilaster or caryatid.¹⁹ And even such a literal example finds historical placement as "six strong, supple, draped female figures (caryatids) stand[ing] on a high parapet, lightly bearing an elegant Ionic entablature." ²⁰ 

Lines of tension develop within an array of exclusionary tactics, coalescing to minor (discreet) point conditions within a smooth visual field; history becomes deviant while fact shifts between myth and legend. And the image of the body continually regenerates in the creation of collective fantasy and collective unconscious. Furthermore, these architectural modes of history establish the image of the body as a point of departure in production of subjectivity. At work is an internalization of outward images and perceptions as an undergirding for the development of the "collective self." Lacan argued the assumption of the image in the mirror as the "imago," the prematurity of the human subject at birth, and perpetual acts of "morphological mimicry," that characterize the "imago" as the primary scaffolding, the primary architecture in the creation of the sustained self. And given the perceived insufficiency in the image of the body as something to be attained in the "morphological mimicry" of the social self, there emerges the existentialist impossibility of an authentic being, as if it could be uncovered from beneath an inauthentic being. 

In a parallel sense, Freud argued the experience of the skin as a "phantasmatic space," distinct from the self as a place in which one merges with the "morphological field." Given the notion of the "symbolic self," a cry of hunger as a sign of articulation leads to various indications of "lack"; signs predicated on lack exceed the biological realm to a variable social realm of lack. However, in verifying conditions of authenticity, one encounters discrete variables that intensify and transform individual identity in terms of another set of variables. And here a variable "imago" forms an alliance with an array of tactical assaults, informing regimes of self-hatred, self-degradation, and self-mutilation. Acts of "morphological mimicry" become wrought with political polarity as Freud's "phantasmatic space" detaches from the body. The mirror, as skin, becomes a deviant, opaque panel where one struggles for visibility, authenticity, and a verifiable realization of identity. As such, birth becomes a recursive point of departure in an endless search for what one can never become:  

“Things got to happenin' right off. The nigguhs up at the school come down to chase me off and that made me mad. I went to see the white folks then and they gave me help. That's what I don't understand. I done the worse thing a man could ever do in his family and instead of chasin' me out of the country, they give me more help than they ever give any other colored man, no matter how good a nigguh he was. Except that my wife an' daughter won't speak to me, I'm better off than I ever been before. And even if Kate won't speak to me she took the new clothes  I brought  her from up in town and now she's gettin' some eyeglasses made what she been needin' for so long. But what I don't understand is how I done the worse thing a man could do in his own family and 'stead of things gittin' bad, they got better. The nigguhs up at the school don't like me, but the white folks treats me fine.” ²¹

As with the gaze and colonialism, and the need to create a power/knowledge structure of domination, the establishment of sociology and anthropology was essential to gain control of foreign populations. With coordination of linguistic theory, the work of nineteenth-century geologists, artists, and painters in the display or representation (or actually, presentation) of "other" peoples was found to be strangely static or stagnant, as if the depicted experiences of the various peoples were innately tied to their location. This parallels certain aspects of Orientalist paintings, which supposed a pure, uncontaminated environment in the Orient where there was presumed to be no trace of European colonialism. Through theoretical constructs of authorship in photography, we find the "cafe as trope" in depictions of "vile" North African "brothels" engulfed in the most primitive forms of barter, images of snake charmers, no "work" of any sort being performed. Consider the art of Matisse as going beyond Orientalist paintings in the subtraction of detail (naturalism) in the propagation of stereotypes, an uncontextualized image of a woman is transformed into a "typical" Moroccan woman with a few careful strokes of the paintbrush, of "character features." And notice that one never sees the West in these depictions, as if only the West can have these views. Such territorial coordination forms the context for arrogant presumptions of "modern civility," our modern, international, contemporary order. 

Yet these modes of affirmation situate themselves such that "as [Jean-Francois] Lyotard puts it in Instructions paiennes, the intellectual Left's critique of power [becomes] vitiated by the fact that 'in the pragmatics of their narrations one finds an exemplary machine of domination in miniature.' " ²²  As a result, there emerges the desire to distance oneself from the politics of the right by an "unloading" of linguistic (architectural) elements. In this "unloading" is the creation of a "safety zone" in which one becomes immersed in an endless cycle of unloading and reloading within the hermetics of their narration. Thus consider Barthes's notion of "writing degree zero," or an architecture of elements entirely devoid of meaning, an architecture about architecture and nothing else. Within this performative free space, elements are taken in an affirmative embrace in the creative act and become available to conservative forces as a multiple, only to be reconstituted as a singular point reference to the deviance of hermetic discourse. And look at Mies's Seagrams building as "an effort to build almost nothing" and its relation to the "silence" of his glass skyscraper project of 1922. Or look at Venturi's appropriation, and subsequent reappropriation, of the arch in executing the arch as a drawn line (residence in Chestnut Hill, PA 1962). Available was the postfunctionalism of sociological and behavioral design analysis and the notion of the engineer and the bricoleur as the absolute functionalist. The reconstituted singularity of these architectural elements are, by necessity, multiple in their deployment, becoming discursively heterogenic. As these elements disperse, they smooth, strengthen, and entrench visual territories of hermetic discourse into minor point conditions. More concretely, these elements form normative territories by which other supposedly more radical (or deviant) regimes are measured. 

Let's look at this necessity of distortion: after the initial creation of the sign (text) it becomes available to distortion as an analog (subtext, hypertext, et cetera). Here is the "myth" of a postulated center (Lévi-Strauss), architecture in the signifying of architecture, a cycle of signification. This has lead to the Modernist proclamation of function as being the essence of architecture, "proposed to elevate the classical metaphysic of architecture to the status of natural law." ²³  This has also led to a Derridian "de-construction" that evaluates conceptual parts deemed "self-evident" and "natural" as if "they had not been institutionalized at some precise moment, as if they had no history." Here provisional strategies emerge, rethinking architecture by way of social/labor-oriented mechanisms; "bleached" writings arise in the manipulation of a work in which all signs or aspects of society are erased; dialogical models coalesce, preoccupied with self-escape and exile as a mode of typological entrenchment; projects initiate in an invitation to "think beyond," only to arrive as a gratuity; eternal notions develop in structures of binary relations that make and predate our understanding of things, (the mighty absolver) privileging being over becoming; mimetic systems oscillate in the search for "real origination" given an inherent system of relations; schizophrenic identities vibrate as they engage in writing and masturbation as supplements and as replacements for the "originar."