POWER, PRIVACY AND PLEASURE

Abstract

This paper examines the establishment and appropriation of a hitherto overlooked space: the modern cubicle. The principal aim of the paper is to develop a political understanding of cubicle space in terms of the everyday practice of liberalism, and in particular Victorian liberalism. The key function it played in this respect was to afford subjects the freedom to operate on themselves in private and effect a moral and physical individuation of the self; part of its novelty as a site of power was the relative intensity with which it bound together various ethical norms, the body and the senses. But the modern cubicle illuminates much else besides. It allows for an exploration of the various cultural values – class, nature, gender, economy, amongst others – that liberalism sought to secure in material terms, and the equally varied spatial, technological and administrative tactics through which it operated. The cubicle, however, was always something of a fragile and indeterminate amalgam of human and non-human agency: civilised indulgence might develop into deviance; and technological fluency deteriorate into breakdown. To this extent, the cubicle also illuminates some of the reciprocities of rule and resistance, power and pleasure that characterise modern liberalism.