To see or be seen? The grounds of a place-based university
Journal: Interstices Journal of Architecture and Related Arts
Year: 2021

In “The Tyranny of Transparency,” Marilyn Strathern argues that, in the neoliberal university, “visibility as a conduit for knowledge is elided with visibility as an instrument for control.” It is, but we would go further. After Deleuze, we would describe the apparatus of the university as an “optical machine”: it is “made of lines of light … distributing the visible and the invisible.” The drive to transparency, or panoptics, dominates the university today – from audit to architecture – and ser