@inproceedings{quteprints63644,
           pages = {777--789},
            year = {2013},
         address = {Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD},
          author = {Simone Brott},
           month = {July},
       booktitle = {OPEN : The 30th Annual SAHANZ Conference},
       publisher = {Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ)},
           title = {In the shadow of the enlightenment : Le Corbusier, Le Faisceau and Georges Valois},
          editor = {Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach},
        abstract = {On 9 January 1927 Le Corbusier materialised on the front cover of the Faisceau journal edited by Georges Valois Le Nouveau Si{\`e}cle which printed the single-point perspective of Le Corbusier{'}s Plan Voisin and an extract from the architect{'}s discourse in Urbanisme. In May Le Corbusier presented slides of his urban designs at a fascist rally. These facts have been known ever since the late 1980s when studies emerged in art history that situated Le Corbusier{'}s philosophy in relation to the birth of twentieth-century fascism in France{---}an elision in the dominant reading of Le Corbusier{'}s philosophy, as a project of social utopianism, whose received genealogy is Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Le Corbusier participated with the first group in France to call itself fascist, Valois{'}s militant Faisceau des Combattants et Producteurs, the {``}Blue Shirts,{''} inspired by the Italian {``}Fasci{''} of Mussolini. Thanks to Mark Antliff, we know the Faisceau did not misappropriate Le Corbusier{'}s plans, in some remote quasi-symbolic sense, rather Valois{'}s organisation was premised on the redesign of Paris based on Le Corbusier{'}s schematic designs. Le Corbusier{'}s Urbanisme was considered the {``}prodigious{''} model for the fascist state Valois called La Cit{\'e} Fran{\cc}aise {--} after his mentor the anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel. Valois stated that Le Corbusier{'}s architectural concepts were {``}an expression of our profoundest thoughts,{''} the Faisceau, who {``}saw their own thought materialized{''} on the pages of Le Corbusier{'}s plans. The question I pose is, In what sense is Le Corbusier{'}s plan a complete representation of La Cit{\'e}? For Valois, the fascist city {``}represents the collective will of La Cit{\'e}{''} invoking Enlightenment philosophy, operative in Sorel, namely Rousseau, for whom the notion of {``}collective will{''} is linked to the idea of political representation: to {`}stand in{'} for someone or a group of subjects i.e. the majority vote. The figures in Voisin are not empty abstractions but the result of {``}the will{''} of the {``}combatant-producers{''} who build the town. Yet, the paradox in anarcho-syndicalist anti-enlightenment thought {--} and one that became a problem for Le Corbusier {--} is precisely that of authority and representation. In Le Corbusier{'}s plan, the {``}morality of the producers{''} and {``}the master{''} (the transcendent authority that hovers above La Cit{\'e}) is lattened into a single picture plane, thereby abolishing representation. I argue that La Cit{\'e} pushed to the limits of formal abstraction by Le Corbusier thereby reverts to the Enlightenment myth it first opposed, what Theodor Adorno would call the dialectic of enlightenment. },
        keywords = {Enlightenment, Le Corbusier, Le Faisceau, Georges Valois, Urban Design},
             url = {https://eprints.qut.edu.au/63644/}
}