Isamu Noguchi
Noguchi’s first scheme for the central courtyard at Lever House
1951

Marcel Duchamp
Minotaure No. 6
1934

I also want to reject both the naive proposition that we are prisoners of our pasts and the pernicious suggestion that history is whatever we make of it. History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Fig. 14. Degrees of color perception. Refraction and visual acuity. 1911.

Scientific shorthand; a system based upon the Pitmanic alphabet. 1900.

While power can be colonized by the state, it should not be seen as belonging to or deriving from the state as the anarchists believed. Power, for Foucault, is not a function of the institution; rather the institution is a function, or an effect, of power. Power flows through institutions, it does not emanate from them. Indeed, the institution is merely an assemblage of various power relations. It is, moreover, an unstable assemblage because power relations themselves are unstable, and can just as easily turn against the institution which ‘controls’ them. Flows of power can sometimes be blocked and congealed, and this is when relations of power become relations of domination. These relations of domination form the basis of institutions such as the state.

Saul Newman, Foucault and the Genealogy of Power, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power