La ducha como dispositivo : mecanismos de control de la higiene

Since its rebirth in the industrialization period, the shower may be considered a device that results from the deployment of mechanisms that emerge from its instrumental condition. With the advent of positivism in the 16th century, scientific advances allow to discover the existence of microorganisms, followed by fear to contagion. At the same time, hygienist currents arise in a way that human being and earth are perceived as an embracing of potentially disease fluids. Consequently, urban space’s sanitation is required, so networks and organs as sewers or lazarettos are conceived, which make from the conduction of fluids the paradigm of isolation and sterilization. Both projects are constructed as utopian architectures, characterized by hermetism and distance, where hygienic protocols are located between science and imagination: the shower is part of these mechanisms of control. Since the 18th century, the shower is polarized between geopolitics and biopolitics. The bourgeois horizontal shower and the popular vertical shower show the two fundamental patterns, that correspond to segregation based on diff erence between individual and collectivity. Therefore, the shower begins as a practice in therapeutic facilities, result of medical control and discipline. From a pastoral approach, the shower is introduced as a heterotopia through ducts and conducts. On the one hand, mechanisms of physical control of the shower are geopolitical ducts: the bourgeois sensitization and the commodification of the shower. With the awakening of the senses, the shower is set up as a private space inhabited by the doctor and the patient, generating a dialogue between the discourse of reason and inner voice. Tnis process starts with fear towards the treatment’s violence carried out in a basement, and continues with the recognition of the existence of the nervous system, to finally become an instrument of popular distraction and in a specific sanitary instrument. The consumption of comfort, spread through magazines and newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries, enunciates the physical control exercised by the shower. Although the establishment of the shower begins with a shortage of resources and an old notion of comfort, in the Modern Movement the sanitary devices are standardized and introduced inside the house. After the two World Wars, massive mercantilization begins and the shower is set up as an independent cabin. On the other hand, the mechanisms of psychic control are biopolitical conducts: normalization, systematization and subjectivation of the shower. The standardizing process of the shower in the popular milieu may be observed through functional transformations on horizontal shower applied to the abnormal. It is first used as a coercive instrument, later as a tranquilizer of euphoric states in mental illness and then as a deterrent against madness. Popular shower is transformed into a medical cabinet to move reason and emotion fluids inside and through the body. The systematization of the collective shower is a product of the military will for effi ciency. This process starts from radial centralization and tends to fragment and serialize its space and time, to finally form a pavilion for its proper use. The shower is promoted and compelled in work and educational means as a necessity, to later reemerge as a desire. During war, the paradox of individualization is presented as a synthesis of systematization and effi ciency in roaming phase. Gender subjectivation takes shape with the popularization of projecting images of naked body in the shower. Cinematographic mainstream is based on duality in heteronormative identities about the masculine and the feminine, while queer space abandons the canons of exclusion and deepens into the dimension of everyday strangeness, making the shower a conviviality place. Queer concept puts into question the definition of the shower from its functionality, to do it from plurality. At last, the prison reveals the shower as a spectacle. The prison shower and the gas chamber are devices where power, justified as moral, is fully manifested. The enclave as reminiscence of the lazaretto, revives the state of emergency and emerges processes that were thought to be extinguished in a sovereign past. Space and practice of the shower lie between necessity and desire, confinement and freedom, individuality and collectiveness, portraying itself as a daily emulation.