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Michel
Foucault:
Spatialized
Power,
Heterotopia (Abstract
&
Others'
Interpretations)
and
Examples
 Spatialized Power -- or Power in grid-like, enclosed
space
- One of Foucault's concerns in interrogating space as both materiality and
ideology is as a means of understanding how power is constituted and operates.
《空間讀本》
- Examples of spatialized power: workplace (Oberkampf factory),
prison (panopticon), school (Parisian Ecole Militaire), hospital and mental
hospital.
By extension, the other spaces of power are: the customs
and immigration office, subway, etc., and mapping is another way of
other control through spatialization.
- Purpose:--
安置、紀律、監控、改變、生產；
?
-- 「可被限制、使用、轉化與改進的馴良身體。」（《空間讀本》p. 379）；
- Methods:
-- 經由對身體的教練與訓練(drills and training)﹔
-- 經由長期的行動標準化﹔
-- 以及經由對空間的控制。
Heterotopia -- "Of
Other Spaces" (Summary by Jerry Liang)
- Helen Liggett "City Sights/Sites of Memories and Dreams" p. 264
For Foucault (186), contemporary spatial patterns differ from both
medieval hierarchical space and capitalist extensive space of exchange.
Contemporary space is characterized by what he calls site. Think
of it also as sight. What we see. "Our epoch," he says, "is
one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites"
(23). Or our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of
relations among sights.
- Soja's interpretation --
the outlines of heterology --
- heterotopias are found in all cultures, every human
group, although they take varied forms and no single one is ever
universal. two categories -- sacred or forbidden spaces and modern
heterotopias of deviation.
- can change in function and meaning over time, e.g.
cemetery.
- is capable of juxtaposing in one real place several
different spaces; e.g. the theatre stage, cinema screen and oriental
garden;
- are typically linked to slices of time; e.g. museum,
libraries as heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, festival sites
as transitory, precarious spaces of time; Disneyed world as both forms
converging in compressed packaged environments that seem to both abolish and
preserve time.
- presuppose a system of opening and closing that
simultaneously makes them both isolated and penetrable.
- have a function in relation to all the space that
remains, an 'external' almost wraparound function that 'unfolds' between two
extreme poles [of creating a space of illusion or being another real
space].
- Three sets of lenses 1. realist (accurate
representations of reality); 2. corrective, moving beyond the scenes and the
seen; 3. eye-less, I-less and aye-less vision (of Baudrillard's).
- Gennochio's interpretation --
- main ideas: 1. Foucault's heterotopia has been
misread; 2. the notion itself is problematic, 3. it should be read more
carefully.
- two kinds of heterotopias: absolutely Other,
'external' spaces 1.'heterogeneous site' capable of juxtaposing in a
single real place several spaces that are in themselves incompatible. --
extra-discursive 2. the coexistence in an 'impossible space' of a large
number of fragmentary, possible, though incommensurable orders or
worlds. --discursive
- The decline of a Cartesian spatial order --
This is a spatiality associated with Western metaphysics and its tribe of
grids, binaries, hierarchies and oppositions. . . . this conception of a
fixed, ordered space begins to give way to views imbued with more 'flexible
and equitable organizations', ...(35)
- The first kind --
"Differentiated from all other sites,
heterotopias were thus conceived as spaces that are outside of all other
places even though it may be possible to indicate their position in
reality'. For Foucault, heterotopias constitute a discontinuous but
socially defined spatiality, both material and immaterial at the same
time. To outline this other spatiality, six principles were tentatively
given, backed up by a dizzying array of examples: brothels, churches, hotel
rooms, museums, libraries, prisons, asylums, Roman baths, the Turkish hammam,
the Scandinavian sauna.
- questions -- how is it that we can locate,
distinguish and differentiate the essence of this difference, this
'strangeness' which is not simply outlined against the visible? More
specifically, how is it that heterotopias are 'outside' the general social
space/order that distinguishes their meaning as difference? In short,
how can we 'tell' these Other spaces/stories?
- G's argument -- Foucault's argument is reliant
upon a means of establishing some invisible but visibly operational difference
which . . .provides a clear conception of spatially discontinuous
ground. Crucially what is lacking from Foucault's argument is
exactly this. (38-39)
- The second kind --
the non-place of language. What is impossible to imagine . . .is a
coherent space which could ever contain such a classificatory scheme [as shown
in Borges' story].
- questions -- In order to call an existing order
into question, F's incommensurable structures must . . . remain outside
(absolutely differentiated from) that order while at the same time relate to
and be able to be defined within it. Yes the familiar problem with
this is, as Steven Cornor points out, that once such a space of
incommensuralbe difference has been sighted ('Of Other Spaces'), cited (The
Order of Things) and re-cited on the pages transcribing it, it is no
longer the lacuna that it once was, in that even as an 'impossible' or
'unthinkable' space it is none the less operational as such.
- G's argument -- the heterotopa does represent a
space of exclusion within his writings, but knowing full well the
impossibility of its realization, it comes to designate not so much an
absolutely differentiated space as the site of that very limit, tension,
impossibility. . . . One could say then that through the
heterotopia Foucault acknowledges the impossibility of the move to
absolutely differentiated and contestory spaces. (42)
- G's example -- installations at a subway
(43)
Examples
- KTV in Taiwan?
- 《河流》
- the abnormal --
- the normal social space corrupted and broken down
-- house (leaking) as the familial space
- the neck
- "abnormal/nomadic desires" -- of the father's, the
mother's and the son's
- non-place -- sauna, overbridge, hotel,
elevator
- Is any one of them a heterotopia, or how?
Sources:
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