Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Resistance, 99--Foucault: Power & Subject   -- Postmodernism -- Literary Criticism -- IACD 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.
 
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• 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.
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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 --
1. 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.
2. can change in function and meaning over time, e.g. cemetery.
3. is capable of juxtaposing in one real place several different spaces; e.g. the theatre stage, cinema screen and oriental garden;
4. 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.
5. presuppose a system of opening and closing that simultaneously makes them both isolated and penetrable.
6. 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 justaposing 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, meseums, 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?
• ¡mªe¬y¡n
• the abnormal  --
1. the normal social space corrupted and broken down -- house (leaking)  as the familial space
2. the neck
3. "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?

 

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Sources:

• Foucault, Michel.   "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics (1986): 22-27.
• Soja, Edward W.  "Heterologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel-LA"   Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Ed. Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995:13-34.
• Genocchio, Benjamin. "Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference." Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Ed. Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995: 35-46.
• ¡mªÅ¶¡ªº¤å¤Æ§Î¦¡»PªÀ·|²z½×Ū¥»¡n°Ñ¡BÅv¤O»PªÅ¶¡ pp. 375-428.