Knowledge and Power

A classical historian would characterized its ‘discipline’ as one in which knowledge is presumed to be diachronic, as a succession of different states of distribution of the means of production, following certain inner logic. However with the uprising of the Structuralism, the entire concept of history was put into question. Michel Foucault takes the synchronic analysis, suggested by linguistics, and applies it on history.

He proposes a perception of history as a succession of discursive formations, as constituted by system of signs, discursive realms that work to construct a version of the real. In order to find a form of unity that combines all possible different formations he develops the term episteme. Epistemes are conceptual frameworks (deeply rooted, unconscious structures for organizing knowledge) that are used in different epochs to understand the world. These epistemes are built as sign-maps to assign order into society. Once this organizing phenomena is reached we will be able to explain “historical events” in relation to particular discoursive formation which allowed  (or did not allow) some event to happen.

One of the most prominent theoreticians of our time, the creator of “Orientalism”, Edward Said combines the concept of epistemes and the concept of hegemony (Gramsci) to show how the Orient evolved as a mirror image of the “idea of the European identity”. The Orient signifies a system of ‘representations’ formed by political forces that brought Orient into Western learning (disciplines!). The first “Orientalists” were 19^th ct. scholars who translated the writing of the Orient into English. Based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest requires knowledge of the conquered peoples, by knowing the Orient West became to own it. This idea of knowledge as power (again Foucauldian influence) is very much present in Said’s critique. Beside Foucauldian influence (in first place the concept of episteme and the method of archival research) another important “poststructuralist” influence is Derrida’s concept of “the center and margins” and of “the Self and the Other”.

Some of Foucauldian concepts were major influence for another school of critique in the US: the New Historicism. Heavily influenced by new linguistic concepts, they start to perceive the historical as textual. History is not any more seen as stable, unchangeable context that literary texts reflect upon. It is rather, like the literary text itself, a discourse.  It is perceived simply as ‘representation’ – term very important to the new historians – enabling to study relations between texts (both literary and historical) and to discover how they trace, or negotiate, certain patterns of meaning.

The New Historians are focused on issues of power, mainly influenced by Marxist theory and Foucauldian theories on knowledge and power. They are mainly dealing with the processes of the circulation of discourses and how they succeed to gain and maintain their “social energy” (term created by Stephen Greenblat).

What is the big impact that Foucault made to change the perspectives of how observations upon history (or literature, or cultural artifacts) should be made?

Foucault noted that the world we live in is shaped as much as by language as by knowledge. Knowledge and perception always occur through the media of language. In certain ways, we will not be able to know anything if we are not able to order the reality linguistically. But language is a matter which is very much alive, perpetrates in time, changes its essence constantly. Therefore, what counts as knowledge also changes in time, and with each change, the place of language in knowledge also changes.

Foucault goes further on in his “historical” analysis, showing that the two realms of knowledge and power are intrinsically interconnected. Modern power can enter every artery of our daily lives (Big Brother is watching you!) subjecting every aspect of human existence to strategies of knowing. The Panopticon is the metaphor he uses to describe the state superior surveillance, which is not any more connected directly to a particular institution or a person. Thus, the form of “gouvernementalite” is formed in which, through subtle techniques of control, compliance is ensured.

Heterotopia_ Michel Foucault

Heterotopia, literally meaning `other places` that describes a world off center, with respect to normal or everyday spaces, one that possesses multiple, fragmented, of even incompatible meanings.

Heterotopia is a rich concept in urban design and can be investigated throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels, festival markets.

The text “Des espaces autres” was a lecture given by Michel Foucault on 14 March 1967 to the Circle of Architectural Studies. The text was however not published for almost 20 years. It was finally published by the French journal Architecture, Mouvment, Continuite in 1984 with title “Des espaces authres”.

 

Heterotopia: Of Other Spaces (1967)

The great haunting obsession of the 19^th ct. was, as we know, history: themes of development and stagnation, themes of crisis and cycle, themes of accumulation of the past, the big surplus of the dead (1) and the menacing cooling of the world (2). It is in the second principle of thermodynamics that the 19^th ct. found its essential mythological resources (3).

(1)    In the formulation `surplus of the dead` we read reference to the demographic and hygienic fears of the 19^th ct.; more particularly, the fear of a demographic explosion bringing with it the accumulation of dead bodies. ...().. Where to bury all these surplus dead bodies? Foucault comes back to this debate later in the text when he speaks about the relocation of cemeteries to the outskirts of the city.

(2)    The 19^th ct was haunted by the fear that the earth was cooling, in a linear, physically determined way from fire ball to ice ball.

(3)    Foucault is referring to the concept of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that closed systems – while their energy remains constant – evolve to ever higher levels of disorder.

The present epoch would rather be an epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at the moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of  (refers to Hegelianism, historicism and most of all Darwinism) than that of network that connects points and intersects with its own skein (The rise of s new spatial order based on the network is a leading theme in the first part of the text, lecture).

Medieval space: space of localization. This space of localization opened up with Galileo, for the real scandal of Galileo’s work is not so much his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolves around the sun, but this constitution of an infinite and infinitely open space... () ... In other words, starting with Galileo, starting with the 17^th ct. extension supplanted localization.

Today the emplacement (4) substitutes extension, which itself had replaced localization... ().. We are in an epoch in which space is given to us in the form of relations between emplacements.

(4)    The term ‘emplacement’ in French refers to site and location (as in parking space) or the setting of a city, but also to support (a billboard: emplacement publicitaire)

Pg.16 Like on FB :)

Now, in spite of all techniques invested in space ...()... contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desacralized. ...()... we may still not have reached the point of a practical desacralization of the space. And perhaps our life is till ruled by certain number of oppositions that cannot be touched, that institution and practice have not yet dared to undermine; oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between space of leisure and that of work. All these are animated by unspoken sacralization. (5)

(5)    In the introduction to The Order of Things he refers to utopia and heterotopia as literary genres. In this lecture heterotopia refers to places and institutional arrangements in society.

Utopias are emplacements with no real place. ...()... utopias essentially are fundamentally unreal spaces.

Heterotopias are: ...()... counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Since these places are absolutely other than all the emplacements that they reflect, and of which they speak, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias: heterotopias.

The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a place without a place. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does really exist, and as it exerts on the place I occupy a sort of return effect… the mirror functions as a heterotopia in the respect that it renders this place that I occupy at the moment when I look myself in the mirror, at once absolute real and absolute unreal space, since in order to be perceived, it has to pass through virtual point, which is over there.

Heterotopias: how can we describe them? What meaning do they have?

I principle; heterotopias of crisis: sacred, or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are ...()... in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly etc. ...()... But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced by what could be called heterotopias of deviation: rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, retirement homes.

II principle; heterotopia in the course of its history: cemetery (the ‘other city’).

III principle; heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in a single real space several spaces: the theatre, the cinema, the garden. (Pg.20) The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been, since the dawn of antiquity, a sort of blissful and universalizing heterotopia.

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IV principle; heterotopias are heterochronisms; linked with the slices of time. Heterotopia begins to function fully when people find themselves in a sort of absolute break with their traditional time: museums, libraries (heterotopias linked to the accumulation of time) and fairgrounds, vacation villages. ....()... museums and libraries are heterotopias in which time never ceases to pile up, heaping upon top of its own summit...

V principle; heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing, that both isolates them and makes them penetrable: pubs, hammams.

VI principle; the last trait of heterotopias is that they have ...()... a function. ...()... Either their role is to create a space of illusion... (brothels)...()... Or else, on the contrary creating another space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly, ill construed and sketchy (colonies), Jesuit colonies.

The ship is the heterotopia par excellence (6).

(6)    This poetical artifice of the ship obscures the fact that the text ends in limbo, that the text required a final part. After the historical outline, the ‘short history of space’ from the introduction and after the main part, the trans-historical/ahistorical outline of heterotopology, the third part should have treated the role of heterotopia in the third phase of space, the spacial order of emplacement. In any case Foucault has not responded to the question that the construction of the text calls for.

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[1] Heterotopia and the city