The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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Parasitism, as a third way of viewing the relationship between different modalities of power, refers to their dependence on the use of a new and external technique in order to coexist, combine, and function in conjunction. For the purpose of solving the problem of the synchronic operation of contradictory modalities of power, particularly the coexistence of the machinery of death and the political concern for life, which Foucault calls “one of the central antinomies of our political reason” (EEW3, 405), he proposes the concept of racism. Accordingly, racism is the method of distinguishing between “what must live and what must die” (ECF-SMD, 254), and it functions as the key mechanism that ties together sovereignty, discipline, and biopower. Racism, Foucault suggests, is the “basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States” – the mechanism that transforms the ability of states to produce death and destruction at hitherto unprecedented levels without letting go of the hold on life, both individually and at the aggregate level (ECF-SMD, 254).
Once it appears on the scene, racism brings different forms of power together, binds them to each other, and activates their simultaneous functioning while it feeds on and lives off all forms of power. Racism necessitates the preservation of state sovereignty for the protection of the “pure race.” Sovereignty, already supported by “medico-normalizing techniques” rather than “magico-juridical rituals,” in turn utilizes the discourse on race struggle (which, until then, has been used to challenge sovereignty) for its own ideological purposes (ECF-SMD, 80–83). Through the institutionalization of racism, the otherwise receding sovereign power is able to exercise its power to kill and to demand life. While racism thus legitimates sovereignty, it also legitimates the further government of life. In order to establish the health and purity of life on which racism depends, biopower must further penetrate society and ensure its well-being (however selectively). Sovereignty is now exercised not for the elimination of criminals or enemies but in order to achieve the elimination of the threat to the species and the improvement of one’s own race. Similarly, biopower is exercised to strengthen and further cultivate the power of the state (ECF-SMD, 255–258). Hence, Foucault argues, the discourse of racism, present in the Nazi and Soviet states in particular and the workings of modern states in general, enables the uneasy and evolving coexistence of the different modalities of power into a conjunction where they are “absolutely coextensive” (EFC-SMD, 260). Such a parasitic articulation of the preoccupation with the vital processes of the population with the familiar power over life and death through racism creates horriic political consequences, not only for those who become the victims of this conjunction but also (suicidally) for the very population these forms of power are intended to protect.
In sum, sovereignty in Foucault’s discourse is a versatile and rich concept, functioning as a negative point of reference for both his theoretical innovations and political aspirations while at the same time serving as an evolving and dynamic modality of power under increasing challenge and pressure by its novel counterparts. Despite the
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presence of certain internal contradictions and tensions in his oeuvre, in part owing to the evolution of Foucault’s thought over time, the general tenor of Foucault’s writings points us in the direction of the claim that neither disciplinary power nor biopower completely replaces sovereign power but that the latter survives, at times by incorporating and actively utilizing these new modalities, at times by being conquered by them from within, and at still other occasions being agglomerated with them by the dangerous parasitism of racism. Even when we decapitate the discourse of sovereignty within political theory, as Foucault has inspired us to do, we ind that sovereignty itself does not disappear. In spite of having left its comfortable residence in the body of the beheaded king long ago, sovereignty manages to endure, revive, and reinvent itself as the power over life with, in, through, despite, and ultimately because of the power of life itself.
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See Also
Biopower
Body
Governmentality
Power
Race (and Racism)
State
Suggested Reading
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. “Indeinite Detention,” in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, pp. 50–100.
Dean, Mitchell. 2001. “ ‘Demonic Societies’: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty,” in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen
and Finn Stepputat. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 41–64.
Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 2008. “Neuropolitics,” in Foucault in an Age of Terror, ed. Stephen Morton and
Stephen Bygrave. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 152–182.
Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. 2006. “Bio-power Today,” BioSocieties 1, no. 2:195–217. Rose, Nikolas. 2001. “The Politics of Life Itself,” Theory, Culture and Society 18, no. 6:1–30.
79
SPACE
For Foucault, space is the product of historical transitions and directly affects the ways things are understood, ordered, and transformed in the present. It is shot through with relations of power and shapes and is shaped by
knowledge. Discussions of spaces run through Foucault’s historical writings, but space only rarely took center stage as an object of analysis in itself. Three key pieces – an unpublished lecture and two interviews: “Of Other Spaces,” “Questions on Geography,” and “Space, Knowledge, Power” – are often seen as the key places to look for Foucault’s ideas on space. Yet his work as a whole is infused with a much more pronounced, and arguably interesting, spatial attunement.
The lecture “Of Other Spaces” or “Different Spaces” discusses the term heterotopia, which might be more accurately translated as “another place.” It was a lecture given to architects in 1967, but Foucault only permitted its publication shortly before his death (FDE4, 752–762). The piece is widely discussed for its reorientation of contemporary thought to questions of space.
The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: themes of development and of suspension, themes of crisis and cycle, themes of the everaccumulating past, with its overload of dead men, the threat of global cooling ...
the present epoch may be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and weaves its skein. (FDE4, 752)
What Foucault does in this piece is offer a brief history of space, before using the idea of differently ordered spaces to think about alternative orderings in the present.
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He stresses that “space itself, in the Western experience, has a history” not simply in terms of different arrangements but in its very understanding. He appears to be fairly indiscriminate in his use of geographical vocabulary, using terms such as place, lieu, espace, and emplacement in what might appear to be a fairly loose way. There is, however, an understanding of how the meanings attached to these terms have changed. Foucault suggests that in the Middle Ages there was a “hierarchized ensemble of places [lieux].” These are often in contrasting pairs: sacred and profane; protected and open, exposed places; urban and rural places; supracelestial, celestial, and terrestrial places; and so on. Foucault calls this “medieval space – a space of localization.” This was opened up by Galileo, who Foucault gives credit for constituting an ininite and ininitely open space. To think of a thing’s place was now only to conceive of it as a point in its movement. The medieval space of localization was replaced by extension. In the contemporary period, the understanding of space on the basis of extension has itself been replaced by the notion of site [emplacement]. Foucault is interested in what might be called networks of connections through ideas such as series, trees, and lattices: “The site is deined by relations of proximity [voisonage] between points or elements” (FDE4, 753). The most concrete question that arises from this understanding of place [place] or site is that of demography: “We are in an epoch where space takes for us the form of relations among sites” (FDE4, 752–754).
Thus the lecture moves beyond the historical to look at the present moment, suggesting a distinction between utopias – nonplaces or happy places – and heterotopias, which are actually existing alternative spatial orderings. Foucault calls utopias “sites with no real place” and heterotopias “counter-sites, kinds of effectively enacted utopias” (FDE4, 755). He gives plenty of examples. He talks of the “crisis heterotopias” that existed in primitive societies for people in states of crisis or transition but that we retain in such sites as the boarding school, military barracks, or the honeymoon hotel. There are heterotopias of deviation such as rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and old people’s homes. Foucault then moves through a range of different spaces: the cemetery; theatres, cinemas, gardens, and carpets; museums and libraries – accumulations of time and, in contrast, sites of leeting time – traveling fairgrounds; Polynesian vacation villages; and various others, including Muslim hammans, Scandinavian saunas, American motel rooms, brothels, ships, and Jesuit colonies in South America (FDE4, 756–762). Foucault did not develop these ideas further, but they have been taken up by a range of writers since their publication.
In 1976, in the irst issue of the new journal Hérodote, Foucault responded to a range of questions from radical French geographers (FDE3, 28–40). Hérodote was named after the Greek writer Herodotus, who the founders of the journal wished to honor not simply for his historical writings but for his geographical sensitivity. In the interview, Foucault recognizes his own “spatial obsessions” (FDE3, 33) but con-
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tinually tries to get the geographers to recognize the power and knowledge aspects to the spatial questions or topics they present him with.
Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s irst of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power. Field is an economico-juridical notion. Displacement: what displaces itself is an army, a squadron, a population. Domain is a juridico-political notion. Soil is a historico-geological notion. Region is a iscal, administrative, military notion. Horizon is a pictorial, but also a strategic notion. (FDE3, 32)
Foucault raises a whole range of examples to illustrate and illuminate his answers in a rich piece whose many facets have still not been fully exploited by geographers. His closing comments are, however, widely cited:
Now I can see that the problems you put to me about geography are crucial ones for me. Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate.... Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns. (FDE3, 39–40)
What is much less well known is that Foucault went back to the journal a couple of issues later and posed some questions back to the geographers (FDE3, 94–95). His questions looked at the relation of strategy; the scientiic status of the geographers’ attempt at a “knowledge of spaces”; the link between space, production, and power more generally; and the geography of medicine. The editors commissioned a number of responses by Francophone geographers (some translated in Crampton and Elden 2007). Foucault was further pressed on some of these claims in an interview with Paul Rabinow entitled “Space, Knowledge, and Power” that originally appeared in the architecture journal Skyline (EFR, 239–256). Foucault highlights a shift during the eighteenth century where discourses on architecture and planning became more explicitly politicized, or perhaps politics became more explicitly spatialized, where “every discussion of politics as the art of the government of men necessarily includes a chapter or a series of chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on hygiene, and on private architecture” (EFR, 240).
In terms of questions of knowledge, it is striking how often Foucault uses spatialized vocabulary to describe it. He writes his history of madness as a history of limits, a limit that is always a division (EHM, xxix–xxx), and regularly uses terms such as threshold, transgression, and boundary. Foucault suggests that the spatial metaphors he used were not his own choices but ones that emerged from the subject matter he was examining: spatial techniques, not metaphors (EFR, 254). To read Foucault as simply using spatial metaphors in his histories would be seriously misleading. In The
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Archaeology of Knowledge and elsewhere, he uses the military term réparage to designate mapping, locating (EAK, 116). This political-strategic understanding becomes more prominent in his later writings, although it can be seen in his earlier histories, too. It is in these historical writings, rather than the three shorter pieces noted earlier, that we ind more careful examinations of space. Here Foucault uses space in a more active sense, where spatial orderings change how discipline works, how the mad are conined, how sexuality is regulated, and how cities are governed. This can be found in his work looking at madhouses and lazarettos, plans for hospitals, prisons, and idealized cities, the army camp, and the public school.
This spatial analysis is pronounced in The History of Madness, where Foucault examines how lepers, the venereally diseased, and the mad are excluded, conined, or otherwise positioned by the operations of power. This operation, Foucault suggests, often works in at least two registers, where the asylum replaced the lazaretto both in the “geography of haunted places and in the landscape of the moral universe” (EHM, 71). Foucault’s analyses of the spaces of the Tuke’s retreat in York are illed with a sensitivity to the ordering of space, through the architectural design and the landscaping of the grounds. Foucault returns to similar topics a decade later in the Psychiatric Power lectures (ECF-PP), yet now with a more explicitly developed conceptual vocabulary of power.
Foucault’s work on medicine also demonstrates these interests. The opening line of The Birth of the Clinic makes this explicit: “This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is a question of the gaze” (EBC, ix). Foucault suggests that there are three levels of spatialization of medicine, where the disease is deined by its place in a family, its situation in an organism, and then “all the gestures by which, in a given society, a disease is circumscribed, medically invested, isolated, divided up into closed, privileged regions, or distributed throughout cure centers, arranged in the most favourable way.” There are three registers: classiications of knowledge, the body, and the space of political, economic, and social struggle. It is in the latter that the basis for changes to medical knowledge must be situated (EBC, 16). The last is more fully explored not in The Birth of the Clinic but in some remarkable lectures given to the Institute of Social Medicine in Rio de Janeiro in October 1974 (FDE3, 40–58, 207–228, 508–521). Here Foucault looks at the architectural design of hospitals, where they are situated in relation to the towns they serve, and how medicine exceeds the bounds of the institution into the wider community. He states that the “question of the hospital at the end of the eighteenth century was fundamentally a question of space” (FDE3, 518).
The classic spatial form analyzed in Discipline and Punish is Jeremy Bentham’s design for the Panopticon. Yet the focus on this model is perhaps misjudged: Foucault only discusses it relatively briely, and notes that he came to it through his earlier work on hospital architecture. In Discipline and Punish and a few other places
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(i.e., FDE3, 517–518), Foucault introduces it as the combination of two different forms of spatial ordering: the exclusion of the leper and the ordering of the plague town. In a town affected by the plague, areas are quarantined, people’s movement is controlled, and there is careful surveillance and inspection. Foucault describes it as an operation of “multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensiication and a ramiication of power” (EDP, 198). In an idealized prison such as a Panopticon, the space of exclusion is itself divided and controlled: a combination of two previously contrasting models.
This book is arguably more interesting for the broader phenomenon of panopticism, which is a means by which society as a whole is surveyed and ordered. Foucault states that “discipline is above all, analysis of space; it is individualization through space, the placing of bodies in an individualized space which permits classiication and combinations” (FDE3, 515). This includes such means as enclosure, partitioning, coding or recoding of spaces, and their classiication in a rank. These operate both at the level of physical space – architecture, landscapes, town plans, designs for army camps, and furniture and other objects of control – and in attendant plans, tabulations, organizations, and schemes. Foucault outlines how these work in three pairs that recall some of his concerns in The Order of Things: “tactics, the spatial ordering of men; taxonomy, the disciplinary space of natural beings; the economic table, the regulated movement of wealth” (EDP, 141–149; see FCF-FDS, 215, 223–224).
In The History of Sexuality and his lectures, Foucault provides plenty of other examples of spatial orderings. In his work on governmentality, for instance, he suggests that territory as an object of government has been displaced, with a new emphasis on population, but still provides considerable attention to the design of towns, the spaces of security, and what he calls the “qualities of territory” (ECF-STP). Many of the collaborative projects he was involved with in the 1970s showed attention to these topics, with projects on green spaces, urban infrastructure, transport systems, and hospital architecture (see Elden 2008). There are other places where Foucault discusses space, in terms of literature, art, or the ordering of libraries (FDE1, 407– 412; EDL; ELCP). This widespread interest in space is one of the reasons he has been such an inluential thinker within the discipline of geography. Foucault is less interested in providing a deinition of space than with outlining different ways in which space has been understood, transformed, and effected, and the effects it has. With Foucault’s historical studies predominantly concentrating on the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, it is unsurprising that the notion of extended, calculable space is preeminent; spaces that are classiied, segmented, ordered, and where exclusions are made and policed. As Foucault declares, “Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power” (EFR, 252).
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See Also
Madness
Outside
Painting (and Photography)
Plague
Strategies
Suggested Reading
Crampton, Jeremy, and Stuart Elden, eds. 2007. Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Driver, Felix. 1985. “Power, Space and the Body: A Critical Assessment of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 3:425–446.
Elden, Stuart. 2001. Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum.
2007. “Governmentality, Calculation, Territory,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 3:562–580.
Flynn, Thomas R. 1991. “Foucault and the Spaces of History,” The Monist 74, no. 2 (April): 165–186.
1997. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2005. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Hannah, Matthew. 2000. Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge.
Philo, Chris. 1992. “Foucault’s Geographies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 2:137–161.
2004. A Geographical History of Institutional Provision for the Insane from Medieval Times to the 1860s in England and Wales: The Space Reserved for Insanity. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen.
Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso.
Teyssot, Georges. 2000. “Heterotopias and the History of Spaces,” in Architectural Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 296–305.
80
SPIRITUALIT Y
Spirituality is not primarily a religious or theological concept for
Foucault. Rather, he deines it as “the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be puriications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modiications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth” (ECF-HOS, 15). Spirituality, then, has to do with the way in which the subject gains access to the truth. In other words, it has to do with the relation between subjectivity and truth (ECF-HOS, 2). This relationship between subjectivity and truth entails three distinctive “postulates” (ECF-HOS, 15). First, the subject does not have in its nature or structure any automatic right or inherent access to the truth. In other words, the very being or structure of the thinking, perceiving, willing subject blocks its access to the truth. Second, the subject, in order to gain access to the truth, must undergo a conversion, must transform her very being or structure qua subject. The subject must, as Foucault frequently puts it, “pay a price in its very being qua subject.” This price involves a labor (askesis) performed by the subject on itself in order to transform its way of being in order to bring about a “conversion of the gaze” and a modiication of its manner of existing. The subject must undergo something like a trial (épreuve). This price having been paid, the subject will achieve a new mode of existing and perceiving in which it will be able to grasp truth. Finally, the truth that one gains by paying the price of conversion is not simply a matter of correspondence or coherence but rather has “return effects” on the subject: “[T]he truth gives beatitude to the subject; the truth gives the subject tranquility of soul” (ECF-HOS, 16). Truth, in other words, does not primarily qualify a thought or statement in its relation to a given state of affairs or to other statements in a system but rather it “fulills
or transigures his very being” (ibid.).
Foucault argues that “throughout the period we call Antiquity, and in quite different modalities, the philosophical question of ‘how to have access to the truth’
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and the practice of spirituality (of the necessary transformations in the very being of the subject which will allow access to the truth) ... were never separate” (ECF-HOS, 17). In other words, the primary task for the philosophers of antiquity was the labor through which the subject was able to undergo a conversion and consequently gain access to the truth understood as the fulillment of one’s being.
The modern era of truth begins when philosophy and spirituality become detached from each other and when access to truth no longer requires spirituality: “In European culture up to the sixteenth century, the problem remains: What is the work I must effect upon myself so as to be capable and worthy of acceding to the truth? To put it another way: truth always has a price; no access to truth without ascesis” (EEW1, 279). Descartes, according to Foucault, helped to usher in this modern age “when he said, ‘To accede to truth, it sufices that I be any subject that can see what is evident.’ Evidence is substituted for ascesis.... This change makes possible the institutionalization of modern science” (EEW1, 279). In the modern era, the subject is related to truth through knowledge understood as a purely mental or cognitive experience of evidence that allows us to verify the relationship between statements and objective states of affairs. In other words, the thinking, perceiving subject is thought to have a natural right and capacity to know the truth and therefore does not need to pay a price in its very being in order to gain access to truth. Furthermore, truth in the modern sense does not have any “return effects” on the subject who knows. Rather it merely has to do with the relationship between propositions and states of affairs and is indifferent to the subject who makes the propositions (EEW1, 279; ECF-HOS, 15–19).
It should be clear that Foucault’s interest in spirituality cannot be described as epistemological – rather the fundamental point is that the relationship of subjectivity and truth is not exclusively epistemological but rather is ethical and even political. It is ethical insofar as the subject must transform her relationship to her self and the way she lives in order to gain access to the truth and to live a true life (EEW, 279). It is political, in a broad sense, because spirituality deines not only the subject’s relation to herself, her life, and truth but to other subjects and to the political community. Returning to antiquity, Foucault shows that individuals practiced spirituality (i.e., philosophy) in order to gain access to the truth that was necessary for effective political engagement, in particular in order to become capable of speaking the truth before the assembly (see especially ECF-HOS; ECF-GSO; ECF-COT). True discourse was central to the function of the democratic polis; hence truth was political (see ECF-GSO; ECF-COT). Furthermore, spirituality involved relationships of spiritual direction. In order to learn to properly conduct oneself – to properly govern oneself – one needed the assistance of a spiritual director: one allowed oneself to be governed and directed by another in order to bring about the self-transformation necessary to be capable of governing oneself truly. Only once one has become capable of truly governing oneself can one begin to govern others in the political ield of