Michel Foucault's Geography

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Latest revision as of 14:26, 26 October 2012

Background

Michel Foucault's geographical thinking and attentiveness to spatial relations, though theoretically less engaged by geographers, is however seen by some (Edward Soja and Chris Philo, for instance) as a blueprint for postmodern geography (Philo, 2000).

The following remark in his essay Heterotopia, indicates the significance of space in his analysis:

" The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and is suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its preponderance of dead men.... the present epoch will perhaps 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 intersects with its own skin. "(Foucault, 1986, in Crampton & Elden, 2007 pp.3)

Foucault's geography in history

Michel Foucault is highly sensitive of spatial relations in his analysis of discourse, knowledge and power relations in society. He asserts that historical enquiry should be conceptualised through spaces of dispersion rather than as a set of events stacked on top of each other across a linear time-line. Foucault reasserted the importance of space, place and geography to stories of history and social thought (Philo, 2000) and is known as one of the key figures in poststructuralist thinking. His concept of spaces of dispersion advocates a way of seeing the social world through space, if one might say so, as a space across which all events and phenomenon relevant for substantive inquiry is dispersed (Hubbard, Kitchin, Valentine,2004 pp.124.)

Geography in some of Foucault's works

Though it is hard to identify a direct geographical approach in Foucault's works, it is, at the same time, hard to ignore the spatial implications and insights. Elden and Crampton finely summarise this relation in their book on Foucault and Geography,

" From architectural plans for asylums, hospital and prisons; to the exclusion of the leper and the confinement of victims in the partitioned and quarantied plague town; from spatial distributions of knowledge to the position of geography as a discipline; to his suggestive comments on heterotopias, the spaces of libraries, of art and literature; analyses of town planning and urban health; and a whole host of other geographical issues, Foucault's work was always filled with implications and insights concerning spatiality." (Cramption & Elden, 2007, pp.1)

Foucault's analysis of space indeed occurs at a micro-level, in bodies, in power relations within action upon action, in subjects.

Geographical linkages of his individual works could be summed up as below:

• In Madness and Civilization he talks of the 'Geography of haunted places'.
• In The Birth of the Clinic he deals with three different forms of spatialisations of health.
• In Discipline and Punish he explores the notion that 'discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space'.
• In his analysis of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, he looks at the physical and psychical control over individuals achieved through the manipulation of spatial relations.

(Philo, 2000, pp.221-222)

References

• Crampton, Jeremy. W., Elden, Stuart, (eds) (2007) Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, Ashgate. England.
• Hubbard, Phil., Kitchin, Rob., Valentine, Gill (eds) (2004) Key Thinkers on Space and Place, Sage, London.
• Philo, Chris, 2000, Foucault's Geography, in Crang, Mike & Thrift, Nigel, (eds) Thinking Space, Routledge, London.

Contributors

• Page created by Kolar Aparna ==Kolaraparna 21:23, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

• Categorized by Jesper Remmen--JesperRemmen 20:58, 21 October 2012 (CEST)

• Links added by Isis Boot - --IsisBoot 21:29, 25 October 2012 (CEST)