Michel Foucault

From Geography

Michel Foucault (1926-1984), was born in Poitiers in France. Foucault studied Philosophy and psychology in the 1950’s at the École Normale Supérieure. After his graduation he joined the French Communist Party for about two years. Then he started teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure and as a psychologist in a hospital.

His thesis ‘Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'Age Classique’ was published in 1961 and it was hailed as ‘magnificent’. In a few years a lot of writings followed.

In the 1970’s Foucault threw himself into political and social activism and he strived for the acceptance of homosexuals and for reformation in prison. In 1975 he published ‘Discipline and Punisch’, one of his most famous works. Foucault taught at several universities all over the world in for example, Vincennes, New York and California. While he worked at the University of California, he wrote three volumes of ‘History and sexuality’. Although Foucault’s thinking may be called either in some parts structuralistic, poststructuralistiv and postmodern, he rather defined it as a critical history of modernity. In 1984 Foucault died in Paris because of Aids (Khalpfa, 2006, p.6)

His most important contributions, especially with respect to geography, will be described shortly beneath.

History

Foucault had critique on the way in which history had been ordered (Philo, 2000, p. 209-211). Total history assumes that there is one central core in the social world that governs all things. You may think for example of great leaders, approaches etc.) According to Foucault total history was not concerned with the social structures and processes that created history. History wasn’t a continuity of events, but it was a timeline divided into periods, stages and phases that had barely relations to other distinct periods.

Foucault rejected this way of structuring history and tried to see history as a flow of events without a single world-view. These ‘places of dispersion’, may be seen as small spatial cells which move around each other and may be related. In this way it’s possible to make a network of causality with all relations turning round one core centre. Their relation depends on their distance to each other. He called this his ‘general history’.

According to Foucault it were not the approaches, discourses or great leaders that created the history, but he was searching for the conditions in which these approaches, discourses or great leaders may arise. He searched for the ‘moments of change’ in the knowledge of people which effect history and which gave society a new direction.

Power, discourse and kwowledge

Foucault was also concerned about the power issues and wrote several books about it. Foucault suggested that power isn’t something you can see and neither can be found in a personality. Power can only ‘exist’ in actions and relations between persons, institutions, groups etc. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p.217) Power can only be exercised over free subjects (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p.221). Power is always present, and may become an intrinsic feeling that makes people act in an ‘appropriate’ way. (His concept of the panopticon became one of his most famous examples) (Sharp, 2000, p.78).

Foucault also thinks knowledge is a good condition for power relations. The more knowledge the more power, one can have on another. A discourse is a set of reasoning, which put a subject in a certain perspective. A discourse is formed by written or spoken texts around a subject. It tells people in an indirect way what is normal and what is not. In this way it also exercises power because it tells people how they should behave and it may give power relations to different institutions and people. Discourse is therefore embedded in culture and knowledge. According to Foucault nothing can exist without discourse (Hall, 2006, p. 279).

Contributions to geography

Foucault did not especially examine geography and actually did not precisely define space, but in all his works he refers to the role played by spatial relations within a complex working of knowledge, power and discourse (Philo, 2000, p225). For Foucault space was bound up in history. His spaces of dispersion are things that are scattered across a landscape and are related to another through their geography (Soja, 1989, p.16).

The only order is the distance to another and being positioned in locations or being associated with a type of environment (Philo, 2000, p.221). Foucault tended to think of space in terms of orders and forms of spatial reasoning that classifies and categorizes inherited knowledge. For example a historical map is a presentation of facts in history which may be used to shape the future; it imposes control of the future (Crampton & Elden, 2007, p. 55).

For Foucault (social) space could be found in ‘enclosures’ of society, which means that people are locked away in institutional spaces, which in turn can be classified into smaller partitions and so on. This gave also form to a chain of power and commands which is designed to physically maintain this organized social space.

“Foucault opens the way in which historical processes involving discourse, knowledge and power are always at work and (re)shaped by the real-world space ‘criss-crossed by trade routes, valleys, highlands, mountains and rivers (Philo, 2000, p.227).”

For more information about Foucault also reed: Discourse, panopticon, power of institutions: Foucault, Total history vs general history, strategic, There is Nothing Outside Discourse, Genealogy, Discursive Formation

Sources:

- Jean Khalfa (2006). History of madness. London: Routledge.

- Sharp, J. (2000).Entanglements of power: geographies of domination/resistance. New York: Routledge

- Crampton, J. & Elden, S. (2007). Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography. Hampshire: Ashgate publishing limited

- Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The reassertion of space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso.

- Philo, C. (2000). Foucaults’geography. In Crang, M. & Thrift, N. (Ed.), Thinking Space. (p. 205-238). London: Routledge.

- Hall (2000).Representation and discourse. In Smith, M. Social science in question (p. 279). London: Sage

Under construction by Marjolein Selten and Fleur van der Zandt