Of Other Spaces is a self-contained piece of work that can be used by others to understand this world. Just because Foucault didn't elaborate on it doesn't mean it has to be dismissed. Perhaps he didn't dwell on it because people didn't understand it or comment on it when he gave his lecture in 1967. The meaning of it, and the significance, may not have been apparent to individuals steeped in binary thinking patterns.
It is fine if you want to use the framework of self, knowledge and power. But is that just about the single experience? What about a framework that draws in others' experiences also. That is what Foucault's model of the heterotopia does.
Less than two weeks ago I gave a talk at a Narrative Matters conference in Nova Scotia, on the Montreal Massacre, an event from 1989 which has really only ever been looked at from the perspective of the women killed. I had already decided to draw all the "hidden stories" into it, and I discovered that Foucault's theory of the heterotopia provided the credibility, I thought, to explain my reasoning - the theory behind it. Nevertheless, despite naming each of the 14 women and telling about Lepine's yelling, I hate feminists, as went into the engineering school, along with others stories, of course, the first comment I had was by a woman (academic?) with a gut reaction, still upset 16 years later with only the thought that it was "women who had been killed." No thought by her, or many others, of the others who had suffered, including Marc Lepine, who had had any chance of a fulfilling future taken away from him by feminists entering traditional male domains. There were a few positive comments, from people who understood the concept and what I was saying about the Montreal Massacre, but it has always been seen a a black-and-white issue and that sort of thought isn't easily changed.
Foucault's model includes the idea of incompatible experiences being together in one space, and also the idea of fragmentation instead of fully comprehensible stories with a beginning and ending. It reflects the kind of thinking people don't like to do, seeing rather that life is a matter of them and us, and making sense of one's own world often means dismissing the ideas and experience of someone else.
Sue McPherson
http://www.MontrealMassacre.net
----- Original Message -----
From: Pozzo
To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 2:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] Introduction: Foucault, Spatiality, Power?
There are no primary discussion from Foucault about spatiality, knowledge and power. The three key domains constitutive of any experience are self (ethics), knowledge (truth) and power (relations). So "limitations" of the concept of spaciality in Foucault is that he developped this concept only in one article in 1967 "Of Other Spaces": http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html and did not elaborate further that concept of space in any of his later works.
Pozzo.
There has been a lot of talk recently (at least among geographers) of Foucault's call for a "history of spaces," which has inspired important new works, such as John Pickles' "A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-coded World" (2004) and Stuart Elden's "Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History" (2001). I am curious what members of this listserv take away from Foucault's discussions of spatiality, knowledge, and power. More specifically, what are the strengths--and limitations--of Foucault's understanding of such power/knowledge/spatiality relations?
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It is fine if you want to use the framework of self, knowledge and power. But is that just about the single experience? What about a framework that draws in others' experiences also. That is what Foucault's model of the heterotopia does.
Less than two weeks ago I gave a talk at a Narrative Matters conference in Nova Scotia, on the Montreal Massacre, an event from 1989 which has really only ever been looked at from the perspective of the women killed. I had already decided to draw all the "hidden stories" into it, and I discovered that Foucault's theory of the heterotopia provided the credibility, I thought, to explain my reasoning - the theory behind it. Nevertheless, despite naming each of the 14 women and telling about Lepine's yelling, I hate feminists, as went into the engineering school, along with others stories, of course, the first comment I had was by a woman (academic?) with a gut reaction, still upset 16 years later with only the thought that it was "women who had been killed." No thought by her, or many others, of the others who had suffered, including Marc Lepine, who had had any chance of a fulfilling future taken away from him by feminists entering traditional male domains. There were a few positive comments, from people who understood the concept and what I was saying about the Montreal Massacre, but it has always been seen a a black-and-white issue and that sort of thought isn't easily changed.
Foucault's model includes the idea of incompatible experiences being together in one space, and also the idea of fragmentation instead of fully comprehensible stories with a beginning and ending. It reflects the kind of thinking people don't like to do, seeing rather that life is a matter of them and us, and making sense of one's own world often means dismissing the ideas and experience of someone else.
Sue McPherson
http://www.MontrealMassacre.net
----- Original Message -----
From: Pozzo
To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 2:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] Introduction: Foucault, Spatiality, Power?
There are no primary discussion from Foucault about spatiality, knowledge and power. The three key domains constitutive of any experience are self (ethics), knowledge (truth) and power (relations). So "limitations" of the concept of spaciality in Foucault is that he developped this concept only in one article in 1967 "Of Other Spaces": http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html and did not elaborate further that concept of space in any of his later works.
Pozzo.
There has been a lot of talk recently (at least among geographers) of Foucault's call for a "history of spaces," which has inspired important new works, such as John Pickles' "A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-coded World" (2004) and Stuart Elden's "Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History" (2001). I am curious what members of this listserv take away from Foucault's discussions of spatiality, knowledge, and power. More specifically, what are the strengths--and limitations--of Foucault's understanding of such power/knowledge/spatiality relations?
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