2. Foucault and the limits of modern geography
The question of modernity should be seen as a social process that moved
in a wide arc, within which the historical frameworks in philosophy and
geography did not match. Peet (1998) emphasizes the historicist elements
of the duration of modernity11In philosophy it is the year of
Hegel’s death (1831), and in geography the death of von Humboldt and
von Ritter (1859), while the emergence of neoliberalism in the late
1970s marked the end of modernity., where he sees the essential
reasons for its emergence in relation to Hegel’s teaching (philosophy)
and the establishment of the scientific method (geography). Clearly,
Hegel22Hegel’s concept of modern explained Habermas in
the chapter of the book of the same name (2/12) The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. is relevant to the modern, as
a world-historical process, because after him there is no more unique
philosophical system, more philosophical directions appear, and
philosophy turns to the problems of man and his existential questions.
This was also reflected in the interpretation of modernity, so this
epoch, in the domain of philosophy, was marked by two parallel flows.
One went with the line ”H” (Hegel, Horkheimer, Habermas). The second
direction emerged as a deflection, mainly of French thinkers, from
Hegel’s ideas and flowed from Nietzsche through Max Weber and Heidegger
to Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, and whose philosophical-geographical
aspect very successfully portrayed Elden (2001) in his doctoral
dissertation33Provided a general depiction of the works:
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault.. From a geographical point of
view, the insistence on the existence of these differences, perhaps,
lies in Hegel’s (1987: 212-221) interpretation of space and
time44Processed within first chapter in Philosophy of nature –
Mechanic, § 253 - § 261.. From
the description of a space that is ”being-out-of-selves, and continuous,
because it is extramarital still utterly abstract and has no particular
difference”, some geographers draw (e.g. Bond, 2014: 7) a dry conclusion
about Hegel’s position on space that is ”dead, fixed, non-dialectical
and immovable.” Also, in contrast to space, time represents ”wealth,
fertility, life, dialectics”. These statements deserve a broader
explanation provided by Hegel’s dialectic of nature, which consists of
mechanics, physics, and organics. The task of mechanics is to
dialectically derive space, time and matter:
”According to Hegel, space is an abstract existing out of each other, it
is a pure simulation that corresponds to the very basic difference of
nature from the idea, i.e. the exterior. So abstract, the space is
continuous and there are no differences yet. However, there must be a
difference in the continuous space, and the first difference is the
three dimensions. Hegel wants to dialectically perform that there can’t
be more than three, and he does so by understanding the act as a
negation of space, but as a negation that remains in space. Based on it,
differentiations in space begin. One cannot stay on a point, because a
point is both in space and not in space, and this contradiction is
resolved by the point becoming spatial, i.e. by becoming a line from the
point. This again denies itself in the surface, and the negation of the
surface is the placement of the surface as the boundaries of the body,
that is, the placement of three-dimensional space. Negation must,
however, go further, space itself must be denied, and the negation of
the whole space must again be a point, or something similar to it, the
negation of space represents a point that is not in space, and that is
the moment of time. The point in time is variable, not constant. In this
way, time represents the changing given of the individual in nature, or
time is just an observed becoming. Further, space as a whole represents
a thesis, time an antithesis, and their synthesis will be a synthesis of
a point in space and a point in time, and that synthesis is a place. But
one place presupposes another place and passes into it, so the negation
of a place is a synthesis of a plurality of places in space and time or
movement. Movement is such a synthesis of space and time that space
decays in time and time in space. As such, movement is a contradiction,
and the negation of that contradiction is the placing of a peaceful
synthesis of space and time, of matter. Therefore, dialectical matter
emerges from space and time. (Petronijević, 1982: 489)
In order to clarify the conflicting views on Hegel’s interpretation of
space, and on that basis a kind of dichotomy in the philosophical
interpretation of modernity, it may be best to present this through the
confrontation of the views of Foucault and Habermas55One of
their rare encounters was about Habermas’ appearance at the Coles de
France (1983), as written by D. Eribon (1994).. Relations between
these contemporaries were not harmonious, where Habermas (Eribon, 2005:
191) described Foucault’s work as ”postmodernism of the neoconservative”
which refers to positions in modernity in order to ”establish ruthless
anti-modernism”. In his work he recognizes the ”spontaneous forces of
imagination, subjective experience, sensitivity”, to which he ascribes a
distant and archaic basis, in a Manichean way he opposes reason to a
principle that can only be invoked, whether it is ο the will to power,
the sovereignty of being or the Dionysian poetic force”. At the same
time, Foucault sought to ignore the work of Habermas, and Dreyfus and
Rabinow tried to devise a way to overcome this bypass66It was an
invitation for Foucault and Habermas to participate in a seminar on
modernity that would be held at UC Berkeley (USA) in the autumn of
1984, but during the summer of that year, Foucault died.. This
doctrinal conflict can be simply presented as Foucault’s skepticism
about the possibility of individualization and universalism), while for
Habermas postmodernism represents the restoration of unacceptable
irrationalism. Foucault briefly explained his position through a review
of Kant’s text Was ist Aufklärung ? 77MagazineBerlinian monthly (1784) raised this question, and as a
particularly significant, published the answers Mandelson, and then
Bucket, who Enlightenment as the process with which we leave
”minors”. By this term, he understands a certain state of our will
that forces us to accept someone else’s authority to use the mind and
cite three examples: we are in a state of juvenile when the book is
our substitute for reason, when our spiritual leader is a substitute
for conscience and when the doctor determines our way of eating.
”A small text, perhaps. Nevertheless, it seems to me that he
imperceptibly entered the history of thought into a question to which
modern philosophy was not able to answer, nor was it able to resolve it.
And behold, it has been two centuries since he repeated it, in various
forms. From Hegel to Horkheimer or Habermas, through Nietzsche or Max
Weber, there is almost no philosophy that, directly or indirectly, has
not faced this same question: what, then, is an event called the
Aufklärung, which is, to a greater or lesser extent, determined what we
are today, what we think and what we do? ” (Foucault, 1984a: 32-50)
Foucault’s interpretation of the boundaries of modernity is not based on
the interpretation of history as a world process (Hegelian approach),
but he determines them through the theory of power, i.e. social
practices that have led to the discipline of the population. It has
already been mentioned that geographical thinking indicates ways of
thinking within different philosophical traditions, and Foucault is
specific because he created on the border of different epochs (modern
and postmodern), and he is largely responsible for this discontinuity.
However, for Soja (2013: 26-31) he was a “postmodern geographer in its
entirety”, from his first to his last work, who explored the “fateful
intersection of time and space” and who was inspired by an emerging
perspective of “post-historicist and postmodern critical human
geography”. This is also confirmed by Ritzer (2009) in the domain of
contemporary sociological theory, whose parallels on Foucault and
modernists can be tabulated.
Table 1: Elements of Grand Theory of Social Development by Modernists
and Foucault