3.2 Spatial turn: space-knowledge-power
Since our focus on Foucault’s work is predominantly geographical, we will try, without a broader description of the content of his books, to point out the elements of radical undermining of conventional thinking about space, which in social sciences gets the outlines of ”spatial turn”. For Foucault (2005: 28), space is not ”homogeneous and empty”, but on the contrary, space is ”all filled with properties”. In this view of space, Foucault did not seek an understanding of social totality, but a connection between space and knowledge (geoepistemology). Because of this, Soja (2013: 26) believes that ”Foucault’s contribution to the development of critical human geography must be discovered by archaeological excavations, because he concealed his anticipatory spatial turn in brilliant spirals of historical insight”. The question of space is deeply embedded in Foucault’s work through the development of a spatial perspective, which takes on elements of ”Foucaultism” (broader scientific framework) and ”Foucault geography” (disciplinary framework). Foucault explained this in his work The Second Place , which he exhibited in Tunisia in 1967, and which vividly hints at a geography of scattering (heterotopia) about which he will write more later.
”The current era is probably more of an era of space. We are in the age of the simultaneous, we are in the epoch of the parallel, the epoch of the near and far, the neighboring, the scattered. We are in a time when the world is being tested, I believe, not so much as one great life that develops over time, but as a network that connects the dots and creates its own mess. It could perhaps be said that certain ideological conflicts that provoke today’s debates take place between the pious descendants of the time and the stubborn inhabitants of space” (Foucault, 2005:46).
During the historical development of science from the Middle Ages to the present day, Foucault recognizes three phases in the conception of space11Since Kant, there’s been a dealing of time with history and space with geography.. Although he emphasizes the issue of discontinuity in his later works, he does not mention them here, so the boundaries between individual phases remain fluid. The first is characteristic of the Middle Ages, which was dominated by a cosmological notion of the structure of the universe and the position of the Earth in it (space), which was accompanied by a kind of hierarchy of certain sacred and profane places, which he describes by localization. With Galileo’s teaching on the infinity of space22Probably he thoughts on the development of physical or absolute space and in the period leading up to the emergence of the quantitative revolution (1960).18A broader review of the interpretation of space, see: G. Mutabdzija, Geophilosophy of premodern (2020)19 www.nationalacademies.org/, Geographic Science Committee (GSC ) is part of the National Research Committee (NCR ), as a segment of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). comes a new phase which he calls propagation and which he does not explain33 further. He designates the next (current) phase as arrangement, which is essentially characterized by the relations of closeness between points or elements. It is important to mention that Foucault distinguishes between two types of space and that the previously described stages of development refer to the interior space (it is probably a subjective experience of space). His more important subject of interest is the space of exterior, which he defines as ”the space in which we live, in which we are seduced into it, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history takes place, the space that breaks and consumes us. it is also diverse”. Based on the previous descriptions of the evolutionary development of the concept of space, it is possible to generalize and graphically present Foucault’s claims.
Diagram 2.2: Foucault’s stages in the development of concepts of interior space