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