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