Space, Knowledge and Power

Foucault and Geography

Stuart Elden, Jeremy W. Crampton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754646549
• eBook ISBN: 9781317051909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Michel Foucault's work is rich with implications and insights concerning spatiality, and has inspired many geographers and social scientists to develop these ideas in their own research. This book, the first to engage Foucault's geographies in detail from a wide range of perspectives, is framed around his discussions with the French geography journal Hérodote in the mid 1970s. The opening third of the book comprises some of Foucault's previously untranslated work on questions of space, a range of responses from French and English language commentators, and a newly translated essay by Claude Raffestin, a leading Swiss geographer. The rest of the book presents specially commissioned essays which examine the remarkable reception of Foucault's work in English and French language geography; situate Foucault's project historically; and provide a series of developments of his work in the contemporary contexts of power, biopolitics, governmentality and war. Contributors include a number of key figures in social/spatial theory such as David Harvey, Chris Philo, Sara Mills, Nigel Thrift, John Agnew, Thomas Flynn and Matthew Hannah. Written in an open and engaging tone, the contributors discuss just what they find valuable - and frustrating - about Foucault's geographies. This is a book which will both surprise and challenge.

PART 1
Questions

Chapter 1

Some Questions from Michel Foucault to Hérodote

Michel Foucault, Translated by Stuart Elden

‘Des questions de Michel Foucault à «Hérodote».’ Hérodote, No. 3, juillet-septembre 1976, 9–10; reprinted in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, Four Volumes, 1994, Vol. III, 94–5.

These are not questions that I pose to you from any knowledge that I might have. They are inquiries that I am asking myself, that I address to you, thinking that you are without doubt more advanced than me on this path.

1. The notion of strategy is essential if one wants to make an analysis of knowledge [savoir] and its relations with power. Does it necessarily imply that through the knowledge in question one wages war?

Does strategy not allow the analysis of relations of power as techniques of domination?

Or must we say that domination is only a continued form of war?

Or alternatively, what scope would you give to the notion of strategy?

2. If I understand you correctly, you are aiming to constitute a knowledge of spaces [un savoir des espaces]. Is it important for you to constitute it as a science?

Or do you find it acceptable to say that the break which marks the threshold of science is only a means of disqualifying certain knowledges [savoirs], or to make them evade examination.

Is the division between science and non-scientific knowledge [savoir] an effect of power linked to the institutionalization of knowledges [connaissances] in the University, research centres, etc.?

3. It seems to me that you link the analysis of space or of spaces less to production and to ‘resources’ than to the exercise of power.

Could you outline what you understand by power? (Through relation to the State and its apparatuses, through relation to class domination.)

Or do you consider that the analysis of power, of its mechanisms, of its field of action, is still at the outset and that it is too soon to give general definitions? In particular, do you think one can reply to the question: who has power?

4. Do you think it is possible to undertake a geography – or a range of geographies – of medicine (not of illnesses, but of medical establishments along with their zone of intervention and their modality of action)?

PART 2
Francophone Responses – 1977

Chapter 2

Hérodote Editorial

Translated by Gerald Moore

‘Éditorial.’ Hérodote, No. 6, 2e trimester 1977, 3–4.

Having agreed to answer questions on geography, Michel Foucault has posed a set of questions to geographers.

Since the core of Michel Foucault’s questions essentially bears on the problem of power, of domination, the responses could not be unanimous, nor could they seek to be collective.

These interrogations of power, especially of the ubiquitous vision that Foucault increasingly accords it, obviously does not only concern geography, but social practices as a whole and representations that have been made of them. The replies from geographers are therefore not specifically ‘geographical’, and they correspond to the idea that each one of them has, not of geography, but of society as a whole. Problems of geography have thus to a certain extent been eluded, both by Michel Foucault and by a good many of those who have endeavoured to respond to him.

When Michel Foucault asks: ‘Can you outline what you understand by power?’ and ‘Who has power?’, we think that there is no single answer, but different types of response, depending on the scale of social space that one takes into consideration: the response differs according to whether one takes planetary space (a very small scale) into consideration – in which case it concerns the role of the two superpowers and very large transnational companies; or whether one envisages a very large-scale spatial organization of the family home and the relation of power between individuals. Understanding the problem of power by systematically distinguishing between different spatial scales and different levels of analysis enables us to avoid conflating very different, but nonetheless mutually articulating, structures of power into a fluid whole and even a ubiquitous presence.

When Michel Foucault asks: ‘What scope would you give to the notion of strategy?’, it is here that we are more critical in respect to his whole discourse, because it tends to use the same term, strategy, to designate, on one hand, plans that are deliberate, conscious, organized, devised to attain certain objectives or defeat an adversary, by choosing means and ruses and considering the configuration of ‘terrain’; on the other, dilute and unconscious tendencies, procedures in which the whole of society participates, without realizing, and which produce involuntary effects, with neither winners nor losers.

When, in his latest book, The Will to Knowledge (which is a crucial piece of reflection for all of us), Michel Foucault shows in substance that what he calls the ‘strategy of power’ proceeds not only via prohibitions regarding the essential problem of sexuality, but also – and much more – through incitements to speak about ‘it’, to think about ‘it’, this ‘strategy’ that he reveals is precisely one that is unconscious and involuntary, as much for those who exercise it (where are they? Everywhere) as for those who are subjected to it (who are they? All of us). It comes down to involuntary apparatuses [dispositifs] and unconscious collective propensities. It is essential to realize this, but [not] by saying: ‘It happens as if there were a strategy and gamesmasters.’ It is precisely because there is not, because there is not a conscious, deliberate strategy opposing specific adversaries for clearly perceived stakes that this tendency is so strong at the heart of our society.

When we speak of strategy and tactics, it is clearly not about these unconscious apparatuses [dispositifs], these collective propensities that we are thinking, but about plans, secretly or discretely constructed, devised by one of the protagonists in a relation of force, plans that take account not only of the means and characteristics of the adversary, and of the other strategy that he, too, could put to work, but also of the configuration of the ‘terrain’ (of topography on various scales of social space) and the relative positions that the forces present occupy. It is for this that knowing-how-to-think-space [le savoir-penser-l’espace] has so great an importance in all strategic reasoning.

Chapter 3

Response: Jean-Michel Brabant

Translated by Gerald Moore

Hérodote, No. 6, 2e trimester 1977, 12–14.

The Power of Scale

The notion of strategy is applicable, in current vocabulary, to a range of terms. Where it concerns us, we hold to the fact that every strategy implies a plan worked out in relation to an enemy, be it real or imaginary, concrete or potential.

The strategy with which we are occupied is that which corresponds to a practice of the domination of space, in all its forms.

Thinking about and organizing space is one of the pre-occupations of power. If every strategy of power has a spatial dimension, power also has a practice of spatial domination that is appropriate to its strategy.

This practice of spatial domination cannot be totally identified with military practice. The latter is only one aspect, one that is perhaps institutionally concentrated, of the spatial practice of power. It is situated on the plane of ‘knowing-how-to-think-[the]-space [le savoir-penser-l’espace]’ of a scarcely defined power. What characterizes power is the way that its internal complexity goes hand in hand with a multiform intervention on the plane of space.

On the stage of confined territories, weak or fragmented authorities, ‘knowing-how-to-think-space’ boils down to knowing how to think war. Ruling substrata are reflected on a grand-scale, just as the chief of a stronghold is essentially preoccupied with the topography of the reduced space that he is charged with defending, and not the strategic data amidst which he is situated.

When power is capable of reasoning on a smaller scale, its strategic knowledge diversifies. This is without doubt true above all of State power, where war or the threat of war is no longer the only means of extending or maintaining its hegemony over a given space. The rise of a range of forces, particularly in the sphere of economics, is based on a comprehension of the play of spaces. Developed on a small scale (we should define more rigorously the level of analysis privileged by different advisors), their strategy is often perceived only on a grand scale (or more simply, on another scale), which obscures its significance.

To decode the spatial practice of different powers is to reveal their social strategy in terms of space, it is to clarify the underlying mechanisms of the force of those who dominate, and the weakness of those who are dominated.

Strategy (as the knowledge/practice of space) can serve to subvert power itself. This knowledge/practice cannot be neutral and, if it is to be used, it must be reinvented. The evidencing of this ‘knowing-how-to-think-[the]-space’ of power must enable us to found, with the struggling masses, a new and efficient spatial practice.

Science and Ideology

The recognition of the scientific status of certain branches of knowledge is without doubt a way of turning these branches of knowledge into a hierarchy, which is linked to power-status and a social consensus, as well as being linked to a necessary disposition toward internal rigour.

The place of geography in this process is, without doubt, novel. Linked to power as strategic knowledge, geography is simultaneously depoliticized and ‘scientified’. The establishment of this scientific status, essentially through the institution of the university, has moved geography from the domain of strategic knowledge to the rank of accessory to the ideological arsenal of power. This passage has been reinforced (in the case of French geography) by the internal epistemological evolution that, while privileging the science of places and not that of men, has refused all ‘knowledge of spaces’.

This ‘knowledge of spaces’, obscured but in part nurtured by the ‘science’ of geography is, before all else, a practice at the level of power and its expert advisors. The present problem consists neither in criticizing geography on the basis of its internal epistemology, nor in putting in place a new science of space (a new or renovated geography).

Rather than placing ourselves on the level of scientific debate, it suits us to decrypt a knowledge that operates on reality, and which one can attempt to grasp at the level of practice.

The State

The notion of power must always be brought back to one’s approach to the social organization of which it is the principal organizer. To avoid this reference or to skirt around this reality is to expose oneself to mistakes in analysis and to bracket the same words under different notions. The power that preoccupies us is that to which we are presently subjected in our society, not an abstract, atemporal power.

Knowledge of this power, its delimitation and the evaluation of its techniques of domination does not come down to an exclusively spatial approach. This essentially hierarchical power is identified with the power of the State, the guarantor and summit of this hierarchy. It is the armed branch of social organization, and this connotation is one of the essential objectives of our study. To map power is first to map the power of the State in all its levels [échelons], to define its different types of domination of space, to detect its areas of weakness and contradictions. This should be the goal of the ‘knowledge of spaces’ for which we are fighting.

This hierarchical and concentrated power expands and reproduces itself in various agencies of society. This hierarchization and concentration is the work of special interests who through their practice establish veritable networks of powers in which particularly dangerous zones are partitioned. From this perspective, the process of production must be at the centre of our knowledge/practice of space, because at the level of power, this knowledge and this practice are thought as a function of power.

Rather than just enumerating productions and resources – although it is not a question of under-estimating the importance of the data that power sometimes conceals – it seems to us more pertinent to situate the strategic place of these elements in space, or in the combined play of different spaces of power. The superimposition of maps of data and networks of power would certainly give us a few clues as to the space at stake in social conflicts.

Should our preoccupation limit itself, however, to the critical elucidation of present power in its mechanisms and the delimitations of its different aspects? This criticism has the function of grasping and orientating the spatial resonances of the struggles of those whom power oppresses.

In the analysis of the gestation of popular counter-powers that necessarily but not exclusively turn around the power of the State, the definition of revolutionary power as a network of power taken up and subjected to the control of different agents of the social process is at stake.

The question of knowing who has power, if we must perhaps initially try to reply to it as it is posed, is therefore foremost a question of knowing who power serves.

Chapter 4

Response: Alain Joxe

Translated by Gerald Moore

Hérodote, No. 6, 2e trimester 1977, 14–15.

Strategy: the art of making decisions conforming to the defence of an interest by taking into account a system of opposed interests and the possibilities of the decisions and defence of these other interests. (A definition ‘approximating’ that of game theory, rather than that of military strategy, where the notion of time is introduced straight away.)

This generalization of the notion of strategy is a semantic fact. One might deplore it, in that it ultimately means anything that one wants it to mean, starting from the moment one considers man as thinking and acting, resulting in: ‘amorous strategy’, the strategy of Saint-Etienne football team, ‘economic strategy’, government strategy, business strategy, the strategy of the board, etc.

Obviously, strategy does not mean war. Nor necessarily even conflict, but always the power of decision, which is to say power. The strategy of a leader who seeks to remain legitimate is not that of confrontation, or at least not only that. In any case – following the terminology of the games of strategy – we generally distinguish between the aspects of cooperation and struggle, the carrot and the stick, promise and threat, like the two faces of Janus, who marks a threshold and not a space. It is rather that strategy is the art of thinking the threshold of the passage to the act [passage à l’acte?]. It is an art because strategy cannot give itself as an object to be explained by the artist: it must be presupposed. One can think only the strategy of ‘x’ … and this ‘x’ escapes the object of the strategic study in question, because one can only strategically draw the distinction between the interest and the person who has the power to make decisions. (These terms are synonymous with game theory.) Every distinction drawn between interest and person (for example, the Marxist analysis that distinguishes between the bourgeois class and the bourgeois parties) can only have strategic sense if one is equally to establish that there exist contradictions between the bourgeois class and party, and that there are accordingly two interests present.

There are thus extreme limitations to the reflection on strategy, insofar as it is not applicable to a perfectly disciplined organization whose interest is defined as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography
• Part 1 Questions
• Part 2 Francophone Responses – 1977
• Part 3 Anglophone Responses – 2006
• Part 4 Contexts
• Part 5 Texts
• Part 6 Development
• Index