Foucault avoids talking about rhetoric, preferring discourse as his comprehensive term, there is no question that his theory addresses a number of ideas that are central to modern rhetoric. He makes a powerful argument that discourse (for which we may read rhetoric) is epistemic; he states in compelling terms that discourse is a form of social action; he enriches and complicates the notion of context with a network of archives, disciplines, institutions, and social practices that control the production of discourse. (1128)
Foucault’s theory of space and its implicit discursivities help illuminate the power structures inherent in spatial relationships such that we might then find within them the sort of “virtual break” that Biesecker describes. In this way, as Biesecker puts it, “power names not the imposition of a limit that constrains human thought and action but a being-able that is made possible by a grid of intelligibility” (356). This sort of “being-able,” however, is nonetheless constrained in terms of its implications for the fully embodied, individualized subject. On the one hand, as Biesecker describes in depth, Foucault’s later work (particularly, she says, in The Uses of Pleasure), addresses “the ‘stylized practices of the self’ or ‘aesthetics of existence’ [which] may be read as a concerted effort on his part to specify the place and function of the deliberate intending subject whose acts, though made possible by the social apparatus or field, cannot be reduced to the mere playing out of a code” (358). On the other hand, however, subjectivity, for Foucault, even in his later work, is still understood as a consequence of societally imposed power relations, even though he sees subject positions as uniquely individual. (Biesecker 360). In this way, for Foucault, human beings may be understood as actively taking part in the environments in which they are situated, but these acts of participation are imposed on them by cultural norms and societal groups.3 This negotiation between the practices of the self and the imposing cultural constructs that influence those practices has been the site of much contestation over what, for Foucault, has been viewed as constituting his theory of resistance.
Foucault, Heterotopias, and Material Rhetoric
In describing the universalizing practices of space such that those practices provide opportunities for the identification of breaks or fissures, or possibilities for resistance, Foucault does take us closer to the notion of an embodied subject who may work with and against the grain of societal constructs. Nonetheless, Foucault’s view of the universalized, resisting subject as always already responding to imposed societal constructs may be understood as constraining or limiting possibilities for a more empowered view of embodied knowledge. Such limited possibilities for the universalized body arguably perpetuate what Hayles has termed Foucault’s “erasure of embodiment” (194). I argue here that while Foucault’s theory of heterotopias allows us to identify the universalizing functions of space such that we might simultaneously identify ways to work against them, his theory does not readily address to a fuller extent the idea of individual, bodily experience within heterotopic spaces. In other words, I argue that to expose the normative functions of space and the possibilities they provide for resistance is not necessarily to understand or describe those functions and possibilities as implicated in embodied, material practice. To derive such insights about embodied, spatial rhetorics from his theory of space thus requires extending Foucault’s work to account more explicitly for the embodied nature of physical space. This is precisely the point at which Blair’s work becomes useful.
That is, while Foucault helps us to understand space as rhetorical, some trickiness arises when we must also understand space and its attendant visual and material artifacts not only as rhetorical and powerful in that “can-do” sense but also as embodied. To help make these connections clearer and to address the dilemma of embodiment requires several steps. First, it is necessary to describe how heterotopias may be specifically characterized according to Foucault’s theory. Next, it is necessary to explain the limitation of Foucault’s work, primarily as articulated through Hayles’ notion of his erasure of embodiment, which, while compatible with an understanding of his theory of resistance, calls for a more explicit focus on the idea of “how embodied humans interact with the material conditions in which they are placed” (Hayles 195). At this point, then, it becomes possible to describe how Blair’s approach works to supplement or extend the potential limitation of Foucault’s theory by providing a point of entry into a visual-material rhetorics of heterotopic space.
Defining Heterotopias
Foucault suggests that we all reside in heterogeneous spaces—that “we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things”; rather, “we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (“Of Other Spaces” 23). We can try to characterize these sites by “looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined” (23). Sites of transportation, for example, may include streets or trains; “sites of temporary relaxation” may include “cafes, cinemas, [or] beaches” (24). Foucault is most interested, though, in those sites “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Such spaces, he says, fall into two main categories: utopias and heterotopias.
Utopias, he says, “are sites with no real place”; they present a perfected vision of society and are “fundamentally unreal” (24). Heterotopias, rather, may be found in “every culture, in every civilization” (24). Heterotopias, Foucault writes, are “real” 4 places “that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society” (24). They are akin to “counter-sites,” or an
effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (24)
Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia as counter-site, representation, reflection, and discursive, contested site would seem to open up the possibility for resistance, or for a site that, as Biesecker has put it, “names the nonlegible practices that are performed within the weave but are asymmetrical to it” (357). As the analysis of photo 22727 in chapter one helped demonstrate, a map is indeed a representation of a particular “real” territory, though often conveys multiple ideas about a place. These multiple ideas about a place are often borne out of knowledge claims that result in competing or contested discourses about what counts as the most “accurate” representation of a single territory. Memorials too count as places that represent, contest, speak of, or invert the “real” sites that they call out or commemorate. Thus, maps as well as commemorative artifacts may be understood as heterotopias. Already, then, it is possible to see that Foucault’s terminology can account for the varied contexts that help shape our potential understandings of a place. Following his initial defining of heterotopias, Foucault then provides some criteria to help identify these sites and the characteristics that qualify them as such.
Foucault’s Six Principles of Heterotopology
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