Category Archives: Foucault

Exterritory

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There were strong echoes of Stefano Harney’s recent seminar at the Exterritory event in Paris this week.  Exterritory is a project initiated by Israeli artists, filmmakers and curators Ruti Sela and Mayaan Amir in 2009, to explore some of the many contradictions produced by the struggle over land in the Palestine/Israel conflict.  Because both sides lay claim in various ways to ‘territory’ (conceived in multiple ways), Ruti and Mayaan wanted to explore the possibility of stepping outside territory altogether to innovate modes of resistance and to highlight the absurdities of the battle over land.  This has involved many different events over the years, most strikingly their projection of images of the region and its many people onto the sails of yachts at night in international waters off the Israeli coast.

Anne Davidian from the Evens Foundation opens the Exterritory symposium

The event in Paris – co-hosted by the Kadist and Evens Foundations – was the first of a number of planned symposia bringing together artists, curators, academics and other oddments to consider what ‘exterritory’ might mean in practice.  The Paris symposium explored various aspects of exterritorial and extraterritorial space (the distinction between the two being far more meaningful in French).  The first session included (defiantly non-) geographer Stuart Elden’s thought-provoking analysis of the construction of ‘exile’ in Shakespeare’s plays and Laurent Jeanpierre‘s examination of theoretical and juridical notions of exterritoriality. The second session consisted of my own rambling thoughts inspired by events of 2008 and the ‘flash-crash’ – ‘Where has all the (xeno)money gone?‘ – and Dana Diminescu‘s fascinating exploration of the complex and emergent spatialities of migration. All four papers were skilfully brought together by the contribution of Anat Ben David, one of Ruti and Mayaan’s regular collaborators on Exterritory.

Angus getting flash with the Flash-Crash

All sorts of cross-cutting themes and resonances emerged from the papers and subsequent discussion that I won’t rehearse here (the event was filmed and will eventually appear on-line) but for me the most striking aspect was the ubiquity of social, economic, political, individual, collective, planned and spontaneous ‘spaces’ that do not conform to the established norms of legally-defined and reproduced ‘territoriality’.  Indeed, by the time we’d worked through the ambiguous spatialities of exile, xenomoney, migration, cyberspace, exception, and many others, territory itself was beginning to look like the minority sport.  Which, of course, makes it all the more interesting that so much of our legal, institutional, police, military and political activity should be devoted to what emerges as a very narrow and privileged mode of living in and thinking about the world.

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Of other Foucaults

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I’ve just been reading Foucault’s ‘On Other Spaces’.  In this lecture from 1967, Foucault argued that we now lived in an age where our social relations are determined not simply by time but by space – a point that is no doubt pretty obvious to most of us now.  What I think is still worth taking from the essay, though, is Foucault’s explanation of heterotopic spaces.

As I understand it, Foucault is arguing that some spaces are over-determined.  They link together many different uses, people and activities primarily because they link together many other spaces.  These spaces (or sites as Foucault calls them) are, in other words, multi-storey.  A bit like in the film Inception, we can bend them, stretch them, and tunnel into them.  Foucault gives a range of examples to illustrate his point, libraries, museums, prisons and so on, but I think the most potent examples are not among this list.

To me, public toilets, carparks and shopping centres are the most obvious examples of heterotopic spaces. Public toilets, for instance, are obviously useful amenities when we hear the call of nature.  In this regard, they are what Foucault calls ‘pure and simple openings’.  But in this openness they ‘hide curious exclusions’.  In popular culture we know that public toilets can be scenes of various sexual activities, drug taking (see Trainspotting for a colourful example), theft, and graffiti.  In short, beneath their obvious use, they are full of activities that many of us never see even if we are aware of their presence through sticky residues of shadows in our mind or on the walls.  As Foucault puts it ‘we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded’.

It seems to me that the most interesting part of heterotopic spaces, then, is not how we enter them but how we are excluded when we enter them.  Here, I think shopping centres come into their own.  While they are open to all they are remarkably powerful sites of exclusion.  The obvious candidate here is the poor who cannot afford the fruits of consumerism … don’t worry, it’s not another blog about the riots last year or the occupy movement.  More important, to me at least, than these fairly simplistic examples, are groups who are excluded through the space itself not the price of good within it.  People with various physical and social disabilities are perhaps the best example of this group.

I need to think some more about this.

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