Foucault's Geography

Abstract

In this paper I examine the character of what might be termed ‘Foucault's geography’, and in so doing I wish to respect the ‘otherness' of how Michel Foucault treats space and place rather than coopting his insights into a broader conceptualisation of the society-space nexus. In the first part of the paper I discuss the more theoretical dimensions to his geography, explaining how his vision of social life necessarily calls forth an alertness to ‘spaces of dispersion’, and here I draw upon both his ‘archaeological’ approach to history and his reading of Raymond Roussel. In the second part of the paper I discuss the more substantive dimensions of his geography, considering the way in which space and place enter centrally into his various historical studies. My account here is quite critical, highlighting a geometric turn that both overplays abstract spatial relations and underplays concrete place associations, but I still conclude that Foucault provides an evocative flavour of ‘substantive geographies' which squares with his claimed sensitivity to spaces of dispersion. My overall argument is that Foucault's geography emerges directly from his own suspicion of the certainties (the order, coherence, truth, reason) supposed by most historians and social scientists to lie at the heart of social life, and as such I think that it can be adjudged a ‘truly’ postmodern human geography in a manner that, say, Edward Soja's postmodern geographies cannot. We might not like this Foucauldian version of a postmodern human geography, but I think that there is much that we can learn from it, even if we then choose to retain our faith in a more obviously modernist conceptual, practical, and political geographical project.

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