25 years on: Remembering Foucault
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault in 1984. Foucault Across the Disciplines provides a forum for assessing and reassessing the impact of Michel Foucault’s thought across the disciplines over 25 years. Hayden White's paper re-assessing Foucault's impact on historical studies is particularly interesting. Foucault's work has had far reaching implications for the way we perceive visual studies and the study of history itself.
For Foucault, writing in the late 1960s, disciplinary licensing had its origins in the 18th Century Enlightenment, yet it still remains a salient feature of contemporary 21st Century Western society. One may argue that disciplinary formation both establishes group identity and set groups apart from each other. Foucault argued that the formation of disciplines such as the sciences or the humanities involved the "disciplining" of language itself. Each discipline has a particular language and particular codes of conduct. By questioning the origins of disciplinary systems he contributed to laying the foundations for interdisciplinary approaches. He acknowledged in 1969's The Archaeology of Knowledge that new understandings often appear on the borderline between disciplines.
In 2009 there is a strange sense of history repeating with political events in Iran still attracting world news just as they did in 1978 when Foucault visited the region as a journalist and wrote first hand about the Iranian Revolution, as if to echo a much quoted line from his commercially successful book, 1968's The Order of Things: "History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist."
Foucault and virtual spaces
Space, to Foucault, was a central to late 2oth Century Western thought just as time and history had been central concerns to 19th Century thought. Foucault’s perception of space and time seems so open to interpretation that it has come to be readily used to explain motivation and immersion in the “third space” of online communication.
Threshold and borderline
In his essay “Other Spaces” (1967) Foucault writes: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space” Specifically of the museum and gallery space her writes: “Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.” visit online link. Melissa Terras' recent evocation of galleries and museums as "memory institutions" indicates that Foucault's ideas continue to be relevant, to excite and to challenge.
Reference:
Terras, M. (2008). Digital images for the information professional. Ashgate: Aldershot and Burlington. Details
Comment
For Foucault, writing in the late 1960s, disciplinary licensing had its origins in the 18th Century Enlightenment, yet it still remains a salient feature of contemporary 21st Century Western society. One may argue that disciplinary formation both establishes group identity and set groups apart from each other. Foucault argued that the formation of disciplines such as the sciences or the humanities involved the "disciplining" of language itself. Each discipline has a particular language and particular codes of conduct. By questioning the origins of disciplinary systems he contributed to laying the foundations for interdisciplinary approaches. He acknowledged in 1969's The Archaeology of Knowledge that new understandings often appear on the borderline between disciplines.
In 2009 there is a strange sense of history repeating with political events in Iran still attracting world news just as they did in 1978 when Foucault visited the region as a journalist and wrote first hand about the Iranian Revolution, as if to echo a much quoted line from his commercially successful book, 1968's The Order of Things: "History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist."
Foucault and virtual spaces
Space, to Foucault, was a central to late 2oth Century Western thought just as time and history had been central concerns to 19th Century thought. Foucault’s perception of space and time seems so open to interpretation that it has come to be readily used to explain motivation and immersion in the “third space” of online communication.
Threshold and borderline
In his essay “Other Spaces” (1967) Foucault writes: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space” Specifically of the museum and gallery space her writes: “Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.” visit online link. Melissa Terras' recent evocation of galleries and museums as "memory institutions" indicates that Foucault's ideas continue to be relevant, to excite and to challenge.
Reference:
Terras, M. (2008). Digital images for the information professional. Ashgate: Aldershot and Burlington. Details
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