The objective of this essay is to present Michael Foucault’s systemic description of spaces and Henri Lefebvre’s perspective on how it has limited the analysis and comprehension of complex spaces. The latter, as a critique of the rationalization process, has used the dialectic thinking in order to develop the concepts of grids in an open-ended system. To analyze the complexities and contradictions between them, is fair to ask, how Michael Foucault use structuralism in order to understand spaces, and what are the downsides that Henri Lefebvre identifies in it? What are the differences between the classification of spaces in utopias and heterotopias that Foucault describes and the classification in grids that Lefebvre propose?
For Michael Foucault, we are in an age of space, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period where it is not enough just to think over the concept of time, but to make connections and link points together in order to create our own understanding of space. Structuralism is presented as the system or method of thinking to achieve this. In his own words “is the attempt to establish between elements that may have been split over the course of time, a set of relationships that juxtapose them, set them in opposition or link them together, so as to create a sort of shape”1. As we create relationships between elements, we arranged them in a position in space and patterns. In this order, Foucault brings the idea of pairs of opposition (created by institutions and social practice), as a way of understanding space by contrast. As examples, we can find the public and private space, family and social space, cultural and utilitarian space, the space of pleasure and the space of work, among others - all of them, oppositional spaces that are presented in our everyday life. In this types of spatial arrangements Foucault presents the utopias and heterotopias, as spaces “with the curious property of being in relation with all others, but in such way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relationships designed, reflected, or mirrored by themselves”.2
A concordant idea of space had Henri Lefebvre, understanding that the pure, transparent and neutral space has permeated the Western culture, creating an illusion that is now disappearing. According to Lefebvre, we are immersed in a Capitalist space that defines spaces of contradictions, such as, center and periphery, global and partial, inclusion and exclusion, conjunction and disjunction, implication and explications, iteration and reiteration, recurrence and repetition. As a critic to the structuralism formulated by Michael Foucault, understandings elements related in space using Cartesian classification, has the objective to eliminate contradictions, to demonstrate coherence and to reduce the dialectic to logic, in the case of Michael Foucault, logic of power. For Henri Lefebvre, reducing the concepts of spaces as an absolute will only work to benefit the interests of power. Considering this, he proposes the use of dialectical thinking into the concept of space, before used by Heraclitus, Hegel, and Marx in the subject of time, achieving different perspectives, constructive conflicts and finally allowing contradictions to be part of the understanding of space.
Furthermore, Henri Lefebvre questions the idea of a ‘plural’, ‘polyscopic’ or ‘polyvalent’ space, introducing the concept of the grid, not to create opposition and contrast, thus to develop more complex relations between concepts, highlighting Foucault isotopias, heterotopias, and utopias as the most relevant of these oppositions. The grid is a new perspective that does not isolate elements from one another in an abstract Cartesian space; it envisions different spaces all at once, places of encounters, places of transition, places of meditation and solitude. This also allows the analysis on three different levels, “a ‘micro’ level (architecture; residence versus housing; neighbourhood), a ‘medium’ level (the city; town-planning; the town-country dichotomy), and finally a ‘macro’ level (spatial strategies, town and country planning, land considered in national, global or worldwide terms)”3. Henri Lefebvre, claims that the number of possible grids is unlimited and it is impossible to prefer one grid over another, giving us an open-ended system. As Lefebvre quotes Nietzsche “But may the will to truth mean this to you: that everything shall be transformed into the human-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly- palpable! You should follow your own sense to the end”4. With this idea, Lefebvre gives the final responsibility to the human in understanding and theorizing space.
To illustrate the difference between both, we can analyze the third principle of Foucault heterotopias. Here, he describes these spaces as the ones that had “the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other”5. As an example, the cinema, which is a rectangular void, projects a tridimensional space into a two-dimensional screen. A dark space with contradictory locations, it transports us into different parts of the world, but at the same time, we are seated in a space with a row and a seat number, a rational space. The example of the cinema is important to Henri Lefebvre, which he states, spaces could not be understood as a single logic relation of inclusion and exclusion, “‘Human beings’ do not stand before, or amidst, social space; they do not relate to the space of society as they might to a picture, a show, or a mirror. They know that they have a space and that they are in this space”6. He critiques the passive role of people in spaces that Foucault implies, on the other hand, he thinks that in social spaces, like this case, humans can situate themselves in space and have an active role in it. At the same time that we are seated in the cinema, we are involved in a series of different enveloping levels, which their relation and sequence are part of the social practice.
In sum, at the same time that Michael Foucault develops the complexity of spaces, bringing new ideas to space (relation between elements, phenomenologist, aura, symbolism, dreams, passions) by using structuralism to arrange these concepts, the results according to Henri Lefebvre is a reductionist categorization of relations by opposition, a systematic description, losing the complexity that at the beginning achieves. On the other hand, Lefebvre, agree with the complexity of space but understands that structuralism is too limited to grasp such complex matter, and he uses dialectical thinking in order to explain more accurate and at the same time contradictories elements of space, giving us a grid system that by definition is open-ended.
1 Michael Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 420.
2 Michael Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 421, 422.
3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 388.
4 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 399.
5 Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 424.
6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 294.
Bibliography
Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics (Spring 1986), vol. 16, no. 1; rpt. in Architecture Culture, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” in Critical Sociology: European Perspectives (New York, Irving (Wiley), 1979).