Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul. Hatice Bay
forms of resistance can flourish. Nonetheless, as will be expanded further, although heterotopias provide escape routes from power, they are not liberated or liberating spaces. In other words, they are always entangled within the forces of power. As Robert J. Topinka in his article “Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia” puts it, they are not positioned outside of the established power relations (56). Moreover, heterotopias are ambiguous, polysemic and multi-dimensional sites, potentially imbued with a different meaning each time. They can be spaces of the dominating and the dominated, spaces of self-empowerment and vulnerability as well as disciplinary spaces of surveillance and spaces that make room for the others. This feature of heterotopia seems to make it an arbitrary space; yet as Foucault himself emphasizes, each heterotopia has a precise function within a society (“Of Other Spaces” 25).
In summary, the concept of heterotopia does not only suggest disrupting other spaces, but it can also be used as a significant analytic tool that challenges dominant constructions of spatial, social, political and cultural orders. Genocchio also points out that Foucault’s heterotopias suggest “we scrutinize and question the implications and possibilities of the slips, exceptions, oddities lurking at the limits of the system that defines for us what is thinkable, sayable, knowable” (43). In this regard, by focusing on Auster’s New York fictions and suggesting that they can be taken as heterotopias, this study argues that the idea of heterotopia can be expanded and utilized as an “analytics of otherness” that has a number of distinctive implications for disentangling and re-entangling the complicated relationship between space, power, resistance, the subject, the other, history and ethics. My intention in the following part of this chapter is to critically examine the orders, which heterotopic spaces not only disrupt but also allow reconsider, in completely different and innovative ways.
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1.4 Heterotopology I: The Entangled Interplay of Spaces of Power and Resistance
As pointed out in the introductory part, contemporary cultural and social geographers contend that the contemporary city has become a site of crisis mainly because architects, urban developers and regional planners have transformed the city into a flat, indistinct and uniform site whose lack of features has created the placelessness of place (Willet 57). Accordingly, as Richard Sennett points out, the contemporary city has been conceptualized as a receptacle of power, where power structures have “[accumulated] a mountain of rules defining historical, architectural, economic, and social context … [to repress] anything that doesn’t fit in … [and to insure] that nothing sticks out, offends, or challenges” (2).
Out of this line of thinking emerges an understanding of space as “characterising the static block of power-the system” where power is equated with domination (Massey, “Entanglements” 282). As Sharp et al. indicate, in the social and cultural geography, power is conceived of as “power to dominate” or as “dominating power” (1–2). Similarly, acts of resistance appear either futile and trivial acts or “anti-authority struggles” (Foucault, “Afterword” 211). According to Sharp et al., such an understanding of power/resistance risks constructing a binary of opposing (dominating and resistance) forces and implies that power is the preserve of the dominant (10). As Cresswell states “This is the clear suggestion in de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between strategies of the powerful (based on a powerful space of the proper) and tactics of the weak (based on myriad movements through these spaces” (265). In his theoretical work Power/Knowledge Foucault envisions power as a complex force. Notably, as Ellen K. Feder in “Power/Knowledge” states, the French word for power is “pouvoir” and this word carries the meaning of not only “force” but also “ableness”:
In Foucault’s work pouvoir must be understood in this dual sense, as both “power” as English speakers generally take it (which could also be rendered as puissance or force in French), but also as a kind of potentiality, capability or capacity. Power, Foucault tells us, must be understood to be more complex than a term like puissance conveys; it has multiple forms and can issue from “anywhere.” (55–56)
According to Foucault, the word “power” tends to lead to a number of misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form, its manifestations and its unity. In his conceptualization, “power cannot be a merely external force ←34 | 35→organizing local interactions; nor can it be reduced to the totality of individual interactions, since in an important way it produces interaction and individuals” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 207). Then, for Foucault, the analysis of power cannot assume the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law or the unity of a domination; on the contrary, according to him, these are only the terminal forms that power takes (The History 92).
Continuing this line of discussion, Foucault advances five propositions regarding power. First and foremost, power is not a thing that is acquired, seized or shared, or something that one holds onto or allows to slip away (The History 94). Power must be understood as being exercised rather than possessed. In other words, it is a practice rather than a possession, or an object or essence. Therefore, its exercise and effects can be attributed to “dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings…a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess” (Discipline 26). Secondly, power does not exist in a position of exteriority to the relationships it works upon, but it is engrained in their internal structure (The History 94). Thirdly, power is not a top down force. It comes from below, and there is not a binary or all-encompassing opposition between the dominant and the dominated. Rather, power relationships emerge at all levels of society independent of ruling powers (The History 94). That is to say, “power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of” (“The Subject” 343). Furthermore, the fourth argument by Foucault is that “power is ‘always already there’ and no one is never ‘outside’ it” (Power/Knowledge 141). Consequently, power refers to “a thoroughly entangled bundle of exchanges dispersed ‘everywhere’ through society, as comprising a ‘micro-physical’ or ‘capillary’ geography of linkages, intensities and frictions, and as thereby not being straightforwardly in the ‘service’ of any one set of peoples, institutions or movements” (Sharp et al. 19–20).
The last proposition about power suggested by Foucault is that where there is power, there is resistance; that is why, resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Foucault continues:
[There is] a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case. (History 95–96)
Accordingly, when power is redefined as a phenomenon that is intrinsically fragile and unstable, spaces of resistance cannot be conceived simply as a ←35 | 36→reaction to power. They cannot be understood as acts that are trivial or futile, either. While in classical terms spaces of resistance are regarded as spaces which contest norms and powers; under a heterotopological perspective, spaces of resistance are perceived as an aspect of power. Likewise, Cresswell states that resistance is a subset of power (264). Resistance, Cresswell therefore maintains, does not indicate absence of power or how people are free from forces of oppression inscribed in space. Instead, spaces of resistance are spread out, sprawling and enmeshed with power networks: “one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance,” says Foucault, “producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds.” (The History 96). This also leads to another significant assumption that resistance does not usually manifest itself in a solid and stable form. Just as power does not have a single identifiable point and is fleeting, resistance is transitory as well. As Éric Darier in “Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction” claims, “Yesterday’s resistance can become today’s normalization, which in turn can become the conditions for tomorrow’s resistance and/or normalization” (18).