Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul. Hatice Bay
‘power’ in the abstract, but, on the contrary, should be approached as a constant recontextualization of power relations as lived and experienced by humans” (18). From this perspective, the domination/ resistance schemeta cannot be understood as fixed or abstract concepts. On the contrary, they should be conceived as inextricably dependent, unstable, relational as well as historically and spatially contingent processes.
Most significantly, lines of power are indispensable for instigating acts of resistance and other ways of becoming and living. In other words, power relations are the condition for the possibilities for change, innovation and creativity. Hence, the concept of power cannot be conceived as a manipulative and subjugating force. It is, rather, enabling and constructive. As Foucault, therefore, contends:
If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network that runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Power/Knowledge 119)
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Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power follows a similar line of thought in her description of power and writes:
[w];e are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order…But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are. (2)
As can be understood from Foucault’s and Butler’s views, power is a positive concept that enables new forms of subjectivities and creative ways of lives. In summary, as Auster’s City of Glass and In the Country of Last Things bear out, power does not only have negative but also constructive dimensions. Power is a dynamic that can be exercised by everyone and that can trigger a sense of agency that would allow for the possibility of resisting deterministic structures of spatial and political orders. Hence, the spaces of cities cannot be assumed to be passive, ordered and normalized spaces which are mere instruments of power. Adopting a heterotopological approach, this study claims that space is an active force as a result of the ever-knotted power and resistance relations. This implies that the urban space is to be understood as a dynamic spatiality where nothing is fixed forever, where there are no essentializing inclusions or exclusions and no hierarchies of power. Ultimately, power can be manipulated to create other spaces for everyone so that the city may become a more democratized and open space.
1.5 Heterotopology II: Spatialized Historiography
Traditionally, history is seen as a linear, progressive, deterministic and time-ridden axis. The historian aims to dissolve events into an ideal continuity, as a teleological movement or a natural process. Furthermore, as many geographers and historians such as Philip J. Ethington, Thomas Bender, David Carr, Edward S. Casey and Alun Munslow have noted, while space is seen as a passive place where events unfold, history is perceived as a dynamic force.4 It was first Foucault who stated that throughout centuries
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space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the other hand, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic… [T];he use of spatial terms seems to have the air of an anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile to time. It meant…that one ‘denied history’… They didn’t understand that [spatial terms] …meant the throwing into relief of [historical] processes. (Power/Knowledge 70)
This statement reveals that the traditional notion of history dismissed geography as a homogeneous and changeless stage, a backdrop to actions of the individuals or simply belonging to nature. Along with the above-mentioned geographers, historians and Foucault, this study argues that space and history are inseparable and space and human action are active forces in shaping history. Therefore, this section focuses on how a heterotopological approach invites a re-examination of the traditional ways of understanding history and history writing. It will be held that the concept of heterotopia as a spatialized thought enables the opening up and re-composition of historical imagination through a spatial perspective. Eventually, I argue that just as heterotopias contest power structures and ultimately make room for other spaces, they also pave the way for the emergence of “other times,” namely, areas and peoples of history previously silenced and repressed.
Firstly, heterotopia lets us view history not only as a temporal but also a geographical event. To put it another way, history can be traced back and brought forward through spatial movements. As Ethington in “Placing the Past” argues, “History is not an account of ‘change over time,’ as the cliché goes, but rather, change through space. Knowledge of the past, therefore, is literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of history indexed to the coordinates of spacetime” (466). In this sense, investigating the past through spatial practices is, first and foremost, an attempt to end the one-sided historicist emphasis on time, origin and chronology. A spatial inquiry into history, thus, is about conceiving history not in its abstract, bygone and unreachable form but as a presentable and re-liveable occasion. As Ethington states, “Placing the past takes ‘the past’ out of time, locates it in materialized topoi, and asserts that history, in any symbolic system, is the map of these topoi” (487). Consequently, this study suggests an itinerary and experiential approach to history. As Thomas Bender in his article “Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History” also states, “the centrality of human action to the meaning of history” should not be underplayed (498).
Furthermore, re-establishing history through spatial activities may well align with Foucault’s notion of genealogy. From a heterotopological view, genealogy can be observed in and as motion through space. As Maria Tamboukou in “Genealogy/Ethnography” also points out, “Foucault’s genealogies are particularly attentive to the catalytic role of space in the ways human beings construct knowledge about themselves and the world around them” (197). In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” as an alternative to the traditional devices ←38 | 39→for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a continuous development, Foucault offers a genealogical inquiry into the past. Foucault defines genealogy as a specific type of history that challenges the pursuit of the origin or descent. In Foucault’s view, descent or origin does not mean heritage or lineage. The aim of the genealogist is not to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things, either. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people (“Nietzsche” 81). He explicates that the search for the origin is an attempt to disinter subjugated knowledges which are “knowledges from below,” “unqualified or even disqualified knowledges,” that are “local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity” (“Nietzsche” 7–8). Consequently, the genealogist’s task should be, by taking a spatial approach, to identify the accidents, the minute deviations, the errors, the false appraisals and the faulty calculations that has given birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us. Ultimately, genealogical analysis reveals that heritage is not an acquisition or a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath” (“Nietzsche” 82). Thus, Foucault asserts that a search for descent is not about building foundations: on the contrary, it is about disturbing what was previously considered immobile, unified and showing the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself. As José Medina in “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance” also points out, “genealogies have to be always plural, for genealogical investigations can unearth an indefinite number of paths from forgotten past struggles to the struggles of our present” (21).
Finally,