sites then manifest, he says, when dealing with “the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine; the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line). [. . .] In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography” (23). Interestingly, we see in Foucault’s description of the contemporary manifestation of the hierarchic ensemble of places, or in the transition from emplacement to extension, allusions to the spatial dimensions and problematics of mediated bodies functioning within a technologically mediated society. Moreover, the “relations of proximity,” or the series, trees, and grids to which Foucault refers, then make possible human practices that, as Biesecker might put it, work both “within and against the grain” to resist hegemonic constructions of space (357). That is, as Biesecker describes within the context of discussing the “implications of Foucault’s work for Rhetoric” (352), the practices that are made possible through these grids also “carry within themselves what Foucault calls ‘a kind of virtual break’ out of which transgression may ensue” (356). Such acts of transgression thus constitute a form of resistance. This notion of resistance, Biesecker feels, is rooted in Foucault’s “non-monumentalized conception of power” (354). I argue here that Biesecker’s ideas about Foucault’s theory of resistance are not only relevant to the field of rhetoric in general but also to how we might understand the rhetorical study of space more specifically.
Biesecker suggests that Foucault indeed has a theory of resistance, and that it is embedded largely in his understanding (and our misunderstanding) of power (pouvoir). That is, “to understand power only as oppressive is reductive” (Biesecker 354). Rather, when we understand that the meaning of the French verb pouvoir loses some of its dimension in the English translation, we begin to understand the ways in which power can be productive for Foucault. Here, Biesecker quotes from Gayatri Spivak: “Pouvoir is of course ‘power.’ But there is also a sense of ‘can-do’-ness in pouvoir [. . .] it is the commonest way of saying ‘can’ in the French language” (qtd. in Biesecker 355). Power then conveys not just limits, but also a “being-able” that happens at multiple levels of practice that at once rely on “existing lines of sense” and “carry within themselves a ‘virtual break’” (357). Resistance thus works “within and against the grain” (357). It “names the nonlegible practices that are performed within the weave but are asymmetrical to it. As Foucault put it, ‘They are the odd term in relations of power’” (357).
Foucault’s program in “The Unities of Discourse” is compatible with Biesecker’s description of how resistance works “within and against the grain” (357). Moreover, “The Unities of Discourse” not only puts into clearer context how scholars of rhetoric might proceed in thinking about discourse but also how they might begin to understand a Foucauldian notion of space. Like his theory of heterotopias, Foucault’s theory of discourse critiques historiography and its propensity toward creating normative continuities; it does so by problematizing a “whole mass of notions” such as tradition, origin, influence, causality, unity, development, and coherence (Archaeology 21), all of which have the effect of “master[ing] time through a perpetually reversible relation between an origin and a term that are never given, but always at work” (22). Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space is founded on a similar idea that contrasts “indefinitely accumulating time” with “time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect” in order to problematize normative continuities and tease apart the various realities that compose a given space; these realities are time sensitive, reliant on cultural contexts, and often oppose or challenge others’ claims to knowledge (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 26).
In the “Unities of Discourse,” Foucault asks us to understand the rules such that we might break them, so to speak; that is, we need to “accept the groupings that history suggests only to subject them at once to interrogation; to break them up and then to see whether they can be legitimately reformed; or whether other groupings should be made; to replace them in a more general space which, while dissipating their apparent familiarity, makes it possible to construct a theory of them” (Archaelogy 26). Foucault’s theory of space also implicitly asks us to interrogate the groupings that history suggests and to question whether they may be viewed from the point of their discontinuity rather than from that of their perceived continuity. He asks that we resist hierarchies of space and look instead for knowledge in unfamiliar places; in doing so, he not only asks us to understand space as epistemic but also as discursive. And if we subscribe to Bizzell and Herzberg’s reading of Foucault’s notion of discourse as rhetorical, then we may likewise understand space not only as discursive but also as rhetorical. That is, Bizzell and Herzberg note that although
Foucault avoids talking about rhetoric, preferring discourse as his comprehensive term, there is no question that his theory addresses a number of ideas that are central to modern rhetoric. He makes a powerful argument that discourse (for which we may read rhetoric) is epistemic; he states in compelling terms that discourse is a form of social action; he enriches and complicates the notion of context with a network of archives, disciplines, institutions, and social practices that control the production of discourse. (1128)
Foucault’s theory of space and its implicit discursivities help illuminate the power structures inherent in spatial relationships such that we might then find within them the sort of “virtual break” that Biesecker describes. In this way, as Biesecker puts it, “power names not the imposition of a limit that constrains human thought and action but a being-able that is made possible by a grid of intelligibility” (356). This sort of “being-able,” however, is nonetheless constrained in terms of its implications for the fully embodied, individualized subject. On the one hand, as Biesecker describes in depth, Foucault’s later work (particularly, she says, in The Uses of Pleasure), addresses “the ‘stylized practices of the self’ or ‘aesthetics of existence’ [which] may be read as a concerted effort on his part to specify the place and function of the deliberate intending subject whose acts, though made possible by the social apparatus or field, cannot be reduced to the mere playing out of a code” (358). On the other hand, however, subjectivity, for Foucault, even in his later work, is still understood as a consequence of societally imposed power relations, even though he sees subject positions as uniquely individual. (Biesecker 360). In this way, for Foucault, human beings may be understood as actively taking part in the environments in which they are situated, but these acts of participation are imposed on them by cultural norms and societal groups.3 This negotiation between the practices of the self and the imposing cultural constructs that influence those practices has been the site of much contestation over what, for Foucault, has been viewed as constituting his theory of resistance.
Foucault, Heterotopias, and Material Rhetoric
In describing the universalizing practices of space such that those practices provide opportunities for the identification of breaks or fissures, or possibilities for resistance, Foucault does take us closer to the notion of an embodied subject who may work with and against the grain of societal constructs. Nonetheless, Foucault’s view of the universalized, resisting subject as always already responding to imposed societal constructs may be understood as constraining or limiting possibilities for a more empowered view of embodied knowledge. Such limited possibilities for the universalized body arguably perpetuate what Hayles has termed Foucault’s “erasure of embodiment” (194). I argue here that while Foucault’s theory of heterotopias allows us to identify the universalizing functions of space such that we might simultaneously identify ways to work against them, his theory does not readily address to a fuller extent the idea of individual, bodily experience within heterotopic spaces. In other words, I argue that to expose the normative functions of space and the possibilities they provide for resistance is not necessarily to understand or describe those functions and possibilities as implicated in embodied, material practice. To derive such insights about embodied, spatial rhetorics from his theory of space thus requires extending Foucault’s work to account more explicitly for the embodied nature of physical space. This is precisely the point at which Blair’s work becomes useful.
That is, while Foucault helps
