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SPACES OF INVENTION:

FOUCAULT AND THE QUESTION OF TRANSFORMATIVE INSTITUTIONS

[Draft]

Kevin Thompson

Department of Philosophy

DePaul University

University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop

November 28, 2011

Abstract

This paper explores what Foucault means by a “space of invention”. I show that these are best understood as

institutions in which intolerable configurations of power, knowledge, and subjectivization can not only be contested,

but continually refashioned and transformed. I argue that institutions of this kind, pace conventional readings, are

central to what Foucault called practices of freedom. The paper ultimately seeks to go beyond Foucault to outline

the basic constitutive features that would define these forums of collective self-formation.

Late in his career, Foucault participated in a fascinating interview with Robert Bono, at the time the National

Secretary of the most prominent confederation of the major French trade unions, the Confédération francaise

démocratique des travailleurs (C.F.D.T.), and a member of the Conseil d‟administration de la Sécurite sociale. One

of the central issues in their discussion was the means by which the seemingly opposed goals of autonomy and

social security—goals advocated by the C.F.D.T. and affirmed by Foucault—could be achieved. This is a rare

instance in Foucault‟s public statements for he here engages in the kind of extension of his thought that he elsewhere

tends assiduously to avoid: working out the contemporary and even future implications that flow from the work of

archaeology and genealogy. Foucault insists that to balance social welfare and individual and corporate autonomy

requires, on the one hand, what he calls a “certain empiricism”, a transformation of the domain of social institutions

into a “field of experimentation”, which would seek to decentralize authority and bring the users of a system such as

social welfare closer to its decision-making centers, and, on the other, “conceptual innovation”, which would take up

the project of rethinking the categories and frameworks under which the questions of security and autonomy

themselves are formulated and approached. He notes that both forms of such work would require forums of public

association and, on this basis, he proceeds to outline a brief history of such sites: from the end of the eighteenth

century, where parliament played such a role in England, to the latter half of the nineteenth century, where the rise

of labor unions and political parties began to engage these projects, to the first half of the twentieth century, where

this work became the sole prerogative of academics, intellectuals, and administrators. He concludes by decrying the

empirical and conceptual “sterilization” that has occurred over this history. At this point, Bono, perhaps somewhat

predictably, asks whether unions might (again) be a forum for such practical and theoretical experimentation.

Foucault replies that this work must now come from all “those who intend to counterbalance the state prerogative

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and to constitute counterpowers. What comes out of union action might them eventually, in fact, open up a space of

invention” (DE IV, 374).1

Now it is clear from Foucault‟s brief sketch here that a “space of invention” is, for him, an institution, that is, a

relatively resilient and stable social site, where intolerable configurations of power, knowledge, and subjectivization

can not only be contested, but continually refashioned and transformed, where, for the case at hand, the relationship

between state provided welfare and individual and corporate autonomy could be continually rethought and

renegotiated. Such forums, he held, would enable associations to emerge that could undertake collaborative

experimentation in new forms of decision-making and thus new forms of corporate self-constitution. These

institutions, in turn, by their very structure even, could also begin to renovate the conceptual fabric within which

social and political issues are posed, deliberated, and acted upon. The fundamental task of a “space of invention”

was thus to forge a site within which participants could take up the work of self-formation in a genuinely

collaborative fashion, to shelter, we could say, emerging new forms of sociality, perhaps even new forms of

solidarity.

However, beyond this admittedly provocative sketch, Foucault left this proposal for transformational

institutions largely undeveloped. The strategy of the present essay is thus to think this issue—the question of the

structure of transformative institutions—with, through, and, even perhaps, at a point, beyond Foucault. Its aim is

twofold: first, to argue for the centrality of institutions to what Foucault called the practices of freedom, and

secondly, to outline the basic constitutive features that would define these distinctive forums of self-formation. I

thus seek to employ the resources that Foucault‟s thought offers to work out the nature and function of spaces of

invention, to develop what I shall call their spatio-temporal infrastructure.

To begin, it will be useful to situate this project within the spectrum of current discussion of Foucault‟s political

thought. Among students of his work, and especially among those who have sought to develop his account of

freedom, two models have been deeply influential: his much discussed appeals to transgressive practices or „limit-

experiences‟ and, though less acknowledged, his equally adamant invocation of newly emergent forms of social

relations, such as male friendships. Both models have served as fertile ground for theories of freedom, from the

subversive performance of identity2 to the cultivation of agonistic democratic sensibilities.

3 Yet, as these schemes

1 All references to Foucault‟s works are included in the text according to the following scheme of abbreviation:

DE Dits et écrits. 1954-1988, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)

NC Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1963, rev ed., 1972)

SP Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975)

STP Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004)

2 See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:

Routledge, 1990)

3 See William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1991)

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are fundamentally agent based, they miss, I believe, what is arguably Foucault‟s most important insight in this area:

relations of knowledge-power-subjectivization necessarily operate in and through specific forms of

institutionalization; accordingly, to transform such relations so that they can enable genuine self-constitution,

genuine freedom, requires a rethinking not only of the practices involved, but of the very nature of the institutions

they forge and that, in turn, shelter them. Foucault‟s studies repeatedly show that it is the field of action, the

constructed environment, that shapes, orients, and ultimately makes both performance and disposition possible. As

such, to foster a genuine aesthetics of existence, a genuine art of self-formation, we must reconfigure the

institutional sites within which we live and breathe. Practices of freedom thus demand nothing less than a profound

transformation of our current social ontology.

Foucault‟s investigations provide ample resources from which to begin to work out such a new logic of

institutionality. Specifically, Foucault‟s studies of social organizations show that the governance of conduct is a

function, at its core, of the spatio-temporal logic of institutions, that is, the material arrangements by which

institutions distribute space and the procedures by which they organize time. Hence, to resist and transform the

intolerable conditions that can develop under such forms of rule and to do so in ways that enable those living under

these regimes to become genuinely self-formative requires new institutional orderings of space and time, what,

following Foucault, I shall call a heterotopic and heterochronic infrastructure. The ultimate task of what follows is

thus to make sense of these new social-ontological concepts.

The essay is divided into three parts. Part I considers the relationship between institutions and practices of

governance. Part II examines the spatio-temporal logic that govern these practices. And Part III concludes by briefly

setting out several more or less concrete proposals for the design of decentralized and participatory institutions of

self-formation, the heterotopic and heterochronic structure of spaces of invention.

I. INSTITUTIONS AND GOVERNMENTALITY

The relationship between institutions and power stands at the very core of the problem that we seek to address. In his

most developed reflections on this issue, in “The Subject and Power” [1982], Foucault notes that the stakes at issue

in this relationship are, at once, methodological and ontological.

Consider first the methodological. If power is most properly understood, as Foucault ultimately concluded, as

governance, where this is defined as the “conduct of conduct”, that is, as the orchestrating of the field of possible

action, then clearly institutions are one of the most important instruments by which such structuring takes place. One

can, Foucault says, use a well defined institution as a “privileged observatory” (DE IV, 238) from which to analyze

the form and logic of the most basic operations whereby their inhabitants are rendered governable. Institutions thus

offer a unique point of access to the microphysics of power.

But, for all the importance of this institutionalist approach, to discern the mechanisms that shape conduct wholly

from within institutions runs the risk, Foucault warns us, of simply equating institutional forms with the arts of

governance themselves. Foucault argues that the consequence of this is a reduction of both the goal and nature of

such techniques. Viewed from within institutional life, the aim of arts of governing appears to be nothing more than

the originating and sustaining of rigid structures of hierarchy and domination and the means by which these

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practices accomplish this end is thus construed as nothing other than the coercive threat buttressing rule and law.

But, in this way, taking institutions as one‟s point of entry into the nature of power is, as Foucault puts it, “to

explicate power by power” (DE IV, 238), that is, to explain the mechanisms of power through but one of its

derivative forms. And this, methodologically, actually blinds one to the more subtle and diverse ways in which

power operates.

This takes us to what is at stake here ontologically. Foucault argues that a proper analysis of institutions must

take its bearings not from the institutional forms themselves, but from the domain of power relations, the various

modes of orchestrating and molding the action of others, the deeper ontological element of which institutions are but

one embodiment. Institutions, Foucault contends, are properly understood as crystallizations of techniques of

governance. It therefore follows that to understand these organizations, to get at what institutions are and what they

do, they must be placed within the epochal ordering—the historical a priori, the deployment, the problematization,

or game of truth—that governs such practices. To do this, he tells us, an analysis must attend both to what these

practices seek to accomplish (their specific objectives and inherent rationales) as well as how they pursue these ends

(the social inequities and specific modalities by which they are implemented), what Foucault calls here the “social

nexus”.4

It is only at this deeper stratum that the historical principles that govern thought and action become evident.

Viewed from this vantage point, institutions prove to be central vehicles by which the arts of governing become

stabilized and durable. By this Foucault means, on the one hand, that institutions enable techniques of governance to

be adaptable to generational transformation, while being granted a measure of insularity from the vagaries of

empirical change, and, on the other hand, that institutions provide the kind of coherence and cohesion these practices

need in order to remain effective throughout diverse cultural patterns and social traditions. Institutions thus bear the

stamp of the age in which they emerge and serve as the instruments whereby the rules governing an epoch‟s seminal

practices are made effectively concrete. Hence, Foucault teaches, social ontology must, necessarily, be a subfield of

historical ontology.

Now though this theoretical articulation is presented fairly late in Foucault‟s career, his earlier studies of non-

discursive formations can clearly be read as bearing out this conceptual framework. The analyses of the clinic5 and

the prison6 serve, inter alia, to unearth the precise operations and arrangements whereby their inhabitants are

4 More precisely, the “social nexus” is comprised of (1) the objectives sought by practices of governance (e.g.,

the maintenance of privileges, the accumulation of profits, or the exercise of some authority or function), (2) the

degrees of rationalization that articulate the inherent logic of such arts (e.g., technological efficiency or economic

benefit), (3) the system of differentiations (e.g., legal or simply customary differences in status or privilege,

differences in the appropriation of wealth and economic benefits, different positions in the labor process, linguistic

and cultural inequalities, inequities of knowledge and skill, etc.), and (4) the specific instrumental modalities

(coercive force, rhetorical persuasion, economic disparity, control, surveillance, or rules) that render them effective

(DE IV, 239-240).

5 See NC and Michel Foucault, Blandine Barret Kriegel, Anne Thalamy, François Beguin, and Bruno Fortier,

Les machines à guérir. Aux origines de l’hôpital moderne (Paris: Architecture + Archives, 1976, rev ed., 1979).

6 See SP.

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rendered disposed to governance.7 They do so by virtue of a shared fundamental logic, a subtle interweaving of

knowledge, power, and subjectivization: they make those under their charge intelligible such that precisely by this,

that is, by being rendered intelligible, each becomes, at once, differentiated and comparable, both unique

individuals, analyzable in all their distinctness, and members of a larger whole, a greater totality, and thus integrated

into a system of collection, correlation, and distribution.8 To be a patient or to be a prisoner is thus to be constituted

as a modern subject—at once, an agent and an object—nothing more and nothing less than what Foucault calls a

“case”.9

Following the line of analysis set forth above, we must, at this point, move out from the institutional frame

itself, move out from within these institutions, and ask what are the practices that make this distinctive institutional

function possible? That is, what are the specific historical techniques by which these structures are able to produce

subjects of governance? This question, as we shall see, necessarily leads us to the question of the spatio-temporality

of power.

II. THE SPATIALITY AND TEMPORALITY OF POWER

According to Foucault‟s account, for the modern hospital (clinic), the techniques that forge governable subjects

(patients) are the arts of “pathological anatomy”, while for modern prisons, these are the disciplines of “political

anatomy”. The former (pathological anatomy) organized the hospital as a “curing machine (machine à guérir)”,

externally, in relation to the urban space that it had traditionally inhabited (where it functioned as the ever

threatening repository of death), and internally, such that the material arrangement of the therapeutic space would,

of itself, retard the spread of infection and permit the introduction of assessment procedures and the employment of

specialized curative regimes.10

The latter (political anatomy) made the prison a “machine . . . to train or correct

individuals (machine . . . à dresser ou redresser les individus)” again externally, as a matter of its proximity to the

city, but, most importantly, internally, apportioning the disciplinary space such that it enabled a controlling

surveillance that was, at once, able to be everywhere and nonetheless remain silent.11

At the core of both techniques

stood a common problem: how to construct an infrastructure that would affect the normalizing gaze?12

The solution is what Foucault calls a process of “ritualizing (se ritualisent)” (SP, 225), one that takes up and

integrates more elementary practices and techniques. What, then, are these more fundamental arts?

In Surveiller et punir [1975], and at least implicitly in Naissance de la clinique [1963, rev. ed., 1972], Foucault

shows that such practices, fundamentally, have as their charge nothing less than constructing a uniquely institutional

7 //Note on reasons for setting aside the account of the asylum from FD and Le pouvoir psychiatrique (1973-

1974)//

8 See “L‟oeil du pouvoir” [1977], DE III, 190-207, esp. 190-191.

9 See NC, 107-123 and SP, 217-227.

10

See “L‟incorporation de l‟hôpital dans la technologie moderne” [1974, DE III, 508-521] and “Le politique de

la santé au XVIIIe siècle” [1976, DE III, 13-27; and 1979 rev ed., DE III, 725-742])

11

See SP, Part III, Chaps. II-III.

12

Cf. NC, 107-123 & SP, 217-227.

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space and time. Specifically, for an institution to be a machine of normalization, its space had to be partitioned into

enclosed, functional, and stratified sites (the “arts of distribution”, the cellular power) and its time had to be set by

precise sequencing of basic movements and the combination of these into naturally progressive, formative exercises

(the “control of activity” and the “organization of geneses”, the organic and genetic powers). All this, in turn, had to

be brought together by integrating the distinct architectural configurations of the built environment with its unique

temporal rhythms (the “composition of forces”, the combinatory power) into embedded spaces of supervision and

the seriated time of judgment, the field of examination, the domain that enabled the fabrication of individualizing

and totalizing cases.13

Now, with this basic sketch of Foucault‟s account, we have before us the outlines of the distinctive spatio-

temporal infrastructure of modern institutional life. But what precisely is this unique form of space and time? More

precisely, following again the line of analysis from institutions to practices and from these to the stratum of the

historical a priori set forth above, what is the ontological “point of anchorage” in which these structures are moored?

To begin to answer this decisive question, we must turn to a brief, but profound set of reflections that Foucault

originally delivered in two radio addresses in December of 1966, which, in turn, became the basis for a presentation

to a group of architects and urban planners in Tunisia in March of 1967 (and which Foucault permitted to be

published only a few months before his death in 1984), a lecture he entitled “Des espaces autres”.14

Of course, a full

reading of this rich and provocative text—one which has been the source of an entire strand of work in cultural

studies and human geography15

—is beyond the limits of what I can develop here. For purposes of the present

argument, I want to draw on but two of its core theses.

The first has to do with the historically changing experience of space. Foucault argues that the advent of the

modern age, the Age of Man as he called it at the time, was signaled more in a shift in the experience of spatial

order, than that of temporal duration. Specifically, an experience of spatiality arose in Europe in the early nineteenth

century that took space to be “the site (l’emplacement),” which, he says, is “defined by the relations of proximity

between elements or points” (DE IV, 753). The techniques of distribution, sequencing, and composition, the

infrastructural arts of construction by which modern prisons and hospitals were built and sustained are thus all

governed by an experience of space as a coordinated relational complex, a matrix, rather than as natural locality (as

in the Middle Ages) or as simple extension (as in the Classical Age). Time is encountered in this period as nothing

more than one derivative way of arranging such sites, as Foucault puts it, as but “one of the possible games of

distribution between elements spread out in space” (DE IV, 754).

Accordingly, modern institutions are distinctive because they are arrangements of irreducible and non-

superimposable sites, nestings of partitioned cells whose stratified embeddedness and isolatability serve as the bases

13

See SP, Part III, Chap. I.

14

The texts of the original radio broadcasts have now been published in Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique,

Les hétérotopies (Clamnecy: Lignes, 2009). The audio of the broadcasts is also available: Michel Foucault, Utopies

et Hétérotopies (INA Mémoire Vive, IMV056, 2004).

15

//Note on Soja et al. and Defert‟s recounting of this history//

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for the decomposition of movements into temporal segments and their subsequent ordering into developmental

exercises. The spatio-temporal infrastructure of modern social institutions is thus nothing other than a logic of nested

enclosure and confinement, of delimitation and pulsation, of the cell (space) and the series (time).

The second thesis concerns the constitution of this modern experience of spatiality. Foucault contends that sites

are always and necessarily relational. They are forged in and by not just their internal properties and configurations,

what Foucault calls the “space of the inside (l’espace du dedans)” (DE IV, 754), but by the “ensemble of relations”

(DE IV, 755) that each site bears with other sites, the “space of the outside (l’espace du dehors)” (DE IV, 754).

Each and every site—be it a train, a movie theater, or a house—is constructed of a web of relations. But amongst all

these relations, there are certain sites, Foucault argues, that are unique: they have “the curious property of being in

relation with all other sites, but in such a way they suspend, neutralize, or invert the ensemble of relations that are

designated, reflected, or thought by them” (DE IV, 755). That is to say, there are sites that are interwoven into the

construction of all other sites, and thus are essential to their being what they are, but that, nonetheless, in some

sense, contradict, stand as other or outside, all these sites. Foucault calls such sites “heterotopias” and he claims that

their fundamental social function is best understood in terms of their being a “mirror” to the other sites that make up

the social fabric (see DE IV, 755-756).16

Just as in a mirror we are able to see ourselves as other than we are and, through that strange othering, come

back to constitute ourselves as what we are, so in heterotopias, the sites of society are able to see themselves, reflect

themselves, in a space that is their direct or inverse analogy, the social order either perfected or wholly devolved, a

kind of desired or horrific space, a u- or dys- topia. Through these liminal sites, then, the spatiality of the social

order is, we could say, forced outside itself and, as displayed there in this otherness, in this moment of absence from

themselves, this spatiality is able to constitute itself back in itself. Heterotopias are thus, at once, virtual and real

sites of alterity by which and through which all the other sites that comprise society come to be what they are.

Foucault holds that in modernity such sites are preeminently heterotopias of “deviation” (DE IV, 757), that is,

sites that house those that society has deemed abnormal: clinics, rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, cemeteries, and,

of course, prisons. And he insists that such spaces, especially in the modern age, necessarily open out upon breaks in

and of time (découpages du temps), “heterochronias” (DE IV, 759), where society seeks either perpetually and

indefinitely to break with the flow of history and accumulate its past, striving to preserve it from its inevitable

erosion as in museums and libraries, or to suspend or bracket, if only for a moment, its onward rush, such as in

festivals and vacation retreats.

Now, following Foucault, I have emphasized here the constitutive function of heterotopias (and the

heterochronias that flow from them). They are the real spaces—the actual utopias one could say—that serve to form

the ensemble of relations by which and through which all the sites of society are constructed. But Foucault notes

that, as other, as outside (dehors), these sites not only serve as a mirror, they are also disruptive. They draw us and

the sites in which we dwell beyond ourselves; they, he says, are a space that “eats us and scrapes us away” (DE IV,

755). By this he means, heterotopias are sites where the ensemble of relations that make up society as a whole can

16

//Note acknowledging the limited role of the concept of heterotopia in Foucault‟s thought. In the radio

broadcast, Foucault introduces such sites as “contre-espaces” (Le corps utopique, Les hétérotopies, 24).//

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be contested and reversed; they are the settings in which resistance to the reigning order and the creation of other

possible forms of life are nurtured and begin to emerge. Heterotopias are thus, in a word, sites of invention.

Accordingly, we can quite easily and rightly conclude from this brief sketch that Foucault‟s studies of social

institutions—of the clinic, which he had already begun several years earlier, and of the prison, which were to

follow—are all investigations of heterotopias. As such, they seek to explore these liminal sites in order to unearth

the practices of representation (knowledge) and intervention (power) at work in them and, following again the path

of exploration set forth above, to trace these back to the historical a priori that is the set of conditions for what is

thinkable and doable within the age under analysis. They are able to do this precisely because such sites serve as

mirrors by which the social order, as a whole, is constituted. They are the spaces of the outside (inhabited by those

deemed unfit to live in the confines of society itself, the abnormal) that, by virtue precisely of this status, can serve

as points of access into the very structure of society and of the epoch as such. Remember that Foucault told us that

we investigate the clinic to ascertain not just the historical conditions of medical experience, but the fundamental

historical structures of experience in the Age of Man itself (see NC, 201-203) and, similarly, that we explore the

prison not just to uncover a political technology of the body, but to unearth the structure of, as he put it, the “carceral

archipelago” (SP, 347) that defines the social order of this same epoch.

But these sites are also, for him, points of resistance to this same reigning logic. They are the arenas within

which the arts of representation and intervention, so settled in their ubiquity in the social order, are continually at

issue, continually and practically being figured and reconfigured. The heterotopias of the clinic and the prison are

thus key sites of struggle within the modern epoch.

Now with this insight about the heterotopic nature of the clinic and the prison we come face to face with what

we must acknowledge is an important limitation of the studies that Foucault devoted to these institutions. The

practices and structures that he was able to unearth in his analyses of these sites bear the imprint of a specific

historical a priori: they are all elements within what could be called the disciplinary episteme, the disciplinary

dispositif, the disciplinary game of truth. That is, they are examinations of institutions and techniques of knowledge

and power that operate under the unique conditions of the age in which disciplinary forms of knowledge and power

reigned supreme. This is nowhere more evident than, as we have seen, in the experience of space that undergirds

them. The clinic and the prison are both, albeit in importantly different ways, sites of confinement, of segmentation

and enclosure. They are spaces separated from other spaces. The logic of the cell is the logic of disciplinary society

itself: one must leave one institution to enter another. They are all nodes or, to adopt Deleuze‟s apt term, “molds”

that together comprise the ensemble of relations, the matrix, that defines the social order in the modern disciplinary

epoch.17

Of course, Foucault realized, as Deleuze reminds us, that the world of modernity that he had examined, the Age

of Man, was waning, that it was collapsing, washing away, “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”, as he

so infamously put it at the conclusion of Les mots et les choses [1966]. And this meant, among other things, that its

experience of space was waning too, that a general breakdown of all sites of confinement and enclosure was

occurring, that all the various kinds of social cells were collapsing and something quite new was emerging. The

17

//Note on Deleuze//

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clinic has given way to the day hospital and home care; the prison to ever more subtle alternatives to incarceration,

to community service and electronic tagging and monitoring for at least those offenses considered minor. But what

is the exact nature of this shift and, most importantly for our concerns here, what are its implications for

understanding the heterotopic (and heterochronic) nature of contemporary social institutions?

Let us consider each of these questions in turn. Foucault analyzed the mutation that disciplinary arts and forms

of knowledge underwent most clearly in the series of lecture courses at the Collège de France that began in January

of 1978 (Sécurité, Territoire, Population [2004]) and that continued into the course of 1979 (Naissance de la

biopolitique [2004]).

In the lecture of 25 January 1978, Foucault examines what he argues are two importantly different techniques of

power: discipline and security. Disciplinary methods, he contends, operate by positing a model (the norm of optimal

functioning, the norm of normality itself, we could say) and they then seek to bring those under their purview into

conformity with this end. Security mechanisms, on the other hand, work by taking the different distributions of

normality already present and modulating them so as to to establish an interplay between them where the

unfavorable are brought into line, precisely and wholly by virtue of this modulation, with the more favorable.

Disciplinary techniques take the individual as their object and seek to bring each one into accordance with a posited

norm, while security looks to the population as a whole and pursues means for bringing its patterns and rhythms into

conjunction with one another in the most optimal way possible.

The historical example to which Foucault appeals to delineate these techniques is instructive: the smallpox

epidemic of the eighteenth century. Disciplinary methods here seek to treat the individual patient, to restore them to

health, if possible, and where not, to keep the contagion from spreading, they isolate the sick from those who are

infected. Techniques of security, on the other hand, are concerned, primarily, not with separating the sick from the

healthy, but rather, with the rate of morbidity, that is, the normal rate of death among all those, all of society,

affected by the disease, whether suffering its effects directly or not. Taking this overall rate and examining its

relationship to another normality, the rate of infant morbidity, for instance, which was much higher, led to the

formation, precisely at the interplay of these different normalities, of vaccination programs as an instrument to

modulate the rates, to effect a reduction in the spread of the disease.

Foucault tries to capture the distinction that he identified in these practices by a terminological refinement: both

discipline and security are types of normalization, he says, but the former (discipline) is a process of „normation‟,

while the latter (security) is, he tells us, simply „government‟ (see STP, 58-65). What we see here is a subtle

historical shift in the dominance of one type of technique of power and knowledge to another: from discipline to

security, from normation to government. Security does not simply replace discipline. Mutation is not, here, linear

succession. Rather, Foucault‟s claim is that discipline and security become historically intertwined with the still

existent practices of sovereignty to forge the newly emergent arts of governmental management that define the

contemporary era, a form of political rationality that takes living populations as its distinctive object of

representation and intervention. The problem of governing society is thus now the problem of shaping and guiding it

through its most natural processes; that is to say, it is nothing less than the task of governing living populations (the

task of biopolitics).

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In the preceding lecture sessions, Foucault isolates the decisive role that techniques of “spatial distribution

(réparition)” play in this mutation: whereas discipline operates, as we have seen, through enclosure and

segmentation of space, security demands that spaces be opened up and released so as to enable almost frictionless

flow and circulation (STP, 14). If discipline is defined by the construction of the cell and the series, if it is, as

Foucault terms it here, “centripetal”, then security is marked by the creation of passage and transfer, by the

formation of perpetually increasing expansion; in a word, security is “centrifugal” (STP, 46). Spaces of security,

spaces of governance, are thus sites not of confinement and constriction, but of incorporation and ever widening

distribution.

Again, Foucault‟s historical examples are helpful in seeing precisely what is at stake in this distinction:

Foucault considers the unique challenges presented by planning the configuration of towns in the Age of Man and in

the contemporary era. For the former (discipline), Foucault appeals to the building of Richelieu in the seventeenth

century. The original construction of the town took the Roman camp for its model. As such, it fashioned the

community using the grid of a square or rectangle which, in turn, was subdivided into smaller squares and

rectangles, all this dictating the alignment of streets and thoroughfares so that the needs of both trade and housing

and their internal hierarchies were satisfied. For the latter (security or government), Foucault looks at Nantes in the

eighteenth century. Here the central issue is not the construction of a wholly original space, but of growth and

circulation and, concretely, this took the form of cutting routes through the town and widening streets sufficiently so

that, by enabling sanitation, trade, relations with foreign partners, and of course, surveillance, a “milieu” (STP, 22)

is created. The milieu is the medium for the circulation of goods and services, people and wealth, and it is fashioned

or, even better, enabled precisely by regulating or modulating the already existent natural and artificial rhythms of

social life (see STP, 13-25).

With this then, we can now turn to our second question: if the breakdown of modern social institutions marks a

collapse of their ontological moorings and if this means that what is at issue for us is no longer sites of enclosure, no

longer the cell and the series, but passage and circulation, the milieu, then what are the implications of this for

understanding the heterotopic and heterochronic infrastructure of contemporary social institutions? Put otherwise,

what is the spatio-temporality of a contemporary space of invention?

III. THE ANARCHIC INFRASTRUCTIRE OF INVENTION

Foucault, of course, does not directly address the question at hand anywhere in his corpus. Nonetheless, the basic

rudiments of a response can, I believe, be worked out from the resources in his thought that we have surveyed. In

order to do this, we must take our bearings from the concept of the outside (dehors) and the two functions of

heterotopias.

Heterotopias (and the heterochronias to which they give rise), we recall, are, at once, sites of constitution and,

equally, sites of contestation. They are the mirror that reflects the ensemble of sites that comprise society back upon

themselves and thereby enables them to come to be what they are. And they are also the domain in which the reign

of this order is suspended, inverted, and thus able to be resisted. But both of these functions, both of these modes of

othering, arise out of the fact that heterotopias are, as Foucault put it, the “space of the outside (l’espace du dehors)”

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(DE IV, 754). Now, regardless of whether the outside is taken here as what is beyond or as what is at the limit, it is

clear that this alterity is conceived in terms of the disciplinary model of the enclosure, the modern segmented and

confined space of the cell (and the series). Heterotopias in the Age of Man stand outside all the vast partitions that

comprise this society.

But, as we have noted, it is precisely this epoch and its mode of spatial distribution that is collapsing: the

modern experience of spatiality as site or enclosure is giving way to that of medium or milieu. Accordingly, if we

are to determine the heterotopic nature of contemporary social institutions and, by that, set down the parameters for

thinking what a contemporary space of invention would be, then the fundamental question that we must address has

to be: what is the outside of a milieu? What form of otherness or othering is at work in the medium in which we now

live for it is only from such a space and by virtue of such a space that the current regime of knowledge, power, and

subjectivization can be contested and it is only in such a space that new forms of sociality can be forged?

Foucault defines a milieu in this context as “an ensemble of natural givens—rivers, marshes, hills—and an

ensemble of artificial givens—an agglomeration of individuals, of houses etc. The milieu is a certain number of

combined, overall effects bearing on all those who live in it” (STP, 22-23). Now, of course, strictly speaking, such a

medium, as the element or ether that supervenes in and from these relations, has no outside. And yet, if we, as

Foucault himself did, follow here the important insights of the eminent philosopher of science, Georges

Canguilhem, from whom Foucault appropriated this concept of milieu, then we can rethink the alterity of the

outside: we can move from the limit or beyond of partition to the error or mutation that is simply part and parcel of

the material environment, the disturbances that are endemic to the ether of the living order (see DE IV, 774-775). It

is by virtue of these errors that the living (le vivant) sustains itself, Canguilhem argued, and it is from these

contingencies that life is capable of creating something new.18

But what would it mean to speak of mutations or

disturbances endemic to the social milieu, that is to field of the passage and circulation of goods and people? Here

we have to think with Foucault beyond Foucault.

A milieu is never stable; it is an on-going process necessarily fraught with the precariousness of its own

existence; hence, the need for continual and vigilant modulation of its flows and circulations. As such, internal

aberrations, like entropy in information systems, inevitably arise. Some become full scale crises, most remain subtle

challenges in need of readjustment. But these interstices, these disturbances, then, at once, constitute the milieu and

open up possibilities for contesting and for transforming it. These errors in the smooth circulation of goods and

people are thus, in a word, the immanent heterotopias that infect the contemporary experience of social space and it

is therefore from them, from these miscodings or instabilities, that we must think the possibility for creating

contemporary spaces of invention. But what would this concretely mean? What might the arts of such spatial and

temporal production be?

Consider first the production of space. A space of invention within a milieu would require a quite distinctive

sort of architecture. Its built environment, whether real or virtual, would have to take advantage of the divergences

in the flows within the milieu, the points at which the circulations go slightly awry, in order to construct forums that

18

Note that I do not take this to mean that Foucault endorses in any way Canguilhem‟s vitalism; to the contrary,

see DE IV, 772-773, cf. DE III, 437-438.

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would draw us into engagement with one another—into deliberations, intimacies, contestations—in the commons

that these very practices themselves create, while, at the same time, providing for the respite we need to come back

to ourselves. Such an arena would be the stage upon which and through which a continual and collective invention

and reinvention of ourselves, individually and corporately, could become possible. The physical and cyber

geography of such heterotopias would be, in a word, nothing less than theatrical, a performance space fashioned in

and out of the interstices that inevitably open up in the circulation of capital and people. Thus, just as the physical

dimensions and material configuration of a Gothic cathedral are designed to draw congregants upwards into the

sacred light, so a space of invention must navigate the flows that define our lives in common so as to bring us into

the shared event of the work/play of collective self-formation.

Now to the question of time. If a space of invention is to take advantage of the disturbances that inevitably arise

in the social milieu, then the rhythm of such institutions must be ruptural, even fractural. Their temporality would

have to be fashioned through meeting procedures that foster cooperation, deliberative and contestatory interaction

and, at the same time, allow for periods of leisure, even outright idleness, so that the participants in these fora would

be able to engage in the creative play of collective self-constitution. These heterochronia would forge periods of

duration punctuated by moments in which the patterns of persuasion, authority, and even force, which have built up

in these sessions, are broken and redistributed. Such a temporal logic would nurture and develop long stretches,

lengthy passages, in which an arrangement of relations would be able to emerge and then, by the periodic

reassignment of roles, the on-going exchange of offices, responsibilities, and authority, these hierarchies would be

broken up. In this way, the theatricality of the space of invention would be supported by a perpetually fracturing

temporal dramatics.

In conclusion, then, I have argued for two basic claims: first, that institutions, in the form of spaces of invention,

are central to Foucault‟s conception of the practices of freedom, and secondly, that the constitutive features that

would define such institutions of transformation in the contemporary world would be theatrical and ruptural, an

anarchic infrastructure of space and time. By setting Foucault‟s accounts of modern institutions within the historical

ontological structures that he unearthed, we were able to see the need to rethink such sites beyond the disciplinary

spatiality that pervades those well known accounts towards the distinctive spatial distribution of contemporary forms

of biopolitical governance. Spaces of invention thus prove to be the heterotopic and heterchronic forums borne

within the interstices of the our present social milieu. Their uniquely anarchic space and time create a clearing in

which the genuinely creative work of individual and corporate self-fashioning can take root and grow. To be sure,

such institutional structures are always fraught with danger. Foucault, better than perhaps anyone else, will have

taught us that. Spaces of invention must thus always remain, among other things, workshops of continual

experimentation in and on their own infrastructure.