Peter Riedlsberger / Version 1
TIME PASSES, BUT SPACE JUST LINGERS ABOUT
BETWEEN SPATIAL DISCOURSE AND DISSOLUTION
Space is an indispensable, prevailing condition in art and science. Since it is a basic category in art’s operation, in creative perception and in theoretical abstraction, it must be constantly redetermined. Space is an essential postulation in contemporary efforts in the domains of theory and system to gain greater insight into the embedding of social issues at the nodal point of the time-space intersection. In the production of history, space is a component, just as time is a component in the production of placement (localization). The following is an attempt at an approach.
SPACE AS A SOCIO-HISTORICAL PLACE, ON SPATIAL DISCOURSE
“The site position is determined by the immediate adjacency between points or elements, which can be formally described as mathematical sequences, trees, and matrixes. We are living at a time in which Space is featured to us in the form of its relations to the position.” (1) The spatial can be interpreted as a structuring medium by which social relations are fostered. Conflicts and clashes for places and localities can be seen as a spatial striving for effect, social conditioning, and power. “Spatial-areas” are therefore the effect and origin of these very conflicts, as well as being an important strategy for densification through poesis: of expression, of texture, and of form. In order to recognize socially suitable space, it is essential to differentiate between the material existence of social space and its social dispositions. Through the common practice of social appropriation by social subjects, a loading of significance occurs and can be ascertained in the physical realm just as a social area or space is materially ascertained.
Direct access to the spatial discourse of a prior reality is therefore, theoretically speaking, impossible. Hence, a spatial-locality is characteristically a construct based on specific constellations of social relations which occur at a concrete time and space. In his earlier works, Foucault discusses the “Spatialization of discourses,” best described in his studies about the origins of madness and of psychiatric institutions, as well as the reorganization of medical knowledge and of the clinical complex. The spatial-area becomes relevant in the social fabric of its institutions. The socially produced order of discourses creates spaces which Foucault describes as “Heterotopias,” “other Rooms,” or “Counter-Spaces,” such as psychiatric hospitals, prisons, barracks, cemeteries, theatres, gardens, museums, libraries, and the like.
In contrast to the term “Utopia,” which is reserved for things and notions which actually have no location, the term “Heterotopia” is applicable to “completely different Rooms.” In a pathological context, a Heterotopia denominates the disposition of an abnormal position of cells; it is an aberration from the normal topology, a divergence from the usual arrangement, principally Other beyond the order of the existent, which mostly is reflexively organized and constructed on a principle beyond our access. Heterotopias are thus about the transformative contingencies of the given and their respective transformative areas. These are Rooms and yet Counter-Rooms and still Other-Rooms. They are places beyond all location. These are real spaces, effectively, wherein the edifices of society are erected: “Counter-Spaces,” so to speak the factually realized utopias in which the very sites within the culture are simultaneously represented and disputed. They are certainly places outside other places, although they can actually be located. Therefore, Heterotopias are those places in a society which in their very structures are totally or partially made intrinsic to the existing order principle, or they can upset the inherent order principle against the presumed disorder in society. In this way, Heterotopias create a reduced image and counter-image of society.
A society is not really ordered through a single metastructure, but rather by an accumulation of the most diverse, heterogenous effects of power. Heterotopias represent exactly these imaginary metastructures, which are then effectively realized utopias, because within them, any ideal order is functional, and the whole of society has been perennially crisscrossed by the heterogenous balance of power. It is either that Heterotopias have to create or reveal illusionary spaces, in which the entirety of the realm of the real and all placements of human life are confined or revealed as even more illusory, or in which an entirely other “Room” is created, another real space which is so consummate, so elaborate, so well-ordered that it starkly contrasts with our disorderly, disparate, wayward chaotic space.
The Heterotopia may, in a single location, consolidate several rooms, various placements which are inherently incongruous. The particular rapport of Heterotopias and temporality is such that it ruptures the linear order of time. Heterotopias are often combined with time ruptures, which one could perhaps best describe as “Heterochronias.” These heterochronic Heterotopias always presuppose a system of accession exclusion, which simultaneously create the effects of isolation and permeability. A Heterotopic place is not easily nor readily accessible. One can only gain access with a certain permission and/or after the completion of specific rituals. There are Heterotopias as well which appear quite accessible, but conceal peculiar exclusionary factors. Anyone/everyone may enter these Heterotopias but actually, it is only an illusion: one may believe one has entered or gained access yet one is excluded. Heterotopias are established in negation to all kinds of “other Rooms,” manifest in a creative subversion against the prevailing spatial qualifications. These spatial qualifications embody reality as a factual result. Heterotopias incorporate an illusion; they are transformed, disparate order. Herein resides the imaginary of a reality as its Other, as potentially unreal. Reality always appears to compress, not in the least fragmentarily, on the surface of a no more irreducible creation of the imaginary as its own incrustation, so to speak. Ordering and ordered reality acquire a greater illusion, a mutually incorporating, registering interaction, which perpetually spins between actual or real spaces and Heterotopias. The Heterotopic mode of real illusions acts as granter as well as antagonist of the very existing spatial order of reality. On the basis of the Other of the Heterotopias, the Other initially actualizes itself as the identical Other of the Heterotopias. The principal Other, as the alternating motive of movement of orders, is made invisible not only through means of the expressed co-meaning, but also through a means of ordered accessions of the Other, whose emergence is fomented elsewhere. Of the reality-transformative potential of Other Spaces, they decide and compose initial order, but then become space and make the Other primarily, namely Another Space, experienceable.
IMAGINARY SPACE AND SPATIAL DISCOURSE
The Other is experienced in human beings through its mirror image. This finding of Lacan’s is the very inception of the psychological ego. The discovery of its mirror image establishes the imaginary. It lends an identification of the body to a place in which it is not present or locatable. In order to elucidate the Mirror Stage, Lacan employs a classical experiment conducted by Henri Bouasse which is referred to as “The Experiment of the Inverted Vase.” The experiment entails an inverted vase which has been positioned in front of a concave mirror under which a bouquet of flowers is hung upside down. Yet the concave mirror provides an image of the vase in an upright position with the bouquet of flowers in it.
Most important is the discovery that the Mirror Stadium comprises not only the discovery of one’s own image, but the fact that between the mirror and the Subject a “First Room” constantly opens up and ever forcefully expands. At its end is the Horizon, which acts as the border of the Mirror Stadium. Beyond the Horizon is the Real. With the aid of the Imaginary and the Symbolic (the Realm of Signs), the Subject creates a Space which is confined by the Horizon. In order to affirm this, it is necessary that the Ego have its own proper position, which is the body. Based on the Lacanian terminology of the Three Orders, this body, in turn, must be reconverted into an object in order to gain knowledge about itself. The whole of perception originates from the Mirror Stage and is then eventually transmitted from the face and body to the Other (otherness). (The big Other designates a radical alterity.)
The psychological localization bears an analogy to optics. Lacan: “The optical images display disparities – some are purely subjective (those that are referred to as virtual), while others are real, so to speak. That is to say that they behave as Objects and should be treated as such. Optics are based entirely on mathematical theory, without which it would be impossible to structure these as such. In order for an optic to be granted, it is necessary that each given point have one point and a given Real Space, which shall then be a point which corresponds with another room, which is the Imaginary Space. That is the fundamental structural Hypothesis.” (2) The blending of inner-space and an outer-space, between the virtual and the real, is analogous to optics, and allows for a clear distinction between real and virtual, while simultaneously making this division impossible. It may arise that something subjectively virtual may be seen or perceived as real, although one may be well aware that it can in no way be real. “The Imaginary Space and the Real Space admix here. We don’t really know anymore where the Subjective and Objective are (located).” (3) Lacan displays here the tight associations and disarray between reality and virtuality, which result in a deep interrelation of the Imaginary and the Real Spaces in the Subject. For Lacan, psychological maturation is initially a process of virtual reflection by the Subject and only then, in a second instance, is a real attainment of total control of one’s own body possible. “That is, precisely what I always insist upon in my theory of the Mirror Stadium. The mere sight of the unmitigated body provides the Subject with an imaginary control of its body, which opposed to the real control, is one that is premature or precipitated.” (4)
According to Lacan, this virtual, principally differentiated self-reflection of self- knowledge is the constitutive dimension of the Human, on which the entirety of its later fantasy realm shall be structured. “On this level, the body image affords the Subject the first form which allows the Subject to situate what the Ego is and that which it is not. Well now, shall we say that the body image is, when introduced into our schema, like the imaginary vase which contains the real floral bouquet. It is so, that we could imagine the Subject before its birth and the nascency of the Ego.” (5)
This is how Lacan arrived at his famous formula, which so succinctly explains his spatial corporeality theory: “The unconscious mind is the discourse of the Other.” (6) It is firstly through the real external for the previously only virtual inner to be constituted as a real spatial-corporeal control of the Ego. The body, according to Foucault, is seen as an uncircumventable foundation of the spatial experience whilst also being a spatially saturated construct. The body is the zero point of the world, the place where paths and spaces intersect. Thereby, the body is nowhere; it is a utopian core in the center of the world, from which I proceed. The body is utopian, because in order for it to be experienced as an entity, it must make an effort to enter the Heterotopian space of the mirror.
This Heterotopia, namely that of the mirror, initially allocates a sp ace to the utopian body experience. Firstly, the body becomes such an uncircumventable “place, from which there is no escape, to which I am damned.” (7) The Heterotopically brokered incorporation of the utopia of a non-diffused, ego-adherent body in the finite space of a body is what altogether makes the body and ego able to be experienced as a merciless topos. Nothing short of utopias are also necessary in order to make it (the body) “vanish.” The direction of impact of utopias consists in their entirely implementing a first-ever, ineradicable utopia, namely, that of a bodiless body.
All utopias seminally articulate a hope: to cause the body to disappear. I don’t have to veg out in this skin anymore. Instead, I will have a bodiless body that is intently beautiful, immaculate, transparent, luminous, agile, unlimitedly powerful, of boundless endurance, free of all fetters, invisibly secured, and in perpetual transformation. The human body is the key player of all utopias. The role of the human body as a Heterotope is therewith included in installation, performance, and works of art. Therefore, it is about unmasking the very body as one of the oldest utopias. It is not about relocating a pre-existing biological body as other examples illustrate through vizard, tattooing, and maquillage, by means of a realized utopia, to another space, another place which is not directly of this world. This procedure would yet lay down a language only on the body, by resorting to all of the utopias contained in the body. Surface phenomena would emerge namely, the utopian faculties directed against themselves to practically discover that the body in its materiality and carnality, as it were, is the very product of its own phantasms. These phantasms deem to reveal these by means of a destroyed body, in order to develop entirely other spaces. Foucault’s words point in a different direction; it doesn’t necessarily need to be gruesome, a habitual space which allows for the body to experience itself differently. “In Love, one can sense how the body exists underneath the hands of the other, beyond all utopias, in all its density.” (8)
Citations
Author’s note: The citations in the original text are in German. In the above text, I use my own translations and include here the original sources.
(1) Foucault, Michel (1967): “Von anderen Räumen.” In: Dünne, Jörg / Günzel, Stephan (Eds.): Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt on the Main, 2006, p. 318.
(2) Lacan, Jacques (1954): “Die Topik des Imaginären.” In: Dünne, Jörg / Günzel, Stephan (Eds.): Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt on the Main, 2006, p. 213.
(3) Ibid., p. 217.
(4) Ibid., p. 217.
(5) Ibid., p. 218.
(6) Ibid., p. 222.
(7) Foucault, Michel: Die Heterotopien. Der utopische Körper. Frankfurt on the Main, 2005, p.34.
(8) Ibid., p. 35.
Sources
Bauriedl, Sybille: “Räume lesen lernen: Methoden zur Raumanalyse in der Diskursforschung.” In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, Volume 8, No. 2, Art. May 13, 2007 (http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-07/07-2-13-d.htm). Bourdieu, Pierre: Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft. Frankfurt on the Main, 1982. Foucault, Michel: Die Heterotopien. Der utopische Körper. Frankfurt on the Main, 2005.
Foucault, Michel (1967): “Von anderen Räumen.” In: Dünne, Jörg / Günzel, Stephan (Eds.): Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt on the Main, 2006.
Foucault, Michel: Archäologie des Wissens. Frankfurt on the Main, 2002.
Foucault, Michel: Die Ordnung der Dinge. Frankfurt on the Main, 1974.
Foucault, Michel: Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft. Eine Geschichte des Wahns im Zeitalter der Vernunft. Frankfurt on the Main, 1993.
Lacan. Jacques (1954): “Die Topik des Imaginären.” In: Dünne, Jörg / Günzel, Stephan (Eds.): Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt on the Main, 2006
