[Framework Post] Week 5: Michel Foucault, Power and Heterotopias.

Shifting from Michel Foucault’s oft-talked about conception of the notion of heterotopia or utopian space, and/ or other ideas in spatial politics, Foucault expounds in Ethics: Essential Works of Michel Foucault (1997) the concept of freedom (a process I like to call the practice of free will) as “the ontological condition of ethics” (284). And by this, Foucault associates freedom with not what people often misread freedom as—for example the ability to do anything within one’s wilful capacity, but more so a “care of the self” (287), or in fact a form of self-governance in which the play of power politics begins within the self.

This is an important and welcomed disjunction in our discussion of architectural and spatial politics, where in fact we often view politics as an active tug-of-war between bodies. So often, we only recognise power politics when an external foreign influence enacts some form of oppression upon another. When in actuality, power politics runs deeper and more intrinsically in our desires for freedom to not be impinged.

Philosophy of ethics (also referred to as moral philosophy, et al) evolved with the precondition that every person has free will, which one exercises in every form of activity one makes. This free will is immitigable, almost completely independent and irrevocable even under the duress of exigencies. Free will, resultantly, grants everyone an unequivocal sense of freedom to do almost how one might not only ensure the perpetuation of not only one’s but also another’s individual freedom. Ironically, the key to this is in, as Foucault mentions quite clearly above, self-governance.

In The Ethical Navigator (2000), ethics scholar William Capitan loudly proclaims that “being moral [or in fact even immoral, albeit momentary] is our opportunity to act with control and focus and to experience our freedom at the highest level” (Capitan 1157). Without this control of power—interpreted as a set of moral codes and values—in the self, we would constantly be wary of oppression by a foreign entity:

I cannot lay down my arms and let down my guard unless I know you will, too. But I can really do this only if I can be sure everyone else will continue doing so. This requires more than an understanding: it requires a relationship of trust. (Capitan, “Introduction”, x)

But what price does freedom pay? My only reply takes the form of contemplating what early 19th Century French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

I think that democratic nations have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they seek it out, become attached to it, and view any departure from it with distress. But they have a burning, insatiable, constant, and invincible passion for equality; they want equality in freedom and, if they cannot have it, they want it in slavery. They will endure poverty, subjection, barbarism but they will not endure aristocracy.

[…]

Men’s taste for freedom and equality are, in effect, two different things and I am not afraid to add that in democratic nations they are also unequal. (de Tocqueville, qtd in Jandas Devan, “When Freedom”)

References:

1. Capitan, William H. The Ethical Navigator. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2000.

2. Devan, Janadas. “When Freedom and Equality Are at Odds.” Straits Times. 16 Jul: 2005.

3. Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as Practice of Freedom.” Ethics: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. London: Penguin, 1997. 281-301.