First published in: Il dispositivo Foucault (Venice: Cluva, 1977), 23-36.

Translated from the Italian by Marson Korbi

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

This essay was first published in the 1977 book, Il dispositivo Foucault, co-edited by the Italian philosophers Franco Rella and Massimo Cacciari and architectural historians Manfredo Tafuri and Georges Teyssot. The book contains the proceedings of a seminar organized and promoted by Teyssot together with the group of historians and philosophers from the Istituto di Storia, the research department lead by Tafuri at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV).⁠

The seminar can be understood as an attempt by Tafuri and his group to come to terms with Foucault, whose thinking was still relatively new and starting to emerge as a point of reference for the Italian left. In order to understand why Foucault was gradually becoming topical, it is important to highlight that the year of the seminar was a special moment for leftist intellectuals like Tafuri and Teyssot. Importantly, in 1977 the dramatic rise of the Movimento del Settantasette, the final episode of “The Long ’68” movement in Italy, raised issues related to gender, race, age, etc. which, with the exception of Teyssot and some students at the time, were new to Tafuri’s group.

Although the essay centers around the issue of Heterotopia, a crucial aspect is also how Teyssot describes the emergence of domestic space as an historical problem, one which, until the eighteenth century, was characterized by very scarce documentation. The following century not only focused on the medicalization of the house as a design topic, but also experienced a pivotal shift in the study of house types, residential units and urban morphology: in the nineteenth century, when the rise of the working class introduced the housing question, an important historical problem became tracing a genealogy of housing, urban strategies and labor movements. Listing these topics as clues for possible research projects, Teyssot’s essay, as is his research activity in general, is not only one of the best architectural understandings of Foucault’s work, but also a good starting point for addressing the histories of domestic space as a whole.

Marson Korbi

At the beginning of The Order of Things, Foucault mentions “a certain Chinese encyclopedia,” by Jorge Luis Borges, listing all the animals of the world.⁠Animals are divided into:

1. belonging to the Emperor,

2. embalmed,

3. tame,

4. suckling pigs,

5. sirens,

6. fabulous,

7. stray dogs,

8. included in the present classification,

9. frenzied,

10. innumerable,

11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

12. et cetera,

13. having just broken the water pitcher,

14. that from a long way off look like flies.⁠

This classification, which may obviously make someone smile for its incongruence and its heteroclite character, allows Foucault to start a discourse on how to organize things within a given historical period. Even the incongruence that one notices in the alphabetical order of a dictionary, encyclopedia or novel, is more logical compared to Borges’s classification, where the structure of the text no longer follow a homogenous classification criteria: an encyclopedia is heterogeneous.

The above heterogenous taxonomy can be defined as heterotopic. What we have in front of us is a real “heterotopia,” which, according to Foucault, is a clear example of the primary literary definition of the term. More precisely, Foucault says:

Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’ This is why Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.⁠

Besides his definition related to the field of knowledge and classifications, and the “taxonomies” structuring thought within a specific period, he could have added another definition of heterotopia related to the question of space, something that could be applied to the structure of real places. I will use an example to illustrate the meaning assumed by Foucault’s heterotopia when applied to a modern city: the sanitary organization of Caen in Normandy, a grid system implemented between 1740 and 1750 which has been closely studied by the French historian Jean-Claude Perrot.⁠ The city’s hospital system was structured as a grid of eight spaces, each hosting a different type of institution. The system was organized as follows:

The first box represents an institution known as the Bon Sauveur, where the prisoners of the nobility or the king were detained. Box 2 contains the Châtimoine Tower, a structure for madmen, prisoners and detainees who were confined by royal ordinance. Box 3 is related to the Hôpital Général, an important structure for the legitimate and poor children between the ages of two and nine, as well as for invalids, elderly, beggars, prostitutes, syphilitics, those afflicted with mental diseases, the feeble, imbeciles, delirious persons, epileptic, etc.⁠ (To us today, these “taxonomies” of confinement, or exclusion, are as absurd as the heterotopias invented by Borges.)

To continue, box 4 was dedicated to the petits renfermés, namely the foundlings having more than nine years old, but also poor children, bastards, etc. In box 5 there was the Baillage, the municipal prison of the city, for common condemned and suspected people. Box 6 contains the charity convent, la Charité, where prostitutes and prisoners, at the request of their families, were confined. In box 7 is a traditional structure with old origins, the Hôtel-Dieu, where foreigners, the sick as well as soldiers, foundlings, etc., were hospitalized. The eighth box of the grid was dedicated to the same institution as box 4, hosting female foundlings, also known as locked-up girls. As it could be noticed, there is a progressive passage in this grid from a system of total imprisonment to one of semi-confinement. The grid does not correspond to the modern system of confinement. It is therefore clear that there is an important leap to make between the organization of welfare and assistance services during the eighteenth century and the system of today. These are indeed the discontinuities that one would encounter within the organization of “things” on which Foucault has always insisted.

Discontinuity: it is hard to propose a smooth evolutionary history of the hospital that starts from its mythical birth and proceeds by illustrating its progressive development, showing ultimately how this structure has reached a definitive state, even if it remains improvable. Caen’s welfare system in the 1700s is a useful example of the meaning assumed by the word heterotopia when applied to a real historical situation in a specific place. It is in these terms that Foucault could speak of heterotopia, no longer intended in a literal sense but instead according to a topological understanding. Heterotopias are “real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and in-verted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”⁠

A double meaning of heterotopia, both spatial and temporal, could thus be defined: heterotopia is a “discontinuity” of time, an interruption of a certain order, abrupt rupture of the order of “knowledge,” and, at the same time, a heterogeneous place which faces up and enters on the background of space continuum.

The analyses of the “spatial discontinuity” are very important for comprehending the structure of modern space. But, before discussing that, we want to give a few brief indications on the notion of “historical discontinuity,” the main point of the Foucauldian discourse.

In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, according to the implicit and explicit method of historical investigation, known as Foucault’s archeology, history is defined as a system of discontinuities. In the book Foucault introduces the concept of episteme, for identifying the structure of things that “hold together” the Order of knowledge from a specific historical period. The episteme represents a conceptual configuration, a term related to the distribution of things, without revealing the Order itself: “in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.”⁠ The term episteme is used especially for defining what Foucault calls the Classical Age (seventeenth and eighteenth century), as opposed to the Modern Age, from which we are about to exit. For reconstructing the classical episteme Foucault examines three axes of knowledge: language, life and exchange, known in the Modern era as philology, biology and economy, and which in the Classical Age referred respectively to “general grammar,” “natural history” and “analysis of wealth.”

All 400 pages of The Order of Things pose the question of discontinuity and detachment of one order from the next: the text shows that there is no passage, “evolution” or “progress,” between, for example, Buffon or Carl Linnaeus’s “natural history,” still anchored to a project of universal mathesis, as a universal science of the order, and modern biology (from Georges Cuvier onwards), where “history,” classification, structure, the “table,” will be replaced by terms such as: anatomy, organism and series. Science, like any other cognitive activity, at a certain point encounters epistemological “obstacles”: to solve them means going through “ruptures,” which are manifested in the form of events. It is through Gaston Bachelard’s anti-evolutionist and anti-positivist thinking that the notion of discontinuity was introduced in France within the history of science. For Bachelard, as well as for his successor, Georges Canguilhem (who had a large influence on Foucault’s work), every particular science in every moment of its history produces its own norms of truth. While on the one hand, Bachelard’s epistemology is historical, Canguilhem’s history of science, on the other, is epistemological: one has to oppose to the subject, and to the continuity of the subject, an analysis of the object and the “ruptures” within the organizational system of knowledge; and, according to Foucault: “to achieve a form of historical analysis able to take into account the subject’s position in the network of history.”⁠ A science’s “truth” is produced as an “irruption,” and, it is precisely the concomitance of many “irruptions” that allows Foucault to define the episteme. However, as Canguilhem has noted, the very fact that Foucault in his analysis does not consider all sciences for the definition of the episteme, poses the paradoxical doubt of the epistemological existence of the “classical episteme” in itself: in Foucault’s reconstruction, the continuity of Physics from, let’s say, Newton to Maxwell, is not present anywhere. As Dominique Lecourt has pointed out, it is perhaps for this reason that the term episteme will be relatively abandoned by Foucault in his later works.⁠ Yet, his scope is not so much to create a universal system of knowledge, as it is to write an “archeology” of Man’s sciences, as therefore opposed to any kind of history whose aim is to search from the Classical Age (the Renaissance or the Enlightenment) the origins of the actual human sciences.

In fact, Foucault’s project is very connected with the drastic critique of the notion of origins as it was put forward by Nietzsche in the introduction of his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) and in paragraph nr. 3 of The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880). Genealogy, or the genealogical approach, is for Foucault: “a form of history that takes into account various areas of knowledge, fields of discourse, categories of objects, and so forth, without requiring reference to any subject whatsoever transcending the field of actual occurrences concealing the emptiness of his identity throughout the course of history.”⁠ The problem of the Origins has to be ignored in order to concentrate on that of the Beginnings of a specific science or cognitive practice, or given concept. This is the way certain problems were analyzed such as, “Les commencements de la technologie” (The Beginnings of Technology), by Jacques Guillerme and Jan Sebestik, and other issues related to how mathematics was applied to social and political management (like Roshdi Rashed’s studies on the mathematician Condorcet).⁠ In these “histories” what comes into play are the modes of how concepts appear. According to Canguilhem, formulating a concept (within a given science) means to define a problem: a problem needs to be posed and its appearance is related to the possibility of its formulation.

Concepts are not words. A concept could be defined with many words. By opposing two concepts, one will often reveal the knowledge structure of a given time: for example, the concept of the organism and machine. In the field of biology, at the beginning of the 1800s, the supporters of the former were advocating for the (organist) theory of the cell, against those who, like French anatomist Xavier Bichat, supported the (mechanic) theory of the tissue. At that time, the big opposition between normal and pathological, instituted a new understanding of a norm in relation to life processes.

Another binomial of great interest was the relation between life and environment. Where does the idea and the concept of environment come from? Precisely from the mechanical conception of space. Newton had the need to define the notion of ether as an answer to the problem of the definition of a space where forces acted on each other (Descartes, for example, was unable to conceive the action of one force without any contact between two bodies). The Encyclopédie affirmed in very mechanical terms that water is the environment where fish can swim. According to the numerous translations of Hippocrates’s treatise, On Airs, Waters and Places, all the known fluids (air, water and light) later assume the characteristic of becoming “environments,” (what in French is called milieu).

Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, could be located in the mechanical tradition while establishing the dialectic between being and environment, putting it in the form of a mathematical problem: “In a given milieu, given the organ, find the function, and vice versa,”⁠ a statement that reciprocally poses the biological problem of the relationship between the organism and its environment.

Within a given science, these “concepts” do not only have a formative value. Yet, once a clear understanding of the environment was set, it was time to develop the modern notion of the habitat (in its biological, geographical and ecological sense): as a result, the modern discourse on habitat, home, dwelling, hygiene and density was born. These new instruments started to be used around 1830, a moment when the population who were accumulating in the city, which became a potential reservoir of labor power, introduced entirely new fields of study.

As soon as these instruments (or concepts) started to circulate in society, they assumed the value of an historical Analogon.

Very often, the metaphorical translations of these kinds of concepts are related to the production of a certain “discursive practice.” Around 1750, concepts such as “function,” used in the texts of physiocratic economists like François Quesnay and Nicolas Baudeau, assumed a new semantic form; it was the minister of the navy, Turgot, who in 1770 first used the word “functionary” in a political sense. Later, Bichat associated it to biology, by saying in 1800 that: “Life is the set of functions that resist to death.” Other concepts were soon introduced (and used in analogical ways) like urban “functions,” later called urban “nucleus,” as well as urban “tissue,” urban “organism” and “evolution.”

Now, the question is if it makes any sense to apply this method of investigation to architecture. In which way does architecture participate in the definition of an episteme for a certain period? Where are the discursive practices of architecture located? Is the architectural “discourse” to be understood as about architecture in general or as an “architectural discourse” properly, the logos, constituted by the architectural, organized and constructed, space?

As an answer it is possible to define three different approaches related to architecture.

First: architecture is constituted as a (discursive, social and “technical”) practice. This practice emerges in the act of composition and design, which are processes that could be defined as the manipulation of behaviors (habitus), the organization of production (the program, the organigram…), the distribution of activities, flows etc. and the organization of forms (both in terms of modelling, and for what concerns typology).

Second: architecture is a form of production per se; it has to do with the production of drawings on paper: it is therefore on the process of representation where it would be possible to make an epistemological analysis.

Without obviously forgetting the third aspect, that the architecture discipline also belongs to the economic sector (the building industry), which needs to be studied for its own sake. Architecture could alternatively be intended as “text,” but, considering the multiplicity of its practices, the knowledge that is related to it in general cannot be reduced to one epistemology. However, having clarified the limits of this kind of investigation, it is possible to try to identify the instruments (or “concepts”) and the “discursive practices” that have structured the discourse about architecture, and the “architecture discourse” itself within a specific period. (As an example of discursive practices one can mention the binary opposition, regular and irregular, which was very important throughout the eighteenth century.)

Within the history of “discursive practices” in architecture there can be no theories to confute: the true and the false have the same value when it comes to indexing the discourse. As Foucault says in the “Discourse on Language”:

Within its own limits, every discipline recognizes true and false propositions, but it repulses a whole teratology of learning. The exterior of a science is both more, and less, populated than one might think […] perhaps there are no errors in the strict sense of the term, for error can only emerge and be identified within a well-defined process […].⁠

Other issues related to the analysis of architecture’s context have to do with the city and the territory. The discontinuity between town and countryside (both in space and time), as defined by Marx in his Grundrisse, was also analyzed by Max Weber in his book The City. ⁠ As Weber points out, the city as a place was a product of the jurisdiction of the feudal world, where private property was transmitted within the family by inheritance; the space of the city was protected by privileged economical statutes (like the exemptions given to certain medieval villages) which contributed in the formation of a fiscal territory, a notion followed later by that of “agglomeration,” and others like it. Yet, “discontinuity” does also exist on the scale of the city, and not only as a result of the fragmentation generated by the speculation on land revenue. Indeed, we still know very little about housing in the city during the 1600s and the 1700s, the era of the “medicalization” of the urban block, the house and the family.

As shown by the work of demographers, and historians like Philippe Ariès and Louis Chevalier, as well as by Foucault’s research, it is impossible to build a linear history of the habitat. The first attempts for reconstructing a history of urban morphology were made through the study of the “evolution” of residential typologies. However, these were elaborated as retrospective deductions based on nineteenth-century survey works or from (notarial, fiscal and cadastral) documents that allowed, at best, a reconstruction of the housing typologies, through the study of the plot and the reading of the descriptions of the “function” of the rooms. Yet, as Philippe Ariès and Perrot have pointed out, until 1820 the rooms did not even have “functions.”⁠ Moreover, according to Françoise Boudon, before the end of the seventeenth century, “the documentation on the houses of Paris around the quartier of Les Halles is only handwritten.”⁠ Redrawing the interpreted documents is thus equivalent to a process of rewriting history.

This kind of proceeding is absolutely legitime when it is oriented to the study of urban preexistences for their conservation, but is wrong when is presented as a method of historical investigation. Here it is possible to reveal a discontinuity in the history of housing, echoed as well in discontinuities related to the city, which “with its principle spatial variables, appeared as an object to medicalize.”⁠ One of the variables at stake is the habitat (dangerously promiscuous, and completely undifferenced). The other is the street (“where the most disreputable professions are exercised,” a space where the difference between public and private space is often confused). Other variables are represented by the so-called “designated areas” of the city, such as hospitals, slaughterhouses and facilities like sewers and drinking water, aspects that occupied the pages of many scientific and non-scientific treatises. Accepting Foucault’s research lines, the real difficulty is to resist the temptation of opposing the habitat of modernity (as “objectual,” “functional,” etc.) to the myth of the primitive habitat—the “natural” one, even though we know very well that the classical code of architecture, albeit undifferentiated, is not at all “natural.”

However, it is possible to advance a more substantial criticism of the “archeology” of the vast containment movement of the pathogenic city, as outlined by Foucault. He delineates a sort of biopolitics, that is a “noso-politics,” which needed to “isolate within the urban system regions that have to be urgently medicalized,” and create areas to be “insularized” within the continuum of the urban “tissue.” However, at this point, with Foucault, there remain numerous unresolved problems, like the reconstruction of the modes of this “insularization” and its implementation within the existing social relationships. To put it in simple and schematic terms: city planning, alongside the transformation of the city into a place dedicated exclusively to service activities, goes through procedures that cannot be taken for granted.⁠ Foucault outlined the general “strategy” of this transformation, but often, especially in his last texts, he missed the individuation of the techniques which made these politics real (leaving only an abstract understanding of the concept of a planar and undefined “power” within the theater of this struggle). From the point of view of our discipline, the “insularization” of the city has its historically defined modes of implementation: once the program (which governs the project) is set, then follows the elaboration of the architectural type needed for the construction of the institutional object; ultimately the project enters within an institutional procedure (passing through committees, assemblies and administrations) where the object is modelled in the confrontation with the social body. Every program is thus “confronted” with different and opposing interests which have their own modes of expression (an elected council, the petition of a pressure group, and so on: all of them having their own modes of expression, each the result of political struggles). Therefore, every program is conformed and takes form (even in architectural terms) by means of a complex system of actions (techniques and politics) which allows the effective realization of every project. These fields of (theoretical and practical) actions contain all the techno-scientific “practices,” together with the, more or less codified, institutional procedures that every project must follow to achieve its realization. These “practices” constitute a “democratic” strategy, they establish the rules of implementation, fixing the “rules of the game” necessary for structuring and designing modern spaces.⁠ While the history of these procedures has yet to be written, Foucault’s indication on the problem is particularly relevant: “history, as it is practiced today does not withdraw from events; on the contrary, it seeks only to broaden their scope […] The significant aspect of this is that there can be no taking account of events without a definition of the set to which each belongs.”⁠ Let’s conclude with the wish that Foucault’s texts may introduce among us historians, as Canguilhem would say, “a generalized fear of anachronism.” The result will be a supplement of rigor, and this would not be in vain.

AUTHOR

Georges Teyssot is an architect and a scholar. He has taught history and theory in architecture schools like the I.U.A.V. in Italy, Princeton University’s School of Architecture, and the GTA, ETH, in Zurich. Since 2004 he is Professor at Laval University’s School of Architecture in Quebec City. He has authored and edited more than nineteen volumes, including Die Krankheit des Domizils (1989), The Architecture of Western Gardens (1990) co-edited with Monique Mosser, and A Topology of Everyday Constellations (2013).