The Philosopher-Historian as

Cartographer: Mapping History with Michel Foucault1

THOMAS R. FLYNN

Emory Universityand Institute for Advanced Study

The historian who sits in Philip II's chair and reads his papers finds himself transported into a strange one-dimensional world, a world of strong passions certainly, blind like any other living world, our own included, and unconscious to the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockle-shells. A dangerous world, but one whose direction can only be discerned by watching them over long periods of time. Resounding events are often only momentary outbursts, surface manifestations of these larger movements and explicable only in terms of them. - Fernand Braudel, Preface to The Mediterraneanand the MediterraneanWorld in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I

The map is not the territory - Alfred Korzybski, Scienceand Insanity

By now it is a commonplace that Foucault is a spatializing thinker. Even if he had not admitted it, the multiplicity of spatial metaphors that punctuate his writing, the numerous tables and geometrical figures (axes, diagonals, circles, triads, quadrilaterals and the like) that appear at crucial junctures in his thought would have given him away, not to mention the powerful iconic arguments that

31 32 usher in, sustain, and advance his "histories." Consider, for instance, his parsing of Velasquez's Las Meninas in The Order of Things, his account of the punishment of the failed regicide, Damiens, at the outset of Discipline and Punish, and of course, in that same work, his well-known analysis of Bentham's "Panopticon," the image that has become emblematic of what has come to be known as the carceral or disciplinary society itself. I propose that we consider such spatialized reasoning first as a method of his- torical understanding (I), then as a strategyin Foucault's ongoing struggle against traditional intellectual history (II), and finally as a self-referentialtool, turning the compass and sextant on Foucault's own work the better to understand the "spaces" charted by his lifelong project(s) (III).

. I. Spatialized Reasoning

Although Foucault's The Archaeologyof Knowledgehas been described as his quasi- structuralist discourse on method, he had developed and applied a distinctive and alternative approach to the history of ideas in his three previous "archae- ological" studies. Delving into the archive of archaeology itself, let me under- score its spatializing character. It works distinctively counter to the telec and evolutionary methods of the traditional history of ideas. His grande thèse for the Doctorat d'état entitled Folie et déraison:Histoire de la folie a l'ige classique(Madness and Civilization in its highly abbreviated English version) is a prolonged discourse on the acts of exclusion and inclusion, of physical confinement and medical dis- placement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries .2 In this work he intro- duces two of the conceptual instruments that fashion his approach to history from then on, namely, transformation and displacement.3The latter, inspired by Freudian topography, is obviously a spatial expression, and the former, implic- itly so, once one realizes the function it plays as an alternative to such terms as "evolution" and "influence" in more traditional historical discourse This has been noted by a number of critics, friendly and otherwise. Speaking of Folie et diraison, Michel Serres, for example, points out that "[Foucault's] style itself seems to have created the structures ... that organize the work and its object. These structures," he explains, "are clearly of a 'geometric' nature; they cover the historical ensemble under consideration with a highly developed net- work of dualities. It is necessary to deploy these 'binary' structures across every possible level of experience ... to get a picture of the rigorous organon guid- ing the organization of this book."5 That "binary" logic, of course, is one of the hallmarks of structuralist writing with which Foucault's work at this time is being linked. It figures in Levy-Strauss' kinship trees, in Roland Barthes' dis- membering of Racine's oeuvre, in Lacan's bifurcation of the linguistic subject, in Althusser's reduction of Marx's Hegelian triads to analytic dyads, and in the comparative mythologies of Georges Dum6zil, whom Foucault acknowledges in