The Food Court Heterotopia: Spatially Reimagining Left Politics

     In preparing for my teaching assistant position at UCD, I recently read Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” a 1967 lecture posthumously published. This relatively early Foucault work concisely outlines the structure of a very real type of space: the heterotopia, essentially a kind of pastiche materialized in real space in which different spaces and times are juxtaposed for the ultimate purpose of creating an illusory-real space revealing how illusory our actually real spaces are. A near perfect example, one not that had yet to reach its zenith in Foucault’s lifetime: the American mega shopping mall.
     Typically, Foucault notes, while all cultures perhaps have heterotopias, the heterotopias themselves fall into two main types: those of crisis (the boarding school and the honeymoon suite , both places where sexuality is first realized for boys and young women, respectively) and those of deviance (prisons, rest homes, mental clinics). Okay, then what crisis or deviance does the mall respond to?
     Any stroll through a food court can, at some level, hint at what almost entirely marginalized and sublimated deviance the mall harbors in neat a semi-circular, white-lit smorgasbord. At most malls one can find Japanese, Indian, Mexican, Cajun, Chinese, Italian, and, if you are a truly “lucky” bourgeoisie, Thai food stalls. And for domestic pride, a MacDonald’s or Burger King (but never both in the small food court!). Here unfolds in cordoned-off compartments bearing too eerie a resemblance to Bentham’s Panopticon prison (a favorite paradigm of Foucault’s) all those ethnic identities (and what expresses an ethnic identity more than food, that most personal and communal a heritage?) in plain view for the leisurely consumer, each disparate culture (always so alien-like from our own) offered up to us for easy and inexpensive consumption. Each stall has its obligatory ethnic representative, each representative its requisite and appropriately accented English.
      What startles one most forcible, when detached just enough from this scene, is the absolute habitiualization of the entire space. No one thinks anything is deviant, any one food is anything other than what is common at a food court. And one would be, from a certain perspective, correct. Certainly, the Indian food isn’t properly representative of Indian food (of what region and style of “Indian”?). Instead, and this comment is, clearly, very banal for any “multi-culturally” adventurous dinner, each ethnic food is greatly “Americanized” by not only our food distribution networks, but our tolerance for culinary deviance: not too spicy and not too strange looking, please.
     What each food culture has undergone is, clearly, a process of acculturation requisite for belonging to the heterotopic space within the mall. And this is precisely Foucault’s point. Entrance into a heterotopia can occur only after “one has completed certain number of gestures” designed as “rites of purification.” To participate in the economic system of the mall, various marginalized cultures must purify themselves of certain culinary deviances (spicy strangeness).
     Yet, what is truly included in the overall heterotopia of the mall (the food court being a sort of heterotopia within a heterotopia)? Clearly one doesn’t see too many Japanese clothing outlets or, rarer still, a Spanish speaking sales person at the Gap. Here, one can see the slightly horrific resemblance between the food court and the Panopticon, the perfectly semi-circular layout of stalls and the circular organizations of Bentham’s cells, both so ordered to facilitate easy visual examination. No doubt the shopper is not ogling the Mexican worker selling burritos to make sure he isn’t plotting a prison break (as if the shopper were a panoptical security guard), but instead simply looking over the stalls to find what culinary exoticism he or she will indulge in. Yet the two gazes are, structurally speaking, nearly interchangeable. Both are gazes implicated in the same action of deviance’s containment. While the prison serves to localize criminals, the food court serves to localize within the whitewashed corridors of the American cathedral those cultures that otherwise would slip from visibility into the cracks and corners of our invisible, domestic third worlds.
     Such resemblance between gazes underscores the bipolar function of all heterotopias. According to Foucault, heterotopias operate between two poles: on the one hand “they perform the task of creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusory.” For the mall’s food court this means, brutally, look, these marginalized ethnicities are here, in the mall, being economically successful and represented; those domestic third worlds cannot be all that real. On the other hand, Foucault writes, heterotopias “have the function of forming another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous, and well-arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived, and in a sketchy state.” The food court’s very real spatiality says, blatantly, there may exist a world were these cultures are even more marginalized then here, but at least in the mall we have a clean-cut, white-lit hall of nations from which we can experience all that each disparate culture has to offer.
     When viewed spatially, these ethnic and class disparities call more forcibly for a new conception of politics – a post-identity politics based upon one’s relation to dominant power. In her seminal 1997 essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: the Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (another essay I read in preparation for TA’ing), Cathy Cohen calls for precisely such a reimagining of radical, left politics. Cohen, questioning the efficacy of the queer political movements in the late ‘90’s for their too limited (and often class-privilege blindness) power binary of heteronormative/queer, petitions for an entire reworking of the conception of political belonging: “Far too often movements revert to a position in which membership and joint political work are based upon a necessarily similar history of oppression – but this is too much like identity politics. Instead, I am suggesting that the process of movement-building be rooted not in our shared history or identity, but in our shared marginal relationship to dominant power which normalizes, legitimizes, and privileges” (458, emphasis added). What the heterotopia of the food court reveals to us spatially is the shared, seemingly abstract (but no less real) relation of each seemingly disparate ethnicity to the dominant power – the predominantly white, middle class shoppers and dinners. And this heterotopia can do more than reveal such a shared marginal relationship to dominant power; it can provide a concrete site for the fostering of shared political action (unionization, collective rent bargaining, voter registration drives, etc) among these otherwise disparate ethnic communities, subversive because the food court, like its ancestor the Panopticon, is laid out such that those in their little stalls and compartments cannot communicate, cannot unionize, cannot create a common political identity.

Apparatus: The Technological Capture of Living Being

      At the close of my Leave No Trace post I introduced the technical term “apparatus” as LNT’s corporate face, defining the term according to Agamben’s lead: an apparatus is a anything “that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (“What is an Apparatus?” 14). Now, this definition is exceedingly convenient in hinting at the objects hypercapitalism produces (from cell phones to automobiles to televisions to blogs to LNT). And certainly, Agamben is on to something very significant with his definition, especially when considering the scope of his inquiry. In attempting to define our contemporary condition, Agamben asserts, “It would probably not be wrong to define the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses” (15). Further, the inquiry into such a proliferating plane of apparatuses (the implication being the absolute capture of all aspects of being) is of crucial importance because “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.” Such is the “experience” of our contemporary condition: the infinite proliferation of these “things” which capture all aspects of our existence and in so doing separate ourselves from our very being (the apparatus’s division “separates the living being from itself and from its immediate relationship with its environment” [16]). And what makes our current apparatuses peculiar, Agamben claims, is their ability merely to desubjectify their captives, in contrast to other, non-hypercapitalist apparatuses, which function according to a desubjectification-subjectification articulation (the classic example being confession, an apparatus which demands the abnegation of the “self” [desubjectification] in order to offer that individual a rebirth without sin [subjectification]).
     However convenient Agamben’s definition of apparatus may be I feel that it makes only a good starting point for our understanding of the crucial role these formations play today. I would, therefore, like to modify Agamben’s definition, in part reverting to one source of his term (Foucault) as well as amending it with Walter Benjamin’s concept of technology.
     Foucault understands apparatus (for him, dispositif) primarily according to three aspects. First, the apparatus arises as a response to an urgency. Second, because its raison d’etre is derived from a historical (actual) urgency, the apparatus always consists of a concrete strategic function located in a power relation (think: Bush’s “Patriot Act”). Third, because of its concrete, functional relationship with power structures, the apparatus emerges at the intersection between power and knowledge relationships and accordingly forms “the network established between” a “heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions – in sort the said as much as the unsaid” (Power/Knowledge 194). Thus, Foucault defines the apparatus as “a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.”
     Now, for Foucault, the apparatus does not come down to a singular technology of power (a single law of the Patriot Act . . . which are truly terrifying in their “being in force without signification,” the very status of the law within a state of exception), but rather that larger set existing between discourses, technologies, laws, etc – a tack differing from Agamben’s singularization of the term. What I above all want to stress with Foucault’s definition is the apparatus’s status between elements of power – a special status that, I argue, gives the apparatus, no matter the scale, its force of capture.
     Thinking of the apparatus as between structures of powers allows for the examination of living being’s capture at all levels and all scales. To think apparatus thusly is to think of them according to Benjamin’s concept the technological relation (which Benjamin cites as the particular relation modern man has with nature): “technology is the mastery not of nature but mastery of the relation between nature and humanity” ("One-Way Street" 487). Technology is the mastered relation with the thing, not the mastery of the thing itself. And that is precisely how the apparatus captures. An apparatus never captures the living being as such; instead it captures living beings, technologically, through a form of bare life the apparatus constructs with its concomitant mechanism of desubjectification. This is precisely why each apparatus involves desubjectification: by separating living being from its nature, the apparatus constructs a “medium” (a figure of bare life) through which it can master living being.
     The apparatus is, accordingly, this articulation through a medium, the very passage of living being through a one-sided play of power in which living being is striped and separated from its nature. Because the apparatus is something “between” objects locked in a power relation, the term cannot be reduced simply to one of the objects within that relation. Instead, the apparatus will never be this or that particular object (this or that cell phone, television, police act, homeland security law), but a specific manner external to that specific object. This manner generates the apparatic force of any object we deem an “apparatus.” This manner is force of capture, the potentiality of an object’s controlling another object. Crucially, this manner is potential; it is able to not be. An object taken as such is never an apparatus inherently; the apparatic manner particular to an object can, in cases, not be. Yet, with the right conditions (when objects are imbricate within larger networks of power relations), the manner forcibly constructs an articulating power relation between objects, wherein one object can capture the other object. Only after the actualization of such a relation can (and do) we call an object an apparatus.
   However, the apparatus as such is the potentiality of the apparatic articulation – the manner that articulates a power relation between objects.

Paradigm, Attempt One

     Because my Leave No Trace post made extensive use of the term paradigm, I feel that an attempted full-fledge definition cannot be postponed any longer. As my "About" page indicates, I have appropriated the term from Giorgio Agamben’s chapter “What is a Paradigm?” in his most recently translated work, The Signature of All Things: On Method (the chapter was initially a lecture given at the European Graduate School in 2002; you can find it here. It is somewhat long, but definitely worth the time as an introduction to Agamben’s more recent work and methodology). I will be taking, therefore, most of the following definition from this seminal text.

     Our common understanding of paradigm comes primarily from Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn defines the term according to two phases. First, Kuhn defines a paradigm as a disciplinary matrix designating techniques, models, and values a group (of philosophers, scientists, theologians, etc) more or less implicitly adheres to(what we typically call the “paradigm”); second, Kuhn singles out a solitary element within that matrix which unifies it through its status as an example, therefore not only replacing an explicit set of rules or prescriptions, but also ensuring the formulation of a tradition of inquiry.
     Foucault takes up this second aspect of the Kuhnian paradigm, shifts the focus onto discursive formations in general (wherein the paradigm becomes, an “episteme”), and posits the problem, “In the enigma of scientific discourse, what the analysis of the episteme questions is not its right to be a science, but the fact that is exists” (Archeology of Knowledge 192). This facticity is crucial to understanding the paradigm, especially as concerning historical and critical inquiry (the purpose of my work as a scholar). Agamben asserts that Foucault’s paradigm seems to follow Kuhn, insofar as it is “not only an exemplar and model” but also “an exemplum, which allows statements and discursive practices to be gathered into a new intelligible ensemble and in a new problematic context” (“What is a Paradigm?” 18). However, what makes Foucault’s paradigm different from Kuhn is his treatment of it within historical inquiry; for Foucault, “the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.”
     Thus Foucault initiates a new understanding of the paradigm, one that radically calls into question the dichotomous opposition between the particular and the general through its radical singularity. And this is where Agamben takes up Foucault’s definition of paradigm and pushes it to its fulfillment. For Agamben’s paradigm can be, primarily, characterized by its absolute singularity, its radical suspension of several binaries of historical knowledge. Agamben’s (and by extension, mine) paradigm is, to take a phrase from Benjamin, a dialectic at a standstill.
     First, the paradigm is an analogical form of knowledge, not inductive/deductive; it accordingly moves from singularity to singularity (31). Second, the paradigm likewise suspends the dichotomy between the general and the particular (and that form of knowledge wherein the general is known through the particular/ the particular known through the general; i.e. deduction/induction) and replaces it with a “bipolar analogical model” insofar as analogies “intervene[] in the dichotomies of logic . . . not to take them up into a higher synthesis but to transform them into a force field traversed by polar tensions, where (as in an electrical-magnetic field) their substantial identities evaporate” (20). These suspensions are, in fact, a singular gesture, one that also entails the paradigm’s suspension of its belonging to the group of which it also serves as an example. That is, the paradigm exposes itself as an exemplar of a historical group (a sort of historical milieu) through its suspended belonging to that group according to its radical singularity (of course, by extension all historical objects are potentially paradigms, given the premise of historiographical discontinuity). The paradigmatic group, however, cannot be presupposed in the paradigms (they are, after all, absolutely singular, or, to borrow an object-oriented ontology term, “operationally closed”); instead, “it is immanent in them” (31).
     What this diagrammatic structure of the paradigm seeks to map is, namely, that implicit paradigmatic core which allows a discursive formation to exist at all; the diagrammatic structure of the paradigm given above is, then, the structure of the paradigm’s communicativity, its pure potential to be communicated. Accordingly, Agamben’s sketch of the paradigm outlines the particular manner a historical inquiry must comport itself to historical “material,” to those paradigms which will illumine previously ignored series of phenomena. Hence, for Agamben the homo sacer (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life), the Muselmann (Remnants of Auschwitz), the state of exception (The State of Exception), and the anthropological machine (The Open) are all paradigms illuminating not the origin of modernity, but a series of discontinuous connectivity. Likewise, for myself Leave No Trace is a paradigm that, when treated in a specific manner, can be suspended from its belonging to a certain group (anthropocentricism) thereby making that group intelligible in a new light. LNT is, therefore, an absolutely singular historical object that serves as an example of a larger paradigmatic plane, but is nevertheless irreducible to that plane.
     While it has been implicit throughout this post, I will nonetheless make explicit the particular “region” of the paradigm. As a historical object it belongs, properly, to the realm of discourse (I do not use the term “thought” here because I wish to avoid the correlationist fallacy). The paradigm is accordingly a discursive formation (something that is part “thought,” part “lived reality”). So, when writing about LNT, I treated its discursive/expressive formation (as a slogan and proper noun) paradigmatically, i.e. as a singularity allowing the exposure of an under-exposed, “larger” paradigm (for LNT: anthropocentrism). Thus, something like LNT can allow the critic a glimpse at the paradigmatic core, or engine, of a Kuhnian “paradigm” (a set of discourse practices centered on an implicit “example”).