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ОглавлениеThe first part of the following chapter seeks to deploy Foucault’s work and his notion of heterotopia as a theoretical framework for reading Auster’s New York fictions. In this chapter, I aim for an in-depth exploration of Foucault’s heterotopia, its theoretical roots and major features. Then, I will explore the subsequent interpretations of heterotopia and their contribution to the study of Auster’s space. I will argue that heterotopia can be utilized to elucidate the entangled relations of space, power, the subject, resistance and history. The second part of this chapter concentrates on Levinas’s concept of the subject because in heterotopias and Third Spaces, it is only through the other person that the subject is able to establish a sense of self that is ethical.
1.1 Heterotopia as Differential Textual Sites
The term “heterotopia” originally comes from the study of anatomy, where it refers to “parts of the body that are either out of place, missing, extra, or like tumors, alien” (Hetherington 42). Foucault developed this term first into a representational and then into a spatial concept. He first introduced the concept of heterotopia in The Order of Things (1966), in his discussion of Borges’ imaginary “Chinese Encyclopedia,” in which it is written that
animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (xv)
For Foucault, what is fascinating about Borges’ “Chinese Encyclopedia” is the enumeration and classification of things that do not have any relation to each other. He elaborates that the “Chinese Encyclopedia” and the taxonomy it proposes “lead to a kind of thought without space, to words and categories that lack all life and place, but are rooted in a ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected communications” (xix). Therefore, for Foucault, there seems to be a peculiar “culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space, but one that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak, and think” (xix). Foucault calls this unusual ←29 | 30→culture of ordering things heterotopias in contrast to utopias. He asserts that although utopias have no real locality 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” (xviii). On the other hand, 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 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. (xviii)
The quotation above indicates that heterotopias offer an alienating representation and reveal the limits of language. In this sense, Foucault envisages material heterotopias that displace normative spaces which are open to new meaning makings and disruptive juxtapositions.
1.2 Heterotopia as Absolutely Other Real Spaces
While in The Order of Things Foucault introduces heterotopias as textual sites that are incongruous, in “Of Other Spaces,” however, Foucault presents a very different account of heterotopia. Here, heterotopia refers to discordant material sites. Foucault begins his article by declaring that the present epoch is above all an epoch of space, concomitantly, an epoch of simultaneity. He writes that “we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” (22). We are at a moment, he asserts, “when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (22). Furthermore, Foucault points out that the space we live in is not a kind of void, setting or dwelling in which we could place individuals and things. For him, the place in which we live is a heterogeneous space, which takes the form of relations among sites (23). He further explains that among all these sites that are in some way related to each other, there are places which are like counter-sites, which have “the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Accordingly, due to the fact that these places are absolutely different from all the sites they reflect and speak about, Foucault calls ←30 | 31→them heterotopias, in other words, other spaces. Foucault then goes on to give six principles of heterotopia, supplemented by examples as diverse as cemeteries, Oriental gardens, military camps, hotel rooms, mental hospitals, monasteries, carpets, museums, libraries, festivals, hammams and prisons (24–27).
The first principle of heterotopia states that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias, but they take quite varied forms. Namely, there is no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia which can be found (24). The second feature of heterotopia suggests that although heterotopia has a precise function within a society, the same heterotopia can as its history unfolds function in a very different fashion (25). According to the third principle, heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites, that are in themselves incompatible. As the fourth trait of heterotopia, Foucault states that heterotopias begin to function at full capacity when there is an absolute break with the traditional time (26). That is to say, heterotopias do not follow traditional time or official history. They have a totally different relation with time and embrace temporal discontinuities. Hence, Foucault notes that heterotopias are at the same time heterochronies. The fifth principle of heterotopia is that heterotopias require a system of opening and closing that isolates them from other spaces while retaining their penetrability. The sixth principle suggests that heterotopia has a function over all the space that remains; it is like a boat “a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity” (27).
Additionally, Foucault points out that there are two forms of heterotopias. First, there are crisis heterotopias, which are privileged, sacred, or forbidden places; “reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.” (24). I argue that the heterotopia of crisis can be utilized as a critical space where alternative self-other relationships can take place. As Ghosts shows, crisis heterotopia may refer to a space where the individual undergoes a rite of passage, namely, an ethical educative process, through which he is endowed with a new sense of who he and the other is.
Foucault further argues that there are heterotopias of deviation, where “individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm” (25). Similar to crisis heterotopia, deviant heterotopias prove to be crucial for this study to explore the transgressions that call into question spaces that are so often taken for granted. In addition, heterotopias of crisis and deviation which are beyond normal time and space are most illuminating in the formation of ethical agents and ethical spaces that take “the other” into account.
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1.3 Heterotopia after Foucault
Obviously, Foucault’s heterotopia is an unfinished and ambiguous concept. In recent studies, particularly in architecture, literary studies, social geography and urban studies, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia has been expanded and various scholars have brought out further aspects of it. Below, I aim to discuss other implications of heterotopia developed by various scholars. It should be noted that heterotopia, despite those elaborations after Foucault, still remains a vague concept that is open for further constructive discussions and creative formulations.
First and foremost, Kevin Hetherington in The Badlands of Modernity argues that heterotopias are not simple other spaces that can easily be pointed out: the Otherness of heterotopia is established by their difference in a relationship between sites rather than their Otherness deriving from a site itself (43). Namely, for Hetherington, heterotopia is a differential space in the sense of an unbounded and blurred space in between, rather than the easily identified space at the edge (17–18). Heterotopias are spaces that can be found at the center or periphery, and, indeed, every space has the potential to become a heterotopian space. Similarly, Mary McLeod in her article “Everyday and ‘Other’ Spaces” discusses that the “other” should not be conceptualized as “a question of what is outside everyday life-events…but what is contained and, potentially contained, within it” (189). Along the same line, Heidi Sohn in her study “Heterotopia, Anamnesis of a Medical Term” states that heterotopias are not margins; rather, they are exceptions which cannot be fitted and fixed into a rigid taxonomy because they differ from all categories (49). Taking these interpretations into account, it can be asserted that heterotopias are continually constituted spatial figurations that challenge dichotomous and dialectical oppositions between sameness and difference, dominating and dominated spaces, center and periphery, near and far, and here and there.
Another significant implication of heterotopias is that they do not exist in the order of things but in the ordering of things. Hetherington defines heterotopias as
spaces of alternate ordering. Heterotopias organise a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. That alternate ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things. (viii)
As clearly indicated in the quotation above, Hetherington views heterotopias “as sites in which new ways of experimenting with ordering society are tried out” (13). Essentially, it is an ordering that is continually changing, fixing and unfixing itself; it is a performance, which is open to infinite change and uncertain ←32 | 33→consequences (28, 35). Heterotopia, therefore, proves itself to be processual rather than ontological. More significantly, heterotopias create the possibility of ordering society in a new way, providing underground resistance. This leads to another important implication of heterotopia. As Benjamin Genocchio in “Discourse, discontinuity, difference” maintains, heterotopias are embedded in the urban as possible spaces for “embodying a form of ‘resistance’ to our increasingly surveyed, segregated and simulated socio-spatial order” (36). Similarly, Loretta Lees in “Ageographia, heterotopia and Vancouver’s new public library” states that heterotopia is a “spatially discontinuous ground” that “opens a critical space” which “provides a real site of practical resistance” (321). In this sense, heterotopias are the potentially transformative spaces of society from which innovative forms of resistance can flourish. Nonetheless, as will be expanded further, although heterotopias provide escape routes from power, they are not liberated or liberating spaces. In other words, they are always entangled within the forces of power. As Robert J. Topinka in his article “Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia” puts it, they are not positioned outside of the established power relations (56). Moreover, heterotopias are ambiguous, polysemic and multi-dimensional sites, potentially imbued with a different meaning each time. They can be spaces of the dominating and the dominated, spaces of self-empowerment and vulnerability as well as disciplinary spaces of surveillance and spaces that make room for the others. This feature of heterotopia seems to make it an arbitrary space; yet as Foucault himself emphasizes, each heterotopia has a precise function within a society (“Of Other Spaces” 25).
In summary, the concept of heterotopia does not only suggest disrupting other spaces, but it can also be used as a significant analytic tool that challenges dominant constructions of spatial, social, political and cultural orders. Genocchio also points out that Foucault’s heterotopias suggest “we scrutinize and question the implications and possibilities of the slips, exceptions, oddities lurking at the limits of the system that defines for us what is thinkable, sayable, knowable” (43). In this regard, by focusing on Auster’s New York fictions and suggesting that they can be taken as heterotopias, this study argues that the idea of heterotopia can be expanded and utilized as an “analytics of otherness” that has a number of distinctive implications for disentangling and re-entangling the complicated relationship between space, power, resistance, the subject, the other, history and ethics. My intention in the following part of this chapter is to critically examine the orders, which heterotopic spaces not only disrupt but also allow reconsider, in completely different and innovative ways.
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1.4 Heterotopology I: The Entangled Interplay of Spaces of Power and Resistance
As pointed out in the introductory part, contemporary cultural and social geographers contend that the contemporary city has become a site of crisis mainly because architects, urban developers and regional planners have transformed the city into a flat, indistinct and uniform site whose lack of features has created the placelessness of place (Willet 57). Accordingly, as Richard Sennett points out, the contemporary city has been conceptualized as a receptacle of power, where power structures have “[accumulated] a mountain of rules defining historical, architectural, economic, and social context … [to repress] anything that doesn’t fit in … [and to insure] that nothing sticks out, offends, or challenges” (2).
Out of this line of thinking emerges an understanding of space as “characterising the static block of power-the system” where power is equated with domination (Massey, “Entanglements” 282). As Sharp et al. indicate, in the social and cultural geography, power is conceived of as “power to dominate” or as “dominating power” (1–2). Similarly, acts of resistance appear either futile and trivial acts or “anti-authority struggles” (Foucault, “Afterword” 211). According to Sharp et al., such an understanding of power/resistance risks constructing a binary of opposing (dominating and resistance) forces and implies that power is the preserve of the dominant (10). As Cresswell states “This is the clear suggestion in de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between strategies of the powerful (based on a powerful space of the proper) and tactics of the weak (based on myriad movements through these spaces” (265). In his theoretical work Power/Knowledge Foucault envisions power as a complex force. Notably, as Ellen K. Feder in “Power/Knowledge” states, the French word for power is “pouvoir” and this word carries the meaning of not only “force” but also “ableness”:
In Foucault’s work pouvoir must be understood in this dual sense, as both “power” as English speakers generally take it (which could also be rendered as puissance or force in French), but also as a kind of potentiality, capability or capacity. Power, Foucault tells us, must be understood to be more complex than a term like puissance conveys; it has multiple forms and can issue from “anywhere.” (55–56)
According to Foucault, the word “power” tends to lead to a number of misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form, its manifestations and its unity. In his conceptualization, “power cannot be a merely external force ←34 | 35→organizing local interactions; nor can it be reduced to the totality of individual interactions, since in an important way it produces interaction and individuals” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 207). Then, for Foucault, the analysis of power cannot assume the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law or the unity of a domination; on the contrary, according to him, these are only the terminal forms that power takes (The History 92).
Continuing this line of discussion, Foucault advances five propositions regarding power. First and foremost, power is not a thing that is acquired, seized or shared, or something that one holds onto or allows to slip away (The History 94). Power must be understood as being exercised rather than possessed. In other words, it is a practice rather than a possession, or an object or essence. Therefore, its exercise and effects can be attributed to “dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings…a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess” (Discipline 26). Secondly, power does not exist in a position of exteriority to the relationships it works upon, but it is engrained in their internal structure (The History 94). Thirdly, power is not a top down force. It comes from below, and there is not a binary or all-encompassing opposition between the dominant and the dominated. Rather, power relationships emerge at all levels of society independent of ruling powers (The History 94). That is to say, “power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of” (“The Subject” 343). Furthermore, the fourth argument by Foucault is that “power is ‘always already there’ and no one is never ‘outside’ it” (Power/Knowledge 141). Consequently, power refers to “a thoroughly entangled bundle of exchanges dispersed ‘everywhere’ through society, as comprising a ‘micro-physical’ or ‘capillary’ geography of linkages, intensities and frictions, and as thereby not being straightforwardly in the ‘service’ of any one set of peoples, institutions or movements” (Sharp et al. 19–20).
The last proposition about power suggested by Foucault is that where there is power, there is resistance; that is why, resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Foucault continues:
[There is] a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case. (History 95–96)
Accordingly, when power is redefined as a phenomenon that is intrinsically fragile and unstable, spaces of resistance cannot be conceived simply as a ←35 | 36→reaction to power. They cannot be understood as acts that are trivial or futile, either. While in classical terms spaces of resistance are regarded as spaces which contest norms and powers; under a heterotopological perspective, spaces of resistance are perceived as an aspect of power. Likewise, Cresswell states that resistance is a subset of power (264). Resistance, Cresswell therefore maintains, does not indicate absence of power or how people are free from forces of oppression inscribed in space. Instead, spaces of resistance are spread out, sprawling and enmeshed with power networks: “one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance,” says Foucault, “producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds.” (The History 96). This also leads to another significant assumption that resistance does not usually manifest itself in a solid and stable form. Just as power does not have a single identifiable point and is fleeting, resistance is transitory as well. As Éric Darier in “Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction” claims, “Yesterday’s resistance can become today’s normalization, which in turn can become the conditions for tomorrow’s resistance and/or normalization” (18). Accordingly, as Darier further explains, the concept of normalization/resistance cannot be understood as “a fixed metanarrative describing ‘power’ in the abstract, but, on the contrary, should be approached as a constant recontextualization of power relations as lived and experienced by humans” (18). From this perspective, the domination/ resistance schemeta cannot be understood as fixed or abstract concepts. On the contrary, they should be conceived as inextricably dependent, unstable, relational as well as historically and spatially contingent processes.
Most significantly, lines of power are indispensable for instigating acts of resistance and other ways of becoming and living. In other words, power relations are the condition for the possibilities for change, innovation and creativity. Hence, the concept of power cannot be conceived as a manipulative and subjugating force. It is, rather, enabling and constructive. As Foucault, therefore, contends:
If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network that runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Power/Knowledge 119)
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Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power follows a similar line of thought in her description of power and writes:
[w];e are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order…But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are. (2)
As can be understood from Foucault’s and Butler’s views, power is a positive concept that enables new forms of subjectivities and creative ways of lives. In summary, as Auster’s City of Glass and In the Country of Last Things bear out, power does not only have negative but also constructive dimensions. Power is a dynamic that can be exercised by everyone and that can trigger a sense of agency that would allow for the possibility of resisting deterministic structures of spatial and political orders. Hence, the spaces of cities cannot be assumed to be passive, ordered and normalized spaces which are mere instruments of power. Adopting a heterotopological approach, this study claims that space is an active force as a result of the ever-knotted power and resistance relations. This implies that the urban space is to be understood as a dynamic spatiality where nothing is fixed forever, where there are no essentializing inclusions or exclusions and no hierarchies of power. Ultimately, power can be manipulated to create other spaces for everyone so that the city may become a more democratized and open space.
1.5 Heterotopology II: Spatialized Historiography
Traditionally, history is seen as a linear, progressive, deterministic and time-ridden axis. The historian aims to dissolve events into an ideal continuity, as a teleological movement or a natural process. Furthermore, as many geographers and historians such as Philip J. Ethington, Thomas Bender, David Carr, Edward S. Casey and Alun Munslow have noted, while space is seen as a passive place where events unfold, history is perceived as a dynamic force.4 It was first Foucault who stated that throughout centuries
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space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the other hand, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic… [T];he use of spatial terms seems to have the air of an anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile to time. It meant…that one ‘denied history’… They didn’t understand that [spatial terms] …meant the throwing into relief of [historical] processes. (Power/Knowledge 70)
This statement reveals that the traditional notion of history dismissed geography as a homogeneous and changeless stage, a backdrop to actions of the individuals or simply belonging to nature. Along with the above-mentioned geographers, historians and Foucault, this study argues that space and history are inseparable and space and human action are active forces in shaping history. Therefore, this section focuses on how a heterotopological approach invites a re-examination of the traditional ways of understanding history and history writing. It will be held that the concept of heterotopia as a spatialized thought enables the opening up and re-composition of historical imagination through a spatial perspective. Eventually, I argue that just as heterotopias contest power structures and ultimately make room for other spaces, they also pave the way for the emergence of “other times,” namely, areas and peoples of history previously silenced and repressed.
Firstly, heterotopia lets us view history not only as a temporal but also a geographical event. To put it another way, history can be traced back and brought forward through spatial movements. As Ethington in “Placing the Past” argues, “History is not an account of ‘change over time,’ as the cliché goes, but rather, change through space. Knowledge of the past, therefore, is literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of history indexed to the coordinates of spacetime” (466). In this sense, investigating the past through spatial practices is, first and foremost, an attempt to end the one-sided historicist emphasis on time, origin and chronology. A spatial inquiry into history, thus, is about conceiving history not in its abstract, bygone and unreachable form but as a presentable and re-liveable occasion. As Ethington states, “Placing the past takes ‘the past’ out of time, locates it in materialized topoi, and asserts that history, in any symbolic system, is the map of these topoi” (487). Consequently, this study suggests an itinerary and experiential approach to history. As Thomas Bender in his article “Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History” also states, “the centrality of human action to the meaning of history” should not be underplayed (498).
Furthermore, re-establishing history through spatial activities may well align with Foucault’s notion of genealogy. From a heterotopological view, genealogy can be observed in and as motion through space. As Maria Tamboukou in “Genealogy/Ethnography” also points out, “Foucault’s genealogies are particularly attentive to the catalytic role of space in the ways human beings construct knowledge about themselves and the world around them” (197). In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” as an alternative to the traditional devices ←38 | 39→for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a continuous development, Foucault offers a genealogical inquiry into the past. Foucault defines genealogy as a specific type of history that challenges the pursuit of the origin or descent. In Foucault’s view, descent or origin does not mean heritage or lineage. The aim of the genealogist is not to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things, either. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people (“Nietzsche” 81). He explicates that the search for the origin is an attempt to disinter subjugated knowledges which are “knowledges from below,” “unqualified or even disqualified knowledges,” that are “local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity” (“Nietzsche” 7–8). Consequently, the genealogist’s task should be, by taking a spatial approach, to identify the accidents, the minute deviations, the errors, the false appraisals and the faulty calculations that has given birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us. Ultimately, genealogical analysis reveals that heritage is not an acquisition or a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath” (“Nietzsche” 82). Thus, Foucault asserts that a search for descent is not about building foundations: on the contrary, it is about disturbing what was previously considered immobile, unified and showing the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself. As José Medina in “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance” also points out, “genealogies have to be always plural, for genealogical investigations can unearth an indefinite number of paths from forgotten past struggles to the struggles of our present” (21).
Finally, the purpose of history guided by spatial itineraries and genealogical investigations is not to discover the roots, but to commit itself to the systematic dissociation of identity and its dissipation. That is, it does not seek to redefine our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return or discover a forgotten identity eager to be reborn; it seeks to make visible all those discontinuities that cross us (“Nietzsche” 94–95). A spatialized inquiry into the past also means being able to develop counter-histories. In this sense, the other times are not simply memories that are to be included in a heterogeneous collective memory; rather, as Medina indicates, they “remain counter-memories that make available multiplicitous pasts for differently constituted and positioned publics and their discursive practices” (24). The result of such an approach may, however, be one of estrangement. As Medina states while investigating history “we make past lives alien as they also make our own lives strangely unfamiliar” (28). Accordingly, “far from making ourselves free to remember or forget in whatever way seems most convenient to us, we make ourselves vulnerable to the past by opening our memories to the challenges and contestations of various subjects-the subjects in our present and in our future as ←39 | 40→well as those in the past” (28–29). Nevertheless, the spatial attempt at looking into history proves to be a progressive act because the emphasis is on the individuals’ potential ability to actively and critically compose history; to have a degree of control as regards to the re-making of the past.
1.6 Theorizing Levinas’s Ethics
This section brings into Levinas to the study because in both Auster’s heterotopias and Pamuk’s Third Spaces subjects are not perceived as autonomous selves, who embark on a spatial journey of self-invention, self-discovery or self-empowerment. It is only through the particular other person that heterotopias and Third Spaces are conceived, and it is only through the other that the subject gains a sense of ethical self. That is why this study eschews to view the urban subjects of Auster and Pamuk as flâneurs. The fact that the urban characters of both authors are always interrelated and dependent on the other provides a direct antithesis to the urban flâneur who as Priscella Parkhurst Ferguson in “The Flâneur On and Off the Streets” points out “walks through the city at random and alone, a bachelor and a widower…suspended from social obligation, disengaged, disinterested, dispassionate” (26). She further states that flânerie “requires the city and its crowds, yet the flâneur remains aloof from both” (27). Rather than strolling the streets aimlessly and keeping to themselves, Auster’s and Pamuk’s characters, on the other hand, aim at relations, contact and response-ability.
As already indicated, in this study, the de-centered nature of the subject is conducive to his becoming an ethical self. That is, the disruption of the self is not a hindrance but essential for the Auster’s and Pamuk’s subjects to open themselves to the other. As the works of Auster and Pamuk testify, in and through the heterotopian and Third Spaces, the self is frequently “face-to-face” with the other, who shakes him out of his narcissistic and solitary existence and endows him with a sense of responsive, exposed and caring sense of self. Before expanding on the relevance of Levinas’s theory to the context of this study, it is significant to outline the critical points of his conception of ethics; hence, in the following section, I will first elaborate on Levinas’s notion of the self and the other.
1.7 Levinas: Towards an Understanding of the Ethical Embodied Subject
According to Levinas, humans are first and foremost sensuous beings who exist in a sensuous world. As Lok Wing-Kai, in his dissertation, “Foucault, ←40 | 41→Levinas and the Ethical Embodied Subject” makes it clear, humans first sense and enjoy the world through their sensual body, not necessarily apprehending the world through their conscious mind (133–134). Alphonso Lingis in “The Sensuality and the Sensitivity” explains Levinas’s conception of sensibility as follows: “Sensuality is not intentionality…Steeped in the elemental, contented with the plenum, its movement is that of enjoyment…being sensual, one enjoys the light, the color, the solidity, the spring, the monsoon, and one enjoys one’s enjoyment” (223). Indeed, confined to his own environment, the sensuous subject is entirely at home with itself and takes delight in his life. Levinas writes that as a sensuous being,
I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not “as for me…”- but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate-without ears, like a hungry stomach. (Totality 134)
The basic mode of life for the sensual subject is to satisfy his immediate needs such as food, warmth, shelter and pleasure. Levinas defines this phase of the subject’s life as il y a. He describes il y a as such:
There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential…What we call the I is itself submerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it. The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves what cannot disappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, without having taken the initiative anonymously. Being remains, like a field of forces, like a heavy atmosphere belonging to no one. (Existence 58)
Il y a characterizes a shapeless, anonymous entity that is without any properties. During this phase although the subject does not have any distinct personality, he is self-satisfied. Obviously, taking care of himself is the priority of the subject. He thinks he is self-sufficient and the world revolves around him. Accordingly, two significant questions emerge: How and why does the subject who is self-sufficient and free open himself to the other and become concerned only about the other? For Levinas, it is the intervention of the other that disrupts the subject’s complacency. In other words, the interruption caused by the fragile other awakens the subject’s sense of responsibility. During this process, sensuality gains another dimension. The once-self-indulgent sensual self, after the intervention of the other, cannot help but respond and be obsessed with the other. The other matters to him. In this regard, sensuality enables the subject to sense the other’s suffering and paves the way for his becoming an ethical subject. As Robert Gibbs in Why ←41 | 42→Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities writes, “There is no ethics without bodies that know hunger, that need food, shelter, comfort. The giving of oneself, therefore, that characterizes the risk in communication requires a material body that can suffer in the giving” (52–53). Namely, it is the sensation and sensibility that raise the subject’s awareness towards the other. Furthermore, according to Levinas, although the subject is self-satisfied in his bodily existence, he is in fact from the start given over to the other. Levinas points out that, “[the] ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world, within the ontology of sameness” (“Dialogue” 24). Likewise, Arne Johan Vetlesen argues that, for Levinas, “there can be no such things as a self-constituting subjectivity. Instead, subjectivity is the accomplishment of a movement – a movement not within an I but between an I and a thou, whereby the thou is the locus from which the constitution of the I springs” (qtd. in Gehrke 8). The other, in this case, is already incarnated in the subject so that the latter is at the service of the other. But the question remains: how can the other be described?
Levinas defines the other first and foremost as the face of the other. This face, however, is a fragile and suffering face. Levinas writes,
There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity. It is the most destitute also: there is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced. (Ethics 85–86)
The exposed face mentioned in the quotation above is the face of the other that spontaneously and unexpectedly becomes the neighbor of the subject. The face summons the self, calls for him, begs for him; in so doing, it arouses the subject’s responsibility (Hand 83). Levinas writes:
The face itself constitutes the fact that someone summons me and demands my presence. Ethical proximity begins here: in my response to this summons. This response cannot be conceived of as the communication of information; it is the response of responsibility for the other man. In the approach to others indebtedness takes the place of the grasp of the comprehension of knowledge. (“Beyond” 109–110)
It should be clear by now that Levinas uses the notion of face to describe how the bodily sensation of the other generates a non-indifferent subject, who becomes ←42 | 43→totally captured and obsessed by the other.5 To face the other is significant for Levinas because the encounter with the face “lose[s]; the avidity proper to the gaze only by turning into generosity” (Totality 50). Additionally, for Levinas, to be obsessed by the other means being obliged to respond personally to and for the other. As I will discuss in the following section, the other, who at first sight appears to be a vulnerable entity, is also defined as a stranger, who has the power to disturb the being at home with itself (Totality 54). Levinas’s concept of the face of the other is also significant for Pamuk. In Pamuk’s works, for instance, this face-to-face encounter with the other is significantly translated from an ethical intersubjective encounter into the political level, where the attempt to pigeonhole the Easterner and the Westerner is disrupted.
1.9 The Passivity of the Subject
Levinas argues that the subject is rendered utterly passive in front of the other’s fragile face. By passivity, Levinas does not mean indifference or inactivity but rather a readiness to be moved by the other. As Michel Juffé in “Levinas and Passivity” indicates, “passivity is not the opposite of activity, it is acting without power, with no possibility of ‘taking situations in hand’ ” (11). Namely, the self is ready to be called by the other without anticipating what is demanded. As Amit Pinchevski in By Way of Interruption underlines, subjectivity is an elemental site of interruption – as always and already accessible and addressable by means of the other’s interruption (11). Hence, for Levinas, the subject is a passive entity, who is obliged to answer to anybody whoever stands in front of him, only because the other person presents his face to him. More precisely, as Edith Wyschogrod in her article “Towards a Postmodern Ethics” explains, the vulnerability of the other evokes one’s own capacity for experiencing pain, for emptying oneself of egocentric orientation, so that one’s corporeality may be at the service of the other (63). Thus, the immediacy of the fragile face of the other makes the subject passively and unconditionally respond to the suffering of the other. Here we see that Levinas treats passivity as a key to constitute an ethical subject. For Levinas, passivity also means becoming answerable. However, by answering to the other, the subject for Levinas is neither enforced by a moral law nor is it a “charity,” in which the subject attempts to show his generosity towards the other through caring for the other (Wing-Kai 189). As Wing-Kai also states, if one’s ←43 | 44→ethical answerability were primarily determined by consciousness or intentionality, it would involve an egoist ethics, since it would stem from the calculation of cost and consequence, not from the other’s ethical demand. This would privilege the subject’s interest over the other’s interest and prevent the self from an ethical turn (165). In fact, the subject has no room to make any rational deliberation before the other’s ethical command. As Seán Hand comments:
[t];he relation to the other, as a relation of responsibility, cannot be totally suppressed…Here it is impossible to free myself by saying ‘It’s not my concern.’ There is no choice, for it is always and inescapably my concern. This is a unique ‘no choice’, one that is not slavery. (247)
That is to say, in the face of the other the self becomes ready to be moved by him and unconditionally respond to him.
1.10 The Traumatization of the Self
The self who is interrupted by the other does not feel joyous or elevated or uplifted. As Deborah Achtenberg in “Plato and Levinas on Violence and the Other” puts it, the subject becomes obsessed by the following questions: “[W];hat does the presence of an other hold out for me? Will the other harm me, destroy me, subsume me, overwhelm me? Or will the other help me flourish, help me develop or grow, let me be, let me be me?” (170) As already noted, the face of the other imposes itself on the subject so abruptly and spontaneously that upon this interruption the subject becomes hollowed out, deposed and paralyzed. Levinas writes:
[p];ain penetrates into the very heart of the for-oneself that beats in enjoyment, in the life that is complacent in itself, that lives of its life. To give, to-be-for-another, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself, is to take the bread out of one’s own mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one’s own fasting. (Otherwise 56)
Levinas further elaborates that the subject approached by the other
is a denuding, an exposure to being affected, a pure susceptiveness. It does not posit itself, possessing itself and recognizing itself; it is consumed and delivered over, dis-locates itself, loses its place, is exiled, relegates itself into itself…exposed to wounds and outrage, emptying itself in a no-grounds, to the point of substituting itself for the other, holding onto itself only as it were in the trace of its exile. (Otherwise 138)
Here, for the subject, the encounter with the other is a turning point in his life; it is an unpredictable, spontaneous and radical interruption. The subject is dislodged and dislocated from his safe haven. Levinas defines the confrontation with the other person as “trauma,” “obsession,” “persecution” and “subjection” ←44 | 45→(Otherwise 148–151). The other does not simply disrupt the subject’s enjoyable life; he at the same time splits his self. After the confrontation with the other, the subject reverts to himself, but as Levinas notes, this time he cannot find an internal sovereign territory there:
To revert to oneself is not to establish oneself at home, even if stripped of all one’s acquisitions. It is to be like a stranger, hunted down even in one’s home, contested in one’s own identity and one’s very poverty, which, like a skin still enclosing the self, would set it up in an inwardness, already settled on itself, already a substance. It is always to empty oneself anew of oneself, to absolve oneself…It is to be on the hither side of one’s own nuclear unity, still identifiable and protected; it is to be emptied even of the quasi-formal identity of a being someone. (Otherwise 92)
Evidently, the other’s interruption into the subject’s life adds an element of strangeness, namely, the self, partially becomes an other to himself. Therefore, Levinas puts emphasis on a conception of subject that can never become self-assured or self-sufficient. Instead, the subject is eternally de-centered and put into an ever incomplete and ever deposed position.
Furthermore, after an encounter with the other the subject becomes overwhelmed because he is the only one to respond to the other. In other words, no one can substitute the subject’s position to respond for the call of the other. Levinas writes:
In the exposure to wounds and outrages, in the feeling proper to responsibility, the oneself is provoked as irreplaceable, as devoted to the others, without being able to resign, and thus as incarnated in order to offer itself, to suffer and to give. It is thus one and unique, in passivity from the start, having nothing at its disposal that would enable it to not yield to the provocation. (Otherwise 105)
Clearly, the subject who is called into duty cannot dodge the command of the other. According to Levinas, he is “a non-interchangeable I” for whom no one else can act as a substitute (Ethics 101). Therefore, he has no choice but to answer even sacrifice himself for the other: “I am ready to stand in for the Other,” Benda Hoffmeyr says in “From Activity to Radical Passivity,” “even die for him if I must” (113). This is the ideal response of the self to the other, but these words do not pass through the subject’s mind so easily. Thus, an ethical response may entail that the subject endures alienation, a lot of suffering and outrage.
Another reason for the subject’s traumatization is the face of the other. For Levinas, although the face of the other has a “sensible appearance” and although the subject sees the other’s face, he cannot conceptually or visually grasp it because “[i];n the face the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends (Totality 198, 262). Levinas writes,
←45 | 46→
[The face of the other] escapes representation; it is the very collapse of phenomenality. Not because it is too brutal to appear, but because in a sense too weak, non-phenomenon because less than a phenomenon. The disclosing of a face is nudity, non-form, abandon of self, ageing, dying, more naked than nudity. It is poverty, skin with wrinkles, which are a trace of itself. (Otherwise 88)
As Levinas emphasizes, the other is a complex entity. He is concrete and leaves traces behind; yet, he never allows the subject to fully grasp the ultimate picture of him. The subject wishes to understand the other; he is drawn to him but all his efforts are futile. As Levinas thus elaborates:
A face does not function in proximity as a sign of a hidden God who would impose the neighbor on me. It is a trace of itself, a trace in the trace of an abandon…It obsesses the subject without staying in correlation with him, without equalling me in a consciousness, ordering me before appearing, in the glorious increase of obligation. (Otherwise 94)
Evidently, the relationship between the subject and the other is asymmetrical, and this is why Levinas holds that “To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as ‘You’ in a dimension of height,” and the outcome of the encounter is not that of reciprocity because “The I always has one responsibility more than all the others” (Totality 75; Ethics 98–99). For Levinas, the lack of reciprocal harmony between the self and the other brings out truly ethical moments because the absolute otherness of the other subverts the narcissist nature of the self and paves for him the way to become a non-dominating self who cannot attempt to grasp the other.
For Levinas, the self-other relation can be defined as an intercorporeal communication which takes place in the Saying. While Levinas defines the Said as “an ontological closure to the Other” and the relation it signifies as “reduced to a fixed identity,” he defines the Saying as “an ethical openness to the Other,” which is “[a];ntecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and the semantic glimmerings, a foreword preceding languages, it is the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification” (Otherwise 5). In other words, while in the Said, the listener tries to thematize and rationalize the other; in the Saying, the subject listens attentively and patiently to the other and allows himself to be moved mentally and emotionally in a non-judgmental way. In the Saying, the subject takes the other person as he is without reducing him into a concept. This is an ideal ←46 | 47→form of communication and may not take place all the time though. The intersubjective communication in the Saying, similar to relations that are based on facing, involves misrecognition and misapprehension, that is, “the risk of lack of and refusal of communication” (Otherwise 120). Nonetheless, unlike traditional ways of communication which absorb, categorize and grasp the other, for Levinas, interpersonal communication, ideally, must result in emotional attunement, affective contact and attentiveness where both parties realize their own distinctiveness, singularity and irreducibility to a theme or to the Said.
As can be seen, Levinas’s ethics is radical, and it has significant implications for this study for various reasons. Firstly, Levinas’s philosophy of subject is a radical challenge to the Western and especially American way of understanding subjectivity. In Western philosophical tradition of ontology, the privilege is granted to the subject, ontology and being. Accordingly, the self is considered as the agent of being, reason and freedom. Especially in the American thought the subject is a self-willed, self-sufficient and self-reliant sovereign entity. Therefore, the fragmentation of the subject that has taken place in recent years has been interpreted as the dissolution and dissociation of subjectivity at the same time. Levinas, however, believes that what makes us human and ethical subjects is a disruption of self caused by the encounter with the other. As Steen Halling also states, the subject’s displacement implies the end of egoism rather than self-effacement or self-denial (222). That is, as Auster’s and Pamuk’s works show the displacement of the subject’s sovereign sense of self is a necessary condition for the self to end his egoism and open himself to others.
Secondly, traditionally, the other is put into a second place in Western or American way of thinking. In some cases, he is even assimilated or eradicated because of his difference. Although the other has gained some importance in recent years, still he is viewed as merely a source of enrichment. As Jeffrey T. Nealon in Alterity Politics states, the subject encounters otherness primarily as a reassurance of its own developing, shifting sameness or as a way of enhancing its own multiplicity (40). Departing from Western metaphysics, Levinas’s concept of the subject offers an alternative conception of the other. In Levinas, the other is superior to the subject. Furthermore, the other is a separate and an absolutely other being, who is beyond the intentionality of self and outside the totality of representation. However, this separate other is a prerequisite for the subject to be ethical and to lead a meaningful life. As Levinas maintains, the other frees the subject “from the enchainment to itself, where the ego suffocates in itself due to the tautological way of identity” (Otherwise 160). Similarly, Johanna Oksala in Foucault on Freedom explains that,
←47 | 48→
the other as radical alterity importantly opens the constituted subject to what it is not, to what it cannot grasp, possess or know…[T];he other is capable of introducing alterity to the constituted subject. The other makes ethical subjectivity possible, but also breaks the totality of constituted experiences by introducing a plurality in being that resists all efforts of totalization and normalization. Only the other ultimately reveals the limits of subjectivity and gives the attempt to transgress them an ethical meaning. (207)
The other is so elemental in the subject’s opening himself to other and to his surroundings that in his notion of subjectivity, Levinas gives the primacy to the other rather than to the self.
Thirdly, Levinas offers a radical understanding of the role of vision in interpersonal relation. In the Western societies, the relationship between the self and the other is primarily conceived of as a visual relation. As Levinas observes, “vision is essentially an adequation of exteriority with interiority: in it exteriority is reabsorbed in the contemplative soul and, as an adequate idea, revealed to be a priori, the result of a Sinngebung” (Totality 295). In our case, it can be asserted that although Auster strives for an ethical relation on the one hand, he also represents the difficulty of it on the other hand. For example, in Ghosts, seeing and gazing are elements that threaten the formation of intersubjective relations. Pamuk’s The White Castle in this sense offers an intercultural face-to-face meeting that is conducive to ethical relations that acknowledge the other as other without trying to grasp, comprehend, categorize or read him.
In sum, in this chapter, it is revealed that heterotopias are spaces in which alternative spatial, social and historical orderings are performed. They are not merely “other spaces” or neutral expressions at the margins of a society; on the contrary, they are relational spaces which are counter-hegemonic, ethically and politically laden spaces. Furthermore, I have elaborated on Levinas’s notion of the self and the other, which argues that the other is indispensable for the self’s ethical becoming. Although the self is traumatized in his relationship with the other, nonetheless, in the end, he is endowed with glimpses of response-ability, responsiveness and exteriority. Finally, it should be obvious by now that both heterotopia and ethics will provide a rich venue for illuminating how Auster’s fictions offer alternative and constructive self-other relations, spatial and cultural orderings to emerge.
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4 See Philip J. Ethington. “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 465–493; Thomas Bender. “Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 495–500; David Carr. “Commentary on ‘Placing the Past: “Groundwork” for a Spatial Theory of History.’ ” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 501–505; Edward S. Casey. “Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 507–512; Alun Munslow. “Presenting and/or Re-Presenting the Past.” Rethinking History Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, 517–524.
