Topology: Secrets of Space - Seminars @ Tate Modern, London, by Bernard Burgoyne

Topology

Secrets of Space Seminars

© Science Museum / SSPL

Saturday 12 November 2011, 14.00–16.00
Saturday 28 January 2012, 14.00–16.00
Saturday 10 March 2012, 14.00–16.00
Saturday 5 May 2012, 14.00–16.00

Topology investigates the fabric of space. It looks into the texture of not merely physical space, but of all conceivable other spaces – spaces of phrases, spaces of colours or sounds, spaces of moods and passions, all spaces of operations on the human soul. Topology resolves the problem of what it is that holds a space together: of what it is that ties a point to its neighbouring regions. Human subjectivity is investigated using concepts of pathway, frontier or boundary; many formulations are possible – neighbourhood; limit; region; inside; outside; openness or closure – all of these can be used to formulate the secret of space.
These seminars will investigate a variety of spatial attributes appealed to by the cultural and political theories discussed in the Starr Auditorium during the Topology: Spaces of Transformation keynote conversations. They will give participants a familiarity with the texture of space. Their aim is that of reformulating the socio-cultural questions by bringing them into parallel with the spatial realities that they presuppose. Rather than allowing the question of space to fade into the background, these seminars draw topology into a relationship with these wider politico-cultural questions, in this way giving them a firmer orientation, while presenting them in a new light.

Bernard Burgoyne has a background in psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, and mathematics. He is a practising psychoanalyst – and Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis – who founded the Centre for Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University. He was at one time Research Assistant to Professor Sir Karl Popper, and works on questions of the scientific foundations of psychoanalysis in a way that does not exclude questions of classical political philosophy – as witnessed by the participation of Étienne Balibar in the Jury of Burgoyne’s Doctoral Thesis in Paris. Burgoyne will be publishing a book on these themes in the New Year, and is simultaneously working on a second book, on the relation of scientific method to the work of Lacan and Bion. The topological formalisation of subjectivity is at the centre of his work, and he has given over three hundred public lectures on this theme at Harvard, The Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, the Tate Britain, the South Bank Centre, the Rijksdakademie for Fine Art, Amsterdam, the Royal Irish Academy, and many other clinical and academic institutions across the world.


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Space, Knowledge and Power by Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden (Eds.) - Ashgate, Usa, 2007

Michel Foucault’s work is rich with implications and insights concerning spatiality, and has inspired many geographers and social scientists to develop these ideas in their own research. This book, the first to engage Foucault’s geographies in detail from a wide range of perspectives, is framed around his discussions with the French geography journal Hérodote in the mid 1970s. The opening third of the book comprises some of Foucault’s previously untranslated work on questions of space, a range of responses from French and English language commentators, and a newly translated essay by Claude Raffestin, a leading Swiss geographer.

The rest of the book presents specially commissioned essays which examine the remarkable reception of Foucault’s work in English and French language geography; situate Foucault’s project historically; and provide a series of developments of his work in the contemporary contexts of power, biopolitics, governmentality and war. Contributors include a number of key figures in social/spatial theory such as David Harvey, Chris Philo, Sara Mills, Nigel Thrift, John Agnew, Thomas Flynn and Matthew Hannah. Written in an open and engaging tone, the contributors discuss just what they find valuable – and frustrating – about Foucault’s geographies. This is a book which will both surprise and challenge. 


Contents: 
Introduction: Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, Stuart Elden and Jeremy W. Crampton. 
Part 1 Questions: Some questions from Michel Foucault to Hérodote, Michel Foucault (translated by Stuart Elden). 
Part 2 Francophone Responses – 1977: Hérodote editorial, translated by Gerald Moore; Response: Jean-Michel Brabant (translated by Gerald Moore); Response: Alain Joxe (translated by Gerald Moore); Response:Jean-Bernard Racine and Claude Raffestin (translated by Gerald Moore); Response: Michel Riou (translated by Gerald Moore). 
Part 3 Anglophone Responses – 2006: The Kantian roots of Foucault's dilemmas, David Harvey; Geography, gender and power, Sara Mills; Overcome by space: reworking Foucault, Nigel Thrift; Foucault among the geographers, Thomas Flynn. 
Part 4 Contexts: Strategy, medicine and habitat: Foucault in 1976, Stuart Elden; Formations of 'Foucault' in Anglo-American geography: an archaeological sketch, Matthew Hannah; Catalysts and converts: sparking interest for Foucault among Francophone geographers, Juliet J. Fall; Could Foucault have revolutionized geography?, Claude Raffestin (translated by Gerald Moore). 
Part 5 Texts: The incorporation of the hospital into modern technology, Michel Foucault (translated by Edgar Knowlton Jr., William J. King, and Stuart Elden); The meshes of power, Michel Foucault (translated by Gerald Moore); The language of space, Michel Foucault (translated by Gerald Moore); The force of flight, Michel Foucault (translated by Gerald Moore); Questions on geography, Michel Foucault (translated by Colin Gordon). Part 6 Development: Geographies of governmentality, Margo Huxley; The history of medical geography after Foucault, Gerry Kearns; Maps, race and Foucault: eugenics and territorialization following World War I, Jeremy W. Crampton; Beyond the Panopticon? Foucault and surveillance studies, David Murakami Wood; Beyond the European province: Foucault and postcolonialism, Stephen Legg; Foucault, sexuality, geography, Philip Howell; The problem with Empire, Mathew Coleman and John A. Agnew; 'Bellicose history' and 'local discursivities': an archaeological reading of Michel Foucault's Society Must be Defended, Chris Philo.


About the Editor: Dr Jeremy W. Crampton is from the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University, USA. Dr Stuart Elden is from the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK.


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Foucault Street Art - PITR variation @ Flicker

Questa foto è stata scattata in data 28 maggio 2010. in Paris

Questa foto appartiene a

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Square Michel Foucault by Matthew Marco @ Flickr

Square Michel Foucault.

So this may only be a small square near Avenue Saint-Jacques, but it is further evidence that Paris knows well enough to honor philosophers, artists, and playwrights in the naming of its infrastructure. I wonder if the United States would be a more progressive country if on par with Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, Jr. were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Allen Ginsburg, Jackson Pollock, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and so forth, crossing major American cities as boulevards and enlivening them as parks and plazas.

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