On The Origin And Influence Of Foucault's "Spatial Theory"

After 1950s, along with postmodernism, a new "space turning" begins to enter people's horizon. In this era of transformative process, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a forward-looking thinker to highlight that the concerns of human existence were switching from time to space. The reflection and criticism of space eventually led to the growing trend of interaction and penetration of various disciplines such as architecture, urban design, geography and culture, which helped influence the re-interpretation of literary and artistic works. This paper is divided into the following chapters.The first chapter briefly reviews the space concepts before Foucault, which can be divided into two main paths. One is the traditional metaphysical concept of space, including Plato's "absolute space", Aristotle's "relative space" and Kant's "transcendental intuition" space concept. The second path is the psychological concept of space, mainly including Berkeley's "visual space", Bergson's time and space dualism and Merleau-Ponty's "body-space." In addition, Heidegger's ontology, the concept of place on the space also played an important role in mid-20th century, which is an important backwash to the traditional tool concept of the space.Chapter Two focuses on Foucault's "heterotopia" theory. Foucault proposed an ideal world of "Utopia" (utopie) relative concept-"Heterotopia" (heterotopies). To the contrary of the illusive nature of the former concept, the latter one is substantial. Though people need imagination to understand it, as a "heterogeneous" space, it is embodied in people's living condition and living experience. It is like a mirror reflecting the real and imaginary world at the same time, so all kinds of incompatible heterogeneous factors that can appear simultaneously.The third chapter discusses the evaluation and criticism of the influence by Foucault's theory of space on literature, art, architecture and urban planning. Literary space and real space in the world make a whole new meaning for the landscape world in literature. For contemporary art, especially postmodern art, the traditional perspective of space was broken, and the depth model of space was infinitely digested. Foucault's theory of space is still affecting contemporary architecture and urban planning. The space thinking in construction planning and Foucault's "power" theory combined to implement on the human body and existence.Chapter Four summarizes the significance and impact of Foucault's space criticism, reveals the meaning of "personal space" and its unity of opposites with "public space", and constructs a new investigation of human existence situation problems after naturalism, romanticism, and existentialism.