space and power

                
                
《Foucault and geography, space knowledge and power》，pp.50
In Foucault's recently published lectures Abnormal, there is an interesting vignette about spatial relations and power. He describes in some detail the development of confessional practices within the Roman Catholic Church and shows how there was a shift from a focus on penance, with all the practices that this involved, to a focus on confession of sins, which demanded a new set of relations between priests and the faithful. These were spatial and power relations, not in any simple sense, but they demanded a set of spatial arrangements which were very precise and which were responses to a perception of problems to be resolved. The confession of sins demanded that the sin be confessed to someone and that this person was able to give remission of sins; in that sense the role of the priest within the Church changed radically and Foucault argues that power relations therefore changed. This change was manifested in the development of a new set of spatial relations that became evident in the confessional booth, which is as Foucault puts it 'the material crystallization of all the rules' (Foucault 2003/1975, 181). The confessional booth, like other architectural features, determined spatial relations and was determined by a consciousness of the importance of spatial relations being managed 'approriately' - people had to be arranged in space in order for the confession to be heard effectively: the penitent and the priest had not to be seen by each other, but the penitent needed to be heard well by the priest; the priest and penitent had to be separated from one another and from the rest of the congregation, but it was important, because of the priest's celibacy and because of the temptations attendant on the confession of sexual sin, they had not to be isolated entirely from the rest of the congregation. These very particular discursive demands necessitated this strange architectural configuration of grilles and half-curtains, encouraging certain revelations and discouraging other discourses. Foucault's careful analysis of the discursive pressures that gave rise to the development of the confessional booth to organize space in particular ways strikes me as a very productive way of thinking through the way that power relations develop in tandem with spatial relations, each exerting a distinct but not necessary deterministic pressure on the other.