Foucault’s ‘Gaze’ Beyond the Corporeal Body Towards the Digital Dividual

Abstract

This article argues that Foucault’s work demonstrates a historical trend moving towards an exclusion from space. This exclusion is predicated on a gaze that has systematically moved further away from the corporeal body to include the digital realm. This study deploys Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘heterotopia’ as a tool for analysing the transformations in the relations between spaces and bodies. The article investigates Foucault’s work on space throughout his oeuvre to demonstrate that such an investigation reveals an emergent focus on bodily surveillance in relation to space, emerging with disciplinary power. Foucault’s analysis reveals that the emergence of biopolitics and regulatory controls allowed for the emergence and proliferation of exclusionary practices from spaces and institutions beyond the body. His later work on liberal governmentality and security reveals an even more dramatic reorganisation in power’s approach to space, which allows for a hyper-specific approach towards determining the inclusionary and exclusionary criteria from space. Foucault’s contemporary interlocutors demonstrate that this trend towards exclusion has been exacerbated and expanded even further beyond the body by the turn towards digital criteria for inclusion/exclusion from heterotopic space. The relation between Foucault’s spatial analyses and the emergence of digital ‘spaces’ provides new insight into the analysis of the contemporary relation between digital data, corporeal bodies, and heterotopic spaces.

1. Introduction

Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ has been discussed by many different authors in analyses of cities (Heyns 2008; Shane 2008; Stickells et al. 2008), private and gated communities (Bartling 2008; Hook and Vrdoljak 2002; Low 2008), and shopping malls and theme parks (Kern 2008; Muzzio and Muzzio-Rentas 2008; Orillard 2008). Foucault’s own work exemplified a preoccupation with space as an apparatus of knowledge and power, sites of exile, spaces of control and enclosure, penitence, healing, protection, or quarantine. However, the changes in Foucault’s oeuvre pertaining to bodies’ changing relation to heterotopic spaces, due to norms and data becoming decreasingly dependent on (or restricted to) the corporeal body, remain largely unexplored.

This article demonstrates that a reading of Foucault’s work pertaining to space throughout his oeuvre reveals an ever-changing relation of inclusion/exclusion1 between the body and heterotopic spaces. I argue that contemporary transformations in technologies and knowledges progressively expand the focus and criteria of inclusion/exclusion beyond the parameters of the corporeal body. Foucault’s framework of ‘heterotopias’ provides a novel tool for analysing the changes between subjects and spaces. I start by examining Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’. I show that the emergence of what Foucault terms ‘discipline’ and its coextensive apparatuses, techniques, and approaches to exercising power resulted in a particular focus on the surveillance of the corporeal body.

Thereafter, I demonstrate that the expansion of power’s focus beyond the body and the institution, emerging with biopolitics, exemplifies a recalibration and expansion of the disciplinary gaze beyond the corporeal body. This expansion rendered calculated exclusion from particular heterotopic institutions possible, without rendering it beyond the disciplinary gaze. I show that the emergence of apparatuses of security allowed for heterotopic spaces to take the form of caterers to individual needs whilst keeping control apparatuses at a distance. By engaging with some of Foucault’s subsequent interlocutors, I argue that the progression of the trend he identified (his analysis of space elucidating the gaze moving progressively further away from a focus on the corporeal body) has led to a system where subjects are segmented into corporeal and digital components. These components mutually co-constitute the kinds of relations subjects can have with both digital and corporeal spaces.

I argue that the relations between corporeal bodies and spaces become co-constituted by digital data and information. Subjects’ access to heterotopic spaces (both corporeal and digital) has become dependent on digital data (Koopman 2019) that is collected and assembled into a ‘dividual’ (Deleuze 1992) assemblage of data. Foucault’s work shows a decreasing focus on the corporeal body’s immediate conduct in deciding criteria of inclusion/exclusion from heterotopic spaces. Han (2017a) argues that continued transformations in technologies and knowledges have recalibrated these criteria from a focus on bodies towards a focus on data constructs. Today, subjects’ relation to heterotopic spaces has become almost entirely mediated by digital data. The subjects’ corporeal conditions of possibility are mediated by the data that make up their digital dividual. As such, the subject itself becomes co-constituted by both its corporeal body and its data—an individual-dividual.

2. Foucault’s Heterotopia

Foucault introduced the concept of ‘heterotopia’ in a 1967 lecture to the Cercle d’études architecturales (Circle of Architectural Studies) to refer to institutions and places that interrupt the perceived norms and continuity of their surrounding environment (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008a, pp. 3–4; Foucault 2008b, p. 13). Heterotopias (literally, ‘other spaces’) present an alterity to the heterogeneity of their surroundings, and juxtapose the metrics of design and scale commonplace to the surrounding environment (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008a, p. 5; Faubion 2008, p. 31). Foucault defines ‘heterotopias’ as “emplacements with no real place” which nevertheless “have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of society”—a society inverted or perfected (Foucault 2008b, p. 17). The word ‘heterotopia’ itself has its etymological roots in medicine, designating biological matter or tissues that are typical except for their position in or on the body (Cenzatti 2008, p. 75; Sohn 2008, pp. 41–43). Foucault relies on the medical origins of the term when he uses it in The Order of Things to designate linguistic spaces that “desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source” (Foucault 1974, p. xviii; Sohn 2008, p. 43). For Foucault, the atypicality of linguistic or spatial heterotopias seems to emerge out of their recalibration, reorganisation, and abrupt reintroduction of elements that are known, but disrupt, rupture, contrast, and break the flow of their surroundings by virtue of where they manifest.

Foucault attributes six general ‘principles’ to heterotopias, to serve as diagnostic criteria that allow for the determination of whether or not a space qualifies as heterotopic. His language seems to allow for nuances and variations pertaining to the extent to which these various characteristics are exemplified by different kinds of heterotopic spaces (Foucault 2008b, pp. 18–21). The first is that the presence of heterotopias seems to be a constant across times and cultures. Whilst heterotopias in earlier cultures most often took the form of ‘heterotopias of crisis’, enclosing and potentially training groups of individuals during times of transition, modern heterotopias often take the form of ‘heterotopias of deviation’ that isolate groups and individuals that exemplify physical characteristics or conduct that present a potential risk to the whole of society (Foucault 2008b, p. 18). A second principle of heterotopias is that they can be reappropriated throughout time according to transforming purposes (Foucault 2008b, pp. 18–19). The third principle of heterotopias is their tendency to contrast and juxtapose their surroundings that may be incompatible (Foucault 2008b, p. 19).

The fourth principle that Foucault attributes to heterotopias is that they tend to have an explicit link to temporality. They are linked to a specific conceptualisation of time that juxtaposes the surrounding appreciation of time/period. Foucault labels this characteristic a ‘heterochronism’ (Foucault 2008b, p. 20). He identifies two different manifestations of this principle. The first being the accumulation of indefinite time, as in the case of museums. The second being the expression of a specific idyllic or celebratory time; a suspension of time as progressive in order to perpetuate a myopic conceptualisation of time limited to a particular space. (Foucault 2008b, p. 20).

The fifth principle of heterotopias is that they delimit access by presenting a system of opening and closing that renders them simultaneously isolated but penetrable (Foucault 2008b, p. 21). The final principle of heterotopias is related to their alterity. They either present as illusory to the point that the juxtaposition reveals the reality of their surroundings, or they present a ‘perfect’ alternate reality that contrasts the disorganised reality that surrounds it. Usually, such spaces are ones that ‘expose’ the disorganised surroundings through rigorous mechanisms of control. Heterotopias such as these exemplify a tendency to operate with an alternative normative framework, either enhancing specific normative practices in relation to the accepted norms of their surroundings or, as with the brothel, generating a space of suspension of the norms prevalent in their surroundings (see Villet 2018, p. 17).

As Dehaene and De Cauter (2008a, p. 6) point out, whilst Foucault’s description makes it clear that almost all spaces share some characteristics of a heterotopia, it is important not to fall into the trap of considering every institution as such. However, Foucault provides enough delineation to at least be able to identify spaces that have several characteristics of a heterotopia. Therefore, I use the term ‘heterotopic spaces’ to refer to all those spaces that have one or more of the general characteristics of a heterotopia. Foucault’s accounts make it clear that heterotopias, above all, regardless of their period, exemplify a juxtaposition of their surroundings (see Cenzatti 2008, p. 79). This juxtaposition generates internal criteria for inclusion/exclusion, which are specific to the particular functions of the space. These criteria are enforced through the mechanisms that delineate and regulate the ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ of the space.

Throughout Foucault’s oeuvre, examples of heterotopic spaces recur frequently. Examples of heterotopic spaces are found within his work on sovereignty, discipline, biopower, and governmentality. Foucault never refers to spaces in these other works as ‘heterotopias’. However, his description of the qualities of heterotopias allows for the identification of spaces mentioned throughout his body of work that qualify as ‘heterotopic’. An analysis of these various heterotopic spaces in relation to bodies reveals the emergence, and subsequent decrease in, a focus on the corporeal body for the delineation of inclusion/exclusion criteria.

3. Pre-Disciplinary Heterotopias: The Exterior Unseen

An examination of Foucault’s work, both prior to and after ‘Of Other Spaces’, reveals a consistent interest in the relation between bodies and spaces. In the first chapter of Madness and Civilisation, Foucault begins his analysis by examining the practice of exiling lepers to leprosaria, and the decline in practices of exile during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. These institutions, established to care for those infected with leprosy, were no longer a necessity due to the reduction in lepers (Foucault 2001, p. 4). Foucault surmises that this reduction was the effect of the successful segregation between those infected and those who were not, as well as the break with the “Eastern sources of infection” that resulted from the Crusades (Foucault 2001, p. 4).

Long after these spaces were shut down or recommissioned, the images attached to the leper, as well as the meaning of their exclusion—that the leper presents a danger to be feared—remained prominent. As leprosy disappeared, the structures providing the template for exclusion remained. The poor, criminals, and “deranged kinds” would continue to occupy the site left vacant by the leper (Foucault 2001, pp. 4–5). One example of how other groups in society, who presented a perceived threat through deviations from the norm, took up the mantle of the leper—to be removed from society, and to be relegated to a separate space—comes in the form of what Foucault refers to as “the Ship of Fools” (Foucault 2001, p. 5). Depicted in the imaginary landscape of Renaissance literature, these ships (thematised as Narrenschiffe), according to Foucault, were mirrored in the real world. They are described as ships that, during the thirteenth century, would “convey their insane cargo from town to town” (Foucault 2001, p. 6). Those considered insane were driven outside of the city limits to wander in open spaces. If not left to wander they [madmen] were entrusted to a group of seafaring merchants.2

Madmen, Foucault speculates, were brought to cities in considerable numbers, and were abandoned or “lost” there by the merchant sailors who conveyed them around on ships. The ship itself, by means of venturing out into the ocean and creating as much of a geographical distinction as possible between the space of the madman and the spaces where he does not belong, imprisons the madman in a heterotopic space where his perceived deviations are hidden from the rest of society (Foucault 2001, p. 9).3

Huffer deploys Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucault’s work on space to articulate the ship’s role in constituting both the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the space (Deleuze 1988; Huffer 2010, pp. 29, 51–61). Huffer’s analysis highlights the heterotopic qualities of the ship. The ship produces a relation that simultaneously defines all elements of the relation. The space simultaneously sets the delimitations for confinement and exclusion, and in doing so, the interplay of norms, rules, and expectations that come to govern the interplay between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ as it pertains to space and the conceptualisation and implications of subjects and subjectivities that move between, or are resigned to particular sides of, the relation. ‘Confinement’ itself then functions as an exclusion or a relegation to an exterior. Even when the subject is ‘confined’ to the inside of the ship, it is placed ‘outside’ of a social, normative, and discursive framework (Deleuze 1988, p. 43). In doing so, the ship (as do all heterotopic spaces of deviation or crisis) produces an interior-exterior. The subject’s corporeal relegation to the ‘interior’ relational component of the corporeal space co-constitutes and functions as a simultaneous indicator of a broader exteriority to the norms, rules, and governing principles of society. Concomitantly, the conditions of possibility for the subject become delineated by their exteriority to the world beyond the walls. Deleuze argues that Foucault’s conceptualisations of space focus on the juxtapositions and relations of exteriorities that intermingle and relate at various intersections.4 Characterising and delimiting the conditions of possibility for subjects’ articulation in relation to their surroundings remains a consistent feature of heterotopic spaces, even as the focus of the disciplinary gaze and the apparatuses of power transform and transcend a focus on the corporeal body.

The Ship of Fools represents a particular pre-disciplinary configuration between bodily exclusion and heterotopic space. The deviant subject’s body was relegated to a heterotopic space of deviation beyond corporeal surveillance. The exteriority to which the madman is relegated is exterior to the extent that the body becomes invisible and known only by proxy. To see the ship and its contrast is to know of the madman, and to ‘see’ him without seeing him. However, as is the promise of the ship, the madman exiled to the ship can be rendered distant, ‘outside’, and potentially forgotten—exterior.

Foucault’s description of the Ship of Fools indicates that, prior to ‘Of Other Spaces’, he had already identified a space that he would later come to describe as a heterotopia. However, the ship’s relation to the body was not hampered by the need for surveillance. The Ship of Fools juxtaposes the spaces around it by virtue of its travels, encountering many different spaces, collecting and rendering deviant subjects interior-exterior. The bodies of deviant subjects are exiled to a heterotopic space that frees all other spaces from the deviancy. The ship that carries the insane represents a peculiar instance, where deviant bodies were exiled to a specific heterotopic space, which itself functions as a heterotopia of deviation that can still push the body outside of society’s peripheral gaze—a practice which would become problematic with the emergence of disciplinary power.5

4. Discipline’s Gaze: The Body Surveilled

The emergence of disciplinary power, and the resulting emphasis on constant surveillance, would no longer allow for the relegation of ‘deviant’ subjects beyond its gaze. In a 1974 lecture entitled ‘The Birth of Social Medicine’, Foucault discusses two separate models of dealing with contagions, emerging in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first model, geared towards the problems of leprosy, relied on expulsion, where lepers were identified and moved outside of the city walls, to ensure a healthy urban space. Foucault remarks that “The mechanism of expulsion was that of purification of the urban environment” (Foucault 2020c, p. 146). He contrasts the model of expulsion with the model established for dealing with the plague, which operated by partitioning and isolating the infected individuals from the rest of the population, within the geographical parameters of the city.6 Infected individuals would be monitored to record recovery or mortality. The plague model became the standard for medical practice in the eighteenth century. Foucault’s discussion regarding the plague model emphasises its preoccupation with observation and recordkeeping—activities that would be significantly hindered if infected individuals were to be relocated to spaces outside of the city.

Foucault’s juxtaposition between the leprosy and plague models would reappear in Discipline and Punish, when he discusses the panopticon—to which he attributes many of the characteristics of surveillance, schedule, and partition he attributes to heterotopic spaces. Foucault describes a space governed by disciplinary mechanisms and surveillance, where the movement of individual bodies is constantly monitored and observed. Roll call and submission of personal documentation become daily activities, and the presence of the sick is carefully monitored and sought out by appointed physicians to prevent contagions. Were there to be those infected by disease, the space would be subjected to quarantine, and measures would be put in place to eradicate all traces of the disease in question (Foucault 1975, pp. 195–97). He writes:

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery,…—all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.

(Foucault 1975, p. 197)7

Governed by disciplinary mechanisms, space is utilised to address the problem of public health and biological threats to the population in the form of quarantines, instead of expulsion. The plague gave rise to disciplinary projects that called for multiple “separations”, “individualising distributions”, and surveillance (Foucault 1975, p. 198). Whereas the leper was met with expulsion, those stricken with the plague were subjected to “meticulous tactical partitioning” (Foucault 1975, p. 198).

However, these two projects are not incompatible, according to Foucault, since the expulsion of lepers was recalibrated by discipline into an exclusion by way of confinement and individualisation (Foucault 1975, p. 199). This “individualisation” was used to “mark [an] exclusion”, which produced “the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital”.8 All authorities who exercise this individual control, according to Foucault, function according to a “double mode” binary division, which results in branding of individuals and assignment to where an individual ‘belongs’, how they must be recognised and characterised, and how much surveillance must be exercised over them (Foucault 1975, p. 199). This all makes it possible for the body of the leper to be put back into play under the authority of disciplinary power, through partitioning and isolation (see also Kern 2008, p. 106). Foucault writes:

On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of individualising disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of disciplinary controls make it possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring into play against him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion.9

Disciplinary power ushered in a fixation on the body and its relation to space that was previously unnecessary. Disciplinary power relies on bodies being within its gaze for power to be exercised over them. The gaze “assures the automatic functioning of power”, which means that surveillance of some kind must be continuous for disciplinary power to be exercised to its full extent (Foucault 1975, p. 201). Disciplinary power operates by generating constant surveillance in closed institutions, and deploys a multidirectional gaze, whereby individuals become agents of surveillance, not only from the top-down as permitted by formal hierarchies, but also laterally and from the bottom up (Hoffman 2014, p. 30). This method of surveillance generates a multidirectional network under which the subject is always rendered available to the disciplinary gaze (Foucault 1975, pp. 176–77). The mechanisms of surveillance ushered in by disciplinary power were turned in all directions, and made each individual a subject and an object of the gaze of discipline (Foucault 1975, pp. 176–77).

However, it is important to note that even in Discipline and Punish, Foucault acknowledged the disciplinary gaze’s need to transcend the surveillance of the corporeal body. He unpacks a wide range of examination and documentation processes that were designed to keep detailed records of subjects, their habits, afflictions, tendencies, health, and professional and academic aptitudes and performances (Foucault 1975, pp. 184–94). This highlights the potential for the gaze of discipline to transcend the corporeal body, and to affect the corporeal reality of the subject by means of quantifiable and qualifiable markers detached from the corporeal subject. When discussing panopticism and police, Foucault highlights the role of the latter in transcending the closed heterotopic spaces of disciplinary institutions in order to expand the disciplinary gaze to “non-disciplinary spaces” (Foucault 1975, p. 215). This expansion enabled an “interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline” aimed at transcending, to some extent, the delimitations that such spaces presented to the gaze. The disciplinary gaze was not altogether absent outside of closed heterotopic institutions. However, the gaze was still severely restricted outside of heterotopic spaces, due to disciplinary power’s limited capacity for surveillance and documentation beyond the body.

Despite early techniques of documentation and policing, the gaze of disciplinary power was still limited by the technologically available techniques of surveillance. Even in the case of written documentation, the corporeal body of the subject still needed to be regularly available to the gaze, in order for this documentation and examination to take place. The limited range of the disciplinary gaze required the isolation of deviant subjects in heterotopic spaces of deviation where observation was enhanced, instead of the relegation of subjects to a space outside of the range of the gaze of disciplinary power. Instead of exiling deviant subjects to external spaces, disciplinary power sought to exclude subjects within the periphery of its gaze, through confinement and subjection to intensified surveillance.

Exiled bodies could not be subjected to any of these techniques, which left them outside of the gaze of disciplinary power. The solution is presented with the deployment of heterotopic spaces that themselves form part of the gaze of disciplinary power. One such institution, to which Foucault frequently recurs, is the prison. In ‘Of Other Spaces’, Foucault identifies the prison as a heterotopia of deviation (Cenzatti 2008, pp. 76–77; Foucault 2008b, p. 18). The introduction of disciplinary apparatuses changed the way in which heterotopias of deviation function. This becomes clear when considering Foucault’s discussion on prisons as “complete and austere institutions”, focused on the subject’s training, aptitude, state of mind, and attitude (Foucault 1975, p. 235). The prison must render the offender separate from the outside world and from everything that motivated their offence, provide them with a strict schedule—meant to translate into habit—and exercise authority over the inmates with regard to penalties for offences. Prison, in order to allow for the consideration of the deprivation of liberty as “useful”, must perform a “positive technical role”, namely the transformation of individuals (Foucault 1975, p. 248). Although confinement predates disciplinary power, and can be seen in configurations of sovereign power, discipline recalibrates the role and function of the prison. Unlike the ‘Ship of Fools’, which confined subjects to a specific space in order to be free of them, the penitentiary functions to act upon and study the subjects being confined instead of placing them beyond the periphery where this could be possible. The disciplinary subject cannot be ignored but can be excluded to the exteriority of the confined space—interior-exterior. The margin by which the prison system exceeds mere detention is filled by disciplinary techniques; with this addition the prison is transformed into the “penitentiary”—not merely a space reserved for incarceration, but for reform, surveillance, documentation, implementation of routine, and generation of knowledges (Foucault 1975, pp. 248–50). The penitentiary, the hospital, and the insane asylum function as heterotopias of deviation, but ones primarily geared towards the exclusion of subjects through the confinement of their corporeal bodies, and the subjection of these bodies to intense surveillance.

5. Regulation and Security: The Gaze Beyond the Body

Foucault argues that body-focused disciplinary apparatuses themselves proved insufficient in dealing with problems pertaining to the population that transcended the individual corporeal subject—including public health, longevity, housing, and migration (Foucault 1976, vol. 1, pp. 138–40). As a result, there emerged new apparatuses of power that were focused on treating the population as a singular ‘species body’ or a singular ‘mass’, instead of a multiplicity of individual subjects that traverse within and between disciplinary institutions. These new ‘regulatory controls of biopolitics’ supplemented the anatamo-political apparatuses of disciplinary power, which were primarily oriented towards the conduct of individual bodies (Curtis 2002, pp. 518–19; Foucault 1976, pp. 139–40; 2020b, pp. 242–43; Hoffman 2014, pp. 71–74). Regulatory controls included those that managed birth-rates, fostered life, prevented illness, valorisation, and controlled the circulation of bodies in the spaces so as to protect subjects from contractible diseases (Foucault 1976, pp. 140–41; 2020c, pp. 137–56; 2020b, pp. 243–45).

The ‘regulatory controls’ of biopolitics were not confined to training and reconfiguring the conduct of individual subjects primarily within closed institutions like schools, prisons, and barracks (Foucault 1976, p. 140), but transcended the individual body and institution to encompass the entire population, and in doing so, they expanded on the focus and gaze of disciplinary power, transcending the primary terrain of institutional spaces.

The expansion of the gaze beyond the body and the institution marks a decrease in the possibility of being ‘beyond’ the disciplinary gaze, even for those outside of specific institutions. It is not that confinement to a prison, a school, or a hospital enters the subject into the gaze. Rather, these spaces rely on a panopticism that intensifies and expands on the surveillance techniques of disciplinary power. Owing to the ubiquity of regulatory controls that continuously focus beyond the parameters of heterotopic institutions, it becomes possible for subjects to be at once included under the multidirectional gaze of surveillance, whilst simultaneously being excluded from specific heterotopic institutions predicated on institutionally specific criteria.

With the emergence of apparatuses of regulation (falling within the schema of biopolitics), and the reconceptualisation of ‘population’, the disciplinary gaze became progressively less restricted to the corporeal body and closed institutions. Apparatuses of regulation operated with an understanding of the population as a single object. The expansion of surveillance and the implementation of apparatuses that transcended the limits of closed institutions allowed for heterotopic spaces to rework the parameters delineating access. Being relegated to the outside of a heterotopic space no longer risks the subject’s availability to surveillance and apparatuses of power.

Foucault’s focus-shift towards liberal and neoliberal forms of governmentality ushered in his focus on security.10 According to Foucault, governmentality operated with a conceptualisation of the ‘population’ as a ‘subject-object’ capable of a certain level of self-regulation in order to achieve a homeostasis without the explicit superimposition of regulatory controls (Foucault 2009, pp. 76–77; Hoffman 2014, pp. 103–7). Apparatuses of security function with a conceptualisation of the population as imbued with a ‘natural’ capacity to self-regulate. Such a population required governments to remain “at a distance” and to deploy strategies and apparatuses aimed at ‘modifying’, instead of ‘nullifying’ the environmental conditions around the population in order to maintain this natural capacity for self-regulation and preservation (Foucault 2009, pp. 71–77; Hoffman 2014, pp. 102–5; Marais 2023, pp. 125–30).

Apparatuses of security operate with less intrusion but with the same wide net as regulatory controls, transcending the parameters of the body and institutional spaces, whilst remaining ‘distant’ enough to avoid the tendency and appearance of imposing ‘do this’ ordinances on the population (see Foucault 2009, p. 71). The subject itself, within the framework of neoliberal governmentality, can be relied upon to pursue its own best interests within the delineations and parameters of legal, corporeal, and economic conditions of possibility. See (Foucault 2008a, pp. 267–86).

Therefore, the need for heterotopias that focus on enclosing subjects and regulating their conduct with precision also diminished (except for extreme cases like prisons). The emergence of the rationale underpinning security apparatuses allowed for a proliferation in heterotopias that were in no way geared towards the active disciplining or regulating of conduct. New heterotopias could emerge that focus on catering to the desires and goals of different types of subjects whilst security apparatuses remain present but distant and protective or precautionary only (such as in the case of gated communities, shopping malls, or theme parks).

The focus on the conduct of the corporeal body is significantly diminished, as the body is considered a single entity within a self-regulating multiplicity. The criteria for the body’s conditions of possibility become sedimented in economic and performance markers.11 The subject is seen as a self-reliant entrepreneur (termed homo œconomicus) who is left with the responsibility of accumulating the resources that would allow for their access to spaces and privileges (Foucault 2008a, p. 226). The conditions of possibility for the subject’s corporeal conduct become decided by what is reflected by the information collected pertaining to their participation in society and the economy.12

6. Dividual-Individuals: Inclusion/Exclusion Beyond Corporeal Space

Foucault’s preoccupation with space as well as the practice of inclusion and exclusion has been taken up by many interlocutors and successors. Engaging with these interlocutors and successors reveals the continuation of the trend of establishing inclusionary and exclusionary criteria predicated on the values of society and heterotopic institutions. Contemporary scholarship also demonstrates a continued trend of these criteria becoming less dependent on the corporeal body, whilst remaining consequential for the aforementioned body’s relation to corporeal heterotopic spaces. With the emergence of new technologies, inclusionary and exclusionary criteria become increasingly predicated on digital data that nonetheless have a direct impact on the corporeal body.

Deleuze (1992) attempted a quasi-continuation of Foucault’s work by positing a progressive ‘replacement’ of “disciplinary societies” with societies of “control”, where mechanisms of control replace discipline in a system of subversive consensual apparatuses of perpetual coercion. In societies of control, Deleuze posits that the individual subject of disciplinary power loses its relevance and is subsumed by the ‘dividual’—an aggregation of data points that constitutes the target of corporate control (Brusseau 2020, p. 12; Deleuze 1992, p. 4). Deleuze’s concept of the ‘dividual’ has been taken up by Lazzarato (2012) and Raunig (2016). His argument for ‘control society’ replacing ‘disciplinary society’ has notably been taken up by Hardt and Negri in their work Empire, and functions as a core feature of their later work as well as subsequent scholarship on Foucault and Deleuze (see Beckman 2018; Hardt and Negri 2017, 2001).

However, Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power does not occlude the possibility of apparatuses that consensually coerce subjects (Foucault and Rabinow 1984, p. 380). Neither does discipline function as a stagnant set of mechanisms that have to be replaced altogether as the focus of its gaze transcends beyond the corporeal body. ‘Biopower’, ‘government’, and ‘security’ do not replace discipline, but are added onto it, and recalibrate discipline and its gaze according to emerging knowledges.13 In fact, Foucault incorporates his previous limiting conceptualisation of discipline into his schema of biopower as an ‘anatamo-political’ pole primarily focused on the individual body. See also (Kelly 2015, p. 153; Foucault 2020b, p. 243; 1976, vol. 1, p. 139). Discipline works within the parameters of available technologies and knowledges in order to exercise a set of ‘controls’14 upon subjects both within and beyond institutions to various degrees (Kelly 2015, pp. 155–56).

However, Deleuze’s ‘dividual’ functions as a valuable concept for the analysis of contemporary practices of spatial relations. The digital dividual that is produced through an aggregation of codes, passwords, samples, data, and documentation is directed and appealed to by corporate marketing aimed at ‘segments’ and demographics (Brusseau 2020, p. 15; Lazzarato 2012, p. 148).

The digital dividual can be perused and comported into a system of what Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. A system of ‘surveillance capitalism’ relies on the collection of digital data in order to produce effective systems of communication, marketing, and prediction of conduct among other endeavours (Zuboff 2019, pp. 10–18). Accordingly, the records of conduct that permeate ‘cyberspace’ co-constitute the conditions of corporeal space. The subject is marketed to, and positioned by, the data collected and accumulated into the digital dividual.

Colin Koopman takes this one step further, by arguing that subjects are effectively produced within the realm of data (see also D’Cruz 2019). Koopman (2019, pp. 170–71) distinguishes his argument from Harcourt’s (2015, pp. 157–232) argument that digital data produces a separate ‘data double’ that can be deployed to mediate our conditions of possibility. Instead, Koopman argues that the corporeal subject and the digital data are one and the same. For Koopman, data and information effectively produce the conditions of possibility for the subject’s conduct (Koopman 2019, pp. 158–69). The subject is their data. Koopman argues that contemporary society is governed by ‘infopower’—a mode of power predicated on documented information that is tied to the corporeal component of a subject through a process of ‘fastening’ (Koopman 2019, pp. 11–12). ‘Fastening’ a subject to their data allows for the mediation of their conduct in the digital and corporeal realms by virtue of either speeding up or slowing down the conduct of subjects (Koopman 2019, p. 12). Koopman argues that ‘infopower’ is a distinct mode of power that is irreducible to the goals and knowledges of sovereign power, discipline, or biopower. However, unlike Deleuze, he does not argue that ‘infopower’ replaces or overrides other modes of power, but rather that it supplements and overlaps with these different modes (Koopman 2019, pp. 159–73).15

Byung-Chul Han argues that the technological expansion that has been coextensive with neoliberalism16 has transcended beyond the material and corporeal to include digital programmes and information (Han 2017b, p. 25). This turn exemplifies an emphasis placed on the psychical dimension of politics, economics, and power—a turn towards ‘psychopolitics’(Han 2017b, p. 25).

Han (2017b, p. 66) argues that the neoliberal turn towards the psychical and technological produces a ‘ban-opticon’, which reduces subjects to ‘trash’ or ‘waste’ statuses based on their economic markers. He juxtaposes the ban-opticon with the panopticon. The ban-opticon does not replace the panopticon, but supplements it by virtue of an exclusion that complements the inclusion and surveillance of the panopticon. The reliance on digital assets and avatars ensures a two-fold exclusion. The exclusion of waste from the ban-opticon is identified and enforced in the digital realm, which has direct implications on the corporeal and material realm of physical heterotopic and panoptic spaces.

Han’s digital ban-opticon exemplifies the post-civil,17 neoliberal tendency, originating with disciplinary power, to simultaneously exclude subjects from corporeal and digital spaces, predicated on criteria elucidated in the digital space. Subjects’ exclusion is predicated on their continuous subjugation to the gaze both physically and digitally. It is the fact that subjects’ bank accounts and economic statuses are available to institutions such as banks that allows for their exclusion from spaces where high(er) economic status is a prerequisite for inclusion. Additionally, exclusion from these spaces does not render subjects outside the gaze that itself is necessary for inclusionary and exclusionary verdicts to be rendered. The inclusionary/exclusionary function of heterotopias transcends beyond the body, beyond the corporeal institution, to render its verdicts predicated on digital data, banking information, criminal records, or even social media activity (see Dehaene and De Cauter 2008b, p. 99; Low 2008, p. 153). Being digitally included under the ubiquitous gaze can ultimately provide the grounds for the subject’s exclusion from specific material heterotopic spaces; see also (Han 2018, pp. 103–4). The digital dividual interacts with the corporeal individual to the extent that the former negotiates, mediates, or delimits the conditions of possibility for the latter. Koopman (2019, pp. 108–50) shows how data collected pertaining to race in the United States has historically been deployed for the practice of ‘redlining’.18 The practice of redlining effectively delimits the corporeal conditions of possibility for business and residence based on digital data pertaining to race. The ‘red lines’ in these cases exemplify the physical parameters that separate the heterotopic spaces reserved for white Americans from the mixed-race areas they juxtapose. However, the data that is used to determine and justify this separation is collected and stored beyond the racialised bodies that are relegated to different relations with the heterotopic spaces.

Inclusion and exclusion now happen simultaneously and instantaneously, but in reference to different spaces, where the relationship between inclusion and exclusion is co-dependent.19 Han (2017a, p. 71) argues that “our society of transparency is approaching the society of surveillance”. For Han, digital surveillance becomes a prerequisite for participation in society. Even the panopticon has become mediated by digital data ‘formats’.20

Han’s digital-panopticon21 echoes Mark Poster’s concept of the ‘superpanopticon’ that relies on methods of documentation and record-keeping that transcend the body, such as driver’s licences and credit cards that provide a continuous stream of data pertaining to the subject’s conduct (Poster [1990] 1996, p. 93). The ‘superpanopticon’ relies on databases in order to construct an ‘additional self’ that can be acted upon in a manner that affects the ‘real self’ without the latter being immediately aware (Poster [1990] 1996, pp. 97–98). Similar to Harcourt (2015), Poster’s argument implies the creation of a separate data double, instead of producing extensions of the subject through digital documentation. However, Poster does focus his discussion within the parameters of Foucault’s arguments about power and space and demonstrates that transformations in technologies and knowledges accompany transformations in the techniques of surveillance.

David Lyon expands on the concept by arguing that the superpanopticon is primarily reliant on an ‘electronic gaze’ focused on a ‘data-object’ (Lyon 1994, p. 205). The electronic gaze expands the superpanopticon’s conditions of surveillance farther beyond corporeal subjects and spaces towards the digital (Lyon 1994, pp. 205, 222). Lyon’s ‘data object’, however, is still treated as an addition to, rather than an extension of, the corporeal individual.

However, viewed through Koopman’s lens, the subject that is surveilled by the electronic gaze both digitally and corporeally is produced by the data that constitutes the conditions for the subject’s conduct.

Subjects avail themselves to surveillance by the electronic gaze through practices of ‘autoillumination’, entailing exhibitionist practices within digital spaces (Han 2017a, p. 72; [2010] 2015, p. 48; Knepper et al. 2024). Han argues that surveillance is an inherent feature of the digital panopticon, and that this surveillance transcends government to include private companies such as Facebook and Google who harvest data for capital gains and to spy on their employees, and banks that use digital data to screen credit applicants (Han 2017a, p. 72). This echoes Deleuze’s argument pertaining to willing participation in the space of data collection. The ‘dividual’ is not constructed from components that are wrenched away from or purloined from the ‘individual’. Rather, the makeup of the digital dividual is consensually extracted through a continuous necessary interplay between the corporeal and digital realms.

The digital even manages to enhance the surveillance of the corporeal, keeping track of subjects’ actions and conduct in the real world, and collecting information of the subjects’ corporeal actions that could operate as inclusionary or exclusionary criteria for entrance to specific spaces. Han deploys the example of Google Glass that records the conduct of the wearer wherever they go, to illustrate the manner in which digital technology records physical and corporeal conduct to document in digital form (Han 2017a, pp. 74–75).22

The trend towards digital surveillance and inclusion/exclusion is taken to the extreme by Benjamin Bratton. In his framework of ‘The Stack’, Bratton proposes that the multifactorial and omni-integrated relationship between layers of digital and corporeal networks and assemblages leads to the disintegration of the frameworks that rely on relationships between subjects and objects to the point that these relations become incidental or ‘accidental’ consequences of the integrated networks that make up ‘The Stack’ (Bratton 2015, n.d.; Wark 2016), Within this quasi-accelerationist framing, the ‘user’ that designates one side of ‘The Stack’ is itself a dual entity comprised proportionally of cybernetic elements and their most immediate relations to the corporeal (Bratton 2015, pp. 254–55). To a certain extent, the ‘user’ itself is a product (itself not necessarily human) or an ‘appearance’ that emerges at one end of ‘The Stack’, and which is deployed as a starting point out of phenomenological necessity (Wark 2016).

Bratton’s argument is primarily focused on the digital. He does away with the strict necessity for a corporeal body entirely. However, for all those entities within ‘The Stack’ that still have corporeal bodies, there can be no denying that their participation in ‘The Stack’ is not limited to their corporeal elements. The corporeal subject interacts with the stack through components that are not corporeal but will affect the conditions of possibility for their corporeal body. The subject does not seem to truly dissolve so much as it proliferates through ‘The Stack’ further away from the corporeal realm of the body to emerge as a dividual-individual that is at once a corporeal entity and an amalgamation of digital elements.23 The expansion of digital data apparatuses casts a net of surveillance far beyond the physical realm, to include the digital space. The participation and inclusion in the digital space provides grounds for the subject’s inclusion or exclusion from physical heterotopic spaces, see (Hu 2016). The trend gleaned from Foucault—that expansion of the gaze and practices of surveillance will expand on the criteria and apparatuses of inclusion and exclusion from spaces—has continued far beyond what the technologies of Foucault’s time would have allowed for his own analysis.

The subject traverses an interplay of digital and corporeal spaces that themselves co-constitute the terrain of the ‘dividual-individual’ subject that is made up of both corporeal markers, conduct, and delimitations, as well as a multifarious assemblage of digital datapoints. The amalgamation of data that produces the ‘dividual-individual’ subject is collected and documented in both digital and corporeal spaces to generate delineations for subjects’ relation with both the digital and corporeal realm. These delineations apply to employment, who they can communicate with, where they are allowed to move, live, and play, and what kind of advantages or drawbacks they can expect to encounter in seeking medical assistance or a bank loan, see (Lazzarato 2012, pp. 147–48). Koopman (2019, pp. viii–xi) points out that there is a multifarious range of biological and corporeal needs that are directly linked to the information represented by the digital sphere. For example, one’s digital credit score may influence one’s ability to feed or house themselves.

Moreover, the relations that are established with digital spaces, and the compositions that produce the assemblage of the ‘dividual’ can have direct impacts on the corporeal individual’s relation to material spaces. Being interior to a specific socio-economic segment within the digital sphere can directly impact the subject’s corporeal possibilities of being interior to a specific domicile, a corporeal space from which to operate a business, or an operating theatre in a transplant hospital. Being exterior to a certain category of online activity can come to delimit the pool from which someone could be considered to be interior to a corporeal space of employment. Digital data produces the criteria by which corporeal bodies are relegated to exteriorities.

In these cases, the gaze homes in on the digital and electronic spaces where it finds the dividual, farther removed from the corporeal body than ever before, but the corporeal body is nevertheless linked to the digital dividual to the extent that the digital dividual comes to co-constitute the everyday corporeal conditions of possibility of the body. The conditions of the body are inextricably linked to the data markers that make up the digital dividual. The relation that the corporeal subject can have with corporeal heterotopic spaces is configured in the digital realm. The conditions of possibility for inclusion or exclusion from corporeal spaces are pre-empted by digital data. The rules of conduct and governance of spaces, which themselves form part of the inclusionary/exclusionary criteria of the heterotopic space, transcend the corporeal subject to include aggregations of digital data that include conduct within digital spaces.

The trends laid bare in Foucault’s corpus as it pertains to space have continued to progress in the direction he identified—beyond the corporeal body towards an ever more encompassing system of surveillance that can act upon the individual body without requiring it to be perpetually within sites and institutions that render it available to a corporeal gaze. Along with this, the expansion of the kinds of heterotopic spaces (both corporeal and digital) that subjects can encounter has resulted in the expansion of inclusionary and exclusionary criteria beyond the body or its conduct towards aggregations of data that can nonetheless be deployed to define the body’s relation to and within corporeal spaces.

7. Conclusions

This article has not explored every space and institution in Foucault’s work that exemplifies heterotopic qualities. There are other examples that could serve to illustrate the changes in relations to bodies and spaces effectively. However, the examples chosen here illustrate the transformation in the relations between bodies and heterotopic spaces with the emergence of new technologies and knowledges. An examination of this kind reveals the unique manner in which the changes in focus on the body transform both heterotopic institutions, as well as the criteria that underpin inclusion/exclusion from these spaces.

Foucault’s work indicates pre-disciplinary heterotopic spaces were not focused on the surveillance of the body. However, with the emergence of the disciplinary gaze, bodies needed to be within or adjacent to heterotopic spaces in order for power to be exercised over them. However, with the emergence of regulatory controls and security apparatuses, the gaze expanded beyond the body and the institution, to encompass entire cities and eventually countries. Security apparatuses would also emphasise a minimalist approach to intervention that would allow for subjects and institutions to conduct themselves with greater autonomy. The expansion of surveillance, as well as the minimalist approach to intervention, allowed for the expansion of the project of exclusion from heterotopic spaces without the risk of losing the subject’s availability to the gaze.

Contemporary theorists have demonstrated that the trends exemplified in Foucault’s work have continued to expand the gaze, not just beyond the body, but beyond the corporeal realm entirely. The gaze (now) includes the digital space of data. What happens in the digital space directly influences a subject’s relation to and with material heterotopic spaces. In this space, the conditions of the corporeal body become mutually co-constituted by the appraisals made of the digital dividual. New transformations in digital technology, as well as the principles that govern them, will continue to impact the subject who is dually co-constituted by their corporeal bodies and their digital data as dividual-individuals.