Foucault’s twisty spatial history of exclusion from ‘madness’ to ‘badness

A little-noticed shift - potentially of great interest to socio-spatial theorists, human geographers and what might be termed ?spatial historians? - occurred in Foucault?s thinking from his work on ?madness? (Madness and Civilization, originally 1961) to that on ?badness? (Discipline and Punish, originally 1975). Whereas the former revolved chiefly around space as distance and barrier, enforcing exclusion-as-exile, the latter took more seriously space as a complex resource for organising, distributing and operating upon troublesome populations in the guise of inclusion-as-confinement. This article charts this big-picture shift in Foucault?s oeuvre, particularly pulling out what occurs in his now published/ translated lecture course The Punitive Society (delivered in 1973). Often regarded as little more than a prototype for Discipline and Punish, it is actually the case that The Punitive Society stages a switch from a stark-exclusionary reading of how society chases away its troublesome ?others? to a more nuanced-inclusionary reading of how society works on these ?others? with the goal of rendering them potentially acquiescent and useful. That the former reading was how Foucault initially envisaged his spatial history of prisons is itself revealing, but so too is what he says about harsher punitive and exclusionary logics still lying at the heart of inclusion-as-confinement.