a reading of foucault’s heterotopias
foucault argues we haven’t learned to read space the way we’ve learned to read time and history. heterotopias are real places that contest all other real places. this is an attempt to understand how.*
*all quotes from foucault, “of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias” (1967)
01. the epoch of space
our experience of the world is more like a network that connects points than a long life developing through time.
02. medieval space
a hierarchical ensemble of places: sacred/profane, protected/open, urban/rural…
03. galileo
galileo’s most important discovery was the constitution of an infinite and infinitely open space. a thing’s place became a point in its movement.
04. extension
extension was substituted for localization.
05. site
site has been substituted for extension. site can be described as relations of proximity between points or elements: series, trees, grids…
06. desanctification
we couldn’t reached practical desanctification of space yet. our life is still governed by oppositions: private/public, family/social, cultural/useful, leisure/work…
07. heterogenous space
we live inside a set of relations which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable.
08. utopias
sites with no real place. fundamentally unreal spaces.
09. heterotopias
real sites that exist and at the same time counter-sites in which all the other real sites are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.
10. the mirror
it makes the place i occupy absolutely real and absolutely unreal, since to be perceived it must pass through that virtual point over there. a heterotopia.
11. first principle
heterotopias are things that have always existed and will exist indispensably for societies.
12. heterotopias of crisis
for people in transitional states: adolescents, menstruating women, the elderly… an example would be honeymoon, a nowhere-space for a nowhere-act that couldn’t happen at home.
13. heterotopias of deviation
for people whose behavior falls outside the norm: psychiatric hospitals, rest homes, prisons and maybe even retirement homes.
14. second principle
the same heterotopia can perform different functions across time.
15. the cemetery
a place unlike ordinary spaces, yet connected with all sites of the city since everyone has relatives there. until the 18th century, placed at the center of the city next to the church.
16. the modern cemetery
when people stopped believing in the resurrection of bodies, the bodies were just a reminder to the people of death. cemeteries moved to the outside border of cities.
17. third principle
heterotopias can bring together several incompatible sites into a single real place. a single physical location can contain multiple conceptual spaces that shouldn’t coexist.
18. theater & cinema
the theater brings onto the stage a whole series of places foreign to one another. cinema is an odd rectangular room where one sees the projection of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional screen.
19. the persian garden
the oldest example of contradictory sites. four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space at the center like the navel of the world.
20. fourth principle
“the heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.”
21. accumulating time
heterotopias like museums and libraries, they want to trap time. they suggest an archive as a defense against disappearance.
22. festival time
heterotopias linked to time in its most flowing, transitory aspect. fairgrounds, vacation villages… absolutely temporal rather than eternal.
23. fifth principle
heterotopias are systems that are both isolated and penetrable.
24. compulsory or ritual entry
entrances that requires you to transform: hammams, saunas..
25. illusory openings
in farms of brazil and some south american countries, there are bedrooms in farms which are separated from the house where the owner of the farm’s family lives. anyone could enter the bedrooms and could sleep, but never have access to the family’s area. the visitor was the guest in transit.
26. sixth principle
“heterotopias have a function in relation to all the space that remains. this function unfolds between two extreme poles.”
27. illusion
so explicitly artificial that they reveal how artificial everything else is too. like brothels, which make visible what remains hidden in “normal” relationships.
28. compensation
they create a well-ordered space that shows how messy and chaotic our actual world is. like the jesuit colonies, life was regulated by the bell and space was organized as a perfect cross.
29. the boat
neither land nor sea.
connects the brothel to the colony, the port to the treasure. the boat doesn’t just travel through space. it is space folded into itself.
“the ship is the heterotopia per excellence.”
“in civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”
heterotopias are real places that exist outside society’s normal functioning. sometimes feared, sometimes celebrated, but always set apart. they continue to exist while simultaneously reflecting and challenging all other spaces. we should think more about heterotopias, because:
– societies say through these spaces what they cannot say about themselves.
– because these spaces can question all other spaces. heterotopias show how the existing order works, what is hidden, what is normalized.
– every heterotopia shows that a different way of life is possible. whether perfect order or open illusion, each one points to what could be otherwise.
heterotopias function as society’s mirror: not reflecting what we claim to be, but exposing what we actually are through what we exclude, accumulate, or perfect.
a bag of holding 