Friday 22 January 2016
Of
Other Spaces: Utopia and Heterotopias by Michel
Foucault
I found the seminar was
extremely interesting and enthusiastic. Foucault is a philosopher who it is
worth to read further as his work has been highly influential. In my opinion,
the points he raises makes me wonder and raise questions.
Foucault is a French
philosopher inspired by Nietzsche and is one of the dominant contemporary
social theorists.
The presenter (Petros) of
the seminar analyse the key aspects of Foucault’s theories
Structuralism by
Foucault: effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected
on the temporal axis an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as
juxtaposed and set off against one another, implicated by each other that makes
them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration.
In the Middle Ages in West the hierarchic ensemble
of space form as sacred places and profane places, protected places and open,
exposed places: urban places and rural places. Moreover, there were places
where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then
on the contrary, places where things found their natural ground and stability.
The complete hierarchy as explained above can also be called a medieval space: the
space of emplacement.
Galileo introduce and dissolved the
idea of emplacement.
Foucault first explored
and used the term heterotopia in his book The Order of Things (1966). He used
the word ‘topos’ in English ‘space’ as a metaphor in language.
Utopia, according to the
Oxford Dictionary,2016 is an imagined place or state of things in which
everything is perfect.
Utopia and heterotopia
are linked to other spaces. However, these spaces contradict to those other
spaces which are link to.
Utopia ? Heterotopia
Mirror Utopia? or Heterotopia?
Mirror acts like a
utopian object. It is a place without a place and we see ourselves where we do
not exist.
A
mirror is at the same time utopia and heterotopia. On the one hand is a place
without place, and on the other it is a real space. As Foucault notes, in the
mirror we find ourselves missing in the place that we are.
Edward Relph is a Canadian geographer known for his
book place and placelessness. In that book the definition of utopia and
heterotopia is flipped.
What is heterotopology?
Heterotopology is simultaneously a mythic and real contestation of the space in
which we live and it is defined with four principles.
Fist
principle
Heterotopias of crisis:
Sacred, forbidden
Examples
For people in crisis: boarding
school, pregnant women, the elderly, the honeymoon, military service.
Foucault suggests that
the heterotopias of crisis are replaced by the heterotopias of deviation: rest
homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons and perhaps retirement homes.
In the case of the
pregnant woman her own body is creating a space for the baby.
Second
principle
A society, as its
history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different
fashion. Each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a
society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture
in which it occurs, have one function or another.
Examples
The cemetery: it is a
place, connected with all the sites of the city, state, society or village, and
in Western culture has always existed.
Third
principle
The heterotopia is
capable of juxtaposing in a single real place, several spaces: several sites
that are in themselves incompatible.
Examples
Theatre, cinema,
gardens.
The cinema is a rectangular
space that has a two dimensional screen that projects a three dimensional
space.
Fourth
principle
Heterotopias are most
often linked to slices in time which is to say that they open onto what might
be termed heterochronies. Generally in a society like ours heterotopias and
heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion.
Examples
Libraries, museums: the
expression of an individual choice, timeless, an archive that enclose in one
place all times in all epochs, all forms and all testes constituting a place of
all times that is itself outside of the time.
Opposite of these heterotopias:
linked to the accumulation of time, the time is flowing, transitory such as
celebrations and festivals. These heterotopias are temporary. According to
Foucault new kind of temporal heterotopias has been invented such as vacation
villages
If a movie seen more than three times then, each
time it is viewed something different is derived from the viewer. For example perhaps
you have seen a movie in a different place, with different people.
The presentation brought
an interesting debated for music festivals. Such an example is the Glastonbury
festival. People from the surrounding area go to this festival every year. The
experience gained on each occasion would be different from the previous as the
conditions could be different due, perhaps, to changes in weather, people and music
etc. The festival can thus suggests, be considered
as heterotopias as is in the town only for a period of time unlike for example visiting
Venice for a week which even after your departure the city will remain the same.
How this case of a temporary festival-event
different from a pregnant woman?? The body of the pregnant woman will temporary
creates a space for the baby. After the birth the body will recover and
transform to its previous shape.
Fifth
principle
According to Foucault heterotopias always presuppose
a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them
penetrable. It follows, as Foucault suggests that the site is not freely
accessible in the manner of a public space. An example of this, as Foucault
notes, is the entry to a barracks or a prison. This is because a person needs
certain permission to enter such places.
Sixth
principle
The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a
function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds
between two extreme poles as Foucault further notes. Either their role is to
create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the site inside
of which human life its partitioned as still more illusory or it is role to
create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as
well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled.
Examples
Colonies, brothels and boat.
At the end of the
presentation the conversation focused on persons present as peoples ‘being in
this world’. This gave me the opportunity to express my point of view upon a
topic that I have my self debated and explained to my colleagues why I believe that.
What I was explained is that we only experience the now and if you thing about
it, each minute that it passing it belongs to the pass and to what extend the
future it is unknown. My thoughts have been influenced by the book The Power of
Now by Eckhart Tolle 2005, which stresses the importance of living in the
present and avoiding placing thoughts of the past or the future above them. The
conversation was led to the conclusion of whether or not people are living now
in heterotopia as everything around us will one day be demolish and destroyed.
Reference:
Foucault, Michel, Architecture/ Mouvement/ Continuite
translated by Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces”. 1967 Web
Tolle, Eckhart. The Power Of Now. London: Hodder
Mobius, 2005
