Of Other Spaces Heterotopias
Author
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), French philosopher and historian of systems of thought.
Publication Details
"Des espaces autres" was delivered as a lecture to the Cercle d'études architecturales in Paris on 14 March 1967. Foucault did not publish it in his lifetime; it appeared in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité in October 1984, shortly after his death, and in English as "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias" (trans. Jay Miskowiec) in Diacritics in 1986.
Its status as a text should be kept in mind: it is an occasional lecture to architects, never revised for publication, and Foucault developed the concept nowhere else. It is one of his most cited pieces and one of his least worked-out.
The Argument
Foucault opens with a periodisation: the Middle Ages had a space of emplacement — a hierarchy of places, sacred and profane, celestial and terrestrial; Galileo dissolved this into extension, infinite and open; and the present is the era of the site or emplacement in a new sense, defined by relations of proximity, storage, circulation and classification. "We are in the epoch of simultaneity... of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed."
Within this, he identifies two kinds of space that stand in relation to all the others by contesting or inverting them. Utopias are unreal sites that present society in perfected or reversed form. Heterotopias are real places that do the same work — actually existing sites that are "outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location."
The Six Principles
1. Every culture has them, in two broad types: crisis heterotopias (reserved for individuals in a state of transition — adolescence, menstruation, pregnancy, old age) and, in modern societies, heterotopias of deviation (the clinic, the psychiatric hospital, the prison, the retirement home). 2. A society can make an existing heterotopia function differently over time — Foucault's example is the changing meaning of the cemetery. 3. A heterotopia can juxtapose in one real place several incompatible sites: the theatre, the cinema, the garden. 4. Heterotopias are linked to heterochronies, breaks with ordinary time — the museum and library, which accumulate all time, and the fair or festival, which is wholly transitory. 5. They have systems of opening and closing that both isolate and make penetrable: entry is compulsory, or requires rites, or permission. 6. They function in relation to all remaining space, either as an illusion that exposes the rest as more illusory, or as a compensation — a space of meticulous order set against a disordered world.
Foucault ends with the ship: "the heterotopia par excellence," a piece of floating space, closed on itself and given over to the infinity of the sea.
Criticism
The concept has been enormously productive and is notoriously slippery. Foucault's six principles are not consistent with one another, his examples do not all satisfy his own criteria, and the category has been applied so widely — to almost any space that is somewhat unusual — that critics have questioned whether it retains analytic content.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
"Heterotopia" is applied to networked spaces constantly, and the application is worth doing carefully rather than by reflex. The genuinely useful principles are the fourth and fifth. A platform is a heterochrony: it accumulates all past time in an accessible mass, which is the condition described under persistent paleontology. And its systems of opening and closing — account creation, verification, invitation, moderation, exclusion — are exactly the isolating-yet-penetrable entry rites Foucault identifies, and they are where a platform's politics are actually located.
