HETEROTOPIA
Cours: Code: Tutor: Student: Period:
Philosophy and Architecture 7X300 dr.J.C.T.Voorthuis bsc.J.Poortman winter 2014
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HETEROTOPIA Every society is based on laws and rules, a system maybe clearly visible or almost completely hidden, both constructing the foundation of its spaces but at the same time revealing and imposing its borders, limits so to say. Within these borders, we understand the social system because we are familiar with its laws and rules. We as society can also understand the character and quality of spaces being part of the system simply because they obey the given demands. There is no need in explaining the character of these spaces since every ‘normal’ space is such a space. But what is normal? I think that this question in general is a very difficult one to answer and no answer could possibly satisfy every situation in which ‘normal’ is questioned, but within this context, normal could be everything that fits in, so to say, everything that follows the rules in such a smooth way that it does not stand out and we do not have to think or doubt about the logic of its existence. It might be everything that does not raise any question since it acts according to the system we are familiar with. So ‘normal’ spaces which follow our ‘normal’ (familiar) laws and rules, create our ‘normal’, understandable society. No questions…… Is that all? The fact that these three words form a question, already explains that actually, this is not all. Normal is not everything, and not everything is normal. Our curiosity withholds us from settling for just normal. Our society is depending on balance and therefore we know there is more than just normal. Because of this balance there is no ordinary without extraordinary. Two opposites both question and criticize each other and thereby explaining, defining each other. If our society is built of spaces that we know as normal, ordinary, there must be spaces out there that we would
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define as extraordinary, different from normal, there must be ‘other spaces’. Due to the system (laws and rules) of our society we understand normal and therefore understand normal spaces. We also know there must be spaces other than normal, ‘other spaces’. But what exactly are they and are we capable of understanding and experiencing them fully?
MICHEL FOUCAULTS ‘OF OTHER SPACES’ In march 1967, Michel Foucault gave a lecture about heterotopia and the manuscript for this lecture, originally titled ‘Des Espace Autres’, was published by the French journal Architecture Mouvement Continuité in 1984. ‘Of other spaces’, Foucaults manuscript, reviews his findings about spaces which he called heterotopias. Foucault speaks about previously mentioned balance when he states that ‘we are in an epoch of juxtaposition’ and refers to the Middle Ages where ‘...there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places.’ 1. He further mentions that our lives are perhaps still governed by ‘a certain number of oppositions…that we regard as simple givens’ and that the sacred is still out there as hidden presence, nurturing these oppositions 2. Foucault wants to point out that the space in which we live happens to be a space that is ‘…in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable to one another.’ 3
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1. Foucault, M. (1967) 1984, p. 113 2. Ibid., p. 115 3. Ibid., p. 115-116
Space is heterogeneous, space is relations and one could describe different sites via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined. Foucaults interest lays not in ‘normal’ sites but in the ones related to ‘...all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites...’ 4 There are two main types of these sites. First, there are the ‘utopias’, society presented in a perfected form, fundamentally unreal spaces. Second there are the ‘heterotopias’, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. 5 Foucault elaborates the principle of heterotopias in comparison to utopias and uses the mirror as example to do so: ‘The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface… But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality… From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there… it makes this place that I occupy…at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.’ 6 Six principles are given by Foucault to create insight in heterotopias. ‘The first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias… But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found.’ As an example, Foucault mentions places like ‘elsewhere’ and ‘nowhere’, places 4. Foucault, M. (1967) 1984, p. 116 5. Ibid., p. 116-117 6. Ibid., p. 117
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reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis or other specific situation. Foucault describes these ‘heterotopias without geographical markers’ as crises heterotopias, privileged, sacred or forbidden places.7 ‘The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion’. To set an example, Foucault chooses the cemetery and explains that it ‘…is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces’, connected with all the sites of the society because each family has relatives in the cemetery but it is also a place that once was ‘…the sacred and immortal heart of the city…’ and over time, turned into ‘…the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.’8 ‘Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’. Foucault uses the theatre, cinema and garden as examples, starting with the theatre which is capable of showing ‘…a whole series of places that are foreign to one another...’ continuing with the cinema where ‘…on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space…’ finishing with gardens as oldest example ‘that take the form of contradictory sites…the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.’ 9 ‘Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time…’. Foucault mentions again the cemetery, where the individual can find both the loss of life and quasi-eternity. He distinguishes between heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time and on the contrary heterotopias linked ‘to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival.’ Describing the first type, Foucault presents museums
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7. Foucault, M. (1967) 1984, p. 118 8. Ibid., p. 119-120 9. Ibid., p. 120-121
and libraries as heterotopias ‘…in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit…’, showing ‘… the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes…’. The other type is not oriented towards the eternal but are rather absolutely temporal. The fairground for example, teeming once or twice a year with stands, but also the quite new vacation villages, offering three weeks of primitive living for inhabitants of the city. Where these two types of heterotopia come together ‘…the experience is just as much the rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge.’ 10 ‘Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place.’ There are two types within this principle: first the type were entry is compulsory, like in prisons or barracks and second the type where entering individuals have to submit to rights and purifications such as the hammam of the Moslems or Scandinavian saunas. Others seem to be pure and simple openings, but are generally hiding curious exclusions. Foucault gives the example of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in South America as explanation. The entry door, meant for uninvited guests, did not lead to the room where the family lived, but to the bedroom where one could overstay the night. ‘Everyone can enter into the heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion - we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded.’ Another example for this type of heterotopia could perhaps be found in ‘the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open.’11 ‘Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains’. 10. Foucault, M. (1967) 1984, p. 121-122 11. Ibid., p. 122-123
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The function unfolds between two extreme poles: ‘Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space…’ or ‘, their role is 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’. The heterotopia of illusion and the heterotopia of compensation. The first is sketched by the brothel, where your illusions receive a body, a touchable shape, where unreality becomes reality. The second is explained by colonization, perfect other places, other then familiar society. 12 Foucaults manuscripts concludes with the metaphor of the boat as ultimate heterotopia, related to all six heterotopian principles, being both ‘…the great instrument of economic development…’ and ‘the greatest reserve of the imagination’. The heterotopia ‘par excellence’. 13 The way Foucault describes his vision of heterotopias and his six principles leave room for imagination. He does not name specific sites as examples, but elaborates mere typologies in his explanation. The image occurs in the readers head and therefore will be different to everyone, precisely as every society has heterotopias in their own form, like Foucault explains. He is very careful in his comments and examples, mostly stating about what ‘can/could be’ instead of what ‘is/must be’ and therefore not every answer is given, mystery is not completely unravelled, only revealed.
PERCEPTION, MEMORY AND TRADITION The book ‘Collage city’, starts with a chapter about utopia, mentioning following quote by Ernst Cassirer: ‘Where we do not reflect on myth but truly live in it there is no cleft between the actual reality of perception and the world of mythical fantasy.’ 14 Would the same be true when the myth would be 8
12. Foucault. M, (1967) 1984, p. 123 13. Ibid., p. 124 14. Rowe. C & Koetter. F, 1990, p. 9
replaced by society and the statement would have been: ‘Where we do not reflect on society but truly live in it there is no cleft between the actual reality of perception and the world of social fantasy.’? Are we blinded by the ordinary? Maybe we are. In that case, we might need something from outside the ordinary, something extraordinary, to question the ordinary. Heterotopias mystery might be capable of doing so. This book further describes man freeing himself from the community of the plant and the animal, by creating an enclosure which is purely human, a civil space. But this space is elaborated as an empty space which becomes limited and outlined, set apart from the limitless (maybe ‘other’) space outside. So man might free himself from the community of the plant and the animal but is still bound by the rules of his own community in which spaces are seen as voids that can be both filled and outlined.15 Foucaults manuscript argues this statement when declaring the heterogeneous character of space. Although we might be bound by the rules of our society, Collage city mentions an interesting aspect of our society namely our history: ‘… the chimpanzee and the orangutan are distinguished from man not by what is known strictly speaking as intelligence, but because they have far less memory. Every morning the poor beasts have to face almost total oblivion of what they lived through the day before…. Similarly, the tiger of today is identical with that of six thousand years ago, each one having to begin his life as a tiger from the beginning as if none had existed before him…Breaking the continuity with the past, is a lowering of man and a plagiarism of the orangutan.‘ 16 Experience creates the ability of societies development. This could mean that every question we answer, raises new questions. We learn from the answer of the old question, we develop, we change and we are capable of asking a new question. It seems that we want to understand everything, and step by step, we get further. 15. Rowe. C & Koetter. F, 1990, p. 50 16. Ibid., 1990, p. 118
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This becomes clearer when the book speaks about tradition: ‘…tradition is related to a felt need for a structured social environment; tradition is the critical vehicle for the betterment of society; the ‘atmosphere’ of any given society is connected with tradition: and tradition is somewhat akin to myth, or – to say in other words – specific traditions are somehow incipient theories which have the value, however imperfectly, of helping to explain society’ 17 Tradition is not a space, place or site and can therefore be not a heterotopia, but it is related to them, both criticizing society and overlapping different times and spaces. If tradition could be a site, it could be, besides a society explaining tool, a heterotopia.
BALANCE In the book ‘Other spaces: The affair of the heterotopia’, Victor Burgin speaks about ‘other spaces’: ‘...between the anecdotal expression of ‘personal feelings’ and the abstractions of political discourse we must interpellate the discursive space of that ‘other locality’ of which Freud spoke that place, as Jacques Lacan put it, ‘between perception and consciousness.’ 18 There always seem to be two sides and with heterotopia, it is not about the one side or the other, what matters most is the very thing that lays in between both sides. Further, Kari Jormakka states that ‘Foucault’s implication that the real or the normal would not exist without the abnormal is supported by many cultural practices all over the world.’ This balance is explained with examples from the King Bushmen, the Yanomamo Indians and the Greek. Besides that, balance is also shown in Greek architecture where city walls established the inside as sacred and the outside as wilderness. 19 So balance might be indeed a very important factor to our society, creating the need of the extraordinary when we are familiar with the ordinary. 10
17. Rowe. C & Koetter. F, 1990, p. 122 18. Ritter. R & Knaller-Vlay. B. 1998, p. 49 19. Ibid., p. 126
APPROACHING HETEROTOPIA The approach of Michiel Dehaene and Lieven de Cauter in their book ‘Heterotopia and the city: public space in a postcivil society’ is completely different from the other approaches of heterotopia. It seems that their quest to understanding heterotopia demands a full answer. They state that ‘In our contemporary world heterotopia is everywhere. Museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, wellness hotels, festival markets – the entire city is becoming ‘heterotopian’. Heterotopia has, indeed, become very obvious and central in our society’ 20 The book elaborates all kinds of spaces as examples of Foucaults principles about heterotopia such as specific vacation parks and shopping malls, trying to explain the obviousness of the heterotopia and their relation to public space. Also theoretical history is used to explain Foucaults theory about heterotopia by giving Hippodamus’ triad of spaces, where heterotopia would be the third space of the triad, ‘…neither political (or public) nor economical (or private) space.’ 21 Also the theories of Soja and Lefebvre are used to explain heterotopia, being ‘…particular spaces of representation ‘linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life’ which retain ‘a partial unknowability… mystery and secretiveness.’’ 22 As great as both the quantity and quality of the information in this book might are, they go beyond the essence of heterotopia. This method approaches heterotopia as if they are ordinary spaces, sensible by the rules of normal society. Therefore, every space explained and elaborated with specific, visible and touchable examples, cannot be a heterotopia. This is why the first statement about heterotopia that would have become obvious in our society, cannot be true since extraordinary and mysterious are key elements in heterotopian spaces. It is not the example, but the principle explained and elaborated by the example which could create 20. Dehaene, M & de Cauter, L. 2008, p. 5 21. Ibid., p. 90 22. Ibid., p. 82
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understanding of heterotopias. A heterotopian site can be found and thereby create insight in the system of heterotopian spaces, but when one starts with the principles and analytically searches for matching sites, the mystery and therefore an essential part of the heterotopias character and function will be lost. No questions are raised since the example is already explained and thereby the example becomes a ‘normal’ site, part of ‘normal’ society. It’s not the space as filled void that shows heterotopia, the point is a cluster of relations with space as its body. Heterotopia is not all cemeteries because Foucault gives a cemetery as example to explain heterotopias, what matters is the relation that space can contain, connecting it with all spaces. Heterotopia is not all theatres because Foucault gives a theatre as example to explain them, it’s about the capability of juxtaposing several spaces within one space. Heterotopia is not the mirror or the reflecting image, what matters is the lesson of the mirror and the image. What matters is if you understand and are capable of seeing beyond the ordinary.
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CONCLUSION The question about the definition of heterotopia stays a quite hard one to answer, since heterotopia play with both our tools to define and our perception. There is much written about heterotopia and our curiosity of the thing we do not understand, moreover the will of greater understanding has driven us to search and find about this topic. If we want to be critical about ourselves, our society, our spaces, we need something else, others, other societies and other spaces questioning our own society. The fact that we constantly are driven to learn will keep driving us in our searches and quests. This process will never end, because as long as we know the familiar, we will not know the unfamiliar and we will fight for getting to know it. We need heterotopian spaces to question the reality and normality of what we define as real and normal. Society will never fully understand its heterotopian spaces, since it is in heterotopias nature to be ‘other’, different and mysterious. The understanding of each heterotopian space will firstly turn it into an ordinary part of society, since the system of society has digested the heterotopian system and its question or critique is answered. Secondly, the understanding of the heterotopia will change, develop the society and thereby develop the ‘ordinary’ because of the knowledge brought by the understanding of the heterotopia. Thirdly, new heterotopias will evolve, the next question is asked, since every unique society (a developing society is a different society with every step in development it takes) has its own, unique heterotopias, and evolution of the ordinary means, for the sake of balance, evolution of the extraordinary. Unless balance is the very thing that blinds us. Then, we might find a heterotopia showing us its deception and questioning or criticizing it. 13
RESOURSES
Books:
Foucault, M. (1967) Des Espace Autres, France: Architecture Mouvement ContinuitĂŠ, published in 1984, translated by by Jay Miskowiec
Rowe, C. & Koetter. F. (1990 Collage City Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press
Ritter, R. & Knaller-Vlay, B. (1998) Other Spaces: The Affair of the Heterotopia, Graz, Austria: Haus der Architektur Deheane, M. & De Cauter, L. (2008) Heterotopia and the city: Public space in a postcivil society, New York: Routledge
Websites:
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http://foucault.info/ http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/