El Tigro Chino
Community as Heterotopia James Anderson Columbia College Chicago (2015)
“What are we in our actuality – what are we today” (“TotS” 145) is proposed textually by French scholar Michel Foucault and subtextually by the NBC sitcom Community (2009-10). Ultimately, both find the hunt for an actuality to be futile. Neither Community nor Foucault subscribe to an ideal human nature. Rather, they argue that individuals are shaped by the cultures and values of their communities, and, in turn, the cultures and values of a community are shaped by individuals. Due to the complex nature of this development of self and community, dichotomies of the two as separate are misleading. It is a utopian fantasy that there exist measurable cause and effect that one could trace to find pure actuality. The reality, according to Foucault, is the heterotopia. This is a space for “all the represented, contested, and inverted” (Bear 531). Heterotopias exist by making or suspending a relationship that is first either ‘marked’ or reproduced, pointing to or indicating in such
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a way as to distinguish the thing indicated and creating it as otherness. This places metaphor and the self on the same table, reconstituting the two as a provisional unity. This abstract and complex idea is the blood that runs through the veins of Community’s philosophical body. Played on the show by Ken Jeong, Señor Chang is the distressing nightmare of the modernity’s heterotopia. As an amoral manic-depressive Chinese Spanish teacher with a mysterious past, there is no Señor Chang in actuality outside of the observable chaos he emanates in the present. Any definition given by Foucault regarding the concept of heterotopia is vague and semantic (as is par for French philosophers). By its very nature, it is sensible to understand heterotopias as specific sites rather than as a type of relationship. This is why Foucault’s text “Of Other Spaces” (1967) is broken into six different principles that discuss the characteristics of heterotopias, including many examples of historical and contemporary heterotopias. Because of this, the essay will address each of Foucault’s listed principles in order, accompanied by an explanation of each in relation to Señor Chang. BASICS OF HETEROTOPIA: Defining Space Heterotopias are the construction of places and times by means of the displacement of things within space. Through their very concern with created order, they result in disorder. They are spaces “with a multitude of localities containing things so different that it is impossible to find a common logic for them, a space in which everything is somehow out of place” (Ferrier 251). Our epoch is one of heterotopic space. “We are in the epoch of simultaneity,” Foucault wrote. “We are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” (“OoS”). We no longer experience the world as a single, straight line from A to Z. The modern experience is a series of intersecting lines. Our existing consciousness is created anew at the occurrence of each new axis in the web. As these quilt marks come together, any hopes of distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘that’ disappears. Since time can only be perceived by observing cause and effect, society’s incapability to tell apart total otherness causes an existence outside of time. This issue has been exacerbated by society’s constant exposure to media technologies. Bruce Sterling wrote that our current network culture has produced a form of historical consciousness marked by atemporality (Mazur 159). The individual can now instantly obtain and create documented information. This is dissipating both our drive and capability to situate ourselves within any kind of actual historical context in regard to our communities or ourselves. Modern anxiety is primarily a construct in relation to space, much more so than with time. Time manifests within social order only as possible patterns of distribution between elements that are scattered over space. This is reflected in discourse through idioms such as “blocks of time” and the idea of “moving through time.” Time is space that can be manipulated, order, and transcended. However, this does not mean that space is a lack of place. Edward Relph argues that space is not a 2
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kind of container that holds places (Lehtovuori 76). This idea is similar to one forwarded by Foucult in the preface to “The Order of Things” when he said “we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container.” This fluidity between the internal and external means that the places of instinctive, bodily, and immediate experience occur within the same space as those which are cerebral, ideal, and intangible. The distinct aspect of place is its power to order and to discipline human intentions spatially. Space and place are dialectically designed in social environments. The physical understanding of the metaphysical space is related to our experience with the places, which in turn derive meaning from their spatial context.
“Through their very concern with created order, heterotopias result in disorder.” FIRST PRINCIPLE: CRISIS and DEVIATION The first quality of heterotopia is one of transformation, and Foucault classifies this principle as two different types. Crisis heterotopias are places where one acquires an expected social mean or milestone. This is the place where one comes of age. According to Foucault, these places “are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis” (“OoS”) Heterotopias of deviation are institutions where we place individuals whose behavior is outside the norm. As examples of these heterotopias, Foucault said those of crisis were schools and those of deviance were prisons (“OoS”). There is no site or space that is innately a school, nor one that’s innately a prison. It is that they serve the functions of prisons and schools. They perform through appearance and functionality within society as means of transformation. Their physical place is arbitrary if away from society. For example, if the traditional, idealized one room school house were floating in an empty void and an entity were to come across this floating building, they would not know it was meant to be a place of education. The entity might mistake it for a hat, some form of antivenom, or even the adjective ‘synonymic.’ This is because inanimate, physical space does not matter without context. What physical matters is the space in relation to society. Señor Chang’s Spanish classroom encompasses both types of this first principle, as it functions as both a school and a prison. In society, the attending of college is often tagged as a key time of crisis and coming-of-age. It is a cultural transition into adulthood. However, all of the main student characters of Community are attending Greendale Community College –the designated outland for society’s “losers.” None of these characters want to be at Greendale, but are placed there. Like criminals in a prison, the characters are placed at Greendale due to society labeling Watercooler Journal
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their performance of social roles as deviant. Paradoxically, the characters are labeled as deviant for playing out their types to the tilt of social expectations. Many of these students feel old compared to the other, younger students, but their desire to return to school comes from a desire to fight that very feeling of nearing the point where they will become useless to society. For them Foucualt would say, “the inactivity of old age constitutes not only a crisis but a deviation” (“OoS”). It isn’t that they are deviants, as much as they didn’t deviate from the normative assumptions associated with their persona. Señor Chang’s Spanish 101 is presented as the single aspect of Greendale to which all the students gravitate. As a requirement to be reintegrated into the ‘norm,’ obtain a degree, and be released from Greendale, all of the students must pass Spanish 101. This makes Chang the obstetrical and the roadblock. He is the unified antithesis to the thesis of the students before Greendale, and the synthesis of who they will be once they leave. This makes Señor Chang and his class a heterotopia. It is the medium in which the transformation occurs. Chang is where and through whom the students come of age, being forced to do so due their deviance.
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SECOND PRINCIPLE: Changes But Remains the Same Another function of heterotopias is that their social use has the possibility to change over time, while the heterotopia itself remains the same. Heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia can be found. A society may take a current heterotopia and make its communal role different. As Foucualt wrote, “each heterotopia has a precise and well-defined function within society and the same heterotopia can, in accordance with the synchroneity of the culture in which it is located, have a different function” (“OoS”). This means that not only does a heterotopia form society, but the society forms heterotopias. In a later episode of Community’s first season, Chang is fired as a Spanish teacher because he does not know how to speak the Spanish language beyond its very basic fundamentals. Now, Chang did not change. It is not that he forgot Spanish. He never knew it. What changed was the social perspective of his knowledge. At Greendale, this made him go from a teacher to a student. This exemplifies the fluidity of heterotopias, as does another person stepping into his place as professor of the Spanish class after his termination. Chang is constructed by the symbolic space he holds in the minds of others, which can change while, in reality, Chang remains the same. THIRD PRINCIPLE: Juxtaposes Several Spaces Several spaces are juxtaposed in a single heterotopia. They exist “where fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately without law or geometry” and are “a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous” (“OoT” Preface). They are spaces “with a multitude of localities containing things so different that it is impossible to find a common logic for them, a space in which everything is somehow out of place” (Relph 104). The prominence of this type of heterotopia that combines different spaces into a single, atemporal form has been spreading like wildfire through globalization and the network culture. The 20th century was a march towards every American home integrating into one device their television, phone, computer, stereo, bookshelves, photo albums, etc. A person can visit the Louvre within the same space they can play Mortal Kombat (1993) with a friend from Vietnam. It is this form of heterotopia which Foucault found most disturbing, writing that it is a “worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite; and that word should be taken in its most literal, etymological sense: in such a state, things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.” (“OoT” Preface) This is the heterotopic principle Señor Chang represents most. To fully understand why, one needs to know both that Chang is of Chinese descent, and that Foucault wrote about China being the Western culture’s ideal of Utopia and the anti-heterotopia: Watercooler Journal
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“In our traditional imagery, the Chinese culture is the most meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to temporal events, most attached to the pure delineation of space; we think of it as a civilization of dikes and dams beneath the eternal face of the sky; we see it, spread and frozen, over the entire surface of a continent surrounded by walls.” (“OoT” Preface) Those walls have collapsed, resulting in the creation of Señor Chang. Chang is not of order. His identity lacks all possible syntax. In one scene, he (an Asian man) dresses as a Matador (originating from Spain) for a Halloween Party (a mishmash of advertising campaigns and Catholicism), which is labeled mistakenly as a Day of the Dead Party (a mix of Mexican and Catholic festivals that does not require costumes). At this party, he is supposedly there teaching the students Spanish (he tells them to stop speaking Spanish because it is annoying) and chaperone the event (he leaves to go get drunk at another party). During the party, a person glibly says in reference to Chang “Look, an eavesdropping Matador” (Chang is the costume he wears and nothing else). Chang replies to this, “Are you calling my people sneaky?” This is an absurd question, because Chang has no one ‘people’ to which he identifies. He is a blob to which other interchangeable words can be applied. He is the face of a global community. The propinquity of different cultural backgrounds makes him nationless. This theory is even furthered when we meet his brother Rabbi Chang. But this cluster of space is not only cultural, but also professional. As aforementioned, he is a Spanish teacher, but cannot speak the language. He is a teacher, but cannot teach. I do not mean that he cannot teach due to his own lack of understanding the subject, but rather, he cannot teach due to his manic emotional swings that toss his students into terror, not knowing what might make him explode in rage. The first time he appears in the show, he goes off on a hectic rant that ends with: “Now, I don’t wanna have any conversations about what a mysterious, inscrutable man I am. I am a Spanish genius! In español my nickname is ‘El Tigre Chino,’ because my knowledge will bite your face off! So, don’t question Señor Chang or you’ll get bit! You’re bit!” The juxtaposition of contradictory ideas in these few sentences are thick enough that they amount to sheer nonsense. He states out right that he is mysterious, but you should not ask him questions. He says he has knowledge when he has none. He uses his claimed superior knowledge as a threat, but the students have come to class to learn from someone more knowledgeable. He defends himself aggressively before anyone has offended him. He says that if people question him they will be bit, and then states that they are already bit (when he has not physically bit anyone.) He calls himself Señor Chang and El Tigre Chino, when his real name is not Spanish at all, but rather one of Hebrew origin - Benjamin.
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Señor Chang puts everyone in a state of constant anxiety due to his madness and unpredictability that are motivated by heterotopic confusion. Characters say outright several times that he is “crazy,” and they’re right. He is a lunatic who is put in charge of the asylum. Señor Chang is the heterotopic harmony that emerges from the mayhem of temporal and spatial dissonance. FOURTH PRINCIPLE: Time as Finite and Time as Eternal Heterotopias are linked to fragments of time. These fragments, when kept as a totem or documented through visual representation, become heterochronisms, which threaten the collapse distinction between a temporal the Same and the Other. For Chang, his keytar is a heterochronism. Back in the 80s, Chang dreamed of becoming a world-renowned keytarist, a dream he had to leave behind. His keytar is a totem, a geographical non sequitur that returns him to his past while simultaneously allowing him to reflect upon the present. A keytar is a relic in several fashions, not only to Chang, but culturally. Keytars came and went within popular music during the 1980’s. They are a fossilization of the time synthpop and new wave musicians roamed the earth, the days of Kajagoogoo and Oingo Boingo and the art they weren’t too shy to share. But, it is now a dead man’s party, and the keytar exists mainly in reference to their high water mark of popularity. This is not limited to the keytar. The world we exist within is a present that is always connected to the past. We are surrounded by items that bear the stamps of particular ages, both on a personal and cultural level. As a society, we treat the past as a fetish object to be recreated in perfect utopian simulation both within the mind and within media (Mad Men, retro clothing stores, etc.). These heterochronisms spring from a non-place of language where the culture can eschew this as ironic, kitsch, or camp, when it is a nostalgic longing for a return to that which has been superseded by a new episteme. Such use of pop culture nostalgia is only a security blanket that millions shared at the same united moment. It sometimes emerges as a riff on the Oedipus complex. Instead of one wanting to have sex with their mothers as a means of returning to the womb, they draw pictures of the Power Rangers in vast orgies and write slash fiction about the Ninja Turtles. Several times within the show, Chang plays his keytar. Within the context of the show, these moments go unrecorded. The moments of him playing are finite or festival heterochronisms. This is a momentary suspension of hierarchies in that it is continuity and not discontinuity. Chang playing the keytar is a moment that can be replicated, but never repeated within the same exact fashion. He can play those few notes again, but they will only resemble the past. However, the moment is not gone. As long as someone who heard him play holds a memory of Chang playing the keytar, that moment will still exist in some form.
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FIFTH PRINCIPLE: SYSTEM OF OPENING AND CLOSING Heterotopias are spaces that are isolated and penetrable yet not freely accessible like a public place. They differentiate themselves through exclusion while still consisting of systems that allow opening and closing. The only way the public has the ability to know that a closed heterotopia has the potentiality of opening is because they are arranged before an observer into a system of signification declaring itself to be a signifier of something further, something under the surface. (Michall 61) “To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.” (“OoS”) In this way, Chang’s Spanish 101 class is a physical example of heterotopias. Since the class has windows, it is visible from the outside. But, not every student is allowed to enter the room. An individual must first go through Greendale’s bureaucratic system of class registration. If the individual meets all the predetermined requirements, they may enter the class.
“Chang makes his students feel like outsiders while they are essentially the same inside the class.”
However, once the heterotopia is opened, this does not mean that it is open in totality – totalities are utopic since they function within a fantasy of universal, holistic truths. Heterotopias undermine language; as a result, they open and close simultaneously. One way this is experienced in Señor Chang’s class is through Edward Relph’s elucidations of insideness and outsideness (Relph 631). If a person feels inside a place, he or she is here rather than there. This is how one forms notions such as “home” and “family.” However, Chang makes his students feel like outsiders and others while they are essentially the same inside the class. He is abrasive and hostile, alienating the students. He even turns the students violently against each other. Chang’s existence of language lacks syntax, creating discourses that undermine the potential for comfort among the students. Even as the students try to gather a systematic means to Chang’s madness, they fail. This is because Chang’s discourse operates within the “non-place of language” (“OoT” Preface). This is shown in the episode “Physical Education.” Chang says a phrase in Spanish to the class, and the class repeats the phrase. This happens several times. With each repetition, both the class and Chang become more visibly confused. Finally, Chang says, “Guys, class is over. I’m telling you to leave.” The students were playing the role they assumed they were meant to be playing within a call-and-response teaching method. This is a “type of interaction between speaker and listener(s) in which the statements (“calls”) are emphasized by expressions (“responses”) from the listener(s), in which responses can be solicited or spontaneous” (“CAL: Digests: Using Call-and-Response to Facilitate Language Mastery
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and Literacy Acquisition Among African American Students”). It is shown earlier in the season that Chang does use this method of teaching. However, this hidden network that determines when the students hollowly repeat the words and when they interpret the meaning of the words cannot be established in language nor corroborated though empirical examination because Chang hasn’t taught them the meaning of the language, only the functionality of the table upon which Spanish 101 functions. (“OoT” Preface) This makes “it impossible to name this and that, because it shatters or tangles common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’” (“OoT” Preface). By observing Chang, the class thought that they were familiar enough with him that the syntax would be implied. They were mistaken. The confusion felt by both Chang and the class as they sensed the symptom is existential outsideness. This is “a sense of strangeness and alienation, such as that often felt by newcomers to a place or by people who, having been away from their birth place, return to feel strangers because the place is no longer what it was when they knew it earlier” (Sowers “PaP”)., According to Foucault, we encounter an heterotopia, since they add a functional zero value into the “interstitial blanks” that separate our normative systems of classification (“OoS”). This event, however, does not make the students feel wholly ‘inside’ the classroom with Chang. Rather, by demonstrating the “exotic charm of another system of thought,” the students can also reveal the disconcerting limitations of their own mentalities (Ballif). SIXTH PRINCIPLE: RELATION TO ALL REMAINING SPACE Defined by correlations between points and elements, heterotopias function in relation to all the remaining spaces that engulf them. Heterotopias are granted a classification within discourse as they exhort themselves into the empty space, which means that a heterotopia can also create the gulf between itself and the remaining space. This paradox is a result of the anthropological roots of a natural history paradigm. “When imposed on cultural history, a natural history framework confuses spatial and temporal distance by spatializing temporal flow” (Kahn). Individuals apply meanings and stories to objects, situations, and people that do not have a total basis within empirical evidence. Things are clustered into a singular pact to create a logical stem of cause and effect. New meaning is created through the artificial contexts of this manufactured logic. “Through being incorporated into an exhibition, they are not merely works of art or tokens of a certain culture or society, but elements of a narrative, forming part of a thread of discourse which is itself one element in a more complex web of meanings” (Vergo 46). Señor Chang is able to fill the space between himself, the classroom, his students, and the rest of the world that the students inhabit through biopower. Often used by Foucault, biopower is a
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genealogical look at the modern dynamics of power. This integrates disciplinary power in that it is a theory that views both the human body and the government as an object to be manipulated and trained. Due to Señor Chang being an authority within the community of students who determines the fate of its population, Chang is able to establish biopower in that he controls the social norms of the students. This would be how the students must alter their lives outside of Chang’s class to control their success within his class. The high level of difficulty in Señor Chang’s Spanish 101 is the whole reason the main characters of the show gathered together to form a whole – a study group. Every action after the formation of the study group is controlled by those interactions that occur within the study group. Through the misadventures of the study group, the life of Chang is fundamentally changed – losing both his job and his wife – as an indirect reciprocal action for his ineptitude to perform as a teacher who could be understood coherently by his students. CONCLUSION Community is a comedy. Its humor comes from the relationships of the characters within and outside the show’s narrative context. Señor Chang is only one of an infinitely massive amount of heterotopic spaces that the show consists of and reflects. By treating archetypes as heterotopic spaces, the show plays off of the expectations of sitcom characters and individuals in our waking life, focusing on how the archetypal elements are types, yet they are still unique individuals within those types. This is what makes the show so funny. In the Preface to The Order of Things, Foucault wrote how the uneasiness of the heterotopic is what makes us laugh. Comic “absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up” (“OoT” Preface). This is not to say that any random act is absurd. For humor to really work on both an intellectual and emotional level the text requires the presence of familiar figures, stock images, and distinctly intelligible rhetorical moves if it is to successfully engage with the audience. The movement of the heterotopic spaces in relation to their familiarity is what gives the show its sharp humor. It is easy for a show to be random when its world only consists of randomness, but “there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language; nothing that more insistently requires that one allow oneself to be carried along by the proliferation of qualities and forms” (“OoT” Preface). The realities both inside and outside the show are those set firmly within heterotopia. If it were not, the familiarity of Community would not exist. Neither would familiarity within community.
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image credits © NBC works cited Ballif, Michelle. “Negotiating the Differend: A Feminist Trilogue.” Web. 15 Mar. 2011. <www.jacweb. org/Archived.../pdf.../JACV20_3_BallifDavisMountford.pdf>. Bear, Laura. “Miscegenations of Modernity: Constructing European Respectability and Race in the Indian Railway Colony, 1857-1931.” Women’s History Review 3.4 (1994): 531-48. Print. Boon, Ed. Mortal Kombat. Chicago, Illinois, U.S.: Midway, 1993. “CAL: Digests: Using Call-andResponse to Facilitate Language Mastery and Literacy Acquisition Among African American Students.” Center for Applied Linguistics. 2002. Web. 15 Mar. 2011. <http://www.cal.org/resources/ digest/0204foster.html>. Community: The Complete First Season. Prod. Dan Harmon. Perf. Joel McHale. NBC / UNIVERSAL. Ferrier, Jean-Paul. “Post-modern Geography or Geography of the Third Modernity.” GeoJournal 31.3 (1993): 251-53. Print. Foucault, Michel, and Patrick H. Hutton. Technologies of the Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1988. 145. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.” Michel Foucault, Info. 1967. Web. 4 Mar. 2011. <http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html>. Foucault, Michel. “Preface.” The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Print. Kahn, Miriam. “Heterotopic Dissonance in the Museum Representation of Pacific Island Cultures.” American Anthropologist 97.2 (1995): 324-38. Print. Lehtovuori, Panu. Experience and Conflict: the Production of Urban Space. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate Pub., 2010. 76. Print. Mazur, Eric Michael. God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2001. 159. Print.
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Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1988. 61. Print. Relph, Edward. “Post-Modern Geography.” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien (1991): 104. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Web. 12 Mar. 2011. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1991.tb01629.x/abstract>. Relph, E. “Classics in Human Geography Revisited, Place and Placelessness.” Progress in Human Geography 24.4 (2000): 613-19. Print. Sowers, Jacob. “Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph.” Google Docs - Online Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Surveys, File Storage and More. Web. 14 Mar. 2011. <http://www. arch.ksu.edu/seamon/place?a=v&q=cache:UnFu0jHFJlkJ:>. Vergo, Peter. The New Museology. London: Reaktion, 1989. 46. Print.
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