‘I am like the crawfish and advance sideways’
(Michel Foucault, 31st January 1979)
This web site is devoted to Michel Foucault’s ideas on heterotopia. Foucault outlines the notion of heterotopia on three occasions between 1966-67. He attempts to explain certain principles and features of a range of cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow ‘different’: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory and transforming. His thoughts about heterotopia are marginal and yet provoke interesting connections with his wider projects concerned with, for example, discipline, aesthetics and ethics.
Foucault simply presents a few thumb-nail sketches which he never develops into a coherent idea. And yet his tantalisingly brief words on the subject have provoked a cottage industry of interpretations and applications from many disciplines and professions throughout the world.
Over the years a dazzling variety of spaces has been explored as illustrations of heterotopia, including: Arab-Islamic architecture, environmental installations, libraries, museums, Masonic lodges, early factories, gardens, performance prototypes, women’s colleges, landscapes, gated communities, Buddhist sites, bandrooms, pornographic sites, cybercafés, shopping malls, burial sites and the body of the vampire. The notion has been applied to anything from geo-political conflicts, to queer spaces, to fascist sites, to places of transgression, to disciplinary institutions… and continues to find new interpretative twists and turns.
Writers, artists, academics and many others have shown an interest in heterotopia. The web seems a particularly suitable place to explore Foucault’s diverse notion of ‘different spaces’. Rather than trying to draw together a definitive understanding of this curious spatial concept, the site will explore its possibilities (warts and all!).
This site offers background information, reviews of various interpretations and applications, specific studies of sites related to gardens and cemeteries and a full bibliography.
This site aims to be the hub of a network of contributions. Please add comments to individual pages and my blogand send in your own text and suggested links. If you have written essays, dissertations or theses on different spaces, heterotopia or any linked concept and would like them published on the website, do send in a copy. It is a chance to get your work read by others with a similar interest and research focus.
The site is self-funded, so any financial contributions from individuals or organisations would greatly help to sustain the site and develop its potential.
Peter Johnson
About the author
I teach in further and higher education in the UK. Publications have included three peer reviewed articles on Foucault, space and heterotopia:
Nice to find a ‘different space’ on the web to enjoy.
So happy to find this web site! I recently found another interesting article on museums as heterotopias (Lord, B. (2006). Foucault’s museum: difference, representation, and genealogy. museum and society, 4(1), 1-14.). This is not written by me but I hope it’s useful for the bibliography (which I’m also going to explore for my PhD thesis). Cheers!
Thanks for that Krista. Will add to bibliography when I update (every 3 months). Good luck with the thesis.
Posted on I’d must test with you here, which isn’t something I usaluly do! I get pleasure from reading a post that will make folks think. Thanks for permitting me to remark!
Thank you for coming up with this idea. Regarding the funding, please consider adding a flattr button, as that is how I (and many others) prefer to donate to blogs and such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
Secondly, I would request you to add abstracts + links to the articles on your blog. AFAIK this is allowed under copyright rules (possibly even Pion’s), and starting with your own articles would be nice.
thanks will start to be more interactive as go along
Peter
materiali foucaultiani
This is an exciting Italian ejournal devoted to examining and applying Foucault’s thought. First issue happens to be devoted to ‘Geographies of power: space and heterotopia’. Articles are free.
http://www.materialifoucaultiani.org/
This looks like a wonderful project.
Thanks for that and also thanks for your replies to individual essays.
best wishes
Peter
Very interesting project! I recall a wonderful heterotopia when I was only 14… grandparents’ medicine cabinet lol: Lorcets, Dilaudids, Xanax, Valium, Oxycodone, Morphine…well also one of Foucault’s other concepts: limit-experience and his building upon Bataille’s concept of Transgression. lol.
At any rate, pleasantries from 20 years ago aside, I’m interested in this site. Not just in geographic spaces… but social spaces, mental spaces (RD Laing comes to mind.) Hell even religious ideals… Hell would be a heterotopia as all the multitude of different types of sinners, where Heaven would be a snooze-fest utopia.
I will definitely read these articles. Coming from the field of American Sociology… well… there is a small group interested in the author, but the mainstream of the field is not so much.
Heterotopia is a wide church. Some would say too wide and that’s it’s key weakness. But one I particularly like is the magic carpet – mentioned by Foucault in his radio talk on heterotopia. The microcosm of the world captured in a symbolic Persian garden and then transposed onto a carpet that flies ….. and sparks our imagination as it travels far to other different spaces
Peter
Re: Nyarlathtep — I myself am writing a PhD dissertation on utopia with this inclination toward heterotopias. More precisely I am interested in suybjective states. I am interested in your reference to R.D. Lang’s “mental spaces”. Do you have any special references as to where in his work I should turn? Or is it something that is talked about throughout his work? Thanks for this! Very Exciting!
Re: Peter — Thanks for starting this site/blog/heterotopia!!!
currently am on my path to PhD in Sociology… I presented a paper on online Call of Duty online social interaction… and sorry Baudrillard… not simulation or “hyperreality” … never the less lets say “heterotopia” is a concept I wish to build on. within social spaces it takes a different type sociability than the “assimilation” being equated to “diversity” that we see in the USA today.
It’s a good concept to build on – a playful and devious, slightly tongue in cheek, reservoir of, and for, the imagination…
Peter
What is this bit about heterotopia being a “devious, slightly tongue in cheek, reservoir of, and for, the imagination”? This is interesting, because it seems to me that this would fly in the face of much of what is widely received about Foucault. I understood “imagination” to be a concept that is (or has been made) too “internal” and that heterotopia was his response (where with the latter he sough to ‘ewxternalize’ the former). Could you expand upon your comment, because it speaks to an aspect of utopia/heterotopia that I am currently invested in.
Thank you,
It is true that Foucault distinguishes his notion of heterotopia from Bachelard’s exploration of the spatial metaphors of imagination, or the poetics of intimate space ‘laden with qualities’ and haunted by fantasies’. He is more interested in the space of the outside [du dehors], sort of turning Bachelard inside out as it were. Foucault is interested in the space through which we are ‘drawn outside ourselves’ and ‘the erosion of our life’ takes place. But these spaces have been produced by the imagination and continue to stimulate it as in Genet’s response to prison life.
That is helpful. Thank you!
I just hope this is an area of heterotopia as well.
I hope so too. I think it is a bit tame so far, but it needs responses like yours to liven it up and spin it in different directions .. thanks for your valuable comments Eric.
Peter
This site is maturing really well. Keep going….
I wonder whether the cultural space within a text such as a TV episode that deliberately evokes a literary context might be considered heterotopic. For example, in the Simpson’s “Thanksgiving” episode Lisa says something like “I have seen the best meals of my generation…” thus evoking the opening of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Another example is the apparently casual reference to William Congreve in Castle 4.11. (Congreve’s play The Way of the World (1700) is remarkably like the contemporary world portrayed by David Grae in this episode).
Unless I have misunderstood, I am not sure if these examples are heterotopic. Are they not simply clever instances of inter-textuality that occur in various media? Foucault’s account of textual heterotopia in his preface to The Order of Things is much more radical, a shattering of ordinary speech as found in Borges’ imaginative and bewildering encyclopaedia. The accounts of the textual and the more well known physical/social heterotopias have connections (say in contrast to utopia) but are also very different. Having said that, as my bibliography indicates, many have tried to relate his wider notion with various textual spaces.
Peter
hi, very nice site and so happy to find this site, I’m following your site for about 4 months. I am PhD student in fine arts. my doctoral thesis on “Visual Analysis on Heteropia”. This site was very helpful for me about my thesis. ıf any, ı need references the context of the relation between heterotopia and art. thanks in advance:)
I’ve known some of your texts, mainly the Focault and Heidegger book, Mapping the preenst, and have become very interested in your blog. I’m a Brazilian scholar doing my post-phd at University of Paris 7 and I’m very interested in getting information on Foucault’s colloquia and discussions. Hope we can meet personally sometime!
Hi there!
I am getting my masters degree in communication studies and am using heterotopia as a form of rhetorical criticism to study gamification of the classroom. There are some fantastic pieces written about heterotopia in our field. Definitely worth the read!
Lou, J. (2007). Revitalizing Chinatown Into a Heterotopia : A Geosemiotic Analysis of Shop Signs in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown. Space and Culture, 10, 170-194.
Wood, A. (2004, Summer). Managing the Lady Managers: The Shaping of Heterotopian Spaces in the 1893 Chicago Exposition’s Woman’s Building. Southern Communication Journal, 69(4), 289-302.
Wood, A. (2003, Spring). The middletons, futurama, and progressland: Disciplinary technology and temporal heterotopian two New York World’s Fairs. The New Jersey Journal of Communication, 11(1), 63-75.
Rushbrook, D. (2002). Cities, queer space and the cosmopolitan tourist []. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 8(1-2), 183-206.
Hi there
Many thanks for that. I had the Lou article in the bibliography but the others are new to me so I will look them up and add them in. Good luck with the Masters and I would be happy to receive a copy of your dissertation or any contribution you want to make to this web-site.
best wishes
Peter
hello, I’m glad to find this site, I’m from Brazil and researching cemeteries by theoretical bias of Foucaut and heterotopias, there is someone more than your research topic is similar?
Good luck with your research. I am not sure what your question means.
Peter
Hi Peter,
Is Facebook a heterotopia?
Thanks
H
Sorry for late reply. I have been away. Facebook? I think you could argue for it as a heterotopia. In a way, heterotopia is a way of seeing things, a relational approach to different spaces. In my PhD I was going to look at FaceParty, a more transgressive social networking site for young people (mainly for cybersex), but went down different path in the end.
What do you think?
Peter
Heterotopia is as likely to contribute to a politics of aestheticization as be be part of the aestheticization of politics. It is a critical tool of analysis, just as utopia can be applied to both fascist and socialist regimes.
Peter