Re: <documenta X><blast> home-affect

Jordan Crandall (xaf@interport.net)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 11:55:24 -0400

In a 1967 paper called 'Of Other Spaces', Foucault sets forth a
conception of the 'heterotopia.' A diffracting of the utopia (which
means, literally, 'no place'), the heterotopia is the counter-site of
simultaneous representation, contestation, and inversion, both locatable
and fundamentally 'outside' of place. Foucault gives the example of the
mirror: in the placeless place of the mirror, 'I see myself there where
I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface:
I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my
own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself where I am
absent.' The mirror is heterotopic in that it does indeed exist in
reality, but it counteracts the position that one occupies. 'Starting
from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground
of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come
back toward myself: I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and
to reconstitute myself there where I am.' The mirror functions as a
heterotopia in that the moment that one looks into its reflective
surface the space that one occupies is simultaneously made real,
embedded in the space around it, and unreal, since in order to be
perceived it has to pass through this virtual point that is 'over
there.'

Foucault sets forth several principles of the heterotopia. Before I
summarize these, I would like to indicate three 'spins' on the matter,
which could be taken into account in thinking about them. First,
Foucault's sketch points toward identity-construction as fundamentally
reflective, and, as Margaret Morse points out, while 'identification' as
a mirrorlike relationship to visual media has been the dominant model
for the construction of subjectivity for at least two decades, this
model is inadequate to explain the immersive aspects of new media, which
complicate (if not evacuate) the distances upon which reflection
depends. Second, the mirror is a technology, both product and producer
of historically-specific ways of seeing, a seeing that figures and
locates the self as embedded in social realities. Third, the
contemporary mode of seeing is not 1:1 but circuitous and phoroptic:
channeled through corrective apparatus whose norms are continually
reworked according to what constitutes 'true' vision (think of 20/20
vision and the television show 20/20 - which the contemporary 'way of
seeing'? how would we know either one outside of
technologically-engaged corrective measures?). The eyes do not go back
toward oneself to constitute the self as located 'here' in a mirrorlike,
immediate reflection: their vision is channeled, routed through a
conductive circuit.

Briefly, here are the principles of the heterotopia.

The heterotopia can evolve, changing its function along a time line, or
it can house many incompatible sites simultaneously. As an example of
the first, Foucault suggests the cemetery, which, until the end of the
eighteenth century, was placed at the heart of the city, next to the
church; now, of course, it is exiled to the suburbs. The cemetery is a
powerful heterotopia because embedded within it are relationships
between the living and the dead, health and disease, proliferation and
decay, purification and contagion, 'proximity' and 'distance' to death.
As an example of the second, Foucault suggests the cinema, where
three-dimensional spaces are projected onto a flat screen in a
rectangular room. Of course, today we can envision the space of the
monitor, or the dense spaces generated through overlapping
telecommunicated activities.

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time, opening onto
'heterochronies.' As an example, Foucault suggests the festival,
carnival, or the fairground, but also the 'vacation village.'

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 as a public space. The entry
is compulsory (barracks or prison) or subject to rites and purifications
(religious, hygenic, or societal). There is a curious contradiction
here: one enters but is excluded, even if the exclusion is the fact
that, having entered, one separates oneself, or denies having entered,
or creates obstacles (social, psychological) to entry.

The function of heterotopias ranges between two extreme poles: one one
hand, they create an illusory space that exposes real space, 'all the
sites inside of which human life is partitioned'; on the other hand,
they create a space that is other -- an idealized, ordered space, in
which case they may become 'heterotopias of compensation.'

What is the heterotopia par excellence? The boat.

It might be interesting to consider the technological apparatus as that
which results from the above: that which is constituted by these
relations - while simultaneously helping to determine them. What is the
apparatus for which 'the mirror' is synecdochical?

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