Foucault’s Heterotopia: The “Other” Spaces Between What is Real and Utopian

Heterotopia invites sets of questions about space and the social structures of

power. For example, Can heterotopias exist completely outside the grasp of dominant power? Heterotopia seems to fly under the radar (perhaps an aircraft is a better metaphor than Foucault’s par excellence?) of social power, yet, if Foucault’s (1986) assertion is true — that space is a fundamental aspect of any exercise of power or form of communal life — then heterotopia cannot exist beyond the grasp of social power. Foucault describes heterotopias that allow escape from social norms and structures, but others that are, for example, colonial heterotopias, prisons, and military schools as highly-controlled, regimented sites. Is heterotopia free of the constraints of social power; in other words, in the final analysis, is heterotopic social power any different from that which dominates real society?Further, Are alternative sites necessarily critical, liberatory, or emancipatory spaces?

By definition, Disneyland, Las Vegas, gated communities, and militia camps are heterotopic. In fact, Foucault states, “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence,” yet Harvey (2000) points out that a commercialized cruise ship is unlikely to be an emancipatory space. How exactly are heterotopias discerned from general social spaces and orders? How alterior is heterotopia; is it really alterior or are we made to think it is? Similarly, as a teaching artist, I consider, Are educative spaces part of the creative or created world? How emancipatory are the classroom spaces I co-create? Within the confines of his lecture and subsequent writing, Foucault’s spatial taxonomy is not clear-cut; indeed, perhaps it cannot be. For example, a classroom or library may or may not be a heterotopic space consistently or comprehensively. More likely than not, the lines are blurred between some general social spaces and heterotopias.

In fact, once a heterotopia has been identified, it doesn’t necessarily continue as a heterotopia, like the SoHo neighborhood that becomes less operational as an alternative space when it becomes popular and rents increase or the original residents leave. Foucault is critiqued in his inability to unequivocally and precisely establish the invisible but visibly different operational spatial discontinuities that distinguish heterotopia from all other social spaces (Massey, 1999). How do we categorize Foucault’s conception of space? It can be argued effectively as representing a Structuralist taxonomy of space or a prophetic Poststructuralist hybridization of space representing a pastiche of Medieval, Cartesian, Enlightenment, Structuralist, Poststructuralist thought, and more.

His conceptualization of heterotopia is also regarded as structuralist by some and poststructuralist by other scholars, and I suspect Foucault would reject both labels as his work blurs borders and defies exclusivity. A final question is, Why does Foucault explore only urban space within his heterotopic framework? From my perspective, by doing so Foucault overlooks the exquisite potential of rural spaces as heterotopic sites. Overall, I find the strength of Foucault’s conceptualization is the taxonomy of real, ideal, and heterotopic spaces. His description of heterotopia calls into question the borders, characteristics, limits, tensions, contestations, and potentialities of the socially constructed spaces we so often take for granted.

In sum, this analysis has explored Foucault’s heterotopia, an alternative space between the range of real social and Utopian spaces. In his description of heterotopia, Foucault reminds us that that power does what it must to survive, so there are continually new sets of problems involving the shape-shifting spatialization of power and knowledge. Within the limits of Foucault’s brief lecture, he challenges the reader to question and consider more deeply the structures of social power evidenced in spatialized social constructs. To Foucault, the spaces that are not Utopian or real are by default heterotopic, which creates a strange brew of spatialized ideological, spatial, and chronological alterity. Foucault’s heterotopia is problematic, yet it challenges, advances, enriches, and re-complicates our understanding of social phenomena and social space.