The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history:
with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle,
themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance
of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth
century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle
of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the
epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the
epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side,
of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience
of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than
that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own
skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating
present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the
determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which
is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to
establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal
axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed,
set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them
appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism
does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of
dealing with what we call time and what we call history.
Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which
today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our
systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western
experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection
of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this history
of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic
ensemble of places: sacred places and profane plates: protected places
and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these
concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were
the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial
place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were
places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced,
and then on the contrary places where things found their natural ground
and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this
intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be
called medieval space: the space of emplacement.
This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo.
For the real scandal of Galileo's work lay not so much in his discovery,
or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his
constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a
space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. as
it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its
movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely
slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth
century, extension was substituted for localization.
Today the site has been substituted for extension
which itself had replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations
of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe
these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance
of the site as a problem in contemporary technical work is well known:
the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation
in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements with
a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the
sounds on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded
elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be
arranged according to single or to multiple classifications.
In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting
or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem
of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether
there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is
certainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations
of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification
of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order
to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for
us the form of relations among sites.
In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era
has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than
with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various
distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are
spread out in space,
Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating
space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit
or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely
desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached
from the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical
desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo's work) has
occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical
desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed
by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our
institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These
are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between
private space and public space, between family space and social space,
between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure
and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence
of the sacred.
Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of
phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous
and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued
with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space
of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our
passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there
is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered
space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space
from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling
water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet
these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily
concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space.
The space in which we live, which draws us out of
ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history
occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, 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 on
one another.
Of course one might attempt to describe these different
sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can
be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define
the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary
bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes,
it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to
another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe,
via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites
of temporary relaxation -cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could
describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed
sites of rest - the house, the bedroom, the bed, el cetera. But among
all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious
property of being in relation with 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, are of two main types.
HETEROTOPIAS
First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with
no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct
or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society
itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but
in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.
There are also, probably in every culture, in every
civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed
in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites,
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. Places of this kind are outside
of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location
in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all
the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by
way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias
and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a
sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. 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; 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 there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the
mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does
exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position
that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence
from the place where I am since I see myself over there. 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 this respect: it makes this place that I occupy
at the moment when I look at myself in the glass 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.
As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning
do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description -
I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -that
would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis,
description, and 'reading' (as some like to say nowadays) of these
different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously
mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description
could be called heterotopology.
Its
first principle is that there is probably not a single culture
in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant
of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied
forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia
would be found. We can however class them in two main categories.
In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain
form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there
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: adolescents, menstruating women,
pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias
are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be
found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century
form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such
a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact
supposed to take place "elsewhere" than at home. For girls,
there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition
called the "honeymoon trip" which was an ancestral theme.
The young woman's deflowering could take place "nowhere"
and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel
was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical
markers.
But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing
today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias
of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant
in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this
are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and
one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the
borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of
deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation
since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort
of deviation.
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; for each heterotopia has a precise
and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia
can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs,
have one function or another.
As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia
of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary
cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all
the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each
individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western
culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone
important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery
was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there
was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in
which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few
individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church.
These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones
with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed
inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different
cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when
civilization has become 'atheistic,' as one says very crudely, that
western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead.
Basically
it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection
of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was
not accorded to the body's remains. On the contrary, from the moment
when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body
will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention
to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence
in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning
of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his
own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the
other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that
cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In
correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois
appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death
as an 'illness.' The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the
living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside
the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street,
it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme
of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until
the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century,
the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries
then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of
the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark
resting place.
Third
principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a
single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves
incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle
of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are
foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular
room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the
projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example
of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is
the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing
creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly
superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was
a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle
four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space
still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the
navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were
there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come
together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets,
they were originally reproductions of gardens (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. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia
since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring
from that source).
Fourth
principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in
time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for
the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function
at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with
their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery
is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the
cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life,
and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution
and disappearance.
From a general standpoint, in a society like ours
heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in
a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias
of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries,
Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never
stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth
century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were
the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating
everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to
enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes,
the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside
of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing
in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time
in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The
museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western
culture of the nineteenth century.
Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the
accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to
time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in
the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward
the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such,
for example, are the fairgrounds, these' marvelous empty sites on
the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands,
displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers,
and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has
been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages
that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to
the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the
two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia
of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the
huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums.
for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet 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,
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. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering
a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites
and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and
make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that
are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -purification
that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of
the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic,
as in Scandinavian saunas.
There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be
pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions.
Everyone can enter into thew 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. I am thinking for example, of the famous
bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in
South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where
the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had
the right to ope this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep
there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual
who went into them never had access to the family's quarter the visitor
was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest.
This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our
civilizations, 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.
Sixth
principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have
a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function
unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create
a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside
of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps
that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which
we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, 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. This
latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation,
and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this
manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general
organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am
thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth
century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in
America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking
of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South
America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection
was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies
in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid
out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the
foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on
the other, the cemetery-, and then, in front of the church, an avenue
set out that another crossed at fight angles; each family had its
little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was
exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of
the American world with its fundamental sign.
The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by
the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time,
everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five
o'clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called
the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each
person carried out her/his duty.
Brothels
and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think,
after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without
a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at
the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from
port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes
as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they
conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not
only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the
present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not
been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest
reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the
place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
