Heterotopia (space)
Heterotopia ( from gr hetero ( different) and topos ( place ) ) is a by Michel Foucault in an early phase (1967 ) of his philosophy briefly used term for rooms or places and their proper systematic significance that only the prescribed standards at a time have partly or fully implemented or that work by their own rules. Foucault assumes that there are spaces that reflect social relations in a particular way, by making them represent, negate or reverse.
Heterotopias are " real places, effective places that are drawing lines in the establishment of the company, as it were, against placements or abutment, actually realized utopias in which the real places simultaneously represented within the culture, are contested, and inverted, so to speak places outside of all places, although they can actually be located. "
In addition, all heterotopias is common that their respective social meaning is not static, but may change in the course of their continued existence. To examine the changing meaning of the heterotopia is, therefore, discourse analysis approach and to understand the heterotopia in the context of social change.
Examples of heterotopias
As examples of heterotopias Foucault calls, youth, the aged and rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, colleges of the 19th century, barracks, cemeteries, cinemas and theaters, gardens, museums, libraries, festival grounds, holiday villages, cultic and non- cultic cleaning sites, guest houses, brothels, colonies, and the ship as heterotopia par excellence. Mirrors play an interesting function, they are neither utopian nor heterotopia, but something intermediate.
Importance
Foucault considered institutional places closer that certain rules are subject to and are subject to their " participation certificate " strict control. There are places where the prevailing norm deviant behavior is ritualized and localized. They are located at the margins of society, "to the empty beaches that surround it ."
This form of heterotopias Foucault as a crisis or - in our modern societies - as deviation heterotopias. He considers it to be fundamental to any society as they structure them, organize and control their members by dissenters are punished or rejected and the continued relevance of the individual company is guaranteed. The most common treated by Foucault deviation heterotopias are, for example, psychiatry and the prison.
On the other hand, offer other heterotopias by their otherness, the opportunity for reflection and problematization of given standards and contradiction.
Properties
Spatial structure
Heterotopias also differ in their structure from other rooms. Thus, they are able to combine several rooms at a single location and to relate to each other that are not really compatible. This is for example the traditional garden of the Persians the case, which connects symbolically depicts a microcosm of its own the whole world, or at the cinema, the audience hall and windows to other worlds at the same time.
Temporal structure
An important role is also played their own, their underlying time structure that identifies Foucault as heterochrony and delimits the heterotopias outwardly: " The heterotopia reached its full functioning, if the people with their traditional time break. "
Foucault describes two extreme in this respect forms of heterotopias: those in which the time is accumulated endless stacks up and pushes in books or images as is the case in libraries and museums, and those that are extremely limited in time and within few hours or days dissolve again as is the case with festivals or the fair.
Opening and closing
Heterotopias are always tied to a system of openings and closings, that does not make it accessible to everyone easily. Your entry and exit is subject to certain input and output rituals. These rituals can exist in complex purification rituals like Japanese tea houses, or of relatively secular nature be like when except payment of an entrance fee at the cinema. The examples show how different can be these rituals and how strongly the degree of opening or closing to the outside can vary - in the cinema theoretically everyone is admitted who pays the price of admission, the Japanese tea house, however, the visitor must first a certain have acquired knowledge of the ceremonies before being allowed to enter the place. In addition, not all heterotopias be entered voluntarily and is not always participate in the heterotopia, when you enter the room. Thus, entering a prison for the inmate is a highly involuntary form of participation; will direct the visitors to the open day, so you walk though the room of the prison, however, remains largely excluded from its heterotopic structures, ie enters the room, not really.
Illusion of space, the compensation chamber
Heterotopias unfold a difference compared to the remaining space. Extreme heterotopia in this respect the space of illusion and the compensation chamber.
The illusion of space creates a reality within which the entire real space appears as still more illusory than the heterotopia itself As an example, Foucault describes the former brothels, which were perhaps because so famous because they created the perfect illusion of a "different " reality.
The compensation chamber creates another "real" space, the perfect and well-ordered appears as the real space. As a compensation chamber could be - in addition to the cited by Foucault Jesuit colonies in South America - possibly even the kibbutz classify as a realized utopia that by their place in the world, at least their initial thoughts when the more perfect real space to appear.
Reception of the concept in science fiction
The SF writer Samuel R. Delany was referring to in his novel Triton to the concept of heterotopia in Foucault. The novel is subtitled: A heterotopic novel.