Andrew's Wiki
Of Other Spaces (changes)

• 1) Every society has them, but they may look differently in diff societies
  • Primitive societies has crisis heterotopias, for people in crisis (adolescents, pregnant women, elderly)
    • We still have a few of ‘em (boarding school, honeymoon, military service)
  • But now, mostly we have “heterotopias of deviation:” rest homes, prisons, psychiatric hospitals
    • For people whose behavior is deviant
• 2) A heterotopia can be made to serve a different purpose as time goes on
  • Cemetery: before, in middle of town, and you may not have your own specific grave; now, b/c of atheism, everyone MUST have own grave, own box
• 3) Can juxtapose many diff, incompatible sites
  • “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”
  • like cinema, theatre, garden (old time gardens are microcosm of plant life, and gardens are happy utopias, a small totality of the world, and its mobile version is a carpet)
• 4) Heterochrony
  • “most often linked to slices in time”
  • “absolute break with their traditional time”
  • museums, libraries: time builds up, “a place of all time” where time’s ravages disappear
    • this need to organize information to save things from ravages of time, a “place of all time” in “immobile place” is an idea only in Modernity
  • Shows you that heterotopias now are “structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion”
  • Also the festival, which celebrates time’s transitoriness: fairgrounds
  • A very interesting example that I should pick up on: “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. ”
    • “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.”
• 5) Entrance and exits carefully guarded (in a sense)
  • “both isolates them and makes them penetrable”
  • To enter: compulsory; accompanied by rites to get in or gestures; gain permission
  • Another great example that’s important to me, that shows how much he needs leisure space to get his point made: “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.”
  • The ones that don’t seem to guard entrance and exits usually have a “curious” system underneath, with “curious exclusions”
  • ex: South American homes w/the rooms for uninvited travelers who needed a rest but NEVER got to the main house, which resonates with “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”
• 6) Relation to rest of spaces
  • “they have a function in relation to all the space that remains.”
  • One of two functions
    • “to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space…as still more illusory” OR
    • “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”
      • compensation
      • suggests that “some colonies” might have been these heterotopias, like American Puritan settlements, Jesuit settlements in S America (perfectly regulated, w/cross shaped town and bells to regulate time), “absolutely perfect other places.”

Final Remarks

• Extreme heterotopias: colonies, brothels
• Boat!
  • “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. “

Random

• On Leisure: “since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.”