may be specifically characterized according to Foucault’s theory. Next, it is necessary to explain the limitation of Foucault’s work, primarily as articulated through Hayles’ notion of his erasure of embodiment, which, while compatible with an understanding of his theory of resistance, calls for a more explicit focus on the idea of “how embodied humans interact with the material conditions in which they are placed” (Hayles 195). At this point, then, it becomes possible to describe how Blair’s approach works to supplement or extend the potential limitation of Foucault’s theory by providing a point of entry into a visual-material rhetorics of heterotopic space.
Defining Heterotopias
Foucault suggests that we all reside in heterogeneous spaces—that “we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things”; rather, “we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (“Of Other Spaces” 23). We can try to characterize these sites by “looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined” (23). Sites of transportation, for example, may include streets or trains; “sites of temporary relaxation” may include “cafes, cinemas, [or] beaches” (24). Foucault is most interested, though, in those sites “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Such spaces, he says, fall into two main categories: utopias and heterotopias.
Utopias, he says, “are sites with no real place”; they present a perfected vision of society and are “fundamentally unreal” (24). Heterotopias, rather, may be found in “every culture, in every civilization” (24). Heterotopias, Foucault writes, are “real” 4 places “that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society” (24). They are akin to “counter-sites,” or an
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. (24)
Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia as counter-site, representation, reflection, and discursive, contested site would seem to open up the possibility for resistance, or for a site that, as Biesecker has put it, “names the nonlegible practices that are performed within the weave but are asymmetrical to it” (357). As the analysis of photo 22727 in chapter one helped demonstrate, a map is indeed a representation of a particular “real” territory, though often conveys multiple ideas about a place. These multiple ideas about a place are often borne out of knowledge claims that result in competing or contested discourses about what counts as the most “accurate” representation of a single territory. Memorials too count as places that represent, contest, speak of, or invert the “real” sites that they call out or commemorate. Thus, maps as well as commemorative artifacts may be understood as heterotopias. Already, then, it is possible to see that Foucault’s terminology can account for the varied contexts that help shape our potential understandings of a place. Following his initial defining of heterotopias, Foucault then provides some criteria to help identify these sites and the characteristics that qualify them as such.
Foucault’s Six Principles of Heterotopology
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
