can anyone help me understand foucault's notion of the heterotopia...and how it influences/functions (if at all) in identity formation.
i have been reading alot about his ideas of heterotopia and utopia but it's still really unclear to me. i understand how he divides the two but how he sees them effectively functioning is a little vague (and why they emerge).
is academia (ie institional) a heterotopia? is "cyberspace"? can the heterotopic / utopic space be explained (or the explanation augmented by) the Situationist's notion of what constitutes a situation (a la debord, via sartre)?
any discussion would be helpful and appreciated.
i have been reading alot about his ideas of heterotopia and utopia but it's still really unclear to me. i understand how he divides the two but how he sees them effectively functioning is a little vague (and why they emerge).
is academia (ie institional) a heterotopia? is "cyberspace"? can the heterotopic / utopic space be explained (or the explanation augmented by) the Situationist's notion of what constitutes a situation (a la debord, via sartre)?
any discussion would be helpful and appreciated.
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Re: heterotopia
Wed, February 22, 2006 - 12:41 PMi'm sure u probably have a working knowledge of heterotopia by now...seems like u sorta do if u can distinguish it from Utopia.
good question about whether or not Cyberspace is a Heterotopia....heck, i wished he lived long enough to witness the rise of the internet & to hear his spew on it as well.
speaking of which, there should be wanna-be Foucalties out there trying to guess or assume what he would say given a certain topic.....for nothing else, it would make for a good debate.
for example, someone should write a book/essay and say "Foucault would respond to the Internet in this way due to his ____________ (insert your own text here"
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Re: heterotopia
Wed, March 1, 2006 - 12:30 PMMy understanding of the heterotopia is mostly second hand - in reading of Foucaldians rather than of Foucault himself. And in that capacity, I've never seen 'heterotopia' specifically contrasted with 'utopia' -- rather more in context of 'topia' in general.
In terms of 'cyberspace as heterotopia' -- I think you could certainly argue that there are virtual heterotopia within cyberspace. Any of a hundred thousand web boards dealing with one of more forms of non-mainstream sexuality would be examples -- these are 'places' with their own rules, delimited from the social space at large. But 'cyberspace' as a whole? Well, I guess you could argue that it *does* have its own distinct rules & logics. And in the broadest sense of the metaphor, it certainly has an architecture, borders, limits, etc. -- all those things that were the critical structures of discourse and material culture for Foucault.
There is actually one reading I would reccomend -- Mark Poster teaches at UC Irvine, had a book about ten years ago (at the dawn of the Internet age) called _The Mode of Information : Poststructuralism and Social Context_. One section is titled "Foucault and the Database." If you put on your Neo-from-the-Matrix glasses for a minute, and think about the actual generative process behind what we experience as space or place in the cyber / virtual realm, the connection between cyberspace and database becomes pretty clear.
In regard to identity formation in that context - I wouln't really know which way to turn from there. And Debord and co I only really understand as read through Baudrillard, which I also don't entirely get.
Hope that helped.