Wednesday 21 January 2009

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967), 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.

2 comments:

  1. the whole text is here:
    http://www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html

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  2. The image here is a Faraday Cage, effectively a space shielded from external electromagnetic radiation.
    This one is from http://www.shieldingsystems.eu

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