THEORY

TROUBLES IN
THEORY PART VI
FROM UTOPIA
TO HETEROTOPIA
The sixth instalment in the series
turns to the theory of ‘space’ as it
was reinterpreted from its Modernist
origins to serve political analysis and
practice, and focuses on the work
and influence of Michel Foucault
A N T H O N Y V ID L E R

IOZ A R I OCTO BER 2014

 3

The recent occupation movements have revived With the increasing interest in space from the social
memories of decisive moments in the history of spatial sciences, however, this open-ended vision was subject
politics, among which the events of 1968 in Paris still to critical revision. Opposed to the rationalised space of
stand out as much for their revolutionary activism postwar housing developments, the Situationists explored
as for the spate of theoretical texts that preceded alternative modes of spatial occupation, inventing
and followed the month of May. The preoccupation the derive, based on a psychogeography that proposed
with ‘space’ was almost universal, whether as an an aleatory exploration of existing urban realms, and
architectural force for social change, or as a repressive in a momentary alliance with Constant, an architectural
1. T h e e v e n ts in P a ris in force for social order. equivalent to an urbanism of psychic desire. They were,
M a y 1 9 6 8 sta n d o u t in th is For the re-conceptualisation of the idea of space as demonstrated in the first issue of the Bituationist
h is to ry o f s p a tia l p o litic s
in the late 1960s was informed by two, apparently International, supported by the analyses of more
2 . A e r ia l p h o to g rap h by
th e p ilo t P a u l-H e n r y
contradictory, intellectual references. The Modernist orthodox geographers, such as Paul-Henry Chombart
C h o m b a rt de L a u w e tradition had celebrated the idea as a liberation de Lauwe, the intrepid pilot and pioneer of aerial
3 . C o n s ta n t’s N e w B ab ylon from the closed academic world of the 19th century - photography who, in his study of Paris, became convinced
P a ris , 1 9 6 3 ‘Space - protagonist of architecture’, noted Bruno Zevi that space was a powerful social flux: ‘We speak, not only
in 1948, summing up over 50 years of spatial theory and of a geographic space, but a social space; of a demographic
practice that marked out architecture from the other space, a cultural space, a juridical space and a religious
arts as a functional and experiential accommodation space ... the limits within which the life of a group of
of the moving body and the perceiving subject. Loos’s humans unfolds cannot be defined by a single criterion.
raumplan, Le Corbusier’s ‘espace indicible’, Schindler’s It is the same for the divisions of space comprised within
‘space-architecture’, were only three of the varied its limits. In reality it is a series of juxtaposed spaces
propositions that were advanced to justify the erasure whose structures sometimes cover each other and
of the Beaux-Arts parti and the load-bearing wall, sometimes escape any superposition.’1
the opening up of the street, and the unlimited territory It was inevitable, given these and many other
of an expanding modernity. propositions, not ignoring the close relations between

A R | OCTO BER 2014 103

 THEORY

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4 . The experim ental Lefebvre’s academic courses at Nanterre and the ‘The Situationists explored alternative
te xtu al spatiality of student movement, that the uprisings of 1968 would
S tephane M a lla rm e ’s be permeated with spatial rhetoric - couched both inodes of spatial occupation, inventing
Uncoupdedes
5. Foucault made a much
in terms of the ‘liberation’ of urban space, but also the derive, based on a psychogeography
comm ented upon analysis
in its strategic and ‘military’ potential. that proposed an aleatory exploration
Here, however, the dominant voice of caution came
o f Velasquez's famous
painting Las Meninas from a former medical historian and philosopher who had of existing urban realms’
in his 1 9 6 6 study, in the early 1960s turned his attention to the institutional
Les mots et les choses forms of medical practice in a series of studies beginning he wrote, were intimately connected to and a key to
withHistoire de lafolie [Madness and Civilization], 1961, the ‘meaning and direction of existence’.2This spatial
and continuing with Naissance de la Clinique [The Birth phenomenology was supported by Eugene Minkowski’s
of the Clinic], 1963. Michel Foucault, expanding his idea 1933 study: Le Temps Vecu - the last chapter of which
of discourse to embrace the spatial characteristics of these was entitled ‘Vers une Psychopathologie de l’Espace Vecu’
newly re-constituted institutions, began to consider (‘Towards a psychopathology of lived space’). This treated
their architectural distribution as contributory factors the ‘space-of-the-environment’ that, in Minkowski’s terms,
in their establishment of order and exercise of power. localised and contained the regions of the interior,
In retrospect we can trace the emergence of Foucault’s the exterior, and their separation. In a metaphor that
spatial turn in a series of investigations into the history was to prove seminal for Foucault, Minkowski here
of psychoanalytical and phenomenological thought, and distinguished between two interrelated and potentially
by way of Husserl, and specifically in his Introduction to opposed, kinds of space - ‘dark’ space and ‘clear’ space.
the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s 1930 essay In 1964 Foucault transferred these insights to the
'Traum und Existenz’ (‘Dream and Existence’), where, analysis of literary texts, and particularly those that
taking modest issue with Binswanger, he claimed that themselves utilised spatial metaphors. In a book review
the spatial interpretation of dreams was as significant as entitled ‘The Language of Space’, he wrote, ‘If space is
their temporal understanding; their ‘forms of spatiality’, the most obsessive of metaphors in the language of today’,

104 A R I OCTO BER 2014

1. Paul-Henry Chombart it was because it offered a fundamental structuring device ‘Over 50 years of spatial theory and
de Lauwe, ‘L’Etude that ‘determines its choices, draws its figures and its
de l’Espace social’, translations’, constructing ‘digression, distance, the practice marked out architecture
Paris, essais de sociologie
1952-64, Paris: Editions
intermediary, dispersion, fracture, and difference’. As an from the other arts as a functional
Sociales, 1964, p22 ff. example Foucault took the recent publication of Michel and experiential accommodation of the
2. Michel Foucault, Butor’s Description de San Marco? In this work, which
Introduction to Ludwig is by no means a ‘description’ in the normal, tourist moving body and the perceiving subject’
Binswanger, Le cas or art-historical sense, Foucault discerns an attempt to
Suzanne Urban. Etude construe systematically all the spaces ‘that are connected words in their tracks, contest the very possibility
sur la schizophr&nie
(1952), French translation
to a building of stone’ that language might conjure: of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths
J Verdeaux, R Kuhn et ‘[those] interior spaces that it reconstitutes (sacred texts and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.’6
M Foucault (Bruges: illustrated by frescoes), spaces immediately and materially In the same year, in a radio talk for children,
Desctee de Brouwer, superimposed on painted surfaces (inscriptions and Foucault transferred the concept of heterotopia
1957), p60. legends), prior spaces that analyze and describe the into spatial terms. In this talk, he evoked the idea of
3. Michel Butor,
elements of the church (commentaries in books and ‘other spaces’, those ‘countries without place, histories
Description de San
Marco (Paris: Gallimard, guides), neighboring and related spaces that come without chronology, cities, planets, universes, untraceable
1963). together by chance, evoked by words (the reflections on any map or heaven, simply because they do not belong
4. Michel Foucault, Dits et of tourists who regard), closed spaces of those whose to any space’. These were the traditional utopias that
Merits (1954-1988), Voll: gazes are turned one to the other (fragments of dialogs). formed the dream worlds of societies.
1954-1975 (Paris: These spaces are their proper place of inscription: There were, however, Foucault went on, certain kinds
Gallimard, 2001),
scrolls of manuscripts, surfaces of walls, books, tapes of utopic spaces that could be situated in real space and
pp439-40.
5. Michel Foucault,
of tape recorders that one cuts up with scissors.’ real time: ‘one does not live in a neutral and white space;
Les mots et les choses. In Butor’s book, these spaces of the basilica, one does not live, die, or love, within the rectangle of
Une arcMologie des the verbal spaces, the place of writing, are composed a sheet of paper’. Rather, ‘one lives, loves, and dies in
sciences humaines to provide what Foucault detects as a double system: a space that is gridded, cut up, variegated, with light and
(Paris: Gallimard, 1966; first, ‘the sense of the visit (itself the resultant condition dark zones, differences in level, stairs, holes, bumps, hard
translated The Order and fragile regions, penetrable, porous. There are regions
of the space of the church, the path of the stroller and
o f Things. An Archeology
of the Human Sciences the movement of his gaze)’ described by the large blank of passage, streets, train, subways; there are regions open
(London: Pantheon page, laid out in the manner of Mallarme’s Un coup de to momentary pause - cafds, cinemas, beaches, hotels,
Books, 1970), ppxvii-xix. dts, with horizontal bands of words cut by the margins, and then there are the closed regions of rest and being at
others dispersed in fragments of verse, others in columns. home. Yet, among these places that are distinguished from
And, second, one that seems closer to photography each other, there are those that are absolutely different:
than writing, a space that evokes an: ‘immense places that are opposed to all the others, that are destined
architecture of the orders of the church, but absolutely in some way to efface them, neutralize them and purify
different from its space of stones and paintings’.4 them. These are in some way counter-spaces.
These insights into textual spatiality were developed
two years later in Foucault’s 1966 study, Les mots et
les choses, with its much commented upon analysis
of Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas. Reflecting on the
surprising juxtaposition of apparently dissimilar terms
in a ‘Chinese’ encyclopaedia cited by Borges, Foucault
finds in the heteroclite, the incongruous nature of
these inappropriate ‘mis-placings’, a key to the difference
between the consoling order of Utopia, and the disturbing
nature of Heterotopia.
‘Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real
locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region
in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with
vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where
life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.
1Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because
they secretly undermine language, because they make
it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter
or tangle common names, because they destroy syntax
in advance, and not only the syntax with which we
construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax
which causes words and things (next to and also opposite
one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why utopias
permit fable and discourse: they run with the very grain
of language and are part of the fundamental dimension
of thefabula-, heterotopias ... dessicate speech, stop

ARI OCTOBER 2014 105

THEORY

0. Michel Foucault, These counter-spaces, these localized utopias.’6

Le corps vtopique - les ‘In the end the space-as-power thesis
For the child, these spaces reside in secret places
MUrotopies, presentation
- under the covers, in the attic, on the ‘ocean’ of the was to be quickly absorbed in political
by Denial Defert (Paris:
Editions Lignes, 2009). parents’ bed. For the adult, ‘there are gardens, cemeteries, critique on both the left and the right,
7. John Simon, ‘Michel there are asylums, brothels, prisons, Club Med tallages, functionalised in behaviourist studies,
Foucault on Attica: and many others’. These ‘counter-spaces’ are not utopias
An Interview’, Social because they can be situated in real space, but, as Foucault and translated into images by
Justice, vol 18, no 3
(Fall 1981), p26.
now introduces the word, hetero-topias, the scientific counter-architectural dystopians’
8. Foucault, Bits et
study of which would be named heterotopology.
Merits, vol 13, pl214. Having isolated and defined the theory that might architectural observation: ‘What struck me first of all was
9. Henri Lefebvre, characterise his previous studies of institutions, Foucault the entrance, that kind of phony fortress a la Disneyland,
La Production de then defined the varied ways in which societies, historical those observation posts disguised as medieval towers
I’espace (Paris: and present, invented their specific heterotopias: with their machiolis; and behind this rather ridiculous
Editions Anthropos, the forbidden spaces of ‘biological crisis’ in so-called scenery, which dwarfs everything, you discover it’s
1974); translation
‘primitive’ societies - spaces set aside for the attainment an immense machine.’7
Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, of puberty or giving birth; and spaces in modern societies, And of course it was the machine itself that interested
1991), pp3-4. more concerned with deviation: ‘the places that society him, with its long corridors, defining ‘specific trajectories’
10. Foucault, establishes in its margins, in the empty beaches that ‘calculated to be the most efficient possible and at the
Le corps utopique - surround it (...) reserved for individuals whose behavior same time the easiest to oversee’.
les MUrotopies. is deviant in relation to the mean, or the required norm’. Foucault was later to apply the same reasoning to
Besides hospitals, that retain something of the space of another semi-panoptical plan, that of Ledoux’s saltworks
biological crisis, these might take the form of psychiatric at Arc-et-Senans, which he visited in the autumn of
clinics, prisons - even retirement homes for the ‘lazy’ 1973. Here he found, as he wrote in Burveiller etpunir,
deviants who no longer work in a busy society. published two years later, what he thought to be ‘the
And there is an almost natural order of establishment perfect disciplinary apparatus that would make it possible
and disappearance, as old heterotopias are suppressed for a single gaze to see everything constantly [from]
(brothels), and some continued in use (cemeteries). a central point that would be both the source of light
The guiding principle, Foucault concluded, is the illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for
juxtaposition in real space of many spaces together that everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing
would normally be incompatible. In these terms, even would escape and a center towards which all gazes would
the theatre, with its combination of stage, rectangular be turned’. And while this vision of a total Benthamite
scene, and auditorium, or the cinema, a ‘great rectangular panopticism was dubious when applied to a Ledoux whose
scene at the end of which on a two-dimensional space is symbolic preoccupations were as strong as his proto­
projected a new space in three dimensions’, would qualify. functional rhetoric, for architects intent on radicalising
Between 1966 and 1969, the critical influence of the discipline the message was clear: either submit to
Lefebvre’s and Foucault’s spatial ideas was evident in a reformist ‘architecture or revolution’, or attempt to
both theory and practice. Lefebvre joined forces with subvert the established power structures embedded in
his assistant, Hubert Tonka, together with Jean Aubert, institutional space by inventing ‘other spaces’, alternative
Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, Isabelle Auricoste, heterotopic forms to contest those already existing.
Catherine Cot, Jean Baudrillard, and Rene Lourau, Yet Foucault had already demonstrated the
to produce a series of pamphlets to be distributed at complexities o f‘revolutionary space’, in a 1972
assemblies and events - La Logique de l’urbanisme, conversation with the Maoist group led by Benny Lbvy
L’argent de l’urbanisme, L’Utopie n’dcrit pas au futur, concerning the formation of popular tribunals.
Des raisons de l’architecture, Urbaniser la lute de For L6vy, these tribunals, of Chinese inspiration, were
classe - together with the short-lived journal UTOPIE: the best way to ensure justice according to proletarian
Bociologie de I’urbain, described by Craig Buckley as correctness. Foucault, however, disagreed, pointing
developing ‘new promises of liberation to new forms out that historically, in the French Revolution, the
of repression’. Here, in July 1968, Hubert Tonka published Revolutionary tribunals had served more as the agents
his Critique of Urban Ideology, and Henri Lefebvre of repression than the arbiters of justice. To demonstrate
‘From Urban Science to Urban Strategy’. his point, Foucault went on to analyse the spatial
Foucault’s work, as we know, was very soon to play distribution of the contemporary French tribunal, and
a fundamental role in widening the scope of architectural arrangement of the actors behind and in front of the table:
history, through the extension of his studies on ‘What is this disposition? A table; behind this table, which
institutions with Bruno Fortier’s team of researchers separates them the two suitors, the thirds who are the
encompassing the architecture of 18th-century hospitals, judges; their position indicates firstly that they are
Les machines d guerir (aux origines de Vhopital moderne) neutral in relation to the one and the other and secondly,
and the design of arsenals and ports (Les vaisseaux et les it implies that their judgment is not determined in
villes); and Robin Evans’ magisterial work on the history advance, that it is going to be established after an enquiry
of the English prison, The Fabrication of Virtue. through the hearing of both parties, in function of
Foucault’s own research into the nature of the ‘prison’ a certain norm of truth and a certain number of ideas
led him to visit Attica in 1971, where he made a distinctly on the just and the unjust, and thirdly, that their decision

106 A R I OCTO BER 2014

6 . F o u c a u lt f o u n d t h e will have the force of authority.’ This order, was, Foucault ‘For architects intent on radicalising the
s e m i- p a n o p t ic a l p la n concluded, very far from the idea of ‘popular justice’
o f L e d o u x ’s s a l t w o r k s
enacted by the ‘masses’ against their ‘enemies’.8 discipline the message was clear: either
a t A rc -e t-S e n a n s to be
't h e p e r f e c t d i s c ip lin a r y
For his part, Lefebvre was sceptical: Foucault, submit to a reformist “architecture or
a p p a r a t u s t h a t w o u ld
he complained, unquestioningly applies the spatial revolution”, or attempt to subvert the
m a k e i t p o s s ib le f o r metaphor to knowledge and discourse, but ‘never
a s in g le g a z e t o s e e explains what space it is that he is referring to, established power structures embedded
e v e r y t h i n g c o n s t a n t ly nor how it bridges the gap between the theoretical in institutional space by inventing “other
[ f r o m ] a c e n t r a l p o in t
(epistemological) realm and the practical one, spaces” to contest those already existing’
t h a t w o u ld b e b o th t h e
s o u r c e o f l i g h t i ll u m i n a t i n g
between mental and social, between the space
e v e r y t h i n g , a n d a lo c u s
of the philosophers and the space of the people talk, Daniel Defert provides a useful timeline of the
o f c o n v e rg e n c e f o r who deal with material things.’0 successive phases of Foucault’s elaboration of this idea
e v e ry th in g t h a t m u s t In the end the space-as-power thesis was to be quickly that has proved so influential in architectural theory.10
be know n' absorbed in political critique on both the left and the Beginning in 1966 with the radio broadcast, Foucault then
right, functionalised in behaviourist studies, and developed the concept in an address to the Cercle d’6tudes
translated into images by counter-architectural architecturales de Paris, hosted by Ionel Schein, excerpts
dystopians. It was a supreme irony that much intended from which were translated into Italian in L ’Architettura
‘subversive’ architecture, dedicated to undermining the following year. The edited version was only to be
panopticism, was to be couched in terms that were more published in full 16 years later, significantly enough, in
reminiscent of the Attica entrance than any disruption Berlin, accompanying the exhibition of the Internationale
of spatial orders themselves - the symbolic masking Bauausstellung (IBA). Here, ‘of Other Spaces’ was adopted
of the machine continued under other guises. as the leitmotif of the general approach of JP Kleihues
If there was to be a single master-trope for architecture and OM Ungers who saw the notion of ‘heterotopia’ as
retained from Foucault, it was the concept of heterotopia. informing and supporting their own version of rebuilding
In the postscript to the newly translated text of the radio the city as a series of ‘archipelagoes’.

A R I OCTO BER 2014 107

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