Welcome colleagues, friends, stalkers, government officials, waitresses, computer viruses,chimney sweeps, gardeners, musicians, mom, anonymous authors, ex-convicts, baby boomers, molecular biologists, pieces of html code, Dave from marketing. This is my heterotopia!
Heterotopia is a term derived from the Greek word “heteros” which means “other” and the Greek word “topos” which means “place”. In medical terminology heterotopia refers to the displacement of an organ or another body part in an improper location (Engel & Pedley, 2008). In the study of diseases of the nervous system, for instance, heterotopia refers to gray matter in the brain found in the white matter of the cerebrum, the top section of the brain (Engel & Pedley, 2008, p.2580). This gray matter looks normal, but causes problems due to its abnormal location (Johnson, 2006). This gray matter heterotopia can affect the brain’s ability to function at higher levels, characterized by the loss of fine motor skills (Engel & Pedley, 2008, p.2581). Patients with gray matter heterotopia often suffer from severe forms of epilepsy.
Gray matter heterotopia is defined in medical terms as an “error in neural development”. The medical heterotopia represents an error in the natural, or physical, ordering of the body. In social theory, however, heterotopia has been appropriated to refer to alternate sites of socio-technical ordering (Hetherington, 1997). Like medical heterotopias, social heterotopias comprise classifiable elements situated, and juxtaposed, in abnormal locations (Johnson, 2006). A key distinction is that social heterotopias provide different, rather than inherently incorrect, ways of ordering social actors.
Michel Foucault introduced the heterotopic imperative to social theory in the mid-1960s. His first reference to heterotopic sites can be found in the preface to The Order of Things. Foucault claims that the idea for The Order of Things first arose from reading a passage from Jorge Luis Borges. The passage sparked a concern about the relationship between time and space in the ordering of the natural and social worlds. In the passage, Borges describes an entry in a fictional Chinese Encyclopedia in which animals are divided into:
(a)belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off ‘look like flies’ (Foucault, 1970, xv).
Foucault acknowledges that each of the categories listed has a precise meaning, and a legitimate content. He claims, however, that it is impossible to understand why and how these categories could come to be juxtaposed outside of the “the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it?” (1970, xvi). He briefly considers two possibilities: utopias and heterotopias. The former is determined to be inappropriate because utopias are “no-places”, the roads to them being “chimerical” (Foucault, 1970, xix). Heterotopias on the other hand do exist in external space. A heterotopia is a site of Otherness, the existence of which “sets up unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate ‘objects’ which challenge the way we think, especially the way our thinking is ordered” (Hetherington, 1997, p. 42).
Personally, I follow Robert F. Reed-Pharr’s definition of heterotopic sites as prophetic visions “of society that allow for the presence of constant change and improvisation” (1994, p. 348). From this perspective, a heterotopia can be treated as a place that emphasizes the “possibility of possibilities” (Reed-Pharr, 1994). The world becomes a productive patchwork of environments, uncertain social relations, dynamic representations and improvised problem-solving strategies.
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Engel, J. and A. Pedley (Eds.). (2008). Epilepsy: A comprehensive textbook. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer Health.
Foucault, M.. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books.
Hetherington, K. (1997). The badlands of modernity: Heterotopia and social ordering. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, P. (2006). Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces’. History of the human sciences, 19(4), 75-90.
Reed-Pharr, R. (1994). Disseminating heterotopias. African American review, 28, 347-357.
