Troubles in Theory Part VI: From Utopia to Heterotopia

Author: Anthony Vidler
Year: 2008 (Architectural Review, "Troubles in Theory" series)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/vidler-troubles-in-theory-6-from-utopia-to-heterotopia.md

Summary

This instalment of Vidler's "Troubles in Theory" series reconstructs the late-1960s re-conceptualization of space that turned from the Modernist celebration of space-as-liberation to a political analysis of space-as-power, focusing on the work and influence of Michel Foucault. Vidler traces Foucault's "spatial turn" from his early phenomenology (Binswanger, Minkowski) and literary analyses (Butor's Description de San Marco, Mallarmé), through the Order of Things (1966) and the radio talk on "other spaces," to the concept of heterotopia — the real counter-site that disturbs the syntax of space and power. He shows how the "space-as-power" thesis was absorbed into architectural history (Fortier, Robin Evans) and how heterotopia became "the single master-trope for architecture retained from Foucault," adopted by Kleihues and Ungers for the IBA's "archipelago" city.

Key Claims

• The late-1960s preoccupation with space was "almost universal, whether as an architectural force for social change, or as a repressive force for social order," informed by two contradictory references: the Modernist tradition (Zevi's "Space — protagonist of architecture") and the social-science critique (Situationists, Chombart de Lauwe).
• Foucault's spatial turn emerged through phenomenology (Binswanger's "forms of spatiality," Minkowski's "dark space" and "clear space") and literary analysis (Butor's Description de San Marco as a systematic construction of the spaces "connected to a building of stone").
• In the Order of Things, Foucault contrasts the consoling order of utopia with the disturbing nature of heterotopia: "Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language... they destroy syntax in advance."
• Heterotopias are "localized utopias," real counter-spaces: "places that are opposed to all the others, that are destined in some way to efface them, neutralize them and purify them... counter-spaces." Examples: gardens, cemeteries, asylums, brothels, prisons, Club Med villages.
• The guiding principle of heterotopia is "the juxtaposition in real space of many spaces together that would normally be incompatible" (theatre, cinema).
• Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) read Ledoux's saltworks at Arc-et-Senans as "the perfect disciplinary apparatus... a perfect eye that nothing would escape" — a Benthamite panopticism.
• The "space-as-power thesis was to be quickly absorbed in political critique on both the left and the right, functionalised in behaviourist studies, and translated into images by counter-architectural dystopians." Much "subversive" architecture "was to be couched in terms that were more reminiscent of the Attica entrance than any disruption of spatial orders themselves."
• Lefebvre's objection: Foucault "never explains what space it is that he is referring to, nor how it bridges the gap between the theoretical (epistemological) realm and the practical one, between mental and social."
• Heterotopia became "the single master-trope for architecture retained from Foucault," adopted by Kleihues and Ungers for the IBA Berlin as "rebuilding the city as a series of 'archipelagoes.'"

Connections

Concepts: Heterotopia · Uncanny · Warped Space · Dérive · New Babylon
Authors: Anthony Vidler · Michel Foucault · Henri Lefebvre · Guy Debord · Constant
Debates: Formal vs. Material Utopianism
Related source notes: vidler-1992-architectural-uncanny · vidler-2000-warped-space · tafuri-1987-sphere-and-the-labyrinth · andreotti-1999-unitary-urbanism · elliott-2009-debord-constant-situationist-urbanism

Direct Quotes

"Heterotopias 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." (citing Foucault, The Order of Things)

"One lives, loves, and dies in a space that is gridded, cut up, variegated, with light and dark zones... there are those that are absolutely different: places that are opposed to all the others, that are destined in some way to efface them, neutralize them and purify them. These are in some way counter-spaces." (citing Foucault's radio talk)

"In the end the space-as-power thesis was to be quickly absorbed in political critique on both the left and the right, functionalised in behaviourist studies, and translated into images by counter-architectural dystopians." (Vidler)

"For architects intent on radicalising the discipline the message was clear: either submit to a reformist 'architecture or revolution', or attempt to subvert the established power structures embedded in institutional space by inventing 'other spaces' to contest those already existing." (Vidler)

Open Questions

• Vidler notes the irony that "subversive" architecture often reproduced the very panopticism it claimed to undermine — does this apply to the wiki's iconic/spectacular architecture (Gehry, Eisenman), which claims criticality while serving capital?
• Lefebvre's charge that Foucault never explains "what space" he refers to remains a live methodological question for the wiki's use of heterotopia and the Foucauldian analytics of power.