INTRODUCTION

Mariangela Palladino and John Miller

Engagements with Michel Foucaults conception of heterotopia have routinely
involved something approaching a disclaimer. For Edward Soja, Foucaults
accounts of heterotopia are frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent.1
To Peter Johnson, they are sketchy, open-ended and ambiguous,2 while Hilde
Heynen insists on the undecidability of the notion of heterotopia.3 It would be
easy to continue in this vein, unfolding a litany of uncertainty and apparent hesitation that has dutifully accompanied the steadily expanding body of academic work
on heterotopias since Foucaults first usage of the term in the 1960s. Ultimately, as
Robert J. Topinka concludes, Foucaults delineations of the topic do not reduce
to one succinct, unproblematic definition of the term, making scholarly attention
to the topic difficult.4 Yet, and this is another almost obligatory observation on
the Foucauldian heterotopia, the idea has proved endlessly appealing, even seductive. For a theme so incontestably ambiguous, the heterotopia has stimulated what
might seem a disproportionate volume of critical responses, most prolifically from
the social sciences. Johnson, in what is the most thorough summary of the topic
to date, gives thirty-six examples of the dazzling variety of spaces that have been
explored as illustrations of heterotopia between 1990 and 2013, including underground band rooms in Hong Kong; pornographic sites on the Internet; the
public nude beach and an off-shore pirate radio station.5 It is difficult at a glance
to formalize what these spaces have in common, except a somewhat general sense
of being set-apart from what might contrastingly be thought of as the normal or
the everyday; a sense that a heterotopia is a different kind of space.
It is perhaps precisely the terms open-endedness that constitutes its allure.
What Foucaults notion lacks in scholarly rigour it makes up for in suggestiveness. As James D. Faubian contends, Foucaults thoughts on heterotopia
set aside the historians usual empirical reserve; there is an expansiveness6 to
his writing on heterotopia and also, though this is not unusual for Foucault, a
touch of poetry. As he somewhat mysteriously ends his Of Other Spaces, the
essay that provides the conceptual centre of this study, In civilizations without

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boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take
the place of pirates.7 What is notable about this conclusion (and these are lines
that will appear again in the chapters collected here) is not its thesis (even if
in the conventional sense it might be said to have one), but its imagery. Foucault is operating here in between scholarship and creative writing; the essay
is in itself an other kind of discursive space. The list of locations that Foucault
himself cites as heterotopias (brothels, colonies, cemeteries, boarding schools,
zoos, rest homes, prisons and more) is, as Johnson explains, almost mischievous
in its variety.8 For all the serious-minded scholarly attention to heterotopias, the
term begins playfully. Sojas summation of his essays tone is perhaps the most
appropriate: Foucault romps through the principles of heterotopology with
unsystematic autobiographical enjoyment and disorderly irresponsibility.9
The ad hoc way in which Foucaults theory of heterotopia has arrived in
critical discourse may also contribute to a sense of intellectual glamour that has
come to surround it. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter explain that heterotopia entered architectural and urban theory more as a rumour than as a
codified concept.10 It is worth noting that heterotopia is not in fact a coinage
of Foucaults, but an adaptation of a relatively obscure medical term, denoting a
body part occurring in an abnormal place.11 The Foucauldian heterotopia has
in a sense two beginnings, though no real conclusion: as Arun Saldanha has
it, the concept was more or less introduced and immediately abandoned by
Foucault.12 His first published usage of heterotopia appears in Let Mots et Les
Choses (1966), translated in English as The Order of Things in 1970. The preface to this archaeology of the human sciences departs from Jorge Luis Borges
invention in his Book of Imaginary Beings (1957) of a certain Chinese encyclopedia structured around a surreal taxonomy of animal life in which creatures are
understood through the following categories:

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(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 camelhair brush (l) et cetera (m) having just
broken the water pitcher (n) that from a long way off look like flies.13

Laughing uneasily, as he describes it, about Borgess fabular order of beings, Foucault offers heterotopia as a mode of characterizing this disturbing conceptual
arrangement. As he will do again, Foucault here juxtaposes heterotopia with
utopia. Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is
nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold. Heterotopias, on the other hand, secretly undermine language; they desiccate speech,
stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source;
they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.14 This difficult
passage reveals heterotopias as a disruptive force, one that operates here primarily
linguistically (though importantly it is a language infused with spatial referents)

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by undermining an appearance or signification of a perfectly untroubled order. A

heterotopia, then, is a space or a language in which to think things differently.
The second beginning of heterotopia can be located in a short talk for radio that
Foucault delivered in 1966 on the subject of utopia. At the request of an architect,
he delivered a lecture the following year based around the same material, though
a published version would not arrive until 1984, with the English translation Of
Other Spaces appearing in Diacritics in 1986.15 The essay opens by arguing for a
historical shift between the nineteenth century and the present epoch. If the great
obsession of the nineteenth century was history with its themes of development
and suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, then the
twentieth century is the epoch of space the epoch of the near and far, of the
side-by-side, of the dispersed.16 Space, of course, as Foucault goes on to elaborate,
also has a history in Western experience,17 but by the second half of the twentieth
century it was already clear that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally
with space in a way that it had not been in previous periods.18 By the time Foucault
was writing, space, he suggests, had become a preeminent global concern.
Looking back from the vantage of the twenty-first century, Foucaults insistence on the intimate involvement of space and anxiety appears prescient. With
the Earths population passing 7 billion in 2011, questions of limits, territory and
migration are more pressing than ever. The accelerating demand for dwindling
resources in an increasingly destabilized global climate (both environmental and
economic) offers a compelling reminder of the ultimate restrictions of our existence
on a finite planet. As Bruno Latour pessimistically puts it, there is not the slightest
chance for nature-and-society to be able to handle the crowding of organisms clamoring for a place to deploy and sustain their life forms.19 Spatial tensions increase
social tensions; altered forms of hegemony transform strategies of resistance as new
geographies of power are configured. The hyper-mobility of a globalized age finds a
striking contrast in the restricted movements of those displaced by drought, famine
and persecution. Indeed, the cosmopolitan, hyper-connected citoyen du monde and
the refugee are perhaps the paradigmatic figures of our time.
The relationship between space and power, that other perennial concern of
Foucaults, is perhaps the most urgent question of our time, and one that pertains to both intimate and macrocosmic scales. As Foucault wrote in a 1977
essay, The Eye of Power:

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A whole history remains to be written of spaces which would at the same time be
the history of powers (both of these terms in the plural) from the great strategies of
geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.20

Although undeveloped in its own terms, the conception of heterotopia does,

then, clearly intersect with Foucaults wider project. As Nigel Thrift summarizes,
Everywhere in Foucault there are markers of his sensitivity to spatial order
as a key to the constitution of power, as a marker of the self, as a requisite

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co-ingredient of numerous practices.21 Thinking about other spaces (in their

many forms), therefore, provides a conceptual tool for thinking about the geographical dimensions of the political and philosophical complexities of the late
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Foucaults essay Of Other Spaces focuses on a particular sense of the relationships between spaces; as he puts it the curious property of being in relation
in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they
happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.22 Heterotopology (the discourse, that is,
of the heterotopia) is involved, then, in a simultaneous reflection and inversion
of the mainstream world (for want of a better term) from which the heterotopia
is removed. Foucault, again, insists on a connection between the utopia and the
heterotopia. But while utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces that present society in a perfected form, which is to say they reveal a direct or inverted analogy
with the real space of Society, heterotopias are real spaces and counter-sites that
remain absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about.23
Heterotopias should not, however, be understood in opposition to the space from
which they are differentiated. They remain intimately involved with the rest of the
world, even as they suspend its regulations and affects. Foucault extends this initial
heterotopology through six principles. A detailed elucidation of these is beyond
the scope of this introduction (they will at any rate return, variously, in the chapters that follow), but a brief summary of the principles is nonetheless useful.
Firstly, heterotopias are universal: there is not a single culture in the world
that fails to constitute heterotopias.24 If this strikes a somewhat generalizing note, the second principle attempts to redress this: a society, as its history
unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion.25 Heterotopias, while widely constituted, are culturally specific. Thirdly,
more complicatedly, the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real
space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.26 Giving
the example of a Persian garden, said to bring together inside its rectangle four
parts representing the four parts of the world, the heterotopia functions as a
sort of microcosm. The garden is both the smallest parcel of the world and
the totality of the world.27 Foucaults fourth principle links space to time ; heterotopias merge with heterochronies (slices of time is Foucaults gloss on this
awkward word) as they are understood to be constituted by an absolute break
with their traditional time. This might function in one of two ways. Heterotopias can be either, as in the examples of the museum or library, spaces in which
time might to be said to accumulate in an archive which encloses all other times;
or, as in the case of time in the mode of the festival, spaces in which time appears
in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect, as in such temporary emplacements as fairgrounds.28 The fifth principle concerns a system of opening and
closing through which heterotopias can be sheltered or hidden so that they are
only accessible under certain distinctive conditions.29 Lastly, heterotopias have

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a function in relation to all the space that remains. The heterotopia is set apart
and connected; it exposes, reveals or recreates the real spaces of society.
Sketching the principles of heterotopology in this brief abstracted mode
leaves us with more questions than answers. It is in the specific application of
Foucaults illusive idea that heterotopia becomes meaningful. The chapters
collected here are responses to Foucault (some direct, some more tangential)
that do not attempt the impossible (and not even necessarily desirable) task of
finally rationalizing heterotopology into a coherent, explicit system of thought,
but rather use the idea of heterotopia to explore specific spatial configurations,
tracing flows of power, patterns of resistance, suspensions of normative order
and, indeed, the re-emergence of normative order. The chapters take heterotopia
away (slightly) from its better established territory in the social sciences into
literary studies and critical and cultural theory. As a whole, the collection does
not aim towards consensus or a standardized understanding of Foucaults essay,
cultivating instead heterogeneous perspectives, styles and philosophical orientations that are unified by an engagement with heterotopias in the context of that
most unwieldy and hotly contested of historical processes, globalization.
As a phenomenon often understood as the imposition or the emergence
of a homogenous experience across the world through the expansion of a neoliberal economic vision, globalization invites, even demands thinking about
different spaces. To reiterate, this is not to say that heterotopias should always
be thought of as spaces of confrontation with or opposition against a dominant
regime. Globalization also constitutes heterotopias; the tourist resort, for example, the most globalized of spaces, might be read in terms of heterotopology.
Globalization produces new social (and material) spaces and, as Nancy Fraser
observes, generates a new landscape of social regulation, more privatized and
dispersed.30 As Jason Read writes in related terms in an essay on the genealogy
of Homo-Economicus under neoliberalism, economic production has moved
from the closed space of the factory to become distributed across all of social
space encompassing all spheres of cultural and social existence.31 Frasers vision
of the dispersed landscape of social regulation and Reads identification of the
distributed character of production return us to Foucaults reflection on the
epoch of space as the epoch of the dispersed.32 Dispersal conjures up at once
ideas of decentralization and of accessibility, an unbounded permeation of capital across global space. For all the ubiquity globalization implies, however, for
Latour, When we speak of the global, of globalization, we always tend to exaggerate the extent to which we access this global sphere.33 The utopic space that
globalization has supposedly extended for everybody to reach, is both limitlessly
dispersed and also, in a sense, withheld from apprehension as a total regime.
Although we might conclude of globalization, as Latour does of ecological
crisis (globalizations twin sibling) that in our current epoch the very notion of
an outside is in doubt,34 there are, of course, countless interruptions and evasions

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within the apparently global reach of capital. In this context, heterotopology

becomes a valuable tool for both disclosing the homogenizing spatial effects of
capital and making sense of other spaces outside a hegemonic topography and a
topography of hegemony. Johnsons conclusions about heterotopology, drawing
on Maurice Blanchot, are here instructive. Heterotopology:
is an attempt to think differently about, and uncouple the grip of, power relations:
to overcome the dilemma of every form of resistance becoming entangled with or
sustaining power. Heterotopias in this way light up an imaginary spatial field, a set of
relations that are not separate from dominant structures and ideology, but go against
the grain and offer lines of flight.35

Thus, heterotopias stage to borrow from Dehaene and De Cauter the contradictions that society produces, they expose unsolved incongruities and interrogate
established, real spaces. Heterotopias, to Dehaene and De Cauter, are placed at
the intersection of two axes: real/imaginary (utopiaheterotopia) and normal/
other (toposheterotopos). These make heterotopias into mirroring spaces; the
attachment to utopia charges heterotopia with the full ambiguity, even undecidability, of whether to attribute to it eutopic or dystopic qualities.36 Dehaene
and De Cauter place heterotopias in an ambiguous, dialectic relation between real
and imagined realms. This collection explores precisely this ambiguity by emplacing heterotopias in real spaces, yet as manifestations of imagined realities; as sites
which resist reality and offer other ways of conceiving material/immaterial space.
The chapters of this collection, while engaging with a globalized understanding of space, forcefully and purposefully dis-engage from it: heterotopia is here
presented as an indissoluble part of homogeneous, global spatiality, but also as
a deviating energy which spins away from it. The contributions included here
share an ethical commitment towards exploring and valuing other spaces as productive forces in generating novel conceptualizations of im/material space; these
are not mere academic exercises, but have a sustained political strength. To Johnsons list of heterotopic spaces and applications of heterotopology, this collection
adds: Gramscian hegemony, the Olympic Games, Gypsy Traveller sites, refugees
in London, hospitals, Africas East Coast, the Mediterranean, a floating asylum,
the habitats of mythic creatures and windfarms. The chapters are organized into
sections that reflect groupings of particular forms or arenas of the heterotopic
(though connections also inevitably flow across the section boundaries).
Part I, State and Hegemony investigates aspects of the experience of space
in relation to economic and governmental forces. Heterotopias are considered
here in relation to hegemonic sites emplacements of power which do not necessarily materialize in one place, but are rather pervasive spatialities. The section
opens with Mauro Palas chapter, From Hegemony to Heterotopias: Geography as Epistemology in Gramsci and Foucault. In this chapter, Pala develops a
comparison between Foucaults and Gramscis visions of space. It is undeniable,

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Pala explains, that they often dealt with the same issues: from the genealogy
of modernity and its characteristic institutions to the idea of nation, the link
between power and knowledge [and the] radical distrust of totalising concepts. The chapter explores how in both Foucaults oeuvre and in Gramscis
philosophy of praxis geography represents the methodological system to scrutinize hegemony. Pala examines Foucaults vision of space as a microphysics of
power where the very notion of discipline is based on a meticulous parcellation
of spaces. Gramscis political theory too is marked by the use of the geographical,
as he makes use of several of the famous metaphors which are part of a geographical conception of politics. Starting from Foucaults geography and the inherent
dynamics of repression and control at stake in any architectural product, Pala
goes on to explore hegemony in Gramscis work. Gramsci adopts a geographical perspective to analyze the Southern Question (a century old issue related
to Italys regional social, political, cultural and geographical heterogeneity). The
Gramscian analysis of Fordism is also driven by a spatial approach whereby, as
Pala observes, the factory becomes the production site that moulds the anthropological traits of an entire life system, and qualifies itself as a heterotopia. In
Gramscis works, Pala contends, both examples of the Southern Question and
the Ford factory as spatial strategies re-evaluate the ability of each individual to
influence or modify particular historical-territorial structures, while also identifying its oppressive or authoritarian nature.
The relationship between heterotopology and hegemony is continued in Tom
Bristows An Occult Geometry of Capital: Heterotopia, History and Hypermodernism in Iain Sinclairs Cultural Geography. Bristow is concerned initially
with urban developments in the lead-up to the 2012 London Olympic Games.
The Olympics, for Bristow, form part of the global capitalist culture industry;
their impact on the landscape of the Lower Lea Valley emerging as an act of enclosure most strikingly represented by the bright blue security fence that contained
the works. If this site is a heterotopia, it is a heterotopia of social control that aims
to subordinate historical and geographical specifics to a homogenous and hegemonic vision of the city produced in the service of what Bristow terms the heritage
industry. Contrastingly, the psychogeographic writings of the poet, novelist and
critic, Iain Sinclair seek to destabilize authoritative voices, undermining the map
of power produced by global capital, instead seeking out unconscious drives
and archaic energies. In Sinclairs version we might understand heterotopia as a
poetic site of resistance, or as a politicised space. Central to Bristows exploration of the economies of power at work in construction and reconstruction of
London (both materially and ideologically) is a tension between Sinclairs work
and that of the more conservative novelist Peter Ackroyd in whose account the
Thames is read as a mirror for national identity. Ackroyds river is a unifying
metaphor, while Sinclairs is a place of multiple, local histories. It is through these
that Sinclair is able to critique the occult geometry of capital, Londons man-

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aged flows (or pedestrian permeability), monitored by a discreet surveillance

technology and underwritten by a supermarket chain so that Hackney in effect is
transformed, as Sinclair explains, into a suburb of Tesco.
Part II on Movement, Marginality, Containment explores the interplay of
movement and containment in the experience of marginalized groups and the
places they inhabit. Involving the common denominator of resistance, the otherness of sites such as cities, camps and clinics is both the product of normative
(hegemonic) spatialization and a site of struggle. In Heterotopia and Placelessness in Brian Chikwavas Harare North, Zo Wicomb explores some of the ways
in which Foucaults concept of heterotopia intersects with postcoloniality. Arguing, following Johnson, that heterotopias do not necessarily subvert or support
social systems, Wicomb reads the Zimbabwean author Brian Chikwavas first
novel Harare North (2009) as an exemplification of a globalized age of migration that engages with a Foucauldian spatiality without providing any hope of
social change. Wicomb is particularly interested here in how Chikwavas account
of asylum seekers in London represents space in relation to subjectivity and how
London (the Harare North of the title) appears as a place of illusion. Chikwavas unnamed and unreliable first person narrator is an ambivalent figure whose
identity appears to merge with that of his friend Shingi, part of a wider interest in doubleness and unstable selves that pervades the text. At the same time
the novels intertextual relationship with Sam Selvons Lonely Londoners (1956)
links the representation of Zimbabwean refugees with the earlier experience of
West Indian migrants. While this connection speaks of the permanent lot of the
migrant, the novel also asserts the difference of London between these distinct
historical periods: London is and is not the same place. In accordance, then, with
Foucaults heterotopology, this is a city that finds its significance through relationships, both through time and across space . The interplay between sameness
and difference that constitutes the narrators experience renders this a fundamentally disturbing place as the incompatible sites of Harare, contemporary London
and London of the fifties are juxtaposed in a single real space.
From refugees relations to space, we move on to those of Gypsy Travellers with Mariangela Palladinos chapter. Its a Freedom thing: Heterotopias
and Gypsy Travellers Spatiality explores how the mobility of these communities still remains profoundly misunderstood, criminalized, severely curbed and
meticulously controlled. The narratives examined in this chapter interviews
with Gypsy Travellers and Mikey Walshs 2009 memoir Gypsy Boy offer paradigmatic examples of Foucauldian heterotopias, of other spaces which deviate
from normative spaces, an analysis with particular significance with regard to
Gypsy Travellers dwellings. Travellers mobile homes recall several aspects of
Foucaults heterotopian principles. A means of transportation as well as a home,
a trailer, chalet or wagon defies dominant discursive categories, embodying the
Foucauldian juxtaposition of incompatible terms. Palladino investigates the

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contested nature of nomadic sites as a challenge to sedentary conceptions of

movement, travel and space. Consequently, Gypsy Travellers spatiality represents both a defensive mechanism against homogenizing, global processes and a
novel way of conceiving of and inhabiting space. Resisting essentialized, hegemonic and sedentary spatialities, nomadism articulates other spaces of possibility.
Continuing Palladinos exploration of marginal sites, Stella Bolakis Heterotopias of Illness deploys heterotopology with regard to the spatialization of
illness. This chapter focuses on real, tangible and habitable spaces, as well as on
imagined spaces of escape, transformation or revelation. The real spaces are the
tuberculosis sanatorium, the cancer clinic and the dementia ward; for Bolaki,
these medical spaces echoing scholars of heterotopias, could be seen as either
vulnerable and marginalized spaces or spaces of Other voices. Indeed, such
sites have heterotopian qualities for they interrupt the continuity and normality
of everyday ordinary space. The imagined spaces are metaphorical heterotopic
spatialities such as illness itself, as a condition, rather than a place. [H]eterotopias draw us out of ourselves in peculiar ways37 and, as Bolaki demonstrates,
illness does something similar, drawing us out of our familiar bodies and spaces,
temporarily or sometimes permanently. The chapter examines three illness narratives Madonna Swan: A Lakota Womans Story (1991), Audre Lordes A
Burst of Light: Living with Cancer (1988), and Linda Grants Remind Me Who
I Am Again (1998) and analyses space in relation to power, race, ethnicity and
culture. Through these illness narratives, which conjugate both the material and
metaphorical aspects of Foucauldian spaces, Bolaki investigates otherness and
heterogeneity in medical spaces. Resonating with other chapters in the collection, this chapter also offers an analysis of heterotopias as sites of oppression
and of resistance. For instance, Lordes The Cancer Journals provides a powerful
example of patient resistance in the refusal of a pink prosthesis after her mastectomy; as a black lesbian feminist her choice is a challenge to multiple forms
of coercion and a resistance to the accepted image of a normative healthy body.
Part III, Seas and Ships, takes us onto water and onto land at the edge of
water to investigate fluid geographies, flows of power across seas and between
nations and the function of the ship, in Foucaults terms as the heterotopia par
excellence. Abdulrazak Gurnahs chapter Writing the Littoral looks at the coast
of East Africa through the work of Joseph Conrad, Karen Blixen, V. S. Naipaul
and his younger brother Shiva Naipaul, picking up on the colonial and postcolonial resonances of heterotopia developed in Wicombs chapter. Framing
his chapter with Foucaults identification of the heterotopia as a site capable of
juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces that are in themselves incompatible, Gurnah explores how the East African littoral becomes disembodied
in colonial writing and overlaid with other meanings. To begin, Conrads story
of colonial traders in Mauritius, A Smile of Fortune (1911) reveals a familiar
strategy of self-consolidation through representation that denies its locations

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The Globalization of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia

complexity. An other space (in this case the imaginative other space of colonial
discourse) comes to be superimposed onto a real space, a pattern also evinced in
Blixens distortion of coastal cultures in Out of Africa (1937). The colonial literary conventions these texts disclose are also, Gurnah argues, rather alarmingly
continued in the writing of the Naipaul brothers. V. S. Naipauls novel A Bend
in the River (1979) is based to a great extent on a profound misunderstanding
of the complexly hybrid community of the coast that makes it reminiscent of
colonial discourses. Shiva Naipauls travel book North of South (1978) contains
a similar disengagement with Africa, taking recourse to the familiar clichs of
imperial disdain, but does contain a moment of ambivalence that shows the
author at least grasped that there was more to what he was seeing than he fully
understood. Gurnahs chapter, then, witnesses an interplay and contest between
the mythic and the real, and between homogenizing colonial voices and specific
cultures, in these literary imaginings of the region.
Iain Chambers Heterotopia and the Critical Cut takes us into the Mediterranean, that marine cemetery of modern day migrant labour in another chapter
concerned with the (post)colonial dimensions of other spaces. While Gurnah
focuses on the operation of imperial orthodoxy, Chambers is concerned with
energies beyond a single-minded modernity and with thinking that embraces
the subjectivating forces, shifting combinations and unplanned vibrations that
do not remain locked in the power of established positions. The sea with its
indeterminate boundaries, its unavoidable, literal sense of flow, produces alternate forms of knowledge to those constituted by the homogenizing effects of
global modernity, comprising an ontological challenge to the histories and
events that apparently require terrestrial ground in order to be narrated. Heterotopias spill out of the homogenous time of capital and nation and invite us
to drop deeper into the folds of the contemporary world. Chambers is particularly interested here in music, an ecology of rhythms, beats and tonalities that
produces sonic cartographies. Music makes the hidden histories of the Mediterranean audible, an argument Chambers pursues with reference to the voice of
Umm Kalthm, an Egyptian singer of notable interest to Edward Said. Umm
Kalthms voice expresses a distinct Mediterranean musicality that also resonates with other musics: the blues, jazz, hip hop. Like the sea, music can propel
us beyond the securities of territorial imperatives, inviting a critical practice
sustained in the heterogeneity of times, rhythms and spaces, in the multiplications of modernity snapping the links of homogeneous understandings. Global
modernity, for Chambers, is always susceptible to unlicensed winds and currents and alternative accountings of the world.
With Diane Morgans chapter LAsile Flottant: Modernist Reflections by the
Arme du Salut and Le Corbusier on the Refuge/Refuse of Modernity we move
into inland waterways. Morgans chapter concerns the Louise Catherine, a coal barge
converted by the great architect Le Corbusier between the wars and used as a floating

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11

asylum on the Seine by the French Salvation Army, the Arme du Salut. Made possible by a donation from Madeleine Zillhardt (the partner of the recently deceased
painter Louise Catherine, after whom the boat was named), the vessel represents an
unlikely alliance between Victorian Christianity and iconoclastic modernism that
disturbs stereotypical views of The Salvation Army. Not only did the barge provide
a refuge for the homeless of Paris, it also, Morgan argues, constitutes a heterotopian
space that destabilizes the habitual perceptions of the terrestrially bound. The Louise
Catherine served not just to alleviate the suffering of the urban poor before feeding
them back into the labour market, but also offered a radical, even utopian message
of social reform that extended beyond France to encompass the penal colonies of
French Guiana. The work of the Arme du salut imagined a future order of things
that questioned prevalent, marginalizing ideas of the criminal and the socially dispossessed. Le Corbusiers thought appears to be supportive of the Arme du saluts
idealistic message, but is also, Morgan explains, problematically entwined with the
rise of fascism, an association that disrupts the sense of the boat as an unequivocally
radical space. Morgan concludes by returning to Foucault and the distance between
utopia and heterotopia, arguing that exploring the heterotopian character of the asylum with its heterogeneous, nonconformist and transient population can instead be
part of a history of utopian thinking that undermines a totalitarian requirement for
homogeneity, normality and conformity.
Part IV Animals, Energy and Ecology brings an environmental perspective
to bear on globalization and heterotopology. John Millers chapter Zooheterotopias focuses on the development throughout the twentieth century of the
pseudoscience cryptozoology, the study of animals usually thought to be mythical or extinct. Such a belief that the world may still contain creatures not formally
recognized by science is evidently based on an understanding of the resilience of
space (or more accurately habitat) in the era of global capital. While the usual
assumption is that the worlds secrets are now exhausted by centuries of exploration and agricultural and industrial development, cryptozoology holds on
to the possibility that mysterious domains may remain. Taking Arthur Conan
Doyles The Lost World (1912) and King Kong (1933, both the movie and Delos
W Lovelaces novel) as emblematic texts of cryptozoology, Miller explores three
of Foucaults principles of heterotopias as zooheterotopias. Millers first zooheterotopic principle is that discourses of space in this context are also temporal
discourses. These are, in Edgar Rice Burroughs famous title, lands that time forgot; as such these are spaces that appear resistant to the spread of global capital.
Secondly, entry to the zooheterotopia is governed by a kind of ritual, connected
to Foucaults sense that heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening or
closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. While this motif
sets the zooheterotopia apart from the rest of the world, it also revolves around
heroic performances of masculinity that reveal the involvement of cryptozoology with imperialism. Lastly, Miller explores the relation of the zooheterotopia

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The Globalization of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia

to all other sites through the insistence that the lost creature must be commodified into global capital through the monsters return to the industrial metropolis.
Ultimately, Miller concludes, the cryptozoological imagination both bemoans
and conversely becomes part of capitalist modernity.
The final chapter, Fabienne Collignons Soft Machines investigates the wind
farm as heterotopia. Like Miller, Collignon is interested in the ways in which
discourses of the environment are involved with global capital, particularly here
with capitalist technoculture. Collignon, examines the wind turbine and wind
farm as both symbols of utopian thought and marked out or marketed countersites to entropy-inducing fossil fuel and nuclear technologies. But while these
machines might be understood as soft for the sense of benevolence they are
usually taken to communicate, they also resolutely reaffirm the dominance of
conglomerates who market their green credentials while remaining invested in
the status quo. In a chapter that draws on Fredric Jameson, Marshall MacLuhan
and Roland Barthes, in addition to Foucault, Collignons analysis draws on the
materiality of the turbines themselves how the turbines thrust demands a
techno-fetishist attention and how windfarms have been represented in popular culture, including, for example, Christopher Nolans 2010 film Inception.
Not only is the rhetoric of sustainability often inclined to be war-like (as in Al
Gores strategic environment initiative), but the machines themselves evoke a
technological sublime associated with fascism (there are echoes here of Morgans
chapter). Placing the turbine blades within a semiotics of plastic, Collignon
traces their debt to Cold War militarism so that for all the green credentials
of these heterotopias, in the end the turbine for the most part forms another
device that legitimises the established regime.
A final heterotopia that haunts these pages is that of the academy itself. This
collection has been conceived across continents and time zones and realized in
a virtual space of instantaneity (the non-place of Skype). Where once the academy was widely represented in that most heterotopian of images, the proverbial
ivory tower, it is impossible now not to acknowledge the growing containment
of the contemporary academy within a discourse of global capital that insists
on an increasingly flexiblized intellectual workforce. To make sense of this disquieting phenomenon, Marina Warner in a recent article in the London Review
of Books borrows the terminology of the expressionist architecture witnessed in
the buildings of her former employers, the University of Essex. For Warner, new
brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning.38 The current model for
higher education mimics supermarkets competition on the high street39 and
weakens heterogeneous realities in the face of a wider, global, international project. The hegemonic spatial formations shaping and pervading academia today
are only a reminder of the Foucauldian space-power binomial; as Foucault put
it, space is fundamental in any exercise of power.40

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