Of Other Spaces

Author(s): Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec

Source: Diacritics , Spring, 1986, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 TEXTS/CONTEXTS

OF OTHER SPACES1

MICHEL FOUCAULT

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, histo

with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes
the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and
menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essen
mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics. The pr
epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch
simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near
far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, w
our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through
than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own sk
One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present
polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabit
of space. Structuralism, or at least that which is grouped under this slightl
general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have
connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them ap
as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-
makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structur
does not entail a denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing
what we call time and what we call history.
Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form t
horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; s
itself has a history in Western experience and it is not possible to disregard
fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing
history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierar
ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected places
open, exposed places; urban places and rural places (all these concern the
life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places, a
posed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the
restrial place. There were places where things had been put because they
been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things fo
their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this op
tion, this intersection of places that constituted what could very rough
called medieval space: the space of emplacement.

I This text, entitled "Des Espaces Autres," and published by the French jou
Architecture-Mouvement-Continuite in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture give
Michel Foucault in March 1967. Although not reviewed for publication by the autho
thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the
domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault's death. Atte
readers will note that the text retains the quality of lecture notes. Diacritics wishes to
Jay Miskowiec for securing permission to translate the text and for furnishing his trans
to us. [Ed.]

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 This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo's
work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the
sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place
of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved, as it were; a thing's place was no longer
anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement in-
definitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century,
extension was substituted for localization.
Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplace-
ment. The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we
can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as
a problem in contemporary technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the in-
termediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine; the circulation of discrete
elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on
a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be
randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications.
In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind
in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of
knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world- a problem that is cer-
tainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of
storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a
given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us
the form of relations among sites.
In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no
doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the
various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space.

Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of
knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still
not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from
the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of
space (the one signaled by Galileo's work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached
the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a
certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have
not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for ex-
ample between private space and public space, between family space and social space, be-
tween cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All
these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.
Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught
us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space
thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of
our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within
themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again
a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a
space from below, of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or a
space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for
reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of exter-
nal space.
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of
our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us, is also, in
itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of
which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be
colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites
which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.
Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of
relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations
that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of rela-

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tions because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of
which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One
could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of tem-
porary relaxation - cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its network of
relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest- the house, the bedroom, the bed, et cetera.
But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of
being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert
the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were,
which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two
main types.
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 in-
verted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate
their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that
they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I
believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a
sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia,
since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, vir-
tual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of
shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I
am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror
does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.
From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I
see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the
ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I
begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.
The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the
moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the
space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass
through this virtual point which is over there.
As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described, what meaning do they
have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description - I do not say a science because the
term is too galvanized now-that would, in a given society, take as its object the study,
analysis, description, and "reading" (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces,
of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in
which we live, this description could be called heterotopology. Its first principle is that there
is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a con-
stant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and
perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however
classify them in two main categories.
In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would
call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for
individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live,
in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc. In
our society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants
can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or
military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations
of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place "elsewhere" than at home. For girls,
there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the "honeymoon trip"
which was an ancestral theme. The young woman's deflowering could take place "nowhere"

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and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of
this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.
But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe,
by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior
is deviant in re'3tion to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes
and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons; and one should perhaps add retirement
homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the
heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since, in our
society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.
The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history un-
folds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each
heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same
heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one func-
tion or another.
As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is cer-
tainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all
the sites of the citystate or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has
relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But
it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery
was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible
tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there
were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter
tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or
mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has
taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when
civilization has become "atheistic," as one says very crudely, that western culture has
established what is termed the cult of the dead.
Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies
and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body's re-
mains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a
soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to
the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in
language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a
right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay; but on the other
hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located
at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the
bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an "illness."
The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of
the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is
this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the con-
tagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the
nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries
then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but "the other
city," where each family possesses its dark resting place.
Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several
spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings
onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign
to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which,
on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space; but
perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is
the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is
now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The tradi-
tional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside
its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred
than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and
water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come

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together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally
reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its
symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden
is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been
a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern
zoological gardens spring from that source).
Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time-which is to say
that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The
heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break
with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly
heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange
heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is
dissolution and disappearance.
From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are
structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias
of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries. Museums and
libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its
own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums
and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of ac-
cumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one
place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that
is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a
sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea
belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to
western culture of the nineteenth century.
Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those
linked, on the contrary, to time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in
the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are
rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these
marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands,
displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite
recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as
those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to
the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias
that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of ac-
cumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums. For the
rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the
rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were
accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge.
Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that
both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely
accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a bar-
racks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one
must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even
heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification - purification that
is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hamman of the Moslems, or else purifica-
tion that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas.
There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that
generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into these heterotopic sites, but in fact
that is only an illusion: we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, ex-
cluded. I am thinking, for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms
of Brazil and elsewhere in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room
where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to open
this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms
were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family's quarters;
the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of
heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be

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found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress
and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated
without however being allowed out in the open.
The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that
remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a
space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is parti-
tioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous
brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a
space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is
messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illu-
sion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat
in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of
terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of col-
onization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in
America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraor-
dinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated
colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay
established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out
according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church;
on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery; and then, in front of the
church, an avenue set out that another crossed at right angles; each family had its little cabin
along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked
the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign. The daily life of
individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the
same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o'clock;
then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at
the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty.
Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all,
that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is
closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from
port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search
of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the
boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the
great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has
been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par
excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adven-
ture, and the police take the place of pirates.

Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec

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