I’m Dr. Andrew Wood – with your introduction
to the City of Gardens.
In this module, we’re shifting our discussion
of public life from utopia to heterotopia.
So, what’s the difference? Well, I’d say
the main distinction is that utopia by definition
is unreal, while heterotopia is real. Utopia
proposes a critique of the real world, while
heterotopia exists in the real world, even
while it appears to challenge real-world rules.
A pretty good example of heterotopia is Burning
Man, that annual pop-up community of artists,
performers, and other bohemians, a temporary
city that blossoms once a year in northwest
Nevada. Sure what happens there is otherworldly.
Yet Burning Man exists; it occupies time and
space – at least while it’s open.
And when it’s open, Burning Man becomes
a social safety valve. It offers an opportunity
for its denizens to play with the rules of
modern life. And yet heterotopia, despite
all its playfulness, is ultimately a domain
of discipline.
Burning Man works – at least according to
that French philosopher and historian Michel
Foucault – not to subvert social order but
to affirm it.
In Burning Man, and in numerous other heterotopias,
people release the tension of modern life
– before opting to place themselves once
more within its disciplinary apparatus.
That’s why I call this module “City of
Gardens.”
Yeah, I think I owe you a bit more explanation
here.
OK, think about the city in the industrial
era, say, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In those days, critics condemned the city
as being dark, sooty, dangerous, and dehumanizing:
a powder keg of economic and social tensions.
To release the pressure of that ticking time
bomb, urban theorists and designers like Frederick
Law Olmsted and Ebenezer Howard advocated
for parks and gardens within the city.
This deployment of nature within the artificial
world would allow people to enjoy the best
of two competing values: the garden and the
machine.
I know we’ve discussed these terms before,
but let’s review them now.
The garden represents what American Studies
scholar Leo Marx calls the pastoral ideal,
a domain of natural order; while the machine
represents an urban ideal, a domain of human
order.
You can imagine a utopia of one or the other.
To visit a pastoral utopia, you might project
yourself back to ancient Greece, to a land
they called “arcadia.” You can also see
some sense of this pastoral vision in the
1989 film Field of Dreams.
To encounter an urban utopia, you could start
with the 20th century arts movement called
Italian Futurism (or perhaps its American
cousin Precisionism) – movements that, recalling
the Gernsback Continuum – reflect utopian
confidence and dystopian control.
Both utopias reflect contrasting visions of
public life.
The pastoral utopia affirms the values of
innocence, simplicity, and permanence, while
the urban utopia affirms the values of power,
complexity, and change.
Both rhetorical visions offer a way to critique
social order. From the pastoral perspective,
you can challenge those who call for change.
From the urban perspective, you can challenge
those who call for permanence.
Here’s where heterotopia reveals its utility
– by enabling the overlap of two competing
utopias within the same space. We’ve already
seen one application of the heterotopian framework
in the example of Burning Man. But where do
we find an even more influential domain of
heterotopian overlap in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, and to some extent, even
now? The suburbs!
Right away you might reject this notion. For
generations, suburbs – with their tract
houses and bland shopping malls – have been critiqued as caldrons of conformity.
Subdivisions / In the high school halls / In the shopping malls / Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions / In the basement bars...
It’s no surprise that Betty Friedan once
called suburbs “comfortable concentration
camps.” And yet the original goal of the
suburb was to free its residents from the
excesses of both the garden and the machine.
In the suburban enclave, where streets are
named the trees they’ve displaced, residents
are promised the best of both worlds.
Now here’s where I want you to do some reflection.
Write a paragraph that answers the following
questions:
How do the American suburbs reflect two competing
values of public life? And how does the suburb
as heterotopia work to affirm social order?
This writing opportunity (just for your notes,
but good practice) should prepare you for
a discussion exercise called “Heterotopian
Analysis and Application.” You can review
the instructions for that exercise elsewhere
in this module. And you can read more about
heterotopia by checking out both Foucault’s
original essay and my summary notes.
Here I’ll merely remind you that Foucault’s
heterotopian framework is composed of six
principles. When employing this framework
to analyze a site of public life that you
find interesting, you’re not expected to
cite all of his ideas. Select the ones that
make the most sense to you.
First, Foucault claims that all cultures,
primitive and modern, produce heterotopias.
You’ll also note that he distinguishes between
heterotopias of crisis and heterotopias of
deviance. Your job is to recognize and understand
the difference between the two.
Second, Foucault states that heterotopias
change over time. He uses the cemetery as
an example, noting how these sites, these
“cities of the dead,” have shifted in
their placement in public life to reflect
changes in social order and medical knowledge.
At this point, you might consider: What is
another example of heterotopia whose changing
placement, and/or function, can be used to
interpret transformations of public life?
Third, Foucault describes how heterotopias
arrange multiple spaces. This is arguably
the most useful part of his framework. At
least this is the principle that most folks
use when employing heterotopia to make sense
of complex environments. Foucault describes
the landscape garden, for example, as the
convergence of seemingly disparate geographies.
[I see a similar practice in the design of
World’s Fairs, which we’ll discuss in
a forthcoming module.]
Remembering that the word “space” can
be concrete or abstract, I hope you’ll consider:
What two spaces appear to be artfully arranged
in the American suburb?
Fourth, Foucault offers a parallel to his
third principle, proposing that heterotopias
arrange multiple times. I think about this
principle when I recall Disney’s attempt
to create an ideal community in Florida called
Celebration. It is a real town – not an
amusement park – that attempted to evoke
the architecture and practices of early twentieth-century
America within a framework of contemporary
technology.
As you study this principle, take special
care to understand the distinction between
heterotopias of accumulation and heterotopias
of festivity.
Fifth, Foucault explains how heterotopias
manage entrances and exclusions. Here I invite
you to think back to the design and cultural
meaning of the front porch. The porch is a
liminal space – in this case, a domain that
blurs the distinction between inside the house
and outside. To visit with someone on their
porch requires, well, most of the time at
least, the fulfillment of some social ritual.
Foucault was fascinated by both the obvious
and the hidden mechanisms of public life that
enabled people to cross, and sometimes to
transgress, the heterotopian emplacement.
Think again about the suburb. How might some
rhetorical practice of this domain allow some
folks to enter while excluding others?
Finally, Foucault emphasizes that heterotopias
expose real spaces. In other words, these
emplacements reveal the messy realities of
our real lives, allowing us to manage the
paradox of our desires, both for order and
for disorder.
This is a complicated idea, one that will
require you to review Foucault’s essay carefully.
As you read his essay, be prepared to explain
how heterotopias work both as sites of illusion
and as sites of compensation.
As we wrap this module up, let me underscore
my respect for your efforts.
Reading Foucault can be a tough slog. His
prose is famously complex, and many of his
critics have dismissed his ideas as being
either incomprehensible or simply wrong. Yet
I join many folks within and beyond the field
of communication studies striving to master
the subtleties of Foucault’s work, to make
sense of public life. I’m glad you’ve
chosen to join this community of scholars
and practitioners working together to explore
the City of Gardens.
