Michel Foucault/ Paul Rabinow

 

Knowledge/ Power and Heterotopias

It is a new perspective to consider that the act of colonisation across the globe could be seen as an attempt by colonisers to perfect their societies. At least, Foucault proposes as much with his description of heterotopias. He sees them as inherent to all cultures. And although each culture may construct them differently, that heterotopias are constructed at all remains universal.

According to Foucault, order imposed on colonies such that they reflected back to the coloniser the hoped-for perfection of his own culture (what the homeland was not and could never be) was an attempt to finally get it right, to have people live ‘as they should’. In this respect, the colony would conform to Foucault’s explanation that a heterotopia is constructed space of both illusion and compensation. Of course, there is no perfection, in colonies or otherwise.

Nonetheless, the efforts expended to shape colonies ‘just so’ could be seen as compensating for something that was missing. For example, for a lack of order in the homeland; or a lack of the coloniser’s power even to effect desired change. On an individual level, for example, to insist that the colonised people become a perfected reflection of the colonising masters, and to hope that these efforts would reflect well back home, thus compensating for whatever had been missing… viewed from this perspective, compensation would seem to make sense. As confirmation, one need only consider the myriad of historic and romanticised reports of individuals devoting themselves to the perfection of colonised rule in farflung lands, all in aid of (hopefully) climbing the social ladder back home.

So, might the colony itself have been a heterotopia? Its creation meant it was a space of illusion (of perfection) and of compensation (for the colonising power and its individual citizen’s perceived failings). Colonies often existed within their own sense of time. They became ‘slices of time’ that were separate from time lived. In a sense, like libraries, colonies became spaces of accumulated time, and by so doing reflected the accumulation of how life was in times gone by.

Cuba is not a colony, but might it be a space of accumulated time, for example with its norm of road vehicles from the 1950s? Once substantail change comes to the country, as it promises to do, that space of accumulated time might give way to the transitory.

Instead of an area that reflects accumulated time, perhaps there would be pockets of the country that would remain unchanged so that vacationers could experience life ‘as it once was’. Foucault described holiday villages as being areas of transitory time. Walling off pockets of the country so that they remained still in time might create the same effect, in essence creating spaces that would be open to the public yet at the same time due to their isolation, closed off.