Gerhard’s Reviews > Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society > Status Update
Gerhard
is on page 298 of 359
The heterotopia and the dead zone, but this can be said of any space, are real spaces but also unreal as much as they are constructed and viewed via representational space. Therefore, taking into account the subject’s position, it is tempting to think about the heterotopia as a place that is seen/created from the Other, unreal side of the mirror – looking at the real, while the dead zone is constructed from the real.
— May 16, 2026 11:15AM
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Gerhard’s Previous Updates
Gerhard
is on page 229 of 359
Things change, though, and time may have come to extend Foucault’s periodization. Arguably, in relation to the production of ‘heterotopias of deviance’, a key change is that the social norms from which deviance emerges (that deviance mirrors) have become more flexible, and deviance a more transient concept.
— May 14, 2026 04:42PM
Gerhard
is on page 100 of 359
All this does not mean that the unknowability and mysteriousness of heterotopias have disappeared. Indeed, the realization that more ‘fragments’ of spatial orders coexist in the same physical space can make their ‘glitter’ more blinding.
— May 14, 2026 04:26PM
Gerhard
is on page 90 of 359
This process of normalization does not translate into the elimination of difference, but in its exaltation as deviance: ‘when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of a child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing’...
— May 14, 2026 01:03PM
Gerhard
is on page 67 of 359
Foucault’s heterotopias have an essentially disturbing function: they are meant to overturn established orders, to subvert language and signification, to contrast sameness, and to reflect the inverse or reverse side of society. They are the spaces reserved for the abnormal, the other, the deviant.
— May 14, 2026 12:52PM
Gerhard
is on page 50 of 359
...the heterotopia that was the Castro Street ghetto – or rather, nested heterotopia of heterotopias, for its bars and baths were themselves sub-emplacements of the counter-sublime – provided a space in which some men at least were able to ‘get outside of themselves’, but it did not realize or even offer the utopian promise of their getting outside of the broader society that had brought or driven them there.
— May 14, 2026 12:09PM
Gerhard
is on page 44 of 359
‘The spaces and places that Foucault identifies as heterotopic are not spaces of the erasure of the normative. They are instead places and spaces in which the ordinary normative order is modified, or rather more precisely, where certain of the norms of ordinary life are under suspension.’
— May 14, 2026 11:51AM
