Heterotopias

• unreal - subjective or intersubjective, imaginary, conventional; belonging to the subjective experience, whether of a single person or multiple people at once.
• real
  • that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon – the unimaginable universe.
  • that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K Dick)
• By these definitions, the real is a subset of the unreal that possesses certain properties, which tend to be assertions that relate our experience of a "real thing" to some embedding of that experience in some other representation:
  • our experience of other people's response to a thing: "Alice says X"'s relationship to "X".
  • our reflexive model of our experience of a thing: "I believe X"'s relationship to "X".
  • our model of the universe, and how a thing fits in it: "as far as I can tell, X must be true".
  • Observers who also occupy the spaces they are observing can therefore only distinguish real spaces indirectly, relationally. We just happen to believe, based on evidence or testimony, that sometimes there's "really something there".
• imaginary - a subjective experience that we don't subject to reality-testing.
• space - something that you can locate stuff in and move around in (or imagine doing so). A "relation over things" that admits of "location" and "movement."

A utopia is an unreal space that is derived from a real space.

A heterotopia is a real space that is derived from an unreal space.

Unreal spaces must be somehow accessible from the real space, and therefore have an interface through which they interact with the real space. At minimum, somebody's got to experience them; if the experience is only "in one's imagination", call that a utopia.

A utopia comes equipped with a value system because of how it's derived from the real space it's built out of. We typically connote a utopia as being built specifically to define and explore a system of justice; but you could use any value system to construct a utopia. This larger definition admits most speculative fiction.

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Once you've dreamt or imagined a space, often you can build it, or find it, or designate it. Sometimes these constructions "naturalize" to reality: that is, they don't retain any connection to the unreality they were born from. But more often, they retain that connection, either causally or intersubjectively:

• It's clear that they could not have existed any other way than via unreality.
• To experience them calls forth a specific unreal experience.
• There is a coherent relation between the navigation or the real space and its parent unreal space.

Call these heterotopias.

Utopias and heterotopias are the two simplest constructions of how real and unreal spaces might relate to each other.

\begin{equation} Utopia: Real \to Unreal \end{equation} \begin{equation} Heterotopia: Unreal \to Real \end{equation}

Combine these two, and you get a class of things like mirrors. A mirror reflects light, and a human observer (probably any observer that has "vision") perceives a space "on the other side of the mirror", which they know corresponds closely, following well-understood and intuitive principles, to the real space on "this side". Here, an unreal space is derived from a real space; but the observer also uses the unreal space to derive the real space. (It might help to recall here that a real space is also a subjective phenomenon, and the distinction between real and unreal is can only ever be continget, and based on subjective evidence).

A mirror is therefore both a utopia and a heterotopia.

Let's tease apart some features of the space-relation the the mirror sets up:

• Mirrors have (near-)simultaneity. Time doesn't appear to play a factor to their function in human experience.
• The protocol of interaction with a mirror is fixed - you can't reach into a mirror, you can't make it violate the laws of reflection except by destroying it. This is because the mirror itself, the interface with the unreal space, is real.

• Foucault, Michel and Miskowiec, Jay , Of Other Spaces
• Foucault's Types of Heterotopias
• A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 4 | Somatosphere