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.borgesAleph2004
  • in other words, humans can only really distinugish between real and unreal spaces by indirect evidence. Definitionally, all we have is our subjective experience; we just happen to believe, based on overwhelming evidence, that sometimes there's "really something there".
• space - something that you can locate stuff in and move around in (or imagine doing so).

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 imagine them; if this is their only embedding, call that a utopia. (The value system used to construct the utopia is there to give the unreal space enough structure that it's a little more narrowly defined than a dream. But you could use any value system to construct a utopia.)

Now: once you've dreamt a space, often you can build it, or find it, or designate it. Unreal spaces correspond to real spaces all the time.

Some such real spaces have the curious property of retaining their connection to the unreal space from which they were born. They could not have existed any other way than via unreality. Call these heterotopias.

• the space from which it's derived (let's call this the source space)
• the constructed space (for symmetry, the target space)
• the constructing method
  • it relates the spaces, at least systematically enough for the constructed space to be recognizable as a representation of the source space.
  • that system of relation works like an interface or a protocol. during and throughout the construction of the heterotopia, the protocol mediates both spaces it's relating.
    • the protocol can be static, as in a mirror, or dynamic, as in a language.
    • it may be futile to distinguish the protocol from the source space - we may only conjecture it to exist based on the evidence of the mediating protocol (which has one foot in both).
    • the protocol operates on both spaces it relates, and it does so asymmetrically.

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 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