The Heterotopia of Facebook | Issue 107 | Philosophy Now

19-05-15 10:38

Philosophy Now Issue 107 //philosophynow.org/issues/107/The_Heterotopia_of_Facebook

The Heterotopia of Facebook

Robin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucaults friend.
Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-mates
Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an oncampus online hot or not tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth and
perpetually expanding corporate power, as well as its part in the digital privacy controversy, has attracted
many seeking to explain its remarkable popularity as well as peoples discontent with it. Although interesting
and important, these studies focus predominantly on what users do on Facebook, leaving underexposed what
Facebook does to the user.
Facebook possesses properties that can be construed not just in terms of globalized online networks, but also
in terms of a type of space. In these terms, Facebook is a world within the world that attracts or repels people
by its geography as much as by its social life. So what kind of space is Facebook? I claim that its what
philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ingeniously called un espace autre an other space; better
known as a heterotopia. As I will elaborate, understanding Facebook as a heterotopic space offers a style of
critical thinking that invites moral reflection on digital culture and its relation to other spaces in our everyday
lives.

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The Heterotopia of Facebook | Issue 107 | Philosophy Now

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The other spaces and faces of Michel Foucault by Alex Lawrence

Foucault images Alex Lawrence 2015 Please visit
preposterous.carbonmade.com

A Space of Revelation
On the one hand, Facebook is often celebrated as a space where the modern interconnected ideal is realized;
while on the other hand it may be seen as another step further into a digital dystopia overwhelmed by the
excesses of the information age. Can we reconcile these seemingly opposite points of view? I claim that
Foucaults notion of heterotopic spaces helps us do so.
Michel Foucault first introduced the notion of heterotopia in the preface of his 1966 book Les Mots et les
Choses (translated in 1970 as The Order of Things), and further developed the concept in his famous lecture
Of Other Spaces (1967). There he says of heterotopias,
There also exist and this is probably true for all cultures and all civilisations real and
effective spaces which are outlined in the very institution of society, but which constitute a sort
of counter-arrangement [in which] all the other real arrangements that can be found within
society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned: a sort of place that
lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable.
Heterotopias exist in defined spaces, whereas utopias are those placeless spaces that we know are inherently
unreal and unattainable. Yet heterotopias are not the opposite of utopias. Rather, like utopias, heterotopic
spaces make reference to other spaces/places, and relate to them by representing them in specific ways.
Their role Foucault said on the function of the heterotopia, is to create a space that is other, another real
space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. At the same
time heterotopias suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or
reflect (all quotes are from Of Other Spaces). The central points to understand are that a heterotopia always
represents society, yet distorts it in such a way that it reveals a cultures ideology.
What do I mean here exactly? Consider, as Foucault did, the Jesuit missions in South America in the
Seventeenth Century. These missions for the conquest of souls were places where human perfection was to
be actualized (essentially compensating for the decay of continental Christian moral values). The Jesuit
villages embodied the Christian ideal even in the shape they were built, by reproducing the Cross. Moreover,
the enactment of the unquenchable desire for moral perfection went hand in hand with absolute power and
regulation. So in this pure Christian space, aspects of Catholicism were revealed that their propaganda
might not have mentioned.
Another function of a heterotopia is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites
inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory. Isnt Facebook such a place? Facebooks
function is best summed up by what Foucault said was typical of all heterotopias: they are countersites, a
kind of effectively-enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. And representing the culture in a unique
way is surely what Facebook does.

The Virtual in Reality

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The Heterotopia of Facebook | Issue 107 | Philosophy Now

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The mirror is a placeless place, Foucault says. In the mirror, I see

myself there where Im not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up
behind the surface. The mirror is a heterotopic space because it is
absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it. It
fully represents the real world, although it is elsewhere. Facebook is
the virtual embodiment of Foucaults mirror metaphor. We see
ourselves on the screen in a sort of image. Our profile pages always
reflect ourselves back at us, while that same image of ourselves
opens up a world where we are not. This is why Facebook is a
heterotopia. In Foucaultian terms, Facebook is a disrupting space
which turns our usual world on its head by disturbing its continuity
and normality. You exit the normal world when you log in; but still
you are involved in representing a version of normal life.
Facebook exhibits many paradoxes. It isolates at the same time as it
exposes: it liberates users from the constraints of distance, yet
confines them to a screen. Facebook facilitates effortless instant communication across a vast number of
locations, whilst sustaining the experience that we are localized. It offers a sense of increased control and
oversight over social connections, while it simultaneously curtails privacy. It has the allure of being
completely open, accessible and democratic its mission statement being Giving people the power to share
and make the world more open and connected yet in effect it constitutes a gated community, with invisible
moderators in possession of total control. That is to say, in order to prevent the sharing of inappropriate
content violating Facebooks terms, all activity is monitored. One is essentially relieved of claims to
Facebook property. These paradoxes are interesting since they may be why so many users (and non-users)
feel so ambivalent about Facebook.
Facebooks paradoxical effect on the users reality is perhaps most visible in the concern about authenticity
that so many (non)users report regarding Facebook. By submitting the user to a process of self-exposure to
others, Facebook renders virtual social life a staged act a performance. This is why the Facebook self is so
often criticized for being highly performative.
However, as Erving Goffman argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), the self is always a
performance, in which individuals attempt to control the impression that others have of them. This fact is
unsettling, because it means that in recognizing the way we present our lives and construct our identities on
Facebook to be a performance, we then come to question our personal identity offline too. It is exactly at this
juxtaposition of reality and image, where the virtual defines the real, that the heterotopia undermines the
notion of real reality, through undermining the notion of real identity. So on the one hand Facebook opens
up a new kind of space where the selection, formulation and articulation of content concerning our identity is
more readily available; but on the other hand, this new-found malleability makes us question what our
everyday identity actually means.
In Of Other Spaces, Foucault explains that heterotopias call into question the reality of the ordinary spaces
around them they disturb by exposing. Facebook exposes not the increasing reality of the virtual, but rather
that our reality, our identity, has been virtual all along. So while the virtual world increasingly resembles our
actual world, the same process has revealed that the actual world is more virtual than we believed, in terms of
how we formulate and think about our identity. Analysing Facebook as a heterotopia brings its relation to
other spaces into focus. Facebook is a world in the world that provides an illusion which paradoxically
exposes the real world as illusory.
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Robin Rymarczuk 2015

Robin Rymarczuk holds a MSc in Theory & History of Psychology from the University of Groningen,
Netherlands. He writes on a diverse range of topics, including media theory, critical theory, technology and
the ambiguities of space.

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