the heterotopia of facebook | issue 107 | philosophy now.pdf

19-05-15 10:38The Heterotopia of Facebook | Issue 107 | Philosophy Now

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

The Heterotopia of FacebookRobin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucaults friend.Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-matesEduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an on-campus online hot or not tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth andperpetually expanding corporate power, as well as its part in the digital privacy controversy, has attractedmany seeking to explain its remarkable popularity as well as peoples discontent with it. Although interestingand important, these studies focus predominantly on what users do on Facebook, leaving underexposed whatFacebook does to the user.

Facebook possesses properties that can be construed not just in terms of globalized online networks, but alsoin terms of a type of space. In these terms, Facebook is a world within the world that attracts or repels peopleby its geography as much as by its social life. So what kind of space is Facebook? I claim that its whatphilosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ingeniously called un espace autre an other space; betterknown as a heterotopia. As I will elaborate, understanding Facebook as a heterotopic space offers a style ofcritical thinking that invites moral reflection on digital culture and its relation to other spaces in our everydaylives.



The other spaces and faces of Michel Foucault by Alex LawrenceFoucault images Alex Lawrence 2015 Please visitpreposterous.carbonmade.com

A Space of RevelationOn 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 theexcesses of the information age. Can we reconcile these seemingly opposite points of view? I claim thatFoucaults 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 lesChoses (translated in 1970 as The Order of Things), and further developed the concept in his famous lectureOf Other Spaces (1967). There he says of heterotopias,

There also exist and this is probably true for all cultures and all civilisations real andeffective spaces which are outlined in the very institution of society, but which constitute a sortof counter-arrangement [in which] all the other real arrangements that can be found withinsociety, are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned: a sort of place thatlies outside all places and yet is actually localizable.

Heterotopias exist in defined spaces, whereas utopias are those placeless spaces that we know are inherentlyunreal and unattainable. Yet heterotopias are not the opposite of utopias. Rather, like utopias, heterotopicspaces 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 realspace, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. At the sametime heterotopias suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, orreflect (all quotes are from Of Other Spaces). The central points to understand are that a heterotopia alwaysrepresents 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 theSeventeenth Century. These missions for the conquest of souls were places where human perfection was tobe actualized (essentially compensating for the decay of continental Christian moral values). The Jesuitvillages 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 andregulation. So in this pure Christian space, aspects of Catholicism were revealed that their propagandamight not have mentioned.

Another function of a heterotopia is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sitesinside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory. Isnt Facebook such a place? Facebooksfunction is best summed up by what Foucault said was typical of all heterotopias: they are countersites, akind of effectively-enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within theculture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. And representing the culture in a uniqueway is surely what Facebook does.

The Virtual in Reality



The mirror is a placeless place, Foucault says. In the mirror, I seemyself there where Im not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens upbehind the surface. The mirror is a heterotopic space because it isabsolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it. Itfully represents the real world, although it is elsewhere. Facebook isthe virtual embodiment of Foucaults mirror metaphor. We seeourselves on the screen in a sort of image. Our profile pages alwaysreflect ourselves back at us, while that same image of ourselvesopens up a world where we are not. This is why Facebook is aheterotopia. In Foucaultian terms, Facebook is a disrupting spacewhich turns our usual world on its head by disturbing its continuityand normality. You exit the normal world when you log in; but stillyou are involved in representing a version of normal life.Facebook exhibits many paradoxes. It isolates at the same time as itexposes: it liberates users from the constraints of distance, yet

confines them to a screen. Facebook facilitates effortless instant communication across a vast number oflocations, whilst sustaining the experience that we are localized. It offers a sense of increased control andoversight over social connections, while it simultaneously curtails privacy. It has the allure of beingcompletely open, accessible and democratic its mission statement being Giving people the power to shareand make the world more open and connected yet in effect it constitutes a gated community, with invisiblemoderators in possession of total control. That is to say, in order to prevent the sharing of inappropriatecontent violating Facebooks terms, all activity is monitored. One is essentially relieved of claims toFacebook 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 authenticitythat so many (non)users report regarding Facebook. By submitting the user to a process of self-exposure toothers, Facebook renders virtual social life a staged act a performance. This is why the Facebook self is sooften criticized for being highly performative.However, as Erving Goffman argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), the self is always aperformance, in which individuals attempt to control the impression that others have of them. This fact isunsettling, because it means that in recognizing the way we present our lives and construct our identities onFacebook to be a performance, we then come to question our personal identity offline too. It is exactly at thisjuxtaposition of reality and image, where the virtual defines the real, that the heterotopia undermines thenotion of real reality, through undermining the notion of real identity. So on the one hand Facebook opensup a new kind of space where the selection, formulation and articulation of content concerning our identity ismore readily available; but on the other hand, this new-found malleability makes us question what oureveryday identity actually means.In Of Other Spaces, Foucault explains that heterotopias call into question the reality of the ordinary spacesaround them they disturb by exposing. Facebook exposes not the increasing reality of the virtual, but ratherthat our reality, our identity, has been virtual all along. So while the virtual world increasingly resembles ouractual world, the same process has revealed that the actual world is more virtual than we believed, in terms ofhow we formulate and think about our identity. Analysing Facebook as a heterotopia brings its relation toother spaces into focus. Facebook is a world in the world that provides an illusion which paradoxicallyexposes the real world as illusory.



Robin Rymarczuk 2015Robin 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 andthe ambiguities of space.

the heterotopia of facebook | issue 107 | philosophy now.pdf

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