Heterotopia as Choreography

Abstract

In thinking through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, with a particular focus on the sailing vessel as the heterotopic space par excellence, this article develops an idea of ‘the choreographic’ in order to illuminate the spacetime dialectics which mobilize certain strands of utopian thought. The choreographic is defined incipiently as a place in process and theorized as the making of a situation in which space and time negate one another. The article presents a three-part inquiry through which this idea of the choreographic is used to assess propositions about utopia come-to-earth. The first part of the discussion excavates the choreographic properties of David Harvey’s model for utopian thought and practice (2000). The second part extends that excavation to questions about the spatiotemporal nature of Foucault’s sailing vessel (1986). Finally, the discussion of spacetime oscillation at sea is used to evaluate the utopian character of a lived example: the Middle Passage slave ship. Here the materialist underpinnings of Harvey’s argument are used to extend Foucault’s ideas to (or locate them in) the context of a ship that carries utopia and dystopia entwined. Ultimately, a dialectics of negation is found to be innate in choreography and is uncovered in the concept of utopia itself.

Notes

1 The concept had been introduced by Foucault ‘in relation to discourse and language’ in The Order of Things (1966) and was developed into a matter of space in his lecture for the Architectural Studies Circle in 1967 (Harvey 2000: 183). The 1967 lecture was elaborated and published in essay form in the October 1984 issue of Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, and Jay Miskowiec’s 1986 translation of that essay for Diacritics is the version to which I refer in this article.

2 While it is beyond the scope of this article to investigate the genealogy of the term ‘choreography’, or to map out the contestations surrounding its meaning, a conviction is maintained that it is a practice that has to do (at root) with the production of time and space through the organization of movement. A definition allowing for the expanded sense in which the term is used here can be borrowed from Susan Leigh Foster, who states that ‘choreography has come to refer to a plan or orchestration of bodies in motion’ (2011: 5). For fifty other definitions of choreography, gathered from artists, scholars, curators and critics, see the survey published in Corpus, the Austrian online dance and performance magazine (‘What is Choreography?’ n.d.).

3 I am indebted here to Fiona Wilkie’s discussion of the relationship between Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, ships and the dreaming that goes on inside theatres (2015: 121–2).

4 The people abducted to slave ships did stage complex and various acts of resistance (Rediker 2007: 8). Paul Gilroy explains that ships crossing the Middle Passage in general ‘need to be thought of as cultural and political units rather than abstract embodiments of the triangular trade. They were something more – a means to conduct political dissent and possibly a distinct mode of cultural production’ (1993: 16–17).