Book Review: The badlands of modernity: heterotopia and social ordering

Abstract

The badlands that this book inhabits are those which lie between sociology and cultural geography. For some they are marginal to the concerns of either discipline. For others, such as Kevin Hetherington, they are places where different orderings of social theories of society, space and modernity, and of social ordering itself, might be forged which, in time, could transform what is taken to be mainstream in both disciplines. What Hetherington himself seeks out in these lands is Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, which he defines as ‘spaces of alternate ordering’. Through the chapters of this book the idea of heterotopia is explored and refined in relation to other elements of social and spatial theory, and exemplified and redescribed through three instances of ‘the space of modernity’: the Palais Royal in Paris, the eighteenth-century Masonic lodge and Britain’s early factories. It is a project which self-consciously seeks to offer new alternatives. Yet it ends up replaying some rather conventional and limited versions of geography and modernity, and the connections between them. Hetherington suggests that the term ’heterotopia’ can be used to describe a certain sort of space: a space that is ordered in a way different from those around it. As spaces characterized by alternate modes of spatial ordering, they then reveal new possibilities and can become the sites of social change. This comes in part from Foucault’s short discussion of heterotopia as places of Otherness and of unsettling juxtaposition. Hetherington then supplements this with Louis Marin’s notion of ‘utopics’ to define the alternate ordering as a promising although always deferred state, and Bruno Latour’s idea of ‘obligatory points of passage’ to suggest how some spaces become important places. He also defines heterotopia against other accounts of space within social theory: representational space, the margins, paradoxical space and liminality. These, he argues, are more problematic, often sharing a romance of the margins, resistance and transgression as the opposite to order, rather than identifying spaces which order in other ways. The task then becomes one of identifying heterotopic places: are they few or many? Hetherington refuses to accept the idea that every space might be heterotopic, each ordered in different ways from the others. However, the price of doing so is to suggest that heterotopias are relatively rare and can