Foucault and Heterotopia: Looming Shipwreck or Flotillas of Lifeboats?

• In Event: The Viability of Change: Challenging Established Norms and Structures in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
On the familiar topic of heterotopia in Foucault studies, I offer a critical reading of the metaphor of the boat. I consider the image of the boat from a philosophy of education perspective with a clear focus on the (im)possibility of utopia (in both the here-and-now and the not-here, not-now of the Anthropocene). On what this spells for environmental education, the image of the boat will serve to crystallize ideas around counter-sites, imaginary alternatives, other spaces or different sites of critique, of heterotopias of crisis and resistance, in the wake of the Anthropocene.

Theoretical framework and perspectives
Among Foucault’s many examples of heterotopia such as utopian communities, cemeteries, brothels, prisons, Turkish baths and so on is the figure of the boat, which, according to Foucault, serves as the image of heterotopia par excellence. But to what extent does the metaphor of the boat act heuristically to decipher the prevalent heterotopic panoptica (the classroom) that one finds in authoritarian systems of education? How can we manifest infinite heterotopias, new utopian imaginations, inaugural seafarings within dominant educative formations? What new floating, liberated vessels can we imagine in the wake of the Anthropocene and the defining global problem of the 21st - climate change? What new sense can we give to the lifeboat and what does this mean for environmental education?

Modes of Inquiry
Guiding my observations will be the different senses of the meaning of the boat one finds not only in Foucault but also in Zizek and Glissant. To inform the notion of the boat, I will also look to Nietzsche and Kant and Deleuze to understand the image of the ocean and the philosophical island in order to understand the dangers and risks of travel and migration.

Scholarly Significance
My conclusion will focus on the changing nature of travel, for example, how the Victorian sense of the journey, of travel in and for itself, has changed in emphasis. This shall serve to explain the notion of quiet viewing in Heidegger (the travel of thought) and how quiet viewing (immobile mobility, new forms of learning and slowness, gentle meanderings, contemplative philosophical walks, new strategies of conviviality and concatenation [Berardi]) may offer new forms of heterotopia within education. This has implication for educational philosophy because it discloses the problem of destination, of exclusion, of mobility, of resistance to speed, of withdrawal away from the world of digital objects, of heterotopias of silence, of retreat from mobile technology and the overall accelerative order of things

Author

• Joff P.N. Bradley, Teikyo University