Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which uses words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.
http://libgen.info/view.php?id=245101 [M. Foucault, 'The order of things']
http://libgen.info/view.php?id=480720 [S.R.Delany, 'Triton- an ambiguous heterotopia', Bantam Books 1976]
Will M.: The paradox (of deconstruction?) was that Borges, as an example, uses language and syntax so successfully to evoke the heterotopian in a world which nonetheless allows him to wield his language as though it were instead a utopia...
RispondiEliminaGiacomo C.: right- I for one have wished to live in Tlon, in Uqbar, in Orbis Tertius...