What is it that you experience when looking in a mirror? Do you see yourself? Do you see yourself in a virtual room behind the wall? Do you see yourself in this room behind the wall looking back at yourself? Would you consider the space of the mirror a utopia: an unreal place full of ideal forms? Would you consider it a heterotopia: a space "different" (hetero-) from but related to virtually all other spaces; a sort of enacted utopia outside of, yet in tension with, all other spaces?
The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal,virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces")
Sexuality is that
mixed-topos of the mirror: both u-topic and hetero-topic:
both a “non-place” place populated by ideal forms and an
“other-place” place that is “a kind of effectively enacted
utopia in which the real site, all the other real sites that can be
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested,
and inverted.” Objectifying myself, taking myself as an object
that will offer itself to me to be known, I myself know myself
reflexively by making use of a third-party surface that can reflect me back
to me. So I objectify knowable, and indeed already-known, others.
What’s more, knowing these others knows them as having an essential
worth. I thus place myself into a moral relation of other-cherishing
and/or other-loathing so that, within or against these others, I
might “see myself [over] there where I am not.” In knowing the
other, in other-cherishing and/or other-loathing, I can know myself
and thus cherish or loathe myself in kind. In knowing myself as within, as
of, the other I
cherish myself if I cherish this other and loathe myself if I loathe
this other. In knowing myself over and against the other, I
can cherish, loathe, be ambivalent, or be indifferent to my sense of
difference or exclusion.
Of course, in these self-reflexive epistemological methods of
self-knowing/valuation, I am not seeing any particular other in his
or her singularity. The others that I draft into my processes of
self-making are all instances of some idealized other, a reflective
surface that shows me to me as though in a mirror: “in an unreal
virtual space that opens up behind the surface.” My sexual self
that appears in a virtual room that stretches out behind the wall is
thus “a sort of shadow [a doppelgänger] that gives my own
visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am
absent.” This is sexuality as utopia.
Of course, the ideals that the singular other instantiates are hardly products of my fancy. These ideals are the deeply entrenched and rather recalcitrant grids of intelligibility, the dispositif, against which I make sense of my world and within which my life is enmeshed. Thus, the mirror that is this other is not utterly ideal, it “does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I [actually] occupy.” This is sexuality as heterotopia.
Through sexuality, functioning heterotopically, I discover my absence from “the place where I am,” viz. in the utopic space of the mirror, as I see myself in an “over there” that is “back here,” in the real space of my room, facing a mirror. “Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself” and “I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.” Thus sexuality, as a mirror is a mixed-topos experience. It “makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”
