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Claudia Simone Dorchain, Independent Scholar, GermanyAbstract
"Heterotopia" is a term coined by french philosopher Michel Foucault in 1966 in his eponymous research, meaning an otherworldly place, a factual (not fictive) realm where the norms of the mass collective are temporarily or continuously not applied. Foucault mentions as examples for heterotopia the theatre as a heterotopia "per se", but also more commonplace spaces like the graveyard, the retirement asylum, the brothel, the carnival street and many others. While much research has been done on the notion of heterotopie in the context of space, order and society, especially in the fields of sociology, much fewer studies actually adress the conscious use of heterotopia in the mass media and for the aim of manipulation. My research shows that there is an intricate interconnection between heterotopia, ritual and egregor. Rituals as highly symbolic practices, performed within the realm of a heterotopia, create an egregor, a field of emerging power, seen situatively, or also a morphogenetic field, seen dynamically. My approach is to first subdivise the heterotopia into corrective heterotopia/individualisation heterotopia and deindividualisation heterotopia. This idea draws inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche´s "The birth of tragedy" and his division of arts into dionysian and apollinian, the first being all about ratio and the individual, the latter being about the irrational and the loss of a sense of self. In a second step, I explain how these two types of heterotopia, combined with symbolically charged rituals, create an egregor, through the lens of modern media, leading to an occult yet effective mass manipulation.
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