Being and Non-Being: The Other and Heterotopia in Hamletmachine

Being and Non-Being: The Other and Heterotopia in Hamletmachine JOSEPH M. DUDLEY Brian W. Aldiss, in his book This World and Nearer Ones, connects the temporal fragmentation of modern consciousness with the success of the Manhattan Project and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.' The advent of the atomic bomb, Aldiss maintains, was an event which developed simultaneously on both macroscopic and microscopic levels, rupturing man's philosophical conception ofhimself in his world. On the public (macroscopic ) level. the devastation caused by the bomb's usage could be glossed over by the sweeping generalities of political ideology,' while on the private (microscopic) level, individuals were now burdened with an inescapable guilt resulting from the arrival of the "atomic age" and its effects on modern civilization.) Thus, man was now thrust violently across the threshold of postmodern consciousness, his linear view of history and himself within the order 01 things (which had been losing philosophical ground ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century) now fully displaced by an epistemology which bore witness to the potentially destructive nature of the physical universe. No longer able to justify his being through his thought processes (as Descartes had advocated), man was now faced with a series of questions which in effect decentered his being by positing it in relation to actions such as "working" and "speaking.'" As a result, certain epistemological spaces were illuminated in which man's thought and existence appeared only in a discontinuous fashion, leaving an empty space, or "unthought" in his perception of the world around him. Thus, man could not testify that he was cease- .lessly working, speaking, or thinking in all spaces at all times; yet, completely liberated from the eighteenth century episteme, his discoursewas now able to admit the simultaneous existence of the epistemological/physical spaces where these actions took place. Hence, man was forced to recognize, in addition to his presence within the various spaces he occupied, at once an Modern Drama, 35 ([992) 562 Being and Non-Being in Hamietmachine essentially spatial doubling of his personality according to the varied roles he fulfilled and his absences from those spaces where (at certain times) he was not required to play a role. Consequently, as a relatively new element in philosophical discourse, man's existence was then defmed (in addition to what he was) in terms of what he was not: a physical absence that was yet a presence in space. As Micbel Foucault observes: Man and the unthought are, at the archaeological level, contemporaries. Man has not been able to describe himself as aconfiguration in the episleme without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely. yet in which it is also caught. The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is. in relation to man, the Other; the O~er that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the . same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality.' Foucault identifies the space in which this Other presence is represented simultaneously with man as a heterotopia, that space which,.depending upon man's conceptual position to and (simultaneously) within it, as at once both real and imagined. Heterotopias, for Foucault, are then "real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.''' Because heterotopias are "capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible'" Foucault likens these cultural countersites to an epistemological mirror where I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, Ihere where I am not...