The City Upon the Hill

“Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct of inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in perfected form, or else’s society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces."

* Utopias don't exist. They cannot exist for Utopia carries the connotation of perfection, and literally translates from the Greek meaning "no where," so... they really don't exist. Thomas Moore tried talking about a perfect land with a perfect government and he called this place "Utopia" because it doesn't exist and it couldn't exist. John Winthrop, during the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted to make it a "City Upon a Hill," a place that followed this "Utopia" idea, a city, a colony, a place above every other place that had ever been known. In any case the Utopia cannot be real, so the real is not the dystopia or the opposite of the Utopia, but the in-between, the heterotopia. The heterotopia is the real. Heterotopias are the places that we can see or understand. It is the real... or even the hyper-real, as Baudrillard could say, because the heterotopia is a mirror of society, it displays what is, but at this time of simultaneity it is also less of a mirror and more of a looking glass, showing what could/should be. (Semes- of no where; symbology of the disneyland as the perfection and ultimate of happiness).

** This blog post was separated from the normal flow of the assignment blog as a symbolic/visual implication of the idea of Utopia being completely separate but necessarily connected to the remainder of the argument of the heterotopia. The layout is also purposeful as being more aesthetically pleasing (subjective; another issue with perfection & utopia, because no person is the same and no person has the same idea of "perfect") than the other blog as a means being its own sort of "City Upon a Hill," or what I found more appealing a "Dance Through The Poppies."

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