Heterotopias

After slogging through Michel Foucalt's Discourse on Heterotopias, my opinion on the article was very clear, and had been so since the first paragraph. I did not find that Foucalt effectively communicated his ideas to a wide audience. He gets extremely wordy, not just in various places, but everywhere throughout the entirety of the essay. The writing is also redundant in it's wordy-ness. Such words as 'fantasmatic' don't seem necessary, it almost sounds like the author is embellishing ordinary words to make himself sound more intelligent. It is extremely dense writing at that. I found it took several reads of the same sentence to decode what Foucalt was trying to tell me through all the vestigial words.

He does present some interesting concepts, if you connect all the scattered dots. But even then he complicates the whole matter to a very unnecessary degree, and this really fogs up the window through which we are trying to get a good view of his ideas. Here is a prime example:

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

My critique of this passage is as follows. First, there is no need for him to dictate the "space" of society or the "space" of anything. He can just simply say "society". It would be like me saying, "I'm going to eat the form of a banana right now". There is absolutely no need to express oneself in such a way. Again he does the same thing in sentence two. "Utopias are sites with no real place." Why can't he just say "Utopia's are by all standards, fundamentally impossible constructs." It still sounds smart, but avoids the vagaries of "no real place". No real place in what? Can't they just be said to be "not real" and leave it at that? This trend continues through this paragraph and through the rest of the discourse. Foucalt phrases concepts with unnecessary complications and mechanisms that skew the meaning of what he is trying to say. Like I said before, the entire passage in question could be summarized, "Utopias are fundamentally impossible, and here is why."

I do not double Foucalts intelligence of his understanding of the principles he trys to delineate, but his explanation is so unnecessarily complicated that said principles are lost and or unintentionally skewed.