Pour une actualisation de la notion hétérotopique à l’ère du numérique

Abstract

On October 28, 2021, the Facebook company decides to rename itself publicly as “Meta,” democratizing at the same time the eponymous subject, “metaverses,” digital and permanent virtual worlds in which users are physically immersed and able to interact. This paper, presented in first instance to the University of Besançon during the summer of 2021, tries to put itself in the place of a living Michel Foucault, in the 21st century: how would he have understood the synchrony of our western culture today? By crossing the notion of heterotopology by Foucault (1984) with the concept of “civilization of access” by Michel Serres (2012) and studies on virtual reality (Fuchs 2018), we use the anachronism in order to bring out new ideas on virtual reality “counter-spaces.”