Netopos: ...Notopos: Bodies of Knowledge
> The cyborg would not
recognize the Garden of Eden ... (Donna Haraway)
by
Timothy Druckrey
http://www.t0.or.at/~krcf/nlonline/mail%20to:DRUCKREY@delphi.com
There
is little feedback in human affairs, and the bandwidth is less than we think
(Marvin Minsky)
Space and duration have come to
dominate discourses of the shift from modernity to postmodernity. And while the
debate surrounding the linkage between the various imperialisms of the spatial
and the temporal hound, and limit, critical thinking about culture, the smooth
contradictions between identity (national and otherwise) and presence persist.
Space might be the final frontier, but the issue of the territorialization and
inhabitation of the communication matrix outdistances the fictional dimension of
sociological space. Yet, the geo-spaces of modernity are still embedded in
global politics. Justifying the attacks on Chechenya, Russian foreign minister
Andrei Kozyrev invoked intervention into post-imperial space, the territory of
identity, the territory of history and the territory of resistance all, of
course, to be conquered. Ironically, President Clinton resists intervention into
Bosnia as an invasion of sovereign territorial integrity. Space, it seems, like
history for Frederic Jameson, hurts.
If we are indeed entering what
Virilio calls the no-place of teletopical technologies, then a theory of
interaction and communication based not on mere physical presence but on forms
of telepresence must accompany the transition into vectors of representation, as
Virilio writes, which, in the electronic interface, affect the order of
sensations. Worn traditions of the public sphere, the sociology of
post-industrialization, the discursive discreteness of postmodern presence, the
imbeddedness or better immersion in the mediascapes of tele-culture must
co-evolve a communicative practice whose boundaries are not mapped in physical
space. Instead, the geography of cognition, the utopos of networks, of
reception, and of community are emerging in territories whose hold on matter is
ephemeral, whose position in space is tenuous, and whose presence is measured in
acts of participation rather than coincidences of location. For the past few
decades, the trajectory of so much research has aimed at the development of
systems of representation that are mediated by the link between communication
and computing. The collision of media that would ultimately meet in the
reinvention of imaging and the development of the internet is of momentous
importance. It is not much of a coincidence that by the late 1940s the
inexorable merging of mathematics, physics, and biology with cybernetics,
communication theory, and genetics was to lay the groundwork for an utter
reconfiguration of culture, one based on the ideology if not yet the actuality
of programming and algorithmics. Not surprising too that the shift from a
matter-based industrial system was being supplanted by a media-based
post-industrial system in which the engineering of consciousness played a deeper
role. Joining televisual and informational technologies was the basis of a
social transformation in which broadcast media seemingly swept across the global
village at the same time providing what Hans Enzensberger called a reactionary
doctrine of salvation. The technological imperialism of western representation
found its metaphor in the not illogical bond between broadcast media and
democratic capitalism.
Limited by the circulatory system of a one-way
street, the broadcast media served as the bully-pulpit of western culture.
Unaccoustomed to participatory democracy, the formation of content evolved to
sustain some of the ideological imperatives of the cold war west, while the
technologies were finding wider availability. These technologies, video, early
computer, and interactive provided what are the roots of the development of
alternative media strategies and distribution systems. Indeed the development of
what is currently provoking dazzling global prospects for communication, the
Internet, was being constructed by the defense department for secure
international communication and data-exchange. The history, maturation, and move
to provide public access to the Internet is an on-going saga whose story has yet
to be written. Suffice it to say that the shift towards public access has
fundamentally challenged a vast array of cultural practices and initiated the
formation of a communicative network that often seems to verge on a kind of
anarchy. This, along with decisive alterations in the fields of graphics, image
processing, and animation have fueled what is undoubtedly the deepest
transformation in the epistemology of western culture. Knowledge, information,
and representation have been merged with a communication technology that
establishes an experiential link within a distributed system. To be connected
now means to be distributed. As Henri Lefebvre writes:
Knowledge falls
into a trap when it makes representations of space the basis for the study of
life, for in doing so it reduces lived experience. The object of knowledge is,
precisely, the fragmented and uncertain connection between eleborated
representations of space on the one hand and representational spaces (along with
their underpinnings) on the other; and this object implies (and explains) a
subject - that subject in whom lived, perceived and conceived (known) come
together within a spatial practice.
If the actual world no longer serves
to signify cultural narrative, then one must assess those emergent narratives
whose legitimacy exists within the relationship between technology and culture.
These forms exist at the point of collapse of the matter-bound metaphysics of
modernity. Indeed, modernitys undoing began as the trope of the enlightenment
reached critical mass in the 1920s. As much for politics as for science and
representation, the period between the wars witnessed the apotheosis of
modernitys triumphs and disasters. And what emerged in the wake of modernity was
a science without a coherent material model, a politics on the verge of
destruction, and a field of representation in which abstraction prevailed a
momentous time in which the status of form was based on hungover legitimacy and
lapsed authority. What materialized in the postwar period was a crisis of the
symbolic, what Arthur J. Miller described as visualization lost.
Computing re-established the image as a bearer not of the illusory
truths of photographic systems but as a means, like consciousness, of
transferring information. Visualization was supplanted by imaging that bore a
new layer of epistemological meaning. Merged into the compressed infographic
representation is a space in which perception and information seem unified. In
Discourse Networks, Friedrich Kittler established the reciprocity between
technologies of representation and archaeologies of information. The discourse
network can designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a
given culture to select, store, and process relevant data. (DN p, 369) Further,
Kittlers work realizes the limits of rhetorical theory unmediated by technology
itself. Practices of information exchange plagued the culture of modernity as
they would its economic practices. Writing, that process of inscription aligned
with data transfer, rooted catastrophic shifts in the relation between
developing technologies and culture. By 1900, the ability to record sense data
technologically shifted the entire discourse network...For the first time in
history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data. The
technological recording of the real entered into competition with the symbolic
registration of the Symbolic. More pertinently, the strained continuity of
exchange exposed the semiotic constitution of both the mechanism and meaning of
information: To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves
reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network
that requires an awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense
experience from the other, transposition necessarily takes the place of
translation. Transposition might serve as a metaphor for the development of
communication technologies that establish a metascape in which experience
evolves collaboratively.
Marshall McLuhan's Global Village, Manual
Castell's Informational City, Marvin Minskys Mentopolis, stand beneath and
astride the fictional cities of William Gibson in Neuromancer and Neal
Stephenson in Snowcrash. In these environ-mental spaces, shifting events are the
key to experience. Castells writes:
The fact that new technologies are
focused on information processing has far-reaching consequences for the
relationship between the sphere of socio-cultural symbols and the productive
basis of society. Information is based upon culture, and information processing
is, in fact, symbol manipulation on the basis of existing knowledge. If
information processing becomes the key component of the new productive forces,
the symbolic capacity of society itself, collectively as well as in
postmodernity. One might think of the networked communities as postgeographical.
Yet, they are linked by the imperative to sustain continuity in the midst of a
nomadic digital culture wired for uninterrupted contact but alienated from the
utilization of technology as intimate and empowering. The issues raised by the
relationship between the development of cybernetics, communication, urbanism,
identity and the network pose stunning challenges to the traditions of culture.
And simultaneously these issues once again accentuate the necessity to consider
the whole function of culture within the technological conception of
connectionism and distributed systems. It is clear that systems theories of
communication, intelligence, biology, identity, collectivity, democracy, and
politics will not fully suffice to encompass the meaning of digital cultures.
Instead, theories of communication will need to be refigured in terms of
interaction, dispersal and technology.
On the countless sites on the
network - MOOs, MUDs, World Wide Web pages - loss of the real.
The
ramifications of this accelerated social shift are difficult to assess. No
cultural transformation has occurred without a corresponding technology.
Networks, expert systems, artificial intelligence, immersion, biogenetics, etc.,
are forms in which the practices of the future are grounded. How much this
relates to the issues of cognitive research and representation is pivotal to
grappling with the development of hyper, inter, cyber, virtual, and networked
media. Indeed, the development of digital media, necessary, one that would
account for the cultural meaning of technology in terms of the meanings it forms
aesthetically and politically. Of course, even in the distributed system of
digital communication, the issue of power is crucial precisely because it seems
dispersed: The cyberelite is now a transparent entity that can only be imagined.
[Critical Art Ensemble . Conjoin this with a range of effects concerning
everything from surveillance to identity and the ramifications of electronic
culture take on stag-gerering proportions. As Virilio writes:
With the
industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained
use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from the earliest childhood onwards,
we are now routinely see the encoding ofincreasingly elaborate mental images
together with a steady decline in retention and recall. In other words we are
looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation.
This collapse
seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its
spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their co-ordination
in knowing, recognising, making known (as images in our thoughts), our thoughts
themselves and cognitive functions, which are never passive.