Diffractive Technospaces

A Feminist Approach to the Mediations of Space and Representation

Federica Timeto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317150992
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The entanglements of information and materiality in our media environment, that new information and communication technologies make increasingly mobile and locative, changes the mediations between space and society. The fluidity and continual reworking of the boundaries of contemporary technospaces - the sociotechnical environments in which humans and machines relate and intersect - is key to the production and consumption of contemporary technologies. Theoretical analyses of communication and space have tended to engage in the representation of such changes without interrogating the representational instruments used at a broader methodological level. Articulating a non-representational perspective on knowledge production and artistic practices, combined with an analysis of space, this book offers a new performative and relational re-turn to representation in contemporary technospaces. The radically materialist, posthumanist and performative position from which this situated aesthetics of technospaces is elaborated, aligns this book not only with non-representational theory, but also with the theories of material feminism, feminist geography, situated epistemologies, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, performance studies and new media studies.

Chapter 1
Space and Representation

1.1 Beyond the Binaries: Modes of Spatialisation

There has been theoretical ‘efflorescence’ (Agnew, 2005, p. 82) around the concepts of space and place in recent decades. The polarisation between these two concepts has permeated many debates within geography as well as other theoretical fields in both the natural and human sciences,¹ revealing many similarities in and exchanges between the metaphors used and the philosophical references employed, although for different aims. This conceptual opposition frequently underlies theorisations that treat space and place separately, as if the characteristics of space could not also be attributed to place, and vice versa, and often appears to be constructed on the basis of a more or less explicit antinomy with the excluded term, showing the utility of a separate consideration to be ambiguous, at best.

The privilege accorded to space or place in these theories seems to depend on, and in turn to generate, a series of other dichotomies that reflect the adoption of precise theoretical stances. So, for example, whereas place is usually associated with the conceptual chain of originality, authenticity, concreteness, belonging, particularity and delimitation, space is considered a more abstract concept and is aligned with a different set of ideas, including deterritorialisation, universality, boundlessness, emptiness and the absolute (Grossberg, 1996; Casey, 1997; Massey, 2005).

Generally speaking, the way space and place are commonly conceptualised today originates from two philosophical traditions: the first one, drawing on Newton, can be termed absolutist; the second one, taking Leibniz as its point of departure, is relational (Agnew, 2005, pp. 84–5). Whereas for the Newtonian tradition space is an entity in itself, independently from what occupies it and thus absolute, the Leibnizian tradition pays attention to the forces and objects that populate space and activate it.

Emblematic, in this respect, is Casey’s (1997) historical survey of the destiny of place in Western philosophy, from ancient cosmogonies to the contemporary period. Casey assumes a phenomenological coimplication between place and the (embodied) self, an intimate relation that he links, for example, to Alfred North Whitehead’s (1979) use of the word region instead of the word place to describe the body’s active ‘withness’ in place (Casey, 1997, p. 214) and to Martin Heidegger’s (1962) concept of Werkewelt, which denotes an enacted world of practices (Casey, 2001, p. 684). But Casey’s assumptions also resonate with other socio-geographical formulations, such as Lefebvre’s (1991) ‘trialectics’ or Soja’s Thirdspace (1989), to which we could add the several oxymoronic definitions of place in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s nomadology (1987) (for example, that of ‘local absolute’, cited in Casey, 1997, p. 335).

So, even though Leibniz (1956; 1973) is the philosopher who, against Descartes, reconceives extension in qualitative terms, as a concept which is no longer divisive but rather connective, Casey (1997) nonetheless criticises him for what he sees as an interchangeability of space and place in his thought – one which, while redeeming space, turns out to be ‘disastrous’ (p. 179) for place because place is ultimately reduced to a position, to the point of being devoid of its ‘placial’ quality (p. 174), which for Casey means ‘the immanent scene of finite place as felt by an equally finite body’ (p. 78). However, in Leibniz’s philosophy, place and space cohere since space is a diffused locality and extension regards quality, not quantity; thus (and here lies his anti-Cartesianism), there are neither partes extra partes nor a divisive conception of extension: ‘extension, when it is an attribute of space, is the diffusion or continuation of situation or locality’ (Leibniz cited in Casey, 1997, p. 170). But still, Casey continues to locate a supremacy of space to the detriment of place in Leibniz’s ‘sea of relations’, in which place qua position (Leibniz cited in Casey, p. 179) remains ‘exterocentric to the situated subject’, providing only site rather than place (p. 178). And, for Casey, place intended as site is a placement that remains extrinsic to what is emplaced: a point in a grid that can be calculated and represented before being occupied, as locations of cartographic visualisations are (p. 201). ‘Yet, site does not situate’ (p. 201), says Casey, only place does.

Deleuze (1993), in fact, is of a different opinion than Casey and does not perceive any essential contradiction in Leibniz’s conceptualisation; instead, he considers these distinctions according to a theory of the modulation of forces, a differential distribution of intensities that give way to either actualisations or realisations, so that, instead of two (or more) substantial orders of monads existing and extending, there are simply different happenings of the same world. Each monad expresses the world through selection and closure but, at the same time, only in a particular place, so that each state is always a differential condition maintaining closure somewhere as an always incomplete openness elsewhere. In Leibniz, the difference between the internal and the external order is not a substantial one: ‘not only is the differential relation the pure element of potentiality, but the limit is the power of the continuous as continuity is the power of these limits themselves’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 47). As Claire Colebrook (2005) also notes, saying that space is relational means that there are no absolute, pre-existing spatial conditions and that relations emerge from a process of differentiation; ‘the power to differ expresses itself differently in each of its produced relations’, so that the processes of spatialisation cannot be properly thought after the event, but as events. Consequently, ‘a field is not a distribution of points so much as the striving of powers to become and that become as this or that quality depending upon, but never exhausted, by, their encounters’ (p. 198; see also Guattari, 1995, p. 80).

Following his argument against site, however, Casey (1997) goes on to criticise the ‘heterotopoanalysis’ (p. 297) that Foucault does in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986). In this brief and extremely dense text, originally given as a lecture in 1967 and later published as an article in the French journal Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité in 1984, Foucault discusses his seminal notion of heterotopia, against which Casey’s argument is addressed. Not only does Casey find the periodisation that Foucault makes, with his distinction among the three epochs of medieval localisation, Galilean extension and contemporary situational relationality, oversimplified and inaccurate, but he also strongly disagrees with Foucault’s assertion that we now live in a spatial epoch in which space specifically takes the form of ‘relations among sites’ (Foucault cited in Casey, p. 299). On the contrary, Casey believes that ours is definitely a dromocentric epoch, an epoch in which time as velocity dominates, where the acceleration of time is essentially seen as depending upon the technological changes of the global village. In particular, Casey’s presupposition of the negativity of the term site makes him equate Foucault’s reflection with Leibniz’s ‘mistake’ of a ‘purely positional or relational model of space or place construed as site’, a concept in which space and place are also dangerously confounded (p. 299). Unfortunately, Casey laments, site as quantifiable location has become ‘the dominant spatial module of the modern age’ (p. 334), preparing the terrain for the subsequent hegemony of time.

The fundamental point is that, in Casey’s phenomenological perspective, emplacement needs human embodiment, and vice versa. Thus, for him, a place cannot be a mere content of representation, since representation only expresses the where and the what of place but not its virtuality, which he links with the phenomenal character of place, which does not precede the inhabitation of bodies but happens only with bodies that are oriented-to a place that they ‘might come to’ as a horizon of action, rather than a container in which they need to fit in (p. 231 ff.).

Casey’s (1997) delinking of place and representation is surely noteworthy. However, notwithstanding his assumption that place belongs to the order of events rather than to the order of measurable quantities (p. 336), his defence of place against absolute space on the one hand, and the idea of a current predominance of time causing a chain of displacements on the other, still appear to be based on an ontological distinction, be it between place and space or between place and time.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Casey (1997) criticises Foucault’s supposed terminological confusion among terms like ‘place’, ‘space’, ‘site’ and ‘location’ (p. 300). If we read carefully through Foucault’s essay (1986), though, we can notice that, after initially defining site as a ‘relation of proximity between points’, he continues by saying that we cannot stop at the geometrical whereness of sites but need to consider the way sites are living spaces and ‘what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking and classification’ they, therefore, imply (p. 23). Foucault’s claim for spatialisation is made on the basis of an analysis of the relations, or rather, the power relations, of space. In this respect, Foucault’s intention is particularly evident in his final reply in an interview with the editors of the French journal Hérodote (2007a). After discussing the not-so-clearly outspoken role of geography in his archaeology of knowledge, he admits:

The longer I continue, the more it seems to me that the formation of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analysed, not in terms of types of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and strategies of power. Tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organizations of domains which could well make up a sort of geopolitics where my preoccupations would link up with your methods. (p. 182)

While phenomenologists have usually centred their analyses of the heterogeneity of space on internal space, or the space of the Subject, Foucault intends to study this same heterogeneity in that which is commonly referred to as external space, the space of relations. At first glance, this appears to be a re-proposition of the dichotomy between space and place in the form of an antithesis between exteriority and interiority. But, as Foucault (1986, p. 23) very clearly asserts when writing about Bachelard’s work, his intention is rather to show how the opposition inside/outside becomes an untenable one.

According to Foucault, space is by no means a void. If we stop considering space as a fixed and un-dialectical passive extension, he claims, we can also do without a conception of temporality as a phenomenon which is either intrinsic to consciousness or coincident with linear progression and organic growth. Seen in this light, then, space does not stand for the opposite of history and time, but is imbued with histories and different spatio-temporal arrangements of power relations (Foucault, 2007a, pp. 177–8) – what Massey (1994) has called power-geometries. ‘Space itself has a history in Western experience’, affirms Foucault, ‘and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space’ (1986, p. 22).

Indeed, this is particularly evident in his notion of ‘other space’, or space as heterotopia (1986): heterotopias, Foucault writes, are sites that ‘suspect, neutralise or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect’ (p. 24). Indeed, heterotopias work dynamically at relating differences among sites considered in their reciprocal counteractions, rather than as discrete entities. As will become more evident in what follows, Foucault anticipates here what Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova (2012) have defined as the ‘becoming topological of culture’, which they also call, with reference to the Leibnizian conception of space, a ‘neo-monadology of trans-individuation’ (p. 19). This becomes more evident, for example, in the potentialities offered by today’s shifting of information into the environment, or the proliferation of ubiquitous interfaces and the various forms of digital networking and sociotechnical mediation. Actually, all these phenomena, rather than merely bringing to the fore new relations happening at the interface, underline the dynamic quality of the interfaces in being productive of such relations, and the diffuse tendency of contemporary culture to ‘behave topologically’ (p. 8).

Our current experience of media more and more involves a naturalisation of its technological aspects that makes it seems closer to ‘real life’, as devices such as transparent interfaces and touch screens demonstrate. However, the presumed seamlessness of ubiquitous technologies disguises the continuous loops of sociotechnological agents as well as the fragmentations of augmented relationality. A loop, a term borrowed from cybernetics, here indicates the simultaneous activity and recursive circulation of the technical and the social, which were previously considered as separate planes. Whereas agency has traditionally been conflated with autonomy (Suchman, 2007), the expansion and diffusion of ubiquitous technologies instead require a more supportive network of interconnected elements to work. This means that the more technologies ramify, the more their presumed autonomy – as the possibility of isolating their technicity from their context of usage and application, according to the instrumental view of technologies – is called into question (see Thrift, 2008). It follows (or rather, it simultaneously happens) that the human subject, traditionally considered as the minimum unit of the Social, loses its autonomy as the post-social condition requires ‘a relational reciprocity’ (Knorr Cetina, 2001, p. 530) of which individuation is a result rather than a precondition.

In a topological field, Lury, Parisi and Terranova (2012) explain, movement and relationality are prioritised over aprioristic notions of space and time, but also over society and technology considered separately. A topological behaviour is evident each time a generative spatio-temporal tendency, which is not superimposed as a model or an external force on a subsiding surface but is rather distributed along the ‘threshold[s] of change’ (p. 17) of a field that continuously performs its variations, is observable, as for example in the case of information over matter. Topologically considered, then, space does not pre-exist its ‘set of relations’, to use Foucault’s expression (1986), which means that it cannot be the object of representation as long as the latter presupposes these relations as being predetermined and static.

A classic example of topology is the study of self-organised space in the manifold geometry elaborated by the mathematician Bernard Riemann in the second half of the nineteenth century as an alternative to a Euclidean measurement of space. Among others, Lury, Parisi and Terranova also refer to the notion of meta-modelisation elaborated by Guattari (1984; 1995). The latter intends meta-modelisation as an operational organisation of the world’s matter as ‘manner’, a ‘pragmatic processuality’ (1995, p. 59, emphasis added) that follows complex paths of ‘virtual autopoiesis’ (p. 61) which cannot be represented by recourse to external systems of signification or codification. In this sense, meta-modelisation is performative and non-representational since it disregards the distinctions between ‘the semiotic machine, the referred object and the enunciative subject’ (p. 30), which would work at reducing and fixing, ultimately at closing, what on the contrary is the open existential production of the plane of immanence (see Chapter 4).²

Analogously, Deleuze and Guattari (1987), while drawing on Riemann’s theorisation for their concept of smooth space as the space that eludes metric measurement and that ‘does not have a dimension higher than that which moves through it or is inscribed in it’ (p. 488), insist as well that a distinction between striated space and smooth space – which should correspond to a basic space/place dichotomy, between dimension and direction, the Euclidean and the vectorial, the intensive and the extended – can only be made in the abstract. As a matter of fact, they argue, ‘smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space’ (p. 474). What cannot be properly ‘placed’ is, rather, their line of demarcation (p. 481).

The differences between smooth and striated space cannot be objectively identified, but depend on the way space (or place, it does not seem to matter anymore here) enfolds and unfolds (see also Munster, 2006). Thus, although, the sea is considered by Deleuze and Guattari as the example of smooth space par excellence, and the city appears as the always-already striated, the first one meets the necessities of dimensionality very readily, whereas the city appears to be intersected by smooth spaces, variations and transits, all over: what distinguished them is thus neither their pure extension objectively given, nor their subjective perception, ‘but the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 482, emphasis added).

Later, when talking about the mathematical model of space, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss ‘a typology and topology of multiplicities’ (p. 483) and pose a distinction between a multiplicity of magnitude, that is, a multiplicity of discrete quantities measurable according to the metrical system, and a multiplicity of distances, that is, one which is composed of a ‘set of vicinities’ that are reciprocally ‘enveloped’ in a ‘process of continuous variation’, so that division always implies a change in nature, and which is neither homogeneous nor dependent on metrics (p. 483). Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction is, in turn, recalled by Massey (2005) who, drawing on Constantin V. Boundas’s (1996) discussion of Deleuzian-Bergsonian philosophy, affirms that multiplicity can be conceived as an ensemble of discrete entities, as a ‘dimension of separation’, or as a ‘continuum, a multiplicity of fusion’ of intensities (p. 21). As Deleuze and Guattari repeat, however, such multiplicities are not antithetical, but rather envelop the one into the other. Considering them as opposed would be a failure to conceive the becoming of multiplicity as itself an engagement with the implications and negotiations of spatiality which are necessary for grounding the imaginations of space in the activity of space. As a matter of fact, a ‘pure imagination’ of place and space, one in which quality and quantity as well as mobility and containment are kept distinct, is, if not impossible, at least dangerous, since it excludes any possibility of negotiating with spatiality, that is, with the politics of space (Massey, 2005, p. 86).

All spaces, according to Massey (2005), contain an element of heterotopia (p. 116) because all spaces are the product of undetermined but actualisable relations, w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Space and Representation
• 2 Reconceiving Representation
• 3 Location, Mobility, Perspectives
• 4 Diffracting Technoscience
• Opening Conclusions Performing Represent-Actions
• Bibliography
• Index