On Close Writing

(audio at http://homepage.mac.com/morganreid/iMovieTheater5.html)

“Close reading” was a mystery when I first heard the term. Now, I think I understand what it means to me. I got that it comes from literature studies, poetics. But it still seems open to interpretation. Here’s mine. (Short version at the end.)

1. Close reading requires time, not just a quantity, but a quality of time.
2. Close reading is a compositional, active, hypertextual engagement.

Here’s what I mean about time: If I spend four normal hours reading, hearing the words in my head, understanding their semantic, denotative meaning, time feels normal to me. (don’t hassle me about “normal”—use it how you like) Normally, I feel aware of the time, and I either feel rushed or like I have tons of time. The thread of doing in which I am involved is one of several activities that I might be juggling. Or I might be thinking about what’s next. I will be in an almost continuously distracted state, which I think is exactly what is sometimes talked about as “kids these days are always multitasking.” (not a quote, but a composite paraphrase contrived for my rhetorical purposes. You know it’s familiar) I am able to monitor the unfolding of events and time in multiple narrative streams. I can spectate, read, and follow. However, in this state, I cannot write, and my senses of semantic connotation are diluted, patchy, and largely limited to collecting what the article is about. I am not in a critical-associative mind state. When, on the other hand, I am able to suspend distraction, and deliberately or otherwise suspend continuous preoccupation with time, time changes. Right off, I want to say that this does not necessarily take more time, but it does take more attention to the One Thing I am Doing. “What am I doing?” “Close reading.” “How long am I Doing this one Thing?” “Twenty minutes.” OK, twenty minutes is a long time to be immersed in close reading without getting distracted. Or is it? Sort of my point really. Twenty minutes is enough time that I don’t have to worry about losing track of the world or vice versa (I can stay off Facebook, phone, and email for twenty minutes). It’s also enough time to shift my brainwaves or whatever is going on, to a more engaged state, in which there is mental time-space to allow quiet impressions and associations to simmer a bit. I can think or read only about that thought or question long enough for it to be enriched by a web of provisional associations. “hey, that reminds me of…” “I wonder if that connects to …?” “That is so [like/opposite of/extending/challenging/contrary to/embedded in/evidence of/a reference to/an example of] [insert theorist/narrative/figure/school of thought/argument/symbol/discourse/trope/concept/method/idea]. There is no urgency or hurry in close reading, and neither is it a process of random free associations. If I can’t generate or notice associations that are productive, interesting, and reasonably warranted or defensible, then I need to read more about the field and its roots and branches. The kind of time I need to do this is somewhat reflective, meditative. It sometimes only sets up on a second (or even third) read-through. In any given hour, if I can stay engaged with just the one article for short periods of whatever (short) duration, and set aside everything else, then I am in the right kind of time to be doing some Close Writing. Short periods of timelessness are required. No exceptions.

This “close reading” term is one of those tricks they (you know who I mean. Them.) set up in academia to sort us out. It’s not reading. It has to be writing, albeit we shouldn’t get sucked into writing the whole hypertextual composition that close reading really is about (“for me”, I’m supposed to say). Remember those concept maps? I like to think I invented the fractal concept map, (I am reluctantly, intuitively sure I didn’t) As I zoom into a text, a word or phrase or idea connects to others within the paper or the discourse or whatever wherever, It Connects. We say how, in short margin notes. The whole paper connects to things, paragraphs, words connect to things. Some more than others. For example, Ever since I read something about Derrida’s “always already,” it comes up all the time. People throw in paraphrases of it all the time without directly quoting. I wonder how many papers I read where this association was there and I didn’t notice it. And that’s an example of a readable association, a step or two less formal than the cited references to quotes from other authors. Quotes aren’t all overt, but they’re along a continuum, from explicit verbatim quotes with (author, year, page citations) to paraphrases to influences noted in the reference list to intentionally intertextual passages to unavoidable discursively related particles and waves to [whatever Derrida would say here]. So in close reading I read until something strikes me as an association, then I write the association. As I write, I am mapping my own engagement with the text and the field.

In high school I was often ticked off at teachers who would talk as if they had objective knowledge of the connotations and interpretative meanings of a passage, since I always thought these were open to interpretation. It turns out that they had some breadth and depth of knowledge of the literature to which the texts are related. (that these relationships are indicative of insider agreement in the field grounded in common background in the canonical texts is still a quiet source of fleeting satisfaction. Then I realize that each reading is varied at some level, and that we all strive to differentiate ourselves within shifting bounds of acceptability. OK Stop with that.) What these teachers wanted from us was close reading, and I thought they had some magic set of rules that they used to decide what things meant. Now I’m going with as much background and related reading of surveys of philosophies of education, philosophies in general, current theoretical conversations) as I can get. If I can get a bit of traction on some of the content, then I can usually come up with enough to chew on, and enough to situate the text at hand into that web of associations.

Short version: don’t multitask; set aside time to focus; read the canon of the field; write notes about meanings and connections. So there.

Oh, and it never hurts to ask our professors about close reading. It’s usually a great talk.

A Reading of Kavita Philip’s “What is a Technological Author??

A Reading of Kavita Philip’s
“What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property” by Morgan Reid

Kavita Philip’s article offers a contribution to the author/text/subject discussion that incorporates both historical and contemporary examples of different forms and configurations of authorship and piracy. Through a hybrid post-colonial, political economy, genealogical and critical legal studies approach, she seeks to “critique,
deepen, and extend the argument about technology’s social networks (often the default ‘progressive’ position) … in the context of new media technologies.” (Philip, 2005 p. 201)

“The pirate” is situated early on as a necessary analytical figure, with a history in literature and a tendency to shift to the boundaries and interstices of legal practice. The meaning of the pirate is multiple, value-laden, varied, and depends on time and the perspective of the one naming the pirate. Noting that the archetypal role of the pirate is to “invert power relations” (p. 199). Philip uses this post-colonial phrase to expose the perspective-dependent—even interchangeable—meanings of taking, appropriation, and stealing. She illustrates the point by depicting the construction and protection of “ecological networks [that] undergirded British military and economic power, and invariably rested on the metropolitan appropriation of ecological knowledge from the margins of the empire” as colonial examples of piracy that were sanctioned by the imperial state (p. 200). Philip notes that European development was in ways dependent on “multiple appropriations of texts and ideas from medieval Islamic scholarship” (p. 200), thus establishing that legal (il)legitimacy is not an impossible element but a contingent, politically-economically constructed aspect of piracy.

To connect to present-day issues, Philip points to discursive connections linking technologically-sophisticated terrorists, actual high-seas pirates, and the emerging depiction of national securities as being dependent on protection and enforcement of technological and intellectual property rights. A central issue and example Philip chooses is the construction of “Asian piracy,” mostly in China, which Philip critiques particularly on the paternalistic colonial tone of the depiction of China as a “recalcitrant adolescent” being patiently guided by the “wise and patient teacher” that is Western capitalism. (pp. 201, 209, 210). Philip uses a comparative discussion of the views of Lawrence Lessig and Lawrence Liang to illustrate some possibilities and the situatedness of two positions in the piracy debate. Further, the notion of “bourgeois law” as that configuration and application of rules which serves a specific segment of the population is applied frequently (pp. 205. 212, 218) ”because it identifies the primary creator and beneficiary of law as an individual who “owns” property (p. 218), and thus serves to emphasize the political economy aspect of Philip’s critical legal analysis.

The controversies and legal battles over VCR and file-sharing technologies that threaten western capitalist profits and property rights are considered throughout the essay, and provide a vehicle for defining and developing the theoretical inquiry of the paper. A connection to Roland Barthes is subtly made in Philip’s early mention of “‘robbers’ today traffic[king] in images, music, and software” (p. 200, my emphasis). To ask whether there is an intention underlying this apparent appropriation and re-phrasing of Image, Music, Text (Barthes & Heath, 1977) is to leap into the depths of the theoretical conversations around the existence, ontology, configurations, and construction of “the author”. Philip draws explicitly on Michel Foucault’s (Foucault, 1977) essay “What is an Author?” and devotes considerable space to adapting Foucault’s ideas on author-function to the possibilities of a pirate-function. In parallel to Foucault’s essay, wherein the question “what is an author?” is dealt with by discussing an author-function, Philip engages her own question of “What is a technological author?” with her ideas about how to represent the pirate-function. The development that Philip makes beyond or in contrast to Foucault’s characterizations of the author-function is that she challenges Foucault’s separation of a techno-scientific author from cultural author of art. Philip points out that
“the question of technoscientific discursivity was something Foucault briefly touched on in What is an Author? but he saw it as radically different from discursivity in art and fiction.” (Philip 2005, p. 207)

Thus in developing her adaptation author-function to a contemporary digital context, of Philip asks

How does the digital revolution, with its mantra of rip/mix/burn, and its interpellation of high-bandwidth multicultural youth, make a difference to how we read modern authorship? Modes of technological authorship throw into relief and exacerbate many of the internal tensions Foucault noted in the author function, and blur the lines between cultural and technological creativity. (p. 207)

Thus Philip makes clear that she is attempting to appropriate, extend, hybridize, adapt, and re-apply the author-function in a new way, in fact she rips (in the sense of “extracts”) Foucault’s author-function, mixes it with pirating and digital technology, and re-arranges and re-configures the ideas presented by Foucault himself. “Burning” is, still, alas, text in a journal..

Philip is ultimately concerned in this essay with the possibilities of scholarship of the subject in an age where law and value are varied and dispersed differently depending on location and situation, and where authorship is, as Foucault asserts, a configuration of practices and relations that varies and shifts with discursive contexts. Economic position, status in relation to the means of media (re)production and, race, class, gender, legal and geopolitical factors all affect the possibilities and representations of the subject which “in this sphere are detached from the requirement of unique authorship” and correspondingly “the bourgeois author recedes; the appropriative function is foregrounded” (Philip, 2005, p. 213). Philip is clearly treating her approach to the subject as part of a wider conversation, with adaptations of rather than references to Derrida’s deconstruction, such as when she points to “the generation of youth that have grown up with the internet [who] are most severely affected, since all their modes of knowledge and entertainment are already interpellated by digital systems of production, distribution, and consumption.” (Philip, 2005, p. 211). This phrasing echoes Derrida’s “always already” phrase that has in itself become always already a reference to something else whose traces may not be readily found to lead to solid foundations. (Derrida, 1976) Later Philip repeats exactly this phrase as she gestures toward “a genealogical project in technocultural legalities” (Philip, 2005, p. 217) in which, rather than treating all (variously privileged) bodies as equal before the law, we can “see technoscientific embodied practice as always already embedded in a network of geographies and histories” (p. 216).

Although Philip addresses the existence of debates about technological determinism versus utopianism, the prevailing effort is to apply post-colonial analysis, which is in itself a piratical, hybrid, shifting, situated discourse, to illustrate the analytical possibilities of scholarship inquiring into the real as well as theoretical issues of digital authorship, copyright, and citizenship. With this approach, Philip draws our attention to the ways that position and status in relation to value in a globalized knowledge and media economy inevitably brings up the possibilities of creative sampling, fragmented authorship, and illegal duplication. The spaces of concern are bounded by margins of both illegal and legitimate creativity and “technological authorship” (p. 202) These margins serve in some cases to define the hegemony, and also serve to extend it, as in the arguments presented in favour of peer-to-peer sharing technologies. (p. 206).

About Kavita Philip

University of California, Irvine (Department of History; Department of Anthropology; Arts, Computation, Engineering; Critical Theory Institute; The Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (CGPACS); Center for Law, Society and Culture

http://www.faculty.uci.edu/Scripts/UCIFacultyProfiles/humanities/ws/index.cfm?faculty_id=5256

References

Barthes, R., & Heath, S. (1977). Image, music, text / Roland Barthes; essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (1st American ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). What is an author? Language, counter-memory, practice (pp. 113-138). Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Philip, K. (2005). What is a technological author? the pirate function and intellectual property. Postcolonial Studies, 8(2), 199-218.

A Reading of Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”

Notes on Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?
By Morgan Reid

The challenge in presenting notes on “What is an Author?” is twofold: first, to present a concise, specific interpretation of the essay, and second, to provide a sense of the development of the piece and the connections and contexts and discursive relationships in which the article is situated.

First, I will venture to claim, for the purposes of inciting discussion, a direct interpretation of not just the essay, but of Foucault’s answer to his own question. It is my hope that this claim will be illustrative of the value of reading Foucault not for his answers but for his process and questions. What, does Foucault say, is an author? Without claiming to represent everything he says, he does say “The author—or what I have called the author-function—is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject.” ((Foucault, 1977) p. 138. The author, characterized as author-function, is a methodological opportunity. More specifically, Foucault points to the prospect for future research toward a “typology of discourse.” (p. 137). In offering this possibility, Foucault notes that

a typology of this sort cannot be adequately understood in relation to the grammatical features, formal structures, and objects of discourse because there are undoubtedly discursive properties or relationships that are irreducible to the rules of grammar and logic and to the laws that govern objects. These properties require investigation if we hoipe to distinguish the larger categories of discourse. The different forms of relationships (or nonrelationships) that an author can assume are evidently one of those discursive properties. (p, 137)

So, in suggesting the need for further work on the ontology of discourses, Foucault offers “Perhaps the time has come to study not only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but its mode of existence” and in this study, the “author-function could also reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships.” (p. 137). The methodological point here is that different configurations of author-function could serve to characterize different types of discourse. As such the author is more than a physical actor or ideological position, more than a signifier, and of course more than an element of speech, but a location and configuration of characteristics whose particular discursive properties are indicators of a particular type of discourse. It is here that we are brought to an interesting set of questions, in which we move from an observation of Foucault’s mention of a methodological opportunity to a much more substantive interrogation of his position and discursive deployment of meaning in relation to other texts and authors and discourses.

As a beginning, and drawing from the previous section’s point that an author-function may indicate a type of discourse, we could ask “Does Foucault indicate that the author-function is constituted by the discourse in which it is situated?” To rephrase, how much of a structuralist is Foucault, or more precisely, how much structuralism is there in Foucault’s deployment of the idea of the author-function?

To consider these questions, let’s look at the essay in summary form.
While it is not expected we will gain any traction on Foucault’s position as structuralist or otherwise, the tracing of influences and ideas in the article is productive in itself, both constituting us as readers and allowing us to act in re-authoring the text in terms of our own priorities and interests. Each reading is anew.

Foucault opens his paper by referring to and clarifying some of the concerns and problems he admits arose from some of his previous writing (Foucault, 1989), and sets aside some of the issues that might be considered relevant to the study of “the author,” such as “ how the author was individualized;…the status we have given the author…” and so forth. (Foucault, 1977) p. 115.

Drawing on a question from Samuel Beckett “What matter who is speaking” (p. 115) Foucault indicates that the indifference in the question is actually an indicator that the identity of the author is a principle of concern embedded in “our way of speaking and writing….[as] an immanent rule” (p. 116). The author usually matters, yet “the writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression,’” it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of interiority.” (p. 116). The contemporary absence of the author is a characteristic of structuralist thought, wherein, and here Foucault is nodding to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, among others, writing is transformed “into an interplay of signs, regulated les by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier” (p. 116). While this is connected to structuralism, there is an indication of writing be an action that challenges order and rules, indicating a clear post-structuralist bent to Foucault’s conversation here.

Shortly Foucault moves to consider the changing role of the narrative in the relationship between writing and death, as manifest in mythical narrative in which the hero dies early but lives on as in immortality, or in the delaying of death in Arabic stories. A later reversal is observed where in the text can have the power to kill the author, or where the author is inconsistent or at odds with, and even a victim of the text (p. 117).

Foucault argues that the issue of the disappearance or death of the author has not been developed sufficiently, and needs further consideration, beginning with the clarification of what constitutes a “work.” Both the nature of the written product, and the identification of the/an author have bearing on whether a written piece of language is a “work” (p. 118-9).

Respectfully, Foucault deals with the limitations of écriture, drawn from Derrida (Derrida, 1983)to note the problem with écriture is that it transforms the absence of the author into a “transcendental anonymity” (p. 120), which does not serve to move beyond what are similar discursive patterns as to be found in religious tropes and nevertheless still serves to retain an author immortal.

It is here that Foucault begins analysis of the author as author-function, by interrogating the meanings and functions of the proper name of the author, in several forms and circumstances, such as when the identity of the author is not important, or when the accepted scope of the author’s works changes, or when the characteristics of the author as a unified or collective individual are changed. (p. 122-3). One key point Foucault draws attention to is that

unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts—separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence. It points to certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture (p, 123).

The key value in understanding this function is that an author’s name is “situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse..” (p 123). Once again there is analytical potential for the author-function, particularly in identifying what type of discourse the author-mane-function is embedded.

In a wider context of society and, Foucault points to four features of discourses in which the author-function operates: first as a form of property, but also of identification and control, wherein the author’s name is associated with transgression, seemingly inevitably, since the fiorce of law regulating the acceptability of a publication could be applied to an author, but when authors become considered more legitimate in the modern period, the acts of transgression were placed within the text, thus “reviving the older bipolar field of discourse in a systematic practice of transgression and by restoring the danger of writing which on another side, had been conferred the benefits of property. Second, author-function has different meanings in difference disciplinary discourses, such as in natural sciences or in literature (pp. 125-7). Third, the author-function is not formed “spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual” but “results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author” (p. 127). As such this author-function is used and constructed for the purpose of understanding texts through analysis against what may be a real or fictional collection of ideas and characteristics, against which we can test for quality and consistency, and in fact for authenticity. Finally Foucault points to the author-function as a “source of expression” (p. 128-9), although this can be problematized readily by the existence of a “plurality of egos” within and around the text.” A summary of the author-functions is offered by Foucault restating these points. (p. 130.1)

The final section of the essay is devoted to the initiators of discursive practices, who “produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of the formation of other texts” (p. 131). Initiators are the authors to whom the discourse refers and often returns for further insight. In returning to the texts of initiators of discursive practices, we find spaces, omissions, which can yield either clear explication or implicit intertextual enlightenment (p. 135).

References

Derrida, J. (1983). L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle.

Foucault, M. (1977). What is an author? Language, counter-memory, practice (pp. 113-138). Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M. (1989). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences [Mots et les choses.]. London; New York: Routledge.

19th Century Subjects, 21st Century Learning-with-the-World

I’m thinking that teaching knowledge and skills relating to basic disciplines is analogous to teaching the alphabet. It is simply not enough to graduate students with competence in physics, chemistry, mathematics, economics, psychology, geography, biology, languages. Graduates and citizens should be literate in the functioning-in-the-world of these disciplines, for example, able to recognize and evaluate the application of sciences into engineering. What should they recognize and evaluate? The principles of design and the value-laden bases of engineering projects, whether these are building or genetic.

Where is the learning in, say, Introductory (and Advanced) Pattern Recognition; Capital Differentiation and Flow; Biological Productivity Assessment and Load Balancing; Principles and Applications of Low-Input Food Production; Maybe these are topics suited to existing disciplines. Maybe I’m just suggesting a few additions to the curriculum. For now, let’s just say these are notes to be fleshed out or revisited later.

What Happened to the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT)?

The CILT was a consortium of researchers and professionals exploring and supporting innovation and applications of technologies in teaching and learning. It “closed” in 2003. I am trying to understand what it was, what relationships were at play, and if the project simply redistributed or adapted itself, or if it’s closing was tied to changes
in funding priorities.

The Internet Archive Wayback Engine gives a picture, but of what (ie what does this patttern mean?):

http://web.archive.org/web/20030216125732/http://cilt.org/

Here are some other pages from Stanford spinoff SRI with CILT content:

http://www.ctl.sri.com/projects/displayProject.jsp?Nick=cilt

Why did CILY close?

Tactical Media: Praxis in Sustainability Education

Tactical Media: Praxis in Sustainability Education

Public opinion may not always win the battles fought over environmental issues, but the possibility of more pro-active and powerful public participation is attractive. While individual persons write the letters, coordinate petitions, and collaborate on research in sustainability and environmental campaigns, educators acknowledge that a paralyzing flood of contradiction is readily available to a student undertaking to define a position in a sustainability research project. Further, students may identify their relations to these issues in many, possibly contradictory, ways. I suggest that some prospects for research and practice emerge from considering the field of public media and the role of students as authors of public media with potentially competitive reach compared to corporate media.

Even while we assume that value and meaning are contingent on context and perspective, it remains worthwhile for students to explore issues and develop their values and perspectives. But in application to real-world experience, we might consider whether engaging students to compete with corporate media will yield satisfactory results without suitable skills, strategies and tactics. These skills, strategies, and tactics may be embedded in the practice of making and publishing (uploading, really) tactical satire.

I proceed on the assumption that an embedded posture, say “environmentalist,” modelled by an educator and prescribed for imitation by students, does not comprise praxis, but rather in fact reinscribes the discipline of compliance. I affirm that student praxis in working with sustainability issues must indeed be embedded in an informed exposure to a wide array of background knowledge as well as training in detecting bias. However, action and practice should be developed not in pursuit of a unified meaning, but focused on achieving convergence of agendas. A student who is challenged to defeat a corporation’s policy, practice, plans, and lobby efforts is usually set up as an heroic David vs the corporate Goliath. The learning value of formulating a position is sufficient to warrant this exercise. However, this is more appropriately understood as a background exercise. When students are encouraged to enter the arena of action, their goal should be to find a way to cultivate into the obvious the obligations of the corporation or agency they are challenging. This requires a higher level of rhetorical skill than forming an opposing, righteous position. Further, to do so using the same tools or weapons that their opponent has deployed, namely public media, has been long a daunting challenge. Presently the landscape changes, in that recent access to public media has become open to a much larger number of students.

A student’s capacity to undermine or counter advertising or propaganda is much more open now than it ever has been.The possibility for the student to lampoon or satirize is partly dependent on her or his literacy of the medium. At a theoretical level, the student can be considered to write as s/he reads (Jacques Derrida, from Dissemination Chicago, U of Chicago Press 1981, Barbara Johnson, trans). In reading a piece of advertising or propaganda, any text becomes fragmentable, therefore reconfigurable. In a practical sense, this is very clear in the realm of internet media, where even broadcast advertising loses the power of its ephemerality, and is quickly subject to capture, dismemberment, rewriting, and redistribution. In this medium the essays are videos, the paragraphs and sentences and words are videos. Letters are clips, shots, cuts, while graffitti and marks are added by hits, tags, favourites, responses, imitations, and honors.

How these opportunities are articulated in education is an area for productive research. Media produced by students is a potential playground for parody. Internet media can be for students a source of entertainment and recreation. Specific to sustainability education, however, well-informed and well-executed tactical satire is to be found as well. Given the theoretical framing in Derrida’s point—to always know we are participants in texts as we read and write, (/are read and written)—and Beaudrillard’s caution to acknowledge and discern the power of the simulacrum, and Ackerman’s reminder that our bodies are our interfaces with the world, I offer a provisional suggestion: that students should be making media that is explicitly both simultaneously derivative and grounded—mashups of their own footage of their own experiences or simulations entwined with a rewriting of the messages of an opponent / potential ally. The goal should not be simply to attack, although rhetorical attack might be one of many possible approaches. The essential basis should be possible action, creative, proactive naming of possibility for provisionally mutually agreeable goals. To simply fight by contradiction is often best a private enterprise. To plainly persuade, cajole, lobby, or petition is legitimate for a democratic undertaking, if one can find one.

If we are to see more of our students contribute more to the writing of the history of our period of critical sustainability issues, their praxis is to wield the agency of a media-maker-or-breaker in the field of contested market-share. Beyond opposition, their praxis is to adapt their media to emerging situations, and to adapt corporate media to their intentions. Students’ praxis is grounded in their own meaning-making, but executed in the real world, where they must aim to rewrite the public media messages to incorporate the corporations into sustainability choices that may not have been apparent to the directors and marketing specialists and engineers whose job is to see profit and a better public image. As educators we are responsible to teach students that they can make challenging, tactical media, and how they can begin doing so in the context of a low-grade, ongoing game, “played” for the preferences of their fellow consumers, for the choices of corporate and government leaders, and for the policies and practices that will affect the health of this planet and all of its inhabitants.

With acknowledgment to Foucault, Derrida, Ackerman, Beaudrillard, Jameson, Haraway, and thanks and acknowledgment to Dr. Don Krug, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia.

Morgan Reid is a Master’s student in the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry, Faculty of Education, at the University of British Columbia.

Toward a Mapping of Cyberspace: Power, Creative Control, and Representation in the Postfordist Nexus

first published as
Reid, M. (1995) Toward a Mapping of Cyberspace, in Critical Mass 1(1). http://www.peak.sfu.ca/cmass/issue1/morg-main.html (offline, contact author: morgan.reid(a_t)ubc.ca)

Abstract:

Toward a Mapping of Cyberspace was written as a study of this new aspect of society from a human geographic perspective. It explores some economic, political, and social aspects of this expanding space of production, identity, and activity. The article is concerned with the need for geographers to develop a spatial literacy of the virtual, yet very real world of computer networks.

Introduction

“The newer architecture . . . stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions”
Fredric Jameson
Geography has for years studied the shapes and forms of our physical and social worlds. Human action in the built environment has been an increasingly important object of study in recent times. Today, some geographers are working in realms beyond the ready grasp of traditional analyses.

Geography has enfolded parts of other fields (geology, history, economics, and critical theory to name a few). Geographical theories based in Marxism have questioned the traditional political representations of landscapes. Systems theory has attempted to write geography in the language of Euclidean and Cartesian geometry. Poststructuralism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and feminisms have problematized and productively challenged the authoritative stance of Western geographical studies. These evolutions have in turn sent geographers to study ever more “new spaces”.

Remote sensing and geographical information systems have provided us with more detailed descriptive maps than ever before. But today, rather than being completely informed and complacent, we face no shortage of challenge, for the more we learn, the more we study and apprehend the vast complexity of our world, the less we actually can claim to know for sure, especially about the meanings of socially produced spatial objects.

The new realm of “Cyberspace” is the interest of this essay. Cyberspace is a new word, perhaps even a new world. It is, I propose, an important, contemporary, socially produced spatial phenomenon, one of the “new architectures” in Jameson ‘s terms. What I want to present here is a limited set of views on the character and history of this new space, how it is deployed physically and interactively by and with human action, and finally a provisional synthesis toward a social understanding of cyberspace through geographical analysis.

A definitive description of cyberspace is out of the question, and contrary to its nature. Rather than offer a simple, useless sound byte to the effect of “cyberspace is . . . “, this section outlines some of the more readily grasped empirical and historical aspects of cyberspace. Following this, we move into a more speculative questioning of what cyberspace might be, integrating a variety of perspectives. Finally, a possible mapping of the networks is suggested (1) .

What is Cyberspace?

If this essay presents one essential piece of “cyberspace is . . . “, I would like it to be this: Cyberspace is an extremely active new realm of political, economic, and cultural power.

This exploration takes us across a great range of scales, from the sub-atomic nanosecond event to the global longwave in cultural evolution. We begin at the macro-scale of history.

History and General Background

In 1969, the United States Department of Defence began the Internet with an initiative to establish a reliable communications network linking the state-military, academic, and military-industrial communities. Institutions were connected via telecommunications links ‘the hardware’ and a standardized software protocol that allowed computers to exchange information with one another. During the 1980′s, academic and research networks evolved in many countries around the world. Canada’s first internationally linked national network was CA*net, comprised of connections of smaller networks. Canada’s early networks used a different protocol than did the US system, but connectivity is a prime goal on the networks, so adaptations were made. In strange resemblance to fordism, this definitely postfordist information industry relies on standardization for its exponential growth. The World Wide Web is another network using a different protocol, called html. All the nets, many using these US-originated standard protocols, TCP/IP and http, presently connect an estimated twenty to forty million users worldwide (Carroll, Broadhead, 1995).

The inevitable question “Who now controls cyberspace?” is difficult to address adequately. Suffice it to say that the local sites are controlled by the authority of that site (for example, Computing Services at Simon Fraser University). The interconnection among specific sites is regulated to an extent by the regional authorities (BCnet, CA*net for SFU). Large inter-network connection, such as through the Internet, is overseen by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society, and the Internet Architecture Board. These are all composite organizations, made up of representatives of lower level authorities as well as individual users. The content of these networks is controlled by the local authorities’ Acceptable Use Protocols to a certain extent, but any site with Internet access can operate in any way it sees fit. Thus, the networks are controlled, and also simultaneously somewhat anarchic (Carroll, Broadhead, 1995: 54-56).

One of the most persistent issues regarding the Internet has been commercialization. Internet cultural custom and administrative directives generally forbid the use of the networks for commercial purposes, but these customs and directives allow a great deal of commercial activity nonetheless (Carroll, Broadhead, 1995). Access to the Internet is in itself a marketable commodity, as is specialized access to specific services. Advertising is controlled and contained, no doubt leaving some sellers suffering paroxysms of frustration as they see the target-marketing potential of the networks go to waste. Conversely, economic opportunity is intrinsic to the nature of cyberspace, since software-based commodities represent the ultimate in flexibly specialized production. We will return later to economic production and consumption in cyberspace.

Parallel to the official developments of the Internet, World Wide Web, and other networks there have evolved more vernacular uses of network information systems. Police, banking, telephone, and other networks overlay and interconnect with these major webs of connectivity. These are readily recognizable as occurring on both personal and national/global scales simultaneously. Day to day life routinely involves interacting with Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), credit card databases, computerized inventories in grocery stores, and occasionally with a centralized, national and international police database that can be accessed from any police radio or mobile cruiser’s on-board computer. While these ntewroks remain for the most part separate, future interconnectivity is reasonable to expect.

Regulation is another related issue, increasingly important as the power of connectivity is both deployed over its domains and dispersed among its users. Within, alongside, and at times in antagonistic opposition to the authorities on the nets there have evolved a range of cultures, often referred to as stereotypical nerds, silicon yuppies, and hackers. Security in such a complex system can mean simply safe operation to some, horrifying panoptic social control to others. Some authors have explored these cultures as fictions (Gibson, 1984), others have looked at these new spaces of identity by way of sociological and ethnographic study (Rushkoff, 1994). The subjects of identity, power, and regulation are discussed in a later section.

A physical description of the elements and components of cyberspace is a useful grounding here. Later, in the final section of this paper, the inadequacy of these physical conceptions leads us toward conceptual mappings of cyberspace, t oward a provisional synthesis of a geography of this new and indeterminate realm.

Chaos Theory: a conceptual framework

Rather than launching into obscure descriptions of CPU’s and ethernet cables, I would like to offer a conceptual framework, drawn from chaos theory, for understanding the hierarchical architecture of cyberspace. Following this conceptual framing, an example case studywill be described in general terms, across the range of scales mentioned earlier. This will provide a material understanding, a sort of physical and system geography, of a portion of cyberspace.

Instead of the mathematical formulas of chaos theory, it is the images of chaos math fractal geometries that illustrate a possible geography of cyberspace. A brief mention of three premises of chaos theory is worthwhile. First, chaos deals with systems of huge complexity, representing relationships between millions of elements at least. Second, mathematical relationships and structures are the software guiding the chaotic expressions. Third, feedback loops are central to chaos and fractal geometry. These are systems whose expression influences their expression. The fractal images are drawn by computers that have been set to visually display the results of an equation whose output is fed back into itself over and over again. In contrast to Euclidean and Cartesian geometries that occur on a single scale, fractal images repeat patterns, apparently infinitely, up and down the ranges of magnification applied to computer images. A snowflake-like pattern, the Koch curve, mathematically generated, shows a geometrical design somewhat like a systems map, of points and connections. There are hierarchies. Successively magnifying the jagged edge pattern of the Mandelbrot set one million times shows that the equation produces jagged edges on the jagged edges of jagged edges, ad infinitum ( Gleick , 1987). The following pages illustrate this effect on two types of chaotic sets. This visual metaphor is very useful to conceptualizing cyberspace geography.

Koch Curve (from Gleick , 1987)Mandelbrot set, a fractal analogue of cyberspace connectivity. The same Mandelbrot set, magnified one million times. (Mandelbrot images from Gleick , 1987)

The number of elements in a cyberspace system is far more than could possibly be represented by a conventional single-scale mapping. Electrons are the basic elements under deliberate control in computer networks. Routed along micro pathways in tiny chips, they are packaged into pieces of information, then organized over and over into ever larger packages, using packages of informationthere is no clear central economic place in cyberspace, it being everywhere and nowhere.

There are, however, economic places of sorts on the networks, selling both things and selling places. An ideal subject for Rob Shields and Michael Sorkin to confer on would be the Downtown Anywhere Web site. One of the Virtual shopping malls, it features a simulated financial district, simulated malls, shops, and services, and clickable libraries, museums and travel agencies, all in two dimensions, with connections to actual products and services (Ziff Davis, 1995).

The most futuristic and perhaps intimidating prospects for network economies are the recent developments in credit card cryptography. Claimed by their writers to be of airtight security, encryption programmes will enable network users to make purchases directly over the networks. Skepticism abounds on encryption, however, since there is a general rule on the networks to assume your files are not secure. It is here we move across conceptual boundaries into a different view of cyberspace: we enter the ambiguous, the permeable, risky, powerful, yet dangerous territory of cyberculture.

Cyberculture: Hackers, Security, and the drive to surf

A good deal of network use is routine, everyday communication. The e-mail links and Bulletin Boards and newsgroups in cyberspace are a forum for social activity, and often used as much for entertainment as for anything more utilitarian. It should be emphasized that, while network information content ranges from the sexually strange to the seriously technical, the majority of users are middle class, “average” people.

However, the hackers are especially interesting. Advertisers might grudgingly follow the rules of the Internet and comply with informal standars and formal, local acceptable use protocols; hackers do not. Against the economic and authoritarian rationale of order and control, hackers produce everything from minor challenges to local network security operators to major nationwide crashes of corporate networks (Sterling, 1992). They are the outlaws and pioneers of the spaces of cyberculture. It is here at the boundary between ideologies that we meet the more colourful citizens of cyberspace.

Hacking in a general sense is much older than computer networks. Levy (1984) reminisces about “hacking” explosives, making bombs for fun, and Rushkoff (1994) interviews a biochemistry hacker specializing in hallucinogens, an old tradition in the Southern California area. But in 1984 William Gibson (who coined the term cyberspace) wrote Neuromancer, a novel about cyberculture. In this and others’ works are characters whose mindsets reflect intimate acquaintance with the absurdities of computer connectivity. Aware of the “intermittencies” that can completely, unpredictably crash any chaotic non-linear system, they live according to the rules of the eternal present. Many of the fictional characters inhabit “real” life as well, but there are those whose lives are entirely concerned with “jacking in” to the datasphere. Among these are sophisticated, dedicated hackers who lay waste to any systems into which they can break. And while these are fictional characters, the fictional world, “real” culture, and the real-life hacker mindset are interconnected by a value system that appears to valorize risk, undermining authority for fun, and paradox (Rushkoff, 1994).

Absurd, arbitrary, hypocritical panoptic authority, any cyberspace authority, is the enemy of the hacker. Against the “forces of ‘power’ [that] have developed . . . networks with which they hope to control, manipulate, or at least capitalize on the behaviours and desires of the population” the hackers rebel. In a life conceived by the hacker as analogous to surfing cyberspace against the rules, the joy, the rush of the present is the only coping skill left. Surfing the chaotic sea of waves denies the cartographers grid of power in a personally freeing way. The rules are arbitrary. Ignore them if you choose (Rushkoff, 1994: 204-206). But the experience of connecting to cyberspace is often as numbing as it is exhilarating, and with the freedom from anxiety can come a loss of emotional involvement, of passion to create a better alternative ( Jameson , 1984: 64). Ignoring or breaking the rules does not constitute social praxis. In effect, the hackers keep the authorities up to date, on their keyboards, and creatively reinforcing their mechanisms of security, control, and proprietary power (Sterling, 1992).

The grid of power is a recurring theme in postmodernism, and the clear concern of this section. Power exists not especially in the networks themselves, but in the control of the information they handle. Jameson (1984: 57) points to the “new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world”. Martin (1981) discusses common concern about a global authority deployed through Orwellian computerized surveillance. In more concrete terms, there is no technological barrier against such power structures, and in fact a number of chillingly personal systems of surveillance are already in use, though not nearly as complete as those suggested by the images of 1984. For example, the London Tube sells farecards encoded with a personalized identity code. While an individual possessing such a card is at most times under no surveillance, upon his or her passing through the turnstile the transit authority is able to record and monitor the passenger’s trip. Similarly, credit card transactions generate lists of customers which are sorted and sold to marketing companies. These aspects of the networks fall into the subject area of power rather than economic activitybecause of the personal nature of the transaction-generated information they produce. These subnetworks are not presently connected to general global networks, but the trend has historically been toward increased connectivity. Consequently, conspiracy theory paranoia may become as much normal, adaptive part of everyday economic activity as it routinely informs cyberspace life.

Reading and thinking a geography of Cyberspace

Cyberspace, we should recall, exists in the minds of people. It is to a large extent beyond our present sensory abilities to perceive. For these reasons I would like to emphasize how important it is to acknowledge the need for an understanding of the deployment of power in cyberspace. A way of understanding these relations of power is available, I would suggest, following Foucault, through geography. Foucault writes” . . . the formations of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analysed . . . in terms of tactics and strategies of power . . . deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organizations of domains which could well make up a sort of geopolitics” ( Foucault, 1977: 77). What is being suggested here, in abstract terms, is that power is deployed through space. In what ways is the deployment of power through space visible in cyberspace? How can it be represented?

The short history of the Internet named some of the authorities and policy makers. The brief look at cyberspace counterculture suggests there are conflicts in the realm of power, skirmishes over whose ideologies, if any, should dominate the information webs. It must be accepted that there are ideological conflicts in cyberspace, and that they are likely to escalate, reflecting the general dynamic of human history. Edward Soja (1989:80) writes “[t]here is no longer a question of . . . a separate structure with rules of construction and transformation that are independent from the wider social frameworkI feel reasonably safe in speculating that economic imperatives will be the prime catalysts to the ongoing construction and transformation of cyberspace, just as economic imperatives are behind many previous social and spatial phenomena. Whether this is a problem depends on one’s point of view. However, I suggest there is an unquestionable problem in having completely inadequate capabilities for reading these transformations. So, while cyberspace grows and changes, geography must discard the inhibition of believing cyberspace to be unrepresentable, and insist on the possibility of mapping relations of power. I am explicitly suggesting that we leave to epistemological debate the question of whether we can know or represent this new realm of power, and simply begin doing so. I acknowledge the risk involved in making mistakes, in failing to produce the perfect spatial representation. In exploring this subject, we are perhaps hacking in the best sense of the word. We are propelling our minds into the unknown, and risking exposure of our shortcomings. This is a necessary risk, for to do otherwise would leave us waiting at our desks for answers. This is a time for field work, for theory, for debate, and for successes and failures. Some academics may well make their careers on these successes, and perhaps some others will criticize, scoff, and devalue the new maps of new spaces, of cyberspaces. Just as the hackers pressed security programmers into rapid development of some of the most sophisticated understandings of computer network systems ever produced, some blend of geographer, communications theorist, surfer, and machine will present new ways of writing the lines of force on the underknown world of cyberspace. The mysterious Ptolemaic map-dragon that dwells beyond the edge of the known world will eventually be slain2 . In the historical long wave, we are thinking a flat earth, and cyberspace is off the edge. There is broad agreement among Jameson, (1984: 89-92), Rose, (1993: 140-141), Soja, (1989: 120), and Haraway, (1991: 150) that we need to make maps of the newly-discovered, newly-created multidimensional spaces, and that to do so we must think differently. The maps could become no more than corporate tools, but coupled with social praxis and some respect for humanity, they might encourage the course of social evolution away from the panoptic dystopias so often predicted.

Adapting for Perception and Praxis

A dilemma is presented here, in the area of how we conceive the maps of cyberspace. Haraway presents an appropriate solution. The dilemma is the need for human agency, social praxis, and those very human emotions, hope and desire on the one hand, and the need for in-depth understanding of computer systems on the other. How can we retain our humanity and think, at least part of the time, like machines? Haraway offers us the notion of the cyborg-mind, but one more human than machine. We often see the cyborg as a science-fiction Frankenstein monster, a destructive, dispassionate reconstruction of a wrecked human body with mechanical parts, on a mission of evil (Darth Vader) or of mindless police enforcement (Robocop). Haraway’s (1991:150-151) cyborg is us: “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” The cyborg is the basis for material society, and a role, perhaps even a reality, we can adopt in the face of hugely powerful and complex social situations. “The cyborg is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity between the public and the private, the cyborg defines a polis based partly on revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other”. Haraway mentions a problem with cyborgs: “they are illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.” Suited to be social agents of the computer age, “cyborgs are not reverent . . . They are wary of holism, but needy of connectionwe are them. As these networks increasingly interconnect, we will either be trapped in the dim, inapproriate, dualistic thinking of me/it, self/other, human/machine, or we will adapt to the schizophrenic rush of connectivity, and, drawing from the extended sensoria of our permeable cyberminds, we will internally exercise a flexible accumulation of knowledge, insight, and, especially, of navigation skill. We need not lose our humanity, but it appears that we need to gain these new sensoria to understand this world.

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Concept mapping tool

Just a mention of this tool that I have not yet had a chance to look at.

http://vue.uit.tufts.edu/