McKenzie Wark on 15 Feb 2001 16:40:23 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> 'Spatial Discursions' - no space |
There is a difference between saying that space disappears, and saying that space *almost* disappears. What one experiences is the latter. This phenomena, of the almost-disappearance of space, has been going on since 1848, which we can take as a notional date for the implementation of the telegraph. This too was spoken about in terms of the almost-disappearance of space. Only space can be quite recalcitrant, and can refuse simply to disappear just because another kind of space, with different properties, has arisen which becomes a power over it. I discussed this, many years ago now, in terms of second nature and third nature. If we think of second nature as built environment, the physical labour of tranforming nature in habitus, then third nature is another kind of transformation, the transformation of both nature and second nature into an information landscape capable of controlling the process of transformation of nature into second nature. This process is limited, technically, until the arrival of telegraphy, which for the first time enables information to move across space faster than people or things. With the emergence of telesthesia, of 'perception at a distance', third nature comes into its own as a space able to fully subordinate other spaces to itself. Telesthesia, which begins with the telegraph, includes radio, telephony, television and telecommunications. (The etymological similarity of these terms is no accident). It is composed of both extensive and intensive vectors -- those that connect New York to Nepal, but also those that connect two diodes within the same machine. The space of third nature is only notionally 'spaceless'. In fact it is always divided, territorialised, partitioned. There is a politics of the space of third nature. A politics of speed and price, of flow and boundary. Interestingly, utopia is able to attach itself to this space as its ideal just as it attaches to nature and second nature. There are romantic utopias of nature; there are technologlical utopias of second nature, and now, cyber-utopias. These ideals never have much to do with the politics of space, however, which is constantly creating boundaries and openings, differentials of speed and value. There's more on this in my Virtual Geography, Indiana University Press, 1994. _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold