brian carroll on 20 Apr 2001 06:36:46 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] No Space like Cyberspace |
regarding: no space III post sent by Pit on Tue, 13 Mar 2001 i've been contemplating Pit's presentation of ideas regarding cyberspace as - much more than i can simplify in one word or two; dead metaphor- american intellectual property- triumpal content- mal_cultural zeitgeist, whatnot-- none of which i can honestly disagree with and it is very stimulating to hear this perspective, as it penetrates a ubiquitous conceptual meme and breaks it apart at its seams|seems... and, i have learned a lot from Pit's perspective(s) and it has take some time to realize the battling of truths, and to try to find out why this is such an enigmatic exchange for me, in that i am conflicted by the paradox of dual truths without resolution; as it seems Pit recognized long before i that these ideas are probably for others to figure out someday hence... there have been a few simple concepts, the old ones, that have arisen when contemplating this no space/cyberspace dialogue... first, i think about the inside & outside, internal & external vantages on the topics of spatiality. take, for example, the concept of 'the land', and one can find that landscape has a story, as Pit presents, in mythical and mystical gardens meant to conjure surreal worlds, which also could represent a state of mind for the makers and inhabitants of these, such as the garden of archaeological follies with artificial naturalness, by creating rolling hills and hidden ponds, in the UK. just as there is landscape, today mindscape, brainscape, netscape are all referents to the landing of space, in time. second, this duality seems to be easily transferred to an even more basic anthropocentric view of spatial issues, in Western terminology at least. that is, the recurring basic theme of the mind and the body. the mind existing in an internal landscape and the body existing within an external landscape. context, and, territory, where 'the land' crosses boundaries, made separate more by philosophy than direct experience. enlightenment and reasons weaknesses enabling the triumph of rationalizations that are separated from the first order event, and becoming themselves the primary basis for truth, the form moreso than the content, else, the facade more than the structure. it may not be this, but appears to be in some cases, especially with hindsight, beyond the rearview mirroring of worlds. thus, a paradox between internal and external and the mind and body. old standards. pretty ancient stuff, this-that. please note, this is not a proposition for separating or unifying these culturally conflicting dualities that play heavily within a word-concept such as 'cyberspace'. thirdly, which Pit brought up and i am now beginning to under- stand is the proprietary aspect of 'cyberspace', in that it is not a neutral term, but has an origin, an ideology, and it can be a belief system propagated in its negative aspects even if it is not an intention of the ghost-writing author of cultural hegemony and the false-construct of cyberspace as cyberspace, and not cyberspace as space. this put into perspective for me the relation to property rights, intellectual property, the legal aspects of space, building/zoning/planning codes, and the development of 'space'. while there is this proprietary aspect in 'Gibsonian Cyberspace' as i think many have called it, including Michael Benedikt, architect-author of Seeing Cyberspace: First Steps; there are also other conceptions of cyberspace as a word that are beyond the coining/commodification of the word, which are generic enough to encompass what a word- concept without the same etymological and past narrative context cannot compare to. while i know little of Esperanto, what i've heard is seems comparable, if it is true it was created as a universalizing language, and has its disciples, yet never 'took off' on its intended course. in a similar way, if it can be said, cyberspace does what a language like British English did for American English, as space has also done for cyberspace. just contemplating this has now made me very worried, in that i find it rich with maddening parallels about many other key- word and concepts. if cyberspace could be considered like American English, as it represents what is seen as American cult/ure, then it could be contemplated that American English may have become a certain type of Esperanto or universal language, although it may not have been so desired, and it may not be a very good one at that, given all the other choices that could have been made, if they could have been made or decided upon and had their intentions ratified by that which does not yet exist but which seems to be forming just for this very same desire for universality. as an attempt at a closer analysis regarding the above, American culture could be seen as a proprietary export. which is truthful. yet, as a language, American English is the opposite of this, it is inclusive and borrows much from many different languages, as far as Edward Hall indicates with regard to language while also demonstrating how space is so very different beyond American culture, language and space, inside and outside, mind and body again... from an American perspective, if mine could be called that, which i think it is not in the terms i am writing, the word-concept that is cyberspace is generic and not proprietary, in the context which i have previously evaluated its spatial aspects. yet, i can now see that cyberspace, when used, could also be considered in terms of being an American 'export' of its cultural control of space, and its expansionism of the American worldview as the universal worldview aspect of using such a word as cyberspace, if denying these aspects, trying to falsely negate the truths that contradict a simple accept- ance of the word-concept, and more. so too, though, it seems reciprocally problematic to see a term like cyberspace only in terms of its proprietary aspects. why? it may be that just because it is being pragmatized via commercialization and the exploitation of internetworked space by the corporation that is the American Enterprise, that global cult/ure, that cyberspace can also be realized as a generic term, counter to its popular notions, and its pragmatic use less about second order re- presentations of other ideas, such as space, and instead a general approximation of an idea, without proprietary specificity, that describes well-enough that first-order experience of the real, not in ideal terms, but enough to become a shared word- concept used to converse about something that is different, a new world import, that everyone is grappling to understand. one aspect of Pit's writing keys in on a difference which to me clarifies a shared intention, but it is so hard to try to explain for me, like trying to resolve all the issues in the purging of words from the internal and external landscapes while also trying to find some resolution in putting out more and more texts, without adding more and more noise, or overloading the circuits with meaning... or its total lack from some vantages... when writing of `the heroic age of cyberspace', as Pit did in a recent post, it reminds me of how opposite to my experience of cyberspace is, as space, not as cyberspace as a word-unto- itself. the idea of a relationship may be that which bridges concepts of space and cyber-space. a type of extension. yes, but... there seems to be a value associated with cyberspace in Pit's view that i do not share, at least initially. after i can see and appreciate cyberspace from its proprietary view and all of the wonderful data and cult/ural analysis Pit has tacitly compiled on the no-space of cyberspace, then i can agree with the proposition being made. but it seems a parallelism of ideas and not a canceling of dueling truthes, but a building of a type of empiricism in the multiplicity that is the thinking, feeling, believing, acting, and reacting internetwork today. to me 'cyberspace' as a generic word cannot be bad or wrong. it could be true or false though, as it is more of technical word when applied to traditional spatial analysis of geography, architectural, and archaeology, all disciplines dealing with the body in the landscape, at the same time as making a bridge to that great internal landscape of the mind, in the development of the studies, researches, and the disciples that follow this system of belief. if the intangibility of space could be held aside for a moment, and the technical analyses of space consider- ed by the above routes of exploration, the mathematical or the quantitative aspects of 'space' could help provide a route to seeing how 'cyberspace' can also be understood from a technical dimension which cannot be disposed of even though other aspects of the concept may be inaccurate or misguided or even stupid. for example, in architecture, a column of marble from classical Western architecture is considered symbolically to re-present the idea of connecting heaven and earth, or in today's context, mind and body, potentially. that's the poetry of architecture. the technical aspect of the column, say when several are put together in a row and march down a street in a line, achieve a sense of a spatial order. and this order can be quantified as has been via mathematical and musical proportioning systems as a type of rationale for the technical truth of this defining of space with architectural artifacts. ratios become important, width, size, and number. now while today's psychologists can say with some evidence that, like a cat's eyes have upward slits as that is how they evolved as tree occupying ambassadors, so too, humans may identify with the column, as a tree, as an earlier habitat, or even as that verticality which goes from the ground to the sky, as a basic truth. that the sky, or upward, is heaven is debatable, but the verticality of the column is self-evidently making a connection, or bridge between realms, which can transit from the technical to the metaphysical. if one can suspend judgment a little further, cyberspace can be looked at in a similar regard, to its simple truth-factor in a one-to-one comparison with the above example, which is representative of the ancient western architectural worldview, which is that of modernist and postmodernist and avant-garde architecture today, even. ... the column today, connecting sky/mind with earth/body, can so too be seen in the electrical distribution poles which often populate the external landscape as wooden columns, created from local forests, else they are of concrete, metal, or fiberglass. the old classical verticality of the pole remains, and the ground is connected with the sky. and traditional spatial concepts can be seen as continuous. yet, the string of wires that are rung upon these poles, for billions of miles around the earth, are like the classical lintel which creates a horizontal structure which these traditional columns support. in the past, this lintel was made of stone (stonehenge) or wood, as is basic construction. today, this lintel consists of wires for electrical power, and electronic communications. that is, if one were to 'section' the cables and wires that hang on the distribution poles, one would be able to visualize (conceptually at least, unless one has a good electron micro- scope) the matter-energy-information transiting the wires, coursing through them, that is, the electronic space that the traditional space of wooden poles is supporting, just as space supports cyberspace, and British-English does American-English as a language. architecturally, space cannot describe what electronic landscape is inhabiting these wires, as is defined externally by these wooden poles, without a generic word-concept like cyberspace. digital space, electromagnetic space, net space, they just do not have the default association that cyberspace has around it as a cultural meme for this new-old space, which we are rediscovering, or discovering anew. or so i propose. by examining cyberspace from a technical perspective firstly, there is an ability to 'ground' the internal virtuality of 'computer and electronic communications space' in a brief word like cyberspace, which takes the virtual and puts it back into the realm of the body of tradition, in the poles while also acknowledging their relationship to the wires, which itself is ancient as can be. there is no value- judgement here. it is an issue of counting thing, seeing the height of things, seeing how things relate to one another, in basic and simple truths. how does 'the Internet', (if ever there was a proprietary word, i would think this is much moreso than cyberspace, as a proper/specific/ proprietary noun) find tangibility in the world, if not through its existence in common physical artifacts around the world, if not by seeing how it is put together, what makes it run, how it was created, evolved, and how its system fits together in the larger assemblage of space that supports it... the grounding of the virtual, of the intangible, of the immaterial, is in the material, in the tangible, and in the actuality of the everyday first order experience of an individual in the world. when such first person observation is considered bad, firstly, it seems that there is a dogmatic assumption at work, some heresy underway, like that challenging of spatial notions between the heaven of the Church and the sun of Galileo. yet today, it is the space of tradition and its uncomfortable and hard-to-grasp relationship to what could generically be considered cyberspace, a technical extension of space in the electromagnetic infrastructure of power plants, media outlets, and the other sub- and supra- networks that rely upon it for existence in the 21st century and beyond, much as did the 19th century begin to emerge from the space of tradition by opening up this mystery, its exponential embrace today encompassed only in the abstraction of speed, as everything is lit so bright as to blind any long-term observation, thins are moving so very fast, words, thoughts, ideas, people, time, so much so that things standing still may even seem to be second-order representations of old ideas that are no longer relevant, but which could instead be seen as vital to stopping this speed-trap and taking a deep breath and stomping the feet down in place, and hanging on as the discursive tornado passes, the trees are uprooted and fall, and we are left to rebuild with a shared experience of what nature is, how powerful it is, and how very fragile is our understanding of what is, in relation to what really is. we know by now, war won't do this. so, cyberspace, from a technical point of view, is an issue of truth and not-exactly-true or not-true or falsity, or half-truthes and paradoxical logics, at the very least degree of observing space today. if, to be brief about it, it had to be keyworded, this technical cyberspace, as a type of space, can be seen in terms of its quantity, not quality alone, and in its mathematical relation to experience (can you have the electrical infrastructure of today with- out the equations of mathematicians, for example). it is like comparing cyberspace in two categories, one as dull and profane as an objective mathematical construct, and another as a qualitative construct evaluated on its language-value, and as a commodity in terms of its theoretical use-value and authenticity. thus, from one view, the pivot point in this sounding, is that the truth and falsehood of cyberspace as a word-concept are butting up against the right and wrongness of cyberspace as a word-concept. from the technical cyberspace first-person, yet also potentially universal, empiricism, one can go further in briding the virtuality of online space with that of the ancient concept of mind. where imaginations and dreams are also this other electromagnetic cyber- space, as is the online experience, a virtuality that is a phase change of difference from the realm of the body and its external landscape. and yet, the mind is outside, it is on hard disks, and on network servers and webpages, as a place in space. and, to continue the technical analysis, to find this 'space' one will arrive at an archaeology of the infrastructure which supports the internetworked landscape, that thing consisting of artifacts of those mundane wooden poles, sadly lacking prestige, in the everyday environment. these structural columns not only carry the powerlines, and the communications lines of the online landscape, the internal life of mind, but also mediate the land of traditional space, as they occupy it as artifacts. this is not an issue of good nor bad, but truth or..? so what it seems to have occurred in our discussions Pit is that i approach the subject from the land, from the external, which may come to equal and opposite conclusions about the word-concept, such that it is generic and not specific, that it is open, not closed, that it is authentic, not a false-construct or a dead- metaphor, because of this particular approach to the same idea from a different vantage. yet, i can too now realize the truth of your position, and largely agree with it, regarding your intent, which i think is to find something authentic and actual and not borrowed and adopted or adapted to a situation which it does not describe and may cloud up the truth in terms of a words language-value in describing this event as realistically as is possible, if possible, at this point (or vector) in time. from my vectorial vantage, this all relates to the basic concept of the mirror. when one stands outside of an experience, yet sees within it, and can think and be within it, yet it is both a reflection and also a projection of the self into a realm beyond, that 'through the looking glass' which the body so far cannot penetrate but conceptually. and thus, it is conceptually we must understand where we are, and our word-concepts need to be useful and accurate if we are to discuss shared experiences. i still think and feel cyberspace is a term of value, in terms of truth and falsehood, about space in the realm of the electromagnetic infrastructure of power, media, and technology. yet, this does not at all negate, nor does it seems to need to, the cultural detritus that is the export of cyberspace as a thing unto itself. which is like another commodification of ideas into ideologies, and the capitalization of intellectual property as a type of homogenizing force against an individual's perception of events, versus an established world view. what has been great for me in all of this is learning from your perspective while in total disagreement upon the basic tenet of 'either cyberspace or no space'. to me this is not the question we face. it is not so much about the word, as the perception of the word, about its interpretation and presentation of it as a word-concept, from a perspective. in my sense of things, it seems i have worked my way inward with the concept, to come to the ideas. whereas you are much more in the ideas, and able to decipher all of the spatial metaphors which are very rich with regards to space, as a technical concept, while at the same time the cultural constructs may be deprived of any real authentic uniqueness, and more like an online McDonalds for all, cyberspace as American cult/ural export. this is all a guess, but it has not left me since our first discussions, and it is time we crack this enigmatic code-word and come to some resolution of the relations between our differing views. there must be some bridge where both a technical cyberspace and a no space cyberspace can co-exist and actually relate to one another, in some type of harmonic field of what is and what ifs... i have not been able to read the text regarding the law of space you sent but am interested in it and find it an intriguing place to go with this idea... making a site now and contemplated making a call- for-projects for exploring 'electromagnetic space and time', in an effort to see if a multiplicity of views of cyberspace as a generic word-concept could be elicited from researchers online. and yet the word specificity and its 'branding', so to speak, limit it by making it technical, whereas if one were to do a call-for-projects for cyberspace, every rote pundit would enter the contest to out-'smart' the others with their command of the cultural ideology, which i think you are referring to. it seems the paradox is within language itself. instead, i would like to try to make a bigger net and try to establish an online collaborative project which compiles peoples' ideas on electromagnetic civilization, and if in spatial terms, all the better. if you, Pit, or anyone else are interested in consulting on this idea, i would appreciate any advice or suggestions you may have on how to proceed. to me such an online project, non- commercial and preferably, in the realm of research, non-proprietary and generic, could clarify where we meet in our word-concepts and where we diverge, and where we can find bridges between our experiences, places to ground the shared landscapes we now inhabit. bc for a short analysis on the columns and e-poles in relation to space and cyberspace, please see the essay: AE Parti http://www.architexturez.com/ae/overview/towards/comp/parti/ltop.htm _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold