I am going to address both Angotti and Saskia/Sanchez in one open
question --- because I want to focus on a slightly different aspect of the
telecommunications debate.
I am concerned that our postmodern
theories of geographical space --- theories that include accounts of
Global Cities and Informational Cities --- have evolved in the
so-called centers, the old metropoles. But have they given adequate
theoretical consideration to the uneven and repressive nature of
these theories? Can they adequately theorize the experience of
'peripheral reality ' be it in the south or north?
Let's face it, cybernetics -- the grandfather of all our
informational theories -- defines a new set of power relations.
Afterall 'cyber' stems from the Greek 'kybernan' meaning to steer --
a mechanism intended to control the space of informational
complexity, where planning and control operations are given
increasing importance. And territory (or space) as Michel Foucault
has taught us -- is above all an arena controlled by a certain kind
of power, a power that exists at many dispersed points --- at the
microlevel as well as at the political level of the city and state. I
am interested in telecommunication surveillance procedures which
mobilize power -- or concentrate authority over both concentrated
command and control posts in the CBDs of Global Ciites and throughout
the dispersed decentralized metropolitan 'peripheries'.
In other words, when information technologies 'hit the ground' they
engender amazing effects: let's deal with these!
The basic assumption in geography is that space is always mappable,
knowable and hence totalizable --- we can gaze upon the city, know
and systematize its plans of violence and horror and hence impose a
grid of control [a network of excluded areas, special surveillance
areas, etc.] over these dreadful spaces. Maps are uneven dialogues
--- directly associated with those in power or control, they are
imposed on the weaker sectors in society. Maps are a language of
power. Why else would the computer program that produced the
simulated virtual maps of the Bosnian landscape over which
negotiators sat in front of computer screens to work out the recent
peace accord be called "Powerscene"?
Maps are also closely associated with data banks, or archives of
information. Thus we might also ask how telecommunication in either
the north or the south has affected our perception and memory of the
city. Again, Foucault noted "Since memory is actually a very
important factor in struggle... if one controls people's memeory, one
controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience,
their knowledge of previous struggles...." Hence theoretical maps of
the city have a way of eradicating our vision of
space from which our memory of the real city is formed. They displace
our sense of agency and heighten our belief that we are adrift in
time and space.
Cybespace's originator, William Gibson, seems to
confirm the vulnerability of popular memory in his statement that
"computers in my book are simply a metaphor for human memory"... Yet
'history'/ memory banks for Gibson is simply a matter of facts, dates, information
in 'dead storage'... it mimics all the tactics of repression and
oppression and violence that colonization engendered. And so we
might return to the early years of computers --- the post-colonial
years of the 1950s --- because the computer's model of memory is
based on an imperial archive that divided the globe into people who
were civilized and uncivilized, who were with or without memory, who
hand long-term or short term memory, and who used writing or only
speech. These divisions still haunt today's theories that are based
on computers and telecommunication.
Or another random thought on maps, archives, and telecommunication
devices: think for a moment about surveillance video cameras scanning
and interpreting more and more parking lots, entrances, banks,
supermarkets, malls, theaters, and ball parks in either the north or
the south --- these fortfied enclaves that seem to be on the increase
around the western world --- Our everyday environemnts are
increasingly usurped by technological devices that see and foresee in
our place.
The space of the city is becoming virtual --- while
surveillance devices seem to reveal more and more of crime and
violence but less and less of anything else.
We are talking about the
city becomeing a city of deterrance machiners that are looking,
assessing, weighing every sexual assault, burglary, illegal entry or
accident. Consequently the contemporary city is absent of community
and urban space a metaphor for a disembodied computerized cyberspace.
Life in the inferno of the pomo city (North/South, center/periphery)
has given rise to a whole series of fact-to-face equivalents or
substitutes that further define this virtual space.
So as I said in my opening remarks --- we have a long way to go in
theorizing and criticizing the manner in which we apply postmodern
geography to contemporary spatial restructuring and global economies
yet never challenge the essential organization of power, nor
address the issues of agency, nor the fact that the space of our
contemporary cities is disappearing from sight/consciousness/memory
into the realm of the virtual.
