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Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position
Abstract
In this paper I provide a description and preliminary analysis of the current 'technological unconscious'. I use this term to signify the basic forms of positioning and juxtapositioning which make up the basic 'atomic structure' of contemporary Euro-American life. Because of the potential vastness of the topic, I concentrate on just one form of positioning and juxtapositioning, namely the construction of repetition. The paper is in three parts. The first part provides a capsule history of how a very few templates of position and juxtaposition have become powered up into a capacious and effective background. In the second part of the paper I argue that in recent years the practice of these templates has been changing as a full-blown standardisation of space has taken hold. This standardisation is gradually leading to the crystallisation of a new kind of technological unconscious. In the third part of the paper I argue that the traces of this new kind of unconscious are taking hold in social theory as well, leading to the assumption of a quite different event horizon which can be thought of as a different kind of materiality.
... In the case of human bodies, this may be a process that happens without conscious awareness. In the relationship between bodies, law, and code, it happens in the multiple formation of a human-legal-technological unconscious (Thrift 2004): 'The activity of information should be understood in terms of its altering effects [affect] on current patterns of being' (Tucker 2013, 33; see also the affective capacity of technology in Ash [2015], and the affective quality of law in Pavoni [2018]). ...
... The main idea is that urbanites do not usually realise when something is happening, such as an invasion of spyware into a computer or a personal data leak resulting from a breach in a company's security apparatus. As Thrift (2004) and Keating (2022) explained, we have all built a technological unconscious within, making most of us unaware of what technologies do to us and their impact on our daily lives. The same goes for the law, in that we have built an inner 'legal unconscious'. ...
... This intermingling of surveillance and cybercriminal activities is the everyday experience of urbanites, meaning that they have become used to living in a state of subtle urban fear, which is thus fully part of their technological unconscious (Thrift 2004;Keating 2022). They wish the lawscape to invisibilise itself and code by 'taking in the chaotic, ever-escaping outside (life, world, space …) and domesticating it, simultaneously including space by excluding its conflictual, eventful and contingent materiality' (Pavoni 2019, 164). ...
This article explores the ontogenesis of software (code) and law and how they are entangled and in-form bodies and urban space. Herein, I investigate how this process of in-forming creates ruptures, differences in the otherwise smooth experience of the urban. These remain largely invisible but surface when interruptions in the everyday use of technologies affect urbanites. These interruptions might be data breaches, frauds, invasive phishing emails and the likes. Information and affect play a key role as posthuman elements in the ontogenesis. Ruptures, differences may also open up lines of flight and resistance that highlight differences rather than conceal them. Taking an ontogenetic and new materialist perspective, this paper contributes to strengthening the theoretical dialogue between law, the science of space (geography) and philosophies of technology.
... The underlying theoretical foundations of our work are twofold: we follow the research program on 'market agencement' developed by (and around) Callon's theorization of markets to explore the socio-technical (Callon, 1998;Azimont, 2010) and spatialized (Thrift, 2004;Vatin, 1996) trading chains that sustain mundane markets. We also build upon recent works in economic anthropology to consider the emerging trading routes of globalization from below as central in the expansion of mundane markets, especially in developing countries (Marfaing & Thiel, 2014b). ...
... Extending this theoretical perspective, our contribution is particular attentive to the creative agencing of circulation and the flow of goods. We consider markets as spaces of circulation, 'positioning', and 'juxtapositioning' entities (Thrift, 2004) through scaling devices (Slater, 2014) and relational arrangements that make objects and their flows governable. This perspective takes seriously the two dimensions of the process of 'translation' in market agencement: 'to translate is to displace' (Callon, 1986), i.e. to transport and transpose from one world to another. ...
This paper tackles the issue of borders and mergers between globalization from above and from below (Mathews et al., 2012) in the market of intermediate energy technologies in Africa. It analyses how labelled products, supported by international institutions, coexist and/or compete with similar low-cost products and makeshift solutions already well established in the popular economy. It also analyses how all these products are conveyed by distinct international trading networks.
... A strand of thought within theories of cultural and social reproduction considers how the tools we use to understand the world around us also play a part in producing that world (Butler 2011;Gibson-Graham 2009;Mitchell 2008;Thrift 2004). This literature, in different ways, examines how tools of analysis bound, close and exclude ways of understanding the world. ...
... Sintetizando nada más que alguno de los particulares énfasis de estas áreas de estudio, los estudios del software han hecho hincapié, por un lado, en los modos en los que el código produce nuevas formas de espacialidad -lógicas de dirección, de posicionamiento, espacios de anticipación (Thrift y Shaun 2002)-y nuevas formas de la subjetivación. Aquí destacan conceptos como «code/space» (Dodge 2004; Martin y Dodge 2011), o el «inconsciente tecnológico» y los «automatismos animados» de Nigel Thrift (2005). Por otro lado, otros autores han abordado el rol que el código y los algoritmos tienen en los procesos sociales de clasificación y toma de decisiones (Striphas 2011a y 2011b), un «software sorting» (Graham 2005) que genera efectos de desigualdad y exclusión en nuevos marcos de «gobernanza algorítmica» (Gillespie 2014;Danaher et al. 2017). ...
Este trabajo discute el concepto de algoritmo desde una mirada antropológica, considerando la centralidad de la noción de agencia y tecnología desarrollada en los estudios de ciencia y tecnología. En primer lugar, se revisan las principales áreas que han estudiado las ecologías digitales y el lugar que ocupan los algoritmos en ellas. A continuación, se propone una definición de los sistemas algorítmicos, en tanto que ensamblajes socio-técnicos abiertos al entorno y constituidos en las redes de relaciones de las que emergen. En tercer lugar, se apuntan algunas aproximaciones metodológicas desde las que abordar la «opacidad» con la que generalmente se caracterizan los sistemas algorítmicos. Por último, se presentan los textos de este monográfico tomando el par «opacidad-transparencia» como eje vertebrador.
... Part of the problem facing scholars of memory is the way in which software is both ubiquitous and invisible forming what Thrift describes as the "technological unconscious." 2 The friendly face of social media largely obscures an ecology of software in which algorithms and databases are actors which mediate our encounter with digital memory. In their work on archives, Brown and Davis-Brown state that activities such as acquisition, classification and preservation are 'technical' activities associated with the archive that may become explicitly 'political' as they determine visibility and access. ...
... built into the databases which are so much a part of our daily lives'. And even while these sociocultural assumptions can quickly submerge into the 'technological unconscious' (Thrift, 2004), they can also have important consequences as recent analyses of the racialised nature of computer technologies demonstrate (Beller, 2021;Benjamin, 2019). ...
Drawing on empirical research, this article explores the possible sociopolitical effects of database infrastructures on the shaping and construction of human rights narratives. While it has become commonplace to theorise human rights through the lens of narrative, academic debates have largely ignored the technical infrastructures through which human rights narratives are constructed. The article responds to this gap by deploying and developing theoretical tools from software and infrastructure studies to consider database infrastructures as complex sociotechnical devices that engender sociopolitical consequences for narrative possibilities. Focusing on two key examples drawn from the empirical research, the article demonstrates the necessity of developing a critical attentiveness to the ways that human rights narratives are shaped by digital infrastructure. In doing so, the article develops and complicates infrastructure and software studies approaches whilst also demonstrating their value for other fields of research which do not ordinarily come within their purview.
... The invisibility of the structuring power of algorithms is a key feature that has been discussed by different authors (e.g., Amoore, 2013;Beer, 2009;Bucher, 2018;Introna, 2016). Nigel Thrift (2004) speaks of a 'technological unconscious' that underpins a society of ubiquitous media in which power, as Scott Lash argues, 'is increasingly in the algorithm ' (2007: 71) or operates 'through the algorithm' (Beer, 2009). Power is thought of in relation to invisible codes or embedded in 'black-box' algorithms (Pasquale, 2015). ...
... Consequently, the tensions between unconscious processes and digital technologies provide ways to link the individual and the cybernetic within contemporary thought. It is worth emphasising, then, that we are engaging not simply with the personal unconscious nor even the collective unconscious, but the digital and the technological unconscious (Ashraf, 2020;Powell, 2008;Thrift, 2004). ...
My focus is on how psychoanalysis and digital worlds influence each other: how they shape and comprehend each other through the human, the posthuman, various new digital processes and cybernetic agents. Together, they create entanglements of consciousness, affect and unconscious processes that are intricate and wide-ranging. They are intricate, too, by interweaving with psychoanalytic theory, illustrated here through the concept of transitional space. They also interweave with a rich body of contemporary social theory and I draw on Bernard Stiegler’s work to show how these extensive bodies of psychotherapy and critical theory relate in important ways to each other. Critical theory is often sensitised to psychoanalysis, but it is also highly critical of the way digital capitalism constructs new cybernetic worlds, the “psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism”, as Neidich (2017) terms it. Patricia Clough (2018) describes these developments as “the user unconscious”, the other- than-human agencies increasingly at work beyond and below the threshold of human consciousness. I emphasise that practitioners cannot avoid these developments, and I conclude by asking how, as psychotherapists in democratic societies, we best engage effectively and critically with them. E arotahia ana e au te pēhea o te awenga i waenga o te wetewetenga hinengaro me te ao matihiko; pēhea tā rāua hanga, mōhio hoki i a rāua anō mai i te ira tangata, te tangata pohewa, ngā tepe matihiko hou me ngā tūāhua kaiwhakahaere kōtuitui. Piritahi ka puta ake he whīwhinga mauri ora, he ngau me ngā hātepe mauri moe tino uaua tino whānui nei. Ka uaua ake anō hoki ki te rarangahia atu ki te ariā wetewetenga hinengaro, e whakaahuahia ake ana e te ariā atea tauwhirowhiro. Ka taki hono atu anō hoki ki te rahi o ngā ariā hapori o ēnei rā ā ka toro atu au ki ngā mahi a Penara Hiekere kia kitea ai he pēhea te hononga o ngā huihuinga whakaoranga hinengaro matawhānui nei me te ariā wetewetenga ki a rāua anō. I te nuinga o te wā kua taunga kē te ariā matapaki ki te wetewetenga hinengaro, engari e kaha ana ki te whakahāwea i te āhua whakahou mahi ao kōtuitui a te haupū rawa matihiko, arā e ai ki te kī a Nitiki (2017), “ ngā arakauwaka haupū rawa”. Ko tā Paterehia Karawhe (2018) whakaahua i ēnei whanekenga ko te “kaimahi hinengaro moe”, ko ērā atu i te ira tangata kaiwhakahaere e rahi haere ake ana te mahi i tua atu i raro iho o te pito hinegaro ira tangata. E whakahau ana au kāre e taea e ngā kaiwhakaharatau te karo i ēnei whanaketanga, ā, i te mutungā ko taku matapaki ki a tātau ngā kaiwhakaora hinengaro i roto i tēnei hāpori manapori he aha te huarahi pai, te huarahi whai hua hai hīkoitahitanga mā tātau.
... Pero, ¿no está el sesgo más cerca de una noción de ideología como naturalización (como dice explícitamente Katz, 2020)? Algunos autores utilizan la noción de "inconsciente tecnológico" (Thrift, 2004;Beller, 2021, cap. 1 sobre el "inconsciente computacional"), pero de una manera muy cercana a la noción de ideología. Esto lleva a la profundidad de la difícil discusión de la relación entre ideología e inconsciente (un punto de partida sería Althusser, 1971). ...
The question about whether there is a political unconscious can be understood in two ways. First, it could refer to whether our unconscious (in the Freudian or Lacanian sense) is political. Secondly, the question could mean: are there political (social, economic...) structures, institutions, and processes that are unconscious, in the sense that we do not perceive them “normally” (whatever that means exactly) nor reflect on them? I want to focus on this second meaning and, above all, discuss the question of whether "technology is society made durable" (Latour). In other words: is technology a manifestation of the political unconscious?
... Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become. (Latour 1999, S. 304) Die Folge dieser Entwicklung ist laut Thrift ein "technologisches Unbewusstes" (Thrift 2004b), eine Nicht-Reflexion der technologischen Bedingungen von Sozialität. Das praktische Nicht-Reflektieren der Bedingungen einer Praxis ist an sich nichts Neues für eine Soziologie, die davon ausgeht, dass Sozialität sich schlichtweg praktisch vollzieht, ohne ihre Vollzugsbedingungen in der Regel mitreflektieren zu müssen (Nassehi 2006). ...
Zusammenfassung
Die Systemtheorie positioniert sich in prominenter Weise als eine Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie, die sich aufgrund ihrer kybernetischen Denkfiguren und Begriffe besonders dazu eignet, die Digitalisierung der Gesellschaft soziologisch zu deuten. Angesichts dieses Anspruchs reflektiert dieser Beitrag die Bedingungen und Grenzen einer systemtheoretischen Beschreibung digitaler Sozialität. Selbst- und Fremdzuschreibungen der Systemtheorie als Theorie digitaler Sozialität rekapitulierend, betreibt er dazu eine Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung jenes kybernetischen Blicks, der Sozialität generell in funktional-formaler Weise als Prozess der Informationsverarbeitung versteht und Mensch und Computer damit gleichsam symmetrisiert. Es wird herausgearbeitet, dass die Systemtheorie zwar in der Tat gut geeignet ist, eine bereits digital konstituierte Sozialität zu beschreiben, ihr jedoch die Hervorbringung der Unterscheidung von Digitalem und Analogem gerade aufgrund ihrer kybernetisch-digitalen Theorieanlage latent entgleitet. Dies, so die Argumentation, manifestiert sich in einem blinden Fleck der Systemtheorie mit Blick auf Prozesse der Digitalisie rung . Zur Bearbeitung dieser Leerstelle schlägt der Beitrag vor, Interfaces als soziotechnische Scharniere, die Analoges in Digitales übersetzen, soziologisch zu fokussieren. Denn erst diese Schnittstellen, so die These, ermöglichen einerseits die Symmetrisierung sämtlicher Entitäten im Register der Digitalität und machen andererseits das nicht-übersetzbare oder -übersetzungswürdige Analoge als „Rest“ des Digitalen intelligibel. Eine Sozialtheorie der Digitalisierung ist mithin angehalten zu rekonstruieren, wie eine Gesellschaft ihre analoge Umwelt laufend digital markiert, verarbeitet und schließlich vergisst.
... Contributing to research that emphasises the imperceptible powers of technologies to modify human behaviour, and particularly social and cultural geographical engagements with bodily interiors (Colls & Fannin, 2013;McNiven, 2016) and nonhuman agency (Amoore, 2018;Ash, 2018), in this paper I develop a reading of the technological unconscious in terms of enunciating powers of signifying and a-signifying semiotics. If in geography the technological unconscious has come to refer to the way infrastructures modify the subject through anticipatory logics of pre-emption (Kinsley, 2010;Thrift, 2004), my focus here is to develop this line of thinking by articulating how signifying and a-signifying semiotics participate in these processes at the level subjectivation and the production of systems of evaluation through machinic enunciation. On one level, this articulation of the technological unconscious highlights the underexplored role of signifying and a-signifying semiotics in explaining how human action becomes modified, albeit subtly, through the interplay of the body and technological processes (Lazzarato, 2014). ...
This paper develops the notion of the technological unconscious by engaging with the geographic relationship between technology and the production of subjectivity. Drawing upon research with the Alternate Anatomies Laboratory in Australia, the paper advances this relationship through an empirical encounter with sonographic imaging. Contributing to conceptualisations of the ways technologies participate in unconscious activity, in this paper ultrasound imaging (sonography) is turned to as one way to think about the enunciation of subjectivity that assists the ultrasound technician in homing-in to particular signifying and a-signifying semiotic cues. Rather than siding with broad understandings of the technological unconscious, the paper articulates the production of specific processes of the technological unconscious via machinic enunciation, which reveals ways of rethinking human-technology relationships through infra-sensible semiotic operations.
... Consequently, the tensions between unconscious processes and digital technologies provide ways to link the individual and the cybernetic within contemporary thought. It is worth emphasising, then, that we are engaging not simply with the personal unconscious nor even the collective unconscious, but the digital and the technological unconscious (Ashraf, 2020;Powell, 2008;Thrift, 2004). 2021). ...
My focus is on how psychoanalysis and digital worlds influence each other: how they shape and comprehend each other through the human, the posthuman, various new digital processes and cybernetic agents. Together, they create entanglements of consciousness, affect and unconscious processes that are intricate and wide-ranging. They are intricate, too, by interweaving with psychoanalytic theory, illustrated here through the concept of transitional space. They also interweave with a rich body of contemporary social theory and I draw on Bernard Stiegler's work to show how these extensive bodies of psychotherapy and critical theory relate in important ways to each other. Critical theory is often sensitised to psychoanalysis, but it is also highly critical of the way digital capitalism constructs new cybernetic worlds: the "psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism" as Neidich, (2017) terms it. Patricia Clough (2018) describes these developments as "the user unconscious": the other-than-human agencies increasingly at work beyond and below the threshold of human consciousness. I emphasise that practitioners cannot avoid these developments, and I conclude by asking how, as psychotherapists in democratic societies, we best engage effectively and critically with them.
... First, how big data is processed is not transparent (Richards & King, 2013). Users are often captivated by elegant user interfaces and convenient service applications (Kaasinen, 2003;Kitchin & Dodge, 2014;Thrift, 2004) without paying attentions to terms of service and their rights of personal location information. The events and actions taken behind the scenes typically occur in a "black box" involving proprietary algorithms and datasets. ...
Traditional boundaries between people are vanishing due to the rise of Internet of Things technology. Our smart devices keep us connected to the world, but also monitor our daily lives through an unprecedented amount data collection. As a result, defining privacy has become more complicated. Individuals want to leverage new technology (e.g., making friends through sharing private experiences) and also avoid unwanted consequences (e.g., targeted advertising). In the age of ubiquitous digital content, geoprivacy is unique because concerns in this area are constantly changing and context-dependent. Multiple factors influence people’s location disclosure decisions, including time, culture, demographics, spatial granularity, and trust. Existing research primarily focuses on the computational efforts of protecting geoprivacy, while the variation of geoprivacy perceptions has yet to receive adequate attention in the data science literature. In this work, we explore geoprivacy from a cognate-based perspective and tackle our changing perception of the concept from multiple angles. Our objectives are to rehumanize this field from contextual, cultural, and economic dimensions and highlight the uniqueness of geodata under the broad topic of privacy. It is essential that we understand the spatial variations of geoprivacy perceptions in the era of big data. Masking geographic coordinates can no longer fully anonymize spatial data, and targeted geoprivacy protection needs to be further investigated to improve user experience.
... Latour's 29 exercise of thought is particularly telling: the modern world and the references about this world disqualify other possible trajectories. As such, city planning's normative formulation of good city life in the just city is compromised by a 'technological unconsciousness' which generates its own rules, values and norms (Thrift 2004a). A bureaucratic and engineering machinery of urban regulation, which deliberative planning scholars were right to question in the ways planners articulate 'motivating visions' or 'scenarios of possibility' (Healey 2007;Hillier 2007). ...
Wie funktioniert Stadtplanung in einem politischen Zeitalter, in dem Dialogfähigkeit eine Tugend und eine Notwendigkeit zugleich ist? Die Stadtplanung, die als institutionalisierte Technokratie zielorientierte Effektivität anstrebt und doch schwer fassbar ist, wurde zum Gegenstand ständiger öffentlicher Anfechtungen und obliegt einer immer häufigeren politischen Rechenschaftspflicht. Mit der unablässigen Forderung nach mehr städtischer Demokratie verschieben sich die Schwerpunkte und Wertvorstellungen der Stadtplanung hin zu mehr Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, Partizipation und Transparenz. In der vorliegenden Dissertation wird ein pragmatischer, von der Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie inspirierter Forschungsansatz verwendet, um die zum Teil widersprüchlichen Auswirkungen des planerischen Strebens nach urbaner Lebensqualität im Zusammenspiel mit den öffentlichen Maßnahmen zu untersuchen. Unter dem Einfluss einer sich neu definierenden Norm, veränderten Werten und zunehmender Bürger:innenbeteiligung wird Stadtplanung als ein Ensemble von Situationen und Ereignissen beleuchtet, welche durch das Aufgreifen aktueller Fragen die Öffentlichkeit erreichen. Durch die Gegenüberstellung von drei verschiedenen Stadtverwaltungen -–Lissabon, Wien und Zürich–- und deren politischen Hintergründe, analysiert die Dissertation empirisch die Entstehung städtischer Herausforderungen als kollektives Anliegen angesichts der verschiedenen Formen öffentlichen Handelns in der Stadtplanung. Mit anderen Worten, es werden Beispiele der Stadtplanung in einer Vielzahl von Erscheinungsformen und Konfigurationen untersucht, indem analysiert wird, wie das Vorhandensein verschiedenster Weltanschauungen zu einer gemeinsamen Expertise hybridisiert wird. Zu diesem Zweck wird die Stadtplanung nicht als eine feste Modalität betrachtet, die zu téchne oder démos gehört, oder periodisch definiert wird; sondern als öffentliche Angelegenheit und Gemeingut, wobei hinterfragt wird, wie „gutes“ städtisches Leben an der Schnittstelle von Politik, Wissenschaft und Ethik problematisiert wird.
... Das Big-Data-Versprechen lebt sodann nicht nur von den zukünftig zu entwickelnden Verfahren der Analyse, sondern auch von der Ausweitung der Erfassung, die immer tiefer eindringen muss in die analogen, von der Datifizierung fast schon nicht mehr verschonten Gebiete des Alltags: das Gesicht und seine emotionalen Regungen, die Stimme und ihre subtilen Variationen, die Körper und ihre mannigfaltigen Vektoren der Veränderung und Bewegung, die Subjekte und ihre Reaktionen und Interaktionen, die (neuen) Maschinen und ihre (neuen) Nutzungsweisen und Einsatzmöglichkeiten. Das Geschehen, das für die Erfassung von primärem Interesse ist, findet unterhalb der Wahrnehmungsschwellen der User statt und übersteigt ihre reflexiven Kapazitäten, die Datenindustrie setzt auf das Aggregat und die Wahrscheinlichkeiten, die sich aus der massenhaften Erhebung ergeben. Mit den Datenmaschinen einher geht also nicht nur ein neues Wissen über das eigene Verhalten und das Verhalten der Anderen, sie bringen auch ein »technological unconscious« (Thrift 2004) Die Datenmaschinen, die gegenwärtig dazu eingesetzt werden, alle möglichen Daten zu sammeln, sind nicht nur Bestandteil des sensorischen Selbstmanagements und einer digitalen Reputationsökonomie (Mau 2017). Sie schaffen ein wenn auch nur diffuses Gefühl ständiger Beobachtung -eine Art immer mitlaufender Anstandsdame, deren Anwesenheit allein schon Wirkungen auf das individuelle Verhalten haben kann. ...
... This audience of one is served through several new and "smart" devices that operate based on a networked technological infrastructure in which individuals are uniquely identifiable and addressable (cf. Thrift, 2004). This occurs via an elaborate system of "virtual address cards," such as user accounts, "smart" cards, cookies, and IP-addresses, that leave behind traces of our online and offline movements and activities. ...
Disconnection presents itself as a modern answer to problems of media addiction and overuse. But, is it really novel? Through a thematic analysis of Dutch and American newspaper articles spanning several decades, this study examines public news discourses on TV and smartphone addiction and their imagined solutions. The analysis reveals Apparatgeist: While there are parallels stemming from similar affordances, the discourse surrounding each affliction and its treatment is also unique to its time. While TV addiction discourse alludes to the loss of traditional values, smartphone addiction discourse emphasizes self-governance. Disconnection is framed as a solution but is imbued with moral imperatives regarding the necessity of self-discipline and productive time. Overall, smartphone addiction discourse points toward being “present” and “in touch with one’s authentic Self” as states that are morally valuable and time-worthy, but under stress in contemporary society.
... Intermundane technologies resemble aspects of what Nigel Thrift (2004) calls the 'technological unconscious'. Bodies, Thrift suggests, repeatedly stage relations with quotidian technological artefacts: from roads and lighting to cables, screens, and wireless signals. ...
This paper discusses how everyday technologies contribute to the enaction of disability, in particular by continually frustrating the formation of a general sense of ease in the world. It suggests that bodies have a fundamental relationality, within which technology comprises a central aspect; and that the very entity called the human is constituted through relationships with technologies. Then, it considers two ways that the organisation of technology is involved in the realisation of both ability and disability. First, it describes how the distribution of technological resources for activity are centred around bodies that are attributed normality and correctness, which also de-centres bodies falling outside this category: the former are enabled to act while the latter are not. Second, it proposes that ability and disability also involve habit: activities that have not only been repeated until familiar, but in which body and technologies can be forgotten. That typical bodies are centred allows them to develop robust habitual relationships with technological environments in which body and technologies can recede from attention, and crucially, to acquire a sense that their engagements will generally be supported. Atypical bodies, as de-centred, lack this secure ground: they cannot forget their relations with environments, and cannot simply assume that these will support their activity. This erodes bodily confidence in a world that will support the projects, whether ordinary or innovative, that constitute a life.
... Further, when mediation is foregrounded as an emergent, yet ontogenetic, property of all online spaces, we can begin to appreciate how a feminist spatial perspective starts from the epistemologically open premise of contingency, not predetermination. If we take online games to expose a more fundamental reorganisation of thought and action, and to form part of broader social shifts in response to technocracy (after Thrift, 2003Thrift, , 2004, then we can begin to appreciate the wide(r)-ranging effects that a feminist perspective can yield. Four subsections outline directions along which such reorganisation might unfold. ...
This paper identifies opportunities and pathways through which feminist digital geographies can expand into the realm of online gaming. Whilst research at the nexus of gender and online gaming has come a long way in the past two decades, geographical perspectives are noticeably lacking. They can contribute to the discourse by emphasising the contingent nature of online gamespaces, and how a gendered subject position might be redefined through, and help to redefine, the (in)distinctions between “online” and “offline”, “gaming” and “non-gaming” spaces. I identify four directions in which feminist geographies of online gaming can unfold: aesthetic-affective spaces of the “virtually real”, relationality through and beyond the avatar, labours of play and the purpose of leisure, and non-gaming spaces and the gaming of space. These directions foreground an exploration of gender within/and online gaming that is ontologically open, spatially fluid and replete with epistemological potential.
... A strand of thought within theories of cultural and social reproduction considers how the tools we use to understand the world around us also play a part in producing that world (Butler 2011;Gibson-Graham 2009;Mitchell 2008;Thrift 2004). This literature, in different ways, examines how tools of analysis bound, close and exclude ways of understanding the world. ...
Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure ‘what works’. Although evaluation has a ‘fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented character’ (Guba and Lincoln. 1989. Fourth Generation Evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 7), an experimental approach, situated within hegemonic positivist epistemologies, has tended to prevail. In this paper, we argue that it is misguided to pursue evaluation with an apolitical pretext of independence and objectivity. Drawing on Butler’s concept of performativity, we explore how hegemonic anti-democratic evaluation practices can potentially re-inscribe and reproduce the very inequalities that WP seeks to address. By critiquing the technologies of evaluation, we lay out one way of understanding how democratic evaluation practices can reclaim evaluation to make possible more diverse and socially just worlds.
... Thrift's notion of hybrid kinaesthesia, in turn, captures how urbanites' bodily movements and gestures often take place in multiple spatial contexts simultaneously. Furthermore, Thrift (2004b) argued (over a decade ago) that we have entered a new phase of 'technological unconscious', one which is fundamentally shaping how corporeal activities are organised and coordinated in the city (see also Thrift & French 2002). Unlike the Freudian or Lacanian notions of unconscious, this body-technical unconscious refers to the taken-for-granted processes that keep the corporeal body in the recursive loop of code-based technological infrastructure. ...
The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the power-related infrastructural dynamic that actualises in the interrelations of big data collection and the bodily movement of urbanites in contemporary cities. By drawing from Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the body and combining them with recent theorisations on choreography, material media theory and critical technology studies, the authors address city dwellers’ embodied relations with mobile devices and ambient technologies as integral to the micro-, meso- and macro-level (re)production of urban infrastructures. By way of discussing the technologically mediated kinaesthesia and movement trajectories of lived bodies, the chapter develops a novel conceptualisation of urban choreography for exploring the mechanisms through which dwelling-in-the-city today functions in a globally extensive cybernetic feedback loop with profit-motivated and surveillant big data operations.
Market studies is a newly emerging field dedicated to understanding the origins, core concepts, theories and methods currently being used and developed to examine markets in the making. Providing a unique overview that introduces, positions and develops this highly fertile area of research, Market Studies is the first book to consolidate its themes, tools and methods in a single, comprehensive volume. Topics covered include: market organization and design; performativity in and around markets; valuation; market places and spaces; methods that may be utilized in studying markets; the field's relation to adjacent disciplines; the future of markets. Deploying a sensitivity for the socio-material constitution of markets, the authors put market practices at the centre of inquiry and offer insights into the future and potential impact of market studies research. The contemporary, practical and interdisciplinary approach is strengthened by multiple examples of original empirical research into markets.
Market studies is a newly emerging field dedicated to understanding the origins, core concepts, theories and methods currently being used and developed to examine markets in the making. Providing a unique overview that introduces, positions and develops this highly fertile area of research, Market Studies is the first book to consolidate its themes, tools and methods in a single, comprehensive volume. Topics covered include: market organization and design; performativity in and around markets; valuation; market places and spaces; methods that may be utilized in studying markets; the field's relation to adjacent disciplines; the future of markets. Deploying a sensitivity for the socio-material constitution of markets, the authors put market practices at the centre of inquiry and offer insights into the future and potential impact of market studies research. The contemporary, practical and interdisciplinary approach is strengthened by multiple examples of original empirical research into markets.
From 2020 until 2023, the process of vaccination and progressive control of the SARS-CoV-2 or “Covid-19” virus has allowed for monitored movement to come back. Within this short window of historical reflexion, this chapter aims to bring light to the current context of social media uses and abuses through the lens of the notion of desire for omnipresence. For that, this study articulates this goal through three different layers of analysis: first, by investigating the emergence, management and incitement of what can be described as structurally addictive platforms of online interaction and how they entail a biopolitics of social media dependency; second, by providing in the notion of desire for omnipresence, a framework to understand the driving force for our current wish to subjectively deterritorialize ourselves toward the limitlessness through a zoopolitics where the virtual profile becomes a mode and a model of existence; finally, by pointing out ways “forward” that disrupt the ordinary understanding of linearity and progress to promote modes of un-marketization of life and human affections with the aim of transforming of our current desire for omnipresence into a genuine desire for presence.
Labour research in geography has long been fascinated with the role of affects and emotions in capitalism. This article foregrounds ambivalent moments when labour creatively uses affection and intimacy to make claims over autonomy and agency. Set against a backdrop of increasing automation of infrastructural work, we draw on interviews with personnel at Jakarta Soekarno‐Hatta Airport (CGK). In culturally situating these automations, we evince how the “heart” (or the Indonesian notion of curahan hati ), with semblances to customer‐facing labour management practices, and other affective dispositions under neoliberal life, is repeatedly deployed to “fill in the gaps” for where automation may fail. We illuminate how these workers navigate wearying, uncertain, and demanding facilitation, security, and customer service situations by emphasising “heart‐to‐heart” relations, even as they stave off technology's encroachments (and withdrawals). This plastic automaticity offers a template by which the pressures of capital's technologisation could be relieved, beyond emotional labour.
Algorithms are usually regarded as fixed objects. In contrast, the article conceptualises and analyses the (social) construction of algorithmic management. By means of interviews, ethnography and analyses of chats, two allocation algorithms in platform-mediated courier work are examined. Different levels of algorithm construction are identified and a conceptual framework is developed to analyse the connections between the workers' technological frames, theories and practices. It is shown that the couriers develop theories about the algorithms' mode of operation based on their assumptions and experiences, and that their practices are guided by these theories. As a result, it becomes apparent how workers develop false theories about the algorithms' mechanisms due to their opacity, which effectively disciplines their actions. However, the paper further describes how the ontogenetic nature of algorithms gives workers limited but existing agency in their interactions with technologies.
This article examines how Facebook’s Feed, its dynamic user interface, incorporates and refashions the capacity to temporalize cultural material and experience that has classically been attributed to subjectivity. I problematize the ambiguous historicity of digital culture across the experience of the ordinary that it produces by arranging the subjective time and ‘ruined’ bits of cultural material into algorithmic timelines. Drawing on recent media theory, I underscore the irreducible alienness of algorithmic temporalizations, which undermine habitual normalization. I show subjectivity moves beyond identity and narrative closure through an unconscious affective investment in extremely popular algorithmic timelines.
Was zeichnet eine (Kunst-)Ausstellung aus? Und was kann es heißen, wenn wir diese nicht nur als eine ›institutionelle Ansammlung von Dingen‹ begreifen, sondern die Ausstellung ›ökologisch‹ verstehen - d.h. ihre ganz spezifischen Milieus, Praktiken und situativen Konfigurationen in den Fokus rücken? Svetlana Chernyshova nimmt eine ontologische Verschiebung vor, indem sie die Ausstellung als eine Existenzweise - [EXP]osition - herausstellt und diese als ein Resultat von vielfältigen ›Metastabilisierungen‹ begreift. Auf der Grundlage von acht Parametern entsteht so ein Modell, welches das komplex-synthetische Phänomen Ausstellung systematisch in seinen Ebenen verhandelbar macht. Dabei rücken neben deren ästhetischen und epistemologischen Bedingungen auch die politischen Implikationen ins Blickfeld und zeigen: Ausstellungen lassen sich diffraktiv denken.
Distributed communication systems have provided for the coordination and control of large‐scale social organizations. Indeed, it was the need to coordinate and control one such system, the railroads, that led to the wide‐scale deployment of one of the earliest distributed communication systems, the telegraph. Progressive enhancement of distributed communication , as seen in the telephone network and the networking of computers, has facilitated the fundamental restructuring of commercial and public administration without the need for colocated offices. Simultaneously, this has allowed for the centralization of information and control. Beyond administration, the increasing portability and ease of use of distributed communication means that it is being used by smaller groups, families, and individuals in their daily affairs. Future developments include cloud computing and the networking of objects into machine‐to‐machine or person‐to‐machine forms of distributed communication.
The term “subjectivity” is looked at in two closely interrelated ways: as the antithesis of objectivity in research; and as a way of locating the individual in their social and political context. The entry begins by setting out the Cartesian subject as centered and rational: for the researcher‐subject it was assumed that, given rigorous application of methods, they could obtain objective data. However, there were always tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, and the entry argues that over the past century or so it has become gradually more difficult to locate the subject and their subjectivity. Subjectivity has become increasingly understood as diverse, as fragmented, and as relational, bringing researchers to a point where they now interpret the research encounter as an intersubjective experience, rather than simply engineering it as a means to optimize objectivity.
This article traces the history of machine-readable data encoding standards and argues that the QR code has become an infrastructural gateway. Through the analysis of patents, corporate documents and advertising, ethnographic observations, and interviews with professionals, I describe the global making of the QR code and argue that the convergence of data encoding standards, mobile computing, machine vision algorithms, and platform ecosystems has led to the emergence of a new component of computational infrastructures which functions as a gateway between different actors, systems, and practices. The central section of the article covers seven decades of machine-readable data encoding history across different national and regional contexts: from the invention and popularization of the barcode in the United States, through the QR code’s invention in Japan and its success in East Asia, to its platformization in China. By revisiting this history through concepts drawn from the field of infrastructure studies, I argue that QR codes have become infrastructural gateways and conclude that this concept is useful not only to understand the current role of QR codes but also to identify and follow the emergence and change of other gateways in infrastructures to come.
In his experimental studies on tactile recognition, the German neurologist Kurt Goldstein observes a peculiar ‘twitching movement’ of the body in neurologically impaired patients suffering from mind-blindness. Drawing on Goldstein’s interpretation of these bodily movements as kinaesthetic reactions, the present article advances a symmetrical conception of tactility that relocates the bipolarity of the sense of touch within the human body. In line with this symmetrical approach, the kinaesthetic reactions will be construed as tactile self-activation or self-touch of the body and conceptualized, following Michael Polanyi’s epistemological notion, as the ‘tacit dimension of touch’. Combining neuropathological aspects with a media theoretical and epistemological trajectory, this article aims at re-evaluating the centrality of the registers of the sense of touch as the fundamental ground for grasping the world in its concrete encounters as well as in its symbolic abstractions.
This conference paper is the first of two papers that discuss the outcomes of a long-term pedagogical research project into the integration of interdisciplinary design-research, and making practices into the content of second-year architecture studios. This paper focuses specifically upon one studio involved in the design of responsive systems and electronic spatial interfaces. The studio introduces students to technologies associated with "The Internet of Things" and encourages them to consider how their use in design might impact a range of different social and spatial systems. Through the design, prototyping, and testing of these systems students are encouraged to learn through practice, developing their projects iteratively while being critical of the implications of their actions. Through a discussion of the studio aims, structure, project examples, and outcomes, this paper outlines an initial approach to the teaching of programming and electronics within a design studio context. Along with the paper on Biological Systems these works highlight the importance of critical engagement with materials and processes and of opening up future architectural pedagogy to new fields of exploration.
Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality.
In this article, we explore methodological considerations of using the car as space for ethnographic research on police work. With a socio-material perspective, we are concerned about how the car’s particular materiality and mobility shapes social interaction that takes place within it. We argue that this affects the researcher role, and that the researcher’s spatial position in the car affects the researcher role further. The position’s impact on interaction is made evident when the researcher is ‘riding shotgun’, rather than being placed in the back seat. We argue that this front-seat role comes with increased reciprocity towards the driver/officer, demanding a more (inter) active research practice. Hence, the riding shotgun position potentially increases the empirical input with the closer interaction between the researched and the researcher. More generally, the case illustrates the very delicate considerations of researcher positioning within ethnography on the move.
This chapter introduces the camera drone’s new aerial ways of seeing, moving, and relating. I discuss how the drone gaze can serve as both a practical and metaphorical lens for research into physical, corporeal, virtual, communicative, and imaginative mobilities. In particular, I concentrate on the example of drone-logs, the juxtaposing of sky video with ground audio, as an innovative, technographic method for video ethnography and elicitation. As a hybrid of multiple technologies and techniques, drone-logs sharpen the focus onto fleeting, slippery, sensory, and kinesthetic motions, notions, and emotions. Ultimately, I argue for the value of a larger “auto-drone” view for researchers to consider their own affective mobilities within research processes and acknowledge their respective relational emplacements from a distanced and detached top-down perspective.
Der Zauber der Medien speist sich aus ihrem Geheimnis: Den Usern von heute sind Laptop, Smartphone oder Tablet eine Blackbox, die ihre Sinne im Bann hält und die Techniktricks im Inneren hinter einer opaken Oberfläche verbirgt. Doch solche Verzauberung ist nicht neu. Um ihr auf die Spur zu kommen, nähert sich dieses Buch der Mediengeschichte der Zauberei an der Schwelle zwischen magischem Moment und Ent-Täuschung. Nicht selten folgt einer geradezu übernatürlich wirkenden Zaubervor- führung die wissenschaftliche Erklärung und Offenlegung ihrer Tricks. Ein solcher Akt der Entzauberung mag zwar magische Momente als faulen Zauber demaskieren. Er rückt dafür jedoch die Technologien der Täuschung ins Rampenlicht: Erst die Ausnutzung physikalischer Gesetze, das Konstruieren mechanischer Zauberapparate und das Spiel mit der Wahrnehmung der Zuschauer machen deren ,Verzauberung’ möglich. Sie erlaubt, die Frage nach Wissen, dem medialen Zugriff auf unsere Sinne und dem sinnlichen Zugriff auf unsere Welt erneut zu stellen. 
Crime and Punishment in the Future Internet is an examination of the development and impact of digital frontier technologies (DFTs) such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of things, autonomous mobile robots, and blockchain on offending, crime control, the criminal justice system, and the discipline of criminology. It poses criminological, legal, ethical, and policy questions linked to such development and anticipates the impact of DFTs on crime and offending. It forestalls their wide-ranging consequences, including the proliferation of new types of vulnerability, policing and other mechanisms of social control, and the threat of pervasive and intrusive surveillance. Two key concerns lie at the heart of this volume. First, the book investigates the origins and development of emerging DFTs and their interactions with criminal behaviour, crime prevention, victimisation, and crime control. It also investigates the future advances and likely impact of such processes on a range of social actors: citizens, non-citizens, offenders, victims of crime, judiciary and law enforcement, media, NGOs. This book does not adopt technological determinism that suggests technology alone drives social development. Yet, while it is impossible to know where the emerging technologies are taking us, there is no doubt that DFTs will shape the way we engage with and experience criminal behaviour in the twenty-first century. As such, this book starts the conversation about a range of essential topics that this expansion brings to social sciences, and begins to decipher challenges we will be facing in the future. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to those engaged with criminology, sociology, politics, policymaking, and all those interested in the impact of DFTs on the criminal justice system.
This essay discusses Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnical framework as it relates to recent contributions that deal with the inherent opacities of digital technology and processes of blackboxing. I argue that Sloterdijk’s philosophy is a precious case of affirmative, non-nihilistic technophilic thinking that espouses the technogenic provenance of mankind, and leaves space for technologically engendered incomprehensibility while tracing a horizon for human beings’ resoluteness. In the first section of my essay I tackle Sloterdijk’s reflections on the philosophical transition from wonder to horror in the twentieth century, and I put it in dialogue with his concept of the monstrous as defined by boundlessness, complexity, and excess. Here, I discuss how the human being shows both monster-slayer and monstrous tendencies. Secondly, after having revisited the question “what happened in the twentieth century” from this perspective, I discuss how Sloterdijk’s analysis of the monstrous provides a coherent genealogy for an assessment of the individual’s relation to current “monstrous” technologies, as they are tied to algorithmic processing. I conclude by arguing that Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics and onto-anthropology allow for an acrobatic confrontation with the possibility of untethering technological advancement from illusory promises of absolute clarity, and promote the immunological value of darkness.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to revolutionise the way we live and communicate, and the manner in which we engage with our social and natural world. In the IoT, objects such as household items, vending machines and cars have the ability to sense and share data with other things, via wireless, Bluetooth, or Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. "Smart things" have the capability to control their performance, as well as our experiences and decisions. In this exploratory paper, we overview recent developments in the IoT technology, and their relevance for criminology. Our aim is to partially fill the gap in the literature, by flagging emerging issues criminologists and social scientists ought to engage with in the future. The focus is exclusively on the IoT while other advances, such as facial recognition technology, are only lightly touched upon. This paper, thus, serves as a starting point in the conversation, as we invite scholars to join us in forecasting-if not preventing-the unwanted consequences of the "future Internet".
This article considers the relationship between the production of a British imperial archive on China and the global politics of empire over the last century and a half. Drawing upon the theoretical work of Bruno Latour, Gayatri Spivak and Thomas Richards,the archive is explored as a coherent set of material practices designed to decode and recode China and other colonized territories. Imagined as an interface between knowledge and the state, the British archive required the establishment of an epistemological network designed to generate knowledge on China. The knowledge so produced was then used to manipulate local scenes and to provide intelligence in 'the Great Game', the continuing contest with Russia over domination in Central Asia. Because of its desire for comprehensive knowledge of other peoples and places, the archive also generated its own phantasms, ones which threatened to undermine and destroy empire. This process of self-haunting is explored through the figure of Fu-Manchu, a discernible mutation of epistemological empire, and linked to the cold war which emerged on the Eurasian landmass after 1945.
The spread of mobile communication, most obtrusively as cell phones but increasingly in other wireless devices, is affecting people's lives and relationships to a previously unthought-of extent. Mobile phones, which are fast becoming ubiquitous, affect either directly or indirectly every aspect of our personal and professional lives. They have transformed social practices and changed the way we do business, yet surprisingly little serious academic work has been done on them. This 2002 book, with contributions from the foremost researchers in the field, studies the impact of the mobile phone on contemporary society from a social scientific perspective. Providing a comprehensive overview of mobile phones and social interaction, it comprises an introduction covering the key issues, a series of unique national studies and a final section examining specific issues.
The rapid and accelerating move towards the adoption and use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organisations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterised in terms of access to information and people ‘anytime, anywhere’. This paper presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets of access to remote people and information, and different facets of anytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified from the study: the role of planning, working in ‘dead time’, accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artefact use in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers.
The author describes a method of comparing sequences of characters,called sequence alignment or string matching, and illustrates its use in the analysis of daily activity patterns derived from time-use diaries. It allows definition of measures of similarity or distance between complete sequences, called global alignment, or the evaluation of the best fit of short sequences within longsequences, called local alignment. Alignments may be done pairwise to develop similarity or distance matrices that describe the relatedness of individuals in the set of sequences being examined. Pairwise alignment methods may be extended to many individuals by using multiple alignment analysis. A number of elementary hand-worked examples are provided. The basic concepts are discussed in terms of the problems of time-use research and the method is illustrated by examining diary data from a survey conducted in Reading, England. The CLUSTAL software used for the alignments was written for molecular biological research. The method offers a powerful technique for analyzing the full richness of diary data without discarding the details of episode ordering, duration, or transition. It is also possible to extend the analysis to include the context of activities, such as the presence of other persons or the location, but such extensions would require software designed for social science rather than biochemical problems. The method also offers a challenge to researchers to begin to develop theories about the determinants of daily behavior as a whole, rather than about participation in single activities or about time-budget totals.
Computer networks are social networks. Social affordances of computer-supported social networks – broader bandwidth, wireless portability, globalized connectivity, personalization – are fostering the movement from door-to-door and place-to-place communities to person-to-person and role-to-role communities. People connect in social networks rather than in communal groups. In-person and computer-mediated communication are integrated in communities characterized by personalized networking.
Les réseaux informatiques sont des réseaux sociaux. Les possibilités sociales qu’offrent les réseaux sociaux informatisés – bande passante plus large, portabilité sans fil, connectivité mondiale, personnalisation – sont en train de favoriser le passage de communautés de porte-à-porte et de lieu-à-lieu vers des communautés d’individu-à-individu et de rôle-à-rôle. Ainsi, les gens se lient davantage dans des réseaux sociaux que dans des collectivités. Les communications directes et via l’informatique sont intégrées dans des communautés caractérisées par un maillage personnalisé.
Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.
This is an important, critical analysis of Derrida's theory of writing, based upon close readings of key texts ranging from his stringent critique of structuralist criticism to his sympathetic and dialogical analysis of Freud's scriptural models. It reveals a dimension of Derrida's thinking which, although consistently present in his works, has been neglected in favour of those 'deconstructionist' clichés used in much recent literary criticism. Christopher Johnson highlights the special character of Derrida's philosophy that comes from the fertilising contact that Derrida has had with contemporary natural science and with systems theory. In addition, he shows how Derrida's philosophy of system and writing rejoins an atomist and materialist tradition repressed by centuries of idealist metaphysics. This study casts fresh light on an exacting set of intellectual issues facing philosophy and critical theory today.
This book explores the history of public transportation in Paris, placing it in the context of the city's urban and social development from the 17th century through the 19th. Regarding the idea of circulation as key to the definition of the modern city, he integrates an examination of this concept with a sharp focus on the organization and structure of public transit in the French capital. He is especially concerned with the relationships between public transit and both the 19th century's epochal urban reforms and seminal developments in state power and business practices. Attitudes of class and gender reveal themselves in the practical restrictions on who used public vehicles. A reinforcement of the existing social divisions of spaces becomes clear. Urban transit is, in addition, a lens through which it is possible to survey the phenomenon of order and disorder in the streets and the evolution of residence and work patterns. By examining the operation and internal structure of early cab and omnibus firms and the French government's creation during the Second Empire of two privately owned monopolies to operate cabs and omnibuses, the author reaches conclusions about the French entrepreneurial spirit, the emergence in horse-drawn transit firms of early modern management structures, and the central role of the state in arranging a market for private firms.
This article attempts to understand the reconstitution of the `present' in modern societies. I argue that this reconstitution is the result of work done on `bare life', which I associate with that little space of time between action and performance. The article goes on to consider the ways in which this reconstitution of the present is taking place, using examples from the economic sphere. Throughout the article, I argue that operations on bare life are not only instrumental but also open up new spaces of biopolitical practice based on a greater recognition of the value of slowness in a world commonly figured as fast.
Steadily increasing levels of interaction and contact are among the factors which helped to secure state hegemony and to foster a wider sense of nationhood in early-modern England. Theoretical debates on this theme have not been supported by a substantial body of reliable empirical work regarding the character of communications. Indeed, research on the speed, volume and cost of communications by road in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has not featured prominently in the work of either geographers or historians. This article uses royal postmasters' records on communications for official purposes in the time of Elizabeth I and James I to explore the efficiency with which correspondence was exchanged and official journeys were undertaken. While, in general, major improvements in average journey times were apparent during this period, differences in the speed of contact between London and key provincial centres, on the one hand, and geographically more remote locations, on the other, persisted. Thus, for government communications, there were marked variations in national ‘connectivity’. In addressing the notion that an increased density and volume of communications played a role in developing further a conscious sense of national identity, the paper also discusses briefly the social and cultural impact of regular, long-distance contact within England during this period.
This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.
There is a growing realization that computer systems will need to be increasingly sensitive to their context. Traditionally, hardware and software were conceptualized as input/output systems: systems that took input, explicitly given to them by a human, and acted upon that input alone to produce an explicit output. Now, this view is seen as being too restrictive. Smart computers, intelligent agent software, and digital devices of the future will have to operate on data that are not explicitly given to them, data that they observe or gather for themselves. These operations may be dependent on time, place, weather, user preferences, or the history of interaction. In other words, context. But what, exactly, is context? We look at perspectives from software agents, sensors, and embedded devices, and also contrast traditional mathematical and formal approaches. We see how each treats the problem of context and discuss the implications for design of context-sensitive hardware and software.
Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world.
Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of “haptic visuality”—a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste—to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.
The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.
In this paper we consider practices of shopping in early modern (17th- and 18th-century) England, and various features of the spaces in which it occurred. We emphasise the density of retail shops in England; the reflexive relationships among 'consumers', shopkeepers, and consumption sites; and the inability of current theorisations based on the semiotics of advertising to address questions about consumers' understandings and identities in an age prior to widespread product advertising, department stores, and mass retail outlets. We contend that, then as now, peoples' interpretation of objects and identities involved practical, embodied knowledges rather than the sorts of explicit, intellectualised understandings central to most contemporary accounts of consumption. Such practical knowledges have been underresearched, and we point to some concepts in recent work which can assist in their theorising.