Space, Technology, and the Body

“Politics,” Stone observes, “works through physical bodies” (Leeson 1996, 114). Indeed, as Foucault’s own work has shown, relations of power in contemporary societies are manifested in a variety of disciplinary techniques that are organized around the visibility of the body. To the extent this is so, physical presence before others is a rather risky venture. The paradigmatic ideal for a kind of participatory democracy, however, has been the agora: an ostensibly egalitarian physical space where citizens could have a say, in part because they were physically present, there in the flesh. Being seen,making an appearance before fellow citizens, was a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for becoming empowered, for being a political actor. In one respect,Oguibe’s story participates in this ideal. The story he tells is fundamentally about how people are disempowered by being excluded from certain spaces, such as cyberspace. Even while he criticizes utopian claims about the democratic potentials of cyberspace, however, he makes the following challenge: “[T]hat we begin to explore with greater seriousness and humanism [the] means of extending the numerous, practical possibilities of this new technology to the greater majority of humanity” (1996). Hence, despite his criticisms, the technology still retains for him a certain emancipatory promise, which is why it needs, in his account, to be democratized, made accessible to others. Foucault reminds us, however, that if invisibility is disempowering, visibility is a trap (1979, 200). Being seen always comes at a price.

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The politics of cyberspace, I want to suggest, foreground these ambiguities in salient ways.Whether by enabling a virtual anatomized body that becomes a quasi-medical exploratory space or by enabling computer forums peopled by virtual personae, computer networking creates virtual spaces and bodies and, in the process, dispenses (with) physical spaces and bodies. The latter, furthermore, should be understood in multiple senses: cyberspace creates, administers, distributes, draws from,manages without, and disposes of physical spaces and bodies. Because cyberspace seems a largely nonphysical phenomenon, however, calling it a space—in the context of our more common understanding of space as physical, Euclidean (i.e., three-dimensional) space—may seem no more than a rhetorical analogy. After all, one cannot walk in cyberspace the way that one can, for example, walk in a city. Not with standing this difference, I resist the dismissal of cyberspace as no more than a metaphorical fiction. In fact, the term cyberspace evokes a stronger, ontological claim that net- working really is a kind of space, even if it is (almost) entirely a “consensual hallucination” (Gibson 1984, 5). This claim, of course, depends on a different spatiality than is evoked by the notion of physical bodies in physical spaces. Indeed, those of us concerned with understanding the
political implications “of the digital era,” as William Mitchell asserts, “must begin by retheorizing the body in space” (1995, 28).

I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) work on the production of social space to show how social spaces are, in fact, not just physical but also mental and lived, i.e., they are composed of perceptual movements, conceptual blueprints, and experiential trajectories. Cyberspace, I argue, is the effect of a similar combination of components. My point is not, however, that cyberspace is exactly like all other social spaces; rather, I argue that it is an other space: a heterotopia. Foucault offered, but never fully theorized, the concept of heterotopia as a countersite that challenges the normalized ordering of the spaces to which it relates. Drawing from other recent work on heterotopias (Hetherington 1997), I develop that concept in more detail as a framework for understanding the specific ways in which cyberspace confounds our more conventionally physical spaces.

Still, because cyberspace is not the sort of space in which physical bodies can meet face-to-face,
16 it seems, on this self-evident criterion, to be incompatible with claims about its utopian promise for a new Athenian style of democracy. The linchpin here is space itself and how it has been
conceptualized in democratic theory. I foreground the conceptualizations of space that have plagued theories of democracy, contributing to the construction of “the problem of scale,” of the optimum size of a polity beyond which claims to a participatory democracy must be given up as chimera. Focusing on the public-realm theories of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, I show how their respective works presupposed more elaborate spatial strategies and a more complex understanding of spatiality—not to mention a more decisive displacement of the body and its needs—than many political theorists have remarked.What emerges from Arendt’s and Habermas’s theories are concepts of public spaces that in fact are more compatible with the bodiless exultation of cyberspace than they might seem, particularly in light of their relentless critiques of modern technology and the mass media, respectively.

Such criticisms of technology, of course, are not unique to these theorists. Indeed, until quite recently, computers were typically feared as institutional tools that displaced workers, under the rubric of automation, and that reduced individuals to numerical entries on bureaucratic red tape, under the rubric of efficiency.What is remarkable in this context is how computers could come to be seen, since about the early 1980s, as a source of individual empowerment and democratic communication. This puzzle is my point of departure, where I turn to a more detailed analysis of the spatiality of cyberspace. Drawing from Lefebvre’s three-part framework for the study of social spaces (physical, conceptual, and lived), I organize my analysis around a comparable framework for the study of cyberspace: namely, hardware, software, and wetware (the human element). I focuses on the technological components (hardware and software) to show how innovations in computer technology—from electronic mainframes in the late 1940s, to distributed networks and packet-switching in the late 1960s, to the microprocessor and personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s—contributed, successively, to the production of cyberspace. I conclude that with a discussion of Gibson’s concept of cyberspace to show how it helped shape a cybercultural community by conceptually locating it. His conceptualization, however, differs significantly from how the term he coined has been taken up by others. These observations provide a segue, where I explore Internet culture in more detail, focusing on how different online practices have helped finally to produce cyberspace as a social space, one that brings together incommensurable phenomena and with heterotopic implications for the more conventionally physical spaces around it. The jumble of institutional and individual linkages and of local and global connections over the Internet, for example, creates contradictory possibilities both positively for international democratic activism and negatively for new forms of covert government surveillance and control. Similarly, the play of embodiment offline (the computer as prosthetic device) and disembodiment online (the computer as electronic screen) creates the conditions both for nondiscriminatory modes of public communication and also for potentially exploitative deceptions, such as those computer cross-dressers who lie about their sex as part of a malicious con.

Of particular significance for notions of democratic citizenship, is the related mix of visibility/invisibility that computer networking enables. These ambiguities, I argue, have engendered different politics of space evident in competing metaphors to respatialize cyberspace: that is, as Information Superhighway or as Electronic Frontier. I analyze these metaphorical blueprints as they have shaped the U.S. encryption debate. That debate, I argue, is illustrative of the key issues. It has been characterized, implicitly (and begrudgingly), as a successful instance of electronic activism (Wright 1995), and it also, substantively, concerns the politics of visibility (through surveillance) and invisibility (through encryption) that computers and networking have ambivalently enabled, highlighting, as well, the implications of these politics for state apparatuses of security,for individual liberty, and for democratic empowerment.

In the conclusion, finally, I return explicitly to the three concepts of space, technology, and the body, foregrounding in summary fashion some of the more salient points that can be drawn from the preceding arguments and highlighting implications for democratic theory and practice. I argue that understanding how these three concepts figure into our social and political practices is critical to developing democratic theories that are relevant to our era and our circumstances.Anything less runs the risk of proffering a nostalgic sense of loss for an ideal participatory space that existed, if at all, only for a privileged few. The overriding point of my analysis is that cyberspace, for all its apparent nonmateriality, is a new kind of social space that enables interactions and practices specific to its own physical laws: ones based primarily on electromagnetic forces. This specificity is what must be researched, cataloged, inspected: indeed, made visible.

The electronic domain of computer networking is certainly an other space in relation to the more familiar spaces we embody daily. At a minimum, it is a space devoid of meat—of the body—and cannot therefore be fully inhabited. As that observation suggests, however, cyberspace, despite its challenges, cannot replace physical spaces and bodies; it can at best supplement and perhaps modify them. How cyberspace constitutes spaces and bodies differently is the crux of the matter for understanding its relation to politics, egalitarian or otherwise. That it harbors the potential for both emancipatory and repressive practices is in my view undeniable and should make us not simply ambivalent, but rather enterprising with respect to the former possibility and vigilant in the face of the latter.

From : Saco, Diana. Cybering Democracy: Public Space and The Internet. University of Minnesota Press. 2002.