The Spatial Turn

Despite their avid use of spatial metaphors in conceptualizing different kinds of democratic practices, political theorists, have tended to conceptualize space in physiocentric terms: as a natural, given, physical container within which physical bodies move. This framework, I suggested, is what has contributed to the construction of size (territory and population) as a limiting condition in democratic theory: the perennial problem of scale. This fetish about size creates a kind of conceptual impasse, generally committing theorists to a single position somewhere along the “democratic corridor”. The common premise is that participation by citizens is a face-to-face affair. Consequently, citizen participation is most active in a small-scale community and, of necessity, least active in a large-scale society, where the business of administering government is, therefore, best left to elected representatives.

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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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