لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Cultural Studies of Space
As a study of the geographical and virtual aspects of consumer profiling, this book continues the interdisciplinary tradition of critical geography, history, communication, cultural theory, and political economy that was forged in the scholarship of Henri Lefebvre (1991), Harold Innis (1972, 1951), David Harvey (1989), and James Carey (1989), among others. A few words about their seminal contributions might therefore help frame the context within which I discuss consumer profiling in the so-called information age.The reassertion of issues of space into critical cultural theory, as Ed Soja (1996) describes it, is a surprisingly recent phenomenon in communication studies. There are at least four reasons why topographical questions have recently problematized our understanding of communication and media. First, new information technologies (beginning with the telegraph in the late nineteenth century and continuing most recently to satellite, Internet, and intranet networks) have challenged our terrestrial definitions of space itself and extended our understanding of space to the realms of outer space and cyberspace. Second, the fragmentation of the body politic and the increased importance of social movements have led cultural theorists to turn to places of inhabitation to ground the complex power dynamics of identity politics. Third, on a larger scale, issues of space have been tied to the development of a global economy and global culture. And finally, the breakup of cold-war geopolitical formations and the reemergence of ethnic and religious nationalism in many parts of the world have led many to question the stability of national states and territorial borders.
As is customary with most critical and cultural approaches to social phenomena, Karl Marx provides a useful framework for discussing topographical questions, even though he was relatively silent on the issue of space and geography. The Marxist perspective, in other words, is overwhelmingly shaped by events in the temporal plane —the historical periodization of the transition from capitalism to socialism, the creation of surplus value from time ‘‘added on’’ to the work day, and so on. In Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), Edward Soja (1989) looks for the reasons for the resistance to issues of space in contemporary Western Marxism and finds three. First, Marx’s only manuscript that directly engages issues of space, the Grundrisse (Outlines), was completed in 1857 but was not translated into German until the late 1950s or into English until the early 1970s. Second, Soja argues that Marx’s theory of alienation is driven by the temporal workday. Finally, Marx’s aversion to the Hegelian ‘‘spirit’’ is often linked to its status as a ‘‘plane’’ of existence, a place to be reached (Soja 1989, 46).Henri Lefebvre, one of the first scholars to challenge the temporal bias of Marxism, nevertheless draws heavily from orthodox Marxism. For Lefebvre, both alienated labor and ‘‘abstract space’’ are removed from the experiences of the working class. Lefebvre’s class revolution focuses on the production of ‘‘differentiated space’’ by both the working class and ‘‘minorities’’—a space that is free from domination and exploitation.Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991)—an admittedly difficult and at times contradictory work—offers two general concepts that contribute important perspectives on the topographic study of personal information. First, in keeping with his view that all space is produced socially (through language, codes, or ‘‘designs’’ that bridge ‘‘mental’’ and physical space), Lefebvre (1991, 38–39) insists on the importance of spatial practices—the routines that produce locations and forge links between work and leisure. Consequently, Lefebvre (1991, 16) notes that
The project I am outlining, however, does not aim to produce a (or the) discourse on space, but rather to expose the actual production of space by bringing the various kinds of space and the modalities of their genesis together within a single theory.
Second, with respect to spaces themselves, Lefebvre (1991, 38) calls ‘‘representations of space’’ the plans and diagrams that fall under the power of engineers and planners. As is shown in this book, in the so-called information age, such ‘‘diagrams,’’ maps, and plans require constant updating because of the accelerating speed of change in demographic, psychographic, and geographic data— that is, the raw materials used to profile consumers. According to David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), such machinic diagrams—or what some have referred to as cybernetic systems of production[2] (Robins & Webster 1988; Mosco 1996; Tomas 1995)—typify the transition from a Fordist to a post- Fordist economy in which linear modes of production (such as the production line) are replaced by fully integrated and networked production, distribution, and sales loops. This ‘‘flexible’’ mode of production thus resulted in the rationalization of production techniques from large-scale inventory management in Fordist economies to ‘‘just-in-time’’ inventory systems in the post- Fordist economy (Harvey 1989, 159).
Stemming from a like-minded interest in technologies of space and economy, the work of Harold Innis has likewise offered a productive framework for many political economists and theorists, albeit from the perspective of political administration and nationalism. Schooled in Chicago but raised in Canada, Innis has been widely associated with a uniquely North American perspective.[3] Innis’s main works (1951, 1972) are concerned largely with ‘‘nation-binding technologies’’ and (in his writing on ancient civilizations) the importance of ‘‘territorial management.’’ Innis argues that communication technologies are either ‘‘time or space biased,’’ the former favoring the dissemination of information over a long period of time and the latter favoring the dissemination of information across vast spaces. Throughout his life, Innis became increasingly concerned with technological monopolies—that is, societies that have a preponderance of time-biased technologies (such as a stone tablet or parchment paper) that are prone to the centralization of knowledge (for example, in the church). Conversely, Innis argues that a preponderance of space-biased technologies (such as the telegraph or the telephone) centralizes power and knowledge in large cities. Contemporary privacy advocates would extend Innis’s concern with archives of knowledge to the consumer database.Building on Innis’s thoughts on the management of space and territory, James Carey (1989) has questioned the impact of the time-space collapse (the technological overcoming of geographical barriers) on the machinations of economic markets in the United States. For him, the United States in the late nineteenth century was a ‘‘space-binding culture’’ that was fixated on building a unified nation-state (as opposed to a time-binding culture that focused on the continuance of centralized traditions and knowledge). The telegraph serves as a unique example, Carey (1989, 203) rightly argues, in that its separation of communication from transportation ‘‘allowed communication to control physical processes actively. The early use of the telegraph in railroad signaling is an example: telegraph messages could control the physical switching of rolling stock, thereby multiplying the purposes and effectiveness of communication.’’
After the introduction of the telegraph, mercantilism would never be the same. Since the buyer might never actually meet the seller of a product, administrative systems and regulations were required to standardize and govern trading practices. A system of grading commodities (particularly perishable goods) followed. Moreover, the telegraph wrought a fundamental shift in the notion of speculation-as-geography (buying goods low in one place and transporting them to sell at a higher price in another location) to speculation-as-futures (investing money on the basis of crop possibilities as opposed to the crops themselves) (Carey 1989, 217– 221). The space-binding exploits of the telegraph would also lead to changing practices in journalism, the demise of vernacular languages, and the growth of ‘‘national news.’’Focusing on France, Germany, and England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Armand Mattelart’s The Invention of Communication (1996) similarly discusses the relationship between trade and transportation routes, communication networks, and the nation- state. Complementing the work of Carey, Mattelart is most interested in the governmental regulations, standards, and rules that resulted from the need to unite and manage the national territory. The most explicit forms of such management of the significant precursors to the personal information economy were early cartographic efforts in seventeenth-century France—attempts to accurately document and assess the boundaries and contours of the national terrain. The standardization of weights and measurements and the installation of the metric system in 1840 were just a few initial attempts at governing the vast territory of France. In contrast to Carey and Innis, though, Mattelart (1996) contributes a unique understanding to issues of technology and space by examining both the telegraph and the railway—the first networked system of communication and transportation. Mattelart outlines the process by which rail lines facilitated the transportation of rail carriages and carried electronic pulses whose disruption indicated a potential derailment further down the line. Thus, Mattelart (1996, 9) discusses the establishment of a national bureaucracy (defined by systems of control, inventory, communication, and transportation) as well as the power of an emerging governmental and technological network, a modern industrial precursor to the computerized information age.[2]The term cybernetics was first coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in his seminal work entitled Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). In an attempt to discuss the fundamental elements of cybernetic systems, Wiener (1948, 115) turned to the example of the railroad: ‘‘In this system there is a human link in the chain of the transmission and return of information: in what we shall now call the chain of feed-back. It is true that the signalman is not altogether a free agent; that his switches and signals are interlocked, either mechanically or electrically; and that he is not free to choose some of the more disastrous combinations. There are, however, feed-back chains in which no human element intervenes. The ordinary thermostat by which we regulate the heating of a house is one of these. ’’[3]Though a special issue on Innis in an Australian cultural studies journal (Angus & Shoesmith 1993) points to his growing reputation outside North America.
