Category Archives: Network Society

American Bodies – A Soma-Semiotics of the USA

A preliminary report of ethnological research on “soma-semiotics,” that is body semiotics in the USA is both interesting and provocative. “Body semiotics” refers to the way in which a society inscribes its values on the bodies of its members, quite apart from the usual group identifiers such as age, gender, education, income, profession, or subcultural affinity. In a society as diverse and heterogeneous as the USA, community and collective identity across ethnic, political, gender, subcultural, etc. boundaries is a major issue.  In addition to this, the postmodern celebration of diversity has created an enormous deficit of unity that society must in some way compensate. Although the fieldwork is not completed, and the theoretical assumptions untested, some of the findings are highly suggestive. The author identifies four types of bodies, that is, four typical ways in which society becomes inscribed in bodies. These are termed “grotes,” “scribbs,” “caps,” and “styles” and there is a separate category for the uninscribed body that is termed “normalo.“

The first type is called, somewhat provocatively, “grotes.” “Grote” is short for “grotesque.” The term should be understood in the sense in which Bakhtin uses the word when describing the grotesque body in his work on Rabelais. The grotesque should not be understood as pejorative. Instead, the term describes how the abstract and symbolic dimension expresses itself in the material and the bodily. Human anatomy becomes a mirror of abstract values and conflicts. What is suppressed on the symbolic level appears in a distorted way on the physical and anatomical level. In this way, the body illustrates those cultural and social meanings that do not appear within the officially sanctioned and supported symbolic realm. Against the background of postmodern rejection of universal values, the body comes to be the place, where unifying cultural identity can be publically displayed.

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The AIME of Media – Latour and New Media

Nowhere are media to be found among the list of beings that Bruno Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence has so far discovered. Even the concept of “communication” does not belong to the metalanguage of Latour’s pluralistic ontology. It would seem that these basic concepts of modern social theory are subsumed under the ideas of “association” and “mediation” and thus not a suitable matter for differentiation into networks of their own. However, the list is not complete. The door is open. But the threshold is high. The master himself does not make it easy to get through the door. In order to be acknowledged as a mode of existence, a network must have its own kind of crisis, hiatus, rupture, or breach, that is, there must be some reason, why actors make efforts to associate in a particular way. Furthermore, a network must have its own trajectory or direction of establishing continuity and jumping over the gaps. Legal associations are different from scientific associations, and these again are different from religious associations. Third, a network must also meet certain conditions of felicity or infelicity regarding what counts as “truth” for it. Quite obviously, legal truth conditions are different from religious, political, scientific, or artistic truth conditions. Fourth, networks “institute” beings of a certain mode and they do this for a certain purpose, function, or what Latour calls “alteration.” If a mode of existence, or a being, cannot be identified by these criteria, then it has no place in the list of modes of existence that the AIME project is assembling. Despite these hurdles, we ask if media and communication do not demand to be considered as modes of existence in their own right. Can a future media studies be based upon communication and media as a specific mode of existence?

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If Facebook were a Nation

With 1.35 billion active users (3rd qt. 2014), Facebook is now as big as China. If we include other social media, such as Twitter, Goggle+, YouTube, Instagram, etc., we seem to be witnessing an unprecedented migration into a networked social sphere that demands rethinking of topics such as globalization, transnational publics, global governance, and international relations. It will be objected that these topics have to do with real politics, with economics, war, terrorism, ecological threats, and issues of justice. However, it would perhaps be too hasty – considering the role that social media have played in political initiatives throughout the world – to assume that global communities of social media users are not also concerned with these issues and do not make a difference in the world of real politics. Traditional political theory is going through a crisis. Politics has always been the prerogative of sovereign nation states. Only citizens of a constitutional state were thought to be capable of political action, that is, participation in processes of deliberation and decision making with regard to the common good. Politics belongs in the domain of what Habermas called the “public sphere.” The public sphere is that social domain in which private individuals come together to freely and equally deliberate matters of common concern. In democratic societies the better argument and not violence or coercion legitimates governance. If legitimate and effective governance is only possible within the boundaries of a constitutional state, where rule of law and democratic procedures are established, what happens to the public sphere in a global network society? Globalization means that almost all important problems go beyond national borders. It means that the “emergence” of supra-national moral obligations such as Human Rights and global governance institutions such as the UN place the traditional idea of state-based politics in question. Globalization leaves the public sphere, it would seem, without a home.

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Building, Dwelling, Thinking in the Network Society

Heidegger’s definition of space (in Building, Dwelling, Thinking) is unusual and thought provoking. Things don’t exist in space, they are space, that is, they exist by making space.  In Heidegger’s view things are not mere objects lying about out there in the world waiting to be stumbled over or discovered, they are active. Things open up places in which humans dwell. Heidegger uses the example of a bridge. The bridge doesn’t merely connect the banks of a river, it lets them appear as banks from out of an anonymous and undifferentiated nature. Not only that, it creates a relation between the banks of the river and the surrounding land. They are “gathered” together as places of crossing, places of meeting, of communication, and of commerce. Such activities, or as architects would say, programs, are made possible by constructions of all kinds; roads, checkpoints, watchtowers, shops, houses, etc. Each thing, each building allows certain activities to “take place.” Buildings create places to live, to do business, to produce or sell goods, to learn, and much more. These constructions are not simply put into an abstract Cartesian space that was somehow already there. Buildings not only take up space, they make it appear and open it up for human dwelling.

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Architecture and the Space of Flows

Architecture is becoming more reflective. Not because architects are theorizing more about what they do – they have always done this –, but because the conditions of the possibility of architecture are themselves becoming an object of architectural design. Stan Allen’s post-semiotic architecture of infrastructures is an example. According to Allen (Infrastructural Ubanism), “Under the dominance of the representational model, architecture has surrendered its capacity to imagine, to propose, or to construct alternative realities.” (50)  This implies a new program for architecture in which design does not exhaust itself in autonomous, representative buildings, but is concerned primarily with “the production of directed fields in which program, event, and activity can play themselves out.” (52) Concretely, Allen is talking about infrastructures, that is, not specific buildings, but “the site itself…the conditions for future events…the construction of surfaces, the provision of services to support future programs, …the establishment of networks for movement, communication, and  exchange.” (54) All these things such as transportation systems, energy grids, communication networks, and so on can be seen as the conditions of the possibility for architecture in the sense of objects and buildings. For readers of Castells’ Information Society this sounds a lot like what Castells calls the “space of flows,” that is, the hardware and software that creates a global network of simultaneous action beyond any local places, traditions, cultures, and identities. Although Castells has not entirely given up the conflict and even contradiction between the global and somewhat virtual space of flows on the one side and the physical and fragmented space of places, he has come to recognize the role of architecture in “making places in the space of flows” (Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age, in The Cybercities Reader ed. S. Graham, 2004). Castells cites such projects as Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Calatrava’s bridges, telecommunication towers, airports, Moneo’s AVE station in Madrid, and Koolhaas’s Lille Grand Palais. Many other multipurpose megastructures in the form of transportation or communication hubs could be added to the list. In these structures what is designed is infrastructure, the network of the network society. It is not place but flow that is the “object” of architectural design. It is the flow that becomes the place we live, work, play, shop, etc. Contrary to Castells opposition between flow and place, what these examples show is that it is the space of flows that is becoming the place in which we live, work, and construct our identities.

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