Professor Rob Kitchin is currently engaged in a large five year EU-funded project: The Programmable City, concerned with the role of software on the ongoing production, performance and imagination of cities. Over on the blog for the project they have announced that Prof. Kitchin’s most recent book ‘The Data Revolution’ is now with the publishers, Sage, with a view to publication later this year. I’m looking forward to it”¦
Here’s the book outline blogpost from the Programmable City website:
Rob Kitchin has just submitted the final draft of a new book – The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences – to Sage and it’s moved into production. The chapter titles are below and the book will be published later in the year.
Preface
1. Conceptualising data
2. Small data, data infrastructures and data brokers
3. Open and linked data
4. Big data
5. Enablers and sources of big data
6. Data analytics
7. The governmental and business rationale for big data
8. The reframing of science, social science and humanities research
9. Technical and organisational issues
10. Ethical, political, social and legal concerns
11. Making sense of the data revolution
References
Over on the technophilia blog, my former colleague and friend Patrick Crogan has written a really insightful piece in response to the general reading of Stiegler I offer in my recent paper The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies. Following on from my rather quick explanation of Stiegler’s use of the concept of technicity, Patrick brings a nuanced gloss on Stiegler’s reading of Heidegger in Technics and Time 1 – please read on below.
I would like to note, as I did in the acknowledgements of the article, that my own engagement with Stiegler’s work and the broader (post)phenomenological understandings of the human-technology relation comes from sustained, very rewarding, discussions with Patrick, whose own insightful work, expertise and translations have been invaluable.
Being and Space
Sam Kinsley, former colleague and technophilia, now at Exeter Uni, recently published ‘The Matter of “Virtual” Geography’ in Progress in Human Geography. It gives a comprehensive overview of the history of formulations of virtual spaces and realities since the heady days of the 1990s articulations of cyberspace, up to recent approaches to ideas of coded and networked spatialities. Sam perceptively mobilises Stiegler’s work including his use of Simondon and Heidegger to propose a way of describing and analysing digitally enabled spatial and temporal refigurations of contemporary existence and sociality.
I wanted to add a gloss on this mobilisation of Stiegler’s notion of technicity, as a point that seemed to me to touch on an important element in Stiegler’s critical adoption of Heidegger’s Being and Time – hence the ‘Being and Space’ title. Sam has this to say about Stiegler’s positioning of humans as always already preceded by technics in a way:
“Culture”, he writes, “can accordingly be thought of as metastable systems of retention, of exteriorized thought: ‘A new born child arrives into a world in which tertiary retention [data, images, writing and so on] both precedes and awaits it, and which, precisely, constitutes the world as world’ (Stiegler, 2010a: 9, original emphasis). The ongoing creation of shared knowledge, and thus a shared memory and history, is in large part mediated by technology (with the notable exceptions of practices of oral history and storytelling).”
Absolutely, and here Stiegler’s take on and taking from Heidegger’ notion of Dasein’s ‘throwness’ is evident. Dasein, the being for whom its being is a question, ‘falls’ into time, and encounters a facticity already there. This paradoxical futurity of what precedes Dasein in a sense programmes (though this word is evocative much more of Stiegler’s Heidegger than Heidegger) the questioning of being that characterises Dasein, along with the tension between an intratemporal business with everyday things seeking to avoid the question and an authentic encounter with it via (in Heidegger) an assuming of the heritage of the collective past as pro-genitor and horizon of Dasein’s future possibilities.
In the latter part of Technics and Time 1 Stiegler ‘deals with’ Heidegger, identifying this notion of a throwness into an already existent facticity as his major insight, while also identifying quite precisely the point in Being and Time (at a certain moment in the famous chapter on historicality and temporality) where Heidegger turns away from the implications of this constitutive factical technicity of Dasein and towards the more problematic notion of a history of being as expressed in the community of the volk – the community – thought separately as a spiritual continuity, somehow transcendent from a facticity now relegated to the status of intratemporal covering over of the former. For Stiegler, as Sam’s account indicates, technics is an irreducible dimension of individual and collective being and any ‘authentic’ reflection or encounter with the question of one’s being, or of being in general (in philosophy, religion, politics etc) develops on the basis of and out of conditions that are factical, that pre-exist s/he reflecting, and that also make possible the transmission and communication of that reflecting to others to come after.
One more note: the oral history and storytelling that is part of the the “ongoing creation of shared knowledge” Sam describes is also mediated technically, if not ‘technologically’ (but perhaps today few instances of mediation passes completely to one side of the pervasive electronic media milieu). Oral transmission is always part of a linguistic technicity; it is always undertaken in conjunction with certain rituals and gestures associated with the cultural event of story recital; and often these will include the production of graphics of various kinds, rupestral, sand-painting, bodily inscription and so forth. That minds retain these forms and conventions and rites testifies to the profound interdependence of organic and non-organic spatial memory supports in the maintenance and evolution of individual and cultural identity.
I have been meaning to write a quick post about this for a while, so this is a ‘late’ announcement”¦
A few months ago I wrote about having two articles concerning digital geographies that I had coming out, the second of which was an article for Progress in Human Geography concerning the matter (both the issue and the materiality) of what have been called ‘virtual’ geographies. I am pleased to be able to say that this article is now available online on the Progress web pages. Unfortunately this requires a subscription for access. However, I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.
“The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies” revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space‘, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life.
Bernard Stiegler has recorded a set of two pieces concerning the ‘digital revolution’ for Le Monde: for their Laws of the Networks[Lois des réseaux] blog, convened by the journalist Dominique Lacroix.
In the first of the two pieces, Stiegler articulates the ‘pharmacological’ nature of the internet, the ways in which our use of the digital both opens up new ways of living and, at the same time, constitutes great risks to our collective and, importantly, mental individuation. In particular, Stiegler focuses on understandings of the public and the private, in the wake of the revelations made possible by Edward Snowden’s ‘leaks’, and the ways in which the digital unsettles and unbalances what we can understand to be private or ‘secret’.
I have translated this first instalment, below. As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text. The notes at the end are also from the original piece.
The Net blues [le blues du Net]
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler defines the digital revolution through the idea of publication and its social significance. The internet and the web bring incredible and unprecedented potential. However this process has become a target for the big American corporations which represent a risk for our societies. Bernard Stiegler brings together the Greek Myths and the work of historian of Greek myths Jean-Pierre Bernant, to clarify the issues of the Snowden affair.
Net blues
The digital revolution truly began a little over twenty years ago, when the United States enabled the internet to be accessible through the web. They appropriated a vision, formed by the European Tim Berners-Lee, and made it an apparatus of neo-colonialism. It was a deliberate strategy for at least five years and which has significantly transformed the face of the world. We have not fully understood, by the way, and I’m not certain we will ever truly comprehend, this extremely complex (always) ongoing process that has a global spread.
The digital is above all a process of generalised formalisation. This process, which resides in the protocols that enable interoperability, makes a range of diverse and varied techniques. This is a process of unification through binary code of norms and procedures that today allow the formalisation of almost everything: traveling in my car with a GPS system, I am connected through a digitised triangulation process that formalises my relationship with the maps through which I navigate and that transform my relationship with territory. My relationships with space, mobility and my vehicle are totally transformed. My inter-individual, social, familial, scholarly, national, commercial and scientific relationships are all literally unsettled by the technologies of social engineering. It is at once money and many other things – in particular all scientific practices and the diverse forms of pulbic life.
This has become what I have called – taking an expression of Sylvain Auroux – the process of “grammatisation”. Drawing on recent work, I ask if this process – as André Leroi-Gourhan has already suggested – triggered the Upper Paleolithic, then suddenly intensified in the event of the neolithic, resulted in ideogrammatic writing. This has been rendered more complex, and enriched, via the automata of Vaucanson; then through the automation of factories, and thus the operation of machinery: and finally to the present situation, which is digital.
Le canard digérateur, one of the most sophisticated automatons by Jacques Vaucanson, French engineer (1709-1782). source Wikipedia
The word “grammatisation” coming from τα γÏάμματα (ta grammata, Ed.), which can be called “the letters” in greek. This makes possible the ‘discretisation” of the flow of the temporal continuum, in the form of words, and this discretisation is effectuated through a spatialisation that is also a graphical reproduction, in other words a visualisation.
Today, the digital permits the discretisation not only of the movements of the mouth and tongue, which provide words, but rather all movements, both human and non-human – for example the movement of beef carcases that cross the Atlantic on cargo ships from Argentina to feed Europeans, which carry RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, and which create what today we call traceability. Other examples include: how we follow the movements of animals and insects to attempt to understand the transformative processes of life, of the earth, and of other ecosystems extraordinarily perturbed by human and industrial activity, which we call the “anthropization” of the world. Yet the digital equally facilitates user profiling–and thus from this facilitates a control of behaviour through social mimesis–to track all human actions and gestures and to apply mathematical correlations with feedback loops to institute what Antoinette Rouvray and Thomas Berns [1] describe as “algorithmic governmentality”, which represents an automated forecasting of both private and public life. Or, again, the discretisation of the movements in the brain, such as brain imaging and the use of such descritisation processes to aid neuromarketing, based in an analysis of the brain that tends to directly solicit automated drives that short-circuit social development [apprentissages].
All of this opens, at the same time, tremendous new and extremely promising opportunities in social relations, in forms of knowledge, in cooperation in all forms, in communities of peer contributors, in the economy of contribution, in new tools for research, in education and creativity and finally in a new age of the life of the spirit. This speaks to a process underwritten with huge contrast and contradictions. I believe that there is a lot less time left than human society, and in particular European society, realises. Unfortunately, in Europe, this realisation was exceedingly late.
The case of Snowden, considered as a whistleblower in Europe and a traiter in the US, has revealed the practices of NSA (National Security Agency) with the collusion of Facebook, Google and other American organisations, informing the US intelligence agencies of all of our activities, through a generalised traceability. Faced with these developments, but also with the growing feeling that it is is less and less tolerable that there is a hegemony of commercial objectives that have no political or social regulation and which are almost exclusively conducted in California, by hackers, the militant developers of the web, the internet and computing and digital technologies in all sectors–which I have been personally using for over 30 years- a large number of proselytisers of the “digital revolution” have been hit by what I have called, during a public talk for Ars Industrialis at the Théatre du Rond Pont: the “Net blues” [2].
These activities and these communities suddenly [tout à coup] discovered that the internet has extremely toxic aspects. For example, because we have seen what Snowdon revealed we have discovered the very possibility of secrecy seems to have disappeared with the digitisation of everyday life. This dissolution of secrecy is very serious. On a psychical level, it is perhaps the destruction of the possibility of a psyche endowed with intimacy and of singular individuation, if it is the case that the unconscious is what remains hidden and secret to oneself. And at the level of diplomacy, the publication of the diplomatic data and cables by Wikileaks – through a channeling [pompage] of data that made the internet possible – which has been presented as a positive thing, is also literally the destruction of the conditions for classic diplomacy, which is to say [de ce qui sert parfois à éviter la guerre]. For me, the publication of the diplomatic cables without doubt includes a positive dimension, but it is absolutely necessary not to elide that it is also a dangerous shift.
That secrets are necessary for international life is obvious. However, for example, is banking secrecy necessary? This is another topic for which we do not have time to discuss, but many believe (including myself) that the automated transfer of information to prevent bank secrecy should be mandatory.
Be that as it may, the secrecy of intimate life is essential and forms the possibility of attaining a dignity of existence–a dignity defined for humanity by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The traceablity of personal data creates a kind of digital nudity which is an indignity for the human [l’homme]. Initimacy is the possibility and the necessity of having a secret life that I compose for myself. This is the primary lesson from Freud. I do not truly know for myself what is extremely intimate to me because that is what we call the unconscious. In the guise of self-expression, the whole of human history is in some way a “keeping of secrets” without making them public and without ever totally having access to them ourselves.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myths and thinking with the Greeks
From the advent of the politeia this becomes a fundamental aspect of social organsiation. The Greeks played an extremely important role in the precise, delineated and institutionalised differentation between the public and the private, for we cannot have a public sphere without a private sphere. To understand this, one must read the text that Jean-Pierre Vernant dedicated to the relation between the couple Hermes and Hestia, Hestia is the figure of the home, privacy, secrecy and the care given to the fire that always comprises a sacred and divine dimension. Hermes is the figure of movement, communication and public space. Vernant shows that there is not one without the other: if we destroy what is secret, we also destroy public space, and vice versa.
As for us, the men and women of the 21st century, we are experiencing a publishing revolution: the digital space constitutes, above all, a process of publishing. We publish ourselves, voluntarily or not. We do it unintentionally when we are tracked by cookies: everything that we do is parsed, storable and analysable through so-called big data, which are new ways of implementing applied mathematics through algorithms which can capture and process the hundreds and billions of [units of] data, which, through feedback loops, performatively change the dynamics of the behaviour of those whose data are analysed in real-time, and which constantly formulate adjustments to trajectories which are in reality a kind of autopilot for behaviour.
Be that as it may, through these publishing systems, we are all capable of publishing and so distributing our ideas, our propositions, our analyses, our points of view, our critiques, and so on – and through this, we become able to take part in a new form of public life, for example by creating [web] sites, like that of Ars Industrialis, and thereby constituting the new possiblities, which Gilbert Simondon called pyschic and collective individuation. I use the word “individuation” to explicate the “pharmacological” character of the internet: the internet is double-edged, it offers new and absolutely extraordinary opportunities for individation but also, at the same time, it threatens the fundamentals of individuation.
The internet is a “φάÏμακον” (pharmakon Ed.), in the sense that Plato described writing, and we are discovering this double-edged nature [cette double face]. The actual system of the web is dangerous for secrets, for psychic individuation, for collective individuation, because we cannot and we should not submit to forms of calculability. Such a capitulation [soumission] can only engender a “voluntary servitude” which could rapidly become involuntary and inescapable [insurmontable]. In contrast, the digital allows the intensification of the incalculable in the same way that writing in Ancient Greece had huge effects on individuation through an enriched social diversity – especially by making citizenship possible, which formed the birth of a new process of psychic and collective individuation.
The promulgation of writing has certainly engendered a loss of idiomatic differences, that is to say, local individuations. All kinds of idioms began to disappear. At the same time, it was a growth in individuation through citizenship, tragedy, philosophy, etc. – All on the basis of public law [rights? droit public].
The question for us is whether the switch to digital is creating a phenomenon of this kind or, conversely, a process of widespread “disindividuation.”
Bernard Stiegler’s office, Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, 28 juillet 2013, taken by Dom Lecroix.
Notes
1. Cf. Réseaux, février 2013, La Découverte.
2. Cf. http://www.arsindustrialis.org/
3. I speak here of performativity in the sense of John Austin, for whom a performative utterance is a self-declaration such as that which I say, by the fact that I am saying it, creates a situation, and this “fact” is something in the situation that is prior to the creation of the situation. Cf. John Austin, Quand dire, c’est faire, éditions Seuil.
The 20th century is the century of the industrialisation, the conservation and the transmission–that is, the selection–of memory. This industrialisation becomes concretized in the generalisation of the production of industrial temporal objects (phonograms, films, radio and television programs, etc)
[Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Time of Cinema. On the “New World” and “Cultural Exception”‘, p. 106.].
Following on from the post I made a few months ago, providing a version of a paper entitled ‘memory programmes‘ that I gave at the “Conditions of Mediation” conference at Birkbeck in June, I wanted to share some thoughts I have included in a recent submission around the theme of the ‘industrialisation of memory’, following Stiegler (as above), and the discourses of the ‘smart city’. I play around with the suggestion of the formation of a ‘municipal memory‘, which could be considered one of the cornerstones of what Nigel Thrift has diagnosed as “Lifeworld Inc.“.
While the lines drawn on maps, policed at crossings and customs posts, can apparently clearly delineate a border, other technologies that can also (be used to) place us, on one side of a border or another, may ebb and flow with atmospheric, material and technical differences. In particular, the relatively well known tendency for the cellular mobile phone system to record the location of a given device (via triangulation) as some distance from the actual physical location has been interrogated and played with by artists and activists alike.
One such meditation on the vagaries of the locational capabilities of the GSM system is the Border Bumping project. Julian Oliver has played around with how we traverse borders by examining how phones register with the network and redrawing a map of the borders accordingly. Oliver has created an app that lets owners of Android phones contribute to the project.
Thanks to the invitation and editorship of Seraphim Alvanides and Kate Pangbourne, I’m happy to share the preprint of a forthcoming article in a special issue of the Journal of Transport Geography: Geospatial technologies in the location-aware future. The preprint copy is available here.Wilson, Matthew W. forthcoming. “Geospatial technologies in the location-aware future.” Journal of Transport Geography.
Abstract:
Arguably, there have been few shifts in the GISciences so paradigmatic as the emergence of locationally-aware mobile devices. GISc researchers in the US have witnessed these changes in just the last crop of PhD students, with topics on location-based services, the geoweb, volunteered geographic information and neogeography, somewhat eclipsing earlier, trendy topics on web-based GIS and interactive digital cartography. Indeed, there are new important players in GISc, with training in and outside of Geography, with backgrounds as diverse as the engineering/computational sciences and the digital humanities as well as critical human geographies. Mobilities researchers, qualitative GIS scholars, cyberinfrastructural scientists, and social and cultural geographers have configured research programs around the proliferation of locationally-aware devices and the ‘big data’ that have emerged from them. In this viewpoint, I shall outline these diverse developments and sketch what I argue are the foundational issues that comprise a research agenda with and about geospatial technologies in the location-aware future: technological development, the social life of data, and the everyday practices around mobile digital devices.
The BBC carried a story in their technology section today about coders writing custom bot scripts that search for restaurant reservations and book tables before those looking for themselves can respond.
The story comes from a blog post by a chap called Diogo Monica, in Silicon Valley (where else), who noticed that tables at a good restaurant he likes were getting booked up by bots and so he decided to write one for himself. The BBC story narrates how:
The code emailed Mr Monica when other diners cancelled reservations or SBP released more tables. While the code helped him get a table now and then it quickly became ineffective. Close scrutiny of the [restaurant’s] website revealed why.
“I found myself looking at it and noticed that as soon as reservations became available on the website (at 04:00), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 04:01,” he wrote.
As with many other time sensitive transactions, in this fairly rudimentary software domain of online reservations a veritable arms race has ensued in the creation of more sophisticated and more rapid software programmes. The fairly arbitrary rules of booking, with automated update timings etc., become the terrain for battle. Where once the ‘who you know’ at the restaurant or in the right social circles would secure you a good table at the most desirable location and time it seems to have transformed, in some cases, into the ‘what you know’ of online booking systems code. As Mr Monica suggests:
“As for tactics, think of this war like high-frequency trading,” he said. “The people with the best algorithms/optimisations will have an edge over everyone else.”
I submitted a review of Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s Code/space, in slightly revised form, for a review symposium in the relatively new journal ‘Dialogues in Human Geography‘. I thought I’d share an earlier version here, just to give a flavour of some of the things I’ve been thinking about…
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s Code/space has been rightly celebrated in a number of reviews (Adey 2013; Wilson 2012; Zook 2012) and with the Association of American Geographers’ Meridian Award for outstanding scholarly work in Geography in 2011. Code/space offers a future-oriented glossary for the understanding and description of the increasingly technical, ongoing reconfiguration of everyday life.
Building from a longstanding and prolific writing partnership (see the Code/space bibliography), in the book Kitchin and Dodge offer a really useful engagement with code and software via geographical sensibilities. They describe a range of examples of the ways in which software is integral within and modulates the spacings and places of (largely Western capitalist) everyday life.
Code/space offers a rigorously argued framework of concepts for understanding software in everyday life. Furthermore, the book hones this framework through case studies concerning air travel, the home and consumption. In the final, impassioned, and more speculative, section of the book, the authors engage their theoretical framework with the speculative ruminations of urbanist Adam Greenfield concerning ‘everyware‘, the proposition of ubiquitous computation embedded into the fabric of the everyday urban environment. To conclude, Kitchin and Dodge offer a manifesto for the emerging discourse and disciplinary context of ‘software studies’ that insists on an ontogenetic understanding of the capacities of code.
Code/space is valuable for two reasons. First, it elaborates a useful and very clear conceptual framework, drawing on contemporary philosophies of technology. Second, and importantly, it brings into conversation a range of important work concerning digital technology that has previously been somewhat distant: geographers concerned with the ‘automatic production of space’ (like Stephen Graham, Nigel Thrift, Matt Wilson and Matt Zook); computer scientists studying human-computer interaction (such as Paul Dourish) and humanities scholars critically reflecting on computation and software (like David Berry, Matt Fuller and Lev Manovich).
Software code, in the terms of Code/space, is perhaps the best example of the human ability not only to produce other entities and forms of spatial experience but more significantly to create things that in themselves produce space–that are ontogenetic. The agency of software must be understood, following the book, as its quasi-generative properties, accomplished through code, which Kitchin and Dodge call ‘secondary agency’, following Adrian Mackenzie (in his book Cutting Code).
Code, in Kitchin and Dodge’s terms, is both a process and a product, both a means of systematically calculating the world and an operational grammar for action, or ‘worlding’, as Nigel Thrift has suggested. To account for this capacity Code/space offers a taxonomy of coded entities: coded objects, coded infrastructures, coded processes and coded assemblages.
Kitchin and Dodge thereby describe the distinction between ‘coded spaces’ and ‘code/space’. Whereas there are many examples of software and code augmenting the production of space, which the authors call ‘coded spaces’, there are increasing examples of the modulation of and making anew of spatial experience through code, which are ‘code/spaces’.
Building from space conceptualised as ‘constantly brought into being as an incomplete solution to an ongoing relational problem’, Kitchin and Dodge offer an account of forms of space that are co-constituted with software, because code ‘modulates the conditions through which space is beckoned into being’. It is this reiterative and transformative modulation that forms one of the central theoretical tenets of Code/space – conceptualised as ‘transduction’.
The conceptualisation of ‘code/space’ and the account of ‘transduction’ are the foremost of a number of significant contributions that Kitchin and Dodge make in this book. Indeed, the former is arguably a particular empirical category of the latter. Code/space is accordingly something of a watershed moment, for geography, in the operationalisation of the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. He was a significant influence on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Brian Massumi and Bernard Stiegler, amongst others.
Simondon was a philosopher of technology, or more accurately of the human-technology relation in terms of ‘technogenesis’. The theory of technogenesis is that humans and technology co-evolved together, that you do not get one without the other. It is this form of human-technology relation that is being described when we consider the processes of transduction described by Kitchin and Dodge, themselves drawing the concept from Adrian Mackenzie who translates it from Simondon. Transduction, in Simondon’s terms, decentres the human, it is
a procedure of the mind as it discovers”¦ [that] consists in following being in its genesis, in carrying out the genesis of thought at the same time as the genesis of the object is carried out (Simondon, translated in Combes 2013).
In offering a kind of ‘Simondonian’ analysis of software and everyday life, Code/space strikes directly at the heart of the question of what it means to be human in an age of a perceived increase in technological agency. The account of the human here is not one of miraculous separation from nature, or from technology. It is a case of imbrication and becoming with a wealth of other entities. This is not a deterministic relation, for the authors, precisely because: ‘The nature and transduction of code/space is then never fixed, shifting with place, time and context (social, political and economic relations and situations). Code/spaces are relational, emergent, and peopled’.
As Kitchin and Dodge suggest in the fourth chapter, in the formation of code/spaces and the en-coding of parts of everyday life, we are negotiating the ongoing reformulation of what it is to be human. Indeed, this resonates with the account of technogenesis that is firmly established in other disciplinary contexts (for example in the work of philosopher Mark Hansen, literary theorist Katherine Hayles, sociologist Adrian Mackenzie and philosopher Bernard Stiegler).
While the major theoretical contribution of the book is the work synthesising accounts of transduction, a substantial portion of the book is given over to case studies of how code/spaces emerge in everyday life. Chapters seven to nine provide three case studies of air travel, the home and consumption. Those familiar with the prolific output of this writing partnership will recognise some of the content of these chapters, although the detail has been updated. Equally, the analysis has been translated into the new lexicon put forward by the book. This works to the extent that the project here is clearly to advance a form of ‘software studies’, though it could prove bewildering to some (there is a helpful glossary at the back).
The empirically based analyses draw out something like a dialectic of software, with its potential to both empower and control, which the authors carefully unpick in the mode of the later Foucault. Genealogies of the various assemblages of actors and discursive regimes in which code/spaces consist are critically discussed to demonstrate how and where labour, power and values are variously located.
In the penultimate chapter the analysis takes a distinctly speculative direction. The authors consider future code/space in the guise of the ‘everyware’ (following Adam Greenfield) of ubiquitous computing, a long-held aim for computation embedded into the fabric of everyday life (following Mark Weiser). Kitchin and Dodge entertain a significant range of speculations about a world of ‘everyware’, from enthusiasm for a prospective empowerment of citizens, to opposition of an increased ‘securitisation’ through ‘sousveillance’.
However, despite a well argued and impartial discussion of these themes there remains a tacit acceptance of these visions of ‘everyware’ without much critical reflection upon the source and reasoning behind the speculation. The ‘powerful discursive regime’ that the authors argue supports the embedding of software into everyday life and the implementation of ‘everyware’ should also be recognised to include speculative discourse (see some of my research). Thus there remains cause for further critical reflection upon such governmentalised representations of the uses of computation.
Code/space offers a wealth of examples of the transformations of everyday life through the transductive capacities of software and code. It is not only a snapshot of contemporary technogenesis with and through computation, and a critical response to such observations. It is also a rallying cry for further critical research in the shape of the concluding manifesto for software studies. Many geographers may ignore or skim the concluding manifesto, focusing instead on the case studies of chapters seven to nine. However, in many ways it is in the concluding chapter that we find Kitchin and Dodge’s challenge to geography.
The ‘digital’ is the latest significant step in the processes of the discretisation of knowledge and memory external to the body, as Bernard Stiegler forcefully shows, and code is precisely its ontogenetic vanguard. Following Stiegler, to study code and software, is to study the latest stage in the spatialisation of time-based forms. To transform the temporal flow of speech and gesture into discrete forms, such as text and mechanical movements, makes them spatial objects: they are constituted in various material forms (from sheets of paper to silicon chips). The transductive power of code can accordingly be understood as the latest phase in the process of what Stiegler, following the linguist Sylvan Auroux, calls ‘grammatisation‘, which describes:
all technical processes that enable behavioural fluxes or flows to be made discrete”¦ and to be reproduced, those behavioural flows through which are expressed or imprinted the experiences of human beings (speaking, working, perceiving, interacting and so on). If grammatisation is understood in this way, then the digital is the most recent stage of grammatisation, a stage in which all behavioural models can now be grammatised and integrated through a planetary-wide industry of the production, collection, exploitation and distribution of digital traces [see Stiegler’s broader work].
Software code is thus the ‘grammar’ of an increasing range of objects and activities of everyday life. Read through Stiegler Code/space echoes his formidable challenge for conducting ‘digital studies‘. Kitchin and Dodge invite us to study (and offer the analytical tools to do so) the ongoing, and increasingly automated, spatialisation of knowledge and the forms of space they reciprocally produce.
