Spatial Machinations
Nice video offering an overview of the Programmable City project (funded by the European Research Council):
The video recordings of the two panel sessions for the Provocations of the Present event at the OU earlier this month have been posted online (links at the bottom of this page). The event was an enjoyable opportunity to engage with a range of contemporary concerns in cultural geography and a moment of reflection on the politics of such concerns – refracted through engagements with Doreen Massey’s work (it was, after all, the ‘6th annual Doreen Massey event’) and Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning (which, as Phil Crang observed, is in its ‘silver jubilee’ year, having been published 25 years ago).
The panelists were asked to offer a ‘provocation’ in advance of the event that would be posted to the Geography Matters Facebook page in order to promote discussion. We were instructed to write short provocations that made punchy points – a difficult task for a wordy academic(!) but this is my contribution:
All culture is in some way technical: it is an expression of technicity, understood as the ways in which technologies (in their broadest sense) are intimately enfolded into our experience of the world. How does this challenge or (re)configure understandings of ‘the human’ in human geographies? What kinds of politics does such an understanding of culture either reveal or elide?
In the talk I gave at the actual event I developed some of these themes in two ways: first, I asked how contemporary forms of mediation might prompt cultural geographers to think about popular culture and the ways we study it; and: second, I questioned what kinds of assumptions about ‘the human’ are we making when we talk about the ‘non-human’ or the ‘post-human’, and how does this influence how we talk about technology in relation to culture.
So, Ã propos of nothing apart from making this text do something more than be read aloud, here is what was basically a script of my talk:
Provocation:
As the introduction to the event highlights, in the conclusion to Maps of Meaning Peter Jackson offers the provocation that continues to resonate in contemporary debates around cultural geography, whether we are debating affect and emotion, identity and difference or the human and non-human:
If cultural geography is to be revitalised, … ‘It can only be by an engagement with the contemporary intellectual terrain – not to counter a threat, but to discover an opportunity’ (Jackson 1989: 180; Stedman Jones 1983: 24).
I want to address the kinds of discovery we might engage in, and in particular focus on two ‘provocative’ questions about what counts in the study of cultural geography. These carry with them the implications of the earlier provocation I was invited to post to Facebook that: all culture is in some way technical: it is an expression of technicity, understood as the ways in which technologies (in their broadest sense) are intimately enfolded into our experience of the world.
So, the first question I will pose is in relation to ideas about popular culture; and the second is in relation to the status of the human in cultural (human) geography.
My first provocation, then, is: should cultural geography be more vulgar? Which can be phrased differently as: how might we better accommodate geographies of ‘popular culture’ in our cultural geographies?
In a recent essay on the recurring accusation of ‘vulgar Marxism’, Makenzie Wark articulates several ways in which the epithet of vulgar gets used and I want to discuss a couple here.
First, vulgarians too readily align themselves with the interests of the working class, or to put it in Clive Barnett’s words, “the implication is that, by even suggesting that there may be some relationship between the higher things in life (opera, literature, fine wine and so on) and base considerations like work, causal explanation itself is guilty of bad taste”.
Second, vulgarians don’t think in great revolutionary leaps but rather in more modest durations. We might think here about the mundane and the everyday, and the micro- spatio-temporalities of repetitive and taken for granted tasks.
What then, might it mean to do ‘vulgar’ cultural geography?
One might argue that the first twenty-something years of ‘new’ cultural geography are founded on readings: reading various landscapes and other spatial formations as texts – as the Duncan’s and others asked of us in the late 1980s. This, of course, speaks to a particular understanding of the medium and the expression of culture: a deliberative cogitation on particular constellations of meaning. One might argue that this implicitly goes hand-in-hand with a particular aesthetics of literature, when asked to ‘read’ landscapes it is analogous to reading Charles Dickens or Milan Kundera, and not Dan Brown or EL James. We apparently ought to aspire to an ‘unbearable lightness’ and not ‘fifty shades’ of cultural geography.
To attend to the everyday and to the popular one might suggest that different media and forms of expression of culture can become more suitable analogies. What does it mean to think in terms of television, radio, the smart phone and the tablet? So, perhaps a range of different sensibilities of watching, listening or touching needs to be added to reading. Such sensibilities might be more accommodating to recent proposals of atmospheres, not least by Ash and Anderson, in addition to landscapes of meaning and sensation. I am thinking in particular here of recent work by geographers that has been described as post-phenomenological (for example, see Ash & Simpson’s forthcoming piece in Progress in Human Geography).
Our techniques for thinking are intimately tied to the mediums through which we express thought and so, to pursue the metaphor, as increasingly ‘multimedia’ scholars we might well supplement the reading of landscapes as text with the watching of, listening to and touching forms of spatial experience as image and sound and haptics.
The subtitle to this event: what culture for what geography? Is for me pregnant with an additional question, so my second point of provocation is the question what do we mean by the “human” in human geography as it is discussed today? and in particular how might this relate to the various ways in which we figure things as not or perhaps after whatever it is we mean by human?
We have all variously framed our research in relation to different formulations of ‘the human’ – humanistic geographies, and their critique; the non-human; the post-human, but the category of the human can still be left as assumed. Such assumptions behind this prefixed ‘human’ condition and constitute how we understand and describe experiences of spatiality. So, this strikes at the heart of a key, ongoing, concern for cultural geography and the contribution we as cultural geographers can continue make.
Specifically, I want to raise this in terms of the implications of our various uses of the non-human, the post-human and invocations of technology.
As others, including Castree and Nash, have observed the assumptions that ‘the human’ carries with it are expressed in binaries – the normative human and its others. Nevertheless, by proposing a prefixed, non- and post- human we risk slipping back into reaffirming the category of the ‘bracketed off’ or ‘exceptional’ human, and so need to remain vigilant.
In particular, technology has been packaged up into the ‘non-human’ and particularly ‘post-human’ whereby the implication is that particular kinds of technology are entirely separate from us, humans, and can be seen to have ‘effects’ upon us and our societies. This is acutely evident in relation to digital technologies through forms of spatial imagination that can imply servitude to an autonomous and powerful technical master on the one hand and a gateway to the transcendence of material form on the other. While geographers have been rightly critical of these simplistic binaries of human/technical, there remains a common habit of referring to technologically mediated activities as somehow extra-spatial, as virtual, in contra-distinction to a ‘real’.
I have argued recently in Progress in Human Geography that, rather than propagating a peculiar human exceptionalism, we can understand ‘the human’ and technology as existing in a co-constitutive relation that can be called ‘technicity‘. There isn’t the one without the other. So, for example, rather than appeal to an amorphous alternate realm from which digital technologies draw their agency, we can instead study the particular spatial formations in which agency and technicity are generated.
Geography is, in this way, well placed to inform and enhance social scientific research concerning digital technologies, particularly in relation to the articulation of spatial experience and knowledge.
Over on our nice shiny new website for the Contagion project, the PI, Professor Steve Hinchliffe, has written a timely blogpost concerning the formations and formulations of concerned publics with regard to the 2013 ‘pilot’ cull of badgers in the South West of England.
In the blogpost Steve highlights the social networking analysis being undertaken as a part of the broader Contagion project, through some interesting case studies, to work through how we can understand the data available in relation to particular issues, the tools that can be used to interrogate them, and the theoretical frames we can use to epistemologically anchor and deepen what can be said about these data.
Steve is also writing, in part, in response to a recent presentation/report by the IpsosMORI Social Research Unit, who are engaging in research around ‘social listening’, which focuses on fracking and the badger cull. The social network analysis undertaken by the Contagion project team arguably deepens and nuances the broad brushstrokes of the temporal analysis undertaken by IpsosMORI and highlights the messiness of the ‘modularity’ of the network convened around the topic of concern – the badger cull. As Steve suggests:
…issues are performed or issue-led publics are generated in ways that involve a key role for social media and for twitter in particular. What we are starting to explore is how those publics are constituted – they aren’t always partisan, they tend to be heterogeneous rather than homogeneous (a standard assumptiion in social network theory is that people of like minds clump together, but this homophilly as it is called, is not so clear cut in public issues – clumping is somewhat conditional on other relations and roles). Moreover, there are suggestions here of key actors and sub-groups that confound any simple sense that social media simply relays a message – communication is messier than that. There is a roughness or spatiality to the social.
Following on from the publication of my article in Progress in Human Geography, I wanted to post here some thoughts that didn’t quite fit into that paper but nevertheless feel like a worthwhile contextualisation of the long-running engagement with digital mediation and ideas of a ‘virtual’ or ‘cyber-‘ spaces in geography.
Discussions of alternative or transformed forms of spatiality constituted by computation have spawned a range of names and phrases for those spatial formations. As Pile argued, the descriptions of ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the virtual’ are ‘a plurality of clashing, resonating and shocking metaphors’ (Pile, 1994, page 1817). In this post I want to begin to discuss the malleable nature of our descriptions of computation, data and software. In particular it seems pertinent to examine the role of metaphors and how some geographers have addressed that role. Sawhney (1996) describes metaphors as ‘midwives’ that ease new conceptualisations of spatial experience into understanding. However, metaphors that constitute discourses are not politically neutral. If metaphors ‘do things’ as Lakoff and Johnson (2003) assert, what they ‘do’ needs to be explicitly examined.
Paul Adams, Stephen Graham and Ken Hillis all offer examinations of the role of metaphors in understanding the spatial experience of ICTs that are worth revisiting (see also: Graham, 2013):
First, Adams’ (1997) useful review of metaphors in literary treatments of computer mediation identifies three, overlapping, ‘fields’ of metaphors: ‘virtual architecture’, ‘the electronic frontier’ and ‘cyberspace’. Adams argues that, despite fears concerning ‘a metaphor’s power to corrupt’ (1997, page 167), such ‘mythical geographies’ fill in the spaces between established knowledge to form what Tuan calls the ‘fuzzy area of defective knowledge’ (Tuan, 1977, page 86).
Second, Hillis (1999) highlights a background of mysticism to metaphors utilised to describe and explore virtual reality as a ‘cyberspace’. For Hillis, many of the metaphors draw upon understandings of light. Hillis (1999) offers three types of metaphor: virtual reality as a privileged position affording ‘vision’; virtual environments as facsimiles or simulations represented through light, akin to Plato’s shadows on the cave wall, and the virtual as an ability to inhabit images as such. Both Adams (1997) and Hillis (1999) postulate a link between the types of metaphors used and the desire to affirm an elevated or omniscient perspective, drawing upon the remote gaze as a tool of imperialism (akin to Virilio, 1984) or the near-omnipotent reach of light to illustrate that desire.
Third, Graham describes the ‘powerful role of spatial and territorial metaphors’ that anchors discourses of ICTs (Graham, 1998, page 165). Graham (1998) identifies a typology of spatial metaphors through which space and place are conceptualised in relation to ICTs: ‘substitution and transcendence’, ‘co-evolution’, and ‘recombination’. Metaphors of substitution and transcendence, echoing Hillis’ (1999) critique, denote replacing physical territory with a ‘virtual’ using new technologies. A co-evolutionary perspective argues that, while remaining separate, both physical and electronic ‘spaces’ are necessarily produced together.
Finally Graham (1998) posits a re-combinative, topological, understanding of socially constructed forms of spatiality that are ‘sociotechnical’ (i.e. linkages between ‘heterogeneous’ actors, including humans, technology and others, formulate spatial experience). Graham (1998), along with Adams and Hillis, identifies the problematic form of Cartesian dualism (a mind/body split) implied by his first category, which also somewhat underlies the second, and the uncritical technological determinism that often accompanies this somewhat fanciful race away from our embodied existence.
Regardless of the apparently ephemeral or amorphous nature of the metaphorical ‘virtual’ or ‘cyberspace’, such evocations are still grounded in a resolutely material register. As Hillis (1999, pages 160-162) notes, language itself is profoundly spatial, and material, in its expression. Writing is the spatialisation of knowledge, what philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the externalization of thought recorded as ‘tertiary retentions’ (Stiegler, 2007), most frequently orthographic writing (see: Stiegler, 1998), with different technologies of retention using space differently. The expression of ‘virtual’ spaces is, then, always already material in character. Hillis, in an argument similar to Stiegler (1998), presses further, highlighting the reciprocal, yet fragmented, relation between word and world:
language is not only a discrete, concrete thing”¦ Neither is it ephemeral, language can be thought of as an “embodied prototechnology”, both confirming us to ourselves existentially at the level of embodied voice and extending us to engage with the lived world through its symbolic affect (Hillis, 1999, page 161).
Metaphors and neologisms are, of course, not the sole preserve of geographers or, indeed, academics. Of course, much of this work speaks to broader popular (Western), late 20th century interests in ‘telematic culture’ (Ascott, 1990), the creation of ‘artificial experience’ and ‘virtual communities’ (Rheingold, 1989, 1998), and the convergence of subaltern cultures experimenting with drugs and computing (Rushkoff, 1994). Alternative, less dyadic, conceptualisations of a ‘virtual’ are also offered by geographers considering the growth of digital mediation. Although perhaps now considered somewhat dated, we might note that ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtual space’ has not been solely evoked as an abstract alternative realm, as Kitchin (1998) has argued:
Cyberspaces are dependent upon spatial fixity, they are embodied spaces and access is unevenly distributed”¦ cyberspaces do not replace geographic spaces, nor do they destroy space and time (page 403).
Following Adams (1997, 2011), Graham (1998, 2005), Hillis (1999) and Kitchin (1998, 2011; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) we can see how, and perhaps why, metaphors and neologisms are used to describe computer-mediated spatial experience and also how geographers have situated the agency of those terms. Earlier engagements with computation were necessarily speculative and concerned with formulating understandings of nascent or imagined technologies. However, in the last decade the growth in ownership of digital technologies has created case studies of widespread everyday use. Some of these case studies are explored in my recently published article ‘The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies‘.
Some references
Adams, Paul C., 1997, “Cyberspace and virtual places” Geographical Review 87 (2), pp. 155-171.
Adams, Paul C., 2011, “A taxonomy for communication geography” Progress in Human Geography 35 (1), pp. 37-57.
Ascott, Roy, 1990, “Is there love in the telematic embrace?” Art Journal 49 (3), pp. 241-247.
Graham, Mark, 2013, “Geography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities?” The Geographical Journal forthcoming.
Graham, Stephen, 1998, “The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualising space, place and information technology” Progress in Human Geography 22 (2), pp. 165-185.
Graham, Stephen, 2005, “Software-sorted geographies” Progress in Human Geography 29 (5), pp. 562-580.
Hillis, Ken, 1999 Digital sensations: space, identity and embodiment and virtual reality. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Kitchin, Rob, 1998, “Towards geographies of cyberspace” Progress in Human Geography 22 (3), pp. 385-406.
Kitchin, Rob, 2011, “The programmable city” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 38 (6), pp. 945-951.
Kitchin, Rob, Dodge, Martin, 2011 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 2003 Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Pile, Steve, 1994, “CyberGeography: 50 years of Environment and Planning A” Environment and Planning A 26 (12), pp. 1815-1823.
Rheingold, Howard, 1989 Virtual Reality: Exploring the Brave New Technologies of Artificial Experience and Interactive Worlds – From Cyberspace to Teledildonics. Mandarin, London.
Rheingold, Howard, 1998 The Virtual Community. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Rushkoff, Douglas, 1994 Cyberia: Life in the trenches of hyperspace Flamingo, London.
Sawhney, H, 1996, “Information superhighway: metaphors as midwives” Media, Culture and Society 18 pp. 135-155.
Stiegler, Bernard, 1998 Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. trans. Beardsworth, R., Collins, G., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Stiegler, Bernard, 2007, “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: The Memories of Desire”.) Technicity. Charles University Press, Prague, pp. 15-41.
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1977 Space and Place: The prespective of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Virilio, Paul, 1984 War and Cinema: The logistics of perception. trans. Camiller, P., Verso, London and New York.
Last year I wrote about 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 published in issue 3 of volume 38. 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.
Kay Anderson gave the Cultural Geographies lecture at the 2013 AAG conference offering a reading post-humanist work in human geography and pushing theorisations of what is or counts as ‘human’ in human geography. Anderson also points to the ways in which the ‘materialist turn’ intersects with culture-nature work within geography and the ways this has expanded the ontological remit of more-than-human geographies. Worth a watch, for those (like me) who missed the conference…
Also, worth thinking about how this work intersects with the ways in which interrogations of material politics are being pursued particularly in (British) human geography e.g. the Politics & Matter group and work on ‘immunitary geographies‘.
Via ANTHEM.
I will be participating in the joint OU/RHUL workshop, which is the 6th annual Doreen Massey event, concerning how we can continue to think about how we bring together issues of culture and politics through the engagement between geography and social theory. Should be a stimulating day!
Friday, 6 June 2014, 10:00 – 17:00 The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
The Geography Departments of the Open University and Royal Holloway, University of London are delighted to announce that the 6th Doreen Massey Annual Event will take place on Friday 6 June 2014 at the Open University in Milton Keynes. This year’s theme is the role of cultural geography in the contemporary moment.
In his book Maps of Meaning (1989) Peter Jackson set out an agenda for the ‘new cultural geography’ that was firmly committed to bringing together issues of culture and politics through an engagement between geography and cultural theory. In the 25 years since its publication cultural geography has, arguably, come to dominate human geography. Theorisations of production of culture as production of space have formed the basis for addressing a variety of ‘issues’ including race, gender, nation, nature and culture.
Today those provocations for culturally attuned spatial thinking have been significantly reframed. Issues such as the environment, mobility, globalisation, liberalisation, security, sexuality and cultural intolerance have become more prominent political issues while other concerns have faded away. Cultural geography has also transformed, as too have the media and modalities of politics and political debate. How do we understand culture within this context and what is the role of cultural geography in the politics of the present? How will geography as a discipline be shaped by cultural geography? This event brings together some of the key thinkers in cultural geography in order to address these questions. As Peter Jackson said back in 1989:
If cultural geography is to be revitalised, … , ‘it cannot be by the defensive reiteration of well tried and by now well worn formulae. It can only be by an engagement with the contemporary intellectual terrain – not to counter a threat, but to discover an opportunity’(Jackson 1989: 180; Stedman Jones 1983: 24).
| 10.00 – 10.30: | Coffee and registration |
| 10.30 – 11.30: | Panel presentations (Societies/Economies/Cultures) |
| 11.30 – 11.45: | Coffee |
| 11.45 – 12.45: | Panel presentations (Histories/Technologies/Environments) |
| 12.45 – 13.45: | Lunch |
| 13.45 – 15.00: | Small group discussions |
| 15.00 – 15.30: | Tea |
| 15.30 – 17.00: | Plenary |
| 17:00 – 18:00: | Wine reception |
This is an opportunity for students to meet and exchange with key figures in cultural geography today.
Confirmed panellists include: Peter Adey, Phil Crang, Anindita Datta (via webcast), Mona Domosh (via webcast), Claire Dwyer, Isla Forsyth, Peter Jackson, Sam Kinsley, Pat Noxolo, George Revill, Gillian Rose, Anna Secor (via webcast), Divya Tolia-Kelly.
Parts of this event will be streamed live (the morning panel sessions and the afternoon plenary) and accessible through the Open University’s Webcast page. Those who are unable to attend in person will be able to join the live streaming and have an opportunity to submit questions that may be selected for discussion.
Registration:
Registration is free, but we ask that everyone confirms their place by filling in their details on this registration form.
Over on the excellent Programmable City blog, Prof. Rob Kitchin offers an interesting set of observations and suggestions about the kinds of writing academic social scientists (and I think particularly geographers here) engage in, how they can be received and thus what one might aim to do in the writing of an academic paper. In particular, I think Rob highlights the challenge (and implicit conflict) for the contemporary (and in particular early career) academic – to be productive and to have impact. In other words, one can read the piece as kind of saying – its all very well pumping out the papers but if you’re simply recycling other material, i.e. applying a bit of well-worn theory to a new empirical example, its not really enough.
My reading of such an argument is as a kind of implicit critique of the logic of exercises like the REF – especially if, in the future, it moves over to being driven by bibliometrics . Its all very well to be cited, but are people actually engaging with your material. This is certainly a challenge I don’t feel like I’ve cracked (and my work has only been very modestly cited)!
Anyway, for colleagues in academia (especially those who are early career), I suggest that this is definitely worth a read:
For the past few years I’ve co-taught a professional development course for doctoral students on completing a thesis, getting a job, and publishing. The course draws liberally on a book I co-wrote with the late Duncan Fuller entitled, The Academics’ Guide to Publishing. One thing we did not really cover in the book was how to write and place pieces that have impact, rather providing more general advice about getting through the peer review process.
The general careers advice mantra of academia is now ‘publish or perish’. Often what is published and its utility and value can be somewhat overlooked – if a piece got published it is assumed it must have some inherent value. And yet a common observation is that most journal articles seem to be barely read, let alone cited.
Both authors and editors want to publish material that is both read and cited, so what is required to produce work that editors are delighted to accept and readers find so useful that they want to cite in their own work?
A taxonomy of publishing impact
The way I try and explain impact to early career scholars is through a discussion of writing and publishing a paper on airport security (see Figure 1). Written pieces of work, I argue, generally fall into one of four categories, with the impact of the piece rising as one traverses from Level 1 to Level 4.
Level 1: the piece is basically empiricist in nature and makes little use of theory. For example, I could write an article that provides a very detailed description of security in an airport and how it works in practice. This might be interesting, but would add little to established knowledge about how airport security works or how to make sense of it. Generally, such papers appear in trade magazines or national level journals and are rarely cited.
Level 2: the paper uses established theory to make sense of a phenomena. For example, I could use Foucault’s theories of disciplining, surveillance and biopolitics to explain how airport security works to create docile bodies that passively submit to enhanced screening measures. Here, I am applying a theoretical frame that might provide a fresh perspective on a phenomena if it has not been previously applied. I am not, however, providing new theoretical or methodological tools but drawing on established ones. As a consequence, the piece has limited utility, essentially constrained to those interested in airport security, and might be accepted in a low-ranking international journal.
Level 3: the paper extends/reworks established theory to make sense of phenomena. For example, I might argue that since the 1970s when Foucault was formulating his ideas there has been a radical shift in the technologies of surveillance from disciplining systems to capture systems that actively reshape behaviour. As such, Foucault’s ideas of governance need to be reworked or extended to adequately account for new algorithmic forms of regulating passengers and workers. My article could provide such a reworking, building on Foucault’s initial ideas to provide new theoretical tools that others can apply to their own case material. Such a piece will get accepted into high-ranking international journals due to its wider utility.
Level 4: uses the study of a phenomena to rethink a meta-concept or proposes a radically reworked or new theory. Here, the focus of attention shifts from how best to make sense of airport security to the meta-concept of governance, using the empirical case material to argue that it is not simply enough to extend Foucault’s thinking, rather a new way of thinking is required to adequately conceptualize how governance is being operationalised. Such new thinking tends to be well cited because it can generally be applied to making sense of lots of phenomena, such as the governance of schools, hospitals, workplaces, etc. Of course, Foucault consistently operated at this level, which is why he is so often reworked at Levels 2 and 3, and is one of the most impactful academics of his generation (cited nearly 42,000 time in 2013 alone). Writing a Level 4 piece requires a huge amount of skill, knowledge and insight, which is why so few academics work and publish at this level. Such pieces will be accepted into the very top ranked journals.
One way to think about this taxonomy is this: generally, those people who are the biggest names in their discipline, or across disciplines, have a solid body of published Level 3 and Level 4 material – this is why they are so well known; they produce material and ideas that have high transfer utility. Those people who well known within a sub-discipline generally have a body of Level 2 and Level 3 material. Those who are barely known outside of their national context generally have Level 1/2 profiles (and also have relatively small bodies of published work).
It seems to be de rigueur to offer ‘smart’, compelling projects or visions of a particular kind of participation in the fabric of the contemporary city through the buzz- concepts/ words of ‘gamification’ or ‘pop-up’. I just want to offer a quick observation of the political problems that might identified with these ideas.
First, gamification proposes that what are considered to be otherwise mundane tasks should be rendered entertaining by introducing the ‘mechanics’ of a game into their operation. This seems principally to be the use of simple, reproducible functions such as attributing ‘points’ for given actions and introducing competition by creating a leaderboard. This, perhaps, in part stems from the ease with which one can, using digital media – especially through apps on mobile phones, reductively quantify a given action and then create a system for comparing those numbers. However, this is neither a meaningful representation of or intervention in those activities apparently being ‘gamified’.
At best ‘gamification’ is running a simplified (reductive) model of a system alongside given activities and pretending the two converge or at least are someway related or relevant. At worst it is the automisation of people in a servile relationship with a mechanism for data acquisition that has been integrated into a system or set of practices that they need or (used to) enjoy. For, more often than not, ‘gamification’ happens in order to facilitate the capture of information about a group of people using a system or service. In this way it can be argued that gamification is, following Ian Bogost, a form of deception. Indeed Bogost argues, following Harry Frankfurt, that if “bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce”, then “gamification is bullshit”. “Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit” (Bogost). Given this understanding of gamification, these ‘mechanics’ are not opening out participation but are rather attempting to subjugate people. The darker and more cynical end of that argument is that, in fact, gamification is a means by which you enrol people into a form of unpaid work as the producers of data desirable to the authors of the system, which is rather like what Maurizio Lazzarato has called ‘immaterial labour‘.
I am certainly not arguing against creating playful systems – I am all for systems that take play seriously, for example see Hello Lampost and other creative and playful interventions into urban experience. I delight in the unexpected and serendipitous and value things that may facilitate that, but reducing that to ‘flat pack’ suites of algorithms to be crowbarred into pre-existing systems is, for me, rather undesirable.
Second, the ‘pop-up‘ model of business is the short-term injection of a business in an otherwise unused or perhaps unusual space, for example: an empty shop or a tent on municipal green space. This is often couched as the use of otherwise ‘wasted’ spaces and perhaps an enabling of a fledgling or experimental business through low-cost accommodation. Or, as ‘Popup Britain’ has it, to: “offer a co-working, co-funded space for brands to experiment with physical retail, test the market and gain face-to-face customer feedback”. Now, shrugging off the marketing speak, these things may be true, but it seems common sense that when commercial occupancy rates climb again councils and landlords will be far less willing to provide such space, the experiments then end and the risky workers are ousted.
My main issue with this model is not the risk of post-austerity commercial revanchism (although that may well be a real risk) but the rehashing of precariousness as a good. The assumption appears to be that small or new business owners must wilfully make themselves precarious, or in the case of ‘cultural’ pop-ups that the staff should be happy to offer their services for a token cup of coffee etc., and remain precarious labour (which seems to have been the case in some of the pop-up things I’ve been in).
Now, there is a realpolitik to this – I understand that regardless of the precarity pop-ups still represent an opportunity for some artists and social enterprises that otherwise may not exist. Nevertheless, once the rents and occupancy return should these artists and social enterprises simply be expelled from the revived thoroughfares and forgotten?
So, it’s not the control and use of desirable-again spaces, that is merely symptomatic of the broader issue. ‘Pop-ups’ seem to me to be founded on the assumption that it is not only ok but desirable to create a whole class of precarious creative worker and that, rather than reward them, we should enforce that precariousness and package it as desirable.
To inject a smidgeon of theory, both ‘gamification’ and ‘pop-ups’ could be critically understood, at their worst, as strategies of ‘proletarianization‘ (following Bernard Stiegler) – a curtailment not only of skilled knowledge (savour faire), and the time to cultivate it, but also of the development of life skills (savour vivre) amongst the populace – creating unthinking consumers. A traditional Marxian critique would also possibly identify both ‘gamification’ and ‘pop-ups’ as the constitution of a form of ‘surplus labour‘ and maintaining a ‘reserve army of labour‘. This is not the realisation of a grand evil plan by the big Other, ‘the bankers’ or ‘the bourgeoisie’, but rather a logic, which has developed with and through capitalism, that we have all internalised and recapitulated and in some way indentured ourselves with.
A couple of questions arise then: Surely gamification has a limited shelf-life before it becomes passé? How long will people subject themselves to quantification and competing against one another for less-than-meaningul ‘points’? Are pop-ups simply using precarious cultural labour as window dressing for vacant shops? Both of these questions point to a third: Who or what counts in these processes and how can they be taken seriously?
It is possible to imagine creative and interesting ways of living together but, I would argue, just because certain (short-term) strategies are popular it doesn’t necessarily mean we should all jump in.
Stuart Elden points to an interesting video of a conversation with Nigel Thrift, discussing urban informatics, ‘big data’ and so on. Slight hint of Thrift buying into the rhetoric around ‘big data’ but still an interesting discussion…
Nigel Thrift, Vice Chancellor of University of Warwick, and Steven Koonin, Director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, partners in this endeavour, discussed the emerging field of applied urban science and informatics, the opportunities it presents, and how it is challenging the way we think about information. The discussion was moderated by Sallie Keller, Director, Social Decision and Analytics Laboratory, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech.