Both Celeste Olaquiaga and Paul Virilio speak of a separation of time and space in the postmodern age. Olalquiaga suggests that the spaces we have created tend to rob us of time. In the mall, for instance, the shopper who, as an animal, equates the passage of time with changes in climate and scenery, can easily feel as though her time there is no more than a single moment; it is not until she exits the mall into real outdoor space that she realizes she has been living the same moment for several hours. Virilio's vision, which is both opposite and complimentary to Olalquiaga's, suggests that new revolutions in the technology of speed (a fax instead of a phone call, e-mail instead of a letter) have made the distances and surfaces of physical space irrelevant.
Physical space in Virilio's vision, like time in Olalquiaga's, is only irrelevant when one is inside the system (a mall, a movie theater, the internet). The catch to the transcendence of space and time is this: we are all still in our bodies, and we must live within the conditions of our real physical existence, even as we deny them. Virilio suggests that such constant duality leads to a splitting of human perception, a stereo reality.
Anne Balsamo describes this stereo reality in terms of a separation between mind and body. Balsamo views virtual reality in particular as "a body-free environment" where that non-organic part of the human being floats within an environment devoid of visual cues as to which way is up, devoid of gravity or the need to balance within/against it. For a more commonplace example, my mind?/eyes?/internet self? recently wandered the halls of the Louvre, while my body remained in Portland, Or., perfectly still except for a few furtive twitches of the fingers.
In homage to the medieval Christian tradition, let's for a moment imagine our dualistic existence as a separation between the body and the mind/soul (Do I achieve the afterlife every time I log on or plug in?). In this scenario, scholarly pursuits (like sociology) fit entirely within the reality of the mind, and refer only to that reality. It makes sense. Most of us accept that (post)modern pop culture is already totally self-referential. What I find interesting is that much of the literature of sociology and anthropology refers not to life (not even to life in some distant land), but to movies and comic books and MTV and metaphors from movies and comic books and MTV.
Traditionally, authors found metaphors to refer to life. Postmodern authors, every now and then, find a piece of life to refer to their metaphors, writing, with some amazement, that something "literally"(meaning actually really physically) happens. Cosmetic surgery "literally" mirrors the shape-shifting that happens in many popular comic books. What happens when the our studies of ourselves refer to pop culture, which refers to itself? Where is the link to the "real"?
The duality of our current vision leaves us to picture the future as a series of either/or scenarios. We are either mind or body, the human race will find either the freedom of a global community (heaven) or the wrenching disembodiment of total incorporation into the system (hell). Always this separation, where parts of us must go in different directions, causing a sort of car sickness of the soul. What if, literally and metaphorically, just for a moment, we unplastered our hands from our eyes and watched the road?
In the following analysis, I would like to explore some of the ways in which we perceive and shape the (real, physical, fall on it and it hurts) space around us, and how that space shapes the way we relate--or don't relate--to one another. What do the spaces with which we surround ourselves say to/about/for us as postmodern human beings? If we were to make those spaces say something else, what would it be?
Back before Europeans had the money or the inspiration to traipsing about in the "spirit of exploration", their maps had fewer lines. The old scrolls were not drawn with the aim of including every place that existed. The cartographers drew the places they knew and the places they thought were important, and filled all the space in between with monsters from their imagination. Of course, as more cartographers went on more voyages, maps got more complicated. Once the great European explorers started bumping into one and other in foreign lands, the dividing lines between the important places became as integral to world maps as the places themselves. Like new families moving into suburbia, explorer/conquerors drew lines around themselves that had little or nothing to do with the original inhabitants or the physical geography of the land; drawn and redrawn millions of times over the past several hundred years, these lines of territorial demarcation mean less than they used to.
In the face of radio and television waves and worldwide trading empires and particularly cyberspace paths that allow some transcendent part of the mind to travel the globe without actually touching the ground, the lines of any nation-state start to seem fragile, perhaps obsolete. The necessary reconceptualization of territorial dividing lines is expressed most clearly in condensed world maps which often appear on the cover of the New Yorker. Like its very early predecessors, this map marks what is conceptually important rather than what is physically present.
The reconceptualization of physical space coincides with the spatialization of cultural concepts. As the lines of the nation-state disappear in favor of more fluid realities, the "objective" study of subjective culture begins using word maps in a last-ditch effort to give itself a more concrete existence.
All this mapping of words is a feeble but interesting attempt to counteract another literary trend: constant reference to literary/imaginary/mediated cultural phenomena as if they were physically real. As I said before, sociological and anthropological literature refers to pop culture, and pop culture refers to itself. So where is the link to the real? Perhaps it is closer than we think.
Postmodern authors are mapping the literary/imaginary/mediated as if it were real. What if, just for a moment, we imagine that they're on the right track. What if this cyberspace thing really is enabling a real-ization of formerly imaginary worlds? Are we willing to face these new worlds just as we faced the new world of the thirteenth century, with a pencil and piece of graph paper? The end of the nation state opens up a whole host of possibilities. Do we want to face these possibilities with the same fragile solutions? Do we want to make yet another new map to be laid over the old ones, forming yet another layer of reality based on old hegemonies of power?
Clearly, I am wary of traditional cartography, but how else does one represent space? Can we even understand space without the mental crutch of our self-imposed boundary lines? If we take away the lines of the box, space is frighteningly large. Since space contains everything, there is no chance of stepping out or back somewhere to gain perspective. There is no mountain high enough to give us a Gods-eye view of everything.
The vastness of space unboxed can give us perspective on one thing: the constructedness of our own spaces. Seeing our creations for what they are could empower us to recreate them in more constructive ways. Even if we're not ready to contemplate the universe in its entirety, a quick glance every now and then might inspire us to re-shape our little part of it in a more innovative image.