Topology and informational societies

"A cultural politics of information thus also implies a renewed and intense struggle around the definition of the limits and alternatives that identify the potential for change and transformation" (25).

"An informational space is inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic: one cannot simply observe it, but becomes almost unwittingly overpowered by it. It is not so much a three-dimensional, perspectival space where subjects carry out actions and relate to each other, but a field of displacements, mutations and movements that do not support the actions of a subject, but decompose it, recompose it and carry it along" (37).

A conception of information that links it to probability, specifically to probable outcomes, requires that the field in which this information is calculated or transmitted be stable-- homogeneous. I'm reminded here (as always) of Derrida's engagement with the supposedly homogeneous field of communication and of our Foucault reading. I'm not confident I can fully engage with Deleuze and Guattari's heterogeneous assemblages, but am thinking about de- and reterritorialization as well as lines of flight in the rhizome with regard to the internet. I was interested in Terranova's interest in the space and materiality of information (topos, milieu?)-- how information societies and globalization are connected, Swatch internet time, IP addresses, the grid. Limits and possibilities would seem to imply space-- how is control constituted as a scramble for space?

Invoking Manuel Castells, she writes, "the network makes explicit the dynamics by which a globally connected elite is coming to dominate and control the lives of those who remain bound to the world of locality, thus reinforcing a 'structural domination of the space of flows over the space of places" (43).

"If a structural domination of the space of flows (the global) over that of places (the local) exists, together with attendant forms of cultural imperialism, it is one that does not deny the fluidity of places as such, their constitution as local reservoirs endowed with a productive capacity for difference" (49).

On the same page: homogenizing (global) and heterogenizing (local).

"A piece of information spreading throughout the open space of the network is not only a vector in search of a target, it is also a potential transformation of the space crossed that alays leaves something behind - a new idea, a new affect (even an annoyance), a modification of the overall topology. Information is not simply transmitted from point A to point B: it propagates and by propagation it affects and modifies its milieu" (51).

On space also, pp. 63-71. Sadie Plant resonates here.

Ultimately I would like to discuss what is or isn't material about information and what is or isn't material about real or virtual space. How is something like the internet deterritorialized? What constitutes a moment of reterritorialization? How does the internet constitute itself in time, and how does adapting to this technology transform the way human beings think about identity and their duration in time? Finally, how does technology determine what thoughts about space and time are possible? How does it determine the scale of the global and the local? If there is no homogeneous space, just an openness through which packets find their way, what is the not-homogeneity of that space if not nothing?

Terranova's use of Deleuze and Guattari's terminology interested me in that it made their concepts seem legible and clear, partly by establishing referents for these concepts. Her assertion that "[it] is not about signs, but about signals" recalls Langlois' explication of Deleuze and Guattari's "regimes of signs" (Terranova 16, Langlois 60). For Langlois, the signs are not primarily linguistic, but there is still an interest in meaning-making and circulations of meaning-production through networks.

In contrast, Terranova's text enacts its content. Terranova writes that, in the contemporary moment, and working from a definition of information where one seeks to establish a contact by transmitting information as a differentiation of signal from noise, redundancy is integral to ensuring that information can survive the potential interferences it may undergo. My repeated remark to myself while reading this text was that it was "so clear." Terranova's stylistic moves made it possible to get that this signaled neither that an especially persuasive rhetoric was at play nor that Terranova had written a text expressing a particular truth that was legible and graspable because it was a good representation of what was out there (see page 24). Rather, the content was graspable because similar phrases expressing the same thesis showed up repeatedly in the text, an enactment of the very redundancy to which she refers.