Weekly Post 2: The Production of Space
On page 19 of the Farman reading, it is stated that one can not imagine a body without space. I won’t dispute that. What I wonder, though, is if people can or do conceptualize themselves or others in digital communications as sensory without body. The emphasis on dislocation is noted in that same session, and it leads me to question if we have not reached the ultimate separation between body and space, one in which the component of the body – at least on the receiving end – is eliminated from the process. Particularly when it comes to exclusively online communications, can we conceptualize someone who we have never met as another body, or ourselves as one to them?
On pages 23 and 24 of Farman, the nature of bodies as being produced by culture is brought up. While virtual spaces are definitely places of culture, they often become places in which traditional cultural norms are opposed and clashes occur between the culture of the physical world and that of the virtual, to put it crudely. Is this virtual culture distinct, if not completely separated, from culture in the physical world, or is it possible that this plays into a Durkheimian notion of these virtual places becoming the anointed places where incremental social change is vented through and takes place in.
In reading about Thrift’s inspiration on the body, I have begun to wonder if the “gap” that Lefebvre claims philosophy has placed between the mind and the body is, in fact, bridged by culture. Thrift discusses the implications of a body that consists of both the biological and the cultural, and in my own studies I have been taught and have confirmed on its own merits that culture is a lens of sorts through which we view the world. Is it possible that it is this quality that allows the conscious mind to interpret and embody itself in the spaces – physical or otherwise – that it occupies?
Definitions:
Cartesian: In reading through Farman’s work and his discussion of dislocation, the notion of Cartesian thought is brought forth again. While I don’t think that the definition itself has changed, Farman provides an interesting example of the idea retaining popular appeal if not philosophically, then practically and subconsciously.
Body: The “body” can be defined in the most simple of senses as an individual’s physical form and any of its extensions (piercings, prosthetics, etc.). In a more complex manner, though, I believe it could be argued that the body it any means through which one embodies themselves in a world, and it is possible for a person to have one or more bodies based on the spaces in which they become embodied.