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Detailed Chapter Summaries

Introduction: The Politics of Visibility

This introductory chapter begins with the story of Joseph Paul Jernigan, a convicted killer whose body was donated to science and then sliced, photographed, and digitized as part of the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project (VHP). Access to this digitized body on the Internet, according to one commentator, has helped to "democratize" anatomical knowledge, making it available not just to doctors and medical students, but to anyone interested in the workings of the human body. The VHP is read through Michel Foucault's two classic works on the clinic and on the prison to raise questions about how space, technology, and the body are being reconfigured in the digital age and what impact this may have on our politics, embodied or otherwise.

1. Theorizing Spaces

The central issue of this chapter is whether and how one can characterize the apparently nonphysical, disembodied realm of cyberspace as a social space, or whether a social space presupposes a physical space in the conventional sense: that is, as an embodied geographic space, where people meet in the flesh. The chapter begins by outlining how space has come to be retheorized--as a produced and mutually constitutive element of society--in recent efforts by radical geographers to integrate space in their social theories. Henri Lefebvre's work provides a suggestive framework for understanding and analyzing the production of social space, specifically, as the product of three spatial elements:

• the perceived realm of physical experience produced and reproduced through spatial practices (physical space)
• the conceived realm of mental experience constructed in and through dominant representations of space (mental space)
• the lived realm of social experience in everyday spaces of representation (lived space)

This is followed by a more explicit discussion, following Foucault, of the relationship between discourse and social space and, in particular, of other spaces (what Foucault called heterotopia) in which existing spatial discourses seem to be thrown into question. Heterotopia aren't simply given, discrete spaces; rather, the term describes a relational space, a space that is heterotopic (or other) in relation to some adjacent, nearby, or overlapping space. The concept is developed further both as a general approach towards understanding the role of space in social change and as a more specific way of understanding the potential challenges that electronically mediated spaces pose for embodied spaces. In the final section, these interrelated theories of produced social spaces and other spaces are applied to a preliminary discussion of virtual spaces:  that is, to an understanding of the spatiality of cyberspace.

2. Democratic Utopias

This chapter proffers a critical rereading of democratic theories in a way that foregrounds their spatial strategies. It begins with two classic examples of efforts to "scale democracy": the elitist republican doctrine of James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 and the more egalitarian doctrine of participatory democracy outlined in "The Port Huron Statement" of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Despite their apparent differences, the analysis shows how these spatial strategies presuppose a rather fixed set of relationships between physical space and political identity, assuming that democratic politics is always best realized when people can actually meet face to face in small settings. Ironically, despite their pessimistic conclusions regarding contemporary technologies, the public-realm theories of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, as is shown in the third and fourth sections of this chapter, conceptualize this dynamic in more suggestive ways, providing the basis for a more nuanced understanding of the bodiless seductions of cyberspace.

3. Hardware and Software: A Techno-Topography of Cyberspace

Cyberspace is composed of three elements that may be treated as equivalent to the spatial elements of Henri Lefebvre's triad for the production of social space:

• hardware (physical space)
• software (mental space)
• wetware (lived space)

An important emphasis of this study, however, is that cyberspace is not just another social space like those we embody, but also that it is an other space, generating confusions in relation to our embodied spaces. Heterotopia, as Foucault argued, bring together objects that don't belong together in the same nonsensical space. So two questions recur throughout this analysis of cyberspace as heterotopia:

1. Which mismatched elements clash together here?
2. How do they impact on more familiar ground?

The story told here unfolds as a kind of chronological topography of this other space. Focusing on the technological makeup of cyberspace (the hardware and software components in the triad noted above), this chapter analyzes its physical and conceptual production through three successive episodes in technical innovations--electronic computing, networking, and personal computing--and the spatial confusions they have helped to generate:

• Bit Space (atom/electron): As a first step, electronic computing gave rise to bit space: an intermingling of the physical space of hard circuitry (atoms) and the logical space of soft data (electronic bits), whose electromagnetic and symbolic properties have yielded different spatial practices and representations of space than those shaping the more conventional spaces of matter.
• Network Space (here/there): The development of networking technology helped extend bit space beyond geographic bounds, compressing physical distances through the creation of a web-like network space that juxtaposed the here and there, bringing researchers at remote institutional sites together in a common, virtual workspace.
• Cyber Space (individual/institutional): Lastly, with the invention of relatively inexpensive, single-user, personal computers, individuals have gained access to a kind of technological power that formerly only institutional users had enjoyed. It is out of this final intermixing of institutional and individual practices--superimposed on the atom/electron mix of bit space and the here/there mix of network space--that what can minimally be called cyberspace finally emerges.

Having discussed the technological basis of cyberspace in the first three sections, the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the cultural origins of the term cyberspace: significantly, as a literary construct, coined by novelist William Gibson, that proffered a rather depressing image of a computerized future where everyone traffics in information and greedy multinational corporations tend to call the shots. These concluding remarks heighten the sense that something more is needed to explain the current optimism about cyberspace:  i.e., that to understand how it has evolved into a democratically empowering social space, we need as well to consider what people actually do when they go online, which is the focus of the next chapter.

4. Wetware: An Ethno-Topography of Cyberspace

The technology may have enabled some productive confusions between atoms and electrons, here and there, and the institutional and the individual. When people go online and actually do things, however, these ambiguities find political expression. They become socially and politically significant confusions, constituting cyberspace as, at once and ambivalently, disciplinary and anarchic, dossier-like and anonymous, (inter)personal and impersonal, sociable and yet faceless. This chapter claims that what makes cyberspace so challenging (i.e., heterotopic) is the co-existence of many incongruous types of online practices and the different identities (or senses of self) they enable. Three broad sets of practices are explored:

• Surveillance: The chapter begins with a discussion of governmental and corporate users, focusing primarily on their institutional practices of surveillance and the senses of alienated identity that data processing entails.
• Hacking: The analysis then turns to a discussion of the first individual users of computers and the hacker ethic that inspired their irreverent practices, noting, in particular, the politics of concealed identity (or better, anonymity) they have promoted.
• Computer Conferencing: Finally, the chapter explores the implications of the expansion of computer use to a wider variety of non-technical individuals communicating online by posting messages to conferencing groups and sometimes creating alternative virtual personae and even virtual communities.

Each of these types of practices have contributed, in competing ways, to the construction, growth, and further development of cyberspace as a distinct counter-site that challenges many of the traditional categories according to which we have understood our spaces, our technologies, our bodies, and by implication, our selves.

For some observers, the crux of the challenge that cyberspace poses is in offering a spatiality that excludes the body. This claim is addressed at some length in the final section, considering the implications of being bodiless for our notions of political agency and citizenship. This study argues, however, that it is not bodilessness alone that matters, but rather the coexistence of both embodying and disembodying practices that makes the experience of going online that much more indeterminate and that, in turn, gives rise to competing political efforts to make cyberspace more safe. As this suggests, the issue is not which of these identity constructs relates to democratic politics in the truest sense (whatever that might mean), but rather what different kinds of socially lived spaces, types of politics, and forms of power are enabled by the confusing mix of these practices in cyberspace.

5. Hacking Cyberspace

Michel Foucault tells us that apparatuses of security are one of the conditions of possibility for democracy in the modern era, enabling the production of what Sandy Stone has called "the politically apprehensible citizen." The topographies in the previous two chapters also revealed, however, that the physical, conceptual, and experiential spatiality that is cyberspace can complicate such political apprehensions; not simply by making embodied individuals invisible on the Internet (a notion that oversimplifies the issue), but rather by confounding the wider array of familiar distinctions (e.g., presence/absence, body/persona, off-line/online) through which we have tended to understand what we see and what we do not see, who we are, where we are, and the communities to which we belong. This effectively makes the Internet a space of politics.

Foucault’s notion of governmentality suggests, secondly, that democracy should be studied as the effect of particular discourses of power. But what happens when his notion of heterotopia is thrown into this kind of analysis? It is worth recalling that for Foucault, a heterotopia is a kind of nonsensical space, a space-between where discourses fail because it metonymically names "this and that" without privileging either. The point, of course, is that under particular conditions, other spaces may be produced that make our apparatuses of security insecure, disrupting a socio-spatial order. If heterotopias confuse by metonymically mixing incongruous objects in nonsensical ways, then one way of attenuating their incongruities is through a kind of metaphorical (re)ordering of spaces that privileges one space (the familiar) over the other (the unfamiliar), reestablishing order by reinstating a norm. What this means, in effect, is that the Internet is not simply a space of politics but a disturbing counter-site that generates, in turn, a politics of space. This chapter is concerned with providing a more focused account of cyberspace and democracy in both of these senses.

The U.S. encryption debate is a particularly illustrative focal point for this sort of analysis. A significant part of that debate has taken place online, which relates to questions about the sorts of spaces that computer networking makes possible for debate and deliberation by an informed, democratic public. In other words, to the extent that the Internet has become a site for staging this public debate about encryption, it has been produced as a space of politics. At the same time, encryption is a new kind of political problem made possible by the development of personal computing, the Internet, and related developments in cryptography. Encryption refers to the technical capacity to conceal one's electronic documents and even one's identity by scrambling messages. As such, it directly concerns the conditions of possibility for anonymity, personal security, and political dissension in the context of the pervasive visibility engendered by state and corporate mechanisms for surveillance and control. In this respect, encryption also draws attention to a politics of space:  specifically, of the radical implications of a bodiless space and the challenges it poses to different kinds of political actors.

The metaphors of "the Information Superhighway" and "the Electronic Frontier" have been proffered by participants on both sides of the encryption debate as putatively neutral, competing descriptions of cyberspace. Rather than unbiased representations of space, however, these metaphors constitute prescriptive blueprints for how cyberspace should be developed further. That these ideas occasionally have been defended by making appeals to democracy is a cental focus of this chapter. The analysis shows that, ultimately, these blueprints evoke very thin commitments to issues of universal access, participation, accountability, and responsibility:  i.e., to those very issues that for many theorists constitute a more participatory form of democracy.

Conclusion: Cybertopia and the Demos

To those concerned with realizing the positive aspects of "a new Athenian Age of democracy" for virtual spaces ("cybertopia") and the self-governing publics who produce them ("the demos"), this study offers a systematic method and vocabulary for understanding what that promise entails and how we fall short of it.

The analysis concludes by returning to space, technology, and the body as core concepts of political analysis. Significant issues have been raised by focusing on how these three elements interrelate, revealing important areas for further research.

• Space: democratic theory, in particular, needs to take a spatial turn, analysing spaces as socially produced and as engendering new kinds of practices, with often mixed implications for democratic participation and public communication.
• Technology: assessments of the implications of technology for democracy must be specific about the kind of technology being evaluated, paying close attention to the spatial characteristics of that technology and implications of proposed policies (like the National Information Infrastructure).
• Body: theorists have been ambivalent about the body quite frankly because they have feared the repercussions of admitting certain bodies into the political realm. Ultimately, what is seductive about the bodiless exultation of cyberspace is that it trades on the liberal utopian fantasy of having a safe, disembodied space as a bulwark against the embodied power of the masses pressing their demands in public not by reasoned debate but by demonstration. If this is, indeed, what underlies ambivalence towards the body in democratic theory, the study questions whether and to what extent democratic theorists should uphold these (liberal) exclusions.