Navigating the Starless Night: Reading the Auto/bio/geography; Meaning-Making [printable version] Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman 11:13 AM, GMT -6:00; June 25th, 2002; Minneapolis, Minnesota: Caffetto, Lyndale & 22nd Street.

Introduction:

<1> Ancient mapmakers relied upon the presence of celestial bodies for their conceptualization of the world, for their external knowledge-making tools, as if a far-off body could help to make sense of our terrestial life/as if it couldn't. Cosmology, as a practice, relied on the construction of an external body of knowledge that the local meaning-maker could situate him- or herself into, and more broadly, their entire society and culture -- the interior is determined by its relationship to the exterior (or the exteriorized). For the ancient Greeks then, the font of Western culture, this cosmology works at once to legitimate the presence of humanity on this terrestrial sphere, as well as providing proof, facticity, for the mapmaker's art: Cosmology not only gives humanity a narrative of its coming into being, but also a rationale for humanity to exist as part of a whole universe. Hesiod, in his relating of the beginnings of terrestrial history, begins with Chaos, with the yawning chasm of the unfilled cosmos -- the eternal vacuum. Into this Chaos, Gaia is parthenogenically born, the first entity, as Hesiod explains that Chaos is no entity at all, but the absence of identity. But whence the earth, dialectical identity is confirmed. And Gaia firstly gives birth to Sky, to blanket her, for comfort. An into this sky, Erebos, the lightless depths of the night, and Nyx, pure night. To them is born Aither, the light of heaven, and Hemera, the day. Gaia proceeds to give birth to her terrestrial children, the mountains, the rivers and seas, the deserts, and the forested wilderness; her first concerns are creating those land-marks that humanity will come to know itself by. Both the person and the tribe, the latter a faulty category imposed by the perception of the world lived in, and the geographical barriers between people. Later, Prometheus and Epimetheus will distinguish humanity from the other animals of the Earth, but through a dependency on their lack -- as if Gaia's gift of a terrestrially founded identity was insufficient.

<2> Our contemporary, scientific cosmology insists that humanity, like all the products of the Earth, and of the cosmos, are the very same stuff that comprises the stars; that we are one and the same entity as the universe. Without embarking on New Age sentiment, it is vital to note that even our contemporary, pragmatic exercises in scientifically based identity construction rely on the supposition that eternal bodies compose, metonymically, the interior, personal body -- that selfhood is only found through a relationship, cosmological or ideological, of the self with the cosmos. The new maps that contemporary thought have provided us are simply Xeroxes of the maps of antiquity, but where once there were dragons there are nebulae.

<3> But these maps are to be burned. No longer do we have external bodies to find, to navigate; our labyrinths are internal, ideological, and imaginary. Our new cosmology is a political one, a purely theoretical one, and one that is as arbitrary as it is necessary. But in this arbitrariness, there is no need to dismantle it: Rather, these mazes of identity are to be celebrated and understood -- the endless labyrinth must become an understandable game of the self. Rather than "here be dragons," here is the cosmos writ small, a cosmos of the possibilities of subjecthood, and a cosmology of culturally inspired identity construction practices.

<4> The question of identity has been a central concern of the humanities and the social sciences, from their very inception. Only recently, with the construction of "identity politics" as an academic concern, has this discussion moved to the forefront of our conception of what intellectual pursuit can explain away for the individual. Previously, the concern with identity had been largely the province of historical biographers and psychoanalysts, but now "identity" has become a political concern, and as such, a prescient interdisciplinary one as well, as "politics" seep through the Ivory Tower. In the following, through an examination of contemporary cultural theory and its sites of contestation, we examine the construction of identity, and those texts that scholars examine for the purpose of distilling identity construction techniques, and both the explicit and implicit theories behind these formations of the self, of subjecthood.

Part One: Narrativity and (Temporal) Movement

The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other's blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define it. (de Certeau 1984, 101)

<5> Narrativity is a crystallization of speed with a purpose, it is the construction of refractive prisms of identity. The event is characterized by the movement of one present to another. Whether that presence is physical or temporal, it is always a question of différance. As opposed to the blank automation that we consider the random occurrence, or the inevitable qualities of matter, the narrative speaks to us, inscribing the blank page of physics with temporality and differences that matter. The story charts a difference from matter as material to matter as meaning, the drift from object to action. When not taken for granted, the operations of our material world are verbs by which the world of objects gain their animation.

<6> Our physical environment, the space of our everyday lives, is constituted through these same practices of telling stories. Landmarks and avenues provide the environment in which the everyday life of the story is lived. A memory of where to turn mediates the places where we end up. A process of forgetting eliminates details, for reasons both theoretical and practical. Every time one of us shuffles through a city street, willfully ignoring a panhandler or stepping around a sleeping (possibly dead) body, or gazing purposefully towards a destination, or absentmindedly at a desired item in a store window, we participate in this process of memory rooted in forgetting. How we navigate the spaces we inhabit tells a story about the world we live in. The present can only come into being through an eradication -- an editting -- of the past; the future only finds meaning through this shifting foundation.

<7> Essential to our understanding of plotlines -- in our lives and in the fictions we partake of -- is the ability to make meaningful distinctions between what matters and what doesn't, which details are crucial elements to the development of the story's action, both physical and psychological, and which are the extraneous workings of pure art, of pure chance. Many things present themselves to our consciousness in the course of a day, but only those landmark events that chart the development of our story find themselves written into our cartography. As Bernard Stiegler writes, "Memory is originarily forgetting because it is necessarily a reduction of what has occurred to the fact of being past, and therefore, it is less than the present" (2000, 84). The project of reconstructing meaningful memories from a phenomenologically dense moment of primary experience is one of distillation, the collection of spirited responses to the everyday by which events can be catalogued for retrieval in some secondary moment, some future moment of past-making, of meaning-making.

<8> This process of forgetting is pragmatic -- it would be an impossible and unending project to reconstruct one's day verbatim as a real-time storytelling event -- a life-sized map of itself, taking its own time to tell its telling (which would eternally expand to contain the time of its own telling)[1], as if, like Sherhezade on that fateful night wherein she begins to tell the her own tale, which must ultimately lead to her telling the telling of the 1,001 nights, we are libraries of recurrent, infinite babble. Instead, the story presents itself with meaningful details, landmarks, constructing a tale of action in spaces of inertia. Those things which can be taken for granted are streamlined out of the narrative, presenting us with the meaningful exceptions to those things which are assumed (accurately or inaccurately) to be a part of our milieu. The river is forgotten for the sake of the rapids. Like Heidegger's workshop[2], those quotidian articles that constitute the assumed characteristics of the story's events drift into invisibility in favor of the exceptions to these assumptions. In the art of storytelling, meaning is constructed when a meaningful detail reframes or reorganizes our initial assumptions. At key points, our relationship to the teller's milieu is situated by key details. By forgetting what we already think we know, we arrange ourselves in relation to landmarks in the space of the story, and avoid wasting time with the superfluous details. We mark the one tree in the park with our initials and those of a loved one, making it thereby special, while the others can all rot: This is forsaking the forest for a tree, but necessarily so. This specialized object gives birth to the future, for it is only in the future that we can revisit this past "moment" of marking, of meaning-making, forgetting other moments for the sake of this individual one.

<9> This process of forgetting is also a method of control, a direction of attention to details that matter and the elimination of details that may detract, redefine, or refocus the time of the story's telling. Hence the importance of de Certeau's "singular response": "one more detail -- an action, a word -- so well-placed it reverses the situation" (88, emphasis in original). For de Certeau, the common practice of telling stories and jokes as tactics of pleasure and sites of agency relies on tactical deployment of the detail so sparse and meaningful that it violates expectations, generates surprise, and radically reorients meanings which were once taken for granted. This practice amounts to a dramatic unleashing of the potential energy dammed up by the rigidity of authority.

<10> The singular response of the everyday exists in opposition to the more staid and controlled strategies of narrativity deployed in governing bodies. Consider Foucault's discussion of discourse and the ways in which systems of knowledge are erected around subjects to construct narratives of deviance. In Discipline and Punish (1975), he writes, "A whole corpus of individualizing knowledge was being organized that too has its field of reference not so much the crime committed (at least in isolation), but the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual and is observed in his everyday conduct" (126). A painfully slow and scientific process of storytelling proceeds step by step providing significant insights into the subject's history of pathology. The deviant as a special species is constructed through a meticulous process of directing one's attention to only those details that matter. It is only in those positions of différance that we can begin to narratize our lives. "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation..." And so we also begin the faulty narratization of nationhood, of geography, and the identity that promulgates from such fallow earth. As if, thence, we can begin to discuss the national character and the character of the nation. History is the process of immunizing us to the eccentricities of a specific milieu, the milieu of place in favor of ideology.

<11> But ultimately our past, whether national or personal, is the construction of continuity, and a continuity that is at once invisible and written on the self -- it is invisible for those adrift in the same milieu and glaring to those of another. We begin to narratize our lives through our accoutrements, through our objects, as if they are the constitutive elements of subjecthood. We invest our selves in our memory, metonymically, and invest our memory into the objects that comprise our identity. For Bernard Stiegler, working from Husserl, these practices constitute our three memories: 1) Primary memory is constitutive of the memory in and of itself, it is the memory as past 2) Secondary memory is the recollection of the memory, the invocation of the memory in the present, an inevitable editting of the past to comprise the present moment 3) Tertiary memory is the memory of the future, a memory of future forgetting, invested in the object in order to affect its eventual return [3]; it is those objects that are constituted through a span of moments, a flux of memories, made concrete (the sculpture, the film, the novel: choose a medium). The auto/biography is thus geography, a map of the self, and the principle tertiary object (even if it exists nowhere outside of the body itself) constructed of other tertiary objects: It is a forest of marked trees, placed in atemporal proximity to make sense, to create a narrative. Our continuities are constructed through a manifold discourse network of memory markers, of triggers that invoke the presence of the past, the inscriptions of culture within the polity of living in the world. And it is the same for the places that we inhabit: A city is nothing more to the tourist than an amalgam of its "sights" -- but then we are all tourists with our own limited itineraries.

<12> In the case of London, for Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, authors of From Hell (1999), the future was constructed through Nicholas Hawksmoor's occult architecture, imbued with the mystical legacy of the sun god, Apollo. Meant to signify humanity's rise to power (or more precisely, man's will to power), his architecture was rife with phallic symbols and discrete designs: They led, ultimately, to both the rise of the British Empire, and its eventual fall. Jack the Ripper, for Moore and Campbell, was the very catalyst to enact the future: "With these actions I give birth to the twentieth century" -- William Gull, Moore and Campbell's Jack and official doctor to the royal family, declares his intentions, and the future follows through. This is the ultimate realization of place's ability to imbue its inhabitants with a tertiary drive [4], a thrown fault that must be fallen into, and worked out of. Inasmuch as London may be a subjective space, Hawksmoor's goal was to imbue an objective drive to the architecture of the city that would enact itself through its inhabitants. The possibilities of meaning-making are necessarily circumscribed by the architecture of the environment, both explicit and implicit.

Part Two: Subjective/Objective Space

<13> In Open Sky (1997), Paul Virilio describes the interval of time and the interval of space, the traditionally understood vessels of change (12) by which our world has been organized through history and geography. These intervals, also the intervals around which Derrida's différance is organized, create rules for change in which difference can be understood to characterize a change in the material qualities of a locality or deferral can be understood to characterize a change in the temporal qualities in a locality. Time passes, or matter passes, in order to mark the conditions of change. A difference both in geographical and historical location, is a break of continuity, and thus outside the scope of narrativity (unless these disparate parts can be yoked to some historical or geographical meta-narrative by which they cease to be temporally and spatially independent). To these two intervals, Virilio adds a third, "light," or "limit-speed" -- that interval recognized as "an absolute standard for immediate action, for instantaneous teleaction" (14). This third interval, as "limit-speed," unites the two previous intervals by generating a new standard by which change is recognized -- differences of duration and extension at once converge to create difference across an interval of acceleration, or changes in speed. We live in a milieu rooted in constant change -- the only details worth mentioning are those which represent changes in our velocity, but this velocity depends upon a space to maneuver.

<14> The two meanings of space -- space as place, and space as void -- come to play active and interrelated roles in the practice of storytelling. Space, as it is used in "public space," is a space filled with meaning, the geographical place of agency, the landscapes through which subjectivities travel. Space, as it is used in "outer space," represents a void or an empty interval that is outside/other to what is understood as meaningful. In terms of duration, this blank space is stasis, a moment in which nothing happens. The differences between space as empty and space as full, under Virilio's third interval, begin to vanish as space is understood as that which is traversed, empty or full, it is the place in which the voyager experiences accelerations and decelerations within rates of flow on open roads or bottlenecked highways. Movement over blank intervals itself becomes a medium. Indeed, space as a frictionless void, begins to take on positive dimensions, as we take to tele-traversing the globe on fiberoptic cables, cursing the bumps and ambiguities that seem so essential to de Certeau's walk through the city.

<15> For John Cage, the critical 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence than comprise one of his most (in)famous compositions, the absence of interruption allows (apparent) infinite interpretation -- it is nothing more than a blank interval. But to the "trained" listener, this blank map is a nuisance. In its utter lack of markers, there is no place to position the self, no reason to include this blank space into the map of life. Frank Zappa, in his recreation of "4'33," records one of the infinite possibilities of the blank interval's potentials: Midway through his recording, the sound of the composition sheets falling from the piano and to the floor interrupt the silence Cage framed, but never intended. Zappa provides a moment of meaning-making, a moment in which the other 4 minutes and 32 seconds begin to make sense: Otherwise those 4 minutes and 33 seconds might as well be an eternity, for eternity is nothing but the absence of markers. Heaven is determined by its utter lack of landmarks: David Byrne's celestial band only knows John Cage compositions, after all, endlessly repeating "4'33"." The poetry of Cage's composition lies in its subjective interpretation by the listener as each time it is listened to it is entirely different. It must always be different as it is determined not by itself, but by the subjectivity of the listener: You could be listening to it right now without comprehension. Damned are the "trained" who bemoan Cage's liberation.

<16> Consider too the blank intervals of sculpture and the relationship of the artist to the everyday. Stripped down for a speedy and pure apprehension, Tony Smith's 6ft. black steel cube, Die (1962), is menace personified, a dense meaning with fascist overtones. The malicious numerology of the cube's apocalyptic dimensions ("six feet under" and the number of the beast) -- a roll of a die too heavy to lift (and with all faces containing the same blank, bleak inscription) -- or a simple command. Smith's work of art is loaded, and its outcomes are specifically pointed to the same nihilistic end. In the minimalist structure, the artist creates a public space that is inscribed with a specific but universal message. The minimalist sculpture boils the message down to specifics, attempting to eliminate ambiguities, and creates a unique and skilled experience between viewer and object. Like secondary memory, the minimalist object attempts to project its narrative on public space, but as a tertiary object it determines our lives.

<17> Perhaps a more compelling example of the generation of public space structured around an interval is Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981). The Arc, commissioned by General Services Administration for Federal Plaza in New York City, consists of a 12 foot by 120 foot by 2.5 inch sheet of Cor-ten steel curved into a gentle arc and tilted onto its side in the middle of a courtyard between two related government buildings. On paper, the Arc seemed like a reasonable adornment for public space in the bureaucratic eyes that authorized its creation. However, to those employees who made use of this space on a daily basis, Serra's work presented an obstacle to what had until then been their everyday behavior. Due to the nature of the job, the employees were required to travel back and forth across the courtyard from building to building, covering the interval in a straight line in order to minimize the exertion and time required for them in the performance of their duties. Furthermore, employees made use of the courtyard for their lunch breaks, eating their meals and enjoying the view of a fountain. With the arrival of the Tilted Arc, the shortcut across the courtyard and the view of the fountain had been obstructed by an inhuman(e) surface. The few pleasures and consolations of mindless bureaucracy had been dashed in Serra's grandiose artistic statement.

<18> While Serra's intention was to force the users of this public space to become aware of their relation to that space [5], in light of the legal proceedings that followed, perhaps they were not as ignorant as he would like to imagine. In his testimony which called for the removal of the arc, mailroom clerk Danny Katz, explained in bitter detail the public's relationship to that space:

I didn't expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It's not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breath re-circulated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can't believe that this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has been the dominant effect of the work, and it's all the fault of its position and location.

I can accept anything in art, but I can't accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. (quoted in "Richard Serra: The Case of the Tilted Arc")

And while Serra's concerns over his freedom of expression as an artist are certainly valid, his exertion of his artistic will over a public space that people used for their own expression, however modest, brought the conflict to a head in which the role of the artist in the exercise of authority are brought into focus. In the case of Serra's Tilted Arc, the ability of the artist to construct meaningful and rhetorically focused space, while it professes to critique authority, serves the nefarious function of being authority's strongest promoter by defining the finely crafted and highly specialized use and meaning for public space, it becomes an objective force declaring a predetermined interaction. While consumers of art typically position themselves as spectators or observers, the Tilted Arc plays a panoptic role. As the intended audience directs its gaze into the work, the work exerts its monolithic presence on the psyche of all who suffer as it proclaims, in its own abstract way, its knowledge and perception of their own miserable lives. Like Bentham's panopticon, this grand centerpiece is painfully present to its human subjects, even if its own being is confounded by the blinding abstractions of its minimalist design. By turning the courtyard away from its ordinary and "quotidian" uses, Serra's work attempts to refocus the use of this interval, boldly declaring, defining, and delineating its meaning for the rest of time [6].

<19> Critics have been hasty to criticize Disney's finely wrought and frenetic approach to a consumer landscape, which presents an illusion of the "good life" based on fantasy and consumption, the apparent opposite of the Tilted Arc we normally interact with. The argument against Disney is that it promotes a sort of banal bourgeois homogeneity without any values beyond the most mundane appeals to family values and good times. The landscape of Disney theme parks (like the landscapes of casinos and malls) is finely tuned to provide narratives that implicate consumers in the park's storytelling practices. This critique, both valid and clichéd, accuses Disney of overwriting the real marrow of the everyday with "false consciousness," threatening to override any hope for democracy by replacing it with a form of marketplace tyranny and gentrified versions of the polis. However, the role of the intellectual and artist in similar processes of authority and control are often conveniently ignored. Even critical works, like Serra's Tilted Arc, which lack the intoxicating mayhem of the theme park, play a similar role in paving over the pleasures and potentials of the everyday by attempting to exert their control over space and time.

<20> These examples of spaces, like all spaces, can be aligned into subjective and objective means of presence, the former denoting "open" spaces (although they are not necessarily empty) that allow interpretation on the part of the inhabitant, whereas the latter, objective spaces, are those that impose their own meaning, their own means to an end. Inasmuch as Main Street in Disney's world may be a void, prepared for communication and promoting closeness in the family on vacation, in this "open" space, an objective, commercial meaning is imposed: there is nothing to do but consume (not the elements of that space, but the products given free reign within that space). Like Hawksmoor's London, the future is inscribed in the very object of the place, and the place thence promotes its ideology to the point of the interpellative.

<21> To return to McLuhan, these spaces are both "hot" and "cool" -- the subjective are those "cool" spaces that allow inhabitants to construct the meaning of those space, they are spaces that are "blank" and awaiting inscription (Cage's "4'33""). "Hot" spaces (not "hot zones") impose their presence on the inhabitant...and this leads to the narratives of these spaces. Subjective spaces are those spaces that we tell stories about, whereas objective spaces are those that tell us their stories through their presence alone. For the Tilted Arc there is only one objective interpretation -- it may inspire subjective accounts, but these accounts will invariably by circumscribed in the very nature of the place encountered. Conversely, the experience of natural spaces inspires a broader range (although, as all accounts invariably are, dialectical) of possible interpretations, hence the history, the entire sphere, of nature writing. Only in nature is interpellation absent, and it is only when Narcissus sees his reflection in the mirror of the lake (the technic of objective realization?) that narcissism and auto-interpellation is born. How else do we explain the very popularity of descent into the wilderness, from Achilles to Thoreau, to Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) and James Dickey's to The White Sea (1993), but as attempts at escape from the interpellative mechanisms of culture, the machines of a society bent on control of the subject? But nature has given way, and now cyberspace, in its infinite (?) promise and possibilities, has arisen as their blank interval to escape the hegemonic practices of socializing ideologies. But it is a new subjective space, a truly blank interval, or one that will ultimately be corrupted as our object, by our objectivity?

Part Three: Cyberspace

<22> Cyberspace emerges to fill the void left at the end of the final stages of our global circumnavigation, which began with wooden ships and ended with satellites, the planet, as Virilio and science fiction maintain, becoming too small for its inhabitants (or for their imaginations). Cyberspace, rather than an accretion of space in positive terms, is cast in explicitly expansionist terms. The space of this metaphor is the space of the great unknown, a "heart of darkness", a great blank spot, both outerspace and the frontier. An alien place, at once high-tech and fast-forward, as well as a place brutal and savage; as Michael Ian Borer notes, this reified space is only a world of our own fabrication [7]. The mysterious and savage others we may encounter in this uncharted territory are only those mysterious and savage others that we have inscribed into this space. The frontier that we enter is only that of our own secrets and deceptions. We, like earlier travelers, construct the "savages" we encounter as we meet them. The uncharted space that we imagine, however, ceases to be geographical, and instead becomes speculative, nudging us ever closer towards a world of possibility. We find ourselves marching relentlessly down a technical path, always appalled by the discoveries that we invent along the way.

<23> This reified space of possibilities has predictably written and fulfilled its own self-fulfilling processes. Like our other attempts to find utopia through the wilderness encounter, utopia, too has emerged in cyberspace. But this public sphere, a world of subcultures organized around specific interests -- My Little Pony fan clubs, Knight Rider fan fiction, and the numerous other species of desire -- creates an exclusive and limited publication not unlike the ones we know today. While there may not be gentrified urban shopping destinations devoted exclusively to Care Bears memorabilia, the splendors of the electronic universe are subject to their own peculiar gentrification. The modem replaces the air-conditioned car ride to desire, and the subject is transported to a special place filled with similar people sharing similar interests. Conflict, should it be found, is resolved through withdrawal from risky or threatening situations or the creation of an entirely new identity, both facilitated through anonymous technology.

<24> It is only natural that into this world of anonymous selves, we project our sexual energies, foster our sexual fantasies -- but into a virtual world, real unto itself, but increasingly void in the practices of real life [8]. There are no mementos to return from the internet with, nothing outside of the self to metonymically construct the self; it is only through the construction, the possession, of memory, and a tertiary memory at that, that we can continue to remember ourselves as real entities. Only scars carry over into the real world [9] -- and debt... But this is not to say that the internet's function is a new one; rather, it is like any medium humanity has constructed throughout its long technological (technic-al) history, from the cave painting to the novel, from the carrier pigeon to the carrier wave: Mediums are meant to be inhabited, inasmuch as humanity becomes mediums for its media, and through this double-construction, through a construction of the self through a construction of prosthetic technologies of expression, humanity imposes its technological identity through complex assemblages of the discursive, mediated self.

<25> Subjects enter into assemblage, forming outcome or goal-oriented desiring machines. The process of navigation, no longer one of pragmatic movement from one location to another, is a cultural negotiation, a Graphical User Interface, an imaginary map by which projects are organized graphically independent of the machinations which remain hidden beneath, a map of objects. To all but computer programmers, the organization of data and the internal workings of the operating system appear to be magical, the real concern being the ability to produce the necessary effects with as little difficulty as possible. There has been an explosion of cognitive maps, but who knows what relationship these maps bear to the rules and laws of the systems they operate, the only concern is what effects these machines produce. The world of Care Bear fanaticism seems to have overwritten other more pressing political concerns like food, water, and life for which most of the world's non-computing inhabitants must concern themselves -- day in and day out.

<26> But why prioritize between everyday life in the streets versus everyday life online? Perhaps it is a question of intervals and spaces, an erasure of singularities, a shortage of opportunities to "make do." Perhaps, there is the possibility that cyberspace, in presenting itself as a series of newly discovered articles of our own creation, threaten to present us with our own self-fulfilling fantasies. In the myth of our fabrication, we bow in subservience to minute instances of discourses about how to consume space, like a million Tilted Arcs, the internet provides us with an explosion of specialized discourses which appeal to our initial assumptions about what's important and what constitutes a life worth living. But then consider Geoff Ryman's "novel" 253: Lacking a predetermined logic of progression, the reader must click (aimfully/aimlessly) on hyperlinks to progress the plot/action/narrative. In the face of freedom from the tyranny of the page, can the reader cope? Given what we've always dreamt of, can we now imagine actually having it? And if it were given, if humanity had the freedom to construct its own conceptual map of itself, Borgesian in nature, what would it point to? What would be its geography? And what would it exclude? Only limitation.

<27> Our fantasies of a technological future, like William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) (as outdated as that fantasy might be now), and our fears, like Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) (as prescient as it remains, of a humanity laid low by its own biology), foresee a telepresent identity as an inevitable outcome of the trajectory that humanity is on. In both cases, this telepresence is a negative aspect, as if the democratic ability to be everywhere present, to be anywhere present, must lead to inhumanity, as if the human is determined in its roots to one place, indefinitely, and in this stagnation, is able to create a stable and enduring identity. In the case of our contemporary technology, in the face of the internet and the ability to exists in any "place," with any other people, and with any (self-regulated) identity, this leads to a construction of objective spaces that limit the users interaction with the world that they (could) live in. Instead, for stability's sake, these narrow spaces are created and ascribed to, religiously, and the liberating inter-net that was a promise of the technology, has resulted in reified islands in the net (to paraphrase Bruce Sterling). And into these spaces, we project ourselves as specters of ourselves, ghosts of a new humanity that has yet to come into being; we create ourselves as tertiary entities, shades of our future selves.

Part Four: Postmodernism and Identity Construction

<28> Postmodern identity construction occurs through two means: The construction of external, prosthetic assemblages and the employment of metonymic media, both resulting in the construction of shadow selves that work to auto-interpellate us into presence in the world. The first may range from the prosthetics of ideology to the repair of faulty limbs, from those of pure imagination to those of physical desperation. The second relies on a diverse technological pursuit on the part of humanity, that, while it changes its means with startling rapidity (but it is the only speed we know, from the cave painting to the cellular phone), its ends always remain the same: a projection of the self into a constructed self. These two spheres are conflated into the idea of a lifestyle, a word we take for granted (it appears incessantly in catalogues, to the point of self-imposition, as if the word can carry the meaning), and a practice that exists, most often, outside of our conscious relationship with the world.

<29> But we love to tell stories, trying to fill our days with the twists and turns of majestic acts, however humble, of tactical courage. This too means we like to forget, to reframe select memories for the sake of the narrative. We forget spaces, our own emptiness, to construct places that tell exciting stories about who we are. We use the space of our homes and our bodies as ground zero for the re-membering of our fractured selves into the cozy accoutrements of the lifestyle. Goths, geeks, yuppies, hippies, bikers, punkers, republicans, democrats, communists, and fascists; we can choose to tell a story about who we are, and why, through the items in our home. Pier 1 Imports has been doing this for years, providing vocabulary for earthy, worldly, sensitive types who have filled their stockpiles with the very same colorful souvenirs as the most seasoned tourist. Thanks to such shopping experiences, we can say things like, "I might not have traveled around the world, but I am the type of person who would do that sort of thing." My home is the physical manifestation of my inner being. My home is a psychic projection. No wonder a dead person's belongings make us feel as though they are standing there beside us: The object becomes hot, becomes objective.

<30> Body art tells a similar story. In the Western world, the contemporary obsession with tattoos had originally been a marker of specific experience. Sailors marked their bodies with images from around the world, creating a global cartography of themselves on themselves. Bikers and prisoners mark their entry into a specialized underground world, a world only open to the initiated. Now, even these extreme acts of mortification are becoming merely a lifestyle. Instead of telling a lifelong epic filled with trials and tribulations, the more mundane story might go like this: "I drove to this place. My mom wired me some money. I looked through a book at the tattoo parlor for some Chinese characters that said something about who I am." Like the Pier 1 household, the tattooed body tells a story about the personhood of the body. Regardless of the accuracy of the translation, what the foreign characters really mean is more along these lines: "At this moment, I am brave (or spiritual or faithful or passionate or spontaneous or strong) and I feel that I have some affinity for the Chinese that can only be fully expressed in the act of committing these symbols to my skin for the rest of my life." The same goes for tribal patterns and piercings which are applied to bodies that seek to be identified as tribal, but do not have any historic or genealogical tribe to belong to, as if they are markings to foretell the entrance of the individual into some post-apocalyptic troop or connote a place in the afterlife. Rather than downplay the sincerity and value of these acts, we tie them to the fact that these are lifestyle phenomena that seek to proclaim a story about oneself that is rooted in a commitment to a pattern of forgetfulness and auto-interpellation into a world in the process of defictionalization.

<31> As with cyberspace, the lifestyle asks us to find meaning and amazement in a fate of our own construction. We feel so deeply and passionately the surprising connections between past and future, and they are all the more amazing because we never can have forgotten roots that didn't exist. Instead, we create a point of reference for a past we never lived and marvel at the synchronicity we experience as a result. For the recipient of the Chinese characters, the tattoos seem so mystical and magical because they are unknown: Imagine instead having the letter "S" emblazoned on the chest, to connote "strength" or "superiority"; "P" for "passion" or "perfect." This attraction to such a mystery, rather than being a mystical link to the Chinese equivalent of whatever might be written now (honor!), is a memory of indebtedness (or a memory of having no memory to which one can attach significance). We quickly find ourselves, like poor, poor Leonard, from the film Memento (2000), sifting through the markers we create, suspiciously scrambling to create a memory that is in accordance with our own desires. And thereby a future that is nothing but desire, no longer a debt to be paid, but a whirlwind to be reaped.

<32> And, ultimately, our lives must be ready at hand, they must not exist so far outside of the body that they lose meaning, they must exist within the physical space that we have created for them to exist within, this being the objective spaces that we construct for ourselves to inhabit. The myth of telepresence, and the "proof" of its failure (in the fiction of Gibson and Bear, both ontologies of telepresence are eschatologies of humanity), help to circumscribe these spaces. And these myths of failure proceed the construction of a technology that would sufficiently allow such to occur, as if the technology could not come into being until a fault within that technology could be properly conceived.

<33> And so we imagine ourselves ancient mapmakers. We rely upon the presence of celestial bodies (the stars of our own reality shows), (re)constructing the world as it has never been seen. Like idiots we stumble across external knowledge-making tools of our own creation, and find ourselves distracted as we march headlong into a future filled with stories of a past we can't remember. But when we look outside of ourselves, and listen to someone else's story, however false or unintelligible it may seem, we begin to triangulate our positions. We mark off locations spatial and temporal and enter into an emerging social sphere. And though our skies may be obscured by the dromospheric pollution of continent-crushing velocity, we begin the cartography of the social. A project for our own times, always changing and never complete, but it does become better, provided we continue to reach towards each other, looking long and hard for new stars to join new constellations, in search of a place we have yet to imagine.

Reading Strategies for "autobiogeography":

Notes:

[1] Like, in Borges, the construction of the secret garden and the map of itself which comprises the totality of the garden, but lies outside of the garden, as if the navigator if the labyrinth can discern the logic of the original by studying the simulacra. As if, for the listener of our histories, the logic of the events contained therein make perfect sense, poetic sense, and a sense of commonality -- a self-evident logic of the self for itself. [^]

[2] Describing the "handiness" of tools as a result of their propensity for use (as opposed to observation), Heidegger writes:

As the what-for of the hammer, plane, and needle, the work to be produced has in its turn the kind of being of a useful thing. The shoe to be produced is for wearing (footgear), the clock is made for telling time. The work which we primarily encounter when we deal with things and take care of them -- what we are at work with -- always already lets us encounter the what-for of its usability. (1953, 65)

In other words, our assumptions which make for more dynamic storytelling, in turn gave way to additional assumptions, nesting our memory lapses within lapses, making room for the work at hand. [^]

[3] Stiegler begins by depicting the "tertiary" as any memory which is bound up in the product, hence any technical production, but contiunues by stating "Because humans conserve the traces of their live in utentils, tools...the narrative of their stories and histories can be transmitted from generation to generation" (2000, 92). The teritary object exists to impart its phylogenic memory to those who later interact with it, making us all archeologists within the perpetuating ruins of our own culture. [^]

[4] This neoligism is meant to encapsulate the "haunting" effect that the tertiary objects we surround ourselves with have upon our lives: While some are rather benign in nature, having little or no effect opon our future lives, others demand that was act through them, to act with them. The tertiary object is that object that by its very existence demands a particular future, it demands a particualr form of generation. [^]

[5] During the legal battle over the fate of the Tilted Arc, Richard Serra testified,

One's identity as a person is closely tied with one's experience of space and place. When a known space is changed through the inclusion of a site-specific sculpture, one is called upon to relate to the space differently. This is a condition that can be engendered only by sculpture. This experience may startle some people. (quoted in "Richard Serra: The Case of the Tilted Arc.") [^]

[6] The Titled Arc was moved to a new location in May of 1985. [^]

[7] Borer, Michael Ian. "The Cyborgian Self: Toward a Critical Social Theory of Cyberspace." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 1.4 (Summer 2002). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/borer.htm. [^]

[8] Inasmuch as Cleo Odzer (Virtual Spaces) may contend that the virtual is real unto itself, because much of our identity construction, our meaning-making depends upon the physical presence of the other (the savage to determine the civilizied), the virtual must continue to mean solely the ethereal and the fleeting, the sprawl of pure information rather than that which is lodged in the tertiary object. [^]

[9] Cf. Julian Dibbell's "A Rape in Cyberspace. " Village Voice 38.52 (December 23, 1993): 36-42. [^]

Works Cited:

Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. 1972. New York: Bantam, 1996.

Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New Rok: Arbor House, 1985.

Borer, Michael Ian. "The Cyborgian Self: Toward a Critical Social Theory of Cyberspace." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 1.4 (Summer 2002). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/borer.htm.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Randall. Berkeley: University of California, 1984.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. 1993. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Dibbell, Julien. "A Rape in Cyberspace." Village Voice 38.52 (December 23, 1993): 36-42.

Dickey, James. To the White Sea. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Heidegger, Martin. Being And Time. 1953. Trans. John Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York, 1996.

Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Norman O. Brown. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Moore, Alan, and Eddie Campbell. From Hell. Paddington, Australia: Eddie Campbell Comics, 1999.

Nolan, Christopher. Memento. 2000. Newmarket.

Odzer, Cleo. Virtual Spaces: Sex and the Cyber Citizen. New York: Berkeley, 1997.

"Richard Serra: The Case of the Tilted Arc." http://www.arts.arizona.edu/are476/files/tilted_arc.htm.

Ryman, Geoff. 253. http://www.ryman-novel.com/

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford, 1998.

---. "The Time of Cinema: On the 'New World' and 'Cultural Exception.'" Tekhnema 4 (2000): 63-112.