Critical Geographies
We arrange ourselves by social geographies, the ways in which we arrange—and are arranged in—space are physical manifestations of power. Political borders, be they between nations or voter precincts, are obvious ones. Wholly imaginary, made real only by social agreements, “formalized” on paper because we have always mistaken our written words for the Words of Gods. Or perhaps we were not making a mistake, at all.
Benedict Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities takes on the question of how we have come to agree nations exist. The entire human epoch suddenly sprung forth with an unprecedented form of social organization in “Europe,” emerging from its Dark Ages produced by an ahistorical catholic church. When God and the souls are eternal, there is no need for recording human accomplishments, no need to focus on the quotidian, and no need for material or philosophical discovery.
Anderson points to the Gutenberg press as the technological innovation that killed catholic hegemony. It made the spread of Protestantism possible, he argues, via the mass production of Bibles written in the various vernaculars. Whereas the catholic sacrament was delivered in Latin and personal salvation required obeisance to church decree (and regular ‘fessing up of your dirty secrets to the one guy in town who collects everyone’s), Protestants were responsible for their own salvation by learning the rules themselves and following them by their own accord. That meant literacy was part of the path.
Literacy is its own study and I will surely be discussing in its own right later. For now, consider the Chinese had developed a press before the Europeans did, but this did not radically alter their social structure or ideology, as Anderson argues happened in Europe. Perhaps one reason for this is the difference between hieroglyphic and phonetic printed language. With the phonetic languages such as Latin, Greek, German, or Arabic, it is possible for a literate person to hear a spoken word and imagine how it is spelled, and for a literate person to read a printed word and imagine how it is pronounced. This is not possible with hieroglyphs, which have no relationship to the sound assigned to the symbol.
Building a general literacy took decades and was tied to the institutionalization of Protestantism in northern Europe, but its effects upon the monarchic-feudal social order were profound. The market for Bibles became saturated, and those who had invested in the new technology sought new consumers. The answer came in changing the content of what was being printed—to create “one-day best-sellers.”
Newspapers.
The name of most all print newspapers contained a geographic designation; this is denoted what stories about people in the everyday world were “local.” Rather than timeless and unchanging tales of saints and apostles, the public narrative was about living people and the setting was in the “present” (or the immediate past, but the timing was such that the news of the prior day was considered of the present day—it was relevant to the day’s occurrences).
Freed from the ideological controls coming from Rome, the Divine Right of Kings that had been conferred by the succession of Popes in their conspiracy to execute “God’s will” upon the Earth, was undermined. Monarchs were forced to negotiate with proto-capitalists whose financial holdings began permitting mass mobilizations of laborers in early, non-industrialized factories. European cities begin to grow in population more rapidly than ever.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, literacy, the erosion of monarchic authority, a massive expanse of land and resources, and an early bourgeoisie led to political revolution. After chasing away the king’s army and governors, the first secular nation-state was constituted. In the Addendum of State Limitations, they ensconced the recipe for Modernity in the very first one on the list:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
First thing we do, neuter religious authority, place the focus on the people and their words.
This is what Nietzsche meant when he wrote, “God is dead.” He was the first victim of the Bourgeoisie.
235 years later and we are looking up at an oligarchy now. The key to liberation from monarchy was for the People to take ownership of property. Those monarchs who resisted too strongly were deposed, the rest were put into titular positions while retaining the grandeur and novelty of their wealth. King Charles III and his family are largely living museum pieces.
The very wealthy self-segregate. They insulate their everyday existence from all but screened members of lower social classes. They live on the highest floors, or in the middle of vast compounds, or on islands. They make themselves unapproachable because they know how and why they have the wealth they do. They know it does not come without exploitation, and there is a one-to-one ratio between the level of wealth and the amount of human suffering demanded.
Their members have no qualms with using their own children as human shields.
The internet is our Gutenberg press. It is challenging (“disrupting”) old power matrixes. It is changing conceptual and social geographies with it’s a-synchronous and de-centering capacities. We are seeing new vernaculars taking shape, new tropes of the video image and meme. We see the nation-state as a political form struggling to accommodate unanticipated challenges to its authority and ability to mobilize populations. The transnational corporation has utilized the technology toward its own ends and interests; more effectively than the American state (especially) is equipped to counter.
Will the people be able to carve a space to create liberty in an information control system magnitudes greater than the catholic church was ever able to? How are we to speak freely and assemble, when the pathways for doing so are constantly surveilled? Can we use the technology to the people’s benefit?