Surviving Codespace: Tracing Lived Space through Digital Literary Writing

Abstract

As theorists, activists, artists, and writers begin to speculatively-if also wishfully-anticipate what comes after or lies biopolitics,1 it is worth considering whether the very topographies of survival have not already shifted significantly Computational processes and architectures, as I will suggest, unwittingly open new perspectives on spatial practices and the performativity of prompting our appreciation of a range of spatiotemporal material practices that corealize complex, multileveled knowledges and experiences of space. These most recent spatiotemporal shifts, and the predominance of social arenas and everyday practices reliant on computational processes and digital technologies-what critical geographers term code/space (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 16) or movement-spaces (Thrift 2008, 89)-catalyze alternate perspectives on life, lived space, and other terms of survival. These computational processes and technologies coordinate the spatiotemporal dimensions of everyday physical so pervasively that Kitchin and Dodge reconceive the spaces we inhabit every day as complexly coproductive, interwoven code/spaces-social domains and practices realized to differing degrees via computational technologies and infrastructure (2011,16). Instead of being confined to computers or software or operating as self-contained technical objects that create their own virtual spaces, computational processes and products are now everyware (Greenfield, 2006) even at the micro-, atomic-, and nanoscales of biological research and medical practices.The very challenges introduced by codespace-and its ubiquitous interweaving of computational architectures and abilities into the spac- es of everyday life-may also open onto distinct possibilities for thinking survival beyond the present oppositional, thanatological discourses. In the current biopolitical discourses and practices, the survival of a social body-conceived of in organic terms of health, well-being, and integrity-is premised on immunological operations that relentlessly trade on certain peoples and forms' deaths or quarantining to accomplish this social body's negative production of (Esposito 2011, xvii). If it is not currently possible or imaginable to unhinge life and the politics of survival from this biopolitical terrain, is it, nonetheless, possible to comparatively register fortuitous problematics, riffs, or drift that these spatiotemporal shifts maybe introducing into a modern biopolitics of life?Feminist digital literary writing and practices2- such as Teri Rueb's 2004 GPS-based locative narrative sound installation Drift-creatively engage with mobile location technologies, computational architectures, and the material practices on which contemporary codespaces rely to understand the kinds of spatial experiences, knowledges, and mobilities they seem to, and might otherwise, corealize. Their experimental digital practices undercut earlier assumptions that codespaces would comprise a secondary, abstract, or virtual cyberspace that is over and against-or above and beyond-geographical place, its racialized and gendered colonialist territorializations, or the space of embodied life. Through their digital literary writing, these feminist authors explore how prior modes of inhabiting, affectively experiencing, and navigating space and material lifeworlds remain primary even as computational processes and technologies are ubiquitously interwoven with everyday on multiple biological, geographic, social, cultural, and phenomenological scales.Drift explores how prior dimensions of space and material space-making practices survive the transformations introduced by computational processes, infrastructures, and their late capitalist political economies. Re-approaching emergent codespaces as an opportunity to (re) understand material space-making practices as they corealize, inform, and exceed social action, culturally distinct experiences, and knowledges of Drift and other feminist digital literary practices reveal how tracing space through codespace and reorienting its transformative technics and spacetimes is key to survival. …