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raxThis is our transphobic friend Grosz from last week. She's giving us some "working hypotheses" to consider when looking at "Futures, Cities, and Architectures." I'm going to summarize each of them briefly and move on; I don't have as much time this week as I did last week. (There will still be detailed notes on the piece I need to present on, but the other pieces may be sparse/not here.)
Our thoughts about the future often say more about our present than any potential "present-to-be."
"The corporeality, or materiality, of the city is of the same order of complexities as that of the body." The city acts as a body-prosthesis; this comes back to the Me++ reading from the first week in some ways.
Our bodies and our understanding of our bodies are both under radical flux because of radical flux in technology; we have a collective nervousness about whether technology is actually going to do any of the awesome things we believe it might do.
Computerization is making broad and sweeping changes not only to how we live but to how we think and how we theorize. (This brings me back to The Gutenberg Galaxy, which argues that technological changes centered around the printing press shifted us from a role-based society into an individual-based or task-based society, and now computerization in the broad sense that Grosz uses it in this essay is going to shift us again. If I had more time I'd go back and re-read it; if I had been a better student years ago I would go re-read my notes on it. And probably be frustrated because they said something like "ugh not much time this week." But if I decide to do more research in this kind of direction, hopefully this pointer will be helpful. Anyway...)
Our new technologies allow us to change our relation to the body through concepts like virtualization and the ease of communicating with people thousands of miles away, either in person within hours (go team airplanes!) or digitally within instants.
"Such technology is possible and useful" only through the body. "Technology... is necessarily tied not to a subject or a community but to bodily capacities and imaginaries." Said more prosaically, even assuming we can build anything we can imagine, we can only build things if we imagine them first. (If I had to come up with an end run around this, as I suspect we may at some point, I would argue that we can build things that can themselves build things that we didn't imagine, by providing them with algorithms that allow them to imagine in potentially unforeseen directions. I guess to some extent that's semantics.)
"The cities of the future will almost certainly resemble cities as we know them today only to the extent that bodies will resemble our own and function according to their various modalities." So if the city is a prosthesis for the body, the way that we use and inhabit our bodies will naturally delineate the way that we use and inhabit our cities. OK, I can buy that.
Our thoughts about the future often say more about our present than any potential "present-to-be."
"The corporeality, or materiality, of the city is of the same order of complexities as that of the body." The city acts as a body-prosthesis; this comes back to the Me++ reading from the first week in some ways.
Our bodies and our understanding of our bodies are both under radical flux because of radical flux in technology; we have a collective nervousness about whether technology is actually going to do any of the awesome things we believe it might do.
Computerization is making broad and sweeping changes not only to how we live but to how we think and how we theorize. (This brings me back to The Gutenberg Galaxy, which argues that technological changes centered around the printing press shifted us from a role-based society into an individual-based or task-based society, and now computerization in the broad sense that Grosz uses it in this essay is going to shift us again. If I had more time I'd go back and re-read it; if I had been a better student years ago I would go re-read my notes on it. And probably be frustrated because they said something like "ugh not much time this week." But if I decide to do more research in this kind of direction, hopefully this pointer will be helpful. Anyway...)
Our new technologies allow us to change our relation to the body through concepts like virtualization and the ease of communicating with people thousands of miles away, either in person within hours (go team airplanes!) or digitally within instants.
"Such technology is possible and useful" only through the body. "Technology... is necessarily tied not to a subject or a community but to bodily capacities and imaginaries." Said more prosaically, even assuming we can build anything we can imagine, we can only build things if we imagine them first. (If I had to come up with an end run around this, as I suspect we may at some point, I would argue that we can build things that can themselves build things that we didn't imagine, by providing them with algorithms that allow them to imagine in potentially unforeseen directions. I guess to some extent that's semantics.)
"The cities of the future will almost certainly resemble cities as we know them today only to the extent that bodies will resemble our own and function according to their various modalities." So if the city is a prosthesis for the body, the way that we use and inhabit our bodies will naturally delineate the way that we use and inhabit our cities. OK, I can buy that.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-12 09:30 pm (UTC)