[please note: this video contains sound that some people can find disturbing. Be conscious of the volume when listening]
vague | (in)nvisible | (un)limit
How (in)visible limits (re)produce singular identities by isolating them in their relation with and accessibility to public spaces reality.
Any space withholding the humble potential of becoming ground for communal exchange - where we are dared to relate with the Other - can be called Public. The Public Space exists therefore only in its potentiality of becoming, and it becomes only through a process of production, by being produced. It can be then considered a product generated by interactions happening in a common ground of shared knowledge, and responding to rules dictated by the dynamic and mutating nature of the language of communication. Language, in any of its forms, is a communal practice, a collective structure that allows the recognition of the Other to happen and understanding to unfold. For this to occur, it is essential to firstly recognise the dynamics that govern this ever-mutating space, as well as the elements that compose the game. Secondly, it is necessary that a process of confrontation and reaction takes place in between at least two bodies within the very same context generated by their physical and temporal presence, on which the being of both the space and the bodies depend. Indeed, as the Public Space existence rests within a constant building and negotiation of the space, the notion of publicity is detached from the freedom of action and expression within a space, but rather becomes linked to a process of produced communication, defined by the rules of the temporality of the encountering.
These encounters are mediated redefinitions of individual limits through dialogue, which starts form the recognition of the Other limits, and the identification of where the threshold stands in between the parts. The confrontation with an opposed limiting counter-body, the tension caused by the tentative of crossing each other thresholds, shapes the potentiality of the common space for exchange. Whoever crosses the boundary subjects themselves to a transformation: by transitioning to the unknown, a completely different state of being begins.
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The temporality of this contingency is reflected in the principles through which individual bodies relate to and connect with the space itself. Thus, when it comes to understand the perception that individual bodies have in relating and belonging to Public Space, the notions of ownership and appropriation developed within this context, are nevertheless linked to the physical and temporal engagement with its components. The sense of identification that each individual exports form the temporal appropriation of the space potentiality of being public, is however a permanent luggage that will influence the next interaction. It is, indeed, through the confrontation with the Against, that each individual definition is constantly built. The renegotiation of personal limits and their redefinition, by daring and comprehending the societal response, is processed as a growth of consciousness, self awareness and identification within the reality of the world.
With the introduction of the world wide web, and the consequent disembodiment of the reality that surrounds us, this notion of Public Space, and the engagement that each body developed within it, has been completely dismantled. Internet, that has been conferred as a powerful tool of global democratised connector, revolutionised the entire structure of our society, including the way we communicate: digitalised relations, endless availability of information, a social sphere effectively deprived of its materialisation.
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Where we used to experience in the space the present body as an obicere - from Latin, something that objects and reproach me, the Against - a tangibility embodied in the exchange could be perceived: the tension caused by the negativity of the Other a clue of awareness of our own limits. Confronted now by immaterial bodies that often stay on the level of the screen, any encounter is removed from its physicality, the experience becomes weightless, therefore the urgency of resistance avoidable and needless.
The digital space is indeed ephemeral and, by loosing its materiality - its body weight, it is no longer capable of a possibility of resistance, of being confrontational. What has been thought as a tool for greater accessibility to information and for “freely” build a definition of the self within the extended social reality, it has been turned around by becoming a endless way of avoiding confrontation with the other and perpetuate our self-perception and believes. Moreover, as the existence within the Public Space is strictly dependent on this constant tension, the conditions of being reproduced by the absence of a (non)body counterpart in the online realm, perpetuate a frictionless replication of the sameness. By being subject to this commodification, the object loses the negativity of its objection becoming more and more constituted by the subject which imagines, thus it takes control over it. The only perceived experience of encounter has indeed been taken over by our own self limitation: we wander, isolated in our own bubble, overloaded by the multiplicity of the hyper-connections that roams freely within our threshold-less territory, also accelerated by the need of global circulation of capital requested by the ruling economical system we live in. In other words, the encounter, now humble its own immateriality and ambiguity, became a process of mutual erosion: the object becomes absorbed and embedded in the subject’s bubble that, on its own end, is no longer struggling with the now disappeared friction with the Opposite. As both sides are no longer offering any resistance, the tension along the threshold disappear and the perception of the limits becomes blurred, making the possibility of a meaningful impact over the individual delineation lost in the whole.
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The consequences of this elusive reality, affects the definition of our own identity that, by lacking of external inputs, now appears fragmented and polarised. The bubble outlining now our reality, grows indefinitely loosing the purpose of defining its own limitations and evolving into a greater filter to the outside reality. Thus, we increasingly develop a vague territory of connections that surrounds ourselves as a mined field for the Other to cross. Its resistance grows therefore in an obsolete principle, turning any attempt to communicate in a polluted cacophony of voices echoing around each of us.
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We are therefore becoming trapped in the illusion of a Public Space that is growing more and more through the perpetuation of insignificant connections, while being increasingly isolated within our own bubbles and deafened by the polluted hyper-communication of voices noise.
References
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Han, B.-C. (2018). The Expulsion of The Other. Society, Perception and Communication Today. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Labelle, B. (2010). Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Book.
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Seijdel, J. and Toebasch, M., (2005). Sound. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
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