Surviving Codespace: Tracing Lived Space through Digital Literary Writing

As theorists, activists, artists, and writers begin to speculatively—if also wishfully—anticipate what comes “after biopolitics” or lies “beyond bio-politics,”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 space, prompting our appreciation of a range of spatiotemporal material practices that corealize complex, multileveled knowledges and experiences of lived 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 life 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 lived spaces 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 people’s and life forms’ deaths or quarantining to accomplish this social body’s “negative production of life” (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, rifts, or drift that these spatio-temporal shifts may be introducing into a modern biopolitics of “life”?

Feminist digital literary writing and “locative narrative” 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 lived space of embodied life. Through their digital literary writing, these feminist authors explore how prior modes of inhabiting, affectively experiencing, and navigating lived space and material lifeworlds remain primary even as computational processes and technologies are ubiquitously interwoven with everyday life on multiple biological, geographic, social, cultural, and phenomenological scales.

Drift explores how prior dimensions of lived 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 space, Drift and other feminist digital literary practices reveal how tracing lived space through codespace and reorienting its transformative technics and spacetimes is key to survival. Finding ways to register and appreciate the “drift” within—as well as between—distinct modalities and metrics of life and the lived space they open onto and foreclose, serves as a crucial means of survival as “life” is reconceived in computationally legible and manipulable terms. Drift creatively pursues the dynamic, unfolding, indeterminate senses of place and point of view enabled, quite paradoxically, by location technologies. Retracing these emergent orientations to lived, intersubjective space, this installation engages with “drift” at another level, in the potential it finds for reorienting mobile technologies by understanding lived space and mobility in alternate ways. It intimates that...