InfoTechSpace

Just a thought about Scott's discussion of surnames. He descriibes how "among some peoples," a person can have many names that relate to different contexts such as relationships or social settings. I recall something that I read that related this practice of names to a sense of place, which he does not bring into the discussion. The idea was that with aural-oral culture names were contextual and that with written language names were not. I don't know how far this generalization holds, but it is an interesting idea. It is hard for us to imagine never having seen a phone directory with a list of names, and our own name on that list, or never to have seen our name written at all. A name that is only a sound that is heard or called out (and one does not call out one's own name at all), always exists only when you are present. When you go to a different place your name can change because that is where you are and so where your name is. There is no other abstracted place, like the god's eye view that Scott describes of a city, where your name can also be abstracted.
I also wanted to remark that perhaps the impulse to invent the airplane was itself the same impulse to see the city from the God's-eye-view, so fulfilling the latter not by coincidence but from the same trajectory of that desire to remove oneself to the higher plane. It is interesting to me that there is this trajectory among some people, who have often weilded power, to oversee and yet be hidden at the same time. A true god-like view. Increasing control by making others more legible and visible, and creating new ways to obscure the self.
This is the "seeing like the state," then, and I find it interesting that Scott does give this kind of autonomy to the state itself. (Not unlike the autonomy given to software in last week's readings). It is as if the state acheives the god-like view while the individual at its head never does. Maybe that is true. For all of one person's power to re-construct a city, that one person never really acheives the all-seeing view. The visibility we talk about today with the potential linking of databases is perhaps similar in that it is how the database "sees" even if it is never really acheived, no one ever links them all together. What the articles we read last week described is perhaps how the "database sees" in the same way that the conceptual "state" sees. It is a metaphor, but one that does tell us something. If we are organized in databases instead of the maps, lists, and urban plans of the modern state, is that a fundamental shift?
(I'd like to talk more about language since it keeps coming up. It does seem like we have to understand language in order to understand the place and time ideas we are tackling. The fact that we do not believe in the power of a magical curse, in the power of words to saturate and actually enter us and act upon us, might tell us about our sense of place now. Language has come up in our readings but we haven't discussed it at length.)
One thing that we keep critiquing is whether the authors of these articles "get it right" but it seems like place is such a mutable thing that can always be imagined in new ways. Thus, what changes is our ability to imagine it one way or another. Some of these authors seem to ask us to meditate on a way of seeing place that we don't often think about. If that is the case then this sense of place is not "real" because it is not in the general everyday imagination of place, but is a stretch. Another way to go about a study of place would be more like Basso's approach where he accesses the images of place of a group of people, but again it is different perhaps from how the reader has imagined place on his own. What Scott contributes to this is the idea which he makes quite clear in his title "seeing like a state." That is somewhere in between. He seems to say that the state sees place like this, while we may not in our everyday lives.
So, 1) why are we trying to stretch our imagination of place? and 2) if we're not trying to stretch it, just let it be, then why is it so hard to think about what place means now? What if we succeed in imagining place in these many different ways, will we really end up with a new idea of place, or just none? Just no senses at all?! That might just be where I am at right now in the arc of this class, my head too cluttered...
g'night all-