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Digital Virtual Places: Utopias, Atopias, Heterotopias

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Book cover Place, Space and Hermeneutics

Part of the book series: Contributions to Hermeneutics ((CONT HERMEN,volume 5))

Abstract

In my paper, I will approach virtual places neither in terms of non-places or atopias, nor in terms of utopias, but in terms of heterotopias. In order to do so I will deal with some major phenomenological commentaries of place in Heidegger before focusing on a series of placial or place-related topics in his 1936–1938 Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowing). In light of the Contributions I will first thematize virtual places indirectly by opening up the triad of calculation/digits, representation/screens, and communication/information bits. Then, I will attempt to relate the treatment of Contributions to a second triad of topics which are directly placial: worldliness and involvement, situatedness and affective attunement, familiarity and homelessness. I will conclude by insisting on the unique heterotopic dwelling that digital places as places of alterity offer us beyond the all too easy topos-atopia and topos-utopia dilemmas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for instance, Casey 1993, 16; Malpas 1999, 21–24.

  2. 2.

    See, for instance, Casey 1993, 288; Morris 2004, 181.

  3. 3.

    This is usually viewed as the utopian approach to virtual space (Rheingold 2012). For the proponents of the utopian approach, virtual space is a space on its own due to its non-reliance upon physical space (Rushkoff, 2002, xx). See also: Dodge and Kitchin 2001, 52–64.

  4. 4.

    Casey further notes that new electronic technologies are caught in the odd, age-old dialectics of space and place as they structurally belong to geometric, abstract space, but their “dromocentrism” endows them with a placial significance (Casey 1998, 343). In his review of Casey’s The Fate of Place Jeff Malpas criticizes him for not paying enough attention to Heidegger’s treatment of the technological in relation to the topological and also to virtual reality’s tendency to forget place. Casey tends to give more importance to the reappearance of place in late modern thinkers and not to some problematic aspects of the odd dialectic with the spatial and the virtual (Malpas 2002, 97).

  5. 5.

    See Casey 1997, 258–269; Elden 2002, 64–70; Malpas 2006, 147–155.

  6. 6.

    See Escoubas 2008, 85; Dastur 2008, 148–51; Russon and Jacobson 2013, 347–50.

  7. 7.

    John Sallis refers to the spatial effect of the guiding attunement of distress (Not) in the first beginning of thought as what “breaks up beings so as to ground a possible standpoint for man within this space.” (Sallis 2001, 183).

  8. 8.

    Stuart Elden points out the significance of calculation in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. He also makes an insightful comment about the theme of the gigantic (das Riesenhafte) in the same text in its relation to calculation. Heidegger relates modern calculation to the securing of space and time which is proper to modernity. Though he explicitly refers to machine technology, Elden establishes a hermeneutic link between “the gigantic”, and also “total mobilization”, to late modern globalization and its intertwining with information technologies moving between real and virtual space. See: Elden 2006, 142–150 and Jeff Malpas’ commentary on Elden’s account of the placelessness of number (Malpas 2012, 294).

  9. 9.

    For a concise account of the dualist, parallelist and phenomenological approaches to digital virtual reality and virtual space: Qvortrup 2002. A significant modification of digital ontological parallelism has been attempted by Rafael Capurro. Capurro’s digital hermeneutics or “angeletics” (Angeletik) presents a weaker version of parallelism by stressing the hybridization of digital space and the hermeneutic nature of digital networks taking Heidegger’s phenomenology of worldliness as a starting point (Capurro 2010, 35–42). Based on this new hermeneutic emphasis Capurro designates, after Gianni Vattimo, virtual technologies as “weak” (schwache Technologie), thus stressing the need to recover the long forgotten by digital ontologists need to recover “the local” in digital virtual space against the atopic and utopian perspectives adopted by digital divide theorists (Capurro 2003).

  10. 10.

    In Contributions Heidegger denounces the “unboundedness of machinations” (Heidegger 1999, 84).

  11. 11.

    On digital utopianism: Turner 2006; Heinrich et al. 2012.

  12. 12.

    On the “uncanniness” of place see: Malpas 2012: 151–2.

  13. 13.

    It is worth noting that, already in Being and Time, anxiety is place-related: “The fact that what is threatening is nowhere characterizes what Angst is about.” (Heidegger 1996, 186; his emphasis). Understood in this sense, virtual places could be seen as a unique chance to challenge the primacy of the rational self in the Cartesian vision of modernity by multiplying the possibilities of attunement with our selves and fostering the respect of affective reason (Seidler 1998).

  14. 14.

    See, for instance, Malpas 2012, 111; Coyne 2005, 194.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

    Golfo Maggini

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Correspondence to Golfo Maggini .

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

    Bruce B. Janz

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Maggini, G. (2017). Digital Virtual Places: Utopias, Atopias, Heterotopias. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_33

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