The problem of spatial metaphors

Metaphors can be a useful tool for communicating theory when they are used correctly. I have already mentioned Marx's metaphor of the vampire-like existence of capital. It concisely conveys the very core of his theory, at the same time shedding light on the concept of commodity fetishism and his theory of value. But metaphors can also be misleading. One such case is Plato's metaphor of the cave, which is in itself quite clear, but tends to be taken out of context. The distinction Plato was trying to make was between opinioning (doxa) and knowing (episteme), where opinioning refers to the things as they appear to us in everyday life and knowing refers to the realm of ideas. It is not the contrast of true and false knowledge and has certainly nothing to do with stereotypes. Indeed both true and false knowledge exist in the realm of ideas, only opinioning is excluded - one can not have an opinion in the realm of pure reason Kant noted later. But the popularity of this metaphor seems to indicate that we are more comfortable thinking in spatial than abstract terms - the paradox here being that Plato himself brings us the ideas, which he values above all, in the form of a shadow, a fleating picture of the world, indeed mimesis.

Then we have spatial metaphors that are essentially misleading. One of those is "public sphere". This is an awkward translation of the German word "Öffentlichkeit", which in itself has no spatial connotations. Indeed Habermas (the term public sphere was first introduced in the translation of his Structural transformations) writes about Öffentlichkeit as specific circumstances of communication that allow citizens to form their opinions in reasoned exchange.

And then we have cyberspace, of course, the non plus ultra of nonsensical terms. I analysed the prefix cyber in an earlier post, so I won't go into detail here. I want to argue that the metaphor of space is highly problematic. It conceals the embeddedness of computer mediated communications in society - it makes us think that cyberspace is a separate time-space that exists parallel to the analogue time-space. This is particularly visible in early utopian visions of the democratic potential of the internet, where cyberspace was seen as a democratizing factor of unheard of proportions, while it was ignored that this democratizing factor was being introduced into existing social relations and was not suspending them. One need not wonder then that the internet has not brought us the golden age of democracy.

Another process that the spatial metaphor conceals is what I would like to call - following Anthony Giddens- disembedding. According to him sociology has been preoccupied with the problem of order and has neglected the transformations of time-space that abstract systems of modernity have caused. Disembedding is the process in which social relations are made independent of local time-space in which they were firmly embedded in pre-modern times through the workings of abstract systems. Abstract systems are symbolic media like money and power (for example the emergence of money means that trade is possible on a global scale, not confined to local time-space as was the case with commodity exchange) and expert systems (the systematized production of expert knowledge). The mass media have played an important role in the process of disembedding and were constitutive of modernity - they made it possible that individuals connected on a national scale, and were no longer confined to interact and identify only among those they had face to face contact with. And this aspect of the internet is what the metaphor of cyberspace conceals. If the internet is itself a space, it is hard to envision it being a medium that is transforming space. It is the medium which is bringing us in contact with disembedded time-space which might be even on the other side of the globe and it is the medium which gives a feel - and no more than a feel - of uniformity between all the different interactions it conveys among disparate locations. It does not suspend the world or form a separate world, but is rather in a dialectic relationship with it, where it is at once embedded in existing social relations and is transforming them.