Rob Kitchin & Martin Dodge, Code, Everyday Life and the Transduction of Space (DRAFT)

Lecture notes, Carleton University - 22 October, 2003

(My comments in round brackets.)

The relationship between humans and technology is contingent, relational and productive - where both humans and technologies are produced through each other, or folded in together.

Code comprises sets of instructions and rules for complex digital functions. Code is bound-up in, and contributes to, complex discursive and material practices.

Space is understood to be a practice, a doing, an event - NOT as an absolute geometric abstraction or social construction.

Following Gillian Rose (following Judith Butler) "space is practised, a matrix of play."

[Gregson, N. and Rose, G. (2000) 'Taking Butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 433-52.]

Kitchin & Dodge understand the production of space in terms of transduction, a process of ontogenesis. (Ontology: what something is / Ontogenesis: how something comes to be.)

Following Adrian Mackenzie (following Gilbert Simondon) transduction includes notions of performativity, but also takes into account objects and non-humans (collectives, following Latour). "Through transduction, a domain structures itself as a partial, always incomplete solution to a relational problem."

[See also: Mackenzie, The Performativity of Code (pdf)]

(There are no problems but relational problems, and we shift from questions of meaning and narrative (representation) to questions of operation and process (performance). Domains 'come to be' through transduction, an ontogenetic process related to FLOW.)

Code induces particular modulations, those of technical mediation.

This process may be understood in terms of technicity - the extent to which technology mediates, supplements, augments collective life (the power of technology to DO things)

Code therefore comprises assemblages - not stable entities, always becoming - that are interconnected and interdependent

These codes and the technicity they engender transduces space - beckons new spatial forms into existence

1. CODE/SPACE - transduction where the problem cannot be solved without code. If transduction fails, space cannot function as intended. (catastrophic model)

eg. airports close when air traffic control computers down

2. CODED SPACE - if code fails, space more-or-less continues to function as intended

eg. shops don't close when surveillence cameras down

3. BACKGROUND CODED SPACE - code has the potential to mediate space if activated (transduced into code/space or coded space when technolgoy in use)

eg. GPS receiver, mobile phone not-in-use

Implications for scale: local and/or global scale becomes redundant becaus of "ongoing individuations across networks of greater or shorter length" - distributed, constantly local and 'beyond'

"a mass of currents rather than a single line of force" (source?)

(thinking about Andrew and Francois' questions and comments about the abstract)

I don't think that the authors misused the term code, although they do use it as an adjective as well.
There is nothing semiotic or representative about their approach, and performativity cannot be held to the same criteria for validity.

Neither do they account for uncoded space - they are not into "grand narratives" and non-coded space simply was not the focus of their study -
the biggest problem here was their assumption that code dominates space everywhere -instead of in particular (Western) contexts.
The ethnographic examples from London illustrated their point brilliantly, but wouldn't hold even in Canada.

The concept of transduction posed a few problems (that actually go back to Mackenzie's vague definitions)
but they could have been better addressed by drawing on notions of hybrid spaces and flows.

Their argument was also weakened by not accounting for a less-than-catastrophic failure of code (i.e. what about degradation, or entropy?)