Existence, Space, and Postranstvennaya Sreda

Manovitch argues that our representations of 3-D space must embed objects as part of the space itself rather than as individual objects that exist within space. It is foolish to say this human endeavor to understand the relationship between embeddedness and space is new, as if humans were not embedding knowledge in space for thousands of years. The tool, although not quantifiable in words, speaks volumes of truth to the phenomenological nature of space and how we understand it—the wheel reveals that we intuitively understood the concepts of friction and the conservation of energy before these concepts were formalized. With the tool, we extend existence, enhance abilities, and open up previously closed spatial trajectories. If these trajectories come to characterize our means of existence, then we concurrently embed ourselves in space—Agre points out that when we attempt to control space, it may control us as well.
Here, we embed ourselves as individuals; however, it was the development of language and social hierarchy/government that marked the beginning of knowledge as a space itself as opposed to knowledge as embedded in space as objects—technology. These developments, like information technologies, are tools that structure abstract relationships between phenomena in space, and that structure is understood as abstract space. The understanding of the structure’s totality however, is “inaccessible to any individual subject or consiouness… like an absent cause, one that can never emerge into the presence of perception [but finds] figures through which to express itself in distorted and symbolic ways,” (Jameson 350)—for example, the capital palace symbolizes the emperor’s power over his people, his permanence, and his centrality to the state. These are fundamental developments because ignorance of the structure limits potential trajectories, dissolution creates chaos, and exclusion from the structure equates to exclusion from society; thus, human existence is further embedded into space because we adapt in order to fulfill the demand of fundamental developments—perpetuation.
It is the age of Imperialism which exacerbated the ontological and phenomenological tensions between human existence, knowledge, and space. Jameson points out that, “the problems of figuration… become visible in the… ‘stage of imperialism’…and they may be conveyed by way of a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience,” (Jameson 349). During this critical period, the “immediate and limited experience of individuals,” is no longer, “able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs experience,” (Jameson 349). The structure of imperialistic society is, “not even conceptualizable for most people,” (Jameson 349) because the gap between one’s true conditions of existence and the space in which existence was interpreted grew too rapidly. Thus, “rather than conceiving space as a totality, one is dealing with a set of separate places,” (Manovitch 25). The multinational network attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by increasing the space/s in which one exists.
The development of the “multinational network or what Mandel calls ‘late capitalism’,” (Jameson 351) responds to imperialism’s figurative problems. However, a “historically original dilemma… that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities,” arose (Jameson 351). Here, our information systems and the realization and representation of knowledge as space resolve, “the fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion,” of the subject in this new multinational, multidimensional space (Jameson 351).
The notions of ontology in Manovitch and phenomenology in Agre suggest that it is the question of what space is in relation to what necessarily constitutes human existence that is at the root of this substantial shift in how, on a very fundamental level, we are now connected to space beyond the physical; and thus, relate to and navigate space differently. It seems that although Manovitch argues that the concept of prostranstvennaya sreda--an environment in which objects are embedded and the effect of these objects on each other--is missing from computer space in the sense of medium, he overlooks a more important shift in the ‘real’ world; in that, our computer systems, information systems, databases, and websites are embedding human existence in space. In Agre, capture transforms action into knowledge, and knowledge into space through the use of computers and algorithmic interpretation. It seems that these information technologies mediate a demand for the representation of the relationship between knowledge and space that constructs existence; in turn, it is the interaction between knowledge and existence that demands, or possibly it only entertains the tantalizing idea, of control over the space in which we exist.
In essence, this is the 'communication' of demands between human existence and technology, and this communication is contextually dependent on the current status of that conversation; and, understand that these two entities, although physically distinct, are spatially bound to one another—if we can now conceive of knowledge, not as simply embedded in space, but as a space in itself quantifiable to the individual. The truly compelling realization is that as we develop these technologies and increasingly embed our existence into space, this 'communication' becomes more intimate, less external to existence, and more symbiotic and mutually interdependent as the concept of postranstvennaya sreda itself suggests. It is human existence itself that is, and has been, undergoing the process of shifting from haptic existence to optic existence (Manovitch 10); and, it is also the realization that within knowledge—the set of relationships that describe space, time, and context—there exists an infinitude of abstract space that, through representation, is open to all of humanity and speaks to the isotropic nature of knowledge inherent to this new existence. This new expansion of space, understood as an unfolding as space is not created but discovered, completes the circuit between the mental space that constitutes our existence as Descartes may argue, the physical space of our reality, and the abstract space of knowledge. Humanity becomes space: we do not want to merely control space, we want to be space.
The cave truly exhibits this last point. Why do we derive so much enjoyment from putting on virtual reality goggles and moving through 3-D space virtually transcending our physical bodies—an existence among representation, abstraction, and simulation? It is because it gives us a taste of what we desire, the freedom to select any trajectory conceivable within space whether it be physical or abstract. It is a brief existence “unencumbered by earth’s gravity or the weight of a human body… In contrast to humans space, in which the verticality of the body and the direction of the horizon are two dominant directions, computer space does not privilege any particular axis,” (Manovitch 23). It parallel’s the embeddedness of objects in 3-D space that Manovitch discusses; however, we are the objects and it is our consciousness that we attempt to embed into space.Unfortunately, this is an ideal; in truth, you cannot select any trajectory conceivable in the cave—this is where the affair ends. We are limited by processors, programming languages, and our physical forms. Humans will continuously chase this ideal until some equilibrium point where the distinction between space, knowledge, and existence is irrelevant.