The Network breathes with new life
everyday and if it rests, we are annoyed. When the biological body (i.e. biomedia)
meshes with the networked city, there appear new forms and ideals, new ways of
knowing, new methods of changing, if not becoming.  Mitchell’s text is a
reflection of this burgeoning ontology; the lived perception of our
increasingly connected and technical lives.  The living Network is the status
quo and we are in a sense, bionodes in an evolving silico-orgainc schematic. 

We live, increasingly, as technical
extensions of an ancient biological embodiment. Mitchell makes this clear as he
describes the various points of the living interface and articulation.  The
cell phone is an extension of human cellular macrocosms (e.g. ears, mouth,
tongue, larynx, etc.); the water and sewer systems are extensions of the human
alimentary canal; blood banks, hospitals and organ centers are body part exchange
and repair centers; even the sexual exchange of genetic information and the
repackaging of biodata in the progeny we produce–all of this represents the
technology we are and the technology we seek to refine and extend ad
infinitum via the concept of the Network. 

The Network is not new–we have
always been connected.  The Network is, however, changing.  We might say it is
evolving as our shadow.

For Mitchell, our capacities for
awareness, response, agency and sentience are evolving in ways we no longer
notice as computer interaction, though we are progressively more synthetically
embodied–persistently creating new ways with which to extend beyond our bodily
selves as understood previously.  Because of this, Mitchell deems "we are
not fully contained within our skins; our extended networks and fragmented
habitats make us spatially and temporally indefinite entities."  Mitchell
relates the economies of scale to bare life, and such an analysis unfolds the
terms of the "human" kind.  From the nanosphere to the Earth’s
ionosphere, we inhabit and design our milieu, intracellularly and orbitally,
via the molecular biology of the cell and the technology of computer networks,
transportation networks and communicative extension.

For Mitchell, it would seem that the
human nomad has flourished because it has evolved (if technically) ever-greater
ways to be connected.  We are now perhaps, hyper-nomadic, living less under the
restraints of this or that environment, untethered to underlying conditions as
in previous ages, because technology keeps us linked to the network that
provides for our needs, from food sources to Capital, almost seamlessly.  Of
course, this most current state does not apply to the most undeveloped regions
of the world, but Mitchell’s text is focused upon the regions of the Earth that
are most represented and embodied by the Network. 

The subjectivity of material
location gives way to the ontology of the link.  Mitchell describes how it is
that access to the Network via passwords and biometric data increasingly allow
for a "nodular subjectivity,’ such that, we feel at home wherever there is
access.  Wireless technology has invigorated this nodular subjectivity.  It is
also true that all of this connectivity puts us a greater risk of collective
crisis, such that a problem ‘here’ may precipitate a problem ‘everywhere.’

While networked, hand-held and
stationary devices increase the robustness of communication and trade across
the terrain, networked power grids and server farms ensure that a crisis of
disruption could leave millions without power, goods, information or access. 
With every new Network node, software or hardware upgrade, the stakes increase
in this complex new logic of capacity and transmission.  The latest twist is
the biocomputation and design of bare life, via computer modeling of genes and
genomes.  Herein lies the erasure of the spirit in the ancient biological
apparatus.  

Humanity is en route to a
future that Mitchell traces and speculates upon well, within the pages of ME++. 
It leaves us wondering whether or not the processes we are witnessing mark an
epochal turn for a new evolutionary variant of humankind that will become ever
more synthetic and non-organic, or instead, will the variations we are
introducing be selectively eliminated by the natural world we continue to
inhabit?  Mitchell’s musings upon the Network and our burgeoning nodular
subjectivity within it, give support to a consideration of humankind’s most
current embodied condition. 

© 2005 Nicholas Ruiz III

Nicholas Ruiz III is a graduate
teaching instructor and doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Program in
the Humanities at Florida State University.  His areas of interest include
modern/postmodern culture and society, global capital, critical theory, globalization
and polity; his work has appeared in Rhizomes.net,
Reconstruction, Media/Culture.org.au, The International Journal of Baudrillard
Studies. He holds a master’s in Liberal Arts (University of North Carolina,
2003) and a baccalaureate in Molecular and Microbiology (University of Central
Florida, 1996). He is also the editor of Kritikos.

Categories: Philosophical