Communication in place

Today I visited a prison to talk about politics in what someone there called the ‘free world.’

I live in that ‘free world.’ But I don’t feel freed by ideas any more. I was asked what the relationship between what we talk about in debates and how we act: whether anyone enacts the policies we defend in debates. I had to say no. Since ‘leaving’ debate for the end of the semester, I wanted to involve myself in politics which I could act on, or with or towards. From then, I have become aware of the relationships between physical location, spatial isolation or influence, and culture (including the cultural distinctions that qualify truths as truths).

I feel enclaved at UGA. Not that I live anywhere ‘unreal’ – I don’t believe we can or should try to divide out real life from unreal life, through lines drawn on or around our political spaces. However, I do think that UGA fosters a politics of vague humanitarianism which stems from the spatial and cultural makeup of the place which I live. I know some brilliant exceptions to this trend. But I also know the trend of poor motivation and attendance for student activism that extends beyond saving babies, stopping ‘curing’ cancer with bake-sales, or dance-marathoning.

Culture is a function of negotiating the social/economic decisions faced to a certain group every day, and the reality of many people’s lives at UGA means that they never face decisions of substantial (explicitly) political consequence. Few people recognize themselves as political agents because the nature of the situation they encounter every day is circumscribed by their physical location as well as their economic privilege. A provided paid education and living situation lowers the profile of economic injustice as a political problem, which inculcates a culture of identification with traditional symbols of power. It relegates the question of how people daily provide for themselves to a lower priority.

UGA, in spatial isolation, makes speaking truth to certain forms of political power very difficult. National news media typically has to be trucked in from Atlanta, political demonstrations or image confrontations with political practices are limited to the environment of Athens itself, or the people who live here. Writing politics from Athens is a profoundly smaller affair than it may be from other places. The physical connections between here and there politically focus activism onto fungible politics: raising money which can be sent anywhere and retain value, de-emphasizing direct action and the strategic use of media as anything more than a sympathy tool. This intersects with globalizing media systems, which construct messages around a supposedly universal audience, centering the controlling discourse on a different place, and creating messages that striate across other messages, transforming them across the filter of television.

The problem isn’t of space but of signal decay across space, and the blockages in communication that develop around a place. Signal decay can emerge quickly or be amplified depending on the means of transmission. Also, which messages control the media central to people’s lives will, naturally, have a bigger impact on people’s live than those outside of control of that medium. The most dangerous and important messages are those able to hijack the lines of transmission than those which are simply more radical. I think that the study of the movement of messages across space – the places where communication creates eddies and concentrations of messages around a place – how thy accumulate, and what those places have in common.

Duncan