Abstract
In 2008, Google started rolling out its “Street View” technology in Google Maps and Google Earth, making it possible to navigate through various positions in an “immersive” photographic view of designated streets in the world. The possibilities of disembodied virtual travel enabled by such technology would seem to anticipate what some have described as our transhuman future; that is, when humans will transcend biology and consciousness will be absorbed into virtual environments, a moment that advocates for transhumanism have described optimistically as “the singularity.”1 Far from detaching us from our physical surroundings, however, the technology has raised more immediate concerns about the consequences of increasingly sophisticated imaging technologies for our lived places. These range from concerns voiced in the media about the violation of individual privacy and fears about the exploitation of global imaging by terrorists or foreign governments,2 to more pragmatic concerns about how such technologies support or mitigate our ethical commitments to the preservation of places of cultural heritage or the integrity of local ecology.3
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Notes
For a brief summary of “transhumanism” (sometimes called “post-humanism”), see, for example, Mark Walker, “Ship of Fools: Why Transhumanism Is the Best Bet to Prevent the Extinction of Civilization,” H+: Transhumanism and Its Critics (Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2011), pp. 94–111; and in literary studies, for a view critical of trans-humanism, see Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. Chapter 1, pp. 1–24. She also responds in H+ Transhumanism and Its Critics in her essay “Wrestling with Transhumanism,” pp. 215–26. The application of the mathematical term “singularity” to transhumanism has been popularized by the transhumanism advocate Ray Kurzweil. See, for example, Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005).
Jeff Malpas, whose work is discussed at greater length below, considers the possibilities and limits of new media in relation to cultural heritage in “New Media, Cultural Heritage and the Sense of Place: Mapping the Conceptual Ground,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 14.3, pp. 197–209. On the relationship between global technology and local ecology, see Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. Chapter 1, pp. 17–68.
Much criticism of the play has thus been concerned with the problem of “locating” the play ideologically in relation to contemporary travel narratives and colonial discourse. See, for example, the essays collected by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman in “The Tempest” and Its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Patrick M. Murphy reviews the diverse variety of discussions of the play in its geographical and historical contexts in “Interpreting The Tempest: A History of Its Readings,” in The Tempest: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 3–72. Although more than ten years old, the essay provides an extensive bibliography of secondary readings.
Virginia Mason Vaughan in her Arden edition (London: Thomson Learning, 2005), pp. 6–7, briefly puts forward this view, citing E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1930), vol. 1, p. 489; Stephen Orgel, in the single-volume Oxford edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), provides a more detailed discussion, pp. 1–3, concluding that the play was not written for court nor produced as a masque (p. 2).
All textual references to Shakespeare’s play are made to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Second Edition, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 15. Christian Schmid explains: “In concrete terms, one could think of networks of interaction and communication as they arise in everyday life (e.g., daily connection of residence and workplace) or in the production process (production and exchange relations).” “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-Dimensional Dialectic,” in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 27–45; p. 36.
Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 27.
I borrow the term “force” from W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 9. Worthen defines performative force by drawing on the revisions by Derrida and Butler of Austin’s notion of performative utterances. Following Butler, Worthen argues that theatre is a “citational” practice that, rather than citing the dramatic text in a repetitive or hollow way, instead reiterates “regimes of performance”: “Plays become meaningful in the theatre through the disciplined application of conventionalized practices—acting, directing, scenography—that transform writing into something with performative force” (10). Worthen moves in the right direction by empowering performance as an affective force, but his argument still depends on an epistemological distinction between the real and the virtual.
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© 2013 Cary DiPietro
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DiPietro, C. (2013). Performing Place in The Tempest . In: DiPietro, C., Grady, H. (eds) Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137017314_5
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