From Cemeteries To Cyberspace:

Identity and a Globally Technologised Age

Abstract

From the starting point of death, this paper considers contradictory aspects of identity in a globally technologised age. It opens up the terrain of knowledge through engaging a politics of experience in questions of death and identity. Closure is inevitably disrupted when the imminence of death is confronted. The project discusses the cemetery and cyberspace, with attention to Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, Michel Foucault’s heterotopia and a liberal version of utopia. A technologisation of knowledge is identified in the relationship between the epistemological framing of these spaces and the identification of the self. A critical reading of this terrain makes visible the assumptions about progress, unity, and identity that normalised discourses of culture and technology presuppose.

The limits of territoriality may be tested by the telemetrical in cyberspace, as the limits of freedom are questioned by the unrelenting presence of corporeality at the cemetery. Possibilities of de-limitation from boundaries are considered, as corporealities are confronted by the materiality of death at the cemetery and
by the willing suspension of physicality in cyberspace. The project follows Foucault’s procedure of the ‘specific intellectual’ in that it does not attempt to claim a masterful discourse of ‘truth’ in matters of technology and identity. The approach is rather one of strategised knowledge, a heuristic approach whereby the possibilities of theory open up in the exigencies of practice.

I will argue that in a globally technologised world technology itself poses urgent questions relating to the formations of knowledge and identity which demand consideration in other than excessively technologised terms. The sites of cemetery and cyberspace simultaneously locate and displace our notions of identity as technicity constructs the space of social relations. The idea of imagined and imaginary frontiers beyond physical reality is the site at which identity faces the unimaginable. The paper has an intensely personal reference to death and the imminence of knowledge.