Smooth and Striated Space

How to conceive of the space of the internet?

Mark Nunes uses Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of striated vs. smooth spaces, at http://www.gpc.edu/~mnunes/vtop.htm

"According to Deleuze and Guattari:

In striated space, one closes off a surface and "allocates" it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one "distributes" oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one's crossings. (481) These two functions, allocation and distribution, serve as the dominant organizational principle that differentiates smooth and striated space.

On Internet, however, these metaphors do not just organize space; they create a space, or more accurately, they substantiate cyberspace as a virtual topography. A striated "highway" topography determines cyberspace as a system of regulated connections between determined points on dedicated lines; conversely, a smooth "plane" topography "writes" a cyberspace of fluid transit and continual passage. The 1995 Microsoft "Where Do You Want to Go Today" campaign, for example, makes use of both topographies, creating two very different images of "cyberspace." In a Microsoft Office and Mail commercial, a female executive in mid-flight calls upon the services of people in Spokane, Washington, who work with her once she arrives in Spain. "Jane on the plane" cruises from site to site via global information networks in the same way that her plane travels from point A to point B. In contrast, the Microsoft Encarta commercial shows a man researching hang-gliding who soon finds himself gathering information on birds and other "wingéd things," then drifting off on the winds of a monsoon to India, and finally to the Himalayas. Both commercials ask the viewer to conceive of a virtual topography by presenting an image of navigation (asking, "Where do you want to go today?" at the end of the spot), but the space that the Encarta user traverses is significantly different from the space portrayed in the Office ad. The Encarta commercial writes a space that is planar and fluid, whereas in the Office commercial, cyberspace is a highway of sorts connecting terminal points in a simulated world.

In their general discussion of smooth and striated space, Deleuze and Guattari associate these two spatial arrangements with two systems: one that is State-oriented and static, the other nomadic and fluid. Striation allows for state functioning by creating what Michael Menser calls a "gravitational space," which sets up the state as "the central organizational organism" or regulatory body (298). That does not mean that striation attempts to shut down the medium; rather, it allocates and organizes functionalities into productive modes. Striated cyberspace sets out to function as a simulated world that overcomes real space by providing more direct (point to point) contact and therefore greater efficiency. This image forms the core assumption of the White House's National Information Infrastructure (NII) "Agenda For Action," which presents the NII (and for now, Internet) as a surrogate space that replaces the real world by overcoming the real world's limits. In cyberspace "the best schools, teachers, and courses [are] available without regard to geography, distances, resources, or disability. . . .The vast resources of art, literature, and science [are] available everywhere" ("Agenda"). But these resources can only become "available everywhere" once "everywhere" is connected through this striated topography of point-to-point contact. Furthermore, in a striated space, if you are not connected, you are nowhere. By this gravitational principle, then, terminal points can only "signify" once they are allocated to definite positions within a given system.

As Deleuze and Guattari note, striated spaces of grids, contact, and control are a function of all States, not merely overtly totalitarian structures. In fact, one might argue that much of the desire for a striated virtual topography has its origins in the Enlightenment desire to define natural, political, and ethical laws that would render "the world" comprehensible and controllable. Following this utopian telos brings us, in Baudrillard's words, to a hyperreal moment beyond its own ends: when the ideal model for the world becomes the world itself (3-4). Striated cyberspace promises to outdo the real world by freeing action from the limit(ation)s of real space. Discussions of Internet that assume a striated topography see the medium as not only providing for more efficient commerce, but also "develop[ing] new 'electronic communities' [for sharing] knowledge and experience that can improve the way that [citizens] learn, work, play, and participate in the American Democracy" ("Agenda"). Other utopian conceptions of cyberspace make use of the metaphor of the city or "electronic agorae": points of community stockpile or "collective goods," with an implicit or explicit call for citizenship in a collective (state) body (Rheingold 13). At a further extreme, Internet-as-cyberspace provides the site for virtual realities that can create "societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital" (Dibbell 37). Implicit in each description of a utopic cyberspace is a topography of "lines and trajectories. . .subordinated to points" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). Cyberspace figures as a multitude of interconnected "sites"; thus, the "highway," however poor a metaphor it may be for the technical functioning of Internet communication, accurately captures the topography of user interface: a striated space in which lines connect terminal points.

In representations of smooth cyberspace, however, as in the Encarta ad, "lines of flight" replace points of contact. For Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space sets up a nomadic system of movement (480). Lines become vectors, rather than units of measurement: "a direction and not a dimension or metric determination" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). As opposed to the gravitational space of a striated topography, a smooth topography provides a space of "deterritorialization" in which points "are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine. . . .Every point is a relay and exists only as a relay" (Deleuze and Guattari 380). The most frequent references to a smooth cyberspace concern hypertext applications like Encarta, or more significantly, the World Wide Web (WWW). As Netscape 2.0's ship-wheel logo implies, the smooth topography of the WWW more closely resembles the sea than the highway, giving users "infinite" degrees of freedom. Here we need to rethink "topography" as an opening of terrain to multiple passages, rather than as the mapping of a specific topos.2 Jay Bolter uses similar language to describe the topographic "writing space" of hypertext: "not the writing of a place, but rather the writing with places, spatially realized topics" (25). Instead of allocating virtual space, the WWW distributes and displaces it; it presents a "rhizomatic" 'Net-scape in which "webpages" serve as pointers rather than terminal points. This topography, of course, provides no more accurate a portrayal of the technical functioning of networked communication than striating metaphors, but at the level of user interface, "surfing" accurately depicts this process of distributing oneself across smooth cyberspace.

While "surfing" has been the predominant media image associated with smooth topography, in some circles, this image of a smooth cyberspace draws explicitly on the language of Deleuze and Guattari and the rhizome. " (http://www.gpc.edu/~mnunes/vtop.htm)