Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class

The telegraph, telephone, and television, not to mention theInternet and mobile telephony, are all forms of communication thatmove information faster than the speed at which objects move. Bothlabor and capital and armies and commodities once moved at the samespeed as the information organizing them. Over the last twocenturies, social space has developed a strange folded quality, where physical space comes more and more to be doubled by a spaceof the movement of information. Telesthesia, or perception at adistance, comes increasingly to characterize how we see and hearand know the world.

How does the evolution of different communication forms affecthow we can perceive and act? How can the underlying infrastructureof communication forms be detected in the events of everyday life?These are the central questions animating this book. McKenzie Warkfirst explores relations between metropolitan and peripheralcultures - or postcolonial relations - with closeattention to the texture of events that can happen when perceptionis mediated. He then examines what were once called postmodernexperiences, and how relations of communication create new kinds ofclass relations and experiences of everyday life, from 9/11 toOccupy Wall Street.