Streets for Cyborgs

Abstract

This article separates the city and the street in order to examine them as concepts which order our experience of both cyberspatial worlds and the “posturban” city. The extraordinary persistence of the flâneur and his successor, the cyberflâneur, despite both having been pronounced “dead” can be attributed to the need to reconcile these concepts in the continued reproduction of urban subjectivities under the terms of global capitalism. However, there is a tension between the understanding of embodiment which the practice of flânerie mandates and new ontological concepts emerging from the way that the biological sciences now write the body. I will argue that new practices of spatial production which subvert the conceptual cartography of contemporary urban space can emerge from an understanding of the street as responsive to a posthuman performance of embodiment.