The Signal and the Territory

• In Event: How Do They Understand the Science? Communicating Science, Risks, and Disasters 2

Abstract

This paper shows how the modern geographical notion of territory has emerged through the choreography and co-ordination of earth signalling processes. I argue that contrary to the modernist scientific conception of the “linear-model” in which scientists unproblematically monitor nature and communicate their findings to a self-evident “public,” the modern sciences of nature prediction have transformed the earth into a signal emitting medium. Through the elaboration of infrastructures and instruments, the science of earth monitoring, instead of extracting the facts of nature, have constituted complex and non-linear assemblies. It is in the process of this constitution that I argue the politics of signalling emerges. I illustrate this argument through an account of the emergence of volcano forecasting on the active volcano Mount Merapi in Java over the course the late 19th through to the 20th century and I show that the transformation of the earth into a signal created openings for complex deformations and transformations of political assemblies that make controversial and contested claims about the meaning of the interior of the earth. To do so, I compare the practices of signal processing by modernist scientists in a state observatory and shamans on the upper flanks of the volcano.

Author

• Adam Bobbette, University of Cambridge