Net, Plasma, Plebs. Margins of the Global City

Abstract

This essay aim at reading the spatial paradigm, dominant today, based on the flows, the net, the networking, as element of a complex discourse designed to offer epistemological legitimation to the economic-spatial restructuring effects generated by globalization. A paradigm whose functioning produces exclusions, selections, cuts and it maybe constitutes the instrument of new governamental policies. The term “plasma”, introduced by Latour to indicate what is exceeding that model, is here used to refine the more classical concept of plebs. In Hegel as in Foucault, the plebs is a social spread that depends on the forms of material and ideal organizations which liberal society assumes time by time, and that problematizes the political centre of the discourse on the city exactly because is not reducible to it.