- Scale, Scope, and Structure
For any thing or event to participate in the worlds I just described, it must have an identity and location that makes it available for connection with other things and events. On its own, it is not present; it needs to be made into an $ { \mathrm { ~ \textrm ~ { ~ ~ } ~ } } ^ { \prime \prime } { \mathrm { ~ \textrm ~ { ~ ~ } ~ } } ^ { \prime \prime }$ with a location. It needs an address to have an identity, and any address requires an addressing table commensurate with the scales of our Stack scenarios. The ability to assign addresses is critical to any geopolitical system (including The Stack). As discussed above regarding the nomos, it is essential for any political-geographical regime to be able to identify the individual sites, fields, instances, and actors within its jurisdictional field, such that any of these would be able to send and receive messages from the others as part of a regular and governable flow of information through space. The terms of the nomos are also the shape of that space as configured by the flows that fill it up. For modern governance, this requires not only the subdivision of geography by lines, but also the superimposition of a formal addressing matrix onto new or existing geographies and the assignment of individual addresses to unique points within them. Furthermore, the hierarchical semantics of the address may also express divisions of geography (e.g., the sequence of building number, street, city, and state for Western postal addresses). Political space is both made and made legible through such categorical presentations, and the ancient and modern histories of cartography, geography, geometry, and geoscopy are interwoven with comparisons between real physical features of the world and these ideal abstractions that measure, codify, and explain their scales, similarities, and differences. That legibility depends on the identification of individual datum (any reference point on the planet ’ s surface) against which position and measurement are made, in reference to the addressing of some subsection of that surface (e.g., that site pinpointed as the intersection of longitudinal and latitudinal lines). In turn, the composite whole model is derived finally from the spaces of difference between internal individual points and sections, occupying positions relative to one another. The model names the points, and the points add up to the model.
The drawing of such a matrix of lines and inscription on the Earth, perhaps in military competition with another enemy abstractions, is also a demarcation of possible interior and exterior relations and of political spatial orders to be accumulated and occupied. At the level of the City layer, however, the structure of addresses is applied less in the service of absolute state geography than for the production and regularization of sender and receiver relations among situated networks. The assignment of a unique postal address to a building gives it a certain legal, political identity as a public entity to which and from which messages can be sent, and the official enumeration of these identities by the state has been an essential feature of the political modernity of cities and a source of sovereign legitimacy for their governance. That legitimacy is enforced by maintaining the apparatus of postal identify for sites within the polis and securing the right to recognize and assign new identities with new addresses. Sovereignty over communication flows may arise from this monopolistic addressing of senders and receivers, even if the privacy of individual messages is formally guaranteed by physical and virtual envelopes. Later, states (and others) would credentialize permission for messaging with postage stamps, imprinting the message with its official seal and selling access to a delivery infrastructure on an parcel-by-parcel, address-to-address basi (consider that it is Charles Babbage, inventor of the first modern computer during the Victorian era, who also contributed to the design of the first system of flat-rate postage pricing instead of rates based on distance). The problems posed by international post for the mutual recognition between different stamp-and-addressing sovereignties were worked out as late as the Treaty of Bern and the establishment of a Universal Postal Union in 1874 (China did not sign on until 1914). But even with some functional measure of global interoperability between postal domains, the heterogeneity of legacy and local addressing schemes and procedures persists and even multiplies with the development of information technologies. For example, whereas in Western systems, postal addresses go from the smallest to largest entity (person, house number, street, city, state, country), in Japan, addresses can move from the largest to the smallest (prefecture, municipality, ward, city district, city block, house number) in addition to a postal code. Moreover, exceptions are found inside the exceptions. In Kyoto, wards are very small, and often they share the same name, and so informal addresses are commonly used instead; in Sapporo, the city is divided into quadrants, and blocks are named according to their distance from the intersection of the center point of convergence of the North-South and East-West divisions. Around the world in many older cities, building numbers may have been originally and unsystematically assigned according to the chronology of their construction and so sometimes in relation to buildings long since gone. More recently, some master-planned campuses also feature buildings numbered in near chronological order, while other developments subdivide areas according to vertical and horizontal grid matrices, like a spreadsheet with addresses of $^ { \prime \prime } { \mathrm { A } } 5 ^ { \prime \prime }$ and “ F9. ” Each system is logical in its own way. At the same time, the assignment of addresses and street names is not only a matter of logistical rationalization; it can also stage highly charged political symbolism. Revolutions are often solidified through the replacement of one geographical regime of street names with another, giving a new identity to the physical polity and its urban stage (France in 1789 – 1799, Russia in 1917 – 1921, and Iran in 1979 are well-known historical examples).
Address Layer
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