Paper to be presented at the 'Nordic
Geographers Meeting' conference in
Roskilde 24-27 of May 2011
Fire, Walk With Me:
Towards a Geography of the Fourth Topology
Richard Ek
Department of Service Management, Lund University, Sweden
Abstract
The concept of topology has become a cornerstone in the project of widening the ontological register in both ANT and human geography. The seminal starting point has for many years been ‘Regions, networks and fluids’ by Annemarie Mol and John Law from 1994, an article that for instance influenced John Urry’s outline of a global complexity. In the article, two familiar topologies, the region and the network is positioned against a third, the not so familiar topology, fluidity. Then, in 2001, Law and Mol introduce a fourth topology, fire, in a reasoning that at least in the first reading, borders to ontological mysticism. The reasoning in the later paper has thus not been cited and used in the same extent as the 1994 paper. This is a bit surprising, since the reasoning lay out a framework with a significant potential to substantially extend the relational thinking – approach as it stresses the importance of the absent (taking the reasoning far away from a simple topographical ontology) in practice, performativity, agency, and materiality of a network. This paper is the first step to outline a geography of this fourth topology. It starts out with a close reading of relevant work by Mol and Law and the articles that have tried to more substantially develop ideas regarding complex topologies. It then continues with giving an idea of how a geography of fire could look like, through an example taken from tourism: the bracelet that is obligatory to wear inside a all-inclusive resort.
Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chance out between two worlds:
Fire walk with me
(Bob)
1. Introduction
The concept of topology has become a cornerstone in the project of develop and enrich the spatial imaginary in the contemporary social sciences. Within human geography, topology as a concept is crucial in the attempts to crystallise a view on relational space and relational thinking as something fundamentally different than traditional, absolute notions of space and place in geographical thinking. Parallel with the project of establishing a relational spatiality we also have the ambition within ANT to develop an ontological richness as a response towards critics of ANT-approaches from the 1980’s and early 1990’s. This ambition has sometimes been labelled ANT 2.0 or ‘ANT and After’ by the involved scholars. These two mainly conceptual projects, ‘relational space and relation thinking’ and ‘ANT 2.0’) should, I think, be seen as a collective attempt to widening the ontological register. Several collaborations between ANT-scholars and geographers on this and similar topics speaks for that. We can also see how this collaboration has started to gain influence in the social sciences, as topology as an analytical concept has been applied by prolific sociologists like John Urry and Bülent Diken. Simultaneously, Giorgio Agamben’s impact in the social sciences and the humanities has resulted in an interest by some geographers (as Claudio Minca) in seeing power as a topological spatiality.
I do not want to make a call for a “topological turn”, but, mainly due to personal curiosity, think it is time to address the concept and different meanings of “topology” a bit more systematic. It is a concept that is a bit bewildering for me, something of a blank figure that are given different or unclear meanings depending on the context in contemporary human geography and in the social sciences in general. I have nurtured this curiosity for some time now. Initially, I tried to contrast the “topological” to the “topographical” in a binary framework, but I am not that certain that that works analytically. Later on, I was attracted to the almost, in my reading, cryptic description of fire as an ontology (laid out by Annemarie Mol and John Law [2001]). I have also for the last years been interested in the work by Agamben (1998) on the camp as a topological figure that increasingly outshines the topographical figure of the polis.
This interest will probably shine through in this paper and in its structure. I will start out by discussing the more general definitions of “topography” and “topology”, and relate back to the two concepts etymological meanings. Thereafter, in the following section, I will recapitulate the relational space – dialogue and how topology is framed there. Then, I will zero in on the work by John Law, often in co-operation with Annemarie Mol, on the four topologies of region, network, fluid, and fire (Mol and Law 1994, Law and Mol 2001, Law 2002, Law and Singleton 2005). Especially the fourth topology is of interest here since it is by far the least commented upon. The ambition here is thus to start to imagine how a geography of the fourth topology could look like. This is done by a close reading of a) the work by Law among others and b) the work by other scholars who use the fire topology to make a case of their own. In the fifth section I will address Agamben’s work as an example of not only the widening of the ontological register but also as an example of widening of the register of critical inquiry in contemporary social sciences.
2. To be Topographical or Topological is that the Question?
In the beginning I saw the notion of “topology” as something different than “topography”, and that the two concepts could be put towards each other in a binary relation. Either you could regard the view from a topographical view of point or from a topological point of view. Topography is here the ‘three-dimensional arrangement of physical attributes (such as shape, height and depth) of a land surface in a place or a region’ and also ‘the detailed description or drawing of the physical features of a place or a region’ (The American Heritage Science Dictionary 2005). The word stems from topos (place) and graphein (to write). It implies a focus on relief and the three-dimensional qualities of a delimited Euclidean space. This absolute notion of space has been dominant in the Western metaphysical tradition, as kenon (void), chora (formless container) and topos (Casey 2005: 202; Grosz 1995: 93). Space is here considered as empty, indestructible and immobile, measured as distance (Curry 1996: 5) and filled with content (whatever that may be, people, nature, society). A topographical view on the world comes “naturally” because of the hegemony of vision in modernity. Actually, the scopic regime in which the use of perspective in the visual practice dominates (Jay 1988, Levin 1993) inherently leads to a topographical view on the organisation of human institutions. This is for instance evident in the practice of traditional or mainstream cartography. A three dimensional world is abstracted into a two dimensional map which implies a distance not only due to the representational regime per se but also a distance between the observing subject and the observed, inherently organised object/geography (Cosgrove 1994, Harley 2001).
To David Michael Levin this means that the world view that the visual practice makes possible is “frontal”: that is ‘…ontology of entities which, at least in the ideal situation, are to be held “front and centre”: in the most ideal act of beholding, the object is to be held in place directly before the eyes. This is the metaphysics of vision: a metaphysics that tends to overvalue constancy, uniformity, permanence, unity, totality, and distinctness’ (Levin 1989: 31, original emphasis), that is, a world-picture (Heidegger 1977, Gregory 1994: 34-37). The world-picture is a topographical picture.
Topology is the study of the non-metric properties of spatial figurations as connectedness and density. Topology is thus ‘the mathematical study of the geometric properties that are not normally affected by changes in the size or shape of geometric figures’ (The American Heritage Science Dictionary 2005). In the Dictionary of Human Geography (Gregory et al 2009: 762) it is described as:
A field of mathematics studying the spatial properties of an object or network that remain true when that object is stretched. These include connectivity and adjacency. Imagine stretching a rubber band between two fingers. Likening the band to a vector line segment, then the start node (the one end) remains connected to the other despite the stretching.
The word stems from topos (place) and logos (discourse). It implies a focus on functionality, relations and the interactions between relations and, importantly, the processes of spatial emergence below the (topographical) surface. The topographical approach suggests then that ‘any spatial coherence that is achieved (on the surface) serves to disguise the relational complexities that lie “underneath” spatial forms’ (Murdoch 2006: 12).
Initially I found the experiment of putting the topographical and the topological in a heuristic framework intriguing – and in a way I still do – as two rivalling figurative ontologies or spatial models. The spatial model or ontology that is compatible with the Euclidean notion of topographical space is the inside/outside division, an ontology that permeate Western history of thought (figured through the “/ - sign”. In the European imagination this spatial ontology is manifested in the notion of a sharp boundary between inside and outside, in America imagination in the notion of the frontier between civilisation and wilderness (Kornberger and Clegg 2003: 81). To Bruno Latour (1993) one of the most crucial implementations of this model is the first dichotomy between human and non-humans, a purification process or practice that creates two distinct and discreet ontological domains inherent in Modernity.
This inside/outside ontology also precede Western Modernity, for instance in Aristotle’s notion of polis as the highest good and the community of Man as a political animal (bios) in contrast to zoē, the simple life of being, or natural life (Agamben 1998: 1). The perhaps most rooted city myth, the story of Remus and Romulus (Diken and Laustsen 2006) is also based on the inside/outside ontology in which the demarcation, the “/” constitutes the differentiation between civilisation and barbarism, between Hobbe’s distinction between the state of nature and a commonwealth, Leviathan (Diken and Laustsen 2005: 24). In the continuation of this, the principle of territoriality chisels out territories that occupy absolute space and politically arranges societies into institutionalised containers of society (Agnew 1994, Häkli 2001, Sassen 2006, Walker 1992). Also the principle of private property, especially regarding land, is founded on the spatial ontology of inside/outside (Berger 1972, Cosgrove 1985).
Schematically, it is impossible to be both inside and outside at the same time, it is an “either or” situation that applies, with dichotomies, generically hierarchical, as nature-culture, male-female, mind-matter, reality-representation, etc. (Haraway 1991). The distinction, per se, is the element in the ontology that makes the difference; it is the walls that make Rome (Diken & Laustsen 2006) and the barbed wire that makes the enclosed space (Netz 2004).
The topological approach on the other hand harmonises with a relational notion on or dimension of space rather than the absolute dimension, and as a spatial model it can be signified or expressed as the “↔ - sign”. Relational takes on spatiality implies a paradigmatic departure from the Cartesian understanding of space since it dissolves the boundaries and borders between objects and space. Processes, objects and events take an ontological precedence over space. Actually, space is the product of processes and events rather than that processes and events takes place in space (Smith 2003: 12). As space is a process, space is also produced (Lefebvre 1991) in flux and emergence, that is, relational space is based on a Heraclitean ontology of becoming rather than a Parmenidean ontology of being (Chia 2003: 114-115).
Schematically, it is possible to be both inside and outside at the same time, it is an “and – situation” that applies. A topological view on the world, consequently, does not concur with the scopic regime of modernity and the principle of realistic representation, the “mirror of nature” (Rorty 1979). The Baroque, for instance, rejected the Cartesian tradition’s monolithic geometry in favour of the distorted and the tactile (Jay 1993: 48).
This dichotomy between two incompatible models, the topographical and the topological, expresses a normative position in favour of a call for other conceptualisations of space than the traditional one – space as quite much equal to distance and place as a demarcated coherent area of space. Thus I am in favour of the relational approach towards space and spatial thinking.
3. Relational Space
‘Space is a treacherous philosophical word’, James M. Blaut (1961: 1) once wrote, as the concept and its different categorisations constitute a matter of constant dispute. Developments in mathematics and physics have had consequences for the philosophical concern with the nature of space. Non-Euclidean geometry and Einstein’s relativistic revision of the concept has become a matter of scientific and philosophical controversy (Sklar 1974: 1). For instance in Newton’s cosmology (Burgin 1989: 28, Harvey 1973: 13-14) space contains all objects, has an absolute quality (Harvey 1969: 195-196). But at the same time, space also has a quality among different objects, a quality that varies depending on the objects’ positions in relation to each other. Space also has a relative quality (Harvey 1969: 195-196). For Newton, it was necessary to separate absolute and relative space in order to be able to observe and measure movement (Curry 1996b: 92, Casey 1997: 142). To Neil Smith (1984: 67-77), the division between absolute and relative space made it intellectually possible to define space as separated, for instance in “social space” and “natural space”. Absolute space came to be related to an external and primary world, first nature, and relative space to a human secondary world, second nature. Nature was separated from culture in the philosophical tradition.
This relational thinking about space and time originated with Leibniz’s work in non-Euclidean geometry. To Leibniz, space, as time and matter, was dividable into atomic structures in which monads are the only existing entities in the universe that are not dependent on human consciousness. All other physical objects exist only if they are acknowledged by the senses as phenomena. The objects are only phenomenological manifestations of the metaphysical substance, the monads (Tonboe 1993: 78-79). In his correspondence with Newton’s proxy, Samuel Clarke (Alexander 1998), Leibniz argued that spatial aspects such as position, distance and motion are nothing else but a system of relations among things, a system without any metaphysical or ontological existence per se (Werlen 1993: 1, Harvey 1969: 195-196, 1973: 13-14 and 1996: 250-251).
Therefore, space is always in a process of becoming since it is the product of relations that are materially embedded practices that must be carried out (Massey 1999b: 283). Here, space is understood through what might be called, in Heidegger’s terms, a “dwelling” perspective founded on the primacy of practices (Thrift 1999: 308). Space could therefore be seen as a verb rather than a noun. Gillian Rose (1999: 293) argues that:
Space is also a doing, that it does not pre-exist its doing, and that its doing is the articulation of relational performances…space is practised, a matrix of play, dynamic and iterative, its forms and shapes produced through the citational performance of self-other relations.
Space is no longer reduced to particularity, passivity and contingency (Doel and Clarke 1998: 48) and ‘space’ and ‘time’ are less important than the always unique acts of “timing” and “spacing” (Bingham and Thrift 2000: 290). In his call for poststructuralist geographies, Marcus Doel (1999: 7) argues that:
Place is an event…neither situated nor contained within a particular location, but is instead splayed out and unfolded across a myriad of vectors…vectors of disjointure and dislocation [that] may conjugate and reverberate, but there is no necessity for them to converge on a particular experiential or physical location.
In sum, there is no space, only spacing; that is ‘…the differential element within everything that happens; the repetitious relay or protracted stringiness by which the fold of actuality opens in and of itself onto the unfold of virtuality. Space is what reopens and dissimilates the givens’ (Doel 2000: 125).
It should be clear by now that Gilles Deleuze have influenced relational thinking about space. As in the topological figure origami, ‘the world can be (un)folded in countless ways, with innumerable folds over folds, and folds within folds’ (Doel 1999: 18, after Deleuze 1993). Folds are everywhere (Deleuze 1995: 156) and space is folded in many ways into manifold (Doel 2000: 127-128). The folding and unfolding of space becomes an event, an actualisation of the virtual (Gren and Tesfahuney 2004: 65, following Deleuze 1994 and Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Place-events are folded into existence (Bingham and Thrift 2000: 290), places are spatio-temporal events (Massey 2005: 130).
The focus on becoming, (un)folding and events in relational thinking has also directed a focus on the works of Michel Serres. In his attempt to construct a “philosophical geography” (together with Bruno Latour), topology, as a ‘science of proximities and ongoing or interrupted transformations’ (Serres with Latour 1995: 105) is highlighted (Bingham and Thrift 2000: 290). Topology is not concerned with the distance variable per se, but with the properties of spaces that are independent of metric measures and how relations are folded and unfolded (stretched, compressed, stratified, etc.) while maintaining certain properties (Dainton 2001: 365, Latham 2002: 131). ‘Topology, in short, extends the possibilities of mathematics far beyond its original Euclidean restrictions by articulating other spaces’ (Mol and Law 1994: 643, original emphasis). Following this line of thought, (relational) time-space can be seen as actor-network topologies, multiple pleats of relations stitched together, ‘such that nearness and distance measured in absolute space are not in themselves important’ (Latham 2002: 131), but how spaces emerge as ordered and hierarchical socio-material relations (Murdoch 1998: 358-359). Relational farness and nearness are not only the product of distance but also the (dis)articulation of diverse (un)foldings of actor networks (Law 1999: 6-7, Latham 2002: 131).
Following Serres’s topological thinking, human geographers have begun to see space, place and time as co-constituted, folded together, situated, mobile and multiple. For Ash Amin (2002: 389), this implies a notion of spatiality as non-linear and non-scalar as well as a:
Topological sense of space and place, a sense of geographies constituted through the folds, undulations, and overlaps that natural and social practices normally assume, without any a priori assumption of geographies of relations nested in territorial or geometric sense.