Paper to be presented at the 'Nordic Geographers Meeting' conference inRoskilde 24-27 of May 2011

Fire, Walk With Me:

Towards a Geography of the Fourth Topology

Richard EkDepartment of Service Management, Lund University, Swedenrichard.ek@ism.lu.se

AbstractThe 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

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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 pastThe 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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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).

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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

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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:

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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.

Every locality becomes a site of intersection and juxtaposition of old and new spatio-temporalities embedded in complex, layered histories. Place is an open, hybrid meeting place (Massey 1999c: 22). As a consequence, a global sense of place is needed (Massey 1991), where places are imagined (Massey 1994: 154):

As articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale that what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent.

Finally, the practice of in a topographical vein regarding geographical scales as a rigid spatial framework from the local, or even the body, through the regional, national, continental to the global has been questioned. Arguing in a relational vein that all networks of social relations are constantly in the process of ordering, Nigel Thrift states that ‘There is no such thing as a scale. Rather, size is an uncertain effect generated by a network and its modes of interaction’ (Thrift 1995: 33). Almost ten years later, Thrift (2004: 59) emphasises even more strongly that ‘Space is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from “global” to “local”. This absurd scale-dependent notion is replaced by the notion that what counts is connectivity…’

This verdict may sound strong, but it is indicative of the relational turn in Human Geography (Jones 2010a and 2010b). In essence, topographical thinking is discouraged in favour of topological imaginations about the characteristics of a relation-based spatiality. “Topological” in this context

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refers to a high degree back to the two geo-philosophies of Deleuze and Serres, as relational space can be twisted around, unfolded, expanded and compressed due to a societal dynamics of practices and events in continuous flux. The question is if ANT-scholars are as inspired by the geo-philosophical approach as the human geographers.

A Hand Full of Topologies

As sociologists or scientific practice the ANT-approach pivot on the interwoven characteristics of humans, materiality and technological artefacts. ANT stresses the ontological symmetry within a hybrid collective, between humans, non-humans (other living beings) and objects like texts, materials and so on. It is the assemblages of humans and non-humans of different kinds that really accomplish something like making social structures last and act at distance and in a way we can say that “society” is durable and doable thanks to all the non-humans (Callon 1986 and 1991, Latour 1986 and 1991). And since action of human-mobile assemblages is constructed within the networks, space and place are made out of the relations as well, made out of the materials that are brought together by the assemblage (Murdoch 2006: 69-70).

In the beginning of the 1990’s critique towards ANT was formulated. ANT had proclaimed and regarded networks as an all-encompassing ontology and narrative and consequently erased all space for alterity and excluded all Otherness (Lee and Brown 1994). Sometimes under labels like “ANT 2.0” and “ANT and after”, there has been an endeavour to open up to a spatial imaginary more ontologically complex than “ANT 1.0” (Hetherington and Law 2000: 129, Gad and Jensen 2010). John Law and Annemarie Mol are the scholars that most consequently have investigated the spatialities of several topological constellations beyond the Cartesian logic of Euclidean space. The starting point is the preposition that objects are an effect of networks and further that the enactment of objects is

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simultaneously an enactment of spatial conditions (Law 2002: 92). What counts as a research object is up to the researcher. Usually, objects are something that is physically constituted and thus takes up space or volume in absolute space, but an object may also be alcoholic liver disease or something else that is seemingly non-graspable (Law and Singleton 2005: 331-332). We can say that the project initiated by Law in different writing constellations is an effort to stretch the ontological realm that traditionally have been dominated by the topographical viewpoint based on the Cartesian imagination of space and place. The topography of Euclidean space must loose its primacy in order to unfold a hidden ontological complexity and heterogeneity.

Mol and Law starts out by declare that Cartesian topography is just one form of social topology among others. They stress (rather than referring back to geophilosophical accounts) that topology is a branch of mathematics that in theirs case has been adopted and used in a non-mathematical way. In mathematics, topology is about the character of objects in space (Murdoch 2006: 100, note 3), and to Law it is about the continuity of objects’ shape even if the object is stretched and bended. Topology concern ‘the properties of geometric figures which remain invariant under bending, stretching, or deforming transformations, that is, transformations which do not create new points or fuse existing ones’ (Delanda 2002: 25-26). Topology is thus not limited in the same way as topography, since it does not comply with Euclidean restrictions like, primarily, three-dimensionality, even if it still is a geometric geographical imagination (Simonsen 2004: 1336). In sum, Law and Mol (Mol and Law 1994, Law and Mol 2001) discuss four topologies. Initially, they execute their reading by discussing three social topologies: regions, networks and fluidity (Mol and Law 1994: 643):

“The social” doesn't exist as a single spatial type. Rather, it performs several kinds of space in which different “operations” take place. First, there are regions in which objects are clustered together and

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boundaries are drawn around each cluster. Second, there are networks in which distance is a function of the relations between the elements and difference a matter of relational variety. These are the two topologies with which social theory is familiar.

The first social topology, the region, is a ‘striated, Cartesian geographical space with demarcated zones and co-ordinates. It is the topography of the social in terms of differentiated regions, e.g. structures, systems, or fields based on territorialized and non-transformable objects’ (Diken 2010: 96). The spatiality of this social topology is the Euclidean space of absolute and relative space. The second social topology, the network, is the social topology that in ANT started out as a critique of Euclidean space but according to the critique in the end got colonial ambitions epistemologically (Lee and Brown 1994). Here, compared to the social topology of the region, proximity is measured in how the elements of the network hang together, and not measured in physical distance. This social topology thus harmonises with a view on space as relational, discussed above. To break up the dominance of these two social topologies, Mol and Law (1994: 643, 658) present the third social topology – a fluid topology:

Sometimes, we suggest, neither boundaries [emphasised in the topology of the region] nor relations [emphasised in the topology of networks] mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture. Sometimes, then, social space behaves like a fluid...We're looking at variation without boundaries and transformation without discontinuity. We're looking at flows. The space with which we're dealing is fluid.

Fluidity signals the absence of clear definitions in the relations or in the shape of the enrolled elements, since the spatial relations are relentlessly

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becoming, shifting and moving. The fluid space of the third topology is a realm of mixtures, generated by robust objects themselves changeable and not well defined, where there are not necessarily clear boundaries. The objects of fluid space are fluid objects of a fluid spatiality that co-exists with the prior two topologies outlined (Mol and Law 1994: 663). Mol and Law (1994: 664) finish their paper by concluding that the study of fluids will be a study of the ‘relations, repulsions and attractions, which form a flow’. In a following-up, Law suggests that in fluid space, no particular structure of relations or particular boundary around an object is privileged (actually mobile boundaries are needed for objects to exist in fluid space). He also concludes that change is necessary if homeomorphism is to be achieved but change need to be continuous rather than radical (Law 2002: 99-100). To make a quick summary, the key to understand the multiplicity of space and place lies thus in a multi-ontological approach towards the research object and not only ontology/social topology as the “network”, for instance. Objects can thus be ontologically understood as intersections between spatialities that in their turn enact different social topologies as Euclidean, network and fluid topologies (Law 2002: 102).

But Mol and Law did not stop here. A fourth topology is outlined in some degree in contrast to the flow topology (with its elemental affinity to water): fire space (Law and Mol 2001: 615). In the fire topology, shape is achieved and maintained through the relation between different forms of presence and absence. Object presence depends for instance on simultaneous absence, or rather the simultaneous absence of multiple others. As a consequence it has three attributes (Law and Mol 2001: 616):

...continuity as an effect of discontinuity, continuity as the presence and the absence of Otherness; and...continuity as an effect of a star-like pattern in this simultaneous absence and presence: this is what

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we imagine as the attributes of shape constancy in a topology of fire. Thus fire becomes a spatial formation alongside (and in interference with) Euclidean, network, and fluid space. To say that there is a fire topology is to say that there are stable shapes created in patterns of relations of conjoined alterity.

Together with Vicky Singleton, John Law a couple of years later clarified this reasoning. The fire topology is just another topology (among other, not yet discussed topologies), since Otherness is limitless, but is brought forward because it harmonizes with post-structuralist critique of the metaphysics of presence that is a central point of critique in ANT. Not everything can be brought to presence, and absence is a precondition for presence, and presence is a precondition for absence (Law and Singleton 2005: 342). ‘An object is a pattern of presences and absences’ (Law and Singleton 2005: 343). In the paper, alcoholic liver disease becomes three fire objects or versions, each made differently with theirs own series of absent presences; in the hospital, in the substance abuse centre and in the general practitioner’s surgery.

This approach is a bit similar to the hermeneutic interplay between the part and the whole, it becomes the researcher’s task to crystallise what is absent but still something that makes a difference regarding the shape and functionality of a specific research object. To Law (2002b), for instance, in the accounts of aerodynamic formulas constructed and used to develop aeroplanes with a capacity of fly faster than the sound, the human pilot (in the function of test pilots) as well as the density of the atmosphere are absent presences, invisible in the formalism but still necessary for its actualisation. Clearly, which should come as no surprise, this approach from a philosophy of science point of view falls within the camp of strong social constructivism, the world is created through the empirical account rather than that the empirical account is a declaration of an external reality.

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To sum up, objects can be imagined in four ways (Law and Singleton 2005: 348):

…as volumes in Euclidean space; as stable networks of relations, as fluids that gently reshape their configurations; and, finally, as generative links between presences and absences that are both brought, and cannot conceivably be brought together…implicit here is a commitment to a spatial ways of thinking. Objects are shapes that hold their shape, but they do so in four radically different ways: as volumes, as stable networks configurations, as gentle relational reorderings; and as patterns of absent presence.

In a progress report, Hayden Lorimer (2007: 94) question if these more porous imaginations of sociality and spatiality (fluids, fire, mess etc.), as escapes from formalist notions of space, are effective as tools for substantial analysis or rather ‘new motifs to better apprehend the complex spatialities emerging between agentive technologies, skill-based interactions, scientific techniques and mobile subject’. Perhaps this is too early to say, but nevertheless has these ideas about different social topologies had a significant impact, primarily among geographers and sociologists.

Some geographers have discussed topology in relation to methodological considerations (Woodward et al 2009) and topology in relation to poststructuralist thoughts more generally (Kingsbury 2007). Others have addressed the notion of topology in relation to power and politics, either in relation to Foucauldian or Deleuzian understandings of power (Allen 2003, Leitner et al 2008, see also Collier 2009) or with references to Agamben’s ideas on the camp as a topological space that unfolds and opens up through biopolitical machinations (Koopman 2008, Giaccaria & Minca 2011). To Belcher et al (2008) the exception functions as an non-localisable transformation process, the emerging and spatialising potentiality of the materialisation or non- materialisation of actual spaces. To these scholars, the challenge to geography is to catch these

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ontological dynamic machinations rather than map out the geometric spaces of actualised camps like Guantánamo Bay.

Other topics that have been covered and highlighted through the social topology framework by Mol and Law is climate change (Blok 2011), old-grown forests (Kortelainen 2010) fisheries certification (Bear and Eden 2008), research on biodiversity (Ellis and Waterton 2005), surgical interventions (Moreira 2004), sinks (Gabrys 2009), telecare service (López and Domènech 2008), territorialization of a pedestrian precinct (Kärrholm 2008) and foot and mouth disease (Law and Mol 2010). Among the more influential scholars John Urry has apprehended the ideas. In his approach towards global complexity (Urry 2003 and 2004) the concepts of regions, flows and fluids are discussed and the conclusion that the social sciences has failed to distinguished between the three topologies’ spatial patterns (Urry 2003: 41). The fire topology is a bit marginalized but nicely recapitulated (Urry 2003: 73):

Finally, these complex intersections between fluid spatialities suggest a further metaphor, what Law and Mol term ‘fire’ (2000). By this they try to capture how a continuity of shape can be the very effect of movement, even of abrupt and discontinuous movement (note the previous description of gases). The term also emphasizes how there is a striking dependence of presence upon what happens to be absent. Indeed, more generally social life often depends upon peculiar combinations of the presence and the absence. ‘Fire’ also brings out how the forms of absence that constitute a present are themselves patterned (they discuss a star pattern but there are others). There is thus a complex oscillating pattern of presence and absence, of contradictions, within social phenomena.

The fire topology is however more integrated in Bülent Diken’s call for a sociology with a conceptual framework that makes it possible to address the contemporary postpolitical condition. The fire topology is here a metaphor for objects that are mutable immobiles that contains not only

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mobility through mutability through discontinuous movements but a dimension of immobility as well.

Presence and Absence – Shaky Steps towards a Geography of the Fourth Topology

Donna: “If you were falling in space, do you think you’d slow down after a while or go faster and faster?”

Laura: “Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn’t feel anything. And then you’d burst into fire.”

Presence and absence are thus key concepts in the fire topology. The presence of an object, and the shape and function of the object are depending on the absence of a plethora of multiple others. Graspable objects is an effect of un-graspable objects, continuity is an effect of discontinuity. At the same time is presence a precondition for absence, so the situation here is characterised by total interdependence. But when the widening of the ontological register started out with notifying not only humans but non-humans, and the networks operating beyond the physical horizon, the introduction of absence as a crucial present component in the analytical schedule is the central addition here. Meyer and Woodthorpe (2008) discuss the spatiality and materiality of absence, and with reference to Law (2004) qualifications of absence. Manifest absence is the first qualification, whatever is absent but is manifested in its absence while the second qualification is whatever is absent and in a relation of Otherness towards what is present simultaneously (Law 2004: 85, original emphasis):

Otherness, or absence that is not made manifest, also goes with presence. It too is necessary to presence. But it disappears. Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting while it goes on routinely…Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting, full stop…Perhaps…it disappears because what is being brought to presence

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and manifest absence cannot be sustained unless it is Othered…The implication is that Otherness takes a variety of forms. Those above – routine, insignificance and repression – are no doubt only three of the possibilities.

To Meyer and Woodthorpe (2008) absence can be spatially located, have some kind of materiality and have agency. A cemetery is a spatially located place in which the absence of people that perhaps was very close to us is quite graspable. This relates to Hetherington’s (2003: 1941) discussion about praesentia (presence of mind), something absent that can attain a presence through materiality: a reminder of the present, a feel of a specifically located place and a sense of being at peace. Finally, if objects have agency and do at least three things (bring space to life, take their meaning from a context, its context) they can also make the absent present (Hetherington 2004: 159):

The absence can have just as much of an effect upon relations as recognisable forms of presence can have. Social relations are performed not only around what is there but sometimes also around the presence of what is not. Absence, I argue, is not just a philosophical concept, it is also a distinctly sociological one. Indeed the category of absence can have a significant presence in social relations and material culture.

So, in a fire topology worlds are closing in on each other, are intertwined through performativity of absent and present objects, materialities and people. The world are an outcome of the word, the word makes possible the actualised event of worlds, like in Killer Bobs chant to get out of the black lodge. But, and this is the temporary conclusion of this on-going paper: the geography of fire topology is not only revolving around the interplay and oscillation between presence and absence, and the necessity of manifested absences and Otherness. There is need for more dynamics here. Therefore, the geography of fire topology also revolves around the phenomena of the appearance of the absent and the

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phenomena of the disappearance of the present. Space folds and unfolds as the disappearance of appearance and the appearance of disappearance.

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