Object-Ions: From Technological Determinism towards Geographies of Relations

Abstract

In spite of the recent proliferation of theoretically informed writings on all things ‘cyber,’- it remains the case that much of the literature on ‘electronic spaces’ is characterised by a strong current of technological determinism. That is to say, it assumes and reproduces a stable and matter-of-fact distinction between the material/technical and the social such that changes in the former are supposed somehow to ‘impact’ on the latter. In those accounts which eschew this position, authors tend to employ an approach towards technology that might broadly be termed social constructionist. After Latour, I argue that, in that they operate according to the same ‘logic’, both these positions—technological determinism and social constructionism—remain within a ‘modern’ worldview. I propose that if we are to (and I argue that we must) tell stories of a world in which what the moderns refer to as the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ are always already bound together, always already binding together, we require other vocabularies than those which divide and ‘black box’ the world into easy categories, vocabularies that are able to grant all sorts of things their rightful place in the (co)construction of the world. Drawing on a variety of writers, I suggest that one element of these other vocabularies might be what I term a ‘materialist semiotics’. Having elaborated certain strands of what this could mean, I offer some tentative accounts of what our ‘virtual geographies’ might look like from an a modern perspective.

La idea de espacio público en geografía humana. Hacia una conceptualización (crítica) contemporánea

“…Alcanzaremos la complejidad en lo infinitesimal, no en la abstracción». (Marrero, 2008: 100) Evidentemente, algunos geógrafos 20 inquietos, como Nigel Thrift (1996Thrift ( , 2000a, Nick Bingham (1996), Johnatan Murdoch (1997aMurdoch ( , 1997bMurdoch ( , 1998 o Sarah Whatmore (1999), no dudaron en reconocer la potencia que el pensamiento de Latour, y la ANT, podría aportar a la geografía. Murdoch (1997a), por ejemplo, se lanza a disolver los dualismos que limitan a los análisis socioespaciales, reconociendo la inoperancia de la idea cartesiana de escala y proponiendo una «geografía de las asociaciones heterogéneas» como alternativa; Sarah Whatmore (1999) asume el giro relacional de la ANT, reconoce explícitamente la influencia de Latour y aboga por un espacio topológico:…”

Genetics and livestock breeding in the UK: Co-constructing technologies and heterogeneous biosocial collectivities

“…Latour, 1999;Whatmore, 2002). In approaching the use of breeding technologies in this way, as heterogeneous and relational, we acknowledge the influence of a 'co-constructionist' perspective developed by various scholars within and beyond science and technology studies (see Bingham, 1996;Murdoch, 2001). Importantly, co-construction is about more than just association between diverse actants, both human and non-human, it is also concerned with the modification of these actants through their associations.…”

Practice matters! Geographical inquiry and theories of practice

“…In the millennial year, JACKSON (2000) and PHILO (2000), both leading lights of the 'new cultural geography' from the 1980s, called for the rematerialisation of social and cultural geography. JACKSON placed his call in the context of different literatures emerging from the mid 1990s, from fresh engagements with traditions of material culture, in geographies of consumption (GREGSON 1995) but also the then nascent impact of Science and Technology Studies, and in particular Actor Network Theory (BINGHAM 1996;MURDOCH 1997;WHATMORE 1999). As the twenty first century gathered steam, these strands of engagement with materiality have matured and to some extent run together with other preoccupations characteristic of NRT including embodiment, touch, emotion and affect (ANDERSON and WYLIE 2009).…”