Situating Technoscience: An Inquiry into Spatialities

Abstract

Down to earthIn the past one of the more remarkable characteristics attributed to scientific facts was their universality. Once established in a single place, their validity was supposed to transport itself everywhere, free of cost and without effort. But no. It is already far too place oriented to put it like this. The faith in the universality of well-established facts depended on never asking where-questions at all. The universal was, well, universal. Which meant that universalism did not figure as a consequence of an attempt to add up, make links between, or otherwise relate various localities, but rather as something which transcended them.Over the last decades something has changed in our understanding of the sciences. To summarise: facts have been localised. Some context. The social studies of science are usually presented as a turn against the normativities of epistemology. While epistemologists were busy arguing about how science should proceed, social students of science went into laboratories and emerged with ethnographic stories about the ways in which science is actually practised. This shifted scholarly attention from the exigencies required of theory towards the textures of the practicalities of the laboratory. Labelling, marking, repeating, cleaning, numbering, noting, interpreting: these came to be known as the activities which compose science-in-action.Thus, or so the overviews tell, idealist wishful thinking was overcome and the harsh realities of scientific life were faced. The point of the harshness not being that fraud and treachery were being perpetrated, but rather that the practice of science requires an enormous amount of laborious, meticulous, and routine manipulation of artefacts. Glamour disappears. Deference to science is no longer required. Epistemology has been defeated, or so the story goes. But, while this is not wrong, other things have been going on too. The process of tracking down`science' in the laboratory rather than in theory not only implied that normative epistemology gave way to ethnographic realism.Abstract. This paper explores the spatial characteristics of science and technology. Originally seen as universal, and therefore outside space and place, studies in science, technology, and society (STS) located it first in specific locations ölaboratoriesöand then in narrow networks linking laboratories. This double location implied that science is caught up in and enacts two topological forms öregion and networkösince objects in networks hold their shape by freezing relations rather than fixing Euclidean coordinates. More recent STS work suggests that science and technology also exist in and help to enact additional spatial forms. Thus some technoscience objects are fluid, holding their form by shifting their relations. And yet others achieve constancy by enacting simultaneous absence and presence, a topological possibility which we call here fire. The paper concludes by arguing that the`global' includes and is enacted in all four of these topological systems.

Experiences of accessing CCTV data: The urban topologies of subject access requests

“…Various analogies have been used in demonstrating the topological 'turn' (Shields, 2012a); most popular are notions of the rubber mat or handkerchief that retains properties of space, power and interrelations 12 even with the advent of time-space compressions -or, when the handkerchief is crumpled up (Allen and Cochrane, 2010;Hetherington, 1997;Law and Mol, 2001). …”

Critical management studies: some reflections

“…seen from one place). In fact, absences also can act (Law & Mol, 2000;Hetherington, 2004), and may play a key role in producing the object which is never unique and simple (Law & Singleton, 2005) Clearly, we need to address this issue of what explains and what has to be explained, the directional forces of social action, how certain practices and entities are seen to travel and extend in space and time while others appear to diminish and fade, and that rather than focusing on homogeneity and durability, we should understand stability and change in terms of difference and otherness. Through doing this it might be possible to understand better the political aspects that interest CMS scholars (e.g.…”

Matter(s) of interest: artefacts, spacing and timing

“…Since the mid-1990s, a focus on fixity and closure has been traded for a stress on durability, potentialities and uncertainty in (post) ANT and related bodies of work (Callon and Law, 2005;Murdoch, 2006). John Law and colleagues have delved into topology and identified other spatialities, including fluids -materially heterogeneous associations without stable boundaries that lack a strong core or fixed structure and gently reshape their configurations akin to Deleuzian rhizomes (Law and Mol, 2001). Fluids also allow for feminine modes of ordering of persons 'willing to serve and observe, able to listen, not seeking control, but rather daring to give themselves over to circumstances' (De Laet and Mol, 2000, p. 253).…”