Open Conference Systems, Nordic Geographers Meeting 2011

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Fire, Walk With Me: Towards a Geography of the Fourth Topology
Richard Ek

Last modified: 2011-01-12

Abstract


The concept of topology has become a cornerstone in the project of closing the gap between the ontic and the ontological through a relational approach 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.