Tuesday 5 October 2010

plural geographies, real relations between objects

"When space-time is thought in this way we get a very different conception of cartography that is topological in character. Traditional cartography (hopefully I’m not offending any geographers here who don’t accept such notions) tends to think space and time in terms of containment space and containment time, based on relations of adjacency. We see such a model of space in the map above where space is thought as adjacent relations between geographical bodies. Under the topological model of space-time I’m proposing, spatio-temporal relations would instead be diagrammed in terms of real relations among objects. In such a diagram, for example, Graham in Cairo would be presented as more proximal to me than Eugene in the office next door. Likewise, there would be a temporal diagram of speculative realist thought defining their temporal relations to prior thinkers both remote in the order of containment time and close. Perhaps we could even render four-dimensional topological cartographies of various objects that capture these real relations in the order of space and time in a single diagram. Increasingly my thought on these matters is influenced by geographers such as Stuart Elden, J.P. Jones, and Keith Woodward (cf. especially Jones and Woodward, “Situating Flatness” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(2))."

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/spatio-temporal-cartographies/

Above is exactly what I imagine as a cartography of disabled through forum participation online. We cannot say in a straightforward manner, that such users are far away from each other in space. Yet, the political question arises in the interstices of plural spatialities such as the cartography of capitalist built-environment and the geography of disability in Turkey. Therefore, we will not say that disabled users are secluded in space but instead, we will say that there is a necessarily political relationship between plural geographies of Turkish modernity.

Imaginary action: a forum organized hacking of traffic lights. I am not sure it is viable but it is a frequently displayed strategy in films relating to theft, organized crime etc. Such an action would reveal the clash of plural geographies at its best.

and it follows;

“uneven geographical development” would refer to topological spatio-temporal relations structuring the economic order. An object-oriented cartography would assist us in the development of maps allowing us to discern the weak points in particular spatio-temporalities, those nodes that would assist in the unraveling of the rest of a particular fragment of space-time, and in devising strategies in which the foreclosed could generate connectivity in such a way as to modify these fragments of space-time as a whole."


Above quote encourages us to think the uneven geographical development of plural spaces within a Leninist perspective. Deleuze (affirming Althusser) already showed us how Lenin suceeded in emphasizing the differentials of capitalism (theory of uneven development) with regard to the possibilty of actualizing  revolution. One can even replace the category of opressed, which could at times open up to a humanist deadlock, with the concept of uneven geographies of capitalist development.

"we must attend to the meshworks that allow one object to extend itself through the agency of another object."

With the disabled forum users, this is exactly the point. To what other objects the networked forum can extend itself? An abled user of social networking technologies carries a high-tech cellphone with him through the streets, or even if he does not, the network through this movement allows multiple objects to join one another's agencies. Whereas through the disabled user extends medical prosthetics (e.g the wheelchair) and the computer in a contained apartment.