Reading Precarity in 21St-Century Texts

What Fate Forbids: Reading Precarity in 21st-Century Texts

Veronica Jimenez

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Center for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

What Fate Forbids: Reading Precarity in 21st-Century Texts

Veronica Jimenez

Doctor of Philosophy

Center for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

2017 Abstract

My dissertation engages with contemporary texts, cinema, and technology that emphasize the transformative and creative potential of the material world. These texts propose a world made not from a multiplicity of inert things, but through the changing and emergent quality of all matter. They not only call into question ontological separations between objects, people, and nature, but also emphasize their mutual constitution. When the world is conceived as a meshwork of juxtapositions, interactions, and encounters, events do not follow one another in the particular causal linearity upon which narrative and history are usually founded.

For this project, I analyze Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream (2006), David

Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), two collaborative projects headed by Anders Bojen and

Kristoffer Ørum titled Radiant Copenhagen (2009) and Topographies of the Insignificant (2010), and Singapore filmmaker Tan Pin Pin’s documentary Invisible City (2007). Until now, these

narratives have been largely considered representative of an increasingly globalized and urbanizing world where recurrent themes of postmodernism and of globalization discourses make an obligatory appearance. These approaches tend to examine global and cultural mobilities while still deploying the modernist territorial spatiality that understands nature as fundamentally stable. I contend that each of these varied texts constructs a vibrant materialism that unsettles binary assumptions about nature and culture and challenges the linear and determinist underpinnings upon which discourses of progress are founded. I argue that the dynamics present in these texts are best captured by “thinking conjuncturally” (Low and Barnett 7): that is, by shuttling back and forth among the different trajectories and temporalities through which events come together. This approach serves to apprehend the manner in which narrative is constructed as being crosscut by the multiple temporalities of all manner of actors.

Key Words: precarity, twenty-first century, globalization, nature/culture binary, heterogeneity, non-linearity, emergence, assemblage, space-time, new materialism.

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation and I have grown together. We took form and meanings in itineraries through Toronto, Madrid,

Singapore, Quito, and all the places, the routes, the airports, the intersections and encounters along the way.

Wonderful mentors advised me as I developed my project. It would be impossible to thank everyone who has accompanied me throughout this process in various ways but I would like to acknowledge a few.

Thank you especially to my supervisor Robert Davidson for his continual supports and patience. I am especially thankful for the space and time he provided to explore, to think more slowly, to see more deeply and for teaching me, among other many things, to know when to erase. Thank you also to those whose contributions reminded me that this work is more a bridge than an ending. Justin Read shared a most generous critical appraisal, bringing to the dissertation new levels of meaning. Thomas Lahusen pushed me to look beyond the project and the texts at hand.

This project could not have developed without the generosity and friendship of those who accompanied me in the process. I thank all those who welcomed me so openly into their lives and homes and those who were always there at my cyberside. Thank you to Martha Arizaga, Soledad Álvarez, Johana Gini, Pamela Torres, Erin Hamlyn, Cata

Morales. This project is also the product of the laughter, the conversations, the meandering and the support they so openly offered me. I am so very thankful for my friendship with Liza Futerman who so generously opened her home to me. She has been a source of ongoing inspiration. Profound and heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Teresa Borja and Carlos Jiménez. I could not have done it without their care and support throughout this project. I thank my mother for reading my thesis innumerable times as I struggled for meaning. The longest conversations throughout has been with my father, with whom, in the course of talking many of the thoughts here developed. Heartfelt thanks to my sisters Micaela and Elisa with whom I got through this project in shared camaraderie and travelling. To

Matilde, who was always part of every route I took and to all my teachers, human and non-human, thank you.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents v

List of Figures ix

Introduction These are the Things 1

0.1 Immutable Frameworks and their Discourses. 18

0.2 Space as the Social Dimension 24

0.3 Ontological Shifts 27

0.4 Actants, Actors, Toolboxes 30

0.5 The Configurational: Thinking Through Multiplicity. 33

0.6 Chapters 37

Chapter 1 Things Come Together: The Topological Dimension in Fernandez Mallo´s Nocilla Dream 32

1.1 Introduction 32

1.2 Global Narratives vs Coeval Narratives. 34

1.3 A Beetle Drags a Rock Through the Loneliest Road in America. 37

1.4 Organism/Organization. 45

1.5 A Coeval Narrative. 49

1.6 Place/Non-place/Fractals. 52

1.7 Fractals and Micronations: The Topological Dimension of Space. 58

1.8 The Creative Potential of Things in the World. 62

1.9 Iterations vs Homogeneity. 65

1.10 A Desert Made of Ingestions, Digestions, and Excrements. 67

1.11 A Conjunctural Reading of Nocilla Dream. 69

1.12 Conclusion: Narrative at the edge of chaos. 70

Chapter 2 The Language of Probability in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. 75

2 H 75

2.1 Introduction 75

2.2 Probability is The Language of Precarity. 79

2.3 Like a Virus in a Bacteria: The Self as a Conglomeration of Linked Temporalities. 88

2.4 Comets Do Not Care. 96

2.5 Fractal History. 99

2.6 The Origin and Fate of Stories. 102

2.7 Place is a Language. 104

2.8 Conclusion: The Zookeeper and the Issue of Wholeness. 108

Chapter 3 Google Maps’ Precarious Machine: Topographies of the Insignificant 113

3 113

3.1 Introduction 113

3.2 Contingency and the Precarious Map: Putting Time into Space. 125

3.3 Animating a Heterarchic Universe: From Powers of Ten to Google Maps. 134

3.4 Microscopic Energies and the liveliness of Pavement. 148

3.5 Black Boxes Open. 152

3.6 Patterns of Life. 156

3.7 Pavement as a Living Tissue. 161

3.8 The Material Ecologies of the Insignificant. 162

Chapter 4 Precarious Places: Radiant Copenhagen and Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City 165

4 165

4.1 Introduction 165

4.2 Temporal Sheaves: Radiant Copenhagen’s Speculative Cartography. 169

4.2.1 Echoes in The City. 171

4.2.2 Entering Google Maps’ Temporal Assemblages. 174

4.2.3 The Map that was a Labyrinth. 177

4.2.4 Temporal Assemblages and Google’s Satellite Composite. 179

4.2.5 Temporal assemblages between the Virtual and the Material. 185

4.2.6 The Timeline: Precarious Pasts, Contingent Futures. 186

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4.2.7 The Unflattanable Map. 190

4.2.8 Search: Users, Collaborators, Events. 192

4.3 Reclaiming Impermanence: Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City. 195

4.3.1 The Generic City. 196

4.3.2 Archaeologists and the Bulldozer. 197

4.3.3 Polyphony as Method. 201

4.3.4 The Decaying Bodies of Memory. 204

4.3.5 Fragmentations versus Interruptions. 210

4.3.6 Sound Fossils. 214

4.3.7 Solastalgia and the Reclaiming of Impermanence. 216

Bibliography 230

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List of Figures

figure 1. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Europe. Screen Capture. Andres Bojen and

Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013. figure 2. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Luxemburg. Coffee. Screen Capture. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013. figure 3. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Rome. Genealogy of a Raindrop. Screen Capture.

Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013. figure 4. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Luxemburg. Ketchup Beetle. Andres Bojen and

Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013. figure 5. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Cartographic Fluoroscopy. Berlin Readings.

Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013. figure 6. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Topological Modulations. Berlin Readings. Andres

Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013. figure 7. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Topography of Relational Events. Berlin Readings.

Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013. figure 8. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Concrete Cunts. Bratislava. Andres Bojen and

Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013 figure 9. “Radiant Copenhagen.” Invisible Graffitti. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum.

2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015. figure 10. “Radiant Copenhagen.”Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015.

figure 11. “Radiant Copenhagen.” Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015 figure 12. “Radiant Copenhagen.” Center of Improbability and Invisibility. Andres Bojen and

Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015. figure 13. “Radiant Copenhagen.” Timeline. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8

Jul 2015. figure 14. “1940’s Fort taken over by tree roots.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore:

Objectifs Film, 2007. figure 15. “Bulldozer” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007. figure 16. “1940’s Coca Cola Bottle.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film,

2007. figure 17. “Graffiti.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007. figure 18. “Opening title.” Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007. figure 19. “Black screen.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007.

Introduction These are the Things

“There are these things,” writes Juliana Spahr in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, “the movement of cells and the division of cells and then the general beating of circulation and hands, and body, and feet and skin.” Spahr’s poem is as much about connection as it is about space.

“This space goes in and out of everyone’s bodies,” she explains, as everyone with lungs breathes in and out. Space, here is encounter. It is an entering and exiting, a shuttling up and down across vast scales from bacteria to the mesosphere, from the division of cells to continental drifts. There is in this notion of connection an implication that the material world comes together as always already crosscut by all kinds of processes. Space is made through these encounters. Connection is what happens in the space between the hands, within the room containing the hands, in and out; in buildings, in neighbourhoods nearby, in and out; in cities, in regions, in the space of nations, in and out; in continents and in oceans, in the troposphere, the stratosphere and in the mesosphere; always in and out. In the poem, everyone with lungs breathes in and out mixing all the nitrogen and oxygen and water vapour, and suspended spores and bacteria and titanium and

“minute silicon particles from pulverized glass and concrete,” from the streets of the cities in and out. Throughout this project I engage with a range of contemporary texts which, similarly to

Spahr´s poem, suggest a narrative world made up of a bottomless proliferation of interwoven trajectories that range from the urban to the atmospheric, from the movement of global capital to the evolution of genes, from the cosmic to the nanoscopic. Thinking through our entanglements

in airy matters serves to disrupt taxonomical divides between people and things, the local and the global, and muddies the distinction between nature and the urban. Space becomes a process of becoming intimately and inextricably attached to a panoply of actors. How might a theory of space evolve from these airy materialities? Might these cross-contaminations position us to think differently about a material recirculation into the body of the city and the globe?

In The Mushroom at the End of the World Anna Tsing makes a case for acknowledging this sense of connection and encounter through recognition of the precarity in which we live.

What Tsing is arguing for is recognition of the unpredictable encounters that transform us and through which the material world comes together.1 It is Tsing´s emphasis on the vulnerability

1 The term precarity has been deployed in a wide array of contexts in recent years, and has acquired multiple inflexions in European and North American contexts (Puar 2016). The term has gained a much broader currency than the one presented in this work. Jean-Claude Barbier points out that the term “précarité” was originally used to refer to the poor. Its contemporary usage has come to describe the affective relations penetrating all social classes. That is, the issue of precarity has not been limited to the ways in which capitalism thrives on instability, but also the ways in which capitalist labour dynamics produce precarious minds and bodies (Berlant in Puar 166). It came to denote employment in the 1980s when neoliberal flexible labour—short term, insecure, and low-wage jobs— became common practice. David Harvey (2005) pointedly argues that neoliberalism activates instability in an unprecedented manner so that precarization is normalized. It has thus become a concept used to emphasize the tenuous position of citizens in the neoliberal economic order. Bourdieu (1998) has studied the way that those in precarious situations becomes paralyzed with fear of unemployment in such a way that it is almost impossible to mobilize them. On the other hand, Judith Butler points out that, in a growing number of contemporary works, the concept of precarity has become a way of expressing “the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks . . . becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler 2009 25). While the bibliography on precarity is enormous, the approach to “precarity” as employed by Tsing resonates with Butler´s approach. For Butler, the term refers not only to working conditions but contingent relations of social being, it serves as a means of thinking through subjectivation, embodiment and agency. In Precarious Life (2004), for example, Butler uses the concept of precarity as acknowledgement of dependency and vulnerability, which draws from an understanding of our precarious social existence interdependent with “the care of others.” The concept, as used by Butler, Berlan, Tsing, and others, is the very foundation for “our ever-shifting understandings of bodies, labor, politics, the public sphere, space, life, the human, and what it means to live with others” (Puar 164). In addition to this social condition of political life, these scholars thus include a second inflection: an ontological condition of being in this world. For Butler, as for Tsing, what is at stake is a means of thinking through social relationality (Puar 170). In Frames of War Butler makes a distinction between the precariousness fundamental to the ontological condition of existence—the “social network of hands” (14)—and precarity—the differential distribution of vulnerability dependent on class, gender, and race. Tsing makes no such differentiation. It is this ontological condition that Tsing thinks through and develops as fundamental to producing 2

inherent in entanglements that are “enacted in more-than-human sociality” (Tsing 152) which is fundamental for engaging the kinds of interconnections put forth by Spahr’s poem. Tsing takes the now pervasive call to challenge and think beyond the nature/culture binary at its word.

Precarity to Tsing is this “condition of being vulnerable to others” (20). The dynamics that Spahr and Tsing are describing unsettle the entrenched binaries between space and time, nature and the urban, object and subject upon which the discourses of modernity have been founded. Positing precarity as the fundamental makeup of the material world, as Tsing suggests, questions the ostensibly stable structures upon which these discourses rely.

The narratives I engage with throughout this project call for the imaginative challenge of thinking the dynamics of the world in which we live as a product of heterogeneous, co- constitutive, and coeval practices and relations. This project engages with the ways in which these texts assemble trajectories and offer a sense of connection that emphasizes this form of precarity. In turn, these narratives challenge the separations between objects, people and nature, emphasizing instead their mutual constitution. In particular, I analyze Agustín Fernández Mallo’s

Nocilla Dream (2006) which has become the ur-text for a generation of contemporary Spanish writers known as the “Nocilla Generation;” David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999); two collaborative projects headed by Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum titled Radiant Copenhagen

(2009) and Topographies of the Insignificant (2010); and Singapore filmmaker Tan Pin Pin’s documentary Invisible City (2007).

new understandings of global capitalism. Tsing applies this state of instability and vulnerability to non-human trajectories, implying that precarity is the ontological condition of the material world. 3

Each of these varied texts construct a vibrant materialism that constitutes a deep turning away from longstanding ontological expectations about the relationship between space and time upon which many predominant discourses about contemporary life are grounded. Ongoing encounters and cross-contaminations are not amenable to the kind of “summing up” so often expected in narratives of place and belonging. To recognize, articulate, and think through the nature/human/object/bacteria/technology assemblages2 that I see as fundamental to the dynamics that these texts construct, it is essential to challenge the assumptions underlying many of our most pervasive ideological constructs about what it means to be in time and space. It is here that employing Anna Tsing´s particular approach to precarity helps. Her notion of precarity puts forth what Nigel Clark denominates a “globalization from below,” where “there is no final cut-off point to this ‘below,’ no guard-rail to keep us to the realm of the already humanized” (2002 105).

In lieu of the stability and permanence with which space has for so long been associated, we are presented with the promise and challenge of indeterminacy.

My chosen texts not only defy spatial and temporal assumptions but call into question expectations regarding linearity, predictability, agency, and change upon which history, narrative, and discourses of progress are founded. These works build open-ended assemblages where different trajectories tangle and contaminate each other. They contain pervasive motifs such as: a stress on spatial interconnectedness, a wide breadth of places, an emphasis on the immediacy and reach of technologies of communication and transportation, and a vast array of

2 The term “assemblage” has been used in different ways in the social sciences, in ecology, and in philosophy. Bruno Latour uses the term repeatedly in order to develop his actor-network-theory (ANT). While Latour’s general approach captures many of the ideas I put forth throughout4 this dissertation, I do not use or refer to ANT. The reason

sources and voices. Until now, these narratives have been largely considered representative of the cultural logic of late capitalism in an increasingly globalized world where recurrent themes of postmodernism and of globalization discourses make an obligatory appearance: fragmentation, simultaneity, homogeneity, alienation, networked interconnection, speed, flow and depthlessness, among others. These approaches tend to examine global flows while still deploying the modernist territorial spatiality that understands nature as fundamentally “staying put.”3

Discourses that maintain the nature/culture binary assume that nature, when left alone, settles into a rooted sense of place-bound distinctiveness, and thus erase out of contention an appreciation of the “biological or geological contribution to the global contours we now confront” (Clark 105). Nigel Clark points out that both “the environmentalist belief in a nature which ‘stays put’ and the cosmopolitan celebration of culture free of groundedness and material responsibilities … can be seen as derivatives of the same metropolitan detachment from the daily dynamics of bio-materiality” (2002 117). Doreen Massey contends that thinking nature this way is reflective of that long-standing belief that space functions as a stable foundation upon “which the global mobilities of technology and culture can play” (2005 98). The primary texts I engage with take place and make place within characteristically urban and globalized settings. It is from the unmistakably urban that the texts fill the world with bacteria, viruses, cigarette butts, people,

3 Since the Enlightenment, nature has been conceived as passive and mechanical, a foundation for human intentionality to be tamed and mastered, or as that in which the human is not. For an in-depth examination of the ways nature has been constructed, packaged and represented in opposition to culture See William Cronnon´s edited collection of essays Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (1996). 5

comets, beetles, plants, and other innumerable actors. The urban thus becomes an ideally resonant place for questioning the imagined opposition between nature and cities. The interest of this project is thinking through the ways in which the wildly abundant amount of connections to actors of all kinds within the urban offer us the possibility to think differently about the places, spaces and times in which we live. The question then becomes: How are generative forms of encounter and belonging constructed in these texts?

What is at stake in the narratives I study is a particular conception of how things, people and nature interact. These texts capture a world cross-cut by all manner of trajectories. In order to appreciate the sense of multiplicity and contamination that precarity entails, it is necessary to unsettle traditional frameworks of thought. It is vital to look at the means through which the basic notions of time and space are reconfigured in the texts, and the ways in which these works then subvert discourses founded on the presumption that space and time are the isotopic and isochronic, universal and a priori frameworks of the world. The belief in a docile and stable nature is buttressed on the long-held assumption that “space” is the immutable framework upon which events occur—“the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile”—in direct opposition with time: the rich, the dialectic and the alive (Foucault “Questions on Geography” 70). Space is understood to be the static structure upon which displacement and transformation may be measured and which is underwritten by a notion of uniform time where different social processes and rhythms of life are gathered up into an intelligible whole (Low and Barnett 6). The supposition of a coherent space upon which history can be enacted, “enables the existence of only one history, one voice, one speaking position” (Massey 42). From this arises an enduring

tradition of taking isotopy and isochrony as features of the world — either as what the universe is made of or what the mind needs to make sense of the world (Latour, “Trains of Thought” 181).

This ontological framework—and this is Doreen Massey´s central argument in For Space—is fundamentally incapable of articulating space “as the sphere of coexisting multiplicity, space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (54). Evidently, as Massey incisively argues, challenging “the historicism of that version of the story of globalisation (its unilinearity, its teleology, etc.) precisely also entails reframing its spatiality” (89). The texts I engage with provide an imaginative challenge to mainstream discourses by proposing nothing less than a new ontology that does not fit neatly into the linear and deterministic language underlying mainstream discourses. To appreciate the significance and agency of biological, cosmological, human and non-human trajectories alike requires that we challenge any sense of a stable ground: “the global flows of the planet, organic and inorganic, prohibit any ultimate refuge of this kind” (Massey

98).

0.1 Immutable Frameworks and their Discourses.

Johannes Fabian powerfully argues in Time and the Other that there is an “all-pervasive denial of coevalness which ultimately is expressive of a cosmological myth of frightening magnitude and persistency” (35). Such a discourse presupposes that culture and society all have an intimate relationship to bounded space, which is internally coherent, differentiated by separation and

contingent on an internal authenticity.4 This framework rests on the ideological conception of time as continuous, homogeneous and contemporaneous to itself, upon which notions of history, community and place have been founded.5 This is the time of “the meanwhile” that, according to

Benedict Anderson’s seminal argument in Imagined Communities, is the foundation for a sense of Nationhood and place. Industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and later globalization processes have, on the other hand, been seen as threatening to the fecundity and openness of time. The systematization of time and space that these processes require—the organization of the work day, the planification of the city, and the homogenization of time and space systems throughout the globe—is repeatedly seen as uprooting subjective temporalities in favour of the objective single temporality of capitalism.6 Hence the contention that these processes require the

4 With the so-called “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities, there was an emphasis on the importance of space. Thinkers in the 1970s began questioning the idea of place understood in absolute terms as a self-contained gathering of people in a bounded territory. Instead, they turned to phenomenology and existentialism in order to develop a notion of place defined and constructed in terms of the lived experiences of people. Places, in this approach, express a sense of belonging, of dwelling and provide a locus for identity (See Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking;” Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Lefebvre The Production of Space, Tuan Space and Place). Such an argument, presupposes the distinctiveness and particularity of place founded on allegations of the rooted authenticity of local specificity. Place in this approach is thus conceived as closed, coherent, integrated, authentic and home, pitted against space which is abstract.

5 There is an implied binary in this framework between subjective time and objective time that accommodates a conception of homogeneous time and a subjective inward-looking heterogeneous and dynamic time. The assumption of a lived time of everyday experience, authentic and natural, is contrasted and exists separately from the abstract time of metrification which is systemic and homogeneous. As Bruno Latour points out, Peguy’s distinction between the history of historian and the history of events; Whitehead’s insistence on process; and Deleuze’s work on difference and repetition were all founded on the binary between time as intensity -subjective and personal -and time as magnitude -abstract and systematic (Latour Reassembling the Social). In Creative Evolution Bergson’s influential work on time pits the notion of “duration” that corresponds to the subjective experience of time, against the hard, mathematical, objective “clock-time’ of the world, which is then labeled as spatialization. This binary has served to buttress many of the most influential discourses of the twentieth century. Bergson’s concern was to resist objective time, which he saw as eviscerating the internal continuity and flow of lived temporality. His axe to grind was with what he saw as an exclusive preoccupation with the discrete at the expense of continua and things at the expense of processes.

6 As David Harvey’s popular notion of “time-space compression” argues, the emergence of communicative networks 8

reification of the, supposedly, singular beat of capitalism over more “natural” temporalities.7

As David Harvey points out in Spaces of Hope, the term globalization serves as a central idea “for organizing our thoughts as to how the world works” (53). Globalization has thus become a specific way to circumscribe contemporary global relationships as “a produced space of transport and communications, of infrastructures and territorial organizations” (54).8 When space is defined as surface and distance as extension, the acceleration of contemporary life, brought about in great part by communication and transportation technologies, results paradoxically in stasis. At its extreme the process of globalization is expressed as a speeding up of contemporary life to the point of instantaneity, where distance is overcome to the point of that stretched across time and space meant a challenge and a reorganization of clock-time upon which early industrialization and urbanization processes relied. Harvey’s “time-space compression” encapsulates a process that generally redefines the coordinates through which we understand the world. “As space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies,” Harvey argues, “and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic) so we have to learn to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds” (The Postmodern Condition 240).

7 In his well-known “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” George Simmel, described a growing metropolis that seemed to pulsate with the metronomic beat of official time. Simmel argued that capitalist relationships required the development of a degree of precision and unambiguous certainty in all agreements and arrangements of modern life –this, he argued was brought about by the general dissemination of pocket watches. Anything less than exact punctuality would cause the entire economic and commercial urban system to breakdown. The need for such precision was due in great part to the growing magnitude of distances at which these economic and commercial relationships took place, which caused “all waiting and the breaking of appointments an ill-afforded waste of time.” Simmel went on to point out that the techniques of metropolitan life were unconceivable without this degree of punctuality, organized through a “firmly fixed framework of time which transcends all subjective elements.” The reification of social time, as is clear in Simmel’s analysis, was directly related to urban expansion that, in turn, resulted in that twentieth century spatiotemporal creation known as “the city.” Lefebvre, in his well-known The Production of Space, articulates this move of clock-time through society, as a process in which lived, natural time is replaced by the metronomic beat of the clock. Time, to Lefebvre, has become a resource, differentiated from social space; industrialization is the predominance of “clock-time” over kairological time. So not only is there a distinction between lived, natural, authentic time, and ‘clock-time; but the system is overriding this natural time. Lived time, he writes, “has been murdered by society” (The Production of Space 96).

8 Globalization, it should be noted, is itself a highly contested concept (for a range of conceptualizations see Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990; Jameson 1991). At a basic level, however, the concept refers to a growing interconnection, an increase in global flows, and the perceived collapse of the spatial configurations of modernity. 9

simultaneity and space offers itself up to the point of ubiquity.9 It is a vision that extols the triumph of the spatial—where space is conceived as surface—while serving as an image of the much-dreaded annihilation of time. Doreen Massey points out that this has led to the impression that “there is more space in our lives, and it takes less time” and at the same time “this very speed with which ‘we’ can now cross space (by air, on screen, through cultural flows) would seem to imply that space doesn’t matter anymore; that speed-up has conquered distance” (For

Space 90). The purported speed-up of life seems to imply that space has triumphed in detriment to our ability to appreciate a linear and causal sense of temporality, resulting in allegations of depthlessness;10 and, simultaneously, that time has somehow annihilated space. The “all- pervasive denial of coevalness” (Fabian 35) upon which the singular grand narrative of modernism is constructed is taken to its extreme by a vision of a synchrony of relations and events that is construed as a fragmentation of the previous unity of time and space; a single history is replaced by no-history. The notion of time as continuous, homogeneous and contemporaneous to itself is replaced by the imaginary of a closed network of instantaneous

9 Urbanization, industrialization and globalization processes have produced extensive theory regarding the spatiotemporal logic and experience of late-capitalist urban space. The jostling crowds, the pedestrians –flâneurs or blasés –the reification of official time, the hustle and bustle, and the degree of alienation, of acceleration and overload, to which the urban dweller was thought to be constantly subjected are some of the most popular and recurrent themes in these discourses. Before globalization processes brought forth visions of a depthless interconnected world, Simmel wrote about how burgeoning urbanization processes produced the anomy of the crowd, the multiplying of sensoria, the proliferation of objects and the reification of clock time, all of which seemed to threaten a more “authentic’ mode of life (“The Fragmentary Character of Life”). Conversely, Jane Jacobs's influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities used the tropes of complexity and catastrophe theory to describe the burgeoning potential of New York’s intricate trajectories which ebb and flow made up of daily rhythms and chance encounters, provided the condition of possibility for the intermingling of the old and the young, workers, merchants, shopkeepers, locals and tourists, mixed in a meaningful street scene.

10 The term has been repeatedly used in both postmodern discourses (See Baudrillard’s America; Jameson Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Virilio “Speed and Information”). 10

interconnections — a replacement of a single time with no time. As Osborne puts it, “Synchrony is not con-temporality, but a-temporality” (127).

While the result of globalization in these prominent discourses is stated in terms of an annihilation of time, the march towards globalization is underwritten by uniform time. Any sense of development is expressed as a teleological, linear and self-contained plot in which all rhythms are ultimately gathered up into an intelligible whole and subsumed to the reified uniform time of capitalism. Discourses on globalization themselves tend to rest upon the assumption of its inevitability, in which any present difference in the landscape is due to a variation in current stages of progress. Universal history is the result of an imposed system that serves to establish a single temporality through the elimination of contingents (88). In this sense, temporal and spatial homogenization is not an observed outcome but a premise. Time functions as an irreversible arrow that points toward a progression but never to a process — the realization in time of what is always already there in potentia. Time here “unfolds determinations, but nothing really happens, exactly as it is possible to calculate all the positions of the pendulum from its initial position without the actual fall of the pendulum adding any new information” (Latour, “Trains of

Thought” 13). It is precisely this denial of coevalness and emergence that is called into question by narratives that tell about the precarity of living in place with others — human and non-human alike. The narratives that I examine in this project are not contingent on the constitution of a single hegemonic “we” told as the unfolding of a story underwritten by a uniform time, and are not amenable to that sort of totalizing coherence. Instead, these works construct a sense of place made through the encounter of diverse and contingent world-making projects. The texts admit

coeval trajectories at every scale, both human and non-human alike, without subsuming them to an ultimate temporal and spatial co-ordination.

Understanding space as a precarious event requires a fundamental reconceptualization of space, time, and thus narrative. In the primary texts that I study here, events take place, literally and figuratively, through an encounter of countless multi-scalar plots. A relational view challenges the cosmology of “only one narrative” where place is reduced to a simultaneous coexistence. Rather, the abundance of trajectories and events serves as a constant acknowledgement of the multiplicity of the planet. The particular linearity essential to clocks, calendars and other one-after-the-other technologies—to which narrative is so often circumscribed—does not work when the horizons, the stakes, the time frames and the actors are different, yet are caught up in the making of the event of place. This take on the world is profoundly different from the standard discourse that posits progress in terms of a sequential unfolding. As both Massey and Tsing recognize, “a precarious world is a world without teleology” (Tsing 20). Thinking through these narratives beyond the accepted expectations of linear causality requires an imagination of space as made through encounter, always in process and never closed. In lieu of stories of “progress”—with their expectation of an overarching linear, uniform, self-contained and irrevocable time—what we are left with is “indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time” (Tsing 20). Narratives that build an open-ended, multi-temporal network of events composed of coincidences, loose ends and elements of randomness refute any idea of progress as a singular historical queue.

Thinking about history and temporality in this way has repercussions for how we 12

conceive of spatiality. As Doreen Massey postulates, in order for time to be open, in the way that precarity suggests, space must be open too (48). In order to turn away from expectations of spatial fixity, Massey proposes thinking of place as “the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This is place as open and as internally multiple. Not capturable as a slice through time in the sense of an essential section” (Massey

141).11 Facing up to the challenge of place, for Massey, requires a recognition of its

“throwntogetherness,” the precarity that these encounters imply, and the challenge of

“negotiating a here-and-now …which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman.” This, she writes, “is the event of place” (140). Thinking space as an event, as

Massey suggests, serves the purpose of this dissertation well.

0.2 Space as the Social Dimension

Perhaps, the greatest challenge to traditional notions of place in the texts I examine, is the

11 Massey (1994; 2005), Thrift (2006; 2007), Tsing (2005; 2015), Allen (2013), Latour (1993; 1999; 2005; 2006) and others, have argued for a rethinking of the notions of space, time, place and society, in order to better respond to dynamics and relationships that have remained unexamined. This has meant a recasting of what counts, a stress on thinking in terms of processes, an emphasis on the relational co-constructedness of space and time, and on the plurality of times and spaces produced by these varied and transversal processes. The sentiment is well taken and coincides with the argument of this project. These theorists provide thought-provoking alternatives to prevalent discourses on space and time. Rethinking the narratives through which we articulate our conceptions of the world is fundamental. What is at stake is a reframing of the fundamental vocabulary and grammar through which we articulate the world. Yet, these interesting and stimulating approaches tend to engage directly with philosophical and theoretical urban discourses, but rarely work from or through the narrative arrangements and forms of articulation underlying contemporary technology, cinema and literature. Working from these narratives is necessary, productive and will serve as a fruitful means of engaging with these ongoing efforts. While the theorists mentioned above serve as important reference points in my project, my approach is not in the mold of any one of them. Rather than working on theoretical texts on space and time, this project works through the different contemporary texts in which the challenge of articulating contemporary spatiotemporal relations is fundamental. 13

decentralization of human agency. In his seminal We Have Never Been Modern Bruno Latour contends that the dualism between nature and culture upon which modernity is founded has ontological consequences. This taxonomy buttresses a deterministic knowledge of “the true nature of human things” based on a philosophy of first principles (Harman 2014). In its place,

Latour proposes a flat ontological model where human and non-human entities are equally able to have effect on other entities. The dissolution of the nature/culture binary, Bruno Latour pointedly argues, constitutes a deep ontological shift that collapses traditional categories.

Engaging with the multiplicity of place demands a recognition of nonhuman trajectories in order to face up to the vital materiality, the deep-set precarity, the constant need for negotiation and invention, that these encounters require. Indeed, if space is the dimension of the social, it is not so, Massey emphasizes, “in the sense of exclusively human sociability, but in the sense of engagement within a multiplicity” (61).14 Likewise, for Tsing what is at stake in deploying her concept of precarity is the possibility of rethinking social relationality. Tsing uses this approach to raise important questions about the relationship between the human and the non- human. The concept of precarity and the co-constitutive vulnerability it implies complicates the human/nonhuman divide in important ways and highlights our contingent interrelations with our ecosystem. What manner of provisional relationships of interdependency and vulnerability arise if the human is just one co-constituted actor among many human and non-human actors that

14 Massey is widely known for her reconceptualization of place within Feminist and Marxist human geography, and for her contributions to understandings of space as the product of social relations, following Lefebvre´s influential The Production of Space, and in conversation with David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Edward Soja, among others. However, it is in her later book For Space, that she extends the relational constitution of space, and the notion of the social, to include non-human processes. The move, as I argue in greater detail, is fundamental. 14

“struggle to establish bonds that sustain us?” (Haraway 2008). The critical work requires naming precarity “without embracing anthropocentrism” (Butler in Puar 173). Precariousness,

Butler argues, invites a rethinking of the human in ways that acknowledges that human life, in all of its sustaining conditions, are bound up with nonhuman processes, and is co-constituted by the entire network of life. Butler develops this argument in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of

Assembly. It is worth quoting her at length.

The point … [is] to gather and hold this merely apparent paradox together in a new thought of ‘human life’ in which its component parts, ‘human’ and ‘life,’ never fully coincide with one another. … Human life is never the entirety of life, can never name all the life processes on which it depends, and life can never be the singularly defining feature of the human — so whatever we might want to call human life will inevitably consist of a negotiation with this tension. Perhaps the human is the name we give to this very negotiation that emerges from being a living creature among creatures and in the midst of forms of living that exceed us” (42-43).

Space, understood as an event made up of the encounter of multiple human and non- human processes, not only has implications for how we conceive the human, but it means that to exist is to be connected and vulnerable to a biological network of life that is always beyond the human. Jane Bennett offers the term “vital materialism” to refer to “a world populated not by active subjects and passive objects but by lively and essential interactive materials, by bodies human and nonhuman.”15 It is precisely this kind of material vitalism which the primary texts I work with construct. “Precarity,” as Tsing uses the term, points to a material world that manifests

15 Bennet offers the term as a counter to historical materialism, and as a response to object-oriented ontology´s insistent rejection of relationality. 15

itself not as a multiplicity of inert things but through the changing and emergent quality of all matter. The stakes of thinking this way is a fundamental reconstitution of the extent of our responsibilities, agencies, and engagements. 16Space as an event has consequences for how we conceive of the extent, ramifications, and involvement of any event.

If Space is the social dimension in the sense of engagement, as Massey maintains, it is a notion of society that, like “for Latour, includes photons, planets, and mushrooms no less than language and disciplinary practice” (Harman 2014). Engagement, along with the throwntogetherness and the precarity that it implies is what is at stake in the narratives I analyze.

Once precarity is considered to be the underlying condition of the material world, then space, as the social dimension, implicates us in the trajectories of human and nonhuman processes alike.

The point is not that humans do not matter in these landscapes but that our agency and our being in the world can only be understood in relation to our co-constitutive encounter with a heterogeneous plethora of actors. From this perspective, precarious narratives dismantle the binary between organic and inorganic, nature and the human. Narrating place, it becomes evident, plotting the trajectories of the many inhabitants and processes, human and non-human, in which the “here” and “now” is involved.17

16 This is why Judith Butler argues that an assault on human lives also implies an assault on the environment and “on living beings and a living world” (in Puar 174) that exceeds and involves the human. In Spahr´s poem, for example, these multiorganic modes of sociality, of cells, pulverized glass, and concrete, from the nanoscopic to the cosmic, in which the human body is co-constituted, points back to a single event: September 11, 2001.

17Jameson sees this abundance of information about the present as producing the erasure of history and the installment of the no-time of postmodernity. This simultaneity is understood as breaking apart the modernist singular universal story that replaces a single time with no time. Augé similarly argues that “the difficulty of thinking about time stems from the overabundance of events in the contemporary world ... it is our need to understand the whole of the present that makes it difficult for us to give meaning to the recent past” (25). These 16

0.3 Ontological Shifts

As Bruno Latour argues, once the binary distinction between nature and culture is challenged, divisions between humans and the material world breakdown as well.18 Once history is attached to natural processes of all kinds, and “as soon as we take the essence accumulated at the two extremes and redistribute it to the whole set of intermediaries, … then history,” Latour points out

“in fact becomes possible. …All the essences become events …. History is no longer simply the history of people, it becomes the history of natural things as well” (82). This implies that the modern human conceit is not the only will capable of putting forth world-making projects. The

multiple stories are seen as too abundant and too heterogeneous to sustain a universal temporal principle; thus, a spatiotemporal discourse of how the past, present and future are arranged collapses. In this sense, the overabundance of events certainly provides an arena for the erosion of expectations of a singular historical narrative. Yet, the conclusion that this results in a collapse of coherence rests on the ideological assumption that the singular historical queue is somehow more natural than a sense of multiplicity. My primary texts question this assumption of a previous more natural, earthly, localized and material way of being in the world, which has summoned so much nostalgia. 18 While the ubiquity of the nonhuman in both my primary texts and the theoretical approaches I have mentioned so far serve to decenter the human as the central object of agency, it is important to recognize that this project is somewhat of a theoretical and methodological assemblage, made up of various approaches to the issue of the nonhuman. I do not work from a single theoretical approach but from the primary texts themselves. This allows for the inclusion of sometimes-divergent scholarly projects. While, as Richard Grussin contends, concern for the nonhuman has a long genealogy in Western scholarship, interest in the nonhuman in twenty-first century studies can be traced to particular theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century. These include: the development of Actor-Network Theory by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon; Animal Studies, particularly through the work of Donna Haraway; Deleuze and Guatari´s Assemblage Theory; New Media Theory which worked through networks, interfaces, and new forms of translation; and Speculative Realism — in particular Graham Harman´s Object-Oriented Ontology. Evidently, these theoretical approaches often diverge and disagree, but they are united by a common interest in working against human exceptionalism in order to think past conceptual dualisms that separate the human from animals, organisms, technologies and ecosystems. The nonhuman turn in twenty-first century scholarship accounts for a number of theoretical “turns” which this thesis touches upon (Grusin 2015). These include the ontological, network, digital, and ecological turn. The nonhuman turn, differently from the posthuman turn, for example, resists teleological accounts that point to a new stage in human development — we have, as Grussin points out, paraphrasing Latour, “never been human.” In this sense, the human can only be understood as an always co-constituted, co-existing, and co-evolving becoming. 17

event of space is made also through the encounter of contingent human and non-human trajectories. In this sense, as Barbara Bender writes, “landscapes, …make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time (History) and space (Geography), or between nature

(Science) and culture (Social Anthropology)” (in Massey 137).

Latour is one of the key figures in what Pedersen and Holbraad (2016) have called “the ontological turn” in the social sciences and humanities.19 These authors see in this shift a common desire to circumvent the longstanding ontological framework—what Latour calls the modern constitution (1993)—premised on the nature/culture binary. These reorientations propose new baselines for thinking through “how best to conceive of the world, its constituents and the relations between them (here, various critiques of Cartesian dualism have been prominent)”

19 Practitioners of the nonhuman turn are loosely untied by their challenge to social constructivism and its insistence that the agency and meaning of nature is derived from cultural, social or ideological constructions. Taken to the extreme, the constructivist emphasis on the human “strip the world of any ontological or agential status” (Grusin “Introduction”). As Grussin points out, it is precisely the epistemological focus of constructivism that, by rejecting the agency of nonhuman nature and technology, discourages discussions about ontology. Theorists included under the umbrella of “the ontological turn” are extremely diverse. The term has been deployed in a wide array of disciplines in recent years. While this shift cannot be considered a school of thought or a movement, these scholars are united in their willingness to question the fundamental terms through which analysis takes place. The shift has gained particular traction in anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). In anthropology, there has been a questioning of the terms of its object of study; these include the one nature/many cultures binary, the analytical distinction between the subject and object, and the social. Marilyn Strathern and Annemarie Mol have been key figures in anthropology´s ontological turn. Strathern´s work on ontology is crucial to Tsing´s work (Tsing 293). Mol and Strathern posit world-making not just as an issue of multiple subjective perspectives about a single world (suggestive of the one nature many cultures dynamic), but, as Strathern pointedly argues, as an issue of an ontologically multiple world. Mol contends in The Body Multiple, that the focus is on material coexistence. The shift is not limited to an epistemological multiplicity alone (perspectivism), but on the profound acknowledgement of the existence of multiple world-making projects. Bruno Latour and Michel Callon´s development of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has been particularly influential in STS. The move has been towards exploring the ways in which science and technology “operate as enactments rather than representations of the world.” STS understands the world as a complex and open-ended configuration, made up of different interactions among humans and non-humans. The emphasis has been on examining particular configurations and effects that emerge from the interaction of socio- technological and material practices. Graham Harman and Ian Bogost have also provided interesting responses to ANT through their development of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO).

(Holbraad and Pedersen 32). This, as Holbraad and Pedersen contend, has ultimately resulted in inherently ontological questions regarding what a person is, what a thing is, and how they are mutually related. These questions provide novel avenues for thinking about and articulating orientations that are usually debated under the banner of postmodernism (31). The shift is towards an ontology that stresses the inherent multiplicity of a world made up of encounters.

“The upshot,” Perdersen and Holbraad write “is an image of a world always in the making, emergent, incomplete and as fragile and mutable as the practices and processes that bring it into being and hold it, precariously, together: a world in composition” (39). It is precisely this sense of ontological precarity that is essential to the texts I analyze.

Listening and telling a rush of stories is, as Tsing suggests, a method. The notion of precarity, Tsing argues, is a means of reopening our imaginations and reorienting our attention.

Tsing and Massey demonstrate how “only an appreciation of current precarity as an earthwide condition” (Tsing 4) can helps us notice the full implications of a world of coeval encounters.

Tsing shows us how to listen to multispecies stories and their “interwoven rhythms.” Coevalness, after all, Massey points out, “concerns a stance of recognition and respect in situations of mutual implication. It is an imaginative space of engagement: it speaks of an attitude” (69). Taking these approaches together provides a novel means of examining and tracing narrative constructions of time, space and their precarious connections. What is at stake, thus, is opening up new ways of analyzing the implications of these interconnections — “less a label or diagnosis than a method”

(“Precarity: Interview with the Authors”).

0.4 Actants, Actors, Toolboxes

I find myself in need of a conceptual tool-box capable of naming the types of narrative relations and connections that my primary texts describe. In order to avoid falling into entrenched assumptions regarding narrative causality, I avoid the term “story” in favour of “plot.” By plot I simply mean the way in which the process of transformation in phenomena is sketched out in the texts in order to construct the narrative. My use of plot also emphasizes the configurational aspect of what have traditionally been considered temporal modes such as history and narrative.

The term conveys a sense of configuration at the intersection of form and process, and in the interplay of scales of action that come together to create patterns of encounter. This permits an appreciation of a heterarchic world through and through — one which may articulate a thoroughly interrelated world of multiplicity.

The idea of matter as composed of different scales of life not only implies new understandings of the relationships, composition and modes of interaction between the organic and the inorganic, but also, and this is fundamental to these precarious narratives, between what is and isn’t significant. By constructing plots that involve actants at all scales these texts call attention to the complex relationships and interactions that contribute to shaping of a world of encounters. Exploring the implications of such a composition is one of my fundamental questions in this project.

In order to appreciate the significance and agency of biological, cosmological, human and non-human trajectories alike, I employ Bruno Latour’s term “actants.” Latour coined the word to refer to anything that can cause a modification of any kind (Reassembling the Social 6). This

allows me to resist making fundamental distinctions between objects, ideas, people, technology and nature and to avoid lists such as this. The term has also been employed previously in different fields with other meanings.20 Latour’s “actant” aims to move away from a semiotic discussion of meaning to an “ontological description of beings: to describe how things come to be, not just what they come to mean” (Sansi 453). This concept serves as a powerful means of moving beyond human exceptionalism and of appreciating other kinds of temporal rhythms and agencies. The term complicates what can and cannot be considered significant in the telling of events, and what can and cannot be erased out of contention in the material constitution of space.

As Latour points out, this approach poses the question: “which actants can interrupt, modify, interfere, interest which others, thus producing as many topoi- kairoi?” (“Trains of Thought”

178). How we answer this question not only depends on the implicit assumptions we make about time and space but on how we establish who and what counts. As Graham Harman argues, since Latour’s use of “actants” reconfigures what and who is capable of producing change, he moves from a world of nouns to a world of verbs, from substances to relations (Harman 2014).

The implication is a fundamental reconfiguration of what is capable of producing change or significantly producing transformation, which in turn greatly modifies the basic categories of

20 The term has been deployed in different ways in various fields including semiotics, computer sciences, and sociology. Propp (1968) furnished a precedent for a narrative structuralist conception of actants. Defining the function as “an act of character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action” (21). He developed a typology of seven general roles or “spheres of action,” that correspond to the ways in which characters can participate in the plot structures found in the genre of the folktale (79-80). The Actantial Model found its most well-known expression in the work of Greimas (1983). He created “a systematic framework for describing how characters participate in the narrated action” (Herman). For Greimas, actants denote fundamental categories “at the level of narrative deep structure” (Prince 1) and defer from actors “which have specific qualities in different narratives” (Rimmon-Kenan qtd Herman). Greimas argued that “an articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; a structure of actants constitutes a genre” (200). Julia Kristeva (1970) furthered the Actantial Model by arguing that the object and subject can change positions. Rather than referring to the potential shifts as “changes,” she suggested using the term “transformation” in order to capture the plural overlapping situations in the narrative structure.

time and space. By employing the term “actant,” I can extricate space and time from the group of concepts in which they have been so deeply entrenched in order to settle these terms among another set of ideas. Not only does the concept of actants emphasize a more distributed conception of agency, it entails an ecology consisting of conjunctures of heterogeneous components (organic and inorganic, human, viral, molecular, animal, technological, ideological) that serve as agents of a creative becoming. This is particularly helpful for my study of actants in the narrative landscapes of my primary texts. Through such a motif, things, people and places are in a constant process of becoming and engaging with other actants in innumerable and unexpected ways on temporal and spatial scales that vary from the Lilliputian to grand-scale cosmic processes.

0.5 The Configurational: Thinking Through Multiplicity.

To grasp the texture of these encounters, precarious narratives require that we move back and forth among scales while holding on to an appreciation of multiplicity — the always-so-much- more. In order to avoid doing away with all the different temporalities, plots and trajectories of which space is made, Low and Barnett propose “thinking conjuncturally:” “a shuttling back and forth between different temporal frames or scales to capture the distinctive character of processes which appear to inhabit the ‘same’ moment in time” (59). While Low and Barnett’s theoretical interest is that of finding an alternative geographical approach to globalization discourses, their point is well taken and, I suggest, also serves as an apt way of capturing the primary texts’ narrative constructions. My dissertation is an exercise in “thinking conjunturally;” formally, it 22

too shuttles back and forth between trajectories and patterns.

The encounter of a rush of stories, contaminating, becoming with, changing each other, and eliciting more stories, cannot be neatly summed up. The scales involved do not nest neatly together. In fact, scale here is not a matter of a hierarchy of planes of existence but of the interplay of tempos and geographies that connect forms of vibrant matter “across corporal and conceptual boundaries” (Harbord 117). It is for this reason that a sense of spatial configuration at the interplay of form and movement is so often made a prominent feature of the narratives I examine. Paying attention to configuration serves to reveal the indeterminate patterns of a complex material world. Configuration matters in precarious encounters; it determines the vulnerability, precarity and open-ended trajectories that emerge. In this sense, an emphasis on configuration is fundamental for conceiving space as an entanglement that is inseparable from movement and for understanding temporality as emergent (For Space 123). Composition,

“underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity” (Latour in Cohen 2013). The term is, Latour goes on to point out, related to

“composure,” which is associated with choreography and scenography. Concentrating on the patterns provides a means of constructing a notion of location made through intimate interconnections at a variety of scales beyond the local/global binary. That the material world and the processes through which it comes together is indeterminate—requires readers to hold on to an appreciation of infinite complexity at scales beyond those of human perception. It is precisely this sense of configuration made through entanglement and emergent re-arrangements of actants and trajectories that requires a multiplicity of forms of encounter and linkages in order

to express the distinct registers within assemblages. Precarious narratives contest traditional notions of interconnectedness and pose a challenge to perceptions of space founded on notions of holism. As such they provide a powerful means of thinking through key figure used to imagine contemporary configurations. A cosmology that stresses such relations produces not structures but configurations, not fragments but arrangements, not things, animals and people but actants. It is the continual production made through a configuration of trajectories, which Nigel Thrift describes as “that sense of propensity of the situation,” or “the potential born out of disposition”

(144), which is fundamental to these texts.

Thinking through these precarious patterns also serves as a means of examining the implications of a multi-scalar world. What the term scale is assumed to imply, after all, comes imbued with particular ideological implications about space, time and narrative.31 Rather than an ordered collection of various discrete spatial and temporal scales, the inclusion of processes within and beyond the human, makes evident that the number of scales is as numerous as the actants involved. A scale in such configurations is not a plane of material existence.

The qualifier “fractal” may help explain my scalar variant. The figure of the fractal, which makes its appearance often and explicitly in many of my primary texts, does not function

31 The meaning and implications of the term “scale” is a point of contention in a variety of fields – it is particularly predominant in fields related to geography, ecology, as well as the sciences, and philosophy. Still, there are remarkably few analyses that attempt to tackle scalar thinking from a range of fields in which the term is fundamental. See Tong, Chris, “Ecology without Scale: Unthinking the World Zoom,” for an introduction to the variety of approaches and uses of the term in a range of disciplines. While I challenge Tong’s proposed solution to the problem of scalar thinking in Chapter 3, his analysis proves particularly useful. For an overview of the use of the term scale in Geography Andrew E.G. Jonas’ chapter “Scale and Networks Part I” and John Paul Jones III, et al.’s chapter “Scales and Networks Part II” for The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography are particularly useful introduction to the discourses and stakes.

as a rhetorical flourish but as an expression of material ontological structures and patterns of connections. The fractal requires a spatiotemporal re-imagination in which every space and time is shot through with other spaces and times. If precarious texts so often resort to figures of complexity — catastrophes, strange attractors and fractals, among others, it is because these narrative configurations are grounded not in the exploration of semiotic constructions about a world whose fundamental ontology remains unchanged, but on a sense of complex co-existant patterns of entanglement in a material world that is always becoming. It is for this reason that the indeterminations of precarity resonate so well with the indeterminations of complexity.

Fractal patterns are the figures that arise from the configuration of mathematically and spatially complex ecological phenomena. Benoit Mandelbrot’s well-known example of the

British coastline is particularly illustrative of the structural and narrative dynamics through which my primary texts are plotted. In The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1983), Mandelbrot finds in the material world an intrinsic contradiction for Euclidean geometry: the length of the British coastline depends on what scale we employ to measure it. In Euclidean Geometry as we reduce the unit of measurement to approach a definite point everything becomes simpler, eventually surfaces become planes — Space in such a geometry is indeed surface. In fractal geometry, however, complexity exists at every scale — measurement does not become more precise as magnitude is increased. New complexities are revealed the more we make the coastline swell into microtopologies. Fractals disrupt Euclidean conceptions of space in a fundamental way — rather than a plane, a fractal topological dimension exists between integers, always exceeding the shape of the space these dimensions occupy. The recursive symmetry that produces fractal

geometries does show instances of order and repetition across scales, but does not produce the kind of causal periodicity that would permit predictability (Lekan 194). As Thomas Lekan writes, “even if we choose the smallest increment of measurement—the slow trail of a snail along the deeply indented bays, rocks, and sand beaches—we could never reconcile that measurement with all the others at different scales into a satisfying result” (195). Fractal relations do not exist in neat or nestled scales — tidily ordered surfaces from the micro to the macro. In a world conceived through multiple scales of interconnection, the “here” and the

“there” fold into an ontology of location defined by multiple temporal and spatial orders which have profound implications for how we think of space, time and place. Thinking the configuration of the world through the fractal provides a concept of connection where relations among actants exist not just as consequential outcomes of some other quality but precisely because of these complex distributions (Thrift 2006). The fractal provides a vision of the material world as made up of deeply implicated processes regardless of metrics; as such, it challenges traditional notions of space and time. Because it is inherently spatial, this fractal geometry is also fundamentally temporal. As Thomas Lekan points out, fractals require a drastic shift in the ways in which we think about space because they require that we think through the complex, vibrant, and fluctuating patterns that make up the material world. As is explained in

Nocilla Dream (see Chapter One), through the fractal, “the flat line of the map takes on relief, takes on body, gurgles” (111).

0.6 Chapters

In chapter one I engage with Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream. The prevalence of places of transit such as highways, subways, hotels and airports; the vastness of sources included; along with the motif of speed and mobility, has meant that criticism of the text has been repeatedly directed through the lens of postmodern theory and the dynamics of globalization discourses.

One of the fundamental problems that I have with the way in which my primary texts have been analyzed previously is that the preoccupation with these narratives as being representative of processes of late capitalism and globalization has erased any consideration of ever-transforming assemblages, the make-up of which is not exclusive to contemporary dynamics. A full exploration of how accepted discourses of progress, globalization and postmodernism tend to describe the cultural logic of late capitalism is outside of the scope of this dissertation. Rather, I will maintain my focus on notions of space and time as constructed by the texts with which I engage.32 That said, my approach does serve as a fruitful means of challenging the ways in which these discourses have been applied in previous critical approaches to the texts.

Nocilla Dream is a particularly interesting entry point for this project because it makes explicit references to mainstream postmodern and globalization approaches, often directly quoting or closely paraphrasing seminal texts such as Baudrillard’s influential America and Mark

Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Rather than a direct critique, Nocilla Dream posits these discourses within a cosmology of complexity. By employing approaches reliant on traditional space and time binaries side-by-side complexity theories,

32 For a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which the notions of time and space are deployed in globalization discourses see Doreen Massey’s For Space (2006) and Low and Barnett’s “After Globalisation” (2000). 27

Fernández Mallo’s text compels an attention to the assumptions we make about space and time.

The overall motifs of precarity and emergence, as well as the inclusion of all manner of actants, serve as a powerful challenge to mainstream discussions. As becomes clear throughout the narrative, things, people, and places, along with the events in which they are immersed, cannot be understood as self-enclosed, discrete entities, but are rather the product of unpredictable processes of becoming. Images of the desert, so often associated with barrenness and desolation, in the text serve to question rather than corroborate motifs of homogeneity, alienation, fragmentation, and depthlessness.

In chapter two I examine David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. Like Nocilla Dream, Mitchell’s text is made up of a multitude of interwoven plots that span the globe. For this reason, a great deal of criticism has centered on Ghostwritten as a “novel of globalization” (Vermeulen;

Barnard) or as a “cosmopolitan novel” (Schoene). These approaches to Mitchell’s text have been deployed in direct contrast to what is considered to be the tradition of the British national novel. I explore how events in the work come together through assemblages that go beyond the level of human action and interaction. The text emphasizes the active trajectories of bacteria, virus within bacteria, DNA, electrons, cosmic processes, technology and so on, as essential to the make-up of the events narrated. The reconceptualization of the human body, as an assembly made up of non- human trajectories, emphasizes the ways in which “the human” as well as all processes generally centered on human trajectories, are ultimately inseparable from the complex ecosystem in which they are enmeshed. The emphasis is not only on movements throughout the globe but across and throughout bodies, and on the generative precarity this implies. I will concentrate on the

particular motifs of fate and chance that run through the text and that provide another platform for discussing the issues of causality, generative vulnerability, and transformation that this material vitalism implies.

In chapter three I examine Topographies of the Insignificant, a collaborative project headed by Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum that uses Google Maps and wikitechnology as a platform for plotting a conjunctural narrative of place. The project brings to the forefront the issue of scale. Google Maps´ zoom and pan function, which Topographies employs and challenges, affords the possibility of plotting the history of place through multiple intricately linked processes and trajectories which range from the Lilliputian movement of a coffee drop as it falls to the ground to the processes of water evaporation, and the Earth’s geological history as a whole, in and out, and back. This conjunctural movement plots place as a narrative told by the coming together of all kinds of processes, at manifold scales. The narrative deepens into extreme microscale plots, telling the trajectories of disposed cigarette butts, oil drops and Band-Aids, among many other things habitually found on urban streets. These “insignificant” entities are thoroughly interconnected to different scales. The result is a plot that contests any binary differentiation between nature and urban, microscopic and macroscopic processes, and space and time. Similarly to Spahr’s The Connection of Everyone with Lungs, the cartographic interface as used by Topographies of the Insignificant serves as a means of plotting a narrative world made up of a bottomless proliferation of interwoven trajectories. As in Spahr’s poem, it is precisely the conjunctural movement in and out through which a notion of interconnection is constructed as the fundamental makeup of the material world. It is this continual and conjunctural deepening

and widening of our field of action through which the event of space is narrated. The histories through which place is made in Topographies become a continually multiplying meshwork of processes, interactions and encounters. Microtopologies make unworkable any concept of nature as a stable and uniform background upon which events happen smoothly. It constitutes a re- imagination of the urban as a process of becoming intimately and inextricably attached to a panoply of actants. It emphasizes the weaving of human and non-human trajectories through which place is made. Through this conjunctural plot, the map indeed “takes on body, gurgles”

(Nocilla Dream 111).

In chapter four, I analyse Radiant Copenhagen along with Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City.

Both works explore different ways of conveying a history of place as an entanglement of multiple trajectories and temporalities. The first—Anders Bojen’s and Kristoffer Ørum’s Radiant

Copenhagen—speculates towards the future, the second—Singaporean film-maker Tan Pin Pin’s

Invisible City—looks towards the past. Both projects construct history through the accretion of encounters of multitude world-making projects. Radiant Copenhagen and Invisible City are particularly interesting because they deal directly with two of our strongest and most pervasive spatio-temporal paradigms: the blank slate and the strong beat of teleological progress. Radiant

Copenhagen’s evident reference to Le Corbusier’s influential modernist urban project The

Radiant City both alludes to and contests his modernist utopic plan. Le Corbusier imagined a city erected on a clean slate independent from any environmental specificity — a surface removed from human action and nature where a perfectly geometric city could be arranged and erected on a Cartesian grid. Likewise, Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City explores Singapore, a city Rem Koolhaas

once famously described as “the apotheosis of the tabula rasa” (1031). Radiant Copenhagen and

Invisible City respond to these claims of blank slates and teleological discourses by constructing montages of varied, alternative, and unexpected trajectories. Amongst the unified drum beat of modernist progress swells a polyphony of world-making projects. The texts put together dissonant trajectories made up of echoes, contaminations, and ruins of other histories. Amongst the crucial question I ask is: what does a history that is not framed by teleology look like? The plot of place arises as an acausal narrative constructed by a multitude of actants, with many authorial voices accumulating into a sense of becoming. Indeed, these configurational, compositional, and deeply conjunctural narratives provide particularly interesting ways of thinking through how history is plotted.

Chapter 1 Things Come Together: The Topological Dimension in Fernandez Mallo´s Nocilla Dream

1.1 Introduction

The transformative and creative potential of the encounter of things, ideas, and people is fundamental to the formal narrative strategy and plot in Agustín Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla

Dream. According to the novel’s “credits,” Nocilla Dream emerged from the fortuitous conjunction of the following: a reading of Charlie LeDuff’s article for The New York Times “The

Generous Tree;” the discovery of Yeats’s verse: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born,” inside a sugar package in a Chinese restaurant; and listening by chance, that same day, to the Spanish rock band Siniestro Total’s 1982 song “Nocilla, qué merendilla!”

The book was written, the text goes on to state, between 11 June and 10 September 2004, in

Bangkok and Palma de Mallorca (221). The creative process and the world in which it was produced are conceived as a meshwork of juxtapositions, interactions, and encounters of innumerable things.

Nocilla Dream, the first volume of a trilogy that includes Nocilla Experience and Nocilla

Lab, has become the ur-text for a generation of Spanish writers known as the “Nocilla

Generation” who have been grouped together because of their common exploration of experimental narrative as a means of articulating contemporary experience.33 Rather than sport

33 The unexpected commercial success of Nocilla Dream turned Fernández Mallo into the emblematic author of a 32

traditional chapters, the text is made up of 113 short sections, numbered through increasing integers beginning with the number one. The text abounds with references to popular media culture, including Daniel Johnston (13), Radiohead (50), Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (148–

49), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (195), Highway to Heaven (148) Little House on the Prairie

(148); and Siniestro Total (180). There is also mention of literary figures and critics, including, among others, Heidegger (170) Marguerite Duras (13), Juan Benet (105), Susan Sontag (149),

Italo Calvino (37), Jorge Luis Borges (44), Baudrillard (13), and Augé’ and his “Non-Places”

(170). Philosophical theorizations from both artistic and scientific fields, such as René Thom’s

“Catastrophe Theory” (105) and Prigogine’s “Dissipative Structures” (42) also figure in the work.

Many of the micronarratives are entirely made up of appropriations and insertions from extratextual material — hence the final section, “Credits.” The excerpts include texts from quantum physicist Richard Phillips Feynman, novelist Thomas Bernhard, theoretical physicist

Jacob David Bekenstein, Daniel Arijon’s treatise on film language, poet François Cheng; an extract from an article from El País by Félix de Azúa, and a treatise of cryptography for the

Internet. This long and yet inevitably incomplete array of sources and discursive fields is expressive of a fundamental ontology: one that stresses juxtaposition and processes over discrete objects, and the bifurcations and unpredictability this produces over causality.

group of writers born in the 1970’s and grouped under the moniker “Nocilla Generation,” “Mutant Generation,” or “Afterpop Generation.” These include Javier Calvo, Esther García Llovet, Mercedes Cebrián, Juan Francisco Ferré, Jorge Carrión, Javier Fernández, Mario Cuenca Sandoval, Eloy Fernández Porta, Robert Juan-Cantavella, Gabi Martínez, Vicente Luis Mora, Julián Rodríguez, Germán Sierra and Manuel Vilas, among others. 33

1.2 Global Narratives vs Coeval Narratives.

Nuria Azancot’s 2007 article for El Mundo, “La generación Nocilla y el afterpop piden paso,” in many ways marked the standard for a critical approach to the texts produced by these writers grouped together as the “Nocilla Generation.” Azancot’s argument emphasized the importance of mass media, the combination of styles, the use of high and low culture, and highlights what she sees as a new way of writing fiction; in a word: fragmentary. The arguments surounding assumptions about postmodern narratives have, in great measure, determined the way in which

Nocilla Dream has been analyzed so far in terms of both plot and structure.

Not only have critics of Nocilla Dream stressed the fragmentary nature of these narratives, they have understood this characterisitic as being the product of an encroaching globalization that articulates social reality through the use of mass media references, films, video games, television, popular music, increased travel, and the Internet.34 Fragmentation as an existential and epistemological condition has been a recurring subject of (post)modern literature.

34 See Azancot’s “La generación Nocilla y el afterpop piden paso;” Henseler Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age; Vicente Luis Mora's La luz nueva: Singularidades en la narrativa española actual; and Eloy Fernández Porta's “Afterpop: La literatura de la implosión de los medios; the anthology Mutantes: Narrativa española de última generación.” The grouping of these authors in a generational paradigm reflects a dominant tendency in Spanish literary historiography. The characteristics of the “Nocilla Generation” narrative strategies are constructed in an evident generational framework, which define Spanish literary history in terms of a series of breaks, and emphasizes radical difference over continuity (See Soufas “Julious Petersen and the Construction of the Spanish Literary Generation.”). Most of the “Nocilla Generation” authors had collaborated together, organized congresses, and were in constant intellectual exchange among themselves. Yet, the reason for the grouping of these particular authors in the “Nocilla Generation” has tended to rest upon the presumption of the radical novelty of their narrative strategies. In direct contrast to a contemporary Spanish narrative that is argued to be markedly linear; rarely engages with contemporary culture, technology and mass media; and, when it does articulate globalization, it does so through the angst of simulacra, empty signifiers, alienation, and inauthenticity, the “Nocilla Generation” is seen as embracing technology, and welcoming the virtual and global landscapes they inhabit. Engaging with the merits and shortcomings of approaching the texts produced by “Nocilla Generation” authors in this way remains outside of the scope of this study. However, my examination of the assumptions about Globalization –upon which these arguments are founded -opens a line of inquiry through which to challenge some of the precepts upon which the characteristics of the “Nocilla Generation” have been constructed. 34

It assumes that a previous sense of temporal and spatial coherence and cohesion has broken apart. The modernist vision of a singular universal history and fixed territorial packages upon which a sense of society, community, and identity was built is replaced by one of breakages and overlaps in the texture of time and space, and thus a fragmentation of the constitutive self. The deployment of concepts such as fragmentation and interconnection to describe the text’s narrative structure—both of which have a spatial and temporal connotation—have been circumscribed by this way of imagining contemporary experience. Neither, in my view, is an adequate approach to the narrative calls into question that the text poses. It is precisely this absence in current analysis that my project seeks to fill. Nocilla Dream, I argue, contests the motif of fragmentation, intertextuality, and interconnection, as they are so frequently discussed in postmodern literary criticism.

The theoretical history of fragmentation as an epistemological and existential condition has a long and interesting history. However, fragmentation, in Azancot’s article, as in most uses in the postmodern vein, clearly refers to a breakage in the expected discursive and narrative linearity of the text. David Harvey’s seminal work The Condition of Postmodernity, for example, subordinates fragmentation to ephemerality and “patent chaos” (11); the term fragmentation is never mentioned without reference to the latter. For Harvey, the shift from modernity to postmodernity can be seen as a tendency to “wallow in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is” (44, Italics are mine). Chaos and unpredictability are repeatedly likened to the uncontrollable and the anarchic (44). Fragmentation here, as in most related postmodern approaches, contrasts the modernist vision of a singular universal history and

fixed territorial packages upon which an impression of society, community, and identity had been built, with a sense of breakages and overlaps in the texture of time and space, resulting in a fragmentation of the constitutive self and of the categorical world. Yet, as I discuss in detail throughout this chapter, rather than anarchy alone, chaos theory is related to a particular concept of generative creativity and newness. The narrative structure of Nocilla Dream resists the foundations upon which linear narratives are constructed, not as a breakage, as the term fragmentation clearly implies, but as a multiplication of temporalities, actants, and processes engaged in the construction of events.

The interwoven plots that construct Nocilla Dream propose a world that neither moves to a singular universal beat, nor results in an immobilized network of instantaneous connections.

Much like Julianna Spahr’s notion of connection in This Connection of Everyone, Fernández

Mallo constructs a world of multiple, coeval and transversal temporal scales and frames that make up the experience of “here” and “now.” Nocilla Dream puts into contention the relationship between permanence and change upon which fixed notions of place are constructed.

In a world of multiple rhythms and manifold processes, how do we articulate agency, predictability and change? It is a way of being-in-the-world that is at stake. The text not only proposes a world where other people in other places have different temporalities—as Fabian had called for—but one in which the texture of time and space is made through the coming together of any number of actants, which are never self-enclosed entities, but always in the process of becoming. In this sense, Nocilla Dream proposes an intriguing way of thinking through what a coeval narrative might look like in an emergent and interconnected world, while at the same

time, stimulating approaches to the broader issue of time, space, causality, and narrative. To follow the many paths of this argument, I shall begin where Nocilla Dream opens: in a desert, and in that desert, a highway.

1.3 A Beetle Drags a Rock Through the Loneliest Road in America.

“The Loneliest Road in America is indeed lonesome. As lonesome as a solitary shoe,” writes

Charlie LeDuff in the article from the New York Times that, along with the other fortuitous encounters listed above, gave birth to Nocilla Dream. He states: “The road, officially known as

US50, cuts through the heart of the Nevada desert, stretching 260 miles from Carson City in the west, to Ely in the east. There is a whorehouse at each end and not much company in between,”

“Indeed,” continues Nocilla Dream “technically its name is US50. It is in the State of Nevada, and it is the most solitary road in North America. It joins together the two towns of Carson City and Ely, passing through a semi-mountainous desert. A road in which, it must be stressed, there is nothing. Exactly nothing. 418 km with 2 whorehouses on each side” (16, Italics are mine; unless otherwise stated all translations are mine). It is precisely this “nothingness” that is contested throughout Fernández Mallo’s text.

The 260-mile stretch of transcontinental Highway US50 that passes through the State of

Nevada has been known as the loneliest road in the country ever since Life Magazine published an article in its 1986 July issue declaring that of all the highways in America this was the most forlorn. The piece served as a warning for travellers of the dangers of journeying to such a

desolate place. Travelling through it, the article cautioned, one would find no traces of civilization — as Charlie LeDuff would later corroborate, and Nocilla Dream would reiterate.

That same year, Baudrillard, describing the experience of driving though the vast landscapes of the American desert, writes in America of the “empty, absolute freedom of the freeways … the

America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces” (5). And later he describes this experience as “the purified form of social desertification. Disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of speed” (5). “Speed,” he claims, “is the triumph of effect over cause, the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of the surface” (7). In this sense, US50 epitomizes the emptiness, the speed, and the mobility, described by Baudrillard. The desert intensifies the experience of speed because, Baudrillard argues, it constitutes “the remorseless eternity of a slow-motion catastrophe” (3) that lends its geography a fixed and unchanging nature. Nocilla

Dream agrees: “the desert, because it is flat and isotopic, is the least catastrophic place” (57,

Italics are mine). 35 This is a desert, Nocilla Dream states, echoing the French philosopher, “that does not advance, a mineralized and arrested time” (37). However, the text goes on to explore the nature of catastrophes, and in the process dismantles any pretence of isotopy, emptiness, or stagnation:

It is said that matter, objects, everything we see, are lumps, catastrophes which have

occurred in the flat, neutral and isotropic space that there was in The Beginning. These are

35 Bruno Latour points out that there is a fixation, in our civilization, with the establishment of immutable frameworks and the search for constants. From this arises an enduring tradition of taking isotopy and isochrony as features of the world –either as what the universe is made of, or what the mind needs to make sense of the world (“Trains of Thought”). Isotopy comes from the Greek isos meaning equal and topos meaning place and refers to something that is homogeneous in all directions. Likewise isochronic means the same in all directions of time. Newtonian science it should be noted is built upon the assumption of isochrony. 38

the so-called First-Order Catastrophes. When one of those objects is taken out of

equilibrium by a foreign agent, it bends towards an unpredictable destiny, taking with it

other surrounding or far away objects … The desert, because it is flat and isotropic, is the

least catastrophic of places. Except when the stillness is broken by a beetle dragging a

rock; or in a crease a blade of grass is born; or a poplar finds water and grows. Then a

husband, to annoy his wife, throws her shoes on the top of that tree toward which, like an

attractor point, another thousand will be added (57, italics are mine).

Again, twenty-three sections later, the exact description of René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory is iterated. The beetle again drags the stone, and the poplar finds water but “then, a gas station attendant in the desert of Albacete kills time making newspaper balls the size of a beach ball and throwing them toward the plain beyond the highway” (94). The basic premise of chaos is that small differences in initial conditions produce widely different and unpredictable trajectories.

Thus, an idea injected within a slightly different configuration like an extra adjective or a slightly different arrangement is a move toward unpredictability.

A failure to recognize that even the desert, with its barely perceptible catastrophes, can never be timeless or immutable is at the basis of the argument of speed and instantaneity, of depthlessness, and the “triumph of the surface,” as material, existential and epistemological conditions in postmodern literature. The ontology proposed by Nocilla Dream through the use of catastrophe theory questions deeply engrained assumptions regarding the nature of time and space. Baudrillard goes on to argue in America that the motif of the desert provides an image of a world increasingly without meaning, depth, or history, because “we are delivered from all depth

there—a brilliant, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity” (124)—a challenge, that is, to time in favour of space. Thus, as the argument goes, time as continuous, homogeneous and contemporaneous to itself is replaced by the imaginary of instantaneity.

In Baudrillard’s America, from the window of a car travelling full throttle through the desert, speed blurs away differences. Baudrillard speeds through space; but in an isotopic and causal world, since there is no measure of movement, no consequence of displacement to be perceived, there is no cause, no effect, and thus no appreciation of temporality. Space as isotopy is not only the opposite of time, but also its obliteration, hence the allegations of depthlessness.

This is a vision that extols the triumph of the spatial and where space is conceived as surface by serving as an image of the much-dreaded annihilation of time.

In order to maintain the perception of the bareness of pure surface and mineralized time, a great deal of things must be discarded from the narrative as irrelevant to the experience of speeding through the Mohave Desert. Any suggestion that on US50 there is nothing, casts off as irrelevant not only the beetles but also the night lizards, the scorpions, the cars that blaze past us on the highway, the brothels and its prostitutes, and that now-infamous poplar tree with hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from it. We must trust that the smoothness of the road and the speed it permits make it possible for nothing to be left or taken in the process of moving between one point and another. We must believe that the desert behaves in the same way as the blurred landscape perceived from the window of the car; we must erase all processes, organisms, and objects that make up the landscape.

Catastrophe Theory, with its focus on the relational and co-constituted nature of time and

space, in which “life is forged in the transformative process of moving around” (Thrift “Space”

142), is not only the opposite of the language of causality, but poses a challenge to that postmodern notion of speed expounded by Baudrillard.36 Traditionally, geometry and physics had been based on the homogeneous concept of space and time associated with Euclid and

Galileo: a time that is the same toward the present and towards the past, like Baudrillard’s desert.

The use of the language of new Physics, such as Catastrophe Theory, referenced throughout

Nocilla Dream, greatly modifies the interpretation of space and time. In a desert made through catastrophes, a distinction between what exists in time—what is contingent—and what is outside time—what is eternal—no longer holds. After the first catastrophe, which Nocilla Dream refers to as the origin from which all matter stems, there is no isotopy because all things are always already a product of catastrophe. This unstable, elemental and chaotic matter is what the universe is made of.

Nocilla Dream’s catastrophic universe implies that even the smallest of actants, in the least catastrophic of places, can cause large and unforeseeable transformations unconstrained by geographic proximity. An ontology that, at its basis, defines space as a fixed, territorially-bound surface upon which time may act, presumes that the “natural” horizon of our possible effects in the world are circumscribed by physical and geographical proximity. A cosmology where space and time stretch relationally in a process of continuous becoming entails a restructuring of the

36 Paul Virilio’s seminal text Speed and Politics, which draws from mainstream globalization discourses, for example, argues that the reduction of distance has had particular economic and political consequences that have resulted in the negation of space. Speed, for Virilio, is defined by a logic of movement–both social and political– which converges in its very point of disappearance – where territory (conceived as space) is substituted by time. The urban landscape for Virilio is characterized by geometries of circulation that bind its inhabitants to a dictatorship of movement. Such a discourse rests on the ideological presumption that time is continuous, homogeneous, and contemporaneous to itself. 41

notions of “here” and “there” so that distance can no longer be understood simply as metric, nor space as Euclidean. I propose that in Nocilla Dream, space becomes an “event” where all actants are a co-constitutive part rather than a thing in which they are placed.37

No place, not even the apparent “remorseless eternity” of the desert remains still. While this may seem obvious—Baudrillard after all does not deny that the desert is a catastrophe but, because it is “slow,” he still erases the catastrophic nature of space out of contention38—Nocilla

Dream demands that we hold on to an appreciation of the multitude of assemblages made up of processes and actants constitutive to the desert. Keeping to the acknowledgement that no space is still, that even the natural world is crosscut by a myriad of transversal processes and cannot be thought of as separate from the mobilities of things and people, serves to dispel the binary between a homogeneous, somehow less authentic “globalization” made up of an instantaneity of interconnections and dematerialized mobility, and a previous, more natural, earthly, localized, and material way of being in the world, which has summoned so much nostalgia. “This is the event of place,” Doreen Massey writes, “in part in the simple sense of the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This is place as open and as internally multiple. Not capturable as a slice through time in the sense of an essential section”

37 Moreover, such a shift in worldviews challenges at its premise any technological deterministic vision of globalization; particularly one that poses the issue of globalization as an utter break in the dynamics that had held space, time, and place, together, in stark contrast with a more “authentic” or “natural” past (See Thrift, Nigel ed. TimeSpace; Massey’s For Space.).

38 Baudrillard’s suggestion that the desert constitutes “a slow-motion catastrophe,” ignores the geological history of nature. The idea of natural evolution unfolding over billions of years, after all, has been present at least since Aristotle (Moore 13). The move is more drastic: while acknowledging transformation, his argument erases out of contention the catastrophic nature of space rather than exploring how it may call into question the basic ontological categories of space as static surface and also as the obliteration of time. 42

(For Space 141). It is precisely this abundance of life and events happening all around us, this constant information of “others busy living simultaneously with me,” (Jameson 362) that serves to create a sense of the vibrant materialism of the desert.

The use of the language of complexity in Fernández Mallo’s texts is quite overt, and has repeatedly been mentioned and deployed by critics as a means of approaching the text.39

However, I question the utility of engaging with ideas of complexity without recognizing how the concept calls into question common postmodern assumptions about fragmentation, homogeneization, and a sense of unproductive anarchy. Complexity, in Nocilla Dream, is not merely a rhetorical flourish. It is a profound reconfiguration of the basic categories of time and space, and thus of why things happen the way they do, and what our place and agency within

39 I use the umbrella term complexity to describe an ontology that stresses processes over objects, emergence over predictability, and interaction over structure. The choice of the term complexity throughout this chapter stems from the explicit and prevalent reference in Nocilla Dream and Ghostwritten to theories stemming from the new Physics of complexity such as catastrophe theory and chaos in order to express an open, emergent, and interconnected world. As has been pointed out by Ilya Prigogine and Isabel Stengers in multiple texts, complexity theories, from deterministic chaos, and catastrophe theory, to Prigogine’s self-organization principle and dissipative structures, propose a new cosmology starkly different from classical scientific approaches by modifying the way time and space are treated in the sciences. The move has been toward an introduction of the arrow of time in mathematical and physical models that breach a long-standing discursive gap between a phenomenological time and a cosmological time. See Order Out of Chaos and From Being and Becoming for a well-written introduction to the issues at hand. Although Nocilla Dream in particular mentions and works through the implications of naming the world through the ontology of the physics of complexity, I am not referring solely to the group of theories coming out of the Sciences. The ontology I am referring to can be traced as much to a shift in the hard sciences, as to thinkers such as Whitehead and his call for a philosophy of becoming. These approaches have been used in the social sciences in order to challenge notions of what constitutes space, time, place and society. This has not only meant a recasting of what counts, a stress on thinking in terms of processes, an emphasis on the relational co- constructedness of space, and time, and on the plurality of times and spaces produced by these varied and transversal processes. These approach have served to call into question binaries at the basis of the prevailing cosmological ideology –local/global, subjective time/objective time, static space/ dynamic time, singular history/non-history; places/non-places; objects/people; nature/society. (See Massey 1994, 2006; Thrift, 2006; Latour 2005, Low and Barnett 2000, etc). Jameson and Harvey, along with a many academics in widely differing fields have recognized that the cosmology of complexity theory potentially revolutionizes our imagination of space and time. What the implications of that upheaval might imply, however, vary from the epistemological ephemerality and atemporality of postmodern narratives, to the emergent and openness of the process of becoming of Doreen Massey’s conception of space. One of my fundamental arguments is that Mitchell and Fernández Mallo’s texts construct a cosmology much closer to the later conception of space. The work is one of examining what that might imply for narrative. 43

these events are. Fernández Mallo’s text requires that we engage directly with how complexity reconfigures fundamental ontological notions in order to understand what the text is expressing about place and the narrative structure of the text. The move from a simple, linear, deterministic and causal world, to a complex, nonlinear unpredictable and chaotic order is at the basis of the shift made by the sciences of complexity.40 Complexity Theory expresses an ontology that is always an “evolving, interactive multiplicity” and that resists any “reduction to a timeless or universal scheme” (Prigogine 72). It is a shift, as Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine often points out, from being to becoming.

Nocilla Dream contends that catastrophes are the elementary transformative and creative condition from which time, space, and matter emerge. Recognizing the continuous becoming that is in the nature of being, means that emergence, unpredictability, and newness are essential components of creativity.41 Thus, we are faced with a specific way of conceiving the behaviour of the arrow of time: while the present determines the future, small differences in the present

40 Dynamic systems are systems in which there are changes and thus an evolution from initial conditions. Deterministic dynamic systems such as those posited by Newtonian science and predominant globalization discourses are causal systems: those in which the results can be exactly predicted from the initial conditions and thus there is no element of randomness or uncertainty in the evolution of the system. In such systems an overall relationship of cause and effect can be established. This relation of cause and effect in classical dynamics relates changes in one variable (the cause)–when all other variables remain constant–to subsequent changes in another variable (the effect). It is this that lends Classical dynamics a vision of nature that was not only universal and deterministic, but provided a means of predicting and manipulating nature. Classical dynamics is based on the presumption of the existence of an underlying absolute mathematical time and Euclidean Geometry that are independent from the social and relative experience of time and space.

41 In this cosmology, space and time must be thought of together; but not as some sort of undifferentiable four- dimensional structure, as in, for example, Harvey’s notion of time-compression, but as an acknowledgement that space and time affect each other in multiple ways, and that how we think of one, inevitably affects how we think of the other. Rethinking what we mean by space will fundamentally put forth different notions of temporalities and vice versa. The emphasis on space as inseparable from movement and change directly challenges a notion, fostered by sedentary views of the world, of place in which people and things may come to rest and dwell. 44

produce small or large differences in the future. Unpredictability implies that we can neither know where the trajectories of actants will eventually lead, nor can we trace things back to initial conditions; origins are thus always contingent. “The beginning,” after all, according to Nocilla

Dream, is the beginning of the universe itself; after that there are only catastrophes upon catastrophes, meeting catastrophes, creating new catastrophes which tend towards equilibrium, only to be shaken apart by other catastrophes; branching off and multiplying the extent of their ramifications. The multiple iterations, allusions, and repetitions highlight the forking potential of time, and they are, in this sense, catastrophes themselves.

1.4 Organism/Organization.

In the desert, with the exception of the hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from the single Alamo tree that found water, the text stresses, there is nothing. These shoes constitute the only “vague” reminder of human presence (16-17). “Nothing,” however, turns out to include hitchhikers, drivers, prostitutes, shoes, beetles, sounds, wolves, newspapers, books, photographs, abandoned suitcases, and other actants that meet, bifurcate, and take on new and unexpected meanings and trajectories. What is more, underneath the desert we find Isotope Micronation, a fully functioning community operating vertically, from 0 to 98 meters below the desert, where 178 people share a

77,000 m2 of space. Above, the desert is crisscrossed with fiber optics transmitting information from the 178 Isotopians to the rest of the world.

Upon the solitary tree that found water the reader finds “high heel shoes, Chilean shoes, sneakers of all brands and colors (even the mythical Adidas Surf), flippers, ski boots, booties,

patent-leather shoes” (24). These “vague” reminders of human presence, which recall that

Borgesian Chinese encyclopaedia that inspired so much laughter in Foucault, is an iteration of

Charlie LeDuff’s feature article; it is identical with the exception of one paragraph.42 If the list seems amusing to the point of being ludicrous, it is precisely because it seems to “break[] up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things;” (Foucault, The Order of Things xv) shattering “the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography” (xv). The list is amusing because it calls into question a classification that distinguishes between what belongs “here” and “there.” The separation between organic and inorganic, between people and things, and space and time, is not a fundamental distinction, but one made by a particular taxonomy.43 That Chilean shoes, Adidas surf shoes and ski boots can be found hanging from a poplar tree in the Nevada desert is precisely why globalization processes are seen as disrupting telluric and essentializing notions of place and belonging — where a supposed “natural” state is replaced by what is deemed to be an unnatural order of things and people.

There is an important difference between an organism and an organization explains

Nocilla Dream: “an organism is an entity, be it mineral, animal, vegetable, or socio-cultural, that lives and develops on its own, almost always following spontaneous complex and internal dictates — it can be considered in every case to be a living being” (42). Organizations, on the

42 In LeDuff’s article, the extract reads as follows: “There are snorkeling flippers, tennis shoes, work boots, flip- flops, high heels, pumps, baby booties.”

43 The notion of actants thus serves to work through entrenched theoretical binaries. Figures such as the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus), and the fractal, as well as Latour’s actants –which make their appearance often and explicitly in most of my primary texts –relate that which had been separated by theoretical constructs. 46

other hand, are dependent on an exterior force to give them commands, whether these are mineral, animal, vegetable, or socio-cultural, they cannot be considered a living being. Deserts, the text points out elsewhere, are living beings (108). The highway too is a “fleshy” strip of concrete that sinks under the pressure of hitchhikers’ feet (16). Neither the highway nor the desert is left the same as passersby and objects circulate through them, littering the desert with lost shoes that, “like a rabbit without a litter,” lay forgotten on the desert floor (19). This is more than the animation of inanimate things. Rather it is an emphasis on the living, changing, emergent quality of all matter and thus, we see the importance of thinking in terms of actants.

Not only does it emphasize a more distributed conception of agency, as I explained in the

Introduction, it puts forth a view of nature as one consisting of conjunctures of heterogeneous components (organic and inorganic, human, viral, molecular, animal, technological, ideological) that serve as agents of a creative becoming and disrupts any claims on a more natural and fixed order of things and people. Nocilla Dream too is a product of the bifurcation and encounter of innumerable actants. As the text explains,

Although, as we know, all that exists is made of fiction, some historians and

characters have been directly extracted from that ‘collective fiction’ we commonly call

‘reality.’ The rest, from that other ‘personal fiction’ we usually call imagination. Thus the

reader will have found real and public biographies diverted from the original, and f

ictitious biographies that have converged into the trajectories of other real ones,

composing, in this way, the docufiction through which Nocilla Dream is constituted

(220).44

Similarly to the “origin” of the text itself, the origin of the poplar tree with its many shoes hanging from its branches, is made up of story upon story, inventions, discourses, theories, versions, exaggerations, contradictions, gossip, and blatant lies leading us further away form any single source. In that way too, the desert, like the text, is alive.

There is a “certainty,” Nocilla Dream observes, that initially the desert was no more than one single smooth and shiny photograph, which was then devoured by coyotes. For their gluttony, the coyotes were condemned to wander alone and hungry through the Nevada landscape the soil of which was made up of the accumulation of their excrements derived from the digestion of that one photograph (104). Photographs, of course, can never be the beginning, rather, they always testify to an a priori like Barthes’s famous “having been there.”45 In his article, LeDuff argues that the shoes serve as proof “that something happened here, that there are other souls traveling on the road of loneliness;” they are, in this sense, LeDuff continues, “like letters, photographs, or stains.” Nocilla Dream reiterates this point arguing that this seemingly

44 The concept of bifurcation, as discourses meet and form new trajectories, dispels any discursive binary between the fictive and the real. Fernández Mallo, a physicist by trade, has produced various articles regarding what he has dubbed “postpoetic narrative.” The writer, he argues, serves as a “laboratory,” whose work is one of continual experimentation, and amalgamation. The work is that of “creating hybrid artefacts between science and what we have traditionally called literature.” Fernández Mallo introduces and elaborates on the concept and implications of “postpoetic narrative” principally in “Hacia un Nuevo Paradigma: Poesía Postpoética Lateral.”

45 As Barthes’s and Sontag’s influential texts repeatedly point out, photography has an uneasy relationship with time and space, reality and objectivity. A photograph serves as evidence of that necessarily real thing. According to Barthes’s argument, photography is more than a trace, it is not just evidence that something happened, it is an image of the past, a slice of past, exposed in the present, undeniably. Barthes points out in Camera Lucida that the objective quality of photography always rests on this superimposition of reality and the past. It constitutes that undeniable memento –that image which is not only a reminder of the past, but an image extracted from the past and carried forth. For Barthes a photograph testifies, not to significance of the thing, this being mobile and made and unmade through context, but to its past existence. While the meaning of the photograph may transform, its reference to what-has-been will hold throughout. 48

absurd conjunction of shoes constitutes proof that even in the most forlorn of places there is life beyond the body; “that objects, alienated, by themselves are worth more than that which they were created for” (24). Moreover, the text’s emphasis on the varied trajectories of objects effectively rebukes any discourse that may posit all objects as subsumed to the singular trajectory of capitalist exchange and consumption. Instead, the poplar tree and its improbable collection of shoes serves as a reminder both of the great creative potential of mobility and of the transformative potential of actants as trajectories meet and transform each other into unpredictable forms. "What is an organism?” asks Michel Serres, “A sheaf of times. What is a living system? A bouquet of times," he answers (Serres 75).

1.5 A Coeval Narrative.

In a nonlinear world, where events cannot be neatly ordered in a row and explained in causal terms, what brings things together? How can the transformative and creative becoming of encounters be plotted out? What brings Charlie LeDuff’s article “The Generous Tree,” Yeats’s

“Easter 1916,” and Siniestro Total’s “Nocilla, qué merendilla!,” together in order to produce a transformation, a terrible beauty, a text?

The lonely poplar tree in the middle of the Nevada desert we are told, serves as an attractor point to an ever-growing number of shoes — multiplying the catastrophes thrown into the desert and bending actants towards unpredictable destinies. Each shoe thrown on the tree is a catastrophe that, by virtue of becoming part of the tree, gives it different characteristics, making it into something different, even when recognizable as itself. The more shoes there are, the

stronger the power of attraction becomes, curving more and more shoes towards it. The tree, being the strange attractor that it is, creates patterns made up of associations, coincidences, iterations, qualities, shared attributes, which produce a relatively recognizable arrangement called Nocilla Dream.

In one section, Bob, a convenience store owner from Carson City looks out towards the desert landscape. To him, the multicoloured layers of geological stratum remind him of the ordered alignment of products, organized in horizontal lines on a shelf of his supermarket, in the middle of which there is a line of cans of shortbread cookies; on their lid there is the picture of a fir tree with Christmas ornaments hanging from it. “Both trees,” the text warns us, “have begun to curve together.” From then on the image of the tree multiplies: the tree in Mozambique found by a Danish Zoologist and an American DHL delivery man, from which hung hundreds of bones from an unidentified animal (52); the Chinese tradition, reserved only for the elderly, of dangling on ropes between trees in order to pick Kwain — a citric fruit that grows on a tree by the same name (64); the equally strange tradition of hanging dry excrement with silk ropes from the ginko-bilova tree, from which ginseng is obtained” (70); a funeral home which cannot be sold because there is a tree growing into the cremation oven where the owner’s grandfather had been incinerated (86); the recording made by Sokolov of the sounds of the interior of a building which produce the auditory equivalent, he thinks, of “the sap of a tree going up through its roots towards its leafs, propelled by unexplainable vectoral forces” (142). Ted, one of the many characters that appear in the text describes a “net of information that hybridizes the organic and inorganic, towards which, like a tree, the stories of every inhabitant of all the micronations of the

planet come to hang” (100). The text, like this net, brings together actants of all kinds whose trajectories curve into each other.

In an otherwise insightful article, David Porush argues that the sciences of complexity pose for time and causality is precisely what the conventional narrative forms are made of; complexity, he states, “is the very stuff of the traditional novel, of the narrative, of the human point of view, of macroscopic realism […] Physics has caught up with Fielding, Dickens,

Austen, Trollope, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and every other novelist for whom small accidents send the hearts of mortals and their fates wheeling out of their appointed Newtonian orbits into grand twists of fate and destiny” (16). However, this is precisely to miss the point of what unpredictability suggests for time, space and the narrative it engenders. From Fielding to

Tolstoy, the twists of fate and destiny are eventually rendered commensurable in the grand scheme of things, because characters are always conceptualized as occupying the same singular and linear time frame. Unexpected things can happen, and they surely do, but this is not the same as unpredictability. All manner of things happen in this shared “meanwhile,” but the coherence of a causal order is finally established, so that the text, like the nation, becomes a place where a host of different events are gathered up into an intelligible whole. This is precisely Benedict

Anderson’s seminal argument in Imagined Communities. Reading conjunturally, as Low and

Barnett propose, permits an appreciation, in texts such as Nocilla Dream, of the many temporal and distinctive frames and scales of processes “which appear to inhabit the ‘same’ moment in time” (59). There is no singular, unified timeline; only assemblages of ongoing temporalities.

This conjunctural approach serves to avoid any suggestion that all these different stories should,

in one way or another, eventually coordinate into a unitary sense of time and space. I am neither suggesting a measure of incoherence nor brokenness, but rather, a conception of coevalness. A conjunctural reading provides an alternative approach to what tends to reduce plots to linear narratives within a singular time frame. As Juan Bonilla suggests in the introduction to Nocilla

Dream, rather than the time of the “meanwhile,” the text emphasizes the rhizomatic conjunction

“and.” This points to a multiplication of actants and thus temporalities.

Any sense of temporal linear unity in the text is disallowed by the absolute present tense in which the majority of sections are narrated along with the persistent use of continual tenses. It is from this present that plots spring. Yet this is not a present that gathers all events up into an intelligible whole, commensurate to itself, such that while the text stretches out into the meanwhile, the characters are frozen in the same instant in time. Rather, it is an overlay of a continuous and incommensurable present process of becoming.

1.6 Place/Non-place/Fractals.

“Place,” Nocilla Dream explains, is a space that is made up of a particular history, identity and culture. “Impersonal” places such as malls and airports, “that are identical in any place or culture,” the text continues, have been thus named by “postmodern philosophers:” non-places

(170). Nocilla Dream is of course referring to Marc Augé’s much cited book Non-Places:

Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. According to Augé, supermodernity

produces places of circulation and consumption such as malls, highways, airports and hotels.46

“Globalization” has become a powerful and prevailing means of conveying an image of total and unencumbered mobility, a world of flows and a vision of a totally and instantaneously connected network. The unfolding of globalization frequently is articulated in terms of a series of binaries in stark contrast to the modernist one. Where once there were wholes, there are now only fragments; fixity is pitted against mobility, space against time, nature against the urban, lived time against clock-time, face-to-face interaction against anomy, wholes against fragments, things against people. It is out of a cosmology based on immutable frameworks, whole objects, bounded identities, and enclosed communities, that stories of fragmentation, of hybrids and half objects arise. Configurations that threatened to collapse territorially bound and temporally coherent conceptions of place are consequently deemed to be threatening to culture, society and identity. They threaten the coherence of such a cosmology as a whole. Instantaneous global communication, global positioning systems, the internet, high-speed trains and modern commercial airplanes among a host of other transportation, navigation and communication technology, have meant a growing amount of connections over longer distances involved in the construction of the “here” and “now” of place. As such they have served, in many ways, to challenge this coherence and the tenets upon which this notion rests. By extension, globalization, in subverting boundaries reliant on territorial packaging, is argued to cause the erosion or disappearance of “place,” and produces instead, as Augé’s much-cited argument goes, non-

46 According to Augé, supermodernity, with its logic of excess produces places of circulation and consumption that are defined almost exclusively by the transit of people and things. These places of movement and flux are described and examined in direct opposition to what Augé defines as anthropological places – relational places that lend themselves to the production of memory, history and identity. 53

places. The conceptual divisions in this networked vision of the world, relies on a binary between “local” and “global.”47 The “local’ is thought of as concrete, made up of enclosed places of community, of surfaces, and geometry, and pitted against an abstract, universal and yet, less

“real” notion of the “global” which is associated with a virtual, abstract, non-territorialized global space of electronic communications. Homogeneity is in this way thought of as less authentic than the purported unity of place it displaces. Augé’s theory of the multiplication of so- called “non-places” is contingent upon this ontology. 48

According to Augé, the multiplication of the fundamental platforms of contemporary circulation, consumption and communication are seen as disrupting the localized, familiar, meaningful, organic and partially rooted sense of place-bound distinctiveness. They are the tenets upon which community, history and identity had long rested. Non-places, in contrast, produce, homogeneous and easily recognizable places of meaningless and “solitary contractuality” (94) where people coexist without inhabiting, leaving no trace of their passing.

These non-places of movement and flux are described and examined in direct opposition to what

Augé denominates “anthropological places.”

Yet, as soon as Augé’s argument is laid out in the text, it is called into question by the

47 In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula Heise points out that there is a tradition of “an excessive investment in the local” (10). This focus has pervaded not only urban studies but ecological and environmental discourses, in which the local has been treated as being more tangible, approachable, and less abstract than the global. Heise, rather, proposes an eco-cosmopolitan approach (10) which shifts the emphasis from a “sense of planet” which opens the possibility for observing the interplay between local and global, and macro and micro interactions.

48 According to Augé, supermodernity, with its logic of excess produces places of circulation and consumption that are defined almost exclusively by the transit of people and things. These places of movement and flux are described and examined in direct opposition to what Augé defines as anthropological places – relational places that lend themselves to the production of memory, history and identity. 54

multiplication of actants that exist in these so-called “non-places.” Kenny, Nocilla Dream explains, a fugitive of the Canadian Government, lives in the international terminal of the airport of Singapore. Lacking documentation and tired of being constantly repatriated, this “non-place” provides the perfect legal vacuum for Kenny to live peacefully. “What most catches his attention is that the daily amount of races and cultures that pass and cross each other in an airport do not modify in any way the aesthetic or human physiognomy of the airport, he has come to compare it to an atemporal entity […]” (183), states the text, paraphrasing Augé’s theory. Like the desert, it is the certainty that time spent within those places produces no transformation, that during those moments space does not change in the slightest, that holds together conceptions of spatial homogeneity. Homogeneity, after all, at once implies that two things are self-similar at this very instant and that they remain in this state regardless of actants coming into contact with them.

That people, things or ideas may be mobilized without any transformation taking place, Nocilla

Dream points out, is the “definition of human sterility” (210). While Kenny is pondering the homogeneity of the airport and the sterility of our involvement with this place, a cleaning lady requests that he stop leaving hairs in the showers of the airport: “everyday you lose more hairs”

(183) she complains. And just as slightly and surely as that rock being dragged by a beetle through the desert, a hair falling off the scalp of a balding man produces a catastrophe.

In order to maintain the illusion that the body in passing leaves no trace, spaces of mobility need an army of cleaning ladies. In Nocilla Dream, we are not permitted to ignore the piece of chewed gum thrown on the pavement. The travelers who pass everyday through highways, airports, and hotels, or the personnel who provide for the needs of travellers are all

significant. The need to challenge the theoretical assumptions and discourses that bulwark the prevailing thinking on globalization has originated from dissatisfaction with the use of abstract theoretical systems that attempt to pull out certain elements of globalization and the relations it constructs as primary forces. Consequently, they freeze these relations into place. The human body in Nocilla Dream is not a self-enclosed entity but instead an endless source of effluences, emanations, emissions, discharges, microbes, and sheddings. It can never pass without leaving something behind. Highway US50 is full of places that spring up to cater to the needs of mobility. And it is precisely in places of transit: hotels, motels, and whorehouses where all kinds of actants meet, collide, and take on different and unexpected trajectories. The desert in Nocilla

Dream is made up of these innumerable actants and the catastrophes their encounters produce.

In Fernández Mallo's text, neither place, nor the actants of which it is made, nor even the human body can be conceived of in terms of a self-enclosed discrete entity; the foundational ontology of a catastrophic world, even in the least catastrophic place, precludes this. In section

13, for example, Nocilla Dream invites us to imagine Armilla, one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible

Cities. The imaginative challenge Calvino poses for his readers, the text argues, is that within each and every one of us, there is a city; one made of veins, and arteries. An infinitely circular channel without faucets or opening that consolidates an “I” with which to save ourselves from the fatal dispersion of our identity in the Universe.

On the one hand, this description of subjectivity relates directly to Nocilla Dream’s description of the desert, thus providing a link between the conception of space as homogeneous and isotopic, and subjectivity as self-enclosed and discrete. On the other hand, the text makes a

direct allusion to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which also constructs the city as mobile, multiple, and open. In fact, Armilla, in Calvino’s text, is the city without walls, or roofs, or asphalt. The only thing that reminds us that it is a city is the tangle of water pipes that expand into faucets, showers and siphons letting water flow out. Armilla is also deserted; yet, where humans perhaps once lived, now live nymphs and naiads. The desert, Nocilla Dream points out, “embrace[s] all kinds of strange creatures into [its] domains […]” (108); so too does the body.

In order to argue for the atemporal sterility of entities such as airports and the self, both the hair that falls, the cleaning lady who picks it up, the ingestions, digestions, leaky faucets, and emulsions, would have to be eliminated. In this sense, the use of the term actant serves to repopulate the world, with people, wolves, beetles, maps, and waste, which have been done away with by discourses based upon presumptions of isotopy and the taxonomic discreteness of entities.49 The narrative construction of Nocilla Dream, the iterations, overlaps, and webs through which the plot comes together, always in the process of becoming, always inflected by myriad trajectories, entails that time and space are constituted in and through encounters, contacts, and interconnections with other organic and inorganic actants. This also calls for an

49 Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), as well as theorists such as Timothy Morton, and Graham Harman who have developed an Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) have recognized the need to take into account the role of things in the construction of events, and the conception of place. While each of these theorists has approached the ontological status of things through their own terms, their stress on interconnectivity, and the inclusion of human and non-human actants agree well with the arguments made throughout this thesis. Indeed, their overall projects have sought to think beyond traditional binaries: local/global, nature/culture, human/non/human. While I do not find it productive to adhere to any of these theoretical approaches exclusively, preferring to explore the ontological constructs of the texts themselves, my approach provides an enriching response to these theories, while also providing a much needed exploration of the implication of these approaches to narrative. For an examination of the differences between ANT and OOO see Latour, Harman, and Erdélyi The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE. 57

understanding of subjectivity that is not exclusively temporal.50 This is a subjectivity that is outward-looking in its appreciation of its own relational co-constitution; this is the measure of precarity that Anna Tsing so poignantly describes. As is made evident through the text’s comparison of Calvino’s city to the constitution of the “I,” subjectivity is profoundly spatial, it is constituted by and co-constitutive of the event of space.

1.7 Fractals and Micronations: The Topological Dimension of Space.

As an alternative to the notion of non-place, Nocilla Dream offers instead the concept of

Micronation. Micronations, differently than non-places, do not rely on discrete notions of bounded place but rather on the spatial potential offered by connectivity. As a resident of an international airport terminal, the text informs us, Kenny has applied for citizenship of the

Kingdom of Ergeland &Vargaland — a Micronation that annexes and occupies all borderland territories. These borderlands include: the areas between countries; all areas outside of territorial waters up to a length of 10 nautical miles; the zone between wakefulness and sleep; mental zones of creative absorption; and all digital territories. At present, the text goes on to explain, Ergeland

& Vargaland’s biggest territorial port is KREV that can be entered through www.krev.org. This port serves, “as a global meeting place” (110). All these borderlands “generally belonging to no

50 These two conceptions of time are reconciled by an implied binary between subjective time and objective time which accommodates both a conception of homogeneous time upon which notions of history, community and place (upon which Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities are contingent) are built, and a subjective inward looking heterogeneous and dynamic time. Thus, the assumption that the lived time of everyday experience–authentic, natural, heterogeneous, and inward-looking–is contrasted and exists separately from the abstract time of metrification, which is systemic and homogeneous. 58

one, are in constant flux, they change on a daily basis, and upon all the earth new ones appear, or disappear, or others, which had been in a state of lethargy or submersion, reappear” (109). Thus, if we were to draw a world map of the physical territory of this Micronation, Nocilla Dream explains, the result would be a broad curve of a potentially infinite length. As is the nature of fractals, the dimensions of this broad and infinite curve is neither a line—dimension 1—nor a plane—dimension 2—but a fraction with topological dimension 3/2. Fractals disrupt Euclidean conceptions of space. They can neither be described as a plane nor a line but through a topological dimension, between integers and exceeding the shape of the space these dimensions occupy. “In just correspondence,” the text goes on to explain, “everything that happens in a microstate is in another body of reality. The flat line of the map takes on relief, takes on body, gurgles” (111). This geometry disrupts any notion of space as something static. Here, space

“gurgles” with life.

Fractal geometry is a means of explaining how everything in the universe is interconnected, evolves and transforms. It is a material description of the world. Thus, the use of the word “territory” in the text should not be taken as a metaphor of an immaterial or more abstract description of how things are related beyond the physical reality of space. As John

Briggs nicely explains, “fractals are unique patterns left behind by the unpredictable movements

—the chaos—of the world at work. The branching patterns of trees, the veins in a hand, water twisting out of a running tap — all of these are fractals” (195).

Fractals are produced by an iteration repeated over and over again that reveals and produces shapes of great complexity. It is this iterative quality of fractals that makes them

nonlinear systems. The iteration of a simple geometric transformation, for example, with small changes in parameters, provokes large changes in the structure, hence the element of unpredictability given by chaotic systems (Briggs and Peat 108). The product is a geometry made up of a repeating pattern at every scale, from the large to the small and back again. Thus, not only does a cartography of the fractal deny measurement per se—only relationship can be established in a fractal world—but, binaries between large and small, or global and local no longer hold because the minute here is as complex as the cosmic, and both are thoroughly interrelated in ways that give no priority to the one over the other. In fractal geometries we can no longer think in terms of large/abstract, small/detailed. The large and the minute are infinitely detailed, and infinitely interrelated. There is no line where the small ends and the large begins.

As historian of science James Gleik points out:

It is hard to break the habit of thinking of things in terms of how big they are and how long

they last. But the claim of fractal geometry is that, for some elements of nature, looking for

a characteristic scale becomes a distraction […] In reality, atmospheric scientists are

realizing that tumult in the air forms a continuum, from the gusty swirling of litter on a city

street corner to the vast cyclonic systems visible from space. Categories mislead. The ends

of the continuum are of a piece with the middle (108).

This is precisely why Nocilla Dream provides such an apt contestation to traditional spatiotemporal discourses and to expectations of narrative linearity. The idea that everything is spatially distributed is nothing new. Since the invention of the microscope, at least, the smallest monad has been seen to have its own geography. The idea of disintegrating the small into the

minute visually and intellectually is already found in the naturalists, for whom the horns of an aphid swelled and filled the entire visual field, only to be collapse into more and more minute minutiae. Ideas of complex composites, of a heterarchic world — a world of multiplicity, mixed ascendancy and divergent but co-existant pattern relations can be traced back to the 19th century with Gabriel Tarde (Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social”). However, the topological dimension of a fractal world in Nocilla Dream goes further than simply positing that the small is as complex as the large. The text joins together the micro and the macro, conjuring up a vision that disrupts notions of a billiard ball world.

This ontology postulates relations among actants existing not just as consequential outcomes of some other quality but precisely because of these complex distributions.

Micronations are more than an appreciation of a coeval worldview a la Fabian, in which other societies and other places, are understood to have their own trajectories and temporalities; rather, it is an ontology that posits every actant, from the monad to the cosmic as crosscut by countless trajectories that are equally complex at any scale and thoroughly interrelated. A topological approach defines distance and proximity in non-metric terms, focusing instead on the way in which relationships create distance and proximity between human and non-human entities.51

Giving way to a topological dimension instead of a Euclidean notion of place/space, entails that a “global” scale of relations is in no way more abstract or less authentic than the

“local.” This geometry subverts any discursive binary between the global/abstract/virtual and the

51 In Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres rethink the near/far binary through a topological approach in the social sciences. Through the metaphor of a crumpled handkerchief, folded and put in our pocket, they point out that while the surface of a flattened handkerchief is similar to the familiar cartographic geometries of “distance” and “proximity,” when folded, the fabric weaves together new relationships of contact –here propinquity and distance neither necessarily entail access nor relationality. 61

concrete rooted/territorial/local. Fractals make unworkable discourses reliant on a presumed isomorphism between bounded Euclidean space/place and societies/cultures such as Augé’s concept of “non-places.” In fact, these fractal configurations demand a rethinking of what “the social” connotes because, as is evident in the dynamics of micronations, they challenge the idea that nation-state-society are necessarily mutually imbricated. Nocilla Dream’s disrupt taxonomical divides between people and things, the local and the global, nature and the urban.

1.8 The Creative Potential of Things in the World.

Things, are not only present in the text, they are central to places of mobility. The most important problem hotels have to deal with on a daily basis, for example, Nocilla Dream explains, is petty theft. Every year, the text goes on to claim, hotels expect to lose more than a million towels, pens, ashtrays, and shampoos. But they also lose entire dinner sets, flowerpots, and rugs. In exchange, travelers leave behind “watches, parrots that speak various languages, urns with the ashes of a loved one, earrings, necklaces, expensive lingerie, orthopaedic arms, contact lenses, blow-up dolls, books of all kinds, a wide range of adult toys, the secret service reports of various countries, and live crocodiles inside crocodile skin suitcases” (25). Everyday actants of all kinds pass through places of mobility, and in this passing, some things are taken while others are left behind. Things are constantly being forgotten, removed, and stolen; thus taking on new values and meanings — that is the catastrophic nature of mobility.

Nocilla Dream is full of artists and collectors whose major creative drive is to create catastrophes, that is throwing things into the world or collecting abandoned things. Hannah, for

example, a current citizen of Isotope Micronation, wrote and published 2000 copies of a book called New Directions. She then wrote an inscription in each and every copy of her book that read: “to whoever has found this. Now, if you wish, you can throw it away. Affectionately, the author, Hannah” (120). During the subsequent three months, she travelled through the most important cities of the States surrounding Utah, where she abandoned the books on streets, under cars, in subway stations, buses, and airports. Hannah’s experiment involves precisely the creation of catastrophes.

During a comfort bus stop on the way to Big Sur, Ted, Hannah’s future husband and co- inhabitant of Isotope Micronation, finds an abandoned copy of New Directions between a Pepsi can and a used napkin (120). By the time he finishes the text, he has fallen in love with Hannah.

Like all those songs heard emitting from any number of loudspeakers spread throughout the world, poems, photographs, and newspaper articles, found laying on restaurant tables, in fortune cookies, in suitcases, or published in one of the many copies of the New York Times that circulate the world, books too are prolific creators of catastrophes. All it takes after all is to throw something into the world and wait to see what happens; from it may come something terribly beautiful, a text, a desert, or a love story.

In a room in Suites of America, a motel south of Las Vegas Boulevard, far along US50, an Argentinian called Jorge Rodolfo believes he has found a secret Borgesian space, “that perfect place to live” made up of the ruins of a map (48). Nocilla Dream is, of course, referring to “El rigor de las ciencias,” in which Borges writes of an empire where the arts of cartography were so accurate that their maps were 1:1 with the empire itself. The map was later deemed useless and

abandoned by subsequent generations to the mercilessness of the desert. In the deserts of the west, Borges goes on to write, there are still vestiges of that one map in which animals and beggars have come to live. Later, Baudrillard came to the conclusion that it was the real and not the map that had been abandoned to the desert. But, for the desert—made up of digestions, bifurcations, catastrophes, and other such creative becomings—no such binary between “the real” and “simulacra,” nor between the natural and the artificial, can be distinguished; one is always made up of the digestion of the other. Jorge Rodolfo, one of the many travellers who journey through the deserts of the west, gives thanks for living in the ruins of that map and that empire (48). Ruins, vestiges, and traces, are, after all, testimony to the unpredictable trajectories of the many actants moving through the desert, of the sheer variety of which the desert is made, and of the creative and transformative potential they hold. Not only do actants continue to acquire new meanings and values much after their purported use-value has run its course, but trash too is creative. From lost photographs or balls of newspapers, to Deeck’s artwork made up of chewed gum found on the street, waste too produces catastrophes. This sense of multiplicity and precarity questions discourses positing the world and all things therein as increasingly subsumed to that singular trajectory of capitalist exchange and consumption.

Appreciating that objects have innumerable trajectories contests any discourse that may posit all objects as subsumed to the singular trajectory of capitalist exchange. In Nocilla Dream it is the entanglements in which objects are implicated that matter; once the many unique trajectories objects take, and through which they themselves are made is emphasized, alienation as a concept becomes unworkable. Things cannot be extricated from the assemblages in which

they participate nor made to stand-alone “to be used or exchanged” so that they “bear no relation to the personal networks in which they are made and deployed (Tsing, Mushroom at the End

122). Capitalism, Anna Tsing astutely recognizes, has no teleology; rather, once we begin noticing the many rhythms, trajectories, and assemblages, as in Nocilla Dream, what becomes apparent is what comes together “not just by prefabrication, but also by juxtaposition” (23).

1.9 Iterations vs Homogeneity.

As explained earlier, iterations are essential to a topological conception of space; they are, in fact, creative. The narrative structure of Nocilla Dream itself is full of them. A close examination of the ontological potential of iterations in the text introduces the possibility of transformation based upon unpredictability and provides an avenue through which to examine the evident intertextuality and numerous repetitions, allusions and iterations both within the text and in relation to other texts.

There is a second myth of origin of the desert told in Fernández Mallo’s text, one that, in the spirit of avoiding establishing origins and finalities, looks not towards the past, but towards the future. As Nocilla Dream explains, the dust raised by the proliferation of construction sites throughout Beijing has caused the wind to drag “quasi solid masses [virtual solids, we could call them]” (144) towards the Yellow Sea where these settle in an ocean that is becoming increasingly solid. Little by little these will, the text foretells, cover Beijing with layer over layer of “virtual solids” until only the tips of the highest skyscrapers will be visible; “and in that moment there will be no difference between the desert in Spain, Morocco, Mongolia or North 65

America. Just like all the water and all the computers on earth are connected in some way or another, all deserts too are the same [as are, therefore, the cities they entomb…]” (144). We may remember, of course, that under the Nevada desert, there is Isotope Micronation, proliferating, transforming, growing, and spreading through fiber optic cables far beyond the Nevada desert.

While interconnectedness certainly calls into question notions based on the discreteness of place, it neither yields homogeneity nor sterility.

There is an important difference between an iteration and homogeneity, and thus between the creative potential of iterations, and the purported sterility of homogeneity. We know that a desert is a desert because it is first recognized, differentiated and grouped with other places that too are barren and indisposed to precipitation. We may believe, at first glance, that the desert of

Albacete, Nevada, and the future Yellow Sea desert, are un-differentiable, and then a beetle drags a stone in Nevada, and a gas station attendant throws balls of newspaper in Albacete, and an internet user posts his collection of found photographs, and somewhere a coyote finds sustenance, and a suitcase bites the earth, and the wind moves construction material towards the

Yellow Sea, and what was a Sea, the same as every other Sea, becomes a desert. Space as emergent, as organism, constantly challenges taxonomies and categorization — sameness constitutes a coincidence of traits in a world always in the process of transforming itself: seas become deserts, cities are entombed and under the sand begin to spring again. An unpredictable world always in the process of becoming is one in which, as chaos theory goes, two iterations with a difference, no matter how small, will eventually take on radically different and unpredictable narrative trajectories. The ontology proposed by complexity throughout the text is

not only one that calls for a conceptualization of space as becoming, and stresses the openness of that becoming, but that, in turn, provides a narrative structure that neither relies on causal descriptions of events nor is for this reason any less coherent.52

1.10 A Desert Made of Ingestions, Digestions, and Excrements.

The desert, rather than being eternal, is a constant reminder of the processes through which it is continually made. Actants of all kinds contribute to its becoming: shoes, photographs, coyotes, and beetles. Each grain of sand provides “proof” that something happened. In Nocilla Dream objects serve as a reminder that everything always is the product of innumerable traces of a beforehand—a consumption, a digestion, a loss, an acquisition, a catastrophe, a transformation— that can never be neatly regimented in a linear arrow from past to present. Beyond the photographic image’s evidentiary status, a photograph, in Fernández Mallo’s text, is an actant in the world, and, as such, its trajectory is plotted through catastrophes and bifurcations. Because the photograph is a found object, it is evidence also of mobility, of the thousands of trajectories it has taken, which can no longer be traced back to any one signifier. Photographs, in the text, like suitcases, shoes, ideas, and other actants, are always in medias res, not only evidence that something has happened, but of the contingency of a referentiality the meaning of which is always about to bifurcate into other trajectories.

In section 5, for example, we encounter Pat Garret, a prolific collector of found

52 While coming through different fields and routes of thought, this is one of Nobel Prize chemist Ilya Prigogine’s fundamental points in Order Out of Chaos, and geographer Doreen Massey’s basic premise in On Space. The work of both scholars rethinks how space and time are conceptualized in their respective fields. 67

photographs. He travels with a suitcase full of these items. The two conditions he has established for a photograph to be included in his collection is that it should depict a human figure, and that it must be a found object. Sherry, a prostitute he hires at one of the whorehouses along the road, sifts through the collection. She recognizes the face of her mother, and finds in one of the photographs the face of the father she never knew. They spend countless nights making love.

One night, Pat leaves, abandoning his Mustang. In Section 73 we find Pat in a whorehouse, this time the prostitute's name is Samantha. He shows her the suitcase full of photographs. They spend countless nights making love. One night, Pat leaves in his Red Ford Scorpio. The iteration results in there now being “two suitcases full of photographs left in two places of the desert.

Faces, families, possible couples which will now only be rhetorical, portraits of one and the other suitcase which will never be found,” states the text (140). We might suppose, Nocilla Dream affirms, that by now the photographs have become dust, or have flown away in different directions, or were eaten by coyotes; each one of those possibilities lead to different trajectories; and all of them produce the desert. There is close to nothing as potentially catastrophic, and as alive as a suitcase full of any number of things collected along the way, always ready to generate unpredictable conjunctions that calls into question the taxonomies and landmarks of our thought.

Those suitcases abandoned in the desert, lay, “with [their] jaw open and face down with the intention of biting the earth” (104), like coyotes, ready to ingest or digest any number of things.

The rhizomatic plot of the “origin” of the Nevada desert as told in Nocilla Dream is intensified by the multiplication of photographs scattered throughout the desert.

1.11 A Conjunctural Reading of Nocilla Dream.

In Nocilla Dream there is no way of establishing what happened first: the introduction of the photograph in the desert or the appearance of coyotes; the beetles dragging the rock or the newspaper balls being thrown into the desert; the virtual solid particles from Beijing; the 1980s tune from Siniestro Total; the hymn of Ergeland & Vargaland; Calvino’s invisible cities or the ruins of Borges’ ancient map; the Chinese cookie with a two-day expiry date or the time honoured poem by Yeats; catastrophe theory, postmodern philosophers or a shaft of grass springing from the desert. How to tell what is futuristic, outdated, anachronic, atemporal, or permanent?

If there was still the illusion that a sequence of events would arise from the chaotic tangle of stories, places and references, section 107 disabuses the reader from any prospect of establishing an origin and an end. In the section we find a list of quotes taken from reviews of

Fernández Mallo’s already published Nocilla Dream which circles the origin of the text into itself and outward toward the world. The text too is in the process of becoming. Like the many actants that circulate through Nocilla Dream, the epistemic boundaries of any single discourse are not discrete, they do not remain unchanged while in movement; rather, they become as they circulate and are entangled in always changing configurations. The movement created by attractors is this act of shuttling back and forth, up and down, horizontally, vertically, fractally, tracing a pattern where neither the horizons, nor the stakes, nor the time frames, nor the actants are commensurable. And yet, of course, they are caught up in the same plot—this is not fragmentation—rather it is this coming together that produces the creative becoming from which

the text was conceived and of which it is a part.53

In a complex world, we cannot tell the story of the desert in terms of a linear plot from the first photograph to the last quasi solid particle of which it is made. Following the path of origins towards the past only gives us catastrophes, bifurcating backwards, multiplying the origins. Towards the future, the process of Nocilla Dream’s plot itself brings about novelty in a radical sense: it is neither known in advance nor imagined as a possibility. The motif of chaos theory in Nocilla Dream makes evident that catastrophies are the stuff of which narratives are made.

1.12 Conclusion: Narrative at the edge of chaos.

If a topological description of space and time, such as the one suggested by Micronations, challenges Euclidean and tellurian notions of space, then the question remains: how do people, things, ideas, and affinities come together in space and time? A fractal topology implies not only that every place is always shot through with other places, but also that they come into existence precisely because of these complex distributions. It is the associations, attractions, iterations,

53 The notion of the fragment has a long and interesting history. In his 1916 text “The Fragmentary Character of Life” Simmel argues that contemporary life is lived in the intersection of “multiple categorical worlds.” Simmel’s text explores the existential implication of fragmentation. For him the notion of fragmentation is not simply a piece of a whole. However, the notion of fragmentation implies the stress on the categorical and the discrete. Fragmentation, after all, cannot escape its primary meaning of segmented, broken, split, and the opposite of continuity. While there are other interesting works regarding the issue of fragmentation which deserve close scrutiny: the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (See The Fragmentary Demand) and William Tronzo’s exploration of the history of the fragment both work with conceptions of fragmentation as something intensely creative and in a constant process of becoming, and much of their arguments coincide with this project, the emphasis on discrete entities, which is fundamental to the notion of fragment, even one that is always ready to enter into new relations of becoming, does not permit a full appreciation of what a conjunctural approach implies. In this sense does not permit thinking in terms of an ontology of the fractal and the conjunctural. Thinking conjuncturally rather than through notions of fragmentation avoids the implication of a lack of cohesiveness or of brokenness the term might imply (even at its most creative). 70

repellants, bifurcations, connections and mediations that together produce the event of space. In an ontology that stresses process over discrete objects, we can no longer think in terms of

Albacete, Nevada, or the Yellow Sea, as separate discrete entities. An ontology of becoming radically calls into question the fundamental way things are categorized, ordered, and said to come together in time and space. How then are things connected relationally? What makes a place a place? What makes a city a city and a desert a desert, taxonomically the same as every other city as every other desert?

The ontology of becoming constructed throughout Nocilla Dream is not based on some romance of unadulterated flow and transformation, or a flip, as Castell’s famous argument goes, from a “space of places” to a “space of flows,”54 but on the delicate line between order and chaos where life is forged. The element of unpredictability implies that place is made through a conjuncture of redundancies, iterations, tempos, practices and coincidences. While particular interactions and trajectories in a chaotic system remain unpredictable, collectively they are attracted toward a pattern, producing not a fixed thing but a general combination of qualities, tendencies, behaviours, to which an organism tends to evolve and forms a relatively recognizable arrangement. When these patterns are continually growing and transforming, never settling into absolute equilibrium, they are called strange or chaotic attractors; and it is these patterns of order and chaos that produce fractal geometries. As John Briggs points out, strange attractors “depict a system whose behavior never repeats itself and is always unpredictable and yet, paradoxically

54 Contemporary “spaces of flow,” according to Manuel Castells, are articulated as the antithesis of the past world- order based on a “space of places,” with the implication of place as the rooted, bounded and contingent on an internal authenticity, as previously discussed. Globalization conversely produces an ever-accelerating and increasingly interconnected world of flows. 71

always resembles itself and is infinitely recognizable” (143). The desert of Albacete, after all, while an emergent organism, is still identifiable as itself. Wanderers and passers-by may leave and return to the desert which will, with a certain degree of certainty, still be there if they retrace their steps. It may not remain the same but it does remain recognizable. It maintains certain traits, it changes at a slower tempo than we do in our lifespan, but it is neither eternal nor fixed, nor can its horizon of emanations and affects be described in terms of geographical propinquity alone. This is how place comes together in a constant process of transformation, unpredictable trajectories and formations, mixed ascendancies, and yet, overall recognizable.

The desert is a conjunction of encounters, myriad temporalities, places, types of materials, people, wind, and sound waves, all of them contributing to the becoming of place.

How many temporalities present in the composition of the desert? The lifespan of a beetle; the nascent shaft of grass; the centenary tree; the limited edition Nike shoes; the ruins of an ancient empire’s cartographic endeavours; the life-cycle of a photograph always about to be devoured by coyotes; the ancient coyotes that predate the desert; the new shiny photograph that predates the coyotes; the cosmic; the tectonic; the atmospheric; the millenary. The event of place, in this sense, is the creative potential produced by that distinct weaving together of trajectories, the occurrences and bifurcating effects of which would not have happened otherwise (Massey, “A

Global Sense of Place” 156), and from which arises Nocilla Dream, love stories, and deserts.

Rather than a series of irreconcilable fragmentations, the text’s multitude of trajectories serves as a means of emphasizing the existence of the so-much-more, thus exposing “the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity” (Bogost, Insect Media). Rather than an ultimate

coherence—as in able to cohere into a discrete unit—the text provides an open-ended assemblage of trajectories that in themselves contain “multitudes (patternings of uniqueness)”

(Massey, For Space 91). The text is constructed through the narrative logic of the rhizomatic conjunction “and,” the etcetera, 55 and the comma. By putting things in relations with one another in ways that do not rely on the establishment of a single common thread among them the so- much-more resists linear narratives and expectations of flow. Rather, the text brings to light the deep relationships between seemingly disparate things in order to express their ontology.

Precarious narratives thus evoke alternative structures that permit a sense of temporal unfoldings without necessitating causality. Rather than a sense of coherence, they provide a general sense of trajectory. In this important sense events in Nocilla Dream, as in the rest of my primary texts, are better understood as assemblages, where the sheaf of plots of which they are made do not offer a sense of fragmentation but of trajectory, of encounter, which create these “patterns of uniqueness.” Using the general notion of precarity in order to describe the formal narrative construction of texts made up of multitude trajectories provides a means of thinking through and

55 For an interesting analysis of the poetic potential of the list see Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists. Eco follows the poetics of the list throughout Western literature, art, and music, from Homer’s Iliad, to Ravel’s “Bolero” as forms that exist between the infinite (the poetic list) and the finite (the practical list). It is precisely the ineffability of the list that permits the poetic. Eco introduces the possibility of narrative as a mechanism of the list by making a distinction between “practical” lists and “poetic” lists. The practical list tries to contain infinity –for example a shopping list or an inventory. The list in literature however, Eco argues, “has its source in our thrill at the infinite” (“The Vertigo of Lists”). The “etc” brings to the forefront the function of the list as expressing the deep spatiotemporal complexity of the material world or as Eco puts it, “the etcetera of lists” (81). This list, Eco argues, points towards “the topos of the inexpressible,” allowing us to think what is present beyond what is mentioned. The list, in this sense, is the facing up to the immensity and the unaccountability of processes and trajectories involved in the making of place. It is in this sense that Eco argues that the list has the unique ability to both collect the world and leave it open. John Durham Peters also describes the function of lists in his writing as a “battle against [his] own finitude” and as an attempt to “catch the cosmos” (qtd in Young). As Liam Young (2013) points out the poetics of “everything included” and the “etcetera” “encapsulates all of the ambivalence and complexity of the list … exclusion vs. inclusion, order vs. chaos, finite vs. infinite, the drive for organization vs. the ecstasy of accumulation.” 73

expressing the ways in which assemblages construct events, while avoiding falling back into discourses of fragmentation.

The contingency of place does not imply utter depthlessness or the stagnation caused by atemporal systems. Rather it is forged on that line between order and chaos—the edge of chaos—where organisms arise. Mitchell Waldrop explains in his book Complexity: The

Emerging Science at The Edge of Order and Chaos that the edge of chaos is this balancing point

“where the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either” (12). It is on this edge where the aliveness, the becoming of space is fluctuating constantly between that stability which maintains recognizable self-resemblance and the creative and transformative potential of the becoming of place.

Chapter 2 The Language of Probability in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. 2 H

2.1 Introduction

“Why do things happen the way they do? …Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply … seizing up?” (61), wonders Mr. Fujimoto, in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten:

A Novel in Nine Parts. In a music store in Tokyo a teenage boy closes shop, flicks off the lights, locks the door, and then, just as the young employee is about to finish bringing down the shutters, the phone rings. He hesitates; should he go back or should he pretend he hadn’t heard the call? He finally decides to run back in. That decision changes everything that happens afterward. How is it that, at that precise moment, in that precise location, trajectories meet up providing the conditions of possibility for present events? What are the odds of this sum of decisions, affects, attractions, and trajectories taking place, making place, at that precise moment? This question runs through Mitchell’s text as characters, organisms and things meet, bump into each other, graze inadvertently in streets, and affect each other’s trajectories in the most unpredictable and unintended ways. The more the interconnections multiply, the more evident the impossibility of establishing a causal line becomes. No single temporal scale provides the full range of information that may point towards the establishment of a definite cause.

It is through the transformative and creative potential of the encounter of things, ideas

and people that events are plotted out in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. As Mo, one of the characters explains: “[p]henomena are interconnected regardless of distance, in a holistic ocean more voodoo than Newton. The future is reset by the tilt of a pair of polarized sunglasses” (375).

Processes here take on a distinct sense of generative precarity. Trajectories cannot be neatly divided or nested between the local and the global; rather trajectories at all scales, of all manner of actants are co-constitutive, unpredictable and emergent. If the flap of the wings of a butterfly can unleash a hurricane, what can the tilt of a pair of polarized sunglasses do?

Mitchell’s text is made up of 10 sections. Each section is named after the place where the narrator is located at the beginning of the section: “Okinawa;” “Tokyo;” “Hong Kong;” “Holy

Mountain;” “Mongolia;” “Petersburg;” “London;” “Clear Island;” a radio station called “Night

Train;” and “Underground,” which takes place in a Tokyo subway. Each section, with the notable exception of “Night Train” is told through a different first person narrator. The “I” jumps from one person to another, changing sexes, ages, dates, organisms and locations. Characters, things, and money reappear or are referenced in subsequent sections, thus making evident to the readers but never to the characters, that they are all implicated in the events that take place in these disparate times and parts of the world. From Tokyo to Clear Island; from London to a nomad tribe deep in Mongolia; all are connected, all affecting each other in innumerable ways; the text always points towards the-so-much-more. Every encounter, bump, graze, every story whispered into someone’s ear, every electron in a brain, every bacteria and virus within a bacteria, becomes part of the conditions of possibility of the present, and as such, their effects ripple through the world until they become immeasurable, ever-expanding and unpredictable. In

the text, history too is constructed fractally.

“Okinawa,” the first section of Ghostwritten, is set during the days following a terrorist attack in the Tokyo subway during which nerve gas was released. The plot is built around the

Subway Sarin Incident that took place in Tokyo in 1995. This serves to situate the events during a recognizable historic moment of large-scale consequences, and to disrupt any linear or causal pretension of the narrative, while also serving as a pivot around which a conjuncture of events are assembled and the plot is composed.

“Okinawa” is narrated by one of the terrorists involved in the attack and is connected to

“Tokyo,” among other things, by a phone call the narrator makes to a number supposedly belonging to his cult, which turns out to belong to the music store where the young clerk—who is the narrator of “Tokyo”—answers. By taking the phone call, the narrator of Tokyo keeps the store open enough time for a young girl, whom he subsequently falls in love with, to come into the store. In “Hong Kong” we learn that the couple have travelled to this city. In a coffee bar just across the street from Cavendish Tower, Neal, the narrator of this section, a recently divorced

British trader stationed in Hong Kong who has defrauded millions from the firm, notices the new couple walk in. The sight of young love unravels something deep inside him; and because, of this encounter, he goes into a life crisis that leads to his death. By the end of “Holy Mountain,” we discover that the narrator is the great-grandmother of Neal’s maid, whom he had taken as a lover, and who, upon Neal’s death, has acquired enough money and belongings from his house to visit

Holy Mountain, thus fulfilling the old woman’s life wish. Trying to narrate the interconnections among these events by establishing a linear causality between each section becomes ever more

intricate until it finally bifurcates into multiple scales at which the plot takes place; only a sense of general trajectory remains. The interconnections become ever more explicit and complex. We discover in “Petersburg” that part of the money Neal had been laundering belonged to a Russian mobster who had entrusted the money to an art thief so that he could launder it through Neal’s firm. Upon Neal’s death, the money is lost. “Petersburg” is narrated by the art thief’s girlfriend.

“London” too is narrated some time after Neal’s death, by Marco, a professional ghostwriter, who is introduced as he awakens from a drunken one-night stand with a woman who proves to be Neal’s ex-wife; and who, while walking through the streets of London saves Dr. Mundarvary, the narrator of “Clear Island,” from being hit by a taxi. That woman, we learn in “Clear Island” is a well-regarded scientist and will be the mastermind of a cyberconsciousness known as

Zookeeper, to whom we are introduced in “Night Train.”

This long and yet cursory and necessarily incomplete account of some of the most evident interrelations between characters and events in Ghostwritten, does not and cannot convey the multiscalar and ever-expanding variety of trajectories present in the narrative. Rather, it serves merely to establish a basic working reference framework of characters and narrative make-up through which to develop my argument. A sense of connection between events and actants gradually emerges, some of which can be threaded together in terms of a “before” and

“after,” as we become privy to the many ways in which the characters’ actions and decisions, their mere existence in the world, produce the condition of possibility for subsequent events to take place. Ghostwritten multiplies the interconnections endlessly until it becomes evident that these are bottomless. The narrative, no matter how thorough, no matter how tightly threaded

together, remains necessarily open-ended and inexhaustible.

2.2 Probability is The Language of Precarity.

The stress on unpredictability in Ghostwritten, serves as a profound reconfiguration of the basic ontological categories of time and space and thus of why things happen the way they do, and what our place and agency within these events are. The move from a simple, linear, deterministic and causal world to a complex, nonlinear unpredictable and chaotic order is at the basis of the shift made by the sciences of complexity. Why things happen the way they do is an obsessive preoccupation in Ghostwritten as the characters struggle to come to terms with the events in which they are implicated. Underlying this concern is the issue of agency. Do we live in a causal and deterministic world in which our fate is set through the predetermined arrangement of forces around us? Or do we inhabit a chaotic and complex world made up of chance encounters and unpredictable outcomes? In how many ways do our actions “ghostwrite” the trajectories of other actants? What conjunction of will and circumstance puts an event into play? Is it chance or fate that governs our lives? Why do we make the choices we make? What is our agency over the events of our life? The answer depends on the ontology through which we choose to name our world and our place in it. The question is answered in innumerable manners by the different characters in the text. Similarly to Nocilla Dream, Mitchell maintains a tension between a causal explanation and a probabilistic explanation of events by presenting both discourses throughout.

Ultimately, though, this serves to challenge the notion of causality by providing a deep sense of the precarity — the vulnerability to others, the indeterminacy, the heterogeneity, the 79

entanglement, in which our trajectories participate, and to which they are always subject.

A deterministic and causal ontology is one in which present spatial arrangements are the inevitable outcome of past arrangements that, thus, contain the future. Fate is fundamentally a spatiotemporal concept. In “London,” for example, while watching the All Blacks play against

England, Marco comes up with the “Marco Chance versus Fate Videoed Sports Match Analogy.”

He explains that as long as the players are playing in the arena, “the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance” (292). But when the game is recorded on video, every moment played is already contained in the tape:

The past, present and future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand.

There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall of the ball is already

fated. Therefore, does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as

time. If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading,

it’s fate all the way” (292).

In A Philosophical Essay on Probability, Pierre-Simon Laplace invited his readers to imagine an intellect that has full knowledge of all the forces in the universe, the location of all atoms of which nature is made, and the ability to analyze this information. Laplace’s intention was to provide a foundational example of causal determinism. Such an intellect, later known as

LaPlace’s demon, would be able to bring together in a single formula the trajectories of the largest bodies in the universe as well as the minutest atom. For LaPlace’s demon there is no element of uncertainty: the past and the future are both “present before its eyes” (qtd. in

Tonnerre 5). The assumption is that of a Newtonian universe — a cosmology that assumes

reversibility and causality as the make-up of the material world. Here, the material world is composed so that LaPlace’s demon’s theoretical viewpoint would provide all knowledge about the past and the future alike; processes here are reversible. If like LaPlace’s demon, we could process the entire myriad of causes that instigate an event to take place, we could indeed know the future. Thus, even when objects and other inorganic and non-human entities are included in the overall makeup of the world, none of those entities, be these human or non-human, have agency over temporal continuity. The arrow towards the future is clearly traced. Here, there is no possibility for Latour’s notion of actants. The concept of chance is a problem of our inability to know about and process all variables at the level of minutiae necessary.

At another moment in “London,” Marco chooses a probabilistic explanation for why events take place:

Why is that guy a bus driver, and that woman a rushed-off-her-feet waitress in Pizza Hut?

Chance. People say they choose, but it comes down to the same thing: why people choose

what they choose is also down to chance. Why did that grey oily pigeon lose its leg, but

that white and brown one didn’t? Chance. Why did that curvaceous model get to model

those particular jeans? Chance. Isn’t all this obvious? That short woman in an orange

anorak wandering across the road in front of that taxi, with the driver mentally stripping

the leggy woman striding past with a flopsy dog — why is she about to be mown down,

and not me? (273)

A narrative driven by indeterminate chance is the opposite of the linear and causal teleology of determinism. The sum total of all trajectories: from the movement of capital to the evolution of

genes, from the cosmic to the atomic, along with the intricate mechanisms of personal choice, of attractions and aversions, as a whole, weave together the conditions of possibility of any event.

In a probabilistic world, even if we knew all the variables and they were measured with infinite precision, the final result could not be known with absolute accuracy — we would only be able to establish a range of possibilities. Events have no beginning and no conclusion; towards the past and towards the future alike, the more we strive for precision, the more trajectories are revealed; the narrative of an event is by definition open-ended. Processes in such a cosmology are not reversible and final causes cannot be established towards the past, or effects established towards the future. In a world that springs beyond our control we cannot, with full certainty predict what will happen — this is the full measure of indeterminacy. Still, even a demon capable of knowing and processing all minutiae would not be able to predict events towards the future, nor establish a sense of causality towards the past. In order to talk through the uncertainty, the characters in Ghostwritten think in terms of odds. The moment we think in terms of odds, we are invoking a probabilistic universe as opposed to a deterministic system where what will happen next can be exactly determined through the knowledge we possess of the present conditions.

The characters in Mitchell’s text are forever calculating the odds of things happening the way they do. The narrator of Tokyo tries to calculate “the odds against a random meeting […] in a city the size of Tokyo, but the calculator [runs] out of decimal places” (39). What are the odds of any particular “three hundred and sixty passengers” sharing a plane travelling to Hong Kong, the largest financial hub in Asia? “Long odds,” Ghostwritten answers. Do we live in a causal and

deterministic world in which our fate is set through the predetermined arrangement of forces around us? Is it a world such as that of the Japanese cultist that is hurrying towards an apocalypse, or do we inhabit a chaotic and complex world made up of chance encounters and unpredictable outcomes? Why, Bat asks Zookeeper in “Night Train,” “out of all the local phone- in late-night radio programs you could have chosen in all the states of the union, why did you choose the Night Train FM Bat Segundo Show?” The Zookeeper replies: “history is made of arbitrary choices. Why did God choose Moses on Mount Sinai?” (210).

Examining the repeated allusion to multiagentic realms of actants that calls into question the pytagorean myth of the body as the center of all things, in Ghostwritten, offers a sense of trajectory that can only be narrated in probabilistic terms. Consider, for example, Mo’s account of how events take place,

Electrons in my brain are moving forwards and backwards in time, changing atoms,

changing electrical charge, changing molecules, changing chemicals, carrying impulses,

changing thoughts, deciding to have a baby, changing ideas, deciding to leave Light Box,

changing theory, changing technology, changing computer circuitry, changing artificial

intelligence, changing the projections of missiles whole segments of the globe away, and

collapsing buildings onto people who have never heard of Ireland (360).

An electron is an inherently probabilistic particle; its existence is a refutation of causality. Since an electron may sometimes act as a wave and sometimes as a particle, if we know its position we cannot know where it is heading and vice versa. Probability, in this view, is an intrinsic part of the universe’s make-up. We are far from the mechanics of change developed by classical

Newtonian physics with its belief in the possibility of a transparent view of the universe where every effect identifies a cause and vice versa — a universe of theoretically perfect predictability.

When only probabilistic descriptions are possible, such as in Quantum physics, the language of causality no longer holds.56

Beyond the implication of Quantum physics for phenomena at the nanoscopic scales for which it was developed, it provides the foundation for a particular ontology, and with it, a theory of change — a means of articulating why things happen the way they do. This point is made more explicit later on in “Clear Island,”

Quantum Physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty. You can know

the position of an electron but you cannot know where it’s going, or where it is by

the time you register the reading. John went blind. Or you can know its direction, but

you cannot know its position. Heinz Formaggio at Light Box read my Belfast papers and

offered me a job. The particles in the atoms of the brain of that young man who pulled

me out of the path of the taxi in London were configured so that he was there, and able to,

and willing to. Even the most complete knowledge of a radioactive atom will not tell you

when it will decay. […] Nowhere does the microscopic world stop and the macroscopic

world begin (191).

Things happen the way they do because of a conjunction of will and circumstance in a multiagentic quantic universe. We have here a measure of the interrelatedness of magnitudes of order and actants in the creative becoming of an event, and with it a theory of change. At the

56 This is one of Ilya Prigogine's fundamental arguments in From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. 84

subatomic level a small change in electrical charges has far-reaching ripple effects, beyond the brain, beyond the individual, beyond the person’s place, his/her nation and far beyond even the individual’s imagination. These effects are unpredictable. One of the corollaries of unpredictability is that, as Ilya Prigogine points out, “even small fluctuations may grow and change the overall structure. […] individual activity is not doomed to insignificance” (313). Not only does this provide a measure of the extent and limits of human agency but of the agency of all manner of actants, any of which can produce change, and none of which can be erased out of contention. Actants of all kinds here are not only possible, they are fundamental to the make-up of events. It is for this reason that the use of Latour’s term “actants” serves, not only to acknowledge the existence and importance of objects but also to stress their ability to produce change. “When, in twenty years time, a professor of philosophy asks him ‘Why do you exist?’”

Marco points out while thinking about his possible son, “he can toy with his nose-ring and answer, ‘rugged lust and ruptured rubber’. Weird. If I’d bought the pack behind on the condom shelf he wouldn’t be/won’t be sitting there. Unmix that conditional and smoke it” Marco challenges us (271).

Based on this ontology, history too cannot be told in teleological terms. In “Hong Kong,”

Neal, re-examines his choices as he tries to come to terms with his divorce. He wonders why he had married Katy, his ex-wife. He comes up with a range of answers: from his infertility, the tensions caused by the ghost that inhabited their house, to grand historical narratives. “Do I go back further?” he wonders as he delves into a short summary of Hong Kong’s historic relationship with British pushers, which eventually made Hong Kong Asia’s central trading hub

(108), subsequently resulting in Neal being sent there. In order to put forth this sense of indeterminacy, this lack of teleology, this absence of railings to convey where we are all going as a whole, the text celebrates the sense of the so-much-more.

While the many characters in Ghostwritten provide any number of explanations for why events happen the way they do — some leaning towards determinism and some towards unpredictability, at the level of narration, no causality can be established. Even the cyberconsciousness known as Zookeeper, who is able to access all information in existence, on every computer in the world, can only speak the language of probability. The text emphasizes both that characters in Mitchell’s text are not privy to all the multiplying and multiscalar variety of forces in play, and that we, as readers who follow these varied plots, can neither access a full knowledge of the trajectories at work nor establish a final sense of linearity. Indeterminacy is a condition that characters, readers and demons share alike; it is not expressed as dread, but as a language that makes our trajectories as much generative as they are vulnerable.

In the text, every decision, every event that delineates the course of the general trajectory of which history is made, is created through interrelated and precarious plots. As Tim, one of the many characters in Mitchell’s intricate plot points out, “we’re all ghostwriters, my boy [….] We all think we’re in control of our own lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us” (295). The explanations of any event can multiply endlessly, but can never be established. In a world that is ghostwritten, any event stems from, and results in, innumerable and always multiplying discourses, narratives and theories. The sense of precarity, so beautifully expressed by Anna Tsing, is at the center of this notion of interconnection. This vulnerability to other

trajectories, this sense of unpredictable transformations that throw the actants “into shifting assemblages” (Tsing, Mushroom at the End 19) is what events are made of; conjunctures are how narratives are weaved together to tell of these assemblages. The kinds of actants that are employed in Mitchell’s text are the opposite of the inert substances of which Laplace’s demon’s world is made. A universe made up of electrons, semen and DNA, articulates the make-up of the world in a manner that challenges deterministic notions. Probability, it turns out, is the language of precarity.

While an ontology based on chance suggests that our free will is limited by the many trajectories that crisscross our every instant and make us what we are, it also indicates that even our smallest action can radically alter the course of history, eventually generating a totally different world than would have existed in our absence. There is an agency to chance that fate forbids, and an openness of the future denied to Laplace’s demon. There is also a limit to knowledge, because no amount of information makes full predictability possible. “This wondering is the nature of matter,” Mo points out, “each of us a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, improbable ones” (337). Speaking the language of probability requires that we let go to “the handrails of stories that tell where everyone is going and, also, why” (Tsing, Mushroom at the End 2); letting the acknowledgement of indeterminacy and vulnerability serve to plot a different sense of being in the world.

2.3 Like a Virus in a Bacteria: The Self as a Conglomeration of Linked Temporalities.

The appropriateness of the use of the word actants stems from the stress of this term on processes rather than discrete entities. In fact, the shift towards unpredictability precludes thinking in terms of self-enclosed units. As such, the concept of subjectivity itself is drastically reconfigured. That identity is always multiple and in the process of transforming is explicitly recognized and explored numerous times throughout Mitchell’s text. There is, for example, an instance in “Hong

Kong” where Neal, while re-examining the events that led to his divorce, suddenly comes to the realization that perhaps the issue is “not a question of cause and effect, but a question of wholeness []. I’m this person, I’m this person, I’m that person, I’m that person too” (108). There is also a moment when, while reflecting on the past, he feels something slide behind him, “a new

Neal inside the old open[s] his eyes” (105). Later on, in “London,” Marco points out that he

“pass[es] through many Mes in the course of the day, each one selfish with his time” (270). “I really am a drummer,” he introduces himself, and a paragraph later, “I really am a writer, too. A ghostwriter” (270), he elaborates.

Mitchell’s text, though, goes further than a mere statement of the manifold aspects at play in the construction of our subjectivity. In Ghostwritten, neither the personal pronoun nor the name federates an internal but ultimately discrete multiplicity of being. The integrity of the “I” in the first person narrations of which the text is composed, is continuously confronted and its meaning spread out and multiplied. In “Hong Kong” there is a short lapse in which the narrator suddenly refers to himself in the third person — an event which, up to that point, can be merely attributed to a moment in the stream of consciousness of internal distancing, as Neal’s body 88

begins to fail him: “I,” the narrator says, “listened to Neal’s heart. It sounded like a percussion grenade in a neighboring valley” (88, Italics are mine). The shift in personal pronouns is brief and goes largely unnoticed. It is in “Mongolia” where the narrative I begins to unravel.

“Mongolia” is presented, similarly to previous sections, through first person narration.

The section begins, as its title suggests, in the compartment of a train making its way to Ulan

Bator which the narrator shares, among others, with a German named Caspar, an Australian girl named Sherry, and a middle aged Irish woman who spends her time writing in a black notebook

— and whom, we later learn, is Mo. That the narrative voice is coming from within Caspar, but is not Caspar, becomes apparent gradually, only six pages into the section is this split made evident. It turns out that our narrator is a disembodied voice who can occupy the mind of its hosts sifting through his or her memories in order “to understand the world” (160). Similar to the formal narrative construction of Ghostwritten, this narrative “I” can jump from one mind to another as long as its host touches the other potential host. The noncorpi calls this process: transmigration.

As Phillipe Lejeune points out in his seminal work “Autobiography in the Third Person” dissecting the pronoun “I” leads inevitably to facing up to the problem of identity. “‘Identity,’”

Lejeune writes, “is a constant relation between the one and the many” (30). This manner of complexity is usually resolved on a lexical level by the use of proper names to which personal pronouns refer, and which provide a unity to our multiplicity. However, in Ghostwritten, it is the unity and integrity of the notion of subjectivity that is at stake, a complexity that resists being resolved in any manner.

“How do I know that there aren’t noncorpi living within me, controlling my actions? Like a virus within a bacteria?” (191), speculates the disembodied, or rather, multiply embodied, narrator of “Mongolia.” “I am my mind — do I have a mind I don’t know about within my mind, like humans?” (191, Italics are mine) “I” wonders. Identity is not only variegated but is always composed of multiple unknown consciousnesses — some symbiotic, others parasitic, all with trajectories of their own. The work of breaking down the unity of the self and, on the formal level, the narrative voice—this recognition of being ghostwritten through myriad and often unknown and unknowable forces, as constitutive of the make-up of the world we live in—is fundamental to the precarious ontology constructed throughout Ghostwritten.

The inclusion of virus, bacteria and noncorpi of any kind in the makeup of the notion of identity conveys a subjectivity that is open, outward-looking and capable of any number of connections with other trajectories. A world where events are made up of actants such as electrons, viruses and DNA stands against any pretense of linear causality. This, in turn, emphasizes the importance of thinking of space as an event in which all actants are not only implicated but also co-constitutive. In fact, as Timothy Morton points out, from the perspective of life-sciences, “There is no ‘outside’ of the system of life-forms” (The Ecological Thought 26), the linkages, interconnections and bifurcations, negate the possibility of finding origins or predicting finalities. In this sense, Morton argues, there is no environment as such: no outside of the living being. The environment is the phenotypical expression of DNA code: “your DNA does not stop expressing itself at the ends of your fingers. A beaver’s DNA doesn’t stop at the ends of its whiskers, but at the ends of its dam. A spider’s DNA is expressed in its web” (26). In other

words, as Ghostwritten emphasizes repeatedly, nowhere does the microscopic end and the microscopic begin. The moment we think in terms of actants, and thus in terms of processes, the continual creative becoming of space can no longer be thought of as separate from the actants through which space is made. References to “multiple alliances, symbiotic connections and fusions” (n. pag), Rosi Braidotti argues,57 serve to emphasize the interconnection, not only between each living being, but each being to the “forces, agents, sites and locations of subjectivity” (n. pag). What Braidotti is pointing out is that actants such as viruses denote a symbiotic relationship of bodily subjectivity that resists binaries. Because viruses are “hetero- directed” in the sense that they need other organisms to exist, they also express the co- constructedness and “co-extensivity of the body with its environment” (n. pag). Her point is well taken. What Ghostwritten is doing by multiplying the actants and trajectories involved in the construction of subjectivity is precisely emphasizing the co-constitutive nature of a precarious subjectivity. Personal history functions as synecdoche and can be understood only in relation to many others—people, microbes, ghosts, bacteria, stories, and actants of all kinds—that appear in the text. The individual, thus, is made through a coming together of different trajectories. Only

10% of the cells in the human body, Donna Harraway reminds us, in When Species Meet, contain human genomes, the remaining cells enclose the genomes of protists, bacteria, fungi (3). This sense of corporeal precarity at the center of what it means to be human provides an interconnected notion of environment that challenges discourses that simplify away our world and our natures in terms of what is ultimately significant and what is not. In her 2010 Bodily

57 She is here referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s machinitic approach. Both this approach and Braidotti’s reading of it work well with my argument here. See Braidotti “Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity.” 91

Natures, Stacy Alaimo develops the concept of trans-corporeality in order to express a profound acknowledgement that corporeality itself is always-already intermeshed in all manner of trajectories. She astutely calls attention to how this “underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (Alaimo One). This way of

“understanding the substance of one’s self as interconnected with the wider environment marks a profound shift in subjectivity” (One) that pervades Ghostwritten.

The issue of subjectivity necessarily relates to the recurring question in Mitchell’s text: If

“I interact with ... reality in the way that I do because I am who I am. Why am I who I am?”

(369) “Why did I make that choice? … Because I am me,” Marco answers. “But that just postpones the question. Why am I me? … Because of the cocktail of genetics and upbringing fixed for me by the blind barman,” Marco concludes (273). Likewise, in “Clear Island,” Mo concludes that she is the way she is,

because of the double helix of atoms coiled along my DNA. What is DNA’s engine of

change? Subatomic particles colliding with its molecules. These particles are raining onto

the Earth now, resulting in mutations that have evolved the oldest single-celled life-forms

through jellyfish to gorillas and us, Chairman Mao, Jesus, Nelson Mandela, His

Serendipity, Hitler, you and I” (369).

As observed earlier, the notion of DNA is founded upon a particular concept of time evolution.

The implication is that the “I,”—the individual—can be understood as an assemblage of co- constitutive temporalities. In Power and Invention, Isabelle Stengers argues that the idea of evolution must “be understood as the memory of its own experiences, indeed, ultimately, for

human beings, as an indefinitely multiple memory of all the pasts we have inherited and to which we are sensitive” (16). It is this self “produced by history and capable of history, that articulates the full breath of the fundamental complexity of living systems, and the fact that they are the product of multiple histories" (17). “Here,” Stengers points out, “genetic constraints, like the notion of species, take on a quite abstract meaning in comparison with the notion of concrete individual” (16). Although Stengers’s objective is to argue for the recognition of the fundamental element of historicity in scientific practice, she is, as a corollary, arguing for a conception of temporality that is spatially and temporally multiple; one that reverberates well with

Ghostwritten’s ontological construct.58 Grand historical narratives are intermeshed with the evolution of DNA.

Mitchell plots a cosmology that seams together the atomic and the cosmic, in a degree of interrelation among actants that requires conjunctural thinking in order to grasp the texture of the event. Why do things happen the way they do? Events happen because every atom, every monad, each tectonic plate, each person, car, thing, animal and story that exist in the cosmos, come together to plot that “now” and that “here,” answers Ghostwritten. No entity exists separately from all the rest, at that moment, in that particular configuration. Space here is not only open, emergent, created and dependent on an intermesh of multiple processes; but these trajectories cannot be ordered in terms of an above, beyond, outside, within, or even greater than the human body.

The zeitgeist of complexity repeatedly explored in Mitchell’s text, has been taken up in thoughtful ways in Shawn C. Ballard’s “Complex Systems and Global Catastrophe: Networks in

58 See Doreen Massey’s For Space for an interesting analysis of Stengers argument in relation to the notion of space. 93

David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten,” and Sarah Dillon’s “Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality,

Time, and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten.” Both Ballard and Dillon provide particularly provocative approaches to Mitchell’s text; their analyses however also make evident the importance of acknowledging the sense of precarity and trans-corporeality that complexity, as a means of describing the interaction of processes and the phenomena that emerges from these interactions. Dillon’s article makes fascinating use of Prigogine’s approach to complexity in order to examine the narrative construct of the text, and examine the relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic in the text in terms of individual action and society as a whole respectively. Ballard’s fundamental postulation, is that Ghostwritten, “deal[s] with the implications of daily global interactions between people (made possible through modern communications technology)” (1). What he is arguing is that complex systems can explain the social interactions produced particularly by globalization. Ballard, on the other hand, approaches the issue of complexity in the text through system theory. While both arguments are engaging, thought-provoking and in many ways in line with my own approach, complexity in his analysis never serves to cross the nestled divide between the local and the global, between the subject and society as a whole. Neither Dillon nor Ballard take the argument of complexity as far as the implications it holds for how we think of our being in the world with others. Mitchell’s text demands that the notion of complexity be pushed further as an understanding of phenomena in a precarious material world, where the language of probability unsettles binaries between the subject and society, things and people, the micro and the macro; a world that springs beyond our control not only because the social is becoming ever-interconnected at a global scale, but

because it provides a deep sense of trans-corporeal movements across actants.

Precarity, Anna Tsing persuasively argues, may describe cosmically interconnected phenomena, but the notion calls into question any sense of the existence of “unified global force fields.” It is the “unexpected convergences and uncanny moments of coordination” which stand against a sense of a self-enclosed wholeness of a system with an overarching frame. It is a sense of materiality that is lacking from Ballard’s and Dillon’s analysis — the deep-set sense of vulnerability of our trajectories to the trajectories of other human and non-human socialities. As we shuttle in and out, back and forth conjunctural assemblages capture a sense of coming- together that cannot nest neatly in scales of human, social, local, national, or global flows. This is a world of heterogeneous scales of agency, which trajectories ripple throughout scales, reconfiguring global universals — from capitalism, technology, nature, or global flows.

Globalization discourses contingent on social and economic flows as product of capitalist forces are founded on the centrality of human agency where the human is conceived as a self- contained entity. Once the human is no longer conceived as a discrete body but as made up of a range of other actants at all scales, understanding socio-material trajectories requires opening

“the human” up to the investigation of a myriad of entities at all scales, everyone of which are significant. This sense of being ghostwritten by multiscale and multiagentic trajectories highlights interconnections across and throughout bodies that do not depend on nestled hierarchies such as “local” or “global,” but rather emphasizes encounters, interchanges and digestions, at all scales, in a vibrant, complex, and thus vulnerable material world.

Ghostwritten narrates the encounters and interrelations of all manner of actants not as

particular to the present moment of “globalization” but as the nature coming together in time and space. By multiplying the possible actants and trajectories included in the making of an event, the nature of complexity must be examined beyond the level of human interaction alone. If the long history of the evolution of genes is as consequential to the “here” and “now” as the tilt in a pair of sunglasses, then history can not be packaged into a linear teleological account, nor can human interaction be thought of as separate from the other milliard trajectories of which an event is made. Moreover, presenting the issue of complexity in terms of globalization tends to reinforce the binary between a purportedly linear, causal past, more given to narrative; and the present globalization processes that produce fragmentation, homogeneity, and simultaneity.

Ghostwritten reconfigures who and what counts in the telling of an event, and thus compels a rethinking of space, time, and thus history. In Mitchel’s text the full measure of chance and circumstance ranges from the prosaic to the supernatural; from the mundane to the historic.

2.4 Comets Do Not Care.

Ghostwritten’s events are woven around the 1996 Sarin Incident in Japan; however, rather than using this incident to place Mitchell’s plot within the logic of a teleological grand history, it serves to make patent the multiplicity and fractal nature of temporal evolution. A description of time evolution through a probabilistic ontology in which any small event may produce large and unexpected consequences, calls into question linear descriptions precisely because, as Mo so aptly puts it, there are no delimitations, spatial or temporal, between microscopic and macroscopic narratives (191). For this reason, like Nocilla Dream, Ghostwritten’s plot is brought

together conjuncturally. The innumerable trajectories, threads and scales through which events are plotted, and transformation is articulated, requires that we hold on to an awareness of the coevalness through which space is made — this is the narrative challenge the text poses both in terms of its formal narrative arrangement and the world it constructs. As Doreen Massey well writes, in space—as in the text—“what is at issue are the terms of engagement of those trajectories (both ‘social’ and ‘natural’), those stories-so-far, within (and not only within) that conjuncturality” (For Space 142). To think that places are static, that they do not move on, is “to deprive others of their ongoing independent stories” (125). Mitchell’s text obstinately requires us to hold on to the acknowledgement that these multiple trajectories exist.

Besides the many direct and indirect encounters between the narrators of the different sections of Mitchell’s text, and the bifurcating threads these produce, the plot is weaved together by repeating images, phrases and associations. The recurring allusion to Quasars, Comets and places such as Kowloon, Tokyo, or Okinawa, take on different meanings and connotations as they are entangled in different and yet interrelated plots.59 Each section is plotted through different spans of time and periods so that temporal and spatial markers take on different meanings and prominence.

Some sections span a century (“Holy Mountain”), a decade (“Night Train”), or a day

(“Hong Kong”). At moments, the narration jumps into the pace of a stream of consciousness or into the cyclical narrative evolution of the mythical; other times, we are pushed forward into a futuristic science fiction narrative, back into the convoluted nature of memory, or placed in the

59 Quasar, for example, is both the name by which the cultist terrorists refer to themselves, and it is the word chosen by the love-struck narrator of “Tokyo” to describe his first impression of the girl. 97

middle of a historical novel. The different places after which each section is named also contain various temporalities. One of the recurring images that travel through the text, providing a measure of the multiplicity of temporal evolution, for example, is that of the comet.

The imagery of comet Aloysius serves a fundamental purpose: it introduces a cosmic time whose trajectory is present in each and every one of the plots weaved by the many narrators and characters in the text. “I have seen the comet, far beyond the farthest orbit of the mundane mind” (17), says the narrator of “Okinawa,” using the comet as an image of apocalypse and rebirth. The millenary lap of the comet is part of the life of a Chinese woman in rural China in the 1960s, and a cultist terrorist in 1996, only to continue its lap 10 years later in “Night Train.”

The vision of the comet is global in its reach. In “Mongolia” the disembodied narrator, having finally found the moment when it first heard the story it had been chasing for so long, is told “It’s about time! I saw the comet” (201). In “Petersburg” the narrator tells us: “The stars are not quite there tonight. A light is moving amongst them. A comet, or an angel, or the last decrepit Soviet space-station falling down to Earth?” (230). And in “London” we learn that Katy Forbes, Neal’s ex-wife, has “a birthmark shaped like a comet” (305). We are told in “Night Train” that in two weeks time, comet Aloysius will pass between the Earth and the moon. “Some generations get all the luck, huh?” says Bat, “Being alive for Aloysius, the closest visitation in history” (416).

Finally, in “Underground” the narrator exclaims, “Wait for the comet, wait for the White Nights”

(439). Later, one of the guest callers tells us that Comet Aloysius could be on a collision course with Grand Central Station, the language of probability dominating even this global threat. As with the rest of Mitchell’s text, the future is uncertain; we are left to wonder. The comet directly

affects the lives of humans that, in comparison, last only a fraction of a second.

In each section only an instant of the comet’s lap can be observed: its millennial tour appearing to the characters as almost stationary. The idea of relative scales in the universe not only provides the basis for a particular cosmic consciousness, but each character gives the vision their own meaning and connotation. Regardless, as Marco points out, “a comet doesn’t care if humans notice its millennial lap, and truth doesn’t care less what humans are writing about it this week” (316).

2.5 Fractal History.

It is, in the “temporal prayer wheel” of “Holy Mountain,” that the mechanisms of the historical novel are employed most explicitly, and where these are most thoroughly put into contention.

While the possibility of a linear and teleological account of events is called into question throughout the text, it is in “Holy Mountain” where we may fully appreciate the consequences an ontology of probability has on Grand History narratives. “Up, up, and up, and down, maybe.

Your left and right, your south, north, west, east, leave them at the Village. You won’t be needing them” (113), begins “Holy Mountain.” The narrator is a Chinese woman who lives alone at the foot of a holy mountain in China—it is never stipulated which one—and whose only friend is a tree. The narrative is plotted through a recurrent and circular temporality. It emphasizes the mythic element of the narrative, which Rita Barnard well associates with the folkloric (211). The plot spans the twentieth century. The woman lives through the Sino-Japanese war, the rise of the

Kuomingtang, and later the communist party, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” and the Great

Chinese famine. Even in the most remote hut in rural china, the political upheaval of the time arrives, along with radios, backpackers, pilgrims, things, people, money and actants of all kinds, carrying trajectories up the path of “Holy Mountain.” It is not exclusively the great financial hubs of Hong Kong and Tokyo, nor the accelerated urbanization of late-capitalist and globalization processes, that produce the conditions for the encounter of innumerable and diverse trajectories that span the globe.60 If in “Holy Mountain” the events of “Okinawa,” “Tokyo” and

“Hong Kong,” are but a grain in a century of Chinese history, that in no way implies that they are negligible to the plot. Rather, they serve to provide the old woman, a measure of release. By the end of the chapter, we discover that the woman is the great-grandmother of Neal’s maid, whom he had taken as a lover, and who, upon Neal’s death, has acquired enough money and belongings from his house to be able to buy a Hotel and restaurant in the Village, thus fulfilling the old woman’s life wish. Nowhere does the Grand History of a Nation begin, and the private histories and trajectories of all manner of actants end. This serves to construct a narrative where the

“then” and “there,” is deeply implicated in the “here” and “now,” in all the “heres” and “nows” from rural China, to bustling Hong Kong.

60 The plot certainly follows capital flows, although these never remain at impersonal level of abstract mechanic transactions. The text follows the effects of the flow of global capital transactions, from one global financial hub, to another, from Hong Kong, St Petersburg, to London; from grand financial schemes, to the lives of the people these affect in innumerable ways. In “London” Marco, the narrator, among his many jobs, works as a ghostwritter for The Tim Cavendish Literary Agency, owned by the brother of the head of Cavendish holdings, which portfolio Neal had been in charge of, and from which he had swindled money. The Agency was about to release The Sacred Revelations of His Serendipity –A New Vision, A New Peace, A New Earth for “a flaky New Age imprint” when “His Serendipity decided to hurry his vision along and gas the Tokyo underground with a lethal chemical” subsequently sticking the company with a print run of fifteen hundred hardbacks (149). When Cavendish Holdings’s assets are frozen after Neal’s death, the Literary Agency has to review their contract for a book Marco, who is in dire need of money; this is one of the many series of events that lead to him being there at the precise moment when Mo is about to be run over by a taxi. In Petersburg, the events, and eventual murders that the narrator is involved in, are also put into motion, among other things, when the Russian mobster comes looking for the money that has been lost upon Neal’s death. 100

The narrator remarks, “I live here quietly, minding my own business. I don’t bother anybody. Why are men forever marching up the path to destroy my Tea Shack? Why do events have this life of their own?” (138). “Men” here, are not discrete beings: they march up the mountain with all the milliard trajectories at all scales of which they are composed. One of them, we are told, brings with him a non-corpi. While the inclusion of events from China’s history incorporates the teleological linearity of Grand History, a circular temporality is introduced through a hallucination the woman has as a young girl. The girl sees an old woman—a translucent ghost—who tells her not to worry: “the tree,” she assures the girl, “will protect you”

(117). At the end of “Holy Mountain,” the woman, now old, hallucinates a young girl—a translucent ghost—crying in her bed: “don’t worry,” she comforts the girl, “the tree will protect you” (144). In “Mongolia,” we learn that the disembodied narrator of “Mongolia” had been inhabiting the tree and talking to the old woman. The conjuncture of trajectories of which the text is made is never separate from the cyclical temporality of “Holy Mountain;” these exist in a swirl of encounters of multiple scales, the disembodied “I” that breaks the discreteness of narrative subjectivity also serves to break the sense of the singular progressive scale of human agency. As is stressed throughout Ghostwritten, there is no final version of events.61 Rather, at the level of narrative, there are only versions — ways in which each character chooses to articulate the world in which they are immersed.

Temporal evolution, and thus any concept of history, is plotted fractally through the

61 The fellowship to a posh publishing business in London, is New Age “oriental wisdom in the new millennium;” to the Zookeeper, it is a delusional sect; to the cultist terrorist of “Okinawa,” it is the answer to an apocalyptic cosmology. At the level of plot, there is no single ontology that demonstrates itself to be more correct or precise than any other.

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weaving together of all the temporal scales and frames that make up the experience of “here” and

“now.” In a review of another of David Mitchell’s text, Paul A. Harris points out that in fractal narratives “it’s synecdoche all the way down,” or up, I would add. A fractal makeup of the universe entails not only that the small is as complex as the large, and both are thoroughly interrelated, but also offers a spatiotemporal cosmology in which every “here,” which is always a

“now,” is shot through with all other trajectories, macroscopic and microscopic alike. The “here” and “now” exists precisely because of this complex plot. This is a history that can no longer be thought of neither causally nor, for this reason, teleologically.

2.6 The Origin and Fate of Stories.

The disembodied narrator of “Mongolia” has one objective: that of finding the origin of a story that it has known from its inception 60 years prior. The story, the noncorpi believes, is the origin of the self. In search of this origin the narrator has transmigrated from the first host of which “I” has memory—a person living in the 1950s in south west China—to the doctor who treated this first host, to over a hundred hosts in South East Asia, Tibet, Vietnam, Korea, El Salvador, the

Falkland Islands, Rio de Janeiro, where the noncorpi has lived in the attics and cellars of people’s minds (172).

The relations of contact, connections, interrelations and associations upon which the “I” depends in order to transmigrate “like a kid playing tag” (168), from host to host, permits the narrator to travel the world up to the moment when we find it travelling on a train, within Caspar, towards Ulan Bator. The knowledge it most desires continues to elude it: the source of the story

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with which it was born (172). The journey continues until the narrator transmigrates into a member of the reindeer people — a semi-nomadic tribe in northern Mongolia with little relation to other groups. It is only when transmigrating into an Old Woman of the secluded reindeer tribe that the narrator finds, hidden within her memories, a memory of the noncorpi’s past: “this girl’s own memories piece together my last minute of life” (201), the narrator explains. The “last” minutes of “I”, of course, run many trajectories beyond this time frame; their repercussions travel the world and inhabit innumerable places in countless minds. “I” discovers in these memories that he was once a boy who, in 1937, was about to be murdered for treason under Comrade

Choibalsan’s social engineering policies. Just before his death, a monk whispers the story the noncorpi had been searching for into his ear. The narrator does not find the origin of the story, but only the moment when the boy heard it — the moment in which the story jumped into him.

Neither the origin of the disembodied voice, nor that of the story, is finally established; rather, only the encounter of the two is found. Origins are slippery things; they multiply, and break apart until they become untraceable.

Even memories, upon which a concept of subjectivity is founded, depend upon, are made with and through others. How many people and things unknowingly keep within them marks, traces, and evidences of our own trajectories ghostwriting their trajectories? Memories, in this sense, underscore “the spatiality of our pasts and the geography of our histories — the dispersion of our selves” (Massey, For Space 129). The effect of “Mongolia” and of the many other ghosts, stories, voices, presences and forces of all kinds, is to emphasize that even within the most intimate corners of our minds and bodies live all manner of trajectories, and that these cannot

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ultimately fully amalgamate into a fixed multiplicity that we can call our “identity.” It is in this way that both the narrative voice and the issue of identity are held in a tension between impossible unity and utter interrelation.

2.7 Place is a Language.

This sense of connection and interrelatedness is essential to the makeup of Ghostwritten. It is also the means by which the notion of place, and thus event, is articulated throughout the text.

Place is comprised through the collective sum of trajectories weaved together by each actant in particular configurations. Space necessarily entangles us in the lives of other people and other actants, as we ghostwrite each other continually.

It is precisely the “throwntogetherness” (Massey, For Space 140) that requires actants to face up to the challenge of multiplicity that the city poses. While each narrator describes the experience of place in their own terms, so that no one definition is ever established, the idea that places are always in a process of becoming remains fundamental to the relationship between events and place. "It’s strange and it makes me sad,” ponders the narrator of “Petersburg,” “that a place carries on without you after you’ve left” (240). This notion of place suggests on the one hand that the experience of place is as varied as the actants of which it is made; and second, that it is neither stable nor fixed, but always changing beyond us.

If the encounter of trajectories provides the condition of possibility for events to take/make place in Ghostwritten, the city, which concentrates a “constellation of processes,” increases the amount of trajectories as “cars, people, and stories trundle up and down the night 104

road” (99). The sheer quantities of possible combinations in a city like Tokyo, with a population of over thirteen million people—and who knows how many bacteria, and viruses within bacteria—becomes inestimable. “It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops,” says the young narrator of “Tokyo.” The city sprawls beyond itself, it is not a thing, it is not discrete, or bounded. “The city never stops rewriting itself,” the narrator explains,

In the time one street guide is produced, it’s already become out of date. It’s a tall city,

and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and

above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower

blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight.[…] You’re

pressed against people body to body in the trains, several hands gripping each strap on

the metro trains (37).

Cities are places where actants are drawn into all types of relationships, usually by chance, frequently fleetingly. On the crowded walkways, all kinds of different actants move through the crowded streets; bodies touch; glances are shared; noncorpi jump around, bacteria and virus within bacteria spread; common rhythms, schedules, and affinities bring trajectories together and keep them apart. Living in the city means depending on other innumerable trajectories at every instance of our daily lives. In a city where millions of trajectories meet, the odds of any one particular configuration become infinitesimal; and yet, for this very reason, the interrelations are infinite. “Gossip works telepathically in Tokyo,” the narrator explains, “the city is vast, but there’s always someone who knows someone whom someone knows. Anonymity doesn’t muffle coincidence: it makes the coincidences more outlandish” (48).

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The anomie of the crowd, which Simmel’s work made pivotal to early modern urban studies, and which has preoccupied thinkers ever since, also denotes, in Mitchell’s text, the extent to which we ghostwrite and become implicated in the lives of innumerable and unknown actants. Our actions, even the smallest, the unnoticed, the most mundane, may become a fundamental part of the weaving together of an event. We may, for example, dial a wrong number, and the possibility of a love story comes into play. The potential for bifurcations is innumerable. This is Ghostwritten’s premise.

In Hong Kong, in a café “Andy Somebody has pulled out his laptop computer […] he doesn’t know it, but Andy’s sitting at the very table where Katy and [Neal] staged [their] Grand

Farewell” (80). Everything we do, use, touch, has been used, done, touched, made by many others; all of them drenched in unknown meanings and inflections. “A city” after all, “is a sea that you lose things in. You only find things that other people have lost” (290); the sum total of which remains always beyond our horizon of understanding, as do the possible bifurcations that our actions, our mere existence, unleash. Everything, as is stressed repeatedly throughout the text is ghostwritten by so many unknown others.

Exploring the city through a probabilistic plot, made up of a sum of milliard trajectories, none of which can be discounted as insignificant in the make-up of an event, requires that the extent of any person’s social and environmental responsibility remain critical to the plot as it is weaved together. While such a realization does not change the socioeconomic barriers cities impose, it does call into question the idea itself of anything being structurally insignificant. It

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calls for us to think of cities, and those who live them, in particular ways.62

Even while acknowledging that the city is multiple, the characters do not live in the city as a whole. In fact, the city is not “a whole.” The notion of place in Ghostwritten is composed through the assemblage of materiality, intermingling rhythms, built environment, affects, and practices that bring actants together in particular configurations and give meaning to the notion of “place.” As the narrator of Tokyo points out, “in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head. There are different ways people make this place.” Sports is one way, TV is another, or the night life; “there are many other places. There’s an invisible Tokyo built of them ...

Internet, manga, Hollywood, doomsday cults, […] My place comes into existence through jazz”

(38). These are not only a list of things people may enjoy doing, or ways through which life may be articulated, but things people must necessarily share with others, and are dependent on others

— if only with the songwriter or the TV producer. Cities present the opportunity for people to form new kinds of linkages — “bonds that do not rely on kinship ties, neighborliness, communal sentiments, traditions and ‘folk’ attitudes” (Wirth qtd City Worlds 43). Much like Nocilla

Dream’s micronations, the city comes together not as a territorial package but as a linkage of shared interest and interrelation, where the mental and the material are co-constitutive.63

62 While this remains outside the scope of my thesis, this approach has the potential to transform how political and socioeconomic issues are posited and examined in terms of the production of space.

63 In his seminal The Production of Space Henri Lefebvre demonstrates how spaces are defined by dominant rhythms that give the impression that only certain groups are really present, such that the existence of domestic labour is hardly noted, let alone thought of in terms of the make-up of that space. It is this way of quelling difference that may provide the feeling of homogeneity in cities in lieu of diversity and difference. However, while socioeconomic differences are still recognizable, one of the important implications of constructing a probabilistic ontology is the profound realization that we live in a world with other many actants whose mere existence affects us 107

2.8 Conclusion: The Zookeeper and the Issue of Wholeness.

The geographic imagination discussed so far constitutes a profound reconfiguration of the organization of knowledge and involves a re-imagination of space. This imagination is made particularly explicit through the description of the world, its dynamics, its beauties, and its horrors, portrayed through the cyberconsciousness known as Zookeeper. As opposed to other sections in the text, “Night Train” has no central narrator mediating the plot. The section is composed of the disembodied voices and exchanges that take place on a radio night-time program called Night Train — and yet, evidently, Night Train too is a place; one similar to

Nocilla Dream’s micronations. The voices that make up the section include Bat—the deejay— and the voices of guests who call into the show. One of the recurrent callers to the program is a voice that calls himself “Zookeeper.”

This cyberconsciousness, the inception of which we had unwittingly witnessed in

“Mongolia,” and then again in “Clear Island,” is capable of accessing all information in any computer on earth; these include government files, weather forecasts, historical archives and, of course, any satellite. The possibilities seem limitless. Through the use of image enhancement,

Zookeeper, can “follow a Napoleon fish hiding in the coral,” “lit by a morning that hasn’t arrived yet,” or scroll in to see “a woman on a hammock [] reading the tenth chapter of the Book of in profound ways. What seems small, insignificant, or passing in one plot, for example, becomes central, or provides the condition of possibility for creative production of events in another’s plot. Even when Neal can barely imagine the life the maid leads beyond the confines of his home -“Strange to think I work in the same city” (96) he remarks - the life of Neal’s maid is profoundly affected by his death, and vice versa. The maid becomes central to the plot of “Holy Mountain,” providing us with a fuller imagination of her own story and trajectory. The Irish woman with the black notebook whom we barely notice in “Mongolia” had been in the process of creating a cyber-intelligence that will eventually be in the position of deciding the fate of mankind. The text requires that we hold on to the recognition that all manner of actants, at all manner of scales, are significant in the make-up of the event. It does not require that we define a strong beat of progress. 108

Exodus” (389) in the coast of Xanadu. The Zookeeper can teletransport from one satellite to another, from one point of view to the other, regardless of physical distance.

For such a being, spatial and temporal markers function differently than for us mere mortals with our exceedingly limited awareness of the workings of the world around us and beyond us. Place, for the Zookeeper, is made up of the sum total of knowledge it has access to, which seems to provide a vision of the possible future trajectories about to unravel. The multiplicity of viewpoints available to the Zookeeper, provides access to a greater amount of scales existing all at once. “What’s the time in Rome?” asks Bat, “six hours ahead of New York time. The sun rises in eighteen minutes” (398), answers the Zookeeper. “In the streets of Amazon

City I can see cyclists going home from the night shift from the zone of industrial estates,” details Zookeeper, “long the northern shore, far beyond the horizon from the south, prostitutes ply for trade in the docks and hinterlands” (413).

The Zookeeper’s description of the world provides a visualization of all informational networks—the sum of “knowledge” of our universe—as a cosmos of processes that can still only be described in terms of probabilities. The closed network of relations so often imagined to be the outcome of globalization is no longer tenable through such a representation. Rather, what is provided is a spatiotemporal imagination deeply entrenched in relation of magnitude. Through the scroll function, things appear or disappear; connections are revealed or hidden from view.

The Zookeeper is privy to a seemingly infinite deepening or widening of the field of vision, inquiry and relations. Here, the much-maligned view from above is just another perspective. The macroscopic narration provided by Zookeeper requires a scrolling in and out of the field of

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inquiry, holding on to all that information together conjuncturally. Access to the sum total of all the knowledge in every computer on Earth does in no way make the Zookeeper omniscient — with all this information, it can only speak in the language of probability and chance:

“I calculate an 83.5 per cent chance he will be released today, and a 98.6 per cent chance the day after. I regret I am unable to calculate when Bat Segundo will awaken,” (415) says Zookeeper as he closes Bat’s program for him.

This geographic imagination emerges from the interaction of multiscalar viewpoints along with an assembly of different forms of knowledge — including the historic, the archival, the political, the atmospheric, among others. This reinforces the notion that no absolute prediction of future events is possible, which are always a function of the pattern of relations in which they are engaged. Indeed, not even this, seemingly omniscient, and omnipresent being can speak the language of certainty of Laplace’s demon.

Similarly to the disembodied consciousness we encounter in “Mongolia,” this cyberconsciousness too has no record of what it is. “That is lost” the Zookeeper informs Bat

(409). What we do know is that one of the trajectories that brings this cyberconsciousness into being, was conceived by Mo, as she writes in her black notebook on a train traveling through

Mongolia. Origins and finalities are foreign to the language of probability. There is however a notion of wholeness here that is essential to the way the text is constructed. Neal suddenly realizes: what if events are not a matter of cause and effect, “but a question of wholeness?”

(270). The whole of interrelated processes through which this cosmology is constructed may be thought of macroscopically. Marco, for example, describes that feeling he gets once in a while

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that “a cog clicked in a mechanism way bigger than [him]” (306). Mo, on the other hand, approaches the notion of wholeness from the microscopic as a conjunction of all the “electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, neutrinos, positrons, muons, pions, gluons and quarks that make up the universe, and the forces that hold them together, are one” (380). Both of these notions of wholeness are given a geographical imagination of scales in “Night Train.” Yet, this notion of wholeness remains open; the temporal world of the text is not self-enclosed like Marco’s video, the potential for bifurcations and uncertainty remains infinite — thus the language of probability.

What is explained visually by The Zookeeper’s description is constructed narratively through the plot. This is a measure of wholeness that posits the relationship between and within actants fractally: in the sense not only that there is no ontological separation between the microscopic and the macroscopic, but also that complexity and detail are infinite on either side of the spectrum. A world made up of electrons is one in which even at the microscopic level actants are not simpler, less complex, or more predictable than the whole. There is no scale in which we arrive at the simple building blocks of matter.

How many times are folded into “London,” “Hong Kong,” or “Holy Mountain”? Or rather, how much of “London” stretches into “Hong Kong,” “Holy Mountain” or into northern

Mongolia? How many places are folded into a moment? There is the history of Hong Kong and of British colonization. There is Capitalism, Communism, the Kuomingtan; classical sciences and Quantum Theory. There is the 1995 Subway Sarin Incident in Tokyo. There are all the

“yesterdays and tomorrows” which “spin around again sooner or later” in Holy Mountain. There are apocalyptic visions. There is the cosmos with comets that don’t “care if humans notice [their]

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millennial lap” — one of which may or may not be about to hit the Earth. There are the trajectories of a story in search of its origins. There are the long trajectories of genetic evolution.

There are cities, and cities within cities; citizens, and consciousnesses within citizens. There are bacteria, and viruses in bacteria. There is every single spark of an electron in a brain. There are condoms that break and produce new life. The trajectory that all of these processes plot together is what makes up a measure of history. Events are these comings together of temporalities.

Neither history nor events can be ordered into a linear, teleological and causal narrative. In fact, the narrative structure of Ghostwritten is precisely this “shuttling back and forth between different temporal frames or scales to capture the distinctive character of processes” in order to build the plot (Low and Barnett 59). Thus, Mitchell’s text requires a conjunctural reading in order to fully appreciate the many trajectories and temporalities—the fundamental ontological coevalness—through which the narrative is constructed. Ends, causes and effects cannot be tied together neatly. For the reader, only an awareness of precarity as a condition that pervades the material world as a whole, where actants are as vulnerable to the fate of the Earth as to the trans- corporeal trajectories of bacteria, and viruses within bacteria. This is the measure of its open- ended wholeness.

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Chapter 3 Google Maps’ Precarious Machine: Topographies of the Insignificant

figure 1. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Europe. Screen Capture. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013

3.1 Introduction

The screen opens onto a partial map of Europe; the topographic aesthetic of Google Maps’ satellite images immediately recognizable (figure 1). The terrain is rendered through gradient shades of green indicating the varying elevations of hills and valleys. Dry planes in shades of brown dominate the Iberian Peninsula and dark green stretches over the boreal forests of Siberia, shades of blue surround the continent. At least since the adoption of Euclidean geometry, maps have relied on an imagination of space as abstract, geometric, and homogeneous; a coherent closed system completely and instantaneously interconnected upon a flat and continuous closed

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synchrony, a static surface upon which objects are placed that provides the observer with an eagle-eye’s view of a coherent and total worldview (Woodward 83). The traditional map depicted an earth made empty of its properties, of its composites, of its living organisms. It is an earth where things do not transform, erode, decompose, or rust. This is not such a map. A few placemarks are sprinkled throughout (figure 2).

I move the cursor over one of these markers revealing its label: Luxembourg.64 I click the mouse and the map opens into scales of increasing resolution. The grids of city streets become visible, then house roofs, and the tops of parked cars, eventually the entire screen swells with details of pavement as I am delivered nose down into a concrete street of Luxembourg. Grass grows on the corner of the street at the border of the screen. The concrete is stained with what seems to be oil or water marks, and is marked by shades of grey, littered with a fallen wrapper, what seems to be a crumpled receipt, a white and blue office pen, and a piece of paper, among other detritus.

As the scale of the screen increases, the placemarks multiply. I move the cursor over them to reveal their names: Pavement Magazine; Base and Subase Repair; Ornamental Bacteria.

I move the cursor toward a marker flagged over one of the deep grey pavement stains: coffee, it informs me. Of course, coffee! The streets of cities are littered with coffee spills. A deep grey stain has formed like a river slithering through the pavement; over it, there is a marker labelled

64 I have chosen to reproduce the underline for those words or ideas that are also links in Topographies of the Insignificant. The underline here serves as a visual means of conveying linkage and reverberation between things, network, processes, data, representation, and words which is a deep and inextricable part of the underlined word/link and which otherwise might escape our attention. 114

Cobblestone Canyon. I click and the screen increases a few magnitudes and opens laterally into a lexia65 that includes a magnified picture of the stain revealing meandering paths of erosion and text. As the lexia explains:

A number of processes combined to create the views that you see in today’s Cobblestone

Canyon. The most fundamental impact on the Cobblestone Canyon is erosion, primarily

by rainwater (and ice), secondly by wind. Other forces that contributed to the Canyon's

formation are the course of motorized traffic, vulcanism, continental drift and slight

variations in the Earth's orbit, which in turn causes variations in seasons and climate.

Should I dive into ice, or click back to the map layer? For the moment I stop. I could be exploring one of the many overlays of Google Maps or Google Earth if not for the address on the html page: http://www.insignificant-topographies.net/.

In June 2010, Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum put out a call for papers seeking contributors for a collaborative Internet project called “Topographies of the Insignificant.” The project would use Google Maps and Wiki-technologies to build a website of an “infinitely” zoomable plot of Europe. The idea was to explore “microtopologies or ultra-local spaces” in four cities across Europe: Rome, Luxembourg, Vienna and Berlin. In Topographies of the

Insignificant, the mechanisms provided by Google Maps lend an appreciation of the existence and accessibility of different levels of perspectives and abstractions. Things appear or disappear, connections are revealed or hidden from view in an “infinite” deepening or widening of the field

65 George Landow introduces the term lexia in his seminal Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology to refer to “text composed of blocks of text” (4). These blocks of text, which in many cases can be read similarly to a page in a book (but can contain a variety of media) are linked to media throughout the platform. Landow takes the term from Roland Barthes’s use of the term lexie in S/Z. 115

of vision, inquiry, and relations. Microtopologies swell until they fill the entire screen, only to contract or expand into innumerable intricacies. Much like the Cobblestone Canyon with which I began this chapter, urban space in Topographies is plotted through the interaction of multiple processes at all scales. Binary distinctions between notions of urban and nature, micro and macro, whole and parts, significant and insignificant, become unworkable and inadequate forms of describing the dynamics through which “the event of space” is made.

From Cobblestone Canyon I pan back out and click on the conspicuous coffee stain to its left. The screen increases a few magnitudes, reveals new shades of humidity, and then opens laterally into a lexia that includes a text box and a video. “I watched the coffee fall slowly down at varying tempi, hitting the ground and spreading out like a giant flower,” the lexia states. The film, meanwhile, displays an avalanche of brown liquid spilling on pavement. Minute processes swell into the visual field; a drop of coffee takes on the sonar magnitude of a waterfall as the drop descents roaring down on a pavement corner. The accompanying text provides both a personal description of the experience of watching the film, and various links that serve to associate the event with myriad other processes which brought it into being and with which it is itself implicated:

In the centre, it was a fine discontinuous curtain, an implacable but relatively slow stream

of heavy black drops, a lethargic, everlasting movement, a concentrated fragment of the

forces of gravity. Near the edges, lighter, individual drops moved faster outwards,

reaching the outer limits of the splash. One single drop pushed itself all the way to the

nearby Radiant Fields. The stream eventually reached the edge of the kerbstone and with

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renewed energy fell down on the pavement into a slowly expanding black puddle. The

coffee seemed to coagulate instantly on impact with the pavement.

figure 2. "Topographies of the Insignificant."Luxemburg. Coffee. Screen Capture. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov. 2013.

And there you have it, one of the innumerable coagulated coffee stains that blemish the streets of cities. The lexia containing the video and text is superimposed on an image of the street corner

(figure 3). The montage of the two fields of vision—the slow-motion film and the close-up photograph of pavement—reinforce the idea of connection beyond any single magnitude and across the boundaries of any one placemark or link. The pavement in the background, with its humidity stains in different gradations takes on new dimensions. All these different scales, links, texts, and forms of representation, together build the plot.

Through Cobblestone Canyon I link to drop and find myself in Rome exploring the Genealogy of a Raindrop. An extreme close-up image of a water droplet coming into contact with the ground appears on the screen (figure 4). The drop, we are told, fell “on this exact spot” on June 7 2010.

Before impact, the raindrop measured 3 millimeters across and contained about 0.055 ml of water. On impact, the text box informs us, this particular raindrop “displaced 5 mg of dust and asphalt,” and thus produced “a small permanent depression in the pavement.” The genealogy of

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this raindrop then moves to a larger historical picture of its trajectories and affiliations. The raindrop was produced by water vapour from the Mediterranean Sea south of Sardinia that had evaporated “around a tiny aerosol, exhausted from a Fiat Punto” while “driving down the nearby

Via Messina 2 weeks earlier.” This raindrop, along with 5 other raindrops that fell in close proximity, formed one of the streams that run through the southeast of Asphalt Canyon. The canyon is about 25 cm and 7 mm deep. It is considered to be Rome’s most beautiful sight. The most impressive section can be found between “2 cm and 3 cm from its beginning, where the river has cut a ravine up to 7 millimeters through the pavement. At the end of the canyon, the stream flows into the sewers of Rome” (emphasis added). Plotting the geneaology of a single raindrop, it turns out, requires us to hold on to an imagination of the event as linked to urban flows and nanoprocesses, the deep time of geological and atmospheric movements, historic narratives, capitalism, and personal narratives, all of which together plot the event of space. Like a fractal tree, in tracing the genealogy of a raindrop, the actants and processes involved multiply

showing complexity at every scale.

figure 3. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Rome. Genealogy of a Raindrop. Screen Capture. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013.

Paying meticulous attention to temporal and spatial measurements has the effect of highlighting both the singularity of the event and the unpredictability that underlies these processes. By focusing on the unique conditions through which that specific coffee drop ends up

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falling on that particular spot, at that particular time, what is made evident is the wide range of non-localized trajectories within which the event takes/makes place. The punctiliousness of the description of measurement also shows that these dimensions cannot and are not used to contain the event. The effect of concentrating on microtopologies and stressing both their apparent insignificance and the event’s particularities, like the close-up, serves as a salutary reminder that each drop of water that falls on streets, like the wings of a butterfly, exists and causes unpredictable and significant transformations.

A full description of the processes, actants and effects involved is impossible. Neither the pan and zoom mechanism of Google Maps nor Topographies of the Insignificant is infinitely zoomable; that is the point. Yet, this in itself does not constitute “a failure to achieve representation,” at least not in the sense that Jameson argued (361-62). The magnification of processes beyond human perception not only reveals a view of microscopic energies, it also makes evident that the number of possible scales and views is as numerous as the actants involved. Neither Topographies’ structure, nor its plot, is conceived as a self-enclosed or fixed system of narrative or representation. It poses a challenge to perceptions of space founded on notions of holism. A complex material world is not the closed, coherent, network of relations in which interconnections are already established. The limits of the instruments through which we are able to perceive the microscopic and macroscopic world does not imply that we are unable to achieve full representation because we lack knowledge, or because we remain unable to analyze relationships at such level of detail and intricacy. Rather, the assumptions upon which

Topographies is founded is that the material world and the processes through which it comes

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together is indeterminate — to make patent that idea is the objective of this cartography. If the map is conceived as infinitely zoomable, as expressed in the initial call for papers for the project, it is because the pan and zoom requires users to hold on to an appreciation of infinite complexity at scales beyond those of human perception.

Microtopologies make unworkable any concept of nature as a stable, uniform background upon which events happen smoothly. Topographies of the Insignificant’s plot defies traditional nature/urban binaries. It emphasizes the weaving of human and non-human actants through which place is made. Of course, this geometry calls into question any conception of space as static. Space comes together through transformative processes that cannot be told as a linear unfolding of events following one another but as a fractal plotting of complex processes.

In an ecology constructed through the collisions and combinations of multiple actants,

“space” cannot be conceived as surface. Even the smallest of actions upon the paved city has an effect as consequential and of the magnitude of an asphalt canyon. “Place” is more than a hub in a circumscribed network of connections. Rather than a flip from modernist singular temporality to postmodern depthlessness—the discourse made prominent in Jameson’s seminal

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—what Topographies constructs is more akin to Doreen Massey’s call for an imaginative opening of space that provides a “sense of contemporaneous multiple becomings” (120). Microtopologies constitute a re-imagination of the urban as a process of becoming intimately and inextricably attached to a panoply of actants. It emphasizes the weaving of human and non-human actants through which place is made. Space comes together through transformative processes that cannot be told as a linear unfolding of

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events following one another but as a fractal plotting of complex processes.

Similarly to Spahr’s The Connection of Everyone with Lungs, the cartographic interface, as used by Topographies of the Insignificant, serves as a means of plotting a narrative world made up of a bottomless proliferation of interwoven trajectories. As in Spahr’s poem, it is precisely the conjunctural movement in and out, through which a notion of interconnection is constructed as the fundamental makeup of the material world. In this way, Spahr and

Topographies capture a sense of precarity. The zoom aesthetic and forms of linkage permitted by the Google Maps interface provide a new layer for narrating a world made up through the encounter of multitude world-making projects and through which a precarious history of place can be told.

Topographies plots a conjunctural narrative that weaves together a history of place ranging from the long trajectories of water evaporation to the microscopic fall of a drop of coffee on a sidewalk, in and out, and back. The project uses the cartographic platform’s satellite aesthetic and tools as a means of portraying this particular form of connection where place is plotted as a narrative told by the coming together of all kinds of processes, at manifold scales, human and non-human alike. The conjunctural reading that the text requires is not limited to the zoom function alone. The possibility for mashups permits the inclusion of various narrative and representational forms. The use of multiple sources and extra-textual material, a strategy also used in Nocilla Dream, serves to plot place as the encounter of countless world-making projects.

Geospatial programs can be used and deployed through countless methods and for myriad

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purposes.66 Works such as Topographies of the Insignificant and Radiant Copenhagen (Chapter

4), I argue, serve as a means of exploring the ways in which the cartographic platform can articulate particular ecological and material plots.

The extensive array of sources and discursive fields included in the project, like

Fernández Mallo’s text, is founded on an ontology that emphasizes interconnection, juxtaposition and processes over discrete objects. The bifurcations and unpredictability produced call into question the notion of causality. Topographies’s focus on the insignificant, told through a persistent deepening and widening of the narrative field, contests the perception of the “all- seeing eye” so often associated with Google Maps’ satellite aesthetic. Bojen and Anders project’s attempt to describe the apparently trivial is more akin to George Perec’s vertiginous endeavor of providing an exhaustive account of place. The proliferation of “insignificant” trajectories serves as a means of acknowledging that places and their histories are ghostwritten by manifold trajectories. This multiplication of details offers a deep sense of the so-much-more which “ultimately,” as Marc Lowenthal states, “serves no other function than that of … eroding permanence” (qtd. in Perec 49-50). In lieu of “everything,” what surfaces are the many unnoticed human and non-human trajectories, each of which have their own world-making projects. These invisible trajectories are fundamental to the history of place: this is the measure of their precarity.

Topographies was a follow-up to Bojen’s and Ørum‘s Radiant Copenhagen which also

66 Overlays and projects that have used Google Earth, Google Sky, or Google Ocean to plot a world of processes. Among notable examples: ATLAS in Silico uses Google Ocean to transform into an aesthetic narrative of metagenomic data of marine micro-organisms, to of the Collected from the J. Craig Venter Institute in 2003-2006 Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (See http://www.atlasinsilico.net/); The 100,000 Stars project is an interactive visualization of stellar “neighbourhood” created by the Google Data Arts Team (See https://www.chromeexperiments.com/experiment/100000-stars); there is even the possibility of following the Migration of Rutland Osprays (See http://www.ospreys.org.uk/osprey-facts/follow-the-ospreys-with-google-earth/). 122

used Google Maps and wiki technology (discussed in Chapter 4). Both projects take advantage of the levels of interactivity and the user agency that geospatial technologies such as Google

Maps allow. The distinctly public and citizen-orientated efforts it relies upon, and the possibility of mash-up and data layering that enable users to appropriate the platform by adding content, were all central to the collaborative process.67

The collaborative writing process took place on a wiki page through which the contributors could add placemarks on the map in which they could include multimedia elements such as texts, films and images. All of the contributions were open for editing, commentary and expansion by other collaborators. The result was a virtual map made up of 600 different interlinked placemarks containing diverse narratives. The use of Google Maps and Wiki- technologies as a platform upon which to construct a collaborative urban plot in Radiant

Copenhagen (discussed in Chapter 4) and Topographies of the Insignificant, make both projects particularly interesting explorations of the ways in which spatial and temporal narratives change once precarity is assumed to be the fundamental make-up of the material world being represented. The seemingly “infinite possibilities of zooming into and out of local, regional, and global views” (Heise 11) embedded in the Google Maps aesthetic offer means of plotting space as an interrelationship of narratives at innumerable scales. What these relationships imply is emphasized in Topographies in interesting and fruitful ways.

While an analysis of the cartographic interface in all its manifestations remains outside the scope of this research, an examination of Topographies of the Insignificant compels

67 These possibilities offer a major challenge to cartographic information distribution and consumption models and have raised interesting questions about access, control, countermapping and counterknowledges (Harris and Hazen). 123

recognition of an utterly ignored feature of Geospatial cartography—the introduction of different forms of expressing temporality into a traditionally static representation—and thus brings into focus new ways of thinking of narrative in cartographic representations that have traditionally been assumed to belong solely to the realm of spatial analysis. The assumption that the basic premises about time and space in traditional western cartography remain fundamentally unchanged in geospatial technologies has hindered a deeper examination of the narrative forms and ontological assumptions these cartographies instigate.

Jussi Parikka’s stimulating argument in Insect Media, contends that there is an “urgent need for a cartography of potential forces of inhuman kinds that question evolutionary trees and exhibit alternative logics of thought, organization, and sensation” (270). The narratives I examine respond to these alternative logics of thought. Topographies of the Insignificant and

Radiant Copenhagen, in particular, emphasize the ways in which the mechanisms of prevalent digital cartographies already incorporate important challenges to traditional cartography by integrating temporalities and constructing narratives that call for conjunctural readings.

Topographies employs the zoom function and aesthetic in order to tell the plot of place through a conjunctural widening and deepening of the field of action. Not only do both projects’ use of different scalar technologies serve to emphasize and challenge discursive traditions embedded in

Google´s zoom aesthetic, but in doing so, it posits a deep vital materialism, defined by fractal relationships, that is fundamental to the narrative of place. In this sense, although exploring the dynamics of digital cartography is not the focus of this project, in order to fully explore the conjunctural plot of place that Topographies constructs, it is important to think through some of

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the assumptions about the digital platform that have discouraged any discussion about the element of material change and contingency embedded in this cartographic spatial representation. Raising the question of narrative within a platform traditionally relegated to the representational alone, raises the question of the nonlinearity of the plot itself. After all, as I have been arguing so far, the compositional matters: it is how things are put, and become, together. It is the conjunctural choreography which puts forth a sense of vibrant materialism. In order to study the ways in which Topographies builds its conjunctural plot, it is first essential to analyze the visual, narrative and representational tradition which Topographies both employs and challenges. In particular Topographies emphasizes the contingency embedded in the Google

Maps platform, and challenges the discursive tradition of the zoom aesthetic essential it.

3.2 Contingency and the Precarious Map: Putting Time into Space.

大學路西段. A University seems like a particularly fitting location to explore. Enter. The map of Tainan City appears on the Google Maps webpage. I switch to satellite view. I want to see the city. Then I zoom in. The large, easily recognizable, buildings of Cheng Kung University appear. I zoom in some more and switch to street view. There it is, the street I walked down at 12 pm every weekday for 2 years, the Seven-Eleven where I would meet friends for lunch. As usual, there are some motorcycles and bicycles parked in front of the entrance. A student with a red backpack is getting off her motorcycle while a girl with glasses is approaching her. The street view image was captured April 2014. I was no longer there; nor was my beloved Vespa. I move

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around the street, I wonder if I can recognize any of the students; their faces are blurred but I might recognize my friends’ backpacks. I move the cursor around; I roam the street like I had done so many times before. A couple of users have shared images and reviews of “Toffee’s

Apartment” the restaurant on top of Seven-Eleven. 王獻章 shared a picture from August 2012; I was in Tainan on that date! The historical image feature goes back to 2003. I roll through the images and settle on an image taken on June 29, 2011. I was there that year. The historical image feature serves as a salutary reminder that this location I am now exploring has not remained unchanged. There is no even flow as I move through the historical images, only jumps and discontinuities. A user has shared some photographs of Masa Loft, a restaurant I frequented.

Panoramio invites me to share my own photos, I resist for now. I’ve travelled a great deal these last few years. I wonder if I could find myself somewhere in the endless database that is Google

Maps: a mark of my passing left in the world — perchance a coffee spill left to dry on the street;

I spill a lot of coffee.

As usual, there are some motorcycles and bicycles parked in front of the entrance. I zoom in some more, a silver Nissan Sedan is crossing the pedestrian walkway; a truck is approaching in the distance, motorcycles and bicycles are crossing every which way; on the street, oil stains, street cracks, garbage, a bucket left in a corner. This is far from the ordered abstraction upon which traditional cartography is founded. A mere inventory of the inexhaustible assortment of life, trajectories, actions, and actants in this spatial representation has something, as George

Perec once wrote, deeply vertiginous about it (Espèces 58). This is a representation of space as inhabited, used, deteriorating, temporal. How are our cartographic traditions subverted when we

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are able to zoom in to and focus on the minutest details of our urban landscapes? What does it mean to see magnified on the screen the dirt, the trash, the practices, and the effects of people, nature and things as they interact?

How we represent space tells us a great deal about how we understand the spatiotemporal landscape, the relationships it produces, and our place in it. Maps tell of an order of things; they serve as a means of locating ourselves; they articulate interactions between things and people and between time and space; and they are artefacts and technologies of power and knowledge. This is all well known in the literature of cartography.69 The taxonomic choices upon which maps are built are founded on deep-set assumptions about the relationship between space, time and entities.70

The separation of space and time, the fixity of the former, the linearity of the latter, serves as foundation for narrative, visual and representational traditions that define how we think our places, our times and ourselves. Once the binary distinction between time and space is

69 There is a wide range of literature of cartography as technologies of power by cultural geographers. See Harley’s “Silences and Secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe” and “Deconstructing the map;” Soja’s Postmodern Geographies; Edney’s Mapping an Empire; and Woodward’s “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space.” These works analyze maps as power productions that are never neutral; they explore issues of the positionality of cartographic production and consumption, representation, and knowledge production. Harley explores the Western cartography’s codes, discourses, and conventions, and focuses on how maps have been used to cater to the interests, order, and exert control. As Harley points out that maps are both essential to and founded on power/knowledge relations that provide a taxonomy that legitimates and promotes prevalent worldviews (429). Cartographer David Woodward’s exploration of the history of cartography along with the ontological assumptions and forms of knowledge production upon which they are founded is particularly useful overview of the history of cartography.

70 As web mapping services become evermore ubiquitous and play an increasingly important role in our understanding of the world, the cartographic interface’s aesthetic and technology demands further consideration. While outside of the scope of this project, a few fundamental questions for further research include: What kinds of cartographies does the interface imply? What notions of spatial and temporal relationships do these modes of visualization and representation put forth? What particular categories of objects and relations do they produce? Do they challenge the homogeneous, self-contained space of traditional cartography in a significant way? 127

challenged, so too is a discourse that posits the cartographic in opposition to narrative. The claim of accuracy crucial to cartography in Google Maps arises not from the expulsion of time from space, nor from simultaneity; rather, it is a claim founded on the incorporation of contingency into the platform itself. It is a medium where events can be and have been incorporated into the cartographic narrative.71 We do not expect the sedan or the motorcycles to still be there trapped in a moment of movement on the streets of Tainan; in all probability, the oil marks will have faded as the streets became riddled with other many stains. That is what the edit button is for.

This is precisely the relationship between change and accuracy recognized in the edit button — lanes change directions, stores close, buildings are razed and natural disasters level entire villages. The interface’s cartography cannot detain change; it calls upon us to collectively update it. Not only is the edit button an acknowledgement of change, it is a means by which to attempt to keep pace with the transformations that take place in the material world, and an acknowledgement of the impossibility of doing so. The edit button also counterbalances the

71 An interesting example of the incorporation of events into the geospatial system is the Occupy Hong Kong protests that took over the streets of the city in 2014 and which can be seen in Google Maps. The protests apparently can be seen on the south side of the city in aerial pictures. As a Huffington Post article on the subject well points out “it's an intriguing glimpse into how the calls for greater democracy are becoming a permanent fixture on Hong Kong's streets, as well as the private thoughts of many of its citizens” (Rundle 2014). The system has also been used as a means of political activity and intervention for the Occupy Hong Kong movement. A fake coffee shop called Down 689 located by the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront was included in 2016. The photograph for the coffee shop on the interface showed the distinctive tents of Occupy protesters. The name “689” is a pejorative reference to Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s chief executive, which references the amount of votes he received in the 2012 election, and the subsequent call for his removal from office (Blundy). Exploring the many ways in which Geospatial systems such as Google Earth and Google Maps can serve for political intervention and agency falls outside of the scope of this thesis. For this project I will concentrate on the temporal and spatial possibilities of incorporating events in the cartographic medium. Still, this issue, as is evident in the Occupy Hong Kong movement carries far reaching political consequences and queries. The narrative potential of these geospatial systems demand to be explored. If this Geospatial system is to be examined through the ways in which it encourages participatory cartographic constructions, then an examination of the implications of a cartographic representation of the world that can be debated and augmented on is necessary. After all, cartography has important implications both for the way in which we approach representations as to the way in which we interact and construe the physical world and our place in it. 128

illusion that these geospatial images are an objective depiction of space by gesturing towards its own status as a mediated representation always open to being modified. If what we are dealing with is a whole-earth representation, this is an open totality upon which data can always be added. The edit button points to both the constructed nature of this totality and its incompleteness. Moreover, as Topographies and Radiant Copenhagen make evident, the possibility of edition and addition of various textual forms, also offers means of plotting multiscalar and deeply interconnected narratives of place.

Google Maps poses a complex set of contradictions to traditional spatial, temporal and cartographic narratives on which Topographies of the Insignificant builds its plot. The temporalities of photographs, film, text legends and animation, reconfigure the way in which the interrelation between urban and nature, things, bodies and technology has been conventionally represented.72 Both Topographies of the Insignificant and Radiant Copenhagen employ and emphasize the contingency embedded in Google Maps as a means of plotting deeply precarious narratives of place. This also serves to think through the stakes of an approach to the world that understands space as an event made up of the encounter of different actants on different

72 Geospatial software offers innovative possibilities for non-professionals to participate in the cartographic debate by accessing and adding to different geospatial layers of maps within maps. The social network allows users to include placemarks and information about different locations, and provides the option of creating unique “overlays” which any user can then access. The level of interaction generates what Helmreich describes as “an index for multiple and socially various interpretations and interventions; its thicket of satellite images, text legends, and street- level photographs can all be tagged, commented upon, modified” (1211). Moreover, thinking of technology as co- constitutive, helps dispel any notion of a single, unified cyberspace; or that space/place is somehow separated from cyberspace. This is why, Appuderai points out, “the speeding up of time within communications networks should not be read as the speeding up of people and their lifestyles” (6275). Scholars such as Thomas M Lekan, Jason Farman, Ursula Heise and Stefan Helmreich have explored ways in which digital cartography engages its users and fosters active participation in the on-going construction of the platform. These analyses have concentrated primarily on the social networking tools fundamental to the ways in which these Geospatial systems are constructed. They have focused also on how the networking and interactive possibilities offered by the platform provide unique opportunities for subverting cartographic representations. 129

levels. What would these narratives and representational forms look like?

Assumptions about what narrative is and is not inflect critical engagements with contemporary cartographic practices. The prevalence of these views is evidence of deep-set beliefs about the relationship between space and time, and thus what constitutes an “event.”

What is more, the limits of these conventions are perhaps never more evident than when confronted with discussions about digital cartographic and hypertext forms.73 Rosalind Krauss has argued that the grid gave modernity a “flattened, geometricized, ordered” space that served as a “means of crowding out the dimension of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface” (9). As such, Krauss goes on to conclude, it is hostile “to literature, to narrative, to discourse" (9). It was, after all, the adoption of the grid in cartographic practices that marked the move towards the abstract, geometric, homogeneous space of Euclidean plane

73 Maps, grids, databases, lists and networks—all of which are fundamental mechanisms of hypertext and digital media—have been considered both representative of contemporary dynamics and fundamentally anti-narrative forms. Lev Manovich’s seminal work (1999; 2000; 2001), for example, argues that the database has become the new symbolic form of the digital era and a way of structuring experience. In exploring the importance and potential of the database as a contemporary form of meaning-making, Manovich puts it in direct opposition to narrative. Both, he maintains, are “competing for the same territory of human culture, each claim[ing] an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (“Database as a Symbolic Form”). In “The Database as a Genre of New Media” he argues that the “database and narrative are natural enemies” because “a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events).” There are two unequivocal assumptions here: first that narrative is, by definition, a causal form; and secondly that an “event” is a gesture towards the linearity of teleological history. The database, like many new media objects, Manovich claims, “do not tell stories” because media objects “don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other” (“Database as a Symbolic Form”). Rather it is the database and the algorithm that are the fundamental forms of meaning-making in computers — together they serve as “two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer” (“Database as a Symbolic Form”). Manovich then goes on to point out that the Web is an open nature medium where sites are emergent — they grow as elements and links are added and inserted anywhere. “How can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?” Manovich wonders. How can we articulate a material world that is conceived as always emergent and in continual transformation? In Digital Memory and the Archive Wolfgang Ernst explains that the meaning- making potential of lists is that of “mak[ing] us aware of discontinuities in media cultures as opposed to the reconciling narratives of cultural history” (25). Liam Young argues that precisely for this reason the list resists “narrative reductionism.” 130

geometry. Massey likewise argues in For Space that the most problematic and least recognized aspect of maps as technologies of power is “that maps (current western-type maps) give the impression that space is a surface — that it is the sphere of a completed horizontality” (108). The western map, she states, since Mercator’s 1636 Atlas, at least, represents “a world where all possible ‘surprises’ have been precodified” (111). For this reason, Massey continues, these

“western-type maps” are contrary to any notion of space as “a heterogeneity of practices and processes … an ongoing product of interconnections and not. … always [] unfinished and open” (108). There is, as I have argued, a long and dominant cartographic tradition buttressed by the axioms and assumptions of Euclidean geometry that support Massey’s statements. The assumption that the basic premises about time and space in traditional western cartography remain fundamentally unchanged in Geospatial technologies has hindered a deeper examination of narrative forms such as Topographies. Delving into the narrative technologies of digital cartography by “thinking conjuncturally” provides a new dimension to the potential for examining what have been considered “anti-narrative” plots.74

74 Narrative, in these arguments is a synonym of causality and the opposite of space. For this reason it is assumed to be that form of “coherence” that necessarily “reduces” the world to teleological accounts. Under similar assumptions, the development of hypertextual narratives provoked worries of cognitive overload created by the irregularity and vastness of networks which, its was feared, would prove overwhelming. Initially, for example, one of the central concerns expressed by hypertext writers and researchers was the “Navigation Problem.” The concern was that the kind of text constructed through network mechanisms would entangle readers in a confusing mesh of links (Bernstein, “The Navigation Problem Reconsidered”). Fundamental to the construction of hypertext was “solving” this problem, with the ultimate goal of constructing a “coherent” narrative. In The Gutenberg Elegies, for example, Sven Birkert famously argued that humanistic knowledge “ultimately seeks to fashion a comprehensible narrative. […] Interactive media technologies are, at least in one sense, anti-contextual.” The threat, he stated, was to the frameworks “that gave definition to the parts of the narrative.” It was information overload, he believed, that would widen and thus erase context: “On the model of Chaos science, wherein the butterfly flapping its wings in China is seen to affect the weather system over Oklahoma, all data will impinge upon all other data. The technology may be able to handle it, but will the user?” The idea that complexity, at its core, is difficult to handle and that teleology is somehow more “natural” to the human mind, is at the basis of these pervasive fears. Hence Birkert’s concern, for example, about whether or not “our narratives–historical, literary, classical—[will] be able to withstand 131

Massey dismisses the entirety of contemporary cartographic as a medium that provides the epistemological foundation for the notion of space as fixed, as surface, and as the opposite of time. Thus, deploying her approach to space as an event in order to explore the undercurrents of digital mapping practices brings into discussion important questions about how we tell the plots of our places. If, as Massey claims, much of the imperial forms of power embedded in Western cartographic practices are founded on a notion of space as surface and the opposite of time, what implications does this have for cartographic forms which, I will argue, are dependent on contingency, open-endedness, and the inclusion of aesthetics that incorporate different and distinct temporalities into the representational realm?

Likewise, the network, more recently associated with the cartographic platform often reproduces foundational assumptions about the concept of space. It serves as a figure of the

“completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have been established, in which everywhere is already (and at that moment unchangingly) linked to everywhere else” (Massey

108). The network, Castells famously argued in his seminal Network Societies, is the fundamental structure of the present, and has become a core concept in contemporary descriptions of globalization and systems of mobility, providing a model for describing a sense

the data explosion? … Or will the knowledge of the world become, perforce, a map as large and intricate as the world itself? (137). Birkert assumes that it is linear narrative that brings order and meaning to what would otherwise be incoherent, that chaos is synonymous with disorder, and that cartographic practices are founded on that particular Euclidean form of exactitude and abstraction of which Borges’s cartographers made a useless art. These suppositions are widespread. Hypertext, with its networked interactive and navigational mechanisms certainly resists seriality but is that tantamount to refusing narrative? Liam Young points out wisely that reducing the list to a symptom of “information overload” and then limiting it to the postmodern condition “does not do justice to the generative quality of the form itself” (Young). Pushing this further, it could be argued that reducing narrative and events to causality is limiting in the same sense. 132

of planetary unity and a notion of interconnection between systems75 The idea of connection constructed by the network must be scrutinized as it too easily falls back to images of static holism — the always already constituted whole. Networks often duplicate the spatial logic of the map: an “ever-present, real-time, [] structure that flattens rather than historicizes” (Starosielski,

Soderman and Cheek), and serve as figures of the fixed, the dead, the opposite of narrative:

“instantaneous rather than durational and causal” and “simultaneous rather than sequential”

(Adam qtd in Starosielski, Soderman and Cheek).76 In this sense, the network is a useful figure for conveying ahistory, depthlessness and simultaneity as the fundamental makeup of the contemporary world.77 The conceptual divisions in this networked world rely on a binary between the local and the global. In between the network, from one place to another, there is nothing but this abstract global. As Latour incisively writes, the networked world, Castell’s

“space of flows,” even with its global villages and its centers of capital exchange, “never crosses the mysterious lines that should divide the local from the global” (We Have Never Been Modern

75 Other works in which the pervasive image of the network to study 20th and 21st century socio-political and economic dynamics is fundamental are Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age and Saskia Sassen’s “The Global City” works examining the role of the city in global circuits of exchange. See also Jameson Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Augé Non-Place: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.

76 Since the link-node structure of the network, along with all the spatial and temporal assumptions it carries, has been considered the paradigmatic form of contemporary society, the proliferation of the network has gone hand in hand with allegations of simultaneity and “information overload” as profoundly contemporary ailments. The network serves to represent the natural outcome of a capitalist system that both requires a full metrification of time and that calls for technologies that provide an uninterrupted and ever-accelerating flow of goods, information, capital and people. 77 Paul Virilio’s argument about the impending “dictatorship of speed” towards which we are heading, for example, stems from what he sees as a “fundamental loss of orientation” brought forth by an excess of information, because of the proliferation of information networks. The network, he argues, eviscerates rich local histories and imposes a single, simultaneous, global time. Network temporality accelerates information paths to the point where time becomes simultaneity (See “Speed and Information” and “The Overexposed City.” 133

121). These abstract networks leave “only a few scattered elements of those spaces. They are connected lines, not surfaces. They are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic, even though they embrace surfaces without covering them” (118). Rethinking the issue of interconnection as a coming together of trajectories in a heterogeneous world with multiple agents unsettles assumed scales of local and global exchange. A complex material world is not the closed, coherent, network of relations in which interconnections are already established.

The sense of configuration made through entanglement and emergent re-arrangements of actants and trajectories requires a multiplicity of forms of encounter and linkages in order to express the distinct registers within assemblages. Jussi Parikka proposes approaching the notion of network not through the “banal idea that ‘everything is connected’ but the necessary specification of how things are connected and disconnected” (“An Interview by Sodoman”).

Parikka astutely argues that networks are not simply figures of a stable diagram of connected nodes but are “processual.” As he explores in Insect Media, networks should be examined through their “temporal becoming” (57). It is this sense of becoming put forth through images of interconnection in the texts I engage with that provides an appreciation of the intermeshed encounters between human and nonhuman processes.

3.3 Animating a Heterarchic Universe: From Powers of Ten to Google Maps.

Google Maps’ pan and zoom function, fundamental to Geospatial technologies, brings to the forefront the issue of scale. Central to any discussion of cartography is the highly contested

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notion of “scale” as a mode of visualization that gives form to a particular spatiotemporal consciousness with important implications for how place can be plotted. As Jason Farman has recently pointed out, the cartographic platform offers the possibility for users, rather than simply viewers, to discuss and augment narratives of the world at a variety of scales. The option of accessing different scales of representation provides a means of assembling location as an overlay of the near and the far, the micro and the macro, the virtual and the material.

The well-known pan and zoom aesthetic of the Eames brothers’ Powers of Ten film has been cited as an inspiration for the now all-pervasive satellite imagery of Google Earth, later integrated into Google Maps (Gurevitch 182). A considerable amount of scholarship has concentrated on what its cartographic platform is believed to “achieve… in excess of Powers of

Ten,” which has been limited to the ways in which the program “translate[s] the film’s frame-by- frame animation into an interactive application” (Tong 200). While interactivity is seen as contesting traditional forms of mapping, the specific dynamics constructed by the program are rarely explored.78 In order to understand the deeply implicated and precarious multiscalar

78 Topographies of the Insignificant takes advantage of Google’s open Application Programming Interface (API): the mechanisms, protocols, and resources provided by its operating system which enables users to integrate the cartographic platform’s resources in other websites and digital interfaces. The interface’s geospatial tools enable users to zoom in, pan out, and link to assemblies made up of satellite images, aerial photographs, street-level images, and commentaries, reviews and even users’ experiences. This possibility has meant that the mapped interface is attached to innumerable sites throughout the web. The same structure that permits collaborations, interconnection, and mashups of all kinds, distributing authorship among users, programmers, and artists, also implies a complex form of interdependence between Google and its programmers. One change in the API key made at some point in 2015, for example, meant that Topographies of the Insignificant’s interface has become inaccessible. If, however, Bojen, Anders, or any of the other collaborators were willing to update the API, Topographies would once again become available. Contingency is the fundamental relationship between programmers, users and the digital interface. Moreover, while Topographies, differently than Google Maps, was closed to further modifications before it was launched in 2010, the use of the mashup function and multi-collaborative creative process through which the project was constructed, was based on an open-ended structure where every addition was always susceptible to editions.

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narrative of place that Topographies constructs, it is first essential to examine the discoursive visual tradition it employs.

Recognition that microcinematography, photography, satellite and microscope imaging, and maps convey different, sometimes intersecting, and often contradictory discursive traditions, and that together they challenge traditional cartography in important ways, has been starkly absent from analyses of Powers of Ten. This is particularly important because assumptions regarding the visual modes associated with the zoom mechanism have carried over to geospatial tools. Media scholars have pointed out how the interface compiles some of its data from military satellites and aerial photographs, the surveillance and warfare capacities of which they caution against (Tong 201). Leon Gurovitch writes a fascinating analysis of the evolution of representations of the Earth and the complex visual and discursive ecology presented by the platform’s satellite view. However, an analysis of temporality’s role in a cartographic medium that claims objective accuracy founded on the expulsion of time from space has yet to be undertaken.

Google Maps was launched in 2005 as a web-based way finding oriented platform that integrated aspects of the core technology of the Earth Viewer browser plugin launched four years earlier. By 2006 the interface was updated to use the same satellite image database as Google

Earth. The satellite imagery provides users a virtual globe as seen from approximately 16,000 miles above the Earth—the same distance as the Blue Marble photographs taken by Apollo 8 astronauts—and co-opts the well-known zoom aesthetic of Powers of Ten.79 As such, the

79 The photograph captured the imagination of a generation, and served as an emblem for changing perceptions of the relationship between humanity and the environment. Earthrise, along with the 1972 Apollo 17 Blue Marble 136

program has inherited the considerable discursive and ideological baggage of both of these seminal twentieth-century representations of the planet.

The Eames brothers’ film used animation in order to portray the relative scale of the universe through an order of magnitude based on a factor of ten. The movie consists of a montage, made up of aerial photography, images provided by NASA of space travel, maps and drawings, and paintings based on images from an electron microscope, to provide a visualization of our universe as constructed through a cosmos of scales and locates us within these relationships. The use of animation and, in particular, zooms and pans, builds a notion of space as one deeply entrenched in relationships of magnitudes, and brings together various fields of knowledge including biology, geography, astronomy and physics in a smooth line of vision in ordered sequence (Harbord 112). Still, while there is a large body of work that explores the film through diverse and interesting angles, an examination of the contradictory notions of time and space at the heart of Powers of Ten is lacking and one I now propose to provide.

series served as key images for new environmental awareness movements (Farman). E.A. Gutkind wrote in his 1956 “Our World from the Air: Conflict and Adaptation” that images of the planet from the air added “a new scale in time and space … to our mental and material equipment,” and allowed people to experience the interaction between humans and nature “in all its innumerable ramifications” (qtd. in Lekan 186). Images of the earth from above had already been implicit in Ptolemaic cartography which “God’s eye” perspective served as a representation of the mastery of man over space. Yet, the paradigm shift to an indexical, analogue representation of the earth through Earthrise and Blue Marble provided a powerful sight of the planet, bare of the political and cultural borders representative of human conquest and legislation, which challenged traditional Western cartographic imagery and permitted an “interconnected ecosphere to come to the fore” (Gurevitch 88) and served as a reminder of the fragility of a planet in which the destructive capacity of anthropogenic human activity was becoming evident. On the one hand it represented a self-enclosed sphere with limited resources, vulnerable to exploitation and pollution. On the other hand, the image served as a symbol of a harmonious ecosphere in which humans existed in symbiosis with the environment (Lekan 2014). Critics of the discourses Earthrise had come to symbolize, however, have pointed out the imperialist and Cold war context in which the photograph was taken. This kind of environmentalism dangerously suggested a spatial and social homogenization of environmental responsibility, which erased different scales and modes of interrelation (Tsing,”The Global Situation” 331). The same image that delivered a representation of the fragility and interrelatedness of the ecosphere, after all, could also be argued to erase the great variety and distinctiveness of social and environmental life. 137

Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the

Effect of Adding another Zero (1977), begins with a close-up of the hand of a man enjoying a picnic in a Chicago park. Every ten seconds the field of vision on the screen widens by a factor of ten. The well-known image of the “whole earth” made famous by Earthrise and the Blue

Marble series appears and then disappears as the frame continues to expand until we are suspended in the outer reaches of space far beyond the astronauts’ gaze. The field of vision then contracts, in the same order of ten, at the same ten second pace, returning back to the picnicker’s hand, narrowing into the layers of the human skin, and further still, until the screen swells with an image of a single carbon atom and then its quarks. This is where we are left, at the border of the microscopic unknown — the new “shadow kingdom,” as physicist Lisa Randall once called it (qtd. in Tong 204).

The opening shot takes place in what is considered to be a live “real time” sequence — time as experienced at the human scale. This scale is then suspended as the visual field widens at a rate of powers of ten. The implication is that “real time” is frozen in a moment of action, and we are now visualizing different scales that exist at “the same moment in time,” and with which we are intricately linked. At this point, the film adopts the assumed temporality of photography and traditional cartography. The illusion of frozen time is maintained as the field of vision widens towards the galaxies. While a mathematical temporal relationship is provided, it lacks any visual intimation of process. The narrator does allude to movement when, for example, he describes “the massive outer planets, swinging wide in their orbits” as they enter our field of vision, yet, the suggestion of a frozen slice of time continues to dominate the visual aesthetic of

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the zoom. As the magnitude decreases the picnickers become visible again, this time caught in a moment of action — photography thus maintaining the illusion that we are visualizing different scales at a single frozen slice in time. Animation in the film mobilizes various technologies that permit the visualization of different scientific phenomena impossible to see with the naked eye.

The scalar relationship up to this point makes patent what the microscope offered for the naturalists: that everything has a geography, that spaces are shot through with other spaces, and that these spatial distributions compose the material world. But it has no intimation of process and remains unable to deliver the concept of a material world comprised of emergent and previously imperceptible processes at every level.

As the scales move towards the cellular level, the animation vibrates as atoms and electrons quiver and pulsate onscreen. The illusion of frozen time becomes inoperable. Electrons are not structural building blocks; they are not static pictures but dynamic actants of microscale processes. From the epidermis to the outer galaxies and back again to the molecular composition of the human body, each scale reveals itself to be a porous and interrelated geography composed always of many other scales of life built into the constitution of scalar thought. However, the animation portrays a vast range of heterogeneous and complex processes within what would appear to be solid or discrete things. “Are these some quarks in intense interaction?” the narrator wonders once we reach “the edge of present understanding”? — an edge that is everywhere with no center and like a fractal reveals new complexities at any scale. There is no reason why we would not, by the same process that animates movement at microscopic levels in the film, visualize the movement of planets, the encounter of galaxies, and the vibrancy of stars. It is this

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cursory depiction of processes and motion that weakens the film’s representation of what the visual relationships among scales may reveal.

Jane Harbord writes of Powers of Ten: “scale is not simply a question of power and hierarchy between things, but a matter of movement and rhythm that connects forms of animated matter across corporal and conceptual boundaries” (117). Is the use of animation in Powers of

Ten able to fully realize this idea? Both in the ways it succeeds in doing so, and also in its failings, the film opens up interesting and important questions about our contemporary modes of representation, narration and visualization of the material world.

Scholars have repeatedly argued that the highly-ordered narrative structure of the film, along with its metronymic and gridded animation, produce the illusion of a vertical hierarchy that subsumes the various fields of knowledge represented.80 The argument is that while animation technology can combine modes of knowledge it also brings a false sense of spatial and temporal unity and flow to a range of scientific descriptions of the material world. Moreover, the vertical hierarchy of scalar relationships associated with the use of the bird’s-eye view, reminiscent of cartographic and satellite technologies of mastery and surveillance, has been central to discussions of the film. Thus, critical approaches of Powers of Ten have centered on the use of a scalar order as perpetuating relativism and totalization through the disembodied, masculinist viewpoint of satellite photography with its “neutral,” and seemingly omniscient perspective — what Donna Haraway has labeled the “god trick” (“Situated Knowledge” 582).

Bissonnette associates this framework with the atemporal and atopical coordinates of traditional

80 See Bissonnette’s “Scalar Travel Documentaries: Animating the Limits of the Body and Life;” Tong “Ecology without Scale: Unthinking the World Zoom.” 140

cartography.81 Chris Tong’s analysis of Powers of Ten is particularly telling. His reading of the structure and implications of these modes of visualization is illustrative of the assumptions made not only about the film, but also about associated modes of visualization, more broadly. Tong argues that the zoom aesthetic of the film, which he goes on to equate with the satellite aesthetic of Google Earth, is a prime example of the vertical hierarchical scalar. These, he argues, are modes of visualization associated with “the age of the world zoom” along with its ideological implications of surveillance and warfare. The hierarchical model, Tong continues, is misleading because it implies that some entities “are more fundamental than others by virtue of their size”

(197), and that “each step leads to the next, and each step is distinct from all others” (199), thus suggesting that the planetary is above the local, the galactic above the planetary, and vice versa

“downwards” towards the atom. Tong then extends his criticism of Powers of Ten to all animations that use the “mechanisms of the zoom” (204), in which he includes the Eames brothers’ film and Google Earth indiscriminately. The Google Maps aesthetic has inherited these discourses.

The mathematical relationship of powers of ten does not imply in itself a valorization of size. The value distinction between “small” entities and “big” entities are precisely the categories and implications that are called into question by relations of scale in the film. “Small” and “big” are not qualities possessed by objects or processes themselves but are dependent both on the

81 With its uninterrupted voyage through outer space and back to the molecular realm, the omniscient voice-of-God narrative style and the perfect symmetry of the image implies absolute control. As Bissonnette sums up, the powers of ten ordering system “reinforces a totalizing logic completely blind to its limitations, its paradoxes, and its failures” (147). This approach suggests that the use of a powers of ten base as the film’s ordering principle imposes on what are heterarchic material relationships the “rigorous order of the clockwork Newtonian universe” (146). 141

width of the field of vision at which we perceive them and the instruments used to observe them.

A field of view one meter wide is in no way more or less important or fundamental than a field of view ten meters wide. The scale at which we can visualize Chicago and the scale at which we can envisage the galactic are only larger in terms of numerical width of the optical field but not in terms of priority, relevance or preponderance. A scale, in this case, is a mathematical and visual language, not a plane of material existence. It does not exist separately from other interrelations and associations beyond the visual field it provides. That is precisely the point being made by the film. The implication is not only that everything, from the galactic to the atomic, has its own spatial distribution, but also that every scale is made up of other distributions that can only be visualized at different magnitudes but that are still fundamental to their existence.

Examining the assumptions, ideologies and mechanisms through which these modes of animation are constructed is necessary. In order to pick apart the postulations being made through the cartography constructed in the film, one needs to pay close attention to what concepts of space and time are being deployed. It is also important to make a distinction between what the film claims to be doing through the use of the powers of ten ordering system and how the film goes about animating this relationship visually.

One implication of the use of the mathematical relationship of scales in the film is to show that in order to conceptualize and visualize a “thing” geographically, we need to use an appropriate scale. There is no insinuation that things cease to exist at other scales, or that they cease to be important to the overall makeup of the material world when they cannot be visually

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apprehended as an integral part of the complex relationships of which the material world is made. Precisely for this reason, the mathematical relationship of scales in Powers of Ten does not imply that each scale is either “above” or “below” another, that one scale is “inside” the other, or that one scale “contains” the other. A scale is not a plane of material reality but a form of visual representation of the material world; and, for that reason, it is a necessarily limited representation of a complex reality.

A “thing” does not cease to be fundamental once it disappears from view. On the contrary, the film’s stated purpose is to demonstrate that entities are made up of and make up the material world through imperceptible spatial distributions. A plain white wall, for example, at a smaller scale, shows a different complexity of relations. It becomes unrecognizable as clusters of molecules and atoms come into view. Each scale at which the wall is visualized shows different connections among entities. In order to see the molecule and represent its relationship to the wall visually we move between scales so that we may see their interrelation. It is this in and out, this movement described by Spahr, through which a concept of space is constructed. The idea of matter as composed of different scales of life not only implies new understandings of the relationships, composition, and modes of interaction between the organic and the inorganic, but also, and this is fundamental to Topographies of the Insignificant, between what is and isn’t significant.

Human beings in this relationship are neither “merely” flecks of dust in the universe once we disappear visually into a new set of complexities at the galactic scale, nor “wondrous” at microscales. The mathematical relationship between scales does not imply a vertical hierarchy in

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the way that Tong is arguing. Rather than an ordered collection of various discrete spatial scales, animation makes visual inextricable relationships and associations between and throughout the different mathematical scales at which the material world can be observed by human beings – for we are certainly the subject that gazes, and those that create the gazing apparatus. As such, it contests traditional notions of interconnectedness.

The relationship between different scales not only demonstrates our limitations of visualizing and conceiving the material world with all its complexities, beyond what our eyes, bodies and technologies can access, it also emphasizes our dependence on technology to visually grasp these relationships. Not only do we need an appropriate scale in order to see and conceptualize a thing within a given set of associations—the scale appropriate to consider a molecule is not the same as that suitable to visualize an electron—but we need the proper technology to access these topologies.

It is also important to make a distinction here between the relationship among scales and the choice of angle of vision. The scalar relationship constructed in the film is not dependent on angle. That is, the same implication of complexity at every scale would take place from any angle of vision chosen. Whether from a bird’s-eye view, an eye-level camera angle, or a low- angle shot, as the field of vision grew or contracted we would be presented again with complexities in the atomic and the galactic alike.

Evidently, the bird’s-eye view is not an angle chosen at random, it is the viewpoint of the satellite and microscope as we peer down on the world and attempt to both know and master it.

And yet, in the film, the bird’s-eye view is both a symbol of mastery and a reminder of our

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limitations. The “view from above” is implicated in a history of representation that not only expresses and cements power relationships, but is also the product of different technological innovations. These inventions, from microscope to film, in turn, had important ontological repercussions. The bird’s-eye view of microcinematography, for example, suggested mastery as it brought into view a cartography that was inseparable from its temporal evolutions.

Importantly, the relationship through which science and cinema develop is not founded on a belief in the camera’s privileged access to an unmediated and objective truth. Kracauer, borrowing from Epstein, argued that rather than accessing a form of physical reality, the camera in microcinematography films provided a “reality of another dimension” (qtd. in Landecker).

Powers of Ten highlights the innumerable complex relationships, intersections, and trajectories in which we are involved and of which we are made but to which we do not have access without some form of technological mediation. Even when the technical instruments and actors that create these images at different scales are not present, the visual nature of the relationship of scales points out the need for mediation. As Massey astutely suggests, the “view from above” is problematic only if it purports “to lend you truth” (108). It is this claim to truth that cartography employs as a technology of power. This is not to say that Powers of Ten or Google Maps do not construct cartographic discourses founded on claims of accuracy and visual access to the material world, but that the mechanisms used for these claims deserve closer examination. As the screen widens to show the outer galaxies, the narrator of Powers of Ten informs us that we have

“approach[ed] the limit of our vision.” The frontiers of our perception and that of the material world are not the same; the film makes clear that there are always more spatial distributions and

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processes beyond the mediated vision of our technologies.

It was film that brought movement and processes into the visual field where they could be examined; as such, it made available for scientific inquiry the vibrant processes of life that exist at microscales. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive,

Mary Ann Doane interestingly notes that the relationship between science and cinema is deeply rooted not only in intersecting forms of observing the material world, but also in the overlapping problem of the representability of time, which is central to this visualization.82 The animation of space through time-lapse microcinematography allowed viewers to experience previously imperceptible living processes. Microcinematography, as an instrument of research is concerned with observing the material world at the intersection of visual space and temporal development

(Landecker 914). Scalar relationships, after all, are as much about time as they are about space.

Film gave to space “the visual acuity for a slow movement” (Comandon qtd. in Landecker 914), so that “the viewer gets the distinct impression of what it is like to flip between objective lenses on the microscope, from lesser to greater magnification” (914). The “mechanism of the zoom” here makes patent an idea of process. Recognizing this as a mode of visualization comparable in many ways to that of Powers of Ten in its intent and structure, opens new routes of analysis that do not reduce the configuration to that of a vertical hierarchy.

The potential of cinematography and animation to show what the human eye cannot perceive, and to move between scales, does not necessarily, as Tong proposed, offer vertical

82 Jean Comandon’s use of time-lapse microcinematography in 1910, which employed the microscope, chronometers, motors and film cameras, served to accelerate minute temporal changes so that they could be made visible to the human eye. Using an ultramicroscope to record a time-lapse film of cellular development pioneered microcinematography. As Hannah Landecker points out, the visualization of these processes was the fundamental method of Comandon’s scientific exploration of phenomena (913). 146

hierarchy of scales for a material world where we must choose between thinking of atoms as

“fundamental” building blocks, or of “the universe itself as the ultimate manifestation of existence” (197). The notions of complex phenomena in biology that these early films provided contested long established relationships between Euclidean geometrical representations and classical physics. The introduction of microscale dynamics provided the groundwork for different approaches to the material world. Space in these films became functional instead of geometrical: what was being observed was live tissue, alive with processes. As Prigogine explains: “The standard geometrical space, the Euclidean space, is invariant respect to translations or rotations. This is not so in the biological space. In this space the events are processes localized in space and time” (Prigogine iv). Thus, microcinematography, at its inception, showed that “elementary” particles, like the throbbing and pulsating electron shown in

Powers of Ten, were complex and temporal entities that were produced through process.

In Powers of Ten, as the field of vision contracts into the microscales and electrons are seen vibrating on the screen, the narrator specifies, “at the atomic scale, the interplay of form and motion becomes more visible.” In this statement lies an important recognition of complexity and the fundamental failure of the film. At the same moment at which the narrator suggests that the interplay between time and space exists at every scale, he also provides an excuse for expelling time visually from macroscale representations. If the relational material world Powers of Ten attempts to construct is “misleading,” it is not, as Tong argues because “these modes of visualization”—referring to the zoom mechanism—assume a vertical hierarchy of scales, but because the film’s use of animation is constructed on two contradictory visual traditions

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regarding the relationship between time and space.

3.4 Microscopic Energies and the liveliness of Pavement. Topographies does not limit the zoom and pan mechanism to an opening and widening of the field of vision from a single point in ordered sequence — the aesthetic reminiscent of Powers of

Ten. Rather, the system allows a magnifying in and out of processes through diverse narrative and representational forms. The hyperlink structure of electronic cartography, and the possibility of including the narrative and representational devices of text, film and photography, afford the opportunity of plotting space through multiple intricately linked processes and trajectories which range from the Lilliputian movement of a coffee drop as it falls to the ground to the processes of water evaporation, and the Earth’s geological history as a whole. There is a deep calling into question of the fundamental notion of “wholeness” around which cartographic discourses have so often centred. Structure does not provide “an already-interconnected whole but an ongoing product of interconnections and not” (Massey, For Space 108).

Among the videos that can be found throughout Topographies of the Insignificant’s plot there is a close-up of a perfectly round droplet of quicksilver in the Vienna University of

Technology as it falls “in a slow graceful dance a few centimeters above ground,” spilling on to a concrete street in Vienna, bouncing back up again, and then opening slowly into a flat shimmering and expanding plane as it comes in contact with the ground; and a video of three stones rotating, hovering, and flying over pavement after having been kicked by shoes in Berlin.

At first, the phenomena being narrated may seem extraordinary by virtue of its apparent

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insignificance, but once we open a myriad of micro-processes to investigation, the amount of varied structures and multiple trajectories that appear lends an appreciation of diverse processes.

As the “small” is converted into massive landscapes of transformation and agency, hierarchical distinctions between large and small-scale processes begins to come apart. What was apparently insignificant to human observation is saturated with movement, capable of eroding, creating, releasing energies, and transforming the urban landscape. The procedure magnifies processes to the size of the screen and of human perception; in doing so, it subverts the assumed relationship between size and significance.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin emphasized how the close-up and slow motion were more than just mechanisms for perceiving what was once missed; they subvert the familiar, the barely noticed, the seemingly negligible or insignificant. “By close-ups of the things around us,” he writes:

by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus

under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our

comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to

assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. […] With the close-up, space

expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does

not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals

entirely new structural formations (236).

The use of magnification and acceleration in film raises important questions about what makes up our environment, agency and narrative, which challenge notions of space reliant on sedentary

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perceptions of the world. Once such appreciation of complex processes is introduced, space, even representational cartographic space, can no longer be conceived as a surface separate from movement.

Similarly to Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (See Chapter 2, Section a.), Topographies references

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in order to explain the unpredictability implied in a cartography that involves as much an idea of movement as it does of fixity. A lexia titled, Piece of Paper With Personal Contact Details, points out, “How many hands has the piece of paper been in and how it ends up here is the more urgent thing. Does it take on a life of its own? And the person who picks it up is left with questions. Knowing his direction, can he discover his location? With his location, can he know his identity?” Things and people, in this cartography, cannot be pinned down; or rather, by fixing them in space through placemarkers, a more mobile materiality is immediately exposed. Einstein and Infeld wrote of the wave-particle duality in The

Evolution of Physics, “we are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do” (278). Between movement and fixity, Topographies narrates events through a cartography that interconnects these various pictures of reality. A placemark reveals the extraordinary event of five Ketchup Beetles making their way through the streets of

Luxembourg.

Ketchup Beetles, which, we are told, are native to most European cities, are the world’s largest insect reaching up to 18 cm in length (figure 5). At 10:30 pm, we learn, the Ketchup

Beetles were observed slowly making their way across town. The insects drew trails through the

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pavement for 30 minutes; later, these bizarre trails congregated a crowd of 100 insect enthusiasts who brought the center of Luxembourg to a standstill. One world-making project intersects with another.

figure 4. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Luxemburg.

Ketchup Beetle. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010.

Web. 3 Nov 2013.

As Doreen Massey discusses, in such an imagination, space is not surface: “What to humans may be a surface is not to the rain and may not be so either to a million micro-bugs which weave their way through it. This ‘surface’ is a specific relational production” (119).

Moreover, the geography and distribution of the beetle’s body becomes as mappable and significant as the satellite image that hovers behind it. This is a cartography that plots streets as lived and emergent places rather than simply means of transiting from one place to another.

Examining their surface or their materials, be these asphalt, concrete, cobblestone or dust, reveals ever-evolving and intricate geological, human and biological processes. “Dust,” we are 151

told in a placemark in Berlin, “comes from everything: minerals, seeds, pollen, insects, molds, lichens and bacteria. In the end, everything becomes dust of an indeterminate grey colour.”

Different non-human processes leave their traces in the urban while, likewise, the biophysical world, which is in constant flux, is made up of processes and relations that cannot be separated from the urban. In a placemark in Vienna, the user is informed that most dust comes from

“human bone, hair, hide, skin, blood and excrement.” The trillions of cells of which an average adult human body is made are, it turns out, “just waiting to become dust in the cracks of the pavement.”

There is a constant emphasis on the emergent quality of which the city is made. In Rome, a lexia explores the materiality and history of Asphalt. This material, we learn, is made from refined petroleum and bitumen, a generic term for a range of natural or manufactured materials composed chiefly of high-molecular weight hydrocarbons. We are taken through a brief exploration of places where asphalt occurs “naturally.” The account includes an exploration of the utility of asphalt as a cover for roads, the first recorded employment of asphalt in Babylon

625 B.C., the use of the material by the Greeks and later the Romans, the origin of the Greek word “asphaltos,” its discovery by the Europeans in the Americas, and the story of how Sir

Walter Raleigh re-caulked his ships with the asphalt found in a lake found on the Island of

Trinidad.

3.5 Black Boxes Open.

The histories through which place is made in Topographies become a continually multiplying

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meshwork of processes, interactions and encounters. The event of place cannot be told in terms of the causal linearity upon which grand historical narratives are founded. The trajectories that make up urban space expand. In the extreme south of Luxembourg, for example, lies “the land of the red rocks.” The name references the deposits of minerals rich in iron ore found in the region, which for that reason has been a mining and heavy industrial region since the Romans. The lexia then goes on to explore the phenomena that makes the colour red perceptible to the human eye, along with a survey of the many light wavelengths that surround us. It concludes with a reminder that while “infra-red rocks cannot be seen by the naked human eye,” it is part of “the additive primary colours of darkness, complementary to infra-cyan, in dRGB color systems. Infra-red is also one of the subtractive primary colors of dRYB color space but not dCMYK color space.”

Red too has its trajectories.

Topographies constructs place through a sense of the novelty inherent in the unplanned and unforeseen interaction between disparate bodies, things and nature that make up the material world. The notion of “actants” here serves the purpose of directly acknowledging the ways in which this form of plotting events fundamentally gives non-human processes and entities an equivalent ontological significance and agency as human beings. Acknowledging this shift is essential since traditionally cartography has followed Protagoras’s dictum that “man is the measure of all things” (qtd. in Olsson 312). This in no way entails a denial of the reality or agency of humans; rather it is an ontological shift that serves to open a multitude of other entities for exploration. In Reassembling the Social, Latour turns to the old etymological root of the term

“thing” or “ding” which refers to a gathering. Here, the concept of “thing” rather than stressing

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discreteness or fixity, suggests particular forms of assembly. For Latour, the emergent aspect of things as events is fundamental to the definition of an actant. It is precisely this approach to the meaning of “things” that is repeatedly emphasized in Topographies of the Insignificant; hence the importance of using the term actants. As Roger Sansi explains, since the term actant is defined by the ability to cause a transformation, the distinction between human action and what would be considered a “natural” event becomes immaterial. Thus, he goes on to argue, the notion of event is central to the definition of the term. Actants not only “emerge out of events but events and actants are coextensive: an actant is a unique event” (452).

The thorough descriptions of microprocesses of apparent insignificance, along with the use of close-up and slow-motion techniques, open to observation a particular kind of actant which has been “black-boxed.” In Pandora’s Hope, Latour argues that an actant is black-boxed when its definition has become so stabilized in its existence, purpose, and effects that the processes through which it is made become “entirely opaque” (183). Black-boxed actants are made to appear as discrete and fixed objects, and permit us to remain unaware of their internal complexity while “concealing multitudes” (193). In Topographies of the Insignificant, the way the events are plotted, linked and intertwined through the use of Google Maps’ mechanisms, requires users to hold on to an awareness of the multitude of trajectories and processes of which the material world is made. By focusing our attention on the unique details, cracks, and actants that exist on city streets, Topologies reimagines streets not as lines of transit and transportation of goods and people from one localized “place” to another, but as fundamental places of encounter of diverse actants and trajectories. Black boxes become unlatched. In Topographies, habitual and

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ordinary objects and traces such as band-aids, coins, recipes, tomatoes, lost pens, lighters, tumbleweeds and cadillacs are intertwined in and are outcomes of complex events. Together they narrate a history of place revealing itself through its mundanity.

The use of Google Maps’ structure and instruments serves as a particularly apt method of plotting an event unfolding as much in time as it does in space. The evolution of anti-littering laws, for example, is accessed through a variety of different trajectories: the development of a banana split recipe, the advancement of refrigeration methods and shipping speeds in the early part of the twentieth century that served to make bananas the most popular fruit in Vienna; the growing amount of discarded banana peels on streets which caused a considerable number of accidents and injuries — Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, we are told, was “reportedly the victim of one such accident, shortly before his assassination in 1918,” and the invention of modern urban street sanitation systems to deal with these peels. It is precisely this rhizomatic

“and” rather than the collective “meanwhile” which profoundly reconfigures the event by challenging teleological accounts. Sanitation laws are immersed in events that bind people to pavement, and pavement to people, to products, to history, to places. Capitalism, which has so often been seen as the fundamental condition through which relationships and things come into contact in networks and hubs of exchange, here is both a multiplicity of manifestations and is inseparable from the assembly of trajectories, human and non-human, of which it is part of but not sole or central cause and condition of the assembly. There is no ideal master concept, no

“great homogenization involved in the notion of a ‘capitalist system’” (Landa 267).

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3.6 Patterns of Life.

The narration of events and their plotting in the map are intimately related in Topographies.

Between form and movement what arises are patterns. These do not serve to fix space or pin down objects and places, but rather to reveal a material world in constant transformation and emergence. The work of traditional cartography is that of pinning onto the map a specific view of the world in the face of transience. As a photographer/cartographer acknowledges in a caption for Cartographic Fluoroscopy 1 (figure 6), “Nothing's permanent. But if only I could fixate that inversion of the World....” Patterns are a way of speaking and attempting to articulate the complexity within. Among the many maps in Topographies, including Topological Modulations

(figure 7) and Cartographic Fluoroscopies (figure 8), there is also a “Topography of Relational

Events.” This last map is the only one that does not contain an image of itself. The patterns made by relational events cannot be captured by any one representational form and serve as a salutary reminder that microtopologies are constantly emerging and transforming things.83 The work of

Topographies is that of plotting relationships between events: of narrating the event of space.

Patterns are “local structures in a state of cartographic deliberation” (Berlin Readings) — they serve to plot the “transition between Context / Ground and Construct” and the “transition between readings of horizontal and vertical orientation” (“Topological Modulation 3 ).

83 Fractal geometries themselves could not have been studied and examined without the advancement of computer technology. 156

figure 5. "Topographies of the Insignificant." figure 6. "Topographies of the Topological Modulations. Berlin Readings. Insignificant." Topography of Relational Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. Events. Berlin Readings. Andres Bojen 3 Nov 2013. and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013

figure 1. "Topographies of the Insignificant." Cartographic Fluoroscopy. Berlin Readings. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013.

Topographies of the Insignificant is full of groups of people whose objective is to examine the seemingly mundane and insignificant in order to find in these apparently 157

inconsequential traces, evidence of deep patterns present in the world. The resulting configurations created in order to understand and explore these traces are the very things

Topographies is made from. These arrangements reveal relations in the material world exposing these multitude “patternings of uniqueness” (Massey, For Space 91). The intricate associations between natural, urban, human and non-human actants at every scale provide the basis for a cartography made of patterns that refuse to flatten themselves out. Among the seemingly trivial patterns unblack-boxed in Topographies are: Human Tracks, Tyre Burns, and the art of Footprint

Recognition. These have been “largely neglected by most researchers, who often seemed to view them as incidental curiosities;” they are rich sources of information about “human behavior, locomotion, foot anatomy, ecology, chronology, and geographic distributions” (“Human

Tracks”). Close observation of footprints, for example, can give us information about the unique sole design of the shoe, the wear that it has received, the approximate height, and estimate body weight of the wearer (“Footprint Recognition”). All this information is revealed through the inspection of these “patternings of uniqueness,” Tyre Burns, as claimed by an anonymous driver during an interview for Pavement Magazine #783 issue: “… are like a signature. … It takes a lot of precursory acts to perform such... artifice. …, I would dare to say it's a Sidewalk Wonder.”

Among those dedicated to finding multitudes in the mundane are a group called Matka

Zem that examines Oil Drop Patterns and other such Fertility Symbols. Like Human Tracks, cars also leave Tyre Treads and drip oil from time to time. The drops accumulate on paved roads creating patterns. Most people will never pay much attention to these commonplace stains.

Matka Zem has come to the conclusion that the pattern is a source of “knowledge on human

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existence and the cosmos” (“Oil Drip Patterns”). They have developed a technique of triangulation between oil spots which meaning they then try to understand. They have named these geometries Patterns of Life. As Matka Zem explains,

Patterns of Life encode a dynamic system of mapping the individual in relation to cosmos

at multiple levels. Cars are wilful creations of man, and oil is the milk of mother earth

reunited with its source on the pavement. More than a two-dimensional surface on a

road, the Patterns of Life represents a multidimensional web of processes emanating in

all directions in a macro-micro evolution. The Patterns of Life models cosmos as a

creation that is happening at every point everywhere, in a fractal-like bottomless

unfolding, penetrating human awareness into deeply implicate realms. Oil drips from

cars are nothing but a cosmic force showing itself.

In Bratislava, we find Concrete Cunts, which refer to shapes

that appear on streets and pavement in usual masses (figure

11). These were, “originally considered as messages sent by

Gaia … as the female power of the Earth and therefore

creating ‘the thing through which we get thrown into this

figure 8. "Topographies of the Insignificant." world.’” Several have tried to remove them, but they keep Concrete Cunts. Bratislava. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2013 on coming up, like seamen fighting their way from the wet dark to the light.”84 In Topographies, patterns are means of getting at and expressing emergent

84 Lovelock’s theory was born from his research into the reasons why life has been able to sustain itself on earth. As 159

spatial distributions and hidden connections. These configurations resist any form of stabilization of objects and of the material world. Precisely because it is inherently spatial, this fractal geometry is also fundamentally temporal. As Thomas Lekan states, an “ecology of chaos,” where fractals are the images of complexity, requires a drastic shift in the ways in which we think about spatial representations; it also compels an exploration “about what meaning can lie in things: as vibrant, fluctuating, complex patchworks that never reach a point of equilibrium” (23). Matthew

Fuller maintains in Media Ecologies that the term “ecology” is more appropriate for these kinds of media objects because it serves to express “the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter” (“Introduction: Media Ecologies”). Panning, zooming and accessing different forms of representation, narratives and patterns, in

Topographies, gesture towards the kind of fractal ecology just described. Through the “Patterns of Life” found in Oil Drops, like the microstates in Nocilla Dream (see Chapter One), “the flat line of the map takes on relief, takes on body, gurgles” (111). This is an important shift concerning the ontological status of things.

Ursula Heise, points out, Lovelock came to use the vocabulary of cybernetics to articulate this “complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet” (Lovelock qtd. in Heise 24). Gaia refers to James Lovelock’s idea that the planet exists as a single entity where all processes that make up our planet are linked together, forming a single all-embracing and self-sustaining feedback system. The Gaia hypothesis is based on an ecology that uses a form of holism and interconnectivity reliant on old paradigms of a highly structured, regulated, and interdependent system that no longer holds. As biologist Daniel Botkin points out, through the exploration of dynamic systems of non-equilibrium, “scientists know now that this view is wrong at local and regional levels… Change now appears to be intrinsic and natural at many scales of time and space in the biosphere (qtd. in Heise 24). It is precisely this premise of holism not only in Gaia but in “whole earth” discourses, which is challenged by chaotic ecologies. 160

3.7 Pavement as a Living Tissue.

The body, like the city, is permeable, sloughing off pieces of itself but also making scabs and marks as it comes in contact with bacteria. The kind of vibrant materiality that Topographies’s complex ecologies constructs is made more evident by the decentering of the human body as the sole agent of change or as a bounded discrete entity. In Rome, for example, we find the human body treated in much the same way as the streets of the city. Cracks on human skin attract

Ornamental Bacteria, which, like the Concrete Cunts, “forms patterns and unwanted ornaments in your skin,” these decorations are also alive and in evolution, healing, scabbing and interacting with innumerable micro-organisms. These too are patterns of life. Ornamental Bacteria are part of mobile ecosystems that are linked to Ice Cubes and icebergs alike. “Even in the coldest freezer,” a lexia explains, “ice cubes are always melting at least a little bit. This melting has a major impact on the area around an iceberg”. The minute temperature variation in the vicinity of an ice-cube creates microclimates where life can thrive, “a variety of invertebrates bacteria and other micro organisms congregate in the area. Many of them come to feed on Ornamental

Bacteria, tiny but mysterious creatures. Snow petrels nest on the icebergs and feed on the microscopic life nearby” (“Icecubes”).

The distinction between living tissue and inert matter dissolves. This is not only a gesture towards coevalness — letting varied processes and temporalities exist “at the same moment” as an accumulation rather than a chronology. Biologist Alexis Carrell, who in the 1920s developed the microcinematography of cells living in culture, pointed out that “tissue is evidently an enduring thing. Its functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to

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moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as a part into the constitution of a tissue” (qtd. in Landecker 922). When pavement is treated like living tissue, as an event, it can be thought of as made up of the metabolic build up of the past. As Carrell goes on to state, “the present of a living organism does not pass into nothingness. It never ceases to be, because it remains in the memory and is entered in the tissues” (qtd. in Landecker 922).

Topographies provides a representation of the material world where what constitutes matter and what can cause a transformation, is continuously expanding. Within the digital platforms, ideas; words; the smell of molasses; wavelengths; Loose Detritus of Thought; “Matter produced by the decay or disintegration of ideas or concepts;” and Detritus of Languages, all have their own trajectories and manifestations.

3.8 The Material Ecologies of the Insignificant.

As Matthew Fuller argues in Media Ecologies, media systems are complex objects in which

“every element is an explosion, a passion or capacity settled temporarily into what passes for a stable state” (“Introduction: media Ecologies”).85 Like patterns, lists, taxonomies and hierarchies exist within the cartographic space of Topographies as means of maintaining in tension both a sense of order and the multitudes they contain. As Fuller well points out, taxonomies here allow for these reverberations, interconnections and emergences to come about and thus to “cross the planned relations of dimensionality — the modes or dynamics that properly form or make

85 In Media Ecologies Fuller explores this point by emphasizing the fundamental materiality and dimensionality of media systems. He writes that it is precisely in the “immaterial” domain of electronic media, where materiality is so often disregarded as irrelevant, that such an approach and understanding of materiality is most fruitful. 162

sensible an objects or a process. As it does so, other worlds gently slip into, swell across or mutate those we are apparently content that we live in” (“Introduction: Media Ecologies”). The links that are included in Topographies, and which construct a particular sense of interconnection, are at times organized as lists of elements, as parts of other lexia, or as placemarks. The different hierarchies and taxonomies through which the cartography is constructed within the interface provide what Fuller calls a “dimensionality.” Each element fits into the ordering system provided by the structure, but “also corresponds and belongs to a multitude of other compositional forces and domains that place it in relation to others that may be virtual, affective, historical, and so on” (“Chapter 4: Seams, Memes”). On a formal level,

Topographies suggests milliard missing links and dimensionalities through allusion and constant iteration. The frequent use of lists also emphasizes the milliard navigational possibilities and paths that could have been taken, thus providing both formal and rhetorical evidence of the scope of this representation of urban material space. As users, the various links and lists call upon us to wonder,

[h]ow can they be connected? The heterogeneity, the massive capacity for

disconnectedness of the parts, coupled with the plain evidence of their being linked by

some syntax, of writing or performative action, allows for the invention of newly

transversal, imaginal, technico-aesthetic or communicative dynamics to flower”

(“Introduction: Media Ecologies”).

The cartographic interface is not a closed system in which everything is included. There is no finite collection of elements that can fully exhaust Topographies of the Insignificant. The

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hierarchies never stabilize; the elements of the map cannot completely be separated into discrete units, the material world it conveys refuses to settle into the map. The structure neither calls for nor makes possible a linear or causal narrative; rather, it requires a conjunctural reading. The narrative is constructed by folding together coeval processes, making different temporalities converge, link, reverberate with each other. Users of Topographies’s cartography, like all the

Matza Zem, the trackers, and the Ketchup Beetle followers, are required to look for Patterns of

Life. The goal of this narrative is not reaching an end; the goal is not even the journey itself; rather, it is this continual and conjunctural deepening and widening of our field of action through which the event of space is narrated.

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Chapter 4 Precarious Places: Radiant Copenhagen and Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City

4.1 Introduction

Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favouring winds are driving us. "For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of light in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop..." (Calvino 147).

For Anna Tsing, polyphony, is “a revelation in listening;” it forces us to pick out simultaneous melodies and to appreciate “the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together” (The Mushroom at the End 224). Appreciating polyphony requires that we challenge our most engrained practices of listening — after all, from classical music to rock and roll, the

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expectation is that a dominant rhythm that overrides any dissonance will produce unity. This learning to attend to and welcome multiple temporal rhythms while letting various world-making projects come together in polyphonic assemblages requires working against aesthetic expectations that there will be a an ultimate “unified coordination of time” (23) which is the basis of discourses of progress upon which we so often found the story of our places, their pasts and their futures.

In this chapter I engage with two projects that explore different ways of conveying a history of place as a polyphonic entanglement of discourses and temporalities. The first—Anders

Bojen’s and Kristoffer Ørum’s Radiant Copenhagen—speculates towards the future, the second—Singaporean film-maker Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City—looks towards the past. Both projects construct history through the encounter of a multitude of different world-making projects. Radiant Copenhagen and Invisible City are particularly interesting because they deal directly with two of our strongest and most pervasive spatio-temporal paradigms: the blank slate and the strong beat of teleological progress. Both are the foundations upon which we so often represent and tell the histories of our places. The city here is an always-already speculative and precarious entanglement, as are the many place-making projects that come together in assemblies of place. As such, both projects require an openness to hearing the productive polyphonies.

Radiant Copenhagen’s evident reference to Le Corbusier’s influential modernist urban project The Radiant City both alludes to and contests his modernist utopic plan. Le Corbusier imagined a city erected on a clean slate, independent from any environmental specificity — a surface removed from human action and nature where a perfectly geometric city could be

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arranged and erected on a Cartesian grid. The tabula rasa, also associated with the cartographic grid, and a recurrent theme of modernist architecture and urban design,86 was the condition of possibility for this modernist urban plan. The project treated the notion of space as a group of geometrical features on an empty expanse. For Le Corbusier, the city’s ideal form and purpose originated from the assumption that near total order, standardization, and control was not only possible but also desirable.87 Likewise, Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City explores Singapore, a city

Rem Koolhaas once famously described as “the apotheosis of the tabula rasa” (1031). Radiant

Copenhagen and Invisible City respond to these claims of blank slates and teleological discourses by constructing montages of varied, alternative, and unexpected trajectories. Amongst the unified drum beat of modernist progress swells a polyphony of world-making projects.

While Topographies of the Insignificant concentrates on the multiscalar temporalities of which place is made; Radiant Copenhagen emphasizes the interface’s polyphonic nature of the history of place. In Radiant Copenhagen, the speculative narrative of the city’s future is constructed through a medium that has traditionally been relegated to exclusively spatial representations. Radiantcopenhagen.net, which was launched in March 2009, contains over four hundred different placemarks pinned on a Google Map of Copenhagen. The futuristic

86 See Hans Ibeling’s Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization.

87 Le Corbusier’s unrealized masterplan for The Radiant City, published in 1933, consisted of identical high-density skyscrapers arranged on a Cartesian grid among vast green areas. The city, Le Corbusier believed, would work as a well-ordered “living machine” which depended on the perfection of its geometrical standard to work. Le Corbusier’s city of the future was designed to provide effective transportation systems, green spaces, and sunlight in order to ensure a better working society. Le Corbusier’s design principles were foundational for modern urban planning developments, and depended on the belief in a need for a totalitarian system of standardization and symmetry. Modernist ideals of progress encouraged the annihilation of tradition and provided the groundwork for the utopian tabula rasa upon which the city would be erected. 167

imaginary/imagery of this cartography makes apparent the complex temporal weavings of diverse world-making projects through which the interface is constructed, not as a single totalitarian vision, but as assemblages of disparate narrative voices and trajectories. In looking towards the future, it reconstitutes the notion of the city as one that is always already precarious.

In Invisible City, Tan Pin Pin explores the ways in which Singapore’s past has been recorded by following the trail of diverse archives made by people who have, in one way or another, taken it upon themselves to document the city. Rather than a film about what has been erased or discarded in the wake of Singapore’s official history of progress, the film investigates what remains echoing throughout the virtual and material landscape of the city. Ephemeral, full of holes and disappearances, and subject to erosion, the plot of Singapore emerges as polyphonic. Invisible City offers a deep appreciation of the inherent materiality and precarity of our places, as much as of our documentary forms, memories and historic records.

Thinking the material world through the encounter of multitude intertwined human and non-human trajectories, admits reflection on the ways in which both works stand against claims of foundational blank slates and teleological accounts by positing place as conjunctures of world- making projects. The texts put together dissonant trajectories made up of echoes, contaminations, and ruins of other histories. Both the Google Maps interface and the documentary montage provide mechanisms for plotting place that require us to engage with the meeting of multiple, layered and divergent temporalities; together, these collections are always greater than the sum of their parts.

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4.2 Temporal Sheaves: Radiant Copenhagen’s Speculative Cartography.

In 2008, Kristoffer Ørum and Anders Bojen put out a call for papers looking for people willing to collaborate in a collectively produced speculative fiction about Copenhagen. The intention was to use Google Map’s interface as a generative tool to build a collection of narratives that affected and transformed the individual scope of any one participant’s engagement with the city.

Like Topographies of the Insignificant, the collaborative work took place on a wiki interface among a group that included writers, musicians, data linguists, art historians, inventors, literary scholars, and artists. Participants could add video files, charts, pictures, audio files, music, photographs, texts and links of any kind with the sole stipulation that all narratives that were added to the map had to take place in the future, and that any and all entries could be changed, edited, or added upon by any of the other contributors. The idea was that, as is the case of digital maps, the interface would consist of a sufficiently large conglomeration of texts that it would become nearly impossible for a single user to grasp the entirety of the narrative possibilities within the interface. Collaboration implied that the amount of contributions, dynamics, and editions would be so vast that none of the participants of the initial project would be able to control the process of construction. The creative method was thus founded on the susceptibility to other world-making projects that is fundamental to the generative and emergent element that precarity suggests. The collective nature of the project is emphasized throughout the cartographic interface, stressing a sense of productive vulnerability of any single narrative, and thus producing an appreciation of the disturbances through which place is made.

Paying particular attention to the strategies used by cartographic digital interfaces such as 169

Radiant Copenhagen for plotting the histor(ies) of place, stimulates a rethinking of the notion of interconnection. The structure of montage, collage, and linkage that animates the interface provides a particularly conjunctural form of interrelation in which personal memoires, historical narratives, data, flow charts, private photographs, dates, videos, among others, are assembled together to plot the narrative of place. Like in Topographies, both the zoom function and the linked assembly call for a “shuttling back and forth” among different spatial and temporal frames. Radiant Copenhagen calls for particular consideration to the ways in which this conjunctural movement reconfigures a sense of trajectory and thus of history. Various lexia and other representational forms present on the screen at once is a fundamental aesthetic to digital cartography. The result is a sense of history made up of metabolic accumulations of the past.

Le Corbusier’s ideal city was founded on the assumption that near total order, standardization and control were not only possible but also desirable.88 While the various participants build Radiant Copenhagen through the strictures imposed by Google Maps and

Wikitechnology, its open-ended structure, collaborative construction, and non-linear historical narrative, contests any claim of a single primordial master plan.89 “Places,” after all, a lexia

88 Le Corbusier’s unrealized master plan for The Radiant City, published in 1933, consisted of identical high-density skyscrapers arranged on a Cartesian grid among vast green areas. The city, Le Corbusier believed would work as a well-ordered “living machine” which depended on the perfection of its geometrical standard to work. Le Corbusier’s city of the future was designed to provide effective transportation systems, green spaces, and sunlight in order to provide its inhabitants with higher standards of living and contribute to a better working society. Le Corbusier’s design principles were foundational for modern urban planning developments, and depended on the belief in a need for a totalitarian system of standardization and symmetry. Modernist ideals of progress encouraged the annihilation of tradition and provided the groundwork for the utopian tabula rasa foundation upon which the city would be erected.

89 As any cartography, Google Maps evidently serves as a system of representation, abstraction and selection. Through its many competing representational forms, taxonomic and ordering systems, Google Maps also functions as a technology of power. While forms of power embedded in the interface are not my central concern here, my 170

explains in Radiant Copenhagen, “are demarcations and infinity” (“Places”). By emphasizing the open-endedness of the historical account and of the structure through which it is told, by refusing to subsume the plot into a unitary storyline, the interface constructs its speculative fiction through the rhizomatic conjunction “and” which points towards an infinite etcetera, allowing us to think the so-much-more beyond what is included. This approach exposes a polyphony of uneven and competing hierarchies, claims to reality and discourses.

4.2.1 Echoes in The City.

Rather than Le Corbusier’s gridded blank slate, the future of the city is defined by chaotic patterns of unplanned encounter. Radiant Copenhagen is full of Clandestine Constructions, structures made up of “Plastic bottles, old shoes, disused computers, yellowed old newspapers and unfamiliar objects arched towards the sky, held together by electrical tape and small pieces of coloured chewing gum. …constructed clandestinely by persons unknown at night, and at first barely visible.” The Google Maps platform provides the tools for a notion of interconnection that puts together in volatile assemblages a myriad of entities including: mushrooms, waste, ruins, charts, humans, insects, waves, plans, computer programs, fantasies of mastery, economic, social and urban policies, water, graffiti, and reverberations — to name a few of the actants. None of these are nugatory parts of the plot of place.

Radiant Copenhagen is replete with Echoes and More Echoes. “There are,” a lexia

approach to the cartographic interface contributes to this larger discussion. After all, in order to explore how manoeuvres of abstraction and erasure are put into play, it is first fundamental to understand the ways in which the system constructs specific notions of time and space and the assemblages they produce. 171

explains,

locations in the city where the boundaries of reality breaks down; places haunted by

echoes and glimpses of other Copenhagens. These are the ghosts of futures past. Some

say they are semiotic phantoms, fragments of a mass dream, bits of deep cultural imagery

that have split off and taken on a life of their own. Others say they are windows into very

real parallel universes. Nobody knows. But look, here comes one (“Echo;” “Echoes;”

“Echoes of Echoes;” “More Echoes;” “Roskilde Fjord Echoes”).

Like in Nocilla Dream, echoes are also iterations with a difference (see discussion

Chapter One), each taking on unpredictable trajectories, each taking place in the making of distinct assemblages we call place. These haunted locations turn out to be events — moments of quotidianity embedded in the making of place. Some people, a lexia explains, “say [echoes] are windows into an alternate dimension. But do these windows have windows of their own? Are those phantoms haunted by ghosts?” (“Echoes of Echoes"). Nodes beget nodes, links beget links, echoes beget echoes, windows beget windows, Google Maps begets Radiant Copenhagen — like fractals, every scale contains infinite scales of complexity, non nestle neatly within each other, nowhere do the city’s echoes end and Google Maps begins. The interface is a sheaf of contradictory temporalities and linkages, and bits of cultural imagery that continually take on a life of their own. Echoes are evidence of material trajectories of the past.

Grafitti “visible for just a few seconds” began appearing in Radiant Copenhagen, “at some point.” For all we know,” a lexia suggests, “they may have been around from the beginning of time” (“Invisible Graffiti”). Some of these graffiti appear in Danish and are untranslatable,

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others only appear in the rain, many have a personal and intimate nature. These ephemeral graffiti are made up of traces of people and of natural phenomena, none of these separable from the other. While Grafitti may be considered a blight on the city’s surfaces, it is also a way of laying claim to place. As Campkin, Mogilevich, Ross assert, “city dwellers [] use images as a tool to imprint and inscribe the city, to make themselves visible” (figure 13).

figure 9. "Radiant Copenhagen." Invisible Graffiti. “I wait for you even though.” Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015.

If graffiti constitutes a perversion of the city’s master plan, the inclusion of environmental trajectories as one of the many possible actants that inscribe graffiti in its surfaces is significant. As place-making projects meet in unplanned assemblages of organic, inorganic and human trajectories, these imprint visible and invisible traces in the urban ecology of place, and they produce transformations that radically alter the landscape. These interactions are central to the construction of an appreciation of multispecies ecologies and open-ended landscape histories. Lekan incisively argues, the conjunctural and fractal form of digital cartography encourages a dialogue “between digital and ocular mediation at a variety of scales and acknowledges, accordingly, that non-human nature can be what Donna Haraway calls an

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unexpected ‘trickster’ — resisting, reshaping, or producing unexpected outcomes whenever we try to fix topographical features on a map or manage landscapes” (197). It is this transience and precarity of the assemblages through which graffiti comes into being that calls attention to the constructed nature of any notion of totality within cartography. In such a structure, as Anna

Tsing notes in The Mushroom at the End of the World has noted, engagement always takes place in awkward and ephemeral configurations of heterogeneous scales—whether these be organisms, social systems, or ecosystems—which are nevertheless generative and capable of reconfiguring traditional local and global universals such as capitalism, nature, or technology. Evidently, maps, photographs, diagrams, computer generated spatial images and even street art, are central to perceptions of and claims to place. Not only can these images generate knowledge about the city but precisely for this reason, they can be used as technologies of power and counter-power. As

Campkin, Mogilevich and Ross state, urban images not only produce evidence for physical change, but in doing so, produce transformation — “[they] not only offer insights to help analyze and understand cities, but also point to ways of radically altering their futures.” The moment a representation, trace or document is made visible it becomes subject to public debate and is embedded in multiple, intersecting and always emerging narrative assemblies.

4.2.2 Entering Google Maps’ Temporal Assemblages.

We enter radiantcopenhagen.net with little explanation of the intentionality or purpose of the interface. The entry or “splash” page informs users of the technical set-up of the interface and offers a list of credits of “featured” collaborators. From the beginning, Radiant Copenhagen

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requires an awareness of the complex and interwoven relationships of ownership, authorship, and programming through which the interface comes together and reminds us of the existence of always-many-more non-featured participants. At first glance, the main content site seems indistinguishable form the readily recognizable Google Maps satellite image of Copenhagen.

Upon closer observation, though, one sees that the names of famous sites have been changed and that almost imperceptible modifications have occurred on the satellite image of the city made so familiar by Google Maps. “Welcome to Radiant Copenhagen,” reads a large lexia in the middle of the webpage. In the background a polyphonic soundtrack begins to play in an increasingly high-pitched polyphony of sounds made up of noises of the city, pop music, jingles, classical music, among others — a concoction composed of the many audio tracks within Radiant

Copenhagen. “Good afternoon passengers,” reads the lexia: “First, I'd like to welcome everybody on this trip to Radiant Copenhagen. The weather in Radiant Copenhagen is clear and sunny. If the Internet cooperates, we should get a great view of the city. Sit back, relax and enjoy the trip. If you become confused, help is available in the top left hand corner of your browser…”

The text then provides a link and suggests that it “might be a good place to start.” It is only when refreshing the page or pressing the reset button—one of the options available in the top left hand corner—that we realize that the suggested link is provided randomly, and that any link whatsoever, of anyplace whatsoever, is just as good a place to start. The top right hand side corner of the screen also provides a Help option, a Toggle Sound button and a Timeline feature that displays a list of some of the events plotted throughout Radiant Copenhagen in chronological order. Besides the instructional links we can also find a Satellite or Map option

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with which users can switch from the interface’s default satellite imagery to a street map representation of Copenhagen.

Radiant Copenhagen fosters the complex gathering of temporalities that Google Maps’ cartographic representation permits — including the assemblage of satellite and personal photographs, narratives and editions. The project also takes advantage of this entanglement of different representational and narrative forms through Radiant Copenhagen’s inclusion of a

Timeline, its emphasis on the speculative nature of its narrative, and its interdependence with and links to the Google Maps interface. Google’s satellite composite, it must be noted, was updated on June 27, 2016. Any update to the satellite image on Google Maps is automatically applied to overlays such as Radiant Copenhagen. Most of the work for this chapter was done with a

Radiant Copenhagen interface featuring 2013 images. Since the collaborative work took place in

2008, and the interface was rolled out in 2009, there have been at least two other previous

Radiant Copenhagen editions. The date on the bottom right corner is the only one on this futuristic mapped representation of Copenhagen that is always displayed on the screen. The lower right corner also has a Terms of Use link for Google Maps and a Report an Error option which, if pressed, takes us to the Google Maps page for the same satellite image we are exploring on Radiant Copenhagen and offers the possibility of sending feedback, including reporting a data problem and adding a missing place, among others. Any change made to the imagery would be reflected on Google Maps and thus on Radiant Copenhagen . While Radiant

Copenhagen’s collaborative work was closed before it launched in 2009, and no further texts, media, or edits can be included, its speculative narrative is inextricably linked to present

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representations of the city.

figure 10. "Radiant Copenhagen."Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015.

4.2.3 The Map that was a Labyrinth.

As we zoom out, the map fills with placemarks. All the pins are fixed on a static satellite composite of Copenhagen, except for a single itinerant placemark. Unnoticeable at first, a small shifting link labeled Travellers wanders aimlessly through the heap of markers, breaking the fixity of the map. Once opened, the link spreads its nomads throughout the networked cartography. Most people, we are told, refer to those who move in derogatory terms such as travellers, tourists, walkers or visitors. They prefer the term “Aliortugaq” which means ghosts in

Greenlandic (“travellers”). However we choose to refer to them, they are a diverse group moving through different scales and timeframes for various motives and in singular ways. We, as the splash page makes clear, are also ghosts, also travellers.

Travellers are linked to the map’s network of narratives but are not bound to a specific

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point in the city. They give to the representational image a sense of motion from which it is inseparable. A minor fraction of Travellers are “Nomads of Nostalgia” preferring to wander city monuments such as Labyrinths and Nostalgia House where users can “traverse[…] through the past, through childhood, through ancient times, through love, through docusoaps and games, through contemplation,” and through the “now demolished” city hall. The Labyrinth, on the other hand, is a structure of “great mathematical beauty […] designed to provoke the occurrence of chance […]. From afar, the labyrinths look like grids or closed structures, growing in complexity. Walking through them, though, you will in the end experience a sense of an opening” (“labyrinths”). Labyrinths and Nostalgia House serve as apt descriptions of Radiant

Copenhagen’s dynamics and of its structure. The project emphasizes how the cartographic interface is conceived as a networked assemblage of open-ended and always emerging narratives. The interface accumulates historical trajectories, drawing attention and building upon the swirl of temporalities and representational frames of which Radiant Copenhagen is made.

The conjunctural movement required by Nostalgia House and Labyrinths also extends to users as they roam. We too are voyagers. It is through this wandering that the future history of

Copenhagen is assembled as a sheaf of past and present trajectories. Meandering through the labyrinthine interface calls into question any expectation that this cartography might be founded on a closed structure or an unmovable set of strictures. The use of Google Maps and wikitechnology provides a means of plotting place through chance and encounter. As Katherine

Hayles recognizes, constructions that dispute sequential accounts, such as digital cartography, provide navigational mechanisms that become a signifying structure in and of themselves

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(Electronic Literature: What is it?).

Placemarks in Radiant Copenhagen concentrate and articulate a sense of collective recollection, so that the sites become places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself”

(Nora 7). As lieux de mémoire, well-known Copenhagen monuments accumulate massive amounts of trajectories, but these never fully harden into place. Rather, this condensation of trajectories, like Houses of Nostalgia, readily invites a journey through multiple pasts, ancient times, our own personal encounters with this place, and through that which is no longer there, the plans that never came to be and those long-since demolished. The timeline and other mechanisms such as the many graphs, lists, placemarks, links and the satellite composite, serve as plotting devices that incite interaction, overlap, and linkage through collocation.90

4.2.4 Temporal Assemblages and Google’s Satellite Composite.

Radiant Copenhagen deploys Google Maps’s technique of superimposed windows to plot place as an assemblage of various visual and narrative forms so as to plot temporal evolution while providing a sense of accumulation of past trajectories and temporal entanglement at a variety of scales. This structure serves to maintain connections across different temporal and spatial registers. As users open lexias, accessed links remain in the background unless previously

90 Ian Bogost describes a similar structure in his Alien Phenomenology. Ontography, in Bogost’s approach, is the mechanism through which an ontology is described, it can take the form of a list or “a compendium, or a record of things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation” (“Ontography”). As such, it serves as a “catalog [of] the diversity of being, deliberately or not” (“Time, Relation, Ethics, Experience”). Ontographs, he explains, bring to light the deep relationships between seemingly disparate things in order to express their ontology. “Ontology is the theory of the nature of existence, and ontography is its description” (Kitchener qtd in Bogost). 179

closed. Within these, audio files, videos, and photographic montages continue to play, producing a polyphony of sounds and discourses. In the backdrop, Google Maps’ satellite composite, along with the interface’s many placemarks, remains visible (figure 11). In this way, the “hereness” of place in the digital interface is made up of a sheaf of time frames that co-exist on the screen. It is through a temporal elision that accumulation and historical trajectory is constructed in the cartographic interface. This juxtaposition of diverse discourses, narrative forms, and representational frameworks construct a sense of place.

figure 11. "Radiant Copenhagen."Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015.

One of the key modifications that Google Maps’ interface undergoes in Radiant Copenhagen is at the level of Google Maps’ satellite composite. The large, looming, and well-recognizable building of Frederick’s Church,—one of Copenhagen’s most prominent landmarks—for example, has been replaced with a slightly altered silhouette of the well-known building in order to represent future material transformation in the city. The change can be confirmed by reverting to Google Maps’ street map imagery, in which the aerial photograph supposedly taken some time 180

after 2025 stands out (figure 12). A placemark at the site informs us that The Center of

Improbability and Invisibility is now using the premises. The lexia explains that The Center is a university founded in 2025 by Halldor Garnichts.

figure 12. "Radiant Copenhagen." Center of Improbability. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015.

While the Timeline, the inclusion of personal snapshots, and other forms of representation embedded in the interface serve to document transformation in the city, Google

Maps’ satellite composite obscures temporal development. The composite is always already a sheaf of different moments in time constructed through a combination of a year’s worth of overlapping images. The satellite imagery puts together side-by-side pictures that have been taken at different times of day and during different seasons in order to provide an always lit, cloud-free, and seamless image of the planet. This gives the impression that the composite reflects a single instant in time.91 The lag between the satellite image and the present material

91 The platform does not show photographs taken in “real-time” – they are generally current to within a span of five years and rarely younger than six months. With the most recent 2016 update, the satellite overlay is made up mostly of images taken by Landsat 8. Images do not always fit together smoothly in the composite without evident discontinuities. In some locations placemarks seem to move suddenly from one location to another when the imagery is stitched together awkwardly. 181

reality is particularly noticeable when extreme changes have taken place in the landscape.92 The supposition is that, despite these uncommon moments of disruption, the material world does not change at a pace fast enough, and transformations are subtle enough, that the time lag between the representation and the material world is not significant in terms of a general sense of contemporaneity.

The composite takes advantage of the discrete singularity, the purported indexicality or sense of rootedness and claims to temporal and spatial specificity of the photographic reference.

However, while the satellite composite coordinates discrete images into a virtual sense of coherence, it does not fully indulge in the discourse that posits the photograph as evidence of that

“necessarily real thing that has been placed before the lens” (Barthes 76).93 The appearance of spatial fixity upon which the composite is apparently built is always already challenged from within, albeit subtly. The ever-present caption at the bottom of the screen, after all, does not point to a moment, but to a span of time — currently 2016. The composite is a view that cannot possibly exist and cannot be captured; it must be constructed. There is no point of view, not even a satellite perspective, in which an image of a fully cloud-free and lit world can be apprehended.

Rather, the image is constructed by erasing out of contention spatial and temporal features such

92 Google’s updates of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, is one example.

93 Brooke Belisle, in a very insightful analysis, points out that these practices are not limited to digital modes of connection. Belisle’s analysis of nineteenth century railroad panorama photographs as arrangements that sought to picture particular imaginations of connectivity through views that could not possibly exist outside of these particular arrangements. Like the digital platform, these composites “not only constrain ways of seeing and representing connectivity, but, … how space and time are experienced, represented, and imagined” (“Picturing Networks: Railroads and Photographs”). 182

as the Earth’s atmosphere.94 Much like in Radiant Copenhagen, this is a representation of a planet where the weather everywhere is always “clear and sunny.” For this to be the case, as

Radiant Copenhagen makes clear, it is not the world but the Internet that must cooperate.

Bojen’s and Anders’s project emphasizes what usually remains unnoticed: the stitches, the clashes, the juxtapositions, the contingencies, the polyphonic beats, and the contradictions we abide in order to let the satellite composite stand.

In Radiant Copenhagen, monuments are testaments to both transcendence and transformation. Cities need monuments in order to commemorate “the grandeur and shlock of culture,” explains a lexia labeled Monument of Radiant Copenhagen. Shlock, as a lexia clarifies, refers to “a shoddy, cheaply made article that is quite often defective as well” (“shlock”). It is precisely well-known monuments, those that hold long histories of urban evolution but also provide a sense of the familiar, the stable and the long-standing, which are replaced in the satellite composite with images of future transformation.

The alteration to the satellite image of Frederick’s Church—by 2025 labelled as The

Center of Improbability and Invisibility—has two important effects. Firstly, it emphasizes the constructed nature of the composite. Secondly, it expresses the balance between transience and familiarity through which the notion of place is founded. It is the lieu de memoire’s relationship between impermanence and permanence that is made prominent. Monuments accumulate past trajectories and condense encounters and assemblages. Because they belong to a larger scale of transformation than our own mortal bodies, they remain even while they change. After 2025, in

94 There is, however, the possibility of accessing OpenWeatherMap with the Google Maps JavaScript API where users can access current weather data, which is refreshed every ten minutes; forecasts, and historical data. 183

Radiant Copenhagen, the iconic site where Frederick’s Church used to be still holds attention and dominates the landscape. Sites remain familiar through the centuries and, by enduring, give us a measure of how much has changed. Radiant Copenhagen thus provides a sense of history that depends not only on a sense of permanence and change but also on the encounter of multiple temporal scales.

If the satellite image is examined alone, its underlying discourses fall in step with the tradition of classic cartography of removing temporal development from space in order to construct an ahistorical representation. This is space as merely “a collage of the static” (Massey,

For Space 119). However, media itself, as McLuhan so pointedly argued, must be approached as an interconnected field of relations: an “environment” which is an “assemblage of technologies and practices accumulated over time” (Gabriele). The plot through which Radiant Copenhagen constructs its speculative history is inseparable from Google Maps’ historical assemblage. The transition to the Google Maps platform can be made smoothly by accessing the Report an Error option. The difference between the 2016 and the 2025 always-linked composites provide a sense of transformation. It is Google Maps’ satellite composite that serves as evidence of the past.95 It is not only the sense of permanence through time that makes Frederick’s Church a particularly iconic lieu du memoire but also the appreciation of change at the core of it. “A topos,” Latour writes, “is the connexion of actions taking place in different sites and times by various actants”

(“Trains of Thought” 180). The multiple agglomeration of images, discourses, and links through

95 The possibility of examining landscape changes through time already exists in Google Maps. While the satellite composite provides a static collage of times, it also offers a link to the Historical Imagery feature where users can access historical photographs on a sequential timeline that can date back to the 1940s in some locations. Users can thus see landscape changes chronologically (Dodsworth and Nicholson). 184

which Frederick’s Church is plotted in Google Maps alone includes: links to reviews and ratings of the monument provided by platform users, a short blurb explaining that the site is an “18th- century Lutheran church with the largest dome in Scandinavia,” 182 personal photographs uploaded by users, and a few “quick facts” along with a link to the main Wikipedia entry, among other varied links. There is neither an ultimate unification of these multiple narrative and representational forms nor an establishment of a single vantage point from where place can be fully accessed. The plans, the designs, the labour, the geological trajectories are all part of the site’s past. The futuristic history of Radiant Copenhagen, thus, is constructed through a polyphony of temporal sheafs that never attempt to establish a foundational beat.

4.2.5 Temporal assemblages between the Virtual and the Material.

Radiant Copenhagen emphasizes the many ways in which the interface calls into question the binary between the virtual and the material, and between the city and the many discourses and imaginaries through which it is told. In order to highlight the complex relationships between representations and the material world, the unveiling of radiantcopenhagen.net was accompanied by a series of performative and interactive events in the Danish capital. A press release sent out by one of the participants was written as a news blurb for Wonderful Copenhagen — the city’s official tourist organization. The 2009 press release, redacted in the present tense, announced the removal and replacement of The Little Mermaid — an event that takes place in Radiant

Copenhagen in the year 2083. The news blurb announced the unveiling of The Large Skull at the former site of The Little Mermaid. The release was published at the height of the controversy

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about the decision by the Copenhagen City Council to move the iconic statue and send it to

Shanghai so that it could be displayed in the Danish Pavilion for the duration of the 2010 World

Expo. It was not that far-fetched to imagine, as was claimed in the press release, that The Little

Mermaid had been beheaded during its stay in Shanghai. The Danish icon, after all, has a long history of suffering at the hands of vandals, having been decapitated three times in its past. The press release was published in the front page of Jylland Posten's popular online newspaper and forced Wonderful Copenhagen to issue an official denial. The news blurb served to underscore the entwined temporal assemblages through which the history of place is plotted in Radiant

Copenhagen. The cartographic interface cannot be thought of as a discrete entity separate from the material world that it represents and in which it is involved.

4.2.6 The Timeline: Precarious Pasts, Contingent Futures.

After the beheading of The Little Mermaid, the iconic statue fell into disrepute and disrepair for many years. In 2073, during the early stages of the construction of the Northern Harbour, the remains of an ancient settlement were discovered “deep below the street of present day

Copenhagen” (“Australopithecus Danesis” Italics mine). The events are told by a narrative voice that positions itself and us in the “now.” The present—the habitual voice of Historical accounts—thus becomes a moving site through which the plot takes on meanings. In November

2073, Doctor Johansson uncovered a fossil at the foot of The Little Mermaid that turned out to be an over four-million-year-old upright walking hominid — older than any that had been previously found. Since the remains of the Australopithecus Danesis were found at the former

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site of The Little Mermaid, and since the statue had become a source of national shame, it was decided that a replica of the fossil, entitled The Large Skull, would be stand in its place. The fossil suggested that humankind evolved from the place now known as Denmark. For this reason, the discovery was followed by a brief resurgence of Danish nationalism and the development of a new religion called Soapology. However, The Large Skull has more prominently become a symbol all over the world of the origin of humans. A few critics occasionally suggest that The

Large Skull should be replaced by a replica of The Little Mermaid to commemorate the statue that had been a Copenhagen icon, a major tourist attraction, and a target for political activism and vandalism since 1913.

The unearthing of the Australopithecus Danesis constitutes a fundamental alteration of the scale used to plot the history of Copenhagen and the evolution of our species. In this important sense the speculative work of plotting the future involves also the introduction of alternative histories. The past, also an assemblage, “come[s] in and out of existence through the contingencies of historical change” (Tsing, Mushroom at the End 158). It is through these coexisting sheaves of alternative and speculative pasts and futures that a history of Copenhagen is assembled. The finding of the fossil, and the reconstitution of the past it implies, requires stretching the history of human kind into a new temporal scale and then re-thinking all of the passage of time in terms of this new measure. A project which intends to speculate about the city’s future will necessarily reconfigure the past. It is thus telling that the Timeline feature does not include the evolution of the Australopithecus Danesis over four million year ago, nor does it incorporate the infamous beheading of The Little Mermaid, the creation of Useum’s, the rise of

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mushrooms as the most important product produced by Copenhagen, or the fungal consequences of such endeavours. While the Timeline cannot and does not contain this openness and heterogeneity from which events arise, it can point to that appreciation of the so-much-more and to the multiple and always emergent plot in which it is involved. Instead of serving as a mechanism for picking out and organizing significant moments in a linear teleology, it draws attention to the linkages among multiple scales and along varied trajectories through which events are made. The seemingly linear historical path of key events included in the Timeline is linked to manifold sources embedded in numerous pathways at several levels of observation. The

Timeline offers a sense of trajectory that is always more than the sum of its elements. While there is certainly a before and an after to every encounter, rather than time construed as an arrow that points toward a progression, the event of place is made up of all the actants that together constitute the condition of possibility of the present, which are “produced by history and capable of history” (Stengers, Power and Invention 17).

The introduction of the arrow of time does not imply linearity but irreversibility. Here the arrow of time manifests not as a mechanism for linear causation but a multiplicity of irreversible events that are the conditions of possibility for an indeterminate and multiple telling of the future and the past. As Stengers explains, the intrinsic complexity of emergent systems arises from the fact that “they are the product of multiple histories in relation to which all constraints […] take on meaning” (17). Since Radiant Copenhagen involves speculative futures, the past too becomes open to speculation. The cartographic interface permits the co-existence of various, sometimes- contradictory pasts and imagined futures. What emerges is a history that is always open not only

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to re-signification but also to the incorporation of new scales, that when added, change all events in relation to it. The fate of the site where the iconic Little Mermaid used to stand, for example, reveals the intricate plots through which the past, as much as the future, is reconfigured. Not only does this serve as a deep challenge to teleological historical accounts by positing place as an assemblage of various world-making projects, but it emphasizes the productive vulnerability of these projects as they are always susceptible to being disturbed through this encounter.

The dynamics of linkages, juxtaposition and mashups make the resultant assemblage more akin to a montage than to a collage. As a time-based medium, the cartographic interface knits together in a complex, ever-transforming net, a multitude of scales, discourses, and views through which the user moves.96 Accessing the Timeline feature offers a lexia that appears to be more akin to a scattered plot ordered chronologically than a linear graph of events. These span from sometime after 2010, with the establishment of the Meta Collection Center (MCC)—an organization that gathers entire collections and, through nano-plasma technology, “reconstruct[s] a multitude of visual and corporeal tangible paths through any collection or museum of the world!”—to the publication of the Venetian Field DeFol’s travelogue Luminous Copenhagen:

Little Footsteps in the Star of the North in 2192. By putting events in relations with one another in a way that does not establish a single common thread among them, the Timeline resists linear narratives. It emphasizes the multiplicity of scales, narrative forms, and actants through which

96 In his seminal Art of the Cinema, Kulechov makes patent the relational possibilities of the montage provide the possibility of construction relationships between objects, nature, people, and processes of all kinds, “creat[ing] so to speak, a new geography, a new place of action” (68). What the cartographic interface’s structure has in common with the cinematic montage is the ways in which it puts together disparate representational discourses and narrative forms, in order to construct dynamic assemblages through which a sense of history and of place arises. 189

the histor(ies) of place are plotted. The Timeline’s articulation of temporality cannot be thought of separately from the assemblage in which it exists; it is embedded in the aesthetic of superimposed windows through which place is plotted in the digital interface (figure 13): polyphony is the structural requisite of the telling of place in this cartography.

figure 13. "Radiant Copenhagen." Timeline. Andres Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum. 2009. Web. 8 Jul 2015.

4.2.7 The Unflattanable Map.

James Purdon asks in his article “Electric Cinema, Pylon Poetry”: “what does a network look like?” The answer depends on what we assume a network is. In order to call into question a tradition of thinking them as horizontal synchronic structures, Starosielski, Soderman and Cheek call for an approach that may “unearth[…] alternative network visualizations that evoke a sense of unfolding temporality or an affect of disconnection.” Examining the use of the aesthetics of the Google Maps interface by Radiant Copenhagen as precisely that kind of “alternative network,” underscores the work of un-earthing, scrutinizing, and re-signifing discourses and representations about Copenhagen’s past and its future, that it requires. Treating networks not 190

only as temporal structures but also as assemblages that explicitly incorporate multiple discourses provides particular depth to depthless models. What does such an unflattenable network look like?

Structure in Radiant Copenhagen is not an underlying dominant foundation from which planned interaction arises in predictable trajectories. Any notion of configuration in the cartographic interface arises from the intersection between form and process through which encounters and assemblages are made possible. It is this dynamism that better captures an ever- transforming network of assemblies that “continually produces transfigurations in its particular objects, subjects and discourses” (Weshler, Sinervo, and Tien).

The map here cannot be understood as a unified and closed object of discourse operating as a solid foundation for its antipodes of temporal unity, coherence and continuity. Radiant

Copenhagen contests a binary approach between structure and unpredictability, where one privileges what the other disallows — abstract representation versus the material world, the significant versus the insignificant, the singular versus the multiple, the fixed and static versus dynamic flow. As Doreen Massey points out, if “it is the fact of spatial juxtaposition that produces the openness, the impossibility of closure into a synchronic totality,” then the cartographic interface’s network is precisely this impossibility. Structure in this cartography is not only what makes possible the interconnections and encounters yet to be made, along with the holes, closures and disconnections, it is what arises from these juxtapositions. It is, Massey goes on to argue, “this element of the chance/openness of space [which] results from the co-existence of structures” (108). The dynamics of Radiant Copenhagen are well captured by Gaonkar and

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Povinelli description of the network as “a set of circulatory fields populated by myriad forms, sometimes hierarchically arranged and laminated but mostly undulating as an ensemble” (391-

92). As such, the interface is made up of the encounter of varied world-making projects.

Structure, then, is a construct made through encounter and interconnection, constantly being made, and thus always undetermined, always unfinished, because finishing is not the objective

— neither in terms of the plot, nor the journey it enables.

This approach to the cartographic network has fundamental affinities to figures of connection such as Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the rhizome: “Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings,” they write, “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (23). In challenging traditional historical narration, the network reveals multiplicities of actants and trajectories that have led to present assemblages. As Bearman, Moody and Faris argue, in “Networks and History,” networked structures can serve as mechanisms to dislocate linear narratives of historical change.

In Radiant Copenhagen each event in the chronological teleology is in actuality a node made up of complex assemblages of interconnection and contamination, which is “the result of multiple sources operating through multiple pathways at multiple levels of observation.”

4.2.8 Search: Users, Collaborators, Events.

Along with the satellite composite and the many links, photographs, videos, and placemarks that come together to plot the future(s) of Copenhagen, the platform also provides a search box. This

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feature offers, for any given word queried, a list of items of all related entries. These, in turn, contain information regarding the name of the user whom last updated or modified each entry, along with the date and time of this most recent edition. The search option exposes the process of construction, technical artefacts and people behind the creation of the platform, discloses some the multitude of actors that enable the cartography in the first place, and underlines the collaborative and precarious nature of the creative process. The dynamics through which the platform is built—and the swirl of temporalities embedded therein—are inseparable from the history of Radiant Copenhagen. While Wikipedia and Google Maps also provide similar information, Bojen’s and Anders’ project emphasizes these mechanisms, thus foregrounding multitude assemblies through which this cartography is created. A search for The Center of

Improbability and Invisibility, for example, offers a list of all the links that make reference to

The Center — 13 entries all together, these include: Black Hole, Central Copenhagen, Garden of

Noisy Roses, Nanotechnology, Ole Worms Bubble Spawn Experiment, Recent Changes, Theory of Timerelocation, among others. The last modification to The Center was made by Anders

Bojen? on March 01, 2010, at 7:26 pm. Each collaborator’s name is also a link that when accessed, either provides short bibliographical blurbs or a username and password protected site, which makes patent the exclusions and some of the power dynamics within the platform. This cartographic interface never fully hides the creative manipulation through which place was assembled, and serves as a reminder that, while the platform is still open to transformation, the lexias within Radiant Copenhagen are closed to modification.

Like Topographies of the Insignificant, Radiant Copenhagen also takes advantage of

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Google’s open API to construct its collaborations and mash-ups. While the process through which the interface was put together was limited to a few chosen participants during a limited timeframe, and was closed to editions and additions once the program was launched, its interdependence with the Google Maps interface means that it continues to be open-ended and always evolving. We, who are sometimes passengers, sometimes users choosing our paths through the links, can also make editions, add locations and provide feedback through Google

Maps. The interactivity, integration and convergence of multimedia, and the collaboration it requires is constructed upon a sense of process-driven assemblies. Radiant Copenhagen emphasizes the underlying precarity of the creative method, to which any speculative narrative is always vulnerable and to which the interface, as part of an ever-emergent network, is necessarily subject. As James Purdon perceptively observes, networks depend “on a vast and heterogeneous structure of interpenetrating systems and bodies.” As such, this digital cartography is uniquely positioned to construct conjunctural plottings of space.

Michel Foucault famously argued in The Archaeology of Knowledge that in order to break down teleological accounts, we must first challenge the apparent unity of the book as a coherent, unified and discrete object of discourse upon which the purported narrative linearity and continuity of history itself is founded. Foucault suggests that the book be understood as “a node within a network” of other systems of references (23). The digital interface makes this patent by positing the network in which historical and representational claims are involved as the fundamental structure of the account. Radiant Copenhagen holds the tension between its status as a closed text—a completed project no longer susceptible to editions—and the open-ended

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emergence of the network in which it is involved. Not only do its conjunctural assemblages expose the nodes of the network as themselves containing complex networks of nodes, but even when links and paths are limited, the sense that the place being represented has as many dimensions as it has connections remains.

4.3 Reclaiming Impermanence: Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City.

Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City follows the trail of records made by documenteurs throughout the history of Singapore. The film braids together varied archival forms of photography, journalism, archaeology, interviews and personal records through which the city-state has been documented by its inhabitants. Tan Pin Pin assembles Singapore not as a territorial package on which categorical attributes are piled, but as a multiplicity of ingestions, mergers and symbioses — an assemblage of things preserved, discarded and forgotten. Invisible City deals with the sense of radical spatial transformation and historical erasure associated with the Singapore government’s implacable march towards modernization since the country’s independence in 1965. The film calls into question the idea that Singapore is the physical realization of the modernist dream of clean slates and intentional design by deploying the trope of archaeology. What else is an archaeological excavation than a confrontation with the precarity of the material world? What else is an archaeological find than discovering objects that have been entangled in all kinds of assemblages of unintentional designs made up of world-making activities — human and non- human alike?

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4.3.1 The Generic City.

The official “Singapore story,” sanctioned by the People’s Action Party (PAP), is a teleological account of the nation’s progress with very little tolerance for alternative views (Loh 5). The dominant historical narrative endorsed by the PAP and disseminated in history books tells first of the triumph of capitalism over communism, and then of Singapore’s march from “Third World to First.” As such, the history of the nation has been strictly and carefully guarded and administered. The National Archives of Singapore, for this reason, have served as “the front gates of history … often locked and guarded” (13). Access to alternative records is often challenging.97 It follows that personal histories and dissentive cultural trajectories have also been erased out of contention. Large-scale transformations of the landscape have been justified in the name of progress and urban redevelopment. As Devan writes “the very physical space of

Singapore is defined by a series of erasures …the erasure of physical space is replicated in historical space” (25). The leitmotif that all trajectories that do not correspond to the teleology of progress have been expunged from urban space has been a dominant theme among Singaporean academics and artists. The overall claim is that in the face of transformation “permanence becomes irrelevant” (Yeo 247).

The modernist urban utopia is based on the assumption that “theoretically everything can stand everywhere … the propensity is to demolish everything” (Ibeling 19). This split from the

97 For an interesting exploration of the role of the National Archives of Singapore in the construction of the historical narrative, along with strategies, historians and archivists alike have used see The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History, ed. Loh Kah Seng and Liew Kai Khiun. 196

perceived tyranny of specific conditions was founded on “the idea that modern architecture was by definition a new beginning and a break from the past” (19). In constructing an ontology which materiality denies the possibility for any such clean slate, Invisible City complicates the discourse of transformation that arises from it.

4.3.2 Archaeologists and the Bulldozer. I begin this study with two scenes interspersed throughout Invisible City. The film begins with shots of young Singaporean archaeologists hacking their way through a thick jungle as they attempt to access a 1940’s fort. Nature, least of all untamed nature, is rarely associated with

Singapore. The country’s overall urban development plan has been underwritten by a utilitarian approach to nature. The modernist view of the relationship between nature and urban development assumes that nature is passive, mechanical, stable, and subject to be tamed and mastered: it is merely a backdrop for human agency that lends itself to be manipulated for the benefit of society. Like Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, nature supposedly exists in Singapore only in as much as the urban plan has provided for it. Singapore is known as “The Green City” because of its detailed environmental conservation projects, numerous parks, and large botanical gardens, which are all deeply designed and organized urban spaces (Teo, Yeoh, Ling and Lai

19). Hence Jameson’s declaration that once “the modernization process is complete, [] nature is gone for good” (ix). The city, as an engineered landscape, is thus imagined to be the product of the single world-making project of a planned urban development in the name of progress and economic growth. But, the scene we are witnessing is not that of tamed nature.

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figure 14. “1940s Fort taken over by tree roots.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007.

The 1940s fort has become entombed under thick roots of overgrown vegetation, and has been sheltered by the dense jungle that has developed around it erasing all paths that led towards it (figure 14). Many trajectories have been involved in this scene. Where that single modernist world-making project claims mastery, the material world, with its plural schemes, pushes back.

This is where archaeologists come in. The dig can be used as a powerful figure to de-centre teleological discourses of progress and the blank slate upon which they are so often founded. The fort exists within an ecology that does that is more than a mere backdrop for the march toward modernization. An archaeological approach to this landscape is not only about what ruins are left in the wake of modernization, but of what continues to live despite of, and even coevally with, capitalism. The trope of archaeology in the film thus serves to multiply the actants involved in the engineering of place and of history. The shaky hand-held camera tracks the archaeologists through the foliage, sometimes tripping over roots.

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figure 15. “Bulldozer” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007.

The second scene I refer to appears later in the film already interspersed in a polyphonic montage of material disturbance. The scene is that of a large bulldozer digging away at a landscape in the middle of Singapore as it prepares the earth for urban development (figure

15). Bulldozers are symbols of human mastery over the landscape, they tell stories towards the future. These tales about progress that speak of fate are established upon the belief that modernization processes transform the landscape so that the physical space of the city, in its entirety, is put in the service of capitalism; all else is thrown to the side-lines: either ruins or waste. All trajectories are digested into this single world-making project: transformation and renewal, progress and its debris alike (Tsing, The Mushroom at the End 18). “Like a giant bulldozer,” Anna Tsing writes, “capitalism appears to flatten the earth to its specifications. But all this,” she goes on to point out, “only raises the stakes for asking what else is going on — […] both inside and out including our combined forms of livelihood practices, archives, scientific reports, and experiments” (The Mushroom at the End 61). In emphasizing a sense of transformation and degradation that is woven into and inherent to space, the film disrupts discourses that would posit the city-state’s landscape as expressive of “delirium of transformation” (Koolhaas 1035) that is the result of Singapore’s monolithic drive toward 199

modernization. As such, the film serves as a powerful calling into question to the qualification of Singapore as a “Generic City,” (Koolhaas 1248) whose urban landscape exists in a perpetual state of tabula rasa.

The jungle taking over the fort, the archaeologists hacking paths through the jungle and the bulldozer plying tracks in the earth, all portray various examples of urban ecological disturbance. Discourses founded on the single drum beat of progress drown out the deeply generative materiality that precarity implies: the interruption, disruptions, and polyphonic perturbances that plural world-making schemes make when they meet. Like catastrophes (see

Chapter One), the idea of disturbance, for ecologists and physicists alike, is as much generative as it is destructive (Tsing, The Mushroom at the End 5). Acknowledging an ecology made up of disturbances requires the imaginative challenge of attending to the multitude of agencies and projects that create disruptions. The notion of disturbance, like that of catastrophes, implies a complex and emergent material world, one that is made through perturbances that unsettle world- making projects leading them in unpredictable trajectories. These provide an understanding of materiality as profoundly emergent and precarious where a wide and open-ended range of phenomena is involved in the unsettling of trajectories. In the same way that catastrophes beget catastrophes, ruins beget ruins, ecologies are always-already disturbed. They are history in media res and always in the making. Tabulae Rasa thus, in disturbed landscapes, are never blank and never slates. This entails more than railing against progress discourses: from ruin appears an ecology that is deeply alive. If Archaeology confronts us with a sense of deeply precarious materiality, then, Tan Pin Pin’s film recognizes, an archaeological approach to archives and

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media will also deliver polyphonies. The trope of archaeology is not only made evident by the multiple shots of the young archaeologists at work interspersed throughout the film, but also by the constant allusions to decay and resignification with which it is associated. Considering how the chemical and biological properties of film both captures and continuously alters what it stores requires that we rethink the language of the archive to a more archaeological approach, one that deals with encrusted processes, with growths scratches, rust and other adhered world-making processes as the inherent materiality of memory. Both the trope of degradation and that of interruption is deeply embedded in the film. All manner of world-making projects come together in unexpected assemblages, interrupting each other, transforming into unplanned forms.

Interruptions make evident the divergent and co-constitutive projects involved. The montage too emphasizes encounter, entanglement and interruption, and the unpredictable effects of these encounters. As such auditory and visual documents become ongoing events.

4.3.3 Polyphony as Method.

Invisible City constructs a polyphonic montage made up of various image archives, including personal records and official collections, interspersed with interviews, interrupted by conversations, intermixed with audio from the past intermeshed with present diegesis, peppered with black screens, intersown with footage of the near present but never contemporary city, and various shots of the young archaeologists at different moments in the process of digging up, cleaning, and filing found objects. Among the footage that is used are such diverse material as ethnographer Dr. Ivan Polunin’s film reels and Marjorie Doggett’s black-and-white photographs

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of buildings that have long since been razed to the ground from the 1950s, footage of ethnographer Marjorie Topley at work in the 1950s, and interviews with young archaeologists as they scavenge the earth for evidence of the past, among others. Invisible City’s montage discloses polyphony that are able to communicate a sense of the entangled connection that make up our history, and with it, a sense of ephemerality and endurance arises that contests the single unifying tale of progress and its debris.

The film, running 58 minutes, won the Prix de la Scam at Cinéma d Réel, and received awards at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and had a four-week run at

Singapore’s The Arts House in July 2007. Tan Pin Pin has mostly chosen to show her films in small gatherings around Singapore and in International film festivals. Tan Pin Pin does not attempt to construct an overarching narrative that would bring a linear sense of coherence to these varied scenes; rather, the montage provides a sense of constant interruption, encounter, and disturbance. Likewise the polyphonic soundtrack is composed of voices, diagetic sound, interviews, and annotations from different interviewees, while avoiding the presence of an overarching narrative voice. Instead of presenting a single linear narrative, each disparate source becomes a thread for making new patterns in assemblages of world-making trajectories. Any conception of Nationhood and belonging contingent on the constitution of a single hegemonic

“we,” told as the unfolding of a story underwritten by a uniform time that produces a totalizing conception of community—Benedict Anderson’s time of the meanwhile—becomes unworkable.

The montage is held together by a rhizomatic assemblage joined by the conjunction “and” which is unamenable to a totalizing sense of coherence.

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The montage produces a storm of accumulated trajectories, each in the midst of degradation and generation and part of a polyphony that does not necessitate an overarching beat. In disrupting the driving rhythm of progress, the film makes us notice the cacophony of patterns through which our material worlds are made. The diversity of footage constantly interrupting each other serves not to underscore fragmentation but as a method to drown out the strong pulse of progress. What emerges is a full polyphony. The film, as its title suggests, is in part about what remains unseen and unsaid; yet, Invisible City is not only about what is missing from official History, but also about the accumulated trajectories that have contributed to transformation within the virtual and material landscape of the city — the deep polyphony within ruins. Rhizomatic montages bring together world-making projects in plots that cannot be neatly summed up, they draw attention to disturbance-generated geographies and cacophonic trajectories. As Deleuze and Guatari point out, “making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation-all imply a false conception of movement” (27). The rhizome produces what Eco termed “Topos of Inefability:” places founded on lists of an infinitely emerging etcetera — and this, and that, and, … etc. The documentary, much in the same way as the archaeologists hacking their way through the jungle, is a work of digging, scrapping, sifting, making paths through the jungle, through spaces, through bodies, through archives, in order to resignify. Archaeology, as a world-making project itself, provides a deep sense of generative decay that pervades the film, its archives, memory and the human body itself. Deleuze astutely points out that the time-image gives body to the phantom that has haunted cinema from the beginning (The Time-Image 41). The montage here takes advantage of the time-

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image in the Deleuzian sense of turning back on itself to examine and reveal the temporal its temporal relationships. By challenging any binary opposition between the living, organic, field of representation and the mechanical and reproducible cinematic apparatus, the phantom materializes; it must first be profoundly material, it is decay that is evidence of death.

4.3.4 The Decaying Bodies of Memory.

Among the various documentary sources the film braids together, Dr. Ivan Polunin’s pre- independence footage of ethnographic and medical material stands out. Watching the footage for the first time, Tan Pin Pin is struck by her inability to recognize these places she calls her own: “I could watch over and over again because I was trying very hard to find places I could possible recognize,” she says in the audio commentary for Invisible City. The images of the 1950s reels are interspersed with scenes of the young archaeologists working away, and with Tan Pin Pin’s interviews with Polunin that took place in 2005.

The first time we meet Polunin, he appears as a vigorous young documentary maker in

1950s Singapore. The passing of time between the youthful adventurer and the 2005 footage of

Polunin, who had recently undergone brain surgery and whose memory is rapidly fading, is stark. Just as the long lost places from the earlier footage Tan so desperately tries to identify,

Polunin too is unrecognizable. These two Polunins, each with their own agendas interrupt each other, a 2005 voiceover narrated by Polunin sometimes creeping on to the old film reels, re- signifying them.

Tan’s 2005 interview with Polunin is peppered with footage of both of them exploring his 204

extensive archive that is kept in a small room in Polunin’s house where film reels are stored in old tin cases, stacked on shelves or in disordered piles on the floor. The vulnerability of the collection is made evident by a close-up of a fire extinguisher that stands in the room as a reminder of the high flammability of early film. The material of memory is neither permanent nor static; celluloid too degrades. Tan’s decision to not touch up the time-aged materials of

Polunin’s footage, thus maintaining the yellowish tint, scratched and jumpy soundtrack, and the time codes on the upper left hand corner, make this decay stand out. Tan’s montage does not follow any chronological order. Jumping from one scene to another and from one time code to another, the montage evidently is also a world-making project.

Invisible City underscores the materiality of the human body and of the documents through which we attempt to hold the world in aspic. While there is a stress on decay and degeneration, these ruins of the past are also the material through which new world-making projects arise. Some of the 1950s footage is narrated with a voiceover of Polunin attempting imperfectly to annotate his reels. In his 2005 interview, he struggles to pinpoint a specific reason for filming the footage in the first place. Even trying to explain what these images are about, for an aging Polunin who has recently undergone brain surgery, is a struggle: “I can’t even remember myself, how would anybody else,” he points out. The ruins of former world-making projects beget new trajectories that accumulate on the screen. The memory of geographical or temporal details for most of the 1950’s footage is lost. Polunin’s voiceover is permeated with hesitation, but in this doubting there is a project. The inclusions of a 2005 interview with photographer Marjorie Dogget who is also in frail health, along with her black and white

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photographs of buildings long since razed, likewise calls attention to the ephemerality of our bodies and our spaces.

Invisible City emphasizes the transience of memory through a stress on the materiality of our bodies and of the mediums we use to document our lives and our places. Memories fade, senility sets in, things decompose, and traces disappear from view, what is left? What is underscored is not only that history has been erased, although that is evidently fundamental in thinking Singapore, but that transformation, deletion, and re-inscriptions by many different world-making projects is the nature of materiality. A close-up of a page scrawled with time- codes, geographical references and numbers, made by Polunin so that Tan may have a reference guide for the film reels, only makes more patent the futility of attempting to establish origins.

The annotations also make patent the second stage of archaeological work where ruins are labeled, cataloged, and inserted within a given narrative. Here, the task is sifting through the clues metabolic accumulations have imprinted on the object and re-signifying it accordingly.

This work, the film makes clear, cannot establish a final meaning for the object; rather, the annotations are embedded within a polyphony of world-making trajectories, they become attached to Polunin’s re-signified collection, and entrenched in Tan’s film — it is the etcetera, as much as the decay, which is accentuated. Polunin’s annotation project emphasizes the contingent nature of film reels, and of the human body as a storage for memory, alike. The archive, even the personal archive, must constantly be re-made and re-inscribed. Likewise, the body does not retain memories and references unmodified. Memory, in relation to its materials, is constantly being rewritten.

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“Does it bother you” Tan asks Polunin “what will happen [with the archive] in 20 years?”

When the possibility of a permanent or static archive is so thoroughly called into question, what is the meaning of acknowledging this impermanence? How does it reconfigure Tan’s approach to

Singapore as a material and lived site? The city and the documents we use to record it exist at the interplay between the transient and the permanent, the dead and the alive. The promise of a fixed archive is founded upon an idea of memory as static and enduring — this is a notion of memory that is not generative. A sense of creative impermanence thus has the potential to bring memory to life. Isabelle Stenger’s explanation of temporal irreversibility as the constitutive historical nature of complex materiality is useful here. Thinking of time in terms of irreversibility means that one of the elements producing it is the cumulative trajectories that transform material; it is this that she calls memory. A body, an object and an archive alike are made up of this memory of all its pasts. No memory, once entered into an assemblage can be forgotten, but not in the sense that it remains static, rather, it becomes part of its trajectory of transformation. Memory is not only an active process but it is precarious, vulnerable to any number of other reminiscences and made up of multitude trajectories inscribed in the assemblages.98 There are no single objects that can be called historical, and those that are, are also constantly being remade, they are fragile, at the brink of disappearing, at the verge of becoming something else. Meaning is rendered

98 For a comprehensive selection of twentieth-century texts concerned with the field of memory studies see (Olick, Seroussi and Levi. The Collective Memory Reader; and Rossington and Whitehead, Theories of Memory: A Reader). While an analysis of this dissertation’s contribution to the general field of memory studies is well beyond the scope of this project, it does indirectly suggest interesting ways in which new materialist approaches may contribute to the field. The study of cultural memory is dedicated in great part to engaging with the material traces of the past. However, although the field has repeatedly deployed and analyzed notions of ruins, traces and artefacts, and their value to individual and cultural remembrance, there have been few approaches that engage with the materiality of these artefacts. Thinking through the relationship of memory with a deep awareness of the materiality of our documents and our bodies in relationship to memory may provide new avenues for thought. 207

indeterminate here. Stengers thus suggests that we understand irreversibility in terms of context driven trajectories, where objects are “being produced by history and capable of history” (Power and Invention 17).

The archive becomes like living tissue continually produced by metabolic processes.

Documents are evidence that something has changed. If tissue did not accumulate metabolic processes, it would remain in a static state, immortal and dead at the same time. Precisely because material degenerates, it gives a sense of trajectory through time. So too, physiological, geological, and bacterial time is inscribed in things through decay and regeneration. “The present of a living organism does not pass into nothingness. It never ceases to be, because it remains in the memory and is entered in the tissues,” Carrel beautifully explains (qtd in Landecker 922).

The archive, of course, even in its traditional meaning, as Derrida recognizes in Archive Fever, has been associated with destruction. Death, according to Derrida, is at the heart of the archival project. Still, it is not this imagination of the self-enclosed archive that subsumes every item to its strictures to which Tan’s film is referring. Through the trope of archaeology, the world is made an archive of past trajectories and assemblages, an archive which never reveals anything but what it has come to be cumulatively in the present. This is an ontology based on an archival and vital materialism. Material memory, precisely because it is related to temporal progression is not static. As Julia Martin and David Coleman conclude, “the very notion of a permanent or fixed archive may have to give way to an ecological preservation system that (paradoxically perhaps) is in a state of constant change” (26).

Polunin’s and Dogget’s footage is intermingled with shots of the young archaeologists at

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work; they too are sifting through, cleaning, annotating, re-signifying, clearing out 1956 coke bottles, examining ancient cigarette butts and the archaeologists themselves leaving behind a carelessly thrown butt in the process. Archaeology works through the world revealing itself via life’s banalities: the past disclosing itself through what past trajectories do to objects through time (figure 16). In the film, the archaeological approach serves to un-blackbox actants such as archives, bodies, and world-making projects that have been stabilized and congealed in place.

figure 16. “1940s Coca Cola Bottle.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007.

The presumption of truth in the documentary form makes the contingent and precarious nature of this truth starkly evident. Documenting is a form of recognition of impermanence. In lieu of the notion of the archive as being able to preserve the past without decay, Wendy Chun proposes thinking of media as an “enduring ephemeral” — a form which is capable of “creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines” (150), and natural processes, I would add.99 Memories are not snapshots tucked away in neatly filed cabinets; and snapshots

99 Wendy Chun is particularly concerned with new media when she develops the notion of the enduring ephemeral. 209

carefully filed away are not fixed, static, or neat. The trope of archaeology thus encourages the noticing of the diverse temporalities of the archive. Stories of progress are not enough to capture these temporal entanglements of which materiality is made. Taking apart the archival as an immobile, discrete entity, and as a unifying foundation for historical narratives, reveals complex assemblages of interconnection and exchange. “The act of memory,” a character in Mitchell’s

Ghostwritten points out, “is an act of ghostwritting” (295); as ghosts, the residual traces of their trajectories may become totally invisible, but acknowledging their imperceptible existence, in itself, breaks apart unifying myths.

4.3.5 Fragmentations versus Interruptions.

The deep sense of precarious materiality that pervades Invisible City has important consequences for historical teleologies of place. This is not a film that seeks to simply redress an imbalance in the account of Singapore’s history. Rather, it is about the recognition that the city, like all of its archives, is not something that is, but something that is constantly and relentlessly made by the encounter of all manner of world-making projects. While the discourses of progress are told as future simple, they point to predictable futures. In such a view, archives, by directly capturing this linear past, would purportedly also help reveal the future. If archives too are subject to precarious materiality, constructing a history through them, results in multidirectional, multiagentic, and multiscalar accounts. Causality cannot be established towards the past nor can future effects be predicted. The diversity of sources in the film does not serve to fill the voids of

Still, the concept can in many ways be extended to all media, as she recognizes. 210

what would have been a coherent and more “authentic” history of the city-state if these had not been repressed. The problem is not that too many “meanwhiles” have been systematically erased by the government, or that the methodical erasure of alternative archives has left Singapore with an incomplete version of events; rather, the material ontology repeatedly put forth by Tan challenges the existence of this authenticity. In a precarious and ever-emergent material world, discourses of wholeness are replaced by images of open-ended emergence. In other words, in

Invisible City, alternative records do not unveil hidden truths, and concealed stories are not discovered; what is revealed is the constructed nature of memory always in the making, precarious, threaded by multitude world-making projects and always thus in the present. The montage constructs a multiagentic telling of the past, made up of the encounter of multiple world-making projects. These include: the footage of the 1950s along with the posterior annotations, Polunin’s more recent voiceovers, the degradation of the reels, the lost referents, and the new referents.

If history told without unifying myths of progress is open-ended and conjunctural, then interruptions help make clear the divergent and co-constitutive projects involved. Rather than fragmentation, I would argue that a more useful epistemological description of the montage in

Invisible City is that of interruption. The appreciation of world-making projects constantly being interjected pervades Tan’s interviews throughout the film: Polunin, who struggles to articulate his ideas, is often interrupted mid-sentence; a cell phone rings mid-interview during Han Tan

Juan’s recount of his experience during the Chinese student’s revolts in the 1960’s; throughout the interviews, people come in, interject, ideas are abandoned, unexpected sounds drown out the

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conversation. As Joanne Loew perceptively points out, this feeling of constant intrusion is highlighted by the use of Han’s cell phone ring-tone as the music for the film’s end-credits (124).

The idea of interruption captures both disruption and encounter. Different world-making projects intrude in each other’s trajectories, emphasizing for the viewer the diversity of projects that converge within the film. As such, the montage stresses the notion that history is made through the interplay of these trajectories. In an ecology made up of interrupting projects — every scene is a swirl of intertwined temporalities that resist unifying myths. Rather than an urban history that posits Singapore as “an endless cycle of erasure and reconstruction” (Yeo 247), assemblages offer constantly interjected disturbances that hold many dynamics, trajectories and imaginations in tension without resolving them. All is always-already a polyphonic ruin, an accumulation of pasts. This puts the generative quality of clashing encounters at the centre of the work of plotting a history of place. Interruptions and contestation redraw world-making projects, continually redefining multiple relationships of encounter and assemblage. Clashes elicit more world-making projects.

Paolo Cherchi Usai’s The Death of Cinema, begins by articulating the questions underlying Tan Pin Pin’s Film: Why do we document? “Why do we try to preserve [moving images]? What do we think we are doing by presenting them as pristine reproductions of our visual heritage?” (i). Cinema, he concludes, “is the art of destroying moving images” (7) as much as decay is the inherent condition of the materiality of film. Cherchi Usai conflates the destiny of film as subject to a “host of physical and chemical agents affecting the image carrier” and its depositing on a matrix: “its causes may be different, but the effects are the same,” he astutely

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points out. This is precisely the sense of materiality and montage upon which Invisible City builds a sense of transformation. Film decays naturally, or disappears because nobody deemed it worthy of conserving. By using a host of documents that have been preserved as a private enterprise away from the closed doors of the National Archives, by emphasizing decay and materiality as central to the montage, Invisible City highlights this sense of impermanence as fundamental to the telling of history. The past is evidenced through metabolic accumulation and the build-up of decomposition. The viewer, usually “unconscious (sometimes resigned, in any case impotent) witness to the extinction of moving images” (17) becomes deeply aware of this degeneration. Perhaps more importantly, in this accumulated deterioration, there is an interminable wealth of past to be told.

Among records used to document our spaces, Invisible City includes close-ups of various graffiti inscribed in the city-state’s walls: “Mr Cheng was here” reads a message on a deteriorated wall. As both evidence of investment and disinvestment in place, graffiti provides a potent reminder that traces tell both stories of degradation and regeneration; they also speak loudly of the clashes between different world-making projects through which the city is made.

There is a sense of ephemerality to graffiti: a sense that it is always about to be painted over.

Graffiti tends to elicit more of itself, so that walls, once inscribed, attract further inscriptions.

The graffiti in the film remain, half erased on eroded walls; still legible under overgrown vines

(figure 17), in the background the soundtrack whistles with sounds of jungle. These traces, trajectories, wanderings weave Singapore and the invisible city consists of them.

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figure 17. “Graffiti.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007.

4.3.6 Sound Fossils. In Invisible City, sound plays an essential part in constructing assemblages — the scratchy soundtrack, the diegetic sound of technology that refuses to erase out of contention the history of its production, the voiceovers, the conversations, the songs, the hatchets against wood, the ruffle of leaves, cars passing, young archaeologists’ feet pressing on old leaves, and also the silences, together make up a polyphony. Sound speaks particularly well of that relationship of impermanence that tangles memory and history in ephemeral and irreversible assemblages. The aural, after all, seems to leave no trace; it inscribes itself in the city in transit; it resists spatial memorialization. Sound recorded speaks in echoes.

An inscription on a screen informs us that there is no audio recording preserved from the

1950s,. What we are about to hear, we learn, is rare archival sound from that era. Dr. Polunin’s footage then appears along with the scratchy sound texture of old films. The audio adds another pathway, telling its own trajectories, but it does not illustrate the scene. Time has aged the sound track into eerie polyphonies, sound strata of past inflections. The film is correct, “no sound has

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been preserved” from that era. What we are listening to is fully in the present, the trajectory of an assemblage of echoes and video recorded in the past, aged through time and re-signified in

Invisible City. The tenuous and transitory nature of time is made more poignant as Dr. Polunin’s footage fades into a black screen where its polyphony continues to play uninterrupted. The blackness gives the viewer the feeling of penetrating the threshold of surface. Here there is depth instead of surface. Like archaeologists, we are left to sift through layers of irreversible past trajectories imprinted on the soundtrack.

The black screen appears at various moments during the film: it is the background upon which the 1950s audio track continues to echo, and Dr. Polunin’s voice emerges onto a black screen as he grapples with lost references. The black screen compels us to notice aural trajectories. Does sound without video tell less tangled tales? The black screen also stands against blank slates. The screen is not empty — voices, technology, ideas, all clash and grow on the black screen; it overflows with encounters, it tells us of disappearances, of silences, of dissipations. The crackling recordings that play through it unfold the stratified complexities of this polyphony.

Those already vanished whose voices continue, to echo through them. The 1950’s recording, now part of Invisible City is a soundtrack of the voices of long past disappeared actants, echoing through a corroded soundtrack, echoing amongst Polunin’s annotations. The old audio of Dr. Polunin’s old audio footage, Tan’s own reels, and all these other documents and records, trace ephemeral assemblages of technology, nature, decay and humans. They serve as sound and image fossils. These polyphonic residues cannot be told solely by histories of

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progress.100

4.3.7 Solastalgia and the Reclaiming of Impermanence. Thinking through the effects of the dramatic urban development that has continually razed

Singapore’s landscapes since 1965 is fundamental in order to grapple with its impermanence.

Just like Tan Pin Pin attempts and fails to recognize the spaces of the past, Invisible City repeatedly speaks to this impossibility. For example, the film follows Tan Pin Pin and her crew as they accompany an aging woman to find the house she grew up in before 1965. They never find it. There are no physical markers to guide them to her house. Rather, as consolation, they find her old school — now Tom Joo Hin Trading & transport Co. Likewise, the camera accompanies Han Tan Juan to a school courtyard where he recounts a memory of a man throwing a bottle of acid at one of his teacher’s faces in 1949. The hand-held camera lingers and sways on a long shot on the school’s peaceful courtyard; is there no trace of its infamous past? If memories are better evoked in situ, how to deal when the markers of memory have been erased so dramatically?

Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to refer to the existential distress suffered by people whose familiar landscapes had been thoroughly transformed by environmental, geological, or corporate action, rendering them unrecognizable. “Where the pain of nostalgia

100 Conservation biologist Julianne Lutz Warren recently held an exhibition entitled “Hope’s Echo.” The exhibition is an elegy to the Huia, a now extinct bird from New Zealand. The Huia vanished before field-recording technologies had been developed, but its song continues to echo through a “sound fossil” (MacFarlane). The Maori had learned the song of the Huia to lure these birds to their traps. This song has been passed down through generations and continued to echo the huia’s call long after it vanished. In 1954, a recording of a Maori singing the Huia’s melody was made. The recording, now part of Lutz Warren’s exhibition, is “a soundtrack of the sacred voices of extinct birds echoing in that of a dead man echoing out of a machine echoing through the world today” (Lutz Warren qtd MacFarlane). 216

arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. … the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible” (Macfarlane). The causes of solastagia are, of course, not specific to the present. Our worlds are fragile in ways we are rarely confronted with. In a world made up of disturbances, some transform the landscapes more intensely than others. If memory and its materiality is frail, precarious and thus impermanent, what happens to our memories and thus our sense of place in the face of solastalgia?

By emphasizing the materiality of memory, so that vulnerable and precarious trajectories arise from the bundle we call our memories, what Invisible City does is reclaim impermanence.

Like Margaret Toplin’s photographs of long-since razed buildings, documenting attempts to capture something that will not be there tomorrow; but in its impossibility, it is also recognition of deep material ephemerality. Instead of discourses of progress that co-opt all processes into its single and linear project, so that transformation and renewal alike are absorbed within its teleology, an understanding of impermanence arises that does not rely on static views of the material world. The film reclaims nostalgia beyond the cycle of ruin and progress of teleological discourses. The work is one of challenging the violence of the single story with multiagentic accounts. This also requires reclaiming the vulnerability of our places underscored by their precarity.

Through this flip in viewpoint, nostalgia can be thought of through the generative forces it carries. If documenting is this longing to hold on to a present that is always slipping away, if recording is a confrontation with that vulnerability, then nostalgia is as much a creative and generative act as it is a realization of vulnerability. To document is nostalgia of the present.

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Places, like black screens, are full, even if only by disappearances which, if we let them speak in full polyphony, yield surprising critical energy. People and the traces they leave behind, time and erosion all contribute to the becoming of a Singapore which meaning and connotations are multiple and always transforming. This is not a filling up of the official history with discarded stories, where the linearity and stability upon which the Singapore story is founded remains untouched, but rather an ecology made up of disturbances. “Intended and unintended; beneficial, harmful, and of no account — within a patch” world-making projects arise, interrupt each other, clash, and generate places (Tsing, The Mushroom at the End 162). The great unifying myth is not filled with alternative trajectories, but dismantled.

Finally, two tableaux. The first is the opening title of the film. In the background brushstrokes of varying shades of grey, like a Julie Mehretu painting, create depth and relief

(figure 18). Some strokes carve deeper trajectories, others disappear behind them; gestural and layered they stress movement through accumulation. Grey streams create a cacophony of layered dynamism. In simple white letters the “Invisible City 备忘录,” in Chinese: “reminder” of the unnoticeable city — appears and disappears into the brushstrokes, in and out. The background deepens into strands of movement overlaid with strokes during 6 minutes. The second tableaux appears at the end of Tan Pin Pin’s film as the screen transitions into blackness and fills with voices of people being interviewed, conversing, interrupting each other, talking over one another, accumulating, until a full cacophonic sound fossil arises from the Invisible City (figure 19).

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figure 18. “Opening title.” . Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007.

figure 19. “Black screen.” Invisible City. Tan Pin Pin. Singapore: Objectifs Film, 2007.

Neither Radiant Copenhagen nor Invisible City seeks to resolve precarity, for it is not something

to be resolved. Both projects make us look closely, listen and move through dissonant,

sometimes contingent trajectories that together produce an assemblage of place. Rather than a

foundational blueprint underlying the evolution of the city, these works point towards multiple

and contingent evolutions. The result is a notion of place as having evolved in all sorts of

unpredictable ways through heterogeneous relations between humans and the ecosystem. Rather

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than serving as a discursive medium for a self-enclosed, stable, and unitary representation of the city, the cartographic interface and the filmic montage produce precarious connections made up of encounters, collaborations, disconnections and erasures, constructed on a non-totalizable, anti- foundational notion of space and place. Both works plot the city as always-already speculative and precarious, as are the discourses, representations, plans, and other place-making projects through which it is imagined. As such, they compel a re-examination of our most commonplace ways of representing and documenting history and place—the map, the photograph, the archive, the timeline—with an openness to hearing the productive dissonances, to reading conjunctural trajectories, and to letting all forms of precarity embedded within these narratives become manifest.

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Conclusion How to Dance to Polyphonies

We are all. We of all the small ones are. We are all. We of all the small ones are. We are in this world. We are in this world. We are together. We are together. And some of we are eating grapes. Some of we are all eating grapes. Some of we are all eating. We are all in this world today. Some of we are eating grapes today in this world. (“Some of we and the Land that was Never Ours” 11)

Engaging with precarious narratives requires not only that we learn to listen to their polyphonies but also that we partake in what Donna Haraway calls “the dance of relating” (25).

All actants “become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes—joined, sometimes—separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter. All the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact” (25). Space, as an ongoing process of encounter, serves as a powerful figure of interconnection. Those who dance to polyphonies are, like the fundamental condition of precarity, vulnerable to the many others with whom they dance. There is an intimacy to these forms of precarious relations that is well reflected by the movement, patterns and associations that the act of dancing implies; there is a communion in this kind of performance that acknowledges the sometimes-awkward complicities required. I conclude, thus, with an exploration of the intimacy at the center of these precarious entanglements through which these texts “speak of boundaries and connections, locals

221

and globals, butterfly wings and hurricanes” (Spahr “Beloved”).

The “dance of relating” cannot be performed alone; it is by definition an encounter. As such, unpredictable polyphonic assemblages are made through the act of dancing. Bodies do not dance in a space that is exterior but rather are shaped by this precarious swaying and are shaped through it. The multiple rhythms and the performed dance arise together. By dancing, trajectories are transformed in unforeseeable ways. They are always-already dancing. Ghostwritten by semiotic phantoms and echoes of the past, the dance of relating relies both on the discomfort and the creative potential of swaying with actants unknown. Unable to rely neither on a strong beat nor on a pre-established pattern of steps, dancing to polyphonies is always unpredictable. This polyphonic performance is one without teleology, it is made of metabolic accumulations of trajectories that are entangled together intimately. The pattern is made through the act of dancing. A few fundamental questions must be asked then in order to learn to dance to polyphonies: With whom do we dance? How do we dance? By requiring us to ask these questions, by teaching us to appreciate polyphonies, precarious narratives contest some of our most engrained principles of reading, of listening, and of dancing. From the multiplicity of sounds, actants and rhythms this polyphony implies arises what Nigel Thrift so aptly calls “a new a-wherenesses” (140).

The texts I have analyzed throughout this dissertation engage with a vibrant materialism that generates new understandings of our histories, our spaces and ourselves. The transformative potential of the dance of relating is fundamental to their formal narrative strategy and plot.

Precarious texts employ and evoke alternative structures that provide a sense of temporal

222

unfoldings without necessitating causality. The creative process and the world in which it is produced are both constructed as a meshwork of juxtapositions, interactions, and encounters of innumerable actants with profound consequences to how we conceive the basic ontological notions of space and time. By employing narrative devices that resist simplistic cause and effect, these texts open up new possibilities for plotting events and experience that explore shared forms of interconnection without falling back into sedentary perceptions of place. Using Tsing’s approach to precarity in order to describe the formal narrative construction of these works provides a means of thinking through the ways in which interrelationships between self and others produces an enlarged sense of community that includes human and non-human agencies.

By constructing plots that involve actants at all scales in the dance of relating these texts call attention to the complex relationships and interactions that contribute to the shaping of the world of entangled actants and their trajectories.

The “dance of relating” requires an expanded notion of interconnection between and within self and others. Dancing to precarity displaces expectations of a unified and coherent subject that underpins referentiality around the human, and is fundamental to the construction of the humanist “I” around which traditional discourses of agency, narrative, community and history are constructed. In this “unremitting materiality of a world where there are no pre- existing objects” (Thrift 139) humans are made through the dance that entangled trajectories, from the microscopic to the cosmic, in assemblies that sway “in and out of everyone’s bodies”

(This Connection of Everyone 4). When the world is made through the encounter of a host of organisms and processes, agency becomes distributed and vulnerable to others. This polyphonic

223

dance resists static boundaries and categories. Our bodies are made in movement; they are always transforming material agencies entangled in this polyphony. The destabilization of the “I” foregrounds a deep collaborative and vulnerable intimacy with others that reconfigures traditional notions of the communal “we.”101 The unified coherence produced by the shared time of the “meanwhile” is unamenable to the interconnected intimacies and vulnerability implied by a precarious “we.” Rather, polyphonic forms of entanglement come together through the rhizomatic conjunction “and” that always points towards the so-much-more and provides a way of thinking about intimacy, agency, and vulnerability beyond the global/local or nature/culture binary that underpins the humanist subject.

“We of all the small ones are,” writes Sphar in the epigraph quoted above. Not only does this communal “we” require that we acknowledge the significance of the microscopic unseen, but also that we become aware of the implications of our de-centered, shared and extended significance. “We” are multiple through our intimate and precarious entanglements. Our presence certainly shapes our ecosystem but Spahr’s employment of the nominative plural also suggests that the ecosystem transforms us in equally significant ways. We, the human and the non-human, become together. We are communal and intimate in as much as we are interconnected and vulnerable to the entanglements we dance ourselves into and through which we are danced into existence. “The sparrows picotent with our hand, picotant with our grain,”

Spahr’s poem continues,

We are all in this world with sparrows. We all the small ones are in this world with

101 Among the many precarious narratives that could have been included in this dissertation. Rita Wong and Larissa Lai’s Sybil Unrest stands out in its exploration and contestation of the lyric “I” through the alternative use of the avant-garde “I” and the communal “we” to emphasize a sense of vibrant materialism. 224

sparrows. With pecking. With the picoter. ... We are in this hand, in this picoter.We are

all. We all the small ones are. Some of we are pecking back… We are all in this world,

this world of hands and grain, together. Some of us are sparrows pecking at our hand.

Some among us are sparrows picotant with our hand. (13)

We are all pecking away, with bulldozers, with hatchets, with roots growing, with bacteria eroding. The texts I have analysed in this work actively engage with spaces and processes generally considered to be the products of globalization and late-capitalism. They dismantle the foundational individualized neoliberal subject, and the coherent communal “we” to which it belongs. As Tana Jean Welch notes, these causal structures “contribute to keeping humans ‘on top’” (11) and separate from the network of vulnerable interconnections through which the material world is made. Precarious narratives call into question the idea that unitary causal

“coherence” is the pre-existing natural configuration of the material world, of subjectivity, and of community. This intimate “we,” Heather Milne aptly argues, becomes “a loose and indeterminate term … a shifting, inclusive, term that moves far beyond the limits of redefining what counts as intimacy in a global context” (203).

We are, of course, also entangled in dances with processes we “would rather not be intimate with” (Spahr 13). The unknown trajectories with which we are so closely interconnected make us vulnerable. However, acknowledging the instability that this dance implies also provides a way of imagining the ghosts that write and dance with us—the semiotic phantoms, the echoes that accumulate and provide a sense of history beyond teleology, “constantly leaving traces—effluent, memories, messages” (Thrift 141). An acute awareness of the so-much-more

225

helps us think beyond teleology and dance without relying on a single beat to guide us; it provides a way of imagining an open-ended and always-ongoing meshwork through which events take/make place and it offers a means of imagining encounter, interconnection and entanglement as the very nature of the dance. As Timothy Morton writes, “All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and non- living beings” (29). Shifting the fundamental notions through which we define our self-hood, the extent of our agencies, and our communal intimacies, opens the possibility to think about the narrative and aesthetic potential of recognizing our entanglements and plotting the experience of co-existence.

The awareness of our vulnerable and intimate interconnection to the other many heterogeneous actants with whom we dance redistributes agencies in such a way that requires re- examining how we think of authorship and collaboration. The works I have engaged with throughout this project pose the challenge of re-thinking what collaboration implies both at the formal level of the plot and as the fundamental make-up of the material world they plot. By incorporating various representational and textual forms, including diagrams, photographs, maps, and insertions of extratextual material, along with the multiplication of trajectories, always in media res, the texts employ the plot logic of the rhizomatic conjunction “and,” the etcetera, and the comma as a means of relating ideas, actants and plots in ways that do not rely on the establishment of a single common thread or discourse. In this way, the texts subvert the time of the “meanwhile” with its underlying assumption of a shared time upon which a common sense of coherence and place is built. Phrases, voices, and rhythms are made to engage in the dance of

226

relating. The employment of lists, juxtapositions, iterations and appropriations serve as formal techniques to highlight the entanglements and interdependence of processes while also offering a notion of transformation produced by metabolic accumulation as new dimensions of interconnection and intimacy are revealed. Moreover, the emphasis given to composition aims not at “unifying … but open[ing] the form to the multiplicity of contexts. …The transcendence is not upward, but horizontal, contextual. It is the transcendence of language with its infinite possibilities, infinite connections, and its charge of the past” (Rosemary Waldrop qtd. in Welch

14).

Concentrating on the patterns constructed through the “dance of relating” serves not only to emphasize precarious collaborations and affects but, in so doing, provides a means of constructing a notion of location made through intimate interconnections at a variety of scales beyond the local/global binary. It is precisely this sense of configuration made through entanglement and emergent re-arrangements of actants and trajectories that requires a multiplicity of forms of encounter and linkages in order to express the distinct registers within assemblages.

The prominence of the configurational in the precarious narratives I engage with serves to reflect the indeterminate patterns of a complex material world. Configuration matters to polyphonies, it defines the rhythms to which we dance together and it determines the vulnerability, precarity and open-ended trajectories that emerge. In this sense, an emphasis on configuration highlights how “patternings of uniqueness” (Massey, For Space 91) are fundamental for conceiving space as an entanglement that is inseparable from movement. Spatial

227

configuration and the dances of relating these permit, are fundamental factors for understanding temporality as emergent (For Space 123). If precarious texts so often resort to figures of complexity — catastrophes, strange attractors and fractals, among others it is because these narrative configurations are grounded not in the exploration of semiotic constructions about a world whose fundamental ontology remains unchanged, but on a sense of complex co-existant patterns of entanglement in a material world that is always becoming. It is for this reason that the indeterminations of precarity and its polyphonies resonate so well with the indeterminations of complexity, What we mean by space and time, the assemblages, agencies, and intimacies made possible by these figures of complexity “has also been (or is potentially) revolutionized”

(Massey, For Space 128).

How then do we dance to the polyphonies of these precarious narratives? As I have argued through my textual analyses in this project, we “dance” conjuncturally. We move up and down, from the body, to the electron, from particles to cosmic processes and as we breathe trajectories in, we also exhale them out into the world. This conjunctural dance lets us sway between pronouns from an “I” to a “we” without settling. As we pass from the macro to the micro and back again we trace interconnections among assemblages. With each widening and deepening, a complex and intimate idea of the material world evolves, reconfiguring the way we conceive of self, place and cosmos. The conjunctural movement provides an opportunity for thinking materiality, history, place and self differently. The shuttling back and forth among disparate scales and trajectories not only “capture[s] the distinctive character of processes which appear to inhabit the ‘same’ moment in time” (Low and Barnett 59), delivering multiplicities

228

where there were once unitary entities, but also denotes a particular sense of intimacy with these processes. What do these precarious narratives do? They build vulnerable entanglements that let us imagine the intimacies, potentials and vulnerabilities of chaos. Assemblages merge, change and accumulate: this is the dance; the dance is the story.

229

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