Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000, volume 18, pages 127 ^ 132

DOI:10.1068/d216t

Guest editorial

After networks ``What they find in that murmuring space is less an end point than the site without geography of their possible rebeginning.'' Foucault (1990, pages 54 ^ 55) The question that the papers in this issue seek to ask is `what is a relation?' Our aim here has been to acknowledge the importance that this question has attained in the social sciences in the last few years and to ask where we might go with it in the future. We have brought together contributions from the disciplines of geography, sociology, and science and technology studies (STS) that have been particularly concerned with this theme of late. Within geography, for example, the question of relations has (re)emerged out of attention to the issues of practice and difference in the making of social space (see, for example, Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1994; 1999; Gregory, 1993; Harvey, 1996; Thrift, 1996). Indeed, how space gets to be made as a set of relations constituted through social action has been an ongoing concern that has been visible within Society and Space since its first issue (Thrift, 1983). It was also a major theme within the economic geography that was at the forefront of theoretical developments in relational spatial thinking prior to the more recent cultural turn (see Massey, 1984). How relations are constituted through difference, furthermore, and the politics of recognition associated with that (see Taylor, 1992) has, of course, been one of the enduring concerns associated with that cultural turn in geography and especially its interest in the space of the margins and space of difference (see, for example, Jackson, 1989; Shields, 1991; Keith and Pile, 1993; Crang, 1998). Significantly, this interest in the relations of difference within spatial theory has come also from feminism (see Haraway, 1991; Strathern, 1991; Rose, 1993; Massey, 1994; 1999) and from poststructuralism (see Doel, 1996; 1999). More recently geographers have also begun to take note of developments around issues of spatial relations that have developed within STS, notably through the approach that has become known as actornetwork theory (ANT) (see Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987; 1988; 1993; Law, 1991; 1992; on the reception of ANT within geography see Bingham 1996; Hinchliffe, 1996; 1997; Thrift, 1996; Murdoch, 1997; 1998; Whatmore, 1997). The main principles of ANT are now familiar within geography (for an overview see Murdoch, 1998). It is known for its relational approach to issues of agency that does not recognise the distinction between humans and nonhumans; its Foucauldian-like acknowledgement that agency is an effect distributed through an heterogeneous arrangement of materials (see Foucault, 1977; Law, 1986) rather than the intentional activity of human subjects. It might be fair to suggest, moreover, that these approaches to relationality in spatial thinking have begun to hybridise with another set of questions to do with complexity (Law and Mol, 2001). It should come as no surprise if we suggest that one of the governing tropes of this merging of interests in relational space has been that of the network. Networks are complex arrangements of space with no clear centre or dependence upon hierarchical relations of difference. The network metaphor fits well, therefore, with a relational approach to space that stresses a nonhierarchical way of thinking about difference and the space that it constitutes as seemingly fluid, complex, and unfinished in character (on such networks as `power geometries' see Massey, 1999). Certainly our thinking in putting together the papers in this issue was to create a space in which the work of

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geographers, sociologists, and those in STS might be brought together to resonate around questions of networked relations. And yet we are calling this issue `after networks', implying that there is something not quite right in this terminology (see also Law and Hassard, 1999). Our scepticism draws particularly on the intervention of an influential paper written a few years ago by Nick Lee and Steve Brown (1994). In it, they raised the troubling question of the status of `Otherness' within ANT's relational approach and brought the issue of its spatiality to the fore. ANT, they suggested, which had absorbed and claimed to accept the poststructuralist critique of grand narratives, had assumed for itself an implied grand narrative around the notion of enfranchisement. In assuming that we see everything as capable of being part of the networked performance of agencyscallops and door closers as much as human beingsANT was combining, Lee and Brown suggested, a Nietzschean concern with effects with a `liberal democratic' notion of enfranchisement. In ANT it was not only marginalised humans whose voice needed to be recognised but the `voice' of things too. Such an approach, which orders that enfranchisement through the metaphor of the network, allows for no space outside. In effect, it leaves no room for alterity and allows for nothing to stand outside the relations that it orders through its description of the world (network). Lee and Brown suggested that ANT was colonial in its pretensions to inclusion, and created a new grand narrative around the issues of relation and differenceand the cost was the exclusion of Otherness and its less certain but equally important spatiality. Similar concerns have emerged from within feminist writing. The unease felt about the sometimes centred and somewhat top-down or managerialist `first wave' ANT studies which appeared in the 1980s was articulated in another important paper by Susan Leigh Star (1991). Although relations are indeed heterogeneous, Star noted that `heterogeneous engineers' come in different shapes and sizes and that the relational ordering required by (say) a male manager is likely to be quite different to that demanded by a poor woman of colour. There are certain relational or network configurations which become standardised, and agents who do not happen to fit the pattern are disadvantagedand their `voices' are marginalised. But feminist scholars have also raised questions about the network metaphor itself. STS writer Vicky Singleton (1998; Singleton and Michael, 1993), though still working within the language of ANT, has observed that the relative stability of certain networksher study was of the UK Cervical Screening Programmedepended not simply upon their coherence, but also on their incoherences and ambivalences. Similarly, Donna Haraway (1994), always sensitive to the importance of metaphors, has talked of cat's cradles and string games as tropes for thinking about semiotic relationality which do not bring with them the flattening and centring that has gone with certain uses of network. Her preference is for a metaphoric overloadone way of thinking about and interfering with what she sometimes calls the current state of disorder (Haraway, 1997). And anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1996) has noted that the notion of `relation' itself draws on European-US understandings which have much to do with kinship, and which tend to emphasise similarity and continuity rather than difference and discontinuity. If we are to continue with a relational approachand we remain basically supportive of that positionthese different commentaries suggest that we need an understanding of relationality that takes into account the possibility of alterity within the relations that concern us; an alterity, furthermore that should not be reinscribed as yet another form of difference. It also suggests that we need to avoid attaching ourselves too strongly to particular metaphors. Perhaps, as Strathern is implying, we need to be cautious about the notion of relation itself: to look for other metaphors which avoid an implied ontological and spatial fixity. Certainly, then, it is clear that the metaphor of the network is too

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limited in its assumptions about connections, regions, and centres of calculationnodes that come to sum up the relations of the network. A network as a spatial imaginary works well when it is the relations between the different actors that are being sought, but to recognise Otherness as inside rather than leave it out requires other ways of thinking about space. We need a spatial imaginary more topologically complex and less certain in order to do justice to the uncertainty that Otherness brings with it (see Lee and Brown, 1994; Mol and Law, 1994; Hetherington, 1997; Law and Hassard, 1999). ANT has moved on from this concern with enfranchising the other as a part of the network of relations since Latour's manifesto for the nonhuman (1993) and his demand that social science take account of the material `missing masses' (1992). In part, this move within ANT has taken the form of studying how networks of socio-technical relations fail; a move away from the earlier concern with successful networks (Latour, 1996). Latour's description of the failed `Aramis' transport system (1996) is a world away from the successes of pasteurization and the microbes (1988) not only because it is about failure, but because it plays with multiple voices and makes explicit by demonstration that it is not possible to draw everything together to offer a single account. ANT has displaced itself to what Latour, citing Michael Lynch, has called `actant-rhizome theory'. Another approach has indeed been to let go of the trope of the network and to look for more fluid and rhizomatic ways of thinking about the spatiality of relations. Some of these have been touched on above: for instance, Haraway's metaphor of the cat's cradle with its complex, interwoven, and sometimes chaotic knots. But there are others. For instance, Annemarie Mol and John Law have explored the metaphor of fluid relations (see Mol and Law, 1994; but see also Law, 1999; de Laet and Mol, 2000; Law and Hetherington, 2000; Law and Mol, 2001). This is an argument that is explicitly topological. The authors distinguish between regions and networksboth of which, they say, imply forms of relationality which perform their own distinctive versions of spatialitybefore considering a third topological possibility, that of the fluid. Fluid objects, they say, maintain their constancy by shifting their boundaries and their internal structures, reaching beyondnecessarily becoming other to network spaces and network objects. All of the papers in this issue have in common a concern with how we might think about Otherness in response to relational ways of thinking about space that come after network thinking. John Law's paper begins by raising the prospect of intransitivity. By examining the case of the Olympus jet engine, designed for the ill-fated 1960s British tactical strike aircraft TSR 2, he addresses more than the issue of how networks fail. Despite all the ordering work involved in the maintenance of boundaries and scale effects between relations, things leak out, explosions occur in test bays, engine parts go cartwheeling down runways out of control and into other spaces where they are equally unwelcome. It becomes clear that assumed transitive relations between the political, the administrative, and the technical which render some of these larger than others fail to operate in such a case. Sometimes small and inconsequential differences can lead to unpredictable and chaotic outcomes but not always. In effect, Otherness leaks into the network that tries to hold relations in place and helps to perform those relations in an intransitive manner that make for less stable spatiality than suggested by the (transitive) relations of a network. Marianne de Laet is also concerned with leaky forms of Otherness. But it is not explosions that interest her but the effects of the more mundane and routine question of what happens to a patent when it travels from one place to another. A patent might be taken as a typical example of what Latour has called an immutable mobile (1990), an inscription device that moves within a network and its nodal points of passage but

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remains the same in different contexts, thereby allowing for relations to be performed in the same way in a variety of different locations. But whereas it is supposed to stay the same in different locations, de Laet, in the topologically relevant way described above, shows how fluid and mutable this seemingly immutable device is. It becomes a different object in different places, which reveals that relations are fluid and contextual within objects as well as between them. Kevin Hetherington and Nick Lee's paper addresses the relations between difference and Otherness directly through what they call (after Michel Serres) the blank figure. They are concerned that relational spatial thinking, with its propensity to include all of the missing masses in a nonhierarchical manner, fails to acknowledge the presence of the Otheras that which is indifferent and outside of relations. Rather than see blanks as things in need of recognition such that we might add yet more presences to an infinite set of possible forms of difference in the making of a network, they seek instead to acknowledge the absent as itself a form of presence and to consider the effects such a recognition has on relational approaches to space. Most relational approaches are concerned with the construction work of building networks and with the politics of inclusion that goes along with this (pace Latour's missing masses). The blank, however, is deconstructive in its effects. The blank figure is not another form of presence that has been treated as absent and now calls out for recognition; rather it is an absence that has a figural presence as such and, at certain moments, comes out of the shadows and is recognised with unsettling but transforming effects. They recognise that spatial relations are not just made up of networks of calculating centres but also contain aporial blank spaces of which sense has to be made if we are to fully grasp the nature of how social orders are made as both processes of stasis and change. Sarah Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne's paper, by contrast, is more concerned with the missing animals in all the discussion of humans and nonhuman (artefactual) relations in both STS and geography. Through two cases involving elephants they show how relations get performed through forms of exchange. Again we are presented with a mobile spatiality in which relations do not settle but which are made through the multiple mobilisations of elephants as both material and immaterial presences. The ordering work required to hold elephants in place is ongoing but never conforms fully to the conditions of possibility afforded by a network of nodal centres of calculation. Elephants perform folds in networks because their Otherness does not conform to the expected relations of the network. Takashi Harada, too, is interested in the prospect of ruptures of Otherness within networks. In particular, he is concerned with how relations get (re)made after the intervention of an event in the form of a disaster, in this case, the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, in 1995. As a witness to that event and its aftermath, Harada worked in a temporary shelter for those who had been made homeless. The network that was Kobe was disrupted by an event that was indifferent to the relations that had held it in place. He acknowledges that space gets repairedbut not necessarily by observing established relations and their differences. School gymnasia become dormitories, insulating floorboards become walls, hair ribbons become devices for the management of insider/outsider status and identity. Space gets made through the materials at hand and the social relations thereby comes to be reestablished and reordered as an ongoing process that cannot be assumed by acknowledging some prior order of relationality. Last, Nigel Thrift also takes up the challenge posed by the event and its radical Otherness by refusing to allow it to be turned into representational work (such as a network). Events, Thrift suggests (and we have already seen evidence of this in Harada's paper), cannot be constituted neatly within established networks of

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relations. They have an immanent quality that means they are shaped as they are made, and a nonrepresentational approach is required to capture their full lived character. Events are effective rather than representational; we might add that they combine intransitivity, mobility, blankness, novelty, and the unexpected together. After a detailed discussion of work on the event and on the related issue of performance, Thrift suggests that the presentness of the event can best be understood through dance. The space made through dance, its rhythms, movements, and immanence, suggests an alternative approach to relations and the making of space than that suggested in current representational spatial thinking. Network spaces, it appears, are just as rigid in their ontological and epistemological assumptions as Euclidean containers and Cartesian grids. In all of these papers, then, relations with alterity are brought to the fore in ways that have not been obvious in much of the relational spatial thinking described above. Otherness dances through all of these papers and into the idea of the network and that particular way of thinking about relations with, we hope, unsettling effects. It is for this reason that we have used the title `after networks'. With Maurice Blanchot, we acknowledge that the outside space of alterity is always already inside and moving in ways that are indifferent to the relations of difference that we as writers on relational space have often tended to assume (Blanchot, 1993; see also Foucault, 1990). Kevin Hetherington, John Law
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