Object-Ions: From Technological Determinism towards Geographies of Relations

Abstract

In spite of the recent proliferation of theoretically informed writings on all things ‘cyber,’- it remains the case that much of the literature on ‘electronic spaces’ is characterised by a strong current of technological determinism. That is to say, it assumes and reproduces a stable and matter-of-fact distinction between the material/technical and the social such that changes in the former are supposed somehow to ‘impact’ on the latter. In those accounts which eschew this position, authors tend to employ an approach towards technology that might broadly be termed social constructionist. After Latour, I argue that, in that they operate according to the same ‘logic’, both these positions—technological determinism and social constructionism—remain within a ‘modern’ worldview. I propose that if we are to (and I argue that we must) tell stories of a world in which what the moderns refer to as the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ are always already bound together, always already binding together, we require other vocabularies than those which divide and ‘black box’ the world into easy categories, vocabularies that are able to grant all sorts of things their rightful place in the (co)construction of the world. Drawing on a variety of writers, I suggest that one element of these other vocabularies might be what I term a ‘materialist semiotics’. Having elaborated certain strands of what this could mean, I offer some tentative accounts of what our ‘virtual geographies’ might look like from an a modern perspective.