This article is an attempt to understand the increasing profile of complexity theory as a geography of dissemination. In the first part I suggest that complexity theory, itself a rhetorical hybrid, takes on new meanings as it circulates in and through a number of actor-networks and, specifically, global science, global business and global New Age. As complexity theory circulates in these networks, so it encounters new conditions, which generate new hybrid theoretical forms. In the second part of the article, I (...) consider how complexity theory might be interpreted as the emergence of a new structure of feeling in Euro-American societies, which frames the future as open and full of productivity. The conclusion offers some words of warning. (shrink)

This article discusses the emergence of the modern body, as portrayed by Foucault, in early 20th-century medical practice. Specifically, this article argues how the coming of the patient-centered record in the United States was a pivotal event in this emergence. We argue how the shape and functions that the record acquired during this period was fundamentally intertwined with the new shape that both the patient’s body and medical institutions acquired. We zoom in on two specific examples: the re-historizing and subjectifying (...) of the body, both afforded by new record-keeping practices. The topic addressed here is the embodying of the patient: the production of a patient with a body whose characteristics are the effect of the interrelation of the patient with a growing number of professionals and investigative instruments, and with a medical record which becomes more and more significant in these interrelations. (shrink)

This article sheds new light on Bruno Latour’s sociology of science and technology by looking at his early study of the French writer, philosopher and editor Charles Péguy (1873–1914). In the early 1970s, Latour engaged in a comparative study of Péguy’s Clio and the four gospels of the New Testament. His 1973 contribution to a Péguy colloquium (published in 1977) offers rich insights into his interest in questions of time, history, tradition and translation. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, (...) Latour reads Clio as spelling out and illustrating the following argument: ‘Repetition is a machine to produce differences with identity’. However, in contrast to Deleuze’s work (together with Félix Guattari) on the materiality of machines, or assemblages [agencements], Latour emphasizes the semiotic aspects of the repetition/difference process. As in Péguy, the main model for this process is the Roman Catholic tradition of religious events. The article argues that it is this reading of Péguy and Latour’s early interest in biblical exegesis that inspired much of Latour’s later work. In Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979) and The Pasteurization of France (1988) in particular, problems of exegesis and tradition provide important stimuli for the analysis of scientific texts. In this context, Latour gradually transforms the question of tradition into the problem of reference. In a first step, he shifts the event that is transmitted and translated from the temporal dimension (i.e. the past) to the spatial (i.e. from one part of the laboratory to another). It is only in a second step that Latour resituates scientific events in time. As facts they are ‘constructed’ but nevertheless ‘irreducible’. They result, according to Latour, from the tradition of the future. As a consequence, the Latourian approach to science distances itself from the materialism of Deleuze and other innovative theoreticians. (shrink)

Spatial representations, metaphors and imaginaries have been the mainstay of internet research for along time. Instead of repeating these themes, this paper seeks toanswer the question of how we might understand the conceptof time in relation to internet research. After a brief excursuson the general history of the concept, this paper proposes threedifferent approaches to the conceptualisation of internet time.The common thread underlying all the approaches is the notionof time as an assemblage of elements such as technical artefacts, social relations (...) and metaphors. By drawing out time in this way, the paper addresses the challenge of thinking of internet time as coexistence, a clash of fluxes, metaphors, lived experiences and assemblages. In other words, this paper proposes a way to articulate internet time as a multiplicity. (shrink)

During the past decade, several governmental reports have discussed how information technology can transform Danish society. Most important among these reports is Digital Denmark from 1999.In this article, the authors examine how to analyze Digital Denmark by considering two strategies for engaging reports. The first aims at uncovering and making explicit hidden assumptions or ideologies in the text. This approach is called “reading against the text.” The second approach—inspired by science, technology, and society studies—considers where a text goes and what (...) it does rather than how to critically interpret it. Texts may be read as material-semiotic actors, having effects on their environment that exceed or bypass discussions of content or motivation. This approach is called “reading with the text,” and the authors argue that traveling with Digital Denmark makes visible the limitations of critical analyses, while adding agency to the report as it moves in between practices. (shrink)

The article argues against the common notion ofdisciplinary medical traditions, i.e. Obstetrics, asmacro-structures that quite unilinearily structure thepractices associated with the discipline. It shows that the various existences of Obstetrics, their relations with practices and vice versa, the entities these obstetrical practices render present and related, and the ways they are connected to experiences, are more complex than the unilinear model suggests. What allows participants to go from one topos to another – from Obstetrics to practice, from practice to politics, (...) from politics to experience – is not self-evidently induced by Obstetrics, but needs to be studied as a surprising range of passages that connect (or don't). Techniques and devices to supervise the delivery, to render present the fetus during pregnancy, and to monitoring birth, are described in order to show that such techniques acquire different roles in connecting and creating Obstetrics as a system andobstetrical practices. (shrink)