From Intervention to Invention: Introducing Topological Techniques

Abstract

This chapter orients readers to the volume and explains its basic logic: that current discourses of technoscience, media, and culture require a new analytical approach—one that can work outside the traditional, modern dichotomies of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, and text/context—to create competent accounts of their political dynamics. Such a framework can be located in the notion of topology. A topology combines the ancient strategy of the topos or strategic position with nonlinear logic to yield a model of discourse that is transductive, concrete, rhetorical (sensitive to contingency), and political (productive of power dynamics). The introduction provides a brief overview of the spatial turn in critical theory, topological theories, and how the chapters in this volume contribute to a post-critical rhetoric.