The difference between [these] trips... comes from the number of others
one has to take into account, and from the nature of these others. Are they
well-aligned intermediaries making no fuss and no history, and thus allowing
a smooth passage, or full mediators defining paths and fates on their own
terms?
(Latour 199 7 : 1 74 –1 7 5)Then, these space-times – which are themselves complex – are in complex, active,
and only partial relation with one another: scattered, haphazard, plural. Thus, as
Serres outlines it:
rationality and the real itself are sporadic. They are distributed, not in geo-
metrically regular patterns, but as archipelagos in a turbulent, disordered sea.
For the Serres of L’Interférence, there is no ruling science, and a pluralistic
epistemology is urgently required. But it is not only epistemology that must
be pluralised. Aesthetics must become polymorphic, too, an aesthetics of
multiple proliferations of spaces. It must turn away from laws and regularities
to exchanges and interferences, connections and disconnections between
spaces.
(Gibson 1996: 13)So, it follows that understanding space-times requires new ‘geometric’
metaphors that are able to describe them in their own- heterogeneous – terms and
can take full account of the number and nature of other actual and possible space-
times.
In other words, we need to look for different kinds of topologies based on
communication and connectedness across divides between exclusive and disparate
disparities. This is a topologie sauvagewhich cannot be fixed and frozen, but can
only keep on making encounters: ‘a succession of spatial accidents, bifurcations,
catastrophes, loops, crossroads between various spaces that have no common
measure and no boundaries in common’ (Gibson 1996: 1 7 ), a world of continual
questioning.
In turn, the search for different topologies must produce many new narrative
styles, ‘a diversification of models corresponding, not only to the actual absence
of technical variants, but also to the multiplicity of resources made possible by the
proliferation of resources’ (Gibson 1996: 15). What this diversification might
then do is to restore a sense of the work and the effort and the force that goes
into producing and linking space-times, which would, precisely, restore Latour’s
variegated sense of relation in tension.
But we cannot stop here. For as practice always generates the ghostly correlates
of unactualised possibles, so space-times are always accompanied by their
phantoms, which rehearse ‘the active presence of absent things’ (Valéry, cited in
Dening 1996: 116), and for at least four reasons. First, because nearly all spaces
bear the freight of their past. As Calvino (19 7 9: 13) puts it in his description of
the City of Zaira, ‘The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines
of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the antennae of the lighting rods,
120 Part II