Celia Lury

Introduction : the becoming topological of culture

In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this ‘becoming topological’ can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating. We show that the effect of these practices is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts. In this multiplication of relations, topological change is established as being constant, normal and immanent, rather than being an exceptional form, which is externally produced; that is, forms of economic, political and cultural life are identified and made legible in terms of their capacities for continuous change. Outlining the contributions to this Special Issue, the introduction discusses the meaning of topological culture and provides an analytic framework through which to understand its implications.

Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism

This book demonstrates how and why vitalism - the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism - matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences whilst simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity.

BRAND AS ASSEMBLAGE

This paper draws out the continuities between understandings of mass product as developed in the Frankfurt school with contemporary understandings of assemblage by way of an investigation of the brand. Drawing on recent developments in mathematics, it argues that the space of the assemblage is a space that is simultaneously mapped and brought into being in a logic of complex topological functionalities. It proposes that it is the implementation of the rationality of this new logic of space – and the emergence of abstract, ‘optimizing’ objects such as brands – that is captured in the notion of assemblage.

MAKING AND MEASURING VALUE: Comparison, singularity and agency in brand valuation practice

This paper explores the use of three different forms of valuation and measurement by or on behalf of brands and branded organizations: financial brand valuation; brand equity measurement; and internal social or environmental evaluations. These systems, it is argued, are sites at which possible relationships between economic and other values are explored, and at which understandings of what is valuable emerge in tandem with the means for acknowledging and measuring it. By tracing the contexts and workings of these systems the paper shows how they allow aspects of the social world, including relationships and affects, to be partially absorbed into the brand as values. We argue that in an environment in which ‘value’ is imagined to be diffuse but omnipresent, the proliferation of valuation systems evidences both a requirement for new forms of measurement (capable of capturing multiple forms of value) and a search for novel ways of linking measurement and valuation. The paper concludes with an exploration of how these new ways of linking measurement and valuation may allow economic agency to be recognized and distributed.

Re-turning feminist methodologies: from a social to an ecological epistemology

This paper proposes an ecological methodology in order to re-think the concept of situatedness in ways that can take into account that we live in relation to, and are of, a more-and-other-than-human world. In doing so, the paper proposes that situatedness should be understood in terms of processes of co-invention that, fractally and recursively, open onto other co-inventions that include the non-human. The paper illustrates this through the concept of patterning. It advances a number of terms – cutting, knotting, contrasting, figuring – as potential practices that can be drawn on to provide analyses of dynamic and multiple relations that cross the boundaries between human and non-human forces.

Introduction : special measures

Issues of measure and value and the relations between the two have inhabited the heartland of sociology since its inception. This continues to be the case even as many commentaries on the current state of the discipline position sociology as occupying a space beyond such concerns. Thus, while many of the texts now recognized as constituting the sociological canon wrestled with questions of how and if sociology could be defi ned by its abilities to measure, record and document aspects of the social, and of how and if such measurements might be entangled with values, much contemporary sociological commentary appears to foreclose these questions by proposing that the organization of the contemporary world is beyond both social facts and social meaning (Law, 2004; Law and Urry, 2004). But it is the contention of this Special Issue that questions of measure and value should not and cannot be assigned to the sociological past. This is so not least because while the contemporary world may not be organized and ordered via a separation of reality and representation, facts and values, the concrete and the abstract, and is not straightforwardly amenable to either the methods of positivism or constructionism, it is also one in which there is a proliferation of information, data, calculative and other research instruments, measurements and valuations. The explosion in the production and circulation of information and data, including its archiving and manipulation, and the role of search engines, data mining systems, sensing systems, logging software and tracking and tagging devices has been noted by a number of writers (see, for example, Terranova, 2004; Thrift, 2008), but of particular signifi cance for sociology is that much of this data is described as ‘social’ data, sometimes but not only produced in social media. In short, there is an ongoing expansion of the social by way of techniques of mediation, measurement and valuation. Commercial organizations, for example, now routinely produce customer and user profi les by assembling information on tastes, preferences, ‘likes’, ratings and lifestyles, which in turn are manipulated with powerful research tools for a range of purposes. Indeed, armed with such data, commercial organizations – rather than sociologists – are now held by some to be at the cutting edge of social analysis, defi ning, for

Social media and self-evaluating assemblages : on numbers, orderings and values

This paper takes tools of self-valuation in social media as an empirical focus. By way of a case-study of Klout, an influential measure of influence, we suggest that the forms of reactivity and self-fulfilling prophecy that have been identified as a problem with some forms of measurement are actually an intentional effect of such tools: that is, the measurements that such tools produce are not designed to capture a separate reality, but are deliberately employed to modify the activity that they themselves invite. In other words, they expect and exploit reactivity. We suggest that such media are indicative of the rise in what might be called participative metrics of value. We further suggest that the capacity to evaluate and modify the self that Klout affords is intricately tied up with the agency and (self-)valuation of Klout as a tool itself. An intermediate layer of the argument is that this tying up is achieved through the production of numbers as specific kinds of ‘enumerated entities’. We use this term to draw attention to the ways in which numbers are never simply abstractions, but always have specific material-semiotic properties. In this case, we show that these properties are tied to the use of media-specific operations, and that these properties, including those of inclusion and belonging, inform how Klout participates in particular kinds of ordering and valuation. We thus explore the interlinked movement of numbers, media, and value in social media as a kind of dynamic assemblage.

Going live: towards an amphibious sociology

In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of ‘liveness’, exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in ‘live methods’ I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of being in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, for the potential it offers sociology to deploy methods reflexively in more than one medium, contrasting the methods of making distributive middles to the methods of establishing measures of representativeness, and exploring the opportunities and pitfalls of participation, or being in the middle.

‘Contemplating a Self-portrait as a Pharmacist’ A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science

This article addresses how it is possible to view Damien Hirst as a brand name. It argues that the brand name is not the mark of an originary relation between producer and product but of a set of highly mediated relations between products. In a discussion of the spot paintings, the process of mediation is seen to contribute to the open-endedness of the relations between products or works established in Hirst’s practice. This open-endedness contributes to the distinctiveness of the Hirst brand name as ‘life as it is lived’ or living-ness. This characterization of the distinctiveness of the Hirst brand name draws attention to the ways in which his practice may be seen as a commentary on contemporary science, in particular the bio-sciences. It is further argued that Hirst does not merely represent himself as a scientist, but as a pharmacist, thus drawing attention to the role of branding in shifts in the processes of creativity, invention and discovery across the arts and sciences.

Number ecologies: numbers and numbering practices

In putting together this Special Issue we seek to contribute to the social study of number, a field which has acquired renewed significance in recent years with a revival in forms of selfand collective-experimentation, the rise of the digital and big data sets, and changing boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ forms of knowledge production. As Guyer et al. noted in a previous collection of Anthropological Theory on this topic, ‘The “modern” world sometimes describes itself in seemingly magical numbers that hang in mid-air, unconnected either to a grammar or a grounding’ (2010, 37). These developments make the question of how to understand our relationships with numbers and numbering practices particularly pressing. The field of the social study of number is interdisciplinary and includes cognitive studies of the situated use of numbering (Lave 1988), histories of statistics, large numbers and probability (Porter 1986; 1996; Hacking 1990; Desrosières 2002; Galison 2003), the study of statactivism and the politics of indicators (Didier 2005; 2010; Espeland and Sauder 2007; Power 1999), the ethnographic and comparative investigation of numeracy (Crump 1992; Mimica 1988; Stafford 2009; Zaloom 2003; 2006), the study of numbers in art, money, technology, and science (Simmel 1990; Hart 2000; Zelizer 1994), the philosophy and history of mathematics (Whitehead 1968; Badiou 2008), and the exploration of numbers as signs (Rotman 2000) or enumerated entities (Verran 2001). All these studies – whether from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, art, digital software, and media studies – consider numbers in terms of what numbering does, rather than what numbering is. Following in this tradition, we wish to adopt a felicitous analogy from Helen Verran and think of numbers in the same way as anthropologists do kin: numbers both are and have relations just as people are and have relatives in ordinary English (Verran 2010, 171; Lave 2010). Accordingly, it makes sense to ask how we live with or in rather than by numbers. The ground-breaking 2010 special issue of Anthropological Theory, ‘Number as inventive frontier’ (cited above) identified a contemporary ‘profligacy’ of numbers which provoked the contributors to explore challenges associated with ‘thinking in numbers’ (Guyer et al. 2010, 37). They adopted a variety of perspectives to address numbering in different knowledge practices, as operations and markers of social situations; private and public numbers, formal and informal, dodgy and provisional as well as precise and persuasive; numbers as symbols, indices, and icons. To build on these understandings, we add, in