Technology, Power, and Space—The Means and Ends of Geographies of Technology

Abstract

This paper is about the means and ends of geographical inquiries into technology and technoscience. In working through a body of literature commonly grouped together under the collective phrase ‘science, technology, and society’, and in seeking to work upon empirical research on electricity networks, the author draws attention to the ontological and representational issues that are confronted when thinking through geographies of technology and geographies of techno-scientific knowledge. In the first part of the paper the ontological status of nonhumans and the politics of representation are discussed as a consequence of a rejection of technical and social determinisms. In the second part, the author turns to review some of the analytical metaphors that are conjured with in order to address the issues raised in the first part. In the third part of the paper the more overtly spatial metaphors of the literature of science, technology, and society are confronted and the move from a measured and ordered managerialist approach to the spatiality of technologies and technoscience is reviewed. In the fourth section, some lessons for the politics of a reconfigured geographical engagement with technology and technoscience are raised.