RESEARCH ARTICLE

Bringing the world into the world: the material semiotics

of contemporary culture
Celia Lury*
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, Coventry,
United Kingdom
This article puts forward the claim that culture is becoming topological. Rather
than using topological concepts to analyze and interpret contemporary culture, it
is suggested that the distinctively topological abstractions of ordering and
continuity of transformation now organize the movement of forms of social life
such that constant change is normalized. This claim is supported by a discussion of
the material semiotics of contemporary culture, which makes use of the Peircian
framework of signs as icons, indices, and symbols to explore the changing qualities
of live(li)ness as they are produced in processes of practical abstraction. The eect
of these processes is to expand modes of relating, and in particular to intensify the
importance of comparison as a social relation. Topological culture is thus
presented as the introduction of new continuities into a discontinuous world and
the making and marking of discontinuities through repeated contrasts; both are
shown to emerge in the contemporary proliferation of modes of relating made
possible by changes in the composition of a mixed sign-system.
Keywords: change; continuity; material semiotics; practical abstraction;
topological culture
Introduction
This paper puts forward the claim that contemporary culture is becoming topological
(Lury, Parisi, and Terranova 2012). It does so by exploring changes in the material-
semiotic practices of proportion and participation, ordering and valuing, calculating
and qualifying, changes that can be understood in terms of the working of practical
abstraction. This is a mode of abstraction that is designed to be operative in the world
(Toscano 2008), part of an on-going, emergent reorganization of knowledge-making,
involving both authoritative and alternative knowledges (King 2011).
While the study of topology initially developed as a eld of mathematics,
1
the
conceptual language it oers has been widely taken up, adopted and adapted, in
social and cultural theory. Indeed, as Noortje Marres (2012) observes, it is hard to
overestimate the importance of topology to social and cultural theory in recent
decades. As Marres notes, topological ideas and in particular the notion that
entities-in-relations make their own space-time have been a source of inspiration
across many social science disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, political
*Email: c.lury@warwick.ac.uk
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory
Vol. 13, No. 3, December 2012, 247260
ISSN 1600-910X print/ISSN 2159-9149 online
2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2012.728144
http://www.tandfonline.com
science, psychology, anthropology, geography, and economics. Topological ideas
have fed into and transformed multiple specic elds of study. So, for example, as
Marres illustrates, in the eld of social studies of technology, topological ideas have
challenged the view that technology and society occupy dierent domains,
contributing instead to concepts of conguration and assemblage, which are
variously composed of social, technical, and natural entities. In studies of the
economy they have contributed to an understanding of markets as emergent in the
activities of rms that continuously and jointly construct an interface to provide a
measure of shelter from the uncertainties of business (Stark 2009; White 2002). In
relation to studies of globalization, topological thinking has fed interest in processes
of de- and re-territorialization, networks, and ows (Appadurai 1990; Castells 2006;
Lash and Lury 2007; Ong and Collier 2005) and is deployed by those geographers
and political theorists who seek to describe dynamic relations and mobilities that
cannot be contained by scaled spatial entities, such as territory (Balibar 2009; Elden
2009). In all these approaches it is understanding relationality that is important, and
topological concepts have been fundamental here, enabling social theory to move
beyond a reliance on the mechanical and organic to include transductive and
transitive modes of relating (Simondon 1992), and helping to turn space and time
from a priori into a posteriori categories (Lash 2009).
However, it is not the use of topology in social and cultural theory that is pursued
here; instead, the proposal is to understand contemporary culture as becoming topo-
logical.
2
It is to suggest that the distinctively topological abstractions of ordering and
continuity of transformation now organize the movement of forms of social life in ways
that supplement and extend those of Euclidean space. In a topological culture, the claim
is, we no longer live in or experience movement as the transmission of xed forms in
space and time but rather movement organized in terms of the topological invariants
of ordering and continuity of transformation composes the forms of social and cultural
life themselves. This is not so much the replacement of a geometrical rationality by a
topological one, however, as it is an extension and transformation emerging from the
ways in which scale, symmetry, rotation, and translation are collectively and variously
put in motion in practices of ordering and continuity of transformation.
In this becoming topological, the cultural forms (or constantly changing
deformations) of lists, models, networks, clouds, fractals, and ows (among others)
proliferate. Ordinal rankings or ratings, for example, are increasing in number and
importance not only in the economy but also in education, health, and popular
culture, as they are used to derive and justify the allocation of resources (see Staeheli,
this issue). Such forms have specic implications for the organization of social life.
For example, Jane Guyer argues that the presentation of rankings contributes to a
process of schizmogenesis, a term she takes from Gregory Bateson, and which refers
to the creation of divisions. She writes:
Between moments when the process stops for the ratings to move in, all participants
relate to one another continuously and competitively. The results seem very close to
what Bateson ([1936] 1958) called schizmogenesis: the continual reproduction,
conrmation and intensication of dierence, which is then ritually marked when the
process itself is momentarily suspended, as if for collective contemplation and
armation. (Guyer 2010, 4)
The operationalization of listing has also provided powerful tools for sequencing,
linking, and connecting activities in many contemporary calculative infrastructures,
248 C. Lury
including, for example, credit rating agencies (Leyshon and Thrift 1999). Crucially,
however, in the movements of lists and other dynamic forms there is a multiplication
of relations of equivalence and dierence and a radical expansion of the possibilities
of establishing comparisons (Heintz 2010). In this movement, change is established
as constant and immanent, rather than as exceptional or externally produced; that is,
forms of economic, political, and cultural life are identied and made operable in
terms of their capacities for change rather than, for example, in terms of their
typological or topographic characteristics. There is an on-going expansion of the
present (Nowotny 2002), and a problematization of events in terms of the potential
they oer for change, for what could be, for what yet might be, as well as for what
might have been. Change is normalized as it becomes a shared condition: everyone
is, variously, implicated, even if only as those whose exclusion is required for change
to happen.
The processes contributing to the emergence of a topological culture are many
and various. Most obviously, information and communication technologies have
moved into wider circulatory practices of ordering and coding, of representing and
regulating sameness and dierence. This includes developments in the mapping and
ordering of time and space, the proliferation of registers, ling and listing systems,
the making and remaking of categories, the identication of populations, and the
invention of logistics, all of which Nigel Thrift identies as contributing to the
emergence of what he describes as movement-space (2004). Elsewhere Luciana
Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, and I have argued for the importance of the expansion of
processes of mediation, which we have theorized in terms of the dynamic sequencing
of framing practices, of connecting and dividing, organized in such a way as to
expand modalities of relating. But here I want to focus on the role of changes in the
material semiotics of contemporary culture and, in particular, the use of icons,
indices, and symbols in the vocabulary developed by Charles Sanders Peirce
(19315). This seems important as a way of exploring the specicity of the processes
of practical abstraction of contemporary society (Toscano 2008).
In using the term practical abstraction I seek to highlight the signicance of the
performative and knowledge-intensive infrastructures or piled upon assemblages
(King 2011) in the becoming topological of culture. That is, it is intended to
demonstrate the ways in which practices of abstraction enter into the social world,
routinely, recursively, and mundanely, creating what Isabelle Stengers calls an
ecology of abstractions (Stengers 2002, 165). Contemporary features of this ecology
include the rise of a market in measurement, the commercialization of epistemology
as knowledge about knowledge, an increasing number of intellectual entrepreneurs,
and public interest in the narratives and melodramas of epistemology (King 2011).
Such developments are, as Toscano observes, more than a matter of academic
concern in a situation of knowing or cognitive capitalism (Thrift 2005), when
abstractions themselves become the object of investment and speculation, and when
procedures and meta-procedures in turn become commodities (Toscano 2008, 73).
The material semiotics of practical abstraction
A number of writers, from a range of dierent disciplines, have discussed the
importance of symbols for societies, most obviously in the notion of symbolic
exchange (Levi-Strauss 1971), but more generally symbols are seen to be central both
to social facts and to the liveliness of culture, the last of these as a consequence of
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 249
their capacity to introduce movement or innovation into culture through their use in
metaphors (Lenoir 2011). So for example the anthropologist Roy Wagner (1986)
understands metaphor to be a fundamental trope, one of the principal sources of
inventiveness, of liveliness, in any and all cultures. For Wagner, metaphor is formed
not by indicating things, or by referencing them, but by setting pointers or reference
points in relation to one another in such a way that the relation is innovative upon
the original order of reference:
Thus we may say that [a metaphor] embodies or images its object, guring
sympathetically by becoming itself that which it references [. . .] Such a construct is
interesting, and relevant to anyones concerns, only insofar as it touches upon converts
inverts, reverts, subverts, perverts and as it relates to, conventional points of reference.
(Wagner 1986, 6)
The metaphor as self-referential sign (symbols that stand for themselves) thus
introduces movement within co-ordinate systems, and within culture; a culture is
thus lively in so far as metaphorical expressions are relative to, innovative upon, and
ambiguous with regard to one another.
The suggestion I want to make, however, is that there is an on-going shift in how
the tropic relations of culture are being made, unmade, and remade in relations
between symbols, indices, and icons. Let me focus rst on indices,
3
and in particular
the use of indices in metrics of various kinds. Historically this has been supported by
complex sets of social relations and technologies, enabling the entities they describe
to be stabilized and then transmitted or made mobile in specic ways, as captured by
Latour in his notion of mobile immutables (1987). But, to speak in very general
terms, such movement has historically required the use of indices in ways that
enabled them to make references in relation to objects as if the indices were
indierent to the objects to which they refer. Such indierent indices provide the co-
ordinates in relation to which symbols may introduce liveliness.
In contrast, the mobility of the entities referred to in many contemporary
indexical practices for example, the derivatives of the nancial market, the
categories of behavior and conduct employed in the joined-up databases of
government, and the search, like, and status updates that help comprise Facebook
and Google is not the outcome of the indierence of the indices by which they are
represented. Rather, their movement is produced in what I will call an a-live
indexical relation to a dynamic (radicalizing) environment that is not kept separate
from or external to that which is being referred, but is continually folded in by way
of 2 or n-place relations (or -tuples). This is relation (or a set of modes of relating) in
which the oscillation between representation and intervention is manipulated such
that it appears as if epistemology and ontology are collapsed. It is a relation in which
the usefulness of one of the most important capacities of indices to point, to
indicate here and now is being redened. That is, the usefulness of pointing for
making culture has, I am suggesting, been limited by the externality and xity of the
co-ordinates of the relations they have been used to enact, but is now acquiring a life
of its own: indices are being animated by the introduction of dynamic feedback loops
in diverse, iterative, and automatic information processing systems, supported by
multiple material, sensory memory systems (Thrift 2007).
How so? For C. S. Peirce, indices use some physical or existential continuity with
their objects to direct attention to that object. This capacity draws on the two
components that are necessarily part of any act of signifying for Peirce: the sign
250 C. Lury
object relation and the signinterpretant relation. The indexical act of signifying, he
says, consists of a sign that signies its object by using some physical or existential
continuity (this is the signobject relation), and generates a further sign to signify
that object (this is, the signinterpretant relation). That the interpretant need not be
produced by a person but by a machine or some other inanimate thing
4
is obviously
signicant in relation to the proliferation of the automated recursive systems
mentioned above, and to the possibilities that ordered, inter-linked sequences of
indices aord for the emergence of what have been called epigenetic surfaces
(Kwinter 2001). The point being made here is that an index is not simply a product
or outcome of action, but is rather a distributed and distributing extension of
agency (Gell 1998). With a newly expanded capacity, the zone of indexicality is
transforming the organization of the live(li)ness of contemporary culture.
A particularly appealing example here is provided by an examination of ocial
denitions of the category personal data for the purposes of the UK Data
Protection Act 1998.
5
As the Information Commissioners Oce (ICO) Quick
Reference Guide puts it,
Data which identies an individual, even without a name associated with it, may be
personal data where it is processed to learn or record something about that individual,
or where the processing of that information has an impact upon that individual.
Therefore, data may relate to an individual in several dierent ways. (Information
Commissioners Oce)
The modes of relating to identied by the ICO include: being obviously about,
being linked to, being used, to inform or inuence actions or decisions aecting an
identiable individual, having biographical signicance, focusing on or concen-
trating on the individual as its central theme rather than on some other person, or
some object, transaction or event, and having the potential to impact on an
individual. What is signicant about this example for the purposes of the argument
being made here is how the category personal data is being brought into existence in
terms of relations, that is, it is a category that is explicitly constituted in multiple
relations or modes of relating to, that are themselves brought about in various
kinds of data processing, In short, in this and other cases, what a datum as an index
refers to is clearly understood in terms of the relations in which it comes into
existence. The argument here then is that in many contemporary uses, indices refer to
and produce not static or inert space in which objects come to life by way of the
associations of metaphor, but a space of movement, in which it is (indexically)
relational operations of ordering that allow entities such as personal data to
emerge. And such entities are always in motion.
Let me oer another, related, example: the inuence metric Klout, currently one
of the most used tools for the evaluation of inuence in social media. This tool
denes the inuence it seeks to measure as the ability to drive action, that is, as the
ability to generate responses and interaction within selected social media networks.
In Guyers terms, the numbers produced by Klout feed a ranking that
simultaneously creates relations of equality and dierence between social media
users, connecting them to each other as inuencers, whilst demarcating dierences
between them by positioning them against each other in terms of a numerical score.
In a recent study, Carolin Gerlitz and I (2012) sought to show how Klout and other
such devices distribute and transform agency. We observe how Klout scores have
been incorporated into a wide range of online devices and are informing a number of
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 251
business practices. For example, social media clients like Hootsuite,
6
Seesmic,
7
and
CoTweet
8
have implemented Klout scores, displaying them next to all contacts
shown on the dashboard, allowing visitors to lter and sort social media users
according to their Klout score (Berry 2010). Klout scores are also being implemented
in customer relationship management systems, for instance by Salesforce.com and
Radian 6, agencies which use the scores to decide how fast to respond to customer
requests, giving consideration to potential positive or negative sentiment the given
customer can generate on platforms (Vaughan-Nichols 2011). On this basis we
suggest that just as Klout understands the inuence of its users as the ability to drive
action, so its own inuence is also determined in the same way. We conclude that the
evaluation of their inuence by individuals in social media by measures such as
Klout is integrally linked to the capacity of such media to evaluate themselves, and
suggest that this interlinking demonstrates the importance of transitive relations for
contemporary forms of life.
But let me go a little further in my general discussion of indices. In a thought-
provoking interpretation of Peirce, Pape (2008) claims that Peirces understanding of
the index relies upon his understanding of two-place relations as parts of other two-
place or n-place relations. As such, he says, they are fundamental to the achievement
of continuousness. Peirce writes, A tap on the door is an index. Anything which
startles us is an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of an
experience (www.helsinki./science/commens/terms/index2.html). Indices are junc-
tions; they divide and connect. The argument I am proposing is that as such they are
increasingly being operated so as to produce (the possibility of) a continuousness of
transformation in n-place relations. In the dynamic surfaces that are spaces in
themselves, indexical continuity of transformation no longer operates only
extensively (that is, in terms of the extensive xity of distance) but may also take
place intensively, that is, in the dynamic spaces of auto-spatialization (Chatelet 2006).
Here is another example, taken from research by Mike Michael and Marsha
Rosengarten into two instances of the enactment of HIV the UNs AIDS clock and
clinical trials for an HIV biomedical prevention technology. In both cases, they
found that the interventions are enacted in global terms but are met with, and
become mediated by, localizing contingencies which themselves draw from
globalizing resources: that is, the divergent spatio-temporalities of these interven-
tions emerge in processes of exible iteration, recursive indexicality, or fractal
dierentiation. Here is how they describe the auto-spatializing consequences of such
recursive indexical processes in relation to the involvement of some and not other
nations in the global practice of random controlled trials (RCTs):
In contrast to what is available in the home country of the trial sponsor and lead
researchers, a trial participant in a low or middle income country is likely to have
signicantly less access to health care and medical resources. In turn, their trial-incurred
needs may place more pressure on already inadequate familial, local and national
resources. On top of this, the very possibility of a new prevention technology may provide
some communities with a diminished sense of transmission risk thereby undermining
existing prevention practices and leading to new infections [. . .] Ironically, then, [global]
trials may reinforce the local conditions which make those localities so technically
attractive for conducting trials. (Michael and Rosengarten 2012, forthcoming)
The argument here is that the on-going relations of interlinking indices
9
are
rendered continuous to one another so as to produce what Michael and Rosengarten
252 C. Lury
call a smooth spatio-temporality. This smooth spatio-temporality not only enacts the
local and the global but also puts them in multiple and constantly changing
relations to each other. In sum, the scientic proof of the object being tested in the
trial is an eect of topological practices of ordering and continuity of transformation.
While in this example these indexical practices produce the local and the global as
a division, they do so in a way that makes visible to some degree at least that this
is not a single distinction: there is not one border or boundary at work in the creation
of a division, but it is rather the outcome of a multiplicity of subdivisions,
recalibrations, and fractal recursions (Gal 2002). As Susan Gal says in relation to the
creation of the distinction between public and private through indexical signs:
whatever the local, historically specic content of the dichotomy, the distinction between
public and private can be reproduced repeatedly by projecting it onto narrower contexts
or broader ones. Or, it can be projected onto dierent social objects activities,
identities, institutions, spaces and interactions that can be further categorized into
private and public parts. Then, through recursivity, and recalibration, each of these parts
can be recategorized again, by the same public/private distinction. (Gal 2002, 80)
Gal suggests that the notion of boundary does not do justice to the semiotic or
communicative process involved in this work of dividing and connecting, of making
and marking (dis)continuities, since she thinks it does not allow for the recognition
that denitions of, for example, public and private are partially transformed with
each indexical recalibration, while deceptively retaining the same label and the same
co-constituting contrast. This is because, she argues, indexical signs are dicult to
discuss explicitly: Once named and thus semanticized, the eeting distinctions of
dierent roles, spaces and categories indexically invoked in interaction turn into
reied objects of the social world that seem solid and distinct (Gal 2002, 85).
Gal uses the notion of ideology to describe how it is that the categorization of
public/private as a single division or dichotomy erases the recognition of the
dynamic recalibration of distinctions performed through the recursive, relative, and
relational use of indexical signs. What is changing I want to suggest, for her
example of the public/private distinction does not necessarily support my claim that
there are changes happening in the zone of indexicality is that, more and more, the
eeting distinctions established in the uses of indices Gal describes are no longer
(only) ephemeral. Instead the kinds of multiple recalibrations she describes are
supported, kept a-live, given many, dierent, composite durations, in an increasing
number of performative infrastructures with a range of dierent kinds of memory
systems, enabling the persistence of multiple continuities and discontinuities, some
deliberate (and deliberative), others accidental or unexpected.
To illustrate this let me return to the example of Klout, which of course relies on
many dierent kinds of personal data: on the start page, users are provided with a
large gure of their Klout score, presented as a whole natural number. Next to it,
three indicators of tendency or inclination show the changes in the last day,
the last week, and the last month, including highest and lowest score. On the score
analysis page, all these metrics are depicted as curves, covering the last 90 days. Here,
the rank is presented to two decimal gures, drawing further attention to the ten-
dency or inclination of a rank score to the next lower or higher rank. Users are also
informed about short-term changes through a pop-up at each log-in, and are given a
warning if there is a decline, or a congratulation if the score has risen. This set of
displays creates multiple temporalities for the processes of schizmogenesis described
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 253
by Guyer, giving emphasis to the knotted nature of the main numerical score (or
index) by operating the number in relation to selected intervals of the past.
To support further the claim that a transformation in the sign system is
contributing to the emergence of a topological culture, however, I need to move now
into a discussion of icons: while indexes may mark continuity and ordering, their
capacity to aord the possibility of comparison, to establish equivalence and
dierence, similarity or dissimilarity is hugely expanded by their use in combination
with icons. As is well known, Peirce describes icons as signs of similitude or
resemblance; as usual, he has three subcategories: namely, image, diagram, and
metaphor. As images, icons are not understood to be exclusively visual; rather images
as icons share one or more simple qualities or sensory qualities with their object. A
sweetener such as NutraSweet
1
, for example, is an image of sugar not only because it
resembles (table) sugar visually by sharing the quality of whiteness but also because it
shares the quality of sweetness. As diagrams, icons share relations or structures, while
as metaphors they signify the representative character of an object by representing a
parallelism in something else. So for example, the mercury in a thermometer, whilst
tting Peirces description of index can also be described as a metaphoric icon: there is
a parallelism of proportion in the translation of heat into an increased volume of the
mercury column. That icons may be understood as signs of resemblance or similitude
in these three ways makes them especially powerful, I suggest, in a culture organized
by abstract practices of ordering and continuity since they are an endless source of
comparison. Indeed while Peirce describes icons as degenerate signs, he also argues
that the capacity of a sign to act as an icon that is, to denote an object by a relation
of resemblance or by sharing qualities is dependent upon what he calls a ground of
abstraction but which, I suggest, might also be described as a social imaginary (Lash
2012, forthcoming), underpinned by a scaolding of n-place relations. In the terms
provided by Castoriadis, the imaginary describes something invented, whether this
refers to a sheer invention (a story entirely dreamed up), a slippage, or a shift in
meaning. Above all, the imaginary is the capacity to see in a thing what it is not, to see
it other than it is (Castoriadis 1998, 127).
10
Peirce argues that
[. . .] the Icon may undoubtedly be divided according to the categories; but the mere
completeness of the notion of the icon does not imperatively call for any such division.
For a pure icon does not draw any distinction between itself and its object. It represents
whatever it may represent, and whatever it is like, in so far as it is. It is an aair of
suchness only.
(www.helsinki./science/commens/terms/icon.html)
He also argues that while symbols require interpretants and indices require
objects, icons need neither of these requirements. He says, An Icon is a sign which
refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and
which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not
(www.helsinki./science/commens/terms/icon.html). My suggestion, however, is that
the support provided by the memory systems described above oers an increasingly
important source for the elaboration of the social imaginary or ground of
abstraction as the possible eld from which relations of similitude may be inferred
(alongside language and other media). Moreover, while Peirce says of the icon that,
as a sign, it is a mere may-be, this does not mean that objects cannot be brought into
existence in the operationalization of icons in relation to this ground of abstraction.
254 C. Lury
Let me give a case or two from my work on brands (Lury 2004). Think, for
example, of how the mere completeness of the tick or swoosh of the Nike logo has
been put to work to produce the Nike brand, both through its association with the
tag-line Just Do It and the sound of a ball passing through a net. For Peirce, the
suchness of an icon is not established until and unless it represents. The ontology of
the thing an icon represents can, however, only be inferred; in that inference, the
thing is framed as an object. And the work of brand positioning may be seen as a set
of practices in which such inferences are systematically tested and developed, and the
thing that is a brand is framed as an object in ways which open it onto markets in
movement. One example here is the development of a logo for the Orange
telecommunications brand (www.orange.com). Before this telecommunications
service was launched in 1994, the companys trading name was Microtel (the
company was itself owned by HWL Telecommunications). A team including
Microtel, corporate identity specialists Wol Olins, and advertising agency WCRS
was commissioned to create a clear strong voice for the brand. The team
encapsulated the core brand proposition in three ideas: my world, my manager,
and my friend. The composite idea was Its my life. A short-list of names that were
held to suit this proposition were identied including Pecan, Gemini, Egg, Miro, and
Orange. The last of these was chosen because it was held to have connotations of
hope, fun, and freedom. Following the decision of the name, the orange square logo
was designed. Michael Wol, co-founder of the agency Wol Olins, describes his
understanding of the use of the color orange in the following terms: Orange is a way
of using red without its stridency, urgency and alarm it keeps the vibrancy but is
warm and cheery. Tescos red means cheap but Sainsburys orange is red, but not
quite. Other marketers say, Orange is attention-grabbing without being aggressive
[. . .] It can be calm, warm and rich as well as fresh and healthy (Marksteen
Adamson, international creative director of Interbrand), and Orange is warm and
friendly as opposed to the cold, blue tones used by telecoms companies and banks
(Robbie Lawson, Wol Olins creative director. All quoted in Day 2001). The strap-
line for the launch advertising campaign was: The futures bright. The futures
Orange. Market research found that people believed the name Orange to be
distinctive, friendly, extrovert, modern, and powerful, and attempts were made to
incorporate these values in the Orange promotional ethos. Refreshing. We
constantly look to do things dierently and in a better way. We give color to all
that we do. We are ready to push the boundaries and take risks.
The Orange campaign won a Gold award from the Institute of Practitioners in
Advertising Eectiveness Awards. This was for its success in creating a brand
identity that captured consumers imaginations, allowing the company to take on its
competitors in a short space of time even though it was a late entrant in the mobile
market. The point I want to make here is that the relation between an icon and its
ground of abstraction is increasingly subject to intervention; in such interventions,
an abstract object such as a brand may be inferred into existence.
As Sanford Kwinter (2001) points out, historically some signs such as color
once so overwhelmed perception that they were removed from the remit of scientic
enquiry and were seen as nothing more than eects of the subjective. This is evident
in the long-standing distinction in the philosophy of science (from John Locke
onwards) between so-called primary and secondary qualities. Secondary qualities
(such as color, sound, scent, and others) were deemed by the philosophy of science
not to be properties of objects as such, but were rather held to be a function of
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 255
subjective sense perception alone. This distinction set up two opposed sites of
investigation, the object-ive and the subject-ive. This objectsubject opposition was
nonetheless also the prompt for a steady stream of studies seeking to bridge the gap
between the two sites. Thus this distinction fueled the age-old search for material
equivalences to match the qualitative feel of elusive inner states, which has included
the pursuit of color correspondences [. . .] and [research] into how people are aected
by distinctive odors (Staord 2001, 156).
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such endeavors were deemed
to be marginal, unscientic, and impractical, but the situation, I suggest, is changing
as part of a wider cultural shift across science, philosophy, and the arts as well as
business. Across all these domains, the dynamism of relations or situations between
object and subject are being re-addressed and made the site of explicit intervention
through practices of establishing comparisons, of making similitudes. Kwinter writes,
The modern, rationalizing mind [. . .] set out to organize the world so that it could
become apprehensible to, and manipulable by, rational operations. Today these
operations have begun to approach the point of radically diminishing returns. [. . .]
the mysteries of the qualitative world are necessarily beginning to recapture attention.
The dierence is that today we have a scaold of mental technologies with which to
investigate the qualitative world in a relatively systematic manner. (Kwinter 2001, 42)
Brand positioning is, I suggest, one such mental technology, an organization of
the capacity for conjecturing, for making abductive inferences about the mere may-
bes of signs and then submitting them to tests in an on-going process of practical
experimentation with subjects. The world is turning orange, as the tag-line for the
Orange mobile telephone company informs us.
What I am suggesting here is that making inferences about icons, in practices of
brand positioning, but also in a whole range of practices of comparison, of drawing
analogies, is a further way in which culture is becoming topological in so far as they
are techniques that make possible what Barbara Staord calls uidities of
compossibility. As she puts it, in the practice of analogy, something is like
something else or participates in what it is not: Analogy correlates originality with
continuity, what comes after with what went before [. . .] This transport of predicates
involves a mutual sharing in, or partaking of, certain determinable quantitative and
qualitative attributes through a mediating image (Staord 2001, 9). For Staord,
analogy is an associative method, a demonstrative and evidentiary practice. She says:
All of analogys simile-generating gures are thus incarnational. They materialize,
display, and disseminate an enigma that escapes words (Staord 2001, 24).
Staord identies two varieties of analogy proportional and participatory. The
rst goes back to Greek mathematics, where it referred to proportion or due ratio
among numbers. This meaning was extended by Aristotle, among others, to embrace
non-mathematical relations in areas like justice, virtue, poetics. By means of a
disciplined inferential logic, it was held that it was possible to establish measurable
connections between incongruent phenomena through a stepped system of predica-
tion. The other variety of analogy the qualitative theory of participation Staord
traces back to Plato. While the method based on establishing quantitative
proportions drew on a geometrical language of equality and inequality, the second,
grounded in the rhetoric of participation, employed the mimetic vocabulary of
similarity and dissimilarity. Both, I suggest, are present in todays practices of
analogy.
256 C. Lury
Staord suggests, however, that the hallmark of contemporary experience is an
absence of analogy, and points to what she sees to be an exaggerated awareness of
dierence as evidence of this. For this reason, she thinks it necessary to recuperate
analogy; indeed this is the primary motivation of her study. Yet she also seems to see
some possible support for the resurgence of analogy in, for example, the operations of
hypermedia that she describes as based on a non-linear structure that operates by
encouraging the swift interlacing of interdependent ideas (Staord 2001, 83). It is in
recognition of such developments, among others, that I am suggesting that culture is
becoming topological. Staord argues that analogy is the making visible or imaging
of ordered relationships articulated as similarity-in-dierence; in the terms of the
argument being developed here, analogy so understood is central to the practices of
making and unmaking of continuity, with such processes being fundamental to the
becoming topological of culture. That is, it is argued here that a topological culture is
emerging in transformed relations between icons, indices, and symbols, in the
relations among which the practical abstractions of ordering and continuity emerge,
sometimes without explicit co-ordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering,
comparing, imaging, listing, and calculating. The eect of these practices is to expand
modes of relating, to intensify the importance of comparison as a social relation
(Heintz 2010). This does not produce either only similitude or only dierence the
latter being what Staord seems to believe to be the case but both similitude and
dissimilitude. Topological culture is the introduction of new continuities into a
discontinuous world and the making and marking of discontinuities through repeated
contrasts; both emerge in the contemporary proliferation of modes of relating.
Bringing the world into the world
The argument I have put forward here is that culture is becoming topological, and
that such becoming is the outcome of changes in the composition and workings of
material semiotic practices of practical abstraction. These practices organize a
relation to an ontology that is in a multiplication of relations specied in ways that
require it to be continually tested and transformed, to be in movement. In focusing on
the role of icons and indices alongside and in relation to symbols, I have sought to
draw attention not only to the continuing importance of metaphor, but also to the
signicance of changes in the organizing practices of our sign-systems. Indeed, I have
sought to suggest that such changes are fundamental to the qualities of a topological
culture, which might be described in terms of a-liveness rather than liveliness. The
world that is being brought into existence, I suggest, is one in which tendency is more
and more part of the actual, and in which potential gains potency, in which the
possible is more and more part of the existent (Connor 2008). This may be understood
as the normalization of change or changing-ness as an unavoidable condition of
social and economic life. This a-liveness or changing-ness produced in the new
uidities of compossibility and co-relation made possible by transformations in the
sign-system is captured by the title of a monumental Biro (ball point pen) drawing
from 1973 by the artist Alighiero Boetti, which spells out the title Mettere a mondo il
mondo: topological culture is Bringing the world into the world.
Notes
1. The mathematical eld of topology has developed through the study of the properties of
surfaces that can be described as spaces in themselves, of which the manifold is probably
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 257
the most well-known in social and cultural theory. For example, the nineteenth-century
mathematician Bernard Riemann developed a general theory of continuous manifolds or
open-sets to dene the curvature of space. This manifold geometry was independent of
the three-dimensional ambient of Euclidean co-ordinates, and was used by Riemann to
demonstrate that spatial structures are changing from point to point on a curve. It thus
provided a mathematical understanding of a continuously changing curvature of space of
n-dimensions. What is of particular mathematical interest in such (varying, or constantly
changing) spaces is invariance, that is, the interest is in what remains constant or the
same in what kinds of surface-spaces. The operations that preserve invariance
sometimes described as the operations of similitude that characterize the objects of
Euclidean geometry are translation, rotation, symmetry, and scaling; in these operations,
the ratio or proportion of, for example, length to width in a shape, or surface area to
volume, is preserved. The operations that preserve or produce invariance in topological
geometry are more general than these; they are ordering and continuity of transforma-
tion. Importantly, they do not exist at the expense of change or movement; rather, the
two are intimately connected in so far as mathematical topology is an exploration of
deformation that preserves order and continuity, or, put another way, it is the setting up
of order and continuity in such a way as to enable deformation or change.
2. Of course, all cultures can be analyzed with topological concepts and in this sense can be
found to be both (geo)metric and topological. The claim being made here, however, is
that the topological principles of ordering and continuity of transformation now
organize more and more of social and cultural life. The paper seeks to show how this is
happening by adopting a material-semiotic approach, informed by Peirce; this is not the
same as the communication approach, developed in Germany by writers such as
Habermas and Apel, who draw on but also signicantly transform, the semiotic
approach developed by Peirce.
3. An inuential understanding of the importance of indices to culture is provided by Alfred
Gells anthropology of art (1998), in which agency is mediated by indexes, understood as
material entities which motivate inferences, responses, and interpretations. He says that
art-like situations can be dened as those in which the material index permits a
particular cognitive operation which he identies as the abduction of agency. Adopting
this perspective one might thus argue that the shift identied here is an aestheticization of
culture.
4. Peirce argues that indices have their characteristics independently of interpretation; he
also claims that indices assert nothing; that is, while they indicate or show things they do
not describe, they do not have meanings.
5. This example was brought to my attention by Ana Gross, who is currently studying the
emergence of the category personal data.
6. http://hootsuite.com/.
7. http://seesmic.com/.
8. http://cotweet.com/.
9. As Pape says, indices refer because their reference is determined by relations of
neighborhood and not by their similarity to their object (2008, 9).
10. For Castoriadis, the imaginary stems from the originary faculty of positing or presenting
oneself with things and relations that do not exist [. . .] This is, nally, the elementary and
irreducible capacity of evoking images (1998, 127).
Notes on contributor
Celia Lury is Director of Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick,
and co-editor of Inventive Methods with Nina Wakeford (Routledge, 2012).
References
Appadurai, A. 1990. Disjuncture and dierence in the global economy. Theory, Culture and
Society 7: 295310.
Balibar, E. 2009. Europe as borderland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27,
no. 2: 1190215.
Berry, D. 2011. Philosophy of Software, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
258 C. Lury
Castells, M. 2006. The theory of the network society. Cambridge: Polity.
Castoriadis, C. 1998. The imaginary institution of society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Chatelet, G. 2006. Interlacing the singularity, the diagram and the metaphor. In Virtual
mathematics: The logic of dierence, ed. S. Duy, 3145. Manchester: Clinamen Press.
Connor, S. 2008. Wherever: The ecstasies of Michel Serres. www.stevenconnor.com/wherever/.
Day, J. 2001. Analysing the allure of orange. www.mediaguardian.co.uk (accessed 5 March,
2001).
Elden, S. 2009. Terror and territory: The spatial extent of sovereignty. Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press.
Gal, S. 2002. A semiotics of the public/private distinction. Dierences 13, no. 1: 7795.
Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Guyer, J. 2010. The eruption of tradition: On ordinality and calculation. Anthropological
Theory 10, no. 1: 19.
Gerlitz, C. and C. Lury. 2012. Self-evaluating media: acting on data, paper presented at The
New Numeracy workshop, Goldsmiths, London, February.
Heintz, B. 2010. Numerische Dierenz. U

berlegungen zu einer Soziologie des (quantitativen)

Vergleichs. Zeitschrift fur Soziologie 39, no. 3: 16281.
Information Commissioners Oce. What is personal data? A quick reference guide.
Kwinter, S. 2001. Architectures of time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lash, S. and C. Lury. 2007. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, Cambridge:
Polity.
Lash, S. 2009. Afterward: In praise of the a posteriori. Sociology and the empirical. European
Journal of Social Theory 12, no. 1: 17587.
Lash, S. 2012. Deforming the gure: Topology and the social imaginary. In The becoming
topological of culture, ed. C. Lury, L. Parisi, and T. Terranova. Theory, Culture and
Society, vol. 29, nos. 45, JulySeptember, pp. 26187.
Latour, B. 1987. Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lenoir, T. 2011. Foreword: Machinic bodies, ghosts, and para-selves; Confronting the
singularity with Brian Rotman. In Becoming beside ourselves, ed. B. Rotman, ixxxxi.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. 1971. Elementary structures of kinship. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.
Lury, C. 2004. Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy, London: Routledge.
Lury, C., L. Parisi, and T. Tiziana. 2012. (eds) Special Issue Topological Cultures, Theory,
Culture and Society, vol. 29, nos. 45, JulySeptember.
Leyshon, A., and N. Thrift. 1999. Lists come alive: Electronic systems of knowledge and the
rise of credit-scoring in retail banking. Economy and society 28, no. 3: 43466.
Marres, N. 2012. Topologies of irrelevance: Mapping the problematic assemblages of
smart energy metering. In The becoming topological of culture, ed. C. Lury, L. Parisi, and
T. Terranova. Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 29, nos. 45, JulySeptember, pp. 288310.
Michael, M., and M. Rosengarten. 2012. Of prepositions and propositions: HIV, globalization
and topology. In The becoming topological of culture, ed. C. Lury, L. Parisi, and
T. Terranova. Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 29, nos. 45, JulySeptember, pp. 93115.
Nowotny, H. 2002. Vergangene Zukunft: Ein Blick zuru ck auf die Grenzen des Wachstums. In
Impulse geben Wissen stiften. 40 Jahre VolkswagenStiftung, 65594. Go ttingen:
VolkswagenStiftung.
Ong, A., and S. Collier, eds. 2005. Global assemblages. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pape, H. 2008. Searching for traces: How to connect the sciences and the humanities by a
Peircean theory of indexicality. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 4, no. 1: 125.
Peirce, C.S. 19315. Vols. 16 of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne
and P. Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Simondon, G. 1992. The genesis of the individual. In Incorporations, ed. J. Crary and
S. Kwinter, 297319. New York: Zone Books.
Staord, B.M. 2001. Visual analogy: Consciousness as the art of connecting. Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press.
Stark, D. 2009. The sense of dissonance: Accounts of worth in economic life. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Thrift, N. 2004. Movement-space: The changing domain of thinking resulting from the
development of new kinds of spatial awareness. Economy and Society 33, no. 4: 582604.
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 259
Thrift, N. 2005. Knowing Capitalism, London: Sage.
Thrift, N. 2007. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Aect, London: Routledge.
Toscano, A. 2008. The culture of abstraction. Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 4: 5775.
Vaughan-Nichols, S.J. 2011. Klout craziness. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/klout-
craziness/1688?tagcontent;siu-container (accessed 30 November, 2011).
Wagner, R. 1986. Symbols that stand for themselves. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
White, H. 2002. Markets from networks: Socioeconomic models of production. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
260 C. Lury
Copyright of Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory is the property of Distinktion: Scandinavian
Journal of Social Theory and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv
without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.