I read sit with my feet beneath me, forgetting til they take pained new creases, Law & Mol talk about 'Fire Space' in Situating Technoscience, sometime like two decades ago. I go to bed.
They've engaged the elemental meaning of Fire (“fire is the element of passion, action, energy, spirit, will, and anger, not to mention creative destruction and sexuality”) to consider objects that don’t quite fit into fluid or networked space: these are objects that have an “Oscillating or Flickering relation between presence and absence”. Their argument is that many things are like this, dependent on that which cannot be made present- and so their topology of fire shows continuity as an effect of a star-like pattern of simultaneous heres and gones. They say some wonderful things about mathematical expressions in this way, “an expression takes us beyond itself, it has other connections, it’s necessary to go elsewhere” speaking of the absences that are present in the expression (in fact make it what it is!)… the paper, the pen, the attitude of the mathematician etc. All of this is working to make a mess, and consider the mess. What can’t be pinned down in a singular thing or moment. Worlds distinguish themselves and then jump somewhere else. things are cutting themselves together-apart like discontinuous, harsh turns away, running away, coming back changed. Different days and inclinations meet and mash in resonance and dissonance alike.
“The argument, then, is that we cannot understand objects unless we also think of them as sets of present dynamics generated in, and generative of, realities that are necessarily absent”
After sleep I meet that boss of mine, with the head that always seems to be glowing from his perch behind the monitor in the dark office. He shows me his new project, making animations of combustion (photo above). Im hit by this constellation, this star-like formation of a thing i dont care about but find myself sucked to. Sleep's taste, lingering through boredom, eye-rolls at the boss and the job from behind my monitor. Called up to take a look, i obey, go to check out his work feeling like oh whatever, the monitors are too bright for this time of day. But then its there, really bright gold, like crumpled metal, like this beautiful thing i want. And it's called 'combustion' and its called 'turbulent flames' and want it, what is it? I encounter this enfolding mass, hit it at the screen, distant from but thinking of its underlying code, the paraview software it was made with, the data it represents, the spreadsheet it probably sits in, the actual flames that might/not have actually happened, the dark lab, the boss, the monday, the time of day, the work hours needed to supplement my TA stipend, the way conversation here occurs between foreheads over the top of computer monitors, the places i'd rather be, the hours ticking down until somewhere else.
It all congeals into a fire-thought-emergent. ‘Fire objects’ became the substrate supporting a particular weaving-together of my milieu. A good feeling, when disparate parts of your lifeworld contaminate one another.
This model depicts a hidden, messy vibrancy within flames, a cartography of the hidden worlds held within and created by an energetic process involving the assemblage of only three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. It illustrates a surface created in between the decreasing space of fuel as it burns up, and the expanding space of a flame as it engulfs surrounding oxygen. The visualization models this middle-space as a three-dimensional surface with an intricate and messily folded topography. The varying depth of this surface depicts the simultaneous shrinking of one space and expansion of another. It’s a “living, throbbing confederation” of contradictory and yet cohesive energies, assembled into the event of burning (Bennet 23). I think the flame might surprise itself sometimes, as a gust of wind might change the speed it consumes the fuel, and it might find its energetic discharges driven-forth with an aimless burning trajectory. The only purpose of this event is for disparate entities to interact, to feed each other and destroy each other, to grow and shrink and eventually disappear. The surface rendered between the elements of the assemblage show a space of contradiction and disjunction, a literal flicker and an energy-flicker too, jumps between magnitudes as the fuel-oxygen-heat interaction of fire exerts its energy in space.
The model shows combustion in a zero-gravity situation, which takes a round shape, different from the upward-reaching teardrop-shaped flame we’re familiar with. The idea of the flame in my mind is highly dependent on its Earthly context; in the zero-gravity context, the multiplicity of the flame is revealed. To think of the flame-multiple like Shi, the Chinese word for a “dynamic force emanating from a spatio-temporal configuration”, is to consider how it’s a full event, a strange fullness that’s made of nothing but endless energy-towards nothing but disappearances (Bennet 35). “Things in the world appear to us at all only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense, alluding-to a fullness that is elsewhere, to a future that, apparently, is on its way” (Bennet pg 32). A flame appears present to us as the potential future of flickering-down and fire-gone and only ash remaining, the presence of its energy and substance constituted only by the promise of an absence of both energy and substance. A ghost of itself in the making, driving forth towards nothingness, all parts becoming-absent, it’s motivated only by its relations.
While never visible to the human eye, and thus unknowable and elusive through a human phenomenology, this surface provides us a tool with which we can situate ourselves in the middle-space between here and not. Present only is the interaction between entities undergoing multiple and simultaneous processes of growth and depletion, a “pattern of discontinuity between absence and presence” (Law & Singleton).