Geographies of the event? Rethinking time and power through digital interfaces

Abstract

This paper examines work in cultural and human geography that theorises temporality in terms of events. Moving from humanist phenomenology, to non-representational and assemblage theories and current geographies of encounter, it suggests these accounts of events tend to analyse the past and future through the lens of the present. Building upon these literatures and the work of Tristan Garcia, the paper argues for an expanded notion of the event, where past and future events can be considered as both distinct from, and linked to, the present moment. Here, time comes to be defined as the ordering and stacking of events, where events are understood as sites of comprehension, in which entities are differentiated. The paper suggests this position is useful in order to trace temporal causality across and between entities and events. Tracing the causality of entities and their ordering and stacking across events enables a closer analysis of what the paper terms the temporal power of non-human things. To illustrate this argument, examples from an ESRC project on digital gaming and in-game purchasing are analysed.