Surgical monads: a social topology of the operating room

In this paper, I describe surgical interventions as events that occur simultaneously in four different spaces or topologies-region, network, fluid, and fire. I also develop a way of describing the relations between these spaces. My aim is to find a way of describing the relations between different forms of spatiality and so between different versions of scale, size, and, specially, of absence and presence. I argue that the operating room is an effect of the interferences between different types of special relations. This is presented as a neo-monadology: I suggest that the interference between these four spaces is generative, not only of the surgical event but also of the differences between the topologies themselves. I use this argument to develop a tool for understanding the multiple relations between the 'local' and the 'global'.