Network Ambivalence

Authors

  • Patrick Jagoda

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2015.150

Keywords:

aesthetics, Alexander Galloway, ambivalence, collaboration, historical present, media, networks

Abstract

The language of networks now describes everything from the Internet to the economy to terrorist organizations. In distinction to a common view of networks as a universal, originary, or necessary form that promises to explain everything from neural structures to online traffic, this essay emphasizes the contingency of the network imaginary. Network form, in its role as our current cultural dominant, makes scarcely imaginable the possibility of an alternative or an outside uninflected by networks. If so many things and relationships are figured as networks, however, then what is not a network? If a network points towards particular logics and qualities of relation in our historical present, what others might we envision in the future? In  many ways, these questions are unanswerable from within the contemporary moment. Instead of seeking an avant-garde approach (to move beyond networks) or opting out of networks (in some cases, to recover elements of pre-networked existence), this essay proposes a third orientation: one of ambivalence that operates as a mode of extreme presence. I propose the concept of "network aesthetics," which can be tracked across artistic media and cultural forms, as a model, style, and pedagogy for approaching interconnection in the twenty-first century. 

The following essay is excerpted from Network Ambivalence (Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press). 

Author Biography

Patrick Jagoda

Patrick Jagoda is Assistant Professor of English and an affiliate of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also co-editor of Critical Inquiry and a co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. His first monograph, Network Aesthetics, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. Professor Jagoda delivered the keynote address at the symposium, Debating Visual Knowledge, University of Pittsburgh, October 4, 2014. 

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Published

2015-08-03

How to Cite

Jagoda, P. (2015). Network Ambivalence. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 4, 108–118. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2015.150

Issue

Vol. 4 (2015)

Section

Special Section: Debating Visual Knowledge Symposium

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