Network Aesthetics

Patrick Jagoda

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226346656
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The term "network" is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word's ubiquity has also made it a cliché, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network's role as a way for people to construct and manage their world—and their view of themselves.Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors and infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought.Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today's world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed.

Part 1

Linear Forms

It is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected.

Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)

In the far future of Fredric Brown’s 1954 science fiction short story “Answer,” two operators turn a “switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into the supercircuit that would connect them all into the one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.” Upon activating this unprecedentedly powerful network, one of the operators asks the supercalculator “a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer”: “Is there a God?” Ominously, at the climax of the tale, the networked machine replies, “Yes, now there is a God,” kills the interrogator, and severs itself forever from human control.1 Fifty years later, the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003–9) told a story motivated by similar cultural anxieties. In the miniseries that launched the show, artificially constructed Cylons achieve sentience and escape from their human creators. After developing their own military force, the Cylons initiate a massive attack against human civilization. The only human-operated military “battlestar” to survive this near-total nuclear genocide does so precisely by not being linked into the computerized defense network that is incapacitated by a powerful virus.2 Networks, in both of these scenarios, are major technological achievements that enable control and communication, but they are also infrastructures that make their human creators susceptible to perpetual vulnerabilities.

During the period extending from the birth of cybernetics in the 1940s to the construction of the US military’s ARPANET in the 1960s to the commercialization of the Internet in the 1980s to the rapid proliferation of the World Wide Web and social media networks in the 1990s and early twenty-first century, the transformation of transnational communication gave rise to dystopian fears—as well as utopian investments—that were most prevalent in science fiction narratives across media. In his 1993 book Terminal Identity, Scott Bukatman argues that “it has fallen to science fiction to repeatedly narrate a new subject that can somehow directly interface with—and master—the cybernetic technologies of the Information Age, an era in which, as Jean Baudrillard observed, the subject has become a ‘terminal of multiple networks.’”3 As the science fiction editor Gardner Dozois observes, extending Bukatman’s point about technological networks to a more generalized network paradigm, we live in “an interlocking and interdependent gestalt made up of thousands of factors and combinations thereof: cultural, technological, biological, psychological, historical, environmental.” Science fiction, he continues, is a literary genre uniquely able to explore this very “interdependence of things.”4

Though cultural fears about the loss of individual control date back to Cold War–era science fiction about “hive minds,” a concern with networks as such proliferates in later twentieth-century works.5 Cyberpunk novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), as well as films such as The Matrix (1999), all represent threateningly ubiquitous computer networks. Beyond the Internet and other communications systems, science fiction has also explored networks in the more capacious sense taken up by network science. For example, speculative novels such as David Brin’s Earth (1990) and films such as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008) dramatize anxieties about ecological networks. Other science fiction works, including Pat Cadigan’s novel Synners (1991), Walter Mosley’s story collection Futureland (2002), and Warren Ellis’s comic book series Global Frequency (2002–4), move beyond thematic representation and use formal experiments to intensify the anxieties and hopes inherent in social networks.

Despite the undeniable importance of science fiction as a genre that makes networks accessible, the linear narrative works that I explore in the first part of this book draw largely from other sources—including historical novels, techno-thrillers, conspiracy films, urban fiction, and procedural crime drama—in order to aestheticize networks. My departure from science fiction has largely to do with an interest in ordinary network experiences. It is not that science fiction is incapable of attending to and speculating about everyday life. However, the space operas and global narratives that remain common within science fiction tend to privilege the systemic nature of networks, as well as interactions between various nodes and links. Admittedly, the cultural works on which I focus—novels such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999), films such as Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), and television serials such as The Wire (2002–8)—make visible similar structures. At the same time, these works privilege affective experiences of networks. Moreover, unlike science fiction works, these pieces are not predominantly speculative.

The cultural works I analyze all appeared in the 1990s and 2000s. Undoubtedly, there are prescient works such as Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a passage of which serves as the epigraph for this overview, which already grapple with an emergent network imaginary. Even so, my historical selection of texts allows me to focus on a moment when US culture was more densely saturated by networks and within a new paradigm. Personal computers and the web, for instance, lost some of their novelty during this period and became increasingly commonplace technologies, especially in the United States. While questions of control are still significant in these works, networks are not imagined exclusively in polarizing dystopian or utopian terms, as is often the case in science fiction.

The first three chapters of this book take up works that examine networks through linear narratives, even as they borrow from and enter into conversation with digital and networked media.6 These novels, films, and television series are, in one sense, inherently inadequate to the task of comprehensively representing networks as totalities or large-scale structures. Specifically, the sequences of text or images that constitute these works make any unified understanding of nonsequential networks impossible. Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” already laments the disappearance of stories—especially a mode of oral storytelling that is supplanted by the novel and news media—amidst an increased proliferation of information. “The value of information,” he writes, “does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.”7 Communications networks have even further complicated the role of narrative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their decentralization and nonlinearity, they defy and exceed narrative form.

At the same time, the rise of networks by no means entails an obsolescence of storytelling. On the contrary, in the early twenty-first century, there is a greater availability of narrative across media than ever before. Even so, long-form narratives of the type that the following chapters analyze stand in contrast (temporally) to the velocity of many networks and (spatially) to their scale. As Bernard Stiegler notes, “Networks of current events necessarily function at the speed of light” because “the value of information as commodity drops precipitously with time.” By contrast, “the time of relation, of ‘narrative,’ is always belated with respect to what is narrated, is always cited in being recited.”8 The limitations of linear narrative artworks are arguably also assets in grasping networks. In Stiegler’s sense, these cultural works can channel networks by slowing down time and, through their tactical belatedness, make these structures sensible via temporal constrictions and dilations. In terms of scale, narrative can zoom in and out of networks to offer both glimpses of macrolevel social networks and experiences of microlevel affective relations. Stories also dramatize, even induce, both the pleasures and anxieties that accompany enormous economic, geopolitical, and technological networks.

Linear narratives can plot series of linkages across time and evoke varied experiences of networked wholes, while still keeping alive the tensions, contradictions, and elisions introduced by networked processes. The works that I analyze do not promise easy resolutions. They insert readers and viewers into the midst of various uncertainties and ambivalences. By attending to both the medium-specific qualities of these works and to their comparative media dimensions, the first three chapters examine the maximal, emergent, and realist qualities of network aesthetics.

1

Maximal Aesthetics: Network Novels

Acts of mapping are creative, sometimes anxious, moments in coming to knowledge of the world, and the map is both the spatial embodiment of knowledge and a stimulus to further cognitive engagements.

Denis Cosgrove, Mappings

And how can you tell the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?

Don DeLillo, Underworld

The Network Novel

In this chapter, I explore the network novel—a late twentieth-century genre that reworks and intensifies the cultural concerns regarding a world interconnected by communication and transportation networks, and made unprecedentedly dependent upon an informational economy. I date the apex of this genre to the 1990s. Certainly there are earlier examples, such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which was published in the early years of complexity science and during the rise of globally oriented American neoliberalism. It was not until the early 1990s, however, that the popularization of the Internet altered the public perception of information technology and transformed networks into an even more prominent metaphor of contemporary life. Numerous novels published during the period registered this major shift and explored the interdisciplinary significance of networks. Several formally innovative novels from the 1990s, including Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), Marge Piercy’s He, She and It (1991), Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), and David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), examine the danger and promise of the seemingly ubiquitous network form. Similarly, early twenty-first-century novels and interconnected short story collections, such as Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000), Walter Mosley’s Futureland (2001), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), oscillate among multiple perspectives and transnational sites in order to interrogate the significance of networks in an unfolding present.

In what follows, I neither categorize all of the recurring attributes of the network novel nor offer a comprehensive list of texts that make up this canon. Instead of such encyclopedic labor, I use this genre to explore the relationship between network structures and novelistic form in late twentieth-century American literature. While network visualizations offer a stable representation or a map of elements configured as nodes and links, the novel makes possible processes of mapping networks across space and time.1 As we will see, network novels do not take networks for granted as stable objects. They seek to intervene, linguistically and aesthetically, in the cultural field of the network imaginary. My selected textual nodes for this analysis—Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999)—foreground the maximal capacities of network aesthetics. Maximalism marks a quality of all of the cultural works in this book insofar as they animate complexity in order to both enable and limit knowledge. The novels in this chapter also activate a series of other concepts that network form encourages us to think about in new ways. These intersecting concepts include “knowledge,” “history,” “event,” and “materiality,” as well as Fredric Jameson’s aesthetic of “cognitive mapping.”

With Underworld and Cryptonomicon, DeLillo and Stephenson veer from previous creative orientations—postmodern literature and science fiction, respectively—to write maximalist texts that aspire to be histories of the present.2 Both novels historicize a world that increasingly follows network logics through formal and stylistic techniques. DeLillo’s and Stephenson’s texts also envision networks in varied pasts and possible futures that give shape to their contemporary moments in the late 1990s. It is important to emphasize that these novels do not merely represent or thematize networks. Instead, they find their fundamental aesthetic raison d’être in the paradigm shift of the network society that they interrogate and intensify through metaphor and technological imaginaries.

Even as I am not proposing a set definition of the network novel, it is worth thinking heuristically about this genre category at the outset. What, fundamentally, does it mean for Underworld and Cryptonomicon to be network novels? One way to answer this question is to differentiate the network novel from two important genres that are related but register different historical imperatives: the encyclopedic narrative and the postmodern novel. The “encyclopedic narrative,” first of all, is a category proposed by Edward Mendelson as a central genre of Western literature, a transhistorical collection of texts that include Dante’s Commedia, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Joyce’s Ulysses. Encyclopedic narratives are maximalist works that originate within national cultures. Unlike epics, which take place in “a legendary past,” encyclopedic narratives attempt to make sense of their present moment’s historical emergence. Through techniques such as synecdoche and metaphor, these texts seek “to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge.” The encyclopedic narrative assembles numerous literary styles and genres, “incorporating, but never limited to, the conventions of heroic epic, quest romance, symbolist poem, Bildungsroman, psychomachia, bourgeois novel, lyric interlude, drama, eclogue and catalogue.”3

Underworld and Cryptonomicon—especially given their maximalism—could easily be mistaken for encyclopedic narratives, but notable differences set them apart from this genre. The Enlightenment-era genre of the modern encyclopedia is aligned with nationalist aspirations.4 Alphabetically ordered and intent on totalizing classification, an encyclopedic compendium of human knowledge develops a general system to assimilate all the globe’s diversity. The encyclopedia represents a prime archival structure of imperial organizing ambitions that finds its present-day extension, for instance, in big data. However, network novels dating back to Gravity’s Rainbow reveal an ambivalent relationship to such informatic organization. On the one hand, these texts achieve historical scope, geographical coverage, and multidisciplinary referentiality that are in fact encyclopedic. On the other, these novels privilege decidedly nonencyclopedic fragmentation, apophenic linkage of elemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Network Aesthetics
• Part 1: Linear Forms
• Part 2: Distributed Forms
• Notes
• Index