[D66] Network Pessimism

[Oto]

http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism


  Network Pessimism

*Alexander R. Galloway* <http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/>

November 11, 2014
<http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism>

I’ve been thinking a lot about pessimism recently. Eugene has been deep
in this material for
<http://www.zero-books.net/books/in-the-dust-of-this-planet> some
<http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia12/parrhesia12_thacker.pdf> time
<http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/84>
already <http://www.plinth.us/issue02/thacker.html>. In fact he has a
new, lengthy manuscript on pessimism called /Infinite Resignation/,
which is a bit of departure from his other books in terms of tone and
structure. I’ve read it and it’s excellent. Definitely “the worst” he’s
ever written! Following the style of other treatises from the history of
philosophical pessimism—Leopardi, Cioran, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and
others—the bulk of the book is written in short aphorisms. It’s very
poetic language, and some sections are driven by his own memories and
meditations, all in an attempt to plumb the deepest, darkest corners of
the worst the universe has to offer.

Meanwhile, the worst can’t stay hidden. Pessimism has made it to prime
time <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8x73UW8Hjk>, to NPR
<http://www.radiolab.org/story/dust-planet/>, and even right-wing media
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW8OK4_1gQ>. Despite all this
attention, Eugene seems to have little interest in showing his
manuscript to publishers. A true pessimist! Not to worry, I’m sure the
book will see the light of day eventually. Or should I say dead of
night? When it does, the book is sure to sadden, discourage, and
generally worsen the lives of Thacker fans everywhere.

Interestingly pessimism also appears in a number of other authors and
fields. I’m thinking, for instance, of critical race theory and the
concept of Afro-pessimism. The work of Fred Moten
<https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/criticism/v050/50.2.moten.pdf>
is particularly interesting in that regard. Likewise queer theory has
often wrestled with pessimism, be it the “no future” debates around
reproductive futurity, or what Anna Conlan has simply labeled
“homo-pessimism,” that is, the way in which the “persistent association
of homosexuality with death and oppression contributes to a negative
stereotype of LGBTQ lives as unhappy and unhealthy.”^1
<http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism#sdfootnote1sym>

In his review
<http://boundary2.org/2014/09/17/from-the-decision-to-the-digital/> of
my new book
<http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/laruelle-against-the-digital>,
Andrew Culp made reference to how some of this material has influenced
me. I’ll be posting more on Moten and these other themes in the future,
but let me here describe, in very general terms, how the concept of
pessimism might apply to contemporary digital media.

*

A previous post was devoted to the reticular fallacy
<http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/the-reticular-fallacy>,
defined as the false assumption that the erosion of hierarchical
organization leads to an erosion of organization as such. Here I’d like
to address the related question of reticular pessimism or, more simply,
/network pessimism/.

Network pessimism relies on two basic assumptions: (1) “everything is a
network”; (2) “the best response to networks is more networks.”

Who says everything is a network? Everyone, it seems. In philosophy,
Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. In literary studies, Franco
Moretti: Hamlet is a network. In the military, Donald Rumsfeld: the
battlefield is a network. (But so too our enemies are networks: the
terror network.) Art, architecture, managerial literature, computer
science, neuroscience, and many other fields—all have shifted
prominently in recent years toward a network model. Most important,
however, is the contemporary economy and the mode of production. Today’s
most advanced companies are essentially network companies. Google
monetizes the shape of networks (in part via clustering algorithms).
Facebook has rewritten subjectivity and social interaction along the
lines of canalized and discretized network services. The list goes on
and on. Thus I characterize the first assumption — “everything is a
network” — as a kind of network fundamentalism. It claims that whatever
exists in the world appears naturally in the form of a system, an
ecology, an assemblage, in short, as a network.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the good news, postmodernism is
definitively over! We have a new /grand récit/. As metanarrative, the
network will guide us into a new Dark Age.

If the first assumption expresses a positive dogma or creed, the second
is more negative or nihilistic. The second assumption — that the best
response to networks is more networks — is also evident in all manner of
social and political life today. Eugene and I described this phenomena
at greater length in /The Exploit/
<http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-exploit>, but
consider a few different examples from contemporary debates… In military
theory: network-centric warfare is the best response to terror networks.
In Deleuzian philosophy: the rhizome is the best response to
schizophrenic multiplicity. In autonomist Marxism: the multitude is the
best response to empire. In the environmental movement: ecologies and
systems are the best response to the systemic colonization of nature. In
computer science: distributed architectures are the best response to
bottlenecks in connectivity. In economics: heterogenous “economies of
scope” are the best response to the distributed nature of the “long tail.”

To be sure, there are many sites today where networks still confront
power centers. The point is not to deny the continuing existence of
massified, centralized sovereignty. But at the same time it’s important
to contextualize such confrontations within a larger ideological
structure, one that inoculates the network form and recasts it as the
exclusive site of liberation, deviation, political maturation, complex
thinking, and indeed the very living of life itself.

Why label this a pessimism? For the same reasons that queer theory and
critical race theory are grappling with pessimism: Is alterity a death
sentence? Is this as good as it gets? Is this all there is? Can we
imagine a parallel universe different from this one? (Although the
pro-pessimism camp would likely state it in the reverse: We /must/
destabilize and annihilate all normative descriptions of the “good.”
This world /isn’t good/, and hooray for that!)

So what’s the problem? Why should we be concerned about network
pessimism? Let me state clearly so there’s no misunderstanding,
pessimism isn’t the problem here. Likewise, networks are not the
problem. (Let no one label me “anti network” nor “anti pessimism” — in
fact I’m not even sure what either of those positions would mean.) The
issue, as I see it, is that network pessimism deploys and sustains a
specific dogma, confining both networks and pessimism to a single,
narrow ideological position. It’s this narrow-mindedness that should be
questioned.

Specifically I can see three basic problems with network pessimism, the
problem of presentism, the problem of ideology, and the problem of the
event.

/The problem of presentism/ refers to the way in which networks and
network thinking are, by design, allergic to historicization. This
exhibits itself in a number of different ways. Networks arrive on the
scene at the proverbial “end of history” (and they do so precisely
because they /help/ /end /this history). Ecological and systems-oriented
thinking, while admittedly always temporal by nature, gained popularity
as a kind of solution to the problems of diachrony. Space and landscape
take the place of time and history. As Jameson has noted, the “spatial
turn” of postmodernity goes hand in hand with a denigration of the
“temporal moment” of previous intellectual movements. From Hegel’s
history to Luhmann’s systems. From Einstein’s general relativity to
Riemann’s complex surfaces. From phenomenology to assemblage theory.
>From the “time image” of cinema to the “database image” of the internet.
>From the old mantra /always historicize/ to the new mantra /always connect/.

During the age of clockwork, the universe was thought to be a huge
mechanism, with the heavens rotating according to the music of the
spheres. When the steam engine was the source of newfound power, the
world suddenly became a dynamo of untold thermodynamic force. After
full-fledged industrialization, the body became a factory.  Technologies
and infrastructures are seductive metaphors. So it’s no surprise (and no
coincidence) that today, in the age of the network, a new template
imprints itself on everything in sight. In other words, the assumption
“everything is a network” gradually falls apart into a kind of tautology
of presentism. “Everything right now is a network…because everything
right now has been already defined as a network.”

This leads to /the problem of ideology/. Again we’re faced with an
existential challenge, because network technologies were largely
invented as a non-ideological or extra-ideological structure. When
writing /Protocol <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol>/ I
interviewed some of the computer scientists responsible for the basic
internet protocols and most of them reported that they “have no
ideology” when designing networks, that they are merely interested in
“code that works” and “systems that are efficient and robust.” In
sociology and philosophy of science, figures like Bruno Latour routinely
describe their work as “post-critical,” merely focused on the direct
mechanisms of network organization. Hence ideology as a /problem to be
forgotten or subsumed/: networks are specifically conceived and designed
as those things that both are non-ideological in their conception (we
just want to “get things done”), but also post-ideological in their
architecture (in that they acknowledge and co-opt the very terms of
previous ideological debates, things like heterogeneity, difference,
agency, and subject formation).

/The problem of the event/ indicates a crisis for the very concept of
events themselves. Here Badiou is invaluable. Network architectures are
the perfect instantiation of what Badiou derisively labels “democratic
materialism,” that is, a world in which there are “only bodies and
languages.” In Badiou’s terms, if networks are the natural state of the
situation and there is no way to deviate from nature, then there is no
event, and hence no possibility for truth. Networks appear, then, as the
consummate “being /without/ event.”

What could be worse? If networks are designed to accommodate massive
levels of contingency — as with the famous Robustness Principle
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-12> — then they are also
exceptionally adept at warding off “uncontrollable” change wherever it
might arise. If everything is a network, then there’s no escape, there’s
no possibility for the event.

Jameson writes as much in /The Seeds of Time/ when he says that it is
easier to imagine the end of the earth and the end of nature than it is
to imagine the ends of capitalism. Network pessimism, in other words, is
really a kind of network /defeatism /in that it makes networks the alpha
and omega of our world. It’s easier to imagine the end of that world
than it is to discard the network metaphor and imagine a kind of
non-world in which networks are no longer dominant.

In sum, we shouldn’t give in to network pessimism. We shouldn’t
subscribe to the strong claim that everything is a network. (Nor should
we subscribe to the softer claim, that networks are merely the most
common, popular, or natural architecture for today’s world.) Further, we
shouldn’t think that networks are the best response to networks. Instead
we must ask the hard questions. What is the political fate of networks?
Did heterogeneity and systematicity survive the Twentieth Century? If
so, at what cost? What would a non-net look like? And does thinking have
a future without the network as guide?

1
<http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism#sdfootnote1anc>Anna
Conlan, “Representing Possibility: Mourning, Memorial, and Queer
Museology,” in /Gender, Sexuality and Museums/, ed. Amy K. Levin
(London: Routledge, 2010): 253-263.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20141115/d5d942fb/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 306459 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20141115/d5d942fb/attachment-0001.jpe>