<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<header class="entry-header">
<address class="entry-title"><a
href="http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism">http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism</a><br>
</address>
<h1 class="entry-title">Network Pessimism</h1>
<p><a href="http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/"
class="homename"> <b>Alexander R. Galloway</b></a></p>
<div class="entry-meta"> <span class="date"><a
href="http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism"
title="Permalink to Network Pessimism" rel="bookmark"><time
class="entry-date" datetime="2014-11-11T02:52:22+00:00">November
11, 2014</time></a></span> </div>
</header>
<div class="entry-content">
<p>I’ve been thinking a lot about pessimism recently. Eugene has
been deep in this material <a
href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/in-the-dust-of-this-planet">for</a>
<a
href="http://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia12/parrhesia12_thacker.pdf">some</a>
<a
href="http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/84">time</a>
<a href="http://www.plinth.us/issue02/thacker.html">already</a>.
In fact he has a new, lengthy manuscript on pessimism called <i>Infinite
Resignation</i>, 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.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the worst can’t stay hidden. Pessimism has made it
to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8x73UW8Hjk">prime
time</a>, to <a
href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/dust-planet/">NPR</a>, and
even <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW8OK4_1gQ">right-wing
media</a>. 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.<span id="more-191"></span></p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/criticism/v050/50.2.moten.pdf">Fred
Moten</a> 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.”<a class="sdfootnoteanc"
href="http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism#sdfootnote1sym"
name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>In his <a
href="http://boundary2.org/2014/09/17/from-the-decision-to-the-digital/">review</a>
of my <a
href="http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/laruelle-against-the-digital">new
book</a>, 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.</p>
<p align="CENTER">*</p>
<p>A previous post was devoted to the <a
href="http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/the-reticular-fallacy">reticular
fallacy</a>, 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, <i>network pessimism</i>.</p>
<p>Network pessimism relies on two basic assumptions: (1)
“everything is a network”; (2) “the best response to networks is
more networks.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Ladies and gentlemen, behold the good news, postmodernism is
definitively over! We have a new <i>grand récit</i>. As
metanarrative, the network will guide us into a new Dark Age.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-exploit"><i>The
Exploit</i></a>, 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>must</i> destabilize and annihilate all
normative descriptions of the “good.” This world <i>isn’t good</i>,
and hooray for that!)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Specifically I can see three basic problems with network
pessimism, the problem of presentism, the problem of ideology,
and the problem of the event.</p>
<p><i>The problem of presentism</i> 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 <i>help</i> <i>end
</i>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 intelle<img
class="alignright" src="cid:part17.03080606.04010006@ziggo.nl"
alt="" height="679" width="341">ctual 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 <i>always historicize</i>
to the new mantra <i>always connect</i>.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>This leads to <i>the problem of ideology</i>. Again we’re
faced with an existential challenge, because network
technologies were largely invented as a non-ideological or
extra-ideological structure. When writing <em><a
href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol">Protocol</a></em>
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 <i>problem to be
forgotten or subsumed</i>: 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).</p>
<p><i>The problem of the event</i> 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 <i>without</i> event.”</p>
<p>What could be worse? If networks are designed to accommodate
massive levels of contingency — as with the famous <a
href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-12">Robustness
Principle</a> — 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.</p>
<p>Jameson writes as much in <i>The Seeds of Time</i> 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 <i>defeatism
</i>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym"
href="http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/network-pessimism#sdfootnote1anc"
name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>Anna Conlan, “Representing
Possibility: Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology,” in <i>Gender,
Sexuality and Museums</i>, ed. Amy K. Levin (London:
Routledge, 2010): 253-263.</p>
</div>
<br>
</div>
</body>
</html>