REVIEWS
“Network Aesthetics is ambitious and comprehensive, informed and original. Jagoda manages to retain the fluidity of the term ‘network’ while understanding it in both its utopian and dystopian dimensions, and he displays an alertness to, and facility with, issues of medium specificity that is both rare and very welcome.”
— Scott Bukatman, Stanford University
“Jagoda’s work makes key contributions to our understanding of the role of networks in contemporary cultural production and will be of value in a number of fields, from literary studies to film and television studies to digital media studies. Network Aesthetics is an important and timely book that powerfully affirms the ability of aesthetic forms and practices to help us make sense of our world—and also to intervene in it.”
— Tara McPherson, University of Southern California
“Network Aesthetics will transform the study of digital networks both for new media scholars and for film and literature scholars. Jagoda’s monograph is a fully fleshed out, closely argued, and richly detailed account of an emergent network aesthetics that informs both analog and digital forms such as the novel, the television serial, the networked game, and the augmented reality game. A remarkable book: lyrical, deeply ethical, and inspiring.”
— Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan
“Comparative in the richest way. . . Jagoda’s sustained critical engagement with popular cultural forms is welcome at a time where the humanities, publicly and within the academy, are often asked to give an account of themselves and their value. . . . In his careful attention to the interplay between media and the modes of relation they give shape to, he does make the simple, necessary case for aesthetic work and the study of that work in today’s political and cultural reality.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Network Aesthetics constitutes a valuable corrective to the cultural lag of the academy, which often pretends—in the name of the Great Tradition—that we are all iterations of Kant listening to Bach while composing the next trans-meta-critique. . . . Jagoda has made an important contribution to aesthetic theory.”
— Contemporary Literature
"This book certainly represents a key chapter in the scholar history of cultural studies, with an undoubtedly original and inspiring approach, while offering a complete and comprehensive analysis of network and connection as 'infrastructural basis' and heuristic notions for the understanding of contemporary life, permeated with interdsciplinarity and transmediality."
— Digicult
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Network Aesthetics - Patrick Jagoda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.003.0001
[aesthetic, affect, control, Jacques Rancière, network, new media, non-sovereignty, ordinary, transmedia, US]
The introduction to this book contends that the problem of connectedness in the early-twenty-first century cannot be understood independently of the formal features of a network imaginary: that is, the complex of material infrastructures and metaphorical figures that inform our experience with and thought about the contemporary social world. This book explores aesthetic and affective encounters with network form through a comparative media approach that spans the novel, film, television serial, digital game, and transmedia alternate reality game. This method is closely tied to the growing interrelationship among cultural forms that digital and networked technologies make possible in our time—as well the increased embeddedness of these forms in everyday life. Networks are a limit concept of the historical present that is accessible only at the edge of our sensibilities. Networks exceed rational description or mapping, and it is at this point that we might turn to aesthetics—in the form of literary and visual art works—for a more robust account. Though this introduction offers a broader transnational and historical context for thinking about networks, the chapters that follow focus on US literature, visual media, and digital art of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. (pages 1 - 38)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part 1: Linear Forms
1. Maximal Aesthetics: Network Novels - Patrick Jagoda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.003.0002
[cognitive mapping, Cryptonomicon, Don DeLillo, event, history, maximalism, Neal Stephenson, novel, sublime, Underworld]
The network novel is a late-twentieth-century literary 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. This chapter examines two novels—Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999)—that foreground the maximal capacities of network aesthetics. When read together, these texts disclose both the novel form’s epistemological capacity to know networks and to record the structural impossibility of knowing networks through language alone. These novels open up a series of concepts that network form encourages us to think in new ways, including the “knowledge,” “history,” “event,” and “materiality.” The various clashes of formal logics in these texts run parallel to paradoxical sociopolitical logics inherent in the discourse and material practices associated with US networks of late capitalism. (pages 43 - 72)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Emergent Aesthetics: Network Films - Patrick Jagoda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.003.0003
[accident, affect, blowback, capitalism, complexity, conspiracy, emergence, film, Syriana, terrorist networks]
Film theorist David Bordwell has identified around 150 films from the 1990s that foreground social networks through assemblages of characters who are linked and whose paths intersect, only occasionally and often accidentally, through the unfolding of complex narratives. Critics only began to recognize these films as belonging to a coherent cinematic genre around 2005, coining related category names that have included “hyperlink cinema,” “criss-crossers,” “multi-protagonist films,” “fractal films,” “database cinema,” and “network narratives.” Network films flourish in a cultural milieu characterized by an interest not only in network structure but also dynamic processes of emergence: the creation of complex higher-level phenomena from interactions among lower-level components of a system. Moving pictures use audio-visual aesthetics and formal techniques such as crosscutting to explore this paradigm. This chapter focuses on Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005). This film engages with a transnational historical present marked by the majority of network films, albeit more directly than most other examples of this genre. In a more singular way, the film uses its formal innovations to grapple with the specificity of discussions in sociology, economics, and politics about so-called “terrorist networks.” (pages 73 - 102)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Realist Aesthetics: Televisual Networks - Patrick Jagoda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.003.0004
[actor network theory, Bruno Latour, multiplot novel, realism, Raymond Williams, seriality, social, sociology, television, The Wire]
Televisual narratives have experimented for several decades with multi-protagonist structures and complex plotting, since the rise of 1950s soap operas. The development of narrative complexity in television serials, especially since the 1990s, has enabled the medium to engage in unique ways with the network imaginary. This chapter focuses on a single series, David Simon’s The Wire. This show offers insight into how dramatic television series aestheticize social networks and put forward a type of realism proper to them. The Wire, which ran for five seasons between 2002 and 2008, follows a wide-ranging assemblage of social actors who relate in a variety of both extraordinary and ordinary ways to early-twenty-first century American institutions and systems, including law enforcement, the drug trade, the legal apparatus, the prison complex, the school system, segregated city zones, political parties, media outlets, and the growing mass of the homeless. The analysis in this chapter concerns the ways that The Wire’s aesthetic makes sensible associations among its featured social actors through a form of network realism. The series enters into conversation with the sociological approach of actor network theory. (pages 103 - 138)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part 2: Distributed Forms
4. Participatory Aesthetics: Network Games - Patrick Jagoda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.003.0005
[action, Between, control, intimacy, Jason Rohrer, Journey, participation, play, Uplink, video game]
The shift to a network paradigm in the late-twentieth century brought with it a reworking of older aesthetic forms such as the novel and film, but it also introduced aesthetic works that were created specifically for networked platforms and social occasions. Video games are arguably the most popular and diverse expressive digital form. Networked games, in particular, provide players with shared spaces that they can explore, experiment with, and transform. Types of multiplayer practices in virtual environments may be of sociological interest but they are also a central dimension of aesthetic experience. This chapter focuses on three video games that belong to different genres but all take up network form: Introversion’s Uplink (2001), Jason Rohrer’s Between (2008), and thatgamecompany’s Journey (2012). All three of these games attend to the affective dimensions and networked aesthetics of early-twenty-first-century digital media. Overall, this chapter explores how networked games use participatory aesthetics to shake up a sense of networks as monolithic structures. These games complicate concepts that are immanent to early-twenty-first-century forms of connectedness, especially “control,” “action,” “play,” and “intimacy.” (pages 143 - 180)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Improvisational Aesthetics: Alternate Reality Games - Patrick Jagoda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.003.0006
[alternate reality game (ARG), collaboration, collective, experimentation, failure, improvisation, pervasive game, process, The Project, transmedia]
This chapter focuses on the alternate reality game (ARG). Unlike video games, ARGs are a more experimental form of gaming that emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century. ARGs can be understood, provisionally, as heavily mediated and narrative driven scavenger hunts that unfold both in physical space and online, frequently amassing player collectives in the thousands or even millions. In another sense, they are transmedia storytelling platforms composed of some combination of text, video, audio, print, phone calls, websites, email, social networks, locative technologies, invisible theater, and other media. ARG players follow a single story or explore a coherent story world. ARGs are games that rely upon computer networks and experiment, through both their formal properties and social affordances, with network aesthetics. This chapter examines how the improvisational aesthetics of ARGs open up thinking about concepts that are key to making sense of networks—especially “process,” “collaboration,” and “failure.” The core method of this chapter is practice-based research, which focuses on an ARG entitled The Project that the author co-created and directed in Chicago in April 2013. (pages 181 - 219)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Coda: After Networks (Comes Ambivalence) - Patrick Jagoda
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226346656.003.0007
[Alexander Galloway, ambivalence, collaboration, historical present, knowledge, network science, politics, Speculation]
In distinction to a view of networks as the universal, originary, or necessary form that promises to explain everything from neural structures to collective animal behaviors to online traffic, this coda emphasizes the contingency of the network imaginary. If so many things and relationships are figured as networks, the Coda asks, what is not a network? Or, if so much can be treated as interconnected, does anything escape connectivity? If a network points toward 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 the position of the present. Instead of adopting novel avant-garde aesthetics (to move beyond networks) or opting out of networks (in some cases, to recover elements of pre-networked existence), these final pages propose a third orientation: one of ambivalence that operates as a mode of extreme presence. (pages 220 - 228)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Notes
Index
