Some Remarks on Network Politics
The following remarks are by no means meant as a conclusion to the AHRC-funded Network Politics project, but rather as a way to highlight some of the themes that have been uncovered through a series of three conferences in 2010-2011: Thinking Network Politics: Methods, Epistemology, Process; Network Politics: Objects, Subjects and New Political Affects, and Platform Politics. It is impossible to do justice to the wide variety of papers and topics that have been presented during these three events and on the network politics website so I am only claiming here to broadly sketch out some axes of reflection.
The theme of the first conference was on the epistemology of networks, and on the open-endedness of the question as to what is a network and how to study it. Some papers focused on online information networks and the algorithmic logic of data processing, while others examined flows of capital; some papers looked at hybrid networks of consumers, business and politics while others analyzed the relationship between affect and information on social networks and platforms; and finally some papers analyzed the immateriality of networks while others examined their embodiments in cities or in new objects such as robots. Methodologically and theoretically, perspectives on networks were influenced and shaped by varied approaches such as Actor-Network Theory, Gabriel Tarde’s understanding of the constitution of the social through imitation, autonomist theories of immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism, Guattari’s a-signifying approach to communication, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs, software studies, cultural studies and theories of affect. The question of the politics of networks – questions of control, power, governance and resistance - were explored in a wide variety of case studies from South Korea to the UK, North-America, Italy and the Middle East, among others. Through this proliferation of approaches, it has become clear that the question of epistemology of the network in an age seemingly dominated by global information networks has to remain open-ended as it is entirely dependent on specific contexts. Any theoretical or conceptual labeling of a network has to follow Deleuze’s distinction between concept as tool box – a way of unpacking the potentials of networks - rather than a brick to add to a preconceived theoretical edifice.
The second theme coming out of the Network Politics conference is with regards to the relationship between power and control over networks and the enclosing of subjectivities and affects. From the proliferation of software and algorithms in charge of processing our personal data, networks of friends and preferences and of correlating all kinds of information that would otherwise overload us to the question of networks as strategic places of control over the capacity to create and perceive new political possibilities, there is a definite emergence of power struggles over enclosing and determining the finalities of networks, be it through national Internet shut-down policies or through the constant transformation of affects into potentially valuable capital on platforms such as Facebook. Networks as enclosures within capitalist and neo-liberal logics open up the concept of the temporal as a site of struggle, in that networks allow for the development of logics of anticipation of crisis, prediction, premediation and preemption, which in turn impose specific logics of subjectivation.
Finally, the concept of platform as spaces where different networks are captured and where different heterogeneous elements – software, users, subjects, informational processes, economic and political agendas – are assembled together under an effort to produce a specific technocultural logic has opened up a more complex and enriching perspective on network politics as the superimposition of previously disparate processes. When code has to be understood as the enactment of ideology, when algorithmic processes produce cultural affects and preferences, when the social and the informational are collapsed into each other, we witness the uneasy and problematic assemblage of ontologically disparate dynamics. This perhaps, is one of the biggest challenge of network politics – requiring us to think at the very moment of junctures and disjunctures of networks.
Ganaele Langlois