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Network Aesthetics Network Aesthetics: American Fictions in the Culture of Interconnection by Patrick Jagoda Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Katherine Hayles ___________________________ Timothy W. Lenoir ___________________________ Frederick C. Moten Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 ABSTRACT Network Aesthetics: American Fictions in the Culture of Interconnection by Patrick Jagoda Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor __________________________ Katherine Hayles ___________________________ Timothy W. Lenoir ___________________________ Frederick C. Moten An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Patrick Jagoda 2010 Abstract Following World War II, the network emerged as both a major material structure and one of the most ubiquitous metaphors of the globalizing world. Over subsequent decades, scientists and social scientists increasingly applied the language of interconnection to such diverse collective forms as computer webs, terrorist networks, economic systems, and disease ecologies. The prehistory of network discourse can be traced back to descriptions of cellular formations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the invention of the electrical telegraph in the nineteenth century. Even so, it was not until the 1940s that researchers and writers began to rely on a more generalized network vocabulary to reflect fledgling material modes of interlinked organization and construct a new postwar vision of the world. Since the 1970s, the field of network science has given rise to an even wider range of research on complexity, self-organization, sustainability, group interactions, and systemic resilience. Scientists such as Albert-László Barabási have studied network design and new media critics such as Alexander Galloway have addressed network ontology. This dissertation contends that to grasp the effects of networks on globalization, we must also look at the fears, hopes, and affects that they generate. While network scientists have been less concerned with the cultural fears, political investments, and changes in human subjectivity signaled by networks, my study of iv American literature focuses on writers, filmmakers, and media innovators who have captured the deep transformations of the era of interconnection. These artists have achieved insights about networks not through scientific analysis, but through aesthetic, narrative, and media-specific experimentation. Network Aesthetics examines how contemporary American literature, film, television, and new media dramatize the affects — alternatively terrifying and thrilling — of interconnection. This interdisciplinary project combines numerous methodologies, including literary analysis, media studies, cultural criticism, and political theory. Given the importance of networks to representation, communication, and computing, these structures serve as an ideal hinge for operating intermedia exchanges. Using varied tools, I analyze terrorist networks (Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana ), financial systems (Don DeLillo’s Underworld ), computer webs (Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It ), neoimperial networks (Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow ), social networks (David Simon’s The Wire ), and interactive game networks (Persuasive Games’ Killer Flu ). In the end, I argue that obsessions with abstract network threats and solutions reveal a change in the most dramatic social protocols of our connected world. Understanding how networks have formally come to evoke fear can help us grow less susceptible to an American politics of terror and more able to act justly as we negotiate our interconnected world. v For Irus, my mother, teacher, and friend, who infected me with her fierce curiosity about the world and, through her boundless love, helped me believe in the interconnectedness of all things. vi Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ x Introduction: The Emergence of Network Culture ........................................................... 1 0.1 Networks in Language, Science, and Culture ........................................................ 5 0.2 Affects of Interconnection and American Networks of Terror .......................... 16 0.3 The Network Sublime .............................................................................................. 31 0.4 Network Aesthetics .................................................................................................. 36 0.5 Literary Webs ............................................................................................................ 44 0.6 American Fictions in a Culture of Interconnection ............................................. 53 Chapter 1: The Terror Network and Other Fictions ........................................................ 57 1.1 Friend, Enemy, Network ......................................................................................... 64 1.2 Frames, Links, Simulations ..................................................................................... 73 1.3 Blowback: Mis-Understanding Terrorist Networks ............................................ 82 1.4 The Terror Network ................................................................................................. 96 1.5 Beyond Routine Imagination ................................................................................ 110 Chapter 2: “All reciprocally vulnerable”: American Finance, Capitalist Networks, and the Fiction of Don DeLillo ......................................................................................... 117 2.1 A “Tentative Alliance”: Capital Terror in Players and The Names ................ 120 2.2 “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World”: From Game Theory to Networks in Underworld ................................................................................................................... 135 vii 2.3 “All Reciprocally Vulnerable”: The Aesthetics of Interaction in Cosmopolis ......................................................................................................................................... 165 2.4 “Crowded Out”: Capitalism’s Spatial Crisis and the Era of the “Worldwind” ......................................................................................................................................... 180 Chapter 3: Synful Systems: Computer Networks and Protocol Perspectives in Cyberpunk ........................................................................................................................... 190 3.1 Cyberphobia and Network Emergence ............................................................... 196 3.2 Romantic Individualism and the “Unthinkable Complexity” of Cyberpunk Networks ....................................................................................................................... 210 3.3 Synful Systems: Pat Cadigan’s Protocol Perspective ........................................ 227 3.4 Imminent Immanence: Redlining Capitalism in Walter Mosley’s Futureland ......................................................................................................................................... 242 3.5 “Company Justice”: Nets and Networks in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It . 260 3.6 Utopias, Heterotopias, and Network Topologies .............................................. 269 Chapter 4: “White Network”: The Racial Edge of American Power in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow .......................................................................................... 274 4.1 Empire’s “Edge” and the Emergence of the Network Narrative .................... 279 4.2 The American Schwarzroman .............................................................................. 300 4.3 “White Network” ................................................................................................... 318 4.4 American Worlds and Literary Networks .......................................................... 334 Chapter 5: Wired: The Network Forms of David Simon’s “Other America” ............ 342 5.1 “A Case that Goes Everywhere”: Social Networks and Capitalist Ecologies in The Wire ........................................................................................................................ 347 viii 5.2 “The Dickensian Aspect”: From the Victorian Multiplot Novel to the Network Form ............................................................................................................................... 365 5.3 “A Dark Corner of the American Experiment”: Tragedy and the Politics of Structure ........................................................................................................................ 380 5.4 “All of Us Vested, All of Us Complicit” .............................................................. 397 Coda: Interactive Network Aesthetics in the Era of New Media ...............................
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