Adrian Mackenzie’s focus is on the experience of ‘wirelessness’ which he frames through a reading of William James’ ‘radical empiricism’. In order to deal with the way that wirelessness is articulated through protocols, regimes of digital signal processing and what Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell call the “infrastructure of experience” (2007), Mackenzie develops a particular take on “network”. He says:

“A network is nothing but concatenated conjunctive relations, and any reality of a network as flow, as global, as distributed, as or as collective comes from how these relations are concatenated.  The coherence of a network, its ability to transport or sustain flow, depends on the quality and density of those intermediary relations. Many of the dynamics of network cultures can be understood as the interplay of disjunctive and conjunctive parts of the collection” (Mackenzie 2010: 121).

One reason Mackenzie is drawn to James is because of radical empiricism’s stress on the importance of transition, the rates and directions in which experience moves. “Experience constantly passes through many different states, ranging from the impersonal to the personal, from the singular to the general. On any scale we imagine, there is no pure flow or pure sensation of transition. Many transitions occur between scales. And every transition is shot through with temporary termini, with snags, resistances, circularities, and repetitions,” Mackenzie says (p19). Whether it is the experience of wirelessness or imag(in)ing both within and across networks, what characterises those states is movement and transition. James says: “our universe is to a large extent chaotic. No one single type of connection runs through all the experience that compose it” (James 2010: 606). In a colourful image he contrasts an idealist view of the world which is like goldfish swimming in a bowl to an empiricist view which is more like a dried human head with feathers, leaves , strings and beads dangling from it. “My experience and yours float and dangle, terminating, it is true in a nucleus of common perception, but for the most part out of sight and irrelevant and unimaginable to one another” (p612).

In the light of this flux of experience (materially rooted rather than idealistically floating), philosophy (and cultural/software studies) must account for transition and movement. James claims that radical empiricism is “fair to both the unity and the disconnection. It finds no reason to treat either as illusory” (p615).

For Mackenzie wirelessness is a matter of, and must approached as, as experience. Similarly I would argue that imaging is a matter of, and must be approach as an (imag(in)ing) experience. This is not some psycholoigisation of a media assemblage. The specific materialities of software, digital signal processing, protocol are articulated through object relations which can be seen through the lens of OOP’s “alliances” or radical empiricism’s “conjunctive relations”.

For James: “philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles. With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my – these words designate types of conjunctive relation arranged in roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness” (p600). Conjunctive relations (ones characterised by these words) are far more at the heart of wireless and scopic experience than disjunctive relations associated with things or entities. They are relations of transition and “while we live in such conjunctions our state is one of transition in the most literal sense. We are expectant of  a ‘more’ to come, and before the more has come, the transition, nevertheless, is directed towards it” (p2476).

James does not say that conjunctive relations are the only ones in play, merely that they have often been seen as less important than the disjunctive relations of difference and distinction that are often seen as defining “what really exists” (Mackenzie 2010: 63).  His aim, and Mackenzie’s, is to bring conjunctive relations of proximity, transition and movement back into discussions of experience. This focus on transition and “expectation of more to come, in movement” (Mackenzie 2010: 21), leads Mackenzie to his view of network not just as flow or distributed but as rooted in the interplay of disjunctive and conjunctive relations.

Networks, as spaces of movement, transition and proximity need to be looked at in terms of how relations interconnect  – not just how objects or nodes connect, but how the relations (Galloway and Thacker’s edges) relate. For Mackenzie, a network is “nothing but concatenated conjunctive relations”. It is the space of movement and relations of transition. It is not that object/nodes do not exist but it is the (conjunctive) relations between them that constitute the network and need to be the focus of analysis. It is only then that network cultures (where those conjunctive relations rub up against disjunctive relations of difference and distinction) can be mapped.

It is here where it could be argued that object-oriented philosophy can contribute by breaking down the node/edge, conjunctive/disjunctive distinctions even further. OOP’s claim that objects are always actants in alliance, always in movement/relation allows us to see conjunctive and disjunctive relations as themselves enfolded. Objects retain their specificity and (disjunctive) difference. Jpeg is not TCP/IP or an SD memory card. But objects are always, inevitably in (conjunctive) alliances. Jpeg cannot be separated from its relations with network protocols and photographic hardware. For James, “what really exists is not things made but things in the making” (James 1996: 263). His radical empiricism takes us far along the road of anti-essentialism by arguing that objects are always in process, transition, being made and therefore the conjunctive is important. OOP arguably takes us still further by arguing that objects only exist in relations, they cannot be separated. (Conjunctive) relations of becoming cannot even be privileged over disjunctive relations of difference. Harman says: “Actants are always completely deployed in their relations with the world, and the more they are cut off from these relations, the less real they become” (Harman 2009: 19).

• Dourish, P. & Bell, G., 2007, The Infrastructure Of Experience And The Experience Of Infrastructure: Meaning And Structure In Everyday Encounters With Space, Environment And Planning B Planning And Design, 34(3), p. 414.
• Harman, G., 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Anamnesis, Melbourne.
• James, 1996, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectuires at Manchester College on the Present Situatuon in Philosophy, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
• James, 2010, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Kindle ed. B&R Samizdat Express,. [Page numbers refer to ‘location’ in Kindle edition]
• Mackenzie, A., 2010, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism In Network Cultures, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..

While some writers have embraced or extended the concept of ‘network’ as a tool to imag(in)e the media ecology or information topology emerging around and through the Internet, others have been wary. Prefiguring many of the current discussions about ‘cyber-scpeticism’ (Lanier 2010, Turkle 2011, Carr 2010, Morozov 2011, Harkin 2009), Anna Munster and Geert Lovink argue that: “networks cannot be studied as mere tools or as schematisations and diagrams. They need to be apprehended within the complex ecologies in which they are forming. This can easily become an empty statement. By complex we mean unpredictable, often poor, harsh, and not exactly “rich” expressions of the social. To project positive predictions, hopes and desires onto networks is deceptive as it often distracts by focusing solely on the first, founding and euphoric phase of networks” (2005). Their critique is more fundamental than an attack on network optimists. They say: “Theorising networks… must struggle with the abstraction of dispersed elements – elements that cannot be captured into one image. The very notion of a network is in conflict with the desire to gain an overview”.

Munster and Lovink warn against allowing talk of networks as topologies and diagrams to fall into imag(in)ing that one can map those assemblages and ecologies as if from an ariel view. “The map is not the network,” they point out – a pertinent critique again in terms of the burgeoning interest in data visualisation in both the mass media (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog) and academia (Manovich 2010). Echoing Galloway and Thacker’s emphasis on political enfolding (2007), they say: “the increasing abstraction of topological visualisation removes us from an analysis of the ways in which networks engage and are engaged by current political, economic and social relations”. “We should analyse the rise of networks as an all too human endeavor, as a tragic fall, and not as post-human machines that automate connections for us,” they argue. “Networks are fragmentors”.

It is not that ‘networks’ do not exist or that ‘network’ is not a useful concept or focus. Rather the question is whether ‘network’ has become too powerful an imaginary for its own good, focusing analytical and political energy, even that of critique on a mythic hetrogeneity. A Google ‘Ngrams’ visualisation shows a hockeystick curve of adoption – the rise of a network society, perhaps. The issue is how that object has been articulated, not as as a simple homogenous or stable entity but as an overarching, heterogenous field of relations ready to be mapped onto a ‘control society’ (Deleuze 1992), a political order (Hardt and Negri 2000) or a geography (Mcquire 2008) often through the operations of ‘software’, an object which suffers from its own over-imagination. Like ‘network’ it is not that ’software’ is over-homogenised – rendered as simple monolith or force – but rather than an emphasis on heterogeneity has its own disciplinary effects, rendering software instances (like network nodes) as points in seamless map, a visualisation of light points from space, a mosaic of forces forming an overall picture.

Munster and Lovink look to disturb that ariel view. They conclude with a call for a ‘more complex conception’ of networks, network sociality and software. “What we need is to be more specific about how the social and its myriad aesthetics are operating through and in software. How is a network really being sustained – computationally and through creative labour? How is the network experience to be thought as felt? Whose labour – creative, manual, skilled, disorganised, etc – keeps it moving along? What intrusions of rhetoric from other images of the social – neo-liberal democratic theory and its dreams of customised participation, for example – break into and intrude upon the fragile links that tentatively form within networked experience?” Just as Adrian Mackenzie, drawing on William James, articulates wireless ‘network’ in terms of experience (Mackenzie 2010), so Munster and Lovink demand that the multiple scales of human actant/action are fully enfolded into any network diagram.

This focus on creative labour, echoed by Tiziana Terranova (2004), is not an exercise in politicisation or materialisation but an acknowledgment that network is the fragmentary, failing, sum of its actants and relations. This diagram is not a clear imag(in)ing. “We don’t need allegorical readings of networks. Networks are not proposals, constructions, metaphors or even alternatives for existing social formations such as the church and company, the school, the NGO or the political party. Instead, we should analyse the rise of networks as an all too human endeavor, as a tragic fall, and not as post-human machines that automate connections for us”.

• Carr, N.G., 2010, The Shallows : How The Internet Is Changing The Way We Think, Read And Remember, Atlantic, London.
• Deleuze, G., 1992, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October, 59, pp. 3-7.
• Galloway, A.R. & Thacker, E., 2007, The Exploit: A Theory Of Networks, Univ Of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
• Hardt, M. & Negri, A., 2000, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass..
• Harkin, J., 2009, Cyburbia : The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live And Who We Are, Little, Brown, London.
• Lanier, J., 2010, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, Allen Lane, London.
• Mackenzie, A., 2010, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism In Network Cultures, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..
• McQuire, S., 2008, The Media City : Media, Architecture And Urban Space, Sage, Los Angeles, Calif..
• Morozov, 2011, The Net Delusion How Not to Liberate the World, Allen Lane, London.
• Munster, A. & Lovink, G., 2005, Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not, FibreCulture(7).
• Terranova, T., 2004, Network Culture : Politics For The Information Age, Pluto Press, London; Ann Arbor, MI.
• Turkle, S., 2011, Alone Together : Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other, Basic Books, New York.

Like Castells, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker also draw on a variation of information theory within their account of network as a political ontology (2007). They use a discussion of graph theory, which “provides us with a standard connect-the-dots-situation” (p31).  This means: “a number of relationships can be quantitatively analyzed” (p31) and gives them the concepts of “nodes” and “edges” with which to map the topology of political networks. However they stress that graph theory is only a beginning (p33) and question a network diagram that attributes agency to active nodes and the carrying out of actions to passive edges (p33). A node-edge separation implies a clear division between actor and action and also leads to what they call “diachronic blindness”. A graph approach, they argue, “focuses on fixed ‘snap-shot’ modeling of networked ecologies” (p33) and “works against an understanding of networks as sets of relations existing in time” (p33). Finally they question a network diagram that draws too rigidly on graph theory because it does not see subnetworks or subtopologies as the at the heart of the matter. For Galloway and Thacker it is the heterogenous nature of networks, the “antagonistic clusterings, divergent subtopologies, rogue nodes” (p34) one finds in peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, or political and military struggles, that define the network and open it to analyse and ‘counter-protocological struggle’.

Tiziana Terranova reads Galloway and Thacker as placing the “life of networks” at the heart of their account, bringing together as it does Galloway’s interest in protocol (2004) and Thacker’s in biomedia (2005). “The network,” she says, “needs active subjects in order to exist, but at the same time undermines their agency by its very nature, by embedding it into sets of relations, and by the fact of being somehow alive” (2009: 47). Although she goes on to criticise what she sees as an overly masculine account of the “impulsion” and “thrust” of Galloway and Thacker’s counter-protocological ‘exploit”, an account of networks as an issue of enfolded political topologies, clearly chimes with her own account of network labour (2004). She goes on to distinguish Galloway and Thacker’s account from what she characterises as the “anthropomorphic agency of actors found in actor-network theory” (1009: 47). While there is certainly the potential for an anthropomorphism within ANT and by implication OOP, Harman is adamant that object-oriented approaches do not imply this. He says:

“Let me first deny the criticism that my model is guilty of anthropomorphizing the world by retrojecting purely human mental traits into the non-human world. The illegitimacy of this critique is easy to show. When we consider those psychic traits that may be uniquely human or perhaps animal, we might list thinking, language, memory, emotion, visual experience, planning for the future, or the ability to dream. In no case have I ascribed such capacities to inanimate objects. What I have done, instead, is to reduce human cognition to its barest ontological feature—the translation or distortion of a withdrawn reality that it addresses. And it should be easy to see that even inanimate causal impact show exactly the same feature. Hence we can speak of a sparse, bedrock form of relationality that holds good for all real entities in the cosmos, and from which all the special plant, animal, and human mental features must develop as if from some primal kernel… Rather than anthropomorphizing the inanimate realm, I am morphing the human realm into a variant of the inanimate” (Harman 2009: 212).

It is even possible to see Galloway and Thacker as echoing some of the concerns of OOP. An object-oriented account of a primordial soup of antagonisms and alliances located in particular times and spaces parallels Galloway and Thacker’s refusal to engage in “snap-shot modeling”. Similarly their “antagonistic clusterings” and “divergent subtopologies” have a similar focus on flat ontologies, anti-foundationalism and emergence that characterise OOP’s ideas of black boxes and actants enfolded in alliances. Finally Galloway and Thacker’s critique of network diagrams that separate actor and action is also at the heart of an OOP account that draws actants as always and inevitably deriving their power and position through alliances that are always being constantly remade.  For OOP as for Galloway and Thacker, actor/actant and action/relation are enfolded, even inseparable.

• Galloway, 2004, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.; London.
• Galloway, A.R. & Thacker, E., 2007, The Exploit: A Theory Of Networks, Univ Of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
• Harman, G., 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Anamnesis, Melbourne.
• Terranova, T., 2004, Network Culture : Politics For The Information Age, Pluto Press, London ; Ann Arbor, MI.
• Terranova, T., 2009, Masculine Holes, Radical Philosophy (July/August), pp. 46-9.
• Thacker, E., 2005, The Global Genome : Biotechnology, Politics, And Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass..

The idea of the ‘network’ is an important one for discussions of the new scopic regime that I argue is being set in motion by actants including the jpeg protocol. Whether it is used with or without the definite article, singular or plural, capitalised or not, the concept is an active force in most, if not all discourses and practices around software, ‘new media’, digital communications and information. As a ‘black box’, an actant that has become an everyday, an object where its relations, alliances and translations are not hidden so much as so transparent as to be overlooked, ‘network’ is powerfully enfolded in discourses, practices, businesses, governmentality and biopower. It is also a site of struggle.

For the Wall Street Journal” “Adam Smith explained how capitalism worked, and Karl Marx explained why it didn’t. Now the social and economic relations of the Information Age have been captured by Manuel Castells”. Its blurb for the back cover of ’ The Rise of the Network Society (Castells 2010) captures a sense that Castells’ meticulous account of information relations across the economy, politics and culture is more than a critical account of information technology or even how technology “embodies society” (p5). Castells’ multi-volume  magnum opus like Capital before it has bigger ambitions because our present moment demands it.

For Castells: “Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies” (p500). His sociology like his illustrious predecessors expands beyond the particular. Just as Marx took terms such as ‘commodity’ and made them do extra work, so Castells takes the concept of ‘nodes’ from information theory and uses it to build a critique of the flows he and others (cf Hepp 2008) see across financial markets, political structures and institutions, media and… well that is why his title includes the simple phrase “network society”. A new space. A new dawn. A new concept for a new time.

Castells builds his analysis on the concept of ‘nodes’ and “flows”. “A network is a set of interconnected nodes, “ he says. In an almost Latour litany he lists what can be nodes in different spaces, scales and topologies:

“They are stock exchange markets, and their ancillary service centers in the network of global financial flows. They are national councils of ministers and European Commissioners in the political network that governs the European Union. They are coca fields and poppy fields, clandestine laboratories, secret landing strips, street gangs, and money-laundering financial institutions in the network of drug traffic that penetrates economies, societies, and states throughout the world. They are television systems, entertainment studios, computer graphics milieux, news teams, and mobile devices generating, transmitting, and receiving signals in the global network of the new media t the roots of cultural expression and public opinion” (p501).

Felix Stalder argues that, Castells “tends to offer very broad and general definitions that shift much of the explanatory work to the empirical application” (2006: 170). Certainly his voluminous data and empirical focus carries his analysis but arguably this is only possible and powerful if the definition of network (and node and flow) is sufficiently dynamic to engage with networks at different scales. It is not that his definition is ‘general” so much as it is, itself enfolded. Expanding on the mathematical concept of node in information theory, Castells makes it work as a sociological concept, expanding his analytical reach into the sort of flows that Hepp et al and Lash{Lash 2002} discuss. Here networks and nodes are interdependent, like actor and network.

• Castells, M., 2010, The rise of the network society, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA.
• Hepp, A. et al., 2008, Connectivity, Networks And Flows : Conceptualizing Contemporary Communications, Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ.
• Lash, S., 2002, Critique of information, SAGE, London; Thousand Oaks, Calif..
• Stalder, F., 2006, Manuel Castells : The Theory Of The Network Society, Polity, Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA.