Network Aesthetics
Sianne Ngai · Columbia University Press eBooks · 2012
This chapter examines two twenty-first-century texts committed to a “philosophy of connection”—one literary, the other sociological—that explicitly take up the challenge posed by the network as form and in a way that directly links it to the challenge of creating a more lucid representation of individual and collective action. The first is Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005), which Latour explicitly invites us to read as a literary as well as methodological treatise. The second text is American poet Juliana Spahr's The Transformation (2007), a generically ambiguous prose narrative featuring a radically heterogeneous collective protagonist. Read together, these two texts give a sense of what an aesthetics or discourse of pleasure and evaluation based on networks might look and feel like, as well as a sense of the poetics of connectionism's limits.