[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited

[simon]

Dear Alexander Galway and empyreans,

I enjoyed your your letter, particularly for the notion of 'reticular 
pessimism' as the /en abyme/ of a socio-cultural dispensation 
mirror-struck by its own mental processes. I even like the idea of the 
network as meta-narrative and proof that pomo's over. However, the 
strategies in play here rather than those of escape - blueprints of the 
prison studied in preparatory lucubration - seem to belong to the 
mentality of the captors - from the viewpoint of the cell, in clear 
sight of the tower, or power.

Albert-László Barabási attributes the invention of network theory to 
Leonhard Euler in the 1780s. I don't think either would agree with Mark 
Zuckerberg, Donald Rumsfield, Bruno Latour, Franco Moretti, David 
Joselit, Guy Debord, John Von Neumann or Konrad Wachsmann that the 
complex fields of the respective engagements of this strangely 
fascinating (uncanny - reticularly depressing) roll-call ought to be or 
can be reduced to what may be considered /network effects/. And, in some 
cases, /affects/ - where network is the nomination of a brand 
endorsement: Facebook is neither truly a network nor social.

In the same way, corpocratic concerns rhapsodise on the now highly 
recognisable formula /Big Data/ - an object that has as much affinity 
with a meta-narrative network as any of the individual cases adduced. 
Then there is the authorial tick of periodisation: after post-modernism 
(nostalgia for the post- or non-human?); and the obsolescence of the 
'68ers - the vulgarity of theoretical products reaching their use-by 
dates. Neither brand theory nor brand network provide any clue as to how 
to make a map that lets us get the hell out Dodge, or dodge the oncoming 
traffic of the imminent - and in the name of brand immanence each holds 
a pasteboard halo.

In the light of the network effects that theoretical dissipation - its 
current /dispositif/ - elevates by the mechanism of reduction to 
/networks/ (pure, simple, unreal thing) or networkism - as that 
theoretical cul-de-sac that ought at least be avoided - 'strategic 
withdrawal' were better called 'statistical withdrawal' - a term less 
pregnant with cognitive content.

Best,
Simon Taylor
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