American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions

Whether regarded with optimism or ambivalence, the rise in the late 1960s of a “global network culture” characterized by an “unprecedented abundance of informational output and acceleration of informational dynamics” (and historically shaped by the late-twentieth-century restructuring of the capitalist mode of production),¹ is widely thought to have led to a “qualitative change in the human experience.”² To be sure, networks as a form of social organization are by no means exclusive to postmodernity, though their thematic prominence in discourses ranging from Internet journalism to post-Fordist management literature—both part of what has come to be regarded as an entire “connexionist genre”³—often gives this impression. “The formation of more or less extensive networks is no more novel than commercial activity was when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations,” as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello note in The New Spirit of Capitalism. “But it is as if we had to wait until the last third of the twentieth century for … the art of making and using the most diverse and remote kinds of connection, to be autonomized—separated from the other forms of activity it had hitherto been bound up with—and identified and valued for itself” (108). More specifically, actors enmeshed in the social networks that played a central role in the early development of capitalism “did not describe their own actions on the basis of the network form, and above all, did not appeal to the network … to deliver value judgments or construct justifications” (151, emphasis added). It is thus not just that the “information technology revolution” has provided “material basis for [the network’s] pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure,” as Manuel Castells has argued.⁴ Since around 1965, what is genuinely new, Boltanski and Chiapello stress, is the rise of the network as a normative concept: the “formation of a mode of judgment which, taking it for granted that the world is a network (and not, for example, a structure, a system, a market or a community), offers fulcra for appraising and ordering the relative value of beings in such a world” (151). What is specific to our contemporary moment, in other words, is the rise of “connexionism” as an ideological worldview and thus as a basis for making evaluative judgments ranging from the ethical to the aesthetic.

What defines a network aesthetic? We know it must be, at the very least, an aesthetic that revolves around connection and information: what are its other formal qualities? In terms of offering a perspicuous representation of social relations in general, what are its advantages and limitations? In what follows I examine 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: “To put it in the most provocative way: good sociology has to be well written; if not, the social doesn’t appear through it.”⁵ Making “the social appear” will thus entail writing “interesting” or “risky” texts (aesthetic judgments Latour uses repeatedly throughout his text and always interchangeably with the verdict “good”), and writing “interesting” texts will entail deploying actor-network-theory, a method that involves tracing ties between a radically expanded number of actors and agencies. My second text is American poet Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation (2007), a generically ambiguous prose narrative featuring a radically heterogeneous collective protagonist: “they.”⁶ Narrated in a serial, repetitive, deliberately belabored style, The Transformation’s story of the ontologically ambiguous “they,” and their increasingly complicated relationships with a vast multiplicity of other agents across time and space, is also a formal experiment in what happens to narrative—plot and character—when a protagonist takes on the hybrid and spatially distributed form of a network. Read together, these two texts give us 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.

“When we act, who else is acting? How many agents are also present? How come I never do what I want? Why are we all held by forces not of our own making?” As Latour writes, questions like these have fascinated people “since the time when crowds, masses, statistical means, invisible hands, and unconscious drives began to replace the passions and reasons, not to mention the angels and demons that had pushed and pulled our humble souls up to then” (43). But this should not lead to the conclusion that the true agent is a force called “the social,” Latour argues. While it is true that “we are never alone in carrying out a course of action”—that action is always “othertaken”—explanations that appeal to “the social” as an underlying cause for these detours are “conspiracy theory, not social theory” (53). Thus, while the “sociology of society” tautologically appeals to a preexisting “social order” to explain the formation and behavior of collectives, the “sociology of associations” or actor-network-theory (ANT) maintains that one cannot study groups as autonomous and stable entities, but only the “ceaseless process” of group formation. Keeping its perspective strictly limited to what might be described as the social’s most minimal unit, the inherently fragile and fleeting “tie,” ANT further sets itself apart from both macro and micro sociological traditions by foregrounding nonhuman and even conceptual or imaginary objects as actors and by privileging the role of “mediators” over “intermediaries.”⁷ While intermediaries “transport” information and meaning “without deformation or transformation,” mediators of action “translate”—deform and transform—the elements they are supposed to carry (38–39).

Having defined ANT as the activity of tracing links between a radically expanded set of actors, Latour’s next move is to describe this activity as coeval with its representation: “What do we do when we trace social connections? Are we not, in effect, writing down accounts?” (122). Latour thus conflates doing sociology with writing in a certain genre or way (an “interesting” way), and both in turn with the reproduction of the social itself. “If the social is something that circulates in a certain way, and not a world beyond to be accessed by the disinterested gaze of some ultra-lucid scientist, then it may be passed along [that is, made to continue circulating] by many devices adapted to the task, including texts, reports, accounts” (127).⁸ Texts, reports, and accounts are thus mediators in an unremitting process of tracing connections, and/or ensuring a continuity of circulation that amounts to “the social” itself. The painstaking tracking of the ANT sociologist, her “continuous and obsessive attention” to the “translations” of action by mediators (127), or to ties “that transport transformation” across a vast plurality of political, economic, legal, biological, psychological, geographic, and linguistic actors (108), will thus retroactively give rise to the very object initially pursued: “the social” qua “something that circulates in a certain way.”

Describing “the social” also as perpetually in process of being made and remade, ANT further aligns this with a mode of production and reproduction whose temporality we might describe as serial. This meticulous way of assembling the social—one tie after another—reinforces ANT’s “continuous and obsessive” devotion to descriptive detail: “A good text should trigger in a good reader this reaction: ‘Please, more details, I want more details” (137). The “tracking” ANT prescribes thus resembles the elaborate “writing-down system[s]” in the classic texts of “obsessional modernity” Jennifer Fleissner analyzes in her account of the latter; narratives such as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness or Dracula in which intensely recursive acts of writing and rewriting reflect the structural incompleteness of modern knowing itself.⁹ The serial connection-tracing of ANT seems haunted by a similar “feeling of incompleteness”;¹⁰ as Latour puts it, “The presence of the social has to be demonstrated each time anew” (53).¹¹ For to “persist in its existence,” the social “needs new associations,” which can only be revealed through the ANT sociologist’s labor, and “such a labor requires the recruitment, mobilization, enrollment, and translation of many others—possibly of the whole universe” (218). Because of this unruly proliferation, even “infinite regress” of agencies, such a labor will also require a radical commitment to doubt. Indeed, according to Latour, ANT requires a conscious decision to “feed off uncertainties,” and in particular the “constant uncertainty over [whether actors are] behaving as intermediaries or as mediators,” which he describes as “the source of all the uncertainties we have decided to follow” (39). As one might immediately grasp from its chapter titles—“First Source of Uncertainty: No Group, Only Group Formation; Second Source of Uncertainty: Action is Overtaken; Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects Too Have Agency; Fourth Source of Uncertainty: Matter of Fact vs. Matters of Concern; Fifth Source of Uncertainty: Writing Down Risky Accounts”—one of the main rules of Reassembling the Social is that “uncertainty should remain uncertain throughout” (47).

There is thus something “continuous and obsessive” not only about the sociological method prescribed in Reassembling the Social—with its commitment to serial activity, the generation of ever more descriptive detail, the multiplication of uncertainties, and the rigorous application of rules—but about its rhetoric and form. Adverbial phrases such as “ceaselessly tracing,” “ceaseless upkeeping,” “continuously upkeeping,” and “patiently following” circulate throughout the text, reinforcing Latour’s point that assembling actors into networks is work, which not only has to be continuously done but redone. This conflation of doing with redoing is highly consonant with the logic and temporality of retroactive constitution, in which to follow the links between actors that constitute the social, is effectively to make the social “appear.”¹²

Underscoring Latour’s proliferation of actors and agencies (human, nonhuman, imaginary, material), and placement of them on the same ontological footing in a way that enables them to be “cumulated, aggregated, or shuffled like a pack of cards,”¹³ Reassembling the Social also abounds in lists of nouns: “Microbes, scallops, rocks, and ships” (10); “films, skyscrapers, facts, political meetings, initiation rituals, haute couture, cooking” (89); “fishermen, oceanographers, satellites, scallops” (106); “fetishes, beliefs, religions, cultures, art, law, markets” (101); “Monte Carlo calculations … mugs … quaternions … black swans” (114); “editorials, textbooks, party officials, strike committees, war rooms” (182); “written names, statistical charts, notebooks, documentation, blood samples, genetic fingerprints, and visual aids” (197). The poetics of the list or catalog often seep into the language of Latour’s commentators, as Graham Harman self-consciously admits.¹⁴ Harman argues that Latour’s “rosters of being” should be viewed as a pointed intellectual intervention, however, rather than as a rhetorical quirk: “We cannot imagine Kant or Hegel invoking such a roll call of concrete entities, which shift the weight of philosophy toward specific actors themselves and away from all the structures that might wish to subsume them…. Instead of dismissing grass, gates, gravestones, radios, classmates, and courts of law as mere ontic details, he allows them to be topics of philosophy again” (102). Thus, while Harman admits that “some readers may tire (or pretend to tire) of these frequent lists, dismissing them as an ‘incantation’ or ‘poetics’ of objects,” he also insists that “most readers will not soon grow tired, since the rhetorical power of these rosters of being stems from their direct opposition to the flaws of current mainstream philosophy” (102).

The rosters of nouns singled out by Harman, however (who also contributes many of his own) are not the only lists in Reassembling the Social. Latour’s prose is also replete with catalogs of actions (verbs): “If the social circulates and is visible only when it shines through the concatenations of mediators, then this is what has to be replicated, cultivated, elicited, and expressed by our textual accounts” (136, emphasis added). Even the word action triggers a rhetorical unfurling into a list of particular actions: “Action is borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated” (46, emphasis added). This pluralization of action becomes particularly prominent when Latour makes lists of the extra activities that one becomes committed to doing when one commits to ANT: “To be sure, [the sociology of associations] requires more work: an extension of the list of actors and agencies; a deepening of the conflicts about practical metaphysics; a pursuit through areas scarcely visited until now; a new practice of finding controversies more rewarding and, in the end, more stable than absolute departure points; and, finally, an invitation to develop a puzzling new custom to share generously metalanguage, social theory, and reflexivity with the actors themselves who are no longer considered mere informants” (87, emphasis added). Latour’s “poetic” catalogs of practices in Reassembling the Social mirror the expansion and proliferation of action that ANT itself requires: its “extension,” “deepening,” “pursuit,” and “development.” Lists in Latour not only multiply and gather up actors; they enact an increase of activity in the form of a series of new projects, like the extra “tinkering, reshuffling, crossbreeding, sorting” Latour calls for in We Have Never Been Modern.¹⁵ There is thus a sense in which Harman’s gallant insistence that “most” readers will not “grow tired” of Latour’s “frequent lists” misses their stylistic point. For the multiplicity and seriality of the catalog (as Harman himself notes) mirrors the ANT principle that commits Latour to “follow[ing] the social fluid through its ever-changing and provisional shapes” in the first place—a project Latour explicitly describes as an “arduous task” (202). Readers will grow tired because, in Latour’s own words, ANT “requires more work.” Reassembling the Social, Latour lectures, is therefore not a book for those who are “lazy” or those who refuse to do their “accounting” and pay the “transaction costs for moving, connecting, and assembling the social” (17, 220). So for what type of person will this book be particularly suited? Those especially skilled at “accounting” and keeping track of their “transaction costs”; those willing to undergo “difficult trial[s]” while working continuously on projects (25, 30). In other words, the type of person Max Weber profiles in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: an important forerunner, as Fleissner notes, of the modern obsessive.¹⁶

The narrative task of making action perspicuous by “ceaselessly tracing” ties between a radically heterogeneous multiplicity of individual actors makes obsession similarly central to both the story and discourse of The Transformation.¹⁷ Spahr’s information-dense, 214-page prose narrative, which she describes in her afterword as a “barely truthful story of the years 1997–2001,” begins as the story of three people of unspecified gender who move from New York to Hawaii to take a job teaching English literature at the state university, then back to New York in time to witness 9/11 and the first deployment of U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Through a series of events that make the three aware of themselves as actors whose actions are “borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, [and] translated” by a vast range of other, similarly interconnected actors and agencies, the three expand into the even larger, more ambiguous collective “they.”¹⁸

There are thus distinct stages of “transformation” in The Transformation, beginning with the combination of two relationships (one between X and Y, the other between Y and Z) into a domestic arrangement involving three: “They decided to fix their relationship into a triangle” (15). When the three move to “the island in the middle of the Pacific,” however, their already complicated kinship arrangement becomes complicated even further by other “patterns of relating” inflected by race, nation, and the history and legacy of American imperialism (21). The experience of colonial complicity, in particular, causes the threesome to morph into the “grammatically accusative” “they.” The they’s increasing awareness of themselves as enmeshed in a web of connections ironically intensifies their desire to keep tabs on their actions—a task that becomes increasingly difficult precisely because of the radical multiplication of actors and agencies to which they now understand themselves to be linked. As if to inculcate a “feeling of incompleteness” in the reader that will mirror the protagonist’s way of writing with “endless qualifiers and doubts” (a description that also applies to the discourse of the anonymous narrator telling their story), we are often left uncertain who or how many agents “they” includes at a particular moment.

As “they” thus seems to proliferate into an increasingly heterogeneous network of human and nonhuman beings, the question of collective action and responsibility—of exactly who is acting when “they” act—increasingly becomes an object of obsessive worry for they. Ironically, the more “they” become aware of their ties to other actors, the more their collective agency spreads—much like the “expansionist language” which they see constantly overtaking or “translating” the actions they intend: “They realized that when they wrote their poems, their essays, their software programs, even their grocery lists in the expansionist language, they immediately became not only part of the expansionism by the accident of birth but they became the willful agents of expansion. When they wrote they wrote as war machine. When they wrote, they wrote as ideological state apparatus. When they wrote they wrote as military industrial complex. This list went on and on” (98). Tracing ties to others makes actions on the part of the “they” that were previously imperceptible to them perceptible for the first time. Yet this only seems to increase the power and size of “they” at the very moment they want to restrict both. In other words, the they’s increased perceptibility of their actions extends their agency, but without increasing their autonomy or self-control. How will they try to compensate for this undesired expansion of action, or manage the guilt and anxiety it creates? By “compulsively collecting rules about what to write and what not to write about” (57); by “making elaborate charts” that “categorized the options for writers like them who came from afar” (92, see also 108). And by “compulsively” gathering these rules and options into lists like the one below:¹⁹

The rules went like this…. Whenever they discussed the island, they had the responsibility to address the legacy of colonialism on the island…. They felt that any work they did about the island should somehow make clear that it was against colonialism. But at the same time this work should also make clear that they were not the only person who had ever thought up anticolonialism. They had to point out both that they supported the movement and that this movement was larger than them so as to indicate that while they supported the movement they were not its spokesperson and were not a major or crucial part of this movement…. They also felt they should not claim to understand the culture that was there before the whaling ships arrived. And if they were for some reason going to write something set in the past, they should not set any of their work in the time before the whaling ships arrived.

(109)

The narrator thus concludes:

So they wrote no poems about how beautiful the bougainvillea was without also mentioning how the plant was probably brought to the island in 1827 by the first Catholic missionary to the island. And during this time whenever they had to submit a biographical note to go with some publication they always wrote they were a continent haole so as to make clear that they did not have genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived but most of the editors of the publications on the continent edited out this information.

(109)

If nothing else, “writ[ing] with endless qualifiers and doubts” results in the production of more writing: “They felt … that they could never have enough rules” (114). The they’s “doubting mania” is thus compulsively countered by a graphomania which expands in tandem with their growing awareness of themselves as part of a larger collective—and particularly after the three make a formal agreement to “let the story they told about themselves … be interrupted by others.”

This brings us to an irony which The Transformation self-consciously thematizes. As we have seen, “they” have an especially difficult time negotiating their role as carriers of “the expansionist language,” which seems always to have effects outside and beyond their intentions. Yet as noted, the practices they turn to in order to control this expanding language—the “collecting and cataloguing of rules” (58)—result in more language. Discursive expansion is thus a key part of the plot of The Transformation, as we see “they” restlessly producing more and more lists, maps, charts, software programs, and other forms for synthesizing and displaying information in order to make the extent of their collective agency more perspicuous to themselves. It is also a feature of the language of Spahr’s narrator, who systematically stretches short phrases out into much longer descriptions disclosing the presence of more actors and agencies than hitherto suspected. “Native Hawaiian” thus becomes “those with genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived.” “New York” becomes “the island in the Atlantic.” “Working-class” extends out into “being of a working-class family of a small rural town in the middle of the continent, a town without libraries and bookstores.” “Expansion” is not only a property of specific languages, The Transformation finally implies, but of networks in general: informational, social, and biological.²⁰

It thus seems fitting that The Transformation culminates in a four-page list in which all the agencies gradually recognized over the course of the narrative as affecting or affected by the protagonist’s actions are re-gathered and made to circulate in an imaginary network. This is a “monstrous” circulatory system consisting of several hearts, through which “they” imagine “pump[ing] through” all the mediating agencies encountered in the story: “They pumped the cracking Larsen B ice shelf through their right ventricles…. Pumped through the superior vena cavas the losses in the world caused by the military that currently occupied the continent. Pumped back around with the inferior vena cavas all they ate. And then pumped through their right atriums the expansionist language. Pumped with their tricuspid valves a vow not to think of themselves as separate from those killed by the military that currently occupied the continent. Then back around to another heart, through the pulmonary veins they pumped long sentences and lists of connections, both paranoid and optimistic” (213–14) and so on. The account of why it feels necessary for they to imagine this circulatory system in the first place is provided in the longest sentence in the book:

They could not write about the 70 percent reduction of the ocean’s zooplankton biomass without having one-way tickets for haoles off the island in their heart and they could not write about one-way tickets for haoles off the island without having the impositions of imperialisms and an understanding of how their legacies continued to shape them in their heart and they could not write the impositions of imperialisms and their legacies without having the expansionist language in their heart and they could not write about the expansionist language without having the arrival of the huehue haole in their heart and they could not write about the arrival of the huehue haole without the air from the fallen buildings that made them retch in their heart and they could not write about the air from the fallen buildings without having the ghosts and the DNA in the dust in their heart and they could not write about the ghosts and the DNA in the dust without having the operations that were already happening and operations to come with names like Operation Devil Thrust, Operation Aloha, Operation Centaur Rodeo, Operation Warrior, Operation Suicide Kings, Operation Tiger Fury, Operation Iron Saber, Operation Duke Fortitude, Operation Lancer Fury, and Operation Lancer Lightning in their heart and they could not write about the operations that were already happening and operations to come with names like Operation Rock Bottom, Operation Falcon Freedom, Operation Soprano Sunset, Operation Wonderland, Operation Powder River, Operation Triple Play, Operation Therapist, Operation Lanthonid, Operation Copperas Cove without having the 70 percent reduction of the ocean’s zooplankton biomass in their heart.

(210)

Only after assembling this list do “they” realize that “they had to stop making maps that were limited by their horizontal or vertical axes. Or charts that started with two options and then spread from there. They needed a new sort of conceptualization that allowed for more going astray than any map they had ever seen” (210). The list that brings “they” to this realization—and to the narrative’s concluding four-page image of circulation—is not just an assemblage of things but of ties: things they find themselves compelled to write about precisely in connection with one another. It is also a gathering-up of agencies, since every phrase listed names an entity that has been affected by or somehow affected they, altering their bodies or mediating/overtaking their actions: from scientific facts (“70 percent reduction of the ocean’s zooplankton biomass”) to political slogans (“one-way tickets for haoles off the island”).

Spahr and Latour thus undertake the challenge of representing/constructing the social—understood in both cases as a challenge of making links between individual actors more perspicuous—from opposing directions. While Spahr’s narrative moves from a multiplicity toward a relatively enduring unity, Latour’s first move is to dissolve “society” into a swarm of nonhuman and human actors connected only for a passing instant in time. Indeed, since ANT calls not only for a radical commitment to localism and presentism but for the immediate disintegration of any concept or structure, as Harman points out Latour’s “philosophy of connection” can thus end up seeming oddly anticonnexionist: with his many individual actors left “island-like” in their “utter concreteness” (104, 105). As Harman elaborates, “Actors [in Latour] are defined by their relations, but precisely for this reason they are cut off in their own relational microcosms, which endure only for only an instant before the actor is replaced by a similar actor” (116).²¹ Most surprisingly, Reassembling the Social claims to be indifferent to social form. Actor-network-theory tells us nothing about the appearance of the assemblages it describes, Latour stresses: just as one should not confuse “drawing with a pencil” with “drawing the outline of a pencil,” we should not confuse “the network that is drawn by the description and the network that is used to make the description.” When it comes to “making the social appear” by way of ANT, only the latter definition of “network” oddly matters: “ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that; it says nothing about the shape of what is being described with it” (142). Hence while real networks like subways and telephone systems “do not necessarily have to be described in an ‘Actor-Networky’ way,” one can use “Actor-Network” to describe “something that doesn’t look at all like a network”—such as a “state of mind” or “fictional character.” In The Transformation, by contrast—a narrative whose main character looks and acts exactly “like a network”—the shape of “they” is of explicit interest to “they” (as we will soon see in more detail).

But for all these important differences in the way Spahr and Latour go about assembling collectives, their opposing trajectories end up converging in a similar affective and discursive space: one defined by the circulation and recirculation of information, by the series and its temporality of ongoingness (“the list went on and on”), by a style of writing marked by “endless qualifiers and doubts,” and by a “continuous and obsessive attention” to descriptive detail. Marked as well by a distinctive set of affects and values—meticulousness, scrupulosity, self-vigilance, a strong work ethic, a radical commitment to doubt, an intense desire for order, and an arguably “inflated sense of responsibility”²²—in Spahr and Latour’s approaches to connexionism the writing of “interesting accounts” intensifies into a poetics of what Spahr calls “obsessive thinking about and revising rules” (113). What is the significance of this link? Of the fact that both Spahr and Latour’s efforts to reduce the opacity of the social (by multiplying actors and making the links between them more perspicuous) result in what we might (problematically) call an obsessive-compulsive aesthetic? Why would tracing networks involve a shift from a relatively anodyne aesthetic of information, seriality, and circulation (what I have elsewhere called the aesthetic of the “merely interesting”) to an intense and fervent version of the same?²³

One answer is that the discourse of “continuous and obsessive attention” in Reassembling the Social and The Transformation points to a fundamental ambiguity about the representability of networks that we see each text grappling with in a different way. As Galloway and Thacker note, any “macroidentification of the network as a cohesive whole” is a “paradoxical move, since a key property of any network is its heterogeneity” (59). Since it is internal to networks to be continually “extended and altered”—and since it is also in the nature of networks to be “internally variable”—there is always a tension between the individuation of the network as a whole, and the individuation of “all the nodes and edges that constitute the system” (59). “Awareness of the increasing interconnectedness of our communications systems” has thus made it “increasingly difficult to think of [social] formations as distinct entities,” as Tiziana Terranova notes.²⁴ How can a perpetually expanding collection of actors be properly formalized? How can the boundaries of a network be nonarbitrarily drawn?²⁵ As Boltanski and Chiapello put it: “Networks can be known only on a person-by-person basis. No one is in a position to totalize them” (130).

The only way in which networks can be given a certain finality in spite of their lack of empirical closure, as Spahr’s text highlights, is thus through symbolization or metaphor. Indeed, it is exactly because “they” perceive the lack of closure in their web of associations that they feel anxiously compelled to search for reticular metaphors. The Transformation thus ends up self-consciously choked with not just metaphors for networks—plant species with reticular root systems, airplane and boat travel routes, fifty hand-holding skydivers, file-sharing computers, an octopus, the Internet, the human circulatory system—but for “the network” as a particularly promiscuous and flexible metaphor. Because growth is intrinsic to networks in the same way that movement is intrinsic to metaphor, most of The Transformation’s metaphors for networks in fact double as metaphors for metaphor, which, as the narrator informs us, has a tendency to “take over poems” in the same way the passiflora takes over indigenous plant species, “smother[ing] shrubs, small trees, and the ground layer” (31). Conversely, one of the most interesting metaphors for networks in The Transformation is “metaphor” itself, which Spahr explicitly aligns with transportation/transformation: “Their dreams were pressing but this period of moving from one place to another place and having this motion take over their thoughts the way metaphor takes over poems was only a brief period” (131). Here “metaphor” supplies a figure not just for a kind of “motion,” but for the more specific motion of “taking over” something (thoughts, poems, actions, etc.): the “overtaking” Spahr refers to elsewhere as “expansion.” Metaphors for networks thus expand and overtake the narrative discourse of The Transformation in a way that directly contributes to its obsessional quality. Indeed, one of the things the three obsess about most is their very dependency on metaphor for a sense of themselves as a network. Though “they did not want metaphors to matter,” “they constantly rewrote metaphors to make them work for them” (17). Metaphor also appears to involve a kind of “overthinking” as well as constant rewriting, as when they reflect on the fact that the tallest building in the small rural town where they grew up was only six stories tall: “They thought a lot about this six-story-tall building even as they felt they were at a risk of overthinking it. But they couldn’t stop from seeing it as a metaphor” (127).

As a strategy for negotiating the ambiguity surrounding the totalizability of networks, the compulsive proliferation of reticular metaphors in The Transformation seems to stand in sharp contrast to Latour’s professed disinterest in the network as appearance or form. Indeed, if metaphorical “overthinking” abounds in Spahr’s effort to combat social opacity by tracing networks, Latour’s attempt to do the same involves a deliberate “underthinking,” advocating an antlike focus on local connections over any “leaping” to structures. Yet one could view Latour’s very dismissal of reticular form as irrelevant (as when he insists actor-network-theory tells us nothing about the look or shape of the assemblages it describes) as a response to precisely the same ambiguity that leads to the not entirely wanted proliferation of metaphors in The Transformation. In other words, it is perhaps exactly because of the formal problem posed by networks that Latour brackets the question of the network as form or appearance. How else explain the oddness of that bracketing, especially since elsewhere Latour suggests that the social is precisely that which can be made to “appear” through interesting or well-written accounts?²⁶

Indeed, one of the strangest, even admittedly “tricky” moves Latour makes in Reassembling the Social is to use “network” as a “benchmark of literary quality,” rather than as a reference to a structure or physical entity with a particular shape (131). Despite the acknowledged “disingenuous[ness],” not to mention grammatical awkwardness of using the noun network as a term of aesthetic evaluation, Latour is adamant that the concept should be reserved for the purposes of distinguishing a “powerful and convincing” account of the social from a “weak and powerless one” (in the same way one might use an adjective such as “interesting” or “good”) and not to describe an entity with a particular shape (130–31). As he states plainly in a chapter section just as plainly titled “Defining at last what a network is”: “The network does not designate a thing out there that would have roughly the shape of interconnected points, much like a telephone, a freeway, or a sewage ‘network.’ It is nothing more than an indicator of the quality of a text about the topics at hand” (129). In this manner, the network is that which distinguishes a “good text”—a “narrative or a description … where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there” (128)—from one in which “only a handful of actors will be designated as the causes of all the others, which will have no other function than to serve as backdrop or relay for the flows of casual efficacy.” A “bad textual account,” in other words, is one in which actors “go through the gestures to keep busy as characters, but … will be without a part in the plot, meaning they will not act [without making a difference].” By contrast, a good or interesting text—one that combats the opacity of the social by disintegrating and then reassembling it—is “a string of actions where each participant is treated as a full-blown mediator” (128).

Network for Latour is thus an aesthetic property of texts, not what texts narrate or describe. As an “indicator of literary quality,” it is more specifically an indicator of a kind of character system in which every individual actor makes a difference (“Remember that if an actor makes no difference, it’s not an actor” [130]). Plural, heterogeneous, and nonhierarchical, this character system would stand in vivid contrast to the asymmetrical one of the classic realist novel, where a single actor or at most “handful” do the acting, while all the rest “will have no other function than to serve as backdrop or relay.”²⁷ By the same token, “network” for Latour calls for a very specific kind of plot: a radically dynamic one where every single action by every actor will have a significant impact on the action of every single other. “Network” qua “benchmark of literary quality” when it comes to “assembling the social” (or making the social “appear” through well-written accounts) is thus bound up with explicitly narratological issues. As Latour notes, “ANT has borrowed from narrative theories” not because “sociology is fiction,”²⁸ but because the “diversity of the worlds of fiction invented on paper allow enquirers to gain as much pliability and range as those they have to study in the real world” (55). Flexibility is the key value here: “It is only through some continuous familiarity with literature that ANT sociologists might become less wooden, less rigid, less stiff in their definition of what sort of agencies populate the world” (55).²⁹

And yet, in a telling contradiction, obsessiveness with its characteristic demand for rigor and specificity (the very opposite of “pliability”) is clearly a positive literary value for Latour as well. This is evinced in Latour’s repeated use of the adverb “obsessively” as a way of qualifying his practices, proudly referring to ANT’s “obsessively blind … trail-following” (179) and way of “actively, reflexively, obsessively” making comparisons (149); and to Latour’s own specific way of “obsessively [asking] questions” (187), his “obsessively literal” interrogation of “social explanations” (103) and commitment to keeping what he calls the “landscape” of ANT “obsessively flat” (174). Of a piece with Reassembling the Social’s idiosyncratic use of network as a term of aesthetic praise for texts in which “all the actors do something and don’t just sit there,” this discourse of obsession points to a general intensification of labor that the “new network morality” of post-Fordist capitalism at once helps mask and sustain: “To be doing something, to move, to change—this is what enjoys prestige, as against stability, which is often regarded as synonymous with inaction” (155). As Boltanski and Chiapello argue, “a premium on activity, without any clear distinction between personal and even leisure activity and professional activity,” is one of the signature traits that distinguishes the current “spirit of capitalism” from the Weberian spirit, which advocates the separation of domestic and industrial life (155). As reflected also by the compulsion of “they” to make lists that “go on and on,” which in turn mirrors how “they kept going, going with job application after job application” (65), the radical intensification of activity in the era of networks, due in part to the erasure of the distinction between “activity” and “work,” points to the rise of “networking” itself as activity par excellence in a reticular world. As Boltanski and Chiapello write, “Activity aims to generate projects, or to achieve integration into projects initiated by others. But the project does not exist outside the encounter (not being integrated once and for all into an institution or environment, it presents itself as an action to be performed, not as something that is already there). Hence the activity par excellence is integrating oneself into networks and exploring them” (110). The politically ambiguous breakdown of the distinction between “work” and “activity” specific to the “new network morality” of late capitalism also points to the rise of affective labor, the putting-to-work of personal and subjective qualities. For “in a connexionist world, the distinction between private life and professional life tends to diminish under the impact of a … confusion … between the qualities of the person and the properties of their labor power,” Boltanski and Chiapello note, making it difficult to separate “affective bonds” from “useful relationships” in a historically unprecedented way (155).

Consciously or unconsciously, the way in which Spahr and Latour mobilize a poetics of connection that is noticeably obsessive—one marked by the “feeling of never enough rules”—thus discloses the link between the “new network morality” and the expansion of work as well as the labor that goes into building collectives in general and networks in particular.³⁰ As stands to reason, The Transformation takes up a more explicitly literary version of this problem: that of sustaining a reticular protagonist in a genre that exerts as much individualizing pressure as the memoir or novel (which is clearly why Spahr’s allegiance to each stays equivocal).

The difficulty of maintaining “the social” qua network in this narrative is reflected most vividly by a certain slippage between the idea and reality of “they.” As noted, the first half of Spahr’s narrative is devoted to showing how the original “three” expands to become “they” after being affected/infected by the history, politics, and culture of the island—all of which “entered into their body and changed it.” The whole point of this first section, with its multiplication of heterogeneous agencies, seems to be that of establishing that the membership of “they,” while always changing and indeterminate, extends far beyond the “three” from which it starts out. After the move from the “island in the Pacific to [the] island in the Atlantic,” however, the referent of “they” reverts back to the initial three, as if the development of “three” into “they” never really took hold (or, more disturbingly from The Transformation’s own point of view, as if the experience of living in the “accusative” on the “island in the Pacific” was quickly forgotten on departure). Theoretically, “they” still includes the flora, airplanes, desks, history, and all the human and nonhuman “actors” which the first half of the narrative works so hard to assemble, even after they return to New York. Yet as the second half of the narrative returns to a more detailed account of their domestic life together and its various formal organizations and arrangements, it is increasingly clear that “they” explicitly refers to “three”:

They settled into an apartment with upstairs and downstairs. One of them had a desk downstairs. Two of them shared a room with two desks upstairs. They all set up their computers and one of them built a network that connected all the computers.

(130)

One of them dreamed of being crushed by two big blue rubber balls…. One of them dreamed they were getting a tattoo of birds such as the hedge sparrow, the dipper, the peacock, the ostrich, and the bird of paradise, all of them in flight or walking, whatever the individual bird’s preference, in a circle around their upper arm. One of them dreamed about Three Dog Night and the Three Stooges and opening and closing doors.

(131)

Not only is “they” explicitly three people here, as opposed to a more ambiguous and heterogeneous “many”; three itself is shown to split easily into two and one (upstairs and downstairs desks) and into one, one, one (dreams). This slipperiness between they and three (or, for that matter, between three and two/one and one/one/one) points to yet another feature about networks that makes them especially challenging to traditional character systems. For networks are “multiplicities” not because they are constructed of numerous parts, Galloway and Thacker argue, “but because they are organized around the principle of perpetual inclusion” which is a “question of a formal arrangement, not a finite count.” What this means is not just that “networks can and must grow (adding nodes and edges) but, more important, that networks are reconfigurable in new ways and at all scales” (60–61). In short, because of the “multiplicity that inheres within every network” (12), a network is never just one. In The Transformation this self-difference is dramatized not just by its oscillation between “they” as indeterminate/fluctuating many, and “they” as a fixed/exact three, but by the constant tension between singular and plural that runs throughout the narrative in the form of a lack of agreement between grammatical subjects and objects: “they were a pervert” (177) instead of “they were perverts.” In addition to highlighting this formal ambiguity on the part of networks, the oscillation between the indeterminacy of “many” and the exactness of “three” mirrors one of the most anxiety-provoking contradictions in the world of networking, as described by Boltanski and Chiapello: the “tension between the requirement of flexibility and the need to be someone—that is to possess a self endowed with specificity (a ‘personality’) and a certain permanency in time” (461). As Boltanksi and Chiapello elaborate, adaptability is a “basic requirement for circulating in networks,” since “to adjust to a connexionist world, people must prove sufficiently malleable to pass through different universes while changing properties.” Yet, in order to “interest” others, the networker must at the same time “be someone”: “If he is merely his faculty for adapting, if he isn’t someone, why attach oneself to him?” (461).

Like the contradiction between “being specific” and “being flexible,” the anxiety provoked by the tension between being exactly three and being many is thus yet another thing that the obsessive discourse in The Transformation arguably reflects and tries to negotiate. For three is already as much of a reticular organization as they. This is already evinced by the metonymy of the upstairs and downstairs computers, which while clearly referring to a “they” of exactly three (two upstairs, one downstairs) is also quite literally a network: “They all set up their computers and one of them built a network that connected all the computers.” Instead of reading the slippage between “they” and “three” as the sign of a failed poetics of networks, then—a failure to take the “philosophy of connection” to its logical endpoint and then sustain it—we could read it as making a series of more polemical and interesting points about the limits of network theory.

One thing that the shift from “they” back to “three” highlights is how the “principle of perpetual inclusion” makes networks very badly suited for explaining why social ties may fail to form, break off, or disappear. Networks can help us schematize extremely dense and complicated social connections, but not the most basic rupture or gap. Because of the “diachronic blindness” of networks,³¹ to become disconnected in the “reticular universe” is to have never existed; Latour’s ANT is thus, as Harman points out, a “philosophy of isolated instants.” Even aside from this inability to narrate dynamic processes, even ongoing states of disaffiliation, disconnection, or exclusion cannot be described by ANT: negative relations that are just as fundamental to the formation and nature of currently existing groups as the positively existing “tie.” But, as if exactly to compensate for this relentless positivity (and representational exclusion of exclusion), Spahr’s narrative exaggerates the gap between different reticular “regions.” In a similar vein, the asymmetry between “they” and “three” in The Transformation works against a formal aspect of connectionism Latour deliberately embraces: flatness. Like Facebook, ANT recognizes no distinction between strong and weak ties, but in the interests of “networking” or “expansionism” treats all associations equally. A tie is a tie: all have the same affective intensity, the same transient and fragile quality.³² In conjunction with widening the concept of “actor” to include a new variety of nonhuman agents, to treat all ties as equal encourages a worldview in which “everything is connected.” But to say “everything is connected” is to make connexionism utterly banal, returning us to the blandness of “the social” as universal explanation, which Latour appeals to ANT to combat. How then to write a narrative with a reticular protagonist that doesn’t lead to this conclusion? By emphasizing that network’s internal variability; its capability of being “reconfigurable at all scales.”

Mirrored by the “back and forth” of the protagonist’s “obsessive thinking,”³³ the slippage between “they” and “three” more interestingly implies that while “they” is larger, more indeterminate, and more heterogeneous, the network of three is just as difficult and laborious to maintain. This is evinced by the intensity of the three’s struggle simply to keep their relationship going, as underscored once again by rules:

When they sometimes met others who also configured themselves in three, they longed to ask them things, like did they too have a schedule for who slept in what bed? What did they do about those awkward moments when colleagues invited them and their partner to dinner? Did they too have a rule that made them mumble something about having more than one partner and could all of them come? What did they do when they wrote their name plus two on the office sign up sheet for the holiday party and then got an email from the secretary that roommates were not invited, only spouses? Did they too have a chore wheel where the wheel was cut into three wedges? But usually they were too shy. And they avoided becoming friends with these others like them as if people would make even more fun of them if they saw them with others like them.

(178–79)

Note how the difficulty of staying three is reinforced by the three’s failure to establish relations with other threes, a socially meaningful absence of connection that could not be registered as meaningful or even visible by ANT.³⁴ Reflected thus in the story as well as in the belabored quality of the discourse, this struggle becomes especially pronounced after one of the three decides, after his/her experience in the Pacific, to move back to the “islands on the Atlantic.” After a “physically and emotionally hard” period of “moving back and forth,” the two follow the one; in part because “moving back and forth … wore them down,” but also because “the islands on the Atlantic were known for their perversions and various sexualities and they wanted to live some place known for its perversions and various sexualities” (122). At the same time, even when ensconced there, the three struggle to find the right concept for their alliance or formation, leading to a “back and forth” on the word pervert in particular:

They embraced the word pervert when really it was probably an overstatement and the fact that they felt that everything was a metaphor against them did not mean they were that abnormal, that unacceptable.

(171)

Although they frequently adopted a haughty tone and called themselves perverts when asked about their sexuality, they greatly feared appearing overtly lecherous or perverse and as a result they abandoned all flirting and innuendo even though they had enjoyed flirting and innuendo a great deal when they were just one of a couple.

(20)

While “pervert” is thus described as an “overstatement,” the three also view it as meaning the contrary of “anything radical.” “Once a friend of theirs who had surgically changed their gender asked them why they did not speak more publicly and explicitly about their relationship. The implication behind their comment was that perhaps they were more in the closet even though their friend did not suggest what they should come out as. When their friend asked them this they immediately felt guilty and wondered at the same time if the reason they did not come out was that they saw themselves more as perverts than anything radical” (175). The three choose not to identify as queer on similar grounds: “they told themselves that they did this out of respect because they were not sexually involved with people of the same gender” (173).

Yet, as dramatized at the level of both discourse and story, the fact that the romantic/sexual alliance of three is just as difficult to maintain, conceptually as well as practically, as the larger indefinite “they” has politically queer implications. For one thing, in highlighting the repetitive, rule-based, obsessional labor involved to sustain both formations, it calls attention to the intersection between ANT and what feminists now broadly call kin work, which is both a reproductive and an affective labor. The explicitly gendered concept of affective labor, in turn, overlaps to some degree with the neo-Marxist concept of immaterial labor that figures prominently in network-oriented studies of post-Fordism and the global information economy: while both involve the production of affects, subjectivities, and social relationships, the latter models itself on labor in the culture industries as opposed to female reproductive labor in the household and also across households, as anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo noted in her 1987 paper originally defining “kin work” specifically as the “creation, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-household ties”—a concept of kinship that defines it explicitly as both labor and networking and thus cuts through what Di Leonardo describes as an impasse in feminism between “the ‘labor’ and ‘network’ perspectives on women’s lives” or the divided focus on women’s nonmarket activities as either exploitative work or as social altruism.³⁵ Though the “work of kinship” is thus explicitly gendered (and the conception of it feminist) in the way ANT is not, the practices they involve are strikingly similar. These politically ambiguous overlaps are brought out all the more strongly by The Transformation’s insistent gender neutrality, as if to confirm the hope, voiced earliest by Gayle Rubin, that alternative kinship arrangements—which is to say, alternative social arrangements—have the power to produce ideas of gender still yet to be conceptualized.³⁶

“Kinship” and “network” are thus far from construed as conceptual opposites in The Transformation, but rather shown to be coimplicated in ideologically complex and politically ambiguous ways. It is only after having been turned into they, after all, that they can think about what it means to be three. Conversely, it is only by their reverting back to being three that the reader of The Transformation is able to grasp how much the connectionist “principle of perpetual inclusion” leaves out when it comes to understanding the conditions that make the formation of certain social entities possible. What this suggests is not just the limits of actor-network-theory for theorizing exclusion’s role in the constitution of that “primary” form of social arrangement, kinship, but how new configurations of kinship might lead to a more critical and politically astute theory of networking.

Notes

This essay grew out of a talk for a panel called “Poetry and Complex Systems: Global Ecologies and Poetic Form” at the December 2008 MLA in San Francisco; my thanks to the organizers and audience members. I would also like to thank Alex Woloch and Eric Hayot for encouraging me to think harder about some of the issues raised in this text and Chris Looby and Cindy Weinstein for inviting me to contribute it to the volume.

1. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto, 2004), 1.

2. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2d ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 508.

3. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005), 138. Further page references will be provided parenthetically within the text.

4. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 500.

5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 124. Further page references will be provided parenthetically within the text.

6. Juliana Spahr, The Transformation (Berkeley: Atelos: 2007), 188. Further page references will be given parenthetically within the text.

7. This macro/micro distinction has most defined the field of sociology in the twentieth century (with the abstract study of structures and systems by Parsons and Luhmann, on one side, and the study of face-to-face interactions by Goffman and Garfinkel on the other).

8. For Latour, the aesthetic of the interesting is thus an aesthetic of circulation, underscoring a link I’ve suggested elsewhere. See Sianne Ngai, “Merely Interesting,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 777–817.

9. Jennifer L. Fleissner, “Obsessional Modernity: The ‘Institutionalization of Doubt,’” Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007): 106–34, 118.

10. A translation of psychologist Pierre Janet’s sentiment d’incomplétude. See ibid., 118. Also see Jennifer L. Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10.

11. See Latour, Reassembling the Social, 37. Latour contrasts the idea of the social as a “building in need of restoration” with his own idea of it as a “movement in need of continuation” as in performance or dance.

12. The prominence of adverbs in general seems nontrivial, since continuously and patiently modify verbs like upkeeping in the same way Latour’s “mediators” modify actions.

13. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 223. Quoted in Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 54.

14. Harman, Prince of Networks, 102.

15. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 126.

16. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992). On Weber’s text as a “precursor account of obsessional neurosis” see Fleissner, “Obsessional Modernity,” 113.

17. This is the case even as otherwise the two texts could not be more different in tone: Latour’s highly charismatic and irreverent, Spahr’s flat and suffused with “guilt” (111).

18. It is tempting to read this problematic as an instance of the negative aesthetic experience Spahr calls “connective paranoia” or of Bruce Robbins’s closely related “sweatshop sublime”: a “moment of consciousness which will not be converted into action” that comes about as a result of one’s recognition of one’s place in the global division of labor (or upon glimpsing “for a moment, the unimaginable face of society as a whole” [88]). But though I’ve written about Spahr and these themes before, I do not think paranoia or sweatshop sublime are the best affective concepts for thinking about The Transformation. The problem “they” come to confront through their tracing of connections is the problem not of paralyzed or suspended agency, but of excessive, uncontrollable action. And while paranoia indexes one of the defining existential dilemmas of postmodernity, which Fredric Jameson described as a “growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience,” the problem of the networked universe in The Transformation involves an excessive proximity and even conflation of the local and global, phenomenological description and structural model that is arguably just as unsettling. See Bruce Robbins, “The Sweatshop Sublime,” PMLA 117, no. 1 (January 2002): 84–97; Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–57, 249.

19. In the same vein, see also their rules for “writing in the complex” (57–58); the “map of poetry” (80); and the “elaborate chart” categorizing “options for writers like them who came from afar” (92–93). Spahr, The Transformation.

20. As Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker note, “networks exist through ‘process’”; they are inherently dynamic. See The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 61–62. Further page references will be given parenthetically within the text. Other accounts emphasize the very opposite; see note 28.

21. Graham Harman argues that “Latour simply cannot be understood if this Janus-headed principle is overlooked.” See Harman, Prince of Networks, 116.

22. Ian Osbourne notes the “inflated sense of responsibility” of obsessives, “a deep seated, automatic tendency to feel accountable for anything bad that might happen.” See Ian Osbourne, Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals: The Hidden Epidemic of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (New York: Random House, 1998), 59. Quoted in Paul Cefalu, “What’s So Funny about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?” PMLA 124, no. 1 (January 2009): 44–58, 49.

23. Ngai, “Merely Interesting.”

24. Terranova, Network Culture, 2.

25. This problem of knowing when to stop, or how to decide nonarbitrarily on the limits of an actor-network, is acknowledged in an offhand joking fashion by Latour, but never really seriously confronted. For a particularly telling moment on this topic in Reassembling the Social, see the dialogue between Professor and Student on 148.

26. For, as Galloway and Thacker note, when it comes to networks, shape or pattern is essential: “material instantiation is coextensive with pattern formation” (The Exploit 35). Latour argues that “network” is a benchmark of “interesting,” “well-written” accounts of the social. It is only these network-like texts that “make the social appear in a certain way.” But since to write the social is in effect to produce it—since the social is precisely that which is made to appear through a certain kind of writing—why isn’t the network a “real” thing “out there” as well as a property of writing (Reassembling the Social 93), since from the ANT perspective the real thing is at least in part constituted by the writing?

27. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 130.

28. See Latour, Reassembling the Social, 54, n 54: “It would be fairly accurate to describe ANT as being half Garfinkel and half Greimas.”

29. We thus surprisingly find a discourse of literary value at the very heart of Reassembling the Social: a guide to how to write flexible, yet at the same time extremely concrete and specific, network-like accounts of social formation which will by definition contribute to the reality of the entity described. Given this embrace of both aesthetic evaluation and literary theory as fully relevant to ANT, it seems worthwhile to note Latour’s indifference to the distinction between narrating and describing, as reflected in his definition of a network-like account of the social as a “narrative or a description … where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there” (128). Latour’s unconcern with the difference reflects an unconcern with the incompatibility between the kind of “character system” that ANT calls for—one in which the concrete and specific nature of each individual agent matters absolutely—and a plot so radically committed to “ceaseless,” “continuous” transformation that it changes the identity of the actors from one moment to the next. While, according to Castells, the “network society” is characterized by the “preeminence of social morphology over social action” (508), privileging a static, formal arrangement of individual characters at the direct expense of narrative, Latour maintains that one can have both a radically open, enlarged, and heterogeneous character system, and a radically dynamic and active plot. Yet actors in ANT “have no choice but to occupy punctiform cinematic frames”; their “utter concreteness,” with each defined entirely by the sum of their associations with others with “nothing held in reserve,” requires that “they be incarcerated in an instant” (105). ANT could thus be described a poetics of activity without development. It is true that development is by no means a prerequisite for narrative: as Lukács and Fleissner show, naturalism is perhaps the handiest example of a kind of narrative filled with restless activity in which even major characters do not “grow.” Yet at an even more basic level, one cannot represent “flows of causal efficacy” or actions succeeding one another in time, without individual agents who endure for more than just an instant. In spite of Latour’s disregard for “mere displacements without transformation,” then, transformation depends on a minimal degree of non-transformation (130). If everything acts upon or effects everything at once, or if everything changes all the time, our experience of the world would be that of Hume’s skeptic: with the entire world reinvented from instant to instant. There is thus a sense in which good ANT texts can really only be descriptions. And yet it is exactly narrative, not description, that Latour seems explicitly to call for when he praises a network-like account of the social as a text “where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there.”

30. Latour even advocates using the awkward term worknet because, unlike network, it highlights this relation rather than obfuscating it: “Work-nets could allow one to see the labor that goes on in laying down net-works; the first as an active mediator, the second as a stabilized set of intermediaries” (Reassembling the Social 132). Making this labor visible requires an intensification of activity that Latour seems to privilege for its own sake. “Work-net” is a better “benchmark of literary quality” than “network” because the term itself functions as an “active mediator” (131, 132). It is thus as if Latour wants to highlight the labor of “networking” less to critique the projective city’s privileging of activity than to demonstrate his adherence to it. ANT—the production of network-like narratives/descriptions—appeals to Latour because it calls for increased vigilance and activity; because it calls on the sociologist/writer to work harder.

31. Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 33.

32. Flatness is a desirable quality for Latour, who refers to the need for “clamps” (174) to prevent “the social” from popping out from behind his traced connections and, in his own words, “keep the landscape obsessively flat” (174). See “How to Keep the Social Flat” in Reassembling the Social, 166–72.

33. While, on the one hand, they “worry people knew they were a pervert” and thus “resort to secrecy about their personal life when meeting new people,” these anxieties are countered with “loud celebrations” such as “mak[ing] out in public while standing in line at the grocery” (177).

34. Again, due to ANT’s “diachronic blindness” and inability to model negative relations—exclusions, disconnections—as significant factors in the formation of societies. Since, according to ANT, what the social consists of is only ties, there is no room in the theory to account for how the absence of a social tie might in itself be socially meaningful (or, indeed, relevant to the formation of groups). Latour, Reassembling the Social.

35. Micaela di Leonardo, “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (1987): 440–453, 442.

36. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Linda Nicholson, ed., The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), 27–62.