I enjoyed all of the readings this week, but I got caught up in Galloway’s Pessimism in a particular place, and it that area that I would like to concentrate on in this blog and hopefully cover in class Thursday night.

It’s interesting that network pessimism relies on two basic assumptions: “everything is a network”; and “the best response to networks is more networks” (2). As I was reading this I couldn’t help but think that if everything is a network nothing really is. To this, Jagoda possess the question “if so many things and relationships are figured as networks, what is not a network?” (111), and Joe rightly notes that Jagoda’s work “is akin to Galloway’s in its suspicion of ‘network as everything/onlything.’”

Galloway asks the question “So what’s the problem?” He is not asking about the ways networks confront power centers nor is he judging the label of “pessimism.” In fact, he notes that pessimism is not the problem. But rather than network pessimism “deploys and sustains a specific dogma, confining both networks and pessimism to a single, narrow ideological position” (4), and it’s this narrow-mindedness that is being questioned.

Ok, so far so good. But then Galloway combines the two as “network pessimism” and states that there are three problems with this: the problem of presentism, the problem of ideology, and the problem of the event. With respect to presentism, Galloway writes, “The problem of presentism refers to the way in which networks and network thinking are, by design, allergic to historicization. This exhibits itself in a number of different ways. Networks arrive on the scene at the proverbial “end of history” (and they do so precisely because they help end this history)” (4).

So, networks and network thinking from their inception do not lend themselves to be understood as products of historical development, is this an accurate statement? If so, in what way are they not understood as such? Galloway continues, “Ecological and systems-oriented thinking, while admittedly always temporal by nature, gained popularity as a kind of solution to the problems of diachrony.” Why is diachronic time an issue here—other than Galloway makes it so by stating that networks are “allergic to historicization”? Galloway concludes this portion of the discussion by returning to the line of thinking I noted at the beginning of this post that “everything is a network” and states that this assumption “gradually falls apart into a kind of tautology of presentism” (5).

I would really like to discuss this in seminar Thursday night.