![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
Society can no longer be thought of as independent of networks because discourses, theories, images, and institutions have transformed and abandoned the metaphor of hierarchy. This paper investigates the space occupied by the network metaphor during the past few decades and how it deals with the demarcation between what is “inside” and what remains “outside.” Examining theorists such as Manuel Castells, Albert-László Barabási, and Michel Callon, who have tried to map out the conditions of a “network,” the paper elucidates why “networks” should be approached ontologically more than as a matter of a conceptual tool.
Notes
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
2. For instance, in linguistic expression, the being of a language has always already to be presupposed, in order for the linguistic meaning to be possible. What is essential is that language, as the condition of possibility for a meaning, has to be conceived of as a whole. It is this wholeness that constitutes the precondition of thinking and acting.
3. John Peters, Speaking into the Air. A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999); Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971); Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Bantam, 1967); Marshall McLuhan, Marshall and Bruce Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 2001); Hanno Hardt, Critical Communication Studies. Communication, History and Theory in America (London: Routledge, 1992).
4. See, for example, John Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology, Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Jean Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970).
5. Oxford English Dictionary Online.
6. See, for example, Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999); on policy network discourse, see David Marsh, ed., Comparing Policy Networks (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1988).
7. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. I (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 470.
8. Castells, 470.
9. Manuel Castells, “Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society,” The British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (January/March 2000): 5–24.
10. Castells, Rise of Network Society, 470.
11. Albert-László Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge: Perseus, 2002), 217.
12. Barabási.
13. Barabási, 95–96, 106.
14. Barabási, 86, 90.
15. Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity. Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 154.
16. John Law and John Hassard, ed., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999).
17. Michel Callon, “The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle,” in Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World, ed. Michel Callon et al. (Houndmills, UK: The Macmillan Press, 1986).
18. Callon, “The Sociology of an Actor-Network,” 23.
19. François Dosse, The Empire of Meanin: The Humanization of the Social Sciences (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.
20. Callon et al., 222.
21. Callon et al., xvi.
22. Law and Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After, 186–87.
23. Callon et al., 228.
24. Callon et al., 228.
25. Callon et al., 228.
26. Of course, despite the often simplifying methodological precepts, there are many fine studies in the actor network theory tradition in which the historical conditions are an integral part of the narrative of the formation of network. Yet, the perspective often remains to be that of a heroic individual, although it is clear that the ontological dimension cannot be reduced to the perspective of individual decisions alone (see, for example, Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
27. In the same year, Callon published an article on the “sociology of translation” (“L'Operation de traduction comme relation symbolique,” in L'incidence des rapports sociaux sur la science, ed. P. Roqueplo (Paris: CORDES, 1976), 105–41. See “Introduction: Rhizome,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
28. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 146–47.
29. Deleuze and Guattari, 16.
30. Deleuze and Guattari, 8–9.
31. Deleuze and Guattari, 17, 21.
32. Deleuze and Guattari, 15.
33. Deleuze and Guattari, 9.
34. See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), 34–35.
35. Of course, in classical sociology, for instance, the world was investigated precisely as a system of relationships. Here, I am only bringing out the idea of this system as a metaphor articulating explicitly the ontological realm.
36. Barabási, 201.
37. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 144–45.
38. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 16–19.