Dean, Jodi

All networks aren't equal

Abstract

Manuel Castells says we live in a networked society. Jurgen Habermas finds that networked communications have produced for the first time what might be thought of as a global public sphere. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that Empire reproduces itself via networks and that resistance may well require viral, non-communicative action. If these people all find the present characterized by communicative networks, why do they disagree on the relation of these networks to democracy? And, might there be a better, more precise, way of thinking through the impact of networked communications on political practices? Drawing from recent work from Richard Rogers and Noortje Marres, I will argue that Habermas and Hardt and Negri similarly--though invertedly--misread networks. Habermas collapse form into content. This leads him to equate the circulation of information with democratic politics as if all information were the same, as if there were no differentiation among sites, positions, links, and forms of authorization. Hardt and Negri collapse content into form. This leads them to presume an identity among users, viewers, and subjects in Empire, an identity rooted in an absorption of contents such that mediation collapses into the immediacies of the society of control. Neither Habermas nor Hardt and Negri can account for the new shapes of politics in the networked society. The new work on issue networks, however, suggests a way out of this impasse.