In his book Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985) – Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990) – Friedrich A. Kittler brought discourse analysis to media studies, coining discourse network to “also designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (qtd. Liu 50n4). Reformulated as such, discourse gains direction, speed, and technological articulation. In Kittler’s discourse network circa 1900, the typewriter becomes a “discourse machine gun” (Kittler 14; cf. 191), and in Alan Liu’s “discourse network [circa] 2000″, Web 2.0 becomes a kind of discourse superlaser-armed drone-network of “phenomenally senseless automatism” (Liu 81) – a conviction anticipated by Kittler in his subsequent book’s ultimate epitaph for hermeneutics: “Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms that defy interpretation and only permit interception…. By its own account, the NSA [National Security Agency] has ‘accelerated’ the ‘advent of the computer age,’ and hence the end of history…. An automated discourse analysis has taken command” (263).

It is in view of this acceleration that contributors to the latest issue of Amodern proportionally urge us to caution. The introducers write:

[N]etwork temporality is often described in terms of acceleration to the point where time is eviscerated as a historical dimension.Paul Virilio warns us of the “dictatorship” of speed that accompanies the development of information networks, which threatens to reduce our rich histories by locking us into a global, universal time – what Castells describes as a “timeless time.”This temporal logic is seen as “instantaneous rather than durational and causal” and “simultaneous rather than sequential,” constituted in relation to immediate crises. The network is understood as ever-present, real-time, a structure that flattens rather than historicizes. (Starosielski, Soderman, and cheek np)

Similarly, Alan Liu in the interview by Scott Pound:

Spatial-political barriers that once took muscular civilizations centuries, if not millennia, to traverse by pushing through roads, etc., are now overleaped in milliseconds by a single finger pushing ‘send.’ The temporality of shared culture is thus no longer experienced as unfolding narration but instead as ‘real time’ media. Specifically, the old phenomenology of store-and-forward temporality transforms into the new ideal of instantaneous/simultaneous temporality – a kind of quantum social wavefront connecting everyone to everyone in a single, shared now. (Pound and Liu np)

In short, we musn’t eschatologize Kittler’s “end of history”-by-automation into a Fukuyaman panegyric on neoliberalism’s millenial prosperity. We must, rather, as with all else continue to “situate networks in time,” historicizing and finding new ways to represent temporal relations within networks themselves: a “network archaeology” (Starosielski, Soderman, and cheek np). For “[n]etworks are processual and not just a stable diagram of nodes connected” (Pound and Liu np).

It’s unconditional (according to discourse theory itself, of course) that a theory that “flattens” history is part-and-parcel of the archaeologized historical conditions it describes as history’s flattening. My probing, then: What can a historicizing of discourse-networks (despite their self-necessitating archaeo-historical pseudo-retroactive arche of universality), or rather, what can archaeologizing the emergence of discourse-network theory in the episteme of the “network society”, tell us about the neoliberal discursive formations around which such a theory emerged (i.e. archaeo-emerges)?

The “dictatorship of speed” articulated above to the atemporal character of actor-discourse-networks is the dictatorship of neoliberal capital flow. The “rational”-subject-oriented neoliberal’s wet dream is perfect frictionlessness to maximize the exchange of money and goods. Like all dreams – a desire for the non-existent transcendence beyond an insurpassable asymptote – this is necessarily eschatological, as optimally distance and time reduce to two noughts ratio-nalizing speed into an ineffable division (speed = d/t). Since “people are being treated only as investments […,] [t]he future is ‘just the future’ – and it’s discounted at compounded annual rates” (Zuesse np).

In this context, I’d like to focus specifically on the “discourse” component of the actor-discourse-network, and its relation to speed and capital. In two 1980s essays, critic and poet Steve McCaffery, following the economic linguistic metaphors of Barthes, Derrida, and Bataille, and informed by Lacanian and Kristevan psychoanalysis, approaches language as a general economy. Flattening language into a material “surface” or “surface play” (“Language Writing” 149, 151), McCaffery makes the anti-hermeneutic discursive assessment that “[l]anguage today no longer poses problems of meaning but practical issues of use” (148). The conventional notion of language as a transparent vessel for a transcendent content, for example, assumes a certain use for it, based around the efficiency and efficacy of content transmission in the old “model of communication as a transmission-reception by two individual, reflective consciousnesses” (156). In such a model,

Deleuze and Guattari’s descri[ption of] the State as “the transcendent law that governs fragments”…applies equally to grammatical as to political control. As a transcendent law, grammar acts as a mechanism that regulates the free circulation of meaning, organizing the fragmentary and local into compound, totalized wholes…. Like capital (its economic counterpart) grammar extends a law of value to new objects by a process of totalization, reducing the free play of the fragments to the status of delimited, organizing parts within an intended larger whole…. [G]rammar effects a meaning whose form is that of a surplus value generated by an aggregated group of working parts for immediate investment into an extending chain of meaning…[,] homologiz[ing] the capitalistic concern for accumulation, profit[,] and investment in a future goal. (“Language Writing” 151)

This is the “restricted economy” conception of language, in which the body and uncertainty are obscured, “the physical act of speaking or writing must withdraw so that what has been said or written can appear meaningful” (“General Economy” 204), and in which potential loss is only rendered another occasion for profit. Even “[t]he meaningless, for example, will be ascribed a meaning; loss will be rendered profitable by its being assigned a value” (203). This conflicts with “general economic” forces, with which McCaffery associates sound poetry and the asemic writing of the Language Poets of the 1970s/80s. Such forms rupture the symbolic with libidinal excess, exploiting language’s inherent equivocality to register its materiality as such, producing “loss” and “waste” irrecoverable to the restricted economy of transcendental hermeneutics.

But McCaffery theorizes these language effects on the basis of what amounts to only a close-reading of language itself. Despite his anti-hermeneutic call to consider only language’s “practical issues of use” (“Language Writing” 148), he reads his theory off of the equivocal effects of rhetorical figures abstracted from instances of actual use. He then illustrates these “distribution and circulation” effects of the “economy” of language (“General Economy” 201), but only within the economies of single texts considered hermetically. Such effects transfigure significantly when considered at the more distant, macroeconomic level of an actor-discourse-network-economy (ADNE).

Take the sound poetry trope of repeating a word until divested of its content (and demythologizing words in general as having content). The body’s sounds become just what they are, without pretense to transcendence. Why this works encourages economic explanation: increasing the supply of the sound decreases its populist market value until the sound no longer exchanges for its content. So, the boy cries “Wolf!” until “Wolf!” ceases to convey the referent help, the help not approving of the labour-time “waste” of attending to two false alarms. Such, would say McCaffery, is the plight of the budding libidinal poet against the profit-seeking sheep farmer who in his obsession for finding in the cry “Wolf!” only precisely the profit that he grammatically prescribes to reap from it, namely saving his supply of wool by interpreting it to mean “your livelihood is in danger”, doesn’t even consider the possibility of those cries’ equivocality – say, signifying the boy’s loneliness, fright, and insufficiency as a child labourer – until it’s too late and the farmer has failed to calculate that the opportunity cost of attending to the boy’s cry is but an insurance hedge in comparison to the loss of his entire flock.

But what happens when we transfigure this scenario to a more macro ADNE? In archaeo-2001, George II cries “Terrorist!”; a speech-act declares “war” on the word “terror.” Because of the speech-actor’s hegemonic network-positionality, “terror” becomes a buzzword, or what we ought to call a netword (especially in light of Liu’s superlaser of instant, “automated” discursive circulation). What the netword does is cast a net of itself; it reticulates a network whose nodes all connect back to it. The netword’s content is negligible; made to buzz, the word’s content becomes fuzz. All that matters is its currency. Precisely because it has been divested completely of its content is it able to travel so frictionlessly – and, in turn, as frictionlessly justify an enormous migration of capital in the form of war machines towards its terroristic referents. But these referents themselves have by this time been obscured by the (war) cry. The war cry operates so efficiently because its frequency across the economy – frequency, which, taken as a collective sounding, equates therefore to a measure of volume – is so disproportionate to its actual referent. “Terror” becomes a fact of everyday life, even when the direct referents are nowhere better to be seen than in the word itself (cf. Massumi on “the Bush administration’s…color-coded terror alert system” [31]). The sound itself becomes its own self-reverberating referent, a positive feedback loop errupting into the macroeconomic action it calls for. By this point, the true referents, whatever they were, become negligible to the structure of the network reticulated by the cry. The boy’s cry for wolf is so loud as to sonically pulverize the wolf itself. Yet the cry is enough to summon the whole village in hunt for it. The master has spoken; the monster is out there.

Figure 1: Logocentric Friendship.

To make the point further, consider the following: If network structure deconstructs tree structure, then how does what we would characterize as “hierarchical” look as a network? Moretti points out that network visualization challenges our conception of hierarchical relationships (4-5); but Deleuze and Guattari observe how “even when one thinks one has reached a a multiplicity, it may be a false one…. An example is the famous friendship theorem: ‘If any two given individuals in a society have precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the friend of all the others.’” (17). “Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual friend is,” and the answer: “the master….Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theorems” (17, italics mine). Figure 1 depicts this theorem’s structure: hierarchy is a tree growing at zero-gravity, where all nodes radiate around a central-node to which every other is connected. Such node-centricity is logo-centricity. That is, this is the network structure of “transcendence.” The (net)Word is what every node refers back to. Sort of like how on the social networking website MySpace (“so long ago,” acceleration culture has made it seem) everyone started with the same Friend: the web-master, Tom. But just because Mark Zuckerberg is not on our Facebook friend list does not mean he isn’t in our network.

It is because of this transcendence structure that removing the logocentric monarch, Claudius, from the network of Hamlet has no structural effect (Moretti 5). The power structure of the court remains in tact regardless of who occupies the placeholder of monarch-network: Hamlet’s feud with Claudius has nothing to do with changing the power structure and everything to do with Hamlet’s egocentrism. Similarly, removing the referrents of “terror” from an ADNE does not affect the power network reticulated by the net-Word any more than the change from George I to George II transfigures the network of power in a democracy.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Massumi, Brian. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 3-25. Print.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford UP: Stanford, 1999. Print.

Liu, Allen. “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004). Web.

McCaffery, Steve. “Language Writing: from Productive to Libidinal Economy.” North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986. New York: Roofbooks, 2000. 143-158. Print.

–. “Writing as a General Economy.” North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986. Roof Books: New York, 2000. 201-221. Print.

Massumi, Brian. “Fear (The Spectrum Said).” positions 13.1 (2005): 31-48. Web.

Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” Literary Lab Pamphlet 2 (2011). Web.

Pound, Scott and Alan Liu. “The Amoderns: Reengaging the Humanities.” Amodern 2 (2013): np. Web.

Starosielski, Nicole, Braxton Soderman, and chris creek. “Amodern 2: Network Archeaology.” Amodern 2 (2013): np. Web.

Zuesse, Eric. “Due to Global Warming, End Is Virtually Certain for NYC, Boston, Miami, Holland.” Huffington Post. 20 July 2013. Web. 8 Nov. 2013.