Ned Rossiter on Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:22:29 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Re[2]: Organised Networks: Transdisciplinarity and New Institutional Forms |
Brian and Felix have opened up rich mines in this thread, but for now I'd like to turn to your posting Albert. For me, democracy is the territory of the state and its failure. For that reason, I find that to think networks is think beyond democracy. Certainly when speaking of the networks we are invoking (do they really need a name, I wonder?) we are not speaking of the state, even if they are shaped in direct and indirect ways by the force of the state. Thus in speaking of networks, I'm not so keen to speak of democracy (even though I have in the past). Now, I'm more curious to unravel this notion and practice of a non-representational governance within networks. Such an activity is not going to be helped so much through reference to core values and functions, as you suggest. Like identity, the former veers towards essentialism, while the latter suggests instrumentality. Networks are looser than that. They are unpredictable attractors. If they have values, then they are intuited rather than identified per se. Perhaps they resonate some kind of structure of feeling. And for sure, there's a media ecology at work in all this. I don't like this word 'swarm' though. It became dirty for me once Leadbeater started hustling it about the think-tanks and creative departments of government, incapable of an idea of their own. Ned # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net