I finished reading Part One of Graham Harman’s forthcoming Prince of Networks at half-past ten last Friday night, on a freezing railway platform in Bletchley. While the laptop kept my knees warm, the book kept my mind spinning. It’s a great philosophical secondary text, a model really for what such a thing should be (in the first place, a philosophical secondary text should itself be a work of philosophy, an exercise in philosophical thinking).

Part One of Prince of Networks presents a gloss on Bruno Latour which also suggests an ingenious theory of glossing, in which arguments and textual fragments are enlisted as “actants” and put through a series of “trials of strength” with the object of testing alliances and creating intense new bonds. There is a dialectic of binding and unbinding at play, in which the gloss alternately probes the “black boxes” of its subject, opening them out and extracting useful parts, and works to close and anneal its own integral composite. Glossing is both explication – unfolding – and implication, the forging of a new complicity between textual objects. It is thus a rhetorical model of the kind of strategic negotiation that goes on between actants in general; or rather, since Latour does not admit a fundamental separation between language and reality, it is an instance of such negotiation.

Why “Prince” of Networks? I assume the reference is to Machiavelli: Latour’s is a cosmos of power-play, and even the occasional references to attraction and seduction between actants do little to mitigate the sense that might is what holds sway always and everywhere in this cosmos. There’s even something a bit S&M about it; I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised to learn that actants engage in role-play and power exchange, mockery and subversion. But perhaps that would be surprising, after all; for all that actants may “tremble” in their places in the networks of alliances that constitute their power, they don’t seem to go weak at the knees for anything.

More when I’ve read Part Two, which promises to be even more enthralling…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.