The possibility of networked histor(iograph)y

Reading Latour, I’m most struck by the ability of the network, as a concept, to (de)locate the thing-ness of a particular thing in, as Latour calls them, the “attributes” of what we might otherwise assume is a self-contained substance (5).  This quality of Latour’s network is, to me, as striking as it is frustrating—for if the network can be designated a “mode of inquiry” by which we describe the existence of “any entity” whatsoever (5), then it becomes impossible to divorce any entity from involvement in multiple, infinite, networks, defined in infinite ways both material and abstract.  What does it mean, as Latour argues, for not something but anything to become “a matter of concerns” (5)?

Instead of Latour’s examples of network-theory rereadings—Avatar’s Eywa, NASA’s Columbia, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Tomas Saraceno’s installations, France’s online political blogosphere—I want to investigate this notion of the network as it could apply to something more like Latour’s hypothetical character “database” from Metropolis, as a sort of social network in which entities are defined by their various relational permutations (13).  Might the entity in question be something less tangible, more abstract, than a body or character?  Can narrative and history, for example, be accurately described by atemporal networks that specify interpersonal permutations, and not by directional progressions or regressions existing in time?

Watkins seems to suggest as much in “Ghosts, Cowboys”—or, at least, she suggests the inextricability of historical fabrication and historical truth, as they are animated by the historiographer herself.  The narrator Claire recounts at least six alternate “beginnings” to “the story” (1–2), beginnings that range from the 1859 founding of Reno, Nevada, where Claire finds herself upon her mother’s death (1), to the 1966 death of a southern California woman after exposure to radioactive fallout from the Nevada Test Site—fallout dispersed from the same nuclear explosion that Claire’s mother witnesses as a child (7–8).  The specter of radiation itself functions as a kind of vector that links various historical nodes for Claire, which makes it possible to read Claire’s narration of multiple beginnings as a mode of (historical, historiographical?) inquiry that relies on nodes and networks.  But the recurring question for Claire and the reader alike is not one of Latourian attributes—that is, of how the various crossings-over and connections among Claire’s imagined histories allow for what Latour calls “rephrasing” (2)—but of whether these networks of histories satisfy Claire’s search for figurative weight.  In Claire’s plaintive description of the “inadequate weight of the past” (20), I read a question about whether the network as a mode of inquiry can account for Claire’s affects of loss.

In some ways this conclusion is irrelevant for Latour.  His concern is more with the possibility of rendering visible formerly invisible connections than with the priority of the network over other methodologies.  But in other ways Watkins suggests an extension of Latour’s theorizations.  Consider his description of the networked individual:

by individual I don’t mean the individual atoms deprived of most of their properties and rendered fully interchangeable before they enter into “interactions”.  Instead of those atomic individuals of the past, we now possess individuals for which we are allowed to assemble profiles made of long lists of properties.  (12)

Claire’s bestows upon her sets of imagined histories, the beginnings of “the story,” a weight that is both inadequate and overwhelming, suggestive of agency or existence “outside.”  Might we speak, in place of the opposition of history and History-with-a-capital-H, of supplementary profiles of history, to match the proliferation of individual profiles?  Would History function, like society, as something less than the sum of individual histories?

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Works Cited

Latour, Bruno.  “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist.” International Seminar on Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age, 19 Feb. 2010, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Los Angeles: USC, 2010. PDF file.

Watkins, Claire Vaye. “Ghosts, Cowboys.” Battleborn. New York: Riverhead-Penguin, 2012. 1–23. Print.