Network Narrativity: Abstract and Bibliography

Hey, everyone. Sorry the blog is formatting this funny; I'll bring hard copies of the abstract and bibliography for everyone to see.

Research Question: What narrative forms fit the network model?

Basic outline of research method:
Research narrative paradigms, network theory, and connections between them.
Make any more connections suggested by the research.

Abstract

The conversation represented by the concept map is one where discussions of narrative and network culture are displayed. The connections within each discussion show how current ideas about each developed, and the connections between them show how they overlap. My final project will attempt to map their overlap further, by showing where networks and narratives are already embodied; the summaries of each scholar’s ideas help to show his/her contribution to that conversation.
The conversation centered around narratives relies primarily on Walter Fisher’s discussion of the importance of the narrative paradigm, which pulls in other scholars’ voices, too. Fisher applies Aristotelian thinking to the Lyotardian dichotomy of narrative and scientific knowledge. Where Lyotard exposed this dichotomy, and pointed to the metanarrative that underpins it, and called on us for the skepticism that is the postmodern condition, Fisher finds in ancient rhetoric the idea that all knowledge can be seen as narrative. He sees, in Aristotle’s discussion of practical knowledge, a basis for arguing that all knowledge is relative, and that narrative, therefore, is essential for transmission of knowledge. He draws on Pagels’ assertion that scientific knowledge is too complex for us to simply incorporate, to argue that narratives are becoming more essential as modes of knowing. The more complex our world becomes, the more we need narratives to take it in.
This complexity ties into the conversation about networks, which is centered primarily around the discussions of Latour, Taylor, and Shaviro, who draw on a range of sources to depict networks and their implications. Latour’s discussion of actor-network theory (ANT) is grounded in Tarde’s discussion of the social, that the social can’t be conceived as its own entity. He draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to show that social systems can be seen as networks, dynamic and fragile, that incorporate the nonhuman as well. Taylor takes the network conversation into more virtual and cultural territory, arguing that our culture is reaching a “moment of complexity” where it will come to resemble a network more than any other form. His discussion focuses primarily on the cybernetic model of the network. This model is represented at length by Shaviro, who analyzes the appearances of networks in science fiction and elsewhere, showing how pervasive and animate they are in our imaginations. The above models of networks seem to converge in the work of Jeff Rice, who draws on ANT in his discussion of the virtual world, the blogosphere, and other clearly network-based entities. All of the above seem to draw somewhat on the work of Lyotard, and also of Jameson, who, as Shaviro notes, discusses “hyperspace,” the anonymous social spaces of airports and similar places, where membership in a network becomes the primary source of identity. Since, as the above scholars argue, there’s some basis for understanding ourselves this way all the time, narrative embodiments of it seem especially important.
Postmodern experimentation with narrative suggests the search for a new model that will help to represent networks. This conversation centers primarily, for now, around Senturk’s research into the hadith transmission system, a network of narrative used by Islamic scholars from the seventh to sixteenth centuries, in which each scholar would know a short story of the life of Muhammad, which could be offered to audiences. While Senturk’s discussion centers primarily around the relationship between social and literary structures, the above scholarship suggests that the hadith model can be seen in terms of network and narrative—each narrator carries a piece of an overall narrative, so that network and narrative are one, enacted by the telling, connecting the narrator to another member of the network. Senturk draws on Barthes’ conception of the critic as one who disrupts traditional narrative patterns, and his research makes for a post-disruption starting point.
This idea of network narrative, where they simultaneously bring each other into being, has at least one interesting contemporary corollary. Shelley Jackson’s web site, “SKIN,” portrays a project where participants volunteer to have individual words tattooed on their bodies. Her site shows photographs of body parts, and the assemblage of photographs constitutes, if not a narrative, a language poem where postmodern fragmentation of narrative is embodied. Hopefully further research will turn up other correspondences.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Introduction to Aristotle. 2nd ed. R. McKeon, trans. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1947.

Barthes, Roland. The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. R. Howard. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Fisher, Walter. “Narration, Knowledge, and the Possibility of Wisdom.”
Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines.
Ed. Walter Fisher and Robert Goodman. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1995.

Jackson, Shelley. “SKIN.” http://www.ineradicablestain.com/skin.html

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge.
Trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word.
London: Methuen, 1982.

Pagels, Heinz. The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Age
of Complexity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Rice, Jeff. “Network Academics.” Yellow Dog. http://ydog.net/?page_id=345

Senturk, Recep. Narrative Social Structure: Anatomy of the Hadith
Transmission Network, 610-1505. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Shaviro, Steven. Connected, or What it Means to Live in a Network Society.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Taylor, Mark. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Tarde, Gabriel. Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Trans. H. Warren.
Ontario: Batoche Books, 2000.