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Network Aesthetics
ARG Design CRITICAL

Ambivalence as Extreme Presence — After Networks

Network Aesthetics Patrick Jagoda

Key Principle

The Coda proposes "ambivalence as extreme presence" as the book's culminating critical method: complete engagement with networks while refusing quick resolution, closure, or certainty. It is distinguished from three inadequate alternatives — avant-garde novelty ("the next technology"), the "whatever" (Galloway's principled disengagement), and passive apathy. The mechanism is "deliberate intensity, patience, and willingness to forgo quick resolution or any finality at all." Crucially, network form itself is denaturalized: it is a contingent historical episteme (Foucault), not an intrinsic property of the universe. The tree preceded it; something will succeed it.

Why This Matters

The Coda directly addresses the scholar's or practitioner's temptation to escape network totality through either acceleration (avant-garde supersession) or refusal (opting out). Jagoda argues both moves fail on structural grounds: novelty replicates capitalist accumulation's logic ("No politics can be derived today from a theory of the new," Galloway), while withdrawal is a privilege requiring technological access and leisure unavailable to most — and forfeits critical literacy. The remaining option is neither heroic subversion nor cynical acceptance but immanent inhabitation: there is no outside from which to critique.

Networks also produce what Berlant calls "crisis lived within ordinariness" — not discrete traumatic events but diffuse, ongoing unease embedded in everyday networked life (the smartphone supply chain, the wireless outage routed through outsourced labor). This dispersal makes crisis perpetually illegible as a discrete event, which is precisely why ambivalence — not critique — is the appropriate response.

Good Examples

  1. Zach Blas's Facial Weaponization Suite — queer mask-making opposing biometric surveillance — is acknowledged as a case where the "whatever"/opacity tactic is the only viable option. Jagoda does not dismiss withdrawal but refuses its generalization. (Coda)

  2. The Speculation ARG (2012–2014) — designed by Patrick LeMieux — enacts ambivalence structurally: it produces neither resolution nor escape, but sustained collective inhabitation of financial network complexity. (Coda)

  3. "Twitch Plays Pokémon" (2014): 121,000 participants collaborating in real time. "A great deal remains unknown, and perhaps even truly unknowable, about how and why such networked collaborations can yield emergent order rather than utter chaos." The epistemic limit is genuine, not rhetorical — grounding the argument for humility. (Coda)

Counterpoints

  1. The avant-garde position is not dismissed as mere naivety — Jodi Dean's critique is taken seriously: despite "many-to-many" rhetoric, social media function as "me-to some-to me," catering to individual expression while minimizing genuine circulation. The network paradigm's discourses remain "astoundingly individualistic." (Coda)

  2. Berlant's sovereign fantasy (the desire for individual control over networked life) persists even in critical practice — ambivalence must be actively distinguished from its simulation as sophisticated cynicism or paralysis. (Coda, from chunk 048)

  3. The "both-and / what else?" frame is not a stable resting point — the "what else?" question actively destabilizes it, asking what network form cannot yet account for. Ambivalence is a practice of ongoing inquiry, not an achieved position. (Coda)

Key Quotes

"No politics can be derived today from a theory of the new." — Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect, cited in Coda

"without allowing for ambivalence, there is no flourishing." — Lauren Berlant, cited in Coda

"Ambivalent thought, it is important to specify, does not necessarily belong to a divided individual. It can also unfold through collectives." — Patrick Jagoda, Coda

"Aesthetic works encourage us, despite the discomfort it may entail, to slow down thought, oscillate among divergent perspectives, inhabit complex contradictions, and enter into uncertain collective configurations." — Patrick Jagoda, Coda

"If network aesthetics have something crucial to contribute to ongoing thought, feeling, and play with networks from an immanent inside that promises no outside, it is the patience, modesty, dissatisfaction, empathy, and thoughtfulness that are necessary, if never wholly sufficient, conditions of politics in the early twenty-first century." — Patrick Jagoda, Coda (closing sentence)

"Networks are arguably a dominant episteme and ubiquitous form of our time, rather than an intrinsic property of the universe." — Patrick Jagoda, Coda

Rules of Thumb

  • Ask "both-and" first (not utopia/dystopia), then push to "what else?" — what does the network paradigm still fail to account for?
  • Distinguish ambivalence from apathy: ambivalence requires deliberate intensity and patience; apathy flatlines.
  • Never generalize a withdrawal tactic (like opacity/refusal) from a specific political struggle into a universal critical method.
  • The collective is the proper unit of ambivalent thought — conflicting voices in a seminar or a movement better describe shared problems than any individual resolution can.
  • Treat "after networks" as a refusal to name a successor, not a prediction — preserving the contingency of current network form without colonizing what comes next.

Related References