Jagoda's terms fall into three categories: [coined] = invented for this book; [adapted] = borrowed and significantly modified; [borrowed] = used with original meaning. The distinction matters for citation: a coined term carries Jagoda's specific argument; an adapted term imports a theoretical tradition with modifications.
Introduction
Term
Type
One-Line Definition
Network imaginary
coined
The complex of material infrastructures and metaphorical figures that make networks legible as cultural experience — not just technical infrastructure.
Network aesthetics
coined
Aesthetic/affective encounters with network form that defamiliarize networks; organized around five aspects: maximal, emergent, realist, participatory, improvisational.
Alone-togetherness
coined
The felt quality of being simultaneously isolated and connected in networked life.
Sensibilities of distribution
coined
Jagoda's refinement of Rancière's "distribution of the sensible" for network form: the perceptual-political regime organized by one's position in a network.
Nonsovereignty
adapted (Arendt/Berlant)
Analytical reorientation toward experiences of being ungoverned, disconnected, frustrated, or overwhelmed — a productive condition, not a deficiency.
Pedagogy of ambivalence
coined
Modeling slow, patient, oscillatory thinking that inhabits contradictions without resolving them.
Network sublime
adapted (Burke/Kant/Liu)
Network complexity overwhelming comprehension, then motivating its recuperation — paired with "an equally infinite, equally unreal hunger for security" (Alan Liu).
Cognitive mapping
borrowed (Jameson)
Aesthetic mediation between individual experience and the unrepresentable totality of capitalist structure — network aesthetics as its twenty-first-century form.
Chapter 1: Maximal Aesthetics / Network Novel
Term
Type
One-Line Definition
Network novel
coined
Genre using maximalist form to make systemic complexity felt — distinct from encyclopedic novel or postmodern metafiction.
Maximalism
adapted
Formal mode that simultaneously enables and limits knowledge of complexity; not encyclopedic completeness but enacted abundance-and-opacity.
Tactical belatedness of narrative
coined
Narrative's temporal slowness as an asset: arriving after the fact reveals systemic connections real-time processing obscures.
Palimpsestic network topology
coined
The Internet as an overlay onto older geopolitical boundaries and colonial routes — network as inscription, not clean break.
Network consciousness
coined
Epistemic orientation succeeding paranoia: the system exceeds any single directing intelligence — no hidden agent, distributed threat.
Agnotology
borrowed (Proctor)
The cultural production of ignorance — networks actively structure what cannot be known, enabling ethical disavowal.
Chapter 2: Emergent Aesthetics / Network Film
Term
Type
One-Line Definition
Network film
coined
Cinematic genre using multi-protagonist structure to make distributed, emergent social processes aesthetically sensible.
Emergence
adapted (complexity science)
Complex higher-level phenomena from lower-level interactions — immanent causality that no single actor intended or controls.
Blowback
adapted (CIA)
Unintended consequences that return upon their originating cause — structural feature of complex systems, not mere accident.
Conspiracy vs. emergence
coined distinction
Conspiracy: hidden directing intelligence. Emergence: immanent dynamics without governing center. The fundamental formal distinction of Ch. 2.
Affective atmosphere
adapted (Massumi/Anderson)
Pre-conscious, distributed felt quality of a situation produced through editing, sound, and space before narrative comprehension.
Chapter 3: Network Realism / The Wire
Term
Type
One-Line Definition
Network realism
coined
Early twenty-first-century serial TV mode foregrounding distributed agency, anti-melodramatic narrative, and nonhuman actors as network tracers.
Soft eyes
adapted (The Wire/ANT)
Wide-angle perceptual mode registering the whole relational field — both diegetic motif and formal demand on the viewer; theorized via Latour.
Waning of genre
borrowed (Berlant)
Condition in which conventional generic forms lose their capacity to organize experience — The Wire develops network realism as the new adequate mode.
Chapter 4: Participatory Aesthetics / Networked Games
Term
Type
One-Line Definition
Participatory aesthetics
coined
Mode where meaning and affect emerge through active multiplayer engagement — centered on how participation shapes form and feeling.
Disjunctive multiplay
borrowed (Bogost)
Separation-yet-interdependence in multiplayer: players affect each other without direct communication or shared objectives.
Extimacy
adapted (Lacan)
"Neither intimate nor remote" — the uncanny quality of feeling connected to players one has never met and may never meet again.
Flux vs. flow
coined distinction
Flow: sovereign mastery and self-loss (Csikszentmihalyi). Flux: productive instability oscillating between control and its failure — the more generative mode.
Arendtian nonsovereign actor
adapted (Arendt)
Player who initiates action without controlling outcomes — freedom as beginning, not mastery; always acting within a web exceeding individual intention.
Agency as affective field
adapted (Stewart)
Agency as distributed participation in affective intensities and potentials, not a property of individual subjects.
Chapter 5: Improvisational Aesthetics / ARGs
Term
Type
One-Line Definition
Improvisational aesthetics
coined
Aesthetic mode of real-time interplay where design emerges through performance — the network emerges through enactment, not prior planning.
Production of belief
coined
ARGs require players to actively produce the reality of the game world through collective interpretation — not suspend disbelief.
Connectedness vs. connectivity
adapted (van Dijck)
Connectedness: community-oriented human relationships. Connectivity: platform-driven, monetizing social ties. Diagnoses ARG design stakes.
Nonsovereign failure
coined
Failure as diagnostic of structural constraints — has intrinsic rather than instrumental value; reveals the network's actual topology and ideological underpinnings.
Topology of failure
coined
Structured mapping of how failures occur within a network — failure revealing underlying form and assumptions, not mere accident.
Play as noninstrumental break
adapted (Huizinga/Suits)
Play as genuinely outside utility logic — intrinsically valuable interval, not recuperative leisure that prepares for more labor.
Coda
Term
Type
One-Line Definition
Ambivalence as extreme presence
coined
Total engagement with networks while refusing quick resolution — "deliberate intensity, patience, and willingness to forgo quick resolution or any finality at all."
Network form as dominant episteme
adapted (Foucault)
Networks as the contingent, historically specific way the early twenty-first century organizes knowledge — not an intrinsic property of reality.
The "whatever"
borrowed (Galloway/Deleuze/Agamben)
Disengagement and indifference as response to networks — valid in specific struggles, critiqued as a generalized privileged stance.
Both-and / What else?
coined
Hold contradictions simultaneously (both-and), then ask what network form still cannot account for (what else?).
Ambivalence as collective thought
coined
Ambivalence unfolding through collectives — not individual paralysis but a mode where conflicting voices "better describe the coordinates of a shared problem."
Immanence without outside
coined
Network aesthetics operates "from an immanent inside that promises no outside" — no transcendent vantage point external to networks.
Rules of Thumb
[coined] terms carry Jagoda's specific argument; always distinguish from [adapted] and [borrowed] when citing.
The Coda terms are the book's most politically charged; they carry its culminating argument.
"Sensibilities of distribution" and "network imaginary" are the foundational coins that carry all five chapters.
"Flux" and "nonsovereign failure" are most often misread as mere borrowings — both are Jagoda's coins.
