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Network Aesthetics
ARG Design CRITICAL

Nonsovereignty

Network Aesthetics Patrick Jagoda
nonsovereignty control distributed-agency Berlant Arendt failure analytical-method

Key Principle

Nonsovereignty is Jagoda's "analytical scattering point" — a deliberate reorientation away from sovereignty and control as the default frames for analyzing networks, toward attention to experiences of being ungoverned, disconnected, lost, laggy, intimately entangled, abandoned, frustrated, or broken down. Drawing on Lauren Berlant, it names the condition in which sovereignty is recognized as "a fantasy misrecognized as an objective state: an aspirational position of personal and institutional self-legitimating performativity and an affective sense of control in relation to the fantasy of that position's offer of security and efficacy." Nonsovereignty is not a thesis to prove but an opening — it runs through all five chapters as a persistent orientation that makes visible what control-first analysis cannot see.

Why This Matters

Both dominant scholarly narratives about the Internet — the militarist story of centralized command (Paul Edwards's The Closed World) and the personal-freedom story of consumer computing — share a single underlying desire for control. The opposition is superficial; the shared assumption is deep. By beginning with sovereignty, both narratives foreclose attention to "the heterogeneous, ordinary, and affective dimensions of networked life." They cannot account for the distributed agency, interdependence, and perpetual change that networks actually instantiate.

Nonsovereignty is also the structural homolog of Rancière's "dissensus" — art's inherent condition of "a practice of dissensus... a rupture of a certain agreement between thought and the sensible." Just as art's politics operates at the level of sensibility rather than strategy, nonsovereignty operates at the level of ordinary experience rather than revolutionary program. The two concepts converge in what Rancière calls "the suspension of power, the neither . . . nor . . . specific to the aesthetic state." This is why aesthetic works are uniquely suited to thinking nonsovereignty: they enact the suspension they theorize.

Good Examples

Hannah Arendt's spectator/actor distinction, applied in Chapter 4 to networked games, maps directly onto the nonsovereignty framework. The actor — involved, dependent on others' expectations, "not autonomous (in Kant's language)" — conducts themselves "in accordance with what spectators would expect of him," meaning action is inherently relational, not autonomous. Games like Between (Rohrer, 2008) formally enact this: players cannot see each other, cannot communicate directly, and cannot observe the mechanism by which the other's actions affect their inventory. The network connection is felt but not legible. The game produces "an involved, uncontrolled, and decidedly nonsovereign" actor.

In Chapter 5, nonsovereignty extends to failure as an epistemological category. The Project ARG (Chicago, 2013) built "a topology of nonsovereign failure that included unviable or disconnected networks." Rather than treating non-participation as a design problem, the designers used it as diagnostic data about contemporary life — overscheduling, individualism, work/play blurring — revealing structural constraints that sovereignty-framed analysis would have filed as operational noise.

In Underworld, Matt Shay's self-interrupting thought sequence performs the paradigm shift from sovereign logic to nonsovereign network consciousness in miniature: "He was surrounded by enemies. Not enemies but connections, a network of things and people. Not people exactly but figures — things and figures and levels of knowledge that he was completely helpless to enter." The self-revision enacts the inadequacy of old vocabulary and the search for new terms.

Counterpoints

The dominant cybernetics lineage (Norbert Wiener, 1940s) explicitly defined networks as the study of "control" and "communication" systems. Cold War anxiety about Communist spy networks mutated into a structural fear that ungoverned overreach yields systemic collapse — producing the security logic embedded in all contemporary network architecture. The network sublime — boundlessness paired with "an equally infinite, equally unreal hunger for security" (Alan Liu) — is the aesthetic form of this control discourse.

Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" — optimal experience as total absorption through mastery and focused attention — is the dominant framework game designers use to theorize player engagement. It presupposes a sovereign subject who eliminates "psychic disorder" and achieves "a sense of mastery." This model is incompatible with what network aesthetics requires: exposure to uncertainty, interdependence, and opacity. Mainstream games from Breakout to StarCraft II interpellate the flow-subject; network aesthetics works against this interpellation.

Berlant's critique is a resource, not just a foil. Acknowledging sovereignty as a fantasy does not make it inoperative — it remains a "misrecognized" condition that organizes real institutional power. Nonsovereignty as an analytical starting point must remain attentive to the ways sovereignty still structures access, visibility, and vulnerability within networks — who is "only distantly detectable or wholly unrecognizable" in the network imaginary's distribution of the sensible.

Key Quotes

"Sovereignty, after all, is a fantasy misrecognized as an objective state: an aspirational position of personal and institutional self-legitimating performativity and an affective sense of control in relation to the fantasy of that position's offer of security and efficacy." — Patrick Jagoda, Introduction (quoting Lauren Berlant)

"nonsovereignty as our analytical scattering point" — Patrick Jagoda, Introduction: Network Aesthetics

"experiences of being ungoverned, disconnected, lost, laggy, intimately entangled, abandoned, frustrated, or broken down. Such experiences are not grand but profoundly ordinary." — Patrick Jagoda, Introduction: Network Aesthetics

"Networks cannot be imagined merely as architectures of control. They are also metaphors for nonsovereign ways of being in the world." — Patrick Jagoda, Chapter 4: Participatory Aesthetics

"The Project challenged this notion by giving rise to and exploring a topology of nonsovereign failure that included unviable or disconnected networks." — Patrick Jagoda, Chapter 5: Improvisational Aesthetics

Rules of Thumb

  • Use "scattering point" deliberately: nonsovereignty disperses analysis toward heterogeneous phenomena rather than converging on a master explanation.
  • Attend to what sovereignty-framed analysis cannot see: lagging, breaking, getting lost, being entangled — these are not noise but signal.
  • Distinguish "safe failure" (game studies: failure as stepping-stone to mastery) from "nonsovereign failure" (failure as condition revealing structural constraints with intrinsic analytical value).
  • The Arendtian actor, not the Csikszentmihalyi flow-subject, is the appropriate figure for networked experience: action is relational, interdependent, and constitutively shaped by invisible others.
  • Network play opens ethics, not politics — "a collaborative process that opens up various, if often unsuccessful, ways of being and becoming together" rather than a program to consolidate.

Related References