Jagoda and Ambivalence

I’m dwelling this week on Jagoda’s “Network Ambivalence.” In some ways, Jagoda’s work here is akin to Galloway’s in it’s suspicion of “network as everything/onlything.” In another vein, though, Jagoda’s call to network ambivalence seeks an alternative framework when the network is embraced, i.e., something between “naïve complicity or the hyperbolic extremism of strategies such as accelerationism” (115).

While the middle ground stance articulated in that passage risks a perhaps too-comfortable political stance, I find it potentially generative in terms of scholarly inquiry. One could easily see ambivalence within networked spaces as an opportunity for, say, compositionism: Jagoda network aesthetics seek “both-and” and “what else” (115). I’m thinking here, of course, with a disciplinary bent, but also in terms of the Latourian idea of a compositionist, s one who dwells in the detritus and abundance of networks patiently with an eye toward composition (as opposed to critique).

I suppose I’m also drawn to Jagoda’s concept of ambivalence here because of it’s open-endedness, it’s affinity to a kind of itinerant intellectual wandering, and dwelling. Courtney gets at this a little bit in her discussion of Speculative Everything last week.

On the other side of my disciplinary hyphenation, rhetoric is frequently understood as inter- or trans-disciplinary, methodologically promiscuous, and conceptually rich in that it borrows from and pollinates with so many other fields. In a way, Jagoda’s approach here to networks as suggesting “constant change and reconfiguration that exceeds any individual’s imagination and leaves open possibilities” provides me with a more grounded framework for “imaginaries” than, say, speculative realism. Or maybe I’ve just been hanging out too much with Scott?