Abstract
Turning to the contemporary period, loosely coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall, I examine recent philosophical attempts to reckon with the globalized, networked world we inhabit. Using Gilles Lipovetsky’s concept of hypermodernism as a starting point and discussing theoretical frameworks from object-oriented ontology to actor-network Theory, I “flatten” the world to trace relationships that examine the possibilities of truth and closure in a networked world. I examine Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves as a paradigmatic case of the networked novel. While House of Leaves makes the networked world seem hopelessly complex, I offer a counterexample. In applying Donald Davidson’s theory of triangulation to the television series The Wire, I argue networks can, in fact, be traced if only we take the proper stance toward the world and the other.
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Notes
- 1.
Journalist Matt Taibbi points out that Friedman’s metaphor is flawed in that the world becomes more connected when we realized it was round, not flat.
- 2.
See Sherry Turkle’s Being Alone Together: Why We Expect More Out of Technology and Less Out of Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.
- 3.
I would argue that Looney Tunes is the most culturally significant piece of postmodernism in the twentieth century whose widespread effects have yet to be taken seriously critically. Most people do not read Barth and Derrida. Everyone knows Bugs Bunny.
- 4.
See Heidegger’s “The Thing,” from Poetry, Language, and Thought for an analysis of the shrinking of distances and times in the postmodern world.
- 5.
Danielewski performs a similar task in his follow-up novel Only Revolutions where the book itself, a road story told from alternating perspectives, causes the reader to turn the book over to the point where it symbolically becomes the steering wheel of the car.
- 6.
For Merleau-Ponty, “the flesh” is not the same as one’s physical body. “The flesh” is the way in which bodies come to assemble and extend themselves in networks.
- 7.
Dasein is Heidegger’s term for what human beings fundamentally are. They are there-beings—always-already situated in a world with an orientation toward what one cares about.
- 8.
It is worth noting that three of the most significant “systems novels” of this period Mason and Dixon, Infinite Jest, and House of Leaves all have endless amounts of commentary from fan pages. The fiction of Pynchon, Wallace, and Danielewski more so than other writers have produced huge networks of amateurs and professionals working together to solve mysteries within the texts.
- 9.
I’m indebted to Donald Davidson’s principle of triangulation throughout this analysis.
- 10.
For a detailed account of the rise of paranoia regarding loss of subjective power by the autonomous “masses” or “public,” see Timothy Melley’s Empire of Conspiracy pgs. 1–45.
- 11.
Though he is not the only writer to make significant contributions in this area. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with the use of endnotes and Jonathan Safran Foer’s cut-up Tree of Codes and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with the flip book of the “falling man” falling upward come to mind.
- 12.
Often “The Sokal Hoax” is mentioned as proof that postmodern philosophy is nonsensical, but it should be noted that the journal in which the paper was published, Social Text, did not peer-review it.
- 13.
The fact that these ideas could move around the culture would only prove that the world is networked. In trying to stabilize truth, critics of post-war philosophy often end up proving their case more than they realize.
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Watson, D.R. (2021). The Flat-Earth Society: Tracing Networks in the Contemporary World. In: Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87074-4_5
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