Beyond Cauliflower

In “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Galloway articulates two theses about networks: “Data have no necessary visual form” and “only one visualization has ever been made of an information network” (85). He identifies a tension between these two theses - one seems to obviate the other – and declares that the contradiction can be attributable to the “unrepresentability lurking within information aesthetics,” or what he later terms the “logic of unrepresentability” (86). His argument coalesces around the claim that “adequate visualizations of control society have not happened,” and therefore, somewhat circularly, that networks exist within a logic of unrepresentability (91). This argument leads Galloway to advocate for “new data types, new “if-then” statements, new network diagrams, new syllogisms, or new mathematical functions for their own sake” as well as artists capable of turning “art into a machine” (97).

Galloway seems to be asking not for new kinds of representation, but rather a critical making practice that helps us understanding things outside or beyond “representation.” As he aptly points out, the metaphors we use to represent networks (webs, nets) predictably dominate attempts to visualize them. Language is just one form of representation – and Galloway asks not that we think of networks in different terms (spores or water seem like good alternative metaphors) but rather that we make things that do what they mean. I find that there is a certain emphasis on action in Galloway’s argument – as if anything that is merely representational or explanatory is always set up for failure when what it seeks to describe is a network.

If Galloway’s article is really an incitement towards praxis, I’m left thinking about 1) the barriers to participating in such praxis (I think McPherson takes this up very meaningfully in the coming week’s readings) and 2) the possibility that a poetics or visualization of a control society/networks might be imperceptible.

Is it at all possible that the reason all network visualizations look like cauliflower is because we are really only capable of understanding cauliflower? If the object of examination exists operates at the level of affect and not sense, perhaps what we gain through praxis isn’t visualization or understanding but an affective relation? And, if what we gain is affective relation, does this change what it means to know or understand something?

Work Cited:

Galloway, Alexander. "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" The Interface Effect. 2012, 78-100.