Network Unavailable: Informal Populations and Literary Form

It is now frequently asserted—even assumed—that the fact of interconnection is, indeed, a fact about a contemporary condition characterized by the globalization of economic and technological relationships. This is significant because, as Patrick Jagoda has recently demonstrated, "the mantra of the present is that everything is interconnected" (30). According to Jagoda, experiences of interconnection have become pervasive because the networked condition they imply has been naturalized: the "network" has been consolidated as "our current cultural dominant" (221). As scholars like Jagoda, Kris Cohen, and Wendy Chun have demonstrated, this consolidation of the network concept has occurred in conjunction with the rise of neoliberalism and the development of the Internet. Attuned to such developments, agenda-setting scholars of global American literature like Wai Chee Dimock, Ursula Heise, and Bruce Robbins have focused our critical attention on literature's capacity to make readers apprehend the scales and antinomies of planetary interconnectedness. Given how pervasive is the network concept, this attention has served a productive approach to contemporary US literature. What it leaves out, however, are global novels of the Americas like Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (2004) and Tao Lin's Taipei: A Novel (2013)—two novels that, as different as they are, represent the contemporary as a condition in which reality is not governed by the laws of interconnectedness. These novels abjure interconnection to represent the present. In 2666 the contemporary is neither networked nor interconnected; in Taipei it is networked but not interconnected. In both, the fact of interconnection is not a fact. Rather, here personhood is inoperative and networks are unavailable. While our critical attention is still focused on interconnection, 2666 and Taipei represent the contemporary as a globalized condition of nonconnection—a condition they center on informal populations of nonpersons. From this perspective, the task of the contemporary global novel is not to produce feelings of connection and expansions of subjectivity. These narratives instead demonstrate that the contemporary global novel can make readers understand how globalization isolates people and divests them of subjectivity.

1. An Interconnected Planet?

For Alexander Galloway, it is a mistake to think that "networks are exclusively endemic to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries," since it is nevertheless the case that the particular model of the network associated with the Internet has "become hegemonic" (282, 290). As he explains, this model of the network is specified as "distributed" and is "characterized by equity between nodes, bidirectional links, a high degree of redundancy, and a general lack of internal hierarchy" (288). A distributed network, in other words, is an interconnected structure consisting of interdependent nodes. In The Exploit (2007), Galloway and Eugene Thacker posit that our contemporary networked condition results from the fact that "in recent decades the processes of globalization have mutated . . . to a system of control infused into the material fabric of distributed networks" (3). Within such global networks, "[b]iological viruses are transferred via airlines between Guandong Province and Toronto in a matter of hours, and computer viruses are transferred via data lines from Seattle to Saigon in a matter of seconds." Within this planetary web of distributed networks, "everything is everywhere": the process of globalization has resulted in an interconnected planet reticulated by artificial and natural networks (4).

The interconnection that Galloway and Thacker's networked condition instantiates is indeed ecological. For Ursula Heise, our contemporary conception of the global is characterized by this interchangeability of "technological connectedness" and "ecological connectedness" (65). While The Exploit does not explicitly refer to ecology, the formulation "everything is everywhere" conforms not only to what Timothy Morton has recently identified as "the ecological thought"—"that everything is interconnected" (Ecological Thought 1)—but also to Barry Commoner's classic formulation of the first law of ecology as "everything is connected to everything else" (35).¹ As Neil Evernden explains, the first law of ecology implies "not just [an] interdependence" but "a literal interrelatedness" in which nodes are linked to each other "causally" so that "a change in one affects the other" such that "[t]here are no discrete entities" (103, 93). Invoked to characterize everything from...