Fiction of the Network Society

Day 2: Excerpt from A Visit from the Goon Squad

Two views of Network Culture A Visit from the Goon Squad and Network

Culture “Woman Hollering Creek” and

deterritorialization/transnational identity (discussion will continue through Friday’s class)

Today

“the cultural politics of information involves a stab at the fabric of possibility, an undoing of the coincidence of the real with the given” (27)

Tiziana Terranova: an optimistic view of Internet technologies

“contemporary communications media capture their users in networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” and “captures creativity and resistance so as to enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many” (4).

Jodi Dean: a pessimistic view of Internet technologies

Where do we see the virtual world superseding the physical world?

Where do we see networks become important?

Where are networks exceeded? How do networks shape the behavior of the

characters here?

Questions for A Visit From the Goon Squad:

Goon Squad—sets up rough division

Human/natural Network/artificial

Purist Music Interacting on street Children’s imagination Sunset

Parrot “Reach” Interacting through Ts Starfish Artificial hype

generated for concertConcert itself

“No one says ‘viral’ anymore,” Lulu said. “I mean, maybe thoughtlessly, the way we still say ‘connect’ or ‘transmit’—those old mechanical metaphors that have nothing to do with how information travels. See, reach isn’t describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous. It’s faster than the speed of light, that’s actually been measured. So now we study particle physics” (317)

Read the description of the Starfish handset on 313. Why do you think Egan includes this object?

What crisis does Alex face on page 321?

Starfish

“she was a person who lived in his pocket” (327).

What is the significance of this idea? How would you say that Egan treats texting culture?

Drawing on what you remember from the story, write for 1-2 minutes on this idea (try to stick to what story says, not your opinion)

Communicating by “T”

If this is human interaction being stored, what issues does Egan raise about human interaction through networks?

Facebook’s data center

What is Alex’s conflict about the parroting scheme? (315)

What is absurd about the details Egan gives us about this scheme?

What does this episode get at about the kind of information (and human interaction) available via the Internet?

Why is the moment with Alex’s wife (328) jarring (“a tiny implosion near his heart”)

Parrot

“It was one of those days when every intersection brings up another familiar face, old friends and friend of friends, acquaintances, and people who just look familiar”

Egan set the genuine human contact—and the interconnectedness of New York City—against the false interconnection of “parroting”

How are they different? How are they the same?

Human contact 329

Read the description of the concert on page 335. What contradictions does Egan raise?

Paradox of concert

Issues for Transnational Recent American ethnic literature: shift from

“roots” to “routes” How do I imagine another place, and the

people connected to that place?◦ = source of misunderstandings that occur in

“Woman Hollering Creek” What sort of isolation and loneliness results

from moving? What sort of new connections are possible

as a result of going?

How does Cisneros characterize Cleofilas's "transnational" experience? 

If Cleofilas is "deterritorialized," where do we see her maintaining imaginary ties to Mexico? 

What challenges does Cleofilas encounter living in Texas?

What media products would (or do) help modify Cleofilas's experience?

Questions for Woman Hollering Creek:

Gloria Anzaldua "borderlands": the "cultural, physical,

spiritual, sexual, and linguistic spaces . . . where people of different cultures occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. . . . It's not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions."

“Woman Hollering Creek” Voice of story—almost entirely written in

gossip—voice of community

Story = deconstruction of one kind of dream—conventional dream of wealth = passion

Replaced with fantasy of living independently—as embodied in Felice and La Gritona .

Questions for story What characterizes Cleofilas’s life in her

hometown? What characterizes her imagination of

Texas? What characterizes her actual life in Texas? What are the elements of the final scene?

“This town with its silly pride for a bronze pecan the size of a baby carriage in front of the city hall. TV repair shop, drugstore, hardware, dry cleaner’s, chiropractor’s liquor store, bail bonds, empty storefront, and nothing, nothing, nothing of interest. Nothing one could walk to, at any rate. Because the towns here are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. Or you drive” (3168).

Deterritorialized

Except now and again when her husband was away and she could manage it, the few episodes glimpsed at the neighbor lady Soledad's house because Dolores didn't care for that sort of thing, though Soledad was often kind enough to retell what had happened on what episode of Maria de Nadie, the poor Argentine country girl who had the ill fortune of falling in love with the beautiful son of the Arrocha family, the very family she worked for, whose roof she slept under and whose floors she vacuumed, while in that same house, with the dust brooms and floor cleaners as witnesses, the square-jawed Juan Carlos Arrocha had uttered words of love, I love you, Maria, listen to me, mi querida, but it was she who had to say no, no, we are not of the same class, and remind him it was not his place nor hers to fall in love, while all the while her heart was breaking. Can you imagine (3169)

Media imaginaryWhat do the telenovelas (soap operas) do for Cleofilas?