ABSTRACT
“Networks” refers to a number of burgeoning critical perspectives that attempt to describe and explain human experience as a product of interconnected relationships forged within and between natural and social worlds that are viewed as random, contingent, and continuously in flux. The word itself is seemingly everywhere these days: in the popular media as shorthand for our contemporary high-speed, global marketplace and public sphere; in corporate offices as a description of contemporary business culture; in the outposts of Internet and high tech development as a kind of brand name for a new culture of information; and in the academy as part of the jargon for new theories about complex systems, social relationships, human and non-human agency, and the histories and dynamics that helped shape colonial/post-colonial/postmodern political arrangements and cultures. As a result, it’s not clear how to distinguish a general from a specific use of the word, and the challenge is compounded by the fact that many of the uses I’ve listed for “networks” overlap. This confounds scholars, even in their own backyards. Faculty in universities throughout the United States, for example, are generally accepting and assiduously studying how digital information networks are transforming research, scholarly publication, and teaching. At the same time, many are repelled by and are resisting their administrations’ embrace of a corporate culture of networked information and knowledge development that, through managerial protocols and bottom-line accounting, seems to threaten “under-producing” departments and academic freedom. Such popularity and contradictory uses makes “networks” a very difficult word to pin down as a theory in its own right, or to claim that it reflects, as with contemporary space and place studies, or the obsession with language and linguistics before that, a “network turn” in humanities and social science scholarship, much less in Jewish studies.
