Felt ill after riding in for class yesterday, I think it might have been the peak-hour car fumes. The first reading, from Mitchell, would have been good to discuss in class too. I have been trying to get a better grasp of the network theory stuff for a while now and that gave me a better view. I am still not utterly convinced as to the utility of network theory over and above using tools like Foucault’s governmentality. As I see it, many of the network theorists have come to the point where they deny the “natural” power of “organic” networks as some did in the beginning and have come to call them a new form of practice and focus on what constitutes the “nodes” and the “routing logic” of the networks if you will. But I see this as already having been done by some of the work surrounding governmentality, the network is the discursive environment in which we make decisions and the locus of decision is what we can call the “actor” (which is perhaps more flexible than the node/individual in some ways). I suppose it’s good to have a different angle on things.