The Distributed Sovereign: Political Affect and Network Protocols
This presentation excavates a more textured understanding of the concept of "the protocol." In contemporary networks and network studies, protocols refer to the horizontal and vertical translations that make possible the material enactments of data between hardware and software platforms (TCP/IP). The historical dimensions of social and political protocol reveal a performance of the power of sovereign control as a threshold of immediacy between the somatic and the social -- not in terms of slowed down forms of representation and communication but as a kind of reproductive, albeit momentary, immanence. An intersecting swerve between the above historical and contemporary registers of protocol is pursued through the specific framing protocol of "packet-switching": beginning with the atom as a fleshy, affectively transformative "packet" in 17th-century epicurean poetics, with a brief turn toward Marx's appropriation of this epicurean data-unit in his dissertation, and ending with some observations on contemporary network packet-switching in terms of political affect.