Revealing how networks reopen our understanding of political discourse today

Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.

Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri. Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks, Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped them, the Romans dressed them in fitted coats, and the Christians associated them with their divine savior. In Sheep, Philip Armstrong traces the natural and cultural history of both wild and domestic species of ovis, from the Old World mouflon to the corkscrew-horned flocks of the Egyptians, from the Trojan sheep of Homer’s Odyssey to the cannibal sheep of Thomas More’s Utopia, from the vast migratory mobs of Spanish merinos all the way to Dolly—the first animal we have ever cloned—and Haruki Murakami’s sheep-human hybrids.
           
As Armstrong shows, humans have treated sheep with awe, cruelty or disdain for many thousands of years. Our exploitation of them for milk, meat, and wool—but also for artistic and cultural purposes—has shaped both our history and theirs. Despite all that we owe them we have often dismissed sheep as the least witted and least interesting of mammals: to be accused of “sheepishness” or behaving “like a flock of sheep” is to be denigrated for lack of courage, individuality, or will. Yet, as this book demonstrates, sheep actually possess highly sophisticated social skills and emotional intelligence. Above all, Sheep demonstrates that sometimes the most mundane animals turn out to be the most surprising.