Nietzsche and Networks, Nietzschean Networks: The Digital Dionysus

The inspiration for this volume of essays, drawn from the pro-ceedings of the Nietz sche Workshop @ Western (held at West-ern University, London on, and the Center for Transformative Media at The New School, New York ny),1 comes from the hy-pothesis that Nietz sche’s thinking is pertinent to a phenomenon which can be described as the planetary propensity toward the digitization and networking of information. Moreover, “Nietz-sche-Thought” — to lift a phrase from philosopher François Laruelle2 — provides unique insights about the complexities of our contemporary network-centric condition, especially in relation to the all-important notion of “information,” which has been conceptualized primarily in terms that are protoco-logical and computational, hence almost exclusively Apollonian(or as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say, “striated”), rather than Dionysian (or as Deleuze and Guattari would say, “smooth”) terms. As Manav Guha argues in his contribution to this volume, the current military understanding of net-centric-ity is “a project of extreme striation involving the harnessing of Dionysian energies of the yet-to-be-processed with the Apollon-ian reigns of the processor.”