View this link:

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/between-networks-and-structures/

Dr. Sinthome at Larval Subjects has been on a role recently. I’ve wanted to post links to pretty much everything he’s written this week, but I’ve narrowed it down to these two posts on networks vs. structures.

The first post is a link to a paper detailing the various ways in which Zizek and Badiou’s structuralism fails to adequately account for change, relying instead on the notion of a “void” within said structure as the sight of revolutionary politics. Sinthome’s Deleuzian criticism of structuralism is that such a position cannot offer any rigorous insight into how a movement, or “collective assemblage,” might arise or what it might look like.

The second post is a more detailed explanation on what the difference between a structure and a network is.

Both are worth reading. I really like the idea of differentiating between structures and networks, but I’m still skeptical that a “network” offers any additional insight than a void within a structure might, i.e., I don’t know if I find it to be the case that Sinthome has demonstrated that a politics of the void is truly lacking in comparison. This might simply be a result of me having read lots of Zizek and no Deleuze (though I have a copy of Difference & Repetition sitting next to me, waiting to be read).