Getting off the Cartesian Clothesline

Abstract

Most attempts to examine the relation between networks and events begin with what we should question—that it invariably helps us to imagine that our units fall neatly into “events” that occupy distinct points in Cartesian time. I show that the core insights that inspired contemporary network analysis come from a structuralist conception which is both far more theoretically generative than the Cartesian vision and does less violence to the nature of the sorts of empirical material that we usually have before us.