Editorial: ‘network’

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: The theme, ‘network,’ speaks to the idea that relationships between phenomena are more important than—and indeed produce or perform—things and beings themselves. Some such things and beings might typically be regarded as relatively proximate, the connections well-known and reiterated; others more distant and the act of connecting them daring, difficult or speculative. These latter relationships often depend on a willingness to traverse multiple areas of knowledge or disciplines, which is precisely what this journal, The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, encourages. In recent decades, there has been much ‘thematic dialogue’ about the place of human beings in the greater scheme of things. Contrary to dominant tendencies in Western thought since the Enlightenment, a ‘networked’ perspective suggests that the putative intelligence of people does not make them separate from everything else on the planet; but, at the same time, this same intelligence, or an assumption of its distinctiveness and superiority, has succeeded in having an exceptional—to the point of catastrophic—impact on the planet’s ecosystem. If there is any way out of this pickle, or at least of surviving in the midst of it a little while longer, it would seem propitious to regard human beings merely as constituent factors in a much vaster and multitudinous assemblage, constellation or ecology, not as the centre around which everything else revolves, while, at the same time, recognising that this puts us in a place of responsibility—to care for everything else we connect with, for the sake of sustaining the wider network and by extension our place within it.