Alloway's Network: Art and the Complex Present anthology comprised articles written between 1971 and 1983 and included sections on “Network,” “Abstract Expressionism,” “The Figure,” “The Art World,” “Words,” “Sites,” and “Women's Art.” The title was based on his 1979 essay on “The Complex Present,” his last important contribution to an understanding of contemporary art and pluralism. The complexity of contemporary art for the critic was not just a question of identifying tendencies, sources, and influences, “but stark plurality. The present is an intricate array, like the radar screen of an airport or harbour. The data, in a great holding pattern, have their historical origins, but the fact of immediate consultability is overwhelming. No matter how often we revise the past, the revisions originate in our own time and are hence a part of the simultaneity that is the structure of the present.” Alloway borrows the terms synchronic and diachronic from Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. A diachronic approach was more appealing to a critic because it provided the “deceptive neatness of causal models.” The critic would select a tendency and argue on its behalf with the result that “very small genealogies often command great prestige…” A synchronic approach was more likely to do justice to the complexity and diversity of the present: “Synchrony provides crosssections, arrays of simultaneous information in terms of co-existence rather than succession.” This would require a “descriptive aesthetic” and “this form of analysis is sometimes represented as static compared with the dynamic character of diachronic events traced in time.” However,

Critics needed to adopt “short-term art history” synchronicity—with its interconnections and open range of options—rather than short-order diachronicity: “Synchrony… possesses its historical dimension, but diachromy is without a compensating sense of the fullness of the moment.