Randy Martin, “What Difference do Derivatives Make? From the Technical to the Political Conjuncture”, Culture Unbound, Volume 6, 2014: 189–210.
This research trip was conducted as part of the "Logistical Worlds" research project. See ➝.
Actual information about the financing of the Rajarat development is difficult to find. Data referenced here about the lack of occupancy and the probable financing came from discussion with the Kolkata Research Group members Ranabir Samadar and Mithelesh Kumar on March 31 and April 1, 2016. See ➝ for further research on the zone produced by the Transit Labor project, directed by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter.
See ➝.
See ➝.
Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield, "Living Infrastructure, Government, and Destituent Power," unpublished conference presentation at Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene Conference, Concordia University (October 19–20, 2015): 1–16.
Since the nineteenth century, the “modulus of resilience” has served in material sciences as a measure for the capacity of materials such as woods and metals to return to their original shapes after an impact. In other fields, resilience tends to name ways in which ecosystems, individuals, communities, corporations, states, etc. respond to stress, adversity, and rapid change.
C. S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecological Systems 4 (1973): 1-23.
See ➝, emphasis mine.
Melinda Cooper, "Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis." Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2–3 (2010): 167–90: 173-78.
It is important to recognize that there are also alternative histories of temporality and control within computing coming from cybernetics. In the work on organizations and economics from figures such as Herbert Simon, and in the work on neural nets coming from the heritage of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, ideas of “Fuzzy” problems and logic were prevalent, and preemption, not prediction, was a dominant theme. These influences went on to be very important and influential in engineering and financial culture, particularly through the figure of Nicholas Negroponte and through architectural collectives such as Archigram and the Metabolists. For more information see: Orit Halpern, "Cybernetic Rationality," Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 2 (2014); Judy L. Klein Paul Erickson, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: the Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, Profit (Boston: Schaffner and Marx Houghton Mifflin, co., 1921), ➝.
Similar arguments in relation to derivatives and credit swapping have been made by David Graeber in Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville Press, 2011), and ibid., Martin.
A shorter version of this piece appeared on the Logistical Worlds blog in February 2017. Special thanks to Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter for supporting this research through their ARC grant "Logistical Worlds" and who gave excellent feedback and discussion on the piece. Also thanks to Robert Mitchell who contributed greatly to developing these ideas, particularly on resilience, which will also appear in our forthcoming book "The Smart Mandate". Finally I want to thank Jamie Allen with whom I worked to develop an earlier presentation that led to this paper for 4S in 2016.