Issue #64 Post-Postcolonial Sensory Infrastructure

Post-Postcolonial Sensory Infrastructure

Ravi Sundaram

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Issue #64
April 2015










Notes
1

Rem Koolhaas, “Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos,” in Under Siege: Four African Cities—Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (Documenta11_Platform4), ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and Octavio Zaya (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002).

2

Cited in Adnan Morshed, “The Cultural Politics of Aerial Vision: Le Corbusier in Brazil (1929),” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 55, no. 4 (2002): 201–10; 205.

3

This encounter was thoroughly criticized by various writers for obfuscating the ground realities of Lagos. For a critical response see Matthew Gandy, “Learning from Lagos,” New Left Review 33, (May–June 2005).

4

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7; 4.

5

Ibid., 5.

6

Ibid.

7

Pointing to Italian “radio pirates” at the end of the essay, Baudrillard suggested that their real danger to the “system” lay not in their politics but in their “non-extensible” and “dangerous” localization.

8

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Kittler began his classic text with this sentence: “Media determine our situation, which—in spite of, or because of it—deserves an explanation.” xxxix.

9

See Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

10

See Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg MacLagan and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2012).

11

Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” Public Culture 7, (1995): 323–52; 340.

12

See Gulf to Gulf to Gulf in the Indiancine.ma archive

13

William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

14

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

15

Informal tenure rather than formal, title defines urban residence in most postcolonial cities.

16

It is also a visceral vehicle of terror where political productivity can articulate intimidation, exploitation, and aesthetics.

17

See Nigel Thrift, “Pass it on: Towards a political economy of propensity,” Emotion, Space and Society 1 (December 2008): 83–96.

18

See Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma, and Ned Rossiter, “On the Creative Question – Nine Theses”, Institute for Network Cultures