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What is the power of the monstrous? Where does it get this power? Jacques Derrida, who in his early work associated the future as such with a certain monstrosity (cf Derrida’s preface to Of Grammatology), said in an interview: A monster may be obviously a composite figure of heterogenous organisms that are grafted onto each [...]

Are you with the Occupation?

What is the nature of a connection? I have been influenced by Franco Berardi (Bifo) recently. He points out that definitions have to be approached through multiple strategies because what is important is shocking thought by the reconstitution of a virtual field of sense and sensation. In other words, part of what is at stake [...]

What is ‘Marketing Ethics’?

What is the relationship of ethics to marketing (and capitalism more generally)? This opens on to other questions, as I’m fond of saying. Such as where is the social in marketing? Where does the social appear in marketing analysis and textbooks? As I noted in Biopower and Marketing in Grewal and Levy’s marketing textbook, the [...]

Biopower and Marketing

“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, capturing [added by the authors], communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” Dhruv Grewal and Michael Levy, Marketing (London: McGraw-Hill, 2008) i Let us begin with a refrain developed in [...]

The Value of Affect: Perception and Media in India today

reticulation 9.6 copy Abstract: This essay aims to diagram the set of connectivities (or “system of relations”) developing in business outsourcing affective, communicative labor and the value-adding digital image in contemporary Hindi-Urdu cinema. What emerges is a resonant set of nested temporalities constituting a new media assemblage. Throughout, I draw on a set of analyses [...]

Distributed Networks: On Security, Terror, Mobility and Other Sensations

This lecture is based on research conducted in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai on mobile phone cultures over the past nine months. This research has focused on changing patterns of use emerging from shifts in relations of power between government, network providers, content producers, value added companies, and communities of active users across urban and rural space. [...]

Mumbai photos

More Composite Photos

This video is a montage of the images with their digital “originals.” I think the video helps defetishize the images, that is it makes the compositing processes a little more palpable. Changing the level of detail changes the sharpness of the color transitions. The processes involved in perception traversing these gradients is what I have [...]

Composite Photos

These photos seem to me to have come together quite by chance, but then they also emerged from patterns of behavior and forms of style, against the backdrop of flows of people, traffic, capital, information. In India today these patterns are emerging through a new ecology of sensation. But I make no claim for these [...]

On Social Viscosities: diagramming the flows of mobile media in India

Sensation and its ecologies get us beyond the pleasure-agency / consumption-docility binary that characterizes radical political thought today. This is simply because sensation is not the synthesis of the dialectic, it is not involved ontologically in dialectics at all. Sensation involves the creative mixing of the virtual and the actual. Deleuze writes, “sensation has no [...]