And

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 other. This graft, this hybridization, this composition that puts heterogeneous bodies together may be called a monster. This in fact happens in certain kinds of writing. At that moment, monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what the norm is and when this norm has a history–which is the case with discursive norms, philosophical norms, socio-cultural norms, they have a history–any appearance of monstrosity in this domain allows an analysis of the history of the norms. But to do that, one must conduct not only a theoretical analysis, one must produce what in fact looks like a discursive monster so that the analysis will be a practical effect, so that people will be forced to become aware of the history of normality. But a monster is not just that, it is not just this chimerical figure in some way that grafts one animal onto another, one living being onto another. A monster is always alive, let us not forget. Monsters are living beings. This monster is also that which appears for the first time, and consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, the composition or hybridization of already known species. Simply, it shows itself–that is what the word monster means–it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure. . . . But as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it, one begins, because of the `as such’–it is a monster as monster–to compare it to the norms to analyze it, consequently to master whatever could be terrifying in this figure of the monster. And the movement of accustoming oneself, but also of legitimation and, consequently, of normalization, has already begun. However monstrous events or texts may be, from the moment they enter into culture, the movement of acculturation, precisely, of domestication, of normalization has already begun. . . . This is the movement of culture. Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection, that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, transform the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience. All history has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or in poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity” (Derrida, Points 385-87)

There are some key tools for the method of ontogenesis in Derrida’s words.

Recent Images

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comrades

hammer grafitti

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st pauls assembly 1

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 previous postings: value, sense, force. What follows will differentiate from the trite position that marketing pedagogy is a biopolitical project. That marketing seeks to goad life into mutation and habituation, and to raise the power of information to the nth degree seems almost obvious. This much is true of marketing: sensation-desire-information are its very lifeblood. By adding the participle “capturing” to the definition the authors show clearly that some mechanism (or abstract diagram) is necessary to assemble flows of communication with the production of consumer desire (cf. Virilio, Information Bomb 17). That is not a turgid sentence. It means simply this: that new media advertising builds on the machinery that came before it. Virilio in The Information Bomb tells us that advertising has shifted from the 20th century function of producing consumer desire to what he calls pure communication. Facebook and the spacetime of Web 2.0 (the informatization of everything). Desire needs to be captured and entrained (a neutralizing-potentializing circuit) through and in the flow of information—in the mode of communication—itself. We are all entrepreneurs of the self, even and perhaps in a special way when we disavow that capitalism as the extraction of surplus value from the processes of the world is the destiny of posthumanity. In what sense is marketing pedagogy a biopolitical process? How does marketing situate itself vis a vis the production of desire in the interest of domination? The aim then is to produce mutations in habit that allow an unmediated experience of virtuality. The transvaluation of all values must value becoming.

Fractal Decay

We have seen that the world was an infinity of converging series, capable of being extended into each other, around unique points. Thus every individual, every individual monad expresses the same world in its totality although it only clearly expresses a part of this world, a series or even a finite sequence. The result is that another world appears when the obtained series diverge in the neighborhood of singularities. (Deleuze, The Fold 60)

Govandi to Vashi

vashi station

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. The wager of my research is that a new ecology of sensation is emerging through an evolving, globally distributed security apparatus. This apparatus has become centered on controlling populations as searchable digital information, while mutating the biopolitical project of maximizing productive capacity and minimizing risk.

Flow:

1. What is a Media Assemblage?
2. Why is it particularly appropriate for diagramming Mobile phone networks?
3. Emergent properties, critical thresholds, and phase transitions of multiplicities
4. Types of connectivity: Security, interoperability, and standardization (ICON, TRAI regulations); pirated connections (ends up valorizing what you are stealing, non-standardized, on the margins of control); and the strategic refusal (Naxalite sabotage); pre-empting emergence: keep control but enable capitalist innovation and value creation
5. Intensive gradients of populations cannot be understood through linguistic categories, we need tools to be able to model intensive gradients of perception, meaning, rates of flow, density of connectivity…etc
6. This leads to a perspective where we take the body’s sensorimotor processes seriously as a mode of unmediated connectivity to media. UNMEDIATED. DIRECT. But with a history. Patterned but unpredictable, as virtual as it is actual, ecologies of sensation are evolving fields of sense, value, and force. So we can understand in this way the mobile phone as directly productive of sensation: in narrative: the mobile phone is a sensational technology (Dev.D), a dangerous device (A Wednesday), and passage into an intercalated timespace (the private bubble around the bodies of people in public places so common in Hindi cinema)…The mobile phone in cinema has become banal, a device assumed to be everyday for postcolonial modernity…VAS production: the creation of sensation through viral content and “necessary” services.
7. Art and Mobile Phones: The Creative deployment of the mobile: social viscosities project, GPS and mapping, the camera (Kainaz’s iPhone photography), the mobile dropping out of the pants video, use of the camera, text novels in Japan
a. Dialtones: A Telesymphony. There are a few different interactive mobile phone performance art pieces that I am aware of but this is by far the coolest of the bunch. Basically, when you come to see this show you (and your cell phone) actually become a part of the show. You register the phone number of your cell phone so that it gets linked with your seat. Then the show starts and it involves the ringing of your cell phone with new ringtones that have been added to it to make it more musical. Your phone and the phones around you are all ringing as part of this amazingly beautiful musical piece. It’s music but it’s made using mobile phones. It happened way back in 2001 but I still think it’s a magical piece to remember today. http://www.flong.com/projects/telesymphony/
b. Cell Phone Movies by Giselle Beigulman. This artist actually uses the mobile phone to create art by taking different models of cell phones and using the video recorder on them to record different scenes in movement whenever she is on buses or trains or in the car. These videos are then combined together to make cell phone movies of the subjects that she has taken video footage of. Learn more her
c. Phonetic Faces. This is another one of those interactive art pieces that utilizes mobile phones. In this case, the Phonetic Faces exhibit is set up (it’s been in various galleries around the world) and people at the exhibit can come add to the piece. They do so by calling a specific cell phone number which tells them how to choose images to collage together as part of the piece and then also allows them to upload their own picture for use in the collage. Essentially, this captures the visitors to the exhibit in images but also alters the piece through their contributions. That’s public art at its best and it has the cell phone at its core.
d. http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2007/01/014567.htm
8. Social Viscosities: cuts both ways…. After a certain threshold of connectivity, the network (which includes but is not reducible to people’s use, no one part of the open, distributed system is decisive, what is decisive is the emergent properties that take hold with the nonlinear interaction of these components), the system takes on a kind of life, it becomes self-organizing after a gradient of probabilistic functionality, a gradient of connectivity…
a. Self-organizing networks doesn’t mean that this is utopic, without hierarchies of power, or resistant
b. Sensation gets us out of the dialectic of docility-agency.

Mumbai photos

Diffuser

Udaipur, Bangalore, Mumbai photos

Colaba

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 been insisting we understand politically, economically, technologically, bodily. At once and altogether. An ecology of sensation, where ecology is understood as a system far from equilibrium involved in creative resonance with other forces, ecologies, material and informational flows.

Arriving trains, Chembur Station

Santa Cruz

Composite Photos

Train to Virar

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 photographs as “art.” And yet clearly the history of perspectivalism, the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity is at stake for me in creating these images. There is an accretion of information some of which coheres, much of which does not, but each image has a certain duration at different scales of perception, a noncoinciding resonant unity, a unity-in-multiplicity is what I hope to continue through the photography (mutating affect, not representation). An ecology of sensation meeting its cliché: Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rikshaw, Agra’s Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (is it less or more racist? to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?), the ferris wheel on Juhu beach, the weighing machine at the local station. This time that I have been able to spend here in India thanks to a research grant from the Fulbright foundation, has allowed me to research the materiality of the ecology of sensation of mobile phones and experiment in forms of creatively engaging this ecology.