Mediating the Anthropocene

One of the most compelling components of this week's readings seems to me to be the, at times agonistic and spectacular, and other times subtle negotiations between the intended and unintended consequences of infrastructural systems. Larkin's  (2008) sense of media retains a promiscuous resonance throughout Signal and Noise. Drawing from a Foucauldian interpretation of power (particularly governmentality) Larkin argues that media infrastructures constructed within the colonial context of Northern Nigeria were constituted through complex arrangements between explicit and implicit, tacitly internalized modes of modern subjectivity. He relies (somewhat sporadically within the scope of the text, in my view) on the figure of the colonial sublime to articulate an interpretation of infrastructures constructed as instruments of turbulent forms of indirect rule as bound with spectacular representations of power that "collapses otherness through the lure of technology as a way of becoming modern" (Larkin 2008: 37). While, the aura of spectacle is short-lived and fleeting (particularly in moments of breakdown, where the infrastructures themselves become subjects of ridicule), representations of the continuation of the sublime continued to be circulated through theories of media to legitimate racist accounts of cognitive and facultative deficiencies among Hausa Nigerians. Infrastructure, in the form of radio and educational and melodramatic cinema, appears as a mode of mediating - through particular nodes (e.g. movie vans and cinema houses, RDS radio and wireless, melodramatic Hausa cinema divided between both North and South) - the relationships between bodies and each other and, ideologically, between bodies and the British and Nigerian states. While configured and enacted with modernist forms of subjectivity in mind, media infrastructures are unruly, not strictly serving as the grounds against which human agency is expressed, but the medium through which the occasionally "terrifying" agencies of things are themselves, also expressed (pg. 116).

For this week, I wanted to follow from this insight to contemplate the emergence of social infrastructures designed to mediate the Anthropocene - the constructed category of existence that attempts to account for the indelible alterations to the Earth's climate, geography, and interconnected ecological systems, initiated with the Industrial Revolution. In particular, I wanted to draw attention to an emergent debate regarding the digital infrastructures with which these alterations are rendered visible, and which mediate individual, governmental, and institutional responses within their moral economic contexts - those sites for moral consideration and contestation. An Inquiry in the the Modes of Existence (http://modesofexistence.org) - AIME, is a digital knowledge production and sharing platform that exists as an extension of the book by the same name, authored by Bruno Latour.

AIME attempts to collaboratively unpack the categories by which we make legible the conditions within which the "project that would have seen modernization spread over the whole planet came up against unexpected opposition from the planet itself." That is, the ways in which the planet evokes acts of resistance against the global extensions of modernization. The digital platform itself is extremely slick. It's expertly crafted to draw you into the complex layers, allowing you to browse and weave through ethereal passages at your own, leisurely pace, calling to mind the image of the flaneur (Bejamin 2002). The section entitled, "crossings" is particularly provocative, providing linguistic juxtapositions between prefixes of your own choosing, placing in conversation different etymological figures than one might encounter in typical speech.

I am interested in the claims of such digital platforms of relationality toward contributing to critically engaging the extensions of the Anthropocene by mediating it within a moral economy situated within particular norms of in/ex-clusivity, aesthetics+ethics, the points wherein which the boundaries between architecture and circuits (gateways) converge (Kittler 1996: 720). For example, Kim Fortun (2014) draws from a reading of Derrida's conception of hospitality to argue that AIME insufficiently balances the central paradox of "hosting and hospitality" that arises within interdisciplinary digital spaces of experimentation such as AIME; at the same time that these space require a certain degree of "mastery" to ensure legitimate representation of data and phenomena (particularly, in Fortun's case, with http://theasthmafiles.org), they also rely on openness and "hospitality" as a systemic, infrastructural responsiveness that positions the infrastructure so as to integrate more heterogenous forms of knowledge, and thus more directly agitate for more just arrangements between heterogeneous assemblages of human and non-human actors. 

Since posting last night, there seems to be a connection to the sublime that I hadn't quite articulated. It seems that digital platforms regarding the Anthropocene function to anticipate the terrifying prospect of dystopian ecological collapse. Where AIME flattens these extensions across geopolitical space, Fortun argues for a framework which accounts for the ways in which disasters are mediated through historically situated categories of systemic violence under late industrialism. 

Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The arcades project. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Fortun, Kim. 2014. “From Latour to Late Industrialism.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309. doi:10.14318/hau4.1.017.

hospitality” that arises within interdisciplinary digital experiment spaces; at the same time that these spaces

require a certain level of engineering “mastery” to ensure legitimate representation of data and phenomena, they

also require “hospitality” (i.e. openness) to more critical interpretations that agitate for more just arrangements

between heterogeneous assemblages of human and non-human actors.