Seminar 1.
Mao Mollona and Irit Rogoff
SEMINAR 1.
MAO MOLLONA AND IRIT ROGOFF
For the first seminar, Mao Mollona and Irit Rogoff laid the foundation of existing understandings of ‘infrastructure’ – what does it promise, what are its fallacies and what is it unable to provide?
Conventionally, infrastructures promise forms of enablement and delivery that are the building blocks of governance. To this end, the seminar began with selections from Saskia Sassen’s work ‘Expulsions‘ on financial structures and Keller Easterling’s ‘Extrastatecraft‘ on spatial infrastructures. Both of these texts are descriptive as well as critical and provide us with a vocabulary for how infrastructure circulates in the world. But the forms of infrastructure are also oblique and extra territorial, working to express subjectivity, exception and dissent, and the seminar group looked at a project by Raqs Media Collective called ‘Cybermohalla‘ and a text by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou on Dispossession and Performative Politics.
By asking some fundamental questions about what infrastructure means to us, what we think it promises, how we have been inducted into relying on it, we can begin to think beyond the limits of the material and administrative notions.
SUGGESTED READING
Keller Easterling, “Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space”, Verso Books, 2014.
Raqs Media Collective, “After hours: art, imagination and the residue of the working day” in “Work, Work, Work” edited by Cecilia Widenheim, Lisa Rosendahl, Michele Masucci, Annika Enqvist and Jonatan Habib Engqvist Sternberg Press, 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybermohalla
Cybermohalla Ensemble and Nikolaus Hirsch / Michel Müller, “Cybermohalla Hub”, 2011.
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, “Dispossession: The Performative in the Political”, Polity Press, 2013. Selected chapters:
– Chapter 2, The logic of the dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance), pg 10-37
– Chapter 3, A caveat about the “primacy of economy’, pg 38-43
Saskia Sassen, “Beyond Equality: Expulsions”, Presented at 9th Annual Conference ‘Philosophical Foundations of Economics and the Good Economy: Individual Values, Human pursuits, Self-realization and Becoming’, Columbia University, 2011.
SUGGESTED WATCHING
Keller Easterling, AA “Think Tank: Plan the Planet, Extrastatecraft Lectures”, 2013.