Technological Ruins

Interpreting Media

May 2011

 

The media explosion in India over the past two decades has been the subject of popular and academic scrutiny. For much of this period The Hoot has been at the forefront of media analysis in India (and South Asia in general). The book section on The Hoot brings to the fore recent debates and studies related to this exciting and constantly changing field. New extracts are posted on the site every month and we invite readers to send in comments, book recommendations, and reviews.

 

The Digitized Imagination edited by Nalini Rajan features a wide array of essays dealing with the history of the internet, open sourcing, plagiarism and its implications in corporate and academic contexts, the politics of new media. Ravi Sundaram’s essay excerpted below is a meditation on the linkages between globalised communicative and technological desires on the one hand and local ‘realities’ on the other. He moves beyond the clichés of India as an IT giant to dwell on the dissemination of hardware and the networks established in and through technology hubs in various parts of Delhi. The reconfigured analytical frames allow for new perspectives on city architectures and spaces, relations between the market and elite as well as business motivations, and their complication by the arrival and settlement of the poor in our cities. The myriad impacts of the digital revolution are carefully revealed in this essay.
 

Nalini Rajan, edited. The Digitised Imagination: Encounters with the virtual world. New Delhi, London: Routledge, 2009. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415492867/

Nalini Rajan, edited. The Digitised Imagination: Encounters with the virtual world. New Delhi, London: Routledge, 2009.
 

175 pages/ Hardback: Rs. 595 (978-0-415-49286-7)

Excerpted with permission of Routledge.

 

Technological Ruins: A Short Essay

 

Ravi Sundaram

 

The technological power of the state in the first three decades after independence in India was rendered through what Henri Lefebvre calls conceptualized space, the represented space of abstract power. The typical form was monumentalized, the figure of the steel mill, the power plant, the dream-form of national progress. These were abstract spaces, where the technological was sutured from lived experiences. This landscape changed radically after globalization of the economy from the mid-1980s onwards, and accelerated in the next decade. The period of the new globalization transformed daily life in India’s cities through a series of shock-like flows, where new networks emerged outside those of the state.1 These were flows of a new media space, unorganized, haphazard and dispersed. Cable television emerged, wired by unemployed neighbourhood youth; a large pirate music culture spread through cigarette shop outlets. Public phone shops became computer access points, and later, internet access nodes. Suddenly the city street became visible.

 

Lajpat Rai market is one of Asia’s largest ‘pirate’ electronics markets, located in the Old City, opposite Red Fort. The market jump-started the cable television boom by manufacturing inexpensive dish antennas, which were bought by dealers throughout the country. Today the market sells music systems to street DJs, television sets and VHS players, fake music, videos and DVDs, cameras, and thousands of electronic parts. All transactions are in cash and most items are manufactured in illegal/grey factories around Delhi. The market, dense, labyrinthine and seedy, is a space far removed from the infotech utopias conjured up by the current elites in Delhi, and far removed from the abstract technological spaces of nationalism.

 

The market is a part of the large and dynamic media space of the everyday in urban India, which has, for all practical purposes, retailed the new cultural constellation to the mass of citizens. These include the thousands of small cable television networks, publicly operated phone booths in neighbourhoods which number in their millions, street music sellers, the large grey computer market, and public internet access points. Here the computer, multimedia and phone outlets have the most visible public presence in the street, while the other forms are dominant in virtual space.

 

What is distinctive about the everyday urban networks of electronic culture that emerged in the 1990s is their preference for non-legal practices. This is partly a consequence of the gradual withdrawal of the state from the everyday productive space of the city, from localities and neighbourhoods. The state now exists more as a corrupt bystander, sometimes intervening as a moral policeman, often without results. Non-legality here refers to the thousands of unregistered service providers, the thriving pirate cultures of cable television, music and film. In the computer industry the grey market is significant, operating from neighbourhood shops and new nodes of commercial activity. It was these non-legal forms that contributed to the dramatic expansion of electronic culture in the city, as also a dynamic service sector in the cities. Street and non-legal cultures are a feature of all post-global cities, but what is significant about India is their preponderance, as well as ability to innovate within existing built forms.

 

Non-legal incremental expansion seems to have been the main dynamic of post-global urban transformation in India, in the everyday at least. Until recently, expansion has not been in the form of spectacular vertical construction regimes as in East Asia, but in horizontal expansion, gradually poaching on state and private land by diverse interests which could vary from contractors, small business, slum dwellers, and private citizens slowly encroaching on public land.

 

For many years this map is deemed to be out of sync with the global catalogue of postmodern urban transformation: no large flows of finance capital pushing for spatial transformation, the absence of a large commercial downtown anywhere in India, no significant spatial class segregation as in the Brazilian experiences, in fact, no building drives cohering around a consumption spectacle. In the early 1990s one was struck by the paucity of building activity in contemporary India, at the pace and spatial concentration that we have witnessed in other societies, and this paucity contrasted with the Mughal, the British and the Nehruvian emphasis on the relationship between spectacle and built forms.

 

The post-global Indian urban landscape in the first years of globalization was transformed by the sector which classical Marxism often referred to contemptuously as petty-commodity producers. The vast majority of this new sector in towns and cities are entrenched in the circulation of electronic cultures, as well as providing new media services to the citizens of the city.

 

In the first place, the old commercial areas built by the nationalist state were reshaped and transformed into nodes of a new post-global commercial activity. Take the example of Nehru Place, a large commercial area built by the Delhi Development Authority in 1970 to serve as the core of a business district in Delhi. When it was built in the best style of international mass production, this rather limited area was in fact held out as the pride of finance capitalism in the capital with obligatory visits by foreign dignitaries. Today the old high-commercial district has long vanished, its place taken largely by the non-legal electronic sector. The layers of encroachment, subletting and density are in fact typical of post-global electronic culture.

 

In Nehru Place, a diverse combination of legal software firms, the non-legal pirate sector for computer components, and scores of shops offering electronic services, co-exists with a street market. The state intrudes periodically, by conducting raids on pirates, but it does not regulate the market on an everyday basis. What is interesting is that this non-spectacular space is one of the largest computer markets in India supplying most of the resellers in city neighbourhoods and small towns. Nehru Place is a typical concentration of single-commodity markets for new global products that have emerged in different parts of India. This tradition goes back to pre-colonial India, but its resurrection for global products in a space dominated by individual stores is interesting. The modal form for this new development was that of cable television in the early 1990s, when the Lajpat Rai market in Delhi emerged as a national centre for components for cable television.

 

This changed urban map suggests the recall of a form derided by colonialism and nationalism alike—the bazaar. Like the pre-colonial bazaar, electronic markets gesture to the state formally, playing hide-and-seek with taxation and the law. Unevenness, intimacy and density are shared by both forms, as is the preponderance of small enterprises. The new bazaars are of course markers of a new arena of consumption, embedded in global technological time, and offer a secular form of ownership when compared to their medieval predecessors. They are also located in a mix of spaces: sometimes traditional commercial areas which they have transformed, in localities and in neighbourhoods. It is a quotidianism of presence which emerged in the 1990s: for the first time since independence the domain of technoculture left the monument and emerged in the street.

 

The retailing of global consumption in the urban everyday has been through the street. This is particularly so in the case of the new multimedia cultures, which have a public presence largely due to the proliferation of images on the street. These images, posted on lampposts, bus stops, street corners all over the country, are often shorn of the phantasmic quality of Virilio’s (1994) vision machine. The images are marked by their functionality, offering access to a service economy at low cost for the cities’ citizens. These functional signs of newness are maps of locality, implicated in everyday practices of electronic non-legality. It also recalls the visual map of the bazaar, chaotic, uneven and non-expansionary. This is a space that is marked by its fragility: the tension between consumption and economic crisis, between nature and artifice, between constant migration patterns and the desire for stability. The contrasts with the old development authority city drawn from the best of functionalist design are evident in the areas of new urban growth. Pirate electronic culture, by emerging in the very ruins of functionalist buildings, has invested them with deep layers of indeterminacy, where flows have transformed the original urge for order.

 

This wild zone of electronic culture was predicated on a certain urban form that had flowered in the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s. This form saw the emergence of new poorer migrant populations laying claim to the city often through non-spectacular, incremental occupations of land, and the opening of small shops and industries. In many ways these new forms vitalized urban life all over India and provided a material foundation to electronic life. In recent years these urban forms have been under attack from a coalition of neo-liberal reformers, right wing courts and elite civic groups who have pushed court judgements that have led to the closing of small shops and industries that were outside the law and settlements of the working poor. Along with this, land speculation and the development of suburban enclaves by developers and finance companies are in full swing. We are entering an uncertain period of conflict in Indian cities. Spectacle has arrived; along with violence and the dream of ‘making it’ in the arena of global power.

 

In the final analysis, the emergence of a new life-world—where the preponderance of industrial products takes the place of ‘nature’—is a significant break for a newly urbanized population. The terms of conflict are no longer between the past and the future, but among many endless presents. Technological life, governed by economies of desire and acceleration do not always conform to a changing urban morphology; so cleaning up the city is going to take a long, long time. Endless proliferation is the fate of our late modern times, when urban morphology overlaps with media effects.

 

Note

 

1. I call this the ‘new globalization’ because India was always part of the world economy, even during the state-controlled import-substitution periods.

 

Reference

 

Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press,

Bloomington.