sensory infrastructures '23

Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. 

"Infrastructures are productive, durationally extensive spaces for the pliable forms of life that people use to make rules and norms and other means of extending the world. Infrastructures do not honor the distinction between the productive and the reproductive because they follow the elastic logic of cluster, of assemblage. Rules are stretchy and norms are porous. In our notice of this capacity for structural distortion and disturbance, infrastructural thought is a way of coming to analytic terms with the complex material and discursive dimensionality, temporality, and use value that constitute the disturbed, yet ongoing, forces of the ordinary...The affectivity infrastructure generates...specifically involves the sensing of the dimension and extension of what we might call organized air, the projected atmospheres sustained by collective practices" (23).

"In a crisis, what passed as 'structure' passes into infrastructure. The glitch of the present that we link to economic crisis, for example, fans out into other ongoing emergencies...Terms for transition provide conceptual infrastructures for living change as something other than loss, but as part of the protocols or practices that hold the world up...writing the long middle without drowning in it...allowing us to see transitional infrastructure as a loose convergence that lets a collectively stay bound to the ordinary even as some of its forms are fraying, wasting, and developing offshoots" (24-25)...

Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso, 2016.

[N]eoliberalism creates subjects. Paradigmatically, we are constructed as competitive subjects - a role that encompasses and surpasses industrials capitalism's productive subject...Even if you do not buy into the ideology, its effects nevertheless force you into increasingly precarious situations and increasingly entrepreneurial inclinations. We need money to survive, so we market ourselves, do multiple jobs, stress and worry about how to pay rent, pinch pennies at the grocery store, and turn socialising into networking. Given these effects, political mobilization becomes a dream that is perpetually postponed, driven away by the anxieties and pressures of everyday life...Neoliberalism constitutes our collective common sense, making us subjects whether we believe in it or not" (64-65).

[T]he left can learn from the long-term vision, the methods of global expansion, the pragmatic flexibility and the counter-hegemonic strategy that united an ecology of organisations with a diversity of interests [around neoliberalism]. The demand... is ultimately a call to build anew the hegemony of the left" (67).

"As the hegemonic order predicated upon decent and stable jobs breaks down, social control is likely to revert to increasingly coercive measures: harsher workfare, heightened antagonisms over immigration, stricter controls on the movement of peoples, and mass incarceration for those who resist being cast aside...These trends portend a crisis of work, and a crisis of any society based upon the institution of wage labor...Political parties and trade unions appear ignorant of the crisis, struggling to manage its symptoms...which direction the crisis of work takes is precisely the political struggle before us" (104-105).

Easterly, William. “Chapter 8: Tales of Increasing Returns: Leaks, Matches, and Traps.” Essay. In The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge , MA: The MIT Press, 2001.

"Within the United States, there are five well-defined poverty clusters: (1) inner-city blacks, (2) rural blacks in the Mississippi delta, (3) native Americans in the West, (4) Hispanics in the Southwest, and (5) whites in southeastern Kentucky" (163).

 Map - union membership here and in major cities - final project IDEAL.

Week 3 - 9/25 - "Listen"

Inspo: Weheliye, Alexander Ghedi. 2005. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Chapter 4: Consuming Sonic Technologies

Week 4 - 10/02 - "Listen" (No class + observation exercise)

North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. Violence and Social Order: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

"A full account of human behavior would begin by asking how the mind deals with the process of change. A necessary preliminary is to understand how the brain intercepts signals received by the senses and how the mind structures the result into coherent beliefs...How do we think about social processes when individuals, at best, have a limited understanding of what is happening to them as they continue to confront new experiences and novel situations that require an awareness of the dynamic nature of the process of change in which they are participants" (251)?

This moment on the map represents my own experience of "rupture" in conceptualizing this project. After emailing back and forth & Zooming with Dana, I really began to lean into the "sensory" aspect of not only the class, but also the content I wanted to work with for this project. While I initially wanted to consider three different fields of "modern" service labor - creative work, food service work, and sex work - I soon came to the conclusion that I couldn't center the sensory and keep such a wide breadth of topics in the final project. I decided to move forward with the sex work avenue, considering the ease with which I was able to curate movies/TV through which to analyze the domestic sphere and the ways in which wives and sex workers are similarly disenfranchised. This decision led me to the (still-evolving) research question: In what ways does a break in the silence that surrounds sex work reveal the unhappiness implicit in the domestic worlds that this silence has been constructed to protect? (To be as clear as possible, the sense I will be focusing on is sound.)

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “In the Event of Precarity ... A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Essay. In Routes/Worlds. London: Sternberg Press, 2022.

"What we [Povinelli & Berlant] have always seen together is the rich resource in relationality, richer than family and hoarded money. We have always seen together that the worst suffering and the most unbearable precarity is in the radical individuality sold as liberal freedom, where people imagine that competition is what's natural while relations that build worlds are exceptional, like dessert" (103).

"[T]he phrase 'becoming-event' actually points to...the moment when peopled places gather whatever creative energies they have left to derange and arrange these kinds of flattening nothings into charging somethings" (105).

Whitecaps x Observation Exercise 2 (probs)

Character guide: Tony, a mafia boss, is married to Carmela, who stays at home. They have two children, Meadow and AJ. Irina is Tony's mistress.

Character guide: Danielle is a last-year college student, majoring in gender studies. Max is her sugar daddy, who thinks she is majoring in business. Kim is Max's wife. Mom and Dad are Danielle's parents. They all find themselves together for the first time at a shiva reception.

Character guide: Razmik is an Armenian cab driver who has moved to LA with his wife, Yeva, and her family. Razmik often enjoys the services of trans prostitutes, one of whom is named Alexandra, during his drives. Chester is their pimp. MIL denotes Razmik's mother-in-law.