Well, thank you very much for these rich talks
and illuminations.
Maybe I'll just begin the session
by picking up on something that you said toward the end
about the problem of community.
We can't hear.
You can't hear.
Let me just see if I can-- hello?
I'll go like this.
I'll pick up on something that you mentioned
towards the end of your lecture about the question
of community.
And you warned of the dangers of essentializing notions
of community related to kind of a phantasm of immediacy
and so on and so forth.
And I wonder if it's possible to put
into sort of syntactical relation
the notions of community that implicitly operative
in your two papers, and the way you warned, on the one hand,
against the dangers of an essentialized notion,
of a potentially regressive community, and the other kind
of community that we saw being mobilized in the first paper
under very different circumstances.
Presumably that is, within the logic and the framework
of the second paper, what we saw in the first paper is not
the type of essentializing or ontologizing framework
that you rightly call into question.
But nevertheless, what kind of a community or what kind
of a concept of community is then
operative in the kind of thinking of connection
and relatability that we saw in the first paper,
if that makes sense?
Yeah, I think when we talk about-- can you hear me?
Do you now-- do you now hear me?
OK.
Yeah, I think when we talk about media connection
or communication media, in any sense,
it's always hard to see that they're
not only about connection but also about disconnection,
about distance.
That's what you showed in your talk, that all these people are
dealing with questions of disconnection,
of delay, of difference, in a way.
So I think when we talk about community
or about the media of community or the media necessary to form
a community, we should always think
of these two poles of connection and disconnection.
And this is, of course, I think, a political question.
It's not only a question of technology
or a question of theory, but it's a political question
of how do we deal with a community that is disconnected,
in which not everyone is connected with everyone else?
I guess I would just add to that that I don't see it only
as a political question, because-- just
that access to the technology means that people
are able to formulate communities
in specific kinds of ways.
So in the two examples I talked about,
there were communities that pre-existed
the arrival of the internet and mobile telephony.
But the disconnection from those services
also means that the kind of formations that are possible
are distinct and different.
And so I see it as a technical issue as well as
a political issue.
So I wouldn't be able to, I guess,
separate those two so neatly.
Yeah, that's, I think, very important,
when you talk about digital networks,
that it's almost impossible to separate
the question of the social and of the technical nowadays.
So I think that that was something
that was very prominent in German media theory, of course,
in the 1980s and '90s.
They were only dealing with the technological side
and refused to talk about social.
But that's something that we cannot do anymore today.
I think Wendy's next.
[INAUDIBLE] move this around.
First of all, thank you for such a spectacular panel.
The papers worked so beautifully together.
So I have a question for each one of you.
First of all, Lisa, I loved how you
were layering so many things together, both the sort
of residual medias as well as your call
for different typologies and sensings of infrastructure.
But your anecdote from Wei Wei also
got me thinking about what visiting or sensing
also renders insensible, and to what
extent, given your visitings and your sensings,
what do you think is made invisible
or a different understanding of the insensible
that can emerge precisely from this work?
And then secondly, Florian, to just bring
Lisa's last comment about residual infrastructures
to yours, of course, what you so beautifully
showed was the dreams of electricity
were also built against water.
So if you think of what a current even is,
it's defined in terms of water, in terms of these slower
infrastructures which can't be all-- that aren't that
allegedly giving as a city?
So I wanted you to think a little more
about the electrical network in contrast to and in relationship
to water networks as precisely central to both that desire
that imagining of both the national and the global
community.
And then--
Sure.
Thanks for the question.
Oh, are we taking another question?
Please go ahead.
All right.
Thank you for the question.
This notion of the proximity of the researcher
to a set of material conditions leading
to greater intelligibility, access, coherence,
is something that I've long tried to question.
In the first book, Cultures in Orbit,
I talk about a whole problematic of distance and proximity
in relation to field work, and the idea
that sometimes you get to a place
and you find that you knew less than you thought you would
know after you arrived there.
So I think it can lead to issues of the insensible.
But I think this is not just related to the researcher going
to a location.
It also has to do with the restrictions of IRB,
you know, the human subjects protocols that
are imposed upon us as researchers
and how they can circumscribe what we do as researchers.
And I'm constantly finding that those bounds are being tested.
In this, I purposely didn't show faces of people
that I interviewed in Mongolia because of that.
I'm not sure if I'm really getting at your question,
but I do agree-- I don't accept the idea that you go there
and you know everything at all.
If anything, you go there and you
know way less than you thought you could ever know.
And I tried to make that point earlier in my career,
and that keeps getting reiterated.
At the same time, I try to emphasize, in the longer
versions of my work, the positionality of partiality
and limits to what we can know, and probably should
have applied that a little bit more here.
But yeah, thanks for the question.
Yeah, you asked about the electric currents
and what the metaphors of water that
are very important in the industry of physics,
and also in the industry of media as well,
talk about media that flow, or media flows,
not only in television but also, for example,
when you were talking about the internet.
But I think even for electricity,
it's important to see that there is nothing that flows.
There is no substance.
Electricity are changing, different changes of matter.
There's no substance that is transmitted through wire.
It's just a different state of matter.
So with these metaphors, we see that there's
this difference between the metaphoric description, which
is prone to an immediacy, and what actually happens
technically or physically.
And I think that we can see this difference still today
when you talk about the flows of the internet.
In fact, they don't flow, but they burst all the time.
So my question goes a bit in a different direction.
So I was very interested that in both papers
there were a lot of reflections on the concept of time
and how is this is related to the work.
And so I mean, if you go back to McLuhan's big prophecy
that there will be a community, and this
will be defined by the end of time and space.
So it's this kind of timeless community.
So and since it's a social form, if you want, to think
it's that it's unchangeable, it's at an end state,
so to say.
And so I found it very interesting to that both papers
emphasized this different time regime, so to say,
where work is involved, on some level,
on the human side, of the men who holds the cables.
So we have seen a kind of commodification of time.
So we have the labor time, we have
the time you have to buy or sell electricity, network access,
and so on.
So what would happen if you really
would take it in the center and start again to think about,
is it also kind of infrastructuring of time?
So whose time is sold here, and who is, on some level,
the master of this time regimes?
And then I think it's very interesting,
because formerly we always thought about the networks
and spatial categories.
And now it becomes so evident that it's basically
a temporal regime.
And so that we have to enter in a kind of time stream there.
And this brings it back to, I mean,
who was really the one who has the power of distributing time?
And as we know in remote and peripheral regions,
lifetimes are also shorter than in the centers.
So it seems that there's a kind of political aspect in taking
more seriously the commodification of time that
is distributed with this networks that
pretend not to be about time.
Yeah, I think what is important about the temporalities that
arise with electricity is that they're not
sensible or not visible for us.
They are way beyond the thresholds of our perception.
That means that we cannot perceive anything that happens
at such short intervals of time.
And I think it's exactly this temporality that is used today
in all our smart media and ubiquitous media,
because they all operate with this temporality,
as Mark Hansen has shown in his work.
So I think this is actually what this history shows us,
that when you look at these technical media,
we should look at those microtemporalities that
are way beyond what we can perceive, but still,
in a way, of course they relate to us.
So I think we have to think about what
is our relation to these microtemporalities.
I think it's a really important question, and something
that we all-- in media studies, we
need better terms of temporality.
I mean, we need more-- we need to be able to understand
how long it takes, how many hops,
and how long those hops take when
we move through the internet.
The traceroute software like Visual Route,
which people have been using for 15 years now,
still hasn't translated into us talking
about what our connectivity is in terms
of temporal structures.
And I think because they're among a kind
of economic elite-- there tends to be relative homogeneity,
as you say, the networks pretend to be atemporal-- that they
remain somewhat unintelligible to us
as critics and historians.
And there's a need take to just start getting more specific
and build temporality into analysis much more regularly.
So all I can say is, thank you for the question
and the challenge.
There are about three or four more people would
like to intervene as well.
We only have five minutes.
So perhaps what we'll do is we'll
collect these questions and comments,
think about them together.
Maybe you'll start.
I think that media theory, and especially like the kind
of high technology, tends to obstruct.
And that's great, that's how we understand.
But then there is also-- there is a dimension of collapse.
There is a voltage capacity, there is ampacity, amperage,
and then that's kind of a bandwidth,
and it works with electricity, but also with the information
kind of volume.
So I'm just interested-- and also
these kind of insights where you can't really just like
store-- it's very hard to store electricity.
It goes to battery or it's just, like, wasted.
So I just wonder how these kind of dimensions
relates to what you were talking about, the medians?
Hi.
This is specifically for Lisa.
I was struck by how you kind of started with a departure point
from queer and feminist and race theory.
And I really appreciated how you were focusing
on the people in a certain way, specifically
in the second example, I would say almost anthropologically.
And I think, even, really what you're
getting at is the affect of the community itself,
you know, the initial question, which
is really kind of these groups of people that are there.
And it was about the community that was then realizing
something technologically.
And I felt like, not that they had to be synonymous,
but the first part was kind of missing that.
And I just wanted to pose the question, one thing that I kept
thinking about, which I imagine that [INAUDIBLE] was half
of the capital, is informality and illegality in terms
of a settlement.
Are these how that fits into the urban structure?
Hi.
Thank you for your talks.
What came to mind with both is about, maybe,
the financial infrastructures, how the transatlantic cable was
financed, but also, to Lisa, to tie into the essentialization
of communities the fundraising video, which reminds
one of a crowd-funding video.
But I went to the website and it's actually donation.
So my question, I guess, is then because if we
do micro-patronage nowadays instead
of, let's say, public and state supports, and are we
part of that community as well?
And one more.
I had a question, but it's fine.
Should I go quickly?
I was just wondering-- thanks for the talks--
I was wondering whether these fantasies of the instantaneous
kind of show up in Lisa's work, because they seem to, right?
There's a sense of being connected,
and that you need to be online rather than trading
data in other ways.
And the same with the radio, that it's
a question of broadcast, and it's not some-- but now
our question maybe of podcasting or something like that.
So I'm just wondering, you mentioned
that there might be other ways in which they deal
the data in the first exam.
In the second, if there's other examples of how they--
whether this fantasy still crops up of being connected,
of hearing the radio, or whether they also
have podcasts and other things.
Thanks.
I was looking for a slide related
to the question of energy.
I think that-- I'm working on piece called Energizing
Media about the relationship between different energy
sources and the kind of content that becomes possible
based on what kind of energy source you use.
So instead of having typologies of media that are just
about genres and narrative structures
or national cinemas or local, we could have, like,
lithium video, which is made with cell phone battery,
or thinking about solar power energizing big Hollywood
productions in certain areas.
I created a kind of a typology around this
that I was looking for.
And I worked on it a while ago, so it's not very
fresh on the tip of my tongue.
But thinking carefully about the relationship between energy
sources and what kinds of content
becomes possible and takes form, I
think is a great point that you made,
or that you're trying to get at.
I don't know if that's what you were getting at,
but it's what I was thinking of in relation to it.
Yeah.
To the degree that you look at this question of energy
is always a question of who owns the infrastructures.
So that's very close to what Renee asked.
When we talk about infrastructure,
we always talk about the people or the companies
or the states that own these infrastructures.
And the collapse might also be a kind of economic collapse
when an infrastructure collapses.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Good German punctuality.
So I think we're off to a very good start with this pane.
Thanks again to our panelists and thanks to the audience.
[APPLAUSE]