Brian Larkin | Barnard College (original) (raw)
Papers by Brian Larkin
Public Culture, 2021
nomic, cultural, and political practices? If so, does this alter higher-order claims we may wish ... more nomic, cultural, and political practices? If so, does this alter higher-order claims we may wish to make about, say, commodification, the production of the subject, the creation of the mass, technological reproducibility, speed, and a host of other phenomena that go along with the rise of the late modern? One of the important elements of postcolonial and decolonial thinking has been to challenge historical narratives and discourses of modernity that emanate from Europe and which claim universality for what are, in fact, particular histories and epistemologies. My work shares this ambition to draw out histories of media and technology that operate at variance with normative histories of the modern. But this runs the risk of reifying cultural distinction and writing histories that focus on the exceptionalism of-in this case-Africa, rather than seeing its participation in a common media history. In this line of reasoning, mainstream histories of visual culture argue that its technological base and cultural techniques were formative to the production of modern forms of spectacle, attention, and capital, but that Kenya or Nigeria are different, anchored in cultural lifeways that provide an alternative to the march of the modern. 1 For some theorists this difference is liberatory, in that it offers a critical position from which Western normativity can be challenged and imagined otherwise. For others, the insistence on difference runs the risk of cultural reification. Achille Mbembe, for instance, has forcefully critiqued the tendency to assert cultural uniqueness. He argues that it repeats a long, racist history by which Africans-ever since the Enlightenment-have been conceived of as outside and separate from the modern, excluded from participating in the same historical and cultural processes as the rest of the world. He terms this the "principle of ontological difference" (2002: 247) and sees it as the grounds by which Africa is stigmatized as backward. 2 Instead, he argues, the "obsession" with uniqueness and difference must be opposed by a "thematics of sameness," an analysis of the ways African societies and nations take part in contemporaneous, reciprocal interaction with cultural, political, and economic flows from all over the world. 3 Decolonial thinking, emerging from Latin America, has been politically animated by the ques-1. It is precisely the attempt to account for this difference from Western epistemologies-delinking-that has animated much decolonial thinking. For an overview, see Mignolo 2007.
Politique Africaine, 2019
Part of a special dossier: L'audiovisuel africain et le capitalisme global
The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018
When Meyer and I (Larkin and Meyer 2006) wrote our article on the shared similarities between Isl... more When Meyer and I (Larkin and Meyer 2006) wrote our article on the shared similarities between Islam and Christianity, it was intended to interrupt what seemed to us then, and still seems to me now, the tendency for studies of Christian movements to be written as if Muslims did not exist in the same polity and vice versa. Difference has been the normative grounds upon which the scholarly literature on religion in Africa has been based, usually organized around a set of binary distinctions: animist movements are opposed to mission Christianity; traditional (often Sufi) Muslims are opposed to Salafis; mainline churches to the Born-Again movement; Islam to Christianity; both of them to animism; and, finally, religion to secularism. While the particular content changes, the structural ordering does not. 1 It is undoubtedly important, as Peel argues, to understand the theological traditions that orient the attitudes and regulate the practice of adherents, 2 but there are other dynamics that are also important and which the emphasis on difference occludes. First, while religions do operate in specific cultural contexts that need to be taken into account, the reverse is also true. Korea is not western Nigeria and neither of them are Guatemala, but Born-Again adherents claim to follow a universalist revelation given to them through the Bible, and our ability to discuss these religions has to take seriously those elements that connect these movements beyond local contexts. Alafia may indeed undergird the operation of Pentecostalism in western Nigeria, but one presumes that it does not in Korea or Guatemala, and yet all see themselves as joined together in a similar religious endeavour. Second, in many parts of Africa (certainly Nigeria), Christians (mainline, African Independent, Born-Again), Muslims (Sufi, Salafi, orthodox) and traditional religious practitioners all participate in a common spaceone that is in constant dialogue with secular forms of Nigerian life. One problem with the emphasis on difference is that it makes it difficult to analyse this more thickly constituted religious and secular environment and to understand quotidian
To what extent is cinema, or any technology, an aggrandizing, autonomous force that demands the r... more To what extent is cinema, or any technology, an aggrandizing, autonomous force that demands the reorganization of the environment around it according to its own technological needs? In the US, the railway system demanded the alienation of land and the coordination of time as a condition of its technical operation. Air travel commanded an instant redefinition of the concept of property—particularly air rights over individual plots—to facilitate flying from one part of a country to another without trespass. Technology, in this sense, is a standardizing, overcoding force that erodes local difference according to its own technological needs. The dispositif of cinema, in this light, can be seen as such an overcoding. The architectonics and screening practices of cinema are remarkably familiar, often instantly recognizable whether we are looking at 1920s Iowa City, Ibadan, Sunderland, Lucknow or Chiang Mai. Despite massive cultural, political, and religious differences, the cinematic apparatus takes on a familiar shape and any attempt to analyze the emergence and history of technological media has to take this capacity of overcoding into account. The turn toward materialism in the recent critical thought, represented in such diverse domains as the archaeology of media, new materialisms, and actor-network theory, asserts the agentive, deter-minative power of technologies and rejects the idea that technologies and objects " are just there to be used as a white screen on to which society projects its cinema " (Latour, 1993, p. 53). On the other hand, to what extent is this overcoding technology vulnerable and porous to the environments it finds itself growing within? The version of technology presented in the opening paragraph is based on an assumption that the ontology of a machine is formed at its moment of invention, and that once formed, it is simply transported from place to place. This is, particularly, the case with media archaeology whose critical effort is focused on revealing the conditions of possibility from which media emerge rather than the ways in which those media, once existing in the world, continue to mutate and grow. A more infrastructural view of media places emphasis on standardization and extension. The invention, in the work of someone like Gilbert Simondon (1992), is a single phase in an ongoing process of individuation that will have multiple phases. Cinema, in this sense, comes to be. It is a porous instrument whose internal structures are in constant mutual exchange with a host of external forces—other technologies, modes of economic organization, political formations, legal regimes, religious disciplines, and so on.
to bear on city life. This approach is necessary and underdeveloped, especially in French urban a... more to bear on city life. This approach is necessary and underdeveloped, especially in French urban anthropology. In a chapter on sustainability projects, Newman situates the park on the larger scale of global green development, where projects that gain traction in the world of climate summits often end up excluding poor residents of urban areas in a celebration of green development.
This article examines the religious use of loudspeakers on churches and mosques in Jos, Nigeria. ... more This article examines the religious use of loudspeakers on churches and mosques in Jos, Nigeria. It examines the medial form of the loudspeaker, how this medium technologizes urban space, and how urban residents generate cultural techniques to live with the sounds it produces. More precisely, I focus on how loudspeakers seek to compel attention by dis-bursing religious messages and how, in a city riven by religious conflict, residents cultivate practices of inattention in order to ameliorate the possibility of religious violence. [
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They ar... more Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of tech-nopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
A presumption guiding this analysis is that religious movements are constituted through communica... more A presumption guiding this analysis is that religious movements are constituted through communicative acts — practices of mediation whereby adherents bind themselves to one another and to a higher power. Religious movements are brought together — realized as movements — through the circulation of discursive forms that address religious subjects, calling them into being, uniting them in common actions of reading, listening, seeing. In the contemporary world, electronic media are central to this process. They are dominant technologies (though by no means the only ones) whereby this circulation takes place and the forms of political and religious identities are forged. How then do we understand the nature of mediation and circulation in forming religious movements? And what does this tell us about the nature of the category of religion itself? My interest is in looking at the work of the South African Muslim cleric Ahmed Deedat. In the 1970s and 1980s, Deedat became an enormously popular figure across the Muslim world, known for using the Bible in order to attack the legitimacy of Christianity. 1 Defining his specialty as " comparative religion, " Deedat borrowed from biblical hermeneutics and secular criticism to attack the idea that the Bible is a work of revelation. The polemical nature of his critique, coming during the emergence of Christian televangelists in the 1970s, promulgated him to enormous fame in the Muslim world. He came to be seen as the Muslim " response " to the massive rise of evangelical Christianity and a media presence to rival Christian preachers. To that end, Deedat's mimicking of evangelism and secular debate was not confined to rhetorical styles: he also mimicked the infrastructure of missionary evangelism by circulating pamphlets and
Public Culture, 2021
nomic, cultural, and political practices? If so, does this alter higher-order claims we may wish ... more nomic, cultural, and political practices? If so, does this alter higher-order claims we may wish to make about, say, commodification, the production of the subject, the creation of the mass, technological reproducibility, speed, and a host of other phenomena that go along with the rise of the late modern? One of the important elements of postcolonial and decolonial thinking has been to challenge historical narratives and discourses of modernity that emanate from Europe and which claim universality for what are, in fact, particular histories and epistemologies. My work shares this ambition to draw out histories of media and technology that operate at variance with normative histories of the modern. But this runs the risk of reifying cultural distinction and writing histories that focus on the exceptionalism of-in this case-Africa, rather than seeing its participation in a common media history. In this line of reasoning, mainstream histories of visual culture argue that its technological base and cultural techniques were formative to the production of modern forms of spectacle, attention, and capital, but that Kenya or Nigeria are different, anchored in cultural lifeways that provide an alternative to the march of the modern. 1 For some theorists this difference is liberatory, in that it offers a critical position from which Western normativity can be challenged and imagined otherwise. For others, the insistence on difference runs the risk of cultural reification. Achille Mbembe, for instance, has forcefully critiqued the tendency to assert cultural uniqueness. He argues that it repeats a long, racist history by which Africans-ever since the Enlightenment-have been conceived of as outside and separate from the modern, excluded from participating in the same historical and cultural processes as the rest of the world. He terms this the "principle of ontological difference" (2002: 247) and sees it as the grounds by which Africa is stigmatized as backward. 2 Instead, he argues, the "obsession" with uniqueness and difference must be opposed by a "thematics of sameness," an analysis of the ways African societies and nations take part in contemporaneous, reciprocal interaction with cultural, political, and economic flows from all over the world. 3 Decolonial thinking, emerging from Latin America, has been politically animated by the ques-1. It is precisely the attempt to account for this difference from Western epistemologies-delinking-that has animated much decolonial thinking. For an overview, see Mignolo 2007.
Politique Africaine, 2019
Part of a special dossier: L'audiovisuel africain et le capitalisme global
The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018
When Meyer and I (Larkin and Meyer 2006) wrote our article on the shared similarities between Isl... more When Meyer and I (Larkin and Meyer 2006) wrote our article on the shared similarities between Islam and Christianity, it was intended to interrupt what seemed to us then, and still seems to me now, the tendency for studies of Christian movements to be written as if Muslims did not exist in the same polity and vice versa. Difference has been the normative grounds upon which the scholarly literature on religion in Africa has been based, usually organized around a set of binary distinctions: animist movements are opposed to mission Christianity; traditional (often Sufi) Muslims are opposed to Salafis; mainline churches to the Born-Again movement; Islam to Christianity; both of them to animism; and, finally, religion to secularism. While the particular content changes, the structural ordering does not. 1 It is undoubtedly important, as Peel argues, to understand the theological traditions that orient the attitudes and regulate the practice of adherents, 2 but there are other dynamics that are also important and which the emphasis on difference occludes. First, while religions do operate in specific cultural contexts that need to be taken into account, the reverse is also true. Korea is not western Nigeria and neither of them are Guatemala, but Born-Again adherents claim to follow a universalist revelation given to them through the Bible, and our ability to discuss these religions has to take seriously those elements that connect these movements beyond local contexts. Alafia may indeed undergird the operation of Pentecostalism in western Nigeria, but one presumes that it does not in Korea or Guatemala, and yet all see themselves as joined together in a similar religious endeavour. Second, in many parts of Africa (certainly Nigeria), Christians (mainline, African Independent, Born-Again), Muslims (Sufi, Salafi, orthodox) and traditional religious practitioners all participate in a common spaceone that is in constant dialogue with secular forms of Nigerian life. One problem with the emphasis on difference is that it makes it difficult to analyse this more thickly constituted religious and secular environment and to understand quotidian
To what extent is cinema, or any technology, an aggrandizing, autonomous force that demands the r... more To what extent is cinema, or any technology, an aggrandizing, autonomous force that demands the reorganization of the environment around it according to its own technological needs? In the US, the railway system demanded the alienation of land and the coordination of time as a condition of its technical operation. Air travel commanded an instant redefinition of the concept of property—particularly air rights over individual plots—to facilitate flying from one part of a country to another without trespass. Technology, in this sense, is a standardizing, overcoding force that erodes local difference according to its own technological needs. The dispositif of cinema, in this light, can be seen as such an overcoding. The architectonics and screening practices of cinema are remarkably familiar, often instantly recognizable whether we are looking at 1920s Iowa City, Ibadan, Sunderland, Lucknow or Chiang Mai. Despite massive cultural, political, and religious differences, the cinematic apparatus takes on a familiar shape and any attempt to analyze the emergence and history of technological media has to take this capacity of overcoding into account. The turn toward materialism in the recent critical thought, represented in such diverse domains as the archaeology of media, new materialisms, and actor-network theory, asserts the agentive, deter-minative power of technologies and rejects the idea that technologies and objects " are just there to be used as a white screen on to which society projects its cinema " (Latour, 1993, p. 53). On the other hand, to what extent is this overcoding technology vulnerable and porous to the environments it finds itself growing within? The version of technology presented in the opening paragraph is based on an assumption that the ontology of a machine is formed at its moment of invention, and that once formed, it is simply transported from place to place. This is, particularly, the case with media archaeology whose critical effort is focused on revealing the conditions of possibility from which media emerge rather than the ways in which those media, once existing in the world, continue to mutate and grow. A more infrastructural view of media places emphasis on standardization and extension. The invention, in the work of someone like Gilbert Simondon (1992), is a single phase in an ongoing process of individuation that will have multiple phases. Cinema, in this sense, comes to be. It is a porous instrument whose internal structures are in constant mutual exchange with a host of external forces—other technologies, modes of economic organization, political formations, legal regimes, religious disciplines, and so on.
to bear on city life. This approach is necessary and underdeveloped, especially in French urban a... more to bear on city life. This approach is necessary and underdeveloped, especially in French urban anthropology. In a chapter on sustainability projects, Newman situates the park on the larger scale of global green development, where projects that gain traction in the world of climate summits often end up excluding poor residents of urban areas in a celebration of green development.
This article examines the religious use of loudspeakers on churches and mosques in Jos, Nigeria. ... more This article examines the religious use of loudspeakers on churches and mosques in Jos, Nigeria. It examines the medial form of the loudspeaker, how this medium technologizes urban space, and how urban residents generate cultural techniques to live with the sounds it produces. More precisely, I focus on how loudspeakers seek to compel attention by dis-bursing religious messages and how, in a city riven by religious conflict, residents cultivate practices of inattention in order to ameliorate the possibility of religious violence. [
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They ar... more Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of tech-nopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
A presumption guiding this analysis is that religious movements are constituted through communica... more A presumption guiding this analysis is that religious movements are constituted through communicative acts — practices of mediation whereby adherents bind themselves to one another and to a higher power. Religious movements are brought together — realized as movements — through the circulation of discursive forms that address religious subjects, calling them into being, uniting them in common actions of reading, listening, seeing. In the contemporary world, electronic media are central to this process. They are dominant technologies (though by no means the only ones) whereby this circulation takes place and the forms of political and religious identities are forged. How then do we understand the nature of mediation and circulation in forming religious movements? And what does this tell us about the nature of the category of religion itself? My interest is in looking at the work of the South African Muslim cleric Ahmed Deedat. In the 1970s and 1980s, Deedat became an enormously popular figure across the Muslim world, known for using the Bible in order to attack the legitimacy of Christianity. 1 Defining his specialty as " comparative religion, " Deedat borrowed from biblical hermeneutics and secular criticism to attack the idea that the Bible is a work of revelation. The polemical nature of his critique, coming during the emergence of Christian televangelists in the 1970s, promulgated him to enormous fame in the Muslim world. He came to be seen as the Muslim " response " to the massive rise of evangelical Christianity and a media presence to rival Christian preachers. To that end, Deedat's mimicking of evangelism and secular debate was not confined to rhetorical styles: he also mimicked the infrastructure of missionary evangelism by circulating pamphlets and