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notes for a contemporary novel II: infrastructure
The inclusion of "infrastructure" on last week's "notes for a contemporary novel" was directly inspired by Sanford Kwinter and Daniela Fabricus, two contributors to the Mutations volume on the contemporary city.
They write:
"[Infrastructure] is water, fuel, and electrical reservoirs, routes and rates of supply; it is demographic mutations and migrations, sattelite networks and lotteries, logistics and supply coefficients, traffic computers, airports and distribution hubs, cadastral techniques, juridicial routines, telephone systems, business district self-regulation mechanisms, evacuation and disaster mobilization protocols, prisons, subways and freeways and their articulated connections, libraries and weather-monitoring apparatuses, trash removal and recycling networks, sports statiums and the managerial and delivery facilities for the data they generate, parking garages, gas pipelines and meters, hotels, public toilets, postal and park utilities and management, school systems and ATM machines; celebrity, advertising, and identity engineering; rail nodes and networks, television programming, interstate systems, entry ports and the public goods and agencies associated with them (Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Security Agency, Internal Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms), sewers and alarms, multi-tiered military-industrial apparatus, decision engineering pools, wetlands and water basins, civil structure maintenance schedules, epidemiological algorithms, cable delivery systems, police enforcement matrixes, licensing bylaws, greenmarkets, medical-pharmaceutical complexes. internet scaffolds, handgun regulations, granaries and water towers, military deployment procedures, street and highway illumination schemas; in a phrase, infrastructure concerns regimens of technical calculation of any and all kinds."
This list is practically a Ballard novel unto itself. |
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
2:00 PM
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