With this week we’re kicking off a 3-week unit of the class in which we’ll be thinking the off-grid in a negative register: as infrastructural failure, or as something that is foisted upon subjects who are unwilling, unable, or without agency to participate in these various socio-technical objects and processes that we have so far this semester identified as “the grid.”
The text for this week is a hugely influential book on the failure of the modern infrastructural ideal in the latter part of the twentieth century. Like any text, especially those that try to construct expansive theories about a huge diversity of cases, it comes with abundant opportunities for critique, and I hope we’ll talk about some of those, but I’d like to read it to think together about what it is proposing.
Please read the Prologue for a smattering of short vignette cases, and Chapter 3. Consider Chapter 1 to be optional – I think it covers some ground that we’ve already gone over this semester in terms of thinking about the grid as modern, large-scale, and largely urban infrastructures. But I wanted to Chapter 1 in case you have interest – it covers some foundational concepts used throughout the book and defines some terms.
Reading
- Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, Prologue, Chapter 1 (Introduction), and Chapter 3 (“The Collapse of the Integrated Ideal”). PDF
Screen
Excerpt (15min) from the film “Examined Life” by Astra Taylor. In this clip, Sunaura Taylor speaks with Judith Butler about disability while taking a walk through San Francisco. Link to clip on YouTube here.
Class artifacts