Nollywood Research

What is less discussed (but see Schivelbusch 1986; and Virilio 2003) is how technology influences through its failure as much as its success. The inability of technologies to perform the functions they were assigned must be subject to the same critical scrutiny as their achievements. Breakdown and failure are, of course, inherent in all technologies, but in societies such as Nigeria, where collapse is a common state of technological existence, they take on a far greater material and political presence (see Mbembe and Roitman 1995; Verrips and Meyer 2001; and Koolhaas 2001).      Rather than elide pirate infrastructure by using it as a window into legal questions of intellectual property, I wish to foreground it. If infrastructures represent attempts to order, regulate, and rationalize society, then breakdowns in their operation, or the rise of provisional and informal infrastructures, highlight the failure of that ordering and the recoding that takes its place. When we scrutinize the material operation of piracy and its social consequences, it becomes clear that pirate infrastructure is a powerful mediating force that produces new modes of organizing sensory perception, time, space, and economic networks. … But Virilio (2003) also notes that with the invention of the first train came the derailment, and few thinkers have been as insistent as he that the development of technology is tied to the development of catastrophe. My interest in technological collapse is somewhat different, not in extravagant spectacles like collapsing bridges or exploding space shuttles but in the small, ubiquitous experience of breakdown as a condition of technological existence. For Nigerians, cars, televisions, VCRs, buses, and motorbikes are often out of service. Even when they work electricity supplies are unreliable and prone to surges that damage consumer equipment. NEPA, the Nigerian Electric Power Authority, is famously known as ‘Never Expect Power Always,’ and phone lines are expensive and difficult to obtain. … A cycle of breakdown, repair, and breakdown again is the condition of existence for many technologies in Nigeria. …      The poor condition of infrastructure and the ubiquity of breakdown bright about their corollary: repair as a cultural mode of existence for technology. This is a consequence of both poverty and innovation. Breakdown and repair structure the ability of subjects to use and be used by technologies. The culture of repair rests on the experience of duration in the everyday use of technology. Breakdown creates a temporal experience that has less to do with dizzying, real-time global integration than with waiting for e-mail messages to open, machines to be repaired, or electricity to be restored. In Nigeria, all technologies are variously subject to the constant cycle of breakdown and repair; the promise of technological prosthesis is thwarted by the common experience of technological collapse. Each repair enforces another waiting period, an often frustrating experience of duration brought about by the technology of speed itself. The experience of slowness comes as a consequence of speed-producing technologies, so that speed and acceleration, deceleration and stasis are relative, continually shifting states. … In Nigeria, the infrastructure for media, especially pirate media, is often marked by disrepair and noise. …      The infrastructure of reproduction, like most contemporary infrastructure in Nigeria, is marked by cheapness, faulty operation, and constant repair. 'All data flows,’ the media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1999: 14) reminds us, 'must pass through the bottleneck of the signifier,’ and in doing so they are vulnerable to being 'engulfed by the noise of the real.’ The 'real’ here is precisely the fuzziness of cinematic images or the hissing of tape recorders—the noise produced by the medium of transmission itself as it encodes and disseminates data. … For Nigerians, the costs of consuming and producing world media require operating on the margins of technology. Distortion on an audio tape, dropouts on a video, and a slow connection to the Internet are the material conditions of existence for media. While media infrastructure creates the reality of being ever more connected to a globalized world, it does so by emphasizing Nigerians’ marginalization at the same time. Electricity blackouts, snowy television images, difficulty getting international phone lines, and distorted loudspeakers on cassette players all create a technological veil of semiotic distortion for Nigerians.      Some of this distortion is taken for granted, rendered invisible to people by its ubiquity. It is clear, for instance, that many of the most popular transnational media forms, such as sports (especially wrestling), action films, and Indian films, are highly visual and thus capable of overcoming both linguistic differences and the audio degradation that makes words hard to hear even when languages are well understood. But this degradation is rarely commented on. Instead, what these films evoke is the fantasy of other countries where deficiencies in infrastructure are believed not to exist. For many Northern Nigerians, Saudi Arabia is a place where electricity always flows, where roads have no potholes, and where hospitals are of the highest quality—just as everyone in Europe and America is thought to own televisions and mobile phones. These fantasies represent implicit and sometimes explicit critiques of the failures of the Nigerian state to provide basic infrastructures for everyday life. The breakdown of infrastructure provides a conduit for critiques of the state and of the corruption and ethnic favoritism of political elites (Verrips and Meyer 2001). …      The infrastructure of reproduction created by piracy generates material and sensorial effects on both media and their consumers. Cheap tape recorders, old televisions, videos that are the copy of a copy of a copy, so that the image is permanently blurred, the sound resolutely opaque—these are the material distortions endemic to the reproduction of media goods in situations of poverty and illegality, and they shape the ways these media take on cultural value and act on individuals and groups. The dialectic of technological breakdown and repair imposes its own cultural experience of modernity, an alternate speeding up and stasis, and a world where gaps in space and time are continually being annihilated and reinforced.