Interview with Brian Larkin on Piracy and Infrastructure
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Summary: These interviews were conducted as a part of the Contested Commons/ Trespassing Publics conference organized by Sarai: CSDS and the Alternative Law Forum in January 2005.
Brian Larkin is assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has published widely on the materiality of media technologies and the relationship between media, urbanisation and globalisation. He is the author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria, 2008.
AT: What prompted you to start your work in Nigeria?
BL: I was trained in American studies as an undergraduate, in the UK. By the end of that, I was doing a lot of cultural studies, media studies. I went to the US with the idea of continuing that sort of work. The move at that point had been towards ethnography of the media. So I enrolled in an anthropology programme that looked at media. It was very new. I was one of the second or third doctorates to come through the programme. I thought anthropology would teach me ethnography, and techniques with which to go and research media. And one thing I soon realised was that the media theory I'd been dealing with was based on Europe and America. I became interested in the fact that there was a world out there in which media played a role in different ways - that the grounds for a media theory could not be presumed - and I wanted to go and research that. Nigeria interested me for a number of reasons. For one, I was interested in the relation between media and nationalism, ethnicity, and violence. Nigeria has a lot of ethnic conflict; it had the first television station in sub-Saharan Africa; it's very developed, relatively, in Africa; it's a very fecund place, there's a lot of stuff happening. I thought it would be a good site.
Nigeria
There are many parallel to the description that Larkin provides of the Nigerian film industry. In India for instance the Malegaon film industry which has emerged as an alternative to the Hindi film industry was also built in similar ways, and shows us how one cannot examine the question of the dissemination of knowledge and culture without seriously examining the history of infrastructure.
Extract form an account of the Malegaon film industry
Prologue: Once upon a Time in Malegaon
Approximately eight hours away from the bright lights of India's financial and film capital, Bombay, is a small non-descript town called Malegaon. The town is populated mainly by migrant Muslim laborers from North India, who work in the power loom sector. Malegaon became infamous in 2006 after a series of bomb blasts. serious communal riots broke out after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The town has however been in the news in recent times for something else. It has emerged as the center of a parallel film industry, which churns out remakes of Bollywood hits, contexualising them to address local issues and to cater to local tastes. Thus, one of the biggest blockbusters of India, Sholay (Flames of the Sun, 1975) is remade as Malegaon ki Sholay, and Oscar nominated Lagaan (Taxes) is remade as Malegaon ki Lagaan, and instead of opposition to colonial taxes, the film addresses problems of civic amenities.
The average budget of a Malegaon production is around Rs.50,000 ($1000), and runs in one of the fourteen local video theaters in the town. It all started when Naseer, a local videographer who shot wedding videos decided to borrow money to make his own film. He shot the film on video and used two Video Cassette Recorders to edit the film in real time. The film turned out to be a surprise hit, and thus started the Malegaon film industry. Local workers working in the various small scale industries double up as actors, ad they try to stay as close tot he original as possible, including camera angles, lighting etc. Understandably, it is difficult to emulate a large Bollywood film with its mega budgets in a small town like Malegaon, so the Malegaon crew has learnt 'to adjust', and innovate using local resources to recreate these films.
So a cycle stands in a for dolly, and a bullock cart is used for crane shots. While remaking an expensive Hindi film Shaan, the director realized that with a total budget of Rs. 50,000 there was no way that he would be able to hire a helicopter, so they simply had to make do with a toy helicopter and shot it in a way that made it look as authentic as possible.
In the past few years, the Malegaon films have created a market of their own, and now there are film distributors who are willing to buy their films for nearby towns, and cable operators who regularly get requests for their customers to screen a 'Malegaon film' . The director of Lagaan, one of the films remade in Malegaon, when shown the remake said "It is remarkable, what they have managed to achieve. Using video theatres as a film school, they have managed to create an alternative to the Hindi film industry in the Hindi language".
The Malegaon phenomenon is very similar to the emergence of Nollywood in Nigeria (Larkin, 2008). There are many ways in which we read the Malegaon phenomenon. It is on the one hand a story of local creativity, which uses remixes as a mode of appropriating dominant culture. It could also be read through the prism of copyright to see how creativity relies on pastiche and quotation, and how a regime of copyright would inhibit such forms of creativity. But it has to be stated that despite using copyrighted material from films to music, the question of copyright has thus far been a non existent one in Malegaon. Like Nollywood, the Malegaon film industry arose out of an infrastructure created by media piracy. The proliferation of video stores, video theatres, the availability of video cassettes and now VCD's and DVD's for the distribution of these films, have all contributed to the Malegaon success story.
infrastructure
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AT: This was also just after the Salman Rushdie fatwa....
BL:The other thing is that Nigeria is primarily a mixed-ethnic country; it has a predominantly Christian south and a predominantly Muslim north. Where I come from in London, there is a large Muslim minority population. Post the Rushdie affair, the position of Muslims in England and elsewhere in the world remains intensely conflicted in society. The figure of the Muslim occupies a political space, and performs particular symbolic work in society. I became very interested in working in an Islamic society. And because of that, to work on these things - media, religion, Islam - I chose to work in the north of Nigeria. There are good reasons, if you research media, to base your work in the south of Nigeria, as it is more developed. The north is always trailing, but has its own compelling dynamics.
AT: Your work on northern Nigeria does unpack a whole history of social practices around cinema. Are you romanticising some of the aspects of the circulation of media, of piracy?
BL: Romanticising in what way?
AT: Romanticising is perhaps a wrong word. I meant that there is a certain investment in giving us a different understanding of piracy than what is usually perceived, which is also hinting at transnational connections which are not 'global' in a negative sense, but in a nostalgic sense, maybe, harking at older linkages.
BL: I was interested in doing work in the global media. As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I was trained to read the debate on cultural imperialism, to trace the move from third world cinema to 'third' cinema, and so on.
BL: Like all things - like the work I'm doing now in different ways - these debates created a conceptual grid of what constituted global media. I went to Nigeria to do dissertation research on that. On my first research trip I was planning to base myself in Kaduna, a mixed Christian-Muslim city, and on arrival to stay in the Muslim city of Kano for a couple of weeks. There I just started going to the cinema, and there was Indian films five nights a week, one night for Hollywood, one night for Hong Kong. There were posters of Indian film stars everywhere; there were stickers on the backs of buses; it's a very vibrant presence in everyday life. I asked people about it - I had read practically all I could on Nigerian media at that time, all I could get hold of, there's a lot more in Nigeria - and only a couple of sources mentioned Indian films, in a minor way. Certainly, none of it was analytical, because conceptually it wasn't defined as African media.
BL: African media, and at the time Bollywood, didn't fit into the paradigm of what people analysed when raising questions about global media. The dominant debate in cultural imperialism is about the spread of Western media and values, and the possibility of resisting that spread by producing African media that reflected African worldviews. Scholars of Indian films at that time didn't know much about how these films circulated in north or west Africa. For Nigerian scholars, Indian films didn't constitute African cinema. And I knew immediately that it was this very powerful thing. So because of that, I became interested in cinema. I am also interested in Nigerian video films.
BL: If you read mainstream journalism about Africa in the West, you come across northern Nigeria mainly because of its pathologies: the sentencing of women to death under Shari'a law, Muslim-Christian conflict, several outbreaks of epidemics and the poverty that all of these feed on. These are serious issues, yet at the same time, in the very midst of it, there's a lot of cultural production.It doesn't mean that ethnic and political conflicts are not important, but to my mind it doesn't mean that one shouldn't pay attention to other aspects of peoples' lives, the creative cultural work that is also going on. And that's what I've tried to do, in a sense.
AT: You attribute a lot of the cultural efflorescence to the pirate aesthetic, and the spread of pirate networks. It's interesting that you don't define piracy in legal/non-legal terms, but in terms of infrastructure.
BL:I've tried to push my analysis of media into a wider question of infrastructure. In my book, one of the simple ways I approach technology is through analysing the ideological intentions that go into introducing a technology. Why did the British establish a radio station? Why does an independent government want to put up a television station? What's in it for them? What are the aims that go into this? These aims and intentions have powerful effects over how technologies are and what they come to be. But, once established, media have particular technological and semiotic properties that are relatively independent of whatever intentions went into their funding. They also enter into social domains and people there may accept and internalise those aims and ambitions, or may use media in a different way.
Brian Larkin's work on piracy in Nigeria similarly forces us to look at and listen to, not merely the onscreen content, but also to consider the conditions under which texts are pirated and circulate. Larkin demonstrates the critical importance of paying attention to infrastructures of production in developing countries where the very process of cultural production is also tied to the relative lack of infrastructure on the one hand, and also becomes the basis for the transformation of the conditions of production by generating a parallel economy of low cost infrastructure. He says that "My interest in technological collapse is somewhat different. It is 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. In Nigeria, cars, televisions, VCRs, buses, and motorbikes are often out of service. Even when they work, electricity supplies are unreliable and beset by power surges that damage consumer equipment. NEPA, the Nigerian Electric Power Authority, is famously known by the epithet "Never Expect Power Always," and phone lines are expensive and difficult to obtain. Poverty and the disorganization of the Nigerian economy mean that consumer technologies such as scooters and cars arrive already used and worn out. After their useful life in Belgium or Holland, cars are exported to Nigeria as "new" second-hand vehicles. After these vehicles arrive in Nigeria, worn parts are repaired, dents are banged out, and paint is resprayed to remake and "tropicalize" them. This is, of course, a temporary state of affairs. Other parts expire, second-hand parts break down, while local "innovations" and adjustments designed to make cars, televisions, and VCRs work fail. A cycle of breakdown, repair, and breakdown again is the condition of existence for many technologies in Nigeria. As a consequence, Nigeria employs a vast army of people who specialize in repairing and reconditioning broken technological goods, since the need for repair is frequent and the cost of it cheap"
This economy of recycling which Ravi Sundaram also describes as the pirate modern becomes the arena for all sorts of technological innovation to begin with, and extends further to experiments with cultural forms such as parodies, remixes, cover versions etc. In a sense Larkin's invocation of the importance of infrastructure contrasts with the obsessive fixation with content which one sees in most western accounts of creativity. In this case the content also has to be filtered through the regime of its own production.
Piracy imposes particular conditions on the recording, transmission, and retrieval of data. Constant copying erodes data storage, degrading image and sound, overwhelming the signal of media content with the noise produced by the means of reproduction. Larkin says that since pirated videos are often by blurred images and distorted sound, they create a kind of material space "that filters audiences' engagement with media technologies and their senses of time, speed, space, and contemporaneity. In this way, piracy creates an aesthetic, a set of formal qualities that generates a particular sensorial experience of media marked by poor transmission, interference, and noise". Larkin uses the question of pirate infrastructure to open out the debate on intellectual property, and foreground the importance of addressing the question of content while looking at a legal aspect of culture. 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. By subjecting the material operation of piracy and its social consequences to scrutiny, it becomes clear that pirate infrastructure is a powerful mediating force that produces new modes of organizing sensory perception, time, space, and economic networks.
One of the significant approaches used by public domain scholars is their emphasis on the ability to create new content building on existing works. They in fact use the metaphor of infrastructure to understand the public domain of ideas. But it often ignores the material linkages between content and infrastructure. The over emphasis on the creation of new content of course raises the question of who uses the new content, and what is the relationship between such content and the question of democratization of infrastructure?
In most cases the reason for the fall in price of electronic goods, computers, great access to material, increase in photocopiers (the infrastructure of information flows) is not caused in any manner through any radical revolution such as free software or open content, but really through the easier availability of standard mainstream commodities like Microsoft and Hollywood. When Stallman and others castigate people for pirating Hollywood, it is only from a position of being able to disavow the global, but for many people the idea of finding their place within the global includes engaging with a world of counterfeit commodities, replicating the global.
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BL: How media operate is the outcome of these three related, yet interdependent, moments of intention and creation, material properties of technology and the social formation within which they operate. That's generally how I think of media. So I examine the introduction of the radio station as part of the same process that led the British into building roads, or funding of the rail network. It helps me, in the colonial context, to define what's going on. And when I see things like the Muslim resistance to the building of cinemas, I think that's partly in consequence to the ideological load placed on media technologies by the British. Media were not simply technical objects, they were doing work in the service of colonialism. And people's reactions to media technologies must be seen in that light.
BL: Regarding piracy, there are radical people who want 'free' piracy, including people at this conference; they want it to be accepted, they think it's a good thing; it's an argument for a return to the commons, in which all these things flow freely. I don't know where I stand on that, particularly. Partly because the people I work with, who are media makers, aren't interested in it. They're making films, they don't want those films pirated, they need to make money off those films - they are not wealthy and they need their work to bring in some money so that they can get by. Otherwise they suffer; they're trying to get by in a very uncertain world. I can see that very clearly. So I don't want to romanticise the idea of the pirate, and say that it's all great. But yet, what they define as piracy isn't what I define as piracy. We have different definitions of it. Their main concern is video rental shops where you go to rent a video to watch it and then take it back. In England and America, that's just not an issue. You can do that, it's like a library. No one says the library is piracy. There, such rental is an accepted form. But in Nigeria it's not.
BL: The thing we call 'piracy' is not a homogenous concept. It's defined differently in different locales. You can't presume what piracy means. You have to interrogate it. When I approached this issue in Nigeria, I sidestepped the legal questions and simply asked: "Given the fact that piracy is the default infrastructure that allows a flow of global media, how does this take place? What work is piracy doing?" And because I have an interest in the materiality of media, how media work, their material properties, I tried to look at piracy in terms of the social situations of viewing it creates. What is the difference in a cinema theatre, as opposed to a video parlour, showing pirate videos, for instance?
BL: In Nigeria, the basic understanding of the operations of media was different from assumptions about media in western theory. How do you negotiate the theory of reception when there are blackouts all the time? Do you ignore blackouts as irrelevant to a theory of reception - merely noise? Or do you step back and ask, what does the blackout do to the viewing experience? I was aware when watching English language videos - which meant pirate videos - that I couldn't understand the words a lot of the time. I speak English, certainly a lot better than many Hausa speak English, but the degrading of the sound was so great, I couldn't understand it. In terms of media reception, this was the consequence of piracy. It made me wonder about the differences between the cinema experience and watching at home. A screen 15 feet high, with sound, versus a small TV, with a bad image with lots of snow and interference.Those questions preoccupied me. When I came to the question of piracy, I decided to sidestep the legal questions and focus on the material consequences. Piracy exists. It is the ground for all media circulation, certainly non-Western circulation. How does it operate?
AT: You make an interesting point about pirate aesthetics. I was going to compare that to the pirate markets here. For example, shopkeepers who sell pirated discs in Delhi say that camera prints don't sell any more.
BL:A camera print.? You mean the one that has been shot in the cinema.
AT: Yes, these were in demand earlier, but now the infrastructure of piracy is so developed that people refuse to accept the degraded print.
BL:My research indicates that people don't deliberately introduce that aesthetic. It's just a consequence of piracy. In my conference paper, one of my arguments is that piracy created the infrastructure that allows Hausa videos to exist. So the consequence is that Hausa videos are produced in exactly the same way as pirate videos. You are given a master tape; you make a thousand dubs of it; you sell the tape to someone else; they make a thousand dubs of it, sell them that way.
Piracy imposes particular conditions on the recording, transmission, and retrieval of data. Constant copying erodes data storage, degrading image and sound, overwhelming the signal of media content with the noise produced by the means of reproduction. Larkin says that since pirated videos are often by blurred images and distorted sound, they create a kind of material space "that filters audiences' engagement with media technologies and their senses of time, speed, space, and contemporaneity. In this way, piracy creates an aesthetic, a set of formal qualities that generates a particular sensorial experience of media marked by poor transmission, interference, and noise". Larkin uses the question of pirate infrastructure to open out the debate on intellectual property, and foreground the importance of addressing the question of content while looking at a legal aspect of culture. 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. By subjecting the material operation of piracy and its social consequences to scrutiny, it becomes clear that pirate infrastructure is a powerful mediating force that produces new modes of organizing sensory perception, time, space, and economic networks.
BL: So the same degradation goes on in Hausa videos as in pirate ones. Yuri Tsivian said that in early cinema in Russia, film makers would use the scratching effects on the film to try and evoke rain. They would try and incorporate the degradation aesthetically. I never found that degradation was an intentional aesthetic effect, in Hausa videos - I was just arguing that it is an aesthetic effect. I live in New York, and when DVD players came out there, they cost $600 while video players cost $150 - and the only people I knew who bought them were South Asian. That's because the jump between watching a video and a DVD is a jump in quality. Not a big one. But for South Asians, the jump between watching the pirate Bollywood films on video or on DVD was an enormous one. The impulse to pay for better quality was clearly there. I've never come across this in Nigeria. Maybe the cost.I don't know. I'm sure that if there were two things that cost the same, presumably people would buy the better quality one. But film makers argue that audiences do not seek better quality for the sake of better quality. Film makers seek to make better films, and use more tricks, but amongst audiences and producers quality was never really a pressing question.
AT: You've used Virilio's argument about everyone celebrating the speed of modern technology while ignoring the possibilities and consequences of breakdown. Could you elaborate on that? I'm looking at this through the lens of the 'pirate aesthetic', as it were, disappearing from Delhi but continuing in Nigeria.
BL:While I find Virilio's work on breakdown and speed insightful, I also find it problematic in that it presumes a homogenous society. He has a dystopian paranoia, that we're all connected in real time, that speed rules everything, that duration has disappeared. Real time technologies means that built space is now defined by terminals, not by the boundaries of walls and doors. Virilio poses all these sorts of issues, and they presume on a society where everyone is connected and in which every connection works. This may increasingly be the case in America, though not completely; but when you go to India or Nigeria, the situation is different. So how do you interpret the concept of speed?
BL: The Internet is very present in Nigeria, it has speeded up Nigerian access to a wider world that's now a real part of everyone's daily experience of time and space and cultural flows. And yet each technology brings its dysfunction with it. And I'm very interested in that question of breakdown and repair in poorer societies, developing societies. The car that gets to Nigeria gets there after it has had its useful life in the West. We have the MOT in England: if you fail the MOT because the car has a broken light, you can't drive. And when it gets to a certain point that it costs too much to get the repairs done, the car is sold on. These cars, and stolen cars, are put on ships to Nigeria, where they start a new life. The network, the system in Nigeria, accepts this as there is a vast support system of mechanics and people who repair electronic equipment facilitated by the fact that things break down.
BL: People have to repair. I'm sure this happens in India. People don't just throw things away. When I moved, to America, my video wasn't working, the plastic screen of my computer monitor cracked, the tube was shifting.I went to enquire about repairs, and each time the person said, "Chuck it away and get a new one, the cost of repairing it is more than the cost of a new one." In Nigeria no one does that. And the necessity of repairs is figured into the concept of time, because while you are sped up in certain respects, things are also always breaking down. When you connect to the Internet, the electricity disappears. You walk around the back and switch on the generator, You have to wait for it to boot up again. You press 'W' for web mail, and thirty seconds later, 'W' will pop up in the browser window. The consequence of using this new technology of speed in a country like Nigeria is that the technology itself introduces new forms of waiting, of duration, that are only there because technologies of speed were introduced in the first place.
AT: You've talked about piracy enabling Hausa video, and how piracy erases temporary differences, the hierarchy of time, and of the "recycled modernity" existing in Nigeria and India. What thoughts do you take away about piracy, following this conference? You've said that you don't take a legal stance.
BL:Piracy is different things in different places. At this conference, different conversations were going on. That's proper, it should be the case. The debates are different, the politics are different, the phenomenon itself is different everywhere, so there are going to be different questions. I worry about piracy in Nigeria because it has affected the Nigerian music industry, really hurt people's ability to live their lives, and make music, and all the rest of it. But piracy also had a powerful effect in that it shifted people back into supporting live performances, it renewed patron-client relations, i.e., music that is not commodified by sale through cassettes, etc.
BL: At the same time, piracy facilitates access to media in Nigeria that otherwise people would be barred from. It's a very real question. Hollywood claims that for every CD sold, every CD pirated, it loses money. That's not true. All the people listening to pirated CDs in Nigeria would never be able to afford originals. All the people watching pirated DVDs would never be able to afford it. Some 1% at the top might, but for the vast majority of Nigerians, 120 million people, as probably for the vast majority of Indians, the stable commodity price of $10-15 for a CD is just not feasible. So if you think of it that way, there's a massive realm of the world's cultural production that is made off limits to whole categories of society. There is a fundamental political question of access embedded in the issue of piracy. There's also the question of protection, and there's a tension between them. This conference has made me think about that quite a bit.
Despite its centrality to modern trade regimes, international data on piracy comes almost entirely from a single source, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which is composed of U.S. copyright industry associations. Ties between the IIPA and the U.S. Trade Representative are tight, and IIPA country reports are often the primary (and sometimes the only) evidence used in the crucial Special 301 report, published yearly by the USTR. The reports also figure prominently in bilateral and regional trade negotiations, and in negotiations between western firms and developing-econonomy states—often as a bargaining chip for extracting additional trade or contract concessions.
Reliance on a monopoly data provider with a vested interest in the results has predictable effects on the underlying social science. The IIPA country reports are widely considered to be works of fiction—the products of biased framing, inconsistent and often opaque methodologies, and numerous reporting incentives to inflate piracy figures. As the policy role of the reports has grown in recent years, and as 'access to knowledge' becomes a more prominent agenda for public-interest IP activism, the need for alternatives has become clearer. Examination of the IIPA studies has been very limited, with some modest exceptions at the national, sectoral level. No broad-based or comparative studies have been conducted, and media piracy more generally has been subject to very little systematic attention.
BL: There's a strong argument about a need for a commons, and that's a very important thing. But on the other hand, I would like to stick with trying to pay attention to how this plays out in different situations, and what the politics might be. I don't think that people downloading from Napster in America have the same moral claims as a Nigerian listening to a pirate cassette. I just don't. There's a world of difference between a Nigerian watching a pirated DVD and someone watching it in New York, where I live. I do think that the current spread of intellectual property regimes is outrageous, as is the fact that more material is being taken out of the public domain.
I enjoyed all the non-media piracy issues, here in Africa, access to drugs is a real question. People are poor, drugs are produced for rich nations, creating a monopoly...
AT: What are you taking away in general, from this conference?
BL:My main impression is of Sarai, even more than of the conference. When I did my research work earlier, I felt very much that I was doing it in a wilderness, in a certain sense. I was trained in a programme that taught me to look at media in certain ways, and there were other people in that programme I learned a lot from. But the things I was looking at, the space of cinema theatres, or the nature and aesthetics of piracy, or the history of the introduction of media technologies: I wasn't in dialogue with anyone about any of that - though of course since that time there has been a burgeoning amount of work. It seems that here, anything I might possibly be interested in is being researched by someone focused on precisely that issue. There's a very rich, very interesting take on media being developed here. Being English, and working in Nigeria, I am interested in India itself, how it works in the overlap with England, the differences - like the overlap in Nigeria and the differences, also very strong. But in many ways there are similar things going on. India does make me want to go back to Nigeria. I haven't been back for a while because I'm trying to finish my book. Being here makes me think, "Oh yeah, I want to go back there."
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