On the Jugaad Image: Embodying the Mobile Phone in India

 
Writing in 2004 for Economic and Political Weekly, one of India’s leading journals, T.H. Chowdary recalled that until about 1994, at any given moment over 3 million applicants were waiting to get a telephone connection in India. Some of them had waited for more than ten years. In Mumbai, applications were accepted only if they were in the “Own Your Telephone” scheme, in which a “hefty, non-interest bearing deposit” was required of the applicant (2085). Even then, though, there was no guarantee of getting a phone. Obtaining a colored phone, a push-button phone, or a phone with an extension cord required waiting in interminable queues or getting a recommendation from a Member of Parliament or minister. “One wit suggested that the telegraphic address of the telephone department could be ‘wait list.’ One communications minister introduced a ‘cash and carry’ telephone scheme. For Rs. 30,000 cash to his agent he would sanction an ‘out of turn’ phone; in his four months, he made Rs. 900 million” (2085). Apparently, his successor legalized the scheme, which meant that the Rs. 30,000 for a “tatkal,” or immediate, phone connection, was paid to the department itself for the sake of appearances. When members of parliament complained about non-working phones and sky-high bills, the minister of communications shot back, “It is not compulsory to have a telephone; anyone could surrender it any time he liked” (2085). Remarkably, as Chowdary recalls, the “‘left, progressive, democratic, socialist’ theoreticians occupying the commanding heights in the Planning Commission said that telephones and other telecom services were elitist. The common man had no need for them and therefore investment in telecom should be restricted to serve governments and a few other essential needs” (2085).
 
This Kafkaesque testimony to the corrupt political bureaucracy that for decades surrounded landline telephony in India highlights the self-satisfied myopia of elite Indian political cultures. Yet telephony in the subcontinent has a long history, thanks to the communicative needs of British colonialism. In fact, the first telephone service in the subcontinent was introduced in 1881 by the colonial government in Kolkata; the first central battery of telephones was introduced in Kanpur in 1907; the first automatic exchange was commissioned in Shimla in 1913–14 with a capacity of 700 lines; by 1947 India had 84,000 telephones for a population of 350 million (India 177). In the fifty years following independence in 1947, the technocratic stranglehold on telecommunications deepened, limiting or denying access to communication technologies to hundreds of millions of Indians, and greatly hindering the development of telecommunication technologies as a whole.
 
Following the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s, the telecom industry was marked for rapid reform. In 1994, a process of privatization was initiated. But events surrounding the Emergency in 1976 prepared for privatization. A qualitatively different experience of representative democracy emerged in India, leading to more intensive capitalist expansion into consumption practices in the 1980s, and new force relations surrounding the formation of voting blocs. Crucial to this process was the nation-building event of the Asiad in 1982, during which TV, cable, the cassette and the VCR, satellite broadcasting, and an explosion of media piracy created a new field of potential and capture for the concrescence of media ecologies. India is uniquely positioned to allow us to grasp this history of media potentiality as a lesson of ethics.
 
Consider: Sixteen years after privatization, governmental discourse narrates that event as a milestone for postcolonial India:
 

 

The telecommunication services have improved significantly since independence with the sector witnessing a series of reform measures that included, announcement of National Telecom Policy in 1994 that defined certain important objectives, including availability of telephone on demand, provision of world class services at reasonable prices, ensuring India’s emergence as major manufacturing/export base of telecom equipment and universal availability of basic telecom services to all villages. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the independent regulator was established in 1997 and New Telecom Policy was announced in 1999, which further laid stress on providing an enabling framework for the development of this sector and to facilitate India’s vision of becoming an IT superpower and develop a world class telecom infrastructure in the country.

(India 177–78)

 

In charting a course from “post-colonial development” to “world-class superpower,” Indian governmental discourse has gone through torsions wrought by liberalization, rapid economic growth, growing internal disparities, ongoing communal tensions, emergent sexualities and gender roles, an explosion of consumer-as-citizen pedagogies, and a reorientation of work toward flexible, precarious, globalized services. These changes are nicely summed up in Ravi Sundaram’s phrase: pirate modernity (2010). Despite the tendencies of transnational capital toward monopoly, corruption, and elite hegemony, forms of piracy throughout South Asia and the rest of the global south have deepened the habituation of populations to copyrighted materials, software, and forms, while simultaneously transforming these technologies into a constantly mutating flow of assemblages of silicon- and carbon-based life. There are over one billion mobile handsets in India, and the national market continues to be the most competitive mobile service market in the world. What happened to the assemblage of populations, perception, and telephony in the twenty years from 1991 to 2011? What are the implications of mobile telephony’s becoming the third largest attractor of foreign direct investment (after services and computer hardware and software)? How has mobile telephony become one of the fastest growing contributors to India’s gross domestic product? What kinds of innovations in the informal economy are facilitating and are in turn catalyzed by this rapid proliferation of mobile media? How has the elite telephone become the mundane mobile, and what are the effects of this transformation at the level of habit, movement, affect, sensation, and perception?

 
In other words, why and how is such a virtual ontology of mobile telephony specifically relevant to contemporary postcolonial India? What is specific to India and perhaps to South Asia about the use of mobile phones? On the one hand, what is at stake in diagramming virtual ontologies of machinic affect is an approximation of the singularity of habit, perception, information, and power flowing through India’s media ecology. On the other hand, the abstract diagram, or resonance machine, immanent to what happens in Mumbai, Bhopal, Delhi, or Bangalore has a broader relevance and strategic importance because it is a way of understanding how to practice assembling with media in ways that shift and potentialize our capacities to affect and be affected, “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of time to come” (Nietzsche qtd. in Berardi 64).
 
India’s economic, social, and political terrain has been undergoing massive changes. As with all such historical upheavals, the opportunities for radical democratic change subsist side by side with new modes of surveillance, capital accumulation, control, and subjugation. Sundaram is again illuminating in this regard. His non-romanticizing mode of analysis shows how questions of resistance must in fact be understood in terms of the numerous dimensions of change immanent to piracy ecologies, only one of which is the juridical order. Indeed, for Sundaram, the contagion and virality of bazaar media are as important as, for instance, the police raids to stop piracy in Palika Bazaar in Delhi. In his analysis, the parasitic, adaptive mode that piracy sets up makes it difficult to produce piracy that is clearly outside the law. Police raids are an acknowledgment of the “viral nature of piracy.” As regimes of control, raids are singularly ineffective in their attempts to “[slow] down the endless circulation of pirate media through pincer-like violence, and securing temporary injunctions in court.” Rather, “Piracy [is] a profound infection machine,” which affects heterogeneous spaces, flowing through all firewalls. Sundaram shows that the dominant dream of securing the digital (which I note in Untimely Bollywood) is part of the boutique solution to piracy for dominant media corporations. However, piracy’s “non-linear architectures and radical distribution strategy [render] space as a bad object; the media industry’s yearning for secure consumption ghettos is in many ways an impossible return to the old post-Fordist days” (Sundaram 135).
 
In this essay I attempt to diagram the architecture of one aspect of India’s contemporary non-linear media assemblages: mobile phone practices. This method of media assemblage analysis takes ethical experimentation as its mode of expression and machinic sensations as its ontology of becoming. In other words, this essay analyzes mobile telephony (focusing on the strategic example of India) by foregrounding an embodied ethics of habituation as central to an understanding of contemporary media assemblages. Clearly, this history of habituation must be situated in the colonial and postcolonial legacy of modulating populations through communication technologies; for instance, the STD-booth revolution pioneered by Sam Pitroda in the 1980s furthered the habit of non-elite populations to move outside the home to communicate through telephony. Today, as the most competitive and fastest growing mobile market in the world, India’s heterogeneous mobile culture provides an excellent window into the processes of globalization, consumerism, digital control, piracy, bodily habituation, and new media assemblages. In this essay, I take affective capacities (the bodily capacity to affect and be affected) as the starting point for understanding the history, mutations, effects, force, value, and sense of the mobile phone in India (Deleuze, Pure Immanence; Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy). Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson (Matter and Memory), Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality), Gilles Deleuze (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy), Brian Massumi (Parables for the Virtual), Manuel Delanda (A New Philosophy of Society; Deleuze: History and Science), Arun Saldanha (Psychedelic White), and Patricia Clough and J. Halley (The Affective Turn), I argue for a method of media analysis that focuses on affect-as-capacity, shifting analysis away from language, discourse, and representation toward emergent, habituated sensations in historically specific media assemblages (within which representation and language form one feedbacked dimension of change). In the broader study of which this is a part, I attempt to move materialist “empiricism toward a higher power” (Deleuze, Pure Immanence 37) through wide-ranging ethnographies of mobile usage and value-added companies in Mumbai and Delhi. These ethnographies diagram virtual-actual circuits of bodily intensity, emergent properties, and changing capacities. They are coupled with broad archival research in the history of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. My itinerary in this essay, however, is more focused on the creation and exploration of a concept that is adequate to diagramming the becomings now afoot in Indian mobile media: an ecology of sensation. To clarify: the argument develops a method of analyzing sensation as it is embedded in material, discursive, embodied ecologies. I argue that such an analysis is particularly relevant to India at the present conjuncture.
 
In the broader literature on the politics of affect, affect is often reduced to emotion or even sentiment. In such work, affect is abstracted from its immanent ontology in bodily and technological processes to become a figure of consciousness or a symptom in psychoanalysis.¹ While much of this work is useful in situating the ideologies of manipulating emotion in dominant political and mass media discourse, it must be connected practically with an experimental ontology of becoming within and through embodied media. I want to focus more specifically on the creation of a concept of embodied, technologically imbricated sensation that resists the reduction of affect to emotion (or what Baruch Spinoza called the “passions”² ). Instead, I elaborate a concept of ecologies of sensation as an ethical common notion, that is, a notion that is common to at least two multiplicities. I address the notion of ecology first.
 

I. Ecological Thought and the Jugaad Image

 
An ecology is necessarily transversal to social, subjective, and material “Universes of reference” (Guattari, Three Ecologies 43). Félix Guattari had famously argues against technologies of socio-machinic reification, affirming instead a “reconstruction of social and individual practices” under three complementary headings, “all of which come under the ethico-aesthetic aegis of an ecosophy: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology” (41). In order to comprehend the interactions, he suggests, between ecosystems, the mechanosphere (or technological evolution), and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think transversally (43). For Guattari, this transversal thought will diagram ecologies beyond the “intelligibility of interlocking sets or the indeterminate interlocking of fields of signification” (44). The logic of ecological assemblages is “a logic of intensities,” of auto-referential, auto-catalytic existential assemblages engaging in “irreversible durations.”³
 
Writing within the context of the philosophy of cognitive science, Andy Clark understands this logic as an important characteristic of embodied, embedded cognition, one that may be called the Principle of Ecological Assembly (PEA) (which is better understood as a processual practice rather than an always already given principle).⁴ “According to the PEA, the canny cognizer tends to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problem-solving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort” (Clark, Supersizing the Mind 13). Clark’s insights into ecological assemblages, especially his insistence on the machinic or technological nature of pragmatic cognition, have important implications for a virtual ontology of mobile phones. Intensive, auto-referential, auto-catalytic ecologies evolve slowly by correlating sensory, motor, and neural capabilities. Hence, at a certain threshold, they reach a momentary balance between potential and the actual, the organismic bundle and its ecological niche. “Ecological balance of this latter kind is what a flexible ecological control system seeks to achieve” (13). We could question whether the final cause of balance is indeed the basin of attraction, or merely a force within such a basin, in which case a flexible ecological control system would better be thought of as open, moving sets of fuzzy, volatile, felt interactions of energy, information, matter, and forms.
 
What Guattari calls ecosophy demands a thoroughgoing realist ontology involved in diagramming the interconnections and fluctuations between “Universes of reference.”⁵ Time assumes its fully ontological role as an irreversible dimension of becoming that traverses ecologies; affective durations correlate timescales of assemblages of assemblages (interpenetrating, yet singular multiplicities⁶ ). Ecologies are pragmatic assemblages, or feedbacked compositions of human neurology, technologies, energy, information, and material fluxes. Assemblages are both irreducible and immanent: their emergent properties are irreducible to their parts, and they are immanent to the interaction of those parts.⁷ Ecologies are extensive (actual, material, metric: quantitative multiplicities), intensive (self-differentiating and self-diverging: qualitative multiplicities), and virtual (possessing potential tendencies and capacities that may never be actualized). In other words, virtual ecologies are composed of three different immanent dimensions of change, as Manuel Delanda suggests. First is a domain of final, or actual products, apprehended by their extensive properties such as the length, area, or volume of the space they occupy, their various components, or their differing levels of matter and energy. But this level of actual extensity is produced by processes that are not apparent at first sight. Thus, there is a domain of production processes, defined by intensive differences that have gradients of belonging. These intensive gradients drive specific populations of flows and are characterized by critical thresholds that change quantity into quality. But, in their turn, these intensive flows marked by critical thresholds open ecologies to the virtual itself. This is the domain of virtual structure, which in a purely immanent way modulates the processes and the products of an ecology in terms of potential capacities to affect and be affected, and co-evolutionary tendencies (that is, tendencies that evolve through the interaction of the components of the ecology itself).
 
A media assemblage analysis of mobile phones in India must grapple with how new communicative and media technologies and practices have emerged from historically variable and also dynamically open forces, senses, and values.⁸ This is a nonlinear process that diverges without resembling, because the divergences are qualitative shifts in intensity and capacities. Because of this variability and openness to change and territorialization, we must situate mobile telephony within a framework that can account for the temporality, intensity, and virtuality of ecologies of sensation. In this ontology, concepts are defined not linguistically but as the structure of a space of possibilities. Multiplicious ecologies, then, are virtual, that is, real but not actual, and capable of divergent actualization. Taking an example from chemistry, Delanda notes that the tendency of liquid water to become ice or steam, for example, is real at all times even if the water is not actually undergoing a phase transition (Deleuze 127).
 
What is the status of virtual ecologies in terms of knowledge, or, better, what are the conditions of possibility of their epistemology? Evolutionary ecologist Tim Ingold offers us a first approximation in his consideration of reindeer herders and hunters of the Taimyr region of northern Siberia. Without fetishizing the otherness of these people, he notes that they operate with a sentient ecology. Such ecologies of sense and sensation produce an informal, unauthorized knowledge transmissible in contexts outside those of its practical application.
 

On the contrary, it is based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a particular environment. This is the kind of knowledge that Janácek claimed to draw from attending to the melodic inflections of speech; hunters draw it from similarly close attention to the movements, sounds and gestures of animals. Another word for this kind of sensitivity and responsiveness is intuition. In the tradition of Western thought and science, intuition has had a pretty bad press: compared with the products of the rational intellect, it has been widely regarded as knowledge of an inferior kind. Yet it is knowledge we all have; indeed we use it all the time as we go about our everyday tasks. What is more, it constitutes a necessary foundation for any system of science or ethics. Simply to exist as sentient beings, people must already be situated in a certain environment and committed to the relationships this entails. These relationships, and the sensibilities built up in the course of their unfolding, underwrite our capacities of judgement and skills of discrimination.
 

(Ingold 25)

 

Assembling sentient ecologies requires a shift from epistemological perspectives that are rooted in representation and analogy. Instead, ecologies of sensation demand a thoroughgoing pragmatism of knowledge or ethical know-how, the vectors of which overturn the domination of a rarefied and abstract rationality. They further demand embodied experimentations with perception, sensation, matter, value, and force.⁹

 
To summarize: I have defined an ecology as an extensive, intensive, and virtual multiplicity that becomes through correlated, resonant processes with intercalated timescales; it is a non-coinciding, resonant unity that, because it never attains absolute closure or totalization, passes imperceptibly through phase transitions and critical thresholds.¹⁰ This definition of ecology allows us to critically approach the immanent dimensions of change through which virtual-actual circuits mutate and evolve. Now, as is well known, Marshall McLuhan was the first critic to apply the term ecology to media. Writing at the moment of the transition to electronic media such as the TV, McLuhan famously declared that “hot and cold” media should be differentiated on the basis of definition level (how filled with data they are) and the degree of “filling in” or participation by the receiver. For McLuhan, a hot “specialist” media technology tends to detribalize and individuate (film), whereas cool media (TV) reaggregates populations. While his definition of media ecology as the speed, scale, and pattern of interaction between technologies of perception and the human sensory apparatus remains relevant for my own analysis of virtual ecologies of media and their sensations, McLuhan’s argument problematically proceeds by analogy and binary opposition. The gradients that seem to define hot and cool media are quickly assimilated to a kind of universalizing pendulum in which “Oriental” or “primitive” societies fall into the cool while Western modernity remains essentially hot (McLuhan 24–28). By contrast, my definition of virtual ecologies of mobile media does not rely on any pre-constituted categories of interactivity, nor does it typologize cultures according to the nature of its interactivity. Virtual ecologies are non-coinciding resonant unities, qualitative multiplicities that, while having a dominant or actual form (a certain functional, yet fuzzy unity), are nonetheless traversed by flows whose scale, speed, and pattern are constantly and imperceptibly diverging from themselves (the non-coincidence of a moving whole).
 
The term I propose as a first approximation of the ecology of sensation at the heart of contemporary mobile cultures in India is a Hindi word that has a wide, common usage in different parts of India today: jugaad (pronounced ju-ghaar’).¹¹ This term has also been adopted by transnational corporations to describe the drive toward innovation in neoliberal accumulation strategies (Radjou). Its provenance cuts across accumulation strategies and subaltern autonomy in India today. According to Wikipedia, the jugaad refers to “a creative idea, a quick, alternate way of solving or fixing problems”; colloquially it means a quick workaround that overcomes commercial, logistical, or legal obstacles. As such, “the jugaad movement has gathered a community of enthusiasts, believing it to be the proof of Indian bubbling creativity, or a cost-effective way to solve the issues of everyday life” (“Jugaad”). To think through the orientation of jugaad with the assemblage of mobile media experimented with here, I suggest we consider it an emergent machinic sensory-motor circuit of globalized digitality itself, in which any given obstacle in the way of a flow of desire through an ecology is pragmatically considered and worked around with whatever resources are to hand (recall Clark’s canny cognizer). In other words, if jugaad is halfway between a representation and a thing (what Bergson calls an image¹² ), this image has an ontological status in people’s perceptions, memories, and habituations when considered from the point of view of what Clark calls above the process of Ecological Assembly. Thus, if we consider that at any given time the majority of mobile phone users in India cannot place a call, having no more than 5 rupees on the phone, and use it instead for a functional semiotics of missed calls (people with a low balance on their account make a call and hang up after one or two rings, signaling to the receiver to call back), the mobile is the jugaad device par excellence.
 
As Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron suggest, bureaucrats and politicians seek “to control the technology for proclaimed reasons of national security, taxation, social equity and public interest.” They write,
 

Some, no doubt, also value the bribes and favors that such control can bring. Between these people at the top and those people near the bottom, new workforces of manufacturers, technicians, tower builders, distributors, agents, marketers, salespeople, repairers, recyclers and second-hand dealers take shape. And even poor people can own cell phones. At the base of the pyramid, we hear stories of fishermen and farmers, rickshaw drivers and vegetable sellers, making “missed calls,” taking pictures, checking prices, downloading screen savers, doing pujas – all with a device that would have mystified most of India before the year 2003. More important, the cell phone appears to arm its owner with possibilities to leap over barriers, not merely of distance but of power. The cell phone does not eradicate power structures, but it can sometimes subvert them.

(398)

 

I want to further this definition of the jugaad image in terms of some of the dimensions and processes of contemporary mobile phone cultures noted by Jeffrey and Doron. Let us take extensity first, and gradually move toward its plane of potential capacities and tendencies. India currently has the most competitive mobile market in the world, adding on average around 15 million new subscribers each month. Mobile connections surpassed landlines in 2004, and in early 2011 the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) gave the green light to providers for third generation mobile connectivity (after a great deal of controversy and accusation of corruption and malfeasance; see Jeffrey and Doron). Consequently, mobile connectivity is among the cheapest in the world, allowing for a wide array of uses: transferring money back to home villages, participating in missed call techno-lects, creating new business models for small and medium scale entrepreneurs, renegotiating largely male public spaces, and improvising ad-hoc uses on the run. These jugaad uses are also accompanied and enabled by a proliferating pirate economy, as Sundaram has analyzed so well (2). Moreover, these rapidly changing parameters render the Indian mobile phone network a far-from-equilibrium ecology of media and pragmatic perception (a key mode of the jugaad). Today, cheap handsets and relatively affordable pre-paid packages for voice, SMS, and data transmission are widely available across India, with an adoption level of over 90% in the major metros, falling to less than 20% in some rural areas (although rural subscriptions are increasing by around 30% a year) (Russell). According to the mobile operators, there are about 700 million subscribers in India, although these metrics are not fully reliable given the quick diffusion of double-SIM handsets and the number of double, or even triple service subscriptions (Singh). There are about a billion handsets in India. What is beyond doubt, however, is that mobile diffusion has passed a critical threshold of density in India, changing quantity into quality. The quantitative expansion has phased into a qualitative contraction of perception, movement, and teledensity.

 
More specifically, what characterizes the singularity of mobile phone usage in India is that, in a country where the landline phone has never been widely used, across a highly heterogeneous population of more than 1.3 billion people (a vast number of whom, however, have used a makeshift STD/PCO booth to place a call at some point in their lives, thanks to the work of “information technology for development” guru Sam Pitroda),¹³ where the rural sector still accounts for around 60% of GDP, the standard feature mobile phone has become an instrument of revaluing and refunctioning life itself. Thus, in 1987, at the celebration of “forty years of telecommunications in independent India,” the country had 2.7 million phones for a population of 730 million people, about 4 phones for every 1000 people. By January 2010, India had 688 million phone connections for a population of about 1.15 billion people, or almost 600 phones for every 1000 people. Indeed, 60% of the population might have had a phone “if phones had been evenly distributed.” Crucially, more than 90% of the phones by 2010 were mobile phones (Jeffrey and Doron 399). Given India’s deep divisions of caste and class, in the past, wealthy, high-status people had far greater ability to travel and transmit information than low-status people. Indeed, elites could often control the movements and communications of subalterns directly. But the mobile phone has disrupted, without simply overturning, these relations of dominant communication; it has the potential to open to subaltern populations possibilities that they have never had before. The far-from-equilibrium conditions of India’s new media ecology assemble convergent media, new consumption patterns and marketing strategies, new target and niche markets, globalizing intellectual property regimes, emergent hacker cultures, mutating black market accumulation strategies, liberalized investment criteria, a highly competitive mobile service provider market, and national and regional discourses of technological dominance, producing an unprecedented situation of change.
 
The mobile ecology in India changes with variable speeds, as different postcolonial histories inform the concrescence of its habituations. Indeed, radio, TV, audio cassettes, and the STD/PCO booth were far more important and widely-adopted communication technologies in India than the landline telephone. The mobile phone has not replaced the STD booth, radio, or TV in India, but because of the convergent tendencies of the technology and the massively intensive and rapid uptake of the device, the mobile has potentialized media habituation itself.
 
Consider this case study from my field notes: Vinita is an active 30-year-old female, whose extended family, originally from rural Tamil Nadu, has settled in the outlying wards of Mumbai. The tight-knit family has been Christian for two generations (self-identifying as dalits). Vinita is separated from her husband, a fisherman, who was a heavy drinker and physically abusive toward her. Taking her 9-year-old son with her, she moved out and currently works three jobs, doing more or less affective work (the term is too capacious) as a domestic cook, a caretaker for a house (both in the M Ward region of Chembur-Deonar), and a caregiver for an elite, elderly woman (who lives in Colaba, in South Mumbai). Vinita is functionally literate (she can read recipes and headlines), educated to the sixth standard, and fluent in Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, with a smattering of English. One way to characterize the life of this second-generation internal migrant is along a gradient of precarity and instability. Her husband repeatedly harasses her for money, and consequently her living situation is renegotiated almost month to month, adding to her bad reputation. Her finances are unstable and informal, making saving money difficult. She is constantly travelling from one end of Mumbai to another, so she relies on family and friends to help with minding her son after school and during holidays.
 
Vinita has been using a mobile phone since 2004; she replaces it about every six months, and uses a prepaid plan, which gives her flexibility to top up (recharge) depending on her cash flow. Her current phone is a pirated Nokia smart phone, which she got from a male relative as a present. This relative seems to take an active interest in tinkering with and teaching others about the capacities of the mobile. Given her high level of precarity, the mobile has become a kind of life line. She uses it to communicate with friends and family during work, and it is always on in case her various employers need her for one thing or another. She frequently uses the common missed call protocol; she also listens to music and news radio and uses the device for basic gaming (her son is the family mobile game enthusiast and uses the phone to play a variety of games).
 
We are speaking in the kitchen, where we most often seem to be together, as she cooks and arranges. I have just shown her a photograph I manipulated on the computer: the Ferris wheel in Juhu. She laughs with delight, putting her hand to her mouth. And we fall to talking again. We are speaking of cooking, and she is telling me how to make the tarka for daal just so (with hing and ghee at the right moment). Her phone rings, she checks it, sighs, and carries on giving me instructions. We speak of home banking in the meantime, where to put the cash she has saved after she has paid expenses and loaned money to family members. I tell her that she must open a bank account, but she says you need an address for that (wrongly it turns out, but I didn’t know that then). She laughs at my Bollywood Hindi, and I wonder at her constant energy level. Again, she asks me what I am doing in India. Again I try to explain why the mobile interests me, why in India it interests me more. We speak of her use of the mobile, and as the conversation progresses she begins to eye it more frequently, wiping the scratched screen, sometimes just holding it while speaking, gesturing with it, but mostly it remains away from the heat and sweat of the stove area, set on top of the washing machine. She tells me of what the owners of another home have been saying about her, that she is a sex worker at night rather than a caregiver to an elderly pensioner. She begins to cry. I shake my head, grit my teeth, our eyes meet. Her phone rings, she wipes her eyes, and takes the call. It’s from her sister in Virar. She is speaking in Marathi. I step away from the kitchen.
 
What knowledge does this conversation offer us? Or, better, what are the active and reactive processes of becoming in this woman’s life, and how is the mobile immanent to these events? We can say that what is happening is a series of struggles over the force, sense, and value of forms of domesticity, ethnicity, religion, age, media consumption, money, reputation, status, motherhood, work, migrancy, and translation. An entire material assemblage of desire is at stake here. Paolo Virno says in an interview, “Experience is always measured—either in an insurrection, a friendship, or a work of art—through the transformation of the interpsychical into intrapsychical. We constantly have to deal with the interiority of the public and with the publicity of the interior” (Penzin 83). This passage of the world through the potential and actual connectivities our bodies and psyches offer is the duration of affect itself (Deleuze, Essays 143–44), which contracts and tenses imperceptibly and habitually, and, like an elastic slackening its tension, expands with greater and greater indetermination and variability. In attempting to engage with Vinita’s interaction with me, I have to consider pragmatically the jugaad ecology, and, hacker-like, consider its condition of possibility, its open, or fuzzy, or intensive set or multitude of individuations or singularities–what we call it is less important than how effectively we diagram its becomings. The reason the diagram of the mobile ecology is different from the landline, the STD booth, the TV, or radio is that it traverses singularities of emergent capacities and speeds of flows, and involves these fluxes in the production of a new ecology of sensation (Ingold’s sentient ecologies pragmatically assembled), the individuation of which can be experimented with bodily, intensively, by modulating this processes of individuation. Each of the dimensions of change that I listed above in Vinita’s life traverses this ecology, and every point is connected more or less intensively with every other point in a modulation of infinite sponginess. This happens at a practical level when Vinita answers the question of how she will be able to save money for a house given the meteoric rise in property values and fees for brokers, or how she will recharge her phone before she gets paid. Thus the events of this dalit woman’s life are prehensions of prehensions,¹⁴ and only an experiment in the “arbitrary forms of possible intuition” could make such a life a practice of becoming, which it no doubt is in varying degrees (Deleuze, Essays 34).
 
In other words, the jugaad image of mobile phones catalyzes the pragmatic exploration of forms of life that are, on the one hand, flexible, and on the other hand intensively exploitative, normalizing, habit-forming, and consumption-oriented. This brings out another aspect of the method of media assemblage. The method shifts scales to question the nature of becoming, its set of processes and practices, flows and institutions. The question concerning Vinita’s life struggles then, does not stop at resistance, but moves on to the question of what is common to and divergent in her multiplicities, their specific composition of tendencies and affects diagramming another arrangement of things, for a time to come. But beyond the lure of hope, the speed, scale, and pattern of her habitual engagement with the mobile foretells a once and future potentiality, plastic and feedbacked to her actuality.¹⁵ More specifically, in Vinita’s hands the mobile functions at a population-specific threshold between weapon and tool. Deleuze and Guattari, drawing on anthropologist Leroi-Grouhan, mark a distinction of vectors (not an opposition) between weapon and tool:
 

As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon, and propulsion is its essential moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very notion of the “problem” is related to the war machine. The more mechanisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, potentially or simply metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compensating for the projective mechanisms they possess, or else they adapt them to other ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, whether projected or projecting, are only one kind among others; but even handheld weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts. The tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a distance exists in both cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in the other, centripetal. One could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or invented (the counterattack is in fact the precipitating and inventive factor in the war machine, to the extent that it is not simply reducible to a quantitative rivalry or defensive parade).

(Deleuze and Guattari 395)

 

This is not a metaphor: if the contemporary 3G broadband spectrum was opened precisely by occupying frequencies reserved for national defense and the military, if contemporary mobile technologies developed out of military research and development and continue to be central to strategies of counter-insurgency, the mobile phone is a switch securitizing data sets for neoliberal governmentality, a projectile of communication, and a tool to modulate subjectivity and work: the jugaad image.¹⁶

 
In short, mobile technologies in India are extending and qualitatively changing the intensive flows within cognitive, social, work, security, and financial networks (Clark, Supersizing xxvi; see also Donner). For instance, consider this set of fragmentary observations on how a mobile functions in the everyday from the 20-year-old Mumbaite:
 

If I’m travelling—daily travelling—like from place A to place B, whether I’m going to hurry or not has to [do] with whether I’m using my phone or not. So if I’m going somewhere and I’m in touch with someone who’s already there I’ll tend to hurry up a bit or speed up my trip. Or it might work the other way as well where if I’m going for some work and someone’s already there having taken care of it—I would know on the phone and probably relax. So the phone has a bearing on how urgent I consider a trip. If I’m going to meet someone somewhere, I’ll call to check if they’ve left so that I don’t have to wait. Or if I reach early I’ll call someone up and talk to them while I’m waiting. If I’m outside and I’m alone for a while and I have nothing else to do then I’ll call someone up or I’ll start fiddling with my phone. When I don’t know what to do with my hands I take my phone out and start to use it. Also if I’m walking across the room and another person is sitting somewhere on the other side and I’m going towards them—because I’m a somewhat awkward, shy person—most of the time if I’m walking and I think someone’s watching, I’ll take out my phone and fiddle with it. It changes the way I walk—in these situations—I can’t say how, but I use it as a…um…decoy. If I want to avoid someone I’d pick up my phone and start talking or pretend. I’d say, “excuse me.” I use this for awkward moments. Out of all my numbers maybe four or five I communicate with on a regular basis. And obviously I use the cell—it’s different from a landline…more personal.

(Desai)

 

The human-mobile assemblage produces an extraordinary range of affective dispositions as emergent capacities. What happens among this woman’s body, her halting gestures, public space, and the mobile phone? An assemblage of speeds and information flows weaponize the mobile, while simultaneously provoking a new care of the self. The mobile becomes an affective trigger, a fashion statement, a decoy, an early-warning device, an excuse, sometimes a phone, and it even allows for a different bodily comportment in space (Venkatesh). There is a gendered dimension to this mutation in embodiment: for a city whose public spaces are, at least according to one influential account, still constituted by no more that twenty-eight percent women in any given space or time, the mobile seems to have become for some (and more and more) women a way of renegotiating male-dominated spaces (Phadke). As one 20-year-old in her third year of college in Mumbai puts it:

 

When you stay connected so you usually remember to call up someone when you are going somewhere or you are just walking on the street or if you have to go to a public place to meet someone then coordinate with that person that it’s ok I am reaching at this place in so much time and you be there. Where are you? I can’t see you (after reaching the location), things like that, you end up just using it while traveling or when you are in public….Coordinate any kind of meeting, basically it’s a lot more convenient than actually going and finding a PCO because firstly you never have change (coins) and secondly it’s always a hassle like if you are in a new area and if you don’t know where the PCO (public telephone booth) is? It takes a lot of time, so it’s a lot more convenient to have a cell phone.

(qtd. in Matanhelia 96–7)

 

Yet, as a 40-year-old male interviewee from Mumbai notes, this very capacity of the mobile can be a source of anxiety and tension:

 

Before mobiles everyone was punctual. You didn’t need to call and find out where they were. Also if you give a stipulated time now, even before that you start getting anxious that the person might change it. Otherwise if there is no constant communication people would always be on time. Now everyone’s connected and traceable all the time.

(Shetty)

 

Such jugaad networks, notes Clark, typically depend on multiple, independently variable, causally interacting sub-states that “support great behavioral flexibility” by being able to alter the inner flow of information efficiently and in a wide variety of ways. A standard computational device like the mobile and its jugaad practices is a continuous correlation of multiple databases, procedures, and operations. The capacities of the device consist in the ability to rapidly and cheaply reconfigure the way these components interact: the jugaad image is a work of speeds and slownesses. “Information based control systems thus tend to exhibit a kind of complex articulation in which what matters most is the extent to which component processes may be rapidly decoupled and reorganized” (Clark, Supersizing 26). These processes of coupling, neoliberal value production, and self-organization constitute the ecology’s intensive plane, which is defined by flows and critical thresholds, the importance of which will always be specific to the singular assemblages at play in a fast-changing political economy such as India. Anna Munster, herself invested in producing diagrams of new media that think through “embodiment in information,” suggests that the intensive plane of the digital is embodied in the capacity of, for instance, silicon to conduct electrons at particular speeds, or in finding functional correlations that modulate silicon’s resistance to deterioration. Digital mobile networks’ ecologies of sensation are further intensified in silicon’s ability to change its composition and properties according to the device’s temperature, its combination with other flows, and its properties of superconductivity at high speeds (Munster 13).

 

III. Conclusion: Toward a “Common Notion” of Mobile Phones: Ecologies of Sensation as Ethical Thought

 
Sundaram concludes his brilliant chapter on Delhi’s pirate kingdom thus:
 

Piracy is that practice of proliferation following the demise of the classic crowd mythic of modernism. Piracy exists in commodified circuits of exchange, only here the same disperses into the many. Dispersal into viral swarms is the basis of pirate proliferation, disappearance into the hidden abodes of circulation is the secret of its success and the distribution of profits in various points of the network. Piracy works within a circuit of production, circulation, and commerce that also simultaneously suggests many time zones—Virlio’s near-instantaneous time of light, the industrial cycle of imitation and innovation, the retreat of the commodity from circulation and its re-entry as a newer version. Media piracy’s proximity to the market aligns it to both the speed of the global (particularly in copies of mainstream releases) and also the dispersed multiplicities of vernacular and regional exchange.

(Sundaram 137)

 

Sundaram’s close historical and comparativist analyses help us to grasp the complexity of contemporary media ecologies—they help to open up new domains of experimentation in modulating media intensities through processes of assembling sentient ecologies. In that sense, pirate modernity as a concept is aligned with what I have been arguing should be termed ecologies of sensation. I believe, however, that we need methods that are more rigorously material in regards to the habits of the body, and that we would create more practical diagrams if we foregrounded the analysis of these habits in the body’s capacity to affect and be affected.

 
In this essay, I have attempted to unfold the concept of ecology of sensation as a common notion. The jugaad image is common to the multiplicities engaged in biopolitical life in India today. These bodies are composed in sensation-flows, and their common notion is directly expressive: the jugaad image as an ecology of sensation involves/evolves physiochemical, neurological, and biological processes in which difference is determined by relative, but mutable capacities or affordances (affectivity) rather than analogy, contradiction, opposition. In ecologies of sensation real distinction is not numerical.¹⁹ For any given ecology of sensation, and there is an infinite number of them (and in a certain sense infinity in them), a set of definite but oscillating affects passes through the maximum threshold of that which is common to all bodies, yet is specific to the unity of at least two multiplicities entering into relations of composition. Tweaking intensities of sensation is itself an ethics through which we affirm the capacity of any process of bodily concrescence or becoming-active to affect and be affected in such ecologies. Another word for this is attunement: the composition of at least two multiplicities happens through graduated temporal resonance. Two temporalities involve/evolve by folding together and mutating through their emergent properties. To make an affirmation of becoming-active is another name for ethics, as the work of Brian Massumi has reminded us in different ways (28).
 
What conclusions are produced by these methodological choices? Perhaps it would be more pertinent to pose the question of methodological conclusions in terms of the capacities of such a method itself to affect and be affected. The aims of the method of counter-actualization, or media assemblage analysis, are several, but one stands out as particularly relevant to an analysis of mobile media: a thoroughgoing break with the representational analysis of mobile media by a systematic, boundless disorganization of all the senses (Deleuze, Essays 33–4), values, and forces that are territorialized in the mobile ecology of sensation. This would be both a practical and aesthetic ethic of composing multiplicities, or a multitude of singularities. By turning thought to the organization of sensation in the ecology itself, its dominant tendencies, capitalist values, repetitions, networked algorithms, habits, stammers, exhaustions, its emergent capacities, and its critical thresholds, a feedback diagram of causality, self-creation, and discourse can be produced (Toscano). The importance of such practical diagrams of becoming is increasingly clear in the emergence of insurrections, force relations, friendships, radical care/reproduction networks, and self-creations that the mobile helps body forth: Naxalism (in the past two years Naxals have destroyed hundreds of mobile mast towers, and they regularly confiscate mobile phones in areas under their control [Manchi 7]), middle-class protests against corruption (Munster’s gluppies—globalized yuppies—are Blackberry/iPhone activists), hacktivism, radical chauvinisms (the VHP and the Taliban), panchayat democracy, the proliferation of art movements, new petty entrepreneurial strategies (what Virno calls the “socializing of the entrepreneurial function” [Penzin 86]), and habituations of mass consumption—all these phenomena are understood more practically in terms of their potentialization in mobile ecologies of sensation.