Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (review)

Brian Larkin’s eagerly awaited book fulfills the promise of its heraldry. Indeed it delivers more than one supposes it had promised, which makes perfect sense because the book’s subject matter—the process of socializing infrastructural technologies—is also shown to have done more than its colonial creators intended. For a study standing on the theoretically rather delicate premise of thinking of infrastructure and media as concepts without ignoring their technical objectives, Signal and Noise does an excellent job of winningly turning that premise into a narrative. As one becomes familiar with the conceptual grid, one is also following an engaging story of the transformation of the Northern Nigerian city of Kano into an urban center through the instrumental logic of colonial modernity. By looking at the introduction of radio network and the development of cinema as tools of propaganda in relation to other social infrastructures like electricity and the railway, Larkin is able to advance the argument that the intrinsic material shape and design of technologies ensure that they extend their social purposes. The supplement is the “immaterial forms of urbanism—the senses of excitement, danger, or stimulation that suffuse different spaces in the city and create the experience of what urbanism is” (13).

The immediate, global context for this extensive socialization of infrastructural technologies is the unprecedented explosion of video-format films in Nigeria, from the late 1980s onwards. Although Kano is the primary focus of Larkin’s research, and he makes a strong case for the qualitative difference between the films produced in Northern Nigeria and those in the South, the specificity of Nigerian films remains the template of his analysis. He conceptualizes the social impact of this cultural and artistic form through what he calls the “aesthetics of outrage,” that is, the use of the mode of melodrama to organize dramatic narrative “around a series of extravagant shocks designed to outrage the viewer” (172). Thus, he validates the earlier proposition that material forms like media and technologies produce immaterial attributes; cinema as an institution of leisure in an urban setting is both the medium and material effect of this response to the insecurity of everyday life. This calls for a comparative analysis of a number of films from the North and the South, and this is one place where the book surpasses its promise because works of anthropology dealing with textual forms tend to fight shy of formal analysis. Though innovative, “aesthetics of outrage” is exorbitant, highlighting only one aspect of an extremely diverse phenomenon. Moreover, there are many reasons, historical, economic and aesthetic, to think of the new Nigerian cinema in relation to African filmmaking. This is an intellectual duty.

Signal and Noise is well grounded in that subgenre of contemporary anthropology concerned with the relationships between media and religious and cultural imaginaries and noted for its theoretical interests. The book’s distinction in this regard is in the manner it foregrounds infrastructural technologies as constitutive of everyday life in Kano, both in the colonial context and in the age of the transnationalization of media. It is a challenging work.