Deptford.TV ‘data spheres’ essay published in FEAR, Sarai Reader 08
Author/Editor : Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Jeebesh Bagchi, Eds.

Sarai Reader 08 is interested in the phenomenon of fear in the form of nuclear attacks, lethal outbreak of a virus, of flash floods and freak storms, etc not as empirical facts but as cultural processes. The book aims to question how fear and anxiety shape individual and collective dispositions, how lives and social processes are designed around and against them, and what effects they have on our politics and our economy. It is especially interested in fear as language, as mode of communication, as a way of ordering and rendering the world…

… The Reader gathers to itself texts and contributions in the form of image-text assemblages that look at the transmission, generation and processing of fear on an intimate as well as on an industrial scale. They encompass mechanisms designed either to allay or intensify fear or ratchet up and down levels of anxiety and feelings of security. We see this as a beginning, and a broad range of questions and areas of interest, some of which have been touched upon this book, still remain to be unaccounted for. While Sarai Reader 08 does not claim to be exhaustive, it does aim to straddle a wide territory. The form that contributions to the Reader have taken is as varied as the content. While there are stand-alone essays, there are also reports, interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works, personal journal entries, research and commentaries. We believe that this diversity helps the Reader evoke responses to the idea of fear in all its myriad dimensions.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as a comfort zone for new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half-forgotten agendas. This is why we see it possible to imagine Sarai Reader 08 as setting the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the limits, margins and edges of our times.