How Systems Cohere: Niira Radia in 2017

<jats:p> Why do mediatized political scandals fail to effect discernable transformations of a systemic kind? This article offers one possible answer to this question by revisiting the media event known as “the Radia tapes scandal” to think through the reasons why, despite its explosive contents, the scandal changed little in the day-to-day workings of Indian political life. I argue that the noneventful temporality of mediatized political scandals is important to attend to because it is in the sphere of the everyday that we might be able to discern how corruption mediates relations between states and publics. That is to say: scandals do not change systems because systems rely on corruption, leaks, and information flows to render themselves stable. By fixating on leaks as a political tool, we run the risk of taking a system’s self-representation of disorder at face value. In making these points, I historicize the Radia affair within a longer arc of mediated corruption scandals in India and then juxtapose the leaks themselves to an artwork by the collective, CAMP. </jats:p>