Infrastructures of liberal life: From modernity and progress to resilience and ruins (original) (raw)
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This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histories of infrastructural power reveal if infrastructures are delinked from master narratives tying them to state and state-backed centralization? While development, nation building, and extraction are often state-sponsored or state-backed projects, the articles here demonstrate that modern states are not the only wielders of infrastructural power. Second, how does this decentering of the state in infrastructural analyses transform the stakes of radical political activity and the work of radical historical actors? In highlighting a different, ...
The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
Political Infrastructures: Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008
There has been a profusion of work in recent years exploring the links between infrastructure and the city. This has entailed a conceptualization of cities and infrastructure that recognizes their mutual constitution and the inherently political nature of networked urban infrastructure. In introducing this symposium, we find that a comparative approach to infrastructure can reveal a diversity of ways in which the urban fabric is produced, managed and distributed, and comes to matter in everyday life. We argue for a more globally informed conceptualization of the politics of infrastructure by exploring three key themes in the symposium: fragmentation, inequality and crisis.
The temporal fragility of infrastructure: Theorizing decay, maintenance, and repair
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021
Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social processes, thus offering insights into lived experiences, governance, and socio-spatial reordering. More specific attention to infrastructure's temporality has challenged its supposed inertia and inevitable completeness, leading to an engagement with questions of the dynamics of infrastructure over different phases of its lifespan, and their generative effects. In this paper, we advance these debates through a focus on the processes of decay, maintenance, and repair that characterize such phases of infrastructural life, by exploring how specific infrastructures are materially shaped by, and shape, social, political, and socio-ecological arrangements. Our intervention has two related aims: first, to conceptualize decay, maintenance, and repair as both temporal phases of infrastructure's dynamic materiality and its specific affective conditions; second, to trace how these phases of infrastructural life rework embodied labor, differentiated citizenship, and socioecological relations. We argue that attention to infrastructure's "temporal fragility" elucidates the articulation between everyday capacities and desires to labor, the creation of and demands made by political constituents, and the uneven distribution of opportunities and resources.
Networked Infrastructure as the Material Culture of Liberal Government
2011
F oucault's theory of governmentality describes the emergence of economic liberalism, from the Enlightenment to its most modern expressions. In governmentality Foucault brings together seemingly opposed historical trends, specifically the conditions for liberalization of the political economy, but also the expansion and intensification of governmental authority and instrumentation. These concepts and tensions provide a useful framework for approaching the archaeology of networked infrastructure. Infrastructure is central to the operation of government, and its history coincides with the history of capitalism and the engagement between democracy and liberalism. Using historical archaeological data, I explore these themes in the context of infrastructural expansion in and around the city of Annapolis, Maryland, during the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
Finding Fragility in Paris: The Politics of Infrastructure after Haussmann
2009
This essay develops an analytic term coined elsewhere: "the fragility of modernity." 1 The term indicates the special fragility of urban modernity, what historians of technology call "the networked city." Modern urban life increasingly depends on complex heterogeneous systems that combine social organization, technological artifacts, and natural resources in delicate assemblages, recalling Graham's and Marvin's recent and sonorous term "splintered urbanism." Simply put, networked infrastructures are delicate, and because modern urban life has come to depend on them so vitally, this fragility not only compromises subways or water pipes, but also destabilizes urban modernity more broadly—socially and spatially, materially and symbolically. 2