The Material Politics of Infrastructure

Abstract

Historians and sociologists have tended to understand infrastructures as fundamentally spatial formations that facilitate connections and flows of people and goods. In this chapter, however, I follow the work of anthropologists and urban geographers who have highlighted the temporality of infrastructures, including the political significance of processes such as maintenance and repair, corrosion, fatigue, and accretion, Whereas sociologists of technology once focused on the ways in which infrastructural networks were shaped, recent studies draw attention to the transformation and instability of technosocial worlds, and consider both the lifetime of infrastructure and the anticipation of infrastructural futures. Infrastructures take the forms of technosocial projects that may be gestured in advance. My contention is that a focus on the temporality of infrastructure also points to the importance of second-order infrastructures of expertise and regulation that are explicitly concerned with infrastructure’s endurance. Infrastructures such as dams and pipelines, for example, co-exist with technoscientific infrastructures such as seismic early warning and environmental monitoring systems. At the same time, the infrastructural qualities of the environment may be transformed in order to render it a sufficiently stable ground on and into which infrastructures such as tunnels and cables can be built. An analysis of the material politics of infrastructure needs to attend to the diverse ways in which infrastructures are both in process and endure.