03.04.2019
Belief in anything – Politics of nothing — The infrastructural void
What does infrastructure institute? One thing that can be said today is that it is possible to believe in anything, to trust nothing (but what one believes), and that Politics is increasingly seen as impotent in the face of large infrastructural issues (Fake news, social media, Brexit, Climate change, etc.). I’d suggest that this has to do with the specifically neoliberal variant of global infrastructural development that has accompanied the post-War and post-colonial period. With its fantasies of “seamless interoperability,” (Rossiter, 2017, xvii) at the conceptual level and — at a structural level — the structural results of the realisation […]
27.03.2019
The exclusion of people by infrastructure?
The work of Judith Butler on the structuring of social performativity around the question of ‘the people’ in Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), raises important questions for the role of infrastructure. In particular, regarding this passage on page 6: Paradoxically, as certain forms of recognition are extended, the region of the unrecognizable is preserved and expanded accordingly… The problem of demarcation introduces another dimension to the problem, since not all of the related discursive actions that into recognizing and misreconizing the people are explicit. The operation of their power is to some extent performative. That is, they enact certain […]
25.03.2019
Real time vs. User time
On the 25th March (2019) edition of the BBC’s Today programme, a contributor to a segment on Apple’s entry into the video streaming market made a distinction between live-time coverage of traditional public interest programming and the user-oriented time of streaming services such as Netflix. Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0003jq8 Though this distinction was primarily made in order to stress the value of a traditional linear broadcaster such as the BBC since it provides a kind of news and current affairs coverage that the browse based content of the streaming giants, this also raises an interesting point as to the different experiences […]
Infra Cultures
*Thoughts in formation* Here, I'm exploring the cultural patterns, imaginaries and practices of infrastructures; what can be called infrastructural cultures, and which might be posed as infrastructure as culture. Part of a wider research into the problems and possibilities for critical, civic and cultural intervention into broader infrastructural contexts, design, policy and 'publics'. Initiated as part of my AHRC CHASE-funded PhD research at Goldsmiths, University of London: "Changing what infrastructure means" (2024).