Infra Cultures

Category: figure

  • Residency post 1 – Harraway – Funny Stories

    Residency post 1 – Harraway – Funny Stories

    This is the first post written while on Residency at Rupert in Lithuania, June 2024. Hopefully, this can be a space for the thinking that happens, but which is outside of the specific things I want to try and get done / written. They can be read as thoughts in formation or as notes towards later texts.

    —

    Perhaps to my own shame, I hadn’t known how funny Donna Harraway is. Last night, I went to a screening of Fabrizio Terranova’s 2016 film-length interview, DONNA HARAWAY: STORY TELLING FOR EARTHLY SURVIVAL at Alt Labs / Sodas 2123 in Vilnius, Lithuania. The film began with Harraway describing at once absurd and mesmerising links and entanglements which, though of a piece with her wider conceptual frameworks of kinship and entanglement, also devolved into the hysterics, the excitement and potential of it all. Of escaping the confines of human-centred epistemologies, ontologies or organisational story. And with this, more specifically, this is those which delimit and confine certain ‘kinds’ or appearances of human as apart from and better than so-called nature, matter, etc.  It was a warmth I hadn’t expected — perhaps foolishly given the rigorously freewheeling nature of her written work — but which created and enacted the conditions for one of Harraway’s central contributions: kinship. I was on board. (The film was made with a friend, a relationship Harraway later cites as being centrally important to her development / thinking / commitments.)

    This warmth also leads a path to the other key themes of the film and Harrway’s work: story telling. Recounting another origin story, Harraway describes a family background and upbringing steeped in story telling and Catholicism. Again, a story steeped in laughter, Harraway talks about the importance and depth of storytelling that is foundational to her upbringing, sitting around the dinner table with her biological family each competing of the best story. Her father, she notes, was sports journalist for The Denver Post. He was not swayed by the glamour or prestige attached to ‘more serious’ topics like crime or business reporting, but wanted to tell ‘the story of the game’. I liked this a lot. That ‘everyday’, collective practices or intensities, or rituals of sport could be the source of so much detail, interest, difference and drama that it would be worth telling and recalling. That one could dedicate a life to its telling, to communicating that intensity, locality and communal narrative. It also helped to ground some of what Harraway would later discuss about the importance of a practice of positively making new things; of telling the specific knots, differences, attachments of this story, of the specific as the site where the general became unstuck and where the specificity of an other wise — ‘it’ — might be found.

    Then, with another bout of perhaps more nervous laughter, she also acknowledges the problems, the power dynamics, the exclusionary, destructive aspects of this story of fascist-adjacent American Catholicism as well as her sometimes messianic attempts to lead the local children on religious missions — using this productively, or at least generatively, to offer an important framing for the role of storytelling and the kinds of kinship that can and must be built. That of inheritance.

    How and why do these things become relevant and come together?

    The artefact of film itself offers something of the texture and implications of Harraway’s work. Difficult to tell at first, but Harraway, who is talking to Terranova off camera, is filmed against a green screen and superimposed against footage of her house and office. The backdrop begins to pan disorientingly with Harraway appearing, doubled and at work in the background, or else with jellyfish floating behind or the room switching location at will or dropping out of shot. These parallel or simultaneous realities are heightened by archival footage of Harraway, her friends, or tongue in cheek TV lectures, or science fiction imagery collaged into the centre of the frame. Of course, you might say: these quasi-structuralist, post modern techniques of film making are of a piece with the digital era of hyper-situated, circulatory and disoriented story telling that often characterise contemporary visually-speculative narrative modes. (Indeed, the film’s director co-runs a masters in speculative and experimental story telling at Brussels’ ERG – School of Graphic Research.) Alongside this, through, the interview contained, for me, some key ideas and questions about what story telling might do in and to the world, and how.

    Stories and kinship

    I enter this having an interest in the ways that narrative can in the words of Meike Bal act as a motor or assembling device in a story (1999). For me, this can helpfully transposed to the repeating anticipatory narratives and practices of cause and effect that make up and hold together infrastructure; an infrastructure (and its transformation) is nothing without an animating story, purpose, outcome. That is, stories hold an infrastructural world up and keep it practically bound to itself (Rossiter 2017). Narrative can be an effective analytic and expository device when considering the often difficult to ascertain totality of infrastructure.  It is especially used by environmental humanities and STS to convey the integration and significance of parts and constituents of active assemblages and the ways that they are situated and relevant (see Star 1999, Bowker 1994, Green (2020). It can also be a means of breaking and making other ways of being and doing together, at meso-scales since stories are one way that the anticipatory meaning and practices that allow infrastructure to be understood to show up as and where expected (Thrift 2004) become expected, relied upon (Berlant 2001). That is, narrative is one way in which the form that comprises infrastructure circulates to become a genre (Berlant), becomes habituated or relied upon (e.g., the ‘democratisation’ of information is how online platforms are woven deeply into everyday life becoming effective surveillance machines). The task, as is echoed/clarified by Harraway here, is to change the kinds of story that hold things together and what, and how and what can circulate so that how a world repeats or endures is different too. (On a damaged planet this is ever more important.) So what did Harraway say about stories?

    To begin with, stories are key for Harraway to the possibility of other ways of being, for intensities to be felt, communicated, known and modelled; for them to become ritualised and to support collective being. She gives the instance of marriage, which though not at all suitable to the forms of kinship and family she lived and wanted, were all they had. They did a job, but were at the same time limited / limiting. This lead in Harraway’s story and work to a desire and commitment to find, tell, create other kinds of story; or redistribute the narrative (Harraway 1986). Towards the end of the film, Harraway narrates a sci-fi inflected story of another kind of kinship and biological entanglement: parenting is not limited to reproductive parents and at birth one is given a cross-species kin, or symbiont with which one will live and inhabit the world with. In this telling, the character lives in symbiosis with a monarch butterfly. While pronounced female at birth, the character decides she wants a beard. Because, in this story, the character lives with a symbiont, she chooses that this beard be of Monarch butterfly antennae rather than hair. A radically different story of what a family or kinship is, does and how it mediates relationships to the world, developing such shared, cross-species intensities are part of how Harraway instantiates the conditions of a wider project of imagining and exploring real and speculative non-extractive ways of doing and undoing. Of living on a damaged planet in ways that demand and enable other kinds of negotiation.

    In contrast with this — or maybe towards this — she also discusses the dangers of stories becoming universal; of the power vested and invested in keep those stories universal or generally-applicable. Capitalism, capitalocene are discussed; their absurdity and violence is in their status as the only way of telling the story of human-earthly life — for those invested in it and those whose critique of it excludes any other way of thinking. (We need marxism/ists, but other ways of knowing too.) This occurs for critical terms too. Chulthocene, Anthropocene, are useful and limited, and in the case of the former a bit of a joke. They do the job, yet they risk becoming total, their difference becoming meaningless. The importance of this non-generallisablity is that it is allows for and is situated within the ways of being, doing, communing that are not repeated to the extent of becoming self-same, exclusionary, against alterity, entirely synthetic to a world of otherness. Rather, this specificity requires an ongoing negotiability; and a connected, recognition that in a dynamic, interconnected, and processual world of systemic and ecological interaction and niches, doing must also be about undoing. About living in the compost. (Here, to stay with the trouble is to stay with these edges: where the exclusion happens, but also the site where negotiation must — echoing Tsing’s concept of non-scalability.)

    Ways of doing and undoing

    So, while stories offer a conceptual frame for how ways of doing and being are known and held together, they also indicate or reveal the significance or consequence of the specificity those stories, particularly as they attach to objects or others and despite the tendency of some stories to become a generalisation. Why? The concept and actuality of inheritance, for instance, shows for Harraway the consequence of stories of and as ways of doing as they clash, negotiate, come into contact with others. Holding a Navaho woven basket she, as a white, American woman, inherits a brutal history of genocide on the indigenous American populations that means she must reflect on what it means to hold that basket in her hands. She inherits the story and impact of Catholicism in this place in this sense too. But turning to her dog, who is experiencing the onset of dementia and whose barks for comfort interrupt the filming, she also inherits a history of species companionship that allows her to comfort her dog, to make good on a relationship.

    Between these specific instances, we find the tensions that can be set up in how stories and how we inherit them. That is, as ways of knowing and doing attach us destructively, generatively, abrasively, etc., into communities of others, and what might be called worldings — where such stories are generalised and enforced as the parameters and limits of shared or proximate existence. On the one hand, she holds and possesses an on object whose cosmology is dramatically at odds with the stories of conquest she inherits; on the other is a story of shared intensity of experiences whose inherited features (companionship, mutual training and responsiveness) cannot be fully known or defined and which generate ongoing mutual dependence. This tension is, then, posed in a non-reparative sense (Berlant, 2016), as a call to be attentive to and to tell and create moments or stories of specific attachment and entanglement. Not as representation in general, but as a part of a commitment to alternative ways of living. To living with the inheritance of a damaged planet which must be negotiated ongoingly as a reality and as a strategy of flourishing with it. This is a serious commitment.

    Family-making and telling is, for instance, such a commitment. To be with, to support, to care for and to be cared for is a lifetime commitment and a serious one: especially when that family and kin are outside of the reproductive family, social norms, or species kinship, such as Harraway’s. It requires, rituals for those ways of being and of dying. This commitment to making and unmaking, telling and retelling, knowing and unknowing of rituals or ways of attachment and doing / undoing is both provided for and key to the metaphor and actuality of what Harraway calls living in the compost  / staying with the trouble. That is, at once it negotiates and embroils us in the ways we must make as well as share and use the resources of a much wider ecosystem or assemblage of beings and needs; and that this pivoting towards both a wider net and a balance between giving and taking is the only way we can live, indeed maybe flourish, on a planet so damaged by extraction and capitalism.

    These terms, of analysis and of a generative philosophy of a good life inspired by and out of this situation clarify and are clarified by the method or practices that it emerges from and what can be taken from it. Specifically, I am thinking of on the one hand the biography of Harraway and these ideas; she tells of building a house, garden and family whilst writing — and of writing only in the summer because teaching take the best of you. These activities, grounding and reflective, creative and iterative are key to understanding how other ways of doing and undoing might be realised. That is, through thinking and making; and making in order to give thinking life in its having to negotiate the assemblage it becomes a part of and which one must make ideas into. And on the other, a more generally-applicable lesson for the relationship of theory / practice proposed and articulated  here together; we need a direction of travel / analysis & iteration that instantiates critical positions / propositions, and a positive, creative act which activate and which mediate / modulate the possibilities that theory / ideas imagine. What might be reality is made out of concrete contact with what already is. This changes what has been, and is the only way that something else might be. The last words to Harraway:

    And yet the only the way to come into grips, to come into presence of it, … is to constantly keep doing positive things; you have to keep trying to make an experiment work. You have to keep writing this particular story, not some story in general, but this story. You have to do this. Be here, not everywhere. You have to be attached to some things, not everything. The only possible way is if again and again and again if we engage each other in doing something [laughs].

    Watch:

    Donna Haraway : Story Telling for Earthly Survival / Trailer / Fabrizio Terranova / 2016 from Atelier Graphoui on Vimeo.

    Thus, this story is of how to create difference; to get to groups with it — that is, what is not the abstraction, but what is real, the trouble, the compost — the possibility of living outside the generalisation. The uncertainty of not being able to give or allocate a name to something offers the possibility of new meaning or practice. This requires the thinking of at least two temporalities or trajectories: the reflective and compositional and the grounded and mattered; or, to adapt Cornelius Castoriadis (as I did in my PhD), to imagine and institute, with the productive tension between them the stakes and what is at stake. Between these dimensions of story telling — narrative and the telling; repetition and inheritance —  is where the negotiation and being with happens, that is, the ongoing negotiated co-existence necessary to living and flourishing with others. Important now more than ever.

    For me, some open questions remain as to how this fares when in contact with structures for shared, common existence, however.

    Infrastructural imaginaries (to redistribute the narrative)

    A main question is one reflecting on the particularity of infrastructure, as that which must be known — or narrated — in advance if it is to be recognised as coherently infrastructural. Admittedly, Harraway is not discussing infrastructure here; however, the centrality of narrative to infrastructure, and of ways of doing and undoing Harraway discusses to how we might think about infrastructure means I can ask this question of the relevance of these ideas of story as they attach to, interface with, negotiate the category of things and practices that are infrastructural and, indeed, which must be also changed if the bigger project Harraway poses of living well is to be realised.

    Specifically, this is the question of how to realise and sustain the conditions for these other kinds of life in dimensions outside of the personal or individual, familial or domestic (in its baggiest sense). This is not a difference in kind per se ‚— i.e., stories and inheritance play similar roles to those of anticipation and expectation of infrastructure — though the difference in scale, temporality, composition or location in infrastructures emphasise the question of distributing agency outside of the human story teller (which is nonetheless central to Harraway’s story here) more acute. That is, to reflect on the structuring dimensions of inheritance as the means of sharing that way of doing and undoing. And to be yet more specific, I am referring to how narrative or story-telling might, in a creative, positive sense might interact critically with the temporality of the loop of infrastructure. Both looping in advance of its realisation and as its reality (see PhD). In many ways, this is academic. Story telling enacts its own infrastructures of possibility through the device of narrative (Bal). But how this relates to or relays with both the practices and epistemologies this enables (Harraway) and the systemic arrangements, work (Carse / Bowker) and how these negotiations are ongoigingly negotiable/negotiated (Carse / Verran) and Configurable (Suchman) remains key to the durablity of these propositions as liveable and sustainable in a planetary sense.

    The setting of creation and instituting

    Another question is of the locus or agent of story telling and doing in Harraway’s work — at least as articulated in this film. (More work is to be done on checking this, of course.) For instance, the stories told here are ones of individuals interacting and deciding on how to live. For instance, choosing to model ones own body with Monarch antennae; the playfulness in kin making through symbiont from birth. The units are small and so there is a tension with the larger scales of relationship / relation that is some how un-addressed. Perhaps intentionally; but not sufficiently for my project. Here, then, I depart from Harraway’s approach, which like a lot of North American (post-Western) theory departs with an idea that individuals make themselves into a world, rather than a European one which imagines itself into or out of an already extant (and in many cases a priori / fundamental worlding, ontology, epistemology, etc., e.g., language, humanist, rationalist, etc.

    Instead, I depart with the notion or inheritance of infrastructure, or infrastructure-like ways of negotiating being and doing in common as the meso-scalar unit or site for how we create into, know/sense and account for the shared, collective experiences of being in an environment with others. Of course, one could imagine radically non-human ways of being. However, in the same way that non-human organisms and matter creates structures or systems of existence and persistence, infrastructure is what we refer to when we refer to those initiated by humans. (I also blur this definition with institutions, which, like patterns in cognition are where certain kinds of meaning are stabilised, anticipated and recognised.) Infrastructure is thus, like the house or theory or family Harrawyay built(ds), a locus of thinking, support structure and interface with others /other beings / negotiation. As noted above, to centre infrastructure requires that we think about narrative in particular ways. This does not contest Harraway’s ideas discussed here, however. Rather, I think it offers a complimentary discussion of how we might address ideas of scale, scope, sustainability, or stability of such stories / ways of doing, whilst being attentive to the closure / generalisation that is an inherent risk in infrastructure. That is how to infrastructure with the trouble; to compost, do and undo infrastructure and the stories that tell it / it tells; to unbuild it as Halberstam might argue.

     

    Redistributing the narrative.

    To be imagined by infrastructure / imagine infrastructure is a way then of framing another aspect of how and why to redistribute the narrative; the purpose and location of other kinds of story telling. Do we need to address those ways of being imagined by infrastructure: post-truth, more than human sensing, knowing and the artefacts of the Anthropocene? To some extent, to know and think about where we are remains importnat; but Harraway’s project also provokes or is centred by the more foundational problem of sustaining shared life, and doing this well. The question then might be, do these complexities or their analysis support that foundational problem? Do we need to know about these in order to undo or unbuild them? Perhaps in order to unmake the cultural conditions or socio-technical  in which they are genre or at least plausible as such.

    Why as these questions? Because to sustain new ways of doing and undoing requires new kinds of narrative, character, story to be not only told and retold, but to be anticipated, expected, repeated as a ground on which that doing and undoing can endure. A non-sovereign relationality or proxemics made possible (Berlant 2016) in the ways stories allow for other kinds of orientation (Ahmed) to be sensed, known in those ways of doing and undoing; one which allows for the decomposition of that inheritance.

    Perhaps this is exactly the role of the curatorial, to enable, support, imagine, assemblage the cultural, socio-technical performativity or rituals that will make other kinds of land use, kinship imagined, imaginable and institutable; and, following this, durable, sustainable and yet transformable. (Here Castoriadis’ turn to ecology and autopoeisis is interesting.)

    This text is longer than expected. But clarifies and helps to weave a number of threads that I have been considering. Specifically as to the point and articulation of a practice that crosses academic, curatorial and writing/creative practice; of the relationship between infrastructures to cultural / more than human settings, and the kinds of conceptual / performative devices through which these are known, sensed, repeated and inherited, such as narrative and configuration.

    —

    Thanks must be given to my host organisation as this research and time has been supported by Rupert.

    x

    12-6-2024

  • User imaginaries — sketching a method for seeing infrastructure in action in the figure.

    As ethnographer of infrastructure Susan Leigh Star describes, the relationality of infrastructure makes for particular difficulties when the boring and mundane traces of its everyday use and operation scale up into the working, socially-interoperational and embedded infrastructures at issue (1999).[1] To consider the quickly-scaling and complexifying relations that make up, not only infrastructural design and assemblage work, but also its maintenance, use and promise,[2] infrastructural study quickly becomes not only difficult, but physically and conceptually overwhelming. Could one really visit every part and permutation of an infrastructure one is looking at? How does one study action at a distance? What are the ethics of studying actors whose identity you may never know?  (1999, 379)

     

    This problem of scale is compounded by the differing arrangements and operational/conceptual relationships constituting different layers or levels of the infrastructure/infrastructural intersection in question. For instance, an abstracted system-level view of an infrastructure scales un-evenly — in terms of form and manifestation and the research methods that are sensitive to these forms — into the experience and adaptations to meanings made by people acting as users of those infrastructures, inscribing their actions into a built infrastructure environment (1999, 383).

     

    As well as being overwhelming, this scaling up of information as a relationship between moving and interconnecting, interoperating and systemic parts, not simply of quantity, makes models of ‘deep’ interpretation based on objects, texts, sites, etc., difficult.[3]

     

    Infrastructure does not exist in one place, nor in one form, and its actions and constituent parts are often frozen behind the standardised and multiple background aspects of the unfolding every day. This contingency requires networked models that challenges the approaches of reading the depth of objects or subjects — what is ‘really’ going on beneath the surface — found in both the humanities and social sciences, by staying close with what is being described to describe what happens and is affected in its movement and action within the sphere of its influence.

     

    Notwithstanding subsequent advancements of methods of data visualisation, which, in concert with the increased datafication of infrastructure / infrastructuring of data,[4] have meant that infrastructural traces can be used to show patterns not interpretable in single objects, sites, or texts, Star proposes that treating such mundane elements of infrastructural activity as a birth certificate form, the spreadsheet, or the standard bridge height as ethnographic site can offer moments of infrastructural crystallisation, tension, and manifestation. These can for Star offer, albeit abstracted, figures and forms for interpretive “‘reading’ [of] infrastructure and unfreezing some of its features” (1999, 384).

     

    Consolidating the ‘invisible work’ of design, real-time adjustment, maintenance that shapes the use of infrastructure, infrastructural manifestations, points of interface, or transformation/ transition (like an official form, a bridge, a computer code) are points where ‘master narratives’ are encoded into infrastructures, and where others are excluded (384). For example, where phone books list only husband’s names for married couples, it is fair to assume — in part — that this reflects a heterosexually-based, sexist society (1999, 378); or where the bridges across the Grand Central Parkway between Queens and Nassau boroughs in New York were constructed to be too low for public transport, that lower income would be effectively barred from the richer Long Island suburbs, “not by policy, but by design” (1999, 389).[5] Studying where infrastructure becomes a differential condition is key to unpicking the ecological and relational world infrastructures shape.

     

    Star’s focus is on large scale systems, which creates certain frame, one which tends towards this complexity. I am also interested in the question of scalability as a dynamic movement back and forth, between micro and macro, in the ‘meso’ scale. This ‘in between’ scale connects the systemic to the depth of interpretation. It suggests that the individual experience of infrastructure is not simply one of being determined by infrastructure — though this is a key frame, not least in terms of how power is distributed and experienced — but that infrastructuring is also a generative and creative act not limited to the infrastructural ‘object’ itself, but also an abstract projection of meaning that is shared and can be staged. It is through this generative movement between scales — imagined and manifest — that the scope of infrastructuring exceeds the object and lives in the performative relationship to how infrastructure patterns social worlds, in formal affective and cognitive and behavioural dimensions through which its relations are practiced away from that object itself (Thrift and Berlant). It is also possible, I am arguing, to think about how certain fields, such as those associated with knowledge production, mediation and dissemination stage infrastructural meaning as its infrastructural function.

     

    If we can pivot towards the imaginary of infrastructure we can discuss and interpret the role of infrastructural imaginaries in practices that repeat certain imagined and manifest ideas about the movement between different scales, and different effects of this relationship. This approach offers a methodological surface, which develops Star’s proposal, on which to think about critical practices which are neither simply caught in infrastructural objects or technologies, nor simply representational existing within infrastructural determination.

     

    For Star, certain objects/forms can be used to focus the various factors involved in the construction of infrastructure as they contradict, reveal, or suspend and delimit human agency and becoming. But to record patterning as the expression of an imaginary we can turn to the figures/figurations passing through it to act as tracers in what is established and manifest as a pattern that shapes and constrains movement through the meso-scales of an infrastructural field.

     

    By following figures through the parameters, interoperations, processes, capacities, functions, positions, proxemics, promises, through which it is used, we can see the kinds of relations and transition that an infrastructure makes possible, that is what it is imagined as, in how the movement or transition expresses the relationships it makes up and connect with in the social field in which it is relevant.[6]

     

    This approach means that infrastructural study does not have to be limited to the study of technology, nor of dominant or hegemonic forms of infrastructure — a model to which infrastructure tends out of the necessity that, to be infrastructure, it is expected, anticipated, and conjured as inevitable (see Thrift / Berlant). It can see infrastructure as a site of productive tension, between patterns of possibility, where infrastructure is not simply that which actors are subject to or determined by, and where infrastructural agency is, in part, a question of how infrastructure is performed.

     

    *

     

    An interview on the Radio 4 breakfast news flagship, the Today programme on 15 Dec 2020 offers a good example of the differences that such figurations can help to describe and trace in different kinds of infrastructural imaginary.[7]Specifically, at stake was how different imaginaries around the role, scope, operations and users of education as a social infrastructure, differently positions and values the individuals it produces in relation to the social field it is a member or part of.

     

    In the last week of term before the 2020 school Christmas holidays, the government had had to strengthen restrictions aimed at fighting the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic because of steeply rising-infections in the capital, moving London from Tier 2 to Tier 3 restrictions.[8] As a sign of how quickly cases were rising, the move came two days before a planned review of tiering. However, a legal battle ensued between the government’s Department of Education (DfE) and Greenwich Council who has asked schools to close a week early because of the exponential rise in the borough. The DfE threatened legal action if the council did not keep schools open, in line with its national policy.[9]

     

    Where these events focused government policy on the pandemic, but also its policy on education onto local events and conditions through the question of access to the infrastructures of education (whether they were open/closed), they also offer a view onto how the presence of that infrastructure manifests certain narratives about the role of education and how it should be experienced and offered. That is, how education sets in play a pattern into which children become individuals — despite the pandemic.

     

    In the discussion over whether the schools should have closed or been kept open in response to spiking epidemic in London between Robin Bevan a headteacher at Southend School for Boys in Essex and President of the National Education Union, who had closed his school, and Rebecca Hickey, Assistant Director of a federation of 9 Harris academies in south London, two clearly distinct positions emerged.[10]

     

    For Bevan, there were three priorities for any head teachers when questioning whether to stay open or go all online:

    1. “what is the very best way of sustaining quality of learning?”
    2. “what is in the best interests of public health?” Is it keeping 1000+ students in dense, over-sized and crowded classrooms over winter?
    3. “do we have sufficient resource, sufficient staffing” to keep school and facilities running and safe?

     

    Ultimately, Bevan argued, the decision to close for safety has to rest in the hands of head teachers “in consultation with their local public health officials,” not ministers.

     

    Hickey, argued against closure since: “head teachers have always had to be incredibly flexible.” More importantly, she said that she couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to many students while they were in lockdown situation, with “very profound levels of trauma that many [students] experienced…” Saying that, while there are “blended learning opportunities,” there are “far greater benefits for students and teachers from being part of the community and live.”

     

    Such principles do not seem to be fundamentally at odds with Bevan’s argument, however, when Hickey describes how the risks of the Covid-19 disease were being managed, a difference is discernible. Across the 49 schools, Hickey stated, “incredibly stringent sanitation and safety restrictions were in place.” As such any case for closure would be made on a case-by-case basis: up to a point where there was “not enough staff to operate risk assessments.” Indeed, Hickey said that head teachers also had to consider parents’ needs, many of whom were key workers. “We have a duty well beyond the four walls of our building.”

     

    Between these positions then are two models of risk, in which the pupil is figured in two ways. The former, for Bevan, is a pupil who is already part of a series of interlocking, and irreducible communities, whose relationship to risk and education is qualitative. This locates the pupil within a series of complex social contracts.

     

    The latter, for Hickey the student is more of a service-user who can expect access to a well-managed service, which has adequate assessment of risks of interruption, but where access and service continuation is the main “impetus” (Hickey).

     

    Here the duty “well beyond” the four walls of the school is indeterminate, it expands into any of the potential infrastructural interfaces that the academy can be seen to meet: but where the academy becomes in this sense not a qualitative boundary, but critical to other infrastructures too: many parents are key workers. Such dependency relies on and is critical to the fantasy of ‘seamless interoperability’ between infrastructures,[11] where access and operation must be preserved, since one failure will propagate to all connect infrastructures.

     

    In this sense, where its inter-dependencies become both critical and indeterminate, the service-user, the student, must also submit to the continuation of that service. This individuates the pupil as a user within this service, in contrast to Bevan’s model, where the student is part of a complex set of shifting community pressures. At certain points the risk to one group outweighs another. Certainly, while the service-user model sees each student as an individuated figure, it also allows the student’s needs to be indexed against their specific situations: such as vulnerability to traumatic experience.

     

    At the end of the interview, Bevan said he would stay closed, and Hickey committed only to a careful, case-by-case review of each Academy’s situation.

     

    What I am seeking to draw out here is not simply the two master narratives at play in these two visions of the operation of the infrastructure of education, but how these are instituted through the figuration of a pupil embedded in a series of local dynamics, and an individual student for whom there is a service to be provided.

     

    The risks associated with developing covid-19 as a result of higher virus transmission and of pupils being out of school focused these differences, but what they revealed were pre-existing, conflicting ideas about how these relationships were assembled into broader social patterns and values — how school instituted, in the kinds of individuals it ‘produces,’ different kinds of imaginaries. [12] Such imaginaries are understood in relation to the infrastructural intersections around education, what that education should do, and its place in the broader society of which it is part, and how each infrastructural condition repeated or multiplied existing power relations. That is to say, that these two figures instituted as imaginaries specific master narratives about what worlds infrastructure should make, and how its users are positioned by it.

     

    For Bevan, the student is situated by an education infrastructure that supports delivery of a certain quality of education possible in a local authority, but which is distinct to public health infrastructure they are part of, albeit differently. The power relations which determine the educational infrastructure and its operating parameters are closely aligned to those of local authority and public government. There can therefore be a hierarchy between these which can be applied to the operations of these infrastructures. The student is thus situated by the principle of the civic social contract of becoming a citizen.

     

    For Hickey, two things are raised: one is that the experience for students of such conditions is indexed against their real material conditions as they experience traumas, in part, determined by access to and distribution of social support infrastructures, of which school is a part. However, there is also another implication of this indexing, which is that it freezes infrastructural figures into the interconnecting and interdependent relations that keep an infrastructure running. When, as Hickey makes clear, we privilege the interconnectedness of infrastructure (a duty beyond the four walls), service users — students — are required to submit to the necessary operating parameters of that infrastructure. This factor comes to be more pressing when infrastructure is increasingly understood as interfacing within a web of others, and as infrastructure becomes more interfaceable and modular. The power in this version of infrastructure is manifest in how this operating demand allows and disallows actions, values, and rights of its users. As Star argues, power is weighted in this case towards those designing and overseeing this infrastructural compact to keep it running as planned. Where this power is manifest in the continuation of the infrastructure, this model can be differentiated from Bevan’s, since in this latter case, where infrastructure remains separable, there is threshold at which its operations should not continue.

     

    As such, the differences between these positions, seen through an infrastructural lens, turned on different concepts of what risks where at play, and how these risks were imagined through the relationship between pupils, schools, the local communities, and the broader society of which they were part. These different priorities build different worlds in which the figure of the student means different things traceable by their role, capacities and limits within those worlds. The political capacity of each in turn rests on the expectation and possibility for change or deviation from carrying on as normal baked into each.

     

    Notes:

    [1] Star, Susan Leigh. ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’. American Behavioural Scientist 43, no. 3 (December 1999): 377–391.

    [2] See: Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. A School for Advanced Research Seminar. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2018.

    [3] For this concept of a different approach to reading depth, see: Love, Heather. ‘Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’. New Literary History, New Sociologies of Literature, 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 371–391.

    [4] See for instance: https://nic.org.uk/studies-reports/new-technologies/the-digital-twin-data-challenge-datasets/; or the use of data dashboards to integrate various information and social infrastructure such as for Sars-Cov-2 data: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk

    [5] See also: Winner, Langdon. ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ Daedalus, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity?, 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 121–136.

    [6] For further elaboration on this see Randy Martin / choreography / promise of infrastructure / description of Klein.

    [7] See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000q9f1 – 2:39:25–2:44:44

    [8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/14/london-likely-to-enter-tier-3-covid-restrictions-to-curb-surge-in-cases

    [9] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/15/greenwich-backs-down-over-plans-to-close-schools-in-face-of-legal-actio

    [10] Academies are non-charitable trust-run schools in the UK, which are directly funded by the DfE, and independent from local authority control. They are not required to follow the National Curriculum and can specialise; in sponsored academies, the sponsor can influence specialism, ethos and building. They are often criticised by teaching unions.

    [11] See: Rossiter, Ned. Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. New York: Routledge, 2017. xvii

    [12] Alongside developing a method for infrastructural figuration and how it ‘moves’ through the patterns of different infrastructural imaginaries, this difference is also interesting for thinking about how the virus has been thought of in the west, as a serious disease afflicting individuals, and in China, where they have experience of Sars on their society, where it is seen as a serious virus. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/where-did-coronavirus-come-from-covid

  • 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 political distinctions, including inequality and exclusion, without always naming them. When we say that inequality is “effectively” reproduced when “the people” are only partially recognizable, or even “fully” recognizable within restrictively national terms, then we are claiming that the positioning of “the people” does more than simple name who the people are. The act of delimitation operates according to a performative form of power that establishes a fundamental problem of democracy even as—or precisely when—it furnishes its key term, “the people.” (6)

    To return to a previous post on “indexing,” in which the issue is whether infrastructural forms of address such as the index enable forms of social performativity to become functional to infrastructure as well as the institution, the question here is if it can be said that: infrastructure works to or by excluding people, or persons, in the name of the people? That is infrastructure as a system of power and the automation of power, works to exclude the non-technical in order enable the contradictions of the institution of forms of recognition such as “the people,” precisely by modelling them out: instead indexing users, rather than citizens etc.? 

    The political question (the definitional one) becomes whether this modelling can model people back in, and thus to reconfigure how the balance between recognition and mis-recognition would be changed accordingly. (Perhaps this is already mapped out in the way that migrants are illegalized, despite in many cases wishing to be recognised, functionally, as human capital — again this calls for alternative modelling.)

  • Distance and Proximity

    Distance and Proximity

     

    Reading “Histories,” in Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, (2017), I am reminded of the sense of proximity at a distance with which Ned Rossiter describes the experience of infrastructure. While he is discussing the experience and perhaps politics of the data center, as necessarily detached from its users in order that it is seen as an infrastructure for an activity, rather than that activity’s object, this could also be used as a frame for thinking about the imaginaries and politics of the colonial and post-colonial infrastructure of Britain.

    Specifically this is to ask if it is the ability to understand infrastructure as ‘elsewhere,’ or at best as only of parallel significance, that motivates and mediates the British self-narration of colony and slavery as detached from its own sense of self? Is it the separation of function and consequence — making effects selective — that constitutes the movement expressive of and enabled by infrastructure which also affords a politics of denial of the structural consistency of British self-narration? That is, is it infrastructure that allows the contradiction of the institution, or an instituted set of beliefs, to exist fully and without collapse? (Here I’m also thinking of Simon Gikandi, Slavery and The Culture of Taste, and an interview with John Lanchester on his book, The Wall. )

    This is not simply a case of revealing a contradiction in a system in relation to its foundational imaginaries, but pointing to how, through infrastructure as a means of (in this case colonial) world building (the Atlantic slave trade, plantations and slave labour, infrastructures of resource, etc.), people subjected to and within that world are also treated as part of that infrastructure. In this way, infrastructure both allows structural denial, and sustains a narrative of separation and disposability.

    One of the great contradictions of the institutional idea of nation is that certain taxonomies of bodies and appearances contain within them an inherent claim upon that certain territory, a claim that is understood in theory as universally applicable. At the level of representation, a core component of the idea of nation, this claim is widely shown to be based on limiting exclusionary, uni-perspectival and motivated categorisations inextricable from the development and expansion of colonial and enlightenment projects. An infrastructural lens might add to this by suggesting how such claims are based on the function of these categories in the specific deployment and disposal of others at its symbolic and actual edge. Eddo-Lodge:

    “Despite its best efforts to pretend otherwise, Britain is far from a monoculture. Outward-facing when it suited best, history shows us that this country had created a global empire it could draw labour from at ease. But it wasn’t ready for the repercussions and responsibilities that came with its colonising of countries and cultures. It was black and brown people who suffered the consequences.” (2017, 15)

    Following Eddo-Lodge, that slavery’s toil took place for the most part in the colonies, and with enslaved people inherited as a property, implied that British slave-owners needed to have little experience or connection to its reality. The same cannot be said for those people who came to Britain under the understanding that the colonial connection to the “motherland” would mean a place within it. For example Dr Harold Moody, a Caribbean man who fought for Britain in WWI, and who came to Bristol in 1904 to gain a medical education. Once trained he was repeatedly refused work by Hospitals and Charities in the capital, for no other reason that race.

    Distance enabled a denial of the disposability of those lives, bodies and labour of the enslaved at the core of British history of the period. And when those people ‘returned’ along the lines of those colonial infrastructures which had displaced them, for the British fantasy of island self-sufficiency and class organisation to be maintained, the presence, and the history of connection needed to be ridded through racist violence, policing and structural barring from work, property and participation. “By 1958, Nottingham’s black population numbered 2,500. But a decade of legislation explicitly welcoming Commonwealth citizens to Britain had not changed attitudes on the ground.” (23)

    With echoes of today’s debate over Brexit, the NHS, and excluding workers from outside of the UK, labour under colony is treated as an infrastructure to be both deployable and disposable. Eddo-Lodge again:

    “The aftermath of yet another world war brought with it fresh labour demands, and Britain once again encouraged immigration. When the SS Empire Windrush sailed from the Caribbean to England, it carried 490 Caribbean men and two Caribbean women, all of whom were prepared to muck in with the job of restoring a post-war Britain.20 The Windrush docked at Tilbury in Thurrock, Essex on 22 June 1948. That same year, the government introduced the British Nationality Act – a law that effectively gave Commonwealth citizens the same rights to reside as British subjects.”

    The subsequent fate of the “Windrush Generation”, of hostile environment, of lost documents, of removing of basic conditions for life and work, and so on, is a clear demonstration of how labourers, converted to an infrastructural function in the eyes of colonialists can be removed from any institutional relation, or be isolated by that function from any deep institutional contact in the first place, with little concern given to those Commonwealth subject’s actual status and provision in the UK. Invited when necessary, forgotten and invisible when no longer needed.

    Moreover, by framing this history as a moment of ‘infrastructuring’ that reverses the former dynamics of empire, is this narrative a turning inwards of the concept of distance as it was transplanted with the post War migration from Caribbean and African into the popular national(its) imaginary and structures? As a reversal of previous imaginaries — the invisible infrastructural work of each lodging, employment, healthcare and citizenship refusal, each racist newspaper article and political speech white Britain took upon itself — distance is infrastructured into the proximity of a shared island. This invisible work that is required to hold an infrastructural world together facilitates a direct transposition of colonial logics of separation, displacement and disposability into the fabric of Britain so that migration would not to unseat white supremacy within British nationalism. That is to say, the infrastructural imaginary entangling distance and proximity was part of the creation of another layer of infrastructural difference or segregation in housing, in employment, in health care, in cultural and social participation and access, which still persists today — precisely despite alleged parity given by commonwealth status.

    This is in and of itself and important infrastructural story.

    It is also potentially supportive when looking at the way in which the digitisation, networking and computational modelling of infrastructure enables a mass expansion of what can be considered as infrastructure and treated as such. That is, once the idea of digital infrastructure — which acts and can be treated like virtual code, but also incorporates physical assets / objects / operations — allows pretty much anything to be modelled, organised, and operated like an infrastructure (see: Kief Morris on Infrastructure as Code, 2018; or Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, on Media Infrastructure, 2015; NIC, “Data for the public good,” 2017), these elements now treated as an infrastructural asset can also become both deployable and disposable. The work of Lisa Nakamura, Ramon Amaro, Aria Dean, and Sara Ahmed would be key here to showing how race is both a model and a focus of this disposability.

     

     

     

  • Consistency (or indexicality)

    Consistency (or indexicality)

    How to put Forensic Architecture into context?

    While Forensic Architecture’s engagement within institutional settings such as art puts pressure on the distinctions between aesthetic possibility and instrumental functionality, it is also possible to contextualise the experiential potential of their work through the infrastructural requirement for consistent and stabile designation of actors in its dynamic systems. I will attempt to develop this way of contextualising an infrastructural practice of art in the case of Forensic Architecture by sketching out how they remodel the ways in which the terms of infrastructural use are determined by indexing consistent and stable users.

    (more…)

  • How to think around infrastructural practices: Boundaries, Infrastructure and Figures

    In setting out to map the set of conceptual and concrete boundaries or boundary conditions that feature in my proposed study of infrastructure, immediately the problem is how to delimit and define what boundaries this means. Before seeing how these boundary notions might have congruence or dissonance, it’s necessary to find a more precise articulation of the boundary and its function in relation to infrastructure. Even just temporarily.

    So towards a sketch: if I understand infrastructure as concerned with repeatability (Marina Vishmidt, 2016) and scalability and interoperation (Easterling, 2016), boundaries are to do with the fixity and movability of the limits of this repeatability (See Sara Ahmed, 2000; Judith Butler, 2007), and as such concern the conditions of possibility, politics and institution of infrastructures.

    Before developing this sketch a bit further, holding infrastructure and boundary to these temporary definitions already necessitates some kind of movement, agency or animation of the relation or gap between them. If not yet a point of congruence, these terms enable some sort of binding or focus. They are, provisionally: instituting, transgression, autonomy, mobility, criticality, translation, multiplication (see Sandro Mezzadra, 2007; Easterling, 2016), contagion (see Mitropoulos, 2012), and figuring — with figuring at this stage being key to fleshing out this gap.

    To quickly shape what I mean by figure here, I would quote Lucy Suchman’s quote of Claudia Casteñda from her 2002 book Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds in her essay “Configuration” (2012) in full:

    “To use figuration as a descriptive tool is to unpack the domains of practice and significance that are built into each figure… Understood as figures, furthermore, particular categories of existence can also be considered in terms of their uses — what they ‘body forth’ in turn. Figuration is thus understood… to incorporate a double force: constitutive effect and generative circulation.”

    Coming back to outlining a working concept of the boundary in relation to infrastructure, initially we can look to instituted conditions of fixity. These can be shifted or modulated, but they are generally negotiated, antagonized against or enforced. This incorporates borders, nationhood and traditionally understood concepts of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. Autonomy might have been understood this way, and to some extent in certain philosophical traditions, the limits of the knowable intersect with boundedness as the condition of possibility.

    In taking on the argued shift from institutional to infrastructural critique (Vishmidt, 2016) — as not simply a development of art discourse, but a generative shift in what critique “produces” — I want to add in here digital and online network infrastructures, new social and political forms and the changed delineations between representation and participation that come with them. Taken together with the historical setting (~2008, Brexit, new-nationalisms…etc.,) I’m hoping to understand my original trouble finding traction and definition in ‘the boundaries and boundary conditions of my project via what Sandro Mezzadra has described as the multiplication of borders (2007). Here, I’m suggesting that these mixed infrastructural states engender a multiplication of borders. Prosaically, the additional interfaces that come with the infrastructural technologies bear this out. As with Mezzadra’s argument on the border, it is how and by who or what that this boundary is interfaced which is key — and as I’ve pointed to, the figures that do so.

    For instance, returning to the animation of the relationship between infrastructure (repeatability and flow) and boundaries (fixity and non-fixity) and how it might be relevant to instituting. Writing on the particular boundary conditions of the mobile-technological interface, Jason Farman argues that sensory-locative experience provided by the mobile interface is not simply a means by which to convey information or visualized data (2012). Farman argues rather that it institutes not a simple sender-receiver cultural or economic relation between a user and service, but becomes central the process of embodiment of that user — precisely because it acts to locate the user as a figure which is in part formed through the spatio-temporal reality of the infrastructures that cohere in each device.

    The figure of the user emerges at this institutional boundary; though this boundary might control the cultural transactions (Ahmed, 2000) of this figure, as Stephen Wright argues in his reclamation of the agency of “Usership” (as a deforming and transformative relation to an object, 2013), the privatization of institutional boundaries as they move onto the interface they have less control over how much the user-figure is interiorized or expelled from that institution. (Thusly, the user has to interiorize it themselves.)[1] While I’m pointing on the one hand here to the multiplication of boundaries via this focus on the figure of the sensorily-embodied user, I am also trying to point to the complication by the infrastructural mode of the strict inside-outside boundedness of the institution. This multiplication doesn’t produce more of the same.

    Coming back yet closer to the normative functions of the institution — the concern of institutional critique, in her contribution to Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford’s edited collection Inventive Methods (2012) Lucy Suchman draws together the question of categorical and object boundaries and the figure under the term “configuration.” Drawing on technology studies, Suchman’s use of configuration begins with its association with aligning technological objects and/or their users. I.e. to configure a device is to set its operating parameters to its particular or expected use cases. However, going further, configuration also offers for Suchman “a conceptual frame for recovering the heterogeneous relations that technologies fold together.”(48) That is to say, how, in contemporary technology discourses and practices, “humans and machines are figured together — or configured.” (49)

    For Suchman this is in part to explore how human-machine (etc.,) relations might be reconfigured. However, what I find useful about the figural reciprocity she describes, is how this shows that it is the boundary — the cohesiveness of each co-produced figure — that allows each actor to reach across and produce, affect or define the other. Without the boundary, it seems to suggest, figures could not act on each other.

    Perhaps then it is possible to say that the institutionality of the boundary rests (in part) in this movement of figuration between boundary and infrastructure. Instituent practices that seek to add a new variable into the conditions repeatability, and which as Gerald Raunig and Stefan Nowotny have argued (2016), rest precisely on this being active, mobile and figured, would seem bear this out.

    Of course what is missing here is a discussion of power. Nothing or nobody reaches across or establishes these boundaries without some sort of political or power gradient. At least in terms of the institution. In the relation between figure, boundary and institution as both a noun and verb, Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed are particularly instructive. Specifically it is Butler’s concept “performativity” as not simply a voluntarism, but a repetitious and ritualized anticipation that “conjures its object,” (xv) that I am thinking of.

    As an example: Writing on the “trouble” of the narrow categorical binarism of “normative” gender, for Butler it is the naturalization of the boundaries of gender into the body that makes its performance both interior and exterior, before and after its supposed performance or presentation. This already reaching across of the power nested within heteronormative gender boundaries, which is instituted within what is taken to be ongoing gender categories is I think as the bounded categories that Butler’s analysis troubles themselves.

    Tying some of these themes together is the question of recognition of difference — that which defines the boundary — as it is complicated by Sara Ahmed in her book Strange Encounters (2000). Mobilizing the figure of the stranger” as representing not a failure to recognize, but as embodying an affirmative act of recognition. In relation to boundary, the stranger (or “alien” as Ahmed caricature’s it to begin with) “recuperates all that is beyond human into the singularity of a given form.” (2) In so doing, the stranger promises danger at the same time as the promise of transcending limits — if we allow the stranger to live within an expanded community. What is at stake for Ahmed in this ambivalence is not simply how the stranger is represented, but how they enable the boundaries of who we are “in their proximity,” how the stranger “is hence, not just beyond human, but a mechanism for allowing us to face that which we have already designated as the beyond.” (3)

    If this seems to have taken the boundary in a particular direction in how it might intersect with infrastructures (especially vis-à-vis the institutions that create the self-awareness of the nation), it is worth reiterating that for Ahmed, it is not the transcending of boundaries that is at stake, but what the boundary takes from the other side (the stranger) in order to uphold or institute itself. (I.e. that it disallows the stranger a life of their own beyond the figuration of that difference, even invited in the community, that difference remains and excludes the fullness of difference.)

    If infrastructure concerns both repetition and controlled forms of interoperation and flow, that in Ahmed’s account (4) figuration of strangerness or outside encompasses a refusal of sameness — or a welcome of the stranger as the origin of difference — becomes key for thinking infrastructure in relation to institutionality. This is not least, given Keller Easterling’s discussion of infrastructur’s tendency towards “habituating without specific content.” (187) Since, as Ahmed puts it, the universalization (or fetishization) of the stranger as a figure that “functions to elide the substantive differences between ways of being displaced from home.” (5) That is, why boundaries might exist in the first place.

    Figuring as well as defining the movement between boundaries and infrastructure is therefore key. The figure of the stranger already highlights what is at stake in the boundedness of the institution within an infrastructural frame. Problematizing this figuration (as well as other terms of mobility or transaction) is perhaps where I could begin thinking the ambivalence of what infrastructure institutes.

    * Originally written as an attempt to shape an argument on art as an infrastructural problem, in January 2018.

    Bibliography

    Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Transformations: Thinking Through Feminisms. London?; New York: Routledge, 2000.

    Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge Classics. New York; London: Routledge, 2007.

    Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London?; New York: Verso, 2016.

    Farman, Jason. Moblie Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012.

    Mezzadra, Sandro. “Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude,” 2007. http://eipcp.net/transversal/1107/mezzadra/en.

    Mitropoulos, Angela. Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2012.

    Nowotny, Stefan, and Gerald Raunig. “Instituent Practices. New Introduction to the Revised Edition.” Transversal Texts, 2016. http://transversal.at/blog/Instituierende-Praxen-Introduction.

    Wakeford, Nina, and Celia Lury, eds. Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. Oxon: Routledge, 2012.

    Wright, Stephen. Towards a Lexcion of Usership. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013.

    [1] The terminology of sticking plaster or candy app in app development being usefully indicative of how this interiorization might be prompted