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 […]

This is really only a note, but I wanted to get something down before forgetting. It has to do with the capacity for denial that comes with infrastructure: this comes with both the notion of infrastructure as a unified, “seamless” whole (see: Rossiter, 2017, xvii); and that infrastructures rather create a fragmented series of worlds which can be reassembled as “accidental” wholes. (See Bratton, 2015, 8) Both of these states are facilitated by the principle/constraint iterable inter-operability that means infrastructures can function with each other, and with other things. However, since this inter-operation is scalable concept, as in all sites, instances, […]