Searching for a stable definition of infrastructure the UK Office For National Statistics describes one attempt which temporarily separates the object from what it does:
One approach to measurement proposed in the literature is to set out either the characteristics or functions of infrastructure and assets that exhibit some or all of these are then included as infrastructure. Characteristics can be physical (how an asset looks or operates) or economic (how an asset behaves in an economic context, especially in relation to market structure or externalities).…
The drawback of using economic characteristics is that they often encompass a larger set of assets than might be desired in the definition of infrastructure. Buhr (2003) suggests that many of the characteristics of infrastructure used in the literature can be applied to assets outside conventional definitions of infrastructure. For example, much production machinery also has long useful lives and limited divisibility, while scale effects can be found in many industries. Monopoly power can also be seen to exist in some non-infrastructural industries, often conferred to some degree by intellectual property protection regimes.
The functional approach considers not what the asset is but what it does. Functions can be broad in scope and includes all assets providing infrastructure services. Important functions of infrastructure include all capital assets that maintain health and personal safety of the population (for example, the water and utilities networks, and flood defences), enable people to work (for example, the transport network) or the production and sale of outputs (for example, the energy, transport and communications networks).
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However, when also considering the ways by which infrastructure makes other things infrastructural, (Rossiter; Parks and Staroslieski) this definitional framework puts certain these becoming-infrastructures under certain tensions. When function is central value for instance, the conception of full functionality makes it as if this functionality must already be fully formed and non-contradictory. It must do as expected. It must have always have been so. Knowledge for example, must be total and fully-contextualized; it must be located and locatable. This puts pressure on the bearer of anything to have a function.
On the one hand this is crucial to the operation and imagining of consequential systems; but from a different perspective, working in education, this leaves little room for learning, exploring and developing a sense of self through this education. I often get the sense that students feel that their statements or thinking must be ready for a world that they understand as fully operational and indexed. This causes both silence and retrenchment of positions as well as a deeper consideration of what one is saying. It also puts the educational process as transformative and / or enabling under pressure, especially the possibility of gaining of agency through a changing understanding of an issue.
If we are to maintain the positive aspects of this consequential and socially-situated form of education, it seems in this case it is ever more necessary for the teaching process to also help suspend, or temporality detach the teaching scenario from having to know in advance; to allow the framing to in part be guided through the process of learning not simply stating.
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Is scripted reality a functional imaginary?
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This is interesting:
