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