Indexing, Infrastructure and Social Performativity

Indexing, Infrastructure and Social Performativity | 27.03.2019

For a while now I have been thinking through the question of how one might experience or attempt to perform agency in an infrastructural setting. That is how can we think through a similar negotiation to that of the inside / outside of the institution in infrastructural terms, when infrastructure presents itself as a theoretically total object? (To begin with, this ideal of totality is easily dispelled: either scaling back to include whomever does not get counted as a proper user as far as an infrastructure is concerned (such as the border); or by simply considering the way that infrastructures layer and differentiate themselves and access to their functions, precisely by being layered (see: Bratton, 2015).) One complicated, though temporarily adequate answer might be found in the notion of “indexing.”

At a more anecdotal level, what I am also trying to point to here is the way in which students I have taught over recent years seem to be less interested in saying “what is,” but rather are engaging in positioning themselves in relation to what they perceive as privilege — theirs or other’s. This is perhaps an internalisation of what Judith Butler describes as the infrastructural politics of vulnerability: that is the ability to negotiate the individual life promised by infrastructure in a neoliberal political order, and the extent to which one is structurally able to actually life independently of one’s dependency on the hard, soft, social and natural infrastructures that support life. (Elon Musk’s escape to space being the prime example.)

To begin with, it is possible to think indexing in these terms in the following ways:

Indexing on a plane / in a field. I.e., where does one stand in a literal, figurative, imaginary, social (etc.) sense?
Indexing in relation to, these same things.
The index as a measure (see FA post)
The index as address (in both senses, of noun and verb) — as an identity and identification: making it possible to be addressed, but also speaking in advance to what can be addressed, politically as much as actually. (This is political insofar as it is both ascribed to a subject, and can be defined by a subject — both as an object and in relation to others. The illegalized migrant is indexed as such; the self-assigned member of an assembly or group defined through difference is another.) It is also a making sense of ones position in relation to not just institution as categorical site, but to infrastructure as spatio-temporal location.
The index as a complication of the notion of category. Google’s early tagline: “Search Don’t Sort,” is indicative of this sublimation of the category as container of informational characteristics into categories of objective characteristics — i.e. what can be done with it (can it be searched, indexed, etc.; is it an image, website and so on; one could also think about the way the memory of information itself is treated as a function of how to search it rather than the ability to recall it). This means not so much fitting into a category, but by placing oneself in relation to the category as meta-definition. This act could be mapped against the agency one might have to place or identify oneself on the one hand, or on the other, as Ramon Amaro has so well described, by being identified by others and other systems of averaging and deviation from the norm / pattern (which can be socially as much as mathematically determined, as with the notion of ‘work’ as the normal, against which deviation is measured). This is all to say: category still exists, but the membership of that category is relative and can be negotiated — at least in theory, and only if, there is an alternative infrastructure to support that negotiation: hence the need for platform in political struggles.

Preliminarily then, indexing might be the aiming for stability in the moving negotiations of infrastructural space and time, and its cultural, social, economic, political, spiritual, religious, imaginary, aesthetic, affective, (and so on,) consequences. The framing of negotiation draws upon the use of the term in The Constituent Museum, 2015:

NEGOTIATION refers to a constituent right to form, shape, and continually re-define relationships of power, as well as structures of inequality, through processes of active commoning. As such, negotiation is also taken to indicate the active process of reaching agreements that are, of themselves, both fluid, provisional, mutual, and constituent. (2015, 9)

However, where the agency of the constituent users of museum are offered an agency vis-a-vis the structure that defines this negotiation (the institution) which echoes the separation between institution and public, and therefore neutralising the institution in the face of constituent power and its critique of institution (Boltanski, 2011): what I want to stress with the infrastructural perspective, is the inseparability of user from structure — that they configure one another, to echo Suchmann, 2012. It is in this sense that indexing is useful insofar as it describes a condition of negotiating relation to or among, rather than simply position, in or outside.

To follow Judith Butler (2015), it is important here to stress that it is the social performativity of these indexes and positions, and their boundaries, that gives them consistency, not their systemic fullness or functionality. In other words, these infrastructural negotiations exist in as much as they are performed, not simply or only if they can be described as systemic or structural. This is a key point in the wresting of the infrastructural conversation away from the domain of technocracy and technocrats.

A question that remains is: How does infrastructure turn social performativity into a system, to institute it or to make it concrete, in law, culture, economy, behaviour or otherwise? Secondly, how does this incorporate a negotiation of the systemic and non-systemic: that is the individuated or singular as non-reducible or not relegated by the systemic?