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.)