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 are the ethics of studying actors whose identity you may never know? (1999, 379)
This problem of scale is compounded by the differing arrangements and operational/conceptual relationships constituting different layers or levels of the infrastructure/infrastructural intersection in question. For instance, an abstracted system-level view of an infrastructure scales un-evenly — in terms of form and manifestation and the research methods that are sensitive to these forms — into the experience and adaptations to meanings made by people acting as users of those infrastructures, inscribing their actions into a built infrastructure environment (1999, 383).
As well as being overwhelming, this scaling up of information as a relationship between moving and interconnecting, interoperating and systemic parts, not simply of quantity, makes models of ‘deep’ interpretation based on objects, texts, sites, etc., difficult.[3]
Infrastructure does not exist in one place, nor in one form, and its actions and constituent parts are often frozen behind the standardised and multiple background aspects of the unfolding every day. This contingency requires networked models that challenges the approaches of reading the depth of objects or subjects — what is ‘really’ going on beneath the surface — found in both the humanities and social sciences, by staying close with what is being described to describe what happens and is affected in its movement and action within the sphere of its influence.
Notwithstanding subsequent advancements of methods of data visualisation, which, in concert with the increased datafication of infrastructure / infrastructuring of data,[4] have meant that infrastructural traces can be used to show patterns not interpretable in single objects, sites, or texts, Star proposes that treating such mundane elements of infrastructural activity as a birth certificate form, the spreadsheet, or the standard bridge height as ethnographic site can offer moments of infrastructural crystallisation, tension, and manifestation. These can for Star offer, albeit abstracted, figures and forms for interpretive “‘reading’ [of] infrastructure and unfreezing some of its features” (1999, 384).
Consolidating the ‘invisible work’ of design, real-time adjustment, maintenance that shapes the use of infrastructure, infrastructural manifestations, points of interface, or transformation/ transition (like an official form, a bridge, a computer code) are points where ‘master narratives’ are encoded into infrastructures, and where others are excluded (384). For example, where phone books list only husband’s names for married couples, it is fair to assume — in part — that this reflects a heterosexually-based, sexist society (1999, 378); or where the bridges across the Grand Central Parkway between Queens and Nassau boroughs in New York were constructed to be too low for public transport, that lower income would be effectively barred from the richer Long Island suburbs, “not by policy, but by design” (1999, 389).[5] Studying where infrastructure becomes a differential condition is key to unpicking the ecological and relational world infrastructures shape.
Star’s focus is on large scale systems, which creates certain frame, one which tends towards this complexity. I am also interested in the question of scalability as a dynamic movement back and forth, between micro and macro, in the ‘meso’ scale. This ‘in between’ scale connects the systemic to the depth of interpretation. It suggests that the individual experience of infrastructure is not simply one of being determined by infrastructure — though this is a key frame, not least in terms of how power is distributed and experienced — but that infrastructuring is also a generative and creative act not limited to the infrastructural ‘object’ itself, but also an abstract projection of meaning that is shared and can be staged. It is through this generative movement between scales — imagined and manifest — that the scope of infrastructuring exceeds the object and lives in the performative relationship to how infrastructure patterns social worlds, in formal affective and cognitive and behavioural dimensions through which its relations are practiced away from that object itself (Thrift and Berlant). It is also possible, I am arguing, to think about how certain fields, such as those associated with knowledge production, mediation and dissemination stage infrastructural meaning as its infrastructural function.
If we can pivot towards the imaginary of infrastructure we can discuss and interpret the role of infrastructural imaginaries in practices that repeat certain imagined and manifest ideas about the movement between different scales, and different effects of this relationship. This approach offers a methodological surface, which develops Star’s proposal, on which to think about critical practices which are neither simply caught in infrastructural objects or technologies, nor simply representational existing within infrastructural determination.
For Star, certain objects/forms can be used to focus the various factors involved in the construction of infrastructure as they contradict, reveal, or suspend and delimit human agency and becoming. But to record patterning as the expression of an imaginary we can turn to the figures/figurations passing through it to act as tracers in what is established and manifest as a pattern that shapes and constrains movement through the meso-scales of an infrastructural field.
By following figures through the parameters, interoperations, processes, capacities, functions, positions, proxemics, promises, through which it is used, we can see the kinds of relations and transition that an infrastructure makes possible, that is what it is imagined as, in how the movement or transition expresses the relationships it makes up and connect with in the social field in which it is relevant.[6]
This approach means that infrastructural study does not have to be limited to the study of technology, nor of dominant or hegemonic forms of infrastructure — a model to which infrastructure tends out of the necessity that, to be infrastructure, it is expected, anticipated, and conjured as inevitable (see Thrift / Berlant). It can see infrastructure as a site of productive tension, between patterns of possibility, where infrastructure is not simply that which actors are subject to or determined by, and where infrastructural agency is, in part, a question of how infrastructure is performed.
*
An interview on the Radio 4 breakfast news flagship, the Today programme on 15 Dec 2020 offers a good example of the differences that such figurations can help to describe and trace in different kinds of infrastructural imaginary.[7]Specifically, at stake was how different imaginaries around the role, scope, operations and users of education as a social infrastructure, differently positions and values the individuals it produces in relation to the social field it is a member or part of.
In the last week of term before the 2020 school Christmas holidays, the government had had to strengthen restrictions aimed at fighting the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic because of steeply rising-infections in the capital, moving London from Tier 2 to Tier 3 restrictions.[8] As a sign of how quickly cases were rising, the move came two days before a planned review of tiering. However, a legal battle ensued between the government’s Department of Education (DfE) and Greenwich Council who has asked schools to close a week early because of the exponential rise in the borough. The DfE threatened legal action if the council did not keep schools open, in line with its national policy.[9]
Where these events focused government policy on the pandemic, but also its policy on education onto local events and conditions through the question of access to the infrastructures of education (whether they were open/closed), they also offer a view onto how the presence of that infrastructure manifests certain narratives about the role of education and how it should be experienced and offered. That is, how education sets in play a pattern into which children become individuals — despite the pandemic.
In the discussion over whether the schools should have closed or been kept open in response to spiking epidemic in London between Robin Bevan a headteacher at Southend School for Boys in Essex and President of the National Education Union, who had closed his school, and Rebecca Hickey, Assistant Director of a federation of 9 Harris academies in south London, two clearly distinct positions emerged.[10]
For Bevan, there were three priorities for any head teachers when questioning whether to stay open or go all online:
- “what is the very best way of sustaining quality of learning?”
- “what is in the best interests of public health?” Is it keeping 1000+ students in dense, over-sized and crowded classrooms over winter?
- “do we have sufficient resource, sufficient staffing” to keep school and facilities running and safe?
Ultimately, Bevan argued, the decision to close for safety has to rest in the hands of head teachers “in consultation with their local public health officials,” not ministers.
Hickey, argued against closure since: “head teachers have always had to be incredibly flexible.” More importantly, she said that she couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to many students while they were in lockdown situation, with “very profound levels of trauma that many [students] experienced…” Saying that, while there are “blended learning opportunities,” there are “far greater benefits for students and teachers from being part of the community and live.”
Such principles do not seem to be fundamentally at odds with Bevan’s argument, however, when Hickey describes how the risks of the Covid-19 disease were being managed, a difference is discernible. Across the 49 schools, Hickey stated, “incredibly stringent sanitation and safety restrictions were in place.” As such any case for closure would be made on a case-by-case basis: up to a point where there was “not enough staff to operate risk assessments.” Indeed, Hickey said that head teachers also had to consider parents’ needs, many of whom were key workers. “We have a duty well beyond the four walls of our building.”
Between these positions then are two models of risk, in which the pupil is figured in two ways. The former, for Bevan, is a pupil who is already part of a series of interlocking, and irreducible communities, whose relationship to risk and education is qualitative. This locates the pupil within a series of complex social contracts.
The latter, for Hickey the student is more of a service-user who can expect access to a well-managed service, which has adequate assessment of risks of interruption, but where access and service continuation is the main “impetus” (Hickey).
Here the duty “well beyond” the four walls of the school is indeterminate, it expands into any of the potential infrastructural interfaces that the academy can be seen to meet: but where the academy becomes in this sense not a qualitative boundary, but critical to other infrastructures too: many parents are key workers. Such dependency relies on and is critical to the fantasy of ‘seamless interoperability’ between infrastructures,[11] where access and operation must be preserved, since one failure will propagate to all connect infrastructures.
In this sense, where its inter-dependencies become both critical and indeterminate, the service-user, the student, must also submit to the continuation of that service. This individuates the pupil as a user within this service, in contrast to Bevan’s model, where the student is part of a complex set of shifting community pressures. At certain points the risk to one group outweighs another. Certainly, while the service-user model sees each student as an individuated figure, it also allows the student’s needs to be indexed against their specific situations: such as vulnerability to traumatic experience.
At the end of the interview, Bevan said he would stay closed, and Hickey committed only to a careful, case-by-case review of each Academy’s situation.
What I am seeking to draw out here is not simply the two master narratives at play in these two visions of the operation of the infrastructure of education, but how these are instituted through the figuration of a pupil embedded in a series of local dynamics, and an individual student for whom there is a service to be provided.
The risks associated with developing covid-19 as a result of higher virus transmission and of pupils being out of school focused these differences, but what they revealed were pre-existing, conflicting ideas about how these relationships were assembled into broader social patterns and values — how school instituted, in the kinds of individuals it ‘produces,’ different kinds of imaginaries. [12] Such imaginaries are understood in relation to the infrastructural intersections around education, what that education should do, and its place in the broader society of which it is part, and how each infrastructural condition repeated or multiplied existing power relations. That is to say, that these two figures instituted as imaginaries specific master narratives about what worlds infrastructure should make, and how its users are positioned by it.
For Bevan, the student is situated by an education infrastructure that supports delivery of a certain quality of education possible in a local authority, but which is distinct to public health infrastructure they are part of, albeit differently. The power relations which determine the educational infrastructure and its operating parameters are closely aligned to those of local authority and public government. There can therefore be a hierarchy between these which can be applied to the operations of these infrastructures. The student is thus situated by the principle of the civic social contract of becoming a citizen.
For Hickey, two things are raised: one is that the experience for students of such conditions is indexed against their real material conditions as they experience traumas, in part, determined by access to and distribution of social support infrastructures, of which school is a part. However, there is also another implication of this indexing, which is that it freezes infrastructural figures into the interconnecting and interdependent relations that keep an infrastructure running. When, as Hickey makes clear, we privilege the interconnectedness of infrastructure (a duty beyond the four walls), service users — students — are required to submit to the necessary operating parameters of that infrastructure. This factor comes to be more pressing when infrastructure is increasingly understood as interfacing within a web of others, and as infrastructure becomes more interfaceable and modular. The power in this version of infrastructure is manifest in how this operating demand allows and disallows actions, values, and rights of its users. As Star argues, power is weighted in this case towards those designing and overseeing this infrastructural compact to keep it running as planned. Where this power is manifest in the continuation of the infrastructure, this model can be differentiated from Bevan’s, since in this latter case, where infrastructure remains separable, there is threshold at which its operations should not continue.
As such, the differences between these positions, seen through an infrastructural lens, turned on different concepts of what risks where at play, and how these risks were imagined through the relationship between pupils, schools, the local communities, and the broader society of which they were part. These different priorities build different worlds in which the figure of the student means different things traceable by their role, capacities and limits within those worlds. The political capacity of each in turn rests on the expectation and possibility for change or deviation from carrying on as normal baked into each.
Notes:
[1] Star, Susan Leigh. ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’. American Behavioural Scientist 43, no. 3 (December 1999): 377–391.
[2] See: Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. A School for Advanced Research Seminar. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2018.
[3] For this concept of a different approach to reading depth, see: Love, Heather. ‘Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’. New Literary History, New Sociologies of Literature, 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 371–391.
[4] See for instance: https://nic.org.uk/studies-reports/new-technologies/the-digital-twin-data-challenge-datasets/; or the use of data dashboards to integrate various information and social infrastructure such as for Sars-Cov-2 data: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
[5] See also: Winner, Langdon. ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ Daedalus, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity?, 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 121–136.
[6] For further elaboration on this see Randy Martin / choreography / promise of infrastructure / description of Klein.
[7] See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000q9f1 – 2:39:25–2:44:44
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/14/london-likely-to-enter-tier-3-covid-restrictions-to-curb-surge-in-cases
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/15/greenwich-backs-down-over-plans-to-close-schools-in-face-of-legal-actio
[10] Academies are non-charitable trust-run schools in the UK, which are directly funded by the DfE, and independent from local authority control. They are not required to follow the National Curriculum and can specialise; in sponsored academies, the sponsor can influence specialism, ethos and building. They are often criticised by teaching unions.
[11] See: Rossiter, Ned. Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. New York: Routledge, 2017. xvii
[12] Alongside developing a method for infrastructural figuration and how it ‘moves’ through the patterns of different infrastructural imaginaries, this difference is also interesting for thinking about how the virus has been thought of in the west, as a serious disease afflicting individuals, and in China, where they have experience of Sars on their society, where it is seen as a serious virus. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/12/where-did-coronavirus-come-from-covid