Leaky, imprecise infrastructures [Rohan - core post #4]

This week’s texts explored infrastructure at various scales to offer a collective intervention in pushing media studies to engage with not only the content of culture and media but also the infrastructure by which it is spread.

The scale of analysis across the texts ranged from the local to the global, with infrastructure operating as an analytic scaffolding across space and time, as Edwards (2003) described. Mattern (2015) and Parks (2015) most effectively illustrate this bridging function of infrastructure, with Mattern connecting layered histories through a more literal take on “media archaeology” than we’ve previously discussed and Parks best illustrating how infrastructure inevitably brings the local and the global into close proximity while also building on historical layers of infrastructure, such as water systems. On the other hand, Starosielski (2015) and Posner (2021) focus explicitly on global objects of analysis and use infrastructure to highlight compelling politics in their histories.

While connecting across histories was a common theme among all the texts, Mattern avoided a simplistic analysis by describing “leaky” infrastructure. She said, “through ‘excavation’ we can assess the lifespans of various media infrastructures and determine when ‘old’ infrastructures ‘leak’ into new-media landscapes, when media of different epochs are layered palimpsestically, or when new infrastructures ‘remediate’ their predecessors” (p. 103). In other words, in examining infrastructure it’s important to resist overfitting the archival record with presentist assumptions about continuity. Finding evidence of historicity in contemporary infrastructure can mean many things that may not be so simple to interpret. For example, Starosielski described how telecommunications has been constructed along historical routes that serve to reinforce without quite repeating history: “rather than extending uniformly across space, cables have often remained embedded in existing geographies, and their effects on media industries, user experiences, and the politics of circulation occur unevenly around the world” (p. 56). The conclusion is not a binary classification of cables and other infrastructure as colonial vs. not, or old vs. new, or local vs. global, but rather something in between and sometimes imprecise.

This impression featured prominently in Posner’s article, which was my favorite this week because of how clearly and effectively she demonstrated imprecision and particularity. Against expectations of infrastructure scholarship to focus on materiality, Posner demonstrates how the global supply chain—an inevitably tangible system of “hard” goods—in fact operates as a strategically ambiguous system of flows and expectations. She highlights an “informational zone—the dance between omniscience and ignorance—as a critical feature of supply-chain software and the industry at large” (p. 5). This “disavowal of particular information”, she argues, is not merely a peculiar or novel or interesting feature of the global supply chain, but in fact a strategically necessary condition for its success. This point reminded me of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in that it’s necessarily impossible to measure flows in the global supply chain with any certainty at a given point in time. This is due in part, of course, to capitalism’s instinctive blurriness between capital and commodities—and capital and humanity. Despite Posner’s resistance to the impulse toward material specificity, I found her article incredibly satisfying in her precise accounting of the imprecision of data and logistics.