On the Materiality of Infrastructures; Marisol Vasquez Core Response 3 / 5

    In Dourish’s “Protocols, Packets, and Proximity,” the author opens with an eerie peculiarity of One Wilshire, a building absent of humans, but filled with data centers and server rooms of telecommunication providers (183). In his illustration, Dourish implies the very absence of human beings at work within the building brands it as “unusual” (183). This truancy of laboring bodies instead replaced with the materiality of telecommunications equipment enables Dourish to center his analysis on a materiality of digital networks. Yet he opts to focalize not just the material itself, but “the materiality of the digital signals that cross them” (184). Consequently, Dourish justifies his approach by claiming attention towards signal crossing unveils “the processes at work” within the materiality of infrastructure.  Materiality seems intrinsic to the consideration of infrastructure, but as Dourish suggests, it may not be delimited by physical routing cables, but also suggests the flows of both data and matter (such as hydropower in Lisa Park’s essay). Considering the argument’s linchpin on flows of data across the infrastructural matter, does infrastructure suggest the material and immaterial, or is it mostly focused on the former? In this post, I intend to examine how some of the authors have interrogated the materiality of infrastructure. 

    This inquiry begins with Edwards, who lays forth the most ideological approach to ‘materiality’: rather than foreclosing matter as just raw material, in “Infrastructure and Modernity,” the author approaches the material bases of infrastructure through multiple scales comprised of ‘force, time, and social organization’ (6). To specify, force, for example, can link the geophysical to the human body (6). What lies at the center of Edward’s consideration of infrastructure is the question of what it means to be modern, and, a user whose condition of modernity rests on the linked multi-scalar infrastructures (27). Starosielski’s “Fixed Flow,” mirrors Edwards’ concerns on modernity through her case study on undersea cables. In one meditation, the author considers the human as user traversing this web of scales and considers the user as “not a rational agent who can locate herself in relation to such infrastructures,” but instead a “posthuman subject that extends across the network in multiple, unpredictable ways, intertwined with developments that are beyond any individual’s knowledge or control” (67). Is this example and Starosielski’s case study thinking across scales of force that may embed the human body and the geophysical? 

    Another tenet of the materiality of infrastructures, might also consider the uneven spatiality and temporality of data flows. One intriguing example occurs in Lisa Parks’ article describes the process of a community user to “send an email or share a photo with another person in Macha,” in which “the data would have to be routed up via satellite to servers thousands of miles away in Silicon Valley and then back down the satellite link through servers in Macha” (124 – 125). Thus, this uneven spatiality of data flow is bounded to questions of development, but as Parks argues, such an advancement towards ‘modernity’ is a questionable one. In Parks’ article she doubts the need for a rural village in Zambia to progress towards due to the rising “local, political, economic, and cultural challenges” imposed by the demands towards global integration (120). As much as I appreciated Parks’ skepticism towards the “straightforward path to ‘modernization’” (120), I felt some of the force of the case study and argumentation waned for me as she ended her article in an omission: “That so many women have never heard of the Internet caused me to reassess the very purpose of our project and to question whether or not we should be in Macha at all…” (132). Considering her own self-doubt emerging in this project, Parks further propounds on the politics and conflicts recurring: “…Since there is no way for Westerners to engage in collaborative ICT work without the baggage of colonial pasts, development ideologies, and class and power hierarchies, and since we inherit and, in some cases, unwittingly evoke or reenact these conditions, how can international research collaboration be organized to craft imaginings and uses of ICTs that will expose, recalibrate, and reorder such relations?” (132). While I am fond of this question she poses, I wonder if there could have been more discussion rather than a provocation on thinking about materiality in the methods her question demands. It seemed as if Parks omitted her own role in Western engagement with ‘colonial baggage,’ and gave a one sentence or so omission and then shifted into a larger meditation on Westerners and development. I felt like perhaps this article could have offered a more ideological analysis related to this rather thought-provoking question.