I was struck by the several intersections across readings this week - ideas of the materiality of infrastructure, it's temporality, and most strikingly, the various explorations of infrastructure's connections to the body.
Lisa Parks’ essay very clearly delineates how the body is an intrinsic part of media infrastructures (Parks 2015). Not only does the biopower of labour put together the physical infrastructures of pipes and wires that make up the communication systems, build dams, and put up electrical cables, but the body is also central to the upkeep of the digital object and its users. Parks’ very lucid description of the repairman squatting on the ground, engaging bodily with the objects that he must repair, digital or otherwise, thinks of repair work as a tactile operation - where knowledge of the digital object comes from sustained tactile engagement with different kinds of objects. Parks notes that these embodied relationships to objects helps create solutions for technical breakdowns in places where resources are limited or running low. The idea that electronics are powered not just by hydropower but also by people who use manual labor to power their electronics, and “autodidacts” who have figured out how to repair them - sets the body squarely within debates on infrastructure, particularly in relation to their often informal/imaginative use in the Global South.
Shannon Mattern argues that, historically, bodies themselves have served as infrastructure (Mattern 2015). Mattern’s turn to an archeological reading of not just media objects but also media infrastructures can be quite generative. She argues that media technologies (and the embodied experiences of those who consume them) have always informed the evolution of urban spaces - that the city at its core is a “communicative space”. Through a range of historical examples, Mattern demonstrates how bodies themselves (“biopower and human intellectual labour”) have modulated the layouts of cities, in their quest for communication - messenger boys running through neighborhoods with telegraphs, Roman citizens transforming architectural facades by using buildings as substrate for public texts, traveling to the city center to hear news. Interestingly, Mattern also notes the use of use of flexible, imaginative, provisional forms of infrastructure to which people in much of Global South must resort, in compensation for a lack or overuse of resources.
Parks and Mattern’s invocation of these informal/shadow modes of use (and repair) in a time of lack, reminds me of the informal, “jugaad” modes of being in many south-asian countries. Scholars like Brian Larkin and Ravi Sundaram, have noticed a kind of “doubling” in infrastructures, wherein infrastructural systems act differently than they are meant to. While Larkin considers this through the prism of forgery and fraud, Sundaram unearths the more productive, poetic potentials of informal, “pirate” modes of using infrastructure (Larkin 2013 and Sundaram 2015). Outside of technocratic urban grids that aimed to control the flows of people and objects, to counter “problems” such as urban migration, pirate markets, urban sprawl - subaltern populations began to lay claim on infrastructures like electricity, TV connections, water supply, and roads - transforming both the city, and its infrastructures.
An excellent example of this phenomenon is the 2013 documentary Powerless (Kakkar and Mustafa, 2013), which follows the exploits of maverick electricity thief and autodidact, Loha Singh. Set in the industrial of Kanpur in North India, where residents face a chronic electricity shortage due to load shedding, electricity thieves, climbing on top of electrical poles all over the city, supply illegal electrical connections to people by plugging them into the official supply through live wires - at great cost to power supply companies.
Dalia Hatalova Blog Post #7/15
ReplyDeleteHi Tanushree, your emphasis on the body points to an interesting aspect of infrastructures – the physical masses of workers are still necessary for the running of systems, negating the imagery of an autonomous android that requires no human intervention. For me, this element also points to Paul N. Edwards's argument about technologies always being social infrastructures at their core, as I mentioned in class. The relationship between nature or the body and its imbrication in infrastructure garners the most attention when there is a rupture in the infrastructure's functionality. Edwards writes of the vulnerability of infrastructures stating that "it is no accident that modern apocalyptic fear stems chiefly from two sources: nuclear war, on the one hand, and ecological catastrophe, on the other" (Edwards 9). Yet, there is an additional catastrophe that appears at first unrelated to technical failure but can be so categorized if we accept human labor as an integral part of infrastructures. The prospect of strikes and labor unrest can cause catastrophic ruptures in existing technical systems, forming another possible disjuncture in the infrastructure alongside that of nuclear war or ecological catastrophe. As your presentation pointed out, labor remains an intricate part of supply chains in the modern era. It is by understanding the necessity of maintaining not only adequate infrastructure in a technological sense but workers with adequate conditions that current conditions can be maintained. Unfortunately, the threshold for maintaining laborers in livable but thriveable conditions is the common result of the current economic system. This circumstance also recalls Louis Althusser's argument that capitalism need is not only for continued production but, consequently, requires reproducing the means of production – including willing workers – in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Taken from this perspective, infrastructures are far from being freed from the issue of labor and are merely taken to a greater scale where the presence and necessity of workers that underpin this world are able to be disavowed.