Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

Introduction: Penny Harvey

As you would expect of an event where the aim is to polarise rather than to reach agreement, and where the capacity to multiply the possible meanings of the motion are the stock in trade of seasoned debaters, ‘infrastructure’ served as a target for both trenchant critique and for creative analytical possibility. In the debate, as you might also expect if you are familiar with the ways in which these very particular conversations unfold, infrastructure was dismissed as both too specific and coherent an entity (unwelcome for the way in which it erases and side-lines other concerns), and as far too vague and open-ended (infrastructure can refer to so many different things that it holds neither conceptual worth nor analytical purchase). Nevertheless, it produced a great topic for debate because people were moved to react. This capacity to enthuse and infuriate is quite recent and seems to respond to the rather sudden appearance of ‘infrastructure’ on the anthropological agenda. When Hannah Knox and I began our research on the roads of Peru in 2005, the concept was not particularly visible. The subsequent ubiquity of AAA panels, workshops, special issues and edited collections had not taken off. By the time we published the work in 2013, infrastructure had acquired such a presence in both academic and political debate that to write about roads without addressing the growing literatures on infrastructure would have appeared perverse (Harvey and Knox, 2013). At the very least, we would have had to explain why we didn’t find the concept useful. Concepts that appear to arrive out of the blue often excite and repel in equal measure. The ‘turn’ from one concept to another always stands in danger of simply re-naming, or reinventing previous analytical possibilities and losing the value of such alternatives in the process. Conceptual histories are an invaluable resource to counter that tendency, and luckily these are beginning to appear (see Carse, 2016).

Whatever opinion one might hold on the generative possibility of the concept for anthropological theory, there is no doubt that infrastructure demands our attention in a variety of ways. However, it is not always easy to establish what kind of attention this might be. The term invokes quite different relational fields for different people. One core tension that tends to emerge in discussions of infrastructural politics is that between the material form (the ‘thing’ and its constitutive relations) and the connective capacity of such forms that are built to enable circulation or to sustain particular life projects (the structuring effects of infrastructural forms). Awareness of the tension between these two possible approaches has been extremely generative for ethnographic study. A road invites us to explore its constitutive relations: the materials, the finance arrangements, the politics, the dreams of progress, the design (which could be meticulous but might be inadequate) and the force of contingent events that routinely disrupt the best laid plans. It also invites us to explore the emergent effects, the ways in which specific material transformations shape social worlds, and create new environments. Here the question is less about how a system comes into being, than it is about the life worlds that such systems sustain and/or destroy. If we take this understanding of infrastructure as the material conditions of possibility for human or indeed for other than human life, then infrastructures offer specific ways of thinking and of investigating human worlds without embracing human exceptionalism, or relying on singular definitions of the human, the natural or the cultural. And herein lies the theoretical interest for contemporary anthropology as we try to contribute to debates about environmental futures, climate change, energy, food and water.

Analytically then, infrastructures are increasingly approached as ecological forms, not single built structures but the material conditions of possibility for life. Such conditions are differentially distributed. Infrastructures involve categorical distinctions, but like all ecological systems their effects are non-linear, their outcomes uncertain, their boundaries blurred. Feedback loops continually modify structures, and allow researchers to find plasticity in systems that might otherwise appear obdurate. An infrastructure from this perspective is a relational space of investigation, where researchers can explore fluctuations, or trace the dynamic shape of what thrives and what dies.

And what of the politics? The debate generated less discussion of the political than it did of the infrastructural – but politics are central to infrastructural concerns. And politics have propelled infrastructures into the limelight in recent years. Human beings are busily building and designing their way into the future, working with a notion of infrastructural investment that becomes increasingly contentious. Across the planet, we can see infrastructural responses to environmental threats. Many of these infrastructures support the promise of economic growth and are needed to respond to the unplanned consequences of previous investments. As investments increase so too does awareness of unreliability, of destructive outcomes and differential value. As the material conditions of possibility for industrialisation begin to age and to fail, infrastructures appear as both problem and solution. As such they emerge as self-evidently political, as sites of struggle.

Whether such appearances reconfigure anthropological approaches to the political is another matter. The participants to the debate are required to come to different conclusions – and the final vote in turn requires the audience to decide one way or another. Taking up the luxury of an introduction to a debate that has yet to unfold, I would add one consideration that disturbs the need to polarise – and that is the recursive quality of infrastructural relations. In their elaboration of the notion of ‘infrastructural inversion’, Bowker and Star (1999) asked us to take the ‘infra’ quality of infrastructural relations seriously. They suggested that there was much to be learned by working out how things got to hang together in particular ways, by unpicking the process. Working with the understanding of infrastructures as the ground on and through which other things take place, and other relations play out, Bowker and Star effectively posited a method of figure/ground reversal for bringing infrastructural relations into view. However, by interrogating the conditions of possibility of particular infrastructural forms (as manifest in both their constitutive relations and their structuring effects), this method also reveals that an infrastructure that comes fully into view loses something of its infrastructural force. A spectacular new motorway disrupts the figure/ground relation just as surely as pot-holes, cones and traffic jams do. They direct attention to the taken for granted, and by doing so expose the relational infrastructural fabric to interrogation, and thus to politics. Connections appear as contingent, even fragile.

In this debate, we were asked to evaluate the current anthropological attention to infrastructures. Some were frustrated by infrastructures’ capacity for relational proliferation, others found this generative capacity to be the most fascinating feature of infrastructural relations. Either way infrastructures emerge as classic anthropological entities, relational distributed things that are also and simultaneously relations between things. They can be simultaneously visible and un-noticed, they are the objects of design and yet always ultimately unknowable as their potential relational fields are only ever partially realised. The extent to which these relational entities reconfigure anthropological approaches to the political will thus depend on how we situate both the infrastructures and the political. These questions may or may not be welcome, but they will surely engage us for some while to come.

The presentations

Laura Rival opposing the motion

Abdoumaliq Simone proposing the motion

Sian Lazar opposing the motion

The debate

Soumhya Venkatesan (Manchester): At the end of the four presentations, the sense that I came away with is that infrastructure can be necessary as a way of engaging with the political, but is not sufficient. Would that be a fair summary?

Lazar: Yes!

Rival: Not quite, for we still need to identify something specific. If you say ‘life form’, you know there are trees, or ‘fish’, and so forth. The problem with the way infrastructure is being used is that it covers such a great range of heterogeneous things and processes that it is difficult to talk about it as a coherent whole to which the political would equally apply.

Bear: I’d like to return everybody’s attention to what the motion was, because the motion wasn’t that attention to infrastructure is sufficient or insufficient to the understanding of the political. The motion was about whether attention to infrastructure reconfigures our understanding of the political, of what the political might be and the grounds for the political. And I think that it does do that. We are not making an argument that ʻall of politics is encompassed through attention to infrastructureʼ. What AbdouMaliq and I are arguing is that by paying attention to infrastructure we see the kind of trans-individual ground from which politics emerges, for what counts as politics and what doesn’t count as politics. It’s not that every kind of politics is encompassed within attention to infrastructure.

Richard Werbner, Manchester: To me, the word reconfigure must be at the heart of whatever you say, and I accept the point that Laura made as she tried to do that. Are we facing something radically different or are we not? So I would say, let’s hear from the panel how they take a stand with regard to the long-term attention, which anthropologists have paid, for example to dams. Where is the historic attention to reconfiguring the political in your argument, both sides.

Bear: Thank you Richard. I think there’s very little disagreement between you and me on this, which is why I gave a kind of historical perspective on the emergence of different kinds of circulatory systems with different sorts of financial arrangements, which generate different kinds of political possibilities and different kinds of volatilities as well. So, while I think that the Kariba dam in Zambia, for example, was infrastructure in that moment of World Bank loans as a political gift of time, and it generated a particular kind of boom of the copper industry, which had a kind of longer term boom than the sorts of infrastructure and the finance instruments that back them now. There has been a historical shift between that moment of infrastructure and the contemporary moment. And that historical shift involves a different conceptualisation of what infrastructure is. Infrastructure is now seen as all of these social networks, as emergent relations within the city that can be capitalised in new ways, that can have new sorts of property relations. And the sorts of lending structures now that exist are totally different from these World Bank lending structures, and they generate different kinds of volatility and different kinds of possibilities for politics. The lending relationships now are entirely marketised relationships. So it’s not just that infrastructure has been partly built by private agencies, which was true of the Indian railways. What’s happened in fact is that there are these special-purpose vehicles that are developed and in which people can invest, in infrastructure bonds and their derivatives, which institute new kinds of credit rating systems in the loans … so everything is driven by a much more marketised short-term speculative volatility. This hollows out the possibility for governments to take political decisions about the economy in a way. These relations didn’t exist when the Kariba dam was build. So I really welcome your question because I think it gets to the heart of what I was trying to express: that infrastructure is historically emergent, and attention to the forms of infrastructure that we have now reconfigures our understanding of the political. This is because the kinds of infrastructure that we have now hollow out the possibility for political decision-making on the economy.

Rival: My paper too tried to deal with history and the unique conjuncture in which we find ourselves today. In fact, I have thought more than once that I could have equally argued in favour of the motion! Understanding the environmental crisis we are going through and being conscious of the seriousness of the ecological problems we are facing should lead us to renewed political engagement. Look for instance at this short video by and about Ecuadorians trying to find a political solution to the problems that their country’s dependence on oil is causing.

[Rival shows a video on Ecuadorian Yasuni-ITT initiative, which seeks compensation for avoiding pollution by leaving oil untapped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOX9rGaNpec]

Too much, I think, has been written on the commodification of nature and not enough on the value of nature and the politics of these values. The Ecuadorian Yasuní-ITT Initiative was presented at the COP 15 (Conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) in Copenhagen in 2009, but people today have forgotten that this politically daring proposal first came from a small country in Latin America, Ecuador. At the COP 21 in Paris tomorrow (6 years on), the idea of keeping the oil underground indefinitely will be debated. It is no longer taken to be a utopia! The point, however, is that it will be negotiated as part of a different political agenda by other political actors; it will be presented as a gift to the world from the North, and not as an illuminated proposal from the developing South.

Lazar: When I saw the motion I initially didn’t question the reconfiguration part of it. My problem is whether it is a welcome reconfiguration of politics. That’s why I differ from Laura [Rival]. I agree that it brings in an extra element. Perhaps before, people might have thought about development of infrastructure, and I’m talking of dams and roads and cables and pipes and electricity and telecommunications, that kind of physical infrastructure. I think the debate used to be about the state, and the people, the state and the citizens. It’s brought in other actors, but it’s still about governance and provision of services in my view. And I think the political itself is about very much more than the kinds of claims we can make upon different actors for resources or services. It’s got to do with all sorts of different kinds of antagonisms. My answer to Soumhya was kind of flippant, but you could do an anthropology of the political that doesn’t include infrastructure at all. So, in that sense it’s not necessary. I just think that if we focus on the materiality and infrastructure than we start to miss things. That is why I think it’s not welcome. I’d actually want to go back to all the anthropologies of the political that are so much about relations in between people, for instance kinship, childrearing, these kinds of things. The kind of old-fashioned anthropology.

Simone: And that’s fine! I mean, if we asked the question: what is it that we can do together, right now? If we’re going to address what is it possible that we can do together right now, we have to consider: well, what is there between us? What’s between us can be the fact that most of us are anthropologists, I would presume, and people come from particular kinds of universities, and there’s a lot of ways in which we can elaborate the notion of that relationship. But what is also between us is something very material. We’re sitting in this room, we’re sitting up here, there’s a table here, you’re sitting behind these tables lined up in particular kinds of rows … we’re speaking … you [the audience] don’t do most of the talking … there’s something very physically, materially between us and what is between us has a lot to do with what it is that we can do together. So if what it is we can do together is a question of the political, then we always ask that question being situated in some kind of infrastructural environment, which gives us particular ways of seeing each other, particular ways of being proximate to each other, of smelling each other. We’re not obviating all of the other ways in which we are connected to each other. But we are trying to find the way in which to bring in another modality, another locus, through which we can raise the question: what is it possible for us to do together?

Bear: Can I answer Sian’s point about understanding politics through kinship? Sian’s point gets us to the point of you would miss if you didn’t take into account infrastructure. It is this missing element that AbdouMaliq has just spoken about very evocatively too. Let’s take the case of kinship and politics: what would you miss, for example, amongst the working class families that I worked with in Howrah (Kolkata, India). What would you miss about their kinship relations and politics if you didn’t take into account infrastructure? What you would miss is the central process that’s disrupting their strategies of accumulation by care within their households. Because what’s going on around them is the seizing of public land by agencies such as the Port Trust, the flattening of their houses, the building of middle class housing (which enables another kind of kinship) and the disruption of these families. As a result of these changes women then have new gender relations, new relations with their children because they are separated from their husbands, their homes are flattened, they have to seek charitable relations … It’s a whole reconfiguration of kinship, and if you didn’t pay attention to the infrastructural elements of this, the fact that physical houses are being flattened, new networks of capital are being invested, there are debt relations between the Port Trust and the central state that flows of capital are moving along for the repayment of central government debts … if you didn’t pay attention to infrastructure in relation to these transforming kinship relations, I’d say you would understand very little about them or the political relations they are connected to.

Rival: I do not disagree at all with you, AbdouMaliq or with you, Laura, for that matter. What I am disagreeing with is the idea that the theories that are brought into our discipline today via the anthropology of infrastructure allow us to understand the material in its relationship to the social in a way which is novel, and which allows us, therefore, to reconfigure the political. Not at all! The link between the material and the political was already there in the writings of Marcel Mauss. This tradition has lived on in France through the work of André Leroi-Gourhan, Pierre Lemonnier and others. It remains our best starting point. Bruno Latour too comes from this tradition, but he seems to have missed bits of it on the way, so I prefer not to engage with his work directly, and go back to the Maussian roots instead. There are fertile roots in the North American cultural anthropology tradition too. We could go back to Leslie White, but suffice it to say that if we open a popular textbook from the 1970s such as Marvin Harris’ Culture, People, Nature, we find entire sections titled ‘infrastructure’, ‘structure’ and ‘superstructure’. Anyone revisiting Harris’ materialism in the light of Pierre Lemonnier’s discussion of the material dimensions of life will quickly realise that there are still untapped treasures in Durkheim, Mauss, White and other early anthropologists and archaeologists. Recent studies in the anthropology of infrastructure, no matter how accomplished, pale in comparison to these treasures.

Maria Lourdes Salazar (Manchester): I think it is important to notice a difference between infrastructure in each particular context and how anthropological project developed in each particular context. So, in Mexico, anthropology is much more politically engaged than in England. Also, are we now moving away from a focus on culture to one on infrastructure?

Bear: Yes, it would be very interesting to have a longer conversation about the history of infrastructure as a historically emergent project within Mexico versus within London. That would be an important conversation to have as part of attention to infrastructure. I don’t think either AbdouMaliq or I are claiming that there’s a kind of single understanding of infrastructure that is at work in all of these situations. In India, for example, there is still a public works department. So there’s obviously a historical layering of an older style of infrastructural project that has been sustained through the Nehruvian period and post-liberalisation. In terms of political engagement: you’re suggesting there is a greater possibility for a political alliance between anthropologists in Mexico and social movements there whilst there isn’t here. I would beg to differ. There’s a very interesting group that is part of the LSE anthropology department that’s organising a free university of London in some of the housing estates that are currently threatened by privatisation, by the selling off of land, and I think that there are equal possibilities for engagement around these political issues.

Jeanette Edwards (Manchester): I found Sian’s engagement with the non-infrastructural aspects of the political quite compelling in the sense that I found myself thinking through gender, class, sexuality; and she gave us a very evocative example of the white, suave, smiley, politician in Argentina who generates fear, disgust, anxiety, shock. Those kind of emotional resonances or responses, Sian seems to be suggesting, are not infrastructural. They are part of the non-infrastructural. So using that example and suggesting that a focus on infrastructure would divert us from attention to that kind of politics of antagonism, shock, fear, disgust. I’d like the proposers of the motion to pin down briefly and clearly why they think that infrastructure can address those aspects of the political.

Simone: In Jakarta, between now and the next 5 years, a half a million units of purportedly affordable housing are going to be provided. This is an enormous volume of infrastructure. And the modality in which this infrastructure is being presented assumes a particular kind of imaginary about how that infrastructure is going to be inhabited. These are vertical towers, projects of 17,000 units in one place, 16 square metre studios and at most 42 square metre two-bedroom apartments. The imaginary of who inhabits these places is one of a kind of scaled-down nuclear family or individuals. In order to make these units affordable, this is the way they are going to be built. But no one building them assumes that this is the way in which they’re going to be occupied. So then in some ways, the modality of affordability and how that is materialised in actual infrastructure introduces a disjunction in terms of how the finance is actually raised, the kinds of social forms through which the finance is raised and then actually, how these things are inhabited. So you have a kind of querying of the residential base of these new infrastructures. Because they end up being inhabited not by individuals and scaled-down nuclear families, but a rearranged sociality whereby different kinds of people collaboratively get together and assume control over perhaps 9 to 10 contiguous units. So, in some sense, it requires a whole new reworking of what a household is, what an extended family is, what the kind of gender relationships are within a form of inhabitation which, in some ways, is occasioned by a particular kind of process of infrastructural development, but not inhabited in that way. What kinds of words do we have to talk about this sociality? What kinds of concepts do we have to think about what is the notion of coherence? So it does address issues of gender and affect and how relationships are managed within everyday life.

Bear: We inhabit bodies, to state the obvious, and as Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out, our sensation of being in our body is generated from the atmosphere around us, and it’s generated from the experience of moving through spaces, of what happens in and to the spaces around us. For that reason, I don’t see any separation between the infrastructural and the affective. As AbdouMaliq put it earlier the infrastructural is everything that is between us, it’s making us feel the way we feel, maybe a bit tired at this moment in the room or whatever else. Our experiences are generated in part by the aisthesis that come out of infrastructures. Now, to give you a very concrete example of this … Sian didn’t tell us about politics, actually. She told us about voting behaviour. And I think AbdouMaliq and I have a much more interesting definition of what the political is than just voting behaviour. But, to give an example of voting. In Howrah where I worked with these working class families, one day I was shocked to see in the newspaper that a whole section of the slum had burnt down just next to where I was doing my fieldwork. It was during an election, and suddenly spectacularly, a whole range of politicians including very famous ones descended down onto these ashes and ruins. Their images were then broadcast through media infrastructures showing their concern, carrying out charitable acts in relation to the people who had lost their homes … and what was very interesting to me was that that collapse, that kind of disappearance, that sudden disappearance of that physical infrastructure generated a kind of political capital for these leaders. But not only that, it created an atmosphere of fear, of a sense of the riskiness of your life as a working class person living in this area, that your house could suddenly disappear around you, which then influenced the result of the municipal election. Now, this is politics as lived in an atmosphere and in an environment as a form of aesthetic that is generated by the presence and absence of infrastructural forms.

Lazar: I want to come back on the accusation of not talking about politics, but about electoral politics. I want to do that by saying that surely, there’s something political about the kind of adversarial structure of this argument, the way we’re all set up opposing each other, not in the Mouffian sense of the political as a kind of an antagonism, but literally a debate with a motion that you argue against, and you have to put yourself in a particular position, and my own desire to meet in the middle! All I want to do is say: ʻyes, I agree with you on this but I slightly disagree with you on this, and I think we’re kind of agreeing on this particular issueʼ. And I think both that desire to meet in the middle, which I think is a really gendered desire and it’s in my conditioning – maybe you could talk about it as infrastructural, these kinds of questions, these kinds of setups … But does it help to do that? And I just don’t think it does. We have other languages, is what I am saying.

Michal Murawski (UCL): I want to bring up another long-standing understanding of the term ʻinfrastructureʼ, which I think has been on the background of many of the presentations. This is the Marxist understanding of infrastructure as a more or less determinant base, on which some kind of superstructure arises, or which over-determines this kind of superstructure. I was at the AAAs just now and there were 13 panels on infrastructure there. And in many of these panels, the only context in which the Marxist understanding of infrastructure was mentioned was people disassociating themselves from it by saying, for instance: ʻI’m not talking here about infrastructure which is causally prior, or which is deterministic, or which is Marxist. I mean infrastructure as assemblage; infrastructure as a bundling of agencies or a flat infrastructureʼ. Surely, this is somewhat curious. To me, the potential of infrastructure for thinking about the political is that allows us to think about not just emergence but also about effective causality, and to not necessarily have a dichotomy between these two things. So, I just wanted to ask both sides of the debate whether a Marxist, let’s say over-determined rather than deterministic, notion of infrastructure is incompatible with a political notion of infrastructure; whether it is obsolete; whether perhaps this is the time to bring Marx back into the debate and let the elephant into the room.

Bear: I suppose more than anybody else, I’m influenced by Marx in my approach to infrastructure, in particular Capital volume 2, which is all about circulation and exchange and the movement of capital around these circuits of exchange. It’s a fabulous book for capturing the forms of exchange, the circulatory systems that existed at that point in the 19th century and there are these wonderful sections on the workers’ relation to the machine, on railways, on how the capitalists deal with decay in their machines … So I’m centrally inspired by that and I think that it goes very well, as many have people pointed out, with an anthropological perspective, because anthropologists focus on the concrete, that’s how we use our case studies and our examples. We use them in a particular way, the way that Andrew Barry says metallurgists use their examples, as these really vital things. What I would say is that Marx didn’t live now, and his Capital volume 2, following these circuits, would look very different now. And I guess what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to capture these circuits now.

Rival: Infrastructure is about the material world, so we are talking about material culture, but material culture in a way that forces us to re-engage with the ʻinfraʼ part of the term ‘infrastructure’. What do we mean by ‘infra’? Of course, you’re absolutely right that Marxist understanding forces us to think about effective causality rather than emergence. I totally agree with you, but, like Laura, I would also say that Marx did not live in the 21st century, and that we have to reinterpret him in the light of a crucial issue: the dualism of nature and culture. Was Marx really thinking along western lines, dividing humans from the rest of nature? He was, and he was not. Parts of his work were along these lines; others were not. This is why we now have a rich tradition of Marxist ecology, which is revisiting Marx’s subject-object dialectic. This is also why Pierre Lemonnier (a former student of the French Marxist anthropologist Maurice Godelier) thinks that being a true materialist involves paying serious attention to materiality and to what he calls ‘technical choices’. In a recent article in which he talks about the debates that were taking place in France in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, he laments the fact that all French Marxist anthropologists were structuralists with little interest in the concreteness of things. ¹ Lemonnier says:

It was horrible, it was terrible! They all said they were materialists but the only things that really interested them were empty, abstract categories. The only material aspects that really interested them were the productivity of labour and the social relations of labour. All other aspects of work and activity normally present when humans engage their lives materially had completely disappeared from their analysis.

The sensory, the affective, or the spiritual are very much part of the Maussian tradition of habitus, though. These are the dimensions that attach us to the world. So, yes, we have to reengage with Marx, but in doing so, we need to get to the materiality of things in a way that does not reproduce the dualism of nature and culture or assume that society has no environment. We need to overcome our social bias. The social is neither completely separate nor totally autonomous.

Lazar: I think that the Marxist notion of infrastructure is much better than much of the anthropology of infrastructure that I see happening, including as you say in the AAAs. It is this kind of tentacled monster that just took over everything. And I think that’s what I’m uncomfortable with, that voraciousness of a single concept.

Ben Campbell (Durham): As an anthropologist who thinks about the politics of sustainability, I’d like it if you could see to what extent this motion helps us understand infrastructure as something that is more politically accessible to people who would have an infrastructure other-wise, with an other kind of wisdom, with other kinds of relationality, with another kind of way of making communities and social relations. I think we’ve heard the powerful argument that infrastructure has a certain historical specificity, but, despite the use of terms like diversity, it is a very monolithic, tentacled kind of thing. I would read a lot of that as congruent with Timothy Mitchell’s work on carbon democracy. If we’re going to move to a low-carbon democracy, which would be about decentralised energy (would we call them infrastructures?), which would be more autonomously regulated and serving people’s needs as defined by communities themselves with some sovereignty over the materialities of their social worlds … I’d appreciate your thoughts on that possibility.

Simone: Then the question becomes how do you work through that? Habitat 3 is coming up next October, and the discussion goes like this: since there is no redistribution project on the horizon, if ever, then how do you use the exigency of infrastructural adaptation as a way to try to sneak redistribution through the backdoor? That is in some sense you give up the political project, of trying to, within cities, within states, have a redistribution project and use the imminence of extinction, that in some sense, cities are going to have to invest an enormous amount of money into infrastructural recalibration within the next coming decades or those cities are gone. Period. They are gone. How do you decentre provisioning systems within multiple sovereignties, within a single administrated ambit, and what does that mean? So you have one community, might be a very poor community, that now is in charge of providing for themselves with some subsidies, with some kind of technical assistance, living in the same city with someone who has a very very different system right next door! So the city becomes a multiplicity of different provisioning systems. What is that as a kind of political entity? How do you think about the notion of a political cohesiveness in that? And we have to take that on, because that is what the discussion is, at least in terms of urban development. You forget about redistribution and you think about a kind of implicit equalisation through decentralised provisioning systems.

Lazar: I think that is really worrying actually. To me the political project of redistribution and of fighting against exploitative power relations is still utterly crucial. And I mean in the sense that’s why I think it is an unwelcome reconfiguration, because what you’re talking about feels to me like giving in and accepting these kinds of horrible inequalities on the basis of this kind of decentring of provisioning. But I also think that in some parts of the world, for example in Latin America, there are still really strong political projects based on redistribution, but not entirely and always infrastructural projects. So in answer to the question itself, I think the fact that we’re accepting the need to move to a kind of an infrastructural other-wise is a political move and a political process in and of itself. The fact that we’re in that situation is something that I still want to rage against.

Bear: I think Sian is doing something slightly unfair which is that she’s associating our analytical deconstruction of the infrastructural moment that we live in with the infrastructural moment, when precisely what we’re trying to do is to understand how inequalities are generated through this infrastructural moment; and we are critiquing the forms of accumulation that are going on behind the scenes. We are also critiquing many of the forms of politics that emerge from that. I think both AbdouMaliq and I are looking for a different kind of social calculus by which we might measure our public things, our res publica. We’re not taken in by the infrastructural moment that we live in at all. I just think the difference is that Sian seems to think that we can ignore it and that we can just re-centre on the human without doing a deconstruction of what the vectors of accumulation are, and the world that we live in.

Rival: Having listened carefully to my three debating partners talking here, it seems very, very clear to me that the difference between the two sides of the table should be looked at as a regional difference as well. As anthropologists we are bound to think theoretically through years of acquaintance with particular regions of the world and their different styles of world making. AbdouMaliq and Laura have years of field experience in Asia, so I am not surprised to hear their position on infrastructure. Sian and I are Latin Americanists. This project of sustainability, if you want to look at it on a global scale, it is a project of making other worlds possible. In French, we call it ʻaltermondialitéʼ. The Zapatista movement for indigenous autonomy calls it ‘otro mundo de posibles’ (‘an other world pregnant with many possible worlds’). People are dreaming and materialising ‘other possibles’ all over the planet; you will find pockets of other-worlds-making all over. There are good historical, cultural and political reasons why Latin America has been a driving force in the political imaginary of alter-globalisation. I cannot envisage the political potential of infrastructure without dissociating myself from this Latin American intellectual heritage. I am inspired by the political culture of Ecuador, a country where I have worked for nearly thirty years. I accepted to join the technical team that was to develop the Yasuní Initiative during Correa’s first presidential term, and I learned a lot. Government officials thought they needed my expert knowledge on Huaorani culture. The Huaorani ethnic reserve overlaps with the Yasuní National Park, and the ‘tribe’ includes ‘clans’ that are living in hiding, refusing all contact with ‘civilisation’. It is common in Ecuador to refer to the expansion of the oil industry in the Amazon as having caused acculturation, if not ethnocide, and even genocide. I accepted the challenge with the desire to show that there is more to anthropology than ethnographic knowledge of forest tribes. I had extremely rich conversations with my colleagues. We came to the conclusion that Ecuador’s political project is anthropological; we even coined a new term, ‘yasunizar la antropologia’ (‘yasunize anthropology’). These conversations have grown increasingly uneasy since the government decided to no longer support the Yasuní Initiative (in August 2013). Ecuadorians are polarised politically, as they disagree on the exact meaning of ‘the good life’ (ʻel buen vivirʼ), their paradigm of sustainable development. Similar political disagreements are occurring in other Latin American countries, in particular Bolivia. Even a superficial look at these political struggles indicates that infrastructure plays at least a triggering role. See the case of the TIPNIS highway through indigenous land and the Isiboro Sécure National Park in Bolivia, for instance (see Nicole Fabricant and Nancy Postero. 2015. Sacrificing indigenous bodies and lands: the political-economic history of lowland Bolivia in light of the recent TIPNIS debate. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 20(3): 452–474). In Brazil, there are urban movements that welcome infrastructural development, but question the type of urbanisation promoted by the government. Activists I have spoken with ask: ‘Why should we go for megacities?’ and remark: ‘Yes, the world is becoming more urban but the great majority of people live in small or medium size cities’. Their politics consist in reorganising the world of the city in relation to the rural areas that surround it, so that people can move freely from one place to another without unbalancing the flows of exchange between urban and rural areas. The world that makes sense to them is a world in which the urban and the rural are rearticulated. Instead of encouraging rural/urban re-articulation, mega infrastructural projects disarticulate these areas even more. What matters to people, then, what is important to them is the materiality of the world. People are articulating worlds. They are enacting or defending worlds in which they can live the good life they want to live. This leads to a great diversity of projects. To conclude, my answer to your question, Ben, is that sustainability politics is going to mean something very different in the plural world that many scholars and intellectuals call the ‘pluriverse’, a term with added ontological connotations, but that’s another debate …

Bear: Can I ask Laura (Rival) a question? Is there room in your political pluriverse for urban working class people? Where would they fit?

Rival: What is meant by the working class in Latin America, where there is structural mass unemployment? Wage earners do not necessarily identify themselves as ‘workers’, let alone collectively as ‘working class’. People work a great deal, of course, and what we call ‘nature’ is central to their livelihoods, but not many of them are formally employed. In the poor neighbourhood of São Paulo where I have been working in recent years, a number of people have started to think seriously about leaving the megacity to move to much smaller cities where they have relatives who seem to fare better. Although this research is not sufficiently developed ethnographically to form an authoritative judgment, it does not seem that the sugar cane cutters interviewed by one of my students identify as ‘working class’. Many lost their jobs when the company producing bio-ethanol mechanised its operations. A significant number decided against moving to São Paulo where opportunities have grown scarce. Instead, they chose to create a livelihood in small towns or in rural areas where their families have retained some land. In one of our case studies, it took 10 years of collective effort to recreate some sense of meaningful regional economy and reverse rural migration. Your idea of res publica is beautiful, but if you agree with me that Marx needs updating, so it goes for res publica and the concept of nation-state. The pluriverse requires new types of polities and a new kind of policy thinking. Globalisation may have slowed down, but it will not stop making issues of State, citizenry and nation-state increasingly more complex. Political anthropology must keep up with the political and economic creativity of communities around the world. Theories such as multi-level governance and polycentricity have been somewhat helpful, but they are not sufficient. People are taking stock of the fact that they won’t have a working class job, that they will spend most of their lives unemployed and that they have to create new livelihoods for themselves. Such awareness is part and parcel of their politics.

Bear: Interestingly that sounds a lot like the communities in Howrah as well. I’m interested in the kinds of judgements that are being made about good and bad politics, because in a sense, what AbdouMaliq and I are trying to do is to look at, in part how some of these judgements are made by institutions, which might also include the Ecuadorian government that has now included the non-human in the constitution. We are interested in how the field for the political is generated and how judgements are made. I think that we need to take that into account when we’re thinking about the political. I was very interested that, in a sense, you are telling me that my working class people were profoundly different from yours and had a different politics, and somehow a lesser politics.

Karen Sykes (Manchester): The attention to infrastructure seems to continue asking a particular kind of political question, that is the assumption that, somehow or another, if we ask how we join together we’re asking the political. There has been a persistent question in political anthropology about what is the difference that makes the difference. What is it that drives us into relationships of differentiation and inequality? And that kind of question is a very different one from the one that the infrastructural predilections necessarily project us into. I would like to suggest that perhaps the debating proposition doesn’t give us enough latitude to rethink the political at all.

Nick Long (LSE): The proposition told us in their very first speech that infrastructure could help us reconfigure the political, because it revealed the dominant mode of economic governance, which was then explained as being financialisation and securitisation. I thought that was persuasive, and the example of the rush to build was very good. But I was wondering where actually is the intellectual work in the reconfiguration taking place in that kind of analysis, because it seems to me that it rests with our understanding of finance and our understanding of securities rather than infrastructure specifically. Infrastructure is just the example, it’s the way in but it doesn’t do very much to actually reconfigure our understanding of the political beyond a general attention to speculative capital. I would like the proposition them to show what it is that infrastructure specifically, in this financial moment, allows us to see about political processes, that other processes of financialisation and securitisation, other kinds of rush, don’t manage to do.

Name unclear (Qatar university): What is it exactly about infrastructure, is it the infrastructure that is a productive ethnographic object, or is it the ʻinfraʼ, is it ʻstructureʼ that invites reconfiguration? Because we haven’t been talking about how exactly infrastructure drives the attention. Attention is one of the words that hasn’t been debated so far even though it is in the motion. And, do all these different things about the infrastructure drive attention in the same ways or not?

Bear: Karen’s question was about inequality and how attention to infrastructure might help us to understand relations of inequality. My argument in the second half of my presentations was an argument about how certain kinds of inequalities that are intensifying in the contemporary moment are only visible if we look at people’s positioning within timescapes, and their experiences of security and insecurity … so I see class relations as being very centrally structured now around the possibility or the impossibility of planning a life for yourself and your community. And, for me, again from my fieldwork experiences, one of the key things that makes a difference to the degree of security that you feel, is your relation to the circulatory networks that are part of this whole knowledge regime of infrastructure, and that it’s these circulatory networks that centrally structure relations of inequality. To answer the third question, this is both a method and an analytical prism, and that’s why I think is very interesting. Because I can methodologically follow these knowledge networks, follow these circuits of capital in exactly the way that Marx would have done. And I can see this as a kind of telos for all sorts of people’s kinds of social actions. So I would say it’s both. Nick’s question was about why can we not explain infrastructure just by talking about financialisation. I would argue that the conscious telos of these projects of financialisation and securitisation is the creation of infrastructure, and that if we don’t look at that we’re missing something central about the conduct of productivity at work here.

Simone: And also the sense that things don’t have to be what they are. Infrastructure is not just simply about the emplacement of capital, it is not just simply about speculation. Cities are littered with all kinds of apparently failed projects. So, when you look at the acquisition of land, this piece of land as opposed to that piece of land, when you look at the mobilisation of labour, when you look at how you get certain kinds of things approved, when you look at how the materials go in to a particular kind of construction, when you look at the kinds of temporal framework involved, when you look at all these things that have to be in some way sutured together, it is a very fragile operation, because every one of those components can be part of something else, which can in some ways tip the thing out of the possibility of its realisation. So you work through the structure of infrastructure, you work through its composition, you work through how it, in some ways, materialises itself to find points of entry, find points to better understand where the hinges, where the kinds of suturing is, where things could possibly be reconfigured in ways that don’t have to be that particular kind of materialisation.

Penny Harvey (Manchester): My critique is for the opposition but I want to start with Laura Bear’s distinction between public works and the infrastructure project, because for me that was the most deliberate attempt to say what infrastructure might be. But at the same time, I don’t think it exactly fits with the proposition of the anthropology of infrastructure, which is much more than that. And I think that is where the strength of the proposition lies. I would suggest that this idea that the shift from public work to infrastructure isn’t exactly what happens. There’s not some lag, it’s the fact that the infrastructure project, as Laura Bear describes it as the circulation of capital, is actually irretrievably wedded to the public work, because the public work is its vehicle. The example I was going to give is this study that Hannah Knox and I did of a road (the Interoceanic highway) in Peru. The road was a public work, and what was really interesting is by the time they had finished building this road, there was another proposition on the table that this road was actually going to be flooded, and a massive dam was going to be built over the middle of it. The road was going to be part of another totally different capital project. We suddenly had this weird sensation that maybe it was never a road, maybe it was always a way of getting a bigger capital project underway, but you start with a small one. But, of course the road didn’t go away. Laura Rival’s opposition to the motion is that the object doesn’t really stand up, the infrastructure keeps changing and you can’t get hold of it and it is not a proper thing. For me what makes the anthropology of infrastructure interesting is this relationship between what Laura Bear is calling infrastructure and public work and how what seems to be a tangible project ends up being, not abstract, but incredibly elusive. They are really difficult to track, they are really difficult to know and then they suddenly appear in the most strange guise, but they will appear in the guise of a public work. Laura Rival, you yourself have made an argument that, because in fact what they do is combine all these different disjunctive scales, that they require a different kind of politics. Sian says that not everything has to be infrastructural, and I completely agree, but that’s not the motion. If we were to do an anthropology of infrastructure, which would require us to think about the collapse or the kind of parasitical relation of infrastructure and public work, then that does reconfigure the political. Because we have to think of a politics that is intrinsically disjunctive and it requires collectives that are not straightforward, they are not in the same place and they are not necessarily even in the same time.

Rival: Penny, I appreciate the point you’re making. However, what troubles me is that it is public work, but in public-private partnerships, and so, have we got enough ethnographic evidence of that PPP? And also, how do people perceive it: do they perceive it as something public or not? I just remember the very big conflict in Ecuador, when the pipeline called OCP was built. There were different reasons why various political actors, social actors, indigenous people were mobilising against it. But the fact that it was a PPP in fact meant it was privately financed, even if it was associated with the name of the president who was in power at the time. In that particular case, what was the worst is that there was not enough oil to make the pipeline viable. It then drove attempts to get more oil. But there was no oil, and the only oil they found (and that was why the Yasuní initiative had some rationality to it) was so heavy that they could not put it in the pipeline. The oil is so heavy that it will have to be liquefied in a costly and environmentally damaging mega-electric plant, as well as mixed with lighter oil imported from older fields to the north. I understand your reasoning on public work, and agree with your assessment that the state becomes visible to citizens via public works. For many Latin American citizens, though, especially those directly impacted by mega-project development, there is more than just the question of visibility. Their right to their way of life and to a safe and healthy environment is compromised. Moreover, many of these state commissioned infrastructure projects are left unfinished. We thus have to include issues relating to the politics of ‘the unfinished’. I don’t know whether this answers your question, but when it comes to analysing citizen mobilisation, we see that people have to defend what they have as well as their right to something that was promised to them, but not delivered. Politically speaking, infrastructure as public work does not add anything new: people mobilise to defend the world they want to live with, including gaining access to new rights and services.

Lazar: You’re talking about public works being the vehicle of infrastructure, but there are maybe other kind of vehicles. You said that these financial relations are materialised in the guise of public work, and in fact that’s precisely my concern with anthropologies of infrastructure, because I think that’s still a kind of government, and so, actually I’m not convinced that there’s much of a reconfiguration here. It’s just not entirely the state. We’d have to actually question whether it was always purely a state providing public works in the past. I think what the anthropologies of infrastructure do is they do amplify the notion of where these public works come from. I’ll grant that. But I still think the notion of the political that operates here is one about government and the provision of services. That’s where I think it’s not so much of a reconfiguration. That’s why I would attack the motion as such. To return to Karen’s point, this question of infrastructures, how we join together, and of circulations, that’s the converse of ‘what’s the difference that makes the difference’. Asking precisely that question is why I wanted to turn to Chantal Mouffe, because I think that sometimes it’s quite hard to think about what do we actually mean by the political. I do think that Mouffe and Laclau [in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy] and Mouffe [in The Return of the Political] come up with a really nice, clear, workable definition of the political … this question of unequal correlations of power. I agree with Nick that infrastructure and anthropologies of infrastructure can be a way into these relations of power, but I think that the all-encompassing nature of infrastructure itself as a thing, and also various academic approaches to infrastructure have the effect of closing off other ways in.

Edlyne Anugwom (University of Nigeria): What exactly are we talking about when we say ʻinfrastructureʼ, as anthropologists, not as political scientist, not as planners or financiers? And I’m also worried, when we want to romanticise Marx and are beginning to talk about deterministic nature of infrastructure: is that really anthropology? To what extent can we claim Marx, in that sense? Maybe I’m old school, but I’m thinking that when you talk anthropology the call for emphasis is going to be on values, traditions and norms, which, in this case, underlie infrastructural development. Even within the context of the emergent political, we need to watch the historical tangent to the discussion. For example, if you look at the whole question of public works, which is a colonial baggage actually, the British colonies had what they called the public works department, which in the 60s and 70s were vehicles or the process through which infrastructure and amenities were brought in. So, different settings if you like, have different implications in terms of how we theorise infrastructure. But I want us also to look more at the whole issue about how infrastructure within the context of the new politics reshapes and redefines community interactions and relations? The financial and political drives, which today empower infrastructure … to what extent are these interfaced with the collective experience and lived-in experience of the people themselves and their aspirations? We have cases, especially in Africa, where infrastructure has been brought in, physical, material culture, but we should know that there’s also a relationship between the immaterial and the material. And the non-material actually is faster than the material. So you have situations where these infrastructures are taking place and it hasn’t met the aspirations of the people, and they’ve been rejected. If you come to my country, we have housing units, beautiful houses that are occupied by lizards. There were built for people. What has happened? What picture, what scenario will you capture from this, especially from a core anthropological perspective?

Madeleine Reeves (Manchester): I want to focus on three moments when both sides appear to talk past each other. First, the question of scale. It is interesting that when particular infrastructures have been named or been visualised, it has been the big mega-projects, it has been the dams, roads, speculative housing construction. To me what emerges in terms of the difference between the proposition and the opposition in terms of the possibilities or not of infrastructure as an approach to rethinking the political, in part hinges on the question of how we think about that question of scale in relation to infrastructure. Because I think the proposition, AbdouMaliq especially, are suggesting we think of infrastructure as this in-between, which allows us to draw towards each other or draw apart from each other, and therefore it is profoundly political. It really foregrounds the question of hierarchy and inclusion and exclusion and so forth. Whereas I think the opposing team has been approaching infrastructure as something separate from the domain of politics, or non-reducible to the domain of politics. They seem to conceive of instrastructure as a kind of finished entity rather than the relation of relations. Second, is whether we take infrastructure as an object of analysis or the object of enquiry; What are we talking about when we’re talking about the potentialities of infrastructure for thinking about what the political is. Are we thinking about infrastructure as a perspective, as an analytic, as a method? Third, the relationship between infrastructure and how we think about what politics is, or where politics is and where politics is located. And that’s the one that I found most interesting, because I think the opposition seems to be working with a conception of politics where the question asked is: ʻwhat is the politics that the infrastructure is a manifestation of? And if we focus on infrastructure, does this exclude other forms or ways of thinking about politics actually, that are non-reducible to this?ʼ So the affective, the other dimensions of politics. Whereas, I think the proposing team is suggesting, and this is what I’ve also found personally generative about thinking about the relationship of the infrastructure and politics, is that an attentiveness to the unboundedness of these infrastructural interventions allows a way of thinking about the kinds of unexpected political configurations that these interventions produce that are non-intentional and non-reducible to a politics of intentionality.

Note

Final summaries by speakers

The vote

The motion: Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political.

For the motion: 26 votes.