Desiring infrastructure

Desires for infrastructure

Before the term infrastructure became widespread, its referents, what we now call infrastructure, were objects of imperial, racist, and governmental desires. Dusty old atlases always begin their overviews about a territory by describing its raw materials (resources for the West to extract) and its infrastructural capacities (to aid extraction and colonial governance). A French term, ¹ infrastructure only became widely used through 20th century transnational projects concerning defense and development. In English, it was used militarily, to refer to culverts and as part of the argo of defense specialists and then in Cold War civilian systems (e.g. roads), now conceived as national self-defense (Weijnen and ten Heuvelhof, 1999: 22). Infrastructure then came to name to post-war desires for development (including by communist states), becoming the go-to term for ‘the technical-political systems required for growth and modernity’ (Rankin, 2009: 61). These mid-20th century roots of infrastructure in international debates over funding for development neatly introduces the economic, governmental, and technical qualities of the concept of infrastructure.

Progressive scholars have turned to infrastructure as an object of research, resulting in a noticeable ‘infrastructural turn’ in critical scholarship (e.g. Dourish and Bell, 2007). This critical scholarly turn reflects not only progressive critiques of colonial installations or surveillance systems and the like, but also desires for infrastructure. Struggles to secure resources for living and participatory governance are struggles over infrastructure (Sassen, 2004). The defining difference between socialist, social-welfare, and neoliberal politics concerns provisioning large-scale systems to support populations. Our periodicization of the late-20th century as post-Cold War, post-Keynsian, and (mostly) post-socialist reflects an overall decline in state provisioning of infrastructure around the world – a decline which is of course the cardinal desire of neoliberalism. Challenging neoliberal privatization, radicals demand public provisioning of working, life-supporting infrastructure. Potable water. Adequate sewage. Affordable sources of energy that do not destroy the planet. People's desire for infrastructure that supports relational life is not being met, while unwanted infrastructures, like those for military strikes or data collection, thrive. These conditions motivate progressive infrastructural research (Wilson, 2016).

Much of the infrastructural turn knowingly or not builds on the creative research of the late scholar Susan Leigh Star, a US feminist with a background in radical Latin American agricultural politics. In her influential 1999 article, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure,’ Star describes normative functional infrastructure as ‘an embedded strangeness, a second-order one, that of the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place’ (Star, 1999: 379). Her research on ‘the truly backstage elements’ of cyber infrastructure reveals how engineers write social forms into architectonics of infrastructure (Star, 1999: 380).

As scholars go to conceptualize infrastructure, we confront difficulty in pinning the term down. For example, Star's ‘the forgotten’ does not capture spectacular or failing infrastructure. A geographer offers a general flexible sense of infrastructure as ‘the vast network that makes possible the movement of goods, people, and information over time and space’ (Warf, 2006: 258). Or, infrastructure refers to what something requires to function (Wilson, 2016). A biological metaphor casts this something as ‘connective tissues’ and ‘circulatory systems’ (Edwards, 2003: 185). Michelle Murphy exemplifies an expansive view by seeing infrastructures as ‘spatial arrangements of relationships that draw humans, things, words and non-humans into patterned conjunctures’ (Murphy, 2013: 104). In my survey of work on infrastructure, I appreciated its variegated meanings, noting that infrastructure ‘applies not only to the technology or literal, materialized objects but includes a sense of systems, management, and energy, as well as planning and design: hence, discourse, symbols, and, arguably even affect’ (Wilson, 2016: 28). As these discussions show, we use infrastructure both as an object of research, a referent, a thing in itself, and at the same time as a rubric, a concept to facilitate critical analysis. Each of these forms are relevant for Kai Bosworth's article, ‘What is “affective infrastructure,”’ notably the conceptual version.

Bosworth's work, lush with theory, expresses an impassioned quest for a concept that illuminates, and is worthy of radical action. The backstory for Bosworth's investigation of the concept of affective infrastructure is this. Our capitalist, settler colonial world, and its invasive, surveilling techno infrastructure, individuates and alienates people. This alienation in turn stagnates activism. What can transform this paralyzing alienation into critique and action? This is the question all activists face. The short answer is political organizing, but good organizing. That means relational coordination that produces collectives which generate shared critiques that motivate action oriented to progressive (rather than reactionary) change. A tall order, and to reach it is no simple matter.

Feelings of activism and analysis

A significant premise for Bosworth (2023) is that radical activism emerges through affects. Accordingly, we need to understand the generation of affect better than we do. Bosworth focuses on affect-laden activism oriented towards progressive collective ends, rather than, say, the reactionary forms so dramatically visible these days. (Does the Right understand affect better, one wonders?) What generates the progressively oriented motivation, feelings, or morale that spurs activism? What conditions enable this community spirit? Would it help to think of these generative conditions as a kind of infrastructure? In an almost destined meeting of the affective turn with the infrastructural turn, the concept of affective infrastructure is at the ready to address these questions. Bosworth investigates whether and how this concept can offer a distinct vehicle for understanding the social-material-psychic dynamics that fuel radical action.

I have learned how much our political investments guide feminist analytical categories and intellectual narratives from incisive exegeses of feminist texts (e.g. Hemmings, 2011). Bosworth's text rekindled my interest in the desires we bring to scholarship. His prose manifests activist desires – its caveats alone reveal 21st century political demands on discourse. What Bosworth wants for a concept of affective infrastructure echoes widely shared political desires for progressive scholarship. We want tools for analysis that can recognize systematicity and structure but also unevenness, failure, and ruins (Stoler, 2008); that eschew technological determinism, functionalism, or teleology (Suchman, 1987); that remain invested in materiality but with a nonreductive understanding of matter (Bennett, 2010); that decenters Europe and settler colonial logic (Chakrabarty, 2009); that challenges androcentrism with organisms and things (Whatmore, 2013); and that does not rely on the individual as the unit of analysis. We want a two-way sense that material-symbolic assemblages that shape, and are shaped by, people's experiences, affect, and practices (a dynamic that Bosworth emphasizes). In truth, we ask a lot.

Forging affective infrastructures

Could affective infrastructure be the concept that fulfils these requirements? If so, in what form? To generate a sense of affective infrastructure adequate to political urgency, Bosworth pursues a staggering array of literatures, including Native-American/indigenous Canadian feminist theories, and mostly – perhaps surprisingly – continental philosophy, including Western Marxism (not Mao), and particularly Spinoza and his intellectual heirs. This journey delivers a principled and methodical scrutiny of the rubric of affective infrastructure. If I knew my Spinoza, I would know whether Bosworth was applying Spinoza's rationalist methods, applying geometric reason (or ratio) to the concepts of affect and infrastructure, to see if affective infrastructure is adequate to offer a shared common notion. I suspect that he is.

In forging affective infrastructure as a common notion, Bosworth adopts an extremely capacious understanding of infrastructure. The infrastructure side of affective infrastructure covers political organizing, social organization, social settings, technologies of power, institutional settings, and settler colonial systems. It means conditions that coordinate and orient collective efforts. While his heterogeneous infrastructure is not my infrastructure, I understand and respect why that is so.

To the question of the affective nature of activism, Bosworth answers with an intriguing foray into the dynamics of clinical psychoanalysis. He uses philosopher Rodrigo Nunes’ psychoanalytic theory to illuminate affective dynamics of political action. This approach casts political organizing (an affective infrastructure) in the role of psychoanalyst and oppressed people as analysand. Political organizing helps a people interpret their shared desires – it raises consciousness–and, in this radical model, ‘infuses’ people with will. That buzz that comes from activism? It's from the group transference of affect amid the sociality of political organizing. Political organizing also orients participants in collective progressive directions, although the material-affective dimensions of this step are less clear in an otherwise comprehensive account. Bosworth identifies a model for such affective infrastructure in Indigenous feminist visions of caregiving kinship that counters settler colonial infrastructural modes.

Epistemologies of critique

There is so much intriguing in the intricate intellectual scaffolding that Bosworth builds for us: I cannot do justice to all facets here. I will raise a rather challenging question about the relation of modes of thought to radical politics. Much radical political philosophy choses immanent analysis over transcendent modes for reasons Bosworth knows well. To the checklist of political desires above, I would add that many of us want to analyze systems without imposing a priori, deductive order on what is most often a mess of materials, people, and symbols. And Bosworth cites the significance of context and empirical work. He also says that anti-colonial socialist movements generate analysis and concepts themselves, something he knows from experience. He has worked at salient political junctures, including well-known Native-American protests over pipelines along Native land. Bosworth's criteria for conceptual adequacy follow from activist critique.

What surprises me in Bosworth's presentation is that, behind demonstrable commitments to politically engaged thought, the structuring method and the conclusions of this article reflect serious commitments to a classic European continental logic. The intellectual manifestation of Bosworth's serious political commitments could be immanent approaches that emphasize singularity, particularity, specificity, or materiality. Bosworth works out the contours of affective infrastructure through (rigorous) theoretical forays, including that of Spinoza. In the classical philosophical debate framed as rationalists v. empiricists, his approach falls on the rationalist side. I am not in turn defending an empiricist mode. Rather, I am asking about the risks of a rationalist mode when developing a radically oriented concept. Can a classical rationalist approach, with its geometric reason, grasp the political salience of a concept like affective infrastructure for radical action? Can such an approach avoid being methodologically deductive or a priori – or transcendent? In short, I see a difference between the radicalism of the content and the classical nature of the form in this essay. With these questions I am admittedly setting a very high bar for a single article, higher than usual, which is unfair to Bosworth but also is a sign of the high intellectual level of this work. These questions derive from a general observation that all too often ambitious political thought that aims to upend Western powers derives from intellectual desires rooted in those very traditions.

Bosworth's foray is ambitious. To borrow from corporate discourse, Bosworth's article offers a ‘proof of concept’ for a concept: here is how affective infrastructure can work in a normative theory of political action. It provides a prolegomenon for research on affective infrastructures of dissent (and a rich literature review for theoretically oriented scholars working on activism). The real question this article raises for readers will be, what will politically committed research on affective infrastructure say now?