Thinking infrastructure as a contested political space: theoretical reflections and methodological implications

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1 Thinking infrastructure as a contested political space: theoretical reflections and methodological implications Julio Alejandro De Coss-Corzo London School of Economics and Political Science - Department of Sociology Infrastructure has become increasingly discussed within sociology, geography, and anthropology. Water meters, roads and dams become research topics. There is not, however, a unified vision of what infrastructure is. On the contrary, numerous definitions render it a contentious concept. Infrastructures can be objects, networks, institutions or, more commonly, a material intertwinement of all these; they can have agency or be mere transmitters of social power. These conceptual divergences give way to very different forms of understanding politics, inequalities, and social change. On this paper, I will seek to clarify this conceptual messiness by discussing two distinct approaches to infrastructure. On one side, I will locate the studies carried out in the tradition of critical political economy studies. On the other, I will place what I term object-oriented approaches, which include Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and Science and Technology Studies (STS). I will deliberately place them on a far too strict opposition, so that a number of their main theoretical and practical tenets become clearer. After mapping out the key theoretical implications of these approaches, I will elaborate on the different politics they entail. This will allow me to indicate how domination, inequality, and social change are understood and put in practice. Finally, I will explore some ways in which these positions can be brought together to offer a nuanced, detailed and potentially far-reaching vision of infrastructures as a place to research contentious politics in the making of the city, capitalism, and the state, in a manner that overrides traditional global/local distinctions. Contentious theories There has been a recent surge in infrastructural studies in the social sciences. This can be seen, for example, in last year s special edition of City (Angelo & Hentschel, 2015), and in the recent series of blog posts that HAU, the Journal of Ethnographic Theory, has published (The Nature of Infrastructure, 2016). These projects are among the latest in a long line of scholarship that is characterised by its diversity (Anand, 2011; Barnes, 2014; Gandy, 2002; Harvey D., 1985; Harvey & Knox, 2015; Loftus, 2007; Meehan, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2015). In the following paragraphs, I will discuss two of the main approaches to urban infrastructures: critical political economy and object-oriented approaches. My argument will place them in a strict opposition, which intentionally overlooks many of the nuances authors in both traditions have. This will help me draw out key theoretical issues, as well as to identify some of their perspectives on politics and power, before attempting to provide a way to bring these two positions together. Broadly, critical political economy sees infrastructures as a historical materialisation of an abstract power, that of capital, which transforms space it is need for profit through the production and reproduction of unequal socioeconomic relations. From this position, infrastructures have a clear efficacy in the production of exclusions and conflict in urban space. 1

2 Yet, this efficacy is determined by the laws that guide the progress of capitalism. The power of this structure is such that no ways of breaking with its pervasive logic are possible, unless they present themselves as a total revolutionary movement. In relation to the urban space and nature, Henri Lefebvre (1991), Neil Smith (2008) and David Harvey (1985) are key figures that have infused critical political economy with a geographical outlook, shedding light in the ways in which the logic of capitalist accumulation materially produces an uneven space. In doing so, they highlight the financial and political means through which the abstract global capital and the state direct flows of money and labour to produce diverse unequal built spaces, including infrastructure. Here, the efficacy of infrastructures is multiple: a vehicle for capital reproduction, an agent in the capitalist production of space, and a specific materialisation of state power. As such, the question of infrastructure is one closely related to the commodification of an urbanised nature (Smith, 2008; Loftus, 2012); the role of the built environment as a key element in the process of accumulation and reproduction of capital (Harvey D., 1982; 1985); unequal access to urbanised resources, such as water, as part of the capitalist production of space and power (Swyngedouw, 2015; Gandy, 2002); a way to explore the intersections between class inequalities, environmental risks, and unsustainability (Swyngedouw, 2004), and the political and socioeconomic conflicts around ownership, control, and management of infrastructures (Loftus, 2007). Yet, it is possible to analyse infrastructure in an altogether different manner. I refer to the one that arises from following diverse object-oriented approaches, such as Bruno Latour s (2005) Actor-Network Theory (ANT) or Vivienne Bennett s (2010) material vitalism. From such perspectives, to think of infrastructures as the necessary product of the underlying structural forces capitalist or other would be erroneous. Instead, they are both artefacts and networks, material bundles of relationships (Carse, 2016) that are contingently created by the coming together of numerous agencies, both human and non-human. These bundles, then, are not merely the materialisation of abstract forces; they are an integral part the production of the social as something that is always material. They play an essential role in forming contestations around resource access (Anand, 2011; Barnes, 2014) and pricing (Von Schnitzler, 2013); they produce the state and power in space (Meehan, 2014; Harvey & Knox, 2015), and are, as such, privileged actors in assembling the social (Latour, 2005). These infrastructures are in a continuous process of being made, resulting in a description of the social that is contingent and open to change. This approach often implies a flattening of inequalities and domination, seeing them as something rather fragile that can be unmade. This account has intentionally missed many of the nuances these theories present. For now, I will hold this argument, in order to show the different notions of politics and power that they imply. By doing so, I will be able to offer an insight into how infrastructures either materialise or produce power relations in the urban space. 2

3 Infrastructure, politics, and power in the urban space Politics, in critical political economy and object-oriented approaches, stand at odds with each other. The first finds class struggle as that which underlies even the most quotidian political acts. The latter frames everyday politics as the place where the overlapping agencies of humans and non-humans shape social life in an open-ended fashion. These opposite notions of what politics are also entail a very different notion of power. In critical political economy, the main conflict is between capital and labour in the appropriation of produced value. The struggle, therefore, is for the control of the means of production, whose private property allows capitalists to exert domination over workers. This mechanism is always beneath the surface. As such, it has produced a lived world in which this fundamental contradiction is reproduced in different ways. The urban space is a good case to analyse this logic. David Harvey (1982; 1985) has argued that it is the financial sphere, with its circulation of fictitious and abstract money, the main driving force behind capitalist urbanisation (2013). Money in financial spheres is easily moved, escaping many of the constraints it had before, when forced to be material and located. However, this movement is not without restrictions. As capital needs to be constantly reproduced, or else it will perish, financiers seek to invest in material things. One of the main investments, Harvey has shown, is the built environment. Producing urban infrastructures roads, pipes, housing, and other urban spaces is an efficient way to mobilise and materialise fictitious capital, and render it useful for the reproduction of capitalism. It does so in two interrelated ways. The first is the economic function of the material production of space. A way to think about this is how infrastructure production becomes a way of overcoming crises of overaccumulation. A good example is Roosevelt s New Deal. The second is the purpose of the built environment itself. Connecting cities, urbanising water or developing commercial spaces are all instruments directed to allow a more efficient, rapid, and inclusive subordination of social relations to the reproduction of capital. This production of space is necessarily unequal. Connectedness and access are distributed differently according to the relative class position of groups and individuals. In an ironic twist of fate, workers are often excluded from the spaces they produced. Such is their curse: they produce something valuable with their labour, and then it is taken away by the fundamental inequality of the private property of means of production and, we might add, societal reproduction. They build the connections and spaces of consumption and then become marginalised and forced to recur to resistance practices to survive and reproduce as a class. This brief example leaves out many nuances existing in political economy approaches to urbanisation. However, it indicates that the political exists as a materialisation of the power of capital over the means of producing and reproducing life. Capital, here, is both a logic that organises social life, and a material thing, exerting influence in space, embodied in several places, including infrastructures. Changing capitalism requires a revolutionary transformation of its very basis private property. In this change, infrastructures are a place of resistance and conflict; insofar they are materialisations of this abstraction, they are disputed, but durable change cannot be found in their contingent uses. 3

4 Infrastructures have an altogether different political role in object-oriented approaches. There, the simple acts of opening and closing a levee, of building a road or installing a water meter are not materialisations of an abstract power, but part of its continuous making. Instead of finding the explanation for domination, dispossession or inequality in a fundamental logic, these approaches frame them as something that can be grasped through the description of the contingent production of the social, in which humans and non-humans enter into precariously stable configurations. This precarious, multiple configuration leaves open ways of acting for subaltern groups. An example might better illustrate this. For Nikhil Anand (2011), when exploring the politics and techniques of water supply in Mumbai, slum dwellers are not a disenfranchised group whose only resources are resistance or revolution. These settlers negotiate their place in the distribution of water by exerting pressure on the political system through informal mediators. In turn, this pressure translates in the material one that makes water flow through the pipes and takes it to the public wells where they get their supply from. These microspheres of negotiation, carried out through infrastructures, are central tenets of urban politics and the place where power is made. Towards a possible synthesis: an open-ended materialism? I argue that these two positions can be brought together. Several authors have proceeded in this way, showing how infrastructures are more than mere materialisations of abstract powers, and do have an impact in the way society is made (Swyngedouw, 2004; Loftus, 2007; Brenner, Madden, & Wachsmuth, 2011). Their agency, however, is not found in their mere materiality. Their power is always framed within the specific logic of capitalism. That is, infrastructures have efficacy in constituting society and space according to the profit-seeking, ever-expanding logic of capitalism, but cannot be reduced to a mere mechanical transmitter of this abstraction. This point is crucial and needs to be further developed and clarified. The idea of what the logic of capitalism is and how it is made must also be criticised. To do this, we can think of infrastructures as open-ended, and shaped by the people they are supposed to control (Zeiderman, 2012). They are, indeed, bundles of relationships, yet these are not occurring in a flat space. Material inequalities enter the stage and produce political dynamics shaped by class-based domination, but also on gender, race and their many intersections, and their historical trajectories. These inequalities are both contingent and durable. They are reassembled constantly in space, partially through the built environment, through a process of labour the making of the logic of capitalism that is composed of a myriad more: the novel forms of finance that sustain accumulation; the policy directives of the World Bank and many other international organisations; the political contestations that go into building a new infrastructure, and the ways in which those that interact daily with it often subvert their hegemonic uses in building a city that serves better their desires and needs. This theoretical view helps materialising the mantra of the blurring of the global and the local through the critical analysis of infrastructures. It also accounts for a logic that is not abstract, but material and historical, and always on a process of reproduction and stabilisation. Capitalism does not act on infrastructures; it is made through them (Moore, 2015). 4

5 This open-ended materialism gives up teleology in exchange for a nuanced historical description of society and space. In renouncing to believe in the necessary end of capitalism through a grand revolution, it might be helpful in understanding how small subversions point to the practices that change the logic of capitalism in material, practical ways (Loftus, 2007). Methodologically, it calls for a qualitative approach, which listens carefully to its informants, understanding how they produce the built environment and are produced by it. At the same time, it remains attentive to the historical trajectories of inequalities and domination. In this way, it is able to interrogate how capitalism is continuously made through infrastructure, with its everyday politics, which collapse the distinctions between the global and the local in urban space. References Anand, N. (2011). PRESSURE: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology, Angelo, H., & Hentschel, C. (Eds.). (2015). Interactions with Infrastructure as Windows into Social Worlds: A Method for Critical Urban Studies [Special Feature]. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Barnes, J. (2014). Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, V. (2010). Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brenner, N., Madden, D. J., & Wachsmuth, D. (2011). Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Carse, A. (2016, May 17). The Anthropology of the Built Environment: What Can Environmental Anthropology Learn from Infrastructure Studies (and Vice Versa)? Retrieved from Engagement: A blog published by the Anthropology and Environment Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association: Gandy, M. (2002). Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City. London: The MIT Press. Harvey, D. (1982). The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (1985). The Urbanisation of Capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2013). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Londres: Verso Books. Harvey, P., & Knox, H. (2015). Roads: an Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. NY: Cornell University Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social : an introduction to actor-network-theory. 5

6 Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell. Loftus, A. (2007). Working the Socio-Natural Relations of the Urban Waterscape in South Africa. International Jorunal of Urban and Regional Research. Loftus, A. (2012). Everyday Environmentalism. Minneapolis, MN: The MIT Press. Meehan, K. M. (2014). Tool-power: Water infrastructure as wellsprings of state power. Geoforum, Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso Books. Smith, N. (2008). Uneven development: nature, capital and the production of space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social power and the urbanisation of water: flows of power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swyngedouw, E. (2015). Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. The Nature of Infrastructure. (2016, May). Retrieved from Engagement: A blog published by the Anthropology and Environment Society, a section of the American Anthropological Association: Von Schnitzler, A. (2013). Traveling technologies: Infrastructure, ethical regimes, and the materiality of politics in South Africa. Cultural Anthropology, Zeiderman, A. (2012). On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá. Environment and Planning A,

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