Core Post 2 -- The Nature of Infrastructure

Last week we discussed “naturalization” and how it contributes to the false narrative that data are simply extant and ripe for collation and interpretation. In a discursive process, data are render natural in the sense that their abstract conversion from output to input is elided. This week, Edwards compels us to look more directly at nature and modernity, how the latter has been discursively constructed to signal a wholesale break from the former. Edwards suggests a multi-scalar perspective is the only remedy to a social science which has for too long privileged the meso- and micro-, and thereby has inoculated itself against ever being capable of understanding totality. More specifically, he advocates for the macro-perspective, which calls upon immense geologic time scales and which figures nature, not as a force in constant strife with modernity, but as that which configures the entire possibility of human development at all.

            Here he deploys several arguments to which I am sympathetic; those who live off the grid and attempt to escape contemporary technology are often rhetorically positioned (even by themselves) as agents acting out of time. To exit the city is, in effect, to exit modernity itself; it is a temporal egress as much as a spatial one. And his assessment of natural disasters, labelled as such because their scale is the only force which can make salient the scale of our own infrastructure, is pressing and rigorous.

            Starosielski tells us that the user is hopeless in the pursuit of rationally orienting themselves within mega-infrastructures; rather, they are “a posthuman subject that extends across the network in multiple, unpredictable ways” (67). And yet, Edwards would have us believe that privileging the micro- and meso- positionalities has blinded us to, and perhaps even invented, what modernity actually consists of. Why then reject the particular in favor of the generalized? As we have seen, working with “exploded objects” such as Alexa engenders new pathways forward in the pursuit of knowledge in deep time. Edwards suggests the solution lies in teamwork, but this seems far too quaint in the face of what he describes. Better to work our way from the ground up.