While I’m not really convinced by his argument that infrastructure is a product of modernity (I think Mattern’s notion of the deep time of infrastructure is more helpful here in thinking across temporal scales), I found Edward’s multi-scalar approach to infrastructure helpful, as it brings up important questions: how do we hold multiple levels of analysis together and how does our perspective change as we move from one layer to another? Turning to archaeology, Mattern suggests that infrastructure creates paths, vectors, and surfaces that act as as sites of cultural and logistical inscription and transmission (Roman graffiti might offer us the original memes and trolls - “O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin”) Further, looking at infrastructure also lets us bring back structures, objects, and “things” back into our analysis, though, perhaps unlike an object oriented ontology, an infrastructural analysis like Starosielski’s look at undersea cables or Parks at internet infrastructure in Zambia, points us to ways in which infrastructures exist at various levels of force and vulnerability depending on location, material, and other protocols.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Is Modernity Just "Big Infrastructure Energy?" - Core Post 3
Some quick thoughts on the readings: This weeks readings on infrastructure, "force amplifying systems," (Edwards 26) were useful for me, as I spend time thinking about infrastructure in some of my own work. In particular, I’m interested in the pursuit of infrastructural entrenchment on behalf of certain interested groups, like propagandists. We might also think of a company like Amazon in terms of infrastructure; not as a retailer, but a logistics company (with an attached Walmart). Amazon's most lucrative arm is their Amazon Web Services platform, which provides cloud computing to all sorts of companies and increasingly the US government. Further, Amazon is also interested in writing their own legislation for technologies like facial recognition software, suggesting it wants to write the rules for its own entrenchment (There’s a reason that the URL relentless.com redirects to amazon!). Amazon might be understood as infrastructure - or a conglomerate that is doing everything it can to be infrastructure. Infrastructure points us to ways of understanding how people are caught up in forces beyond their own control that still nevertheless unfold over daily life and practice. Infrastructure can have interpellative force, but it often works best when it hides itself - the call is coming from the house itself! As the anthropologist Nick Seaver writes, “infrastructure is a trap in slow motion.”
While I’m not really convinced by his argument that infrastructure is a product of modernity (I think Mattern’s notion of the deep time of infrastructure is more helpful here in thinking across temporal scales), I found Edward’s multi-scalar approach to infrastructure helpful, as it brings up important questions: how do we hold multiple levels of analysis together and how does our perspective change as we move from one layer to another? Turning to archaeology, Mattern suggests that infrastructure creates paths, vectors, and surfaces that act as as sites of cultural and logistical inscription and transmission (Roman graffiti might offer us the original memes and trolls - “O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin”) Further, looking at infrastructure also lets us bring back structures, objects, and “things” back into our analysis, though, perhaps unlike an object oriented ontology, an infrastructural analysis like Starosielski’s look at undersea cables or Parks at internet infrastructure in Zambia, points us to ways in which infrastructures exist at various levels of force and vulnerability depending on location, material, and other protocols.
While I’m not really convinced by his argument that infrastructure is a product of modernity (I think Mattern’s notion of the deep time of infrastructure is more helpful here in thinking across temporal scales), I found Edward’s multi-scalar approach to infrastructure helpful, as it brings up important questions: how do we hold multiple levels of analysis together and how does our perspective change as we move from one layer to another? Turning to archaeology, Mattern suggests that infrastructure creates paths, vectors, and surfaces that act as as sites of cultural and logistical inscription and transmission (Roman graffiti might offer us the original memes and trolls - “O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin”) Further, looking at infrastructure also lets us bring back structures, objects, and “things” back into our analysis, though, perhaps unlike an object oriented ontology, an infrastructural analysis like Starosielski’s look at undersea cables or Parks at internet infrastructure in Zambia, points us to ways in which infrastructures exist at various levels of force and vulnerability depending on location, material, and other protocols.
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