The temporal fragility of infrastructure: Theorizing decay, maintenance, and repair

Keywords: Infrastructural life, temporality, materiality, embodiment, affect, labor, power, socioecological relations
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social processes, and more specific consideration has been given to the life phases that connect infrastructure’s development, use, and deterioration, thereby challenging long-held assumptions of its linearity and completion. Infrastructure’s temporalities are more than merely moments in time. They are predicated upon, and produce, different material conditions, social perceptions and labor, power geometries and policies, and socio-ecological relations. In this paper we explore the dynamic phases of infrastructure and their associated material and affective conditions, to highlight the “temporal fragility” of infrastructure and its contingent social relationships. We focus specifically on the phases of decay, maintenance, and repair that characterize infrastructural life, on the grounds that these specific temporal phases shed light on the labor enacted by ordinary people to secure connectivity and flows, and encapsulates embodied and affective experiences. Our intervention has two related aims: first, to conceptualize decay, maintenance, and repair as both temporal phases of infrastructure’s dynamic materiality and its specific affective conditions; second, to trace how these phases of infrastructural life rework embodied labor, differentiated citizenship, and socio-ecological relations. We argue that attention to infrastructure’s temporal fragility elucidates the articulation between everyday capacities and desires to labor, the creation of and demands made by political constituents, and the uneven distribution of opportunities and resources.