Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century ed. by Eike-Christian Heine and Martin Meiske

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century ed. by Eike-Christian Heine and Martin Meiske Thomas Kaiserfeld (bio) Beyond the Lab and the Field: Infrastructures as Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century Edited by Eike-Christian Heine and Martin Meiske. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Pp. 292. The contributors to this anthology, comprising an introduction and ten empirical chapters, argue that infrastructures have been an overlooked site for knowledge production. New knowledge, they claim, has traditionally been traced back to spaces like labs and field studies. In these environments, control has to a varying degree been exercised over conditions and elements. Not in this volume, where instead infrastructures—characterized as a second nature—are branded as a hitherto ignored arena for the generation of knowledge. Beyond the Lab and the Field examines projects characterized as "scientific bonanzas," a metaphor for infrastructures as junctions for opportunities as well as distress. The cases include the Panama Canal; dam constructions in Germany, the United States, and Spain; the German autobahns during the Third Reich; Siberian oil extraction and irrigation in the Caucasus during the Soviet regime; European and Dutch power lines; a highway in Tel Aviv, Israel; and an airstrip in Antarctica. Timewise, the empirical examples stretch from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth. The different chapters constitute a range of relations between infrastructures and knowledge, including social sciences and the humanities. Most straightforward are probably examples of how construction of infrastructures such as the Panama Canal led to the emergence of tropical medicine and to the further development of geology and paleontology. But infrastructures, such as waterscapes exploited for hydropower, can also exhibit more complicated patterns of knowledge management, including the coexistence of different knowledge traditions. In addition, the monograph includes examples of how new knowledge may constitute formative elements of infrastructure projects. In the case of autobahn construction in the Third Reich, archaeological excavations pointed backward to an imagined glorious Germanic past while the new road system under construction pointed forward to modernization and motorization. Ethnographical research was mobilized in Siberia in order to understand how indigenous people could be transformed to contribute to the extraction of oil, resulting in new knowledge about indigenous Siberian lifestyles. Related to this are examples of counterexpertise knowledge opposing new infrastructures by introducing alternative value scales for the assessment of their impact, such as accessibility or the preservation of cultural and natural heritage. Taken together, the different contributions make up a heterogenous collection in which the theme is analyzed from a number of perspectives. One drawback is that the concept of infrastructure becomes a bit stretched. [End Page 268] Although briefly discussed in the introduction, where it is characterized by "profound interdependencies" (p. 5), and in a chapter on the European electrical system as arrangements that enable "flows of energy, information, people, and goods" (p. 163), many of the chapters focus on isolated parts of infrastructures. The resulting impression is that the common denominator for the sites of knowledge production analyzed is more ambitious construction projects than infrastructures. For instance, an Antarctic airstrip is certainly a project that is part of an infrastructure. But when the analysis is focused on ecological knowledge mobilized in opposition to the exploration of Antarctica, the infrastructural aspects are easily lost. Another concern is the choice of analytical concepts. Although Thomas P. Hughes's notion of technological momentum is employed to elucidate the suitability of infrastructures for the study of knowledge production as they often involve substantial investments in order to mobilize extensive resources to be managed by numerous stakeholders (p. 8), his ideas regarding reverse salients are never put to work despite their relevance to knowledge production in the contexts of infrastructures and large technical systems alike. In fact, many of the contributions could easily be brought together as examples of how reverse salients are handled by the production or engagement of knowledge—or, alternatively, how knowledge may create reverse salients where there were none due to ignorance. Still, the different contributions make a strong, albeit somewhat less concerted, effort to highlight infrastructures as an important space for knowledge production and...