Infrastructural awareness

Abstract

ABSTRACT The invisibility of functional infrastructures has become a truism. Although infrastructures are invisible in many ways—because of their size, because they are hidden, or because they are so foundational—those whose livelihoods are endangered by infrastructures are keenly aware of them. In-person and online action against the Dakota Access Pipeline brought dramatic attention to oil infrastructure even though the pipeline was not only not visible, it was not yet built. I argue that the practices that make infrastructure perceptible—whether technological, geographical, social, or historical—are also always political. This study sets the efforts of Oceti Sokowin, other Indigenous, and non-Indigenous water protectors into the context of U.S. infrastructure history to examine the wide-ranging effects of the dominance of sight in infrastructural awareness and to make the case that infrastructures are not normally functional, whether by inevitable accident or in the more fundamental failure of infrastructures’ imbrication with settler colonialism in North America. Rerouting entrenched habits of perception helps to correct some of the damaging legacies of using sight as a metric for value, to foreground the fundamental nature of infrastructural breakdown, and to expand definitions of infrastructures to better account for their far-reaching and diverse dependencies and effects.