The Location of Infrastructure

Abstract

A & Q 55 Kuzuoglu, Ulug. 2018. “Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Lewis, Geoffrey. 1999. TheTurkishLanguageReform:ACatastrophicSuccess. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nammour, Yara Khoury. 2014. Nasri Khattar: A Modernist Typotect. Amsterdam : Khatt Books. Simons, Gary F., and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2018. Ethnologue Global Dataset : Twenty-­ First Edition Data. Distributed by SIL International. http://www.sil.org/. Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3: 377–­ 91. Zaugg, Isabelle Alice. 2017. “Digitizing Ethiopic: Coding for Linguistic Continuity in the Face of Digital Extinction.” PhD diss., American University. Zhong, Yurou. 2019. Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity 1916–­1958. New York: Columbia University Press. The Location of Infrastructure Ram Bhat I argue that infrastructures are useful when understood as a vantage point, a point from which one could investigate both state and subject, materiality and meaning, structure and agency. Admittedly, to occupy this productive vantage point, a broad working definition of infrastructure is needed, for example, “a totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalised structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate , connecting and binding people into collectivities” (Larkin 2008, 6). The entanglement of media and communication infrastructures in state–­ subject relations is fertile ground for interdisciplinary collaboration and research among social anthropologists, political sociologists, media and communication scholars, and science and technology studies scholars, to name a few. In the age of late capitalism, the expansion of internet infrastructure further aids the free flow of capital across the globe. At the same time, this free flow of capital should not be used as an excuse for us to assume that the effects of either capital or technologies are similar everywhere. In several countries of the Global South, especially in Asia and Africa, neoliberalism has been accompanied by the increased visibility and influence of the state, although key sectors, such as transportation, aviation, telecommunication, education, and 56 A & Q health, continue to be privatized rapidly. Infrastructures as conduits of capital contain material and symbolic traces that can be studied in various ways—­ as evidence of novel social practices, institutional and financial arrangements, electoral politics, new government schemes, new disciplinary practices, and so on. Such new practices and arrangements are sites for rethinking the specificities of “Asia” and “inter-­ Asian” connections, thinking about how our societies are constellated in new ways without necessarily reverting to older and increasingly exhausted conceptual categories. Media and communication scholarship, along with other disciplines and fields, has seen a renewed interest in infrastructure. Infrastructure studies has been a crucial component of what has been called the “ontological ” turn. This “ontological politics covers more than the question of how politics is embedded in technological devices, for it concerns the emergence of potentially novel forms out of infrastructural arrangements ” (Jensen and Morita 2015, 85; cf. Knox 2017; Woolgar and Cooper 1999; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). In part at least, this move signals an exhaustion with analytics that treat politics as an exclusively discursive domain. “In shifting attention away from politics as a primarily discursive activity, these new materialist reworkings have distanced themselves from conventional political categories in order to focus instead on processes and relations that exceed these descriptive concepts” (Knox 2017, 365; cf. Braun and Whatmore 2010; Marres and Lezaun 2011; Whatmore and Landström 2011). Such a postdiscursive perspective can generate insights into media and communications infrastructures that have hitherto been understudied in favor of investigations focused on content, audiences, and political economy. Take the case of satellites used in warfare. It has been argued that “satellite images can be used to bring (infra)structural processes and matters to the fore by intimating or revealing parts of systems or processes that are simply too vast for the frames, conventions and capacities of modern media” (Parks 2012, 79). From undersea cables to standards and protocols, infrastructures—­ taken literally as objects of research—­ show how the local is constantly marked by the national and the international (Starosielski 2015; Easterling 2016). In India, for example, since the mid-­ 1980s, the rise of Hindu nationalism has gone hand in hand with utopian imaginaries of technological development. The right-­ wing Bharatiya Janta...