Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination

Abstract

This essay explores how contemporary political life is framed through engagements with material forms. Extending work that has demonstrated that politics is best understood not as a discursive or institutional sphere but as the effect of material engagements, the essay asks, just how is it that materials become the grounds for politics? Focusing on the history of a road construction project in the Peruvian Amazon, the essay illustrates how politics becomes realized through engagements that entail the affective force of emergent materialities that break through or rupture a normalized understanding of sociomaterial relations. This rupture cracks open a space for material diagnostics, wherein both familiar and unfamiliar political forms are able to take shape. Thus in material diagnostics are found both the potential for ontological difference and considerable repair work wherein the grounds for a future politics is remade.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Their efforts to keep at bay the inevitable burial of cities by desert sand illustrate what Zee calls “chronopolitics.” Citing Walter Benjamin, he explains that chronopolitics refers to “the various ways in which the political does not merely operate in ‘empty, homogenous time’ (Benjamin , 261), but rather … makes the manipulation, acceleration, or projection of time both the condition and ongoing goal of political and governmental intervention” (Zee , 218). We can see this form of politics at work across many of the essays cited above as well as in other work on environmental and infrastructural management that also demonstrates, along with Zee, how critical it can be to approach temporality in ways that can account for politics and scales that exceed the human (Degani ; Knox ; Vaughn ).…”

Care goes underground: thinking through relations of care in the maintenance and repair of urban water infrastructures

“…This scholarship recognises materials as 'specific, relational, agential, and importantly political' with the capacity to 'affect and indeed reframe social processes'. 49 Building on this work and responding specifically to provocations to attend to the role of the more than human within relations of care, 50 we seek to extend understanding of who (and what) can participate in care relations. 51 Through attunement to nonhuman actants within networks of water infrastructure, we build on existing work by exploring how and under what conditions nonhumans become implicated in care relations and the ways in which human participants work with these in order to effect care.…”

Waiting for the flood: technocratic time and impending disaster in the Himalayas

“…Infrastructure projects also have their own temporalities, as the promises they hold permit states to conceptualise a future of modernity for nations, with crucial implications for the agency of local populations (Hetherington, 2014; Lord, 2016). Examining the affective dimensions of infrastructure projects reveals how the political can emanate from the material and the feelings and imagination they encode (Knox, 2017). It is because of this capacity of infrastructure to index emotions that the state's failure to support Zanskar's development in the past reinforced feelings that it should be totally focused on preventing a flood that endangered infrastructure.…”