The body as infrastructure

Abstract

<jats:p> In this paper, we conceptualise the human body as infrastructure, asking what kind of infrastructure it currently is and what kind of infrastructure it could be. We therefore tease out the historically and geographically specific ways in which human bodies have been (re)produced as infrastructure, emphasising the violence of abstraction in capitalist modernity that transforms the productive body into a technology of calorific inputs and outputs. Nevertheless, through demystifying abstract labour we point to the relations of (re)production (needed for the body’s ongoing repair) and the metabolic processes (responsible for both decay and repair) that are subsumed within a broader capitalist system of accumulation. In so doing, we turn to the immanent contradictions and struggles that resist the body’s production as a one-sided technology of circulation and through which it is, and can become, an infrastructure for life and sociality. </jats:p>

Bodies-in-waiting as infrastructure: Assembling the Philippine Government's disciplinary quarantine response to COVID-19

“…This article draws from a growing strand of UPE scholarship that problematizes body relations in the city ( Andueza et al, 2020 ; Canoy, 2021 ; Doshi, 2017 ). In this specific body of work, bodies are agential and vibrant socio-materialities that co-constitute and populate urban forms and spaces.…”

“…In reading the foregoing passage taken from Gandy's discussion of complex bio-political contestations in urban spaces, bodies are not subservient to human will nor inferior to the urban body itself. Rather, bodies themselves are vital infrastructures in the city ( Andueza et al, 2020 ). Specifically, we extend this assertion in viewing non-mobile or sedentary bodies as structured by complex social formations, and that these seemingly inert bodies are themselves course in and through power ( Bissell, 2007 , 2010 ).…”

“…In other words, bodies are not mirrors nor passive conduits of social processes. Rather, as constitutional to the relations of the becoming urban, bodies always exceed their ‘exchange value’ ( Andueza et al, 2020 ). Thus, bodies-in-waiting as everyday infrastructures cannot be fully abstracted by the capitalist machine because these bodies don't just occupy or are commodified in space, but rather are viewed as fundamental to the differentiated worlding of urban life.…”

“…Divisoria as an embodied infrastructural ecology also shows complex relations of bodies-in-waiting that trouble the capacity of the body to wait in relation to intersecting everyday temporalities (i.e., bodies while waiting to get vaccinated, also cannot wait to move and feed its thirst and hunger). As such, the disciplining of bodies-in-waiting via strict quarantine measures is like ‘the tussle between the demands of abstraction and concrete processes of social reproduction plays out’ ( Andueza et al, 2020 , p. 12). In other words, bodies-in-waiting as (im)mortal infrastructures can be viewed as both complicit and resistant in their constitutive role of reproducing differentiated and liminal urban realities, wherein simple binary classifications are always already blurred or transgressed.…”

“…Bodies-in-waiting are politically engaged infrastructures. As Andueza et al (2020) posited, ‘it is not only the rule of capital that needs to be articulated on the permanently shifting cultural grounds that give social reproduction its multiple meanings, but it is also from these grounds that any possible political composition of resistance must emerge’ (p. 13). The left panel in Fig.…”