The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive

Sanctuary Inter/rupted : Borders, illegalization, and unbelonging

“…This locating of borders as an act of “state violence and control inscribed in landscape” is important to better understand borders as “historically specific social systems, which frequently shape distinctive borderland cultures and identities” more complex than linear images of “black lines on maps” (Moctezuma and Davis ). Zannah Mae Matson () suggests that increased proposals for heightened physical border defence are based on assumptions that “the border is a line that can be extruded into vertical planes to form fences, walls, and barricades.” In tracing sites of border renegotiation, Matson complicates the border as a container of space to trace the ways that the border is alive as a “relational product of past struggles, past corruption, and past projects” (Robbins , 32). While calling attention to transgressive flows that cross physical borders is important for tracing “inconsistencies in state infrastructures of control” (Matson ), it simultaneously suggests the unfixed nature of border infrastructure and the way in which its unfixedness can operate to reinforce and reproduce the boundaries of citizenship in white settler society beyond the physical border.…”

Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam

“…This is not to suggest that a condition of visibility intrinsically represents nonexistent or damaged infrastructure or vice versa—that displacement from sight implies performance as usual; in fact, I argue against these very presumptions. As Bruce Robbins () proposes, smell may be a more reliable referent to the lack or disruption of infrastructure. Moreover, Soviet infrastructure, as Todorov's quote at the start of this article suggests, once extolled utilitarian form through a technopolitics of visibility that strove to convey the emancipatory powers of spectacular public works to an enchanted, viewing population.…”

“…As Milan Kundera also noted of Soviet‐era plumbing in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (see Robbins :29).…”

Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo

“…Infrastructure is a classic “public good,” a set of resources available to all and whose use does not decrease its availability to others (Samuelson 1954; Stigliz 1999). The “smell of infrastructure is the smell of the public” (Robbins 2007:26).…”

“…“Infrastructure needs to be made visible,”Bruce Robbins has said, “in order to see how our present landscape is the product of past projects, past struggles” (2007:32). Robbins's text reveals social struggles hidden in the invisibility of infrastructure.…”