For Butler (2015), thinking of infrastructure as intrinsic to politics arises from the embodied—and therefore vulnerable, exposed, dependent, and relational— character of being human, which includes vulnerability and exposure to, dependency on, and relationship with a multitude of non-human things. As she writes, “we cannot understand bodily vulnerability outside this conception of its constitutive relations to other humans, living processes, and inorganic conditions and vehicles for living” (p. 130). The vulnerability that structures our relations to these others is exposed in moments of infrastructural lack or failure, but Butler’s (2016) key insight is that the condition of being vulnerable precedes these moments and persists after them. As she puts it in a later essay, “It was not as if we were, as creatures, not vulnerable before when infrastructure was working, and then when infrastructure fails, our vulnerability comes to the fore” (p. 13). Vulnerability attaches to the relational, performative, dependent quality of being human in the world. Infrastructure is not the cause of this vulnerability but one of the names for it. According to Butler (2016), “relationality includes dependency on infrastructural conditions,” and it calls for “theorizing the human body as a certain kind of dependency on infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations, and networks of support and sustenance by which the human itself proves not to be divided from the animal or from the technical world” (p. 21). Butler is neither first nor alone in thinking about deep relationality as intrinsic to being human, nor in extending this relationality to a broad range of non-human others, including the animal, organic, inorganic, and technological others whose agency we are vulnerable to and who are vulnerable to ours. The list of thinkers following this line of thought and exploring its implications is very long (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016; Peters, 2015; Tsing, 2015). It includes, significantly, a number of Indigenous thinkers, who teach us about relational ontology as it exists across a broad and diverse range of Indigenous philosophies, cultures, and practices, both historically and contemporarily (TallBear, 2018; Todd, 2016; Watts, 2013; Whyte, 2016; see also de la Cadena, 2015; Kohn, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, 2015). It includes many thinkers who see this orientation and the ethics arising from it as crucial to the possibility of ecologically viable futures (Alaimo, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Some have explored the question of whether and how these relations might be understood specifically as political relationships, a proposition complicated by customary associations of political action with reasoned speech and deliberation, and by the fact that the non-human others with whom we might otherwise have a political relationship typically do not speak (or, at least, do not speak typically) (Baker, 2020; Bennett, 2010; Connolly, 2017; Latour, 2004; Povinelli, 2016; Stengers, 2010). This is where Butler’s (2016) intervention becomes particularly generative, in that it suggests the possibility of infrastructure as the form such a politics might take. As she describes, it is commonplace to cast vulnerability and political agency 236 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 46(2) as opposites and “to assume that vulnerability is disjoined from resistance, mobilization and other forms of deliberate and agentic politics” (p. 22). This opposition relies on an account of politics as a conversation between autonomous, self-determining, sovereign subjects that feminist thought has long since exposed to be a masculinist fantasy. Politics takes place under the sign of heteronomy, a response to the inescapable experience of being acted upon by others. It is not the expression or assertion of our autonomy—it is the mediation of our ongoing and shared vulnerability. As Butler (2016) avers, if we reject the binary between vulnerability and political agency, and understand them to be complementary rather than opposed or mutually negating, we can think about politics in new modes. These are modes in which “vulnerability is still there, but only now assuming a different form” (p. 23). Butler does not make this argument but infrastructure can itself be understood as a mode of politics under these conditions, a material response to the experience of shared vulnerability between humans and non-humans alike. Infrastructure is not only a name for this shared vulnerability but the very form that politics between and among these beings takes—with politics understood as the mediation of their mutual dependency. In her essay “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,”
Lauren Berlant (2016) suggests that “one
task for makers of critical social form is to offer not just judgment about
positions and practices in the world, but terms of transition that alter the
harder and softer, tighter and looser infrastructures of sociality itself” (p.
393). The political subject of infrastructure is not just the subject for whom
infrastructure is an instrument of various violent and failing sovereignties, or
the site for contesting them. This subject is also a maker of critical social form
(not just arguments), a carrier of the destituent powers of building,
repairing, caring, provisioning, planning, and kin-making. These are the powers
of “non-sovereign relationality” that Berlant (2016) describes as “the
foundational quality of being in common” (p. 394). Enacting these powers takes
the material form of infrastructure, not speech. Infrastructure is the form
that politics takes in troubling times, under conditions where existing
political economies become or are rendered inoperative, a way of mediating
relations between humans, and between humans and the non-speaking others they
depend on and who depend on them. Under these conditions, “the question of
politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for
managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence and ordinary contingency of
contemporary existence” (Berlant, 2016, p. 394, emphasis added).
Infrastructures become the means, or staging ground, for “the nonreproductive making
of life”—for making lives that do not simply reproduce the relations that
structure the present, ad infinitum. In this sense, Berlant (2020) has recently
described herself as “an infrastructuralist”: “I am interested in the build. I
am interested in how we build out difference from within the world we are
living in … trying to build out infrastructures for collective life that refuse
the one we are
living” (n.p.). Here, infrastructure names the collective practice of literally
making a difference.
[...]
A similar orientation toward infrastructure and politics is evident in Métis scholar Michelle Murphy’s (2018) stirring account of the politics of “alterlife,” the politics of anti-racist, queer, and decolonial reproductive and environmental justice: Alterlife resides in ongoing uncertain aftermaths, continuingly challenged by violent infrastructures, but also holding capacities to alter and be altered—to recompose relations to land and sociality, to love and sex, to survival and persistence, to undo some forms of life and be supported by others, to become alter-wise in the aftermath of hostile conditions, to surprise. (p. 117) The surprises of alterlife take infrastructural forms. Alterlife politics attend to “what relations should be dismantled, refused and shunned … and which kinships, supports, structures, and beings get to have a future” (p. 110), questions whose answersinvariably take the form of infrastructural dismantling and making, respectively. In particular, this politics takes the form of dismantling infrastructures that reproduce the separation of certain human bodies from others, and from lands, waters, air, and non-human beings to enable the extraction, exploitation, and exhaustion of the latter for the benefit of the former. And it takes the form of building and supporting infrastructures that materialize being otherwise, in ways that enable life chances and careful, responsible relations, instead of selectively and unequally disabling and destroying them.
- Barney, Infrastructure and the Form of Politics
