Concept: Infrastructure

Definition: (noun)

1. Built networks for the exchange and flow of goods, people, and ideas
2. An approach in the academy that uses formal structures and culturalized forms in order to investigate society and the nuances within it

Related Terms: networks, systems, grids, structures, framings

Description:

At its core, infrastructure consists of the built networks for the exchange and flow of goods, people, and ideas. These networks provide the basis for daily modern life, incorporating factors such as the speed and direction of movement, and vulnerabilities and temporalities in physical infrastructure.¹ This can be seen in projects such as public works, city planning, digital data centers, and roadways. Typically, infrastructure projects require large investments of money and labor, and can last over many years.

Social and human sciences scholarship incorporated infrastructure in the 1970s, beginning with economic sociologists, political economists, and historians of science and technology, primarily aiming to conceptualize infrastructure, and pay special attention to its political dimensions and implications. In the 1990s, the work evolved to incorporate the rapidly growing digital information systems and their effects.² Zygmunt Bauman gave us the image of liquid infrastructure in his book Liquid Modernity (1999). In his work, Bauman calls for an ontological recalibration of infrastructure in order to represent modernity’s evolving software-focused, fluid state. This work untethered infrastructure from its former solid and hardware-based connotations, and extended it into the age of digitization and the accompanying human experience.³ One key point to note here is that infrastructures are also systems of meanings and values: they evoke hopes and dreams of connectivity, or the nightmares of excessive development and new modes of social division. This is nowhere more evident than in contemporary responses to AI or artificial intelligence that purports to supplant other types of digital infrastructure. 

Modern cultural humanities research has extended the tradition of studying material infrastructures to think of infrastructure as an approach, rather than an object. In urban studies, infrastructure is used to understand and uncover how power and people interrelate or are divided.⁴ In her book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain investigates America’s largest fast food chain, McDonalds, in relation to Black communities in the United States. In her historical presentation of the restaurant’s founding and rapid growth, Chatelain discusses the white supremacist infrastructure in the early to mid 20th century that first allowed for McDonalds to be largely economically and physically inaccessible to Black Americans, and then moves forward to the 1950s and 60s to discuss the reasons for the franchise’s emphasized presence in predominantly black and urban communities. Chatelain references factors such as Jim Crow policies, bisecting highways that devastated Black communities, and Nixon’s black capitalism political and economic policies. In her book, Chatelain effectively uses infrastructure, both in reference to McDonald’s infrastructure and anti-black infrastructure in the United States, as an approach to uncover the many nuances and interconnections between American Black communities and McDonalds’ corporate success.

Modern media studies also participates in incorporating infrastructure as a method. In their introduction to Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities, Aaron Pinnix, Axel Volmar, Fernando Esposito, and Nora Binder discuss media studies’ relationship to infrastructure. They write, “In the last decade, media scholars have turned to infrastructure studies to complement traditional approaches to studying media infrastructures, question common narratives of technological progress, or reconsider widespread conceptions of “media” (Binder et al. 2023, 21). This can be seen in works such as John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds. In this book, Peters uses foundational media philosophy, such as the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and Friedrich Kittler, to argue that media are environments, and conversely, that environments are also media. As such, media are the very infrastructures which combine nature and culture, allowing human life to thrive.⁵ Here, Peters incorporates infrastructure as a method in order to encourage a reevaluation of the term ‘media’ into the central idea that media are the foundation of human’s interaction with the world around them.⁶ They are, in his words, “systems of order.”

In her piece, Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics, Simone Browne also uses media infrastructure as a lens in order to investigate western society and anti-blackness. Browne draws from Franz Fanon’s concept of ‘epidermalization’ in Black Skin, White Masks to think through race and the body in the context of biometric technology, looking not only at the infrastructure of the technology itself, but also the role of the technology in establishing infrastructures of subject–making based on race. Her work highlights the generative power that an infrastructure methodology holds, as it provides a framework for thinking through and questioning power structures that perpetuate discrimination, inequity, and violence. 

The Migration Mapping project takes inspiration from Chatelain, Peters, Browne, in our aim to incorporate infrastructure as a Concept in order to activate a new lens in our work at the intersection of media and migration. This will allow us to incorporate new entries into our datasets that center around infrastructure as an effective intellectual approach. 

 For example, in his film Sleep Dealer (2008), Alex Rivera centers his world around the imperialist infrastructure in Mexico in the not–so–distant future in order to provide a poignant commentary on labor, ecology, and racial capitalism. The film is set in a (somewhat) dystopian future of North America where the border between the United States and Mexico is completely walled off and Mexican water rights are in the control of multinational corporations. The film follows Memo Cruz, a young man who travels to Tijuana for work after his father is killed and his family’s farm is destroyed in a targeted drone strike. In his migration to what is dubbed “the city of the future,” Memo navigates displacement, virtual labor factories that export Mexican labor for U.S. urban development, and personally invasive technology that allows for the selling of one’s own memories. Rivera’s film centers on futuristic ecological and advanced technological infrastructure in order to present a migration narrative that is as relevant to the present, as it is predictive of the future.

As a digital archive, resource guide, and research hub, Migration Mapping works to keep track of mediated forms that allow us to make sense of migration as a human practice. Infrastructure is a central piece of this pursuit, as it incorporates not only the physical structures that allow for the flow and movement of people, but it also presents a methodology for thinking through the political, cultural, and social components of infrastructure that are extremely relevant in the mediation of migration.

M.M. & S.C. 2024

References:

¹ Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43.

² Binder, Nora, Fernando Esposito, Aaron Pinnix, Axel Volmar, and Universität Konstanz. Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. 1st ed, 2023.

³ Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Newark, UNITED KINGDOM: Polity Press, 2000.

⁴ Chatelain, Marcia. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. First Edition, First Printing. New York: Liveright, 2020.

⁵ Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. 1st edition. Chicago, Illinois London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

⁶ Peters, 2015.

Further Readings:

Kish, Zenia, and Benjamin Peters. “Farm Media: An Introduction.” New Media & Society 25, no. 8 (August 2023): 1827–41.

Minority Report. Action, Crime, Mystery. Twentieth Century Fox, Dreamworks Pictures, Cruise/Wagner Productions, 2002.

Parks, Lisa, Nicole Starosielski, and Charles R. Acland. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. 1st ed. Geopolitics of Information. Urbana, Chicago ; University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Duke University Press Books, 2015.