ABSTRACT
“People as Infrastructure” was a concept deployed by the author in a 2004 publication of Public Culture. This essay returns to this notion following widespread use across the urban studies community, and attempts to find new dimensions of applicability not considered in the original publication. These are rooted in an exploration of a techno-poetics of urbanism, the continuous and oscillating relationships between human agencies and technicity, and the subsequent need to reimagine the basic terms of urban collective life.
It is somewhat ironic to return to a concept – people as infrastructure – that has bolstered my professional reputation but one which I have rarely used since its inception, in this case, some sixteen years ago. Its origin as a kind of “throw-away” formulation in a workshop designed to invoke anthropological empathy, soon assumed a life of its own, a way to complement notions of the infra-political, which was a theme of a special issue of Public Culture. Despite its playfully irreverent origins, people as infrastructure did express my deep-seated concern with how to consider urban collective life as something beyond notions of individuals, households, communities, and institutions. Work embedded in the intensely heterogeneous worlds of majority districts in Africa and Asia – entanglements of poor, working and lower middle-class positionalities and practices – constantly exhibited the inadequacies of classical sociological designations. Such designations did identify salient modes of organization and attachment. But, they did not fully apprehend urban space as a fabric of entangled attunements, maneuvers, and antagonisms among shape-shifting constellations of materials and bodies.
I thus proposed shifting the conceptualization of the intricate choreographies of collective life away from reference to social bonds, ideological commitments, habitus, and communal sentiment to an emphasis on a “mathematics” of continuous recombination of people’s experiences and practices. It was an intentional maneuver to render people’s actions as technical, an infrastructure generating possibilities of acting in concert beyond the explicit intention or planning of any individual or group. In this brief essay, I want to briefly explore the extent to which the theoretical and political objectives at work in the initial proposition, “people as infrastructure”, hold out in relation to the changing spatial and temporal frameworks of contemporary urbanization, as well as the changing parameters of collective life. Here, the technical dimensions I associated with intensely “peopled” collaborations are much more explicitly disembodied and computational, in line with changing modes of capital accumulation and extraction that dominate urban life.
Revisiting the people as infrastructure concept
The people as infrastructure notion, at its core, acknowledges the tyranny of imposing frozen, uni-dimensional categories on messy, evolving social life and social relations that assimilate countless processes and inheritances (ultimately rendering the search for cause and effect problematic). Here performed activities that ramify in all directions raise fundamental challenges about where any observer draws the boundaries that enable narratives of cause and effect. For example, on the surface, it might be impossible to draw plausible lines of relationality between the argument a butcher and customer have over the price of a particular cut of meat, the argument a mother ten blocks away is having with a young daughter about how far she and friend might venture away from home, and arguments of local officials gathered still another ten blocks away over new regulations to be adopted for the market where our butcher is now arguing. However, these simultaneities might indeed be connected by a nuanced frame that erodes their apparent insularity and links events and processes via recognition of structured structures that engulf them.
This is not a matter of a genealogy of circumstances, a network analysis, or a bird’s eye overview that could deliver an “all-points” visualization with these in a given field moving in relation to each other. Rather, it is a matter of how events, interactions, and scenarios work off all that precedes and follows it, and how their very conditions of possibility are posed. Regardless of whether all of these arguments have occurred before, as a matter of course, this argument now is this argument, taking place now in a particular conjunction of hundreds and hundreds of events that surround each other, and constitute a surrounds – an opening of any context or scenario onto an infinite field of other encounters.
Practically, we would be inclined to render these arguments in prosaic and practical ways. The butcher faces the imposition of new taxes by the local council and tries to sneak in an extra surcharge to a more tangential customer; the mother seeks to limit the daughter’s mobility because she doesn’t want her to run into an estranged father on the way to a local council meeting; and the local council is arguing because the market has been getting away with under-invoicing its daily proceeds. These are to be the plausible relations, if any, of all of those that might exist. But in the daily operations of those majority districts with which I was most familiar, the plausible was not always the usual, and certainly not the most eventful. Where the eventful consists of the ways in which the very heterogeneities of the composition of districts were implicitly relied upon, not to guarantee the stability of everyday practice and disposition, but to work the district’s ways out of various dilemmas, unanticipated occurrences and debilitating contestations. Where the eventual continuously incites new relations amongst things, for such relations underpinned the local economy.
Across these urban majorities, there was the conviction that messy interchanges among different sentiments and actors would eventually produce something better than existed now, even when people might be hard pressed to demonstrate real results. In the rough and tumble everyday worlds of trying to make the most from what was available, of putting together people and things that didn’t seem to really go together, residents tended to be convinced to let many different scenarios play out. They demonstrated a basic tolerance for ways of doing things that didn’t necessarily correspond to their values or beliefs. What was important was an experience of forward momentum, even in small increments; the feeling that one wasn’t stuck in place, that there were ways of “working” the situation, playing the field, that allowed one a sense of agency. In this way, residents were always looking out for each other, not simply in the sense of taking care, of having their neighbors “backs”, but looking out onto the world with a receptivity that then rendered all of those arguments, all of those quotidian scenes of buying and selling, gossiping, exchanging, and witnessing a critical infrastructure for the endurance of a territory, a people, a community – whatever was the imaginary designation of what was shared in common.
The radical openness of people as infrastructure
This “looking out for” in part corresponds to what Achille Mbembe (Citation2017) has called a “radical openness” to the ways in which humans are imbricated in a vast web of interdependencies of various scales, whether it be that of the biome, ecological complementarity, social metabolisms, or shared inhabitation. This radical openness does not necessarily involve an individual and an “other;” it is not an ethics of being together, but an acknowledgment of all of the ways one’s existence is tied to affiliations of all kinds. These affiliations are the very architectures of endurance, and no matter how “peopled” they may be, the people have a status no more or less important than anything else. Thus, the phrasing, people as infrastructure, was intended to resituate urban human existence in a way that acknowledged the constellation of accompaniments to the eventfulness of urban life. It was the imagination of a broader playing field where the human condition in the urban is punctuated by relentless collisions between human situatedness, human endeavor, and the inheritance of resourced realities. Infrastructure seemed to provide that broadening concept, the mechanics of a radical openness that transcends the matter of human decision, and characterizes the positionality of human life that is constitutionally open to what Simondon (Citation2017) calls a transindividual domain, where the interactions among bodies and materials engenders new constellations of sense and capacity.
The attempt was thus to lend collective life the energetic language of infrastructure – through surges, reticulations, chokepoints, circumventions – that emphasized the intensities and conditions of people enacting occupied spaces between bodies. Those spaces were boundaries blurred, where shapes shifted into emergent vocabularies of mutable forms depending on the angles, scope and proximities of observation and participation. It was not that the districts with which I worked lacked enclosures and insularity, for all kinds of parochialisms abounded. Residents always sought a plethora of social intimacies, even with expenditures they could not afford. All kinds of authorities would crop up out of the woodwork claiming distinctive constituencies. The “looking out for” cited earlier was a way in which social intimacy was rendered something expansive, reflecting a desire to know and be known across wide terrain, not as cohesive, singular selves, but known in variegated, even contradictory ways, as people wearing “different hats” on different occasions. Even as the predictability and security offered by enclosures was necessary in districts inclined to veer all over, where everyone’s vulnerability to an anonymity by default of the sheer diversity of operations required some anchorage of repeatable recognition.
At the same time, the potentials afforded to doing the same thing in a different way lured forays into the intensities of the streets, a public domain that could not be easily enclosed or claimed by anyone, a domain with its own changing language simultaneously pushing and pulling against the enclosures but also sustaining them. Elaborations of these volatile mixtures were not merely the backdrop of lives lived within the confines of domestic, religious, ethnic or occupational settings. Rather, this elaboration was the locus of continuous recalibration and mutation, issuing stability through everyday changes in atmosphere. From the daily night markets of Kebayoran Lama in Jakarta, to the sunset exercise sessions of the multitudes in Phnom Penh, to the cacophonous openings and closings of stores in Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, a frenzy of bodies in motion seeming to know exactly what to do infuses the surrounds with a remarkable charge. Always bordering on chaos, a proficiency of collective choreography creates an enlarged sense of spaciousness. This spaciousness testifies to the capacity of bodies to be simultaneously more and less than what they are – a dynamic infrastructure. This making visible a collective potential’s spaciousness could be drawn upon at other times and circumstances to lend a surfeit of possibility to even the most banal transactions.
The concept’s renewed importance
I believe that these reflections on people as infrastructure have renewed importance given the vulnerabilities of collective life today. As urban populations become objects of increased extraction in systems of ensnarement, they are counted and discounted in political economies of human deployment. Here urban existences count in a mode of calculation applied. Residents become harvested for behavioral proclivities, risk probabilities, biological inheritances, as well as their capacities to labor under specific conditions and remuneration. Urban residency is ultimately converted into a controlled but grand experimentation. Particular kinds of bodies are repositioned, moved around, left on their own, wasted, and become receptacles for particular kinds of policies provided political-economic agendas are being serviced. Certain kinds of residents and households – subalterns and the racialized poor in particular – ultimately become cast as responsible for their own social reproduction. In this way these residents count.
In this counting, then, these bodies are discounted as bodies with their own aspirations and attainments. Their desires only count when they are manifested in behaviors that can be measured, subjected to the probabilities of specific outcomes, and ally with political and economic projects that seek to define and mobilize them. Then, there are also residents whose lives are so substantially discounted that they may literally disappear from view, or made to disappear. Bodies can become the raw materials, not only for the accumulation of profit by others, but rendered materials in the elaboration of what Neferti Tadiar (Citation2021) has called the cash rewards/kickbacks/rents/protection money/promotion logics of police-political machines. Here, the very social intimacies of collective life – all of the neighborhood support systems, spaces of enclosure, and streets of “wild” encounter – are attacked in a conscious strategy of cultivating fragmentation and distrust. Here, an infrastructure is being dismantled, and the operative language becomes depletion, ruptures, spilling, and fractures.
The language of infrastructure I have used pointed to the ways collective formations respond to this calculated human deploying. Here formations always pursue repair. Adroit processes of suturing, choreographing, and enacting a sense of “we” are crucial mutual doings. Yet, increasingly, the contemporary question is the extent to which many such collective formations may be beyond repair. Or, whether the emphasis on reparability acts as a calling card for the capacities of resilience now purportedly demonstrated by all. Whereas repair indicates the realities of brokenness and vulnerability, of the need to pay attention to how things work, and how they can be stretched to their breaking point, resilience is forwarded as an essential capacity, as an ability for residents to roll with the punches and still remain operative. Despite the extremities of eviction, displacement, and dispossession, residents are still often able to piece together some fragile and limited versions of collective force and action. But they now often do so from locations where few are paying attention. For, physical displacement now most usually entails operating from the far hinterlands, or in territories intentionally made marginal or wasted from overuse or irrelevance.
The Dilemma of Valorized Circulation and Temporary Settlement
An additional conundrum facing conceptualizations of collective life is the heightened valorization of circulation and the temporariness of settlement and livelihood as key urban orientations. Both volitional and involuntary displacements of subalterns and lower middle class residents to the peripheries of urban regions exacerbate atmospheres of human temporariness. Here, individuals and households seek an address, park belongings and some family members, and secure some form of shelter that everyone searches for and needs. Many formerly urban core residents in Jakarta, for example, currently experience this. Faced with rising housing costs, labor-intensive needs to repair present built and social environments, and intensifying local political antagonisms, they opt to migrate to temporary peripheral locations. They sense that the dispositions of an urban future, something which they cannot yet describe with any precision, nevertheless make their current ways of life untenable, inadequately prepared for what is coming.
Many frequently return to their old neighborhoods to maintain occupations and social ties, but investments in collectivity take place at a distance, and in conjunction with time spent probing other spaces for possible opportunities. Transport costs increase, particularly as boarding house rooms, cheap apartments or house rentals have to be paid for across different locales. But, for example, Jakarta’s enduring system of cheap public transportation enables a circulatory system, which even if time consuming, exposes residents to regional elements which they had only limited knowledge. Collective life here is increasingly an assemblage of itineraries, temporary encounters, short-term contracts and arrangements, social media organized information exchange, and the search for something adequate for now. Much time is spent in quasi-public gatherings, e.g. convenience stores with outdoor seating, road side stalls and eating places where conversations with those who are neither friends nor strangers take place often long into the night. Attention is paid to those in buses, trains, and shared taxis as to where they are headed and under what circumstances. This propulsion forward into uncharted terrain, accompanied by arduous visits back “home” and the rituals that maintain coherence, demands new conceptualizations of collective life on the move. It demands attention to ways in which various aggregates of people facilitate and impede circulation. The circulation of functions and identities that once functioned as an internal modus operandi of majority districts are literally being elongated across space.
Much has been written about the dangers of technical logics and apparatuses to the sustaining of collective life. Today present regimes of calculability, preemption, and algorithmic deployment overtake the human capacity to produce and share knowledge. At the same time, increasingly automated ways in which futures are specified, incorporated as probabilities into the present, threaten to obviate the need for collectivity. Here, the stability of selves is continuously undermined through continuous runs of variables which assign specific, changing valuations of self. Yet, this wounding of the collective by the technical is fraught with instability in an elaborate invention. If the imagination of a future for the collective can emanate from the collective itself, and if the recognition and operationalization of collectives are increasingly situated within more strictly technical relations, these logics and instruments of the technical can facilitate a progressive reimagination of what it means to inhabit the urban. An imagination that unsettles the predominant relations between human and environment as a means of remaking relations among human inhabitants themselves. This is what people as infrastructure allows – i.e. the simultaneously rendering of the collective as both human and technical production, as an ongoing appropriation and meshing of these as the human and technical is a constantly moving, unfixed target.
As Simondon (Citation2017) reminds us, there is no real division between human and technical life, as if they were separated by a real boundary. Form, matter, and energy coexist in the technical; none of them appears as an external element that superimposes on the others from the outside. For Simondon, there is no human nature, only thresholds and transitions that define the human as a particularly unstable field of individuation. But rather than explaining instability through the abstract model of the species he focuses on degrees of individuation. This is not to deny human singularity but to refuse bounded notions of the human as a form of becoming autonomous from animal and mineral existence. Individuation is not human to begin with; it emerges out of an inhuman milieu and unfolds in innumerable directions.
Too often, social mobilizations and the valorization of practices for city-making forget the importance of the technical in the ways that both material and social events take form. Whatever takes place relies on distinct forms of technical mediation – on recording techniques, narrative devices, architectural forms, infrastructural arrangements and modes of visual and cognitive display–all of which filter, transmit and generate data and information in ways that are neither neutral nor transparent. This is not just about plans and tools, written-down or improvised. The technical is a way in which things come together, with and without us, in a process of energetic transmission, where new functions and operations kick-in in the coming together of specific elements and conditions.
Reflections of Technicity
We may make these technical devices or have a hand in forging them. These instruments bring their own temporal grammars and imaginations to bear upon the imaginative and affective horizons through which time, memory and durations are indexed, validated and taken forward. They create an entirely new set of possibilities. They are not the outgrowths of striving bodies but collisions of materials and processes that generate impacts far from their initial sites and “steady-states.” As Hansen (Citation2012) points out technical operations configure environmental conditions of sensibility “not to confront perception with the transcendental sensible content that comprises its virtual condition but to expose as experience that (which) occurs without directly yielding any perception whatsoever.”
As Manning and Massumi (Citation2014) investigations of perception and movement have emphasized, every time we perceive something occurring in an environment, it entails a process of “reciprocal interfusion”. Something is apportioned out to us as we apportion ourselves out to it, in a process of mutual figuring rather than the imposition of our intentions upon the objects or experience within the environment. This mutual reaching toward a conjoint enactment, which is the basis for perception, is set against a backdrop where there could be many different alternative realizations. Whatever is perceived in the enactment of a relationship between an environment and us is always an instance of some larger potentiality that already exists. It is not outside the possibility of perception, but does not require perception in order for it to be present. In other words, a technical operation, a process of something taking-form.
While these reflections on technicity may largely be known through processes of engineering, metabolic functioning, and geomorphic transitions, they are applicable to the present conundrums of urban life. If one scans the horizons of most cities of the Global South, there is a prolific enfolding of uniformity, deviation, and “strange deformation.” Some half-century ago, most people afros the globe had the same set of conditions to work with, the same materials, even though their availability and popularity changed over time. Residents largely had the responsibility to build things themselves. Even when states and municipalities laid out a basic platform of housing and services, these were usually reworked over time. Large numbers of the world’s urban population continue live in built settings that are either incomplete, provisional, reworked, or barely held together.
Such built environments can be conceived as a manifestation of provisional problem-solving, or the manifestation of disparate individualized attempts to put together shelter and livelihoods that were functional for the time being until the “real urban development” finally took hold. But more importantly, we should revisit what remains of them for their technical proficiencies, and as technical instantiation of collective action. While they no longer constitute an aspirational horizon, nor should they be replicated in mass construction or become the objects of an urban heritage, we might understand the knowledge that emanates from them and the kinds of collective capacities they enabled. How to reapply these capacities in new form for new conditions might go a long way in relocating the field of technics to remaking the social in ways that are more equal and just.
While such built environments can indeed reflect instabilities and the levels of accumulation and security available to its residents, they can also function as ongoing processes of reworking. They always challenge a series of problems and opportunities, often contradictory, of attempts to make the most out of the city and the resources available to residents. Many majority districts became an array of rough landscapes, full of rough edges. The gates, the walls, the structures, the pathways, and so forth may have been propelled with a similar set of imaginaries and constructed with similar kinds of tools and labor. But the outputs resounded with a diversity that stood out by virtue of the all the elements of commonality. It was the plurality of constant incremental adjustments, adaptations, and small innovations that not only reflected a heterogeneous social body but was itself a platform for intricate differentiations among people. These were sensory, spiritual, cognitive, performative, and experiential environments in addition to being built and economic domains. They were elaborations of various information and ways of connecting and disconnecting things. They were full of things, which because of their lack of fit, lack of seamless articulation, exerted different impacts on each other at different scales and with different processes.
Information rich environments were continuously re-supplemented and lived through; they gave residents many things to work with as a means of working with and on each other. This is why Simondon’s notion of the transindividual here is important as a way of considering the implications of environments that are either over-designed or mass produced, and where technical operations are limited to particular forms of cost-accounting, risk analysis, and surveillance.
Conclusion
People as infrastructure, helping us to understand today’s urban challenges, identifies both the dangers in the seeming dissolution of collective life from new forms of capital accumulation and political rule enabled by automated knowledge production. The concept, in one of its dominant tenets that I highlight in this essay, warns us of the dangers in renewing collective life in strictly non-technical terms, i.e. according to the nostalgic, even melancholic sentiments of a humanist ethos. This does not obviate the ways collectives will need to deliberate and negotiate questions about what they want to be and how to live together. As we discover that city life across the globe is improvisational, ephemeral, always evolving and incomplete, and assimilative of countless processes and inheritances, there is more to learn about people as infrastructures being created and deployed. I believe that we need to excavate more depth and nuance to this complicated and complicating process. Social ontologies from Jakarta to Manila to Detroit to Flint to Calcutta, ever tinged by the dialectics of fragmentation and order, unfold in ways that we are only beginning to realize. It is in the spirit of this recognition that I offer this brief essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
- Hansen, Mark B.N. (2012). Engineering pre-individual potentiality: Technics, transindividuation, and 21st-Century media. SubStance, 41(129), 38–49. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2012.0025
- Manning, Erin, & Massumi, Brian. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
- Mbembe, Achille. (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press.
- Simondon, Gilbert. (2017). On the mode of eixistence of technical objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina & John Rogove (Eds.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Tadiar, Neferti X.M. (2021). Remaindered Life. Duke University Press.