Afterword. Relations, Refusal, Reticulation

Abstract

The articles in the special issue ‘Infrastructural Lives' draw attention to the ‘hidden transcript' of infrastructural practices in distinct urban and rural locations in India and Vietnam, showing technical labour, outright refusal, and improvisation across myriad reticulated connections to be elements of an ‘infrapolitics' that is practical, responsive, and reckons in various ways with the forces of calculability and control inherent in infrastructural expansion, digital surveillance, and urban redevelopment. The authors explore how roads are policed and navigated, how livelihoods are transformed by new technological systems, and how diverse tactics of negotiation and refusal can be mobilised to sustain lives. These articles demonstrate that tactics of resistance and refusal are elements in a wider infrastructural politics, sometimes ‘completing' networked systems and making them ‘work’ for marginalised populations, sometimes evading or refusing their logic of connection and circulation in preference to other patterns of circulation.

Keywords:

• Infrastructure
• India
• Vietnam
• Anthropology
• Hidden transcripts

Relations

We are in a seminar room at a university in Delhi. A diagram showing an urban intersection is drawn on a board. The lanes are erased and divided with dotted lines to carve out a pathway for a flyover that will carry cars up and over the meeting point of these two imaginary traffic-clogged streets. Some equations are added. Some laughter—the presenter has just demonstrated that increasing road capacity in this way reduces the space for unimpeded travel and increases the time taken to get across the intersection, rather than the opposite. Delhi’s mania for building flyovers has been neatly punctured by math. Someone suggests that perhaps a better alternative would be an automated system, reducing decision points and informational chaos, clarifying complex relations by minutely controlling each driver’s actions. With a few calculations and comments, the same logic is shown to apply: Increased capacity generates the traffic to fill it; urban complexity and human behaviour conspire to cause congestion. In this way, a simple material ‘fix’ to a problem of urban infrastructure in times of change—Delhi is adding more cars each day to its roads than the rest of India combined—is considered and dismissed, and a high-technology imaginary of control is also conjured, only for the latter to be rejected in its turn. These young experts are alert to the needs of their ever-growing city but also to the real absurdity, material impossibility, and, to them, political unpalatability of many infrastructural and technological solutions that are offered.

This—or something like it—occurred amongst a convivial group of graduate students from various universities, both Indian and foreign, that I joined in Delhi in 2005. We were practising for roles as experts, professors, and advisors on urban and social problems. None of us had any real expertise in roads, traffic management, or urban government (our degrees were in law, computer science, anthropology). But we hoped that critical knowledge and, indeed, a moral sensibility might be honed by discussing everyday issues: we set ourselves the task of unearthing the political relations, unequal distributions, and practical problems embedded in material infrastructures, from roads to electricity and water systems. It seemed both urgent and intellectually exciting to trace how such basic elements of urban life shape the options people have and the choices they make—and make them add up to radically disjunct lives.

Looking back on his own contemporaneous research in the urban South, AbdouMaliq Simone has remarked that this millennial moment saw many efforts to craft a new ‘mathematics’ for understanding processes of urban life and to describe the infrastructures—formal and improvised alike—that sustain a ‘continuous recombination of people’s experiences and practices’ (Simone 2021, 1341). It appeared necessary and even politically useful to render people’s own everyday activities ‘technical’ in this context, to grant them significance as operations of city-making. Further, as David Harvey said in much the same moment, the right to the city was not to be defined in purely spatial or demographic terms of access and levels of consumption but rather as a ‘right to change ourselves by changing the city’ (Harvey 2008, 23). For many scholars focused on the devices and infrastructures of urban life, an ‘insistence on materiality  …  [was] at the same time an insistence on morality’, because these seemingly incommensurable registers of understanding appeared to be tightly intertwined in everyday life in the cities where we studied—each material intervention, each effort to meter or control proliferating complexity, raised questions of meaning and value as well as distributive justice (Ferguson 2012, 562). Nikhil Anand put concisely what motivated this new ethnographic attention to inadequate, splintered, leaky infrastructures and the work people did to map and maintain them: ‘the very possibility of life, its duration, and the degree to which social aspirations can be realised’ were at stake, and at issue, in people’s ‘claims on the very materials, pipes, and valves of [an urban] water system’ (Anand 2017, 228–229).

However, such an understanding of urban infrastructures as contested, critical objects that are performed into existence at the same time as they order and regulate political relations may also have limited our appreciation—in that meeting in Delhi—of the extent of the new regimes of investment, capitalisation, surveillance, and control that were also gathering force. We focused on the intersection or the interchange where intention met material form; meanwhile, grander or at least better-resourced efforts to render life calculable, and to profit (politically and economically) from the impersonal traces of actions and interactions, were taking on a new salience and significance. Simone observes, thus, that ‘today …  regimes of calculability, preemption, and algorithmic deployment overtake the human capacity to produce and share knowledge’ (2021, 1346). Infrastructure was being reformed and reframed as a topic for another logic of investment, remaking, and control that operated at a different scale altogether (as noted, variously, by Appel 2019; Elyachar 2012; Roy 2001). Our insistence on mapping infrastructures’ material fractures onto social and pragmatic ones, and our concern with the attendant urgency of both need and claim that was thus made visible in these congested spaces, was rather less holistic than we assumed.

The guiding principles offered by Susan Leigh Star (1999, 380) for ethnographic studies of infrastructure—that ‘one person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty’ and that the definition of infrastructure is thus ‘fundamentally relational’ to concrete plans and purposes—takes on new significance as we look back at the now decades-long attempts to define an anthropological approach to infrastructures, amidst continuing urban and rural transformation, geopolitical shifts in scale and orientation, and the digitisation and interlinking of economies. Whose topic? For what purposes? At what scale? To be sure, bringing these questions into focus demands, still, the specification of perspective, examining how and when an infrastructure becomes difficult, complex, or refractory for some subject. This is where an ethnography of infrastructures begins, amidst the frustration caused by traffic or with someone’s sense that things could be better managed, more smoothly organised, or that life could simply be easier (the promise of technology). But understanding the force of infrastructures in ordinary lives also involves being attentive to deeper movements, and resonances between levels, including material shifts and constraints, rationalities working across scales (forging means-end relations and distributing roles), and the discourses and technical practices that, in their impersonality, allocate responsibility and rights and distribute costs and benefits. The discourses at issue might be those of elites and experts (rationalities, logics) or those of everyday talk and moral judgement (complaints about corruption or assertions of propriety) (Collier 2011; Muir 2021). They may be highly emotive accounts of injustice or conspiracy, attributions of racialised difference, or rhetorical forms that evoke moralised registers of ‘citizenship’, ‘ownership’, or ‘justice’. All these are integral to the making and political operation of infrastructures, anywhere.

But how to develop an attention to these other levels, cultivating a wider, multi-perspectival view, ethnographically, while retaining a critical focus on the intersection of the material and moral? Naming the problem is not the same thing as providing a method for tracking such relations between materials, forms, reasons, and people as they really play out in space and time and across scales. The papers in this special issue provide some pointers, from a very crucial set of sites in Asia for any future-oriented account of infrastructure and the lives, relations, and judgements it sustains, beyond Eurocentric histories and modernist metanarratives (compare Hirsh and Mostowlansky 2023).

These authors reckon with large-scale and indeed scale-making realities across the Asia-Pacific region, with a dual focus on India and Vietnam. Their attention falls, geopolitically, to either side of the largest concentration of economic and political force in the region: the transnational and scale-making investments of Chinese infrastructure development across Asia and beyond provide a context, however tacitly, as salient as local and national histories and political economies for each of these cases, as Philippe Messier makes clear in his Introduction. However, they also track the specific discourses that attach hopes, expectations, and fears to infrastructures, whether in the cosmopolitan language of calculative reason and technological imperatives, or in the tactical evasions and dissatisfaction of the users of infrastructures and those displaced by new standards and forms. That is, while attentive to ‘large-scale’ realities and abstract forces, they do not turn away from everyday lives and ordinary (but structured) transactions and cross-cutting claims; nor do they trace a borderless algorithmic logic of control, one that mutely forecloses opportunities for choice. Rather, they focus on the relations linking levels of reality (from imagination to materiality) that are formed across diverse spatial and temporal frames as claims to and judgements about infrastructures are actually made—what they are good for, the evil they bring, the problems they solve, the violence they carry, and how to use them to specific purposes.

Ethnographically, the focus here falls, still and again, on mundane and routine technologies and infrastructures: the phones that people keep in their pockets (with or without an active connection, see Foster 2023), the side-roads and byways that connect villages, the calculations of day-labourers and piece-workers, the vehicles (and their drivers) that provide local mobility—in sum, the tools and procedures of everyday life and livelihood in both urban and rural locations. But a novel attention is also paid, here, to the play of reasons and judgements (official and not) and especially to less visible, more hidden or secreted dimensions of infrastructural practice—technical problems are encountered and overcome, relations are made, connections are forged, but there is also disappointment, tacit refusal, even outright rejection of new terms of connectivity, forms of surveillance, or increased costs associated with infrastructures. These articles together reveal not only the hopes, aspirations, and potentials of communication and connection provided by infrastructures, but also the risk—or promise!—of mis-communication, defiance, or parasitic use that is integral to networks dense with ambiguous relations (Degani 2022). Importantly, for these authors neither tracing discrete perspectives nor describing the technical materiality or hybrid assemblage of an infrastructure is enough to generate an understanding of infrastructural lives: an accounting is also sought, from their varied ethnographic interlocutors, of the meanings and values and the plural relations—political, economic, more-than-human, intimate, or otherwise—that infrastructures enable and sustain, for better and for worse.

Refusal

The emphasis on relations and interactions, and hence judgements of morality and value, in each of these essays is related to a wider argument about ‘infrapolitics’, as described by James Scott (1990). Scott’s work is explicitly discussed only by Jean Michaud and Simon Bilodeau; however, their essay represents a distinct return to a concept scantly discussed in existing anthropologies of infrastructure and yet one that is of great significance for the perspective on ‘infrastructural lives’ this issue as a whole develops (cf., Anand 2017, 245 n.58). When he coined the term, Scott was not of course thinking about ‘infrastructure’ or even state planning of roads and cities and regions—though he went on to do so in later work. Infrapolitics, for Scott, was a hidden or minor counterpart to domination and hegemony; as such, infrapolitics developed from the notion of a ‘moral economy’, while Scott’s elaboration of it made a distinct contribution to the hybrid Foucauldian/Gramscian account of power-and-resistance that still provides a touchstone for much anthropology.

In short, Scott aimed to carve out some ethnographic and analytical space for understanding the political lives of the oppressed, without reducing their options to either ‘ethical subordination’ to hegemonic values or overt defiance and open resistance (Scott 1990, 92). He showed that much of the daily life and ordinary action of dominated populations, which might seem like adaptation to or accommodation of the demands of the powerful, had unavowed or obscured political dimensions—and hence the potential to make and even remake a world. This potential could be traced only in what he called the ‘hidden transcript’, the record of those myriad obscured or indirect ways in which the dominated exerted themselves to protect their dignity and maintain moral autonomy. Intriguingly, Scott observes that if there is a hidden transcript of resistance, comprised of those secret or hidden mutterings, pilferings, and the more explicit moral justifications that circulate within dominated groups, there is also a hidden transcript of power, ‘representing the practices and claims of  …  rule that cannot be openly avowed’ (Scott 1990, xii). Elites and people occupying the centre of a network of power (or, travelling on its smoothest highways and widest and most ceremonial boulevards), too, produce their own ‘backstage’ accounts to justify their public actions (Greenhouse 2005). One thing that distinguishes the hidden transcript of the oppressed, however, is that it is neither a legitimating mask nor an overt economy of justification, a set of positive permissions, reciprocities, or injunctions but, also, a litany of refusals, rejections, and tacit, practical responses.

Refusal is an important theme of all the papers that this concept helps illuminate. An ethnographic account of refusal is most clear in the two papers that focus on people in rural, highland areas grappling with the costs of development and of new roads that provide connections to centres of power. Michaud and Bilodeau, focusing on the ‘slow violence’ of development projects encroaching on Hmong communities in upland Vietnam, trace a hidden transcript formed by Hmong responses to and refusals of the very public promise of infrastructure—promises of prosperity and inclusion. This transcript is made explicit when some of their interlocutors express relief that the global pandemic suspended the arrival of ever-more tourists seeking authentic and remote ways of life, even though this meant a loss of income. Similarly, many Hmong reject the prospect of a prosperity that comes at the expense of urban migration. When their interlocutors say that ‘life is cheaper’ if they simply stay in their villages and tend to their farms, or if they leave the city and opportunities opened to them there in order to return to primary work in agriculture, these are neither laments nor stubborn hewing to tradition—rather, they represent an active refusal and a way out of the disciplines of wage labour, the costs of new technologies, and wearying exposure to constant extraction and appropriation of value.

For Karine Gagné and Jigmat Lundup’s interlocutors in the Hemis Nature Reserve in Ladakh, meanwhile, an act of refusal takes a directly technological and infrastructural form—a levered barrier that can be raised and lowered across a new paved road that extends into the reserve. This barrier is only intermittently tended and hence of relatively little use in regulating tourist access to the park, as well as having little official status. Its ‘informality’ and material modesty notwithstanding, the checkpoint animates passions and represents a materialisation of a hidden transcript—it is a claim, in Anand’s sense, on the very stuff of infrastructure. However, this claim is expressed as a desire to block movement and refuse connection and access. This barrier was also the fruit of bitter experience, a reaction to new relations: the road was more desired than feared among Hemis residents until it had actually been built and its consequences felt. Unlike the Hmong, for whom a way of life in a distinct niche (political, cultural, and ecological) provides its own infrastructure for retreat, supporting life even in the refusal of wider connections or their foreclosure by global crisis, the villagers in Hemis National Park do not seem to have such recourse—they have largely given up their livestock and homesteads, rely on tourism and trade, and are more exposed to the raw edges of infrastructure development.

I should note that this attribution of a ‘way of life’ to Hmong villagers is my construction, not Michaud and Bilodeau’s. They particularise intensely in their mode of presentation and refuse any such generalising characterisation of habitus, offering instead individuated examples that add up to a catalogue of discrete options and variations and choices. If these systematically tend toward withdrawal, autonomy, and sufficiency, that is a fact lurking in the hidden transcript where myriad individual marks are made, not a product of some inner logic or cultural script. The tendency towards refusal and retreat that they document, however, remains strong evidence of infrapolitics at work.

Reticulation

The other two papers focus on urban places and lives, again in India and Vietnam. I don’t want to overstate the difference between these two sets of articles—they all trace a reckoning with proliferating infrastructural forms, circulation and connection, and technical labour (a point to which I will return). However, there are intensifying forces and pressures at work in contemporary South and Southeast Asian cities that take refusal off the table as an infrastructural strategy. The demands of wage-labour and capital, growing alongside neoliberal governmental projects of development, surveillance, and infrastructural upgrading, all press on urban subjects, even those who seem most ‘disposable’ in relation to the aspirations of state and capital (in Turner’s terms). Focusing on Ho Chi Minh City, Erik Harms has thus observed a tight intertwining of aspiration and exclusion, materialised as luxury and rubble, in the dynamics of urban development in Vietnam. The lines that divide these realities do not fall neatly between classes, he argues, nor are they simply inscribed in the divisions of the city, as in modernist imaginaries of zoning; rather, they are each implicated in the other, and both shape the lived realities of all urban residents. Indeed, for many people in Ho Chi Minh City, ‘their own struggle to defend their rights is founded on the denial of rights to others’ (Harms 2016, 16). Similarly, as Christina Schwenkel had described for the residents of Vinh, a smaller town in northern Vietnam, the cultivation of novel patterns of consumption and capital investment strain both the habitus and the built forms of the socialist past, raising not only infrastructural but also moral quandaries as ruination and redevelopment appear as two aspects of the same process (Schwenkel 2020). Such tensions between urban materiality and morality systems, and how they are navigated through evasions and improvisations that entangle people ever-more-deeply with infrastructures and with each other, are evident also in Hanoi, as described by Sarah Turner, and in Hyderabad, by Philippe Messier. These two articles bring close attention to the moral economies on which people rely, and the resources of judgement, calculation, and technical ability that they employ in order to sustain livelihoods, not apart from or against the novel demands of infrastructure but rather within and through their ramifying connections.

Turner traces a set of livelihoods and urban mobilities that depend in part upon the legal recognition and welfare provisions of Vietnam’s socialist state—licences granted to disabled war veterans to operate three-wheeled carts for moving goods. The livelihoods of these drivers are under threat by city plans for regularising the roads and speeding transport. Turner describes them and their vehicles as a kind of infrastructure in their own right, a necessary if precarious element in the fabric of urban mobility serving poorer citizens and tight-packed neighbourhoods. While attending closely to the drivers’ constrained choices and their ‘out of date’, localised, and precarious mobilities—seen as ‘disposable’ in the face of progress—Turner also highlights their canny movement across the many layers of the urban palimpsest, from negotiating police surveillance and rights granted or denied, to travelling with heavy loads on roads designed for one mode of transport but crisscrossed by others, to their own technical acumen, building, maintaining, and loading the three wheelers. Turner’s conversations with the men who drive three-wheelers thus help us appreciate the highly particular forms of skill and embodiment involved in navigating any infrastructure network. Further, as she says, ‘marginalised communities form networks’ of their own that shape their interactions with the more formalised material and political infrastructures of the city. Importantly, refusal does not seem to be an option for these drivers, and they poignantly stress that they have little else to fall back upon or other livelihoods to retreat to; nevertheless their skilled navigation of the shifting urban environment and its potentials and possibilities offers valuable lessons for thinking more acutely about mobility, its forms, and its connections to urban justice—how, once again, some rights to the city are predicated on the denial of others, while some changes to the self and to the city are incompatible with each other.

Philippe Messier’s account of programmers and stone cutters in Hyderabad also offers a distinctive perspective on the active navigation and technical manipulation of interleaved networks. The middle-class computer programmers and video-technicians and the low-caste Vaddera labourers he works with all use their particular skills and their own tech savvy and knowledge of the city to maintain their footing in its changing political economy, and to intervene in and even ‘complete’ the technological milieu in which they move. The Vadderas, in particular, travel obscure routes across the nighttime city and evade both physical and digital surveillance to keep building supplies moving and income coming in, providing essential materials for the infrastructures of the tech economy. Yet these subaltern workers are also users of mobile communications networks and subject to automated, digital forms of surveillance and control, in particular the video feeds from tens of thousands of cameras that now populate Hyderabad’s roads, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and governmental imaginaries. Messier shows that these technologies of control and surveillance depend, for all their apparent seamlessness as a dense network of devices, on a ‘margin of indeterminacy’ which can take shape either as their simple inoperability or breakdown in certain environments, or as blind spots and possibilities for circumvention that are exploited by subaltern actors in the city. This does not resolve into a simple opposition between ‘high-tech’ surveillance versus skilled evasion but, rather, reveals the interweaving and reticulation of diverse techniques, creating a technological milieu that forms the subjectivity of all these actors. Simple chisels and stone blocks are linked through multiple mediations with cell phones, trucks, and roads, while algorithms interact with local knowledge to form a hidden network underneath and alongside the computerised manifold of the surveillance cameras. This other network of city life interleaves with the official one, as the hidden transcript and the public transcript do, each partially obscuring and partially revealing the other.

The differences between technologically dense urban lives and rural ones far from centres of power are less distinct than they might appear, and indeed these articles should be read more for the continuities than the apparent contrasts between them. While Turner and Messier show that the hidden transcript is not always a matter of retreat or refusal but also of adaptation, improvisation, and technical labour amidst proliferating connections, Michaud and Bilodeau’s and Gagné and Lundup’s observations also reveal much sophistication in controlling the flows of goods and information in circuits of power. That is, a moralised response to infrastructure may appear from one perspective as refusal and from another as precarious improvisation, but both involve technological acuity and strategic deployment of knowledge to forge connections, make judgements, mark distinctions, and take actions—making infrastructural lives. Michaud and Bilodeau, thus, demonstrate significant investment of cash proceeds from formal market trade in strengthening kinship ties through rituals of sacrifice or by pursuing officially-illegal and untaxed cross-border exchanges—refusal of the promises of infrastructure and retreat from the beachheads of nation-state or capitalist authority in tourist marketplaces is, thus, also a turn to other forms of circulation with their own scalar possibilities. By contrast, the new roads that have been built to provide villagers in Hemis National Park with services and goods also bring tourists and trekkers more swiftly to the more remote parts of the reserve, denying local residents the opportunity to guide these visitors and earn some income from them. Responding to this change requires petitions and assertions of right as well as material claims, playing on all the powers of restriction, licensing, and taxation mobilised by the very legal architecture of the reserve. Meanwhile, the mundane technology, the simple barrier across the road that these villagers have built (though they needed the help of a construction crew equipped with heavy machinery to erect it), is as much a means of interaction and connection as refusal, and a technology of control over the circulation of specific people that is comparable, ethnographically, to the policing power of the algorithms and databases devised by some of Messier’s computer engineers in Hyderabad (a digital surveillance which is itself not as effective or totalising as it seems, while other actors depend on this routine failure to ‘complete’ their own technological milieu).

All these articles show that the contrasts which make certain actions appear ‘infra’ and others appear ‘political’, distinguishing necessity from virtue and nature from technology (and even rural from urban), might need to be rethought once again from the specific perspectives amidst technological systems (and more-than-human natures and urban ecologies) that they offer. Read together, they demonstrate that the work of navigation, intervention, adaptation, and even refusal by which such distinctions are in fact made and lived is similar in form and orientation if not identical in content across all these contexts. In sum, two relatively distinct approaches to infrastructural lives are essayed and combined in different measures in these articles, which vary only in degree: dwelling on refusal or disconnection as active responses to the ‘invisibilities’ and ‘infrastructural violence’ that people suffer, or emphasising people’s entanglement with technologies, the claims they make on their materials, and their improvisations with technological possibilities and affordances. Both approaches—which are never pure—offer located answers to a basic anthropological problem, one that stands apart from any particular focus on infrastructures but that can be illuminated by ethnographic attention to them: how ‘beings of a certain kind  …  operate in their environment  …  and manage to transform this environment by weaving with it and between themselves permanent or occasional relations of a remarkable but not infinite diversity’ (Descola 2014, 273).

The ethnographic answers to this problem that these papers give are specific, and yet can provide some indications of the range of responses that can be made and actions that can be taken, as life itself is rendered technical, calculable, a resource or standing reserve. What attention to the hidden transcript of infrastructures and to infrapolitics can bring to this inquiry is a better specification of the kinds of materials and the technical operations on which beings (of a certain kind) can rely to resist this productivist framing. The evidence of the hidden transcript is not a positive set of prescriptions, a code or a coherent battery of responses to ramifying and reticulated powers, but it does provide some possibilities for thinking about the relational, and hence moral, possibilities inherent in infrastructures of various kinds—material, digital, legal—and how to turn these possibilities to advantage.