Infrastructural awareness

ABSTRACT

The invisibility of functional infrastructures has become a truism. Although infrastructures are invisible in many ways—because of their size, because they are hidden, or because they are so foundational—those whose livelihoods are endangered by infrastructures are keenly aware of them. In-person and online action against the Dakota Access Pipeline brought dramatic attention to oil infrastructure even though the pipeline was not only not visible, it was not yet built. I argue that the practices that make infrastructure perceptible—whether technological, geographical, social, or historical—are also always political. This study sets the efforts of Oceti Sokowin, other Indigenous, and non-Indigenous water protectors into the context of U.S. infrastructure history to examine the wide-ranging effects of the dominance of sight in infrastructural awareness and to make the case that infrastructures are not normally functional, whether by inevitable accident or in the more fundamental failure of infrastructures’ imbrication with settler colonialism in North America. Rerouting entrenched habits of perception helps to correct some of the damaging legacies of using sight as a metric for value, to foreground the fundamental nature of infrastructural breakdown, and to expand definitions of infrastructures to better account for their far-reaching and diverse dependencies and effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• oil
• water protectors
• Standing Rock
• visibility
• settler colonialism

Acknowledgements

This is written in gratitude for the water protectors. My deep thanks to Ted Striphas, Logan Rae Gomez, and the three anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily thoughtful and generative feedback. I am very grateful to E Cram, Brandi Denison, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Jane Haxby, Jiyeon Kang, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and David Supp-Montgomerie, who all generously offered advice for revision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘infrastructure awareness’ has appeared in engineering (Luiijf and Klaver 2005) and computer science (Hincapie-Ramos 2010) to refer to a general cognizance of infrastructures. Here, I intend the term to signal a political practice that does not take infrastructures—their scope, boundaries, promised performance, value, or necessity—as a given. Downplaying sight and developing multisensory awareness, as in Shannon Jackson’s (2005) ‘Touchable Stories’, where the term also appears, opens the possibility of calling these definitional elements and their lived effects into question.

2 Halegoua and Lingel (2018) offer the productive term ‘legibility’ to considerations of infrastructures that are erased from public awareness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenna Supp-Montgomerie

Jenna Supp-Montgomerie is assistant professor of religion and media, jointly appointed in the Religious Studies Department and Communication Studies Department at the University of Iowa. She is the author of When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture (NYU Press, 2021).