The Infrastructural Unconscious

The Infrastructural Unconscious Christopher Breu (bio) Infrastructure and the Humanities Infrastructure and the humanities make strange bedfellows. But, of course, strange bedfellows are often the most interesting ones. At first glance, they could not be further apart. The humanities engages the aspects of human knowledge that are about the language-based, the representational, the cultural, the aesthetic, and the historical. Infrastructure, in contrast, names all those forms of material, structural, and social support that enable the work of culture as well as that of basic human sustenance to take place. It is that which both enables and limits human (and, increasingly, nonhuman) flourishing. It not only makes culture possible, but it often structures who has access to different forms of cultural expression and how amplified or recognized these expressions become. It is not surprising, then, that the contemporary emergence of infrastructure studies has primarily taken place in the social sciences. As Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta argue, the current version of the field grew out of work in critical science studies and then was picked up in anthropology and the more theoretical wings of sociology. As this multifield history suggests, there is something fundamentally interdisciplinary about infrastructure studies. Indeed, one can take the question of infrastructure as a fundamentally Marxist one, given not only Marx's materialist methodology but also the emphasis, within his corpus and that of later Marxist thinkers, on the necessary integration of the different fields of knowledge. In terms of the former, central to Marx's critique of bourgeois idealism is the emphasis on the material labor and structures that make the sphere of ideas and of cultural expression possible. This suggests that central to Marxist analysis (and this makes it different from Foucauldian analysis in the last instance) is at least a minimal disjunction between representation and that which produces and enables representation. It also suggests the violence (as well as promise) that inheres in any great (or ordinary, for that matter) work of art or culture. This copresence of violence and aesthetic or cultural production (very much including academic knowledge production) is one meaning of Walter Benjamin's famous assertion "There is no document of civilization [End Page 183] which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (2007, 256). The violence of any exploitative class system—and one would add other systems of exploitation, extraction, and disposability, including those around race and gender, as well as animals, plants, and other aspects of the ecosystem—inheres as a stain within the cultural production of beauty and meaning. It is crucial to attend to such stains and their origins in violence. However, the dialectic also insists that we read this the other way too. Out of the transformation of the natural world and out of social and economic transformation (including much that is violent) emerge great social and cultural possibilities. This ability to transform our world in profound ways—to produce infrastructure—is central to what Marx theorizes as "species being" in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1978, 75). (We, of course, are not the only ones who possess such abilities. All species transform their environment. Humans just do so, at least in the period of the Anthropocene and with the emergence of global capitalism, on a scale not seen by other species.) Within such a framework, infrastructure becomes not only a political-economic question but an ecological and cultural one as well. Given these parameters, it is a question of not whether we need infrastructure or not, or whether we can somehow disentangle culture from violent infrastructures, but how we can transform infrastructure itself so that it promotes the greatest amount of sustainable flourishing, economic equality, social equality, and ecological justice. Within such an expanded framework, the relationship between infrastructure and the humanities becomes more apparent. The two questions are bound up with each other. Given that representation and signification are some of the fundamental ways in which we understand the infrastructural, the humanities become crucial not only for apprehending the infrastructures of the past and those of the present but also for articulating visions of better infrastructures for the future. It is a question of "the promise...