Resilience and Colonial Infrastructural Legacies

Media Précis

Week 2: Colonial and Imperial Technopolitics

Kyle Harp-Rushing

Mediating between the material, economic, symbolic, aesthetic, and embodied scales of interactions with, within, and through infrastructure risks evaporating our sense of iterative moments and expressions of agency, contestation, “hacking,” and resistance. This risk is perhaps compounded when weighty infrastructural formations of modernity, nationalism, and governance within (neo)colonial contexts are situated as our objects of study. As Mrázek (2002)  notes, nationalism in late-colonial Indonesia as it is articulated within the engineered figure of Kromoblanda consists of negotiations of identity nested within power relations at once ethereal, sublime, and fundamentally material (Mrázek 2002, xvii). Resisting the urge to frame “engineers” and “engineering” purely within the realm of the physical interconnections between material objects, Mrázek prefers a plural conception of engineering that refers to the combined imaginative and material relations by which native Indonesians and Dutch colonialists configured each other. However, Indonesian subalterns are rarely depicted here as non-actors trampled under the weight and velocity of Dutch modernity. Rather, if we follow Mrázek’s argument for conceiving of “language as asphalt,” his heavily empirical approach to historical documents, Indonesian fiction, memoir of political prisoners, and advertisements, forms a densely interwoven matrix for supporting his argument. While mutually interconnected and interdependent technological systems such as roads, railroads and trains, clothing and fashion, cruise ships, Dutch vacation homes, air conditioning, lighting, typewriters, and radio were “thinged” by Dutch colonists in such a way as to engineer a systematized and transposable experience of continually being “home away from home”, while marking out racist, gendered, and classist lines of difference, inclusion and exclusion (particularly around recurrent concerns with hygiene, optics and policing), some of these very technologies comprised sites of contestation around collective identity (e.g. clothing under Dutch occupation was never rendered fully “systematic” under the figure of the dandy, partly because it was grossly out of place in the Indonesian climate and Indonesian nationalist amateur radio mechanics engaged with the medium as a mode of “floating” away from the home, and of contesting particular musical forms as inauthentic). Late-colonial Indonesians were never entirely “caught up” within the machinations of technological systems, but at the same time, the ability to interact vis-à-vis their immaterial and material forms was not only unequally distributed according to, but further reproduced under, relations of class and race (and assumingly gender and sexuality, though Mrázek noticeably pays less attention to politics of either).

Continuing with the argument that neither the materiality of infrastructures, nor intentional politics are determinative, nor inconsequential (Hecht 2011, 3), I am interested here in animating Mrázek’s (2002) concept of engineering to provoke questions regarding the emergence of a “structure of feeling” (Williams 2009) around “resilience,” particularly as it is takes shape under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100 RC) initiative. http://www.100resilientcities.org/#/-_/ 100RC claims to provide particular cities with $1 Million U.S., an “innovative new position in city government, a Chief Resilience Officer”, and connection into a global network of public and private institutions and NGOs, to go towards not only helping “individual cities become more resilient, but [also facilitating] the building of a global practice of resilience among governments, NGOs, the private sector, and individual citizens.” Imaginaries circulate through social media infrastructures, engineering an assemblage in which global relations, cities and individuals are made to become more “resilient” – i.e. able to transform systemic stresses into “opportunities for growth”. However, as Mrázek (2002) argues through his decision to maintain “nationalism” as a subtext, local configurations of “resilience” are likely to be multiple. Despite a capitalist development technic of modularity, wherein cities with deep legacies of colonial violence and extraction are awkwardly situated alongside and re-imagined through the same infrastructural assemblage of political-economic and technological interventions as cities historically constitutive of the overly simplistic “center”, there appears on the website relatively little discussion regarding the extent to which people in local contexts (often outside of formal government positions) might provide the most radical and ethically vibrant and responsive forms of infrastructural and decolonizing (re)engineering (Simone 2004). Rather like uneven formations and access to “Indonesian national identity,” resilience here is worth interrogating as a technopolitical façade (or perhaps, fabrication) through which difference and inequality are potentially materialized in the same moments and through the same material-semiotic conduits through which they are disavowed. The weight of modernity evaporates through narratives of “failures to self-actualize”.     

References

Hecht, Gabrielle, ed. 2011. Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Mrázek, Rudolf. 2002. Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton Studies in Culture/power/history. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16 (3): 407–29. doi:10.1215/08992363-16-3-407.

Williams, Raymond. 2009. Marxism and Literature. Repr. Marxist Introductions. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.