Fantasizing Infrastructures: What are the Costs?

References:

Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The Undersea Network. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kahn, Miriam, 2000, Tahiti Intertwined: Ancestral Land, Tourist Postcard, and Nuclear Test Site. American Anthropologist, vol. 102, no. 1, pp. 7-26. Arlington.

I enjoyed following Nicole Starosielski in her submarine and on-land adventures to track the fiber optic networks that hold our modern world together. She brings forth an imaginative and daring portraiture of infrastructure that comes with surprises, agony, detours, and to be sure - entanglements. We continue to see how infrastructure is laden with contesting histories (the local/native stories and the global narratives, as also seen in the roads in Peru from last week's book), contradictions, uneven terrains, power negotiations, cultural shifts, and contestations.

It is striking to be reminded that “The reliability of undersea cables has been deemed ‘absolutely essential' for the functioning of governments and the enforcement of national security". Yet as Susan Leigh Star points out, infrastructure “is by definition invisible, part of the background of other kinds of work”, and like infrastructure at large, the discourses of fiber optic cable networks - like the cables themselves - become ‘submarine' in the modern everyday life.

Starosielski shows that telecommunication infrastructures are invisible, edgy, and sometimes oh-not-so-sexy entanglements. One aspect that really fascinates me is the entanglement of the fiber optic materiality and human fantasy. Last week, Christina took us on a tour of futuristic HCMC, and how fantasy is packaged and sold through images about forthcoming infrastructure and lifestyles. There can be gaps - indeed big gaps - between imagined infrastructure and the materiality of such imaginations. Like the cables and the sattelite. So SIGNS. And FANTASY. Because people find satellite internet connection more ‘fascinating' and ‘sexier' than cables that the discourses of wired transmission are abandoned, despite the fact that the wired system carries most of the load. I thought: How awesome - The wired gets lost in the ‘wireless.’ The real gets lost in the virtual. This is no coincidence. As Steward Ash suggests, “Why would you want to know [about undersea cable design and installation]?”. Consumers most often and only care about the performance of the network rather than its technological and environmental infrastructure. Starosielski keenly points out “a broader social tendency to overlook the distribution of modern communications in favor of the more visible processes of production and consumption".

The ethnography is a sobering reminder that when we are connected to ‘the cloud,’ there is much more that is transmitted than just the signals and our data. I like how Starosielski brings ostensibly unrelated events together (children's game of tug-of-war and the tug-of-war in infrastructure development) and juxtaposes the real and the perceived in critical radical ways. What we see is not always what we get. The need to dig deep remains.

So with this love fest for Starosielski, I present you Mariam Kahn’s intertwined ‘third space' (2000). For all the good reasons - both talk about the complicated nature of space and places, about the relationship between the (both built and non-built) environments and humans, but also because of the shared themes in how space is an entanglement or intertwining of histories, cultural practices, and power relations. I think about the themes of transforming and transformed environments in political ecology and infrastructure. As we have discussed, infrastructure has social and environmental implications. The relationship between humans and the environments come from the material exchanges, political patterns, and cultural practices. Kahn shows how the natives' relationship to the land is reciprocal (through their way of life, as well as rituals such as burying the placenta), and in many ways, such a relationship is in contrast to the cable networks’ relationship to the lands and seas it crosses. Another set of relationship in Haiti is between colonial gaze and local responses, which comes with tensions and the quest for new possibilities.

The ethnographic accounts and analysis of Starosielski conjure up what Kahn calls “thirdspace" - a space beyond dualism (Kahn 2000). In her analysis of Tahiti as "a complex intertwined space, equally real and imagined, immediate and mediated," Kahn conceptualizes a theory of space without colonizing it. What creates the thirdspace? Kahn defines ‘thirdspace' as social/lived space, following Foucault's ‘we live inside a set of relations' and Lefebvre's ‘the dialectic' in France/1970s, and Soja’s ‘the habitus of social practices, a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings' in 1980s/90s. An attempt to get at alternative understanding about space, the human practices/experiences in and between spaces.

Thirdspace encompasses the relationship of humans to their environments, which includes not only the material exchanges, but the political, symbolic, and religious patterns that are shaped by the space/place and in return also shape the space itself. In many ways, thirdspace is the rejection of power relations in the other spaces. To be free to explore and to be creative is a form of profound resistance, and thirdspace is conducive to this freedom.