Im/Materiality and Transformative Knowledge Projects?

While reading Nicole Starosielski's The Undersea Network, I felt moved by her ability to trace the interconnected histories, cultures, politics, and relations that undergirded her study of undersea networks through multiple spaces and times. In particular, her project's eventual move to consider a politics of undersea networks in effecting change within a political system and popular education around the materiality of telecommunications was particularly moving to me. It was moving to me because I saw in Starosielski's work a project that examined the politics of infrastructure through a grounded approach that fundamentally suggested subversive and progressive political maneuvers that could be performed towards transformative potentials. To me, I feel like Starosielski performed this task with an attention to materiality.

Through her many different examples, The Undersea Network demonstrates the many avenues of how these apparently abstracted, wireless, deterritorialized, resilient, urban, and distributed notions of information technology are not in fact what we expect them to be. Insisting on the materiality of these pipes and networks as they manifest within grounded and insulated/interconnected spaces, I find Starosielski’s work with infrastructure particularly interesting because it not only connects the discussion of materiality and immateriality within much of media and cultural studies, but also offers suggestions for political import.

A place where I find analogous discussions of materiality and immateriality is also in critical fashion studies. As an (inter)discipline, critical fashion studies has been negotiating its own relationships to materiality and immateriality. I am reminded of Sophie Woodward and Tom Fisher’s article “Fashioning through Materials: Material Culture, Materiality and Processes of Materialization” published in the journal of Critical Studies of Fashion and Beauty, where they too attempt to have scholars of fashion attend to the questions concerning im/materiality while articulating the many productive routes one may take with a focus on materiality. Here, they focus on the materiality and materialization of clothes and clothing. They connect it to the distribution process of cloth, which arguably is also exposing the infrastructure that undergirds fashion industries.

However, as I reflect on this articulation, I am reminded of Staosielski’s closing comments and purposes for this study. In some ways, I feel like one can characterize her closing comments as an evocation for the reader to feel compelled to effect some political and social change regarding information technologies in order to secure a strong infrastructural system for information technologies in the service of, for example, democratizing Internet access in ways that can be potentially interconnected to the places through which undersea networks form. The questions that comes up for me then, is: For what ends would the production knowledge on the materiality of culture be useful to effect social change? What are the transformative potentials of turning towards the material in fashion studies? What materializing and materialized projects are not being articulated through the cutting edge research in critical fashion studies? 

As I reflect too on both of these works, I wonder if academic scholarship on infrastructure or fashion can be transformative. The question of criteria for what that transformation may look like is important to highlight here too. As a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary movements and fields have sought to advance a moral, ethical, and/or political project within the academy that fundamentally challenges particular forms of oppression and domination, is The Undersea Network an example of this kind of project? I am left wondering what other ways she could have taken her analysis for these purposes. In posing this question, I wonder what role does politics play in the formation of academic scholarship. Should an overtly political impetus animate one’s research project? 

As we've seen with the various texts the last few weeks, infrastructure is an inherently political issue as it is entangled with various political, cultural, and material forms (e.g. colonialism, modernities, racism, imperialism, liberal development narratives, etc.). Examining its historical junctures and how it functions as an assemblage and palimpsest has been particularly useful in dislodging common sensical ignorances but also in dislodging how historicism functions as a privileged site of narrating social change and difference. If anything, the questions that are traced in the case studies we've read so far have indeed outlined the various forms of politics inherent in infrastructure projects. The point that Starosielski makes that I resonate with and that I hope to assert via my questions is that in learning about particular social phenomena/structures, how does one imagine otherwise? How does one engage with these politics and find ways to imagine alternative strategies of relating to materials, of understanding colonial histories, of reflexively understanding the gendered and racialized logics through which the categories we use are co-constitutive? What would that project of imagining and potentially being/becoming otherwise look like? 

Works Cited

Woodward, Sophie, and Tom Fisher. "Fashioning through Materials: Material Culture, Materiality and Processes of Materialization." Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 5.1 (2014): 3-23. Web.