What is ‘affective infrastructure’?

Abstract

Recent work in analyses of infrastructure and affect theory has mobilized a concept of ‘affective infrastructure’ in two related but somewhat different ways. On the one hand, some scholars use the concept to draw our attention to the emotions produced by concrete infrastructure systems. On the other hand, scholars have sought to locate how affect might condition forms of political organization. The concept risks analytic confusion: is ‘infrastructure’ metaphor, analogy, or material-technical system? Is the concept historically, spatially, or empirically situated, or does it have potential generic parameters as well? This article seeks to reconstruct two ‘sides’ of affective infrastructure while drawing out its significance for infrastructural politics. Doing so also involves understanding the problem space from which it emerged: affective geographies and 20th century Marxism. This article's process of reading results in a cluster of attendant concepts that give ‘affective infrastructure’ further specificity: mediation, endurance, determination, technical alienation, temporalities of repair, and political organization. The article's wager is that the concept gains analytic utility when it is used to clarify the ratio between historically situated technical alienation as a power relation of enduring colonial capitalism and the project of organizing anti-colonial social relations that might work to transform the capitalist mode of production.

Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

“…Cruel optimism offered answers to the problem of political paralysis by reframing it as a question of why detachment is so difficult. Other work towards the end of Berlant's life affirmed the need to generate, build, and sustain new infrastructures of intimacy and belonging, often learning from queer, feminist, and neo‐anarchist activist communities; infrastructures that might better support worldings that exit the binds of cruel optimism, and make room for other sustaining objects and relations (see Berlant (2016a) on the commons; Bosworth, 2022; McCormack, 2016).…”

Mapping affective infrastructures otherwise

“…In Bosworth's (2023) article, a generative reading of affective infrastructure importantly asks us the following: how do we locate affective infrastructures and what do they help us understand politically? Questions of the conceptual specificity and political implications of affective infrastructures resonate within and beyond geography, for those of us concerned with material and embodied forms that sustain, redirect, and channel new collective affects.…”

“…In thinking about the role infrastructure may play, Bosworth acknowledges that there is something else that infrastructure offers to our understandings. Indeed, infrastructure occupies an ambivalent space, 'and is both that which partially causes and can never transitively "determine"' (Bosworth's, 2023) what occurs next. The attempt to bring infrastructure and affect in conversation through a reading of their mutual intellectual traditions and trajectories can steer inquiry into transformative justice and future-making.…”

Affective infrastructures and political organisation

“…Pinpointing the notion's double function of denoting constraints and affordances, Bosworth suggests that we should view affective infrastructures as encompassing at once ‘a certain form of passive technical alienation … in which a collective's powers are separated from it by the social subjection of work and everyday life’ and efforts to channel ‘the indignation arising from such a situation back into an affirmative politics that would grow the capacity to organize the infrastructures of everyday life’. Yet this formulation immediately highlights the need for a choice regarding the level of generality at which the concept is expected to operate.…”

“…Yet this formulation immediately highlights the need for a choice regarding the level of generality at which the concept is expected to operate. For it would be possible to stretch it so far as to cover an entire social formation: we could then speak of a single affective infrastructure for a society or period as the ‘metastable solute out of which different sorts of affective politics are individualized or formed’ (Bosworth, 2023). The concept would thus be essentially coextensive with something like ‘infrastructure’ or ‘material basis’ in the Marxist lexicon, with the added idea that these necessarily involve the production and reproduction of certain affects that in turn contribute to their reproduction.…”