Infrastructure

In 2010, several major news outlets reported on research out of the University of the West of England, where a group of researchers had tried to use the single-celled organism Polycephalum to identify the most efficient path between rail stations. Before that, another research group had used a similar organism to find the most efficient path connecting major American cities. By placing a food source atop a map of the United States, Spain, and other countries, and allowing these organisms to seek out their food source organically, these “biologically inspired adaptive network designs” appeared to show which countries had designed their infrastructures most efficiently, and whose infrastructure could be improved according to the biological imperative to feed efficiently (Tero, Takagi, Saigusa, and Ho 2010; Parr 2014).

While the article’s authors touch on a widespread hope of infrastructure as an objective, efficient tool for mobility, it turns out that it is not the forces of nature that have guided infrastructures’ routes and purposes in the United States. Infrastructures are not merely a means of motion in some objective sense, but rather, as one recent definition goes, “critical locations through which sociality, governance, and politics, accumulation and dispossession, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed, and performed” (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2019: 3). This definition, from an edited volume entitled The Promise of Infrastructure, suggests that infrastructures bear functions—social, political, and even economic—beyond the mere conveyance of bodies, machines, and information. Their evocations of terms such as “form” and “performance” also reveal a deep social scientific interest in infrastructures as objects open for analysis based on their aesthetic forms and the sociopolitical functions they perform.

This essay emphasizes the deep and granular impact of infrastructure on our conceptions of political life. It describes interlocking points of engagement with political theology and asks questions that will, I hope, prompt a more material and territorial conception of political theology that can be sensitive to diverse genres of built space and attuned to the politics of movement and the ethics of mobility.

Defining Infrastructure

Infrastructure is no simple means of motion, nor does its forms and functions reflect the natural order of things (Larkin 2013). Like “religion” and “religions,” infrastructures and “infrastructure” have appeared in scholarship as both empirical sites, and as elusive conceptual frameworks, available for investigation as physical objects but stretched tenuously between the lens of inquiry and its public invisibility. By invisibility I refer to, for example, the way a smooth road or a working supply chain can pass unremarked in daily life. Yet as religious studies and media studies scholar Jenna Supp-Montgomerie has pointed out, “awareness of infrastructure is politically determined,” meaning that “the practices that make infrastructure perceptible—whether technological, geographical, social, or historical—are also always political” (Supp-Montgomerie 2021: 2). As I intimate below, one of political theology’s tasks in examining infrastructure will be to examine the dynamics of its visibility in scholarship as well as in objects of study.

The study of infrastructure has been multidisciplinary, though it has only begun to make its mark on scholarly considerations of religion and politics. Information scientists named infrastructure in the late 1990s as a new domain for the social in the digital age, while media studies scholars and ethnographers have both extended that study theoretically and brought it to new sites since then, moving the field from invisibly minute digital pathways to unmissably large highway systems and other logistical hubs and networks (Starr 1999; Larkin 2013; Easterling 2014; Carse 2016; Hetherington 2019).

Infrastructure has served as a central, if often silent, partner, in scholarly understandings of modernity and the dynamics of power through which different parts of the modern world become connected. Consider, for example, one episode in the scholarly exegesis of the concept of nomos, which was introduced by German political theorist Carl Schmitt in his 1950 text The Nomos of the Earth, which is foundational in political theology. In a 2005 special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly addressing the concept, Fredric Jameson and others emphasized the “spatial characteristic” of nomos (literally law, custom, or order), elaborating Schmitt’s world historical analysis as a function of “the seizure and occupation of land” (Jameson 2005: 107).

In that same volume, religion scholar and critical theorist Kenneth Surin questioned Schmitt’s failure to elaborate on the various connective tissues that bound the state and its various communities together. “The state is the state, or becomes the state,” he writes, “because, at the minimum, it provides an infrastructure with an array of attendant powers” that can integrate different classes of people “vertically” into hierarchies, as well as “horizontally” integrating diverse populations such as religious groups and racially minoritized populations. Surin himself has little to say about what “array of powers” infrastructures might have in organizing religious groups and other populations, offering an open invitation for others to further explore the roots of the state form, religious institutions, and other groups in material and institutional networks of power.

“Networking” the Study of Religion

Scholars interested in similar questions to Surin have deployed terms such as “network,” “assemblage,” and “entanglement” to explore the weft of various forms of institutional and material power. These terms often serve interchangeably in the project of delineating relations among bodies, affects, and states.

But what possibilities might emerge if we call those networks “infrastructures” rather than something else? When scholars have attempted to define “modernity,” infrastructure has often played the role of silent substructure, its technical improvements often considered a natural outgrowth of capitalism, and its effects on mobility, exchange, and social interconnection often presumed rather than interrogated. Yet it has also played a significant role in dividing the west from the rest—the “developed” from the “developing.” Interrogating infrastructure projects in, for example, postcolonial and “Global South” contexts has provided scholars across disciplines with a rich viewing platform not only for the ideas underpinning the exportation of development ideologies from the North Atlantic, but also for the on-the-ground forms of life that emerge in scenarios of colonial governance and infrastructural neglect. These concerns, as much existential as they are logistical, correspond to current questions in political theology and theory about what we might call micropolitics—politics of the multitude, represented not by the will of the sovereign, but by the tendencies, alignments, and intensities of the many.

In the absence or neglect of official infrastructural channels, for example, we might interpolate human networks of kin and social connection into the concept of infrastructure—collections of precariously placed people bartering and sometimes illicitly commandeering the technical means to reproduce life and activate creative economic networks alongside or apart from officially-sanctioned infrastructural development initiatives. In such moments, when the precarious creativity of “human infrastructures” emerges, the nomos of western hegemony is unveiled as a grand dream of connectivity and regularity held together by ordinary structures. What urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone calls “sacral spaces” are inevitably bound up in these human infrastructures (Simone 2004), contributing not so much a spiritual perspective on life or pie-in-the-sky platitudes as a hope of logistical liquidity. Theorizations of religion along these lines could be a powerful device for understanding the emerging rhythms of life in most of the world’s cities.

We find such conceptions of movement from below—from the outsides—in concepts from Black studies attempting to theorize the unofficial and underground as “logistics” (Moten and Harney 2013). As for the organizing impulses of nomos, an attention to infrastructure can bring to the fore an attention to territory as a grounding impulse for colonization, conquest, and enslavement. Official infrastructures in the global North, like other territorial formations, are part of what Tiffany Lethabo King calls “representations of conquest”: material claims to territory needing to be read along their grain and intersectionally—the rubric of conquest links populations, King (2019: 49, 79) tells us, through their mutual figuration in colonial space and time. Infrastructures offer one way of tracing the particular shapes of that space and time, but also for naming the fugitive paths between their cracks, beneath their foundations, and at their margins.

Some research in American religions suggests that religious ideas and institutions helped to plan, produce, and execute infrastructure projects, and—more importantly—activate in them dreams of liberal, Protestant nationhood articulated along the lines of empire and capitalism (Walker 2019; Supp-Montgomerie 2021). From circuit riders to travelers on the Erie Canal, to railroad agents and their backers to promoters of the telegraph, the historiography of “American religion,” especially those works focused on the term’s hegemonic power, is rich with infrastructural imaginings. These often treat the nineteenth-century processes of economic infrastructural development as a backdrop for the simultaneous political, economic, and religious phenomena hegemony over religiously-nonnormative populations yet to be interpolated into the desired state of secular, republican self-governance. Viewing religion as “infrastructured,” Jenna Supp-Montgomerie extends the concept “beyond institutions and their demands” and “into the territory of everyday life.” In such territory, religiously articulated landscapes are bound up in the ongoing material and technological processes that have the potential to reproduce, or make anew, people’s relationship to each other and to politics.

Political theology could play a major role in continuing to elaborate this “infrastructured religion,” particularly by attending to the top-down dreams that drive infrastructure projects. This area of inquiry is particularly generative when such projects fail to fully realize their goals, producing unexpected ground-level patterns. Where political theology may offer its most productive contribution is in theorizing religious concepts and affiliations as a means of mobility, allowing people to track new paths through contexts where their future remains precariously undetermined, and where daily life meets conditions of emergency. Scholars of political theology interested in infrastructure may ask: How do concrete and conceptual tools come together to formulate a future in contexts where none seems to exist? Contemporary research on infrastructure also trades on a language of enchanting hopes as well as mundane operations. In the space between those extremes, infrastructural development, access, and use measures out life’s livability in conjunction with other concepts and institutional frameworks. The use of infrastructure as a framework can serve as both an analytic and a reminder: relationships born of or maintained by interconnection do not exist apart from the politics of movement.

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Annotated Bibliography

The author has also included an extended bibliography on resources from infrastructure studies could contribute to religious studies, which can be found below.

Ellis, Isaiah. “Infrastructure between Anthropology, Geography, and Religious Studies.” In Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities, edited by Katie Day and Elise M. Edwards, 107-118. London: Routledge, 2020.

In this short handbook essay, Ellis covers definitional and methodological problems in the study of infrastructure and identifies that field’s points of connection to religious studies.

Geertz, Clifford. “The Wet and the Dry.” Human Ecology 1(1) (1972): 23-39.

In this essay, Geertz comparatively analyzes irrigation systems in Bali and Morocco. He concludes that such systems signpost cultural distinctions that map onto economic and religious meanings.

Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox. “The Enchantments of Infrastructure,” Mobilities 7(4): (November 2012): 521-536.

This essay argues that infrastructure projects play upon and help to create “social moods”, including what the authors call “enchantment.”

Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-343.

This field-shaping article reviews extensively the literature on infrastructure within anthropology and media studies. Readers can look to this article for its coverage of the literature as well as for its discussion of the political uses and aesthetic forms of infrastructure projects.

Peters, John Durham. Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

In this collection of essays, Peters argues that everyday media constitute the infrastructures of everyday life, in a sociopolitical as well as a technical sense.

Sinha, Vineeta. “Marking Spaces as ‘Sacred’: Infusing Singapore’s Urban Landscape with Sacrality.” International Sociology 31(4) (2016): 467-488.

In this essay, Sinha complicates the binary between sacred and secular space that characterizes religious studies and sociological treatments of urban landscapes, both infrastructural and social.

Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna. When the Medium was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

In this book, Supp-Montgomerie argues that American Protestants saw the emergence of the Atlantic telegraph as an opportunity to missionize the world. She also introduces the term “infrastructured religion,” which is ripe for further exploration and theorization.

Walker, David. Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

In this book, Walker argues that the U.S. transcontinental railroad was a point of contestation over the meanings of American religion and the fate of religious difference in the context of liberal capitalism.

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References

Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Carse, Ashley. Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014.

Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014.

Hetherington, Kregg, ed. Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Jameson, Fredric. “Notes on the Nomos.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104(2) (Spring 2005): 199-204.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Larkin, Brian “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-343.

Lazar, Sian, Penelope Harvey, Laura Bear, Laura Rival, Soumhya Venkatesan, and AbdouMaliq

Simone. “Attention to Infrastructure Offers a Welcome Reconfiguration of Anthropological Approaches to the Political.” Critique of Anthropology 38(1) (2018): 3-52.

Moten, Fred, and Stephano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Starr, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3) (November/December 1999): 377-391.

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

Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna. “Infrastructural Awareness.” Cultural Studies DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.1988121.

Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna. When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

Surin, Kenneth. “World Ordering.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104(2) (Spring 2005): 185-197.

Tero, Atsushi, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, and Kentaro Ho. “Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design.” Science 327(5964) (January 2010): 439-42.

Walker, David. Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.