ABSTRACT
In his recent overview of the anthropology of infrastructure, Brian Larkin calls attention to the cultural work enacted by infrastructure, such as how it impels a modernist orientation to a perfectible future via the promise of movement and progress (Larkin 2013). Present ills will be solved when techno-science and engineering delivers desired transformations. For this teleological viewpoint to have traction, Larkin points out, it is not enough for infrastructures to simply exist as technologies or conveyors of function. They must also operate semiotically, aesthetically, affectively, changing bodily and psychic expectations through their operations. Yes, a road that replaces dust and dirt with sealed surfaces, that transforms the softness of a pre-colonized world to the hardness of a colonial order, ‘cultivates citizens’ technical skills and knowledge as a condition of [their] operation in the modern world’ (Larkin 2013: 337). But, Larkin says, there’s more. The whole enterprise also operates along visceral and aesthetic registers: ‘the hardness of the road, the intensity of its blackness, its smooth finish – produces sensorial and political experiences’:
Infrastructures operate at the level of surface, what Buck-Morss (1992) refers to as the terminae of the outside of the body – skin, nose, eye, ear – rather than the mind inside. Softness, hardness, the noise of a city, its brightness, the feeling of being hot or cold are all sensorial experiences regulated by infrastructures.
