ABSTRACT

For Emile Durkheim, society is a literal super-organism, part of nature and nature's highest expression. The product of evolutionary time, a given society is a metabolically active, functionally differentiated whole, utilizing the bodies, practices, and cognition of actually existing humans as its cellular components. Many scholars working under the banner of the new materialism have expressed impatience with social theory and continental philosophy's preoccupation with what they call "epistemology", and their desire for a (re)turn to "ontology". Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari got something essentially right in their discovery of the core role played by coding and tracing in the dynamic systematicity of social processes. The ethnographic study of infrastructure in both complex and small-scale societies takes on a vital importance. However, what is critical in the turn to infrastructure is the focus on infrastructure as organizational matrix, that is, on its logically and causally prior relationship to vector and quantity, to force and action.