ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the gap between bodies and the infrastructure used in policy implementation by looking at the point of impact – where policy meets people – as a material context made of flesh, infrastructure, and the surfaces of each. Pursuing an anthropologically driven holism that includes bodies, their materiality, and the affordances that these bodies have in relationship to the materiality of infrastructures of care, enables one to see where the gaps between these arise. It thereby gives special attention to negotiation between the social body and the individual body, and to the specific points of breakdown within policy implementation. It examines how policy choices impact the bodies of the citizens or residents for whom they are designed. This chapter offers new insights into the genesis and constitution of policy failure as it manifests materially. It argues that failure arises in the fault lines between the affordances of the bodies for which policy is written and the affordances of the infrastructure by which policy is implemented. As long as these infrastructures are controlled and negotiated according to the democratic ideals of neoliberal equality, they will fail when met with the reality of the human subject.
