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.