Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity by Tim Jordan Brigid McClure Kath Woodward

Author:Tim Jordan, Brigid McClure, Kath Woodward [Tim Jordan, Brigid McClure, Kath Woodward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138185920
Goodreads: 27164772
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Infrastructures

The machine assemblages of work that I have discussed in this chapter – the human bodies and artifacts, their relation to architectures, technologies and non-humans more generally – are also, crucially, composed by infrastructures. Whilst infrastructures tend to be taken for granted (until they fail), ‘belonging to a given culture means, in part, having a fluency in its infrastructures’ (Edwards 2003: 19), that is having corporeal competences (e.g. in how to open the door of a train or operate a ticket machine). I’m referring to infrastructure rather than materiality in order to make two things clear. First, to end the invisibility of some kinds of material objects, central to doing work well but too often taken for granted in studies of work, especially in accounts of the zone which privilege the worker’s inner state. This is akin to the method of infrastructural inversion advocated by Bowker and Leigh Star (2000). Second, to attend to the relationality within the assemblages of work and its processes. It is this relationality that underpins my argument about colleagues, corporeality, technology and temporality that render the zone or the shit as felt – but analysable – timespaces. For Edwards, infrastructures are bridges between the micro levels (e.g. of particular technologies) and macro accounts of modernity (here, of neoliberal capitalism). So, the expectation that, say, new software will facilitate some form of work, that the software will become essential to how the work is done and will require a skilled engagement, is both part of ‘friction-free capitalism’ and the flow of work within an organization or setting. The socio-technical material objects that working bodies use are important not only for how they make possible ‘the zone’ (or ‘the shit’) but also because of their connections with, and dependence on, broader systems, including the internet, roads and transport. To put it another way, infrastructures are not only interesting when seen at big scale. Further, infrastructures do not always work effectively. Sliding from being in the zone to being in the shit may be the result of human error that trips some feature of the infrastructure, or of some breakdown in the technical machinery.

As Graham (2012) and others note, infrastructures are most noticed when they break down. Infrastructural breakdowns, interferences and subsequent repair work are ordinary practices, but also carry with them the conditions for falling in the shit. Trentmann suggests people are good at finding new ways of ordering behaviour, especially when they’re used to disruption, indeed ‘disruptions reveal the flexible side of habits and routines so often imagined as stable and stubborn’ (Trentmann 2009: 68). His examples concern the big infrastructures of daily life: access to water and power. At work, people panic when systems fail but deadlines can’t be changed, and managers, customers or clients are unlikely to be forgiving.

Software systems that work, but that break easily, or that have unexpected consequences, hint at how infrastructures affect the conditions for being bitz or BITS, as when new ‘rationalizing’ tools are introduced in healthcare on the expectation that they can be applied in chaotic situations (Berg 1997).

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