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Abstract

In this paper, the author proposes that for STS as a discipline to change and progress, and to generate opportunities when entering into a dialog with postcolonial and feminist studies and activism, as well opening itself to decolonial options, it must first conduct itself in acts of provincialization. To do so, a methodological challenge is proposed: Taking infrastructure seriously by understanding infrastructure as founded in and by cultural and knowledge labor. Taking inspiration from Chandra Mukerji and others, this methodological re-imagining is proposed in the form of cultural infrastructural genealogy.

Keywords

cultural & knowledge labor decolonial options feminist theory genealogy infrastructure postcolonial STS provincialization

Introduction

Once a problem-oriented programme, the original promise of STS to be open to both emerging ideas and different voices, yes Other than those steeped in Western legacy epistemologies and ontologies, had slowly but surely turned into more conventional aspirations of STS becoming a discipline: most of the departments and journals are now ‘established’ and have begun to practice the policing and gatekeeping of boundaries and conventionalisations that are no different from, say, the hardened infrastructure of how that which is considered relevant is managed and governed in prime-time sociology. In looking at prime-time sociology, we can take as an analogy how little uptake climate change has seen in ‘mainstream’ sociology (as demonstrated recently by Koehrsen et al., 2020) or how non-Western sociologies or reminders of the founding role of Black scholars each have to fight uphill battles to find even the smallest acknowledgement (Go, 2020). In STS, the emergence of feminist and post-colonial STS has not changed ‘the new disciplinarism’ (i.e., making of the object of STS into a ‘durable singularity’ [Appel]) when these scholars try to remind STSers and their newly minted ‘mandarins’ (to evoke Fritz Ringer) what it was that the field once had embarked on to be: different, open, and actually be doing something (differently). Instead, those who enact post-colonial and feminist STS as something more serious than just a citational game that serves but choreographed participation and notary teleologies experience being treated by their ‘esteemed and established’ big brothers as the cute little sister who gets dressed up and presented to the disciplinary social science family for the Christmas dinner before being told to go out and play in her room when the grown-ups talk. Against this infuriating status quo, this special issue is a bold effort to do away with STS’s epistemological infrastructure having succumbed to its version of what Gordon (2006, 2014) so aptly calls disciplinary decadence. As a counter-agent to this poison of decadence, Lewis Gordon proposes teleological suspension. I want to follow his proposition because I still believe that STS as a programme or systematicity, much like sociology as a discipline, could have important contributions to make. Sociology could simultaneously be an infrastructural contribution to society (by offering a way for society to understand itself) in the form of knowledge labour and also a means of critique of how knowledge labour comes to be and therefore how it comes to be exploited or exploitative. Similarly, STS might still be a programmatic infrastructural contribution to scientific practice (itself a form of cultural and knowledge labour) in society by helping science understand itself better, aka its infrastructure as well as how it serves society as an infrastructure; while also opening up itself and science in the same brush-stroke for the type of critique that could make science, STS (and sociology) and society better. However, I do not think it is possible to make something better through a grand programme or a big system approach. I do believe that one can work with systematicity¹ without there having to be an all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all system (aka a fixed, hard and ambitious economy of relevance). To use an analogy: rather than producing a precisely managed, husbanded (Oikos, Oikein) garden that is ruled by the colonial, ‘territorial ambition’ (Mukerji, 1997) of pedagogy (the systemic instruction of the masses) of place-making (Mukerji, 2006, 2010, 2012) that sheds knowledge practices into ‘relevant/permitted’ and ‘irrelevant and thus disposable’ ones (Stingl, 2020), I propose that contributions, realistically, will have to be more like patch-work, tending (in systematicity) to patches of infrastructure aka knowledge and cultural labour, as one does to garden patches (Anna Tsing).²

In this article, I want to address the form this contribution takes and offer up one particular avenue to attempt teleological suspension methodologically while being mindful of one’s positionality (one’s patch, so to speak): Infrastructural Genealogy.

In the following, I will briefly explain that we³ cannot simply be universally and trans-temporally post-colonial; instead, we need a way to slowly come together to a place where beginning with provincialisation, becoming response-able for a cooperative scholarship, and to be making a place from where in knowing where one comes from and stands the choosing of decolonial options is possible. Following a short description of a broader concept for infrastructure (as outlined in Stingl, 2020), I will make the case for a methodology of infrastructural genealogy: this methodology is inspired by a proposal from historical sociologist Mukerji (2007a) on cultural genealogy, and from there, it is further influenced by ideas gifted to us by Susan Leigh Star, Hans Blumenberg, Tim Ingold, Michael Mann, Atsuro Morita, Dorothy Smith, Vivien Schmidt, Hannah Appel, Andrea Ballestero and Kristin Asdal (see in particular Appel et al., 2018; Asdal, 2012, 2014; Asdal & Hobæk, 2016; de Goede, 2021; Larkin, 2013; Morita & Jensen, 2015).

From Provincialisation to Decolonial Options

I would assume that at my mention of decoloniality and postcolonial STS—and the context of this special issue—most readers will be somewhat astounded that I do not cite more post-colonial and/or non-Western scholars. While the works of many non-Western scholars have been influencing the world of ideas my scholarship lives in, my purpose in this article is, however, to illustrate an avenue of provincialisation.⁴ In so doing, I want to propose, too, that already within geopolitical Global Northern and epistemological Western scholarship, the insufficiency of this scholarship resulting from its inherent epistemic imperialism and injustice can be made explicit and can be opened for alternatives if only one is looking at it closely. In short, it is possible to provincialise the Western discourse of STS/sociology within this discourse—it would, however, not be possible to decolonise or have decolonial options from within this discourse. One must begin by provincialising. Decoloniality/decolonisation (as shown by Anibal Quijano, Maria Lugones, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gathseni, Gurminder Bhambra, Boaventura de Sosa Santos, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and many others; see as an excellent introduction and overview: Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) is important learnings for anyone who sets out to begin the journey to uncover the colonial matrix of power and being, and the cognitive empire that governs their thinking and doing; but at the same time, simply appropriating decolonial writers and their ideas would, actually, no less be problematic: Finding the right balance is important to not end up constantly reopening the ‘colonial wound’ through, for example, ‘good intentions’.⁵

Respectively, to have tools at hand that can provincialise from inside, to open one’s discourse up for choosing decolonial options in a cooperative, non-appropriative way is, in my view, an important step, or even better, a lateral move, or a move that simultaneously goes before-and-beyond as I proposed, for example, in Care Power Information (Stingl, 2020) on the example of how to ‘make trouble for the sociological canon’ and to ‘stay with’ it (Haraway).

Infrastructure

I also understand discourse here not only broadly but as an institutionalised discourse aka an agenda aka a discursive project in the sense of Anna Tsing’s (and, subsequently Hanna Appel’s) view on ‘projects’ understood as

organised packages of ideas and practices that assume an at least tentative stability through their social enactment, whether as custom, convention, trend clubbish or professional training, institutional mandate, or government policy. A project is an institutionalised discourse with social and material effects. (Tsing, 2001, p. 4, also quoted in Appel, 2019, p. 285, and elaborated in Lin, 2015)

Taking my cue from Hannah Appel’s seminal work on infrastructure in contemporary anthropology, I agree with her but expand that it is true that both(!) anthropology and sociology have

sought to disassemble and disaggregate the fetishised surface of such fictions—showing the State (…), but also capitalism, development, race and Gender to be multiple, contested and contingent—we have focused less on the practices by which those multiplicities, contestations, and contingencies are mustered into durable and consequential singularities. (Appel, 2019, p.145)

Key to studying infrastructures is the study of what Andrea Ballestero calls devices in her seminal study A Future History of Water (Ballestero, 2019), which she exemplifies on the devices of ‘formula, index, list, pact’, and in my case studies the examples would be the devices of monitoring (the EU BioMonitor) and indicators (for biodiversity). Ballestero (2019, p. 9; I quote here at length, but deem it necessary) states that

[a] device is a highly effective instrument for organizing and channelling techno-political work. It is a technical instrument that merges practices and desires with long-standing assumptions about sociality that have been embedded in legal, economic, and other technical vocabularies and institutions. A device is a structured space for improvisation; it is embodied in the actions of specific persons, but it is also the braiding of long histories of economic, legal, and political systems. In my conceptualisation, a device both affirms and destabilizes social categories and institutions, while providing a way to identify the particular practices, offices, computer files, and conversations whereby that material-semiotic is performed.

As the discourse of and on the Anthropocene—itself an important (culturally) working conceptual enactment, a device, and a braided historical narrative (such as the device and narrative of the ‘garden’) but also a problematic concept (such as ‘patch’)—makes clear: its silent, othered infrastructural elsewhere (Hofmänner, 2016, 2020; Trouillot, 2003) on which and by which infrastructures are themselves subject to a pre-infrastructuration, are the relationalities of more- than-human-ecologies (these are studied, for example, by Morita [2017]) or multispecies communities and entanglements (as studied by Chao [2022] or Kirksey [2014, 2015]).

In Care Power Information (Stingl, 2020, Chapter 10) I wrote about a different approach to infrastructure: I proposed that any larger territorial state and its society or otherwise organised collective, be it nationally or trans-/supranationally organised, will invest in guaranteeing freedom from external control on its members’ behalf into infrastructure. Infrastructure, following and dependent on the underlying, often neglected and silently othered more-than-human worlds, refers to the following three (partially interlocked) areas: knowledge, culture and information labour. Of these, the most important and foundational one is Knowledge labour.

I excluded, against the Global Northern grain, this singularity called ‘the Economy’, because it cannot be infrastructure. Instead, infrastructure is that which is ‘response-able to enable and constrain’ actors to participate in the economy and the polity on fair and equal terms. Economy, therefore, rests on infrastructure, for it is also a matter of care-ful discussion (aka knowledge/cultural labour) what kinds of (re)sources, values and valuation processes an economy rests on: not every economy (not every garden patch) is monetary-/profit-based or based on models of ‘equivalence’ in the manner Western epistemology dictates (see here the examples in Kockelman, 2016).

I stress especially on the role of hereof, first and foremost, cultural and knowledge labour upon which other aspects of infrastructure rest, if with degrees of interdependence, and on which, especially, the economy rests in a relation of dependency (and, again, not this other way round as the dominant paradigm still dictates—planetary fatally so). Knowledge and cultural work are practices that are also often best understood in terms of their underlying craft (Maitz, 2007, 2014; Myers, 2015) and are artisan(al) (Santos, 2018),⁶ thus, found as practices that are, at the same time, on the surface and are the surface and are also silently operating under the surface (Ingold, 2012, 2017, 2020). This centrality of cultural and knowledge work of infrastructure begs the question of its onto-epistemological role in and for Global Northern geopolitics and Western epistemology, how to lift this role and make it speak against its previously othered silence to facilitate provincialisation.

(Cultural) Infrastructural Genealogy

My take on infrastructure, which gives culture and knowledge practice such a central role, takes inspiration from Mann’s (1984, 2008) work on infrastructural power and, more importantly, Chandra Mukerji’s work. In ‘The New Rome’, Mukerji gives a concise version of her study of the construction of the Canal du Midi under king Louis XIV in late 17th century France. There are many fascinating aspects that her research reveals, but what has always stuck with me is how 17th-century canal construction ran into serious trouble and that ‘the mighty white, male elite engineers’ could not snap their fingers to (aka arrogantly) solve the problems they were encountering. What did the trick was a specific knowledge about hydraulics engineering that was part of a collective memory of cultural and knowledge practices shared only by one specific group of people:

The people who knew the most about hydraulic engineering in uneven terrain were peasant women who lived in towns in the vicinity of former Roman bath colonies in the Pyrenees. Some of the classical infrastructure for the baths remained in use into the seventeenth century, spas frequented by nobles with health problems. But in many towns of the Pyrenees, the baths lost their usefulness, and locals applied classical principles of hydraulics to new problems, producing a living tradition of water engineering with Roman provenance. The sophistication of the tradition was described in detail by Colbert’s forestry expert, Louis de Froidour. Women from these towns worked on the systems in the summer when the men were away with their flocks of sheep and other livestock in the high meadows, doing the essential job of making cheese for winter. Women also sought seasonal employment as agricultural laborers on either side of the mountains, so they were a good target for Riquet’s recruitment drives, and they appeared in large numbers, first to work on the dam, hauling dirt up the mountain to fill the voids between the masonry walls. Although hired for unskilled work, they nonetheless demonstrated skills in hydraulics that proved essential for finishing the water supply and, later, for taking the canal through the mountains by Béziers to the sea. (Mukerji, 2009, p. 23/24)

In what these women provided, we find constitutively, interdependently and co-productively merged ‘collective representation and collaborative practices’ (Mukerji, 2009, p. 25), for which Mukerji has been working on a methodology to lift and elaborate them. For this methodology, she found genealogy as an approach that suggested itself; but in understanding the importance of something that can be conceptualised through a concept of ‘culture’,⁷ she turned not to the more fashionable option of Foucault but to Nietzsche. Her example is, of course,

the use of indigenous hydraulics with Roman provenance on the Canal du Midi in 17th-century France. Women labourers brought hydraulics techniques derived from Roman principles to the canal, but their work was not considered classical. Ironically, the Canal du Midi was promoted in propaganda campaigns, defining France as the New Rome, but the peasant women who carried Roman culture in their eyes and hands were not socially elevated enough to be New Romans, so they were written out of this story. (Mukerji, 2007a, p. 49)

Importantly, for cultural genealogy to be conducted, each genealogical approach would ‘focus on the social roots and political consequences of on-going cultural forms, and approach the problem in some sense semiotically’ (Mukerji, 2007a, p. 51), but it is Nietzsche who is

more concerned with memory and self-consciousness—the loss of the past entailed in the construction of historical narratives that allows traditions to carry unnamed and hence unchallenged powers into the present. Nietzsche’s genealogy treats temporal change in social life as more complex and problematic; what is left unsaid and yet done over time, both evades and still shapes discourse through practice. (Mukerji, 2007a, p. 52)

This approach, applied by Mukerji to a European historical–cultural sociological topic, however, does capture, I think, something inherent to the post-colonial experience: the experience of loss, the acts of silencing and the colonial wound (Trouillot, 1995) caused by what we can summarily dub here as Empire (Bhambra, 2021; Boatcă, 2007, 2021; Go, 2020). However, being epistemologically a product of ‘Euromodernity’, it is not itself post-colonial nor a decolonial option. But that should, of course, not disqualify it; however, it should situate it and make clear its limits. Hence, what cultural genealogy does help us do is, I propose, provincialisation. Given that my notion of infrastructure is slightly different than Mukerji’s—in her version of genealogy, cultural practices are put to use towards ‘hard’ infrastructural projects—but that it is also not so different that the two methodological projects aren’t birds of a feather, I speak of cultural infrastructural genealogy to demarcate our nuanced differences in objects of study. What I propose is, then, about ‘soft’ infrastructures, the knowledge and cultures of tending to and caring for patches. I do not mean to indicate that these practices of knowledge and cultural labour, in their systematicities, do not offer themselves to a discussion about general learnings. In the same way, knowledges of the women who made the Canal du Midi, knowledge which they maintained and tended to in their cultural–ecological patch for generations held general learnings; this does not however give rise to a universal truth or universal system. What we can do with it is understand (provincialisation) how those who had pretended a universal system of knowledge ultimately imposed a kind of order that profited some and failed others (the way some plants grow in a managed garden, even with great variation, but the management system denies the emergence and potential of variability⁸ across patches).

Openings, Not Endings

Three individually different yet excellent examples of kinds of cultural infrastructural genealogy—because I consider a major point of ‘my’ concept of infrastructural genealogy that it is not(!) my concept nor that I could or anyone should dictate its ‘one and only’ form, but that on the contrary it is variable and produces no defined, bounded and steady operational forms nor Weberian/Simmelian ideal-types but something more akin to fluid types—can be found in Wolford’s (2021) account of the ‘plantation’ that helps us better understand its role in the concept Plantationocene that Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway and others have gifted us as an alternative to the Anthropocene concept that does important critical work; in Ballestero’s (2019) account of devices that make a water regime being rooted in the Salamanca School and in Collins’ (2021) account of the ‘forest and its people’ as cultural infrastructure in Suriname and Guyana that is being racialised in a tripartite way that includes the environment from colonialism to post-colonialism into the REDD+ regime (see also, Jodoin, 2017). I have learned from them, and I urge readers to find their fluid types to learn cultural infrastructural genealogy with (not[!]: from). My essay here is meant not to impart ultimate wisdom, provide a finished and applicable method, or present research results (not even to say: ‘further research is necessary’). It is not a readerly text, as Roland Barthes called it, but, in his vernacular, a writerly text. I am emphasising, instead, that scholarly wisdom, research results and social scientific (including STS) methods, and, of course, the canonic texts rest on not just a history but a story-verse of cultural and knowledge labour, on a (cultural) infrastructure, the practices and narrative craft of which are open to genealogical inquiry. In so doing. I propose, instead, a methodology to arrive at teleological suspensions (to learn, to listen) and ‘garden patches’ (Tsing) of provincialisations that present openings for generative dialogs with those who offer decolonial options. For those individuals who are in and care for STS, this means understanding that they tend to and care for their garden patch, and that their patch has a history of being positioned in a garden with a history of being managed by Global Northern (imperial) geopolitics and Western epistemology. To understand this positionality and to want to care differently for one’s patch as part of not just the garden but, perhaps, the variable planetary ecology is not some zero-sum game, nor does it mean to dispose of all of one’s disciplinary knowledge, learnings and traditions, it, instead, means to understand how they grew to be what they are and what they have done to and with the world around them, including the implications of connections not made, resistances evoked and potential collaborators previously excluded and harmed…and the taking of reparative responsibility for this history. Tending to patches—rather than executing the ‘territorial ambitions of managed gardens’ (Mukerji) means to suspend all decadence. In looking at the historical narrative and epistemology named ‘Anthropocene’ in the context of a planetary eco-system, which is constructed from devices such as the biodiversity monitoring measures and for which projects and hard infrastructures are created to remake society into (the ‘durable singularity’ of) a circular Bio-Economy, someone needs to ask: who and what and where and when is this ‘we’ in ‘society’, the ‘(eco)system’, the singular ‘Garden’, and how to collaborate better to tend and care? Here, STS could come in as a key part of the conversation, if and only if it were willing to suspend any decadence. In so doing, I propose not just a return for STS from ‘a discipline’ to a ‘problem-oriented’ programme (Stingl, 2016), but to move laterally to a new kind of cultural labour and infrastructure that is all about finding in and creating from the problems opportunities together with others.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest concerning the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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From Provincialisation to Decolonial Options: A Methodology of Infrastructural Genealogy

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

From Provincialisation to Decolonial Options

Infrastructure

(Cultural) Infrastructural Genealogy

Openings, Not Endings

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Notes

References