A tale of infrastructural capitalism. The promising and ruinous adventures of Homo Faber

Abstract

Capitalism has a long history and our current condition is the result of it. A thorough understanding of this condition is a prerequisite for thinking about our future in a transformative key. Indeed, the contradictions in the organization of metabolic exchange have become more acute and the ecosystemic crisis is the non-deferrable horizon within which the relationship with the future must be thought. The paper therefore seeks to highlight the features of continuity that contemporary capitalism presents, focusing on the figure that embodies the paradigm of the relationship with space and time, of which capitalism has become the dominant version, namely the figure of homo faber. This figure, which has emerged within the so-called meta-trap of trajectorism, currently also presents elements of discontinuity, in particular the key role that infrastructures play in the reproduction of the institutionalized societal order through which metabolic exchange is organized in contemporary capitalism. But infrastructures themselves present an ontological paradox, consisting in being both a promise of the future and the process by which this promise becomes a ruin, just like the ruins (social, ecological, symbolic) with which we have to live today. Only a political reading of the ruins, aimed at grasping the alternatives of the future that may open up in them, can make it possible to avoid being trapped in the reproduction of a relationship with space and time that is destined to jeopardize reproduction (social, but also of life tout court, human and non-human).