Passing Things Along: (In)completing Infrastructure

by AbdouMaliq Simone (Max PIanck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen)

To cite this article: Simone, A. (2015). Passing Things Along: (In)completing Infrastructure. New Diversities17(2), 151–162. https://doi.org/10.58002/60gq-3m28

Infrastructure not only concerns the movement of things, but also is itself a movement. It is a movement that gathers up remnants, the disparate, and that which has been cut loose from discernible modes of belonging. This is the case even though we may acknowledge its concretized and stalwart features, its violent inscriptions, heavy sunk costs, and ephemeral architectures of financing. Infrastructure is a movement in perception, not simply by constituting multiple vantage points or lines of articulation, but by pointing out how things are constantly coming undone, playing with a risk that it is really able to hang together across actual and potential perturbance, that it can displace the possible salience of highly localized conditions, triggers, and alterations by always shifting loads, acting as if it is always somewhere else than it is.

Keywords: , , , ,

New Diversities • Volume 17, No. 2, 2015
The Infrastructures of Diversity: Materiality and Culture in Urban Space
Guest Editors: Marian Burchardt (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen), Stefan Höhne (Technische Universität Berlin) and AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen)
ISSN-Print 2199-8108
ISSN-Internet 2199-8116