The Promise of Infrastructure ed. by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (review)

The Promise of Infrastructure emerged from a 2014 seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. Its first iteration was a series of brief posts that appeared on the Cultural Anthropology website in 2015: "The Infrastructure Toolbox." These posts were varied and evocative, and they offered a useful starting point for a student's journey into the surprisingly rich, nuanced, and complex world of the "infrastructure turn." If the original posts offered just enough to pique one's interest, the full-length versions now published in The Promise of Infrastructure pull together and engage in much greater depth the key themes of the Santa Fe conference. At the same time, however, the volume seeks to more explicitly come to terms with the infrastructure turn itself. Since 2014, the study of infrastructure has grown significantly, and the volume seeks to confront the questions "why infrastructure?" and "why now?" In response, The Promise of Infrastructure offers a provocative reflection on the current academic, social, and political moment that we find ourselves in.

That moment is one, we might say, of crumbling infrastructure. There's a lot of decay, ruin, and rubble in this book. Most of the essays convey a palpable sense of the end of something: liberalism, modernity, faith in the progress of development, humanism and the primacy of the human subject, a stable climate, or carbon-based energy. The promise of these things—or more accurately, the failed promise—has been a promise materialized through infrastructure. While the writers of this volume thus suggest that the study of infrastructure can offer much critical insight into the promises of an Anthropocentric world gone awry, they also suggest that such insight—that is, into how our human worlds are caught up in and formed through nonhuman materialities—is absolutely necessary to charting possible futures in the Anthropocene.

Following the editors' introduction, which happily does not waste our time with summaries of the chapters to come but instead offers a useful review of the broader themes underlying the infrastructure turn, the volume is divided into three parts: time, politics, and promise. Temporality is of course fundamental to promise, and the chapters in part one—by Appel, Gupta, Harvey, and Schwenkel—all explore how infrastructures materialize the promises of a particular future (of, say, oil-fueled modernity, efficient connectivity, democratized access to energy resources), and how their suspended construction, fitful maintenance, and eventual decay or destruction suggest not simply the always-incomplete reality of this promise, but also the need to move beyond an analysis that imposes a linear teleology on infrastructure development. That is, instead of viewing infrastructures in terms of plan-construction-completion, we might do well to think of them as always ongoing, always, as Gupta suggests, in the process of becoming something else.

In part two, chapters by Von Schnitzler and Anand explore the technopolitical dimensions of infrastructure. Here it is less the decay of infrastructures that is at issue than their durability relative to a state's administrative and/or juridico-political arrangements. Material infrastructures of water provision, for example, may outlast successive colonial, nationalized, and privatized regimes of ownership. Their material durability thus conditions and distorts political and economic "transitions" (in places like postapartheid South Africa and neoliberalizing India) in unpredictable ways that help us better understand why certain social formations resist transformation even after the political institutions upholding those formations have been swept away.

Chapters by Larkin, Bowker, and Boyer in part three offer more sustained reflections on how the study of infrastructure might in fact redeem the failed promises of the anthropocentric crises that we find ourselves in. These chapters more explicitly situate the infrastructure turn within what Boyer calls the "anti-anthropocentric turn." This turn away from "the toxic legacies of radically human-centered thinking and action" (p. 226) embraces what we might think of as a more honest (and indeed revolutionary) reembedding of the human and nonhuman, the...