The Broken Promise of Infrastructure

Keywords: infrastructure, promise, populism, modernity, capitalist realism, public works
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 28

Abstract

The so-called “promise of infrastructure” has been well-documented among anthropologists and ethnographers of large-scale public works projects. Inscribed into its sinews of concrete and steel is the promises of civic betterment, economic growth, racial and national supremacy, and even the forward propulsion of History itself. However, since the mid-2010s, a new wave of populist business leaders and politicians have cottoned onto the symbolic capital that is sedimented into infrastructure’s promise, deploying an infrastructure rhetoric to extract electoral and share-holder value from it. While infrastructure has always required certain forms of fictive investment – financial, cultural, political – to come into being, what distinguishes the newly populist rhetoric of infrastructure is a seemingly knowing admission that the future it promises will never arrive.

To demonstrate its case, this paper will compare Elon Musk and Boris Johnson to show how they have each comparably exploited the promise of infrastructure for financial and political gain. Through a critique of the infrastructure rhetoric deployed by these two Faustian figures, it will argue that the populist promise of infrastructure is always already broken. More than the whimsies of two ego-inflated men, this broken promise of infrastructure speaks to a much more pervasive metaphysical condition induced by late capitalism and climate breakdown – what Mark Fisher once called “the slow cancellation of the future”, only now this semi-authoritarian cancellation is taking place very fast.