What I’m calling infrastructure denotes an emergent contemporary conceptual understanding or agreement— an understanding I describe using what Derrida calls différance and what Stiegler calls technics. Infrastructure is différance and technics topologically wrapping around the other as the moving points of a torus (or any shape a relation between différance and technics might become). It is called différance when understood in the poetic symbolic, and it is called technics when understood in the mathematical symbolic. It is related to what Brathwaite calls the nommos, and what Kristeva might call the thetic, or more precisely, the way Kristeva understands the vacillation between the thetic and the semiotic, where the semiotic’s precondition is the thetic, an immaterial symbolic consistency, that the semiotic can rupture. It is also close to what is often meant by “the materiality of the signifier.” Infrastructure names a relatively new general understanding that results from telecommunications culture where objects under ceaseless transformation are not strange (like the constant updating of car models or ioSs, or entire networks, like 5g). It is our general comfort with the idea of systems under transformation. Marx’s theory of the commodity is apropos, as the science of capitalism/commodity/knowledge/ideology inaugurated by Marx, was, according to Althusser, the science of parsing where ideology motivates the understanding of an object’s inside and outside, therefore, perhaps, where that identity might change. In this sense, all infrastructure is Marxist because at the core of its identity as a concept is the irreconcilable transformation of things materially, conceptually, socially, and symbolically, transformations that are necessarily motivated by systems of production and class struggle.
We call infrastructure that which we assign an identity predicated on the rubric of technics, understood as epiphylogenesis, and différance, understood as the unnamable inheritance of the trace. The différance of technics is infrastructure. I am not trying to provide a theory of something called infrastructure, but rather, I am trying to name what appears to me to be a relatively new sociological phenomenon/concept that we have become accustomed to naming infrastructure. That is, I am trying to describe the utility of the concept of infrastructure for describing the social/material conditions of the present, and show that it is used this way. A more properly genealogical study of the concept, I imagine, would lead to such conclusions: that infrastructure is the name for a topological conceptual figure of technics + différance, or, as I have been arguing, all that which can change in a given identity/object without fundamentally destroying the core conceptual knowledge about it. In this way, somewhat paradoxically, what I’m calling infrastructure is both what holds things together and what can change without altering the conceptual understanding of the thing’s consistence (i.e. it consists as a certain ratio of the mathematical symbolic and the poetic symbolic). This is related to the way infrastructure is used by Althusser and, by extension, Jameson, to describe the relation between “base” and “superstructure.” Like Kristeva’s material semiotic irruption (signifying process) of the sign into the thetic/symbolic figure. Like Deleuze’s “pre-signaletic material,” and what the “sea” or “nommos” often means in Brathwaite (like a particular spirit of an object), and the relation between what he calls “Closed Systems” and “Open Systems.” What Glissant might mean, simply, by “relation,” and close to what Fanon and Wynter are getting at with “sociogenic.”