Embodied Infrastructures

Abstract

Infidel to academic disciplinarity, and employing a poetic, feminist reading of two vignettes and a case study, this paper presents “embodied infrastructures” as a fundamental grammar of prefigurative politics through which a redirected society rehearses an “otherwise” political future. Embodied infrastructures are identified in the people’s mic of the Occupy movement (2011), and the human chain and “home thrown in the mud” in the women’s antinuclear protest practices at the Greenham Common Peace Camp (1982-early 2000s). Acknowledging the interdependence of bodies, materiality, and democracy, and rejecting delegating their beliefs, morality, and intentionality to technologies, participants in prefigurative political movements are determined to become infrastructure themselves. Infrastructures of embodied resource circulation are seen in continuity with “corporeal infrastructures” found in communities of scarcity during which bodies are activated as social actants—evident in Chandigarh’s appropriation of autochthonous capacities of auto-construction, and a cautionary tale of the inherent vulnerability of bodily employment when co-opted by conditions of alienated social relations. Embodied infrastructures are radical in their transgression of the boundaries between collectivity and individuality, users and designers, labor and work, privacy and publicity, futures and presents. They bring “life making” and “thing making” together as entangled, mutually constitutive paths to collective emancipation.

Keywords:

• embodied infrastructures
• feminist materialities
• prefigurative politics
• Greenham Common Peace Camp
• Occupy movement

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to the Special Issue’s guest editors for their guidance and care. I am also indebted to my New School colleague and friend Victoria Hattam for our intellectual and pedagogical “accompaniments” in the last ten years. The paper is dedicated to those who made homes for and with me, and my lineage of women: Kleanthi, Despoina, Ioanna, Efterpi, Eytychia, Katerina, Despoina-Kleanthi, and Maya for the human chain that connects us from Kriti and Athens to New York. Αυτή η δημοσίευση είναι αφιερωμένη στην δικιά μας αλυσίδα, Κλεάνθη, Δέσποινα, Ιωάννα, Ευτέρπη, Ευτυχία, Κατερίνα, Δέσποινα-Κλεάνθη, Μάγια.

Notes

1 The first Occupy protest camp arose at Zuccotti Park in the Financial District of New York and lasted from September 17 to November 15, 2011.

2 Luke Taylor, “Judith Butler at Occupy WSP,” October 23, 2011, YouTube video, 6:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYfLZsb9by4.

3 Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement,” Social Movement Studies 11:3–4 (August 1, 2012): 375–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.710746.

4 Richard Kim, “We Are All Human Microphones Now,” The Nation, October 3, 2011, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/we-are-all-human-microphones-now/.

5 Lilian Radovac, “Mic Check: Occupy Wall Street and the Space of Audition,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11:1 (January 2, 2014): 34–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2013.829636.

6 Carrie Kahn, “Battle Cry: Occupy’s Messaging Tactics Catch On,” NPR Section National, December 6, 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/12/06/142999617/battle-cry-occupys-messaging-tactics-catch-on.

7 Marco Deseriis, “The People’s Mic as a Medium in Its Own Right: A Pharmacological Reading,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11:1 (January 2, 2014): 42–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2013.827349.

8 Deseriis, “The People’s Mic.”

9 Deseriis, “The People’s Mic.”

10 Fabian Frenzel, Anna Feigenbaum, and Patrick McCurdy, “Protest Camps: An Emerging Field of Social Movement Research,” The Sociological Review 62:3 (2013): 459, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12111.

11 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110–14.

12 Fingere (“to mold, shape”) derives from the Proto-Indo-European root d^heý^h/; see Andrew L. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (London: Oxford University Press, 1995), 158. So *dʰ or *dʰeyǵʰ- regularly becomes Latin f; *ey becomes Latin i; and *ýʰ- becomes Latin h, meaning that the nasal n must have been inserted at some point to give us fingō and not unattested fiho. This gives fingō—or fig-, with the loss of -n-, and forms nominal stems including figura, figulus (“potter”), and figurare. Special thanks to linguist Lefteris Paparounas for this detailed explanation.

13 Carl Boggs, “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers Control,” Radical America 11:6 (1977): 100.

14 Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 52. While Breines examined prefiguration through the politics of the New Left in the 1970s, this phrase references the 1908 manifesto of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union.

15 Wini Breines, “The New Left and Michels’ “Iron Law,” Social Problems 27: 4 (Apr., 1980): 422.

16 For studies of non-left-leaning prefigurative politics see Lara Monticelli, “On the Necessity of Prefigurative Politics,” Thesis Eleven 167:1 (December 1, 2021): 99–118, https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136211056992.

17 Monticelli, “On the Necessity.”

18 Monticelli, “On the Necessity.”

19 Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Doing Sociolegal Research in Design Mode (London: Routledge, 2021).

20 Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42:1 (October 21, 2013): 329, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.

21 Fran Tonkiss, “Afterword: Economies of Infrastructure,” City 19:2–3 (May 4, 2015): 384–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1019232.

22 Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research 7:1 (1996): 111–34.

23 Tonkiss, “Afterword.”

24 Jilly Traganou, “The Paradox of the Commons: The Spatial Politics of Prefiguration in the Case Of Christiania Freetown,” in The Future is Now: An Introduction to Prefigurative Politics, ed. Lara Monticelli (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 144–60.

25 AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 16:3 (Fall 2004), 407–29.

26 Suzanne Clisby and Julia Holdsworth, Gendering Women: Identity and Mental Wellbeing through the Lifecourse (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016), 9.

27 Tonkiss, “Afterword.”

28 Mark Johnson, “Migration Infrastructures, Surveillance and Practices of Care and Control: Filipino Muslims in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” paper presented at the Anthropology of the Gulf Arab States II: Ethnography and the Study of Gulf Migration, MESA Annual Meeting, New Orleans, October 7–11, 2013, 18–19; (Middle East Studies Association) cited in Clisby and Holdsworth, Gendering Women, 10.

29 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Cornell University Press, 1985), 171; cited in Clisby and Holdsworth, Gendering Women, 11.

30 Roger Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies,” Security Dialogue 45:6 (December 1, 2014): 548–64, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614550899; cited in Yoana Fernanda Nieto-Valdivieso, “Women as Embodied Infrastructures: Self-Led Organisations Sustaining the Lives of Female Victims of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Colombia,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 17:2 (August 2022): 2, https://doi.org/10.1177/15423166221100428.

31 Nieto-Valdivieso, “Women as Embodied Infrastructures”: 2.

32 Une Ville à Chandigarh, directed by Alain Tanner, written by John Berger and Alain Tanner (Switzerland: Artaria Film, 1966), 16 mm color, 51 minutes, accessed December 2, 2022, https://www.swissfilms.ch/en/movie/une-ville-a-chandigarh/84AFACD8D40C4CAAACE2B6F404866B96.

33 Donna Haraway and Thyrza Goodeve, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997) cited in Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, “Unacknowledged Distinctions: Corporeality versus Embodiment in Later Life,” Journal of Aging Studies 45 (2018): 5–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jaging.2018.01.001.

34 Gilleard and Higgs, “Unacknowledged Distinctions.”

35 Chandigarh is the capital of the provinces of Haryana and Punjab, a portion of which was assigned to Pakistan in 1947.

36 Une Ville à Chandigarh.

37 Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 128, cited in Sanoja Bhaumik, “Can Western Architecture Ever Be Truly Decolonial?,” Hyperallergic, June 27, 2022, http://hyperallergic.com/738421/can-western-architecture-ever-be-truly-decolonial/.

38 Russell Walden and Stanislaus von Moos, “The Politics of the Open Hand: Notes on Le Corbusier and Nehru at Chandigarh,” MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies, April 22, 2021, https://mitp-arch.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/55ayllas/release/1 .

39 Bhaumik, “Can Western Architecture?”

40 Jilly Traganou, “Maintenance in Autonomy: Christiania’s Self-Managed Infrastructures,” paper presented at Maintainers III Conference, January 1, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/40812525/Maintenance_in_Autonomy_Christiania_s_Self_managed_Infrastructures.

41 Ann Snitow, “Greenham Common,” Occupy #3, n + 1, 2011, https://www.nplusonemag.com/dl/occupy/Occupy-Gazette-3.pdf.

42 Snitow, “Greenham Common.”

43 “Rebecca Mordan in Conversation: Greenham Common Women,” Wales Art Review, August 27, 2021, https://www.walesartsreview.org/rebecca-mordan-in-conversation-greenham-common-women/.

44 Spivak’s early notion of “strategic essentialism,” with all its risks, as a way of mobilizing identity in the context of negotiation or resistance—rather than as an anthropological category—might be pertinent here. The concept was introduced in “Feminism, Criticism and the Institution,” Thesis Eleven 10/11 (1984–85): 175–87, but was eventually abandoned in Gayatri Spivak, Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), xi, 432–33.

45 Snitow, “Greenham Common,” 45.

46 Jilly Traganou, “Wall Street as Border Zone,” in Design Studies Companion, eds. Penny Sparke and Fiona Fisher (London: Routledge, 2016), 31.

47 Alexandra Topping, “‘A Demonstration of Female Energy’: Greenham Common Memories,” The Guardian, August 22, 2021, UK news, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/22/a-demonstration-of-female-energy-greenham-common-memories.

48 “Rebecca Mordan in Conversation,” Wales Art Review.

49 Sarah Jaffe, “Social Reproduction and the Pandemic, with Tithi Bhattacharya,” Dissent, April 2, 2020, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/social-reproduction-and-the-pandemic-with-tithi-bhattacharya/.

50 See for example film documentation from “1980s Greenham Common, Women Protest for Peace, CND, Police,” YouTube video, Kinolibrary Archive, Clip ref AB66, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TIXBJuwUcE, timestamp 1:48.

51 Anna Faulkner, interview with the author, October 2022.

52 Testimony of Bridget Boudewijn, https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bridget-Boudewijn-and-Sue-Bolton.pdf.

53 Ann Snitow, “Pictures for 10 Million Women,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8:2 (1985): 45, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346053

54 Snitow, “Greenham Common.”

55 Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons,” in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia Press, 2013), 7.

56 Silvia Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Common in an Era of Primitive Accumulation (2010),” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, ed. Silvia Federici (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).

57 Faulkner interview.

58 Kate Kerrow, “It Ain’t Just The Web, It’s The Way That We Spin It, Creating A Women-Only Space,” in Out of the Darkness, Greenham Voices 1981–2000 (The History Press, 2022).

59 Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (London: Zed Books, 1998), 77.

60 Michele Lancione, “Radical Housing: On the Politics of Dwelling as Difference,” International Journal of Housing Policy (April 2019): 1, 3, 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2019.1611121.

61 Lancione, “Radical Housing”: 5.

62 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 31–32.

63 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), 5, 154.

64 Arendt, The Human Condition, 38.

65 In Jaffe, “Social Reproduction and the Pandemic.”

66 Arendt, The Human Condition, 152.

67 Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 32.

68 Karl Marx, Estranged Labour, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, quoted in Tithi Bhattacharya, “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory” in Social Reproduction Theory, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 10.

69 Bhattacharya, “Introduction,” 2.

70 Traganou, “The Paradox of the Commons,” 155.

71 Meg Luxton, “Feminist Political Economy in Canada and the Politics of Social Reproduction,” in Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism, eds. Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 36; cited in Bhattacharya, “Introduction,” 3.

72 Bhattacharya, “Introduction,” 10.

73 Kate Kerrow, Rebecca Mordan, and Frankie Armstrong, Out of the Darkness: Greenham Voices 1981–2000 (Cheltenham, UK: The History Press, 2022).

74 Jilly Traganou, “Girl with Maquette: A Memoir of Prefigurative Imaginaries at Work,” Arena: Journal of Architectural Research 7:1, 2022.

75 Bennett, Vibrant Matter.

76 Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (London: Verso Books, 2020).

77 Spade, Mutual Aid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jilly Traganou

Jilly Traganou is professor of architecture and urbanism at Parsons School of Design, The New School, and coeditor-in-chief of the journal Design and Culture. She is currently working on the role of space and materiality in prefigurative political movements and is interested in multivocal scholarship that experiments with poetic, performative, and collective forms of knowledge production and presentation. She is author of Designing the Olympics: Representation, Participation, Contestation (2016) and The Tôkaidô Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (2004), and editor of Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories (2023) with Sarah Lichtman, Design and Political Dissent: Spaces, Objects, Materiality (2020), and Travel, Space, Architecture (2009) with Miodrag Mitrašinović.