The broken tracks of postsocialism. Distributed agency and political accountability along Romanian railroads

This paper proposes a semiotics of postsocialist infrastructure, focusing on the temporality of rail mobility in contemporary Romania. Studies of infrastructure often stress its material and symbolic invisibility or treat it as networks and assemblages of humans and non-humans over which agency is diffused. Yet disproportionate attention to agency risks abstracting from the interpretations people derive from everyday interactions with infrastructure and the assumptions informing them. Reading infrastructural malfunction and assigning responsibility is politically paramount in Eastern Europe, where state socialisms constructed infrastructure as a precondition of social modernity and an index of achievement, paving the way for contemporary aspirations for development. When faced with railroad malfunctions, Romanian travelers tend to attribute the cause to the state rather than to assemblages of human and non-human actors, actualizing historically constructed ethical expectations of the state as provider of modernity. Premised on the dual nature of infrastructures as technological and symbolic objects, and informed by mobile ethnography along Romania’s rail network, I explore the material avatars of the state, citizens’ interactions with materialities, and the political possibilities arising from these encounters.