Infrastructures and Capitalist World Ordering

Abstract In this forum, we employ infrastructures as an analytical lens to explore contemporary world ordering, which we root in the dynamics of capitalism. Beyond enabling mobility and facilitating capital’s expansionist transgression of social and geographical barriers, we show how the current densification and expansion of infrastructures are actively undermining the imaginary of a world ordered through spatially bounded, internally unified entities. Infrastructures, as we demonstrate through four case studies, become complicit in the production and reification of social abstractions, key among them abstract time, space, nature, and subjectivity. Infrastructures, therefore, contribute to the flattening of lived experiences, inserting capital’s calculative logic onto social lives while providing it with a material form. Building on the examination of port, agro-industrial, financial and urban infrastructures, we explore how capital's general drive toward accelerating mobilities leads to the pluralization and modularization of spaces, transforms practices of statehood, destroys ecosystems, builds on speculative exclusionary practices, and obfuscates violence intrinsic to abstractions by rendering them technical. Infrastructures, we conclude, lend themselves to a nonschematic and nonsedentary understanding of the social, transcending scalar fixes and highlighting the (violent) relational materialities that are structuring social relations at different scales.