infrastructure

Issue 9.4 Previous Issues

Neoliberal Façades, Concrete Utopias: The Infrastructure of Weird Fiction

Infrastructures are technologies which facilitate fundamental operations and systems within a society (Cambridge Dictionary n.p.). Infrastructures often appear mundane, with examples including roads, public transport systems and government buildings. However, their pervasiveness, alongside the roles they play in the structuring of everyday existence, make infrastructures political objects. Anand, Gupta, and Appel (2018) describe infrastructures as “social, material, aesthetic, and political formations that are critical both to differentiated experiences of everyday life and to expectations of the future” (3). This understanding informs Infrastructure Studies, a critical field which examines how experience with infrastructure informs the material conditions and political imaginations of citizens.

Issue 5.5 Previous Issues

Infrastructure and the Anthropocene in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

Andy Hageman October 30, 2016 No Comments 21st century literature Anthropocene C capital capitalism contemporary British fiction ideology imbrications infrastructural infrastructure Men in Space oil spill Remainder Satin Island systems theory Tom McCarthy

To read a Tom McCarthy novel is to find oneself weirdly and wildly awash in grids within grids, maps within maps, of infrastructural objects and systems. Protagonists and minor characters alike obsess over these objects and systems of infrastructure—over their grandeur, their minutiae, their flows and flaws, slows and jams, their symbolic ideological concretizations, their masterful and/or absurd designs, their volumes of strata.