Milieu 12 of 12
Infrastructural power
Ask the physical question. Through what pipes, records and materials does authority actually reach a body, and what does that infrastructure allow or forbid.
- Years
- 1957 to 2012
- Location
- Britain and the United States, with fieldwork elsewhere
- Funder
- Not a funded programme. University scholarship, grouped here by the question it asks.
- Institution
- UNKNOWN. No common institution.
Most of the literature on control stays at the level of ideas. This cluster asks what the authority is physically made of.
Mann's distinction
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (four volumes, 1986 to 2012) separates Glossary / MannWhat elites can do without negotiating with anyone. Modern states have less of this than people assume, and it is not the main danger.Full glossary, what elites can do without negotiating with anyone, from Glossary / MannA state’s capacity to actually reach into society and carry a decision through. Modern states have unprecedented amounts of it.Full glossary, the capacity to actually penetrate society and implement a decision.
Modern states are historically low on the first and unprecedented on the second. That is the sharpest available correction to the assumption that visible authoritarianism is the main thing to watch. A state that has to negotiate with everyone, and can then reach every address, every account and every record, is a new kind of object.
Tilly
Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" (1985) and Coercion, Capital, and European States (1990). States as protection rackets that succeeded and then legitimated themselves retrospectively. This is the evidentiary version of Benjamin on law-making violence in the law domain.
Mitchell, and the best single argument here
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (2011). Coal is concentrated, moved by rail, and requires dense labour at choke points, which gave workers the strike and helped make mass democracy possible. Oil is pumped, piped and shipped, and needs very few workers, which engineered that leverage away.
Democratic power as a function of infrastructure geometry. Also Rule of Experts (2002) on Egypt, which is one of the few places in this project where the analysis is not North Atlantic.
Classification as a silent instrument
Bruno Latour and science and technology studies generally, on how facts and standards get built and then become invisible infrastructure. Pair with Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (1999), on classification systems as political instruments that nobody experiences as political. It connects directly to Scott on Glossary / ScottSimplifying a messy reality so a state can count, map and tax it: surveys, permanent surnames, standard weights, grid cities. Reality then gets reshaped to match the map.Full glossary in the bureaucracy domain.
Largely rejected
Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (1957) and the hydraulic-state thesis, which argued that societies dependent on large-scale irrigation produce despotic bureaucracies. It has been largely rejected empirically and was shaped by Wittfogel's own break with communism. It is included because it is historically important and because reading a discredited argument carefully, for what it still gets right, is a skill worth having.