Nearly three decades ago, Steven Shapin's writing on ‘invisible technicians’ brought into the foreground a hitherto marginalized constituency that is now widely acknowledged by historians of science. No serious scholar can now write of past scientists’ work without thinking more inclusively about who participated in the practicalities of past technoscience. Since then, a range of other less immediately visible yet highly important agents in scientific change have entered the historical lexicon; most recent among these are the ‘maintainers’ who have long kept large-scale systems operational (almost) uninterruptedly, so that normalized services can be taken for granted. To this ever-multiplying array of important actants to weave into historical explanations, we can now add the (largely) non-human domains that are sustained by maintainers: the infrastructures of modern life. It is this topic to which Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rüdiger's edited volume is devoted, infrastructures being implicitly contrasted with the ‘superstructures’ that long preoccupied Marxist historians.
This new thematic development in ‘the material turn’ of academic humanities and social sciences stems in part from Brian Larkin's article ‘The politics and poetics of infrastructure’ (Annual Review of Anthropology (2013) 42, pp. 327–343). Larkin wrote there of infrastructures as the material forms that ‘allow for the possibility of exchange’, and more precisely as ‘the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked’. While Larkin drew attention to the aesthetic aspects of human encounters with infrastructure, Marklund and Rüdiger's collection takes on a more traditional focus on specific systems of transport, notably railways and pneumatic tubes, and on telecommunications: the telegraph, Internet and satellite television across a range of European and North American contexts. Yet as a collection that looks at state-run, or at least state-legitimized, infrastructure its editorial line is refreshingly critical of Thomas Hughes's systems historiography for privileging engineering over culture, and of Patrick Joyce's ‘techno-state’ approach for its undue preoccupation with ‘top-down’ governance.
Instead Marklund and Rüdiger highlight the value of understanding the significance of infrastructure in terms of the ground-level approach of everyday usage and social practice (p. 11). Equally interesting is their point about the inclusive importance of ‘multi-stability’: this refers to the way (akin to Peter Galison's notion of a ‘trading zone’) that the same infrastructure can be used ‘differently by different people who assign different meanings to it’ (p. 15). As a counterpoint, the editors also deploy the concept of ‘layeredness’ to highlight the ways in which different infrastructures can intersect each other, and not necessarily comfortably so. After all, many coexisting infrastructures which have been developed at different times under different political regimes with contrasting priorities – e.g. bicycles versus cars, or railways versus roads (pp. 15–16) – often operate in tension or in competition with each other. We can thus better understand how resilient large-scale technologies embody the power imbalances long ago highlighted (if oversimplified) by Langdon Winner's meditations on how large artefacts can engender new forms of political inequality.
While the editors’ introduction serves as a helpful primer in the topic, their eight contributors to subsequent chapters do not all engage explicitly with the themes laid out for them by the editors. Among highlights should be mentioned Anna Harris's study ‘Sounds like infrastructure: examining the vibrant materiality of pneumatic tube systems through their sonic traces’. She highlights the widespread use from the late nineteenth century to the present day of pneumatic tube systems in supermarkets and hospitals for speedily and securely pushing documents internally around buildings, solely by the power of compressed air. The decades-long presence of these systems, which were literally built into the walls of these institutions, has often only been detectable from the occasional noises which they generate: expert engineers, however, are typically able to diagnose from unusual sounds when and whereabouts such systems have malfunctioned. One can only agree with Harris that this often hidden form of infrastructure deserves significantly greater study, not least since she broadens her interpretation to emphasize how infrastructures in general ‘refuse to remain silent’ (p. 21) – one of the very few sensory insights on infrastructure in this volume.
Another important piece is Andreas Marklund's chapter, ‘A stake in public confidence: communications privacy and the interests of the state during the establishment of modern telecommunications in Denmark’. Here we see how the development of telegraphic communications in nineteenth-century Denmark raised important questions about how far this state infrastructure operated for the benefit of the state in monitoring its citizens or for the expedited private communications of its citizens that were its main clientele. Evidently the ambiguity in this matter raised questions about how far Danish citizenship incorporated both rights to privacy in telegraphic communications and their obligation to allow the state complete peacetime surveillance of whatever passed over its networks.
Focusing on a subsequent wartime context is Elizabeth Bruton's study of ‘The cable wars: military and state surveillance of the British telegraph cable network during World War One’. Bruton shows how communication infrastructure developed in peacetime was not simply appropriated for the mundane facilitation of modern warfare: the aggressive destruction of enemy communication infrastructure was evidently a vital (if rarely visible) feature of successful military campaigns by Britain and its Great War allies. Equally important in infrastructural management was their constant discreet surveillance of less developed networks operated by Germany and its allies, and thus the strategically valuable interception of the notorious Zimmerman telegram in April 1917. Crucial to this, as Bruton emphasizes, was the significant amount of redundancy deliberately built into the telegraph networks of Britain and its allies prior to the outbreak of the First World War to ensure their continued operation even while under attack and attacking others.
The lack of an index in this volume makes it difficult for the reader to track its common themes across the other chapters. And one might have wished for deeper meditations about what is to be learned about comparing communication and transport infrastructure in both peacetime and war. Moreover, one might have wished for more reflection on the provenance of the very term ‘infrastructure’ as largely deployed post-Second World War, apparently as an artefact of that era's emerging military–industrial complex. Nevertheless, to escape the transience of the localized contingency-laden case study, this volume shows us that the persistence of infrastructure deserves attention in any history of modern science, technology and medicine.
